Daniel Coburn

One very important thing about building links externally is to make sure you do not link spam.  What is link spam?  That’s when you post links to your site for the sole purpose of gaining a link in a post, comment etc.  While many of the blog’s out there now have rel=”nofollow” standard with all links there are still people that feel the need to spam it.  If you are going to go to a blog, or a forum try to make sure you add value.  First it gives people a reason why they might actually want to follow your link to see what you have to say.  So become a part of the community and not a spammer in the community.  It will give you credibility and a good chance of getting people to link to you because of the benefit you have shown them as an active part of the community.

You build good internal links to push your pagerank around, now you need to focus on building up your Internet reputation. How do you do this? How does Google say who’s important? Short answer it’s a popularity contest! Longer answer: It’s a popularity contest amongst peers.

So when you build links it’s important to build them from pages that make sense to be pointed too you.  So if you are a dog site, links from computer sites don’t help you too much.  So you need to find good sites that are in your niche and get links from them, also bigger sites with links into you are also helpful.  Now on those links if you are able to control the text that’s in the href use keywords that are important to you.  So instead of having <a hfref=”http://www.site.com”>site.com</a> do something like <a href=”http://www.site.com”>keyword</a>.

Also you should try to get your site into DMOZ and if you can afford it get it in Yahoo! directory.

As we mentioned your links need to look like they make sense or they won’t pass PR to you and could actually hurt you if the search engine see’s that you have a ton of unrelated links you will lose authority amongst your friends and will lose rankings.

So just make sure the links make sense to users and they’ll make sense to the engines.

A while ago I posted that my son had a cleft lip and palate.  I wanted to give a quick update since some people seem to be finding my blog cause of it and I wanted to offer insight and any help if needed by folks out there.

My son is about 17 months old now and has been on the operating table 4 times with a total of 8 surgeries repairing his lip, palate, feeding tube and hernia.  Most people really want to know about the cleft so let me go over the operations he’s had for that and some difference that occur in other parts of the states/world.

His first surgery was to repair his bi-lateral cleft lip.  This surgery seems pretty basic “Sew the lips together”, but in all honesty it’s very complex.  First you have to cut open all 4 surfaces and then attache the muscles and the flesh, all while trying to form a good looking lip.  (Our son’s doctor did a great job Dr. Warnock).  But in Utah they also put a prosthetic palate in his mouth, most other states do not do this.

His next surgery for his cleft was supposed to be to repair his soft palate only, but my wife and I did research that said doing the hard palate at this time had advantages, and also only Utah did the prosthetic.  We consulted with our son’s doctor and he agreed to do it.  His stance was that’s the way everyone in Utah was taught since they were taught by the same doctor, so they all did it that way.  However, there’s not hard evidence that says one way is greater than the other.  If we didn’t do the hard palate at this time we would have another surgery when our son was 4.  So long story short they did everything on this final surgery.  Soft Palate, Hard Palate, Nasal Passage repair, Dental Notches…

Our son came out of this surgery very well, one great advantage is when he sneezes very little comes out of his nose now   [if you have a cleft palate kid you'll know what I mean].

I think the biggest thing to remember is it is not easy for a parent of a cleft to hear “Well at least the can correct it”, because their child is going to have a series of MAJOR surgeries.  If you know someone with a cleft baby, tell them “It’s going to be tough and possibly a lot of surgery, if you need anything we’ll be here for you.”  (you get the point).  But the good news after seeing my son’s battle with being a preemie and the cleft, I know he’s a tough kid and will get through just about anything placed before him.  Also I have a new set of fancy words that I know… In the great words of Homer J. Simpson “I am so smart S.M.R.T”

Anyone who has even taken a physics class knows that matter is neither created nor destroyed….  The same sort rings true for pagerank.  All of the pagerank in the world is equal to 1.  If you add 1 million pages, the universal sum is still 1.  Since you cannot change the universe, you need to know how to massage it.  If you have a website with 5 pages, you cannot control a lot of the virtual real estate, and will have to create more depth to control more of the pagerank available.  If you want to grow pagerank on certain pages you need to funnel traffic through links to them.  For example pages that should not have pagerank are contact us, privacy policy, etc.  they don’t earn you money so don’t give them the benefit of pushing rank to them.  So how do you push the rank internally?  Simple provide links.

All page link to your home page, so the home page of a site typically gets more rank since more pages both internally and externally are pushing rank to it.  While pages that should also be considered are category pages etc.  Many of these will be part of your universal navigation so they will also get rank pushed to them.  It’s important that you use appropriate keywords were possible to allow search engines to know the phrase that is important to the page you are pointing too.

You also want to have links to your contact us page etc since you do want to allow customers to get there, and you need them for better ranking in Google, but instead of use <a href=”contactusurl”>contact us</a> use a no follow <a href=”contacturl” rel=”nofollow”>contact us</a> this will prevent you from passing rank from a page to that un “wanted” page.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in SEO is the incorrect or simply the lack of using basic HTML tags. The first priority on a page should be a the Title tag, it’s prime real estate and should be used well. One thing you should not do is put your website in the title (especially first thing). Why? Because they already know where they are at so put a valuable title that describes the page, uses important keywords etc.

Next is the H1, H2, H3 etc. The H1 is the single most important part of content real estate that you have on the page. It is heavily favored by search engines, especially Google, and you should only have ONE per page! H2′s are less important H3 less and so on. So do not waste your H1 & H2 tags on wasted phrases. If you use an H2 in navigation you better make sure those keywords are important to you. Speaking of which “Home” is not a great keyword, try to be more created like “Gaming News” etc.

So my rule of thumb:
H1 = 1 per page
H2 = 3-5 max
H3 = 6-10
H4 = which ever…

What does it mean to have unique content?  Is it that you take an RSS Feed from 8 places and merge them together? Is it taking articles and editing a few words here an there?  No it means original content.  Sure you can easily aggrigate content from multiple sources and be someone’s one stop shop, but you’ll never be that one stop shop for the search engines.  You need to have a few original thoughts in your life about your topic, if you do, write about them.  Or if you read a really good article, you can post a summary of it and then link to the original if you want.  The important thing is that your site should be different from everyone else’s site.  This will give more reason to give your site higher rankings and gets spiders looking at you more often than not.  If you are blogging for personal benefit, then that should be easy, but if you are blogging on a topic some people will fall into the not so unique content.  It’s important to be aware of limitations and just keep writing, even a “bad article” is better than a copied one.

SEO 101:

It is important to understand exactly what is search engine optimization.  I believe the easiest way to state it is that it is a method to make your website readable by search engines in such away that the pages you want to be displayed are for a given keyword.

So some major portions of it:

1. Site needs to be spiderable
2. Pages need to be unique
3. Proper use of basic HTML tags (i.e. Title, H1, H2 etc.)
4. Proper use of internal links
5. External Link Building

These are some of the very basics, the things I call SEO 101!

Your url’s need to be search engine friendly / safe.  In other words do not use query strings if you can avoid it for telling the server which page to serve up.  An Example of what not to  do: www.website.com/page.php?id=123  now if you have 10k pages you would have id= 1 -> 10,000 and Google will not like that. so instead do something like www.website.com/page/1.html where you tell the server that the 1.html is actually = page.php?id=1  this makes the pages “unique” from the url perspective.  This also makes the site more spiderable and has the ability to be completely indexed.  Also on the topic of spiderable all of the pages should be linked.  (ok well not all of them, I’ll write about page rank shifting later)  Also you need to use a sitemap.xml file!  That will make sure all of the pages are visible to the different search engines.

More in my next post.

So it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged on this blog.  I have a few other which have taken my attention.  I have been wanting to change this from evoblog to WordPress for some time.  Since I left Evo they stopped working on all software so I wanted something maintined and upgraded regularly.  The issue?  I had pages indexed in Google already, so I went through and created 301 redirects for almost every item that was in Google except the Gallery.  Now there are several posts in here that don’t make sense since the video or image links have been broken with the import. (sorry)

So what is involved with doing the 301′s and why would anyone want to do them?  Basic SEO 101, if you have a page in Google, don’t let Google lose site of it (unless you want it gone).  So you tell the server that a specific page has been 301′d to the new url.  301′s tell Google this is a permanent move, 302′s say it’s just temporary.  So if you have htaccess on your maching you can simply drop a line like this in it:

redirect 301 /cat_9.html http://www.danielcoburn.com/category/games/

This tells the server take the url sent to the server by a user “/cat_9.html” and send it to “/category/games/”

Easy to do, just a pain to do so many.

New theme should be around soon…

I’ll post more often.