It is a bit like PR, but based on communities.

If you have good hilltop rating, it will mean you have lots of links (or “votes”) from related sites.

:)

Buy your-keyword.info, at domainsite.com for just $1.99. It isn’t much to lose, and can get you to the top of search engine results for those keywords really quickly. I’ve made >$100 in a couple of days for a 4 day old .info domain that came up #1/2 in Google.

It won’t work for competitive keywords. Find non competitive ones that you can still get a few hundred visitors a day with if you are #1/2/3/4/5.

Sorry for quick post….!

This post has the “low down” on them and how to save money with them.

Even at their cheapest levels you get:

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Although, yes, I am hosted with them and links in this post are affiliate links to save you money I 100% reccommend them – I have a LOT of domains, LOTS of sites and use several hosts, and Dreamhost are by far the best.

You can save upto $95 by using HOST95 as your promotional code. This page has a table on it showing how much you save – often $95!

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Also, if you donate money through dreamhost to charity, they match that amount (so donate $10 and the charity gets $20!).

There is a bit more information at this page about how to save money when signing up for dreamhost.

What is mod_rewrite?
Mod_rewrite is a system for apache that lets you basically rewrite urls. It is quite advanced, while at the same time being quite simple.

Why is it so important?
It lets you change pages from something like viewnews.php?id=329579823948 to something like /viewnews/the-news-story-headline/. Of course, you will need to update your actuall links (from id=… to the new ones). But the reason it is so good is because firstly, who can remember 329579823948? And who can remember the-news-story-headline? Additionally, it is a lot better for seo to have keywords in the url, and most times your page title / etc will have the keywords in it.

Ok, walk me through a simple example using mod_rewrite
Ok. We are going to do a very simple mod_rewrite first, one that doesn’t involve any parameters (no id= or whatever).

For example, say at the moment our page is:
http://example.com/about_us.html

We want it to be
http://example.com/about/

Firstly you will need to be using apache. Make a file called .htaccess, and put it in your public html folder (same folder as index.php/index.html etc etc. In my case with my host, it would be /london-seo.com/.htaccess. Often it is something like public_html). You may have a bit of trouble making it in Windows. If you do, name the file “.htaccess“ (with the quotation marks).

Now you wanna put in .htaccess the following (first two lines are not always needed, depending on your server configuration):

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^about/$ about_us.html [L]

See, its pretty easy. The ^ just means that represents the start of the string, and $ represents the end of the string. It is just regular expression stuff… You don’t need to worry about it too much for the time being. Note how the domain itself doesn’t matter (nothing about example.com is in there)

Now lets do a more complicated example. We want to change:
http://example.com/news.php?newsid=48672

to:
http://example.com/news/48672/

Well we would then put in the following code:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^news/(.*)/$ news.php?newsid=$1 [L]

The $1 indicates that it should replace whatever was in the first occurrence of (.*) (note – there can be more than one (.*).)

Well, that’s it for a basic mod_rewrite tutorial. Ideally you don’t wanna have id’s that relate just to a number, but you want some keywords. A good way to do this is to in your news.php only use the newsid=xx, but add in some extra, so you could have:

http://example.com/news/mod-rewrite-tutorial/89487/

The code for that would be:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^news/(.*)/(.*)/$ news.php?newsid=$2 [L]

Notice how there is no “$1“. As you get more advanced you will get used to this kinda stuff. Again, this is only a basic tutorial, there is a lot more to it, but this will get you started.

A few years ago if you put the right keywords in the title and meta (keywords and description) tags, you could quite easily get to the top of search engines, especially when mixed in with a few links and repetitions of the keyword in the body text.

But SEO isn’t all so simple any more. Otherwise, people would manipulate search engine results so much that they become useless. In a way, all of SEO is “black hat” – using bad methods to manipulate search engine results rather than just letting them show 100% natural results.
That isn’t to say that the contents of a title tag etc is worthless – no, far from it. But some things, such as the meta description tag is quite outdated now. Not many search engines, certainly not the major ones, take much notice to the meta description, or even keywords, tag. Don’t even ignore these though. Search engines still use the description tag to describe your site in search engine result pages. To be honest, these should be aimed more at actually drawing a user in when they read it than trying to manipulate search engine results with it.

There are many “new” methods that people have only begun to realise helps within the last couple of years. For example, refrencing your sources in an article can often help, especially if they are external sites. However, this relates to the general outgoing links is good rule. Don’t depend just on in-coming links to your site.

The anchor text of links is a very large contributing factor for search engine results. Just take a look at a Google search for failure. That was pretty much 100% done by bloggers just using the anchor text in links to www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html.