SEO Tips Blog Website Optimization Guide

Web Directory List

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Here are some web directories that offered free/paid services:

http://www.prolinkdirectory.com
http://indexking.net
http://www.getweblist.com
http://www.pegasusdirectory.com
http://www.gowebguide.com
http://www.svguia.com
http://www.fatinfo.com
http://pluslink.info
http://www.mygreencorner.com
http://www.galilery.com
http://www.investhz.com
http://www.directoryvault.com
http://www.skoobe.biz
http://directory.owntruth.com
http://www.linkaddurl.com
http://www.littlewebdirectory.com
http://www.directoryfx.com
http://www.crazyleafdesign.com
http://www.addgoodsites.com
http://www.pontofla.com
http://agaccess.com
http://www.raidsys.com
http://afuw-act.com
http://www.pfsunited.com
http://www.maxxv.com
http://www.rayuelalibros.com
http://www.invitation.tv
http://www.pcib.com
http://www.sufficed.com
http://www.olydirectory.com
http://onemission.com
http://www.liveurls.net
http://www.allsitessorted.com
http://www.link1directory.com
http://www.danielmillions.com
http://www.viesearch.com
http://www.webworldindex.com
http://www.prospector.cz
http://www.arakne-links.com
http://freedeals.highstuff.com
http://www.ablazedirectory.com
http://www.sighbercafe.com
http://www.articleszones.com
http://www.moviedigg.com
http://www.ultraorganizer.com
http://www.microwho.com
http://www.nepotistic.com
http://addbusiness.net
http://www.ryodirectory.com
http://www.wahweb.com
http://www.pop-net.org
http://www.directory-free.com
http://www.newwebdirectory.com

Picking a good test page with Google Analytics

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By using Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/), you can find pages on your site that could most benefit from website testing. See the video below:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1v7m9BFqTJ0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1v7m9BFqTJ0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

How to overcome Google's minus 30 filter

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This is the Google filter identified last October. This filter is for down ranking web pages in their result pages. I noted that many webmasters in online forums reported their experience on this aspect and still going on. Google applies this automated filter to some websites those are practicing spammy SEO techniques. The result is those websites downgraded by 30 positions.

Here are some quotes:

"I just got my site rank #31 on its own domain name and bunch of keywords/phrases I usually watch were bumped from #1 to precisely #31. Those #2 through #10 are sort of all over the map but generally within the first 60 results."

"I have this penalty on 2 sites and on both cases the site was hand checked by someone at Google and the next day it was dropped ~30 spots on all keywords. First site was 100% white hat, second site had too many affiliate links."

"I have a similar situation on my site. It's a PR 8 site that used to rank for just about anything I wanted. Then I added several hundred thin affiliate pages and all my rankings dropped from page 1 to page 4. I still rank #1 for my site name though. I also still rank high for specific searches in "quotes". I'm not sure what caused the penalty."

There are many things that can trigger this type of penalty. The only way to overcome this is to remove the spam elements from the site. You may verify whether the following techniques/methods that applied to your website:

1) JavaScript redirection
It might be considered as spamming. Rather than using this use 301 redirection by changing your .htaccess file. Read article

2) Guestbook/blog spamming
If you try to get links from guestbooks and blogs by spamming them then Google may applied this filter to your website.

3) Doorway pages OR Duplicate Pages
Remove those pages, Google doesn't like doorway pages. If you must use special landing pages for PPC ads and other ads, make sure that these pages cannot be spidered by Google and other search engines. You can use robots.txt to do that.

Try to remove the above spam techniques from your site. As this minus 30 filter is an automated filter, you will probably get your ranking back after some days.

Google Search Operators

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Here are some Google search operators to access for specific information.

allinanchor: (allinanchor:yellow gadget)
Search for multiple words within anchor text

allintitle: (allintitle:yellow gadget)
Search for multiple words within the page title

allinurl: (allinurl:yellow gadget)
Search for multiple words within the URL

bphonebook: (bphonebook:company name, place)
Display a business phone directory listing

cache: (cache:www.anywebsite.com)
Display Google's cached version of a page

date: (yellow gadget date:5)
Restrict search results to pages added/updated in last X months.

define: (define:meta tags)
Define a word or phrase

filetype: (yellow gadget filetype:doc)
Restrict search results by file type extension

inanchor: (inanchor:"yellow gadget")
Search for a word or phrase within anchor text

info: (info:www.anywebsite.com/anypage.html)
Display info about a page

intitle: (intitle:"yellow gadget")
Search for a word or phrase within the page title

inurl: (inurl:yellow gadget)
Search for a word or phrase within the URL

link: (link:www.anywebsite.com)
Display pages that link to the specified page

phonebook: (phonebook:name, place)
Display a phone directory listing

related: (related:www.anywebsite.com)
Display pages of similar content

rphonebook: (rphonebook:name, place)
Display a residential phone directory listing

site: (ebook site:www.perfect-optimization.com)
Search within a site or domain

stocks: (stocks:infy)
Display stock quote and financial info for a specified ticker symbol

URL canonicalization: Matt Cutts' advice

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Recently, I read in Matt Cutts' blog (Google Engineer), he is telling about cannonicalization of URL, which means the basic URL that should consider for google listing and ranking.

Normally, web developers uses several methods to link to the home page by www vs non-www, redirection, duplicate URLs, 302 'hijacking' etc. In most cases we can see links that are similar to the following, but going to the same page:

www.example.com
www.example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/index.html

All the above links are different in technically and web server returns different contents for all those URLs. Here are some tips to solve this issue that Matt Cutts answered:

1) Do not place different versions of links throughout in your website.
2) If Google listed different versions of URLs, try to setting up 301 permanent redirection in web server.
3) Do not use the URL removal tool to get rid of these kinds of URLs.

Matt Cutts' link to this topic:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Some more tips:

1) Do not submit different versions of URLs in search engines
2) Use Google sitemap to set your preferred URL to index

For your reference:

Relative or absolute paths to use in your page?
How to fix indexing www and non-www versions of domain

Search engine friendly URLs

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Here are some tips to make all your dynamic urls crawling by spiders.

(Taken from SEO News - September 7, Issue #135)

"* Unfriendly dynamic URL's are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind. Here are some examples of some unfriendly URL's:

Sample 1:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts.php&354=prod333&subproduct

Sample 2:
http://www.surfboardsatsea.com/boards/filename.php?id=F98ZF4
&productId=39222&ion=wicked&brand=582&template=532

These URLs are problematic because a search engine may consider these addresses too complex to spider. Why too complex Suffice it to say that the more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content too dynamic to read; it changes too often to be valuable to a search engine.

The way around these types of URLs is actually not so difficult; it may only require a small investment of time and money. The 'time' will be required when researching which URL fix is right for your system. The money may be required to pay a programmer to implement and test the new URLs. Here are how the URLs might look once they are fixed to be search engine friendly:

Sample 1 Fixed:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts/354/prod333/subproduct/

Sample 2 Fixed:
http://www.surfboardsatsea.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/board532/

These URLs are better because they do not include the extraneous characters that are so telltale on dynamic websites. In addition, the URLs are designed to appear like normal website directories when in fact they are dynamic URLs.

Important: it is vital that you minimize the length of the URLs that you use. Search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories. The samples above show fixed URLs that have about as many subdirectories as I would allow (4). *"

Directory submission - Increase your site popularity

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Here is another list of directories that you can submit your site link to increase traffic and popularity.

http://www.jayde.com/
http://searchsight.com/
http://www.cyberwebsearch.com/
http://www.clickey.com/
http://www.re-quest.net/
http://www.somuch.com/
http://www.cantufind.com/
http://www.bhanvad.com/
http://www.a-free-directory.info/

Use your H1 tag effectively

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The H1 tag is designed to tell the page topic. As the text on this tag describes your page content, search engines considered this tag as your page title and they give more weight to terms designated by this tag. Also note that use of many <H1> tags may dilute the importance of your page and cause problems in evaluating pagerank of your site.

By default <h1> tag is realy big and may not suit to your page layout. But you can use CSS to define the format of <h1> tag so that it fits in with your overall design. See some examples below:

-----------
h1 {font-family: Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Times New Roman; font-size: 16pt; color: #000;}
-----------
h1 {margin:0px; padding:0px; font-size: 16pt;}
-----------
h1 {background-image:url(/images/image.jpg);margin:0px; padding:0px; font-size: 16pt;}
-----------

Some tips:

1) Use <h1> tag only once in a page
2) It should be at the top of your page
3) Avoid using class attribute within the <h1> tag (eg: <h1 class="exmp">your header</h1>)
4) Avoid graphical titles, use all six header tags instead
5) Avoid use of other tags inside the <h1> tag (eg: <h1><span class="text">your header</span></h1>)

Blog submission links part 1

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Here are 10 Blog links that you can submit your blog (Blog home and submission page):

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/
http://dmoz.org/add.html

http://w.moreover.com/
http://w.moreover.com/cgi-local/site/sourcesubmission.pl

http://www.syndic8.com/
http://www.syndic8.com/suggest.php?Mode=data

http://www.newsknowledge.com/
http://www.newsknowledge.com/products/suggest_new_source.html

http://www.genecast.com/
http://www.genecast.com/news/create.jsp

http://www.technorati.com/
http://www.technorati.com/ping.html

http://www.popdex.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.blogstreet.com/
http://www.blogstreet.com/bsibin/add.cgi

http://www.blogwise.com/
http://www.blogwise.com/submit

http://www.boingboing.net/
http://www.boingboing.net/suggest.html

Is robots.txt file a must?

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Search engine crawlers first look into this special file when it visit your site and this text file tells which files should be indexed and which pages should be ignored in their search results.

Although this file is very important, use it only if you want to restrict some of your files being crawling by search engine robots. Here are some situations that could open a way to use this file on your site:

1) You want to restrict some robots crawling from entire website.
2) You have some directories contain private data that don't need to be indexed
3) Certain pages are temporary or not completed so don't need to index those till its completion.
4) You need to protect some files from viewing publically.

How to create robots.txt file

Robots.txt is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. It should be saved to the root directory of your site. It is also easy to create a basic robots.txt file but if you misconfigure it, you can accidentally prevent your site from being spidered and indexed.

Following keys are allowed in the robots.txt file:

1) User-agent: Here you can specify the name of robot
2) Disallow: It tells the robot(s) which parts of your website are out-of-bounds.

Examples

To exclude a file named "sample.htm" located at the root of your site, from spidering Googlebot (Robot of Google):

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /sample.htm

To exclude a folder named "data" located at your root directory and its all files from all spiders and bots:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /data/

To prevent all robots indexing your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Some useful links on robots.txt file:

Database of Web Robots
Robots.txt Syntax Checker
Robots META Tag
Robots.txt generator