Brett Reilly's Blog

Seo is a very touchy subject and I have read many books, ebooks and websites but one thing is clear getting as many genuine related links to your website is the easiest way to get people to your website as all the major search engines reward this, but then here is the hard part.

Making your website an seo heaven for search engines with out taking away your clients ability to use your website, I have stopped doing any seo on this website as it has mainly turned into a diary for me and to remember things that really worked.

• Getting all your pages indexed and have a accurate description of what is on the page is a must.

• Having a fast server with little or no lag is a great benefit.

• Getting Valuable links to your site. (as stated above)

• Being honest to yourself and search engines is a must. You can get penalized badly which is the opposite of what you want to do.)

• Being Patient for changes to show signs.

• Do not try everything you read. ( some things may have a negative effect. )

• Keywords are important in your content, keyword meta tags are not.

This should get you started on your success, the question I have noticed around is how to get links and how fast should you submit them and should you outsource your link submission.

If you website is new slow is the best policy for long term goals, for short term goals or what I call marketing to the masses fast is the answer but it must be repeatative, this is really a marketing issue rather than a search engine issue as it takes about a month or more before search engines show solid results, but if your part time webmaster like me slow is best as you don’t want to be flooded while your at work or out with friends.

Outsourcing your submissions and seo is fairly easy, I use submitedge.com which are a great reliable company for my website 7meditations.com which is slowly coming up in the seo world, I have been using them since February and continue to use them, as I am not financially rich I have been slowly adding links and upgrading packages, and they have great all in one packages.

Or you can do it yourself which is what I do for my other websites, which is time consuming and I do it real slow, usually when I have some spare time, using directory submission software and occasionally adding comments on blogs I read and add my links in my name, unless I am bad mouthing them to make me feel better.

Thats about it.

Have you paid money to a company claiming that they can get you listed in Google in less That seven days? have you paid someone to resubmit your website to the larger search engines so you can supposedly get visitors from these search engines.

Thinking that you paid them to do nothing at all?

Step one.
Make sure your site has original content.

Step Two.
Pay someone or if you have time, do it your self (the whole purpose of this) to submit to at least 10 directories paid or free a week.

Step Three.
Use A site map, get an account with Google, to access Google Webmaster Tools validate your site add site map, Google will usually grab your site map within a few hours, it will then, depending on how many pages you have, index your site fairly quickly withing seven days larger sites will and mostly take longer.

Step Four.
Everyone follows Google, so within a month or so Yahoo, Ask( Google back end ) and then MSN about 2 months later and the rest just follow.

Step Five.
Wheres the optimization? Have a meta description or a decent size catch phrase for each page, Keywords only if you want to lose 50% of your clients who search, most top ranking sites in Google only have one or two keywords or none at all per page. Google will do a quick math solution based on the words on the page and say yah or nay.

Step Six.
Keep The content fresh, Unlike this site, Usually where I experiment, if its a static site, take your time to word it right from the beginning, as the words on the page will matter, or find a really good wordsmith, but remember its your clients and not the search engines that pay you remember that they need to read it too.

Step Seven.
Don’t Forget Step Two.

The rest of seo is simple change little pieces at a time and be patient.

I’m not sure if it is really that useful, but today after fiddling around with my websites I think I have found that nice little median, where AWStats and analytics actually have something in common.

With this site I was using Ultimate GA and getting about 2 to 3 visits a day where AWstats was giving me between 300 – 500 visits a day, doesn’t sound right does it, well yesterday I changed it to a basic plug in, and if that didn’t work I was going to manually put it in the theme, but it seems to work.

Now Google analytics is giving me a more accurate picture, I’m happy to see I have readers, all you RSS readers I thank you for reading. Now I can say that I am getting about 100 readers a day, more when there is a new post, the rest are spammers and bots.

I also Noticed today that Google has changed the css file and changed the look slightly of the dashboard it looks pretty. Don’t forget to comment or buy me a coffee, I take Paypal.

MSN is winning by looking at my site’s stats so what does this say about google? Or is all this just hype so people will use MSN?

My say MSN list’s my site in their search engine the next day, Google takes about week or not at all on one of my other website’s and I get hits from MSN more than Yahoo and Google Combined, on other other hand another web site of mine Google lists with out a problem maybe becaused I focused on Google optimization on that site but I still get visits from MSN not Yahoo or Google.

Google’s page rank is a load of crap to my understanding as I have seen sites with 8-9 on rankometer that have one line of text and no relevence to what I was looking for these sites were out of place most probably due to them cheating the system, and yesterday this site had a page rank of 8 though as soon as I posted yesterday it was back at Zero, mmmm? if Page Rank is that bad and tempremental it’s not worth focusing on and neither is Google.

Google has the right attitude to running a business and attempting to please everybody though latley I have been using MSN since they have updated I get the results I want and they list my sites quickly and effiecently with out losing focus.

So the answer to the war on search I think Microsoft are creeping ahead, will google come back and win me and who ever else they have lost, wait and see.

Just read the Google story and now I understand Google’s standpoint, this is a great book for anyone who uses the web more often than not or even if your trying too get listed on Google, the story starts with Brin and Page at Stanford and goes right through until 2005 the history of Google is full of life and rewards, including a few images in the center, with the beautiful Marissa Mayer featuring with star studded cast from Google including a rack server that they have used.

They also Speak about how they went public on the stock exchange and what happened between them and other companies trying so hard to make enemies with friendly fun lovin’ Google.

Also there are some useful links in the back of the book.

hint:type Google labs(you find everything you need there)

Also if your sick of others telling you how to get listed on Google, you can go to Google Webmasters and find all there there is to know on how Google works, it just cut’s all the bullshit out.