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.

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!

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.

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.

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche – you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time.

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.

2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don’t forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.

3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it – keeping a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords… are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site – make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.

4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don’t ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google’s influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.

5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the ‘anchor text’ is related to your keywords but don’t ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don’t forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in your niche.

6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing short 500 – 700 word informative helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters… plus other major online sites. Don’t forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you’re also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don’t forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages… to increase your rankings and traffic.

7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts – a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts. Works similar as a sub-domain but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you’re creating content to first satisfy your visitors.

8. WordPress blog software is extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.

9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter… media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati… you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It’s time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on all my content.

10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don’t want SEO – you want effective SEO. In order to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.

First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you’re pursuing – your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That’s why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what’s been searched for or discussed.

Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site – tops in your niche – the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.

Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you’re into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.

Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you’re seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.

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.

Before we get into that, let’s quickly recap what has happened up until this point. It is relevant, I promise.

As the internet grows larger daily, and the number of searches online increase – we see people getting fanatical about getting their sites ranked. And why not? It’s a great, constant source of traffic leading targeted visitors to your door!

If only getting the results was easier!

I’m sure some of these statements will ring true for you.

* SEO is simple but not easy.

* SEO is time consuming and requires knowledge that only a small handful of business owners truly have, (since their real focus is and should be running their business) but is needed by everyone, not just a small handful.

* SEO is maddening but EFFECTIVE and NECESSARY.

So, what do you do when you know you need SEO, but you also know it is sometimes frustrating, it’s time consuming and it’s not your area of expertise? The consensus seems to be that you have 2 options:

1. Hire a professional SEO Firm. This frees up your time to run your business, and leaves it to the professionals who are equipped with the proper knowledge and time.

2. Learn SEO yourself, either through a current and up-to-date manual or some consulting.

Both scenarios have pros and cons. Whether you do it yourself or you hire an SEO Firm, you need to be 100% sure that the big picture is taken into consideration, and that you aren’t unintentionally sabotaging your own efforts.

Let’s look at SEO through the years, not in chronological order — just by highlighting a few key events.

Doorway pages were the biggest thing online – everyone used them, and they worked! Until Google caught on that people were just trying to trick them, and they banned the pages. Mouths dropped open in shock, as sites sitting pretty at the top of the SERPs (search engine results page) dropped from sight.

Reciprocal links were all the rage. Emails flew across the internet. You link to me, and I’ll link to you. Everyone was fast becoming friends and creating an information network that was all interlinked. Fabulous!

Until Google caught on that this isn’t a true representation of how popular your site is, people are just creating link farms and mass-generating “faux link popularity”. More mass droppage of sites from the SERPs.

One-way links are definitely the way to go. It’s exactly what Google wants, and if we simply buy a link from another website, Google will see it as a viable one-way link to my site. Who says you can’t buy love. I’ve got Google lovin’ me.

Until Google realizes there are sites with high PageRank out there, making a nice new monthly income for linking to sites that have not earned a link – and therefore the faux link popularity issue is just perpetuated.

With all of the link confusion, it is a constant source for debate: reciprocal is OK, as long as it is relevant and from a high PR site. One way is the only way to go, but only if it is relevant and from a high PR site. What is high PR anyway, is it anything above 3 or 4 or 5?

With all the questions flying, attention seemed to go back to a new and improved type of doorway page. One that includes links to other sites (resources) underneath text for your site.

This is truly great – this technique is actually legit, you are providing a real value to people by having helpful links on your site, and the search engines just happen to view those links with text as keyword rich, so they boost your rankings.

A very legitimate tactic, it made sense to the engines, and it was fairly easy to do. Great – we’ve finally found a way to create some great pages that Google seems to like. Everyone is sitting pretty now.

Until Google sees the internet infiltrated with sites that are nothing but mass-produced pages with no customization. Resource pages spit out by software, with no real content to support it. That ended the “resource page hay day”.

Blogs are “it”. Everyone can create a free blog, and then blog and ping like crazy. It drives the spiders to your blog when you ping, they follow links in your posts to your main site, and next thing you know you can control Googlebot, and Yahoo Slurp. With a few good posts, you can plan on the bots swinging by to pick up more pages in your site. Cool, things are happening now! Until Google realizes people have programs doing auto-posts and auto-pings and it’s not the most relevant or original content. Google wises up, and for those still trying to get away with automated blogging and pinging, you’re wasting your time.

The link debates rage on; content is still king; and people want rankings more than ever. What’s next?

1. RSS Feed – for a long time no one knew what it stood for, but they all love it. You can create content and send it out to the world to read with their preferred viewer. That truly is an opportunity to get your message out there!

You can also pull feeds into your site to bulk up content. Amazing. What an opportunity.

2. Enter the Press Release and Article Syndication. Brand spanking new and dressed to impress. It was fabulous – write informative articles and submit them around the internet – the benefit is two-fold – each article will drive traffic to your site, and the links within the article will count as links for your site!

The Press Release was killer too. Write an informative, keyword rich press release and get it sent out to thousands of media outlets online. You could count on about 30 days worth of traffic enjoyment from one release. Not to mentioned, press releases get picked up in the News engines and the regular engines too.

Great – so what’s the problem?

Too many people don’t look at the big picture, and the actual reason behind algorithm shifts. People don’t learn from them, they simply adjust their methods and move on until the next algo shift.

If you really look at the trends, and realize what Google wants and why they do what they do, I think you’ll find a very common theme.

Google wants to deliver relevant results to people. They have no hidden agenda. They simply want to deliver the best and most relevant results in response to someone’s search query.

That alone tells us all we need to know. In order to get good rankings, we need a popular site with great, informative content that is current.

Any current hot technique is only a fad. We make sure of that. What do I mean by that? Stay tuned for Part 2 of “Are You Sabotaging Your SEO Success?”

The top webmasters have an understanding of SEO and how it affects their sites. There are many myths about SEO and what it is, but even if you have never heard the term it can be easy to apply and benefit from SEO.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website from a technical and stylistic viewpoint. The technical optimization takes the form of using the proper Meta Tags, Alt Image Tags, and off-page optimization techniques. The stylistic adjustments are made in order to make the content more search engine friendly such as keyword density, bold text, title text, headings and other ways to highlight the most important keywords on your site, so the search engines can deliver accurate results to users.

The natural outcome of optimizing a site is increased traffic from search engines, and ranking higher in the results that are delivered to their users.

SEO won’t necessarily change the look of your site. Although, sometimes it is a good idea to make structural changes to a site to make it easier for the search engine to read the page. Many times some subtle changes in your headings, focusing on your keywords in text, adding content can make a big difference in your overall SEO.

Depending on how competitive your chosen keywords are, you can expect to see results from your SEO efforts fairly quickly, sometimes in just a few days. To start your SEO effort, however, use broader, less competitive keywords and work your way up to the more competitive ones. This way you can get the momentum going and gain PageRank to compete in the more competitive terms as you move up in the search results.

Tracking your website statistics is the best way to track your SEO and know if your SEO efforts are bringing the desired results. Basic statistics are included in most hosting packages, or you can check out GoogleAnalytics.

Pay attention to the source of your traffic as you analyze the data. When you start to see increasing referrals from the major search engines you know you efforts are working. Then, watch where your traffic is coming from on a geographic area. If you only ship to The US, you wouldn’t want to attract visitors from Australia. If you sell globally, then you will be able to determine where you product is hot.

If you are using other advertising methods like pay per click, or Banner Ads, direct them to special landing pages so you don’t skew your results with traffic from paid advertising.

SEO is far and away the best way to attract free, highly targeted traffic to your site. SEO can easily be incorporated into your advertising and marketing efforts, and the increase in traffic, and ultimately sales will make the effort well worth the time.

I’m here to hopefully answer SEO outsource questions and help you get your site pulling in the traffic you’d like to see. Remember, traffic is the lifeblood of your website, and SEO is one of the best traffic generation techniques you can employ. Let’s get to work.

There is a study recently completed on the results of companies outsourcing SEO (Sept. 2005, Jupiter). The results may appear shocking, but it is something I see every day in this business.

The study showed that 64% of companies that chose to outsource their SEO work did NOT follow the instructions their SEO firm laid out for them! Let me repeat- they did not follow instructions! Even though this company recognized the importance of traffic (good), researched and selected an SEO firm (better), and laid down the cash (lots of it for a professional and effective outfit, even better), their not following directions let it all fall apart!

Imagine. If 64% of those who contracted SEO work don’t get it, how easy would it be for you to get ahead and optimize your website- the more attention you pay to detail, the more SEO, the more SEO, the more traffic you get, and the more traffic, the happier you are, invariably.

The more SEO changes, the more its principles stay the same. The SEO winners are not those individuals who chase each new trend. The winners are those who commit to their SEO firm and treat their business with the seriousness success commands.

So, now that you have an SEO firm working your website into search engine page-ranking super-being, your job is to sit back, implement the pertinent adjustments, and wait for the results. Carefully shaping the firm’s suggestions into the working fiber of your website is critical, as these changes are those that will drive your site up. Forget Desperate Housewives- try desperate SEO firms. With 64% of clients NOT making the moves necessary for success, no wonder there are rumors of astounding failure with SEO firms out there.

Now that you are part of the 36% that takes action, its time to treat your website with the seriousness and commitment it deserves. Then, get to work with the right SEO company to open the floodgates of traffic SEO can deliver. Internet marketing success is simple, not easy, and its your choice.

There are hundreds and thousands of so-called SEO consultants but only a few are professional, reliable and experienced. Find the crème of SEO Experts can be a difficult job but here are some tips that will make your work easier:

Don’t fall for the tall SEO promises

There are several SEO consultants who make tall claims about their level of expertise. Some of them even claim that they have got websites number one ranking in the top search engines like Google or Yahoo within a few days. One of the favorite lines is, “I can get your articles submitted to hundreds of directories and it will make a major impact”. The truth is that firstly, no expert in SEO or SEM can ever guarantee number one ranking on any of the top search engines for a particular or set of popular keyword phrases, and absolutely nobody can guarantee this within a few days (unless this is a pay per click campaign). Secondly, there are only a few authentic and relevant submission directories over the internet where you can submit your content to enhance back-linking. The thought of the day is, “Don’t go for the promises, go for the facts!” You need a talented SEO firm to seek out quality links for you efficiently.

Website ranking of the SEO expert

SEO expert’s website is the first place you need to visit if you are planning an internet marketing campaign. All top SEO experts will have their own website with details regarding the services offered by them, their portfolio, client feedbacks, and a contact us page. The best way to check the authenticity and expertise of SEO consultants is by checking the ranking of their website. If their website is at the bottom of Google PageRank then they are probably not good enough and will not be able to offer positive assistance for your SEO campaign. Another important thing you need to check is if their website has been blacklisted by search engines like Google. There are many SEO specialists who have been blacklisted because they have used black hat SEO tactics and spamming for increasing web popularity and page ranking.

Reputation of SEO Consultant

There is a saying that “reputation always precedes the person.” In this case, you will need to ask the SEO consultants for client reference as well as read through any testimonials published on their website. You need to check the website of their clients and check their ranking on different search engines and over the internet. Most top SEO Experts will have no issues sharing their references.

Once you are satisfied with the response and the website, you can initiate the process of hiring an expert.