Posts by PixelatedKarma

You shouldnt need to pay w3c anything to get an error free result. It should be part of your site QA/QC process; you just need to keep running it and correcting errors; it takes time but it should be done anyways. Error free clean code with good markup is just a good best practice all around.

And if you dont do it for SEO think of it this way; you have a wordpress blog. After a few years you are seeing 25,000+ visitors per month because of this you have migrated from a shared hosting plan to VPS to dedicated server in conjunction with a CDN to handle the traffic load. Maybe you see the potential of it growing even more; so you invest on migrating the site to a cloud environment. These moves become so much easier having clean semantic code because you dont have to worry about the theme having to be hacked together during every move to make the site actually work.

Or how about this reason - wordpress releases a new version; suddenly all the hack code you've used to be browser compatible (and was error ridden in w3c) with your theme now makes you theme no longer work. Now all of that hard work you've dumped into making your website look, feel and act how you want - is now all gone.

Be the SEO person who does things right and do right by your clients; it will take more time, it will be more …

I bet we still see 5+ posts a month asking on how to increase pagerank. I am glad they finally came out and said it though especially since they have so many stronger ranking signals now that link building is only one portion of it all.

You ever heard of the 80/20 rule? This CEO is putting his Company into the 80. To get 30-40 UNIQUE RELEVANT QUALITY backlinks a day will be possible for the next 3 months probably (difficult but not impossible). Beyond that you'll be scratching links from websites with less merit and might end up hurting his website more than help it. People like this CEO are all about quantity, whereas SEO has made a major shift towards Quality. Without this SEO recognizing this your being set up to fail (hence why this CEO is putting his company in the 80).

Now if you want your first step; I'd strongly suggest you analyze their current backlinks. Rid yourself of the bad apples to begin with. Then begin researching your competitors backlinks. Beyond that creating stunning copy and sharing that will become your new best friend.

Yeah there is a bit of a difference and we can thank google's effort for local search and the natural geo-location of their servers. Google will always attempt to show the results as cached by the nearest location of their servers - hence why google.ca and google.com SERPs will display slightly different results. The logic behind this is to provide faster loading webpages/more local results to visitors which should in theory provide more relevant results to their query.

By tricking google into believing you are a visitor in a different timezone, it's going to try and line you up with the correct geo-location data center which of course could change where you are placed in the SERPs.

Thats why personnally I am convinced it is impossible to always rank in the top 3 spots in every geo-location google provides search; although it doesn't hurt to try!

You won't be able to rank a single page perfectly because you are at a severe disadvantage. However that shouldn't stop you from being able to rank well. First to understand why you wont rank perfectly: Google and Bing both prefer quality content and lots of it. A single page website generally cannot provide fresh and new quality content to keep search engine crawlers visiting your website frequently.

However I assume that you are really wanting to keep your single page website and dont want to waste the time or money you've spent creating it or having it created. So your best option is to create some really great relevant web 2.0 articles, do some social bookmarking, get some amazing relevant followed inbound links, make sure your keywords are in place and working (focus each section of the page on a grouping of keywords which are all related to each other - watch out for keyword density) and constantly work on boosting social media signals. You may also want to consider developing landing pages which funnel your visitors to your main page and which can also help boost your ranking for your keywords - these landing pages will also help get you crawled more frequently especially if you are building some really good inboundlinks. Beyond that if your website is semantically correct and you are meeting every single SE best practice you should atleast have a fighting chance.

https://www.google.com/cse/

thats for your google custom search bar.

As for website performance use a tool like y-slow to find suggestions on changes to speed things up. Compression and caching are your best friends.

@lukaskille - question for you; are you monitoring the effectiveness of your efforts? To clarify, are your efforts reaching people and people just arent converting? Or are your efforts falling on deaf ears?

In the first scenario, things are relatively easy to diagnose. I am assuming that if you are proving successful with your current clients and that you are providing a niche set of web hosting services (most companies in that industry are because its so competitive). The problem probably has to do with your sales/marketing funnel. If people are truly seeing the ads/content but not converting then the problem lies with the way you are trying to convert them. Do you have a call to action on each blog post you are sharing on social media? Is your call to action placed in a good position? Is it clear what you want your potential client to do? Do the colors/layout of the call to action effective?

With the second possibility, which is that you are just being lost in a sea of other web hosts with bigger and better social media efforts you need to take a step back and look at what you are doing. Are your efforts targeted appropriately at the right audience? You may need to figure out who your existing customers are and re-target your SMM efforts to meet that same demographic to basically replicate the clients you have. But wait, maybe your content just sucks, maybe the right people are seeing it - …

A great practical example of a legit link wheel......you start a reseller company, business is good but you want a bit more incoming revenue to pay bills, so you create a web design business but keep them both seperate. You quickly link the two together.

A year goes by and both companies are doing well but you decide with the demand of seo by your various clients to create a marketing company, you then link all three. Some more time goes by and you want to create a server blog, you reference the design company and the web hosting company and your friend's development company. Some more time goes by and you buy out your friend and host all web apps through your hosting company, pretty soon you have 5 legit websites all linking to the main hosting company. Because you contextualize the links and all the sites have quality relevant content, the link wheel will prove to be very effective especially if they are all on different c-blocks.

If you do a search you will find multiple references to dublin core on both these forums and on google itself.

The very quick easy way of explaining what dublin core is - its semantic meta tags. If your entire site follows semantic guidelines then dublin core will probably be your next step.

Thats fine Kelly and you can continue with your current practices but kiss your keyword ranking efforts good bye to some degree. If the crawler terminates the crawl because of errors then your whole page wont be correctly crawled; thus wherever that break is (as almostbob mentioned) is the last part of that page the crawler is going to give you credit for. So thats fine if your errors are found all in the footer section....not so great if the crawlers are stopped before or slightly after the fold which in turn makes all that wonderfully written copy after the termination pretty much pointless in ranking you in SERPs.

w3c errors can and will effect your SERPs if they are serious errors. Alot of crawlers have improved to the point that they can overlook alot of minor errors (forgetting to close a tag for example). However if the error is serious enough or there are enough errors sometimes the crawlers will come back with an error and they are not able to properly crawl your website. If this happens you are only being credited with the content which they can crawl which could potentially lead to contextually misplacing your website within that search engine's rankings - ie. not placing you where you truly should be. The best way to see if your errors are effecting your rankings check the crawl errors under Google webmaster tools.

If you are getting incomplete crawls; you should probably start by fixing those errors. If not then move onto other SEO priorities (ie. creating content). However if you are getting incomplete crawl errors then also remember that its going to take a minimum of 3 days before your webmaster tools reflect the change, and thats if you are being crawled daily.

Remember the web is going semantic and has been for a long time - so all it takes is your competitor to have a semantically correct website to beat you out if they have highly competitive content to yours.

Just to weigh in quick, the only real paid traffic is through ppc campaigns. Other promises for x amount of traffic for y amount of money is a scam. There are several applications available through black hat websites which will spoof traffic to any site, the more sophisticated applications can even trick referral sites (ie Google) into believing that a keyword has triggered multiple visits to a website. If your goal is to make your stats look presentable for Adwords or other such programs then these programs could in theory help you if you didn't get caught, God help you if Google catches you though - welcome to SEO purgatory.

Other then that you need to realize that these services aren't offering real views from real people so if your website is focused on selling a product or service it absolutely will not help you.

To add to what Scott said, one thing we have encountered in the past is a Company will work out a contract flat rate agreement with a shipping company (UPS/Fedex/etc) and if they offer their products in say 3 countries they will average the shipping cost across all three countries (sometimes even weight the average moreso towards the most shipped to out of the three). They will then use that average number and calculate it into the COG (Cost of Goods).

This way it never is a loss in profits but its an amount that is actually factored into the product's cost to the Company; this way when they keystone the product for retail/distribution pricing the customer is actually paying more for the shipping then they actually would have if they just paid the shipping rate - BUT the Company puts on a good face because they offer "free" shipping.

To put it into an example;

You build widgets that cost $4 to build. Shipping costs $2 to the US, $3 to Canada and $6 to the UK. The US accounts for 75% of your sales, 15% come from Canada and 10% come from the UK. So effectively you'd come out with a weighted average of $2.55 (if my math is correct) for shipping bringing your COG to $6.55. You keystone at say 1.5 for distributors/wholesale and 3 for retail so your wholesale prices are going to be $9.83 and $19.65 - because you've calculated your shipping into your COG …

Depends on how popular your website is and how you can value your website (this is where alexa rank is handy). If you can prove that you get the visitors/traffic then you can justify larger amounts. I can't tell you what your website is worth; however there was a guy who made $1 million dollars from selling every viewable pixel on his website (sold each 10px x 10px area for $1 and sold a million of them). Was it worth it to the ones paying? Questionable? But he created a viral fad that he could prove was worth that much money. So how much do you want from him? And how do you justify that cost? Those are questions you need to answer not us. I can't verify that you have 1 million real unique visitors a day; but maybe you can prove it to him

So who is your target audience? I know you said its narrow but who are they? How does you friend intend to monetize this (monthly subscription, outright sale)? I hope you dont think any of this is negative because its meant to be real and not build you a fairy tale that you are going to sell a million units your first day and retire - it just wont happen.

You kinda took a losing bet in my opinion; I've done marketing on similar projects and this is a marathon you are about to run - not a viral sprint. Unfortunately its really hard to sell something when you are competing against free (there are alot of sweepstake type widgets out there). Free wins almost every time. Now I don't know the scope of these products but it does sound like you think you know your target market (alot more then most people know). So you want to find out everything you can about your market; what age are they? what demographic are they? where can you find these people?

Once you answer these questions to yourself then you can proceed. You don't hunt deer in urban areas; likewise you don't find customers where they dont exist. You are selling digital nothingness; its not something people can hold, smell, or taste - so your job has now become increasingly more difficult. You can tell me that your sweepstake software is going to bring my company a million new emails for …

2-3 years ago yes it would have mattered. A big push back then was basically keyword stuffing which would include repeating keywords in meta tags, header tags, content, image tags, links, etc.

Back then using www.mysite.com (assuming mysite was a keyword you were trying to rank for) would have been big brownie points because it would have stacked with www.mysite.com/synonom-to-your-site-keyword increasing the chance of being ranked for that keyword. However nowadays the best practice revolves around a more natural way of building keywords so using relative links does not hurt your website rankings.

Pinterest just like any other social media platform will be important depending on the demographic you are trying to reach. You need to know your product and your demographic (who you are trying to sell the product too). If you are trying to market a food product and your target demographic is women between 25-34 years old in household income brackets above $100k/yr USD - Pinterest may be where you want to focus all of your social media efforts. If you are trying to sell a product to males in that same genre; you are going to find your ROI is horrible and you will probably be out of business and/or customers relatively quickly.

Google takes into account social signals when ranking a website. This includes how much your website's content gets shared, the amount of followers you have, and the amounts of likes/favorites you have.

Google uses this ranking algorithim because unlike other ranking factors, social media can accurately guage a website's interaction and popularity among its fans/users. This means that if you have quality content and an active user base its probably worthy of your site being higher in the SERPs because you are providing value which is something that Google has been valuing now for the last 18+ months pretty heavily.

You didnt provide enough details for us to help.

Is your website new? If not, how old is it?
If you have a new website it could take 2-3 months for your website to get crawled, especially if you don't have a good inbound link strategy.

How often is content updated on it?
If you have an old website but you have not given it any attention in the last few months; google may have slowed the crawl rate of your website as well this is because Google looks at your website and goes "hey this content isnt being updated, why should we spend the time and resources on crawling it if content isn't updated regularly?"

How many unique visitors does your website get a day?
Using google analytics you should be able to see exactly how many people Google is recording to your website. If you aren't hitting high enough numbers; Google won't crawl you often enough, it just isnt worth their time. And if you are running a personal blog, no your mom visiting your blog 50+ times a day won't count as individual visits in Google's eyes.

How popular is your website?
I know lots of people trash on Alexa; but sites <1,000,000 tend to be crawled on a more regular basis. After all Alexa is considered a social signal by Google.

Does your website have good social signals?
Further to above, are you on the proper social media channels? Are those …

SMO - Social Media Optimization; the process of optimizing your social media pages in an attempt to gain more followers/likes/etc. which in turn helps boost social ranking signals on Search Engines.

SMM - Social Media Marketing is the process of marketing your product and/or service through PPC, Copy, and Viral Content.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing generally refers just to PPC. Generally someone who specializes in SEM is competent in running successful Adwords or other online advertising campaigns.

http://adwords.blogspot.ca/2014/08/close-variant-matching-for-all-exact.html

That's the official Adwords blog.

Since this thread was brought back from the dead; I have a question if any of these users are still active. How did your facebook campaigns go for you?

All of you seem very much pro-facebook (rightfully so with it being so large with such endless possibilities); but I really need to ask how many of you have actually had success with converting your likes into paying customers? How much of your content has went viral? How many of you were so disappointed that your target niche weren't biting that you ended up having to do FB's PPC to get the users from FB to your actual site? Have you come to realize how limited the organic reach of your FB page's posts are?

I'd almost be willing to bet that 10% of the people who responded originally to this post had anywhere near the results they claimed the original poster would have with Facebook.

I dunno maybe your target demographic was found on Facebook and maybe you've done amazing; but it would be interesting to hear after 4 months where you guys have gotten too.

People need to use "common sense" when submitting to directories (I know, I know - common sense is not all that common but stick with me for a minute). There really are no rules because every niche of every business which is online is slightly different. When you look at why directories went from being the go-to back in the early 2000s for inbound links to being frowned upon its because people over did it much like how in 2014 people are now over doing guest blogging to the point Google is now frowning upon it. Anyone who has been online for any decent amount of time can probably label off more then a handful of directories that looked like they were built in an hour using homestead's old website builder - these are not directories you want your brand associated with. If the directory looks like a spam directory; its probably going to hurt your website. If however the directory is a reputable directory relevant to the content of your website then that link is going to help you.

Some quick rules of thumb:
* Only submit to a directory and/or directory categorys which match the content of your website (ie. a web design directory for a web design website)
* Favor submitting to directories which are local to your target market places
* Favor government and educational directories if applicable, but keep it relevant to your niche
* ONLY submit to directories with a …

Create a quality website, with quality content that can go viral; share it on social media and win OR you could spend thousands and rent your traffic through PPC. But if your website has been live for any amount of time you should ask yourself; why aren't people coming to my site? Is it because nobody is interested in your product? Is it because your website doesn't look professional so those who do arrive at it bounce quickly? Are you not providing your user any real value in visiting your website? Once you can answer those questions you will get traffic.

I would tend to agree because SEO as we know it very much revolves around Google itself. However on the other hand saying that Google is the father of SEO is also like saying the catholic church is the father of organized religion. Just because they currently hold the most power and generally dictate the drive for SEO does this really quantify Google as being the ruling power.

If we look back I'm sure we can see the founding fathers of SEO through a relatively easy Google search and by comparing the facts as presented (as mentioned previously), and by founding fathers I mean the people responsible for originally tinkering with their websites to try and increase their SERPs.

But SEO 15 years ago isn't really close to what SEO is today; nor will it be the same in another 15 years (especially if the internet of things takes foothold). Can you really imagine doing onpage optimizing for your website for a household bathroom mirror? I imagine that would be quite similar to optimizing a website for mobile/tablet search nowadays with vastly different criteria. Are we destined to now have our SEO dictated by Google? Or will Baidu eventually infringe enough on Google's space to make Baidu's algorithims the new SEO testiment? After all - even Rome fell once upon a time. Maybe with iphone6 adopting DuckduckGo - maybe we'll see a different shift in direction. After all users are becoming increasingly more aware of the requirements of privacy and …

"The Google “Zebra” update is both rumor and an SEO inside-joke. As of today, there is no Google Zebra update. The myth arose after comments Matt Cutts made at a conference regarding merchant quality. It was dubbed “Zebra” because Google seemed to favor black and white animal names for their algorithm updates aka “Panda” and “Penguin” (the recent Hummingbird, not withstanding!)."

Click Here For An Article from SEJ on this

To answer your questions:
1. What are infographics?
Infographics are an indepth way of communicating an idea or content in a visual form
2. Why does it work for SEO?
Google and Bing both love images; when you see on-page seo advice about keywording images. It's because search engines rate images extremely high in their algorithm. By providing infographics on a regular basis; you are getting the best of all worlds - you can link them to your pinterest (SMM), keyword them (on-page), and you are still providing content which in 2014 is king
3. How to Use it?
Create your own infographics, post them as individual blog entries, share them to Pinterest/Instagram/wherever you are focusing social media efforts. If they are good they will get shared and thus create contextual inbound links to your website.
4. The benefits of to SEO
See the rest of my answer

It all depends on what we are marketing. Joe's plumbing service isn't going to have the same marketing requirements as John Doe's Pizza Delivery or Jane's Gaming Clan.

See Joe's plumbing service is going to do better focusing on offline marketing, direct response marketing, PPC campaigns on google, yelp, yp, etc. Because that is where people will be interacting with that brand and seeking out similar services. Social media as great as it is will help build relationships with a small minority of their customers but wont give them the desired impact that they desire because quite frankly not alot of people want to see a status update on what their plumber is up to unless they need him/her. Service companies like Joes probably wont see a huge benefit to even having a website if it is just a small plumbing outfit; however if they begin franchising then they enter into a phase where they really do need to push SEO to get their name out there. But at that point the website generally isnt just for publicity, its viewed more as a tool with an employee login - maybe even a CTA to book plumbing services online for their customers.

John Doe's Pizza will benefit more from facebook/instagram/twitter/etc. because their target demographics will be present on those platforms; and the best part is, everyone wants to post food porn on their status feeds. Now while offline marketing will still be effective (forget copy and content - word of mouth …

Hello and welcome;

First I'd like to say that pay per download is pretty much CPA (Cost Per Action); an advertiser or yourself is paying for each successful action - in this case a download.

This is such a broad question because its so situational. I guess to begin the first thing any webmaster wants to do is ensure they are providing the best possible user experience to the people visiting their website. So if your revenues are coming from forcing people to download and install spam; you haven't achieved this because very rarely are you going to have repeat visitors.

From there I would then wonder about the way that your content is presented; is it presented in a spammy fashion? Does your website appear to look like it was built in 1996? Chances are if the answer is yes or possibly to either of these questions - CPA is not going to be effective for you.

So lets say you have managed to create a great user experience and you have presented yourself in a clean and professional manner - awesome, congrats you are now posing yourself to have a successful CPA campaign. Now if you are somewhat of a decent marketer you should have your site laid out so that people are instantly offered that CPA through a call to action - if they dont do the conversion then you provide something to keep them engaged (ie. content as to why they need it); at the bottom …

The idea behind dublin core is pure standardization for cataloging multiple types of resources (including but not limited to webpages and online media such as videos, pictures, etc.). It's debateable how much weight search engines give to websites that utilize dublin core meta tags however the general consensus seems to be that if you had two sites that otherwise would rank in the same position; the website with the addition of dublin core meta data would probably rank one spot higher in the SERPs because of the fact that Dublin Core is considered a minor SEO modifier. Honestly we (Pixelated Karma) now use dublin core on all of our web projects, especially the larger and more complex ones where we implement an internal search engine. This makes developing an internal search engine somewhat a breeze especially on extremely dynamic websites and web apps. However if you are thinking of converting an old site to dublin core; I personnally dont think its worth it.

The reason I say I dont think its worth converting older websites is because unless you have planned a complete re-design of the website, planning a major re-launch, etc. then to convert isn't going to make a significant enough change to your website to be worth it; not when other SEO tactics such as working on increasing social signals and content are shown to be far more valuable to increasing your rank. However if you are utilizing a good template system on that old website then it …

Let me first start by saying that this is kind of a complex question. In theory its alot like learning to drive. You take the course (I'm assuming you are doing your Google Partners program) and then you get fed to the wolves and after a few fender benders hopefully you become a good driver.

The best thing you can do for the course itself is to keep studying their prepared tutorials. The reason I say this is because its extremely easy to get off on a tangent on Google's blog, SEL, etc. Yes these resources are valuable and up to date however they wrote the test for a period of time and have developed the materials that they provide to match that test. Since writing those materials they have probably done 1000+ minor tweaks so going with the shortcuts taught at the many many internet sites out there might not be 100% what google wants to hear on their partners test if that makes sense?

Now just like driving, when you leave the classroom sometimes theory and reality don't see eye to eye with each other mainly because PPC like many other forms of marketing are becoming increasingly more complex. For example some agencies have individuals set aside just for researching keywords for ad campaigns and some people do nothing but measure campaign progress. Very specialized but for larger campaigns sometimes they are completely necessary to have these individuals. Really the only tried, tested and true method you can …

It's one of those things.....unfortunately even following security best practices for developers with the way technology changes at such a fast pace something will almost always get missed at initial launch and even as time goes on. To use iCloud as an example, apple has some of the brightest, smartest developers in their work force. They utilize multi- layered security....yet they missed preventing brute force attacks something that is one of the oldest types of hacking in the history of the internet. It happens and as long as everyone and their dog considers themselves a developer and as long as we as internet users keep trusting more and more information online, these breaches will continue.

Just to add one thing, yahoo does offer free listings if you can prove you are running a website for a non-profit, as a hobby, etc. Also they will give you a free listing if the site is local for a small business and in the US but it's a bit difficult to go that route without jumping through a few hoops.

Maybe blue hat SEO is when you use 5+ year old SEO tactics and make little or no effect on search engine ranks hahaha. Read Google Best Practices, learn each aspect of SEO indepth and as Happy Geek has said you will be doing SEO the right way.

Mat is correct; you need to find relevancy whether it be PPC related or social media campaigns.

Sure getting on social networks might increase awareness of your product/service but not getting on the right social network and targeting the right customers will result in fewer conversions and makes your efforts a waste of time.

I saw this on Search Engine Land this morning. I agree with the study that the average website will see far more traffic from organic search. The problem is, that looks at the average website (and who knows what their test sampling is). I have seen some websites which have below 200 SERP for every keyword yet their bulk traffic is coming from direct input because they have focused offline marketing so hard.

Then we have the stackoverflows vs the huffpost (two very different types of websites). Stackoverflow I can bet recieves 75%+ of its traffic from organic search while I bet huffpost nowadays probably recieves close to 75% of its traffic through either direct input or social media due to its focus on content marketing.

When it comes to a website, your traffic sources are always going to be dependent on your marketing focus and the relevancy of your marketing to your niche. I have touched upon this in other posts on this forum, but one thing that this study does conclude is that hail mary approaches to social media marketing are pointless and useless wastes of time.

@kelly, you can believe what you will. Yes the specifics of traffic do play a role, in fact do an experiment for me. Setup a macro script on a website you are monitoring to re-visit it once per day. Notice how your rank initially goes down but then suddenly you lose more then you gained? That's because Alexa needs to see the traffic specifics of a site to ensure you aren't gaming them (it goes beyond # of visits as posted above). Now try getting high quality traffic through the methods I've mentioned above, including inbound links from High alexa ranked sites ( top 100k), see how your rank goes down and stays down? Alexa has said themselves, that they take into account inbound links from sites they can see. Those are sites with the widget installed, sites which are frequented by individuals with the Alexa toolbar, and sites where the stats are publicly available.

Infact if you really don't believe me, please don't try it with any of your clients and please don't tell them about it. That way our clients can see the better result, especially the ones who want top dollar for their advertising space.

Also Kelly, yes your friends are in part right but they're wrong that it's just traffic. To tell someone to increase their visitors just to decrease their alexa rank isn't doing justice to that person. With all the ranking signals I mentioned above, if you can't accurately convey that to the person …

@Kelly and Ketul - please see my answer above. It's more then just visits.

Great post Geek; now lots are aware of the security flaws in snapchat which relies on things caching on your device's storage. The one hope are new items such as crypto-phone and Mark Cuban's cyber dust may actually provide users a bit more safety to their privacy (due to relying on encrypting information in the system memory versus system storage); but like anything it is not 100% fool proof.

In the last little bit we have seen a change in the technology industry; where we have went from code first to design first. I think in the future we may see the user experience (including security protocols) get designed prior to the user interfaces prior to the actual development.

As a Company who designs, develops and markets digital products and services we are well aware of the old adage that what can be built can also be taken apart. That being what it may you try to limit the amount of personal data available if a breach ever does occur. Fortunately the general population is finally starting to smarten up to internet/computer security, partially impart thanks to individuals such as Edward Snowden and the massive media campaign on the heartbleed bug. However when we see the end of people willfully putting personal information online/doing a good job of covering their tracks while online (through https)/the end of 1234 passwords; then maybe we will see a drop in security breaches. But end of the day a program is only as strong …

I cant add much to what the above posters have said; however don't stress about edu links. Sure they have weight, but if the rest of your website isn't 100% or as close to perfect as possible then you'd be better off fixing your website so it passes every SEO audit out there. That effort will go further faster then if you battle for days/weeks/months on end trying to get a single inbound link from a .edu website. End of the day, even the admins of .edu's are beginning to become smart to SEO tactics and they know their own value. So even after you fight and win that holy grail of .edu links, there really is no garauntee that it will even be a followed link (even though their nofollow links still count, thats a topic that I mentioned last time you asked about .gov/.edu links).

Now if you don't heed my advice to make everything perfect prior to chasing down .edu/.gov/.whatever links then I'd highly suggest that you build a relationship with an educational institution who teaches/trains/etc. individuals in a discipline similar to the product or service you provide. Maybe your a journalist and your website is about journalism, then I suggest you build a relationship with an institution who teaches journalism and writing. By building that relationship, providing them with VALUABLE resources that they can actually use to teach their students, maybe even taking on an intern or two - then you might be lucky enough to …

Since this thread seems to have arrisen from the dead; I'd like to put in my two cents. The answer is dependent on what your website is about. Google+ is a great start because of how it ties in with the rest of Googles products and services which will help your website be "Google official" - thus minorly effecting SEO but the rest will all depend on the audience you are trying to get. You need to remember that the reason SEO exists is to get good rankings in search engines; we want to get good ranks in SE to drive traffic; the reason we drive traffic is to be found; the reason we want to be found is to convert visitors into paying customers (whether through direct lead conversion, using our services offline, or by making money through ad revenue).

For example; Instagram can be extremely effective - but only 17% of users in the last half of 2013 were reported as being adults with 37% of those users being in the age group of 18-29. The majority income bracket in the group of adults was $30,000-$50,000.

If your website is aimed at selling retirement properties; Instagram will not be your most effective social media platform. However if you are selling alcohol then you are definitely on the right path (statistically speaking when you combine those stats with the stats of consumer consumption of alcohol).

That being said as a part of your social media strategy you shouldn't just …

@savedlema; go into your Google Webmasters Account and click on the left where it says "Crawl", then select the subcategory "Crawl Errors"; it should tell you exactly the pages that Google is having problems crawling.

As for the DNS problems, I can't add much more value to solving your problem then what others above have suggested. However I would suggest that you discuss the issues with your webhost. To me I would assume if Google is having problems with your DNS servers something is going on with your hosts domain name servers.

If you are not visible on google after alot of SEO effort; make sure that the page is not/has not been penalized by Google (you can see this by logging onto your google webmaster account).

Make sure your robots.txt aren't hiding your website from crawlers.

Make sure there aren't major errors on your website (does it validate with w3c? for both css and html?)

Verify that the keywords you were targeting aren't high competition keywords - those are going to take you working your butt off for hours everyday to rank for especially when there are domains and websites that probably have more historical value then you.

Theres alot more things you can do; infact with SEO you will never truly be finished. However the biggest thing you need is time and patience. For every action you do today, don't expect noticeable results for atleast 3-6 months.

Exactly Kelly. The keyword meta tag barely holds weight anymore. Such little weight that I'd be surprised if sites who arent putting keywords in at all are even being penalized. Now this might change if you are using something like Dublin Core for your meta tags which might still carry a bit more weight then your average keyword meta tag. So if you create a page called web-design.html. Use a signular keyword like Website Design, but don't go overboard putting 25+ keyword variants of Website Design in the keyword meta tag - focus those keywords in other higher impact areas. However you should still have that single broad keyword because if a new engine or new algorithim comes into play then you won't lose any points for not having anything there.

Keywords should really be focused in site title, description, heading tags, content, em/b/i/strong text, links, and the content that that page is linked to.

@Kelly Burby to be quite honest the meta keywords tag is pretty much useless nowadays. All it really does is give your competitors your keywords on a silver platter so they know what to compete with you on.

@driazi. Here are some easy steps:
1)First thing you should do is head over to Google Adwords.
2)Look for the keyword planner.
3)Begin searching up your niche - your profile says you are into Software Development - so based off of that the tool should return to you a bunch of keyword suggestions
4)Filter down the keywords; since google will probably return to you more then you ever want to actually read. You want to filter down to keywords that are searched alot but have LOW competition.
5)Pick out three or four keywords/keyword combos/etc.
6)Write content which is specific for those keywords. Include the keywords in your all the ways mentioned by hericles. Do not exceed 4% keyword density.
7)Wait a few days to rank
8)Tweak your content and watch your content go viral; thus increasing your inbound links and increasing your SERPs
9)Win at the internets

Well put Dani, I hadn't even thought about the disadvantage of losing referral information. This will definitely be interesting to watch!

@topic starter; I would strongly advise you to google nofollow links. By understanding the multiple types of links that a webmaster can use you'll get part of the answer to your question.

If you were to run the mozbar (on FF); there is a great little tool which Highlights links and text. By activating this tool you can see: Followed links, NoFollowed links, Internal links, External links, and keyword highlights. Why is this important? Well I'd suggest you head back to google and study link building and specifically link structures.

Spoiler Alert
What you should learn is that every webmaster wants to obtain followed inbound links (the holy grail of inbound links). This is because when SE crawlers know of a page and they begin recrawling it they look for updates to the page including new links. When they see that a new link is added they follow that link (unless its nofollowed); they keep following those links until they in theory crawl your page and ultimately the whole internet.

The more links to a website the more it tells the SE crawlers that the website is more popular (hence the importance of inbound link building). So what happens when they hit nofollowed links? Well they still record that link they just wont follow it to its destination and it will barely take that link into account in scoring the quality of a webpage/website. However enough nofollowed links and those too begin to add up to your website's overall …

Optimizing single pages take alot of time and are honestly getting to become next to impossible. You will still probably need to set up a blog (making it not a single page) so that you can provide ongoing fresh content (either through blog format or resource documents). This will be timeless in maintaining and even gaining Search Engine Rank. On your "single page" you would then include a widget to show the latest blog/resource posts.

As for what you need to do on those single pages in order to effectively rank:
1. You better better develop your page to be one of the best semantically correct pages on the web, build it securely, build it so its quick as possible (minimize css, js, and http requests)
2. You need to do alot of keyword research, find high search volume keywords with low competition (pretty hard to do for high competition niches such as web development)
3. You need to become the master of writing copy - it will probably take you a few revisions to figure out what actually works
4. You need to build extremely effective inbound links (think of the top 5 best inbound links you've ever built in the past; now get 20 of those per month)
5. You need to guest blog, social bookmark, etc. like crazy
6. You are going to need to age your domain
7. Utilize social media to its full potential - abuse it like …

Everything you need to know about Alexa has already been posted about recently in this topic:

http://www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/search-engine-optimization/threads/482514/alexa-rank

Not to re-hash and add confusion because you have some pretty good answers already Siberian. However one weighting factor the search engines take into account is the age of domains. Your website may actually be at an advantage over that other domain for the simple fact that your domain is older and should in theory be a better resource according to the SE algorithms.