SEO For The Common Webmaster

Ranking in the major search engines especially Google takes a lot of time and effort to achieve the right SEO results. There are many factors that play roles in optimizing your site for search engines. The major factor in SEO is link building.

There are several ways to build links pointing to your site. Many new webmasters choice the easiest route which is to just haphazardly place links on all over the Internet anywhere they can get a link. They also fall for link exchange schemes that are suppose to drive tons of targeted traffic to their website. This method will help bring a little traffic but it does very little to build solid organic traffic from the search engines and it does very little to move your site up in the search engine rankings.

The key is to build solid one way links that are from quality sites that are related to your niche or topic. These type of links take more work to find but will provide you long term results. Link building is not an overnight venture and a webmaster should be prepared for a lot of work to optimize their link building to achieve the results they want for their site. SEO work in general is not easy and it is an ongoing process.

Luckily, for those webmasters who are short on time, there are quality link building services that offer SEO services to help webmasters get the most bang for their buck. These types of services offer link building through commenting, in content links, blog roll links, and various other places on sites relevant to the webmaster’s niche. It is always better to hire out the service than to spend hours of your time if you have no idea what you are doing.

Link building is the most important factor is SEO. If your car broke down and you were not a mechanic, would you try to repair the car? If you have no idea how to optimize your website for the best results, hire an expert to do it. If you have the ability and know how, by all means, do the work yourself. However, if you lack the time and/or the skill to do a quality job, hire a reliable link building service to achieve the results for you.

Google’s own Matt Cutts excited the online world yesterday by adding a bit of link bait to his blog. He announced that the Google Pagerank (PR) will be coming over the next few days. I have seen this linked all over the Internet and there is a buzz. Here is the post address if you care to see for yourself http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-pagerank-update/.

As I have written on this blog before, it is a good way to see how you are doing in creating back links but it is not good for a true measure of how your site is doing. It brings no traffic and it can easily be manipulated.

I do have to hand it to Matt though, link baiting is one of the best ways to build back links and his short little post has stirred up the webmaster world and his link is all over the place. Take an example from him and find hot topics that will create a stir and you too could see the benefit of such posts.

Google offers some of the best webmaster tools in the business. Without a doubt, they are the leader when it comes to Internet search and webmaster related stuff. However, wake up webmasters, Google is not a God.

I am a member at many webmaster forums and I am always seeing threads started asking of this or that is allowed by Google. Some stuff is related directly to Google’s services like Adsense and Adwords. However, many times webmasters are asking what they can or can not do on their own site. You, the webmaster, own the site! Google may lower your search rankings but with the right marketing and advertising, that will not mean the end of your website.

Look at John Chow’s blog. He does not even rank for the words “John Chow.” His blog is still one of the most profitable on the Internet. I am not saying you should not try to rank high on Google. I am not saying you should say, “FU Google.” What I am trying to say is that your site should be built for you and your readers, not for Google. You should not spend your whole time worrying rather anything you say or do is going to have you removed from Google.

Truth be told, they need us as much as we need them. Their rules are generally fair and try to prevent spam sites from reaching the top. If you are an ethical webmaster, there should never be a problem. If you are trying dishonest tricks to beat out the competition, you may get caught.

Be the best webmaster you can and do all the honest link building and advertising you can and your website will be successful. Above all, remember, Google is not a God!

When advertising your website or blog, one of the most important things is to choice the right keywords to place in the anchors. Choosing the right keywords will affect where you rank in the major Search Engines. These should be related directly to the content of your website. For example, I often use SEO for the Common Webmaster or Search Engine Optimization when advertising this blog.

Sometimes you have a website or family blog and you have no idea what to use as a keyword. At this point, it is smart to seek some help. You can spend money and buy the latest greatest software or you can use many of the free online keyword tools to find out the best words to target. You can easily find such tools by searching Google or other top search engines with the term “keyword tracker” or “finding keywords.”

One of the best tools I use that is quite handy because it shows you the competition for certain words is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool is designed for use when you are planning to advertise through Adwords but you can use it to find the keywords relevant to your website or blog. There is two ways to search, one is by placing a keyword or key term in the box and see what relevant terms are related and what the search volume and competition is. The other way, the one I prefer, is to put in your URL of the website and let the tool extract keywords for you. Once the keywords are extracted, the tool list all of them with search volume and competition.

There are several other tools that are handy and useful and can be easily found by searching. Keep in mind that when entering a niche market that has high competition, it will be much harder to rank in the search engines for those keywords or terms. It is best to find words related to your topic that have a good search volume and low competition and focus on those terms.

If you have some additional advice about choosing keywords, please leave a comment for the benefit of all the readers of this blog.

It is pretty certain that the next Page Rank update is going on. Many PR tools are buzzing with new numbers to excite the masses of webmaster. All the webmaster forums are pumping threads and threads about the current PR update.

I do not claim to have inside knowledge but I do believe Google has changed a few things in their algorithm again. I do not rely heavily on the PR number but it is a good measure of how well a webmaster has done when it comes to link building. I spent a good bit of energy and money to build links for this site. As of now, we have went from PR0 to PR2. This is much lower than I expected for all the back links that I have acquired. I have other blogs which are higher with a lot less links. I also think my links to this site were higher quality than the ones for the other blogs. This proves one thing, you can not figure out Google because their algorithm remains a secret.

Overall, some of my blogs were up and down. Some regained the lost PR from the last update and some remain the same and one loss ranking. This means nothing in the matter of traffic, my traffic has slowly increased over the last two months and I look forward to a bigger jump in the months.

How did your sites do? How important do you think PR is in the whole scheme of things? Please share you thoughts by leaving a comment.