Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Time for another SEO related post and get away from all of the usual webmaster issues, coder delays and the launching of new sites.

I will go over the basics of keyword research in this post, keyword research is usually the 1st step of an SEO project, researching keywords is a vital step for any successful onsite optimization or offsite optimization for that matter.

Determining the keywords your going to target, the number of those keywords, and the completion you have for each keyword can make or break your SEO, selecting keywords that don’t bring you qualified traffic searching for what your looking for, is just a waste of bandwidth, lots of websites get traffic that doesn’t covert into sales, signups etc. of course, lots of aspects come to into conversion, such as site designs and usability, all of those work together actually, selecting the right keywords, have a nice website design, simple and easy to use and navigate through, having an analytics program in place to track your website visitors, see where they come from and why are they leaving a certain page so fast.

Alright, back to our topic, so how do you go about researching your keywords, well, 1st of all, lets think about what would you search for if your looking for what you sell? great, make a list of these search terms, chances are, those are some of the key terms that you want to target in your SEO.

Keyword Research Tools

I usually use a number of tools to research keywords, here is a list of some of those sites:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/  An excellent tool from digitalpoint.com, the tool uses data from wordtracker and overture’s keyword research tool.
http://www.nichebot.com/ another excellent tool to research keywords.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal  Adwords tool for researching keywords.

Use one or all of these tools for each one of the keywords you compiled earlier, you should end up with a big list of keywords, note that when selecting your keywords, don’t always go for the keywords with high search frequency, these keywords usually take longer time to rank for, and require more work and link building, longer keywords that have a higher relevancy rate to your business usually provides you with less traffic, BUT with better conversion rates.

Now you should have ended up with a huge list of keywords that we need to narrow down, we should check the competition for each keyword, keywords that have lots of competition in a saturated market should be taken off the list, unless your willing to spend $$$$ on link building and don’t mind waiting for a year to see rankings.

Search Google for those keywords and checking the sponsored results is a quick way to see what kind if competition you have, if you see lots of sponsored results for the keyword, chances are that keyword is being targeted by lots of the websites, you can also run the allinanchor and intitle and inanchor arguments on Google, if you find lots of websites using that keyword in their title or in their anchor text, chances are, those websites are optimized for that keyword, its your call if you want to take such keywords off your list or not, I usually target a combination of high traffic keywords (organic) and no so competitive keywords.

You should now be able to do some basic keyword research for your website/s, if you have any questions or a specific issue with a website, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email and ill be glad to offer you some advice.

I thought I should post a topic geared towards SEO only this time, we all know how having links pointing to your website can effect your rankings, especially on Google, simple? maybe, some think any link from any website can boost your rankings, that’s why you see people running spam scripts that post comments on blogs and guestbook’s, taking advantage of the blog/guestbook script to gain hundreds and sometimes thousands of back links, well guess what, Google can pick those up!

Yes that’s correct, Google can pick such spam links and cut them out, and either penalize the website their pointing to, or give no value for those links at all. we’ve seen lots of websites loosing their rankings after the “Jagger” update in 2005, you now know why lots of websites lost their long held page 1 rankings on Google.

Link building isn’t as easy as it used to be, link exchanges are now being found and ignored by Google, so you can forget about sending emails to other websites requesting a link exchange, best case scenario is that you can get some traffic from the other website, especially if its related to your website, but you can forget about improving your rankings from link exchanges, I still get emails from webmasters requesting a link exchange, I either ignore/delete the email, or respond with a polite/short explanation of why I don’t exchange links anymore, BUT if the other website was interesting, I offer the other webmaster the option  of a 3 way link, where he links to my website (A), and I like to his website (B) from a 3rd website that I own (C).

While this is a solution, I really think that’s its temporary, with the advancements in the algorithms such links will be found, especially if all of the websites that are used for 3-way link exchanging are hosted on the same IP address, its the easiest way to find 3 way link exchanges.

Google can also pick up paid links, links at the footer of the page or that are placed in a special box can be found and either ignored or given very little of the link power (passed to the website the link is pointing to) the age of the link is also an important aspect of links that are placed on high ranking, high PR websites, links placed for a month or less probably wont get any PR value or an improve in their SERP’s for that matter, this seems to be another way for picking up paid links.

Alright, so what can I do about it?

Best choice is to build a website/webpage that makes people want to link to it, that’s absolutely the best way to get high quality links from other websites, writing what we call a linkbait is usually a good way to get links, a linkbait is usually an article, topic, post or a page that is written with the intention of creating a good impression for the reader that makes him want to link to it, or use it in his website and provide a link back to where he copied it from.

Ok, but I also want to buy text links to boost my rankings.

In this case, you should take note of the following notes when buying links on websites:

• Make sure that the page your buying a link on is cached on Google

• Preferably has a good PR

• The page shouldn’t have more than 20 out going links (the less the better)

• Link shouldn’t have the nofollow tag added to it (check the html source, more about nofollow later on)

• Link shouldn’t be rotated using a script, it should be a direct link to your website

• Make sure you use your main keywords in the anchor text, more tips about this later on.

• It would be great if you can put the look where it would look natural to have it there, not besides other outgoing links, for example I was looking at websites to place links on for pagerankincrease.com instead of placing it with the other links under recommended websites, I asked the webmaster to place it in a new section called “Do you want to increase your page rank?” followed by little text about the service and link to the website using my main keywords, of course this usually costs more than your standard text link,  but you would get way more click through rates, especially if its strategically placed inside the websites content.

• Placing links on websites related to your industry will provide you with a better bang for your buck.

Those are the main points you should take note of when buying links on websites, researching which websites are best suited for you to buy links on is another large topic that I am planning to post about soon. Generally speaking you should look for related websites, don’t look at their PR only, if its a good website that you would want to bookmark then its probably a good idea to place a link there, if its a website you find no value in even if with a high PR then its probably not a good idea to waste money on a link on that site.

I can’t stress enough on not using any website that offers “Thousands of link on related websites” you never know what kind of strategies those services use, what kind of websites they use, and more importantly how would Google look at a website that gained 1000′s of links in a matter of weeks, banned? probably!

That’s about it for now, link building strategies is a huge topic, with rules changing all of the time with the advancements of algorithms and the new ways spammers find to increase their link popularity (and the new rules search engines implement to catch them, its a never ending story!) I’ll do my best to cover these issues and the latest buzz about the nofollow tag in my next post. For now, I am outta here!

Its been some time since I updated the blog, 5 days if I am not mistaken, I had a couple of days off last week which gave me some time to work on some of my sites, pagerankincrease is now fully operational, I’ve used a template that I had for now, I’ve been more concerned about the websites content and optimization, I also did some link building for it, hopefully I’ll get it to a PR5 with the next update.

Mypsacelobby.com is now sold, me and my partner in that website agreed to let it go and start off another one, last time I checked the website had 74 online guests, I am sure the new owner will enjoy the traffic and the steady (small) income this website provided, which will eventually increase with the correct advertising.

The new gaming website is still under construction, this will be a huge improvement in the gaming website that me and Imad start, I’ve already moved around 600 games to it, planning to get it to more than 1K games soon. below is a preview of the website

I am going to start optimizing the website soon, hopefully I’ll get it results similar to the ones I got my last SEO client on Google (ranked him on the 1st page for myspace games and myspace game)

Talkhomebusiness

Participation on the forums increased with the announcement of the new contest, still below the level that I hoped for, I am considering buying a package from Bryan (forumshock) to get those lurking members to post. I’ve submitted the contest’s press release on prweb.com (paid distribution) the press release got a 4 point editorial review so I am guessing they were pleased with the quality of the press release (they actually said that in the email) not sure if this is a msg they send to everyone to encourage them to upgrade or was it really worth it. I would post it here but its a bit long, you can read it on preweb.com here.

Thats about it for now I guess, I’ll try to post an update soon on the status of current/future projects.

I’ve decided to join the seo contest webmaster-talk is running, as I mentioned in my post earlier today I registered a new domain seowebmaster.org and thats the domain I am going to use for the contest, I figured I should register a domain that I can use after the contest is over.

Any ways my retsambew dash klat for Charity website is up and running, I’ve already started optimizing it, hopefully I’ll find the time to continue working on it, the contest will end in Sep. so I have enough time.

 

I’ve set my mind on a great script for a video website, you know the type of sites with funny videos in different categories, anyways the script that I found was way cheaper from the one I saw at the beginning (which was $150) this one has almost all of the features, and way cheaper, I’ve sent a pm to the script owner today and I expect to get the script in a day or two.

Domain Hunting

Now I need to start looking for a suitable domain name for this site, something creative and yet has some SEO potential in it. Any ideas?

MyspaceLobby

This site has been doing great recently, it got around 3000 uniques last month and now has a PR4, sadly after adding the Google sitemap to it (I didn’t have a good feeling about it, but my partner wanted to add it) the website lost the rankings I achieved for it on Google, it dropped from the 2nd page to the 9th page I’ve read about some sites adding the sitemaps and then losing their rankings, that’s a lesson for the future I guess, the website is moving backup, but slowly, it initially dropped to page 11 after adding the site map, now its on the 9th page with results varying from one DC to the other, that’s of course after deleting that damn sitemap.

I am not 100% positive that the sitemap did that, maybe it went back in the sandbox, but that didn’t happen for a new site that I optimized for a client and it still have a page 1 rankings for almost the same key term.

Besides Google, the site has an excellent ranking on MSN, rankings on Yahoo and yet to happen “hopefully” I guess it needs some more work, and I’ll have to make some time for it.

There seems to be another PR update going, or has finished, it looks like that it effected all of the sites with a PR0, non of the websites with any PR had any changes, most news sites jumped to PR4 and this blog got a PR5, I did do some link building for this blog, but I did minimal if any link building to other PR4 sites, some are saying that this is all temporary, we shall see!

I am not that happy with the last PR update, I was hoping for more! here are the final results:

1- talkhomebusiness.com PR4 (no change)
2- premiushosting.com PR4 (PR3 before the update)
3- post4hosting.com PR4 (PR3 before the update)
4- yourjobconnection.com PR2 (PR3 before the update)
5- businesstemplates.biz PR3 (PR4 before the update)
6- promptsubmission.com PR3 (PR4 before the update)
7- webhostingdirectory.be PR2 (PR0 before the update)

As you can see, 3 websites went up, and 3 websites went down, and 1 staid the same, I’ll have to work harder on link building in the next few months to get all sites a higher PR, I will also be opening pagerankincrease.com soon, which I will work hard on the most to get it a decent PR with the next update (will take around 3 other months) I hope I find the time!

A page rank just started today, I’ve been monitoring it for the last 2 weeks and it has finally started, Most of my websites increased 1 PR, which wasnt what I hoped for, results are still changing among all of Google’s DC’s, so I am hoping that I get better results.