SEO For Long Term Success – Just Because It’s New Doesn’t Mean It’s Better

Below are some good nuggets about online business building and search engine optimization from Fantomaster.

This is no “secret sauce” use common sense by giving people what they need or enjoy or even get worked up about.

If I was going to produce a course about SEO in 10 minutes a day or SEO for dummies, this is some of the basic information I would include. There is no need for cloaking as long as you are doing your job in making your website the best it can be.

The good old classic SEO rules still apply and have actually never stopped:

• build web sites with good, useful information or content
• make your pages light, usetight code and fast to load
• use keywords in your title tags and text heading tags
• use meta tags sparingly but intelligently
• attend to usability as much for your human visitors as for the search engine spiders
• optimize on site navigation and internal linking structure.
• use secondary content features such as RSS, bookmarking and images

Adamantly watch your internal link structure and reduce orphan pages. Old pages should not be indiscriminately discarded, but reworked into new longer pages.

In general it is better to have 10 long high quality pages than 100 short generic pages.

whenever we conduct an on site link analysis of any large corporate site, there’ll always thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of pages that are either entirely orphaned or bleeding link juice the wrong way.
In some cases we’ve detected that up to 25% of a site’s pages weren’t linked to from anywhere at all

Want users to come back to your site? Use subtle persuasion and make meaning.

publishing our SEO cartoons consistently week by week has proven a prime traffic magnet as well. Those cartoons are arguably one of the best investments we’ve ever made in terms of keeping the buzz level up.

External links are important, but only a portion of site ranking factors. The larger the website, the less effort should be spent on manual link building.

if all you can think of in terms of organic SEO is “links, links, links”, you’re missing out on about 90% of all those other possibilities and traffic conduits available

Cloaking is one of the most discussed and least understood tool of information delivery. It is one of the only ways to reliably rank for ultra competitive niches.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has publicly admitted that there are industries where you don’t stand a chance in hell if you don’t adopt hard core black hat SEO techniques including PPC: pills, porn, casinos. (This is not something we do, and have never engaged in cloaking)

Yahoo! or Google may roll out 800 new spiders within a couple of hours. there’s no reliable way of automating a list of spider IP addresses. “Poor man’s cloaking” such as delivery by UserAgent, free IP bot lists or JavaScript based operations are simply too risky to be worth the effort at all. Only use software that offers genuine IP delivery because there’s no other reliable approach.

An online business is very similar to a traditional brick and mortar business. There is a historical success rate of only 10%. Advice for starting a new online venture:

It’s also governed by the very same economic laws:

• don’t spend more than you have
• buy low, sell high
• listen to your customers
• watch out for your competition
• don’t give in to smug routines

None of this has fundamentally changed because it’s the way the world of commerce (or, if you like, capitalism) works.
Some ventures may prove to be a roaring success in no time (which, incidentally, tends to happen in the “real world” as well), most all operations will have to practice relentless perseverance before turning a profit.

There’s no easy way out and no guarantees of internet success, no matter what some over hyped marketing “gurus” may claim when trying to pitch you on their overpriced stuff.