The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #3 “Duplicate Content”

Among those well versed in internet marketing, duplicate content is something of a sticky issue. The exact nature of the problem is in what constitutes duplicate content, with some internet marketers insist anything that has previously been written on any other website qualifies as duplicate content – while others say it only matters for the same text to be repeated on the same website.

The exact definition is not exactly known, and isn’t helped by the fact that the search engines are not particularly forthcoming on the issue. However, if you are found to be using duplicate content on your website and a search engine does have an issue with it, you can kiss goodbye to a good ranking with that search engine.

It is more likely – though not certain – that the duplicate content rule applies to text used within the same site. You should not, for example, make lots of pages all using the same article with no changes. This is the lesser version of duplicate content, though some marketers still exist search engines frown on the same article or text being used from anywhere on the internet will trigger a duplicate content penalty.

The idea, of course, is to avoid plagiarism and for search engines to avoid publishing results that show the same text over and over again. To be absolutely sure you’re not committing the duplicate content sin, always write and use original content, both within your website and externally. That way, you can be sure – no matter who is right and wrong in the debate – that you aren’t going to be penalized for it.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #2 “Cloaking”

All the major search engines compete to make their search results as relevant, up to date and informative as possible. For a search engine to be considered effective, and therefore gain users, it relies on its reputation for providing the right information for any given search term.

They’re right for assuming this. Imagine you were looking for some tips on how to clean your windows, and you used a search engine you’re unfamiliar with. If you visited a site through this new search engine, and it brought you to a website on adult porn – you wouldn’t be too happy, would you? In fact, you’d probably dismiss the search engine as useless, and wouldn’t bother to use it again.

That’s why search engines take an issue known as ‘cloaking’ so very seriously. If their livelihoods depend on the search results being accurate and informative, search engines have a duty to their own business ethics – as well as their customers – to frown upon cloaking, and they do. Do it, and your website will be removed from search results and most likely blacklisted.

So what is cloaking? Cloaking is the practice of writing a piece of programming that means human visitors to your website see something very different from what a search engine bot crawling your website sees. If you cloak effectively, you could indeed disguise your adult site as something as harmless as cleaning windows – and you’d benefit from a good SEO ranking. You’d also, unfortunately, ruin the search engine results – and they can’t be having that. When it comes to cloaking, avoid.

Search Engine Friendly Pages

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #1 “Hidden Text”

Anyone with a basic understanding of search engine optimization will know that text on a website plays a large part in how you are ranked in search engines. In fact, it could be argued that the textual content of a website is actually the most important thing for search engines.

It’s therefore natural for the cunning mind to wonder if it’s possible to introduce sections of ‘hidden text’. Imagine you’re not the best writer in the world, and you don’t want to have to spend a lot of money outsourcing content creation. Yet at the same time, you’re aware of the importance that search engines place on textual content. So rather than writing poor articles yourself, trying to jam your keywords in, you can simply write the keywords into a spare section of your website – and then changed the font color so it is the same, or virtually the same, as the background of the page. Suddenly, your website is stuffed with keywords, but all without having to publish poor articles or ruin the look and feel of your website in general.

This practice goes by a variety of names, including font matching and keyword stuffing. However, whatever you call it, it’s a bad deal.

Why? Well, the reason is obvious – it’s a cheat. Google, and the other major search engines, place an importance on text content because they want their search results to be relevant. Hidden text defeats the point of this, and if you’re caught doing it, you will have your website banned from the search engine – for good.

What Is Robots.txt?

For a search engine to keep their listings up to date, and present the most accurate search engine results, they perform an action known as a ‘crawl’. This is essentially sending a ‘bot’ (sometimes known as a ’spider’) out to crawl the internet. The bot will then find new pages, updated pages or pages it did not previously know to exist. The end result of the crawl is that the search engine results page is updated, and all of the pages found on the last crawl are now included. It’s simply a method of finding sites on the internet.

However, there may be some instances where you have a website page you do not want included in search engine results. For example, you may be in the process of building a page, and do not want it listed in search engine results until it is completed. In these instances, you need to use a file known as robots.txt to tell a search engine bot to ignore your chosen pages within your website.

Robots.txt is basically a way of telling a search engine “don’t come in here, please”. When a bot finds a robots.txt file, it will ‘read’ it and will duly ignore all the URLs contained within. Therefore pages within the file do not appear in search results. It isn’t a failsafe; robots.txt is a request for bots to ignore the page, rather than a complete block, but most bots will obey the information found within the file. When you are readied for the page to be included in a search engine, you simply modified your robots.txt file and remove the URL of the designated page.

Why Is SEO Important?

Think back to the days before the internet, when everyone looked for business listings in the Yellow Pages or a similar hard copy directory. Now, imagine you’re trying to find a plumber. You go to the “P” page, flick through, and only see three plumbers listed.

It’d be a massive advantage for the three plumbers, wouldn’t it? To effectively be all that potential customers see. Well, that’s the power of SEO.

When someone uses a search engine, they type in a set of words to bring up results that are relevant to them. Once the applicable websites appear on the results page, they are rated in terms of ‘relevancy’. Any website which has correctly used search engine optimization will be judged by Google to be ‘relevant’. So if you have correctly used SEO, your website will appear somewhere near the top of the search engine results page – hopefully in the top three.

Why is that so important? Well, studies have shown that the vast majority of those using search engines only click on websites listed in the top three results of any search engine results page. This is where it compares to being only one of three businesses listed in an old-style paper directory like the Yellow Pages. Master SEO, and your website will appear in high in search results, in the slots (one to three) that users click. That naturally leads on to more people visiting your website, and that in turn means more business, more customers, and ultimately more money.

What Is SEO?

“SEO” stands for “search engine optimization”, and as the name would suggest, it’s all about utilizing your website so that search engines can find it easily.

When someone searches for a website, they will key a few choice words in to their chosen search engine. For example, if they’re looking for a restaurant in New York, they’ll probably type something like: “good new york restaurant” or even just “new york restaurant”. SEO is all about making sure your website appears at the top of the search results for any given phrase like this.

Obviously the phrase is dependent on your niche, what you’re selling or what services you offer – but good SEO practices are about reducing your site down to those key words that people type into Google. There would be no point, in the example, for a great New York restaurant to have their website online but not have it come up under search results for “new york restaurant”.

However, with hundreds of thousands of websites online, there are literally thousands of pages that could turn up results for (again, using the example) “new york restaurant”. SEO is the method used to beat all the other websites, and get yourself as high in the search results as possible. As most users will tend to visit a website from the top three search results and completely neglect the rest, the efficacy of your SEO really can make or break the success of your website. And if your business in general is dependent on your website, then SEO can be the difference between success or failure in the business world.

Get Traffic To Your Websites With 0$ Cost

There’s one and only strict rule in getting visitors and income from your site: A steady flow of site`s traffic. If no one attends your web site, it hardly bares a chance of making any money for you. Many web sites have tried and went wrong in doing so and these leads to the sites death. It takes money to maintain a revenue generating site; it also takes a lot of money sometime to make residual income online.
BUT, it does not need a whole caboodle of hard cash to generate site traffic for your web site.
Did you ever question yourself how does these big hit web sites get traffic to their web site? Some of them are spending lots of money to drive the hits to their web site, investing in a lot of ad campaign and different types of marketing systems and strategies. This is totally worthy because, well, they’re what they’re at present, high earning, and mega super duper sites.

You do not need to do all this if you do not really have their kind of resources. There are a lot of techniques to generate affordable site traffic without being forced to spend what you do not have or can not afford. A lot of people have banked on high cost techniques and have landed up everything they had.

Here I present to you the Top 4 ways to bring forth affordable site hits that could help your web site a good deal. Even if you just get a low part of productive visitors in to client ratio it will still works specially if you acquire a high number of site`s hits.

1.    Exchange Links With Other Relevant Sites To Attract Their Visitors

This is a trusted and established method. Rarely would you see a web site where there’s no outbound link to a different site. Many webmasters are wishing to exchange links with each other so that they could develop more common awareness about their web site. You’ll shortly see and feel the sudden upsurge of the hits coming in to your web site from other web sites.

A major requirement in exchanging links with other web sites possesses the same niche or content as the other site. They must share a common topic and audience so that there is continuity in the providing of service and info to what concerns your target audience.

Exchanging links will also boost your chances of getting a high ranking in SE results. It is basic knowledge that SEs ranks high web sites that have inbound and outbound same kind of links. With a nice high ranking position in the SEs, you’ll generate a lot more hits into in your site without the high costs.

2.    Write and Submit Articles to top article directories

There are a lot of ezines and internet encyclopedias in the World Wide Web which provides give up space for content to be put in. If you would like to save costs, you should do the articles yourself. There are a lot of self-employed authors who are willing to compose a high quality for you for a low price, but to save money for a long run; it is advisable to write those articles yourself.

Compose articles that are themed with the topic of your web site. Write something that you’ve expertise on so that as they read it, they could sense your knowledge around the subject and will be much more eager to go to your web site. Write article that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your web site has.

Always include a resource box at the end of your articles that can link back to your site. Write a bit about yourself and your web site. If you provide a light, informative and interesting article, they will surely go to your site for more information about the subject.

3.    Make a Newsletter to keep in touch with your audience.

This could feel like a hard work because of all the articles you would need to use to build a newsletter but contrarily, this is not so right. There are a lot of authors and web sites that are willing to offer costless articles, reports as long as they can acquire their name in on your newsletter. This will also offer free advertisement for them as well, so it is beneficial for both of you.

As your newsletter gets broadcast, you are able to broaden your public knowingness and build an opt-in mailing list that can dramatically increase the chances of your success online.

4.    Join Online Communities and Forums for laser targeted traffic.

This simply requires your some time and nothing more. You just need to share your knowledge and expertness with many internet communities also as your site. You will be able to get free advertisement when you attend forums that have the same niche as your web site.

Share your 2 cents and allow them to understand how well-educated you are about that particular subject. As you keep building your reputation, you are also building the reputation of your web site, making it a respectable and dependable business that could be frequented and trusted by a lot of people.

Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a pre written title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.spam,

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

Increase Your Websites Traffic With Proven Methods

Proven Techniques to Increase Your Website`s Ranking and Traffic

It is no doubt worth noting the basic techniques that are needed to be used in order to increase your website`s traffic and SERP and hence improve your revenue..

·    Produce a web site with useful and informative content, merchandises or services.
·    Do not consider your site as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, changing sales tool and location, exactly like your genuine store.
·    Place your main 1st and 2nd keywords within the 1st twenty-five words in your page`s content and spread them equally throughout the written document.
·    Search and use the proper keywords/phrases to pull in your target purchasers.
·    Keep your web site designing as simple as it get so that your visitors can navigate well between different web pages on your website, find what they desire and buy products and services.
·    Make your buyer visit easily and give them lot of styles to think of you in the form of mailing lists, free eBooks, discount coupons etc.
·    Submit your website i.e. all web pages and not only the home page of your site, to the most popular SEs and directory services. You can also hire some freelance individual to do so, whenever required. Make sure this is a manual submission. Don’t get engaged in a machine-controlled (automatic) submission service.
·    Always observe the changes in SE algorithms and actions and consequently alter your web pages so that your SE top-ranking stays on high. Use web tools and freeware to observe how your site is doing.
·    Use Tracking systems to see where your hits are coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether SEs or links from other web sites and the keywords they used to reach your site.
·    Use your keywords in the right areas and sources within your web page. Such as Title tag, META tags Headings, etc.
·    Demo your industry and product or service expertise by publishing and submitting articles for your site or for article sites so you’re sensed as an expert in your market.
·    When selling products on internet, make use of simple payment methods to make your buyers feel fast and comfortable.
·    Monitor your competitions and the top ranking sites to see what they’re doing in the way of design, navigation, articles, key phrases, etc.
·    In case you are not sure about something, hire professionals in that particular field. Though it may seem expensive to do so, but it’s much lesser expensive than wasting your money and time on a site which nobody visits.