A very interesting phenomenon has been happening to my posts on this web domain. Searches for specific phrases in my articles briefly rank in the top of the SERP results before being completely de-indexed. After a short while at the top of the charts, my newer posts have completely disappeared and a Google search for their titles only shows links from other indexed articles on this website.

Is it over-optimization? A lack of incoming links and/or pagerank?

For now, I’m going to see how this works out. I will continue writing content for this website but acquiring backlinks and traffic will be prioritized toward other websites I’m building. There seems to be some sort of minimum threshold for PR flow into a website’s internal pages, but we’ll see if this changes over time and increased content and website depth.

This might show up for a while at the top if you’re looking for a specific phrase, but I expect it to get buried beyond recognition just a few days later. We’ll see if anything happens but I’m starting to doubt it!

Get good content, link to the content, and then add some more content!

This is a little snippet from another site of mine, JacksonvilleSEO on Blogspot, and I want to write down what I’m thinking about it while its on my mind. “Good content” is pretty open-ended and I would define that as effective at answering the visitor’s questions, and using proper elements of On-Page SEO.

I’ve only been at this for a short while, but I can get some decently converting traffic with targetted long-tail keywords that are about 3 or 4 words long. I don’t have many links, article & directory submissions haven’t been a priority, and yet you are somehow reading this wondering about On-Page SEO and SEO Planning.

Well pay attention, because the search engines have decided this is what you’re looking for. Look at the essay you’re reading and pay attention to the use of formatting and keywords. I want it to be clear to my readers, and the search engine spiders, what the intent of these words to be. This means:

• Identifying keywords
• Using bold & header attributes on keywords
• Explaining concepts related to the keywords

SEO Planning - Google Keyword Tracking Tools

Let’s take a look at Google’s Adwords Keywords tool and consider the ultimate keyword: SEO. I’ll order it by search volume instead of ad competition because right now I’d rather build a reader base than quickly convert a few dozen clicks into pennies. It looks like there is a decent pocket of traffic in the “SEO Young” phrase so I will make the next long-tail SEO attempt here and consider my specialty: SEO in a Young Website. (notice I’ve added in a reference to my domain that is likely to be searched as well.)

The main term I have to emphasize is this: “On-Page SEO”

This page is a great example of the first phase of on-page seo: Using the words and the formatting of your page to make sure the search engines know exactly what it is about. There are meta-tags and addons that can help you out if you’re using a CMS like WordPress, but I will need to discuss at a later point in time.

Seo in Young Websites

#1 Patience

Don’t go chasing promises of huge traffic at little cost or link purchases. You will learn the hard way that the traffic is unlikely to stay around (at best), and if you’re using Google Adsense you’re likely to find out that many forms of “artificial” traffic can get you banned.

Articles & Directories - The Basic “Free” Backlinks

Write some articles and submit them to free websites like EzineArticles. If you write something compelling, other website publishers will pick up the article and add it to their websites too. If you’re lucky, some of them will keep the resource box and the backlink to your homepage or related article.

You can also search for free link directories and website directory organizers. I don’t suggest submitting too many for a young website, because growth that looks “too fast to be true” is often grounds to be sand boxed. Search engines expect a website to start building slowly, and they’ll probably expect your growth rate to increase as time goes on, not decrease because you’re done submitting articles all of a sudden after building a few thousand links that way.

Related Forums

Many forums have natural linking systems (as opposed to blogs that have been almost ruined by “nofollow”). Join related forums and become a part of the community. Get into conversations with the topics you address on your website. Don’t spam them, find a purpose for being there beyond your SEO ambitions. Don’t put a link to your website in every single post unless its in a signature and the forum specifically allows that. Some forums want reciprocal links or completely ban links in signatures. Its also probably not the best idea to advertise for your forums on someone else’s forums unless they are significantly different topics.

Get to Know Other Website Builders

Email the owners of the websites that inspired you to start publishing, offer them your assistance. You might still be a small fish but its never too soon to start building a network of co-operation. Participate in webmaster discussion forums (like Digital Point) where you can ask questions and share what you’ve learned from your own success, even if they are small or temporary. Worst case scenario, you can share with the community what not to do.

You know how it is when you’ve built a stable eco-system. Think about your aquarium when you were a kid or some artificial environment at the zoo housing multiple creatures in harmony. Everything works right because every player knows where they stand in the hierarchy and respects it. The catfish eats the algae, and hopefully the Angelfish gets fed on time and he leaves the catfish alone.

The major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN thought they had it all figured out - and that they could tell day to day, who was standing where on the food chain. But something happened. Something called a blog.

Whereas most user-pages used to be single page profiles on Xoom and Geocities, but suddenly people with little to no HTML or PHP knowledge were cranking out several dozen SEO-optimized posts a week. Users would leave comments and links and trackbacks were deep-linking to niche-specific articles with open discussion and … well … Google thinks thats a bad thing. Personally, I love the concept of blogs - more accurately, the concept of content management systems optimized for perpetuating links, creating discussions, and providing information on ever increasingly specific niche fields.

Anyway, Google dreamed up this “no_follow” attribute for the HTML markup of a hyper-link. They promised it would save us from spam for once and for all, as if a few dozen characters of code could stop the human nature that drives people to compete.

I have been working at this website building business for about six months now, but since before then I’ve been working for a website and occasionally working on e-marketing. Content development was my main project, and its just in the last year or so that I’ve really paid attention to how those articles and pages get to the users who need to see them.

What I’ve learned is: Google owns the internet. Or at least it thinks and acts like it does.

Its not Google’s fault, its just the nature of its success and “internet weight.” Imagine Einstein’s curved space-time. A web page’s weight is like its mass / density and it warps the very fabric of existence all around it. Google just happens to be big enough that almost everything else has fallen into orbit around it.

Google isn’t like a black hole, because outputs almost everything it gets - and it has a near-infinite supply of fuel as the word “google” will soon be considered standard diction. “Honey, what’s the escape velocity of our sun?”
I don’t know. Google it.

In the last few months, the internet world has been shaken out of its peaceful co-existance - no - reliance on Google’s rays of traffic to sustain the economies that thrive. Google has had two big sneezes that seem to have changed everything: its approach to blogs and the “no_follow” attribute; and its approach to paid linking.

Of course, its not the end of the universe - its just a new internet order.

Don’t get too used to it, of course. Google might sneeze again tomorrow.

I know this for sure. Even if Google doesn’t like ranking my favorite pages on the top of their SERPs, they always show up within minutes to read it.

I guess you could say that the google spider bot is my most loyal reader, always up to date with my latest post in minutes, no matter what page I’m posting on!

I’m not sure if Google knows quite what to do with me yet, and I think they’re pretty upset over all those rel_nofollow tags I have pointing at me, like some sort of sign or guilt or shame (think alternative search results vs. the main category).

I guess the top of some chart is better than nothing, but where is the traffic? Chirp chirp - 100 here 100 there, but those numbers don’t impress me now that I’ve been getting them for months.

Well Google you win. You get more content. More pages and more thoughts squeezed from my mind like a sponge at crazy hours of the night.

If you write it, if they link it, Google will come. Just avoid the “no_follow” like the plague.

The best way to put this idea in to practice is to write what people want to see. If your content is unique and useful and written for human eyes, it will be received better by the people placing the links that create the ultimate editorial support for your website or online presence

Link building is important and if anything, I’ve fallen victim to the idea that more is always better. For the most part, any link from a related website in a “good neighborhood” won’t hurt your website so in that sense more is better. The only question left is, which ones are best?

Obviously, its links that DO NOT contain a “nofollow” or “external” tag. Some websites will add these to comments and trackbacks (and mine probably does too because I’m not much on the technical end I just like having software that will publish my essays for me). Of course, there’s the school of thought that you want rel_nofollow on the links leaving your website, but I’m not sure if that really affects things because one of my pages got penalized hard for a few bad links with nofollow even though I took them down within a day.

So, anyway, I like to go to Yahoo Site Explorer a couple times a week and type in link:mydomain.com to search how the link tree is growing. The results fluctuate so I try to not look too often…and I’m not sure what exactly I should be getting from the list. It does show, I believe, some of the relative weight of the various links. The ones toward the top tend to be the most valuable and the ones at the end much less effective. Internal linking matters too, so don’t completely ignore the links from your own domain. Regardless of the search engine results, you still want your website to be well-linked to itself so your users can find their way around the various topics and themes without spending too much precious time searching.