to be continued…

to be continued…

• To get traffic from search engines - The primary purpose of SEO is NOT to be number in SERPs but to get as much traffic as from search engines as possible! This distinction is important because though you might rank better than before your SEO efforts still can’t be considered a success if you don’t reach the number of traffic you need/want from search engines.
• To get interested visitors from search engines - This pertains to relevance. You want the traffic you get to be interested in the content of your website. If you get a very high bounce rate then you need to take a close look at your keywords and start targeting search terms that are more relevant to your site’s actual content.

These are the two most basic reasons for SEO, however, if you look at the bigger picture you will see that even the above reasons exist to support the primary goal of your site (market your products online, educate people about your field, etc.). Hence, always remember that SEO is just a tool to help you reach your website’s aim. If you want to do effective SEO then do not lose sight of your goals.

There’s no doubt about it the fastest way to get traffic is not via organic SEO. However, while waiting to become achieve domain authority what you can do is to take advantage of the sites that have already achieved this. To do this the solution is still to somehow get linked to by a trusted site.

Spammers take advantage of sites with authoritative domains by inserting hidden links on the site. What you can do without resorting to spam tactics is to:

• advertise on the site;
• rent a page on the site (some sites allow this);
• get yourself on the site’s blogroll/listings;
• contribute content to the site and link to your site as resource site; and
• use other white hat link building tactics you know.

Note that by getting links from trusted sites will benefit you more than one way. The link will add to your site’s authority (not applicable for ad links that since the nofollow attribute is used in such cases), you’ll get more visibility for your site, and you’ll get traffic referred by the site.

This tip is fairly old since we all know that domain age is a factor search engines consider when ranking webpages. If you plan on buying an old domain make sure that it is AT LEAST 5 YEARS OLD. According to randfish the top 100 domains for any type of domain ending (.com, .biz, .net, .info, etc) are mostly older than five years.

4. Get links from .EDU pages

If you look at Google’s SERPs you will find that not all .EDU pages rank well, however, even then .EDU pages (even those that don’t rank that well) are still considered to authority/trusted sites. Because of this you would do well to get links from these pages. Of course links from .GOV are great too but it is harder to get links from government sites so you might as well focus on getting a link or two from a .EDU page. Again this doesn’t guarantee automatic authority for your page but it will still help boost your site’s authority.

The answer to the question on when you should court trusted/authoritative domains for links is simple…You should court them if your domain is not yet a trusted domain.

The value of an inbound link increases if the linking site is consider by Google (and other search engines) to be authoritative, which is why most of us need it in order to increase our own domain autority. However, if your domain is already a trusted domain you shouldn’t have to bother trying to get links from other trusted domains. Of course getting links from them is still a good thing but since you are already a trusted site Google will still view your contents as relevant and will thus give you a good rank. Instead of spending your time optimising your site through link building you should instead focus your attention on other issues such as conversion rates and brand/reputation management. This doesn’t mean that you should completely forget search engine optimisation. You should always be aware of your standing with search engines and manage your site to keep it optimised and in good standing, in terms of search rankings, but since you’ve already achieved the goal of many sites, which is to rank well in SERPs, then you should be taking the next step.

In randfish’s post on “Google Spam Illuminates the Algo’s Reliance on Domain Authority” he outlines some things that can help you enhance your domain’s authority. Note that you should do your usual link building strategies and simply use the additional knowledge to get the results you want a bit faster.

Tips on achieving domain authority:

1. Use a single domain

Instead of using multiple domains for different content it is better to put them all under one domain. The reason for this is that with the more domains you have the more links you’ll need to build each one up. On the other hand, using just one domain will mean that all the links you gather for each content/topic will add to the overall number of links for that domain…and we know that the number of links is what really counts.

In my opinion though even if using a single domain is, as randfish put it, “universally wise” it is still better to use a different domain if your content are of very different topics. Remember search engines also favour themed sites since it helps them determine relevancy. Aside from that the relevance of the links you gather also counts.

The time to put all your content under one domain is when the content are related to each other. For example, put your SEO and SEM content under one domain but use a different domain for your fashion content!

Before continuing with the discussion let us assume that the website being optimised for the keywords is a website that sell computers and computer parts.

• computers - Since this keyword is very vague as a website that sells computers my advice is to simply make sure that this keyword (both in the singular and plural form) be found ALL OVER the website. Being a very competitive term I would advice smaller websites not to bust their budget trying to make it to the top of SERPs with this keyword especially since users looking to buy computers usually enter more specific keywords.
• refurbished computers - Obviously this keyword should appear on the product description pages of each refurbished computer on sale. A wise thing to do would also to optimise a landing page for refurbished computers on sale. Although you would want your main page to contain the term refurbished computers so that people can still find it via the main page you should optimise the refurbished computers page for this search term more than you would the main page. Leading the user to a page with more specific information will encourage them to stick to that page since they information they need is right before them.

to be continued…