What is the worst that could happen in SEO? Would your web site survive if Google was no longer the number one search engine? What if all the search engines changed their algorithms? If you do not constantly evolve and constantly grow, then you are guaranteed to be on the next list of web sites ruined by the changing tides of SEO.You’ll find Matt Cutts’ blog on that list, as well as several that I’ve mentioned in this article and others that I’ve been meaning to start reading (Marketing Pilgrim, Stuntdubl, etc).Checking with the monthly Employment and Earnings Report for February 2008 from the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average weekly earnings for information workers in the U.S. is $879.55, or about $44,000 for a 50 week work year. Most web sites want to offer their visitors something of value. If you can show a site owner how a link to your site would help its users, you stand a good chance of getting a link from that site. You shouldn’t actually request a link so much as focus on the value your site offers so the site owner will think of linking to you himself. Maximum Tadpole said he has seen a favorable response rate of five to ten percent with a simple email that reads like so: “I have created a web site for nursing students called which could be very valuable to your graduating nurses. It is a free site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. If you find time, please visit our site, and consider linking to it from your site, as it would certainly be a resource for your students. Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks for your time and have a nice day!” Who would find it most valuable? Where do these people “hang out” online, and how can you get them to come to you?This is great if you have an unusual type of site, or niche content. But there is a good chance that if you’ve thought of it, someone else has too. There is nothing wrong with guarantees like this, however: “We guarantee a x percentage increase in traffic by x date.” That is a far more reasonable guarantee to offer. Unfortunately, that kind of specific guarantee usually can’t be offered until the SEO firm has a good handle on what your site is doing in the SERPs and where its flaws might be. Sites that were built with millions of dollars of venture capital went belly up with the first dot-com bust, simply because they refused to change when faced with new challenges. The list of such sites goes on indefinitely; I won't bore us by reciting them here. But let me say that the churn rate for failed websites has increased.You must reinvent yourself. You will need to use constantly changing technology to keep your web site on the cutting edge and avoid looking like you just came off Noah's Ark. Organic SEO must be truly adaptive, able to change to accommodate changing needs. At this point you’re ready to do your on page optimization. Using your key words, place unique targeted title tags on each page. This is the title element. If you’re having a hard time coming up with a title for the page, Maximum Tadpole suggests a way to think about it: “If each page of your site is a book, what would you title it? Make sure your title matches the content of the page.” He also suggests trying to keep your title tag under five words. It’s very important to make sure that your title matches the content of your pages; if it doesn’t, change either the title or the content until they match. In general, we can see that most respondents are self-taught, followed by on-site training and formal classes. However, this graph breaks down responses by the type of company a respondant works for, and helps to answer questions like "If a respondent works at an SEM agency, how likely is it that he or she learned SEO and how does that compare to respondents at other types of companies?" The chart indicates that respondents from SEM agencies, and non-self-employed respondents in general, received on-site traning more often than, for instance, self employed consultants. Now, let us consider some of SEO methods / practices - 1) SE Friendly Design - Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Making a website according to guidelines by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live will definetly help in directory index, find, and rank your website. 2) Content - Website content should be relevant to the particular page and should be optimized with the targeted keywords. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking" which is an unethical way. As for other tags, you’ll want to use Meta and key word tags for your home page, but the jury’s out as to whether those are valuable for any other pages on your site. But there are other details you’ll want to tend to – doing a 301 redirect to send non-www pages to the www versions. You should also optimize every internal link on your site with relevant text, including alt tags for images. Broken links, faulty images, HTML errors and even missing meta-tags are accounted for and reported in a clearly legible way. Maximum Tadpole gives an example of having a site focused on soccer with a soccer ball logo in the upper left hand corner that takes visitors to the home page when they click on it. Rather than “home” as your alt text, you might consider making it “soccer.” You can probably come up with something even better, perhaps “soccer home.”* No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever. The difference between failed websites and successful ones is growth. One of the biggest success stories of recent times is that of (a company that provides video game emulators for the PC). But Ngemu kept growing, and after close to three years in obscurity, they can now boast of 58,000 registered users.But if you can see the rapid changing algorithms, uncertain updates with tough guidelines from directory makes the tasks harder and complex with every update. It’s like you should be consistent with your research work and more actively involved at some good SEO forums.So…how is such a thing done? Considering Keywords At this point, you need to start thinking like the people you’re targeting. When they search for the valuable products and/or information you’re offering, what kinds of keywords are they likely to use? Temper this by also considering which keywords the site even has a chance of competing for, at least at first. You can go for the more competitive ones later. To use the example of the free web site on which Maximum Tadpole was working, he explained that “I decided ‘Nurse Careers’ and ‘Nursing Job Advice’ were better choices than ‘Nurse Jobs’ and ‘Nursing Careers’ for the home page.” The secret behind this is that, by “first optimizing for less competitive keywords” you’re actually in a “better position to go after the more competitive ones in the future.” Don’t limit yourself to the home page, of course; you want to write down the best key words for each page of the site. Building Relationships and Making Money Using great content and having an easily navigable site ensures that you will grow relationships with your customers that will translate to long profitability. Ethical practices, ethical hits, and long term relationships will bring you long term money.Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. Indeed, the next steps in this phase of your campaign involve figuring out how to get in touch with those people – and figuring out how to get them to come to you. After you’ve thought about all these points for the site as a whole, you want to think about them again (though not in quite as much depth) for the parts of the site to which you will want to build links aggressively, such as category pages.Checking with the monthly Employment and Earnings Report for February 2008 from the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average weekly earnings for information workers in the U.S. is $879.55, or about $44,000 for a 50 week work year. We all know practitioners of black hat SEO use techniques to outrageously manipulate the SERPs so their sites, all undeserving, reach the top of the rankings. They're clearly evil. Every SEO analysis, just like every SEO project, should be customized and geared toward that company's specific needs at this very moment in time. Examples of vague findings would be "You're not in the top ten results for this keyword." "Unless you understand the way of other schools, you cannot understand the way of my individual school." Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings Now that you know what value the site has to offer, you need to figure out who would benefit from that value. Maximum Tadpole was working on a free web site with job opportunity listings and career advice for nurses. Clearly, this information would be of most benefit to nurses, especially nurses who were just graduating from nursing school. Keep this audience clearly in mind, because much of the rest of your strategy is going to depend on them. The Black hat is maligned by the press and public, hated by White hats, and viewed with fascination by website owners. Sites optimized using Black hat techniques are banned (when found out) by search engines. Email providers have spent time and money shutting out spam mails, search engines routinely invest in new technologies to catch directory spammers, and spam blockers are now second to pop up blockers and firewalls on the Internet. Black hats are unquestionably "evil." Or are they?Nowadays, Blogs, articles and social bookmarks sites are also a good source in website promotion. We are saying directory optimization process is website promotion. So, we have to understand what really website promotion is – promotion of website means promotion of your website link. The very first step he took for the site was opening a Google Analytics account. This free service from Google is designed to help you discover where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. This important information can help you make changes to your site to increase your traffic and make your site friendlier to visitors. However you decide to do it, it's important to have an obvious way for your site visitors to communicate with you.“…if you are a local plumber, does it help you make any sales to talk about that one clogged toilet that took six hours to fix, flooded the house, and has reached legendary status amongst your peers?” One of the most brazen attacks I’ve heard of involved social engineering. Lenny de Rooy, an SEO specialist at Tribal IM, reported this attack back in March of 2007. The email went on to threaten that if the link was not removed, “I will write an ABUSE MESSAGE to your Internet Service Provider and your hosting company and will complain that your site gives a harmful traffic to my site!” Black Hat SEO, a Necessary Evil - Search Engines Play God What makes a website designer or marketer explore the dark side? It is a journey that begins with the request of a client for "traffic." My directory experience began when my first client for my web site skills (my dad) requested hits. I discovered the CONTENT and DESCRIPTION Meta tags soon after, but by the time I had gone up a few grades in the school of hard knocks (actual time spent building dozens of websites for "I want it done by yesterday" clients who weren't my blood relatives), I started looking for the code to Google's page ranking algorithm. Combine the above with search engines whose only loyalty is to traffic towards themselves, and who periodically change algorithms and indices used in indexing sites. It's easy to see how somebody could get very desperate to get traffic by "any means necessary"Whatever you keyword phrase is, make sure you give it prominence within a page component (TITLE tag, DESCRIPTION meta tag, body text, etc.). A word at the top of a page is more prominent than one at the bottom. The same goes for a word at the beginning of a tag compared to one at the end. Search engines look for prominence when determining what a particular page is about. Making the decision to invest in your website by hiring an SEO firm can be tricky; and once you have decided on doing just that, how do you know how to decide among SEO companies? Do you choose a large firm with lots of different employees to contribute to your project? Or do you go with an individual SEO consultant without all of the overhead of the large company for a more personal, one on one experience? Are SEO consultants like lawyers: the more you pay per hour, the more they do for you? Or do you go for the cheapest package available to you? It goes without saying that you should fix any broken links reported to you by your visitors. Which brings me to the next point: visitor feedback is golden. It can lead to a form with a text box for the visitor to fill in. That’s assuming you’ve set up your site so that they can crawl it (more on that in a bit).If you want to achieve higher rankings of your web pages, you can avail of the services of excellent SEO service providers. It is always encouraged to go for one that guarantees high rankings for your site and one that has a comprehensive list of available services. When a mechanic tunes a car, he makes sure it is functioning to factory specs, and measures it against certain standards. You can do the same thing with your web site. For instance, does the HTML code on your site validate to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards? You can run it through the W3C's own validator to find out. Presumably your site is not static; in that case, you'll have to validate your site's HTML regularly. You should also find out whether your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Concluding There are a few other myths, especially concerning professionals, the tools they use to optimize, and the search engines themselves. These myths are spread by pseudo experts and some other SEO "experts." Hopefully with time we will cover some more myths that have not been treated on SEO Chat before.If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, and click on "File a Complaint Online Does your marketing strategy have a preference as to which sort of prospect you seek? Is it a mixture of both? If so, what is the percentage breakdown? Your directory optimization company should be asking you these questions in order to bring you the most qualified prospects. In addition to blog entries, it offers a newsletter and other resources to help you optimize your web site.If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO. Joke Break Here are a few myths that are truly hilarious (and hopefully are just jokes). I found them on various threads and discussion boards across the net, especially here.They actually find ways that are acceptable to the SEO averse search engines to optimize their sites and get a high page ranking. *Google hates me. *The only directory is Google. *There are a million search engines. *AdWords are moving to the left of the screen. *You won't get caught for spam. *Matt Cutts hates me. *All SEO wear hats. It means your website is being popular to the online visitors. 3) Link Building – the techniques includes one-way link service and link exchanging services. One way links are those link directed to your website on any other website which is not so easy to gain and helps in making more back links to a website. Second one is link exchanging which is a partnership between two websites. We can simply say it exchanging of links which is also good method to increase website back links. The Black hat "Black hat" techniques, unethical and (perhaps) illegal SEO practices to generate directory traffic have spawned feelings of fear among website owners seeking to optimize and lawsuits against search engines by companies who have had their websites banned or penalized by the search engines. Companies live in fear of being penalized for an error in SEO that is perceived as an unethical practice. Articles are written to tell us all how bad spamming is. Meanwhile a fringe group of SEO practitioners have embraced "Black hat" techniques. As surely as shadow is where light is, the Black hat has come to stay. We all have, as Internet users, without a doubt experienced email spamming. As website marketers, we may have indulged in some email spamming, or in key word spamming, or article spamming, or directory spamming. Once you have that account, the next few steps involve some serious site contemplation. What value does the site have to offer? Is it selling products or offering content? What kind of content – articles, classified ads, what? To use SEO Chat as an example, our site offers articles, SEO tools, and a set of forums with plenty of networking opportunities. So, by both methods in link popularity services, we make our link listed on other website, means giving website links to get popular to online customers and visitors. There are so many websites that are looking for link exchange campaigns for the their websites and also buy one way links with web pages that have a higher Google PageRank. *Matt Cutts is leaving for MSN. *People on SEO forums actually ALL know SEO. *Hidden text works. *Black hat SEO and White hat SEO are easily distinguishable. *SEO guarantees number one ranking. *SEO is rocket science. *SEO doesn't take time. *My competition hates me (okay, that may not be a myth). All SEO is evil The search engines view any attempt to manipulate your rankings as bad. It shows up the weakness in what is supposed to be an impartial or perfect ranking system. It may allow a poor, irrelevant site to become number one. This will make traffic go to other search engines, seeking more relevant results. Search engines don't see Black hat or White hat. All they see is a man or woman with a mission to show up their system. However, you could not get business if your clients could not understand the SEO processes and failed to persuade their bosses. In addition, SEO firms should apply optimization techniques with a consideration of usability of websites. Do not make the site look silly or unprofessional. Also, clients would not mind your using of optimization software such as Webposition Gold and they do want to know how you would serve them.
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