SEO Tips

I was looking around for some simple tips and found this posted by simple-biz



I think this will be a great way to get this forum started off.

Following on from J's SEO tips above I think anyone contemplating SEO on their site should always have the basic fundementals in place. I posted an article on Search Engine Friendly Web Design which I discuss in more depth some of the tips raised in the above post.

Another thing to consider when your starting out optimising your pages is the simple mistakes that can get your site penalized.

Here's a current list of Top 10 SEO Mistakes:

Every search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is a double-edged sword. It’s like traveling in space: one wrong calculation here and one there and you can end up billions of light-years away from your destination. In this post I’m going to suggest 10 SEO mistakes that you should definitely avoid. There are 100s of things that can go wrong, but these top 10 SEO mistakes can cause you the most harm. Here they are:

1) Wrong title of the page

Your title is the first thing the search engine crawlers encounter when they visit your web page. Your title tells the search what your page is about. Even when your link appears in the search results page, it’s your title that attracts the users and makes them click the link. Avoid deceptive titles. Use keywords in your title and be as clear as possible. Another mistake regarding the titles is that sometimes all the pages belonging to a website have the same title: this is a big mistake. Every page of your website should have its own unique title.

2) Wrong selection of keywords

Almost every SEO effort revolves around the chosen keywords and lots of money and time is spent on obtaining a high ranking for the keywords. All the effort will go down the drain if you focus on the wrong keywords. Carefully study what keywords and key phrases your target market is using to find what you have to offer, and then optimise accordingly. Use the free and commercial keyword-analysis tools to zero-in on the precise keywords. Never assume on your own what keywords your target market is using.

3) Having no textual content

No matter how snazzy a website you have, if it doesn’t have enough text, the search engines will never find out what you represent and what product or service you intend to sell.

4) Having wrong content

It is as good as having no content because your bad content will give all the bad information to the search engines. This is partly related to selecting the wrong keywords because even by selecting the wrong keywords you can easily generate wrong content.

5) Choosing the wrong target market

You should know to whom you want to sell, and only then you can properly steer your SEO campaign. If the target market is wrong, how can optimise your website correctly. With wrong target market you’ll be choosing the wrong keywords and misplaced search engine campaigns. Always be sure of whom you want to target.

6) Indiscriminate use of graphics and animations

Graphics and animations look cool, but they only look cool once. They are like a movie: the more times you see them, the less attractive you find them. Unnecessary frills bloat your pages and push your real textual content downwards. Always remember that when the search engine crawlers visit your website they can make no sense of your graphics; they are only looking for the text content.

7) No use of header tags

Header tags — <h1>, <h2>, …, <hn> — are very important tags because they are supposed to highlight the gist of your web page. To create heading people often use bigger fonts for the <p> tag which is totally wrong. Search engines look for important keywords within your header tags so always use them to highlight the main points of your text, and if possible, use the keywords within the header tags.

8) Excessive use of keywords

People think the more keywords their pages have, the better is the chance of getting ranked hire; this is a complete misconception. Excessive use of keywords can get your website blacklisted on various search engines. Although you must have your keywords and their synonyms in your text they don’t have to appear in every sentence. Just have them in the beginning, within your title and other header tags possibly as anchor text.

9) Wrong linking policy

Linking is a very potent SEO methodology, but only if done properly. Indiscriminate incoming and outgoing links can severely harm your search engine rankings. Try getting inbound links from reputed websites and never link to websites that are considered “bad” (porn, spamming, scams, etc.) by the search engines.

10) Not blogging

Not blogging is a mistake because even if it directly may not affect your rankings (or it may), you can rest assured that your competitors are using it to boost their search engine rankings to get highly relevant traffic.

So avoid these top 10 SEO mistakes and gradually keep climbing up the ladder of higher rankings.

Source: Top 10 SEO Mistakes

Search Engine Optimization - What is it?
Search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is set of methods aimed to improve the ranking of a website in search engine results page (SERPs). The term also refers to an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients' sites.
The Search Engines have there own set of algorithm defined by their Engineers to rank the websites. There are more than 200+ factors defined, that influence any web site's ranking. To achieve a top ranking (first page) a website needs to follow certain rules that are ethical and come under the guidelines of Search Engines.
If done properly then search engine optimization can work as a magnet to the Search Engine robots. Search Engines bring about 85% of traffic to the Web sites. So it's very important to rank well in the search engines otherwise you are losing a lot of targeted traffic and that too comes for FREE!

Darker side of SEO
A Look Into The Dark Arts of SEO
The dark side of SEO known as Blackhat “BH "derives from the white hat and black hat label from the early hacker days. Because most people nowadays see hackers as someone who is evil and malicious, but really a hacker was just someone trying to learn more about computers, and gain more insight into it. Obviously once malicious hacking took place, it gave the term, “hacker” a really bad rep, so the good guys labeled the bad guys as black hatters, and themselves as white hatters.
Now, it’s a pretty well known fact that, this isn’t like Star Wars where if you drift over to the dark side, you can never come back to the good side. It doesn’t work like that, even though most people think so.I am a firm believer that to be absolutely amazing in the entire art of SEO (because it truly is an art to master) you must know both sides, white and black. For people that swear by only knowing white hat seo and never meddling in black hat, they are either lying, because everyone gets curious sometime (and let’s not forget, some tactics labeled BH now at some point was considered legal and WH years ago) or they are selling themselves short by not learning as much as they can about SEO.
I think people need to learn both parts. Even if they are so anti-black hat seo, it’s something you have to learn just to know or seperate your methods and tactics with when optimizing a website for the search engines.

Best Regards,
MarketRaise Corp.

I have found that using anchor text in my backlinks has been VERY helpful.

For example, I sell Business Telephone Systems in Dallas

By making the link to my site active with anchor text such as up above, it creates a higher likelihood my site will be found for those key words.

As a matter of fact, keywords that I am weak in google rankings on, I will actually choose to write articles with those keywords as the anchor text for the link back to my site in the bio section. The results are measurable on a weekly basis. Don't underestimate the power of anchor text backlinks.

Hi,
Thanks for giving the valuable seo tips which help in promoting the website..........

Nice post, thanks

To give friends easy tasks is also a very good technique I use.

Hi friends actually i am new here and this is nice to have you here.thanks to all of you for these great article posts..good job.every seo professional needs these types of information.