I am agree with Neil,
-use of image alt tag really works. Image and video also help to hold readers eye and good for decreasing bounce rate.
-On page is obvious but quality backlink is still working.
– Nofollow and Dofollow ratio is only for balance. Nofollow has no other purpose.
-As I know the rank of Miserable failure is a result of using anchor text.
SEO trend is always changing

Hi Ben

TO be frank, I do not have a definitive idea of the time frame. But logically speaking, a decent site should get some dofollow backlinks after 1 year. Highly skewed NF/DF ratio would suggest either (1) spammy nofollow links (2) very few dofollow links. Try to get some dofollow links and do not use automated link blasts. That is what I would suggest.

Hi Adam

Thanks for your question.

Focusing on low competition niches worked well a few years back. Build a lot of micro-sites targeted to specific low competition keywords > Rinse and repeat. But it does not work any more, atleast, not to a profitable level. Now, even for a low competition niche, you need to spend significant amount of time to produce content and do promotion. Even after you hit the first page, a single blog is going to produce peanuts. So the return on investment is low.

I would suggest you to focus on high competition niche. You don’t need to dominate the main keyword. If you have lots of content, you will draw enough traffic through long tail keywords. This + quality will ensure the growth of your blog/site.

Most importantly: Start building the email list early. Loyal followers will share content and in turn, build links for you.

I hope that helped. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Hi Justin
Image links with alt tags do work. I have improved my rankings using this strategy. Try it out.

I have experienced this. Long posts with quality content optimised well for SEO along with images and comments have helped may of my posts to rank higher in Google SERPS.

Thanks for sharing with us – fellow bloggers your helpful SEO tips. Luckily I do most of the listed tips. I’d still like to use the opportunity to ask you a qustion – so would appreciate an honest answer. I got a couple of blogs that I run – two of them are in rather competitive niche but having keywords with big search numbers, and one of my blogs is really in a niche where there is almost no competition but ofcourse much fewer monthly searches for the main keywords. So based on your experience where should I concentrate my focus – trying to get on the first page of google for the low-competition niche, or keep writing great content and building backlinks for the higher-competitive niche? I am having quite a dilemma – so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you guys and keep up the great work!

Cheers

Adam

Thanks.

Hi

These two are the most important points. Write quality stuff and make it attractive with the headlines. That’s the core concept of blogging. Glad you got it.

Neil

Hello Gugulethu

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Please read the whole post. I think you read the headlines only and got the wrong message. Here is my reply.

1) Alt tag of image based links helps SERPS itself. I have tested this myself. I will let you know when I publish the case study. I am not saying that presence of an image would improve rankings. What I said was that an image based link improves ranking of the page linked to, not the page containing the image.

2) On page SEO is obviously a factor, and that included outbound links. Linking to bad neighborhood is a bad sign, linking to quality sites is a good sign. Commonsense, actually. No, this is not going to help you rank on its own, but this is a factor. Rankings depend on a lot of factors, not just incoming links.

3) I never said that building nofollow links would boost SERPs. I said that a healthy balance is naturally expected. So do not focus on solely nofollow links like blog comments. I quote myself from the post “My suggestion is to avoid getting excessive nofollow backlinks.”. I am not sure what you are complaining about.

4) Miserable failure is hardly a competitive keyword. Longer contents get more links, hence better ranks. Simple. Obviously there are exceptions where a piece of short content may be preferred and get tons of links. But they are exceptions.

Again, Thanks for your comment. I suspect you just read the headlines. I hope I have been able to clarify your doubts.

Regards
Neil

1. Images in a piece of content won’t make the page rank higher in Google. Images are not a ranking factor, Google will never rank Site#A higher than Site#B simply because Site#A has an image.

Alt tags, title and description on an image helps the image rank well in Google Image Search, that’s all.

2. Google will never rank a website simply because it is linking to other websites. Your on-page SEO is yours, you have the right to do whatever and linking to other sites is not a ranking factor.

3. Nofollow links are just a waste of time, energy and money. Don’t bother with Nofollow links, it’s just a myth, your theory has never been proven.

If that was true then I would just send my competition a lot of Nofollow links to their site and outrank them. Focus on creating Dofollow, it’s not true that you need the right balance.

4. For the comment above, the number of words on a piece of content is not a ranking factor. Go to Google and search “Miserable Failure”, you’ll find an about(.)com page in the search results that has got no text, it only has an image.

That proves that the number of words is not a ranking factor or else you would only find websites with long content when you search on Google.

Google Panda will penalize a blogger for writing “thin” content (which are articles that are less than 250 words).

Longer articles would definitely give a blogger a better chance of their posts showing up in the Search Engine Results Pages.