Archive for seo:

Slowly But Surely

It has been less than a month since I registered http://www.ukelectricshowers.co.uk but already it is ranking well in Google.co.uk

So far I have spent $419 on backlinks and bookmarking which has been money well spent in my opinion. As time progresses and the domain ages I am hopeful the site will rank better. From my previous experience I know this can take anything from two months to two years, it’s up to Google!

This is my first attempt of ranking a name well with the view of become a domain leaser. The term “electric showers” receives about 40,000 searches per month in the UK alone and I am confident I will be able to lease it. If not, then I’m sure private adverts will ensure a return on my investment.

The domain was registered on November 10th 2008, a little less than a month ago, and has achieved the following ranks…

• electric shower – 46th out of 594,000 competitors
• electric showers – 45th out of 385,000 competitors
• electric power shower – 38th out of 184,000 competitors
• electric power showers – 25th out of 257,000 competitors
• uk electric showers – 5th out of 563,000 competitors

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

August 2008 Earnings

August was another slow month, with little or no revenue generated. I’m still working hard to establish quality sites on the WWW and slowly but surely my content is being ranked well. I hope in due course to persue revenue through private advertising, but for now I’ll need to stick with 3rd party ad networks.

The good news is that my blog is generating a few dollars these days, with the sale of all 5 of my text link ads. The ranking for KhalidsLife.com has shot up to 4th in Google for “Internet Entrepreneur” and I hope the blog will stay strong in due course.

Revenue for August: $21.

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

Pleasantly Surprised

Getting ranked well in Google is no easy exercise, especially when you are starting a new site with a brand new domain and attempting to exceed the quality of rival sites. To be honest, the only method I’ve ever found to work 100% is link building where the anchor text is the keyword you wish to target.

I was pleasantly surprised to find one or two of my sites have crept up the rankings without link building, just from the domains being a little older. In my experience this can really help and I have read some webmasters buy a domain then leave it for a year before they build a site.

The extra traffic I am not getting will help me nicely and I am sitting here with a smile and I own over 100 domains that are maturing day-by-day. I can’t wait to start producing good quality sites on domains I’ve had for maybe 2 or 3 years.

Right now though I’m still working on my current front line sites, including the content based ones I’ve been talking about. Both are coming along nicely, I just wish it was 6 or 12 months down the line and they were established.

Time will tell. Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

No Follow, Might Follow, Do Follow

The “No Follow” attribute (rel=”nofollow”) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments due to comment spam. As time passed, websites began using this in other areas, such as text links, to ensure their pagerank (PR) was not being leaked to other sites and to stop search engines indexing external pages.

Whilst he “No Follow” attribute may stop PR leakage, links are still counted towards the overall backlink count, which is what you should be targetting. In my post Off Site SEO, I stated “I’ve found building relevant backlinks works a treat when trying to rank well in the search engines.”

Regardless of whether these links are “No Follow” or not, they’ll still be counted. Sure it would be beneficial if they were “Do Follow”, but it is not the deciding factor.

Here are some important notes regarding the “No Follow” issue…

1. Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves. In short, it doesn’t look good.

2. Search Engines follow NoFollow. Both Yahoo and Google have been known to count NoFollow links as backlinks in SiteExplorer. Proof from Search Engine Journal and Jon Warass.

SEO – What do you do?

It is amazing how many different services there are on the web that “Guarantee …” with a “Money Back Refund” etc etc etc. Further to that, the amount of conflicting information is rather bewildering – “Googlebot hates…” or “Googlebot needs”.

Like many things in life, SEO is trial and error. There is no clear system that guarantees you a premium ranking in the SERPs and with so many different things you can do, how would you know what is right and wrong without conducting your own tests?

I managed to rank Kortaz.com #1 – #5 for a number of different keywords. Without sounding arrogant, I think that’s quite an achievement considering “Kortaz” was not even a keyword and the site was not filled with content!

I think the amount of backlinks with the anchor text as the keyword made the site strong and this was the driving force behind its ranking. These links were built up over time with webmasters submitting their own proxy links to be listed on the site.

Aside from backlink building, being popular in Digg and Stumble Upon have their benefits too (I didn’t used them for Kortaz.com but for other sites). As well as bringing in visitors, many webmasters look for content through these sites and this can generate backlinks.

It is quite important to mention on-site SEO too and that generally means ensuring your site is keyword rich with unique content and good anchor texts.

I’d really like to know what you do when it comes to SEO and how you rank well?

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.