SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

Reciprocal linking is a topic that generates a lot of discussion: everyone wants to know how to get it to work for them. Much of this discussion involves link trading, or linking together their own websites, and whether its going to get you in trouble or not. They invariably fear that they will run into problems with search engines who may consider it cheating. Many of them have heard horror stories about Linking Farms which often get banned from Google along with every page associated with them. This fear is justified by the obvious disasters that link farms can ensue upon a web site. There are very few webmasters who are willing to take the risk and rightfully so.

Misunderstandings cloud the debate on reciprocal links on both sides. Reciprocal links deserve a fair hearing, because some are bad for a website, but most arent. In the beginning, almost all sites had plenty of reciprocal links (the tradition of the links page), and they worked exactly as intended. Links brought in additional traffic, and affiliate links let people make money. These links pages are less and less common now, but seem to be making a slight come back during this period in which SEO work has become a phenomena and a hobby for many web masters. The fact that SEO work is so common now will inherently lead to answers to questions which have been guarded for years. These answers will help people decide if the old fashioned links pages are worth having or not.

Most people see nothing wrong with good, old-fashioned link trading, but swapping links is only one aspect of reciprocal linking. These link swaps are allowed and, in many cases, considered beneficial. Link trades are great for web sites because they allow them to communicate a greater amount of information to their visitors. These link swaps are only beneficial, however, if they link to pages that are somehow relevant. Links to completely random pages that visitors will not find interesting are useless and could be considered fraudulent exchanges.

There are also automatic link exchanges on the good side of things, and link farms on the bad one. Link exchanges can be extremely beneficial, but before you allow yourself to get roped into this kind of situation, make sure that it pans out as a legitimate source of traffic. If you subscribe to a link exchange, the links should be hand made by you. They should not be kept in a gigantic database on the middle mans server. They should also be done upon request rather than automatically. You should be able to look through each link and view each page to insure quality.

Reciprocal links are popular because of the good things they give you: they act as ads for your site as well as increasing your search engine rankings. Some people, however, say that you shouldnt link to other websites as it decreases your own link popularity they dont realize that you need to give a little to get a little.

Third Party Link Sites.

These sites allow anyone to join, like a club but they dont usually work to your advantage. They say theyre going to make it easier to find sites that will exchange links with you, but in reality you often wont get the kind of link quality you were expecting. Its a bad idea to use one of these link agencies, as many of them lack basic linking knowledge and have no idea of the best link strategies.

There are some rules that you should follow when you agree to link to another site, and some rules that you should expect the other sites to follow. Many webmasters dont know how to trade links effectively you need to teach them. Theres a right way and a wrong way to manage links always remember that quality is more important than quantity. FFAs with hundreds or thousands of links are completely useless, and no search engine wants them in their index. Many have been banned from the search engines.

The abuse of linking going on today is proof of the ignorance that surrounds link trading just look at an FFA if you dont believe me. Trading links has been going on since the beginning of the web, but all it would take for it to lose its popularity is for the search engines to start paying less attention to it, as they will soon be forced to do.

Search engine optimization isnt rocket science, but it can feel complicated at times. Theres no need to worry about the jargon when youre just starting out, though, and part of the point of SEO is to make everything simpler and cleaner, the way search engines like it.

Everything a search engine does has a pattern and a reason. Even if the algorithms are too complex for you to understand, there are patterns that can be found if you look hard enough. All you have to do in order to find the patterns is be willing to look for them which basically just consists of keeping your eyes and your mind open.

Being good at SEO requires some effort, but is for the most part very basic. To have a successful campaign, just follow these simple rules they apply to all websites.

Search engines always try to give users whatever they can find that is relevant to their search. You have to realize that most search engines dont work by moving the good stuff towards the top: instead, they try to push the bad stuff towards the bottom, and hope that whats good will float up. Content is King and it can get you good search engine rankings easily if its written properly and sprinkled with the appropriate keywords. This not only brings visitors to your site but also feeds search engine spiders and crawlers. I cant stress enough that good content is the key to good SEO.

A fast way to develop good content is to generate a series of articles or an ebook regarding your topic. These items are very powerful in the world of SEO because they provide your visitors with something to read and they allow you to conquer some key words that you normally wouldnt be able to touch. If you are managing a website for pets, an article about dog food is more likely to generate a high position in the search results for dog food than your home page. Therefore, if you write articles pertaining to your subject but slightly more in depth than you can put on your home page, you will benefit drastically.

To try to get to number one in an index, you must first find out where your site is now. That means checking each search engine to see your position, and coming up with a strategy for each one who knows, maybe youre already number one on one of the smaller search engines! You cant just assume, however, that because your site is listed in one search engine that it will be listed in all of them. Thats not how search engines work.

Look at the sites that currently rank high on the search engines and you will see that have simple designs with graphics that use minimal bandwidth, and theyre easy to navigate. Simple, clean designs are what both search engine crawlers and search engine users like, as it lets them get the content they want without any fuss. This is what you should be aiming for.

Some sites are considered good enough to be ranked highly in search engines, even though their designs make them difficult to look at. This goes to show that the looks of a site have nothing to do with where a search engines places it in the rankings all search engines care about is text. If the content of a site is relevant to what people are searching for then thats all that matters to a search engine.

Lets take a look at meta tags, keywords, descriptions, and titles. Theyre all important elements, even if theyre not what will make or break your site theyre just one part of your strategy. These elements need to be compelling and sprinkled with your keywords, as this will entice users to click through from the search results page to your website. Its best to start off slowly, gradually adding things in as you learn.

If you have any questions and you dont know where to go, then check out some of the forums on the subject just do a search for seo forum. These people are usually more than willing to post answers to your questions, or direct you to someone who can answer your question if they cant. Remember to be patient with yourself: learning something new takes time and effort, and SEO is no different.

Although Overture (now owned by Yahoo) can be used by itself, its often better to use it together with another PPC engine, to get the best chance of being seen. Overture is the largest of the PPC engines so it is a great place to start if youre going to try making money by spending money, but make sure that you dont try to provide your visitor with too much too quickly. It is very easy to over diversify your online advertisement portfolio and, in effect, pull yourself out of the game with a strained wallet.

Overture does nothing to hide the prices of its advertising from you theyre straightforward from the beginning. This is a great advantage for users of Overture, as you can never spend more than you want to. You know exactly where your ads will show up, and you can change them as often as you want. The ideology behind Overtures open display of its prices is that an informed customer is the best kind of customer. You never run into customers who complain about what they got because you tell them what they get. This is the kind of attitude that more online utilities and web sites should adapt. It gives web users a fair shake at optimizing the return on their financial investments.

You can include prices and other details in your listing so that people are better informed before they click this saves you money on people who click and turn out not to be interested. After all, you dont drop the big bucks just to watch your hits climb. You pay for quality hits that will result in sales or whatever else you are trying to deliver via your web page. Make sure to only pay for key words that are going to deliver quality traffic with sales potential. You should write a different ad for every keyword youre targeting, taking the time to do it correctly. Use the keyword in the ad, as Yahoo will put it in bold to make it stand out, and more people will click on your ad.

Remember that one of the biggest reasons that you are probably using Overture is that it is so outspoken with its prices. If you are selling something, why not put the price right out there in the advertisement? This is a quick way to avoid getting hits from those users that are seeking free versions of whatever you are selling. Believe me, no matter what you are selling, somebody is trying to get it for free.

Since using Overture gives you more flexibility and room when it comes to writing ads, youll be able to do more with them. Other sites you typically give you a standard 3-line ad area and no more, which doesnt leave much room for creativity. In the case of Overture you can generate spectacular ads that really give you a chance at displaying your product as something that the user would want to buy before they even click on the link.

One thing to remember when you create an advertisement is to state the most important things first, in case some of the ad gets cut off or the reader gets bored before they finish.

When youre one of the top 5 bidders for a keyword at Overture, you get a little bonus. Yahoo will list you twice when you have one of the top five positions once at the side of the page, and once at the bottom. If youre not in the top 5, youre missing out on this free exposure so its much better to pay a little extra to become #5 than to stay as #6.

Check your advertisements at least weekly, making sure youre still where you want to be relative to your competitors. Change the ads every time you launch a new product or service, and dont be afraid to try out new keywords you think of.

Be creative, and create short-term Overture ads for special offers if youre offering free shipping or free gifts for a limited time, say so! Use your ads to promote, advertise, and sell. After all, sales are what youre paying for, right? Many people are unaware that Overture lets you do this, so its a chance to stand out.

Is your website is dynamic? You need to be careful, or you might not do well in the search engines. Some spider handle dynamic URLs quite well, but others have trouble and even those that do spider them might not look very deep within your site. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot really predict what will be delivered in these URLs at all times. If you have an inkling of what is going to happen to URLs most often plan ahead; try to insure that you do not run into problems regarding these URLs.

Dynamic web pages are usually database driven and displayed on-the-fly. You can recognize by looking for symbols like question marks and ampersands in the URL. These on-the-fly web pages are hard to deal with because they very every time that they are delivered. The best way to conquer this problem is to run everything that you can through the URL rather than through post method or through sessions/cookies.

If you want to sell one or two products, then you only need a static website with one or two pages. If you have a database with hundreds of products, however, then it would be very time-consuming to make each page manually thats when most people build a dynamic website.

These dynamic web sites should be organized in such a way that every page that has the potential to become dynamic can be delivered in a static form as well. I.E. your product listings pages may display certain categories dynamically, but they should have static links that will simply display every product. You should also have distinct links to each category as most search engines can handle a dynamic URL as long as it doesnt change each time that the site is viewed.

There are programs that will automatically produce static pages from a database, but its not usually the best move. Most designers to work with true dynamic technologies such as PHP, because of the amount of time it saves. Because search engine technology is increasing, the problems associated with dynamic URLs are decreasing day by day. It is still important to have constants, but you dont necessarily have to have a huge list of static links throughout your site.

It can be much easier to put www.domain.com/article.php?num=1 than www.domain.com/articles/article1.html. A search engine can easily locate the prior so there is no real need for the latter. The only time that you will see trouble is if you have things like www.domain.com/article?num=1&userid=2424 where userid changes for each user. If this sort of thing happens you may run into trouble and should arrange so that the userid isnt completely necessary (unless, of course, you want the page password protected).

Dynamic websites arent usually engine friendly, though, unless you deliberately make them that way. If youve spent money and time to build a dynamic website then you wont want to throw it out you need to learn how to optimize it for the search engines.

So how can you keep the functionality of your dynamic website, and make it search engine friendly at the same time? Well, suppose you have a website with products, and instead of having each product on one page youre using a dynamic, searchable database. Searching returns a list of products that meet the search criteria, and maybe a small picture clicking the picture shows the user more information about the product.

You have to realize that search engines cant use your search box, so the only way for them to access your dynamic information is if they follow a link to it some other way. The lesson to learn is that you need to give access to all your pages with plain, text links, somehow you cant just rely on searches to drive your whole site.

What this means is that somewhere on your website you need to have a list of your products that has been organized by category from here, you should be able to follow links to every page in your database. Once youve done this, the search engines can see your content.

Offering both search and category views improves your sites navigation, as well as making it crawlable your work will be useful to your visitors as well as the search engines, which is what SEO is all about.

DMOZ is the directory where Google starts when it crawls the web, so getting listed in DMOZ is good for you. SEO with DMOZ starts with selecting the search terms youre targeting, and then finding a directory category that includes them. This can be a time-consuming and difficult task. Youll often find lots of matching categories. The trick is to find the most precise category and, if possible, a directory that does not have too many other competitors in it. You can hit a niche market simply by being placed in a category that has few competitors. DMOZ, of course, makes the final decision as to where your website will be located.

Dont choose a category thats too general for your site, as it might just get removed later on. Make your site stand out by using a unique, catchy description one for people, not search engines. Remember, you will probably get a pretty hefty number of hits from DMOZ itself. When you are trying to get listed in DMOZ, dont worry about trying to get a nice listing in the search engines that crawl here, worry about getting a good listing here. The search engines care more about where DMOZ lists your site than what you have to say about your site in your description; DMOZ cares more about how accurately described, how interesting, and how often visited your site is than where you are listed in the search engines.

A third feature to be aware of is the PageRank of the category, and the number of listings on the page. Youll do better with more specific, smaller categories, especially if they have dedicated editors. A small category with a high page rank is the best situation that you can run into. Remember that a pages page rank is split between the number of links that go out from it so if you run into a page with a rank of seven with seventy-five out links you probably arent as well off as a page with a ranking of five and ten out links. This is a constant for Google Page Ranks, not an exception for DMOZ. Your targeted keywords should appear in your sites description, towards the beginning. Dont put them towards the end, as the editor might chop them off to save space!

Remember that once a site is submitted to DMOZ, its very difficult to update its description. Give it a few days to think it over before you submit it, and be more vague about websites if you think they might change. Dont write descriptions that could become out of date easily. If you are running a monthly special you shouldnt include this in your description unless you say something to the extent of low price sales monthly. If you suddenly decide that you are going to completely transform your site into something completely different you will have huge problems with your listings. Keep this in mind before you start building your site if there are possibilities that you will choose to reuse the domain that you have purchased.

If you absolutely have to resubmit, you can submit a blank form that informs the editor of your former web site that your site has changed drastically and that you want the old listing deleted. From there you can submit a new form to any category (or categories) that you need to be listed on with an updated title, description, and key words.

Multiple Listings for the Same Site.

Some editors allow multiple listings for submitted sites, especially if theyre good quality sites that span multiple DMOZ categories. Its always best to request multiple listings you can use the text box on the submission page to justify yourself.

If you find a good category for a niche inform the editor as to whether or not this will be a specified category and then search for any other categories that are related. You may get a good deal of hits from your niche, but it may also be a small market for a reason. If there arent that many people who would be utilizing that particular category, you may want to submit to other categories that will provide you with more substantial results.

Being Patient.

Follow the submission guidelines and dont exaggerate. If no-one seems to be reviewing your site after a week or so has gone by then you could post a question. Be patient, though: most of the DMOZ directory is edited by hand, and theyre very busy. In many cases it can take as long as three months to get added.

DMOZ simply wasnt prepared for the sudden importance it had forced upon it. One of the biggest problems with the directory is that each site must be looked at by editors, so your site might not get indexed for no reason other than the editor not liking it, or even just losing it.

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you dont know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they arent getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you dont have much reason to keep a link if you arent getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure its still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someones site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your sites content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says Disallow and has the URL of their links page, then theyre not letting spiders index that page. Dont exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being cloaked, and report it to the search engines if it is. You dont want to get involved with these people better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesnt necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldnt be more than 20 links if the site breaks this rule, dont even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking theyre helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them dont even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. Theres no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

For as long as SEO has been in existence, there have been all sorts of myths about it, and the situation isnt helped by the number of so-called experts spreading them. Heres a list of the biggest SEO myths:

You cant optimize perfectly for every site

There are 10,000 search engines out there

PageRank is dead

Your should repeat your keywords 100 times on each page

Search engines dont have time to ban you for bad SEO

You should submit your site to every search engine going

You dont need content to get ranked high

Meta tags are very important

All you need is more links

SEO doesnt require patience

New sites cant get listed in search engines

You should have multiple domain names

Its good to resubmit every week or every month

If you find companies that tell you any of these things, then you should run away as fast as you can. Dont pay attention to the myths of SEO the only techniques you should be using are ones that are proven to increase your websites ranking.

There are a lot of unethical, unprofessional business practices in the optimization industry, and you need to make sure you have enough facts on your side to compare the services youre being offered. To have a good SEO campaign, you cant fall victim to the kind of big promises that are always un-promised in the small print. Dont throw away your money: invest it properly in good marketing, advertising, and content.

When inexperienced and unprofessional optimizers scam uneducated SEO customers, it gives everyone who works in the field a bad name. If anyone tells you that its OK to keyword stuff, or that you dont need PageRank well, theyre just completely wrong.

If youre trying to make money with your website, you need visitors, and thats where SEO comes in. SEO is important because of the amount of competition you have. When youre competing in a worldwide market, you need to stand out.

You may be wondering how search engines arrange the top pages from millions of others. There are calculations involved and you have to work with these to put your site in page one.

How Do Search Engines Work?

There are three important elements that make up the database and finding of relevant material by search engines. From the inputting of words, the search until the hierarchy of results, there is a process that is mathematically formulated and produces the links and sites that suit best.

1. The web crawler. This is also known as a spider or robot which roams the web. It is a program that translates web pages and any existing links relevant to the page. The web crawler begins by looking through the web addresses that are available in its database or index. Any other page on the internet is added to the database should the web crawler consider it relevant to its existing index. Thus, the database continually grows and the web crawler also goes back to the index to check for updates and again search for new available links.

2. The index. The index holds all information of websites and pages that the web crawler has discovered during its frequent web roaming. Whenever any website or page is updated by the owner, the index also updates its stored information thus it continually grows over time.

3. The search engine. A search engine is a software that goes through all the information stored in the index whenever a search is done by a web browser. An algorithm supports the final results according to how relevant the websites found are to the search. The hierarchy of page results is determined by shutting on or off categories that the search engine feels is relevant to the search.

The Goal of Search Engines

The ultimate goal of a search engine is to provide the most relevant and informative web pages to the web browser. The effectiveness of search engines may be tested through search engine optimization. Page results for different search engines may vary depending on the algorithm that they are using. Thus, website owners aim to improve their rank based on the algorithm.

How Can I Get on Page-On of Search Engines?

1. Links. Links are small routes leading to your website thus a lot of these will increase your visibility in search engines. When typing in a search, it is possible for your URL to be exposed even if the engine may be revealing another website housing your link.

2. Page Summary. Make your page summary more effective by using meta tag names and using keywords in a balanced manner. Be more flexible in your websites description so that it can stand out even if the search is bound for a different category. This prevents your website from being completely shut out by the search engine.

3. Title. Although the true nature of the fixed algorithm used by search engines is not fully known, it might help to start with titles that begin with the letters A to E. Engines arrange equal scoring websites in alphabetical order.

4. Keywords. Wisely input keywords in your web pages. More is not better when it comes to key words since engines will decrease your value with too much repetition. Four to five keywords per page is the most you may be using to help boost your visibility.

5. URL. Share your URL as much as you can in multi and single-database services to increase your value. You may also put it in blogs, your friends linking addresss and emails.

Why am I SEO Stoopid?

I’m SEO Stoopid because I didn’t properly take notice of what my stats could have told me.

If I would have done, I would have noticed something sooner and factoring that something into my response would very probably have saved me a goodly number of lost posters and art print sales.

My site is primarily about SEO. I’ve been doing it since 1996 or thereabouts and have clients of many years standing. Halfway through last year, I started adding posters pages to it. It’s restful and unoressured compared with a lot of SEO, plus I wanted to see how fast I could get unrelated pages indexed and where and with whom, plus unexpectedly I found that I enjoyed doing it, lots of reasons.

When the first two phases of Jagger hit, I was cool. It washed over my seo clients the way I expected it to (it had no effects at all), and it washed over my (by now only mostly) SEO site the way I expected it to (it had no effect at all there either).

Then came the third wave. Oh dear!

My site’s serps (not my clients’ - they’re all fine) went into a decline that they still haven’t come out of. I was getting damp postcards from my serps telling me what depth they were reaching. They told me in one message they’d dived deeper than any known footballers. Imagine! If they ever come back up they’ll need time in a decompression chamber before they can surface again.

I decided that since I was tanking anyway no-one would be finding my poster pages from the engines and so now was the time to hive my poster pages off to their own site, something I’d been meaning to do for some time as a site is unlikely to do well for two such diverse subjects. I got myself a new domain for them too, in anticipation of the day when I have more time and can settle them down on their own dedicated space - the demand I had for them shows that they deserve it and I’ll be attending to this in the new Year.

I put them in a little backwater personal hosting space I have with my Broadband ISP. I have a custom 404 on my main site and I adjusted it to make it plain to folk that I’d moved the posters to a new domain as they were swamping my SEO efforts.

Now I always kept a good eye on my stats but I’d failed to note that results from Google, these days, aren’t just from Google any more. They’re from Google Images too - and despite the fact that I’d tanked in Google.co etc for text seaarches, unknown to me as my old stats package didn’t make the distinction, my posters were still very very well ranked in Google Images. I only found this out by studying my Google Analytic stats, a service I’d only recently signed up to in anticipation of clients expecting me to keep them abreast of Search Engine and SEO events.

I checked out “Michael Sowa Prints”. I was in the 80’s in Google.com but to my amazement I was at positions 1 and 3 in Google Images. I checked out “Salvador Dali Prints” and “Escher-prints”. Same kind of deal, I was well off the main map and out in the boonies in the text-driven Googles but top 5 in Google Images. Go see, they’ll probably still be there even now.

So, what was I to do? All those potentially hard-to-get serps were going to waste as when people didn’t see the result they expected when they clicked through, just my 404 page (polite though it was) they just went somewhere else.

Hurriedly put all my pages back up again is what I did, and on my SEO site too, thinking to catch what business I can from what’s left of the Christmas rush. I’ve left all of the links to the new site in place as they’ll get people hopping back and forth from each site to the other, hopefully without realising. All the posters and art prints, the wall tapestries too, will have to be moved over eventually and on a permanent basis. You can have a site about SEO or a site that uses SEO to sell posters, you can not, not for any length of time, have just the one site that does both.

Not the way Google are ordering the universe anyway.

I’ll change over slowly in January using individual 301 redirects and this time they really will be permanent.

For now I don’t believe it’ll matter as Google, according to their own stats via Google Sitemaps, have no info about the new posters site and given everything else they have on their plate just now I don’t suppose they’ll be indexing it all and handing out a content penalty before I’ve moved everything over permanently.

But look at the sales opportunity I very nearly missed, eh?

Moral of the story is, make sure your stats package is the best that it can be. I don’t think I’ll be using my old stats package too much from now on, but I’ll keep it on as it does have some individual visitor tracking capabilities that Google’s version of Urchin currently lacks. Reading your stats regularly will save you money and time in the long run.

But do make sure they’re as detailed as possible - you may miss important information if they aren’t! Don’t be an SEO Stoopid!

I have been on the Internet for a long time. At least I have been doing marketing a long time in relation to the Internet as a commercial entity.

Around the end of 1995 I speculated in domain names, learning about keywords and phrases and how they help the search engines find the content you are providing at your website.

I continued to learn about keywords and as search engine optimization became a necessity I was ready to use what I had learned about keywords and phrases, domain names, search engines and content.

There were quite a few people, say a couple of hundred who really knew how to use keywords to optimize websites.

However, then it was to help search engines do a better job of indexing all of the content on the web. Now it seems the roles are reversed and the search engines are in charge. At least many seem to think so.

Now there are also a lot of people, thousands, who claim to know all of the search engine secrets and some claim they can get you top listings if you just sign up with them, buy their Ebooks, buy their videos, or buy their software.

I always have a hard time with the math. If these guys can guarantee you a top 10 listing for your keywords, then 11 companies sign up for their service that are also targeting your keywords or phrases, then how do they get all 11 customers a top 10 listing?

There are a lot of things we have known about the importance of for years such as anchor text, titles for links, surrounding links with keywords in the body text to make the links more relative, alt tags, metatags, keyword count, and more.

But now almost every day I see a website or article promoting a new search engine secret and it has a name I have never heard of. Then when I investigate and read up on it I find that they have renamed anchor text something else, keyword-count something else, etc.

Just like Hollywood these days seem to only be remaking movies we have already seen and giving them new names, it seems there are a lot of people out there now renaming SEO methods that are as old as the Internet with new names and selling them as new secrets.

They sell you these new secrets on video, in an Ebook, in a Seminar, or produce software that optimizes your website for you.

Most of the SEO Gurus of today never actually optimized a website for themselves or anyone else with any good results. They simply advertised to other people that they know how to make them rich in 90 days with little or no work at all and can promise you top 10 search engine rank in all the major search engines.

There are some of us who actually do the work and will keep on doing so and remaining ethical about the business. Its just hard to sit by and see so many people bilked out of their money with promises that no one can keep.

I have clients send me stuff all the time.

Hey look at this new SEO technique I got in my email!

“Look at this website I found that can get us top listings in 30 days!

I go and read up on it for my client and find the same old stuff repackaged once again. Things I am already doing for the client is now a video or an Ebook and they cannot understand why I would recommend not spending money on it.

If you are going into business on the web and you read this article, just learn one thing from it.

There are NO shortcuts to success. Get rich quick schemes are just schemes. There is no magic formula or secret to getting top listings in the major search engines.

If there is a secret, it is that it actually requires hard work to be successful on the web just like it takes hard work to become successful with any business on or offline.

Buying an Ebook or a video or some software is not going to make you rich or get you top listings in the search engines. Anyone who tells you that work is not required to make money on the web is lying to you.

Learn how to do this for yourself or hire a professional who does not promise you the sky, but also hire one that can prove the results they have gotten for clients and for their own websites.

Testimonials are worth absolutely nothing.

Chris McElroy is amazing! He got me a top 10 listing for my website in less than thirty days! The videos are easy to follow and in just days I was an SEO expert. I recommend everyone buy his Ebooks too! -John Doe, New York

Now dont you just want to run right out and buy my video? Too bad I dont have one to sell.

Nope, no Ebooks either.

No Software to make you rich.

But I can do the search engine optimization and promotion for your website and prove the results with weekly increases in link popularity and search engine indexing.