SEO isn’t for everyone, and honestly… it’s a huge pain in the butt to manage if you are currently working on ad campaigns, writing new content and handling everything else for your business. Over the past few months I’ve been working with RankPay, and they have a really amazing setup. In short, you pick the keywords you want to rank for, and you don’t pay anything until you see results.

After seeing some great results, I wanted to sit down with Justin from RankPay and have him answer some important SEO questions and provide a few seo tips as well. Please keep in mind that Justin’s answers to my questions are based on the question themselves, but with SEO there are so many different moving parts and dynamics that not every questions answer will work for each and every website. Let the learning begin!

SEO TIPS & FAQs ANSWERED

How effective is article marketing for web sites, in terms of seo rank and keywords? (ie: using backlinks as keywords and submitting one article vs. weekly for the same site)

Backlink building is one of the most important things that you can do for your Search Engine rankings. While article marketing is a great strategy to build highly relevant backlinks to a website, it must be executed properly to see results from a rankings perspective. When backlinking you want to make sure that you have links from a variety of websites and not only a single one. Therefore make sure that you are submitting articles to more websites than just Ezinearticles. Next you want to make sure that your links include your keyword, also known as anchor text. Anchor text helps the search engines better understand the content of the item that its linking to.

Obviously the PageRank of a web site is very important, but let’s say we have a few sites/domains that all have the same page rank and links to the site, but one domain is 10 years old, another is 5 years old and another was just recently registered, how will the age of a domain/site effect it’s results in search engines?

The age of the domain can have an affect on search engine rankings if the link age that were pointing to those domains are nearly as old as the domain itself. If all things equal, and one domain was registered last week and another registered ten years ago they will both have an equal opportunity to rank. Again, the only thing that would influence something differently is if the ten year old site had been indexed by Google years ago and has backlinks that are older than the new website.

What are you thoughts on the millions of autoblogs that are simply replicating content? How long of a life span do these sites usually have, and how does article replication effect both the original content creator, and the ones stealing it?

We aren’t fans of autoblogs, stealing isn’t right and copying another persons content is the same as stealing. It is disappointing to see the recent explosion of autoblogs and their popularity in the internet marketing community. Matt Cutts just posted today about how Google has rolled out algorithm changes that deal with this very thing: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched

There are millions of old sites that were built in plain HTML, but still rank very well in the search engines. What is the best method for these site to convert their HTML sites to WordPress sites, while keeping SEO and prior links in tact?

Great question Zac and critically important for most long time internet marketers. When transforming a website from legacy HTML to WordPress there are a few methods that you can do to keep and retain backlinks. Keep in mind though that both methods are very time consuming but worth while in the long run.

First, take inventory of all your websites URLs and indexed pages in Google. There are tools that can expedite this process, or if your site isn’t that big you can go to Google and search “site: https://www.url.com” This will show you an index of all of your pages from your domain in Google.

After taking inventory of the pages, you’ll need to replicate those same URLs in WordPress. You can change the permalink structure to reflect your old page URLs by adding .html to the end. For example, /%postname%.html. This will change any of your post names to have .html at the end, matching your old legacy html website.

Finally, you need to make sure that you copy your information architecture of your old website. That includes directories and how your site had its linked laid out before. While this method is extremely time consuming it will help save your site from experiencing a tremendous loss in rankings or PageRank.

The easier method to converting a legacy HTML site to a WordPress website is to use 301 redirects for all old pages to the corresponding pages on your new website. You’ll want to make sure that you don’t miss any links, so do a backlink check in Yahoo Site Explorer and verify that all links that pointed to your old HTML website are redirected using a 301 to your new similar page.

Backlinks, Page Content, Sitemap and Image Tags… can you rank and give a quick explanation of each in order of their importance when trying to make the most of your site for seo ranking purposes?

#1 Page Content

Page content is the single most important ranking factor for all websites. By having great content on your site, that is also relevant and keyword friendly, you give yourself the possibility of attracting quality inbound links. Do yourself a favor and make sure that the content is unique, and that each page has keywords corresponding to it which you are trying to target in the search engines.

#2 Backlinks

A great backlinking campaign can work wonders on a website’s search engine rankings. It’s one of the strongest ranking variables in Google’s and other search engine algorithms. Not all links are made alike, so don’t try and go get as many links as possible, it’s all about building a great backlink portfolio by first and foremost creating great content that your readers want to read.

#3 Sitemap

A Sitemap allows your site to be indexed and crawled properly. It also helps the search engines crawl and identify pages that may not be linked from any pages on your website. Be sure that your site has a sitemap that’s built in an XML format and is located on your root directory (https://www.url.com/sitemap.xml). If you use WordPress there are many plugins that can help you automate this process.

#4 Image Tags

While image tags can slightly help a websites rankings they are not significant enough to waste a tremendous amount of time on. The biggest benefit about having proper image tags is the traffic that a website may receive from Google Images. By having proper image tags, and file names, Google could rank your websites well in Google Images. Although from an SEO perspective I would not recommend wasting a lot of time on Image Tags.

What is the fastest way to build up page rank for a web site?

The single best way to build up PageRank for a website is by having excellent content. Build great content and watch the backlinks naturally come in. By building your site for your reader you’ll be surprised by how many natural links will begin appearing. Another strategy is to have and work with a great PR company. Landing a review on a reputable newspaper, website, or magazine can help your sites credibility and rankings.

Using RankPay for Keyword Placement & SEO

I hope you’ve enjoyed this Q&A session with Justin from  RankPay on seo tips and how you can improve your web sites search engines rankings. I highly recommend using RankPay to improve your seo rankings, as I have been using them for the past few months now and with many different sites. You will never pay for RankPay services until you see a Top 30 ranking for your specified search phrase, and each campaign is limited to a minimum of only 6 months. In addition to providing a quality service that works, you will also have a full support team that can provide you with advice on choosing the best keywords, setting up new campaigns, seo tips or just any questions you might come up with.

Try RankPay now and use promo code “SAVE” for a $50 credit towards your account!