SEO CheckList

Do you blog? If your answer is yes, then you most probably know what Permalink is. Permalink is your blog post’s permanent link, hence, permalink. Whenever somebody links to one of your particular post, they’ll be using this permalink unless you prefer them to use your trackback URL instead. Using WordPress, you’re given carte blanche on how you prefer your permalink to look like. You could use any of the following permalink structures for your posts:

http://www.domainname.com/?p=123
http://www.domainname.com/2008/01/28/sample-post/
http://www.domainname.com/archives/123
http://www.domainname.com/%postname%/

You could, of course, choose whichever tickles your fancy. However, when talking about the SEO game, there’s an ideal structure for permalinks. It’s been discussed here numerous times before and of course, in other SEO-centric blogs. When trying to optimizing a web site or a blog, one of the key factors is none other than keywords or key phrases. And yes, it IS an important aspect of blog optimization. When querying for a certain keyword, the permalinks are also looked up. No, really. Try it out. Type a keyword or a key phrase query in Google and you can see some results from blog sites have their permalinks highlighted, meaning Google used the permalinks as a gauge of relevancy.

Hence, when deciding on the permalink structure, it’s best if you do away with garnishings and stick to what’s important. That would mean options number 1 and 3 are out of the running. You could choose between the second option, the one with the post name and the date, and the fourth, the one with the post name only. You could go with the post name only permalink, if you want your posts to have a certain degree of timelessness. If you want people to be aware of when the post was made, however, the second option is the more logical choice.

It wasn’t so long ago when SEO experts were still figuring out what the supplemental index was and how we could avoid falling prey to its claws. Here in SEOChecklist and possibly in many other SEO blogs, the supplemental index is still mentioned relatively often. Over the course of 2007, however, Google was taking steps into eradicating supplemental results. Indeed, by July, Google stopped tagging supplemental results as, well, “Supplemental Results.” What happened was that there’s now only a thin line demarcating the main index from the supplemental index results and we expected that line to thin a lot more in the following days. Indeed, last December, Google announced the death of supplemental index although my searches still seem to have one. Perhaps it takes some time.

Moving on: reactions to this move by Google have been, suffice it to say, varied. As is the nature of humans, disagreements ensue and everyone has his own say on the matter. On one hand, many marketers and web site owners were livid. They’re angry that their web sites would be classified with web sites which used to be in the supplementary index, many of which are scraper and spam web sites. On the other hand, some are thankful because they finally stand a fighting chance against bigger, more established web sites in their niches. At the same, in view of the December announcement, it seems Google is improving the indexing and the Googlebot could index web sites a lot deeper than before.

As of current, it’s still too early to determine the effects of the supplemental index being eradicated. As long as I’m still seeing supplemental results on my searches and as long as there are still irrelevant results thrown into the main index search pages, we’ll just have to wait and see how this goes.

A blogroll is an integral part of every blog. In fact, when a blogroll isn’t present, it’s like a blog isn’t complete. Did you know, however, that SEO-wise, your blog roll might do your domain harm? As of this point in time, unless you’re fresh on the scene (wherein which, I would recommend reading through my past posts), we all know what PageRank is. While there are many who frown upon PageRank, it is still highly-regarded since many people believe it to be a key part in being at the top of the SERPs.

Now, as I believe I’ve discussed before, one of Google’s basis for PageRank is links. When you link to other web sites, you’re giving out your PageRank. Now, by default, blogrolls appear on EVERY page of a blog. What this means is that if you have a thousand pages and you have 100 links in your blogroll, you’re giving away 100*1000 PageRank juice. Just imagine if you have 300 links on one page. To be able to level off external links, you need to constantly link to internal pages. With too much external links though, you can’t level it off.

One way to go about it is to remove the blogroll from your internal pages. This means if you have 50 links in your blogroll, then you only have fifty external links. Another would be to use the nofollow attribute to the links in your blogroll. If you’re using WordPress, you can use this tip by Justin Cook. It worked for me like a charm. The hack would add the “nofollow” in the list of rel attributes. You could also try this one by My Digital Life and see if it works for you better.

This is the last half of a two-part discussion regarding links. This time, I’m discussing One of the most common advices I come across in many web master forums is to link to other web sites. In short, to include outbound links in web pages. One might not really understand it at face value. After all, aren’t inbound links the ones responsible for both traffic and PageRank? Still, outbound links have their uses even for SEO purposes.

First, we should debunk the myth. Many SEOs encourage the practice of outbound linking because they believe that linking to other sites using anchor texts you want to rank high for helps. Michael Gray of Graywolf’s SEO blog has conducted a study on the potency of outbound links. His aim was to create a hub for a certain niche. A hub is a web page which links to non-affiliated authority sites on a niche. According to the results, the web sites which used the anchor text “click here” instead of the relevant anchor text, ranked higher for the targeted keyword or key phrase. This factor is, of course, arguable. Others wouldn’t agree and think the same.

With regards to PageRank, Google advices to keep the outbound links in one page less than 100. More than that would drain the PageRank of your web page. Let me explain. When you link to a web site, Google gives it a score. The overall score for one page would be that particular page’s PageRank. The scores given for all the links on one page would be the number of links divided by PageRank. If you have 500 links in one page, it will drain your PageRank out.

Outbound links help when you want to create a hub. However, I believe the most important reason to link out is to encourage a link in return. There are some blogs which nobody links to because they’re their own little islands, linking out to nobody else. When other web masters or bloggers are alerted to your existence, you MIGHT get a link back in turn if your play your cards correctly.

I’ve been mentioning backlinks quite often in many articles and I’m sure the experts need no more explanation. Every time I go to web master forums, however, I’m greeted with questions about linking so I thought it best if we tackle the basics of linking. First up — inbound links. The most widely known information about inbound linkage is — the more the better. It’s not always as easy or as straightforward as we want it to be. There are several factors which determine the value of inbound links to your web site.

1. Relevancy

As was mentioned before, if your inbound link comes from a Viagra or an online poker web site and your niche is, say for example, health, then sorry to say the links does your more harm than good.

2. Anchor Links

You will rank better for terms used to link to you. For example, if you have a domain to which others often link to using the term “weight loss” (because that’s your niche), you’ll rank higher for that phrase. The anchor links serve as the other web site’s vote for yours.

3. The Ranking of the Site Linking to You

Suffice it to say, the higher the ranking in the SERPs of the one linking to you, the more weight the search engines you give to the link. You’ll be surprised what a single link from the number 1 web site in your niche could do to your own ranking as opposed to a dozen inbound links from web sites from the lower half of your niche.

You will not always be able to control the web sites linking to you, of course. Even if there are many spammy web sites who link to you, what matters is that you’ve done your job and got links to reputable web sites in your niche.

Expired domains might be nothing but expired domains to some people but you can benefit from expired domains if you’re able to find a keeper. Many expired domains were left to die because they were never marketable in the first place and the ex-owners didn’t do well in marketing their domains. However, there are those with quite a substantial traffic to their names. Such domains might have expired due to various reasons such as mismanagement or the lack of time and interest of the owner.

So what exactly can expired domains bring you?

1. Traffic

Find an expiring domain with traffic and you’re spared some of the initial marketing and promotional efforts which, in my own humble opinion, are always the most grueling. It’s better having that initial traffic than having nothing at all, isn’t it? When your niche is the same as that of the old web site, chances are, you’ve already found your first bout of readership with the expired domain traffic.

2. Backlinks

When people link to the old web site, they link to the domain. Hence, you will still retain the back links. If and when you launch your web site and the niche is the same, there’s a chance that other web sites which link to your domain would retain the back links and that would work to your advantage.

3. PageRank

I’ve talked to a lot of web masters who don’t see PageRank as gauge of a web site’s success anymore. However, the concession is that it is still a determining factor when you have to sell your web site and of course, it might affect your ranking in the SERPs. When Google indexes your new web site and determines the niche to be the same as the old one and at the same time, you retain the old back links, you retain the original PageRank.

We already know links FROM spammy sites are a no-no but how about link TO spammy sites? I don’t actually consider this a major factor in the rankings game. Say, for example, you sold a link to a porn site in your web site and the buyer had paid 3 years worth of link space and then, after a while, you learned about this. That one link, at least in my opinion, won’t hurt your rankings. It’s when you continuously link to or currently have a humongous collection of links to spam web sites and web sites banned by Google, for example, that would really hurt your rankings in the SERPs.

Why?

Well, think of it in terms of backlinking. When you link to a web site, that would mean there’s something there you’d like your visitors to see. Search engines would then look at it as a vote of confidence from you to that web site. It doesn’t matter if you’re saying that web site is good or bad, all that matters is that you’re linking to it. So if, for example, you have 200 links to bad communities, there’s no question that the search engines would take notice. If your domain is a forum, links to spammy sites can’t be helped since the content is user-generated.

What To Do

If your web site has user-generated content, then you pretty much can’t do anything about eradicating links to bad sites from your domain. The most you can do is improve the ratio of bad links to good links. Meaning make sure your web site has a larger ratio of links to good and trusted web sites. If you have user-generated content, however, there will also be many who’ll post quality outbound links.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is, links to spammy sites aren’t exactly that detrimental, in my book, unless they go in numbers. If you take time to balance with good outbound links, you have nothing to worry about.

Many have asked if the age of their web sites matter in their rankings in the SERPs. Needless to be said — yes, it does matter. As of this reading, why don’t you search for a highly-competitive keyword and look at the results. If you might notice, all the results on the first page would be web sites with years on the World Wide Web under their belt. I do have a domain though, which ranked in the first page after only a month, but the niche is highly limited and non-competitive and I believe I was able to do optimize it quite well.

I could see a couple of factors contributing to this aspect though there may be a lot more which I wouldn’t be touching:

1. Google Sandbox

As was discussed before, newer web sites are placed in the sandbox for more competitive terms or key phrases. That would mean, if you don’t stay longer than a year or so and if you’re terribly unlucky or if your niche is highly saturated, chances are you’ll never see you web site out of the sandbox.

2. Age of Back Links

This is arguably the main reason why age of site matters. Basically, search engines take the age of the backlink as a factor in their algorithm. Google, particularly, computers for trust to a certain web site. Which means, old links which aren’t removed are trusted by this number of web sites, hence, a plus for that web site linked to. Consequently, because of this, unscrupulous competitors could play with the algorithm. The term “Google popping” came up when rivals started to play dirty. They’d put up links to their competitors’ web sites and pull them down after the page has been indexed.

Needless to be said, yes, the more content the better. When search engine spiders or bots index your web pages, they create caches of your pages which are displayed in the SERPs. The more content you have, the more spiders can index. The more indexed pages you have, the more the chances your web site could appear during keyword queries and of course, the traffic you can get. With regards to advertisement revenue, think of it like this — say you earn 20 cents per indexable page per day, that means if you have 1000 pages in your web site, the potential earning is $200 per day. Of course, that’s only theoretical, but you can’t deny that the more content a web site has, the more one can earn.

Regarding search engines, content is necessary for queried keywords. So if your web site is centered on pictures or flash animation or videos, don’t neglect indexable content. Spiders can’t read text written on the pictures or the videos and animation. That means your web site won’t turn up results for keyword queries. To work around this, don’t forget to write some amount of indexable content onto your pages. It might also be idea if you name your files based on keywords.

While the more the content the better it is, that doesn’t mean you should just put anything onto your pages. Don’t forget that if you put duplicate content, chances are, your pages are going to be show in the supplemental results instead of the main index. The results would be the same if you include keyword-stuffed articles into your pages. In the end, it’s not only sheer volume that matters, but also quality and originality. If you can combine these factors, then you would have had created a viable web site with a strong fighting chance against all others in your niche.

In every web master forum, you’ll see buyers requesting “quality” content from writers. It has even come to the point that the world “quality” has become overused that no one would believe the word anymore when encountered. There are a lot of people who are content with keyword-stuffed articles to feed the search engines. Where is the importance of quality, human-readable content, then? And how do search engines include quality content into their algorithm? Simple. Search engines measure quality content depending on its effects and subsequent results.

1. Getting Backlinks

Even if poorly-written rehashed content prevails the World Wide Web nowadays, well-researched, well-written content will always have a place. Informative and comprehensive content will always be linked to by other web sites. It’s a given that when you catch people’s attention with your content, they’ll link back to you. If you know how to market and promote your web site, getting back links from reputable web sites is a cinch. Consequently, search engines weigh back links heavily in their algorithm.

2. Traffic

Well-written content is sure to attract an influx of traffic. When you have some back links set in place and people click through, they’ll stay to read well-written content. And in effect, they’ll also link back. It’s a snowball effect. When thousands of people drop by, I’m sure it tells search engines something good is going on in your domain.

3. Relevancy and Proper Keyword Density

Well-written content is expected to have the right keyword density and isn’t keyword stuffed. Despite that, it could hide the fact that it is optimized for the search engines with the apparent enjoyment factor. Well-written content is also expected to use proper formatting (header tags, bold face, etc) which could help boost rankings in the search engine ranking pages.