Rudy Dallal | SEO – Web Design – Tel Aviv – Baltimore

In mid October I started the RDezine SEO Experiment; I’ve tried to isolate important elements and to understand their significance.

Ranking #7 on Google SERP

After a month of intensive quality link building, RDezine.com moved up from the #30th rank to the #7th for the key phrase “baltimore seo“. I think I’ve concluded my experiment and here is a summary of what I found:

1. Optimizing your web site is the first thing you ought to do – this got me from Google’s sandbox to somewhere on page #12
2. Creating a blog in order to provide fresh content constantly – that got me to the #3rd and #4th pages
3. Building quality links from authoritative sites in your niche
   • comment: if you can get any .edu or .gov links, you be move up
4. Commenting on blogs- months after I didn’t not create any links, i commented on some blogs of Harvard University students that deal with SEO or Internet and I moved up a page!  I think that the nofollow issue should be reexamine since I notice a crewel in nofollow links on my site.
5. Joining niche social networks and groups – search groups in your niche, advertise your site
6. Patience…

and that is it! (well not really, but it is a start )

Oh, on Yahoo I have the #4 spot and MSN –NADA!!!

Now I need to focus on constructing a website in Hebrew – or should I say “tel aviv seo”

Want to be on Google's first page?

“So what do you do?” they ask often, and roll their eyes when I say “SEO and website optimization”. The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers mainly to the process of focusing your content to specific search terms or phrases. For example, if one is searching for “SEO company in baltimore maryland“ , one will find that usually the search terms appear in the title or one of the headers. This occurs because Google thinks that words that are the the title page and/or in the headings are more important than the words in the paragraph.

So what determine the order of Google’s search results? NO ONE KNOWS! period. Some people know many of factors in that formula but no one can grantee first placement on the search results.

Google considers many other factors such as:

• links to your site and their quality – link from an article is better than just a page full of links, right?
• site optimization - follow the SEO basic guide and Google Webmaster Guidelines
• proper site listing - do not post it everywhere, choose the right directories.
  • http://www.dmoz.org
  • telephone companies’ online information
  • local commerce organizations
  • any government site
• domain name age – new domains have some hard times
• hosting company – choose a big one!
• location - there is a priority to the searcher location (if I’m in the UK and searching for a web designer to hire, I more likely will get results from the UK (.uk domain names) than from web designers in France ( .fr domain names.)
• content – content is a king!
• content age – who wants wrinkly cucumbers?! keep the content fresh!
• depth of content – 3 level deep is enough
• web site internal linking

During the years, SEO professionals started to notice pattens that occur when a change or addition is made, and SEO methods started to form. Some methods have been condemned by Google and announced “illegal” practice, for example: cloaking is technique in which the content presented to the search engine is different to that presented to the user’s browser. Such a technique will be the practice of so called: Black Hat SEO. Google will penalize websites that use Black Hat SEO practices by “throwing” the website to the sandbox – somewhere not in the first two pages of the search results.

This article was written by Rudy Dallal, an SEO in Baltimore, MD and Tel Aviv, Israel.

To be continued…