Florida update, new strategy

[Aji]

Hi,

After the florida update i thought of penning down the summary of it apart from cries.

Here what I hate to see but true

Linking Strategy
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You should not have one single keypharse as anchor text for all backlinks, try to have around 4 to 5 keyphrases (40% use the main keyphrase, next 30 % some other,...). Also try to link different pages instead of your homepage. Donot do reciprocal linking, you will be penalized for that.

H1 tags
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You should not have more than one h1 tags, donot follow the h1, h2, h3 sequence. Have H1 and h4 and thats all.

Alt tags
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I recommend donot use it right now, the reason being all tricks of SEO should not be applied on the same page. So leave it, less priority.

Title
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Title, meta tags keep it as early, but I will say donot use title and h1 together.

Keyword density
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between 3% to 10%.

Links + Title + 5% keyword density +nothing else =#1

More to add but right now I will stop here for other experiences, lets share it and get into the right track again.

Thanks
Denny

[janeth]

Hi denny,
That is the samething we where seeing except did not see the problem with h2, and h3 tags but now I see how that can be a problem.

[Aji]

Hi Janeth,

Do you also think the same for the linking strategy.

Denny

[janeth]

I think you should only get one link from each site and that you should mix up your key words so you do not have all the links for the same key word.

I would also not point all my links to my home page.

[Aji]

Yeah what you said is correct Janeth, but there are many more things.

keeping it simple, use a strategy which help you to optimize your site just half as earlier.

Denny

[DrTandem1]

Regarding (1)placing links to pages other than the Home page, (2)don't do reciprocal linking and (3)not using ALT tags:

(1)I think linking to pages other than your Home page may have some merit, but there are definitely disadvantages. You will need to maintain the page file name other than the Home page to maintain the traffic. Your Home page is the index file, so that is a safe bet that it will still be there as long as you have a website.

Another potential problem is that you will be diluting the importance of the site by spreading the link targets too thin. In other words, your site may get a better ranking result with 50 sites linking to your Home page than 100 sites linking to 5 of your subseguent pages. If Google focuses on the domain name in a link, then it won't matter which pages are targeted. If they are concerned with the subsequent pages, then you would be diluting the effect with links to different pages.

(2) I have seen no evidence that exchanging links is penalized, as long as neither is a "link-farm". It may be that sites that have their links embedded in another site's content fare better than a simple link on a link page.

(3) I doubt Google would penalize the use of the ALT attribute. It would be easier and more reliable for them just to ignore it. The ALT attribute serves an important function besides another place to park a keyword. It is of great assistance to people with slow connections, no images or visually handicapped (the ALT text could be read to a blind person by software that can detect it.)

[Aji]

DrTandem1,

There is not penalty for alt tag, but there is penalty for over oprimization known as (OOP, over optimization penalty), so you should not have all the things, like h1, alt tag, ,...... on a single.

But now I donot trust google, tommorow they might say that their should be links to internal pages, as those pages are good content wise. So better play safe. but sure you must do linking to the homepage as high as 75%.

There are many new concepts arriving, I am tring to do some good. Best of luck.

Denny

[dilipsam]

Hi everybody,

My version:

Visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html and you'll get the notion that Google has somewhat become a stricter version of Altavista. I guess this is probably the first search engine to acknowledge key issues and emphasize clean HTML. Which search engine did this before? I guess none. Only good and genuine SEOs emphasize clean HTML while the remaining looked only at good SEO copywriters.

Let's say you have book review site. Now Google also looks for keyword variations. For example, the keyword review can be written as criticism, the keyword can be stemmed or truncated and spread throughout the page as Google now understands Applied Semantics. This is one way of increasing the keyword density. What I mean here is maintain 3% to 5% for the keyword 'review' and reserve the other variations for another 5%.

What do you say folks?

Regards,
Dilip Samuel

[ronniethedodger]

Hi everybody,
Let's say you have book review site. Now Google also looks for keyword variations. For example, the keyword review can be written as criticism, the keyword can be stemmed or truncated and spread throughout the page as Google now understands Applied Semantics. This is one way of increasing the keyword density. What I mean here is maintain 3% to 5% for the keyword 'review' and reserve the other variations for another 5%.

I say -- right on! I have been doing that all along. One thing you have to keep in mind is that you need to write it to make sense as well.

The benefit of doing it this way, over focusing on just one phrasing, is that searchers actually exercise that same type of thinking also. As you stated above with mixing the word reviews with the word criticism -- people would probably use both and you will capture more of the result returns. Although I would use critic(s) over criticism more.

Puncuation can be critical too. Especially puncuation in possessive forms of pronouns such as mens and men's, womens and women's. Take for example the phrase "mens products". Google will offer up that one line at the top of the results "Did you mean men's products?".

The puncuation can make or break a lot of your result returns...consider this, if you only write for one form -- then you are only getting the searches for that one form of phrase. You need to mix the two.

This same phenomenon is inherit in the various forms of nouns and verbage also...such as plural nouns and past tense verbs.

Nouns (as with pronouns) you can get away with mixing both singular and plural forms of the words with not much trouble, or consequences.

Verbs on the other hand can get a little tricky. It is not enough to just mix different tenses of verbs on a page. In fact, if you mix the words without being syntatically correct...especially in the context of a single paragraph...it may be construed as spamming.

I am finding more and more naturally constructed queries showing up in SE referral logs. Searchers are constructing actual sentences (ala AskJeeves style) and getting better results.

Parsing English text is pretty tough, but they are getting more sophisticated in that endeavor. You need to write your content with that aspect in mind. Not only will you be doing the searcher a favor, but yourself as well by virtue of him/her finding you for exactly what they are looking for. It is one thing to have all of these marvelous phrases at the top of the results, but another if millions of others are keying it in differently.

Picard: "Computer? How many Class M Planets within this quadrant is serving a population over 1 Billion?"

Computer: "One-hundred and fourteen...eight of which are within one-year of our present location."

Picard: "Of those eight, which one has a McDonalds?"