Why Content is King.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 20-08-2009

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You have heard it time and time again: Content is King. Yet still people ignore the truth of this common-sense phrase. People use the web to find information its the content of a page that is important to them, because thats why theyre there.

The content of a page is the primary thing that a search engine will look at when considering your site. The meta tags and the hidden text that many people like to place on their pages in order to draw search engines to their sites is much less important to the search engine. Many search engines dont even consider meta tags any more. Dont get me wrong, meta tags are a necessity when optimizing, but they are much less important than content.

Hidden text is not only skipped over by most search engines, it can give you serious problems with search engines. The king of search engines, Google, will remove sites from its index if they utilize hidden text. Hidden text is categorized as text that is the same color (or similar color to) the background or text that is the set as transparent using CSS.

When people arrive at your site, one of two things will happen. They will either find something of interest and stay, or theyll turn around and leave. They make this decision within seconds. You need to have things that people want to read, or all your precious click-throughs will be for nothing. If you cant come up with something to put on the front page of your site, hire a writer. Writers are there to create reasons for people to stay. They get paid for a reason, they are worth while.

You can never have too much information its a fact that people want information. The web is great for information because you can find so much out there with so little effort. Hidden somewhere in all that information, you can be sure theres something that youd love to find. Search engines are there to help you uncover it.

You could take some of this information and tailor it to your websites needs, using bits and pieces that will be easy to read and useful to your visitors. The more interested in your website a visitor is, the more likely that theyll stay a while, and come back some other time. You might even see some money from them, sooner or later.

Borrowing content word-for-word isnt the way to go, though, because of copyright laws but you can always create your own content. Remember that the most valuable web content is unique information that no-one can find elsewhere.

Another great method for delivering content is to provide RSS feeds from other sites straight onto your site. Many sites i.e. the New York Times site will allow you to put their RSS feeds onto your site. An RSS feed is basically an online news bulletin. If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or lower you probably havent encountered RSS. If you use FireFox or Opera for your web browser, you probably already know how great RSS can be for personal use. Imagine having all of that content available on your web site without having to pay a writer!

When selling products and services, make sure that you have enough information about your products features. Include everything anyone could ever want to know about your product. If you are running an affiliate site, buy a few of the products that you are selling and use them on a regular basis. This will give you the opportunity to find out what their major selling points are and allow you to make them into featured products and provide high quality reviews.

Think of it as leading your reader for a walk through your mind arrange the site to help your readers see what you see.

For example: a page on music, could lead to a page on rock music, which in turn leads to one about the various forms of music, which leads to a page on equipment, and so on and on. Each page on the site can lead into the next, in a reasonable progression of thought. Your content becomes not only new but also fun to experience, as you make it easy for the reader to understand where youre coming from. Tell a story with your pages.

Warning! You Cant Fool Google.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 19-08-2009

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Almost daily, I see a report about a company or individuals who is trying to fool Google through SEO. When are they going to learn that you just cant fool Google? Why would you even want to try it, with when you risk being banned from the biggest search engine in the world? Many people seem to try just because they wonder if it could ever be done. As a general rule of thumb: it can’t!

There are some instances in which people think that they have tricked google. They believe that something that they have done has rocketed their site to the top of Google’s listings and they truly believe that they have managed to “stick it to the man.” Nine times out of ten when this happens they either performed an SEO procedure that Google allows or even endorses or they just happened to fill Google’s criteria better than other sites in their category without even realizing it.

Once in a while someone will actually come up with a way to fool Goggle. They will be enjoy a nice high spot on google’s listings for maybe even several months, but then the end comes for these proud sites. As soon as Goggle notices that it has been cheated, these sites are removed from the index; sometimes permanently.

The fact is that these people dont understand the power that Goggle has. Anyone with a real interest in making money from the web should consider that getting banned from the search engines effectively removes your site from the web. They dont have to let you back in, and they dont have to give you any right to respond youre entirely at their mercy. You dont want to get in their bad books.

Aside from the fact that Goggle will remove you from its listings, there is another incentive against trying to fool Goggle. If you fool Goggle, you are fooling your clients. There is no reason to try to lure visitors onto your page expecting to get something and really giving them something else. This is a poor way to conduct business and more often than not it will chase the customer away for good.

If you want your website to be found in categories that dont apply to it, try purchasing ads on pages that are listed towards the top of the Goggle listings in these categories. You can actually increase your sites reputation in Googles eyes rather than hurting it by adding another link to your site. This is an excellent form of marketing because it allows you to reach out beyond your market simply by dishing out a few dollars a month.

Some of the most popular methods of trying to fool Google’s PageRank system are link farms and link exchanges. Link farms are basically websites that exist only to get links to specific sites counted by the search engines. Link exchanges are groups of websites that each pay a monthly fee to link to each other like link farms, only more expensive and dodgy. In both cases, the websites involved are attempting to climb the ranks of Google’s search results through the sheer quantity of links to them this is known as Googlebombing. But it doesnt always work.

Goggle knows that cheaters can ruin their search engine for the rest of us. After all, if link farms inflate the rankings of less-useful Websites, then well all start seeing worse search results. Thats why Goggle constantly updates PageRank to keep those kinds of sites away. The Page Rank formula that Goggle implements is mysterious and ever changing. This is the primary reason that Goggle cannot be fooled.

It has been found recently that Goggle is now sending out cloak bots, disobeying robots.txt to find out whether sites are cloaking serving a different page to search engines than what visitors see. These cloak bots are controversial but seem to have some positive effects on the Googles results.

Unethical methods make it difficult for people who are trying to do SEO the proper way, which is one of the reasons why it needs to be monitored so carefully. If people stopped trying to find ways to manipulate the system, it would be much easier to keep up with whats going on.

As you may already know, Goggle publishes a list of guidelines suggesting legitimate ways to improve a site’s ranking, by making it more accessible and better. One of the tips is to make pages for users and not for search engines. Youd do well to listen to their advice.