Thrudigital

In this article I am going to go through my SEO techniques from A to Z.

The first SEO technique is in your domain name. Believe it or not, this is true even with an old domain name that lacks primary keywords. If your domain name is missing the most important words, then go ahead and buy a new, more SEO-friendly domain name! Your website may lose organic traffic for a month or two (when thrudigital.com was redirected to web-developers.net, we lost all organic traffic from Google, but this started to return after a couple of months), but after finishing the process or re-indexing and re-crawling, you will return to your previous positions. I do not understand why search engines pay so much attention to the domain name (because in my opinion domains formatted as “word1word2word3word4.com” are too long, hard to remember, and basically useless), but with the way search engine algorithms work, we must use keywords in domains and URLs. Personally speaking, I wish that domain names weren’t considered when calculating rankings!

The second SEO technique is another absurdity, again unrelated to quality of content (thus also pages returned as a result of a search query). It’s the title tag. Title tags can be manipulated very easily, so I don’t understand why search engines takes this into consideration. But, as above, title tags must be optimised. Optimisation of title tags is simple: if you want to have higher chances of being ranked in the top 10 for “cell phones”, it is necessary to mention the phrase “cell phones” within the title tag. The fewer words you use, the better. However, it is still possible to rank well with long title tags. See this search query for example.

The third technique is to use clean XHTML code: no tables, no frames. Simplicity is everything. I have no objection regarding the use of this factor in the formula of algorithms. In fact, I’d welcome more weight to be given to this factor, since many websites with ugly code rank well in Google. Often, such websites don’t work properly in browsers other than Internet Explorer.

The fourth of my SEO techniques are the h1 and h2 headings. These can help move your website up by 30 or even 40 positions. When it’s ranked 30th, then I strongly recommend to add the h1 and h2 headings to the content. This would be perfect if there was no CSS. Many webmasters manipulate the layout of these headings via CSS. After making these modifications, headings look like ordinary text. Use it, but be prepared for your competitors to do the same thing. This is an on-site factor, so what you can do, others can do too.

The fifth of my SEO techniques is a well-linked website. Linking between pages is necessary to tell search engines that you really want your website’s visitors to be able to navigate easily. It is not important to use only one form of anchor text when linking to pages. It must all look natural. Since the vast majority of webmasters have no idea how programming languages work, this is where you can take a real lead over the competition.

The sixth SEO technique is content. Although this is the sixth, it is also the most important. There is nothing more to say: high-quality content will bring you success sooner or later. Poor content will result in bad rankings.

The seventh of my SEO techniques is “the additional value” given to your website’s visitors. Everyone can write an article, but only a few can write really useful articles. Unfortunately, nowadays there are hundreds of firms which offer copywriting services. Again (unfortunately), many copywriters just rewrite articles from other websites. And this is why unique articles have no chance against unethical SEO techniques. In order to prevent this from happening, one should write articles within a particular plan and to fit the website it will feature on. Basically, the article must be useless when found on another website. For this purpose create tools (calculators, whatever) that your articles refer to. In addition, refer articles to each other. Use links! Add pictures, refer to pictures within articles. Put a copyright layer on all pictures on your website! I’ll give you an example: many dishonest webmasters copied articles from my aqua-fish.net and it made me very angry. After integrating the cross-linking algorithm into the core, articles point to each other via defined words. I also started putting copyright layers on all of my images. So when someone makes a copy of article from my website, it refers to other articles on my site. This way my website receives additional incoming links. It’s not the best way to tackle this, but it’s still better than having all articles being stolen without even a single link pointing to the original source. I could report these guys to Google, or sue them, but for now the links are good to have. You can see, therefore, how linking helps you maintain ownership even after someone has stolen your article. If the links remain, any potential visitor will likely find the original website.

The eighth SEO technique I use is the “spread a word” method. Usually this consists of directory submissions and forum posts. Let people discover tools on your website, and let them spread a word about these outstanding tools. It can’t be bad. Even criticism is welcome! Negative advertisement is still advertisement! As I mentioned in this post, the best links come for free, so I never push too hard. I like it when things are natural.

There are some techniques that I don’t use for SEO: bold text, italic text, phrases in the first and last sentences, keyword density factor, meta keywords, spamming on blogs (comments or registering in WP-MU blogs), too many forum signatures, email marketing (this is spam, isn’t it?), and so on.

And it works… the proof is here: web-developers.net was 3rd when I published this article. Further proof: web-developers.net was 9th when I published this article.