SEO Articles

SEO is an ever changing world. What clicked in 2007 is passé and what is in vogue today may be out of use tomorrow. Search engine change tactics and algorithms very fast and this way they can keep the black hat measures in check and also implement strategies to channel the ever-expanding volumes better. After all, the algorithm is a mathematical computation that is being affected by volume-change.

Think of back links. Back links or reciprocal linking was celebrated once but today its mass abuse has made top search engines like Google and yahoo ensure that the sites dealing in back links do not get any merit. The black hat measure of enhancing search engine ranking was not acceptable to the search engines though they could tolerate sites going for advertising through it. Also, inbound links from authentic, well-established websites are most welcome and they increase the prestige of a site.

Also, the entire theory behind keywords has changed. Earlier, deep keyword intensity was appreciated by search engines who thought that it was a smart means given to the sites to enhance their search engine rankings. Today, extra thrust on the keywords are being taken as a liability and such sites are not recommended by the engines.

This is because the emphasis of search engines has changed. Today, they look towards humans as the main focus and not themselves. According to search engines, the reason why sites do business is the visitors and in fact without the visitors nothing is worth it. Extra thrusting of keywords makes an article stretched and tedious. The unique element of an article is what a visitor comes to see. Yes, at times, the agenda is to shop and buy a service but most of the time its readership. In such a case, keywords can be a kill.

An advice from the search engines for the budding websites is to use long tail keywords. Search engines believe that long tail keywords bring sales whereas short tail keywords bring enquiries. Think of it. People who type “shoes” are least likely to buy shoes. Those who type “rexin poly-coated “shoe” are your buyers. This makes the long tail or the long stream keywords a success.

You must remember that the right ways of tweaking the Meta tags and page contents and also the correct way of page navigation along with dealing with HTML is the route to steer clear of Google-letdown.

You must remember the bots or spiders of Google can only read texts and not images. This is why it is more important to track the Google software and find out what part of your site is there for Google indexing. What cannot be indexed by Google cannot be read by it and hence it does not reach visitors.

Google might not be the giant anymore and the Yahoo split has really cut it in wrong places bringing its share down by 27 percent yet it rules the search engines and ensures that SEO does not incorporate any black hat manipulative measures from website owners.

It is easy to understand the different strategies of search engine optimization, but it is difficult to apply those strategies to a plan of action that will work to increase your website’s ranking. The key to proper search engine optimization is consistency and variety. You must constantly build links to your website utilizing different strategies. This is because SEO is not written in stone; search engines are always changing. To counter these constant changes, adding variety to your SEO efforts will offer a safety net in case a search engine changes its algorithm.

To create consistency and variety in your SEO efforts simply write out a plan of action detailing what types of strategies you will use and how often they will be conducted.

To create a simple plan you can use the rule of 5, meaning that you will plan to do 5 different SEO activities each day. You can submit articles, make a blog comment, submit your website to a website directory, post in a forum with a link in your signature, and social bookmark one of the pages on your site.

These 5 actions you take each day may be small, but you will build 150 links a month and 1800 in a year! This will definitely boost your ranking for a moderately competitive key phrase or two. If you have more competitive key phrases you want to rank well for, you can take the rule of 5 and use it in each category of link building. This is a lot of work, but it can be accomplished. It takes a great amount of devotion as well. Many people cannot do this type of work day after day because it gets boring. Consider hiring someone to do it for you.

Completing this link building strategy for one year will lead to 12,600 links pointing to your site. With this large amount of links, you will be able to rank in the top 10 for a competitive key phase as well as the top space on Google for less competitive key phrases.

Before you take on the task of creating this large search engine marketing project, you must write out a plan. The plan should contain specific details of the project. Create a monthly plan, a weekly plan, and a daily plan of action. Additionally, write out the key phrases you plan on targeting in 2 in two columns. One column will contain your key phrases listed in order from greatest to least KEI score, the other column will contain your key phrases listed in order from greatest traffic to least. A key phrase can have no competition but if it is not searched, it is worthless.

Now that you have everything written out, it is a matter of daily work. You have simplified SEO to basic tasks and you will see results in a few months or as soon as a few weeks. You may not reach the number one spot as soon as you would like, but given enough time with this consistent plan, you will see your rank rise high.

A critical step in your small business internet marketing efforts is on page search engine optimization. Search engine optimization as a whole involves three major steps:

1. On page optimization
2. Content editing and creation
3. Natural Link Building

The purpose of search engine optimization is to improve your natural rankings in the search engines so that when someone is searching for what you offer, your site will come up as one of the first sites listed.

For example, if you are a landscaping company in Arizona and someone goes to Google and does a search for the phrase “Arizona Landscaping Companies” you want to be on the first page of the search results so they will visit your site.

Why is SEO so important?

As a search engine optimization specialist, I have been able to see first hand why SEO is so important; because if done right, it completely levels the playing field against all of your competition. You can’t buy natural rankings, you can only achieve them as a result of good ethical search engine optimzation techniques.

As research has shown, natural search engine rankings provide higher click throughs as well as higher converting web traffic than other types of search engine traffic. Not to mention that once your website has high rankings in the search engines, all of the traffic you get is free. There is no other advertising venue that can offer anything similar.

Search Engine Optimization not only involves working with the code on your website including titles, meta tags and alt tags, it also involves properly written content that is readable to visitors and keyword rich for the search engines. You also must work with the code on the site as well as the site navigation to ensure that your website is indexed properly.

The other major factor in SEO is obtaining back links or in other words, getting websites to link to your website. Some search engines look at this as the #1 factor when they rank a website.

Many SEO professionals and Internet marketers think of page rank, the rating google gives to every website, as a worthless measure of their websites’ overall link popularity, but in fact it can be quite a useful tool.

Page rank is measured by the amount and quality of the links pointing to a website. For this reason page rank can be very important. For example, you can view many of the most popular sites and notice that their page ranks are usually quite high. The reason for this is because they have many links pointing to them and directing traffic to them. The most important aspect you must realize is that these links are not pointing to these sites by accident; webmasters have built a very large website with many different articles and a large amount of useful information.

The best SEO strategies can be taken from the sites with high page rank. These sites usually employ many strategies you should be using. Despite the fact that many of these sites also have larger budgets and can afford to add 10-50 pages of content per day, you can still use their strategies on a smaller scale. You can also use the site’s sources for your own content knowing that it will rank well in search engines.

Page rank also affects your website’s search engine rank. In some cases two websites can be built, one with zero page rank, and the other with a page rank of two. In many cases, the website with page rank two will rank better than the one without any page rank and the website without page rank has the better domain name. The reason for this is unknown, but we can assume page rank is one of the many methods Google uses to rank websites. Of course Yahoo or MSN, the other two high traffic search engines might not use page rank at all, but still may use other strategies.

In addition, page rank is a good indication that a website is worth spending money to buy text links on. Buying links on high page rank websites has been tested to work well for increasing both page ranks and website’s search engine ranking.

Many people become confused by page rank because when they ask Google to show them how many links point to their site (By querying: “links:http://yoursite.com”) Google only shows a small sample. By using Yahoo to do this task you have a better picture of the links pointing to your site.

So, before you condemn page rank like all the other marketers on forums, try to remember that it is a tool invented by Google to try and show the worth of a website based on link popularity. Even more importantly, people who pay to attention to page rank, overvalue the concept. They are willing to pay large sums to have their sites appear on pages with high page rank and are successful so although it is a good idea, you should be cautious.

When doing internal SEO for your site, it is important how you distribute your “Google juice” to all the links on your site.

After all, you don’t want to pass most of your Google juice to all the other – non-important to rank but still very important – links on your site and leave your home page with no strength to rank well in the search engine result pages!

So the question then becomes: To “follow” or “nofollow”
Points to consider:

- Sometimes it is good to share the link juice on your site, but in a limited fashion. However, when it comes to social community sites or forums, the limited use of nofollow is extremely crucial. A very popular forum may have up to 150,000 member profiles, most of them with links to their own sites or affiliate pages. It is important that you not give away all your link love to these links.

- For a CMS (content management system) that comes with nofollow links in it by default, it’s always a good idea to leave those links there otherwise Google might think you have something to hide.

- Should you absolutely use nofollow to guide the flow of the search engines’ link juice through your site? Not absolutely. Use it only to cut down page rank love to pages like the “Contact” page or even the “About” page.

To summarize: Analyze your situation carefully. Does your website warrant the use of nofollow? Busy web sites like forums and social network communities should probably use nofollow on their sites. But most sites, generally, don’t need to implement the nofollow structure.

Does Google really penalize your site for using “nofollow”?

- Generally, any large changes to your site could cause a Google engineer to stop and take another look at your site. So if you add a lot of nofollows and make the site fluctuate in the rankings, Google might begin to wonder if the site is still trustworthy.

- But then also doing a lot of changes of any other kind to your site, could affect the search engine results in the same way. If you notice fluctuations in the way your site ranks, it may be caused by the site changes you did and not necessarily the nofollows.

- Google engineer, Matt Cutts says that there is no problem using nofollow on your site. However, since SEO can sometimes tend to be a bit complicated, there might be an instance where using it a lot on your site could be a red flag to Google. For instance, it might flag the owner of the site as someone who knows SEO. While this is not inherently bad, if there are signs that merit the attention of a Google engineer, it might increase the chance of a human review.

Many people see SEO as a way to generate free traffic, but in reality, to more experienced marketers, it is more of a long term, permanent strategy that is used for promotion. Many Internet marketers try to optimize their websites in a way that is obviously spamming and throwing massive amounts of worthless pages with links onto the Internet. This content is created to try and boost ranking quickly, but in many cases, this strategy does nothing.

Marketers assume that visitors do not notice that these pages offer no real information except of the link to the products. Unfortunately, many people are surfing through the Internet so quickly that they do not notice these poor quality sites unless they receive a virus or Trojan. Some visitors continue to buy the products, which enables the Internet marketer to continue this shady strategy.

SEO should be used as a long ranged plan for a website and should only be a portion of a larger marketing strategy. Many times certain marketers can’t afford more than a few hundred dollars for their budget and some can’t afford any budget at all. These marketers turn to SEO as the main or only marketing strategy they use in order to generate free traffic with link building and article marketing.

The problem with using SEO as your only strategy for generating traffic is that it is limited. There are only so many visitors that you can gather from search engines. Of course, there are many cases where it is the only source a website needs, but this is not something that should be expected.

In addition, SEO takes a long time to generate any real results. The age of a website is an important factor in its ranking. Using other marketing methods such as buying links, banner space, and other promotional strategies will accelerate your efforts to generate traffic.

Finally, SEO can only work to a certain extent. When building links and optimizing a website, many search engines stunt the amount of ranking a website can gain. Google and other search engines have built in systems that attempt to figure out if your site is gaining popularity naturally or through your SEO manipulation.

For these reasons and more, search engine optimization must be used in moderation in a consistent fashion. You can create a plan of action that can be used for building links and creating content, but remember the number one need for a search engine is to have the most relevant material on the top. Most people searching for information will be completely satisfied with the top 10 results that are given.

This is the reason why the require offsite and onsite SEO. It is your job to go beyond onsite SEO into link building and other offsite methods because all of your competitors who probably have similar onsite optimization.

One of the most important steps in search engine optimization is selecting the key phrases that you want to optimize for. Many SEO professionals call this keyword research but I like to refer to it as key phrase research because in this day and age of SEO, it is not realistic to try to rank for any one word.

Some things to look for when doing key phrase research:
The type of key phrases used in optimization should match the theme and popularity of the client’s website. For example, if the client is a real estate agent in Denver Colorado, it wouldn’t make sense to optimize for the phrase “real estate” as this phrase is much too broad and competitive relative to the theme of the client’s site. Because the client’s website is geographically specific to Denver the key phrases would need to be Denver specific accordingly. So a more relevant phrase would be “Denver Colorado real estate”.

Additionally, some industries are more competitive than others in the search engine world. A good example would be the real estate industry. Because there are so many realtors who have websites in every city and they all target the same key phrases, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to rank for the highest searched terms. It is important to use discretion when determining which key phrases the client’s site will have the best chance to rank for.

Deciding whether you can choose to optimize for really competitive phrases depends on at what level your website is.

Some things you should look for to help determine this would be:
~ Your page rank on Google
~ The age of your website
~ How many of the website’s pages are indexed in the search engines
~ How many back links your website has

Such a big part of getting high rankings in the search engines is knowing how to improve link popularity. For example, Google looks at links as the main factor on how they rank websites in their search results. Links give the search engines an idea of how important a website is. By seeing how many other websites link to yours, they can tell whether or not your site is important. Each link pointing to your site counts as a vote for your website’s importance.

Another important factor of improving link popularity is the knowledge that it does matter what links point to your site. In other words, not all links are created equal. When you begin the process of building link popularity, there are some important principles to remember:

» Avoid Link Farms and Free For All links pages at all costs – many search engines will not recognize these as legitimate links
» Get links from websites that are relevant to your website - the closer the website is related to your the more weight it will carry
» Get links from websites that have many back links - search engines look at linking many levels deep, if a site that links to you has many links pointing to it, its a better link for you
» Try to get non-reciprocating links to your site - when you link back to the person who is linking to you it carries less weight with the search engines, try to get one way links
» Submit to as many directories as possible - you never know which directories will help improve link popularity so submit to a lot of them, just make sure they offer a one way link (no reciprocation)

Buying Text Links

There is some debate in the SEO industry on whether or not buying text links really work. I recently read a blog post from an employee of Google that said that when they find sites that are selling blocks of 10-20 text links, Google will not count any links found on those websites. He even specifically pointed out links sold by Text-Link-Ads.com as ones that are worthless.

Having said that, there is debate that these links do help with Yahoo and MSN. So the tough decision is whether the increase in rankings you get from Yahoo and MSN is worth the price of the link.

My advice would be that if you are happy solely with the traffic that you get directly from people clicking on the link, then it is worth paying for it, otherwise spend your money elsewhere.

Link Building The Right Way

Over the years I have worked with over 200 websites as an SEO consultant. The advantage of having worked with so many different sites is that I could effectively test what works and what doesn’t work.

During that process I have learned how to build link popularity for clients to make it look as natural as possible to the search engines, thus maximizing search engine rankings.

The biggest thing to consider when trying to improve your link popularity is that search engines want to see links that are naturally added to the web. Many of the link building services out there will help you get alot of new links but these links hold little value in the eyes of the search engines.

For example, reciprocal links used to have a great effect on rankings, now you probably get 10 emails a day that tell you how great your site is and that you should do a link exchange with them. Because this process is so abused, these types of links have been discounted.

A natural link is one that is embedded into the content and flow of a website. For example, a natural link would be one where in the middle of this paragraph, we link to another site because they are a good resource on the subject I am talking about. Just like the phrase “natural link” above is a link to another site.

These types of links aren’t reciprocal, and they don’t appear to a search engine to be purchased so the SE’s give them more weight.

Some tools for effective link building

One Way Text Links – As one way links have become a hot topic in the SEO world, this website will allow you to track your submissions to over 600 directories that will give you a one way link. Since most of the websites are free, this is by far the most cost effective way to improve link popularity.

Need Help Building Your Link Popularity?

Since there’s been a lot of confusion and questions lately about the “importance of”, the “how to’s” and “what if’s” regarding link building, I thought I’d post a few tips on how to go about getting some link love for your site or business.

First of all, without getting links to your website, it’s very hard, almost impossible, to rank for your search term(s). That’s why it’s important. You need some links pointing to your site and content. Website submission services do not work. In fact, I would not recommend that you submit your new website to Google.

Submitting your site to Google basically informs Google that your website is new and what Google will do is then put it in the dreaded “sandbox”. Once in the sandbox, Google will monitor your site to make sure it’s not a spammy site and that it can be trusted. This process can take from a few months to a year.

So the best way to avoid all that is to have other sites (the popular, the better) linking to you. The Google spider bots will find your links on those popular sites and then index your site that way. Your site won’t need to spend time in the sandbox with no traffic.

So now that we have established the importance of getting links, let’s see how to get those links.

Using community websites and forums.
There’s literally a forum for every topic out there. All you need to do is Google “your topic name+the word forum”. Register and post on these forums. Do not spam. Just post helpful tips and advice that help the other users on the forum. That way, you will gain trust and more business.

And if you get an itch to post about how wonderful your site is, just remember, people nowadays are bombarded with ads everyday. So do not actively promote your website or even say how good your company or amazing it’s products are.

Another thing to do on a forum, is to set up your signature link in your forum profile. This signature is actually a link to your site and on very popular forums that are crawled a lot by the bots, it is always a good thing to have your signature. Some forums may require a few posts from you before allowing you to put a link in your signature. So do it and then move on to another forum.

Make sure that the posts you write in the forums are meaningful otherwise the other members of the forum will turn you in quickly and get you removed.

Write and Submit articles to news sites and social sites.
Everybody has a story to tell. If you create interesting readable content people will link to it.
So just write your story, in the most exciting way possible, and submit it to the social news sites out there. If it is interesting, people will link to it. Lots of people.

Next time we will look at even more methods of gaining inbound links.

Back links have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become the main building block to good SEO. Thus by exploring the anchor text of a site’s back links, you will get an idea of your competitors’ link building strategy, understand what people think of the site and also get help with your keyword research (webmasters usually focus on their most important keywords when building links).

SEO

Outside of SEO, the back links of a web page may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest. These links indicate who is paying attention and to what page. While it is also true that search engines do not punish you if you have back links from link farms or black hat sites (because you have no control over what bad guys link to), if you decide to enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts.

Another thing with the SEO gurus is that many of the so called SEO guru’s have been known to show a lack of understanding regarding where page rank comes from, and how internal and external links distribute page rank between pages. Make sure your SEO professional shows a clear understanding of page rank and the effect of your site rankings on Google based on the external and internal linkage of your site.

Page rank

In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of back links is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important). The scale for PageRank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the page providing the link. Google engineer Matt Cutts has publicly indicated that the Toolbar PageRank values are republished about once every three months, indicating that the Toolbar PageRank values are historical rather than real-time values. If you have an internal architectural problem and your PageRank is spread across thousands of pages of duplicate content then some of your good content will end up in Google’s supplemental results, and won’t rank for much.

Rankings

Rankings are important, but not the whole story. SEO should be judged by bottom-line improvement, not arbitrary Google rankings. Every month when the Google bots start re-indexing your website looking for new content and keywords, it’s always a good idea to keep track of how your Google rankings are going. However, there is a school of thought that says that interlinking between sites, such as 100 or so sites, on one server or IP can lead to lower rankings in Google. Google generally identifies a network of interlinked sites on one server as a link-farm and may penalize you based on that fact alone, so be careful where you link and who you link to.