this is going to be my most complete seo post yet
1st things 1st, an intro to the seo software i will be using and recommending.
The 1st thing your going to want to do is find out where your ranking now and what pages you need to work on to improve.
Rank Reporter 3from inspyder is what i highly recomend (you may want to just get the whole seo bundle)
for now if your sites small just starting out and your just beginning to do seo and arent ready to invest $ into it just get the trial version here Rank Reporter 3 Free Trial or use this link to Buy Rank Reporter 3
what id recomend is go to google analytics under search engine trafic set the keywords as primary metric and source or search engine as secondary then export the report as a csv you may need to edit out some excess data you dont need but what you want to have is a list of all the keywords that googles sent you the most trafic from
add that list to rank reporter and run a search (if your running a long list like i am select only google or only the 4 or 5 google worldwide engines) trial version your limmited to only a few keywords
while thats gathering your rank let me introduce you to a few other tools that will be instrumental or helpful in your efforts
sitemap creator i am currently beta testing sitemap creator 4 and i can tell ya when its finnished you will love it as much as i do.. to me it feels custom built to my needs cause this company is awesome every single suggestion i ever made they built into it! in fact the latest build of version 3 has a url replacement feature that was added just for ning!
i suggested since ning has no root access a url replacement feature that would allow you to upload to a subdomain then have all the sitemaps in the index have the subdomain overwrite the www.. 15 minutes after making that recommendation i get an email saying heres a beta build we added that feature to..
version 4 will have a pause button very handy for crawls that take days to complete as well as video sitemaps too
info on Sitemap Creator 3 the trial version is good enough for sites just starting out so download Sitemap Creator 3 Free Trial, but most ning sites will find the full version esentail so Buy Sitemap Creator 3.
I have tested lots and lots of sitemap generators 1/2 didnt work at all none worked as good as this 1
people who used only my sitemap tip in the past had seen a 50% increase in trafic in 2 weeks
thats how esential this is
next one is really powerful when used right (for max benifit some outside services used along side it will be recomended later)
Backlink Monitor 3
this tool not only monitors the "health" of your backlinks, it automaticly discovers backlinks and heirarchy finds domain and page pr as well as index status
u can download the trial here Backlink Monitor 3 Free Trial or Buy Backlink Monitor 3
these are the main programs we will be using to improve your rank but you may want to look at some of the other packages they offer 1 does a sitewide spellchek and broken link check one copies your entire site to your drive etc
all seo and webpage management products
ok so you should now have your ranking info being gathered you downloaded the trials or full versions of the sitemap and backlink software and are ready to put it to use
i'm going to have this partialy step by step instruction and partialy more detailed explanation of concept
some parts maybe over the heads of newbies to seo but try to read and understand it if you can at least get a vague understanding it will be helpful
1st while the rank reporters running let me tell ya that your site needs a splash page.. and i do mean needs
your main page changes constantly which is great for freshness but can confuse the hell out of bots
say your sites most used feature is the forums and u have 10 forum posts front center on main page .. your sites main theme is education often those 10 posts are education related but vary widely in topic then sometimes 1/2 are off topic
1 day you may rank great fir primary school the next day not at all because the primary school post dropped out i[of se]ight (the post itself having less power deeper in then front page may still rank at number 23 or 40 but he main page no longer ranks at all)
a splash page lets u fine tune the on page seo to your main keywords
target the hard to get main topic keywords ive covered basic on page seo in other tips and will touch on it lil later here too but id recomend using any on page seo analysis tools you find online most will get you close and you can try more then 1 and compare results.
your probably not going to do full on on page seo on forum posts and blogs but pages are excelent for more "long tail" seo
by this i mean your splash page is targetted to 2 or 3 "prime " keywords thoe high trafic hard to get ones your pages you target to wider area lower trafic easier to get keywords
blogs and forums u leave up to a combo of luck and off site seo (with minor exceptions)
you can edit titles add tags etc but your probly going to leave the body of text alone
however dont discourage the same topics being brought up over and over..often in forums if a questions asked all the time the responce is "read the stickies" or for ning read the featured instead reply fully every time a topics brought up is 1 more opportunity to have that page come up number 1 (u may even come up number 1-8 dominating the 1st page with multiple pages)
lets pause here and get your sitemap updates running cause that takes a long time to complete on large sites
1st lets configure it you want to import the robots.txt into the excluded pages
next priorities heres what i have mine set to yours yiu can adjust from here
forum priority 1.0 change freq always (splash page and most important and active feature should be priority 1.0 and change freq alway s to encourage googlebot to visit often for the freshest listings)
sharing 0.0 monthly (you dont want googlebot paying much atention to this at all)
photo 0.9 daily
friends 0.2 daily
profile 0.6 daily
events 0.3 weekly
main/sharing 0.0 monthly
video 0.3 weekly
activity 0.3 always
profiles 0.4 hourley
page0.7 weekly
group 0.7 hourley
/ 1.0 always
xn/detail 0.2 always
favicon.ico 0.1 yearly
these set a general guide to how often these features are updated a well as how important they are to be paid attention to.
next crawl rate i have experimented with this alot trying to get the best mix off speed and acuracy and found that 3 threads and a crawler delay of 0.20 works the best
for images to be listed select no title no captions to get the most of it and in the advanced project settings under additional root urls put in https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/552887?profile=original under general make sure all content types is checked and ion mages tab exract image data is checked
(when version 4 is released check the extract video option too)
id recomend disabling javacript processing as it may cause weird issues in some groups
now click go after entering your root url ofcourse and let the crawl complete (depending on site size can be hours to days)
once youve done a satisfying run u can schedule it to run in the background as a task
now theres a couple tricks to using this on ning
sitemaps should go in he root but since it cant you create a subdomain sitemaps.yournetworksdomain.com host that domain somewhere (u can get very cheap hosting here)
in the upload settings set up the ftp info for the subdomain and at the bottom you see a url replacement field put the subdomain url there
(only applies to sitemaps over 40k urls which require a sitemap index)
because you added the api.ning as an alternate root and cannot verify it through webmmaster tools then you must add a line to your robots.txt (in dashboard click search engines) add this to line 1
Sitemap: http://sitemap.whateveryournetworkdomainis.com/sitemap. (gz or xml depending wich option u use i recomend gz)
upload using xml sitemap include priority change freq etc images mobile .. if needed sitemap index change it to 40k not 50k urls per sitemap
use gz compression (recomended but optional)
ping when done
verify the subdomain in webmaster tools and this is where you will submit and monitor sitemap activity not the main domains wmt account
now to the final tool the backlink monitor
1st off let me explain the importance of backlink with a cruedly drawn diagram..lol
so as you see your site has many links coming into it feeding it pr points, relevence points trustworthy points.. but each page linking to you has the same network of links pointing to it
and so on and so on the wider out you go the more diluted it becomes but u=in general 5 levels deep can be used to yoir advantage
how?
this may sound crazy but its working for me and i just barely began days ago
do off site optimization on other sitesthat link to you! nit their whole site ofcourse just the pages linking to you and rhe pages linking to the pages linking to you.
in the backlink monitor theres an export links to service option with a dozen backlink submission services and a few that do way more then just submit
3 services im using are all tied together are
https://www.majesticseo.com/ for finding backlinks heres the only issue here tho to use it for free backlink finding you need to place a 0 byte text file in your root.. ningwont alow that so u probly need to use a subscription or alternate service
i havent looked at all their other extras that come with subscriptions but might be worthwhile (i have webdav still so i have root access so can use it free)
use that to find your backlinks to add to the reporters list of links to scan and find your 5 level deep hierarchy of links
now that u have the 5 level deep hierarchy you can use 1 or both of these
this is a paid subscription service that links over 1000 in network high pr and relevant booster links to your links
and
this builds thousands of new highly relevant high pr links to your site you can get a 25 50 75 or 100 links per month package
these link profiles can be changed at anytime either to target new keywords to tye same page, or to target new keyword s to a new page
its recomended you at very least change the link anchor and text every 2 months or so to keep it more natural looking
(so all your links dont have the same anchor or description all over the net)
one other awesome link building tool is article submissins but how do you submit 1000 unique articles? by creating 1 article that "spins" into 1000 unique articles
www.rankace.com is 1 i use because it has over 1000 in house article network s that each rotates articles to the front page for max value (a link on a front page is worth way more then 1 5 clicks in from the front page)
using a simple to learn spin syntax you turn 1 article into thousands of unique versions
these new links will be found by the link search above added to the link booster the link monitor will find the boosted links which can be boosted a well
and your building a flood of pr and relevence giving your pages authority
now you have your rank reporter results
check out how many are number 1 probly a few since your only searching the top performing keywords (u can add low performing to the list to improve later too especialy high relevance/important ones)
look for any on page 1 but below rank 1 or 2 to work on 1st
add these to the masterlinker link profiles emphasizing the keywords that your already doing good on but want to improve
also boost any link s to those pages and possibly do an article submission for them
(article submission will be slowest to see results but well worth the effort ..artcles are trickled out for a reason only 3 a day per article but multiple articles linking multiple pages adds up! and by a y-year in yoyr talking 1000 links with very good relevence to 1000 pages powering up 1000 keywords)
now your on your way, you git rank data you are tracking changes over time running reports monitoring your backlinks building more powering them up
your sitemaps are submitted in webmaster tools click settings the let googlebot control crawl rate or set your own crawl rate (in the www not subdomain) set to set your own crawl rate and turn it up to the max! you want googlebot to live on your site finding fresh content as fast as it can and indexing it
now you also fine tuned pages a s well as splash page optimization
another thing you can do is feed your pages link juice internaly
dont overdo it but place 1 or 2 links in the body of posts and pages to a page or splash page you want to be the authority on the topic
link values heirarchy
relevant anchor text dofollow with pr from a good trustworthy neighbourhood
pr etc but a generic (click here.. read more.. etc) anchor
naked or no anchor (image links and or just urls)
all links have value but quality links have far more value
so now your link building super charging article posting (forgot to mention those sites also generate tons of social bookmark type and rss feeds links too)
you did some generic on page seo using some online seo analysis page
your seeing results and monitoring them
you want to try some more on page options
some of these changes can have big effects some tiny making a chanf-=ge with a big effect is a risk that can payoff big or backfire big tiny adjustments by the dozen are safer for more fine tuning and should be monitored and compared to trends
titles if you change the title it can really make a diference..good or bad
h1 and h2 -h6 tags can make a big diference
tip
i posted 2 language editor seo tips fir changing the feature module headings h2 tags to seo tags
ex: all photos... all forums became all dreadlocks photos all.. dreadlocks forums
stuff like list and bold will make a smaller safer diference
so adding something like
- dreadlocks are best when kept clean
- dreads dont need much work or maintenance
- (add 2 more )
can give you a boost
changing the overal page word count and keyword density slightly will make a lil difference as well
once u have the big stuff close concentrate on the small stuff ..unless your still not doing great and feel taking a risk on a more powerful change is worthwhile, in that case go for the title or h1 tag and adjust slightly and slowly
example my splash page title was something like
dreadlocks clean natural healthy dreads locs methods and maintenance
then went to
dreadlocks natural healthy dreads methods maintenance pictures
then dreadlocks natural healthy dreads
and finaly
dreadlocks natural dreads
im at number 4 for dreadlocks or dreads
for natural dreads i have number 2 only cause my blog www.naturaldreads.com has number 1! (ofcourse that has links to my site feeding it relevence)
im afraid to change my splash page any more for fear of losing that top 4 position so now im working on all off site link building
the 3 sites above me
2 are 10 years old so have seniority and hell of alot of links (they suck bad though and are considered scams)
..and wikipedia
all 3 will be very hard to unseat.. but i am determined to knock the 2 out even if i cant beat wiki
my other seo tips
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/seo-simplified
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/getting-more-images-indexed-using-sitemaps-updated-info
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/more-language-editor-seo
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/serp-vs-reach-vs-loyalty
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/simple-seo-using-language-editor
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/offsite-seo-m-nage-trois (sorry bout this 1 haha)
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/1-million-pages-ad-revenues-and-sitemaps
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/1-2-a-million-pages-indexed-in-google-over-50-of-the-site
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/brand-recognition-how-often-is-your-site-searched-for-by-name
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/taking-down-the-big-dogs-aimming-for-number-1
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/what-a-proper-sitemap-can-do-for-you
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/high-ranking-high-traffic
https://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/seo-tools
i guess thats all
i was going to make this much much longer and more complete but i realized for many of you a simplified versions alot more helpful and i had so many seo tips already most of it was already covered
Replies
haha i actually was going to go way deeper in depth i actualy expected it to take 3 days to put it all together but realized much i had already covered in other posts and would be better to keep it simple, gather questions tben do a second 1 to fill in the gaps and answer questions
Great post. I could use a little more detail on setting up the subdomain and placing the sitemap there and pointing google to it. Do you have to register subdomains?
register no but create a dns record yes
do you have a host already?
if not this is my site i set the prices cheap as hell and u only need the most basic cheapo shared host so set up the domain on the host by add domain (use the full sitemap.yourdomain.com)
\next wherever your domains registered go into the dns manager create an a-record in the 1srt box (usualy theres a default @ there) type only the subdomain sitemaps in the next "points to" box put the servers ip click ok and save
next you want to verify with webmaster tools typicaly uploagung an html file is easiest
in nings dashboard click search engines/nots this is your robots.txt
add a line above all others
Sitemap: http://sitemap.yourdomain.com/yoursitemapfile. gz or xml depending wich option u used when uploading
default fille names sitemap i recomend gz its faster smaller etc
anything else?
the sitemap crawler uploads and pings the servers (google bing yahoo)
the statement in the robots.txt ensures its found as well as says that api.ning is yours as weelll
when you run it automaticly in the background select upload (only if changes detected) and auto ping servers and it woll run on a schedule without having to do a thing
(u may stil want to run manualy every so often just to detect and correct any isues)
oh in webmaster tools u can submit test sitemap to test it then once tested submit it so its live
oops forgot the link for hosting
I have a host for another website. Can I use it for the sitemaps subdomain as well? My friend is the owner so I think he can setup the back end. I'm still not sure on how to setup the subdomain under my DNS manager (godaddy.com)
yep as long as the host plan allows multiple domains have him add the domain do you know the ip already?
once the domains linked to a directory on the server in godaddy click the domain (main domain) this brings up the domain manager
in the domain manager center bottom you see launch dns manager
thbe dns manager loads you see
a-records
cnames
mx records
rtc (sections)
the 1st A-record section click quick add
left box subdomain (only sitemaps) next box put the server ip there
leave the ttl as tge default
save zone file (top right)
then ok
wait a few minutes to an hour and or try whatsmydns.com (or is it org or net) to test theglobal propegation
once all the global dns servers point to the right ip your good
anything else?
Got it. I'll get to that point and then let you know if I need further help.
awesome
i just started beta testing version 4 of sitemap creator and i love it theres still some bugs ive found but its faster smoother uses less ram has everyt feature i ever asked for
they are an awesome company pretty much every feature i requested except the pause (which was harder to implimemt) they added to a custom beta for me within hours...really impressive support
the version thats out now has features i had added just to fit nings limitations so its pretty much built for ning
One other thing, how important is the splash page, and do you host that elsewhere or does Ning have that option?
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