It’s good to be in front of the monitor and talking to you again. I did not go the beach yesterday – by the time I was all set to go, it was already noon so I had a relaxed lunch and read a book. I spent the day reading “1421: The Year China Discovered America“, fantastic book and I realised that it’s enjoyable to read history book!
Now, let’s come back to the Yahoo ranking.
I concluded that my number 1 Yahoo feat was largely due to a lot of LUCK. I was lucky to be able to get the domain name indexfuturestrading.com. This was exactly the keyword that I wanted to optimise. And I believe Yahoo still put emphasis on the domain name for relevance and ranking. The other LUCK factor is Labour Under Constant Knowledge. I continue to read and study a lot on SEO.
How I optimised my web page…
I studied and analyse the top 30 listing on Yahoo.
- keyword density
- keyword position relative to the top of the page
- keyword decoration. i.e. normal, bold or italic
- total number of readable words
- keyword anchored text link placement
- graphics – density, size and placement
- H1, H2 tag usage and position
One very useful tool I used:
http://www.keywordcount.com
And I did what I thought was right:
- keyword rich title and description meta tag
- anchored text links, internal and external links
- descriptive filename
- getting relevant backlink partners
- script-free webpage(so cannot place Adsense or Adsonar)
- good content
- link directory
- writing a blog on the steps that I’ve taken and the results
- a whole lots of other nitty gritty things
- and Lots of Patience
Basically, http://www.indexfuturestrading.com is a “trimmed down” version of www.tradersvic.com. You’ll need to compare both websites to see what I meant by “trimmed down” version. I re-wrote the homepage article, other than that, I did small changes to the pages that I lifted from the original tradersvic.com. Technically, as far as HTML is concerned, the major difference is that I used CSS on indexfuturestrading.com and tradersvic.com was purely HTML tables. I did that to optimise the page loading time. I believe indexfuturestrading.com loads faster than tradersvic.com.
Another important point is, I already have a number of websites indexed by major SE and some with PR3 and PR4, and I point them to indexfuturestrading.com. Because, it is more or less similar to tradersvic.com, I did not use tradersvic.com backlink. I heard Google does not like duplicated websites.
As far as Traffic Equalizer is concerned, I used it with more CARE than when I first used it with tradersvic.com. I hand picked about a thousand keywords. Yes, I spent many hours doing just this. The initial lists of about 2,500 keywords were generated with the help of Overture and AdWords Keyword Tool.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
I think the use of Traffic Equalizer does help but you can never be sure when the SE algorithm will penalise the use the use of such software. It’s a risk you have to consider.
Regarding Traffic Equalizer and Directory Generator, I FEEL that TE produced faster results. After more than a month of letting them loose on the Internet, none of my DG’ed websites ranked favourably. However, I am not worried at this early stage as I see that both both TE and DG use the same fundamental concept in driving targeted traffic so I assume it is a matter of time. How targeted was the traffic? My Adsense CTR averaged about 2% before I started using TE. With TE generated pages, it doubled.
As for level of traffic, indexfuturestrading.com just only made it to the top so I need to monitor it closely for a month or two in order to have a better picture on the level of traffic. As of now, indexfuturestrading.com traffic is lower than tradersvic.com. This is logical, indexfuturestrading.com is only 3 months old today. It is a baby as compared with tradersvic.com.
So far, I have been successful with Yahoo and MSN. However, I have yet to achieve same level of success with Google. The best that I got was 1 keyword ranked number 1 and 2 on Google but that was an exotic keyword, “sgx simsci“.
As for Google, I failed to see any pattern when I compared the top 30 websites. I suspected that having backlinks is one of the more important criteria for getting good search postion. So, I have just acquired PR Maximizer and will use it to analyse some of these top websites.
The difficult task ahead is how to maintain the top position with all these giants competing with me! This is just the beginning and it’s going to be fun…
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