SEO Experiments - My Top 10 Point of View

Folks,

I have been lately doing lot of SEO experiments. Of them I found many interesting stuffs that I would like to share.

1) Always have good number of words in any articles - Preferable more than 300.
2) Making good title - Keyword and meaningful title is worthy.
3) Having keywords sprinkled and preferably in the top paragraph is vital. But do not stuff your keywords.
4) Give more importance to user experience.
5) Build links with keyword as anchor texts.
6) Build links with variable keywords in anchor texts.
7) Do not involve in massive link building activities.
8) Have different form of links. Massive one form of links may sound spam to search engines. Have a mix of links - Links from articles, forums, blog posts, websites, link exchange, blog comments, profile links and what not.
9) Continue your link building activities day by day. It is an ongoing process.
10) Above all keep your users in the top. Think like this - What is your user looking for in your website. Do branding and loyalty by addressing critical user problems - Delivering useful service, wonderful information, great tools etc.,

I hope these tips from my SEO experiments would have helped you. Do you have any results of experimentation to share?

Thanks
Sam

First - Vishal, thanks for stopping by and congrats for getting #1 spot. However, I have a different perspective altogether. I saw your recent post on Spiritual way of getting backlinks. It was a nice reading, but many times this system doesn't work.

After analyzing your success on http://www.easyphpcontactform.com, I want to say something.

> Initially you have linked to this website from home page of WAHF.
> A link from related authority website has triggered this search engines to trust this website.
> Then comes your service. You have got a great script. A light weight beautiful script.
> This went on viral and many webmasters has used these.
> You have given a link at the bottom of the form and many have this live links on.
> This made you get links. I mean backlinks.

As you summarized, you have created good website and backlinks have followed that. I appreciate and it is well taken point to be noted.

The tough part
However this doesn't work all the time.

How can I create a quality website that outbeats my competition?
My competitor runs his website with 12 content writers, I am just the only writer..! How can i outbeat his quality?
How can I create a website if I am not that much familiar of what I would like to write?

Vishal - Your POV is correct if a person starts a website for passion and waits patiently. But businesses can not run that way. TIME IS MONEY AND MONEY IS TIME here

If the ground rule set by you is the right one for every one, why does TV and advertisement exists. Why can't companies create right product and wait it to get famous. Why do they spend tonns of money on advertisements?? Why do they anchor acter and actresses?

So, it is all what a person want to achieve. Now internet marketing is all about content creation, link building, competitor snapping etc., Without all these it would be difficult to survive.

Here is my example
* I found a niche where I can mint some money.
*So I created a website for that with zero knowledge on it.
*Later I gained some knowledge but not enough to create a killer content as Vishal did in the case of php form.
* So I hired a content writer and developed contents.
*I did vigorous link building.
*Now after 4 months, I got PR3 and I am getting $200 per month from adsense.

Without link building the whole project would have been messed. Since I am not able to find natural link resources, I have to do link building to survive.

So I want to revise our Vishal's wordings as follows.
* Build killer content/service
* Do some initial link building and continue the process.
* Forget it! - Nope. Continue link building activity, watch your competitor.
* On the other hand continue adding value to your website.

Unfortunately I would not prefer to patronize you Vishal. These are the words that I learnt from many guys and from my self experience. And I am the only one to vote No on the voting

Sincerly
Sam

Thanks Samuel and VIshal - this is a great thread!

Great information. I've learned to always keep link building natural and it will pay off more in the long run.

Good SEO is a lot of hard work, but well worth it as long as you're consistent, continue to learn and apply new techniques.

All the topics you have posted here are really great.
These are useful for me.
Thanks for sharing

Just 1 question Samuel. Is link exchange safe? I remember reading it somewhere, that Google doesn't like it. And can lead to sandbox. Can someone clear that up for me, please.


And thanks for sharing this information here

I have done a few link exchanges and didn't have G punish me for it. I think it would depend on who you exchange links with for instance there are plenty of black hatters out there that G is aware of exchanging links with them might not be a good idea. Do your homework before you do it.

However, I do believe that I have been sandboxed for using affiliate links. It seems that every time I make a few affiliate sales my blogs get sandboxed for a short time. I am not sure about this, but it sure is a weird coincidence if I am wrong.

Great information!

I noticed that depending on how competitive the niche is, either Sam's or Visham's techniques work.
I've got sites where I built good content and backlinks after creating the sites and they keep staying in the top 10 even if I do not do anything more but there are also other sites of mine, where adding new content and backlinks is simply a must to keep the SERP's position. Competitors aren't sleeping

Justine, I couldn't agree more!

We always start by asking ourselves what would our human visitors want to see on any specific webpage? We hope that those answers help us to create content rich pages which offer a variety of search terms which we should be able to rank for. Additionally, by writing for our human visitors instead of for spiders, we hope that our conversion rates will be improved.

I can also second link building being a time consuming and long term process. It's well worth the investment if this holiday season is any inclination for my wine business.

samda your strategy is good but after panda and penguin updates is it still working?