I want to share everything i have learned over the last couple years on SEO search engine optimization and how to gain high ranking and high traffic on your ning site.
these tips will be devided into new ning sites and old ning sites
new ning sites on page seo is criticle to getting listed at all where you will be seen take advantage of the splash page feature and use that to target your most important keywords. do not try to unseat the big dogs that dominate the single keywords example if your sites sports related dont even bother trying to target sports football baseball etc instead target broader terms use a keyword research tool search related keywords then find the keywords with the best cross between monthly tradfic and low competition
your front page should only target the very most important key phrases other pages deeper into your site can target any number of other keywords. by this you can get thousands comming into your front page and hundreds comming in to less important pages all adding up to tens even hundreads of thousands 9depending on your niche)
now use a tool like this search engine optimization tool to check your sites readiness for submission identifying problems in your code you will never get it perfect but this does a very good job of identifying common seo mistakes.
make sure your domain name registration is longer then 2 years! domains registered for 2 years or less dont look serius to search engines so rarely list high, if you can afford it register for the max 10 years. investing in the future of your site shows you are serius about its success.
use a valkid sitemap sign up for google webmaster tools bing webmaster tools and submit your sitemap to each
tip: nings sitemaps fairly useless you can get a real sitemap crawler and if you have any other hosting acount (or you can get 1 here for only $2.23 a month) you can add a sitemaps.yoursite.com subdomain on the hosting account just for your sitemap then in your robots.txt (search engine bot controls in dashboard) add sitemap: http://sitemap.yoursite.com/site,map.xml (or .gz)
this way spiders and bots will find it on the subdomain
submit to search engines manualy especialy the important ones (lets face it thers only 1 important 1 4 semi important ones for every 30,000 hits google sends bing sends 300 yahoo 100 and all 10,000 others out there maybe under 100 all combined
but thats not o say they should be ignored it can help to be listed in as many sas you can.
next and very important more important maybe the on page seo
quality link building i made a post here last week but also on my blog here but basicly you want to attract links to your site from relevant sites and high pr sites (pr=pagerank googles page authority ranking system) high pr sites that are relevant to your site especialy increase your sites pr as well. you can use www.tynt.com to build links but also should use a reciprocal linking system i added 1 on 2 sites (still setting up catagories so if you add a link suggest a catagory for it ) link directory 1 link directory 2 you can get your own just like those at www.skalinks.com (again you will need a hosting account to add a subdomain to)
ok now established older sites
you can use all the info above however you can ttry for those huge payoff hard to get keywords, the single word goldmines that get 75,000 to 15,000,000 searches a month
if you rank near or on the 1st page for these but low rework your main page slowly
retarget it at the 1 or 2 most important key words or phradses
(you can optimize other pages deeper in for wider ranf]ges so lose no traffic from the more narrow targetting on the front page
a title change can make alot of difference..good or bad do not change it often track the progress over many weeks even months after a chasge before considering another
examples from the earlier mentioned sports old title sports forums football baseball hockey being the old broader totle (tho thyd probly try targetting even easier keywords) try refining that to sporsts discussion forums
or sports forums or sports discussions
the word sports then has a title weight of 33% to 50% and searching sports forums you get 100% relevance
find out whos linking to your competition and try to gain links from them as well
internal links pump up the power of pages you want to list higyer for certain terms use good navigation but do not limit yourself to navigation links within body text help even more
say you have a domain name sportspages.com and pages/football/ /baseball/
all over your site wherever baseball or footballs mentioned (no more then 2..or max 3 per pag e link those words to those pages
keep building links to your site! never stop cause u can be sure the competition never does
tip on link building although 15 mik]\llion links on 1 site is alotta links for ppl to click on and come to your site search engines really only give credit for 1 per domain when it comes to page rank however if they use the anchor text wghos keyword influence yo want to pass to your page then its still helpful to an extet
(disclamer he links fr domain names and hosting etc is my site you can use any hosting or domain name registration site you choose to i dont intend this as spam only helpful ifo but since they are mine i can assure you i have all prices set as low as possible if you do choose to use them0
pro tip 2
if your current domain name does not include your most important keywords, the words that your targetting to take down the big dodgs then by all meands get 1 that contains the keywords (if u get 1 that is only the keywords thats gold ..skyrocket to the top gold)
if you get he new domain do not just change it use the domain mapping set the new domain as primarty forward the old to new submit the new domain and sitemap you will lose no traffic from the old listigs as they now go to new domain but soon the new domain will take over and list higher
i have alot more tips on my blog here
applying these techniques my site at under 2 years old (domain age is also taken into account) is just below the 2 biggest competitors for the 2 most important keywords
and last i checked (bout 3 months ago or more) has over 400 number 1 positions for wide area lower trafic search terms over 1000 top 5 and 4000 top 10 position listings
and i gained abn average 100-400 positions weekly for the roughly 100 keywords scanned on roughly 30 engines
havent tested in ages tho so cant tell u current trends since the title change thats getting me higher for the high competition terms
Replies
Some great tips. One note of caution having just tried TYNT:
TYNT seriously mashes your urls, eg. profiles/blog/list#axzz1QkNtwLV3
Awesome+1
May I ask what is a good site map exactly if NING's is useless?
BTW, here is the link to register your site to Bing and this is for Yahoo!.
a sitemap should list every page in your site
mine lists as of yesterday 813,000 nings version on mine 10
slight difference huh
also u should be able to set priortity and change frequency for diferent sections
and after 40-50,000 urls split into sitemap index and multiple sitemaps
ive requested a server side crawler over and over which would be the ultimate solution
hope it helps i got alot more tips on my blog too
2 years! domains registration...soaringeagle, where do you get this information?
Where can I get a real sitemap for my site?
Bless
did alot of research thats 1 of the few things google let slip out domains registerred for over 2 years look more serius while domains registered for just 1 year are concidered temporary and not serius
more committed to your site
you can use any number of sitemap creators the 1 i use is inspyder i tested dozens and inspyder just was the best 1
there are websites that crawl and host your sitemap for yiou for a feee but with how marge ning sites get im bertting they'd cost too much
problem is
you either need webdev to access the root or host it on another site and have robots.txt tellthe spiders where its hosted, or ning has to allow ftp or the file manager to set custom urls for sitemaps too. somehow getting them into the root.
the only way they cant be in the root is if u specify an alternative location using the robots.txt
the domain age and registration period thing, many of the better seo scans will test the registration length and domain age. and if you ever accidently let it lapse and have to re-register it it will seem like a brand new domain so you lose seniority credits and can drop in rank even though alexa and pagerank stats stay with the name being a newly registerd name u lose out.
so i recomend protected registration to prevent accidental elapsing and to renew the registration everytime your expiration dsates under 2 years awaty if you can max it at 10 years i would then renew in 8
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