StandardsGirl.com – Views From Within

Links.. Links… Links.. ?

At PubCon Las Vegas this past year, InLinks was the newest link buying platform and though they received a strongly worded letter from Matt Cutts, my guess is that will stop few from giving inLinks a try. But I wonder sometimes, why all this focus on secretly buying links when there are many things you can do to get a site to rank, straight out of the box without them, then allowing natural or ‘forced’ natural link building to work.

Now, I am not saying you can rank well and permanently if no one links to you. What I am saying is, with good on-site optimization, you can make it to the top ten without a single link and a PR of 0 and then you can follow that up with good white hat SEO and SEM and get there without all the fuss of chasing the link and the algo and without the risk of crashing during an update related to paid link buying.

Now I know the first people to slam me will be those who say, “have you tried to rank for the PPC of the net? Pharmaceuticals, Porn or Casinos? Til you do that you have not done SEO!” (This has actually been said to me at a conference) And I will say honestly, no I have not, but how many of us SEO’s are working in those verticals?

No Links, No Page Rank and No Black Hat.

What I can say is my site last year ranked 6 weeks out of the box, in the top 25, for the single term “flooring” in a competitive market, with 58 millions pages in the result, with a domain under one year old. No links, no PR, no black hat.

In addition, we were being found on 3,500 moderately competitive terms only three weeks out of launch and deep crawled within seven days.* A feat I should note, that got our site anonymously noted by Dave Naylor at the black hat, white hat session in San Jose and at SES London (though I only found out about this third-hand at PubCon, so hopefully I am not misquoting). However, if one of the top people in SEO agrees your methods have plausibility, I thought it might be worth sharing with you.

My Top TEN Ways to Rank Without Links or PR

(note I cannot give away all the secret sauce here as my former employer would be quite distressed, but follow these and you will rank better than if you don’t – to that I can attest)

1. Content! Content! Content! Have you every wondered how much unique, original content matters? It matters! And it matters a great deal. On our site, we had not one piece of duplicate or copied content. Every page, every FAQ, every glossary item, even our privacy policy were all original and unique and written with SEO in mind.

   When discussing this with Dave Naylor and Maile Ohye at the SES Charity Event, we had quite the debate about this concept. Did it really matter so much as to produce this type of result? In the end though, Maile did say that content is very important and the fact that we had 1500 pages of original and unique content played a definite factor in our ranking, a strong factor.

   So, on the word of Maile and Matt Cutts! Content, content, content! Put your money there and not into paid links. You will rank better and more consistently.

2. Content! Content! Content! Take Two. Once you have your content written, go back and check your pages for your keyword shingle density. Of course this is assuming you have already done your keyword research and know for what words your pages are being optimized. If you have not, make sure you have done that before you optimize. Never assume you know what searchers are looking for because you will be so often surprised.

   Also, keep in mind that you do not want too many or too few shingles on the page and this includes titles and descriptions. I have seen pages with 10-20% densities for their keywords and the site owner not understanding why their site is not ranking. You can over optimize as much as you can under optimize. Check and test your densities to get an idea of what works best for you.

   Need a simple way to figure out where your densities should be? Do a search for your keywords on Google and then check out who is ranking and what their densities are at the time. Is this a perfect method? No. However, it will give you an idea of how densities are effecting your page.

3. Site Architecture. Google’s indexing system is similar to a card catalog system at a library. When designing your site, know that site architecture is critical in your ranking without links.

   When organizing your site look for conceptual breaks, similar to a table of contents.IE If your site is about ‘fruit’ your top page should be organized by the general concept fruit > then sub-pages oriented along the breakdowns of fruit > then detail pages on types of fruit. The more definite your structure and the more concentrated your page content on single subjects the more likely you are to get good ranking and long tail search traffic.

4. Flat Hierarchy. Now make sure when you do organize your content that you keep your hierarchy as flat as possible, all information should be kept as close to the root as possible. This is not only good for search engines, but good for users too. Users do not like to click more than 3-4 times to get to the information they seek, so keep it within quick reach, then you have good spider food with good usability and better time on site statistics.
5. Proper Titles. I will not go over all the SEO 101 of how to create titles, but make note that a title is of utmost importance in ranking without links, so do your research on what makes the best titles for engines and users.

   One hint – For example, if you are ranking Las Vegas in the travel industry, there is no need to add Las Vegas Hotels Las Vegas Travel Las Vegas Flights to your title. Las Vegas – Hotels, Travel and Flights will serve you much better than spamming your title. Well, at least most of the time , occasionally you will see a spammy title get through, but as one of my clients recently learned, it does not mean you will stay there.

   His site was at number one with a very spammy title leftover from another optimizer and then one day he dropped out of the top 100. Of course, I fixed it and he is back where he likes to be, but it just took one update and POOF! gone. So be careful to do titles correctly. Do your research and make sure you understand what makes a good one, if you can only spend time in one area of study, make it this one.

6. Proper Descriptions. Again, just as I did not go over the 101 of titles, I won’t do it for descriptions. However, this is important as well. Now, recently I have read some debate about whether or not they matter, but on my sites they have. So I can only go from my experience. However and even more importantly, they matter to users. Your rankings are of no help, if your site gets no traffic. Write good descriptions and you will increase your traffic, whether no. 1 or no. 5.
7. Internal Linking. Once you have completed your content and your optimization, revisit your pages and in the content see where you can logically link to other sections of your site. This is different than linking from your nav areas: header, footer, navigation. Google primarily strips the value of those out of your internal linking score. However, linking between pages is highly encouraged as it is good for users and helps the spider navigate your site more easily and group your pages together more readily.
8. Link Content. Your anchor text on-site is just as important as your anchor text on links to your site. Make sure to stay away from anchor text that reads “click here” or “read more”. Give the spider more information about the page it is going to, make it relevant and you will see the benefits.
9. Valid Clean (X)HTML/CSS Code. I posted on this blog that you can rank better with good site code and got slammed when it hit Sphinn, but I realized I phrased my argument wrongly at the time. Will valid code get you ranked better and crawled more deeply? Yes! But why it does it is where I went wrong the last time, so to clear that up here and now.

   It is not that Google checks to see if you have valid code, at least not to my knowledge, but it is what is in valid code that helps you score better on the algorithm. It not only makes your site much better in terms of text-to-code ratios, but it makes it much more friendly to the spider when it is not reading deprecated elements and nested tables and improperly used tagging etc.

   In addition, there are items used in W3C valid code that help your site score better overall. But again, does Google check to see if your site is valid? No. Does being valid help you score better on the algorithm, yes. I have many sites that I have worked on that all have benefited from this method.

10. Accessibility Compliance. I bet a few of you just went what? You did didn’t you? I know that there will be some of you that will scream at your screen right now, but that is ok, because of this I have had much proof.

    Now, most people will tell you accessibility compliance will not help you at all and please know I am not saying use spammy accessibility code to rank better. In fact, this will not help you at all. However, the things you do to make a site properly accessible will help your site do better in the rankings. You only need to be at a WCAG level 1.0 in the new 2.0 standards, but it does help. Now, maybe you think I am way off to left-field, but Google has always said check your site in a Lynx browser. A Lynx browser is what? Yes, an accessibility tool. If it looks like a duck…

    Now, before I get slammed with “prove it” and “what works – show us”, I have to tell you I promised Jim Thatcher I would not reveal the SEO benefits we found this past year. People with accessibility issues have a hard enough time having an internet that they can use without the more unethical people in our industry using accessibility techniques to rank a website. I can just say it does help and it does work. Again though, using it in a spammy way will not help your site, it must be usable and compliant.

Well thanks for the ‘Google Guideline Overview’, but umm that was no suprise!

I bet you got to the end of that and you said to yourself, well that is not anything new. This has all been in the Google Webmaster guidelines for years. To that I would say, you are right, it has and it is not new. What is new to me, after attending quite a few conferences, would be if people believed these to be valid.

How many times I have heard people at a conference say, I never look at the guidelines. Well, from my POV. living in Las Vegas, if a betting system told me a better way to make a bet or play a slot, I would say to myself “hey – they make the product – there might be some value in trying out the techniques they told me to try”. I never understand why that is not the same here, but it is not.

However, very few SEO’s have had the opportunity I have had and that is to design, develop, architect, code and optimize each site they work on. I have had that opportunity because I am a designer/front-end coder/accessibility and W3C usability compliance specialist for eleven years who started working with SEO about five years ago. This means I have constructed the sites I rank from start to finish. This also means I know what I have put into that site and how the items I put in have effected it.

So maybe, Google publishes these guidelines for good reason after all, but who knows, everything I say could be wrong. Or at least maybe I hope you think so, because the fewer the SEO’s who work with these concepts in mind, the easier it makes my job in the end.

Before I go…

Before I go, please note that this is a gross overview of some of the items that I find most important in ranking without links and pagerank. This being said, the specifics will have to be ones you determine to be most valid for your industry; ie densities and architectures and valid code values.

What I can say, that my sites have all done much better than they should under the current paradigm of “links are king”. So there might just be something to doing really good on-site SEO and then using links for the icing on the cake, instead of the other way around.

Just a thought!

Thanks for reading!

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*I left soon after that, so was not able to get it to the top ten, but with a little offsite I have no doubt we could have made it.