SEO

A commenter on the site asked the question about Search Engine Optimization domain name choice and branding at SEO Tutorial – Domain Name Choice. My answer got a little on the detailed side, so turned it into an SEO article.

The question was if you have a branded domain name is it worth investing in an SEO domain name to make up for the loss is Search Engine Optimization benefit by having a branded domain?

Lets look at a real world example of a brand marketing domain name that’s gardening relevant (I think the commenter has a garden relevant site ).

I keep reading reciprocal linking is worthless (from a Google ranking perspective) from so called SEO experts, but they never supply proof. It’s all supposition, not actual scientifically collated evidence.

I don’t do too many reciprocal links (not in the classic sense anyway), but many of my own websites link back and forth (a LOT) and they do great in Google because of it, some of my sites ONLY have reciprocal links from my other sites and my sites see over 20,000 unique visitors a day. If reciprocal linking was some how downgraded I’d see many of my websites traffic decreasing because my sites link back and forth so much (all the links would be worthless). Yet my traffic keeps increasing on sites not using affiliate content (thin affiliate sites die traffic wise no matter how many links).

As a SEO consultant who loves to use affiliate based content I have fallen foul of Google’s duplicate content filters way too many times

Few years back I had a really nice set of Amazon affiliate stores that used Amazon’s XML datafeed, prior to Google cracking down on thin affiliates: basically content created using the affiliates content with no added value, AKA duplicate content or thin affiliate content, my very easy to make millions of indexed Amazon affiliate product pages (created from duplicate content) went from pulling in 25,000+ unique visitors a day to a fraction of this traffic (probably about 500 visitors now, little from Google).

Following a thread on alt.internet.search-engines (database-driven varying content of title and alt tags) and despite 10 posts so far, no one has answered the question!

Times for a short article on Does Google Prefer Fresh Content?

Main thrust of the original posters question regarding generating fresh content.

My question was how much better might the search results be if the content of my title, alt and header tags vary at random with every (most) visits, all containing appropriate keywords and content.

This poster has obviously been reading various forums, websites etc… that state as an SEO fact that Google prefers fresh content.

Been following a thread in the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines called Crit My SEO

As normal turned into a flame war and so the internal/outbound linking discussion was lost, but it inspired a post.

The OP asks -

I’m trying for a more wiki style link structure and have nofollow loads of internal links to keep juice flow controlled.. anyone got any thoughts

Stacey from Jezsta SEO Services made this good point:

So you think your internal links are crap and not worth going to? Why would you do that? PR reasons? I suppose you haven’t heard the latest links that are related count real nicely as weighted text on your pages. You need outgoing links that are related to help your relevance also. The only things you should nofollow are maybe affiliate links and sites that are unrelated or not really needing the link per se.

Earlier today I has working on one of my high content websites that targets Free Recipes: in the process of upgrading from around 11,000 recipes to over 100,000 using WordPress as the backend (added almost 160,00 recipes to a database and in the process of making them WordPress compatible)!

Checked SERPs on Google.co.uk and my site is 1st for Free Recipes, but on Google.com it’s around 12th. Not a big surprise I’ve pretty much neglected the site for over a year (despite it making a lot of AdSense revenue, soooo busy with SEO clients, rarely find the time for my own sites) and it’s PR has dropped (PR4 down from PR6) so needs more TLC (Text Links and something begining with C ).

All good SEO consultants know for a site to do well for competitive SERPs that page/site needs links (as many as possible please ). Some sites have no problems gaining text links naturally, but many small businesses struggle to compete for Google SERPs due to a lack of quality links.

And so purchasing text links has sprouted a thriving niche SEO industry which has it’s own set of pitfalls.

Buying text links is a touchy subject in the SEO community. The white hat SEO consultants think it’s a blackhat SEO technique and so frown on it’s use and the blackhat SEO’s know if done correctly buying text links can help a sites performance long term.

Through our SEO Consultant Services site we now offer text link advertising to non SEO clients.**

** Text links used to be only available to SEO clients on our SEO Consultant Retainer Plan.

To obtain a text links quote please visit our Buy Text Links page and fill out the form at the bottom.

Example Text Link Purchase

Ten PR5 links : value $400 (~£200)
Twenty PR4 links : value $500 (~250)
Seventy PR3 or less links : value $350 (~£175)

Our fee for a set of 100 text links as described above is only £200 (~$400) a month!

Please note we no longer sell text links, we advise using Text Link ads (click the image below).

Might seem a dumb thing for an SEO company to discuss, but search engine optimization isn’t for every website.

ROI (Return On Investment) is a critical factor in the decision to hire an SEO Consultant, not much point spending thousands of dollars on SEO services if it doesn’t result in many times more in increased income.

So how do you go about deciding if search engine optimization is for your website?

Has your site the potential to pull in lots of traffic from Google?

If you’ve visited our site previously you’ll have noticed a major design change, yes we’ve moved to a CMS, specifically WordPress.

Although WordPress is a blogging CMS it’s pretty easy to adapt to a web site like this one. For one thing we can now add a blogging format to the site rather than the static content we had before.

We’ve been using WordPress for other sites (mostly blogs) for quite sometime now and have developed some SEO optimised WordPress templates, we even give some SEO WordPress templates away free at More Earnings via Search Engine Optimization blog and have plans to build a package of SEO and AdSense WordPress Themes soon.