C. Miscellaneous SEO Strategies
One thing I highly recommend is becoming a member of www.webmasterworld.com
and frequently reading posts in their Google forum. I also recommend joining Warrior
Forum.
The latest Google results indicate that:
1. It’s important to optimize your pages so that they have “normal” addresses,
without id’s and/or strings attached. You’d want yoursite.com/product.html
rather than yoursite.com/product123.php?117765
2. It’s important to be consistent with your site’s interior links. In other words, if
you link to your pages like this <a href=”http://yoursite.com/file.html”>, then
don’t link in other spots like this <a href=”file.html”>. Pick one and stick with
it.
3. Use a simple sitemap page that links to all of your pages.
4. Use 301 Redirects. Make index.html do a 301 redirect to
http://www.yoursite.com/. Make yoursite.com redirect to www.yoursite.com.
To do this, you can insert the following code in your site’s .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST } ^yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) $ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST } ^[A-Z]{3,9}\
/index\.shtml\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.html$
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http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]
You should also sign up with an external tracking program to find out exactly where
your visitors are coming from. I use Site Tracker to keep track of where my site
visitors come from, and it also tells me what keywords they used to get to my site.
D. Cloaking
As you can see, proper SEO strategies, commonly referred to as ‘“white hat”
strategies, are time consuming. I quickly found that keeping up with it would require
more work than I was willing to do. That is also why I don’t really bother with white
hat strategies anymore. I’ve moved on to “black hat” strategies such as “cloaking”.
Cloaking is frowned upon by most webmasters, except for the ones who do it and
make a lot of money. I can’t list my cloaked websites here, because some jealous idiot
would report me and get my sites banned. But, I will tell you the easiest way for a lazy
person to get a good ranking, is by cloaking. Cloaking involves showing a keyword
rich, highly optimized webpage to search engines, but a normal page to human visitors.
It’s important to note that highly technical webmasters can and will report cloaked
websites and get them banned. That is why:
1. You should always cloak on a throw away domain that you don’t care about,
and have it redirect people to your true website. I advise having up to ten throw
away domains at any time pointing to your true page.
2. You shouldn’t cloak for highly competitive keywords because your cloaked
site will be reported quickly. If you cloak on a throw away domain and use
good keywords that get a medium amount of searches, you should be able to fly
below the radar. Search engines like Google will only ban cloaked domains,
but not the sites they redirect to, EVER. So your true domain will always
remain safe. This is because Google knows your competitors would be able to
easily get you banned if they punished the site that was redirected to. If this all
sounds confusing, that’s okay, because there is software out there that handles
cloaking for you.
I prefer a pretty expensive one ($2,480), called Fantomaster. I have used it very
successfully. The creator, Dirk Brockhausen, is extremely helpful and provides free
support for life. If you have no idea how to cloak or use his in depth program, you can
pay him a small fee to set up a cloaked domain for you. The only cheaper software I’ve
found that I like is Search Engine Cloaker. I’ve tried many of the other cheap ones and
found that they are practically useless. There is also a cloaking forum on
www.webmasterworld.com where you can ask people which software works best for
them.