10 SEO tips for better rankings
These are my top 10 tips for getting good rankings, based on what I have taught myself about SEO. They are more about strategy rather than me feeding you with garbage info on how to get 200 links to your site in five minutes. I’m actually not an SEO, I don’t offer this service – I just use it to rank my own sites.
1. Pretty much all types of link building works, from the best form of link building (natural, in-content links on high PR pages with good anchor text) right down to the bottom of the barrel links (blog comments, profile links, mass article submission, link wheels)
2. What matters more than anything is how you execute the link building plan, especially with bottom of the barrel links. If you’re getting a load of bottom of the barrel type links, you need to know how to properly execute this strategy, otherwise you could get yourself dumped out of the money making positions in the SERPs.
3. Paid links are a huge money drain if you just leap in and start buying links without a strategy. Many of them get discounted, but the good news is that there are ways to buy links which are powerful and less risky. Probably the safest way to “buy” links is to purchase some from well-indexed, spam-free directories (if you can afford it, it’s probably better to do this than mass submit with the same titles/descriptions).
4. Distribution of dofollow and nofollow links: You don’t need nofollow links to make your link profile look “natural”. Well over 95% of my links are dofollow, yet this doesn’t negatively affect rankings.
5. Anchor text distribution: You can rank a page without any anchor text variation at all, but it doesn’t always work. The best strategy for anyone worrying about anchor text distribution is to target one key phrase and then target derivatives of that phrase on the same page. So you can start with widgets, then best widgets, best blue widgets etc.
6. It’s too tempting to over-optimise on-page factors. You can rank for keywords which are not in your title, not in your H1 tags and not even on the page, so don’t obsess about trying to stuff too many keywords in, forsaking the readability of the page.
7. Think about a good linking structure, especially if you have more than 100 pages. If you’re running Wordpress, get plugins to help you interlink the different pages/posts on your site.
8. Think ahead, way ahead. Think about what you might be doing in one or two years from now and put the foundations in place. It will be a lot easier to rank a site which has been indexed for some time than it is to put up a new site and start throwing links at it straight away.
9. If you’re going to spam (blog comments, forum profiles etc.) be smart about it. Think about how you can get past moderation and consider the fact that it looks fishy if you pick up a couple of hundred links one day and then the next they are removed.
10. Experiment. Don’t take my word for it, or anyone elses. Put up a test site or two, throw different links at it, change the structure of it and see what happens. Most people who tell you that something doesn’t work either haven’t tried it or haven’t executed it properly.
