SEO and Stuff

Key things to look for in a domain

• Age, the older the better. Age matters much more if the domain had previous content on it, use the wayback machine at to find out information about this.
• PR is generally a good thing, if the site is 5 or above on an old domain you can link build like a devil.. and that makes getting that #1 spot that much easier.
• Links already coming in do two things, make your site rank well in the SEs and since theres a link, there could be some traffic coming from those spots!
• Sites that are easy to remember allow users to find them no matter where they are. Use pronouncable words, people like onomopoeia words because they sound cool when you say them. If you tell somebody your website address they should write it down without problem. Keep it short and sweet if possible, 10 letters or less is great.
• Of course the domains that are worth big bucks are for common words that people will type directly into their browser, if you see one of these grab it as soon as possible.

Country extensions are great if your doing a website specifically for a country, though its important to remember that if someone types the address directly into the computer they will likely put .com at the end. Many people still dont know that anything other then .com (maybe then know of .net or .org too). Having a country specific domain name could effect you in SE's local search, though at this time it doesn't do too much.

One website in particular that has gone out on a limb as far as domains is del.icio.us they heave succesfully created a website by using a county extension, and a sub domain together. Who would have thought that the domain icio could be so nice. Perhaps the next big site will be something like space.es (spain extension).

I recently did an interview with Karamveer Singh (AKA JimKarter). Below is an edited version of the interview, if anyone is interested in reading the complete email please send me an email. Interview is spaced by questions.

Karamveer Singh: hi John
Seoandstuff: hey, ready for the interview?
Karamveer Singh: yup.
Seoandstuff: btw i've never done one of these before
Karamveer Singh: its a first for me too..

Seoandstuff: So tell me a little bit about your background
Karamveer Singh: Ok. My name is Karamveer Singh from India.
I am graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. I worked for VERITAs Software for 3 years and then started my web solutions company (2 years back)

Seoandstuff: whats the name of your current company?
Karamveer Singh: Adroit Web Solutions.

Seoandstuff: ok, so what does Adoit Web Solutions mainly do?
Karamveer Singh: Its mainly into 3 things..
1. web design
2. SEO and web marketing and..
3. Consultancy.

Seoandstuff: ok great it seems you've made a success out of the epitrope directory, can you tell me about your experience creating this directory?
Karamveer Singh: Epitrope of one of the 5 directories I own and it is doing good. But google (in recent update) didn't do well with the site. Epitrope is a one old domain which I bought it from somebody at DP and created my directory on it to bypass the sandbox. I modified the epitrope's phplinks directory's script to add a details page to each listing where user can add other links and content of the site. Then I started the link building process.

Seoandstuff: so why did you choose Epitrope over the other domains available as you said it was older, what else led you to choose this one
Karamveer Singh: I bought it as it had some existing backlinks which had it made it a PR4. So I bought it and added a lot of backlinks. And, it was already out of the sandbox.

Seoandstuff: ok that leads us to our next question, what would you say are the best ways to build links?
Karamveer Singh: Here are the steps I follow:
1. Create good content.
2. Submit to directories (free as well as paid)
3. Write some articles related to this content and submit to articles directories
4. Exchange prime-location links with with same category but non-competetive site
5. then go for DP's "Link Sales" forum.
Seoandstuff: yeah ive seen you there quite often!
Karamveer Singh: yup.

Seoandstuff: what goes into your decision making when you purchase a link?
Karamveer Singh: There are many things..but here are my top priorities...
1. Age of site..
2. Page rank (backed by the number of backlinks by google)
3. and the relevency of the site with mine.
Karamveer Singh: I never buy links from new sites, whatever is the PR.

Seoandstuff: what about a old pr 7 in a totally unrelated category?
Karamveer Singh: If PR is not backed by number of backlinks (which very often happens at DP), then I don't buy links.
• High PR but old => good for directory.
• Low PR but related => Good for my content sites

Seoandstuff: what seo tools do you generally use?
Karamveer Singh: I use following tools:
• http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ ( for keyword checking)
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (again for keyword checking)
• http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html (checking for fake page rank while buying sites)
• http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ (checking pagerank on all datacenters)
• http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ (for checking ranking of all my sites)
• and the last but not the least http://www.google.com

Seoandstuff: ok then, what do you think about the various search engines and where they're going.
Karamveer Singh: Different search engines do different things .. and take different things into consideration.. Google is definitely a winner but it gives a lot of weight to things which are creating problems with SEO industry.. Yahoo is a good guy.. they do things simply.. and MSN seems to like fresh content on the sites a lot. But lately google seems to have a lot of problems with spam and so called 'bad data push'. But still, faith once built is not easy to vanish soon..

Seoandstuff: Do you see msn taking the place of yahoo in the future?
Karamveer Singh: Not atleast for next 5 years. But who knows. This is what we used to think about altavista once upon a time.
Seoandstuff: i used to love altavista back in the day
Karamveer Singh: everybody used to love it once upon a time, but then google came.. who knows who will be next.. maybe MSN may be not..

Seoandstuff: what kind of hat do u wear?
Karamveer Singh: Always White.. SEs don't like anything in black.

Seoandstuff: how fast do you build back links?
Karamveer Singh: Not more than 20 links a week if Pr is less than 5 and approx 10 otherwise.
Seoandstuff: you mean if a PR is 5 then you will only grab 10 a week?
Karamveer Singh: yes.
Seoandstuff: what if your website is older than say 5 years or so
Karamveer Singh: Then I don't think on how many to get and how fast.. i grab them wherever I can find good, relevant links.. but i avoid sitewide if unless they're for a directory

Seoandstuff: so what are some mistakes you have done or seen with regards to SEO?
Karamveer Singh:
1. Not taking proper backup regularly. It has costed me more than $12,000 which managed.com went out of business overnight and switched all their servers without giving any time to webmaster to take backup.
2. Using my yahoo email account + yahoo as a registrar. I had more than 100 domains with yahoo (as a registrar). My admin contact on that domains were also the yahoo email. One sudden day, I lost my yahoo email account. There was no way for me to get those domains back. Yahoo customer service sucks.
3. Sites with the same keywords on all pages (this is a big newby mistake) never work.

Seoandstuff: yep, 3 biggies as far as SEO are H1, title, and domain, I’m talking about the actual domain name (not regarding age and pr)
Karamveer Singh: yes that’s the top 3.

Seoandstuff: how should keywords be placed in the domain, h1, and title tags
Karamveer Singh: the domain name should mostly have only one (main) keywords of yours.. H1 tag should also have only one keyword.. use more keywords in H2 and H3/H4 tags. I put around 150 keywords in my meta keywords. That’s what seems to work best for me.

Seoandstuff: ok, how else would you structure your title tags?
Karamveer Singh: I put my main keyword in just small descriptive title but don't fill it with a list of keywords.. Maybe just one or two keywords in some descriptive form.
Seoandstuff: sounds good and white hat
Karamveer Singh: Oh yes.. I said black is black and not good

Seoandstuff: the final question, what is your newest service or website?
Karamveer Singh: I have just bought a 8 years old domain at DP around a week back and I am working on creating a car site on it. It’s old age is showing its value. In one week, I have started getting 1000 visits and 2000 page views per day.
Seoandstuff: wow
Karamveer Singh: Besides that.. I continuously working on my 200+ older sites.. and also provid SEO services to DP members.
Seoandstuff: ok here is his new site Car Dealers - The list of all car dealers from various states of America for every car.

Coming to China can be quite an adventure. Its fairly easy to come, and your sure to enjoy youself once your here. The easiest way to come to China is as a teacher, because you need basically no qualifications except a fluency in English.

If coming to China to become a teacher, you may find that life is not as hard as many other jobs in the world. You can choose many paths to take in any part of the country, from Shanghai to Beijing , and you can travel almost anywhere with much ease while making friends along the way. There are three main types of teachers in China :

•  School Teaching: Within a school setting a teacher is granted many luxuries. Some schools offer free housing, some have benefits, and others offer great travel plans to list just a few. The pay is usually lower than private teaching (approximately $1000USD-$2000USD a month full-time work), but the increased job security and steady income more than make up for the loss of income in most cases.

•  Private Tutoring: Private tutoring is where many people earn most of the money available to teachers. A one-on-one tutoring class can earn a teacher on average almost $20USD an hour, with higher pay for larger classes. The only downside is that there is very little job security, as you are never guaranteed students to teach.

•  Part-time/Private Tutoring: This is the most preferred path many English teachers take while living in China . While working part-time at a school a teacher can also instruct many private-tutoring classes in order to supplement his or her income. This combines both the security of a school job with the higher income of private tutoring.

Whatever path you choose to take, your life will almost certainly be an easy one. The standard and cost of living in China , even in Shanghai , is much lower than most western countries, so many goods and services are easily available. For example, it is easy for any westerner to live in a comfortable, luxurious apartment overlooking the largest park in Shanghai in a quiet part of the city and have a personal maid come in every day to cook and clean your house for you, and you would still have money to go travel while only working 30 hours or less each week.

Inside teaching itself, it can be a very relaxed life from day to day.

My good friend alex writes about his life as a teacher “Each day I wake up around 11:00am and take a nice long shower before having my maid make me breakfast. While she's cooking I get dressed, watch some TV, or check the latest news on-line. Around 1:00 I leave my home for a short 20 minute trip to my office (about 10 minutes walking along a park and 10 minutes riding a clean subway, complete with plasma screen TVs). When I arrive at 1:30 I clock in, and then sit around and drink free tea or coffee until 2:40 or 3:00, whenever my first class starts. My job is then just making conversation with people for an average of five-and-a-half hours each day. Of course, I work an eight-hour day, so that's five-and-a-half hours of actual work and two-and-a-half hours of break time each day. Then around 9:30 I go home and have the rest of the night free. I only really work three days a week, and between this and a few private tutoring classes I can easily make over $1000USD a month while traveling around China at my leisure."

While reading through a post by Top 30 i glanced at his sig and saw this link text "Top List: Five SEO Excuses" lists some of the big excuses companies use not to do SEO. This is a rather brilliant play on the marketing side for his company. Most SEO firms tend to differentiate themselves by being able to rank for specific competitive phrases, a one word "SEO" being at the top of the list (putting words like casino, and sex aside). Now if somebody asks the question, "So how do we know your good at doing SEO?" Virante SEM will be able to respond with this link http://www.google.com/search?q=five+seo+excuses and be able to sell their services.

After following that link you can see that the 5 sub domains create a sentence between them, you should switch to virante.

A short analysis of how this went down. All 5 excuses share these characteristics:

PR 0.
Age, del.icio.us, .edu, .gov, dmoz, bloglines and yahoo dir are nonexistent.
1 Cached page.
Alexa 3,195,273

Here are the differences, or in some cases similarities. I have found these results through the SEO Extension (about which I wrote a blog yesterday which then disappeared because of blog.com).

Now lets look at the on page characteristics.

The titles on each page are simply the excuse, which is what really makes this a nice looking list in the google results.

Each page has the words “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO” in heading tags. For your note all the h1-h5 tags share the same size weight and coloring. On page 1 it is an H1 tag, page 2 H2 tag, etc.

Each reason is structured like (1) followed by a heading (though not with a heading tag) which matches the page title, this is bolded. On the first excuse page “top 5 reason to avoid SEO” is bolded.

On the 2^nd-5^th pages there is a catch line above the Heading tag such as “Below is the number 2 reason to not use SEO...” this is not formatted in any way.

Progressively from the 2^nd-5^th pages there is additional line space between the short catch line and the Heading tag.

All except the last have a picture which advertises virante SEO (links to www.virante.com). There is no alt tag associated with this.

All 5 pages list the following each of these are either a default link (blue before click purple after) or they are a simple underlined sentence. If is an underlined sentence however it will be linked to the text by a java statement like so onClick="location.href='http://virante.ajaxle.com'"

Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 1
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 2
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 3
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 4
Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 5

However each page lists it differently, on page 1 the first link is followed by “There is no money in it. Part 1” This not a link just descriptive text.

Also on the first page there is an extra text beneath part 5’s underlined text which reads “These are the top 5 reasons to avoid SEO”

Also in part 1 the first underlined text is a link to part 1. None of the other underlined sentences are links.

Page 2

The first link is structured like so “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 1” of which the underlined part is a link. All other footer underlined things on page 2 don’t have a link.

Page 3

Structured the same way as page 2 except “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 1” and “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 2” are both links.

Page 4 is the same as the above, except ““Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 3” is a link.

Page 5 is the same as the last 4 except it has “Top 5 Reasons To Avoid SEO Part 4” as a link.

Conclusion

They are able to rank for this phrase by marketing for a phrase which has very little competition. These 5 pages create an associated network of pages, which google sees (especially with the same website, merely different sub domains). The reason the pages rank in proper order is for the simple fact that a static html hyperlink points the most to reason 1 the most, followed by 2 and on. Therefore within the network reason one is considered most important. The java links don’t seem to be weighted as highly by google, else the proper ranking order doesn’t make much sense.

Finishing up

If you followed the first link to Five SEO Excuses you'll have seen the DP thread listing info about how this website came to the top, and also a attempt by Top 30 to rank that thread at the top of the google serps for Five SEO Excuses. I'm all for the link love but i gotta be fair and spread it all around so heres my links for Virante,

5 SEO Excuses SEO Excuse 1

5 SEO Excuses SEO Excuse 2

5 SEO Excuses SEO Excuse 3

5 SEO Excuses SEO Excuse 4

5 SEO Excuses SEO Excuse 5

• Navigation should be simple and easy to use, within two-three clicks from the main page you should arrive at your destination page.
• Using keywords within links is important
• If using an image link you must use alt tags
• Avoid flash menu systems, and advanced java links
• Create outgoing links only to sites you think will be beneficial to your customers.
• Less then one hundred outgoing links is good for a small site
• Links within content at keywords can be used to not only improve navigation, but search engine optimization.

Headings

• Use H1 tags as the first header then go down the list to smaller ones, if H1 is too large use CSS to change its style to fit your needs.
• Headings should be used often and contain keywords.

Titles/Domains/Files

• Domains should be simple for the user to remember, www.something-else.com is a good example
• Use –‘s between words. Search engines parse them as spaces, while _ are parsed as nothing.
• Titles should be descriptive and keyword rich, 7 words or less
• Files should be named using –‘s as well

Content

• Content should be created to be unique within the site, and the internet as a whole
• Bolding text doesn’t matter very much if at all.
• Links within content are very helpful
• Headings should be used often
• Regular updates are benificial

This is just a short intro about who I am, and what my blog is going to be about. This blog will be about SEO, webmastering, gadgets (because they're cool), and whatever else I think worthy of my time to write about.

A short bio:

I've been doing seo since the start of june. I started by researching hard, hitting forums, blogs, tutorials, e-books, movies, mp3s, and basically anything i could find about the topic. Some of the highlights were SEO Book, and a link building course at SEO Research Labs.

I've been working on doing SEO for one insurance company that has several websites (and we're building more). Prior to starting work here i had absolutely no experience with SEM. Anyhow things have been going pretty well.

I've been doing paid website design for 3 years now and i'm totally self taught.

I'm living in shanghai and enjoying myself quite a bit here. With a rather small salaray i can live pretty damn well. Hopefully my salary will increase with the site rankings.

Blog Plans:

I want to figure out if anybody is actually coming to view my blog, and if there is maybe ill make my own page for it. Later i'm planning on creating a couple tools which should be hosted someplace, and my blog is as good as any.

My take on where SEO is going:

Links, titles, headings, and content are most important.

SEO is an up and coming job, and will be at the core of web marketing.

We're going to be seeing degrees, in the next few years in this field.

There are too many directories, directories dont give as much link juice as other sites.

Bought links will be worth less and less to serps

Unique content will become of greater importance as SE's have better spyders