SEOTops

So many webmasters spend their time working the social media angle.  It must be doing something for them.  I know from my own experience that most Stumblers and people who Digg are just completely blind to ads that are on a website.  So why do we keep doing it?

The Links…HELLO…

Yes social media sites can be an important part of link building.
Social Media Optimization is what it’s called.  You can read a good post about the differences in SMO and SEO Search Engine Optimization here:  Search Engine Optimization VS Social Media Optimization

I know many webmasters who simply use social media sites to find relevant articles and sites that are popular to leave their own website link at. Wordpress blogs are great for commenting on if it’s relevant to your niche. Sometimes, it’s simply a Digg comment page that is relevant to your site, it’s even a better bonus if the page is older and has some Page Rank to it.

Tell me what you think about it!  I’d love to get some perspective of others into why they are using the Social Media Optimization method of getting visitors.

So Google are now offering a great new free tool in there webmaster area. Some webmasters may still find creating a perfectly structured Robots.txt file quite difficult. With the new tool on offer you can now create one simply by entering the file names or directories which you wish not to be displayed.

Although this is not a totally new idea or concept, Google have created this tool so its trustworthy, reliable and dependable just like myself - Ok so now all webmasters should have no reason for not blocking duplicate linked content on your sites and from stopping spiders indexing pages you do want to be.

For more information on how to use this new tool and maybe read abit more about it functions check out Google’s Webmaster Central Blog

Insurance company Gocompare.com look to have secured there place back in the top 5 positions of googles SERP’s for the keyword “car insurance”, After being heavily penalised by Google for practicing blackhat link building techniques involving link purchasing to boost there PR. It is said to be that although they were dropped for about six weeks it shows they have cleaned up there act and have received only minimal punishment from Google. A little warning to Go Compare is that they are very lucky and this shows the reason why you should always perform SEO as per Google’s guidelines.

It is reportedly stated that Go Compare actually lost about 84% of there traffic giving there competitiors a major income boost over the past few week, it is also sending a spark warning as to how powerful Google actually are for either making or braking an online business.

When considering what to put in your Meta Description, it’s important to know how to write for people so that they will have something interesting to read along with having your keywords in such a way that the search engines will pick up on them as well.

No matter what type of site you have, you will want to make sure that the keywords you are targeting are located in the meta description in a natural flowing way.  If you have a hard time writing like this, you can always hire someone to write them for you so that you end up with the best possible meta description you can have.  Just be sure to include your keyword list so that your writer can implement them for you.

Try getting your main keywords in the first few words of your meta description.  If you are targeting both the plural and singular version of the word, you can use this “|” to break them up.  You can make it interesting reading to real people by using descriptive words to go along with your keywords and work them in so that it will be beneficial for both the reader and the search engine.

Don’t spam your meta description with unnecessary keywords.  For instance, if you sell kites on your website, you could say: The largest collection of kites including butterfly kites, animal kites, and 3 dimensional kites.  What you don’t want to say is:  Kites, Kite, Walmart kites, Target kites and more can be found on our kite site.  By using these keywords in your description, you will only be hurting your SEO efforts, not helping them at all.

Well I’d like to pass out some link love to great articles I found while I looked around on the internet.
First one is Top Wordpress Seo Tips for Top 10 Rankings Great Article with tips about getting your site ranked higher.
Ever wonder why you don’t make money online? Learn 7 Reasons Why you don’t make money online
How can you recognize a bad SEO Firm? Learn 11 Ways to Recognize a Bad Seo Firm

P.S. the cartoon is from weblogcartoons.com

Ok wordpress is currently one of the most diverse and most used blogging tools there are to date, it has great funcionality, great themes and best of all great for SEO.

Although  wordpress is very SEO friendly I’m going to let you in on the top 3 tips you can perform for onsite optimization to help boost your SERP’s positions.

1. Firstly before starting your wordpress blog you should change your permalink structure from the default to custom “%postname% - this will change your URL’s to the postname of the post slug you have chosen, therefore getting you listed in the search engines with your chosen keywords in the URL thus giving more strength to your page for the chosen keywords. If you already have a blog with alot of posts you can use a plugin called “Permalink Redirect” this will enable all your old posts not to show an error message as it will redirect your default p=? links to your custom made ones.

2. Download the “All in one SEO plugin” this is a very useful tool to generating changes to your meta tags, decriptions for each and every post

3. Create a site map you can easily do this by downloding the plugin from here 

I highly recommend if you are looking to start a blog to use wordpress, get yourself a nice valid xHTML theme, write good keyword positioned content and participate in the blogosphere community, finally most importantly dont forget your incoming links

Happy Blogging

Are you looking for that perfect secret formula that the people who hold those top spots on the search engines use?  Well I’m going to give it to you today so that you can start writing your content in this way to get you to the top of the list.  Of course when used in combination with off site SEO this can really help you get traffic to your site.

Most people concentrate on more than one set of keywords per page, which is fine, but you will need to define your main keyword before starting to write your content and then put your other phrases in order after that making sure you are only concentrating on 3 at the most.  So lets say your main keyword is labeled A and the next two are labeled B and C.

You want to have A located in the very first sentence of your content to get the most attention from the search engines.  The closer to the beginning the better.  Now continue on with your first paragraph and make sure you use keywords B and C before starting your next paragraph.

Now in the second paragraph, place keyword A in the first sentence and then continue on naturally.  In the third paragraph use keyword B naturally in your text.  Paragraph 4 should include keyword C somewhere in it before moving on.

In the next few paragraphs use your keywords (A, B, and C) naturally and no more than 2-3 times each before getting to the closing lines of your article. Try to make at least 4 more paragraphs to use your keywords in, and the search engines love lots of content so the more paragraphs the better.

In your last paragraph, it gets a little tricky but nothing you can’t handle, you’ve already gotten this far, you can do it!  This time we are going to use keyword C in the first sentence followed by keyword B and then keyword A should be as close to the end of your closing lines as possible.

Using this method will allow you to get the most out of your keywords in each article you write, giving you the proper keyword density.  Remember the more content you have the better and the easier it is to use the keywords you are targeting.

In my time doing SEO, I’ve come across many characters who believe they’ve got the basics of SEO down and one of the greatest advice these people hear is ANCHOR TEXT, put your link under anchor text to help you rank higher for those words in the search engines- that’s pretty basic info you think how could someone mess that up right? WRONG! Now I’ve had clients with keywords like handbags,shoes, purses and watches all in one link which begs the question- Does anyone actually search for that except you? Who in thier right mind goes to google and types in handbags, shoes,purses and watches and then heads over to the keyboard and presses ENTER- that’s right noone.

Basic lesson- This is a sentence- Handbags,purses, lipstick, bags,bentley, shoes and watches.
This is a keyword- Handbags or Gucci Handbags maybe even Brown Gucci Handbags you know words that actual living human beings search for not aliens.

Lesson of the day- Before you start link building please for your sake and mine do keyword research, find out what people are truly searching for before you waste 10,000 links with the anchor text,bags,shoes,purses,lipstick,hotdog,fries,bentley and watches.

Why is Keyword Research so important?
If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, your customers may never find you, resulting in lost income and meaningless rankings, How many people spend 2 months building great links for some words that noone actually searches for, they get to the top of the search engine and can’t understand why their traffic levels haven’t improved. With keyword tools so readily available, there should be no reason why anyone should be in competition crazy keywords but everyday people are fighting each other off to get to the top of some crazy keywords that only they would search for.

How does Google and other major search engines feel about domain name extensions? They don’t show favoritism and they certainly aren’t prejudice to any of them from what I can tell from reading on the webmaster forums.

Does Google like .com’s more than any other tld extension? No, they don’t. It just so happens that .com’s have been around much longer than .info’s have been so you naturally you are going to see more of those come up in the search engines. Many webmasters have found their way to the #1 spot on Google and other search engines with a .info extension so that pretty much tells us that Google likes all extensions equally.

What is important to Google is the content you have on your website. If you are continuously providing good content and working on your SEO, then your .info will rise to the top.

Keep registering those keyword rich domain names no matter what extension they have, as long as they work for you, go for it!

How can you tell if Google has your site marked as spam? One of the best indicators is that no matter what SEO efforts you do for your website, Google, Yahoo! and MSN refuse to index you.

The reasoning behind this is simple. Google employees view each web page and rates them all individually by the content that is published. If your content is duplicate content with nothing other than ads and the copied content, you can bet that you are marked as spam.

The best way for you to look at your website is to take off any duplicate content you have used and all the advertisements to see if there is anything with any real value left. If not it’s time to reevaluate your content to make sure you are offering your readers something they can’t find anywhere else. The search engines will have your site listed in the search results in no time and all the hard work you put into SEOing the site will finally pay off with lots of natural traffic.