SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

Uneducated customers usually expect unrealistic results when it comes to SEO. This is mostly caused by some so-called optimizers who promise things that just arent possible. When it comes to SEO, you should always do your research before you hand over any money. This applies to every aspect of your business as do most SEO related techniques. It is always important to keep in mind that your SEO work is no more or less than another business expense. You should never fork over money until you have done your research and ensured that you will be provided with a quality product.

Basically, there are only a few choices when it comes to getting search engine traffic. You can use pay per click ads, or submit your site to the search engines and hope you get a good ranking. Instead of hiring some overpriced company who know nothing about optimizing your site, you should keep control of your site and save money by doing the SEO yourself. Another great resource is to find a site that you would like to post your ads and pay them for a static link.

These links are very powerful because they will increase your google page rank since they are permanent. They are dually useful because you know where the traffic is coming from and you know that you are getting traffic from a site that is related to your own.

Legitimate companies wont try to hide anything if a companys WHOIS information looks suspicious, then buyer beware. Any legit SEO specialist or company will give you more for nothing than they make you pay for, to show that theyre serious and they can deliver on their promises.

Basically, theres no shortage of websites that promise to get your site to that number one position in the rankings. The biggest problem is that all of these scam search engine marketing companies use recycled information (the same information anyone can get from the web). Worse, many of them use outdated information, or information thats just plain wrong. There are too many inexperienced people out there trying to make a buck, without having any knowledge.

The truth is that no one can guarantee the number one position they can try to get your site there, but its rare for anyone to even be able to guarantee you the top 10 nowadays. In many cases you have just as much chance of getting yourself into a top 10 position as any of these companies do. Any person or company that guarantees you a number position is just out to take your money: beware of these people! Theyre out there and you might not even realize what youre dealing with at first, as they do a good job of pretending to be knowledgeable about SEO.

Not only do you have to be careful of the unscrupulous companies doing SEO, but you also you need to be careful of some of the companies trying to sell you SEO tools. Apart from being a waste of your money, some tools can actually damage to your site’s rankings. Theres plenty of software that is honestly helpful but there are still problem cases, especially with search engine submission software. Many search engines and directories wont accept a site that is submitted through one of these programs.

Unfortunately, the Web has more than its fair share of fast-talking con-artists ready to separate naive people from their hard-earned money.

If you do outsource search engine marketing, make sure you find a real, specialized search engine marketing firm to do the work for you. You need to be certain that youre using a trustworthy firm with a first-rate track record — check them out and see who theyre working with currently. Knowing something about the subject helps you to ask questions and make the right decision.

Do-it-yourself marketing is still the best way, if you can put in the time and effort to complete it. It can be time consuming in the beginning, and if you dont have the two or so hours a week it takes then you should consider hiring someone to do it for you. Search engines are a great way of finding out more about SEO learn as much as you can before you get started and youll do much better than the people who didnt bother.

The “duplicate content penalty” myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content. The myth is that search engines will penalize a site if much of its content is also on other websites.

Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a “mirror” penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I’m talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: “penalty” is a loaded concept in SEO. “Penalty” means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine’s terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine’s index of web pages (”de-indexing” or “delisting”).

How have I exploded the “duplicate content penalty” myth?

* PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).

* The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it’s a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.

* Experience. I’ve seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.

But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster “fans” who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?

1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the “reprint content” page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.

2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients’ articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that’s up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that’s not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.

* Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.

* Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor’s note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.

* Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can’t link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the “duplicate content penalty.” Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.

What can you do if your keywords are too common? Is there anything that can help?

Well, for a start, including misspellings in your meta tag keywords could help you to get visitors who dont know how to spell or those who type too fast this traffic is just as good as any other, after all. How many people do you know that use a dictionary when they dont know how to spell a word? I certainly cant think of many. Including misspellings will help you to some extent, but it probably will not provide you with a drastic improvement in traffic especially considering that many search engines now have built in spell checkers so that if a user spells a word incorrectly it asks Did you mean ? You can use tools like WordTracker to find out which misspellings are the most popular, and target those.

Try to think on the same level as your users, not always like a webmaster. Thinking like the average person will make you more successful you should constantly remind yourself to think like the average person when youre trying to pick what words people will use to find you. If you can get into the mind set of a lay person and think What would I type into the search box if I was looking for the content on this web page? You probably come up with the key words that are most important. Think of each group within your audience and try to come up with realistic search queries. Entering each word from these queries into your meta tags should help you substantially in terms of increased search engine traffic.

One of the things that will set you apart from the rest of the world is learning the special language of your trade. When you learn about your chosen trade, you start using acronyms and other words that would be foreign to most people, but mean something to the people who would be searching for you. Words that people outside your industry would search for arent the same as ones that people inside it would search for targeting jargon words can help you to get highly-targeted traffic with little competition.

Another thing that will set you apart is using words that someone unfamiliar with your trade would use in an attempt to find content regarding your trade. You cant target your site only to those who already know a good deal about what you have to offer. Your content probably wont be fresh to people who are experienced in your field so you are much more dependent on your products at that point. If, however, you are able to target people who know little or nothing about your particular trade, you will be able to generate a good deal of traffic and probably move a sizable amount of inventory.

One last, but very important, method of providing good key word is to discuss the subject of your site with others and observe their reactions to your language. If they seem to suddenly understand what you are saying, that phrase may be a good one for your key words. Talk to your friends, your family, and other web masters about your subject and see what language is generally associated with your subject. This language is generally the correct language to use when generating your key words.

The most important thing to keep in mind when attempting to come up with unique key words is that there are huge groups of people out there who are interested in your goods but have not been targeted by other sites. These markets (known as niche markets) are basically ripe for the picking. If you can come up with a group that would be interested in your product but has not been targeted thoroughly by your competition, you will be able to drastically increase your traffic and/or sales. The ability to identify and target niche markets is an art and it can be developed by any truly dedicated marketer, but you have to be observant and patient in order to come up with valuable niche markets. After all, you are attempting to do what nobody has done before!

As an SEO, you will constantly be fighting with your key words. You will be trying to come up with more interesting or unique key words, and you will be trying to implement them more smoothly into your web page. The fact of the matter is that this takes time and practice. You have to get thoroughly engrossed in the community surrounding your market. Check out some forums relating to your market, look at the common forms of media coverage such as magazines and books. There are possible key words everywhere just waiting to be exploited for the sake of increases in your traffic and sales.