My online Manifesto

Because there are so many factors to consider in the search engine game and because search engines are constantly changing the rules about optimization, you may want to hire an SEO expert. Only you have to be careful who you hire. Some SEO companies may use “black hat” techniques to get your site ranked high in the results pages. That means they use methods the search engines do not approve of, and your site could end up being banned from from search results.

You won’t put your business in jeopordy if you hire an SEO expert who uses “white hat” techniques or those techniques that search engines recommend. These people follow the rules and do not attempt to deceive the spiders.

One example of white hat verses black hat is in content creation. With a white hat method, the content that is indexed by the spiders is the same content that searchers see. Nothing is hidden, and no type of deception is implemented. With a black hat method, content is created for the spiders in order to get the highest rank possible. Text is hidden by making the text white on a white background. Or the page is “cloaked” by sending the spiders to one page while redirecting users to another page that is human friendly.

If you get caught using black hat methods, the consequences are reduced rankings or banning from being listed altogether. SEO experts can be helpful by writing your copy, advising you on your design and submitting your site to the directories that are best for you. So if you want to hire someone who will improve your site rather than improve your chances of being banned from this source of traffic, here are some tips to consider when hiring an SEO expert:

–If they guarantee you a #1 ranking on Google, stay away. In Google’s own words: “Beware of SEO’s that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a ’special’ relationship with Google, or advertise ‘priority submit.’ There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Google Sitemaps program, and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.”

–If they are link happy, stay away. If their main method for getting you ranked high is by linking to them or getting you involved in a link farm, you’ll waste your money. Linking to irrelevant sites and having them link to you will actually hurt rather than help your rank.

–If they won’t explain their tactics, stay away. Be wary of those who claim to be great at optimization but won’t tell you how. They may be using black hat techniques, and you are the one who will pay the price when the search engines block you. The SEO guy will just find another client, and you’ll have lost an important traffic stream.

–If they won’t expain the use of their fees, stay away. They may get you a high ranking but be using pay per click rather than the free organic traffic. This is an important distinction to make as the PPC could end up costing you a lot of money if you aren’t aware of what’s going on.

–If they won’t sign a contract, stay away. At the beginning of the working relationship, protect yourself. Have a contract in writing between you and your SEO expert. The contract should include costs involved and require the expert to stay within the search engine recommended guidelines. Also make sure it includes a refund policy if you are not happy with your results or if your SEO’s actions get you kicked out of the search engine systems.

Whether you choose to optimize your site yourself or have someone else do it for you, you need to know the keywords you’re trying to win on in the search engine results pages and how to optimize your pages using those keywords. If doing this yourself, just start with your main pages, learn how to optimize them, then branch out to your other pages, always adding new content with focused keywords and phrases.

There are so many free tools and software programs for SEO enthusiasts that it almost becomes overwhelming and difficult to grasp the ‘right’ tools to use in your SEO efforts. Everyone has their own personal preferences which makes this predicament even more perplexing.

Well enough about me and my love of words; let’s get down to business: What are some of the best free SEO tools on the web?

Cool Tools

Google Keyword Research Tool: When this free tool came out the other week we all had a little dance party in the office we were so excited! Well to be honest, there wasn’t any dancing involved but it sure did give us a reason to celebrate

This tool is amazing! Simply type in your keyword and you can see a long list of related keywords with approximate search volumes for those keywords as well! You can even customize the results with this tool: everything from the location (country) of your keyword results to finding out which month had the highest search volumes. For more information on how to use this keyword research tool check out this great article.

This free keyword research tool immediately replaced my other keyword research tools by Wordze and SEO Book after just one test use: that’s how powerful it is. In short, the tool rocks and it instantly makes keyword research way easier and much more efficient!

HTML Playground: This tool is great for those that have limited HTML knowledge or just aren’t sure how to apply the right formatting in an easy and efficient manner. Well this free tool takes all the ‘hard work’ out of HTML coding for you. It has a list of all the most popular tags; simply click on the tag, customize the parameters and colours you desire and the HTML code is ready to go! It even shows you a preview of what your text or image will look like once uploaded! This tool is simply vital for any HTML rookie or beginner.

Firefox Extensions

There are hundreds of free Firefox extensions readily available at Firefox Add-ons. They have tools and add-ons for just about everything! My favourite Firefox add-ons for SEO are:

SEOpen: This add-on lets you place a toolbar in Firefox to quickly analyze everything from the number of Yahoo! Backlinks to verifying whether the PR of a site is legitimate or not; and that’s just the beginning. I think of it as in all-in-one SEO resource that is absolutely mandatory!

SearchStatus: This nifty little add-on simply lets you display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere on your browser. It also allows you to highlight nofollow links and comes equipped with a fast keyword density analyzer. Pretty sweeeeeet!

SeoQuake: This tool is one of the most advanced Firefox add-ons for SEO. Yet it’s perfect for both beginners and advanced users. Basically, SeoQuake displays the parameters for search results and even includes the findings into the search engine result pages ‘SERPs’ for the most popular search engines. You can then set these parameters to display by ascending or descending order; so you can search for any keyword in Google or Yahoo! and then set the order to show the highest PR’s, or the most Yahoo! backlinks, or by whatever parameter(s) you are most interested in.

And now, my favourite Firefox add-on is (insert drum roll) Speed Dial!

This add-on lets you visually display your most used websites so you can access them instantly! Forget about using bookmarks ever again! Simply open up the add-on and enter the number of columns and rows to determine the amount of sites displayed in your speed dial. To enter in the sites simply click on the boxes and type in the URL’s.

When you want to access your favourite sites simply hold CTRL and press the number of the site (number set in speed dial options) to open it up in a new tab or window. Or you can press the speed dial button which displays all your sites in one window and then you can just click on the site you want to open. Once you get the hang of this add-on you can instantly access your favourite site(s) with just a couple of clicks: saving you both time and effort! It’s a win-win situation like no other!

These cool tools and Firefox extensions are really useful and can dramatically improve your SEO efforts while simultaneously saving you time and improving your efficiency. Be sure to check them out and feel free to share your own favourite Firefox extensions!

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) both the bane and boon of many a person’s existence. It’s a known fact that the best way to get traffic to your website is by simply having your site show up in the first page or two of the major search engine’s results. Visitors that come in from those search engine results pages (referred to as SERP) have two main things going for them. They are more likely to buy, and they didn’t cost you any money to get there. Getting your site onto those first two pages can be a struggle, and people are always watching what you are doing and gunning for the top spot. You have to keep aware of all of the latest tactics and methods and measure yourself against your competitors.

Yes, competitors. Many people aren’t aware of the competitive nature of SERPs positioning, but it is. Keep in mind that you are ranked in comparison with the other sites in the results. If the search engine thinks that your content is more relevant, then you rank higher, if it is determined that your content is less relevant, then you fall in the results. If they know what they are doing, the other sites showing up for the searches you wish to rank high in are watching you, and the other sites on the first two pages to see what they are doing, and if they are rising or falling.

So how do you ensure that you can rank well against the other sites out there and rise in the SERPs? Well, for starters, let’s assume that there are only three search engines, because frankly, Google, Yahoo, and MSN (in that order) represent the majority, the vast majority of searches. And Google represents the vast majority amongst those three. For the purposes of this article we’ll focus only on Google. If you do right by them, what you do will be good for other search engines as well.

Before we go any further it’s important that you understand the nature of SEO. It is not an exact science. The exalted minds inside the Googleplex do not share their secret sauce with the unwashed masses. The reason for this is simple: if they revealed exactly how their logic works, it would be exploited–this has happened before. The methods for performing SEO are based upon the trial and error of many, many internet users as they worked out what works, what doesn’t and what will get your site unindexed – or worse: banned.

This is important. There are good and bad ways to optimize your site. The bad ways are called ‘Black Hat’. Sure, they may work for awhile, and some Google can’t (or doesn’t bother to) pick up automatically. However you can report a site to Google as using Black Hat SEO tactics and Google will remove that site from the index (meaning it won’t show up in search results). Removing a site from the index is usually only done for a certain amount of time and can be appealable. Banning is far more severe and banned sites are often gone for good with no way to get Google to add it back to their index. Beware of a lot of things that seem shady. If you think they are shady, chances are that the folks at Google will think so too and if one of those other sites in the SERPs wants to rise up and they visit your site and see your shady tactics, they won’t hesitate to report you.

Yeah, it’s a bit unfair, but it’s the world we live in. Google’s not alone in this–the other search engines will do it too.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive into the two ways to optimize your site.

On Page Optimization

This is what most people think of when they think of SEO. In reality it is the less effective of the two methods, though as Google improves its ability to determine real content from fluff it is getting more valuable. A bit of history first.

Back when people started realizing that they could make or break their business by where they came up in the SERPs, they started adding all sorts of content to their sites to improve their ranking. The most common of these was the meta keywords. These are words that are placed in the code on a website that tell the search engines what the site is about. Way back when the ‘net was young, the search engines believed these keywords. They don’t anymore. People abused the keywords system by putting their competitors names in them, or by even putting completely bogus words in. A site looking to sell more jeans would put Britney Spears in their keywords to get people to visit them inadvertently. Needless to say, keywords play very little importance anymore. I have gotten sites to the #1 position on Google without using keywords at all.

As the search engines got wise to the whole bogus keywords thing, they started looking at all of the content on a website. They can only read text, so images and animated graphics (like flash) were ignored. People learned tactics to place all sorts of text on their site that was invisible to users, but that the search engines (looking at the source code) would see. So search engines started to distrust the websites themselves.

You’re asking yourself how they can know what a site is about then. They asked themselves the same question and came up with an obvious answer: they can’t. But other humans can. This is called ‘Off Page Optimization’ and is covered in the second type of optimization.

They never really disregarded the webpage entirely, but they lowered its importance in their overall factoring of a page’s importance and relevancy. However, as their savvy increases and they have more computing power to analyse content, search engines are starting to consider the page’s content as being more and more important. They can often discern the difference between human generated and computer generated text, and can tell if the content on a page is relevant to a particular topic or not. As they do this more, the page itself will continue to get more important.

There used to be a lot of tactics and tricks to get the search engines to pay more attention to your page, but the number one tip is now this: Write human readable content (don’t try to write it to load it with terms and keywords) that has value and real relevancy. Make sure that you do use the words and phrases you think people will search for, and do use them more than once, but don’t go overboard. Bolding and using larger fonts (and H1 tags) will help as well, but don’t overdo it. If you make your page look too wonky it will not work for the second type of optimization.

Here’s a quick rundown of things to make sure you do.

Make sure the page title is descriptive – make it different with each page if you can

Use the meta description tag and make it good – this is what most search engines show as the blurb about your site on the results page.

Don’t worry alot about your HTML formatting. Search engines are used to reading crappy HTML and they don’t care too much

Make sure you use your keywords in your copy more than once

Do bold them if it works in your content

If you can make it work, use an H1 or H2 tag. If you are comfortable with CSS you can make the text in them smaller (this is becoming less and less important).

Make sure to use alt and title tags on images. It lets the search engines know what the image is about and can cause your images to show up on the Google image search.

Use title tags on your links. It will help the search engines know more about the page you are linking to and improve relevancy

Don’t put too many links to other sites. Links out lower your page’s importance.

Off Page Optimization

This is also called ‘Off Site Optimization’ which is a misnomer. Search engines care little about ‘websites’ and care more about ‘web pages’. The reason for this is that they don’t link to a site, they link to a page. So what is this mysterious type of SEO you ask? Well, if you read the on page part above you will have learned that Google and the other search engines decided that they couldn’t trust the page itself too much as too many people put fake content on a page to generate traffic. So they decided that the best way to know if a page was relevant was to let people do it for them.

How do they make this work? Well, they simply look at who links to you and what their page is about. If your page is about sewing, and another page that Google knows people like is also about sewing and it links to you, then your page is probably not misrepresenting itself. This is the driving force behind what is called ‘Page Rank’. Page rank is essentially a calculation of the importance of the pages linking to you vs the relevancy of your content to those pages. If a page about banking links to a page about peanut butter, then chances are that the search engines won’t assign any importance to that link, but links between pages of similar content have high importance.

There is also a nebulous thing that we know exists, but don’t know how to quantify. It is the matter of how much a search engine trusts a site. Sites with high trust have their outbound links given more importance than sites the search engine does not trust. An easy way to determine if a site is trustworthy or not is to think about it yourself. The folks at the search engines are humans, they will trust the same sites you do and distrust the same sites you do (give or take a bit).

Untrustworthy Sites

Link/Banner farms – sites with nothing but links to various other sites. These used to work, but the search engines wised up and now having a link farm link to you will hurt, not help

Sites with a lot of advertising on them – The search engines know that these sites are mostly computer generated and have no valuable content, and so don’t pay any heed to what they link to.

Black Hat Sites – sites that use questionable SEO tactics aren’t ones that you want linking to you. Google is suspicious of them, no reason to make it suspicious of you

Trustworthy Sites

Directories – There are two types of directories. Automatic and Human verified. Google knows which are which and if your site is listed on a human verified directory (meaning that someone looked at your site and verified that your description and content match the category you chose to have it listed in) then it knows that your content is relevant to the description you gave. Find the directories for your market (just google things like sewing boston directory or whatever your niche/market is and you’ll find some to list in.

News Sites – Many news sites allow you to post comments on them. Don’t spam, but find some relevant articles to your site and post a few comments. Its not advised that you place your link right in the article (unless you think it applies) but rather have your link in your profile.

Sites with high page rank – This is key. There is little point having sites with no page rank link to your site with no page rank. You want sites with high page rank linking to you. Install the Google toolbar and select yes when it asks if you want to view pagerank. This will let you know how other sites rank and help you determine where to try to get links.

There are a lot of other tips and helpful bits of information out there and I’ll be posting a few more specialized articles about them. While there is a lot of bogus software and ebooks out there that will literally tell you no more than what you have read above, there are some that will help you carry out the suggestions above. They’ll suggest directories, give you reports on how well you rank against your competitors and many other things. Most you can do on your own, but they take time. Good SEO software should mainly remove the tedious, manual tasks involved in SEO and help you focus on more important things like niche research and adding actual, valuable content to your site.

There are many SEO companies within the industry that I see that make Guarantees about getting your website to the top of the search engines. The only guarantee a SEO company can make you is that there is no guarantees. In this article I will discuss why this is the case and some things that should make you run away from an unethical SEO companies.

In truth the problem with SEO is that you are at the mercy of the search engines and they can change there algorithms at a drop of a hat. This can lead you website listings to take a nose dive. The search engines are always improving how they return results as they want to serve the most relevant results for your search query. One thing that hinders search engines is spammy unethical practices by website owners and even some SEO companies. It is not good enough for a SEO company to say that they are ethical they need to back this up by giving you evidence on how they will optimise your website. If a SEO company does follow unethical practices then it’s your business that will suffer because of it.

Here are some things if you hear a SEO company say that should set alarm bells ringing.

1. Will guarantee you first page positions. 2. We will submit your website to hundreds of search engines. 3. We will focus on increasing your PageRank. 4. We have a special relationship with the search engines. 5. We optimise for SEO 2.0

If a SEO company always follows the search engine guidelines this will maker you website future proof as the SEO services that you will receive will never loose favour. If you follow unethical methods you may get some good results but it is just a matter of time before the search engines click onto this and you rankings and traffic will take a nose dive.

A good search engine optimisation company that I used for my poker site is MOU. They made my website design user friendly and well optimised. In review you should read Goggles webmasters guidelines and come armed with this information when you speak to an SEO company. If a company is not forthcoming with what they will actually do to increase your visibility then don’t use them. If they have nothing to hide then they will tell you exactly how they operate. I must say the industry as a whole is mostly full of ethical companies; however the few give the many a bad name.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one internet marketing strategy that any internet entrepreneur would want for their website. Well maybe except for those that really established a strong name over the web, but as for those that started out in ecommerce would really need to learn about SEO. Let’s get to the point, SEO is used as a way to raise a website’s rank in any search engine like Yahoo! and Google (any of the top 10 slots will do, but It’ll be greater if it would be in top 1). By doing so, the possibility of visitors that visits a website would increase, thus increasing sales and profit margin. So long-story-short, SEO is all about increasing the visibility of a website in the world wide web by use of search engines. Now the question is, how do you do SEO?
SEO companies are now available for hire around the world, such as SEO Philippines companies. Some companies have outsourced their SEO needs to these establishments. But it can also be done by anyone that knows basic SEO procedures, even at home. So here is a step-by-step, do-it-yourself, guide on SEO and how to increase visibility in the world wide web.
Step 1: Get Your Keywords
The first step that any SEO Philippines company would do is to research on keywords that perfectly describes the website. Free online keyword research tools like Google Adwords Keyword tool or SEO Book’s Keyword tool are popularly used by many SEO specialists. Highly competitive keywords is the main ingredient in any successful SEO dish. But highly competitive doesn’t only describe single words such as “SEO”, it also emphasizes on the keyword structure, if it really describes the website like “SEO service in the Philippines”.
Note: In a keyword research, always make sure that the keywords are relevant to the website to be optimized. Irrelevant keywords pointing to a website could earn a one way trip to “Ban“svill courtesy of search engines.
Step 2: Know Your Enemies
Well not exactly “enemies” per-se, but competitors. After doing a keyword research, It’s time to look up on your competitors by use of your chosen keywords. Try looking at what SEO tactics or strategies they’ve done. By viewing their source code (ctrl+U for Firefox), you can see the keyword density, meta tags they used, alt tags, and title tags (I’ll explain these later on). To learn the number backlinks (I’ll explain these later on) of a website, try using SEOpen’s free backlink tool, this way you’ll know what you have to beat to gain their spot. Using your competitor’s strength against them is one successful way to succeed in an SEO campaign.
Step 3: Start On-Page SEO
So here we’ll start the first pace of SEO, the on-page optimization. Actually, SEO is divided into 2 parts, the on-page and off-page (which I’ll discuss later on). On-page optimization involves making changes within the website to make it more “search engine friendly”. The strategies and tactics used here are as follows:

Content Optimization – This strategy involves changing the content of the website, particularly with it’s text elements. One way is to embed the researched keywords on texts found throughout the website, focusing mainly on the headers (those with the big bold letters). It is said that keywords used should be take about 7% of the total number of words in a content. Let’s say you have 400 words in a single page, so 7% of that 400 (which is 28) should be keywords. Note: Make sure that the content is still readable after placing those keywords. Remember that the users are still your prime target, not the search engine spiders. Site Map – Site maps are an important part of websites optimized for search engine. This way, search engine spiders (or robots) could easily crawl through the whole website by use of site map. Making it easier for spiders to crawl through the website is one way to make a website “search engine friendly”. Meta Tags - Meta tags are comprised of the Title, Description, and Keywords of the website. Other than the content of websites, meta tags are also the perfect place for keywords. The only difference is that these things are like a “Free Buffet” sign for search engine spiders, it’s the one responsible for attracting search engine spiders to crawl your website. But remember that it still depends on the structure of the meta tags. Alt Tags - Alt tags are those found in HTML image codes. Let’s say your keyword is “SEO Philippines“, your image tag should now look like this: <img src=”images.png” alt=“SEO Philippines”> Just like the meta tags, alt tags are also an appropriate place to put several important keywords. Note: Make sure that only one (1) keyword should be placed on every alt tags found all over the website to avoid keyword spamming (which is part of black hat SEO) Title Tags – Like meta tags and alt tags, title tags are also an appropriate place to put some keywords in. By adding a keyword, let’s take for example “SEO Service”, in the title tag, the HTML hyperlink tag should look like this: <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);” href=”default.aspx” title=“SEO Service Online”> Note: Alt tags are not seen by visitors, only the search engine spiders so it wouldn’t hurt to just leave it with the keyword. But title tags are seen by visitors, so make sure that the title tag is still readable after embedding the a keyword or two.

Step 4: Start Off-Page SEO
Unlike the on-page, off-page optimization involves SEO strategies outside of the website. This part of SEO is divided into two categories, backlinks and public relation strategies. Backlinks are links all over the world wide web that points back to your website. It has long been considered that the many backlinks you have, the more popular you’ll get. Another theory added is the weight or importance of the website where the link is coming from. Tools used to determine the popularity of a website is through Google’s PageRank and Alexa traffic tool. Here are some of the strategies used by SEO specialists to get backlinks.

Link Exchange - One of the earliest forms of backlinking involves exchanging links with other relevant websites. Article Marketing - This type of off-page SEO can be considered both for backlinks and public relations. An article commonly generates an average of 3 links (depending on the kind of article directory it was submitted). It’s also considered as public relations because these articles commonly promotes the business they’re trying to market. Blog and Forum Commenting – Forums and blogs are also a popular trend to generate backlinks by using their signatures as links linking back to your website. Blogging - Other than commenting on other blogs, creating your own blog and embedding links is another popular way for generating backlinks.

PR or public relation strategies of off-page SEO involves generating traffic not only through search engines but also with other types of media. This type of off-page SEO mainly works by marketing their service through word of mouth. These strategies involves the use of:

Social Media - Social media such as Friendster, FaceBook, Twitter, and MySpace are the perfect place to start a buzz that could benefit the website through the marketing strategy they call “word of mouth”. Adding a link could also help in getting more backlinks. Social Bookmarking – By using the articles in bookmarking sites such as Technorati or Digg, people could easily learn about your services through your article. This is also another way for the articles to gain more importance in the web, thus increasing the chance for your websites to be visited through your articles.

Other forms of off-page SEO is submitting your website to search engine directories. Make sure to submit your URL for free to Google, Yahoo!, Alexa, www.altavista.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.Jayde.com, www.whatuseek.com, and more. DMOZ and Yahoo Directory listings are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit, but if you do not have time to search for and submit, you can also use our search engine submission service.Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more information.