Website content is one of the big 3 when it comes to search engine optimization. The search engines love websites that have alot of unique content on them.

What I mean by unique content is the copy on the site needs to be original to your website only. Many website owners try to build content on their websites by going out and getting articles that have been written that are free for distribution. The problem with this is that the same article appears on tens to even hundreds of websites. The search engines see the same content all over and completely discount it for everyone.

The proper way to build content on your website is to write the content yourself. It can be articles, more sales copy for your product, you can start a blog and much more. If you are constantly updating the content on your site the search engines will come back to your site often to index the new material.

The trick of writing website content is to make sure it is optimized for the search engines. Having the right keyphrases in the proper quantities and locations can make all the difference between top 10 rankings and no rankings at all for your most important keyphrases.

Link building is an important aspect of off site SEO. In many cases, once the site is optimized the only possible method of increasing search ranking is by link building, which can be difficult. Not only do you need to build links to your site, but you must make sure they are relevant and they are built consistently. Additionally, many links have to be built pointing to your site to succeed against the competition.

Viral link building is a fantastic method for building large quantities of links. Hopefully, you can build links that are specific to your site, but many times they may not be. This strategy focuses more on the mass link building aspect. Many search engine experts say that building a large amount of links in a relatively short amount of time may not help tremendously, but the links are permanent and one way, which is always an excellent quality.

The first method for building a large viral SEO campaign is to utilize social bookmarking and networking sites. Social bookmarking sites allow users to submit links of interest to them. They also have an extra added feature that allows users to rank the links through a voter system. The more interesting the website, the more votes received. This strategy can generate buzz and plenty of links.

Another strategy is blog commenting. Posting comments on blogs related to your industry can help boost your websites visibility. To create a viral effect your site has to have interesting content that will create word of mouth allowing other webmasters to link to you. You can also contact blog owners and ask them if they are willing to write a post about your site by enticing them with a fee.

Link bait is a term referring to a blog post or web page containing information that can be considered a great resource. It is content that other web masters have to link to because it is so useful. You can create this kind of content by thinking about what information people in your field are looking for. For example, if you own a site about cars, you could create a page of content listing all the different dealers in an area. Other websites will be more than happy to link to you and use the information in their articles.

The most important aspect of a viral link building campaign is that you attract attention to interesting content, as boring content will kill this strategy. If you expect people to be interested in your website you have to offer content that will bring people back to your site. A link bait page of content will be bookmarked and visited by the same people many times. People will refer others to the page and search engines will be more than happy to rank your page in the top spots thanks to all those links. Search engines are looking for relevancy and authority pages. A page with this kind of great content will definitely rank well.

Most Internet marketers have a habit of following only traditional and ordinary link building methods. They neglect the many other ways of building links that require new and clever ideas. These strategies can be used to increase page popularity in a way that your competitors will not be able to mimic.

One of these original methods comes from “abusing” large sites like E-bay. Many large websites today employ some kind of user generated content strategies. E-bay allows you to create a blog that can generate many very powerful links to your site.

Another method to consider is creating a contest on your website asking people to place a link on their blogs or websites to your site with specific anchor text. This may be a little difficult to do because you might have to be very careful with your instructions depending on what niche your in. If you offer a large enough prize you will be amazed at the response you will get. For example, many bands employ this strategy by asking their fans to place a link to their site from their Myspace or blog in return for an entry into a contest to win tickets for the band’s next concert.

In addition to these strategies you can tap into the power of pod casts. If you submit the pod casts to directories especially made for them, you will be generating great one-way links. Visit one of the many websites that can convert your RSS feed to a Podcast and you be set for this strategy.

Torrents are another very underused link building strategy. Torrent sites allow people to download all sorts of software for free. Many of these sites are not monitored and allow you to be very liberal with the links you create on the site. To use this strategy, all you have to do is create some kind of digital product. Create a short E-book or some kind of useful free software. By using Google you will find many excellent torrent websites. Read the instructions they give to submitting your torrent and then do so. In the area where you describe your download, place a link to your site. You can also add a link in your software, it won’t add to your link popularity, but you will gain some traffic.

Another method similar to the torrent strategy is to use PAD file sharing. Many websites allow people to download what is referred to as “freeware” or “abandonware. These are terms for software that was sold, but is now free or has always been free to the public. You can use the software you created through the torrent strategy and convert it into a PAD file, which is an XML type file that allows these freeware websites to easily understand what you are submitting to them. People are able to download your software in masses and you gain links from the PAD file sharing websites.

Starting an SEO company is a very difficult undertaking. BY virtue of the service being offered the only way to gain true credibility as a new SEO company is to have good rankings for SEO related terms. Since everyone in this industry is trying to rank for the same phrases and since many of them have a good understanding of how to do this it becomes increasingly difficult to rank well.

The challenge has become even more apparent now that we have obtained top rankings for the term “SEO services”. It’s not just regular website owners requesting our SEO services these days.

It always amazes me when I see a lead come through my website requesting SEO and it is from an SEO company. You would be surprised how often this happens. “SEO companies” literally want me to help them get ranked for SEO related terms. Are they really serious? Do they have no shame?

How are you going to start an SEO business helping others get ranked well when you are trying to hire someone else to get your site ranked. How can you speak to a potential client and with a straight face tell them you can help them get ranked high in the search engines when you have admittedly asked for help from another pro to do the same for you?

These are no doubt the same companies that I receive spam emails from all the time telling me they can help me get to page 1 of Google. Of course when I reply to the emails asking if they even checked my rankings or to send me the report of where their website ranks, I never hear from them again.

This is not the right way to start an SEO company. It is going to be slow at first. Target terms that are a little more specific, preferably geographic terms that you can rank well for quicker. No they aren’t going to bring in massive amounts of traffic and new clients, but slowly and surely you will build up a clientele and as your company gets older your rankings will grow and thus the business will grow.

If you as an SEO company can get your own site ranked for terms that are some of the most (if not the most) difficult phrases to rank for, then you should earn the trust of your potential clients. I literally have people tell me on almost every phone call I take, “I found you at #1 for “seo services” so you must know what you are doing.”

Build your SEO business the right way and the success will come with it.

I recently attended the SMX Advanced SEO conference in Seattle and was taken aback by the blackhat techniques being discussed.

I was actually a bit surprised at how much of it there was – some of the extreme being the praising of the completely fabricated 13-year-old’s story as brilliant marketing and statements like, “We’re not here to be moral; we’re marketers” and “You’re not going to get creamed, the site will, so don’t worry about it.”

Since when is telling a bald-faced lie brilliant marketing? And for morality I think, do you have no morality? None? You’ll just help child pornographers, arms dealers, tobacco companies, etc.? If the answer to that is “No”, then there clearly is a line that even the blackest hat will draw. So it’s just a matter of where the line is drawn, and how the line is decided.

“There’s a market for it. Somebody will fill that void. Why not SMX?”

By that logic, it’s fine to have a session on how to:
- carry out an email “pump and dump” stock scheme,
- develop a Nigerian email scam,
- get past the spam filters and send at a million emails.

The fact that there is a demand, does not mean it should be presented at a conference purporting to represent a professional industry.

I think the question then becomes strategic. Where does the industry want to be in five years?

Then make decisions according to that goal and plan. It cannot be based on “anything goes” or “whatever we can get away with”.

I think that just deepens the perception of “they’re just fringe geeks with their own rules and no morals” — which to most people with money means “jerky little twerps” — which means the companies with big money are going to go to Ogilvy for their web stuff.

I am sure that most SEO’s want to build solid, professional, long-term success for their clients and for themselves. I don’t think that comes from pump and dump stock schemes — or by making making completely fabricated news articles.

Every web site owner needs to architecturally structure their site(s) in order to get Google and the other search engines to recognize their main keywords.

In other words, you want to structure your site in such a way that Google not only “sees” your keywords, but actually considers your site the “authority site” on a particular subject matter.

So what do you do? It’s called “Advanced SEO”. Also known as SILOING to the SEO gurus out there.

So what is a Silo?

We all know that proper site structure is an extremely efficient way to get ranked (and highly at that) on Google. Silo is advanced site structure technique. In fact, Google guru, Matt Cutts, defined silo as: “A silo is a vertical page linking design. You have your landing page, or your main page, at the top of the silo and underneath this page you have pages which support your main landing page theme.”
In other words, have a good site structure. A system that will lead the search engine bots all over your pages, gobbling them up with consistency.

Example #1

To further explain what siloing is, let’s take a practical example. Let’s imagine you own a web site that sells balls of all colors. Of course, you want to optimize your site for the term “balls”. But since you sell orange, brown, white and red balls, your site might not be recognized as the “authority site” for “red balls” if somebody was searching for “red balls” on Google.

So what do you do? How do you make sure your site comes up as the first result when potential customers Google the term “red balls”?

Easy!

As the site owner, you need to make sure that your site has various silos of content. In other words, different themes for every type of product. The question is, how do you differentiate the various themes as opposed to bunching them up all together?
You can:

- Create Tags
- Put the items in different categories
- If you have a blog, you can install a “related posts” plugin
- You can link to the product landing pages using the exact keyword.
- Add more relevant content to your site.
- Create a sub domain for the different products e.g. redballs.yoursite.com

And really that’s it. By defining exactly what your web site is all about (by separating everything) you are telling Google, “Hey, this part of my site is dedicated to red balls and red balls only.”

The advantages of doing that are numerous. When somebody lands on your page and they are looking for “red balls”, they won’t have to waste time, get frustrated and leave – without purchasing anything. Why? Because your page is all about “red balls” and that’s exactly what they are looking for.

So next time your hear somebody say “silo your site”, you let ‘em know, “Hey, my site is good to go. I’m ranking #1 on Google for red, blue and green balls”.

The competition to get noticed in the web world goes tougher by the day and all the potential sites fight for their place on the net. And the most effective weapon they have for utilization is the armor of SEO – Search engine Optimization.

The times have changed and the clues and tricks that were very functional till only a little while ago have been badly exposed. Google, the ace search engine does not fall for it. Needless to say, the respective sites, for their own sakes have to necessarily update themselves to be in the roving eye of Google.

Google sends spiders or crawlers on getting a keyword placement through the relevant sites and makes a statutory index of the site by analyzing its contents. It then hands the site a page ranking status depending on how well or badly the site has done its homework.

Gone are the days when a prominence of keywords in the top half or the first page of a particular websites received brownie points. Major search engines like Google, yahoo and MSN have outgrown their feathers and now gauze the fake attempts of the sites even if the latter try to use the old tactic of link exchanges.

The current SEO trends that are running the internet market are of inbound linkages and submission to relevant blogs and forums. The hyperlinks attached to major related sites do wonders to the credential of a site. Submission of RSS feeds and URLs are also of benefit.

User content on interfaces have to be seriously analyzed by the core team of a site before giving final touch to the product the site is playing on. The keywords and tags work differently in different sites and the effort has to be there in diligence to understand the algorithms of these search engines through several trial and errors.

Pay-per-clicks and bought spaces in forums and blogs have an elixir like action and such sites automatically command respect. The search engines have the requisite machinery and skill to detect which is a serious shopper and which is not. The general logic is to be rather on the former side than the latter.

If rumors are to be believed, Google’s Webmaster 3 is coming up with a very unique concept which is mysterious to others in terms of algorithmic manipulations. If someone types ‘television’, then even the sites that have the word TV in any form, maybe a part of taxi no., will come up. That will include a gamut of more such sites and a ghastly increase in results. Therefore, the task would be really cut for the sites to be on the first pages of a search.

Even on the advertising front, there are drastic changes coming up and advised to the trend-setters to be a big name in the business. The alert website programmers have to buck the trend and follow basic principles. The domain and meta tags with clear keywords are still a must. Getting approvals from other sites in the form of inbound links is very efficient and a research on keywords a very essential part.

Nowadays, a simple Google search for the term SEO yields a lot of results. And depending on what you are looking for, you will find numerous articles and blog posts giving you advice and instructing you on how to go about optimizing your site.

As a result, new Internet marketers can get simply overwhelmed when looking for the right solution. It it important to note however that, looking in the right spots, even a total n00b aka novice aka newcomer – should be able to discern and filter out the good advice versus the poor or untimely advice. But they have to know what they are looking for.

So what’s a newcomer to do? How is a newcomer able to tell who is “doing it” right? Who is the proper SEO master?

Google is the answer. Whoever turns up on page one on Google (and stays there) for a competitive keyword is doing it right. All you have to do is do what they do.

Just remember…the fact that a certain SEO strategy is out there, doesn’t imply that it is right or it is the proper way to do it. So this immediately disqualifies a bunch of so called SEO gurus. After disqualifying the self-proclaimed gurus who don’t have tangible evidence, you are left with a few SEO specialists who know what they are doing. You just do what they do. But you won’t be alone. There’s a lot of people out there who know what to do as well.

So let’s say now it is between you and about a thousand other bloggers. You all know the right strategy. You all know what to do. How do you trump your competition?

You could 100% focus on the SEO strategy. While this is not easy, remember that most of your competition will focus maybe 50% on the strategy and then divert their attention to another strategy. This is where you can dedicate yourself and breathe, eat, drink and live for the one foolproof SEO strategy that you know works. Just do it.

And remember, even though you are doing it, you have to do it right. Don’t just focus on doing something and then do it all wrong. For example, you do not want to spam Google and other search engines when trying to get your keywords indexed.

It is a lot of work. And will not happen overnight. But one thing is for sure. If you get a strategy that works and you focus on it, then there is no doubt whatsoever that in the long run, you are going to trump your competition and get the high organic search results that are the bread and butter of most websites and businesses.

Like a famous company once said, “Just Do It.”

Every business owner, small and large wants to do SEO. But if not done right, their SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering their sites. That’s why it’s advisable to hire a professional SEO firm or people who know what the heck they are doing.

What to Consider When Hiring an SEO Firm

If you’re a small business person with a web site, you’re probably working 12-hour days to keep things running. Hiring an SEO firm might be the answer. SEO has proven to be one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing available.

Many SEO’s and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure, technical advice on website development (for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript), content development, managing online business development, advertising campaigns, keyword research and SEO training.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. In a recent news article on Newsweek Magazine and the Washington Post, Rand Fishkin, chief executive of Seattle-based search consultancy called SEOmoz, said he focuses on getting editorial links for his clients, partly by creating feature articles that Web publishers will link to: “We call it link-baiting,” he said.

Search

Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. We believe that a Search Engine Optimization Company should cater to the individual needs of the client and be readily available to handle any request at the drop of a hat.

We believe that this sharing of information will help our members to increase their rank, while our SEO clients come to understand the processes involved in attaining and maintaining high search engine ranking.

For example…an unusual question came up at WebmasterWorld recently, asking if you can request a site to be completely removed from a country specific Google search engine. In this particular case, the site owner wanted to remove his site from Google Netherlands, because the site had some issues being available to Holland searchers.
So the owner of the site wanted to remove it from all search results within the Google Holland and Netherlands search engine.

This is where a professional SEO firm becomes invaluable. A professional SEO firm will look at the specifics and then tell you how to go about it without risking getting the whole site banned from Google.

Satisfying user intent from off-site search engines or on-site internal search is a crucial way to reach modern-day searchers. Leaving organic search results to chance can be costly for your brand.

Remember…keeping up with the always evolving technologies and techniques of the Search Engine Optimization industry requires both a purpose driven focus and a visionary streak. To be sure, there are now structured search marketing methods with established returns to serve the very tangible needs of the business community at large.

A good SEO firm, among other things, has the responsibility of creating quality content or bait that helps attract incoming links to a client’s website. The more the number of incoming links, the higher the rank of the site will be in the search engine result pages. That is the bottom line.

So what are those “other things” that a good SEO firm will or should do for your business?

- First and foremost, when you are hiring an SEO firm, they should be willing to provide references that you can call to confirm, that yes, the SEO firm that you want to hire is top notch. Case studies and especially testimonials are just not enough. At a minimum, you should at least be able to talk to a past client of the SEO firm. Some of the past clients will not be willing to divulge their secrets or how they are currently getting their traffic since it might be a threat to their business but you should at least be able to talk to a few willing clients.

- All web sites are not created equal. Each and every website has it’s own unique needs that need to be attended to differently. A good SEO firm will not treat your website with a “one-size-fits-all” kind of mentality. Some websites just need more content. Some websites underlying structure is so non-web compliant and SEO unfriendly that it needs to be fixed before anything else can even be attempted. The SEO firm has to go in and find out what’s wrong with the site. That’s why you went to them in the first place, right?

- A good SEO firm should be able to tell you how they intend to accomplish the job. Like mentioned before, the main job of the SEO firm is to get inbound links to your site. The stronger (read “from more authoritative or respected sites”) the link the better. A good SEO firm will not hide the process and will lay it out to you. In fact, you want them to teach you all the basics of SEO while they are doing it. Not that you want to become a master SEO yourself, but it doesn’t hurt to know the basics.

Many sick people, especially those with terminal illnesses, are not doctors nor do they have advanced medical degrees but they know the names of their medications and exactly what it’s for. So learn to ask and a good SEO firm will tell you the basics of what they are doing and how it’s going to help your business. After all, you don’t want your site banned when an SEO firm uses black hat techniques, do you?

- Content, in any shape or form, is the ultimate link getter. A good SEO firm will create “link-bait” content that’s going to attract links from other sites. Content can be in the form of videos e.g. Jib Jab type of videos or it can even be thought provoking articles.

- Last but not least, a good SEO firm will not just tell you what you want to hear, but will tell you exactly what the problem is. You have a problem. And your problem is that you are not ranking on the front page, preferably number one, for your search term. You want an SEO firm that will tell you straight up that the pretty flash design on your website just ain’t working. Yes, you spent a lot of money on it, but the flash has got to go.

Look for an SEO firm that will be upfront and honest with you even if what they tell you is hard to hear.