The Seven Deadly SEO Sins

When compared to its offline marketing counterparts (things like PR, promotions and advertising), SEO has a pretty negative reputation. Many consumers hear "SEO" and think to themselves "Oh yes, that's when companies flood my inbox with junk mail and pepper my screen in pop-up ads." Others see SEO as an attempt to game the system and spin the search results.

Even though SEO has been around for long time (pretty much as long as there have been search engines), the industry as a whole still has a bad reputation. This is mainly because of the actions of a few SEO spammers and black hat practitioners. They are the ones who are actively trying to manipulate the search engines and they are the ones that send you e-mails in the middle of the night with subject lines like "A weight loss program that lets you eat cheeseburgers and pizza? It's true!"

As a site owner, you never want to have your brand lumped in with these SEO con men, even if you didn't mean to engage in black hat SEO. That is why it is important to avoid the following SEO sins:

1. Low-Quality Content

Unless you've had your head in the sand for the last few months, you know that the Google Panda update cracked down hard on numerous "content farms" that churned out thousands of low-quality, spammy articles. The update also took on regular sites with a lot of duplicate, low-quality content. Content marketing is one of the most important elements of online marketing success. Poor content won't get you anything other than a search engine penalty.

2. Keyword Stuffing

This is one of the cardinal rules of SEO, but many sites are still guilty of stuffing their content with keywords in an attempt to be more appealing to the search engines. Content should be written for the end user, NOT the search engines. Peppering your content with keywords might make it easier for a search spider to index your content, but is that search spider going to be doing business with your company? Not likely. Keyword-heavy content is one of the biggest causes of a high bounce rate.

3. Poor Site Navigation

A good SEO rule of thumb is that it should never be more than 3 clicks from your homepage to any deep internal page. If a user has to click all over your website with no idea where they are or how they got there, they aren't going to waste their time. Your site structure has to lead them down a predetermined path of information. It needs to be a logical progression through the site. If a user can't find what they are looking for the moment they arrive on your site, they won't bother to dig through your pages to find it.

4. Spammy or Duplicate Meta Descriptions

Meta tags are like little advertisements for your website in the search results. Those 150 characters are what convince a searcher that your site is the one they are looking for. They may not be the most important factor for search engines, but they play a huge part in the overall user experience. Each page needs its own Meta description that describes the content of that page! Just like the actual pages themselves, you don't want to stuff the Meta description full of keywords. Would you want to visit a site where the Meta description looked like, "Caribbean cruises, cruise the Caribbean, Caribbean cruise, Caribbean cruise vacation, vacation cruises to the Caribbean..." Are you going to trust that site?

5. Irrelevant Links

Links are important currency in the online market space. The more quality, one-way links a site has pointing towards it, the better trust factor it has with the search engines. But quality is far more important than quantity. 10,000 links that come from spam blogs, "bad" sites like adult or gambling sites, cloaked text and link exchanges actually devalue your website. A link is not worth your online reputation. Too many shoddy links and the search engines will remove your site from the results entirely.

6. Copying the Competition

Each industry is unique and each site has its own set of challenges to deal with. Studying the competition is important because you need to understand the SEO arena you are about to enter, but copying the SEO strategy of your competitor will get you nowhere. Just because it worked for them, that doesn't mean it will work for you. Also, what kind of fight are you really putting up if your company just does everything the competition does? It guarantees that you will always be two steps behind.

7. Going for Immediate Results

SEO is a long-term process that builds momentum over time. You are not going to see overnight success. If that is your goal, to rank on page 1 of Google within the week, you are opening yourself up to a lot of black hat SEO techniques that will artificially inflate your ranking. While success might be sweet for a little while, the search engines are going to catch on sooner or later and you'll fall off the face of the Internet.

These SEO sins and others are the reasons why the SEO industry has a bad reputation. Some black hat SEO practitioners do them intentionally, and sometimes site owners without enough SEO experience accidentally do. The best thing site owners can do is to learn what is and what isn't acceptable for white hat SEO and consider that their line in the sand.

About The Author

Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO services firm that also offers SEO consulting and SEO site audits. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Contact Nick Stamoulis as 781-350-4365 or nick@brickmarketing.com

Search Engine Optimization Animation for Beginners - SEO 101

Search Engine Optimization Animation for Beginners - SEO 101

Search Engine Optimization Animation for Beginners (SEO 101) explains the basic theory behind search engines and ranking. It touches base on the importance of content, describes what backlinks are and gives examples of Social Media Sites.

Twenty Basic Tips for SEO Newbies

Twenty Basic Tips for SEO Newbies

If you have a website and are trying to earn a living from it, then you need to know Search Engine Optimization. SEO is key to driving more visitors to your site. More visitors means more business, so you definitely need to read on.

As with anything, you can take it to the limit and hire an expert in the field, but there are things that you and your web designer should be doing to optimize your search engine rankings. Here is a list of 20 things you can do now, to improve traffic to your website.

1. Use a keyword tool such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or their Search Based Keyword Tool . You will then be provided with other key words and phrases that users search for that you can then integrate into your site. Take care, however, not to stuff your text with keywords in an unnatural way, which can count against you.

2. Content dominates. Web crawlers love ever-changing content, so update your site regularly. Post good, well-written material that is unique and be sure to include your keywords within the content. Consider a blog, if your site content won't change frequently. Spiders LOVE blogs!

3. Content may dominate, but links rule. Make sure to get your site lísted in numerous trade directories, associations, colleagues, etc. Be sure the locations of your backlinks are quality ones, and relevant to your site.

4. If you like image maps or Java script drop-down menus, be sure to include text links in another location on your pages. Web crawlers can't decipher your images and they require real text to follow.

5. Page titles are important! Title each page individually according to its subject matter. Title tags should be keyword focused, and if you insist on putting your business name in it, put it at the end.

6. Write articles. As usual, be sure to include your keywords, post them to your site, and then post them to article sites. You will be surprised at where your articles will end up after a few months, all linking back to YOU!

7. Hyperlinks within your site should be written with the proper keywords, i.e. "green t-shirts" and not "click here".

8. Go easy on the Flash. Spiders cannot crawl flash animations, so keep them to a minimum, especially if the animation contains text that you want your visitors to read. Integrate that text into the page instead.

9. Make sure that external links to your site link to the actual domain, i.e. http://www.redroses.com, and not http://www.redroses.com/index.html.

10. Renew your domain name promptly! Domains that are about to expire, or even that have less than one year remaining can be considered spammers by some search engines, and this will hurt your rankings.

11. SEO is not a one-shot deal. Since searches, and searcher's needs, change quickly and frequently, expect to work on your optimization daily, in order to get the best results. Getting crawled initially can take weeds, and getting high rankings can take months, sometimes a year or longer, depending on how much effort you put into in. Nothing ventured, absolutely nothing gained, in this case.

12. Use captions with your images. No brainer, and use ALT tags with them as well. Include the words "picture" or "image" in your ALT tags, as searches will often be for a keyword along with one of those words.

13. Use an XML sitemap. You can get one of these from Google as well. Sitemaps provide very crawl-worthy text for hungry little web spiders.

14. Search engines love video, too! Be sure to include video in your sites, and then upload the video to other quality sites, such as Metacafe, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and, of course, YouTube.

15. Get a Google Webmaster account. This will provide you with numerous tools that you can use to better enhance your visibility.

16. When you have your Google Webmaster account, enable the "Enhanced image search" feature. Allowing Google to find your photos will help in your SEO efforts.

17. Monitor your account. It's vital to know what page your visitors are coming in to your site on, and what page they're exiting from.

18. Link back to yourself. Putting links to other pages in your site is an easy way to improve traffic to individual pages.

19. Name your URLs clearly. It's easy to understand what www.cowboyboots.com/women/buckarooboots.html would contain, but if your page is titled www.cowboyboots.com/45773/bbb.html, search engines are much less likely to figure that one out.

20. Don't make the mistake of paying money to companies that say they can get you ranked higher! With a little time and effort, you can improve your site's rankings yourself, and some search engines consider links from these sites to be of poor quality.

I hope these tips help you on your way to better website optimization!

About The Author:

Theresa Sheridan runs a freelance website and graphic design company in Central California.

Build Valuable Backlinks

Search engine optimization consists mainly of on page activity and off page optimization. Building backlinks is a part of off page optimization strategy. High quality backlinks have the potential to increase a websites ranking in the SERPs.

Backlinks are considered valuable when they:

a. are do follow

b. contain the appropriate anchor text,

c. are deep linked to the relevant inner pages,

d. are linked from high PR niche websites

5 Tips for Building Valuable Backlinks:

1. Perform A Competitive Intelligence Analysis

Competitive intelligence analysis allows you to scrutinize the competitors' backlinks and their link profiles. Run a Google search for your target keyword and list the top 20 competitors. Capitalize on the Yahoo! Search Explorer tool to determine the backlinks for each of the top competing websites. Use an Excel spreadsheet to make a list of all the backlinks providing websites. The next step is to shortlist the do follow websites from the list. Arrange them in the descending order of their PR. At the end of this procedure, you will have a list of highly valuable do follow websites to link from.

2. Submit URLs to Search Directories

Search directories are of two types: general and niche directories. Backlinks from niche directories are normally considered more valuable than the backlinks from general directories. Most of the search directories take months to process your linking request. There are some directories which link back within a few days. Websites which build a high number of backlinks in a few days are looked upon suspiciously by Google. The best way to build backlinks is over a period of time to avoid getting tagged as a link spammer. Submittíng a website's URL to directories is a time consuming task but provides great results at the end.

3. Submit Articles to Article Directories

Submitting articles to article directories is a very popular approach to link building. Most of the article directories allow you to include a link in the article. You can also add a link to the author description of the article with appropriate anchor text. Article directories are known to rank well in the search engine ranking pages. An added benefit of submittíng to article directories is the traffic it drives to your website. There are a large number of high quality article directories which accept free article submission. Simply sign up, verify your account and start submitting articles.

4. Post in Forums

Forums initially served as a means of conversing and solving queries. Today forums are also used to obtain valuable backlinks to your website. A majority of forums allow a signature link at the bottom of every post. This signature link is a do-follow link. You can select the desired anchor text and link to any important inner page of your website. There are a few forums which allow you to enter more than one signature link. Just remember to participate in the conversation, ask questions and answer those of others.

5. Create Link Bait

Link bait involves creating compelling content on the website which makes others link to it. You should write frequently and consistently to develop a following. Keep tab on the latest happenings and news in your niche; be among the first few to break the news online. To create that perfect link bait, your articles should contain news, updates, a controversial topic or even some great resources. Keep the information quotient of your articles high and watch the link baits pouring in.

If you want other websites and blogs to link to you, double check who you are linking too. Don't be in a rush to get backlinks. A handful of good quality and authoritative backlinks are worth more than a hundred low quality, low PR backlinks.

About The Author:

Debbie A. Everson is the CEO of SearchMar.com, experienced SEO Consultants and Search Engine Optimization Agency to over 2,000 small businesses. Learn about search engine optimization, paid search advertising, social media, and emaíl marketing. Read my SEO Blog at blog.searchmar.com for hints and tips. Follow me on Twitter @searchmar. Call 1.866.885.6263 to speak to one of our SEO Consultants. Visit www.searchmar.com.

Tips About SEO

It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to getting search engine traffic because there is so much out of date information being circulated.

That is why it is always best to also learn many other traffic generation methods like viral marketing for example.

Not only is there out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned.

The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about.
2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site.
3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page.
4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website.
5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag.
6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.
7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.
8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides.
9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag.
10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software.

One Way Linking Strategies Using Link Directories

One Way Linking Strategies Using Link Directories

Introduction:

Building high quality links to your website is one of the most important things that you can do to improve your search engine rankings. You can think of these links as votes in favor of your website (this is the way the search engines see it). Acquiring high quality links for your site can be very time consuming; however, it is a very important thing to do if you want to get great search engine rankings.

Before I continue, let me quickly define Link Popularity (link pop) for you. Link Popularity simply refers to the amount and quality of inbound links to your site. There are many free tools available on the internet for checking your link popularity.

How Link Directories Can Help You

Using link directories is one of the best ways to get quality links to your site. Just so you know, a link directory is a web site that has a large aggregation of links which are organized by topic. People who are searching for a particular type of web site will use link directories as an alternative to doing a search engine query.

There are thousands upon thousands of link directories out there to choose from. I recently typed the keywords 'link directories' in to Google and received 1,120,000 hits.

When you submít your site to a link directory, it is edited by a human. Your submission will either be accepted or rejected, depending on the quality of your site and whether it is relevant to the directory you are submitting to. If your site gets accepted, the users of the link directory will consider your site to be credible. Also, the search engines love links that point to your website from quality link directories.

You will want to have your link placed on as many link directories as you can. There are three reasons for doing this. First, you will get targeted traffíc to your site when people search the directory for your type of site. Second, you will improve your search engine rankings as your link popularity increases. Third, having links from link directories will help your web site pages to get indexed quickly.

Some Features Of Link Directories

When you submít to a link directory, you are usually given 3 choices that look something like this:

Featured Links 

Regular Links 

Regular Links With Reciprocal 

The featured links will normally keep your listing towards the top of the list. There is always a charge for featured links (this is one of the ways that link exchanges make their money). The trouble here is that if a lot of people are buying featured links for a particular category, you may still be pushed quite a way down the list.

With a lot of link directories, the regular links and the regular links with reciprocal are offered for free. When I submit to directories, I always choose regular links and I only choose free ones. Listen, there is such an overwhelming number of link directories out there, that if you start paying for your submissions, you will quickly empty your bank account. There are plenty of free ones to choose from (just type free link directories into Google, and you will be surprised at the numbers). 

A final note here is always choose the regular link (one way) as opposed to the reciprocal option. These days, search engines consider one way links to be more valuable than reciprocal links (reciprocal links are still OK, but they are not as good as one way links).

Link directories are ranked by Google just like any other web site. The range in page rank will be between 0 and 8. You will want to spread your submissions between all of the page rank values. This will make your links look more natural in the eyes of the search engines.

The Submission Process

There are basically three ways that you can carry out the submission process.

1. Sign in to your favorite search engine and type in "free link directories". You will get enough hits here to keep you busy with submitting for the rest of your days. 

2. Purchase one of the many link directory submission software packages out there. These packages are normally semi-automated and will save you a huge amount of time.

3. You can pay someone to do the submitting for you. There are plenty of web sites that will offer to do your submissions for a fee, but be careful, as some of them are quite spammy. Make sure to do your due diligence first. You should aim to do about 200 to 300 submissions per month.

Good luck with your linking campaign. Remember the importance of using link directories as a key strategy for gaining targeted traffíc to your website. 

About The Author

I live in Delta, British Columbia, Canada with my wife and 2 boys. I am a full time Paramedic and I love my career. In my spare time, I may be found flying, hiking, renovating our house or playing sports with the boys. Check out my affiliate marketing website: www.wealth-dynamo.com

One Way Linking...

One way linking means that a web site links to your web site, but you don’t link back to that web site. One way links are also known as non-reciprocal links.It is more valuable as they appear to be a more “natural” way of linking between web sites. One way linkinkg is more valuable than reciprocal links in terms of boosting your web site’s link popularity, therefore the more one way links your web site has, the higher your web site’s link popularity.

Advantages:
1)Increases your link popularity more than reciprocal links

2)Can Be Free

3) Increases page rank

4) The site is submitted to related category.


Check with the below keywords.... Use them for searching niches reated to your websites.....

“Suggest link” +”keyword”
“Suggest a link” +”keyword”
“Suggest site” + “keyword”
“Suggest website” + “keyword”
“Suggest a site” + “keyword”
“Suggest URL” +”keyword”
“Suggest a URL” +”keyword”
“Suggest an URL” +”keyword”
“Submit link” +”keyword”
“Submit Website” +”keyword”
“Submit resources” + “Keyword”
“Submit site” +”keyword”
“Submit a site” +”keyword”
“Submit URL” +”keyword”
“Submit a URL” +”keyword”
“Submit an URL” +”keyword”
“Submit resources” + “Keyword”
directory +”keyword”
directories +”keyword”
List of “Keyword” Directory
“Your Category” +”add url”
“Your Category” +directory
“Your Category” +”submit site”
“recommended links” +”keyword”
“Your Niche Category” +”suggest a site”
“favorite links” +”keyword”
“Add link” +”keyword”
“Add site” +”keyword”
“Add website” +”keyword”
“Add a site” +”keyword”
“Add URL” +”keyword”
“Add a URL” +”keyword”
“Add an URL” +”keyword”
“Add resources” + “Keyword”

Basic Steps In SEO

Basic Steps In SEO

Website owners are hiring SEO companies to get them to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. They are paying thousands and thousands of dollars for some easy tasks. Here are a few simple steps you can do instead of hiring a SEO company.

Keywords

Keywords are basically words and phrases that can describe your website and different pages. To achieve a good placement, on search engines, you must have the appropriate positioning and density of keywords or phrases you chose. Keep keywords on topic and they will greatly help your site when ranked on search engines.

URLs

Page URLs are the first thing that search engines see when they crawl your site. A very easy SEO tip is to include keywords in your URL titles. This will provide even more keys words for the search engines. Your URLs should also be easy for search engines to read.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are information tags that are placed in a web page that are not seen by users. They are intended for search engines and other applications. These are getting less and less important but keywords placed as meta tags will always help.

Title Tags

Title tags are used to describe your site or page. Here is another great place to put keywords. In fact you should only place keywords in the title.

Content

Content is the key to any good website. Users come to your site because the content is helpful and interesting. Within the content is where the keywords should be. You should make sure all content is spelt correctly and you use the correct grammar. I cannot emphasize how important content is - It is everything!!!

Quick Summary

There are some easy steps you can take to improve your search engine ranking. Some easy steps include: putting keywords within your content, meta tags and title tags. Your URLs should be easy to read and contain keywords. You should also write good quality content that contains keywords, should be spelt correctly and should contain the correct grammar. All of these are simple SEO tips that can improve your search engine rankings.

Effective Ways To Build Back Links

Effective Ways To Build Backlinks

Any website owner would love to have their site ranked high on search engines. One important step that should be taken to gain a high ranking is to develop backlinks. A backlink is basically a link, on another site, that points to your site. Besides improve your page ranking, backlinks can increase the traffic your site receives.

Submit Your Site To Directories

The first step to generating quality backlinks is to submit your site to directories. Submitting your site to directories takes time and resources but the benefits are high. You will develop reciprocal links, one way links, that search engines will love. You will receive traffic from these driectories which is always good. Another benefit is that submitting your site to directories is free unless you submit to paid directories.

When submitting your site, make sure you look for the highly ranked directories. Also make sure you submit your site to directories that are related to your site.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Next, I would use social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com, Del.icio.us, and furl.net, to generate backlinks. You can really build up some good backlinks by simply submitting content to these sites. Not to mention, this will bring a lot of traffic to your site.

Link Exchange

Some people believe that link exchanging is useless and that people should just build reciprocal links to your site, but I still believe that link exchange has some benefits. Link exchanging allows your site to appear on other sites, bringing in traffic to your site. It will also give you another link that search engines will use in determining your page rank.

When you participate in link exchanges, look for other sites that are similar to yours. Be careful not to partake in too many exchanges, it may hurt your site rather than help.

Blogs and Forums

Use blogs and forums to your advantage. Use forums and blogs to get your site name out there. Also make sure to include you url in your forum signature and in blog comments.

Good Content

Good content is the key to any site and you should concentrate most of your resources on this. If you have good content on your site, it is more likely that other sites will link to your site and reference it. Here are a few tips to writing good content.

While making content make sure you concentrate on a few things.

1. Visitors tend to scan pages, so use headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists
2. Keep your content focussed. There should be only one topic per page.
3. Make sure your content is well researched and accurate. Nothing is worse than misleading information
4. Make sure you have current content on your site
5. Have someone, who is fluent in english, check over your content for spelling and grammar errors

Quick Summary

To increase backlinks you should concentrate on directory submissions, submitting to social bookmarking sites, partipating in link exchanges, use blogs and forums to your advantage, and build good content. If you work on all these and perfect them, you shouldn't have any problems

SEO Tools...

SEO Tools...

Search engine optimization requires many hours of research before the process actually begins. SEO tools are a great time saver, often offering information and data in seconds as opposed to hours of manually checking for specific SEO related information.

Though an SEO tool offers an opportunity to save time in gaining needed data quickly, tools do not replace the need to become familiar and experienced with SEO guidelines. Before an SEO tool can prove to be useful, one must first become accustomed to each of the major search engines and their algorithms to best understand and implement the data that you are researching into your own SEO project.

How Search Engines Work or How to Get to the Top Search Engine Ranking?

These two questions are actually the same, because if one understands how search engines work, he will probably be able to get a site to the top search engines ranking. Think about it.

Unfortunately, the answer is a complicated, dynamic and a secret one. The answer has to do with SEO – Search engines optimization. In fact, very few SEO experts, SEO consultants, SEO software and SEO companies can actually give you a perfect SEO solution.

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization Ideas..

SEO is of course search engine optimization; is the process of optimizing, or making your site good for, natural search engine rankings. I use the term natural search engine rankings to simply differentiate SEO from the purchased, or sponsored search engine rankings.

You might be asking yourself, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is improving your website so that when someone does a search in google, MSN, or other popular search engines, your website is a top return. It makes your website more accessible and improves the amount of clients who see, and therefore, visit it. Search engine optimization is a great way to help your business grow.