on-page seo: easy steps to a perfectly optimized page

www.theSEOmethod2.com 1

ON PAGE SEO

Optimise & dominate.

David: Hi, guys, David Jenyns here from Melbourne SEO services. In this video presentation,

I want to take you through how to do excellent on-page SEO. A lot of people when they

first get introduced to search engine optimization, I think end up focusing on the wrong

things to their detriment, rather than just getting out there, following the rules of thumb

and putting out more great content. So I’m going to take you through what it is you need

to be focusing on.

Get your priorities right

I think first and foremost, the most important thing

you need to think about is getting your priorities

right. Rather than focusing on keyword density or

making sure that you’ve perfectly optimized a web

page for SEO purposes and for the search engines,

you need to make sure you get your priorities right.

When push comes to shove, the Google spider isn’t

going to pull out its wallet and purchase your products, it is the client, the user who

searches the website who is the one who is going to purchase your product.

Accordingly you need to put usability first. You should always put the user before the

search engines. I can show you some good rules of thumb to follow but if they end up

inhibiting the user’s ability to navigate to what it is that they want or maybe if it muddies

the water as to how clear it is for the user as to what action needs to be taken next, you

always want to err on the side of the client, the end user, thinking about usability.

We’re not just putting up websites and trying to get blogs and pages ranked just for the

sake of getting ranked. We’re doing it to sell a product, we’re optimizing for an outcome.

Typically that outcome could be a variety of different things. It might be getting a sale, it

could be an opt-in, it might be getting someone to watch a video. Whatever it is, make

sure you identify what that outcome is first. Then you can make sure that your page

achieves that and then SEO becomes secondary.


No magic formula

Another thing I want to talk about is that fact that

there is no magic formula. I’m going to give you the

good standard rules of thumb, best practices that

you can apply when you’re optimizing a web page.

Google doesn’t go out there and announce its

algorithm. It doesn’t tell you, here is exactly what

you need to be doing to rank number 1. Moreover,

the line in the sand moves all the time. Google is constantly updating its search engine

algorithms and rankings are changing. So there is no magic formula that you can follow,

just these rules of thumb that I’m going to give you.

Another idea that I want you to get early is that Google ranks pages, it doesn’t rank

websites. I’ve seen a lot of people think that, once they’re website has been approved by

Google, or once they start to rank really well, their entire site ranks really well. Google

doesn’t rank websites, it ranks pages, so each page needs to be optimized accordingly. We

need to do both on page and off page optimization for every page. Really what every page

is, is another ticket in the search engine lottery and the more tickets we have in the search

engine lottery, the greater chance we’ve got of winning that lottery. So we want to create

more pages that are optimized correctly.

Ultimately, you just really want to give Google what it wants. If you think about it, what’s

Google’s objective here? Google talks about wanting to serve up the most relevant and

interesting content to its end user. The reason Google wants to do that is because it knows

that if it achieves that goal, the user will constantly come back to Google and use Google’s

search engine. Once they have the user coming back, it’s like they’ve won the eyeballs of

the user. Now they look to ways to monetize that. Google knows it’s that attention that is

important and that they can sell that attention to its advertisers.

They do that through a whole host of means but the primary one is through the AdWords

program. They’re then selling that attention that they’ve got because they’ve served up

good relevant content to the user once they’ve got that attention and then they can sell

those eyeballs on. What do we want to do? We want to give Google what it wants. We

want to give it good quality, original content. I want to give you a good example of one of

my sites. This is one of the ones that I’ve made public to give you an idea of what I’m

talking about with good original content.


So we’ll just head over to freetradingsystems.org.

Now this is a website that I developed, it was

originally an e book called The Ultimate Trading

Systems. We wrote it and rewrote it multiple times

and basically constantly kept on taking feedback

from users and incorporating it into the book. That’s

a fantastic way to get started if you’re new to trading

the stock market or any market for that matter. What I’ve done on this website, I’ve tried to

make it as simple and clean as possible. There are some navigations along the left here

which will take the person through each of the different chapters. There are different

videos at the top of the page and then there is content beneath the page. Then there is

also an ability for people to start commenting underneath.

The reason I show you this is just to show you this is good quality content. I’m not just

putting up a bunch of spam pages. We’ve had these videos professionally recorded, the

content has been edited and re edited. As a result, this website does really well in the

search engines. So give Google what it wants and you’re going to be much better off in the

long run.

Solid advice

Let me give you some solid advice on how to do

your on page optimization. Again, these are just the

rules of thumb, no magic formula. Take what I’m

going to give you here, apply it to your own

websites and don’t get too caught up in the details.

The first thing you need to know and we’ll go into

keyword selection in more detail in another presentation, you need to understand that for

each page, each page should only be optimized for one keyword, maybe two keywords.

A lot of people what they’ll do is, and I’ve seen it time and time again, they’ll try and have

one page go after ten different phrases. What ultimately ends up happening there is you

confuse Google as to what that page is about, especially if they’re on a variety of topics. If

we’re talking golf balls, gold clubs, golf swing, if you tried to optimize one page for each of

those three keywords it would be difficult for Google to know, what is this page about? Is it

about golf balls or is it about golf swing or whatever. So you want to make sure that you

choose one keyword and optimize one keyword per page.


You can do variations of that keyword and it’s what I suggest. You might do something

like, let’s say if you were going after trading systems, for example, because that’s what I’ve

done for the freetradingsystems.org, you might have trading systems as your primary

keyword and the variations of that which I’ll call the secondary keywords could be things

like trading system or trading plans possibly because there is some slight correlation there.

That’s me knowing the market, but you don’t want to go too far away from what it is that

original primary keyword is trying to optimize for.

Once you’ve picked your keyword, you need to make sure that keyword occurs in the

correct places throughout your website. You want to make sure it appears in your title,

your meta descriptions, your meta keywords, a few times in the content on the website. I’ll

also talk about some html tags, the H1 tag and bold and italics and things like that. Also try

and have the keyword in the URL if possible.

Let’s jump over to the website here and I’m going to

talk you through the optimization for this page. Let’s

just perhaps choose one of the pages here. Ok, so

this particular page, the keyword that we’re trying to

optimize for is trading goals. Let’s go view page

source and you can do this in any browser. We can

have a look at a little bit of the back end code and

then we’ll jump back to the front end because I don’t want to give you too much

gobbledygook. If you’re not too sure about this, pass it on to your web designer and show

him this part of the video and he’ll understand.

Firstly the title tag is important. I think Google says

you can have about sixty-four characters long.

Typically for the title tag I like to have probably

around five or six words. I don’t really like to go

much more than that. I like to weight the keyword

towards the front of the title where possible. In this

example I’ve got trading goals up near the front. It

doesn’t really matter and this is that idea of as long as you have that keyword in that title

tag, you’re going to be right. You don’t want a formula that you copy every time. So maybe

you put it at the front sometimes, maybe you put it in the middle sometimes, sometimes

you put it at the end. You can mix it up a little bit but I’ve got: Trading Goals, Make Them

to Make Money.


You want to incorporate in some good copywriting as well, thinking in terms of what will

appeal to a user. The title tag is what ultimately ends up in the search engines when you

type a particular keyword. I’ll show you that in a moment. You want to make sure you have

the keyword in the title.

The next area you want to focus on are these two here. We’ve got the meta description

and the meta keywords. Now the meta description, again, you want to have the keyword

in there. You should at least have it once, twice is ok, three times is ok. Any more than

three and I’d probably say you’re starting to spam it. You get about 160 characters or

thereabouts to work with, so it’s a couple of sentences long. Again, this appears in the

search engine results, so it’s important to make sure that you make it as attractive as

possible from a copywriting point of view to increase your conversion rate.

Then we’ve got the keywords. You can see the primary keyword I’m going after here is

trading goals. Now I talked about those secondary keywords, the variations on that

primary. We’ve got here trade goal and trade goals. They’re slight variations on that

primary word and that’s what I was talking about. We’re very specifically targeting a

keyword for Google and we’re not confusing it by throwing in a whole host of other

keywords. Each page should optimize for one and a couple of variations. So those are some

thing you need to take note of there.

The next thing you want to have a look at is on the actual page itself. I suggest you have at

least a minimum of 300 words content on a page. Any less than that and you’re probably

not giving Google enough to sink their teeth into. You also want to put the keyword if you

can into an H1 tag. Again that’s probably something you want to pass over to your web

guy if you’re not sure.

This is an H1 tag. It’s just a heading tag and it

basically draws Google to this particular line of text

and says, hey, this is more important, it’s a heading.

So when you have your keyword in there, it’s like

you’re saying to Google, the keyword is more

important because I’ve put it in an H1 tag. Similarly

there are some other things you can do as well, like

making sure that you bold the keyword on the page, you can italicize it. You don’t want to

do it every time. You might do it every now and then. It’s just a matter of making it look

natural and keeping things mixed up, so sometimes you might use it, sometimes you

might not.


In this example, I don’t think I have. If I scroll down

the page, it’s in an H1 tag. Actually I’ll show you this.

I’ve got a cool little plug in here for Firefox. You

might want to get it, it’s called Search Status. I’ll just

highlight the keyword and hopefully it gives me the

opportunity to enter that keyword. It’s trading goals,

so I entered that in there. It’s highlighted it

throughout the page. We’ve got it here in an H1 tag like I talked about. It’s early in the

content as well. I’ll keep scrolling through, there it is again and it’s also down the bottom.

The rules or thumb when it comes to optimization for keywords within the content on the

page are: have it early and often. I like to have it at least in the first paragraph or close to. I

like to have it at least in the middle of the content and also near the end of well. A lot of

people get caught up in this idea of keyword density. What keyword density is, let’s say

we’ve got 100 words on a page. If you have the keyword displayed once in that 100 words,

that would be a keyword density of 1%.

This is going back a few years, people used to talk about, what is the perfect keyword

density? I shied away from that. I think you just want to write what is natural. You want to

work the keyword in a little bit. I have given you in the presentation a slight rule of thumb

which you can follow which I’ve got here. If you want, you can have the keyword maybe

about three times per 500 words. That’s a minimum. You might have a few more, you

might have a few less depending on if it’s a fewer number of words. It just really depends,

mix it up and don’t always do exactly the same thing. Make sure that you’ve got it

sometimes on the page.

If you can use an H1 tag every now and again, use a bold tag, italics and image tags as well.

This is again one of those minor things. It will depend more so in some niches than others.

In the stock market niche it doesn’t really apply so much because people aren’t using the

Google image search to try and find images related to the stock market.

As I talk about later, I’ll talk about another example site, my planet13.com.au website

which is a rock and roll clothing store. We use a lot of images on that website and we like

to make sure we’ve got those images appropriately tagged. Someone might be searching

in Google Images and they might search for Metallica logo and it’s a good idea if our

images are coming up. So it’s more important for us to optimize those images than we do

for the stock market material.


Again there are some of the things you can think about. Really when push comes to shove,

the main things you need to do are make sure that you have a unique title. I didn’t go into

that in detail but I see this. This is a big problem with people optimizing their websites.

Every page on your website should really have a unique title. That is, every page should

have its own custom title, you don’t want to have it exactly the same. Google doesn’t like

that. So the title is important, make sure, I’ve got there sixty-four. It’s around sixty-four

characters long that you can work with, otherwise it’s just going to go … and not finish

that sentence. I’ll jump over to Google and show you that in a moment.

The meta description, make sure you’ve got the keyword in there. The meta keywords,

make sure you’ve it in there and then just make sure you’ve got it on the page a few times.

If you can also incorporate the keyword into the URL as well, that’s a good idea. So it might

be something like freetradingsystems.org/tradinggoals.html. That’s just an extra way to

say, yes, Google, this page is about what it is I’m talking about.

I’m just going to head over here and I just want to

search, let’s say trading system, continuing with this

example of the freetradingsystems.org. I’ve just

searched this here and I want to talk you through the

title and description just so you know how important

they are. The title of the page will appear here. You

can see it actually bolds the keyword so it’s important

to make sure you have that keyword in there. It’s important to write an attractive title so

that someone wants to click it. If someone’s typing trading system, I’ve basically said,

download your free trading system here. Tell me that’s not going to get their attention.

Then I go into the description here which is the meta description, another important thing.

You want to make sure, I’ve got here, there are three … so that means I’ve probably

written more than the 160 characters, so always keep that in mind. I’ve written: Looking for

free trading systems? Of course they’re looking for free trading systems because they typed

into the search engine, so I’m really talking to the individual and I’m encouraging them,

you can download our free … What’s this free thing I can download? That’s another reason

why title tags and meta descriptions are important because they display in the search

results as well.


Keywords tips & tricks

So let’s have a look. A couple of little extra keyword tips and tricks. Firstly keywords get

bolded in the SERPs. Now SERPs stand for Search Engine Results Page and I just showed

you that a moment ago. You saw how, we’ve typed in trading system and see how trading

system is bolded there and it’s bolded in the description as well. Use that to your

advantage and use it to grab someone’s attention because things that are bolded just

make them stand out. So use that to your advantage. I just noticed down here another one

of our websites, systems trading blog, that’s another one that we’re looking to optimize

and we’re on the first page, that’s good, ok. I digress.

Another tip here, for keyword stuffing. Keyword

stuffing is bad. What is keyword stuffing? If you have

a look over here, this is keyword stuffing where

someone writes ‘White is a word on a white web

page that is white because the background is white.

White is a colour, white is not black’ and so it goes

on. That’s an example of what keyword stuffing is. If

you’ve chosen a keyword, you don’t want to optimize that page for the keyword. You just

want to make sure that you have the keyword put in those places. Just follow the rules of

thumb that I mentioned and you will be well on your way.

The next thing I want to talk about is latent semantic indexing. This is something where I

think a lot of people have got unnecessarily caught up. Google goes out there and

registers a whole bunch of patents on a whole lot of different things and I think they do it

just to protect themselves just in case they want to incorporate it into the search engine

algorithm at a later point in time.

Latent semantic indexing is this idea that when you write a piece of content, lets say we’re

optimizing for the keyword trading systems. Google registered this patent basically saying,

if someone is writing around the keyword ‘trading systems’ then they would also reference

some of these other keywords. So if I’m talking about trading systems, some other terms

related to that, they’re not variations but they’re related, things like how to enter, how to

exit, how much money should I put into a stock, the trailing stop, an initial stop. These

keywords are typically surrounded whenever someone is talking about trading systems.


The idea is that you want to have these, these keywords, these semantic keywords within

your text. I don’t tend to worry about it too much because I’m out there putting good

content and that’s ultimately what I’m doing, so I know those keywords are going to work

their way in anyway. I don’t need to focus in on making sure that I’ve stuffed enough of

these latent semantic keywords in there because it just happens naturally. If you write

good content, then latent semantic indexing is going to happen naturally. So don’t stress

yourself too much about that.

Just the important thing, don’t follow an exact formula, follow those rules of thumb that I

talked about for the basics of on page optimization. Rather than focusing on getting a

page perfectly optimized because there is no perfectly optimized page, focus on building

more pages. I’ll talk a little bit more about internal linking structure and why that’s so

important. Rest assured you’re going to have better bang for your buck, you’re going to

have better return on your investment for your time if you focus on building more pages,

as opposed to tweaking and making the pages that you’ve already got exactly right.

Pagerank sculpting

Similarly, here’s another thing that I think people

spend a little bit too much time focusing in on. Matt

Cutts has recently come out and talked about page

rank and the way page rank sculpting works and

how it’s not nearly as effective as it used to be. Now

I’m not going to go into too much detail about page

rank here and we’ll talk about it in another

presentation. But since we’re talking about on page optimization I think it’s important that

I do talk about it a little bit. Matt Cutts, who is one of the Google engineers, or he’s

someone who works over at Google, who’s pretty much part of their media department

and he announces and makes videos and posts a whole lot of content about the way that

Google is working and changes in their algorithm. If you have time, I think it’s a blog worth

checking out. Just Google Matt Cutts and you can find out more about his blog.


The idea of page rank, page rank is just an explanation or a way for Google to determine

the authority of a particular page. It’s just a ranking scale, a scale between zero and ten.

The closer to ten you get, the more important or the more authoritative that website is

seen to be in Google’s eyes. That said though, it’s not something you should get caught up

on too much because I’ve had plenty of websites that rank really well on Google and

they’ve got a very low page rank. As you build a page over time and you we do build links

to it, your page rank will start to grow.

We’ll have a look at the way page rank is distributed. As I mentioned, it’s a ranking

between one and ten where the higher the number, the more authoritative the website is.

Having a look here, this is a standard linking structure. You can see this is a web page here.

If you just imagine that is one of your web pages. Imagine you’re linking out to three other

pages from your web page. So you’ve got a page that links to three other pages here.

Sometimes people talk about page rank as link juice, so that’s just what I’m referencing

here, it’s a synonymous term. The way that linking works is that if you have some

outbound links, links pointing to other pages, it’s talked about the idea the link juice is

equally dispersed among those outbound links.

Let’s say this page rank here is a page rank 3 or it has link juice value of 3. When we link

out to these three separate pages, we’re sending an equal amount of that link juice to each

one of these pages. We’ll go into this in more detail when we do talk about off page

optimization. Link juice is important because it helps your website to come up in the

search engines. In this example, you can see it’s equally distributed between these three

outbound links.

What happened here, something called ‘no follow’ was introduced. Quite a few years back

now, when blogs started to become all the rage, when someone creates a blog, there is the

option to be able to comment on those blogs. What people were doing, by commenting

on those blogs, they were given the option to link back to their website. It was a way to

increase their page rank because they’d be funneling or stealing some of the link juice

from the website where they commented from.

When people figured this out, they started spamming as many different blogs and

websites as they could to get as many of these inbound links back to their website. To try

and combat that spamming, Google introduced a thing called no follow. The idea was that

the no follow tag was a special tag that you put into every link on your website that you

didn’t want to pass this link juice to.


Here’s an example of using the no follow. This website still has a page rank of 3, but using

this special attribute, we’ve put a no follow tag which means don’t pass any link juice to

this website here. Now the link juice is being funneled between these two pages here. So

our page rank of 3 is split in half and we’ve got now link juice value of 1.5 and a link juice

value of 1.5. The link where we used this special html tag now gets zero.

Now this was working all well and good in the land of Google for a little while, until people

started to do a thing called page rank sculpting. What they would do is, they would have

their site and they would start to use a series of no follow tags to try and funnel that page

rank back to specific pages that they wanted to have ranked. Through using an intricate

internal linking structure and also off site linking structure, they were able to channel all of

this page rank to specific pages and cause some websites to rank a lot better than they

probably should.

Google realized that and the game changed again. Just recently Matt Cutts has come out

and said, hey, we’ve changed the way no follow works. It kind of goes back to what we

were doing when we were doing the standard linking structure, only when you use the no

follow tag, no link juice is displayed. The first thing that Google will do currently, this is the

way that Matt Cutts has explained it, is that when you’ve got a page and it links out to

three different pages, the link juice is divided between those three outbound links, just as

the example here, example A shows you.

When we introduce the no follow links, so now imagine we use the no follow tag attribute,

the link juice value for this web page just disappears. It’s not distributed to these other

ones. Instead this is not turned into 1.5 and this 1.5, it just disappears. You no follow it, it

disappears into the ether of the website or the ether of the internet.

So now the whole idea of page rank sculpting doesn’t work nearly as well as it used to

because you can’t funnel that page rank. If a link is on that page, it is going to get

distributed there, whether or not it gets passed on. It will get divided into the three

outbound links but the actual value of that link won’t get passed on.

I know that was a little bit lengthy and might have gone over the head of some people.

The reason I wanted to talk about that is just so you don’t get caught up in page rank

sculpting and you focus more about just making sure you’re building good quality pages.

Dan Thies and a few other great SEO people talk about the idea, it’s just better to let the

link juice flow and not try and page rank sculpt it.


Pagerank what?

The only time you might consider using page rank is

when you’re really trying to optimize to get the

absolute most out of your site. Maybe if you optimize

for internal reputation. What I’m talking about there

is when you’re linking within your website and you’re

linking to a page. Most people link to their homepage

with the anchor text ‘home.’ I’m going to head over

to Planet 13 and that’s a good example.

This is another website that I’ve helped build and manage. Having a look here, you can see

we’ve got a home link up the top here. Now when we talk about off page optimization,

we’ll be talking about using anchor text and the importance of making sure the

appropriate text is used when linking to a page. It educates Google as to what that page is

about.

Now obviously we’re not trying to rank for the

keyword ‘home’, so I don’t want to link to my

homepage with the keyword home when, if I have a

look up the top here, I know I’m actually optimizing

for the keyword ‘band merchandise’. I’m not looking

to optimize for the keyword home. So that is an

instance where I use the no follow tags.

I’m just going to use highlight no follow tags using that search status tool again, a plug-in

definitely worth getting. You can see here it’s highlighted all of the tags that I’ve no

followed. I don’t want to try and rank for home. I don’t want to try and rank for store

locations, I don’t want to rank for customer support. I use other methods and other ways to

send links to the pages with the anchor text for which I’m trying to rank.


Really that’s the only point in time where I might use

no follow, just for the internal reputation, to make

sure that I’m telling Google, hey, this page is about

band merchandise or whatever, then I’ll link to that

page with the right anchor text. If I’m going to link to

it with something outside of a keyword that I’m trying

to rank for, then I’ll use the no follow tag. Actually I

should probably just show you, I’ll jump in and go view page source and just show you

what that no follow tag looks like. Again, just pass this onto your web guy, he’ll know what

it is all about.

Having a look here, you can see, there’s our link there. Go on to planet13.com.au and we’ve

got here rel = no follow, so that right there is our no follow tag. You pop that in whenever

you don’t want to pass any of that Google page juice or you don’t want to have Google

read that link. I don’t want it to think, hey, this page is about home when I’m trying to

optimize for another keyword. So that’s about the only time I would use it. The best thing

that you can do when it comes to page rank is just to send links to the pages you want to

rank to. Find out what your high converting pages are, your money pages, and send more

links to those pages.

If we head over to Planet 13 again, this is a good

example. I’ll scroll down the page here, I’ve still got

that no follow tag on, highlighting the no follow tags

and you can see down the bottom here. Here are all

the keywords I’m trying to rank for, ones that I

consider more important. You can see here band t-

shirts and band stickers and band buttons and band

patches. These are some of the keywords I’m trying to rank for, so I’m sending some link

love to those pages and I’m making sure that I’m doing it with the appropriate anchor text

as well. So just send more links to the pages that you would like to rank for.


I want to give you another example as well. Let’s check out maybe this Blink 182 patch.

Something else that I do, on some of my pages you want to get your internal linking

structure right. So it’s a good idea on a page to link to other pages with the keywords that

you’re trying to rank for. This is a page about Blink 182, and if you have a look down the

bottom, I’m sending links to Blink stickers, I’m sending links to Blink 182 video, Blink 182

discography because they are keywords that I’m trying to rank for. So I’m going to make

sure I have that on the page and then I’m using my internal l inking structure to help

increase my page ranking when it comes to the results in Google.

So that’s the best way to do it, send links to those high converting pages. I’ve got here

more pages equals more sites. I actually made a booboo there, it actually should be more

pages equals more links. When you’ve got more pages, there are more linking

opportunities, more opportunities for you to link back to yourself with pages that you want

to rank for. Again, this is something you don’t want to over optimize and don’t spam.

You’re not going to have on every page, links to every single page on your website. That’s

not really going to help you.

Pick out those high converting pages and link to those. Ultimately that’s why big sites win

because big sites have more linking opportunities. They’ve got more pages, therefore

they’ve got more opportunity to send links to those pages which ultimately help them rank

better in the search engines.

A picture is worth…

Ok, so a picture is worth a thousand words and I

think this will help explain a little bit more the way

this linking structure works and the way that you

should structure your website. If you imagine this

bucket as your homepage and we’ve got our SEO

juice in the top here. That’s our page rank. Now

these pages down here or these buckets are our sub

pages and you can see here we are linking, these little lines here represent links from our

homepage through to these sub pages. So you can see here we’re linking through to some

pages that might be important just for navigation and help the user to get around the

website.


Also we’ve got pages here, you want to link to those important pages that I talked about,

those higher converting pages. You want to make sure that you link to those. That’s what

I’ve done here with these green links. Those green links represent pages that I want to

have ranked that are outside of the normal navigation. I’m linking through from the

homepage to those pages and you want to make sure that you do it with the right anchor

text. You want to make sure that you do it with the right text explaining to Google what

that page is about. That’s the way to funnel the page rank or funnel that link juice to the

pages that you want to have ranked.

Then you’ve got these more internal pages here, these other buckets and these other

buckets are still linked too but you want to link to them from your sub pages. Because this

page here for me isn’t as important to get ranked, maybe it doesn’t convert as highly,

maybe it’s an information based page, whatever the reason is, I don’t want to have it

funneling all of my good SEO juice, It will get down there at some point. I want to make

sure it is indexed but I don’t want to send this valuable link juice trying to get this page

ranked when these ones are more important. They’re the ones that are going to equal

money for me.

You also want to have a look at some of these other pages here I haven’t linked to. You

really should be linking to all of your pages on your site. You’d just be linking through from

your sub pages and not having a direct link from your homepage.

Another thing you might look at doing, and this is part of that internal linking structure, an

area I think most SEO people overlook, is the idea that you should really be linking to these

pages, these pages where I’ve got these green links here. You could link to them from

these other internal pages. These sub pages could be linking through to those pages that

you want ranked. That is a good practice. Hopefully that gives you a little bit more of a

visual representation on what’s going on as far as this link juice.


Dave's hot tips

I wanted to give you a few bits and pieces now, just I

suppose blow away some of the myths that I’ve

heard around SEO and a whole variety of topics.

We’ll start off with duplicate content. Now when it

comes to writing duplicate content, Google really

doesn’t like it if you’re doing duplicate content on

your own website. What I’m talking about there, you

want to make sure that every page is unique. Don’t take the same bit of text and copy and

paste it or have multiple versions of the same page on your own site. Google doesn’t like it,

it will de index certain pages and may even de index your website. So make sure that every

page is unique.

When it comes to off page, I think this is where some people go wrong. They’re trying to

build links to their website and they’re really focusing in on making sure that they’re

sending links from only unique websites, only unique bits of content. I don’t really think

this is as important as people make it out to be. I’ve heard people talk about the idea even

that Google will apply a penalty if you’ve got so many links to your website from exactly

the same sources with exactly the same content. I personally haven’t found that to be the

case.

Rarely does Google actually apply a penalty for anything that happens off site. Think about

it this way. If Google did apply penalties for things that happened off site, then what could

happen is you could just go to your competitor, do a whole lot of these things that could

‘introduce penalties.’ You might link to their website with a whole lot of duplicate content,

you might link to their website with all the same anchor text, you might do a whole lot of

things, to apparently in Google’s eyes, try and be gaming the search engines. If that was

the case, Google would then de index the site and you could potentially de index your

competitors.

At very worst, I think Google may not apply or count those links. So if you do something

where maybe there is some sort of duplicate filter clause, I think it’s more that those links

won’t count, it’s not that it will end up harming you. I’ll give you a good example of that. I

think duplicate content off page is something that happens naturally. It happens in nature

and that’s ultimately what we’re doing when we’re trying to do our SEO. We try and

replicate what happens in nature.


Getting links from a lot of sources that are using the same content happens in nature and

I’ll give you an example. Press releases are a fantastic example. Just recently we’ve done a

press release and I’ll hit ‘back’ a few times because I searched for it before. We wrote this

press release in PRWeb, distributed it out to try and get some inbound links and get some

coverage for a survey that we did just about Google versus Yellow Pages and how Google

is pretty much people’s choice when they’re looking for everyday products and they’re

steering away from Yellow Pages.

PR here I guess, not to get confused with page rank, this is press release we’re talking

about here. This is a distribution service that takes our press release and distributes it over

hundreds and hundreds of websites around the internet. I’ve gone ahead and taken the

title from my article here and I’ve posted it into Google. You can see Google has come

back, I’ve used it in quotes, so I’m looking for an exact occurrence of this which is going to

be my press release.

You can see here we’ve got an occurrence of 958

times. So Google has found and indexed 958

different occurrences of exactly the same content.

There might be slight variations on the way the page

is laid out, but the content, for all intents and

purposes, is exactly the same. So clearly Google is

indexing it and clearly it happens naturally. So don’t

stress so much about making sure that all of your links are one hundred percent unique. As

long as you’re building links from a variety of different sources, having a lot of the same

links is ok because it happens in nature.

The next thing I want to talk about is using XML Sitemaps. Sitemaps are just a list of all of

the different pages within your website. If you haven’t heard of the terminology before,

just pass it on to your web guy.

Ask him for a Sitemap to be created for your website and then just head over to the

Google Webmaster Tools. This is a free service provided by Google where they allow you

to submit your Sitemap. It makes it easier for Google to know what pages you have on

your website. Rather than it having to crawl it, you basically say, here are the pages that I

want indexed within Google. It’s a great way to make sure you’re getting recognition for all

of the pages that you do have, especially if you haven’t got your internal linking structure

set up correctly and Google is not able to spider your website.


The next thing I want to talk about is double indented

listings and how you get them on Google. So I’ll just

head over to Google here and I’m just going to search

Green Day merch. Here’s a keyword that I’m trying to

optimize for, for my Planet 13 website. We’ve got an

indented listing here where you’ve got one listing

where Google says, yes, this is relevant. Then they find

another page on your website that is also relevant.

The way that you go about creating these pages is to first go after one keyword. Some

people when they’re trying to do these dual listings, which are great listings, I mean

they’ve been proven to convert a lot higher, when people visit a listing and they see that

it’s indented, it just grabs your attention. You want to click it, it appears more authoritative.

They are well worthwhile going after. But the way that you go about it is making sure that

you first rank for the keyword. Try and get a number one listing for one page.

Once you do that, then you might start to optimize for a second page. So just as I talked

about all that on page optimization work, you want to do it again for a second page and

start to build links to that page. Then, over time, Google will recognize that you have two

pages that are relevant for that result and then serve it up accordingly. That’s how you go

about and get it. Is it the holy grail? Probably not the holy grail but it’s definitely an

excellent way to increase your click through rates when looking at the organic search

results.

Similarly another thing like that is called Sitelinks.

Google awards Sitelinks to trusted sites. We’ll just

come over here. I’m going to search Planet 13 and

we’ll show you a Sitelink here. These are the links

underneath. A normal listing down here doesn’t have

any links but once Google recognizes that this an

authoritative link, and how do you make it

authoritative? You build links to your website, you do good on page SEO, you follow

everything that I’m going to be going through in this and my other presentations and then

your website can become authoritative.


All you want to do is make sure you’ve got pages within your site that you are sending

links to and you’re optimizing for particular keywords. Google will analyze your website

and determine, hey, this is an important link that we need to add to the Sitelinks in those

result pages. It’s excellent if you can get it because it does make your website stand out as

an authoritative website. It can take months to do and really it’s just about building those

inbound targeted links. I gave you an example there, Planet 13. Another one as well, you

can check out my freetradingsystems.org. Just search trading systems and you’ll see it

come up there.

Danger zone

The tail end of this presentation, I wanted to talk about some of the things that you should

be avoiding. This is the highway to the danger zone. If you’ve seen Top Gun you can

probably have that song playing in your head right now. These are some of the things you

should avoid doing.

Firstly we’ve got cloaking. Now cloaking is where you

display one thing to the search engine and another

thing to the end user. So when the search engines

visit your page, they might be served up a very

highly optimized page that is going to do well

because you’ve keyword loaded it and made it all

really well optimized for the search engines. When the user actually visits it, they’re

displayed something else. That’s what cloaking is and it is something that you should

avoid.

All of these things that I’m about to go through now, look, sometimes when I don’t have

much to do and I feel like reading up on what Google is doing, I download things like the

Google Guidelines and different reports that they put out which outline what it is that

they’re looking for. I’m just taking all of this research and giving it straight to you. Google

says these things are bad. Cloaking is one.

Selling links is another one. You don’t want to have any inbound links on your websites

from websites that are selling links, advertising that they’re selling links and you don’t want

to be selling links yourself. Google doesn’t like the idea of users trying to game the search

engines, doing things to get their website to come up when really it is a bad website and it

probably shouldn’t be coming up anyway.


Selling links is one of those things that probably a few years ago, people when they

realized that ok, having inbound links is important, therefore I can sell that opportunity to

other people and I can get a monthly fee for sending a link to them. Really it’s a way of

gaming the search engines.

Google realized it was a bad thing so they said, look, anytime that we know it is a paid link,

we’re going to discredit it. Now that is one of those things that you can get penalized for

because it is something that you have to actively go about and do. So just go ahead and

avoid those. You also want to avoid doing hidden text and hidden links. This was all the

rage six years ago or more like ten years ago.

Very late nineties people were doing things like taking keywords and putting white text on

a white background so the user couldn’t see it but the engines could obviously read it. It

was a way to do more keyword stuffing. Google doesn’t like it, don’t do it. Same with

hidden links, along the same lines. You can use some different attributes to make it so that

links are hidden to the user. You just change the colour – you want to avoid doing that.

It’s the same with JavaScript redirects and any sort of sneaky redirects for that matter.

Google doesn’t like it. A JavaScript redirect is something where, let’s say you’re searching

for Britney Spears photos. A search engine result comes up and you click that and you’re

expecting to see some Britney Spears photos and then you’re redirected to a page that is

completely unrelated. It might be something to do with mortgages or credit cards or porn

or whatever the case may be. Those redirects Google doesn’t like, don’t do it.

Then we’ve got hundred percent frames as well. By using frames, this is probably

something that your website webmaster might know about. You can tell them just to

make sure they avoid it and make sure that they don’t do it. You don’t want to be using

frames on your website. Frames are a way to pull data and website content from other

websites. So you’re pulling content into a frame and it typically means that it is not

viewable or not seen by the search engines. It’s a way of hiding and masking content. It’s

something that you should avoid.


All of these things really come down to, you know if you’re being sneaky. Look, I’ve tried so

many things online over the years and I keep coming back to the idea that if you provide

real benefit to the end user, you’re going to do so much better in the long run. There is no

point in going for these little tactics and these little techniques to try and game the search

engines. They’ve got some really smart people over at Google, engineers that are highly

paid that sit there just looking for ways to spot how it is that you’re trying to game the

search engine. Just don’t do it. Provide material that adds value to people’s lives and there

is a real benefit to the end user.

80/20 rule

I just wanted to finish up I suppose by talking about

some of the things that you should focus on. That

was a pretty long presentation and I covered lots of

different things. It really comes down to these

fundamentals and if you focus on these you’re going

to get the 80% of the results just by focusing in on

these 20%. Really don’t get caught up. Sometimes

people try and get that perfect optimized web page. Just follow the rules of thumb that I

gave you and you’ll be well on your way. Don’t be sneaky and try to do anything that

Google doesn’t like.

Ultimately big sites win, so the best thing you can do is just keep building more pages and

making sure that you do your internal linking structure correctly. Link to the pages that you

want to rank, and just let the link juice flow. Don’t worry so much about the no follow tags

and things like that.

I started with it and I suppose I should end with it, because ultimately it is the most

important thing, you want to make sure that you focus on usability. Usability is number

one. The end user is the person who is going to open their wallet up and buy your product

or they’re going to take the desired action. They’re going to opt in, they’re going to watch

your video, they’re going to do whatever. So make sure you put usability first, SEO comes

second. Follow those rules of thumb and trust me, you’ll be ahead of the pack and well on

your way to dominating the search engines.

If you have any questions or you’d like to see more presentations like this, make sure you

head over to melbourneseoservices.com and yes, I’ll look forward to seeing you in the next

presentations. Thanks guys.

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