Simple, Ethical SEO?

Google may realise your two blogs have duplicate content, and is assuming the old blog is the most relevant and important. In Livejournal's account settings, under the privacy tab, you can tick "Minimize my journal's inclusion in search engine results" to stop Google from indexing the old site. It should drop out of search after a delay, letting your new site be the most relevant result.

The best way to get your blog or website up the rankings is to write useful, interesting content.

If you join in with relevant discussions elsewhere, you'll get more visitors to your own blog too, but that comes second to good content.

Good writing and a few worthy incoming links.

Good link building takes time and effort, there are no short cuts other than knowing how to look and what to look for.

More often than not, the criteria people look for when linking to you (be that by your request or otherwise), is that you have something useful that can add to or compliment their site. I'm non-fiction and for this, on my site, I have a free eBook which helps, as well as other free advice which I am adding to over time. Commercial alone and it narrows down a bit the places that might link to you.

Don't just submit to directories, general directories don't hold as much weight with search engines any more. Specific directories relavent to your site do help though. I'm in 2 minds about whether paid directories are to be avoided because on one hand it could be bad if only about money any site is allowed willy nilly so long as they pay, or a quality relevant directory also needs a fee for the time of someone to look your site over with proper scrutiny to make sure their directory is quality.

As others have said here, content is important that is like making the ball round so it rolls when you get the ball rolling, as is onsite SEO in general such as your internal linking structure, having html text links that crawlers can recognize (e.g. they can't "see" pictures). Page titles all unique to avoid link juice cannibalization etc. Key word reasearch etc. the traffic for "Ice cream" exact match is quarter of a million per month and low competition but there's no much you can do with it as I don't think people look for ice cream on the internet. Same with "Banana split" lol On the other hand "BMW" profitable word with high traffic but medium to high competition as you might expect.

"Romance novel" is 1900 per month low competition. "Romance Novels" 14,800 a month medium competition. As a beginner I started with a few low competition keywords with traffic between 1000 and 2900 each. 10,000 - 20,000 hits per month easily within my grasp if I had more time than 2 months per year part time for SEO which is all I have unfortunately.

MumblingSage said:

Whenever I hear search engine optimization talked about, it's usually in a bad way. And to be honest, I understand that, to the extent it involves manipulating algorithms and coding alchemy that seems to resemble the Black Mass more than actual website management.

However, as I understand it at its root SEO is just making sure search engines can find your content and rank it where readers will find you easily, assuming you're what they're looking for. And I find I have a need for that, especially as I'm currently transferring between blogs, and my old LiveJournal is still ranked higher in Google searches than my new one. Not desirable!

So, if there are simple, non-deceptive ways to get my website higher in the ranks, without the use of vile wizardry, what are they?

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Thanks for asking. I'm finding this thread very useful.

MumblingSage said:

What's a bit frustrating right now is that my new blog's had at least 100 hits in the past week, and it's still lagging behind a number of old results that haven't been updated in months, which I find it hard to believe are more relevant or popular.

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Put a link in your Sig to your blog.

Really truly, that will help.

SEO is fine. Professional optimizers distinguish between "black hat SEO," the kind of deceptive, baloney manipulation characterized by linkbait, linkfarms, and so on, and "white hat SEO" which is meant to ensure that your site shows up well in relevant searches.

Writing good content that includes useful key words - for instance, "speculative fiction" as well as "science fiction" - will help your site to show up in more searches. Getting good incoming links from other sites will help your site show up higher in page rank for any particular search.

There are a lot of other white hat techniques (not "tricks") and if you're really, really interested, I suggest you check out SEO for Beginners.

And...you know...if you find it helpful, give me a shout-out by linking back to my blog, theswordthatnagged.blogspot.com.

Smiling Ted said:

SEO is fine. Professional optimizers distinguish between "black hat SEO," the kind of deceptive, baloney manipulation characterized by linkbait, linkfarms, and so on, and "white hat SEO" which is meant to ensure that your site shows up well in relevant searches.

Writing good content that includes useful key words - for instance, "speculative fiction" as well as "science fiction" - will help your site to show up in more searches. Getting good incoming links from other sites will help your site show up higher in page rank for any particular search.

There are a lot of other white hat techniques (not "tricks") and if you're really, really interested, I suggest you check out SEO for Beginners.

And...you know...if you find it helpful, give me a shout-out by linking back to my blog, theswordthatnagged.blogspot.com.

Click to expand...

Best advice for SEO is SEO moz. I'd recommend following them.