The theories on SEO in 2010 (primarily linking) are shared by many bloggers and SEO specialists the reign supreme, but would not want to share some of these theories with their clients (or risk going out of business). Nevertheless, a new Internet is upon us and we will sink or swim by the new algorithms and by the choices we make going forward. I hope you enjoy the read.

This is the index of this post as follows (you can add the word “my theory” to precede each of these bullet points if you wish);

1. Why reciprocal linking is dead.
2. Why reciprocal linking software is a waste of time and money.
3. Why 3-way linking is dead.
4. Why article marketing is dead.
5. Why link wheels are dead.
6. Why link spamming is dead.
7. Why blog commenting is dead.
8. The nofollow tag attribute.
9. Why trackback links are dead.
10. How link aging effects your web site.
11. Stop listening to Matt Cutts. (no offense Matt)
12. What is the safest method of linking?
13. One more on the old SEO methods.
14. Examples of successful web sites.
15. Our site/blog (wife/me) niches.
16. What you should do to succeed.
17. Final comment.

Why Reciprocal Linking is Dead

The old school reciprocal linking is certainly passe because simply swapping links is so readily and easily discounted by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and all other major search engines. This old style of linking was very effective for a very long time, because webmasters were creating many hundreds of links from different websites, convincing the search engines their domains were popular. Well over a decade ago the Google algorithm began discounting many of these kinds of links. Basically, this kind of old-school reciprocal linking only showed Google that you had a lot of man hours put into link requests, and you were a hard worker.

Now I know that many people who are in the Internet business find this to be the most frustrating thing about Google and all other search engines these days. The very fact that you can work, and invest in, creating links to your website by doing trades is not rewarded. You would think that Google would reward those who work the hardest, which is what everybody has been led to believe since we were born.

The simple fact is that just working hard, and investing hard, doesn’t mean Google gives you any benefit in their search engine results. What Google cares about the most is ideas – the modern search engines don’t care how hard you work, but more about the unique ideas and compelling content you have on your website. By discounting most of the linking strategies webmasters and companies/corporations are using, the search engines are making sure that a particular page on your domain is truly, and absolutely, popular because of the natural inbound links going to it. If your domain has thousands of inbound links that were created in the most natural way (from other webmasters linking to you) then the search engines can tell the page is truly compelling. This is “old hat” to experienced webmasters.

Furthermore, the search engines are sophisticated enough to recognize any kind of link strategy and scheme using any kind of modern linking software. Even three-way linking, which I will get into next. Google can see that there is a relationship between different domain names, hosting IP’s (or Class C-Blocks if you prefer). There are only so many IP’s out there that you can manipulate as you create artificial inbound links, and this is why the traditional link exchange software applications worked for so long. The requirement now, if you want to create any meaningful inbound links to your domain, is to let go of the idea all together (we’ll get to that later in this post).

Search engines can tell (especially Google) what kind of links you have coming in, and if those links were created because the webmaster(s) who linked to you was genuinely interested and compelled by your page. I know that many so-called SEO experts and software gurus will disagree vehemently, because they base their entire SEO strategy (or Company/Business) on creating artificial inbound links between web sites. In the long run, we will see who is right and who is wrong.

Reciprocal Linking Software

We (well most of us webmasters) would spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on reciprocal linking software and then hunker down for many hours a week requesting links, approving links, submitting links, and checking links. Most of us hated it (I know I really hated it), wondering at the same time how much of a waste of time it might be. In the back of mind I always thought the link swapping game was going to be a dead end endeavour someday.

The major search engines can see these scripts in action, and they discount most of these kinds of links. Most of the links to your site are placed on pages that are not even cached, or have very little PR value. The end state of all these hundreds of hours of linking is not good – it truly is a waste of time these days.

This kind of artificial linking will get your site “found” by the search engines, so for the very short term you could call this a positive thing. However, if you are using blogging software to run your site, you never need this in the early stages of a domain. Blogging software Pings, so you will “get found” very quickly. With a WordPress blog, you will be found after half a dozen posts, and that is right out of the box before adding extra pinging services to the list in your WordPress Dashboard.

The next phase of reciprocal linking was Three-Way Linking.

Three-Way Linking Is Dead

Many so-called smart SEO specialists and webmasters soon discovered that simple link trading wasn’t really that effective anymore. They put their heads together and discovered an ingenious way of creating artificial links that Google (and competing search engines) would see as unique and natural. They came up with three-way linking, which means that you have Website A, linking to another webmaster’s domain or page, and that webmaster returns a link to your Website B. It is as simple as that.

Webmasters who had the means, and were fairly highly ranked (with enough green bar showing in the Google page rank information tool) were in a position to leverage one highly ranked website for the purposes of three-way linking. The problem is that Google has figured that one out too. Google’s algorithm engineers and coders simply added a plug-in (if you will) that recognized three-way linking based on IP’s, and relative patterns.

Even further, if you are using any Google application (such as Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, etc.)Google can see what IP your working from. Once again, I can hear the skeptics of my theories here screaming that there is no way Google can see what IP you’re working from, uploading files from, and blogging from. Their algorithm obviously sees this information, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put this kind of tweak into their algorithms.

So now Google can see what you’re up to and what is going on in your little Internet business. Of course these technologies are not perfect and they can’t be absolutely accurate in regards to what you are doing, especially if you are using proxy IP’s when working online. Still though, they could see the activities of the IP’s and the domains in play, and even that is enough for them to make a judgment call on the kind of a web property you are running.

Like all artificial link strategies, the three-way linking schemes works for a short time, and maybe even for months, but that is not good enough when it comes to the Internet. Everybody wants a piece of the ultimate income, and the competition is coming at you fast and furious. You are up against corporations and large, small, medium businesses who are outsourcing their SEO and I’m sure you sometimes think that “little ‘ol you” is never going to compete. But don’t get discouraged, there is a brilliant and sparkling silver lining in this cloud.

So what do you do if reciprocal linking, and three-way linking, is a waste of your time and money? Many of us turned to Article Marketing.

Article Marketing Is Dead

Article marketing has two basic schemes that come into play. One scheme is that you have other webmasters put up a piece of content in the form of an article on their site, and create a quality link in the article back to one of your domains. The second way of article marketing, which is very popular, is when you submit articles to article directories such as Ezine Articles, with an inbound link to your website in the article. Both article planting schemes must be done in such a way that the link created in the article uses your target keyword(s) as the anchor text.

It doesn’t work very well unless every article you write is perfectly 100% unique, original content. That is the first problem, and using content spinners and article re-writers doesn’t work either. I will get into why content spinners and re-writers don’t work on a another post, but you can take my word for it (or not at your peril) for the time being. So basically, just putting your articles up on article directories (spinning them or rewriting them if you wish) doesn’t do much at all for your web property anymore. Google knows what is going on and discounts almost all of the links you getting from these directories. Once more, because there are small number of decent link article directories out there, your point of no return comes quickly.

When the search engines see hundreds of links going to your website from one directory, which is running on one hosting IP, they begin discounting links. Just the IP aspect of the Google algorithm discounts these links, let alone the fact that the search engines are now discounting links from article directories – period.

The best way to do article marketing is by writing unique, fresh, 100% original content, and having it put on thousands of different domains with different links, using different text anchors. This could work if all criteria were put into play, but now you are in a Catch-22 situation. If you are going to create 100% pure original content on other websites and blogs, would you not be better off putting it on your own domain(s)? My belief is yes, you are better off putting this kind of content on your own domains and letting other webmasters link to you over time.

So what do you do when traditional link exchanges have gone by the wayside, and three-way link exchanges have gone by the wayside, and article marketing has gone by the wayside? I guess the answer that most webmasters have these days is Link Wheels.

Link Wheels Are Dead

I know that my opinion on link wheels will perturb many webmasters, because thousands of SEO gurus think that link wheels are the modern answer to search engine ranking. Sorry – Link Wheels were dead coming out of the gate, and I would have to say that if we want to keep using the life and death metaphor, Link Wheels were stillborn.

Why are Link Wheels fairly useless in the long-term? Because once again, when you create artificial inbound links using blog farms and other third party sites, you are getting your links from small pool of IP’s. The same problem you have with Article Marketing essentially. Blog farms, and their usual counterparts (Link Wheels) use third-party domains such as Blogspot, Hub Pages, and Lenses on Squidoo are all part of the same animal, and I can guarantee you’re wasting your time. How do I know this, because I’ve tried every black hat technique known, and I was a damn good link spammer too.

Link Spamming Is Dead

Link spamming is dead and I don’t say this because I fancy myself as some kind of “purist” expert (I just established that right) – I say this because all mey tests showed one outcome – limited and temporary gains with the possibility of huge losses. You may as well be a bank robber I suppose. If your market niche is something like pornography, gambling, or drugs, then I can see why link spamming is you’re only option for getting inbound links to your domains, but get ready for a long hard battle spamming forums and blogs everyday of your business. Get ready to spend a stupid amount time changing IPs, and IP locations, as your sites will soon enough be banned.

Link spamming has reached new heights because of some fairly clever software developers around the world who create scripts that entice competitive webmasters into investing hundreds of dollars on applications that spam forums, blogs, etc., creating hundreds and thousands of inbound one-way links to their domains. All in the hopes of wiping out their competition and rocketing to the top of the search engines.

These software developers, and black-hat tool creators, will swear up and down how wrong I am about the futility of this activity, but go ahead and try it for yourself – you’ll find out how temporary this kind of linking is. Sure, you can temporarily get a domain ranked high for competitive keywords, and make a quick buck because of the traffic you get, but that buck is getting smaller every month, and these domains are getting banned quicker than ever before. The gig is up when it comes to black-hat techniques and a new day is now upon us.

Not only are the search engines becoming more sophisticated and wary of these kinds of links, and this kind of IP activity, the platforms for managing and running blogs and running forums and directories are more sophisticated, and are managing to block these kinds of spam linking tools in their tracks. Furthermore, users such as you and I are learning to use our scripts and software on our platforms more effectively and we manually check for spam on a daily basis. In the time that I wrote this post, Askimet snagged over 2 dozen inbound spam comments.

With the more advanced technologies for stopping spam, and the change in behavior as far as webmaster vigilance goes, it’s making the ROI (return on investment) for spammers a dwindling effort, and the point of diminishing returns comes quick like.

The very fact remains that the world is recognizing the ultimate income is made on the Internet. When you have a web property that makes money around the clock 24/7/365, it is much too valuable an asset to be risking with outdated linking techniques and SEO schemes. Even if using black-hat techniques guaranteed your website had a three year run ranking high in the search engines, it still isn’t really worth it, when you consider having a real white hat quality web property, running safely and indefinitely, is by far the more prudent endeavor. All of the SEO specialists and so-called black-hat artists are understanding this, even if they won’t admit it to you, and fiercely argue that their techniques will always be around for manipulating the weaknesses of search engine algorithms.

So if traditional reciprocal linking is dead, 3-way linking is dead, article marketing is dead, blog farms and link wheels are dead, and link spamming is dead; what works now? I guess the old commenting on blogs is OK still right?

Commenting on Blogs for Google PR is Dead?

Commenting on other blogs use to be a fantastic way to create high quality inbound links to your web site or blog, but that too is going by the wayside thanks to the Google invented “NOFOLLOW” tag attribute. Google soon realized that we (us webmasters) could created PR on our domains by commenting on related blogs and creating inbound links of quality. The blogging platforms soon added the nofollow attribute to all commenter domain addresses (URLS) and that put an end that game in a hurry.

Major web properties such as Wikipedia soon followed with the nofollow tag attribute as well, and a the rest joined in to stop link spammers from using them for easy links. This includes ALL major sites like Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, etc. etc. There is of course the exceptions like Squidoo, Hubpages, and Ezine articles, but these “true links” (without the nofollow tag) don’t really help your domain much more than just letting the search engine robots know your web site exists. A great way to get your site or blog found of course. Nothing wrong with that still.

If you want to know more about nofollow tags and structure, read here. (you’re welcome Yaro)

So this commenting game was over on all user-hosted blog platforms (listed below), and 3rd party hosted platforms as well;

List of User Hosted Blog Platforms

• b2evolution
• blosxom
• Django
• Dotclear
• DotNetNuke
• Drupal
• Frog CMS
• Elgg
• Habari
• HelixBlog
• Jaws
• Joomla!
• Livejournal
• LifeType
• Movable Type
• Nooto
• Nucleus CMS
• PivotX
• Serendipity
• SimpleLog
• Slash
• Subtext
• Textpattern
• Thingamablog
• Typo
• WordPress

So now what does the savvy webmaster and so-called SEO expert do to artificially create inbound links that pass page rank to a domain? We’re quickly running out of ways to game the search engines here and it feels like we might as well pack up our laptops and throw them in the river right? Nope – this story gets better, so hang in there.

The Nofollow Tag From Deep Inside Blog Posts (OUCH!)

Even some blogs are not passing PR to your domain anymore when they give you a REAL and NATURAL link. Why? Because they may have a plugin running on their blog platform that adds the infamous “NOFOLLOW” tag to the link going to your site. These bloggers don’t do this to be stingy or anything, it’s just that some plugins for WordPress (like SEO Smart Links) gives the blogger an option to add the nofollow tag to ALL outbound links. Many platforms enable bloggers to do this now.

BUT, if you have a web page that has some very compelling content, you will still have hundreds of other webmasters linking to it that don’t use the nofollow tag. You will still be golden.

TrackBack Spamming (Linking) is Certainly Dead

TrackBack linking, or spamming, no longer works and never really did for very long. About the same time that the nofollow attribute was added to blog platforms in the comment sections, the same thing happened with TrackBack links. TrackBacks used to be a great way to show that one blog was referencing another blog, and would link them up accordingly. The WordPress system is really simple for creating TrackBacks because all you have to do is link to another WordPress user’s blog page and the TrackBack was automatically created. Of course, the spammers ruined this too because this became nothing more than a tool used by manipulators of the system to create powerful inbound links to their websites, and the websites of their clients who they were performing “SEO services” for.

Even with the new spam protections that blogs have incorporated as per the norm, you don’t see very many serious bloggers with high-quality web properties approving TrackBacks anymore. When I link to another blog or website it is because I believe that their particular page has perfect relevance to the posts I am writing (or I just like them or they are a friend of mine). I believe this to be true for all serious bloggers.

If the blogger allows the TrackBack, that is just great, but I know that the TrackBack link has a nofollow tag applied so there is no sense in trying to link to another blog just for the sake of a link. Google’s idea of the nofollow attribute was brilliant in that it stopped people from linking just for the sake of linking. So that was it for TrackBack spamming.

Thank god that all the work we did getting high quality links in the past will help our web sites indefinitely. Hmmmm……you guessed it.

How Link Aging Effects Your Web Site

Here is the really big ugly that drives home my theory layed out later in this post. This makes any webmaster want to throw up after all the work they have done over the years begging for links and investing countless hours learning how to use link exchange software. There is a time limit on the value of inbound links to your domain. Once again, we will hear all of the naysayers scoff at such a theory, but in my opinion, this is exactly what is going on.

The search engines are now looking at how old the inbound links to your domain are, as well as the value of where they are coming from. Basically, the websites that have the most recent inbound links and the most valuable inbound links, will win the rankings game. This may not seem fair if you consider the work aspect that I described above, but if you really think about it this makes sense.

If a URL address has a consistent flow of new high quality inbound links pointing at it, is obviously the latest and the greatest as far as the search engines evaluate page rank. Just because some domain has thousands of inbound links pointing at deep pages within the site from years ago, doesn’t necessarily mean it is still the authority website anymore. This one aspect of the page rank algorithm will makes most webmasters shudder at the thought, but it is something we have to deal with. Even though this will greatly affect web properties everywhere, there is still a way to make things work for you and beat the competition any time, and any day of the week. We will get to that soon enough here if we just listen to Matt Cutts — right?

Stop Listening To People Like Matt Cutts

Webmasters have been listening to people like Matt Cutts for a long time now, as they try to decipher what he is saying and it’s getting to be ridiculous (and pathetic) over the last few years. The truth is that the Google algorithm has so many sets of criteria involved that no Google employee can truthfully tell you what effect their algorithm is going to have on your website, except to say “if you build a quality website you will do well”.

As far as the way the Google algorithm ranks the pages of your website’s and blogs – Matt Cutts might as well be speaking in parables. He says something vague regarding the Google algorithm and all of his minions instantaneously begin analyzing his every word hoping it will give them a window into how the Big G is ranking webpages. It is a complete waste of time.

And on top of this, there are thousands of self titled SEO experts that claim to understand what Matt Cutts is “really saying”, and what Matt Cutts “really means”, and they will usually have so-called test sites to prove the new theories they have about the Google algorithm. Webmasters like myself used to spend hours each week listing on every word that Matt uttered in the hope that he could shed some light on what direction we should be taking with our search engine optimization strategies.

The whole term “search engine optimization” (or SEO) is misleading to the newcomer. Suggesting that you can optimize your site, is synonymous with saying that you can manipulate search engine results. This is why Larry Page is famous for creating his Pagerank model.

No matter how you try to optimize your website with artificial linking, and internal linking, you still have to deal with the fact that you have to have hundreds (thousands usually) of inbound links to the pages of your domain that were created naturally, and you have to have enough of these inbound links coming from “good” sources to eliminate the possibility (in Google’s eyes) that the links are not artificially created for search engine manipulation. If you take into account the way Google judges incoming links from different IP’s, you can see how futile it is to create simple Blog Farms and Link Wheels to get around their algorithm.

So do yourself a favor and remove Matt Cutts’ blog from your favorites and move on to the only safe and sound method of maintaining your domains. Let us now discuss what successful web property owners have done to succeed beyond their wildest dreams without using any of the old and new search engine optimization schemes we have been discussing.

So What Is The Safest and Most Powerful Way of Linking?

Their really is only one method left if you want to rank high in the search engines indefinitely and enjoy the traffic and the income that traffic creates. The smart webmasters have understood this from the time they launched their very first website and/or blog. They wrote compelling content (articles and posts) that were irresistible to search engines and human readers. They wrote content that was compelling enough that other people wanted to link to it. Even if you had only one stellar article (bloggers often call them Pillar Articles) on your website or blog, but enticed thousands of other webmasters to link to it, that would make your website a high value domain in the eyes of the search engines and real people.

So some so-called white-hat webmasters and domain managers who understood this, only published unique and original content on their domains and it paid off. You can imagine their disappointment when even this didn’t put them ahead of their competition. Even if they have a decent number of inbound links from repuatable IP’s, and their content was 100% original, they stopped ranking for most of their competitive keywords. So what could that be? The answer is simple – quality content that is in definition 100% original and unique is still not enough to beat all the competition.

You have to have all of these factors and your articles have to be so compelling that other webmasters are linking to them in a flurry. Of course this is very difficult to do unless you have something special to say on your blog and/or websites. I hope that by now in this article you don’t feel like throwing your laptop or desktop into the river, off a cliff, or into the ocean, because there is hope.

Hope is Dead

Just kidding — hope is very much alive.

Yet More Of The Old Linking Theories and Strategies

When I was taught how to build websites I was told to create (or have somebody create) 300 to 500 word articles and publish them on my domain over time, covering most of the keywords you are targeting for traffic and search engine attention. Then it became 500 to 1000 words, and now some believe you need to have 15000 words to win with the search engines. There is some validity to this theory in my opinion. I do believe that if you have a longer article, or longer piece of content,  due to visiting commenters, and visiting TrackBacks, you will do better than much of your competition that has a smaller and less significant post as their piece of content. But even this is no guarantee of winning the battle for search engine superiority.

You must have an article that is extremely detailed and complete, which shows the search engines that you are really covering the subject and providing more information than any competing page on the Internet. Most importantly, this content must be so compelling that others will link to it eagerly to show the interesting slant you have on the subject. The combination of these two factors is what works on the Internet and always has. I seriously doubt that if you cover these two critical factors you will ever see your traffic disappear and your online business model fade into oblivion.

Examples of Successful Web Site Owners

You can see my theory on this for yourself any time you go on the Internet and see the most successful websites and domain properties that are succeeding in demolishing the competition every day, week, month, and year. No linking software or scheme will ever make your domain name appear above theirs for long. These kinds of blogs and websites have extremely useful information and they have inbound links from hundreds and thousands of different hosting IP’s, which no linking software will ever imitate in the long run and for the duration.

So in 2010 I see the only way to succeed in the long-term is by writing substantial pieces of valuable and compelling content on a well designed blogging platform such as WordPress (or any other dynamic content management system). If you are working alone you are going to be maxed out at two blogs/domains – maybe three of the most. If you have a writing team and financial resources to exhaust, you could manage more blogs, but you are always limited by your manpower. You can use some helpful tools if you can’t type very fast, such as speech recognition software which I’m using right now to create this post. This will help you maintain a couple of good blogs, if you can’t type very fast and don’t have the money to hire good writers to write your content.

The corporations and the large companies can afford to have a budget for writers and webmasters to create compelling content on a frequent basis, and they will always be difficult to compete against, but if you write articles that are extremely compelling then you can beat a complete team of writers any time you want. You can throw all the money you want at writers, but if they don’t have the unique ability to write compelling articles you won’t be getting the flood of inbound links to your domain. This is why the Lone Wolf bloggers out there can succeed where corporations don’t. They have the time, freedom, passion, drive (like succeed or don’t eat), experience and the know-how to write such powerful pieces of content that they wipe out Fortune 500 companies on a regular basis.

If you want to be in this business for the long haul, you better learn how to do this. Of course this means you will have to be writing about something you know fairly well and have some kind of passion for. (How many times have you heard that one?)

Our Market Niches and Strategies

Our money making blogs are on subjects we never “tell the world about”, and cannot be found using Whois or any other filtering system to track the domains we manage. We see visitors to Zulit browsing through all of our different domains that are hosted from this particular hostings company’s Class C Block, but the truth is that the blogs we make the most money from are with different hosting company servers in different areas of the United States, using private domain hosting. The sites that we share in the blogs that we talk about making money, make an extremely small percentage of our overall income. Quite simply put, we like to have some sort of example to point at to show visitors how to make money online, but we can’t take the chance of advertising our main money making domains. We learned this the hard way about 4 years ago.

These real money making blogs make 90% of our income, and they are on varying subjects, some of which are very lucrative, some of which are moderately lucrative, and some of which are modestly lucrative. They all have one thing in common though – they have over 1500 words added to them every second day, every week, every month of every year. This content is researched and written on in length, and the subject matter is highly searched for online. I can’t stress enough how important using your own keyword research methods are. We of course use all of the typical keyword research tools to be found on the market these days, but the most important keyword research tool is our imagination.

You just simply have to imagine what people would be looking for on the Internet to find the lucrative niches out there. Most of our niche blogs have a high demand for traffic and an extremely low competition level. There was a time when I used to share all of our domains, and nothing was ever private, so anybody could use the Whois service to poke around all of our different money making domains. This kind of frustrates some of the people that come to Zulit.com and see our last month earnings reports, but I can assure you we are not leaving out any information on how we create our income. We creat traffic exactly the way I suggested in this last section.

What Should You Do To Succeed Online

There is one particular way you can succeed online and will never fail over the long run. You will never see your hard work get flushed down the drain by the latest search engine algorithms that are designed to filter out manipulative webmasters and domain managers. There is only two aspects to this proven method of working online.

a) The first thing you need to do is use a content management system that is advanced – preferably free and open source coding . I suggest using the WordPress blogging platform on your own domain, but you may want to use a hosted blog like Blogspot. You can use different content management systems, but make sure that all of the spam protections, updating systems, and plug-ins work seamlessly. The only reason I suggest WordPress is because that is what I know, and I can tell you that they have come a long way, making it easy to manage your web property.

b) The second thing you need to do after you’ve chosen a content management system, is work in the right way. Completely disregard everything you have ever heard about so-called SEO techniques, and put an end to using linking strategies, reciprocal linking schemes, and black-hat SEO traps. Even better, just quit thinking about linking altogether. All you want to do is write compelling content. The old days of just throwing up quick posts into your blog for the sake of pinging servers is over. That just won’t do it anymore. Take a look at any good article, on any subject, and you’ll notice that it’s always a lot more than 500 to 600 words.

The search engines have taken this into account as well. They know that generally speaking a short little snippet of content is not really doing it for the visitor. This is why writing long and in-depth articles will put you in a better position with the search engines when compared to article directories, and other bloggers who write small little trifles just for the sake of putting something up. But keep in mind, even if the article is extremely lengthy (like this one is becoming) this doesn’t mean you’re automatically going to win the search engine war against your competitors. You still have to have others linking to the article on a regular basis if you hope to keep your position in the search results.

If you look closely at the search engine results, you’ll notice that the pages that rank high have a few things in common;

1. the page is on a highly ranked domain with a good repuation, or;
2. the page has more inbound links to it than other competing pages focusing on the target keywords (or subject), or;
3. the page is on a domain which has some directly related inbound links to the actual keyword(s) and the domain is extremely narrow in scope (niche), or;
4. the page has more content on it regarding the requested search query

So what you want to have on your websites are pages that have a great amount of content on a particular subject (obviously longer than five hundred words) that are compelling and add another slant to the subject matter. Even if you have a brand-new domain and the search engines are just beginning to spider your site, and the search engine robots are beginning to index pages, and you have no inbound links from other web property managers, your end state goal should be in play already – making sure your articles are interesting and compelling enough that others will want to link to them. This ensures that your website or blog is covering all of the above criteria listed.

1. the search engines will notice that your content is in depth, 100% original (not spinner or a re-writer content), and that your article is lengthier than most all of your competition.
2. the search engine will notice that your domain is new and they will be excited (well as excited as an algorithm can get) to see this new domain and this new content for themselves.
3. if all the content you load to your website or blog is of high quality, the search engines will notice and this goes to creating a good reputation with them.
4. the next thing that will happen is that the search engines will give you that chance to be seen (and believe me if you write decent content they will give you that chance) and you will be found for particular search engine queries made from real people – the all-important users, and webmasters.

If your content is adding something, to the ongoing discourse on the Internet, that is unique in its approach, and other webmasters see it as compelling, you will slowly begin to gain real and valid inbound votes (links). The search engine algorithms will see this slow building inbound link pattern, and you will gain even more ranking with the search engines, solidifying your so-called “good reputation”.

So as you can see above, all of these most important attributes of a successful web property automatically come to pass if you follow one simple rule – write in-depth content that just has to be taken seriously.

More Tips

From what I have seen watching my competitors blogs, and my blogs in action, you are better off writing longer, in-depth articles of discussion, then simply out doing your competition in frequency. You can see this if you look at the other high ranked web properties out there. I certainly don’t waste my time looking at blog posts that are only 200 words long. I will only link to an article that I believe covers a subject in depth. Even if I don’t agree with the blogger in question I will still link to their post because it covers an in-depth idea and opinion. Often, I will try and link to two diametrically opposed blog posts that completely contradict each other, showing the diversity of the subject in question.

So don’t worry about the old adage of creating three articles a day on your blog. Take the time to think about a subject you want to sink your teeth into and write about it in-depth. Surely you will spark the imaginations, the minds, and maybe the hearts (hmmm) of other bloggers who either strongly disagree with you, strongly agree with you, or at least see the value in your thought processes. Either way you slice it they will begin to link to you. You will begin to get a good reputation with real humans and real algorithms

Patience becomes the all important factor if you are a simple Lone Wolf webmaster. You run a small business that is just yourself – perhaps you and your spouse working (this describes my online businesses). You have to realize that you can’t compete in multiple markets and subjects ALL the time. In the beginning you have to focus on one particular subject and stick to it for a couple of years, so it had better be on a subject that has a fair amount of interest, and it better be subject matter that isn’t over-the-top too competitive (like gambling for instance). This is not to say that you can’t compete in the long run with the most competitive websites on the Internet – it just means that you have to be that much more patient, diligent, hard-working, and creative.

The days of going from 0 to 60 in six months time are over. Big time over. You will have to learn to enjoy creating content, whether that be by typing, or using some sort of speech recognition software to lavish your blog with heaps of original content that you feel passionate about. Of course, you can become passionate about a subject if you start to research it and find the beauty in that topic of interest.

For instance if you found a great subject that had a lot of traffic from real users searching it on the search engines, you could read up on the subject until you were well versed and could add to the discussion online. There is only so much to know about any topic, and you would be surprised at how quickly you can become an expert. I go to this extent when I create new niche blogs. I order books online, videos, etc., to learn all about the subject so that I can write about it in my own words and then dominate that niche with my blog.

Even the people who have been studying that topic for years will respect your website and link to it because you have done your homework and you know what you are talking about.

In Closing

If you are like me, and have been in the Internet income business for awhile now, I suggest you consider these theories I am writing about today. The time that we spend using linking software, and scripts, designed to trick the search engines into thinking a domain is completely unique and managed by a human, could be used to simply write compelling content for our visitors, and the visiting search engine robots. You can see clearly now how this theory is true with some of the big moneymaking blogs on the Internet these days. If you focused on writing one 3000 word article, with unique and compelling content, once a week, you will be further ahead than any linking, article marketing, or auto blogging scheme can get you. This is why concentrating on one or two blogs is so important when you start out.

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“these theories of mine are simply theories and I have no studies or actual proof to back up my beliefs in regards to search engine optimization”

Well I’m dropping this sort of disclaimer at this point because I have tested thoroughly the different methods in which to gain search engine ranking and the elusive Internet traffic that comes with higher rankings.

It seems to me that the playing field in which search engine optimization specialists play has narrowed greatly, as the major search engines judge a web site on only a few primary variables. This is not to say that the over 500 million different variables of criteria that Google judges a web site by are no longer in effect (in fact they are obviously in effect), but to say that there are some key factors that and SEO specialist must focus on in order to beat their competition in ranking.

There was a time when every so-called expert would go on and on about everything from source code, server speed, inbound linking, on page optimization, keyword density, content length, etc. etc. – these different criteria are obviously somewhat important to an extent, but not to a large extent anymore.

It is very important that for pure search engine optimization, that the webmaster, or the Company that hopes to rise in the search engine results for particular keyword queries, avoids the investment of excessive time, money, and energy, in regards to the old-school concerns of on-page and off-page optimization. It is much simpler than that.

Assuming that all of the old-school search engine optimization tactics are followed loosely, the most important ingredient for modern and state-of-the-art SEO is the on-page optimization. In fact, a well-written and periodically updated Web property using the most basic HTML or PHP structure can rank highly for most target keywords without allot of time invested in off-page optimization- such as inbound linking campaigns.

In fact, Google has learned to discount almost every possible method of, what I call, “unnatural inbound linking”. Unnatural linking can be defined differently by any number of Webmasters or so-called search engine optimization specialists. For our purposes, unnatural linking is the event of an inbound link to a Web property that was manufactured, or created simply for the purpose of gaining rank.

I don’t even consider manufactured inbound linking to be of much value anymore. This is not to say that some of the manufactured inbound linking tactics such as article marketing and link swapping cannot somewhat help a Web property, but I am saying that these tactics will not put your web site or blog over-the-top and into the so-called critical mass stage of inbound hits from many thousands of unique search engine users around the world a day.

In our coming as SEO posts (and perhaps course) I will be going into some of the methods by which by we can avoid wasting valuable resources on outdated and almost useless search and an optimization tactics.

For more on up-to-date search engine optimization tactics for the modern world wide web, you can visit my brand new SEO web site (Bonavista Web) using my real name, and not my writing name – Terry Zulit. This SEO business site was created primarily for doing business, but there are some points of interest to the blossoming SEO specialist.

This site is not optimized for traffic or rank as of yet because 99% of my clients come through referral, and I handle a select group of companies as to keep my wife and I on the road, and free to travel.

Our private online income is more than sufficient to pay our bills and afford our lifestyle.

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“Doorway pages are pages of content created using software that have very little quality content, and site managers use them to artifically inflate their page rank and traffic. Often the doorway pages are cloaked redirects which is and even uglier manipulation”

Ok….fair enough. But that does not answer the question in sufficient detail. I think I’ve finally figured out what a doorway page has to do to be considered as such by the SEs.

Obviously cloaking and redirecting will be seen as doorway pages by the search engines, but what about pages that Do have SOME valid content, and are used to get traffic and income.

When I first started the Internet income game, I used an eBook that showed me how to build niche sites. This was long before I blogged. Unfortunately, the author of the eBook unwittingly showed his students how to create web sites that use doorway pages. Because of this I saw some of my first sites getting banned by Google.

Ironically, I paid a writer to help me write all the content, so I had original content, but the site(s) still got banned. This led me to testing, and I’ve been testing for 4 years now.

This is what I’ve found:

1) it’s doesn’t matter how good your content is because your pages can still be seen as doorway pages
2) it’s doesn’t matter if you have a small number of these pages, because if they’re seen as doorway pages, they’ll get banned.

There is one sure way (that I’ve found so far) to avoid having allot of pages considered doorway pages on your domains. DON’T LINK TO THE HOME PAGE of the domain from any of your article pages. Also, if you have random links going to and from related article pages, the search engines will not see them as doorway pages.

So if you have a site you want to add a whack of pages to and you want to avoid the doorway page problem do this:

Create a new page off your main domain which acts as an index page for the particular topic. Add all your new pages in that topic or niche from this new page, and you can create a link on all your article pages back to this new index page, but DON’T LINK ANYWHERE ELSE. Don’t link to your domain home URL, and don’t have link clusters in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page. Only link from within the text to other pages in this “satellite” niche.

After 3 years of using this technique I’ve never had a site or blog banned for doorway page penalties.

These are my personal finding. I would be very interested to hear YOUR thoughts on this subject.

TZ

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UPDATE: right click this link and (Save Target as….) to your desktop

Open the .txt file and copy/paste the code (don’t change any of it please) to your web site or blog….ViOLA! You have a really cool tool for checking future Google PR on your domain.  

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Well I did and it almost gave me a heart attack. I was checking all the Google servers for my page rank using the domain only. Zulit (dot) com. WRONG!!! It showed your humble narrator’s precious site as a 0 page rank. That’s right! ZERO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I was sick to my stomach, proving that Google PR DOES mean something to me after all.  Apparently I was living in denial on that claim.

So I spent 3 days accepting that Zulit was toast, and I built 3 other blogs, and started working hard on them. Still deeply saddened and didn’t know why Zulit was getting the Google hammer.

This morning I was looking at future page rank tools all over the Internet. I discovered the mistake I made when entering in Zulit for PR checking. You have to inlcude the full URL, and NOT just the domain name, as most site linking to you are using your full URL for linking in. AAARGHHH!!! Stupid or what. I’ve been doing this for almost 5 years now and I didn’t know that.

SO! Don’t make the same mistake I made. Be sure to check your Google PR using your FULL URL. Below is handy little tool for checking your Google Page Rank. Actually, I consider this tool to be the best future Google page rank checking tool in the Internet. 

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Submitted by Mike Kuhn @ http://www.nichewebsitekit.com

Story…

I’m sure you know the traditional and often taught ways of getting much-needed inbound links. It’s almost always the same: trade links with other websites, write articles for submission, and submit your site to as many directories as possible. These are all useful methods, and all have their purpose, but there is one method that is often overlooked that should form the cornerstone of your link-building efforts. In this article I’ll show you exactly what to do to get the most effective links you can get: from authority sites in your niche.

I. Build your site up a bit first, adding some good content.

II. Look at a small subsection of your site, and brainstorm what type of site you think might be interested in that section of your site without being an actual competitor to your main site itself. For instance, if you have a site on “landscaping,” and within your site you have a subsection about koi ponds, other sites that don’t compete with your main site but may be interested in koi ponds would be fish hobbyist sites, or perhaps even sites that focus only on koi ponds.

III. In Google, search with the broad keyword of your subsection. With the above example, I would search Google for “koi ponds” and also “fish hobby.” Click through to some of the sites that appear in the top ten.

IV. Email the webmaster of EVERY one of these sites and offer to write content for them. Tell them that you’ll taylor the article to their reader’s needs, and that it will only appear on their site. Ask them what they need. Tell them that you only require a link to the related subsection on your website.

V. When you are ready to write an article, make it GOOD. Really do your research, and treat it just like an essay in high school. You’re teacher will be grading you on the subject. If you don’t think you can write it well enough, it is well worth it to find a good article writer and pay him. Don’t spend less than $20 for an article of this importance.

VI. At the bottom of the article, add a SHORT author biography. Briefly explain your site, and who you are and what you offer. Within this bio, make sure you have a link to ONLY the subsection of your site, as well as an anchor text link to that subsection. An example would be: “Mike is a landscaping enthusiast and has installed many koi ponds.

Do this as many times as you can for EVERY major subsection on your site. This is why I also recommend siloing your site, if nothing else than just for organizational purposes, and writing a handful of articles in place of each one article you would normally write. Links from the top ten at Google will do more amazing things for your site than a hundred links from general web directories.

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You need to link to other blogs and sites (periodically) when there is information on another Internet page that can be of value to your readers. The search engines love this kind of participation, and so will your readers. For instance, I would link to this article at ctbizblogs.com because it reads well on the same subject as this post.

Here is another great article on the virtues of outbound linking over at successful-blog.com.

Another plus your blog gets when your article links to another on-topic Internet page is this; when you create a link you are adding to the number of keywords found in your page code. In other words, when you add a link in a post, you add the URL address of the page you are linking to, which will likely have keywords in it that are on-topic to your post. You will again be adding critical keywords to your code when you title the link. This is a powerful realization. This all has to do with spider bait for the search engines.

I’ve also heard bloggers mention that posting on other blogs is not important due to the fact that most have blogs have no-follow tags for comments URLs. I disagree.

First of all; Some blogs do not use no-follow tags in the comment URL presentation. Second of all; it’s very important to keep in the loop by posting your comments on other blogs. Let em know you’re there! Let other bloggers see your idea(s) and let them see a link to your blog or site. This is critical when you are just starting out with your blog. If you are new to this and want to learn how to make a comment, just click the comments link at the bottom of this post, and leave your bit. If you don’t have a web site or blog, simply leave the URL field blank.

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It worked very well too – if you could recruit over 1000 inbound links to your site, you could rank very high in the search engines. (especially Google). But that game is all over now, and if you are still doing that kind of linking your site has likely been punted from Google, and perhaps MSN as well. The game has changed dramatically, so I want to update some of the new players who might be reading this.

The kind of linking you need to do is what I call “natural linking” – meaning the procurement of inbound links that makes sense to the search engine algorithms. Try to only add a handful of good links to your site per month. 5-10 inbound links every month will do fine. Below is my definition of a “good link”.

Definition of a good link:

a) An inbound link from a pagerank (PR) of 3 or higher
b) An inbound link from a page that is on topic with your web site or blog

Avoid linking with sites that have nothing to do with yours. This a sure fire way to get Google’s shirt in a knot. They’ll penalize you for that kind of linking, so don’t be tempted to load up on inbound links with some kind of fancy software or script. Just be natural about it.

You must be sure not to add other sites by large numbers per month, or harvest inbound links in droves every month. Google sees that as “unnatural linking” as well.

The best way to get unbound links is slowly, and from other bloggers or webmasters that are pointing out your content to their visitors. This is a very natural process, and the search engines will love your site or blog for it.

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To check the inbound links going any of your sites or blogs click here. Enter your domain name(s) and email address and then click send results. The results will be sent to you (without any additional spam), showing you the inbound links in the following search engines:

AllTheWeb
AltaVista
Google
MSN
Yahoo!

This is a quick and easy way to see how your site is progressing

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I was building a site for a friend and he had chosen a particular template online. I used his template and was surprised to see how well his site was doing in search. I had optimized his site exactly the same way I had optimized my sites in the past, but his was doing much better. I eventually tried using the same meta tags that his template had. It worked.

So now I use the meta tag pattern below for all my static sites and my blogs.

To get the meta code I use for static web sites, right click here and select “Save target as..”

To get the meta code I use for WordPress blogs, right click here and select “Save target as..

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(h)ttp://www.yoursite.com/your-great-article-title-with-your-desired-keywords-in-it.htm

For a static web site I would title the page with dashes, so that the URL ends up the URL example above. If you use a WordPress blog there is a way to make this happen automatically when you make a new post.

You may have noticed that all the pages of your default WordPress blog have URLs that look like something like this:

(h)ttp://www.yoursite.com/?p=15

The above URL is not ideal for search engine indexing, so there is an easy way to change all that. Follow the instructions below to change your URLs (permalink structure).

Download this file (1.htaccess.txt) right click the link and select “Save Target as…”. Download to your computer and then upload it into the root directory of your hosting server. Should be the same place your WordPress index.php file lives.

Once you have the 1.htaccess.txt file uploaded to your server, change the file permissions to 777 (see our video tutorial on how to change file permissions click here) After you’ve successfully change file permissions, change the file name from 1.htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

Once you have done the above, login to your WordPress blog and click options and then permalinks. Choose one of the permalink options. (I suggest using the Date and name based choice, or a custom choice of your choosing) Then click the Update Permalink Structure button at the bottom/right of the page. That’s it. Now your URLs will be search engine spider friendly, using the title and the main keywords of your post in the web page address. This automatically changes all the URL addresses of your blog, so you want to do this when your first start your blog.

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Once you have a web site or blog created and on it’s way, you will soon be receiving emails from SEO companies that promise to optimize your site and increase your traffic for a price. The prices will range from the one time optimization fee to the monthly fees. Some of these companies charge thousands of dollars per month for their services. The goal of this series is to help you carry out search engine optimization on your site without spending any money.

This is not so much about reader and visitor appeal. As I’ve mentioned many other times, focusing on your content and how it can help your visitors is the key factor, BUT it’s important to have your site (and all of it’s pages) optimized for the web.

The next installment of the SEO series will be in regards to meta tag.

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I have been asked MANY times; “How do I get more targeted traffic to my web site or blog”. The standard answer I usually give is, “You need to add continuous quality content and gather strong inbound links”. Sounds simple, but there is an exact process I use to draw traffic to my sites. There are other things to consider, such as meta tags, URL choices, keywords, article and post titles.

If you have a limited understanding of the Internet, you may not know what I mean by inbound links. You may not know what I mean good content. You may not have a clue as to what I’m talking about. That is why this series is being created — so that beginners to the art of Internet income can learn the tricks and tips all experienced webmasters use everyday. As beginners read these lessons, I will hyperlink all of the terms and phrases to a definition page, so new-comers don’t get lost. You will notice these hyperlinks appearing on return visits. For instance, this article itself will have a multitude of hyperlinks included for definition purposes.

4 Reasons For This Search Engine Optimization Series

Reason 1) The first reason why I’m creating this series of tutorials on search engine optimization (SEO), is that I have many family members, friends, and acquaintances, that have new blogs (and web sites) that need traffic. I’ve helped these kind folks get their start, but it takes more than just starting a blog to actually make money with it. It takes traffic. Lots of targeted Internet traffic.

Reason 2) The second reason why I’m creating this series of lessons regarding search engine optimization (SEO), is that all of the words used in these teachings will become lucrative spider bait, and create more traffic for Zulit.com.

Reason 3) The old saying that goes; “If you want to learn something well you need to teach it”. Absolutely. When I teach people thoroughly, and in a way that they can understand clearly, I too gain further insight and knowledge.

Reason 4) The fourth reason why I’m writing this series of tutorials about search engine optimization (SEO), is for the quality content and value quota I demand from Zulit.com (me). As I touched on above, all web site owners and/or blog owners have to adhere to the quality content rule. That is if they ever want to see any natural traffic from the search engines. To me (and the search engines) the definition of quality content is information that can be useful to readers. Quality content also creates the on-going quid pro quo between Zulit.com and other bloggers in the blogoshpere, which results in more inbound links.

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