EVERBODY’S FREE (TO ADD GOOD CONTENT)

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’07

Add Good Content

If I could offer you only one tip for your website success for the future and it’s performance in Google, adding good content would be it.

The long term benefits of good content have been proved by Forum Geeks,
whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy your good serps, oh nevermind, you will not understand the power and beauty of your good serps until they’ve faded or gone (or been hit by the -950). Build trustrank by linking to other “trustworthy” sources and getting them to link to you.

You are not as fat as you imagine (but does your site look thin?)

Don’t worry too much about aquiring Google Page Rank, or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to generate Google PR as buying 300 new keyword rich domains, duplicating pages and linking them to your site. Know 1 PR 9 link might be worth 100 PR 1 links ;)
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday (or 4 times a year).

Do one thing everyday that scares you - comment on some blog or participate in a new forum… experiment with adsense ads, challenge other peoples’ views and make new friends and enemies.

Get Google PR!

Don’t be reckless with other people’s blogs, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Blog

Don’t waste your time on jealousy, sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind,
the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself (and of course those authority sites).
Remember the compliments you receive in forums, forget the insults, if you succeed in doing this, tell me how - their all geeks any-road (and shouldn’t you be in a forum that allows sigs and gives you free stuff anyway?).

301 those old pages and domains, throw away your old notes about getting into DMOZ.

Stumble

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your new free Stumble traffic, the most interesting people I know still don’t.

Become a Link Ninja.

Be kind to your unique page titles and descriptions, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll get to number 1,
maybe you won’t,
maybe you’ll have subdomains,
maybe you won’t,
Maybe you’ll have hyphens in your domain name,
maybe you won’t,
Maybe you’ll redirect non-www to www (or vice versa)
What ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your website, use it every way you can, don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest sales tool you’ll ever own.

Create linkbait, even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.

Read Google Webmaster Guidelines, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not tell Google about your site, they will only make you!

Get to know Ask, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.

Be nice to your blog roll, they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that Wiki links come and go nofollow, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to target geographically and know that there is not just one Google.

Optimise for MSN once, but stop before you realise there’s no traffic.
Optimise for Yahoo once, but stop before you realise there’s less traffic than MSN.

DIGG!

Accept certain inalienable truths, positions in Google will rise and fall, Adwords will get more expensive, politicians will fail, you too will be up at 2AM tonight as usual, and later when you do you’ll fantasize that when you are, no-one else is, everyone else positions were crap, Adwords was effective, politicians were miserable failures and forum newbies respected senior members.

Respect your forum senior members (but not too much).

Don’t expect one source of income to support you. Maybe you have an Adsense Account,
Maybe you’re no 1 in Google; but you never know when you’ll be booted out of either.

Don’t mess too much with your site structure and file names or internal anchor text, or by the time you’re done, they will look PR0 or be de-indexed.

Be careful whose links you buy, but, be patient with those who supply them free.

Reciprocal linking is a form of nostalgia, not as useful as it used to be.

Get natural links, join Webmasterworld, Visit Search Engine Land, Play with Sphinn. Learn about the amazing W3C, HTML and CSS :) Get to know Matt Cutts & Aaron Wall, join Delicious and the rest of them. Did I say get to know Matt Cutts?

But trust me on the good content. ;)

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