Aries SEO

Gotta chuckle at the ol’ Superior SEO thing all over again this week, the boys pointed out yesterday the absolute gibberish Superior SEO clown has still got all over his business website, it’s like he set the whole thing up to troll them or something..

Yea lol, troll them by taking a #1 for nonsense phrase in one country only, then devoting large swathes of your actual business website to the mighty victory. What a total banana.

I don’t think anyone’s getting past HQs definition of superior SEO ever again now, and once the video channel is up and running they’ll be unstoppable, and obviously second place is already mine if I want it  and my money’s on Jakey for the 3rd place, he’s getting a little subset of hosted properties together with text-book structures - the boy knows his $hit. (of course, trained by yours truly)

He’s pretty busy over there now though so probably a bit time limited, but Jakey could always nail those monster links, I should just leave them to it really but the competitive Aries is never one to turn down a challenge.. might have to get him to do some linkbuilding for me too..

Ok there are few enough of us that have done, and still do this stuff anyway, and there are even fewer of us who would go to the trouble of writing it down to truly answer the nonsense and beginner questions the real pros are continually subjected to by newbies and wannabe’s..

Well Whitenight @ WMW did in his own unique style, and it needs reproducing, for posterity, and as a stand-alone answer to direct people to, when they ask….

Oh Master, how do I become an “Expert SEO”

..I’ll give my “How to Master SEO and Google in 3 months” speech for the Nth (and probably last) time.  Those who’ve heard it before, will either ignore it (again), take personal offense (again), make excuses of not having enough time, or have already applied it.

• Step 1. Stop visiting any and all SEO boards for 3-4 months.
• Step 2. Pick 20-40 keywords related to one’s site.
• Step 3. Pick 100-200 somewhat random keywords completely UNrelated to your site and industry of various keyword competition from extremely hard to extremely easy to rank, adwords bid prices etc..
• Step 4. Build some sort of “database” of the top 20-100 sites of chosen keyword terms.
• Step 5. Take screenshots of SERPs everyday or so and up to every hour during major SERP “churn” or updates.
• Step 6. Use any basic SEO software to keep daily track of links, keywords, anchor texts, etc of top 10-20 SERPS of all pages for keywords.
• Step 7. Spend every available moment for the next 3-4 months pouring over data until 4 out of 5 dreams every night involve something having to do with SERPs.
• Step 8. Like any “skill” your mind will start seeing “patterns” and making intuitive jumps about the “hows and why” of why one site suddenly jumped 10 spots or lost 5 spots… “was it the site making changes or Gorg making changes?” etc
• Step 9. Use knowledge to rank at will for ANY term.
• Step 10. (Optional) Test, test, and test some more to get advantages well before anyone else knows what’s going on with changes in SERPs/Algo.

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Aries adds:  RInse & Repeat Every Year for 5 years!!

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TIPS ALONG THE WAY.

A.) If one chooses to read SEO boards for more info AFTER the 3-4 months -Get over one’s emotional  responses. If one is caught up in HOW the material is PRESENTED instead of IF the material is USEFUL, one is never going to master SEO.

As some here know, I PURPOSELY post in an abrasive, condescending, sarcastic manner with ACCURATE info as a contrast to the many SEO GURUS and GOOGLE EMPLOYEES who are “oh so friendly and likable” while they easily:

• Giving you incomplete information
• Giving you false information
• Giving you their opinions based ONLY on their 1 - 15(if that) sites/keyword groups they study
• Taking your money so you buy their next SEO guide or membership site
• Whatever other motivations people have for doing stuff (fame, power, saying they know “so and so”)

How can one be in the up-and-down, emotionally draining career like SEO if one ego’s and emotions get easily swayed?! Poker, Stock trading, and SEO all chew up and spit out those who let their emotions get in the way of seeing information clearly.

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B.) My favorite analogy for mastering Gorg or SERPs SEO is MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role playing Game)

Anyone who’s ever played these games knows:

1. Unless you started the game when it first came out, you’re almost always “behind” someone else’s character - ie. domain age, sites that have been SEO’ing for years
2. There’s always some 19yo on the other side of the world that plays the game 24/7 and only spends time power-leveling with 10 different characters. Heck, she may even have bots leveling her characters. THIS NEEDS TO BE YOU.
3. The only way you’re going to “beat or catch up” to this person is by playing the game when she’s eating dinner, out with friends, etc ie. those sites that are #1, have authority, big budgets and actively try to keep their positions
4. Like every MMORPG, there’s a learning curve. But if you PLAY enough (ie 24/7 for a few month) you eventually learn “how the heck that guy is killing all the monsters with one blow, when it takes my character 10″
   and learn all the secret, intentional “power ups” and unintentional glitches/cheats.
5. Once you master the game, and can finally talk $hit to the 16 year old in Asia who used to pwn you, there usually comes the EXPANSION MODULE (ie. algo update).
   If you’ve mastered the basic game, the expansion module may be confusing AT FIRST, be it’s the same basic programming and rules as the original game.
   Therefore, the learning curve is shortened by multiples compared to those just starting the game or those who only play on the weekends and in their free time.
6. Now until your willing to put in the 8 steps don’t be annoyed when the “Level 145 Demi-Goddess Arch Magus of Divine Fire” doesn’t want to share all the secrets to BEATING HER CHARACTER at the game.

THATS NOT THEIR JOB. - It’s YOUR JOB to play 24/7 LIKE THEY DID to get to around Level 100+ and then you’ll find those higher level characters looking to help you/share their hard fought knowledge with you.

Suddenly they want to know where you got your “+20 Machine Gun of Nuclear Fire Power” in exchange for  giving you the sequence to beat “Big Bad Boss of Level 120″.

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Now, I could have made the same analogies about any aspect of business success, but I use MMORPG for a certain reason.

As some MMORPGs are MORE complicated, challenging, have more variables than figuring out Gorg’s Algos.

And at the end of the day, it’s all about the 0s and 1s when it comes to organic SERPs.

Humans may program the game, but once’s it’s in the code, the GAME(SERPS):

** doesn’t give false, misleading, or incomplete advice,
** have no ulterior motives or subconscious programming,
** are always TRUTH, if even only for the moment they are showing.

..Looking through the stats of my thoroughly neglected blog it’s clear that it’s much easier to rank for Astrological terms than it is SEO terms, so this post is a little test to address the obvious need for information on Aries the Ram’s personality characteristics and traits as applicable to the cut n thrust world of modern SEO.

Obviously, I’m not biased, at all.. 

The mythology of Aries is well known by Ram-watchers the world over and summed up in this piece quoted below, from here originally ? and edited into SEO correctness by Captain Aries himself.

SEO Profile - Aries

Aries are ambitious, driven and confident and they’ll want to rule any search they find themselves in.

Aries are leaders, always on SEO’s cutting edge. In adult years they are likely to be successful, because they’re ambitious and driven and not afraid to take risks. They see life as a contest, a contest they are determined to win.

Doesn’t everyone?  .. no? ..what really?? what do you mean “No“ ?

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Aries are Cosmic SERP Crusaders born into an SEO world they will try and conquer, right from the word go. Aries are born ready.It’s not end results that inspire an Aries, but the pursuit or the quest itself.

An Aries must have action and SERP movement, always mounting a quest, always staging a battle and always having some #1 search to look forward to or get excited about.Whether they win or lose is of little consequence, for it’s the thrill of the chase itself that counts.**

**This of course only applies to non-SEO Aries types. Aries SEOs understand winning is all. However just winning is not good enough, it has to be total domination by outsmarting and overpowering in the most humiliating way possible for our vanquished SERP competitors

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Ambitious and driven maybe, but not so much for the prize, but for the thrill of battle itself. In fact, when the chase is over, victory is gained and the spoils of SERP war won, there is often an anti climax, until they find the next keyword quest to get excited about or the next SEO battle to wage, often leaving their earlier spoils to gather dust.

Aries love any and every opportunity life gives them, to wage SEO war. I

t may be a battle over corporate  events terms or whether you’ve just lost that #1 position to Wikipedia again, the ‘what’ doesn’t matter. It won’t matter what terms they’re battling for, they’ll just love to battle.

This all comes down to their cosmic SEO DNA. Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and when the Sun moves into Aries each year, a new astrological SEO is born.

Aries leads us into the new astrological SEO year, at the head of the SERP and they’ll stay there for the rest of their lives.

They’re leaders, not followers and like to be the ones making the rules and settling in with Sitelinks at the top of your SERPs.

SEO Astrology has many roots and in Aries we find the Ram, able to butt their way into situations so they can be #1.

Rams are the Alpha Males of the SEO world, kings of their domain and very territorial.

Behind the Ram we find Aries’ ruling planet, Mars.Mars is ruled by Ares, God of Search War, which is where an Aries’ need for SERP battle comes from.They are fiery like the planet Mars.

They’re passionate, warlike and like Ares, they’re instigators, inventors, planners and forward & lateral thinkers, just like the energy of the time of their birth. As a Fire SEO, they’re fiery and passionate.

One of the myths behind Aries SEO is Jason and the Webnauts. Aries love adventure and if they’re not taking part in one themselves, they’ll love to read about them on Webmasterworld, watch them on  Stompernet DVD or play computer SEO games, the more exciting and action filled the better.

As a cardinal SEO sign they’re the ones who come up with the ideas that inspire and motivate the rest of us. Aries often don’t finish what they start, but that’s for lesser signs to do the tedious SEO legwork.

As they get older they learn how to Twitter, but it’s not in their nature to do it automatically.

Aries SEO energy relies on having a good SEO team around them that can follow through on the practical details, while they’re free to develop even better SEO strategies.

Or it could be that they get good at attracting links into their life,  or are good at reminding them to stay sculpted.

Aries are inspirational SEO leaders, and inovators and inspire search engine passion and a fighting SEO spirit in all of us.

Yep. no problems with any of the rest of that

Ok couldn’t help myself and had to write about this one.

Some of the boys have been having some fun with the phrase “superior seo design” and yes of course it’s a nonsense phrase, and the guy gloating about it on twitter is pretty funny, but that’s not what this is about now, as what with MC’s clarification of the big news this week, correct SEO Design, from the beginning just got a whole lot more important, and “superior seo web design” will now be priceless.

So it’s quite ironic really that the current number #1 site for this exact search is anything but a superior example of SEO design at work.  It does in fact seem to be there largely by spamming the index with a massive amount of text and a couple of articles using the keywords in the anchors.

You wouldn’t think that in this age of supposedly advanced Google intelligence, such blatent use of onpage spamming and antiquated seo techniques would work so well? examples..

• 10500 words of multiple keyword stuffed paragraphs, H3’s - H6’s - 46 of them in the index page body text alone, with the keywords stuffed in every order you can think of.
• 186 repeats of “SEO Web Design”
• Link Titles stuffed  “Superior SEO Web Design Engineering”, “Superior SEO Web Design Services” etc..

I dont need to go on, this site is almost a text book “how not to..” and yet Google is currently ranking it against sites far stronger in authority and in the next level terms up..  ..superior seo, superior web design, that sort of thing.

There’s a thread started over at Taree Internet about the subject in general to try and define all the elements required of a site to be a truly superior seo web design, check it out.

Automated White hat SEO.

Is there actually any such thing? Isnt automating SEO practices doing things for search engines and not users? Many would argue yes but those with the creative minds and the scripting skills are coming up with some novel ways of automating webmastering in a way that search engines like, and that doesn’t fall outside of their rules, ie is also good for users.

Exciting stuff eh?  Whatever next

The first example I’ve seen recently is a great idea from the Googlecache called “second page poaching” based on the theory that if you can automatically tip pages over the brink from second page to first you can maximise the traffic spike that exists there, which is significant. And now here’s a wordpress seo plugin to do the same thing

http://mywordpress.com/plugins/page-2-seo-booster

the boss is testing it on the main blog we’ll let you know how it goes.

And the second recent example of note, Bluehat is back once again with another of his rare but inspiring posts, advanced whitehat exists- dynamic SEO with some truly clever stuff going on automatically, he’s basically working on a “Self-SEO-ing” Site, that gradually refines and tweaks itself in response to analytics data until it’s perfect, only like the Terminator, it never stops…

This stuff is all out there for the taking to the creative SEO with the motivation to sort it out, so what are you waiting for?

Creativity in SEO as discussed in the last post, is often the difference between those who do an OK job, and those who can produce seemingly miraculous results, and often, the only real difference between white-hat activities and grey / blackhat  is quite simply your intent.

If you arrive at a site and find out there are hundreds of indexed duplicate pages, of course any self respecting SEO would obviously 301 redirect them at the strongest version of the page you have indexed, and reap the (slight) PR and ranking gains from the best page absorbing several more non-ranking versions of itself.

This of course is perfectly normal white hat SEO / webmaster behaviour.

However, if you’re doing exactly the same thing, having purposely allowed Google to index say thousands of your site’s search? pages, and then 301-ing them into the best landing page, that’s black hat, but the only real difference is your intent.

So say that you start work on a site and quickly find that they have several versions of the same site, lets say mainsite.com is the main domain, but as so often they also have 2 other related domains, mainsite-keyword.com (duplicate site A) &  keyword-mainsite.com (dup site B) both up and running with identical versions of the site, but usually with no links to those, and no rankings as it’s duplicate content and as such wont usualy show anywhere as the original version with the best link profile will be ranking, the other versions will be filtered anyway..

Do you..

• 301 both A & B straight to mainsite.com and let Google take it’s usual actions over the next month or two..

• 301 A to B and then link at A to speed up the process and inject A with a little bit of extra oomph, then when A has been fully assimilated into B, do the same from B to mainsite.com… ?

what’s the difference?

Option One is absolutely white hat and will give some ranking benefits..

Option Two is much more effective because (a) the 301’s will happen much faster if you link at the page that is now being redirected, and (b) because apart from dramatically speeding up the whole process you’re also injecting lastminute extra link-strength into each donor page, as it sacrifices itself and donates it’s Google-life to the next page down the chain.

So we’re back to that question of intent.

Surely as an SEO our intent is of basically to get mainsite.com ranking as well as it can do..?

Chaining 301s together can occasionally get troublesome after the 3rd hop but always seems to work very well with up to 2 hops..

So if we had 8 versions of the same thing, is it:

• dup sites 1-8 into mainsite.com..  job done.. ?

Or is it..

• 1, 2 & 3 into 4
• 5, 6 & 7 into 8
• 4 & 8 into mainsite.com

if you link at 1, 2 and 3, at the beginning of the process, then once they have disappeared out of the index, and there is only 4 left, then 301 it to mainsite.com and link at it (4) again to speed / strengthen..

This is very effective, but could of course be considered “doing things for search engines” rather than for users, and hence your intent is SERP manipulation..

Decisions decisions..

Lets be honest, SEO is basically about an intent to manipulate SERPs, if you already ranked at the top you probably wouldn’t be engaging in SEO anyway would you?

The real decision of course is the same as always, when you have effective little tricks that straddle the lines between white and less than white hat SEO, do you dare use them?

Not on client sites of course, but if we didnt try these things on our own sites we wouldnt know they work would we?

301’s are a hugely under used technique in general (except in Black hat land where theyve been abusing them for years) and are a valuable legitimate part of an SEO’s arsenal.

Hopefully this has been a little insight into taking some time to think creatively about the situation and strategy may sometimes allow you to accomplish the same thing, only better.

I’ll leave the ethics of what you do on your own sites up to you

I want to talk about the more creative side of SEO for the next few posts to come.

To read about SEO on most forums and blogs you would think it’s a totally formulaic science whereby if you just follow steps a-z and it will work, when in reality, and especially on big sites, at the cutting edge there is almost invariably room for considerable “creative seo” movement in your strategy and execution.

It is on these outer edges where the “what-if’s” & “well, why don’t we try…s” can sometimes produce fantastic results, hidden gems of information or SEO “tricks” which can literally rocket you up the charts.

There are really no hard and fast rules and as with any “art” there are a lot of different approaches and ways of achieving the same end, ie a work of art. The ability to think laterally is a real plus in SEO as often the best solution isn’t the most immediately apparent and may take a little mulling over from a lateral perspective before the best idea finally creeps into view on the radar.

So in the (upcoming) series what I’ll try and do is give actual examples as much as is possible without giving away any identities, of how problems can quite often turn out to be quite the opposite with a little lateral thinking and creative SEO applied to the situation.

Subscribe and check back in, it is very likely you might learn something you hadn’t thought of..

Yo, so the boss has been nagging me to get my own site up for months and as I already contribute on their  SEO spec ops blog anyway, it’s not such a bad idea.

But on my own terms, speak it as I see it, say it as it is, no holds barred. It must be noted that my views are not necessarily the views of my employers, and I do not speak for them on here.

And they asked for it..