I am not about to start a debate about which is the most important factor in organic search rankings nowadays.

No, far from that.

It’s just a thought, a rant if you will about where the Web is going.

Think of it as the outline of my organic search strategy.

At the very first, tag is king. I mean, you can rank very well on search engines just by using the right counts (and repetitions) of a keyword in the meta keyword tag.

Add a nice meta description line, and you immediately rank on the first page of the search results overnight.

A bit later, you can create crappy content. I mean really crappy content without much value, even if they were hidden texts, and get the same rankings after the next crawl.

The days of meta keyword stuffing and content keyword stuffing have ended though.

Nowadays, links are king.

Search engines, especially Google, think that if people point to your site pages, it is a vote about how important the page is. The anchor text determines pretty much accurately about the topic of the page in question.

As the result, search marketers spend thousands per month to buy backlinks from various sites.

Reciprocal links from random sites are not effective anymore. But you can buy one way links from high PageRank sites easily, spread across different IP blocks, themes, etc.

At the end of the day, content is king.

Content rich sites and portals gain links organically because people think they are worth linking to. As the web grows only a few sites that truly have great content will survive.

The owners of these sites get real traffic from site referrals. A lot of them. In turn, search engines also reward them for their relevancy.

Now is the time, if you buy links, to also allocate some of your budget to build content, tools and informative graphics that people will find interesting and helpful.

Buying links can help propel your site quickly, but doing it aggressively without any long term strategy will jeopardize your business faster than you could imagine.

This is a hot debate and controversy around the age of domain and how it affects rankings, especially in Google. Regardless of what they argue, it seems like in most occasions, sites that have been around for a long time consistently appears in the top 10.

All factors equal, older sites have had longer time to build content and links. On the contrary, the data shows that domain age alone plays an independent role in how Google ranks websites.

How does one check the age of a domain?

• Use the whois command/service. Either use the whois command from the UNIX operating system or search for one which provides such web service. Easywhois comes to my mind.
• Alexa. Alexa plots rank, page views, and reach. In the overview page, you can get many information, including the site age.

One more tip that could help you see how a site progressed over time since it was first established is the Internet Archive (Way Back Machine).

Although not all versions of the site changes appear on archive.org, at least it provides the most complete and publicly available history of a web site or domain.

A domain/site may have gone through makeovers several times in its lifespan, but still chances are they also rank very nicely in their niche, assuming they do it correctly now.

Should you buy an existing site/domain? Or, should you register an idea as a domain so that you can do something with it in the future?

I would say, yes and no.

Yes, because if this factor becomes more important in the future, certainly you have an unfair advantage over the newcomers.

No, because there are a myriad of other factors that could affect rankings. Perhaps, you don’t want to depend solely on organic search in the future. Just as an example, think about social media and networks. Moreover, algorithms change all the time.

Of course, you want all the advantages you can afford if you are in a very competitive industry. Your choice.

Guess when was the last time I open Macromedia Dreamweaver MX — my HTML editor? Peeking at the “access time” of the file, it was two months ago. I forgot why I needed a HTML editor two months ago. Perhaps it was just the spyware scanner that accessed the file.

Anyway, my point is that since I was using blogware and other content management system (CMS) to manage all my web content, I never have a need for HTML editor anymore. Yes, not even for publishing smaller sites with content but no navigation. I modified a copy of WordPress theme/template to achieve that.

For mini sites, I still have to use static HTML files because they save some space. But for once, I have burned gigabytes of my web templates into DVD and store it in the drawer. Perhaps it is another candidate for dust collector.

Today’s tip is this. If you are planning to start a content blog or website, consider blog software. Even if you have already run the site for quite a few months, switch to WordPress or Movable Type (two of my favorites blogware).

Why?

Because if you are still using static HTML pages, which require you to manually edit the template to publish just one page of content — and again manually change the links in various pages in different locations, you are asking for trouble. There are too many places for errors.

Think about broken links, inconsistent tags. You know what I am talking about if you have ever edited a small site.

In the long run, your competitions who are using blogware will outrun you, simply because they waste no time in publishing.

Note that even if you have no plan to blog regularly, you can still use blogware to publish and manage a traditional website — just much easier.

The best way to get your feet wet, especially if you don’t know how to install WordPress, is by using Blogger. You can start blogging immediately in a few minutes.

Make it on today’s task list to register for a free account and start blogging.

Let’s start the new year with a tip. For those who have known blogging, there is nothing new about current tip. For others, it might be a life saver.

If you’re a web publisher and online marketer, chances are you also publish an email newsletter. Having each issue delivered to the recipient’s mailbox really is very hard nowadays. Luckily, you can still do it and achieve very high Return on Investment (ROI).

The thing is, you want to automate and leverage as many things as possible so you still have the time for other more important tasks like developing products, improving conversions, and so on.

What do those have to do with blogging?

By no means I would say blogging is an alternative or replacement for email marketing. It is far from that.

For web publishers, who regularly produce content, blogging should not be a chore. It should fit naturally into your daily routine.

Take the content from your old email newsletter issues and publish them to your blog. The blog serves multiple purposes:

• As a place to hold all the archive of current email newsletters.
• To attract more traffic from multiple sources, including organic search engines.
• To get more exposure and page views.

If you publish great content, more exposure and page views could easily translate into more business. People are going to trust you more if they have read something good about you.

Blogging makes these processes easier because publishing with blogging is much like writing an email and clicking the “send” button. Replace “send” with “publish” for blogging.

We haven’t even scratched the surface about blogging. More tips will follow in the future. Stay tuned!

Do you want to check how many backlinks are there for your domain?

What if you can do it once across multiple search engines?

If the answer is yes, there is a good news for you. You can try Justin Tubb’s Backlinks tool.

Enter your domain or any domain and select the search engines you want to query. It will automatically return the number of backlinks available for the search engines you’ve selected in previous step.

The numbers include links to live query on the search engines themselves so you can further find out actual results of the queries.

There are times when you want to use backlink checkers. Often in your pursue of search engine rankings, you want to measure how hard it is to outrank your competition on a specific keyword or keyphrase.

Using automatic backlink check tool per domain still wastes too much time.

If you do agree with me, then try SEO for Firefox. Yes, you have to use Mozilla Firefox browser because this is an add-on to the browser.

When turned on, this tool will automatically enhance your Google search queries with a lot of very useful information for SEO. I save this information with the Scrapbook extension (also for Firefox browser) so that I can track results over time.

A quick tip: Numbers of backlinks matter, but not the most important of all. The higher the PageRank of the incoming links, the less you will need to rank. Getting a few quality backlinks will actually rank you higher than thousands of PR 1 backlinks.