Search Engine Optimizations Report

What better place to explain our SEO strategies than here?

This report could also act as a guide for anyone trying to obtain a better search ranking. Especially if you go for specific keywords, like in our case, 'rankmaniac 2011' or 'rankmaniac'. If you want proof of how this works, just type in those keywords on Google :).

If you have anything you would like to add, feel free to comment below. We appreciate your feedback, and we'll definitely update the post with your suggestions.

Here are our tried and tested strategies:
1) Use the appropriate keywords within the domain or sub-domain name. In our case: 'rankmaniac 2011'.
2) Use a respectable, thus well search ranked, domain: 'blogspot'.
3) Use a widely used blogging framework to easily add content. Less work for us, and search engines are already 'used' to spidering websites using the framework.
4) Post a lot of content. The only way Google would know that there is reason to go to our website.
5) Post content related to what the keyword relates to. Example for rankmaniac:
Search Engine Optimizations, Google, Websites, Pagerank, Caltech, etc.
6) Spread content in multiple pages that link back to the main page. The blogging software already does this for you, if you use multiple, not too long posts. This strategy makes the main page the most important within our website, the perfect landing page for the visitors.
7) Use links to well ranked, outside, pages. All well ranked pages do this (ex: Wikipedia).
8) Use rel="nofollow" for outside links. Prevents the leaking of 'pagerank juice' to the outside world.
9) Interlink and have clusters. The web has these properties, so should our website. Ex: the framework provides archives where our pages will be in, and each page links to its archive (and close by archives). Each archive will thus become a cluster within our website.
10) Update often. Shows spiders that our website is alive and gives them reason to re-spider our website more often. Below you'll find our crawl chart from Google, and we noticed that the more often we update the more Google crawls our page.







11) Post a lot of comments on other blogs/sites, which link back to our main site. Even though most blogs use 'rel="nofollow"' for links which prevents them from being useful for pageranking purposes, search engine will sometimes follow through and re-crawl our main page. However, don't go spamming! A billion 'nofollow' links won't help much. What does works is posting a couple of links per day, in addition to having new content. You need to aim to have "Get more results from the past 24 hours" shown under your Google result. (Twitter is also really good for this.)
12) Use the Google webmaster tools! Very helpful, provides a lot of info and settings you need to know about. Same for Bing webmaster tools.
I'll post a more detailed version soon, but until then here's a quick how to for Blogger:
-- Sign into Google webmaster tools with the account you used to create your blogger blog. If it's not asking you to add it, click 'add a site', and enter the url.
-- Click on the site, go to 'Site Configuration'->'Settings' and pick a geographic target.
-- Go to sitemaps and submit one. To get the link, go to Blogger Sitemap Generator and type in the url to the blog.
13) Social networking! Advertising (read 'begging') on Twitter and Facebook helps a lot. Having many users following the blog is also a big plus.

Semi-'white hat' strategies:
1) Create multiple blogs relating to 'rankmaniac 2011' and having diverse content that use the same techniques to get well ranked, and link them to our main page. This hopefully gives search engines the impression that our main page is not only important within its website, but also for other websites.

Strategies still to be used:
1) Interlink inside pages using appropriate keywords in the link. Ex: linking to a page about search engine optimizations using 'seo'. This gives Google hints about the content of each page, and follows wikipedia as a very successful model.
2) Meta tags that contain good keywords, rankmaniac, and the like. We heard search engines seem to like them, but we also heard it's not good to abuse them.

Furthermore:
Follow what Google says in their Webmaster Guidelines.

What not to do (inspired from above):
1) Duplicate content. Google will figure it out, and searching for duplicate stuff isn't that hard algorithmically.
2) Long lists of keywords (which are probably hidden). Google won't like it, since it seeks CONTENT (in sentences) not lists. Also, the last thing your users want is to reach your page searching for 'someword' and not find it on the page.