magoo
Joined: 11 Dec 2004
Posts: 14
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| Help with SEO |
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Hi
I know it's a longshot but I was wondering if there's anybody who'd be interested in doing some SEO for my site in return for my helping with some programming. I've got pretty good experience with PHP, ASP MYSQL and all the usual web technologies. I'd rather spend my time on programming than learning SEO as I have no plans to build more websites in future so the skills would not be of use to me again. SEO on my site wouldnt be too difficult I think, the keywords arent very competitive and I've made a reasonable start. I hope it's OK to post this here.
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Sun Dec 12, 2004 12:06 am
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Thermit
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 272
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I'll give you some tips if I can find anything that is less than optimal. Have you done anything so far in the SEO dept.?
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Mon Dec 13, 2004 12:55 am
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magoo
Joined: 11 Dec 2004
Posts: 14
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Yeah thanks Thermit. I've submitted the site several hundred directories and have been requesting link exchanges. I've found a few keywords that have little or no competition recently and have started going after those. the phrase I was submitting was indie/alternative music chat forum. This is also the title on the homepage and appears in bold there as well. I'm not sure if this is a good acnhor text to use as it contains a /. I heard that words like and act as stop words and I wanted to catch searchers on indie and alternative. Maybe not a good idea what do you think? When I get links and submit to directories how long does it take until this affects my SERPS? I have done a lot of work on in yet have PR0 and appear at highest 112th in the SERPS on a phrase that has virtually no real competition!
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Mon Dec 13, 2004 8:30 am
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Thermit
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 272
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What you are currently doing is promoting several keyphrase variations at the same time...
"indie/alternative music chat forum"
Which is really 4 different keyphrases...
indie music chat
indie music forum
alternative music chat
alternative music forum
I would do an analysis on these 4 terms to see which ones are the most commonly used. From my experience, and opinion, I would think that "alternative music forum" would be the big one.
I've just gone to Overture and done a little research...
Alternative appears twice as popular as indie when used with the term music and forum appears slightly more popular than chat also when used with music. So my hunches were correct. You can play around with different keywords, and get suggestions here...
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Anyway, you will get more bang out of your anchor text if you focus on the main keyphrases individually, not all globbed together, although that will work too, to some degree.
It can take a while for your directory work to make a difference. The SE's have to find the new pages, and integrate the new links to your site into the algorithm, and then update their index and publish it. With Google this can happen quicker, changes can actually be seen in a few days in some cases. The PR that you see in the toolbar is updated irregularly on a schedule or 3 to 4 months. Hopefully, we'll see an update there in Dec or Jan.
I recommend that you purchase some quality backlinks from directories that have decent PR showing PR4+, if you haven't done this already, keeping in mind what I mentioned earlier about focusing on one main keyphrase at a time.
As for your title, I would retitle...
WeirdEars.com Indie and Alternative Music Forum
This basically replaces the / with an "and", and drops the Chat part. I'd keep chat in the homepage text though.
How old is the site?
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Mon Dec 13, 2004 7:40 pm
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magoo
Joined: 11 Dec 2004
Posts: 14
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Thanks, that's all good advice. I'll definately be submitting the individual phrases now rather than submitting the long phrase with all the keywords, I was basically trying to target all the keywords together but I guess that's not the most effective way of doing it. The reason I used the / instead of the word "and" is that a SEO tool I downloaded told me that and operated as a stop word and that anything after that would be ignored. Whether or not thats true I couldnt say, there seem to a lot of different theories about these things. I also used another tool http://www.nichebot.com/ to find a few key phrases with very little competition and I've built some content to fit those keywords. I've been trying to get links to it using the kewords too so hopefully that will start to pay dividends soon. It seems that with a PR of 0 that google won't put me anywhere sensible in the SERPS though so I'll have to wait for them to update I guess. I suppose the thing to do is get as many directory links and inbound links as possible for now until they update it, hence boosting my PR. Then concentrate more specifically on exact terms. In answer to your question the site has been online since around June I believe. Although I only really did anything with it from September onwards.
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Mon Dec 13, 2004 10:02 pm
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magoo
Joined: 11 Dec 2004
Posts: 14
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I'd heard about the sandbox before but hadn't really looked into it. I just read another thread on here about it and that would explain a lot. Google recognizes 140 links which should be enough for some PR at least. I Guess I just have to wait. I have started submitting to other directories with different anchor text and am varying it a bit, using alternative music forum most often. Hopefully that will help the SERPS when I eventually get out of the sandbox. That Nichebot tool is really helpful. It gives you a good idea not only of what keyword searches are popular but also what sort of competition there is on each phrase.
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Tue Dec 14, 2004 11:16 pm
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Thermit
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 272
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Did some research, unfortunately you're not in the top 170 for "alternative music forum" search on Google, but you are already doing okay for that particular anchor text...
allinanchor:"alternative music forum"
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=allinanchor%3A%22alternative+music+forum%22
If you type that string into Google or click the link, http://www.weirdears.com is #1.
There may be other factors that are keeping you out of the main results. Maybe related to sandboxing of links, maybe related to other factors.
One thing that has worked well for some people is to simply link out to authority sites in their field using anchor text similar to what you've been trying to get inward, except this is linking out. You never know!
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Wed Dec 15, 2004 12:53 am
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magoo
Joined: 11 Dec 2004
Posts: 14
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I ran the tests on my keyphrases using the tool I posted in the other thread. It seems that I should be in the top 10 at least for my phrases, there are even other sites in there with PR0, some of which have less incoming links and dont show up on the top 10 for the allinanchor test. It looks like pretty good evidence of a sandbox effect to me. I'm hoping I can get a nice boost to my PR when they next update. I think that and a removal from the sandbox whould put me at the top for my keyphrases.
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Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:28 pm
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Thermit
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 272
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As if this stuff wasn't complex enough already, there may be an overoptimization penalty.
As an example, I've got a site that ranked well for "money forum", "money forums" and "financial forums". The one that it should have ranked best for, IMO, is "financial forum", but that string also appeared exactly in my title, and the rank was on the 3rd page of results. Go figure...
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Wed Dec 15, 2004 9:11 pm
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hk996
Joined: 01 May 2006
Posts: 4
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is it possible you look at my website and find me a good title!?
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Mon May 01, 2006 3:50 am
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