make money on the internet

Bloggers often overlook the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) while concentrating on content creation. Although nothing gets blogs more traffic like good content, it is beneficial for bloggers to pay attention to optimizing their blogs to help increase blog traffic.

SEO advice on the internet is bewildering and often confusing to bloggers. One expert advises one thing while another says the opposite. SEOmoz has devised a quiz to test your knowledge of SEO which I have selectively reproduced here. See how many SEO tips you have come across from the list below which are quite different from what you thought you knew.

1. Q: Which of the following is the least important area in which to include your keyword(s)?

   A: Meta Keywords

   The meta keywords tag is least important among these because search engines do not consider it in ranking calculations and it’s never seen by visitors or searchers (unlike the meta description tag, which displays beneath listings in the SERPs).

2. Q: When linking to external websites, a good strategy to move up in the rankings is to use the keywords you’re attempting to rank for on that page as the anchor text of the external-pointing links. For example, if you were attempting to rank a page for the phrase “hulk smash” you would want to use that phrase, “hulk smash” as the anchor text of a link pointing to a web page on another domain.

   A: False

   The biggest problem with linking out to other websites with your targeted keyword phrases in the anchor text is that it creates additional competition for your page in the search results, as you give relevance through anchor text and link juice to a competing page on a competing site. Thus, FALSE is the correct answer.

3. Q: Which of the following is a legitimate technique to improve rankings & traffic from search engines?

   A: Re-writing title tags on your pages to reflect high search volume, relevant keywords.

4. Q: Which of the following is the WORST criteria for estimating the value of a link to your page/site?

   A: The popularity of the domain on which the page is hosted according to Alexa.

   Since Alexa data is typically less useful than monkeys throwing darts at a laptop, that’s the obvious choice for worst metric. The others can all contribute at least some valuable insight into the value a link might pass.

5. Q: Which of the following content types is most easily crawled by the major web search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live & Ask.com)?

   A: XHTML

   XHTML is the obvious choice as the other file types all create problems for search engine spiders.



6. Q: Which of the following sources is considered to be the best for acquiring competitive link data?

   A: Since Yahoo! is the only engine still providing in-depth, comprehensive link data for both sites and pages, it’s the obvious choice. Link commands have been disabled at MSN, throttled at Google, never existed at Ask.com and provide only a tiny subset of data at Alexa.

7. Q: Which of the following site architecture issues MOST impedes the ability of search engine spiders to crawl a site?

   A: Pages that require form submission to reach database content.

   Since search engines will assume a site is crawlable if it has no robots.txt file, doesn’t have any crawl-specific issues with paid links, can read iFrames perfectly well and is able to spider and index plenty of pages with multiple URL parameters, the correct answer is clear. Pages that require form submission effectively block spiders, as automated bots will not complete form submissions to attempt to discover web content.

8. Q: What is the generally accepted difference between SEO and SEM?

   A: SEO focuses on organic/natural search rankings, SEM encompasses all aspects of search marketing.

   SEO – Search Engine Optimization – refers to the practice of ranking pages in the organic results at the search engines. SEM – Search Engine Marketing – refers to all practices that leverage search engines for traffic, branding, advertising & marketing.

9. Q: Which of the following is NOT a “best practice” for creating high quality title tags?

   A: Include an exhaustive list of keywords

   Since all the rest are very good ideas for title tag optimization (see this post for more), the outlier is to include an exhaustive list of keywords. Title tags are meant to describe the content on the page and to target 1-2 keyword phrases in the search engines, and thus, it would be terribly unwise to stuff many terms/phrases into the tag.

10. Q: Which of the following character limits is the best choice to use when limiting the length of title tags (assuming you want those tags to fully display in the search results at the major engines)?

    A: As Google & Yahoo! both display between 62-68 characters (there appears to be some various depending on both the country of origin of the search and the exact query), and MSN/Live hovers between 65-69, the best answer is… 65!



11. Q: A page on your site that serves as a “sitemap,” linking to other pages on your domain in an organized, list format, is important because…

    A: It may help search engine crawlers to easily access many pages on your site.

    As none of the others are remotely true, the only correct answer is that a sitemap page may help search engine crawlers easily access many pages on your site, particularly if your link structure is otherwise problematic.

12. Q: Why are absolute (http://www.mysite.com/my-category)URLs better than relative (”/my-category”) URLs for on-page internal linking?

    A: When scraped and copied on other domains, they provide a link back to the website.

    None of the answers makes sense, except that which refers to scrapers, who often copy pages without changing links and will thus link back to your site, helping to reduce duplicate content issues, and potentially provide some link value as well.

13. Q: How can you avoid the duplicate content problems that often accompany temporal pagination issues (where content moves down a page and from page to page, as is often seen in lists of articles, multi-page articles and blogs)?

    A: Add a meta robots tag with “noindex, follow” to the paginated pages.

    The only method listed in the answers that’s effective is to use “noindex, follow” on the paginated, non-canonical pages.

14. Q: If you update your site’s URL structure to create new versions of your pages, what should you do with the old URLs?

    A: 301 redirect them to the new URLs

    The correct move is to 301 the pages so they pass link juice and visitors to the new, proper locations.

15. Q: When you have multiple-pages targeting the same keywords on a domain, which of the following is the best way to avoid keyword cannibalization?

    A: Place links on all the secondary pages back to the page you most want ranking for the term/phrase using the primary keywords as the anchor text of those links.



16. Q: High quality links to a site’s homepage will help to increase the ranking ability of deeper pages on the same domain.

    A: The answer is “TRUE” as the properties of PageRank, domain trust, authority and many other search ranking factors will cause internal pages on a well-linked-to domain to rank more.

17. Q: Spammy sites or blogs begin linking to your site. What effect is this likely to have on your search engine rankings?

    A: The correct answer is that a very slight positive effect is most likely. This is because search engines do NOT want to penalize for the acquisition of spammy links, as this would simply encourage sites to point low quality links at their competition in order to knock them out of the results. The slight positive effect is typical because not all engines are 100% perfect at removing the link value from.

18. Q: A link from a PageRank “3″ page (according to the Google toolbar) hosted on a very strong, trusted domain can be more valuable than a link from a PageRank “4″ page hosted on a weaker domain.

    A: TRUE.

    Since PageRank is not nearly the overwhelmingly strong factor influencing search rankings at Google these days, the answer is definitely “TRUE.”

19. Q: Is it generally considered acceptable to have the same content resolve on both www and non-www URLs of a website?

    A: No, this may cause negative indexing/ranking issues.

    This is generally considered a bad idea, and may have negative effects if the search engines do not properly count links to both versions (the most common issue) or even view the two as duplicate, competing content (unlikely, though possible).

20. Q: Which of these is least likely to have difficulty ranking for its targeted terms/phrases in Google?

    A: A new domain that has received significant buzz and attention in the online and offline media, along with tens of thousands of natural links.

    This is a tough question, and the answer is even somewhat debatable. However, as phrased, the MOST correct answer is almost certainly – “A new domain that has received significant buzz and attention in the online and offline media, along with tens of thousands of natural links” – as each of the other situations have many examples of having very difficult times ranking well.



21. Q: Which of the following link building tactics do search engines tacitly endorse?

    A: Viral content creation & promotion.

    As representatives from each of the major engines have acknowledged publicly, viral content creation and promotion is viewed as a legitimate and preferred tactic for link acquisition.

22. Q: Which of the following factors is considered when search engines assign value to links?

    A: The date/time the link was created and the temporal relationship between that link’s appearance and other time-sensitive criteria.

    The only one of these that search engines would consider (and have mentioned in patent applications like this one) is the temporal data.

23. Q: There is no apparent search engine rankings benefit to having a keyword-matched domain name (eg www.example.com for keyword “example”).

    A: FALSE

    This is “FALSE,” as many examples of keyword-targeted domains have been shown to have a phenomenal amount of ranking success in the engines, despite other factors not being nearly as strong as the competition.

24. Q: If you want a page to pass value through its links, but stay out of the search engines’ indices, which of the following tags should you place in the header?

    A: Use meta robots=”noindex, follow”.

    As Google tells us here, the proper format would be to use meta robots=”noindex, follow”.

25. Q: Which of these factors is LEAST likely to decrease the value of a link?

    A: The linked-to domain has a link somewhere that points at the linking domain (each domain link to pages on the other’s site).

    This is because despite the fact that these links are technically “reciprocal,” they don’t fit any pattern of penalization for such links (such as being listed on link list style pages). The search engines are least likely to devalue these because of all the natural patterns in which such linking occurs (blogrolls, news sites, forums, hobbyists, schools, etc.).



26. Q: Which of the following strategies is the best way to lift a page out of Google’s supplemental index?

    A: Link to it internally from strong pages.

    As “supplemental” has been defined by engineers at Google as being a page with very little PageRank, the best way to lift it out, from the options given, is to link to it internally from strong pages.

27. Q: Which of the following CANNOT get you penalized at the major search engines?

    A: Using “nofollow” internally on your site to control the flow of link juice.

    As Matt Cutts has noted recently, using “nofollow” to sculpt the flow of link juice is perfectly acceptable.

28. Q: For high-volume search phrases, the Search Engines usually will not differentiate between singular and plural versions of a term (eg “cell phone” vs. “cell phones” or “bird feeder” vs. “bird feeders”).

    A: FALSE.

    As we can see from searches on the various phrases – cell phone vs. cell phones and bird feeder vs. bird feeders – this is FALSE. There are clear differentiations.

29. Q: Which factor is most likely to decrease the ranking value of a link?

    A: Comes from a page with many reciprocal and paid links.

    All of the answers can provide significant link value except “comes from a page with many reciprocal and paid links,” which is very likely to have a strong negative affect on the value of the link.

30. Q: Duplicate content is primarily an off-site issue, created through content licensing deals and copyright violations of scraped and re-published content, rather than a site-internal problem.

    A: FALSE.

    The answer is FALSE, as on-site duplicate content issues can be serious and cause plenty of problems in the search engines.



31. Q: Which metric is NOT used by the major search engines to measure relevance or popularity in their ranking algorithms?

    A: Keyword density in text on the page.

    Keyword density is the outlier here. Dr. Garcia explains why search engines don’t use the metric here.

32. Q: For search engine rankings & traffic in Google & Yahoo!, it is generally better to have many, small, single topic focused sites with links spread out between them than one, large, inclusive site with all the links pointing to that single domain.

    A: FALSE.

    This is FALSE, primarily because the search engines’ current algorithms places a great deal of weight on large, trusted domains, rather than small, niche sites.

33. Q: Which of the following social media websites is the least popular (as measured by active users & visitors)?

    A: Newsvine.

    Newsvine is the smallest of the above, both in terms of traffic and users.

Of course these are just the basics of blog SEO but they are a good start to optimizing your blog without incurring too much cost by hiring SEO experts. And just a final note to this post, PageRank was named after Google co-founder Larry Page and not does not refer to how pages rank.