SEO Myths, Yahoo Axis, Microsoft Socl, Facebook IPO, Speedlink 21:2012

Hello everyone. Hope you all had a great week. This week, there has been some interesting stuff going on in the search industry and on the social web. Yahoo has launched Yahoo Axis, their new search engine/browser, which as they say is aimed to redefine what it means to search and browse the web. Pretty bold statement but at first glance, they just might be up to something. I installed the “desktop” addon on my FireFox browser and started to play a bit with the interface. Let’s see how it goes. Have you tried Axis yet? How about DuckDuckGo? Looks like they are attracting more users…

Another interesting stuff that happened this week is the launch of Microsoft’s new social network Socl, pronounced “social”. As with Axis, I also jumped in to see what it has to offer, and first impressions reminds me of certain features (named differently), available on another network. At first, it may look complicated, but once you get the hand of using Socl’s interface, it is actually not that difficult to use. Danny Sullivan wrote a great coverage about Socl, so if you are interested, read what he has to say. Will Microsoft be a major player in the social arena? Remains to be seen. Too early to make any judgements.

On another forefront, I really wanted to skip the whole hulabahlooh related to FaceBook’s IPO. Share price has dropped roughly 17.5% from its original IPO offer price. Scary, if you ask me, and still not sure where all this will end. We’ll see.

Finally, this week’s WhiteBoard Friday of Rand from SEOMoz, is really worth watching. In case you missed it, he explains in detail, why you should not worry about certain “SEO advices” popping up here and there, due to the latest updates from Google. All in all, just apply the most ethical search engine optimization practices, and you should be fine.

How To Build High Quality Sites?

Building High Quality Sites

Building high quality sites is really not that new if you consider the countless amount of information available to you on the internet. As a matter of fact, I think that it is widely spoken about topic, the difference being that most of the information out there are just being said in several different ways.

The Panda algorithm change, has apparently given quality a new meaning. It is now all about “quality”. Quality content, quality links, quality websites, quality navigational structure, and so on. Come to think of it, was this ever really an issue? I don’t think so. It just gotten more attention now because “someone” decided that enough is enough, and those who were affected by Panda, now seems to realize that search results has always had only one main objective in mind, provide users with meaningful, useful and top notch search results.

Google, determined to provide a better and faster web, recently announced that Panda is just but one of the 500 search improvements they are expecting to roll out this year. If you were one of those affected by the devastating effect of Panda, then you should know that it isn’t over and continued efforts should be made to improve your websites quality (if needed) in order to protect yourself from any similar moves in the future. As a matter of fact, Google also mentioned that after Panda, several other tweaks have already been made and that up until now, many sites and users are assuming that changes in their rankings is still related to Panda, whereas, it is no longer the case.

As Google states:

Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.

That said, and with the purpose of improving websites quality, Google has taken the time to create a shortlist of questions, one should be asking, about the quality of a page or an article, which are really the important components to assess the overall quality of a website.

What Is Considered A High Quality Site?

As I said before, there are many great articles out there that are indirectly giving you advice, where ultimately, contributes towards what is deemed to be a quality website. If you really want to stay ahead of the pack, and improve your rankings, then here is the shortlist that Google suggests to ask yourself about your site. This will help you step into Google’s mindset and provide you with guidance on how to build quality websites.

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

What You Can Do Now To Improve The Quality Of Your Site?

If you are amongst those that feel were impacted by Panda, rather than looking for ways to game the algorithm, focus on improving your pages and articles based on the above list (those that apply) and pay special attention to this message given by Google. I think this is extremely important.

One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

There you have it. While you may already be aware of this shortlist provided by Google, I thought I’ll share it anyway, in case you missed this one out.

Have you been affected by Panda? Was it positive or negative? Is there anything else you can add to help us improve and build a high quality site?

The Best SEO Practices and Tips 2012

SEO, or search engine optimization has been a much discussed and debated topic. IMO, I think it will continue that way, for as long as there are search engines and most importantly when users continue to make use of them. There are studies all over the place, where results indicate that when someone is looking for something, they start generally by “searching for whatever it is” online. SEO is not dead as many would like you to believe, but it is constantly changing and as new factors come into play, others go. In addition, SEO is just a piece of the puzzle, now included in a much larger scale called “inbound marketing” (more on that later).

Best SEO Practices For 2012

As I mentioned before, the best SEO Practices have not really change that much, as the most important ranking factors pretty much remained unchanged. At its basics, you need to know that there are only two essential elements for good SEO, on-page and off-page. On-page SEO are those that you as a publisher can control directly, while off-page SEO essentially relies on user behavior, social engagements, visitors, and other publishers, although there are some cases where you too can control part of it.

Now and understandably, you might be a complete newbie to this whole SEO thing. If that is the case, I strongly suggests you to read the following, before anything else. While these material may have been published for a while now, they all provide a lot of information that are valuable. It will definitely introduce you to the basic concepts of content optimization for search engines and a bit more .

• Another Step To Reward High Quality Sites (new update: GWT Official Blog April 24, 2012)
• Google’s SEO Starter Guide
• Google’s SEO Report Card
• Google’s Website Quality Guidelines
• Best SEO Tips and Practices for 2011
• Search Engine Land’s Guide To SEO

On-Page SEO Ranking Factors and Important Elements

Essentially, you will need to address the following – Content, Code and Site Architecture. Let’s put aside the need for quality content as that is the only one that is a given.

Best On-Page SEO Practices For…

Content Creation
180x150 Marketing Evaluation
Quality content is really what you should aim for, as this is what it takes to enhance or improve users experience. I won’t be discussing posting frequency as it depends a lot on your topic or niche and how often you can generate good content. If you ask me, it is way better to post a great article 2 –3 times a week than shooting for useless and low quality daily content. That won’t cut it. You should know however that search engines, and in particular Google, is now looking for “fresh” content. Obviously, if you are talking about something that is “hot” or trending , the more updated the information is, the better. Otherwise, find a frequency that suits you best and stick to it.

Now, you may be asking what is quality content? Oh boy, we can stay here forever, but to keep this short, anything that can be helpful and enhanced peoples lives or experience is what quality is all about. Do not refrain yourself to just writing “text” posts. You can make use of all content creation methods such as Videos, Infographics, Videographics, Images or a combination of all. You can even be a great content curator, if you know how to do it properly, and having a hard time to self-create content. Read the “Quality Guidelines” as suggested above and you will know what it takes to have a quality website.

Code

This is nothing more than the language that you use to generate “signals” for search engines bots. Content creation is geared for your readers, visitors and users in general, while the “code” is the part where you optimize your site and content for search engines. This is where you put in practice the proper use of words (known as keywords) in your title and description. Proper use of words here means that you are using the most relevant keywords that best describe your site or a specific posts. Words are important for your SEO campaign and while it is not “everything”, it is a very important piece of the puzzle. On a later stage (hopefully next week), I will provide the best SEO tools (and best SEO plugins), that you can use to assist you in optimizing your content, among other things. Watch out for that?

And let’s not forget about the theme you are using. For SEO purposes, one of the best recommended platforms is WordPress. Even Matt Cutts recommends it, and for a good reason. Why? Because according to Matt Cutts, WordPress takes care of about 70% of the technical issues required for your SEO. The remainder, or 30% of on-page SEO can be complimented by using the best SEO plugins and whenever possible using WordPress SEO optimized themes. Don’t get fooled by the later. There are many that will say that their themes are SEO optimized. Do some research first just to make sure. The only two SEO optimized themes that I know of, because I use them, are Thesis and Genesis (aff links). You should give them a try .

Site Architecture

Also known as usability, site navigation, etc.. Having quality and optimized content is great, but your site should also provide the best of user experience and accessibility for search engine bots. Page speed, Link structure (broken links are bad) and easily allowing for search bots to crawl your site are all but important ingredients to wrap up your on-page SEO. In addition, you may want to seriously consider setting up the authorship markup on your site, as this is one way of Google knowing about you as the author. Excellent way to “prove” that you are the original creator of a certain piece of content, while providing exposure, building credibility and trust.

The guides above, my SEO Tips, along with the great information out there, should give you an idea of how and what you need to do to accomplish this objective. Take page speed for example. If you are on WordPress, reading how to make your WordPress site load faster will provide you with a step by step instruction on how to achieve this.

Recommended articles for more Best SEO Practices and Tips

• SEO Strategies and Inbound Marketing Best Practices for 2012
• The KISSmetrics Guide To Keyword Research (series)
• Promoting Your Content on YouTube

Off-Page SEO Ranking Factors and Important Elements

Once upon a time, the only critical element to off-page SEO was basically link building. Essentially the more quality links you can amass and point to your site, all the better. This was achieved in many ways, including but not limited to link exchanges (include wheels), article marketing (so, so), directory submissions, etc. These were effective back then, but as the game changes, search engines are now giving more and more importance to “quality and natural inbound links” and other external SEO factors, such as social engagement, trust factor of a website, etc.. These are the ones that we essentially do not control and have to rely on users, other publishers, to help us build credibility and trust. Hence, why it is now very important to have great content, build relationships and engage actively on the social sphere.

Best Off-Page SEO Practices For…

Links or Link Building

As I mentioned above, inbound links are still very important, the only difference being that search engines now favor “quality” over “quantity”. The more natural, trusted and authority sites links to you (domain level), the better. This is why it is equally important to monitor and track backlinks. In addition, inbound links are further strengthen with the use “again” of proper words, also known as anchor text. The more relevant your anchor texts are, the greater you chances of ranking well for that particular term. If you do find a link pointing to your site that you feel does not have a proper anchor text, politely ask the webmaster to change it, if they can. If you have “other” sites where you can control the links and anchor text, remember to use relevancy, over “spammy” like keywords.

Other ways of how to get backlinks and traffic generation techniques exists and a bit of research can help. However, not all methods are considered “white hat” or ethical, and with “Google Panda” continuing on its path on “removing” useless stuff from their index, you want to make sure that you are doing the acceptable thing. One great form of link building is via guest posting. Start with this list of awesome sites that you can submit your guest post for consideration.

Social Web

Ahh! The social sphere. What is there to say about it? A lot actually, but let’s focus on SEO and how the social web can help your site rank better. Basically it all boils down to your online reputation, the trust and authority of the people who share your content, the amount of “votes” you obtain from influential people to your content, and the level of engagement and interaction you perform on the major networks. Search engines are now heavily looking at you and your content on social networks. It is believed that the more trusted and authoritative people share your content, the more your content could be considered of high quality and value. At least that is what is perceived.

I won’t put too much details as to what you should and should do on social networks. The important part is that you know that they are now important and you should not ignore being a part of the major ones, such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter and now Google+. I don’t want to seem pushy, but I really encourage you to be a part of Google+ and also build your Google+ page, if you have not done so already. Results from Google, specially when a user is logged in any Google account, are now showing relevant results from your circles first, before anything else. Here’s a great and free guide (PDF) on everything you need to know about Google+ (excellent).

There you have it. These are the best SEO practices that you should seriously consider for your SEO campaign. The above are all part of a “big” pie and while some factors are indeed more important than others, do remember that there is not one single factor that guarantees you top rankings.

Worst SEO Practices For 2012

Yep! There are also SEO techniques that you should avoid. While some may give you a sort of instant boost in your rankings, they will, in due time, not only hurt your rankings but may cause other unexpected negative impact on a lot of things. Your reputation, brand, among other things that are at risk. So think again and avoid, copying content, posting shallow or useless articles, excessive use of repetitive words (stuffing), link cloaking, bad redirections, any attempt to falsely manipulate PageRank, and yep, paid and spammy links. All these are frowned upon and is bad for user experience.

Stay on the right path. Avoid shortcuts as they may only result with your sites demise and whenever possible, be sure that you are in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and Bing’s webmaster tools.

And finally…

5 common mistakes in SEO (and 6 good ideas!)

Maile Ohye from Google covers the five most common errors she finds in SEO, and then concludes with six quick tips to make sure you’re on the right track.

Wishing you all success in your online endeavors on 2012!

18 SEO Experts On How To Do SEO In 2012

Google is moving fast and algorithms improve rapidly. It’s not easy keeping up with the latest in SEO, so I asked the top SEOs of our industry what we should do more of in 2012, and what we should stop doing. Enjoy these 2012 SEO tips!

The experts

• Rand Fishkin (CEO, SEOmoz)
• Dr. Peter J. Meyers (President of User Effect)
• Will Critchlow (Founder, distilled)
• Danny Dover (SEO Consultant and Author, DannyDover.com)
• Bas van den Beld (Speaker, blogger and owner State of Search)
• Ann Smarty (Owner at MyBlogGuest)
• Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney)
• Aaron Wall (Founder, SEObook)
• Neil Patel (Co-founder Crazy Egg and blogging at Quick Sprout)
• Justin Briggs (SEO Manager at Big Fish Games and blogger)
• Tom Critchlow (VP of Operations NYC, distilled)
• Gianluca Fiorelli (SEO Consultant, ItaliaSEO and blogger)
• Stephan Spencer (Author, SEO and Internet marketer, Stephan Spencer)
• Marcus Tandler (Partner at Tandler.Doerje.Partner and blogger)
• Dennis Goedegebuure (VP Internet Marketing at Geeknet and blogger)
• Scott Polk (VP of Internet Marketing, ObsidianEdge Marketing)
• Trond Lyngbø (SEO Strategist, Metronet and writer at Search Engine Land)
• Russ Jones (CTO, Virante)

1. What Is Your Best SEO Tips For 2012?

Rand Fishkin

Move outside of classic, old-school SEO. If you’re sticking to keyword research and targeting with a dose of site accessibility and link building, you’re almost certainly going to lose out to someone who’s broadened to include content marketing, viral product incentives, email, social media, conversion rate optimization and branding as part of their online marketing efforts. The power of combining tactics and reaping the benefits of overlapping marketing practices is insanely awesome.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. I think the big lesson of Panda is that more isn’t always better. More indexed pages cost Google money and often dilute your most important content. Canonicalize true duplicates, tame near-duplicates, and burn thin content to the ground. If you syndicate, make sure you bring something unique to the table, and if you’re a thin affiliate, fatten up.

Will Critchlow

More than ever, I believe code is the new content. I think we will see interactive data visualisations getting bundles of links and shares.

Danny Dover

SEO has grown beyond simply building links, writing comments and optimizing tags. It now involves the entire website experience. Don’t focus entirely on doing traditional SEO, instead diversify in other marketing channels (e-mail, CRO, social, PPC). I think the winners will be the ones who excel at online education. I predict that industry will grow much bigger in 2012.

Bas van den Beld

1. Watch out for personalization and make your content shareable. Things are getting personal. Google is making Google+ the center of it all to make everything as personal as possible. This means that we will be seeing a lot more personal elements, for example in the SERPS. This means you should make your content as shareable as possible. Get people to share and they will spread it to their network. It will show up in their personalized SERPS.

2. Optimize your snippets. Google is putting a lot of emphasis on snippets. Optimize all your snippets, not just the meta description, but also the rel-author, the reviews, everything.

Ann Smarty

If your focus has always been content and quality, there will hardly be anything to change for you next year. Maybe you should try playing with some fresh content and thus tracking hot trends for that. But other than that, just keep on!

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker

For 2012 I suggest that people should build websites that people want to link to.

Aaron Wall

Google continues to bias the algorithms toward brands. As Google promotes brands then in many cases you might find using one of those promoted platforms offers a higher ROI than building out sites from scratch. If you look in the SERPs across a wide selection of keywords you will see that many people are building business models based on being the eHow of Facebook or the eHow of Youtube. In addition to that low level sort of stuff, one can list their products for sale on sites like eBay, Amazon or Etsy.

Neil Patel

Stop building links too quickly. If you grow at too fast of a pace, you’ll find that it becomes really hard to achieve top rankings. In 2012, slow and steady will actually win the race. Don’t go after quantity, go after quality links.

Justin Briggs

I’d keep a look out for the growth of entity specific search algorithms, with a focus on building a brand, building out AgentRank/AuthorRank, and citations for “real world” items, such as specific products, locations, movies, songs, etc. I think increased brand detection, rel author, the social graph, and schema are early stages of this style of ranking algorithms. Search engines are moving beyond page and domain level algorithms and becoming increasingly sophisticated at understanding entities / objects.

Tom Critchlow

Focus on user engagement. I think marketers will get a lot more aware of user retention and loyalty and that Google will publicly discuss how they reward these metrics by measuring brand loyalty and search history. Whether it’s that exact metric or not, I think we’ll finally see a slight weakening of link-based metrics and more emphasis put on social/user metrics.

Gianluca Fiorelli

I would strongly suggest in implementing the rel=author and rel=publisher tags, hence using Google+.

In fact, I consider that the “author rank” is going to be one of the most important factors for Google in order to discriminate authoritative sites in the next months, as it will “identify” what authors and publishers sites are really popular both in the social and link graph.

It is my firm conviction that SEO and Social Media are going to merge in many aspects, and those rel are going to be tool Google will use (alongside others signals) to do that merge.

As a consequence, that means that sites will need to finally embrace what we call “Inbound Marketing”, spending less time with old classic tactics (which will still have their importance though, even if reduced IMO) and strategically planning a real content marketing plan, which will need to focus on the users needs, and without forgetting where their users spend time: on search (SEO) and social networks (SMO).

To conclude, my best tip is: SEOs, if you want to rank well in the years to come, you must become Inbounders; use data and code like SEO, communicate like Social Media Specialists and plan content as Content strategists.

Stephan Spencer

One important new area of focus is enhancing your Google listings via rich snippets. Focus in particular on marking up videos. Very few companies are taking advantage of this. I expect that Google will, over time, introduce additional types of rich snippets, in particular, ones that will help promote Google+. Think about such things as Google Hangouts and public Circles showing up as rich snippets in the search results.

Marcus Tandler

Become a Brand (or at least look like one…). Be Social (just don´t spam and annoy people). For any given term, Google doesn´t really want to rank those sites the best, which do the best SEO – Google wants to rank sites, which are the best result for the user – Be one of those sites, be the best result for the user for all the keywords you´re targeting!

Dennis Goedegebuure

Link & anchor text diversity. Any backlink profile of your site needs to be natural and diverse. This has already been important in 2011, but will be getting more important as algorithms become smarter. This includes having a natural follow vs no-follow ratio in backlinks.

Scott Polk

Concentrate on Social Signals that the search engines look at from trusted sources. The NSTIC is going to change things – Google and Bing will give more weight to signals from trusted sources … Google Plus/Profiles, etc.

Trond Lyngbø

All traffic is not equal. Small businesses realize this. Instead of targeting high volume keywords, they will focus more on local SEO strategies that not only attract customers into stores, but also ensure they’ll spend money. Conversion, and not just traffic, will be king.

SEO experts will help businesses discover ‘customer intent’ as they search the Web, to target long tail keywords that address customers’ needs, and do it while communicating their values and USP. They will measure ROI and long term profitability over visitor counts, or search rankings.

Paradoxically, this lowers expenses, since higher quality traffic means better conversion to sales, lesser competition, and reduced advertising costs.

A twist that further boosts local SEO effectiveness is ‘social optimization’. Location-based targeting that focuses on prospective customers where they already gather online, and communicates with them using the right tone and approach, gets explosively more powerful when combined with ‘social marketing’, where friends vote up a product through Facebook likes, or a friend’s ‘customer reviews’ show up on search engine results pages or social media platforms.

Those will be the ‘big wins’ in 2012 and beyond, I think. We’ll see this being the year when ‘search’ and ‘social’ meld together into a future of Social Search.

Russ Jones

Start using metrics to make decisions religiously. Half the battle is being efficient with your marketing dollars. You should know how valuable every link is that you attempt to acquire, how much closer it brings you to overcoming your competitor, and how much it costs relative to the potential traffic it will bring in.

Multi-site strategy. There is absolutely no reason all your eggs should be in the same basket. The only algo-update-proof SEO strategy for your site is to have more sites.

2. What SEO Techniques Should We Stop Using In 2012?

Rand Fishkin

Folks have talked a lot about Google’s webspam team negating the value of a lot of “article marketing” link sources. If I were a betting man, I’d say the next large-scale link spam devaluation algo they’ll launch will be in that realm (and thus, I’d avoid the practice). I did a whiteboard friday earlier this year noting that article marketing is mostly a scam, even though there are times when it can work. I expect to see those “working instances” drop even further.

Of course, that’s not to say that good practices in similar fields like guest blogging, white hat comment marketing and the like aren’t still great techniques.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Stop buying exact-match domains just to rank for long-tail keywords. One or two are fine, and domain keywords still matter, but Google is turning down the volume, and the days where you could register 100 domains and link them all to yourself are gone. You’re wasting time and money on a tactic that will eventually crash and burn.

Will Critchlow

I’ve noticed the web spam team using article marketing more and more as their go to example of low quality link building. I have to assume that means they are talking about it a lot in their meetings…

Danny Dover

I recommend you stop basing your day-to-day efforts on “change over time” metrics and start to move toward cohort (preferably tied to an event like sign ups) based metrics. That said, keep the “change over time” graphs for your boss, cohorts are confusing and “up and to the right” graphs are much simpler to showcase your work.

Bas van den Beld

Stop looking at things from your own perspective and start looking from a users perspective.

Ann Smarty

You should have stopped them long before 2012 but if you haven’t yet, here they are:

• Wasting your time on directory submissions (there are just a couple of them still worth the time and the money, like BOTH and Directory Journal);
• Wasting your time on article marketing (better try guest blogging instead);
• Wasting your time on on-site optimization myths (like focusing on keyword density and trying to nofollow all your external links);
• Wasting your time on trying to cheat rather than investing in quality and long-term approach!

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker:

I suggest that people should stop building websites for search engines and start building websites for people.

Aaron Wall

Anything which has a high upfront cost structure without either building brand signals or offering immediate returns is suspect at this point. You not only have latent algorithmic risks from things like the Panda update, but also the fact that Google will scrape & re-purpose as much as they can to launch their own thin arbitrage sites (hotel finder, Google Advisor, product search, flight search, Google places, YouTube, etc.) and preferentially place those at or near the top of the search results.

Look at what Google has done in these verticals. Unless you are in a micro-niche that they view as a waste of time they will eventually try the same in your vertical.

In many cases the parasite will kill the host. Look how many of the yellow page companies have been through bankruptcy.

Neil Patel

SEOs should stop using article spinning and directory submission services. Sure you may see a bit of an increase in rankings, but it doesn’t really help that much. Instead you should focus on building high quality links.

Justin Briggs

From a search quality perspective, I’d tread more carefully with off-topic, inaccurate, and low quality infographics. It’s certainly on Google’s radar. I’m a big fan of infographics, but they’ve worked too well, which has lead to a lot sites and SEO shops just pumping out bad infographics. This will certainly cause a relevancy problem for Google (if it isn’t already), by ranking sites not on their quality, but on their ability to get a lot of infographic links. A number of lower quality affiliate sites and lead gen sites are able to acquire links from hundreds of domains by putting up an infographic on their domain. We’ve seen something similar with widgets back in 2008. I’m not critizing the technique, because I’ve used off-topic linkbait, but you have to be careful when balancing the link profile and creating something defensible.

Tom Critchlow

Article marketing. I doubt many people are still using it anyway but if you are I really think you should stop!

Gianluca Fiorelli

I don’t think SEOs should really stop using any old classic techniques in 2012, for the simple reason that they probably will work still. But surely, as I said before, SEOs should start to spend less time and energy with them. I am thinking especially of techniques like Article Marketing, that has been reduced in spinning articles in hundreds of article marketing sites, which mostly have been penalized by Panda (therefore does not drive that much traffic), and whose links are really bad quality once. Better to spend the time invested in article marketing in creating more quality content for your site and then promoting it with inbound marketing actions.

Stephan Spencer

Stop focusing on exact match keyword-rich domain names.

Marcus Tandler

Stay away from (exact match) keyword links – be glad about every link you´re getting, but don´t obsess about the anchor text.

Dennis Goedegebuure

Outing websites.

Scott Polk

Antiquated Link Building, Article Marketing, You really need to think about the future and plan strategies around where you think the search engines will be heading. It is time to stop chasing the dragon and be proactive.

Trond Lyngbø

Social signals synergizing with search is powerful because it builds trust. We rely more on word of mouth and a friend’s recommendation, over a faceless company’s marketing campaign.

But a disturbing trend is emerging, as companies and professionals endorse black-hat SEO tactics like selling Google+ likes, posting fake customer reviews, and building dozens of dodgy profiles across online communities in an attempt to cheat and lie their way to the top of search rankings. I don’t like how this evolves.

Attempting to “build trust” through lying is just wrong! It has got to stop. I’ve always advised against black hat SEO. As a consultant, it’s important for me to know how these tactics work, but I would never suggest thinking that you can outsmart Google. That could end up a disaster.

A better strategy would be to embrace SEOnomics, rooted in economical leverage of SEO through understanding the psychology of your prospects. That’s the kind that will pay off handsomely in the long run.

Russ Jones

Renting text links. Yes, they can still work, but there is hardly a single link out there that you can’t acquire on a permanent basis for less than 1 year’s pay. Yes, it will take more leg work, but at the end of the year you will have a great link profile that you don’t have to keep paying for every month.

What are your best SEO tips?!

What do you think will be more important in 2012, and what should we stop doing? Feel free to post your best SEO tips.

18 SEO Experts On How To Do SEO In 2012

5 New SEO Tips For 2012

I’m here to share some new seo tips to help newbies in blogging 2012 , I’m sure these new seo tips help bloggers to improve their blog serp (search engine results page) ranking in top search engines like Google , Bing , Yahoo etc.

SEO TIPS

• Try to get link juice , Its very important to increase your SERP (search engine results page) ranking and also page rank . Yes simply you can get good page rank with having link juice . Search on Google for more information about link juice , otherwise kindly check this page to learn about link juice and value of it . ” The Keyword Academy blog was explained very well about link juice .
• Recently I seen few blogs was activated top commentators plugin with do follow links . We will get good traffic + ranking with being the top commentator . its better then writing a guest post , just drop comments on few blogs to be the top commentator . Always be careful on selecting blogs , don’t select blogs with low page rank , low links , spammed & copied content .
• Don’t use plugins like SEO search term tagging 2 , recently I noticed that so many new bloggers was using plugins like incoming search terms . I will agree that those plugins was help to increase traffic but its like fooling search engines . Sure you will penalized by Google if using plugins like this , these type of techniques called as Black Hat SEO . I think may be you already know about this .For Example “Incoming Search Terms” plugin some times attract wrong keywords from search engines . wrong visitors means high bounce rate , you will be penalized by Google if have high bounce rate .
• Don’t approve comments like “Thank you” , “Nice Share” etc . these type of comments will help search engines to penalize your blog . I mean these type of comments will be counted as Copied content by bots . So many people was dropping same comments like this , its called as spam . So don’t approve comments like this .
• Some of my friends was building very high amount of links daily , also they are pining Google daily tons of times . I think over back linking and pinging Google very often was not good for your blog health .

Bonus Tip :

Install “SEO Slugs” WordPress plugin to remove stopped words from your post urls , you don’t need to do any settings on this plugin ,just install that’s it .

I’m publishing this post as a experimental , if I got good response from reader ? sure I will publish few more interesting & unknown seo tips in future .

3 Steps to add your website(Blog) to Google Search

Are you waiting to add your website (Blog) to Google Search ? its very easy to get indexed by Google . This Google indexing process is very easy then compared with other search engines .This tutorial is help you to quick indexed by google , once your blog is indexed on google then your website (Blog) is visible on Google Search .

How To Add Your Website/Blog To Google

Check below 3 easy steps and follow the same steps to get faster indexing by google.

Step 1 : Create your free account on Google Webmaster Tools and sing in to your google webmaster tools account then go to this link and submit your website details .

Step 2 : Google take minimum 2-3 days to index your blog on Google search.in these 2-3 days you have some little work to do ..

• Write unique and good articles
• get links on other blogs
• do link exchange with other blog owners
• try to increase your blog back links
• submit your articles to social bookmarking sites

above little activities are very very useful to increase your search engine ranking .Search Ranking is help you to increase visitors from search engines .

Step 3 : after 2-3 days you blog is automatically added to Google search.if you want to see your blog in Google search ?

” Site:yourdomain.com ” Type this in google search then press enter and see your indexed pages in Google.

Note: in above keyword replace yourdomain.com text with your original website name.

if you got any problems on indexing with Google ? feel free to contact us OR drop your problem below in comment section.

Hope you are enjoyed reading “3 Steps to add your website(Blog) to Google Search ” use below options and share with your friends ..

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Getting Started

Even if you are new to web development you have probably heard about search engine optimization--SEO for short. Generally speaking, SEO is more important to commercial websites than it is to personal websites but it's just plain cool to see your website appear in the top 10 results of a search regardless of what type of website you create. In this article we will explore the basic concepts of how search engine optimization works.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Simply put, search engine optimization is the practice or organizing your website's content and HTML to improve each page's organic rank (organic rank means basically any unpaid result). To that end there are many different factors that go into organizing content and HTML to be more search engine friendly. The most common factors that you should consider when optimizing are the content of the page, the page title, the meta description and the meta keywords. Obviously there are more than just 4 factors to successful search engine optimization but these elements form the basic core.

How do Search Engines Work?

There are two different types of search engines, crawler- based and human-based. And yes, it's just like a automobile transmission--automatic and manual. The crawler-based engines use automated systems that constantly "crawl" the web and catalog everything they find. The human-based engines are exactly the opposite. They require a human to read, review and rank websites then enter that information into a database.

There is also one other "mutant" form of search engine that is usually referred to as a Hybrid engine. Hybrid engines use crawlers to automatically compile the basic data from websites but then use the human input to influence rankings. For example, two different websites that are virtually identical in content may end up with very different raking results if one website has been favorably reviewed by someone and the other has either not been reviewed or received a bad review.

Now that you know how the search engines compile their data I'm sure you would like to know exactly how they determine their ranks. Well, that is the big money question. All search engines have either developed their own unique algorithms or use a variation of a base search engine to compile ranks which means no two search engines are exactly alike. In fact, those algorithms are such closely guarded secrets that we will likely never know exactly how data is compiled and organized by any of the major search engines.

What's Important to Search Engines?

As I stated earlier there are many different factors that search engines weigh when compiling rankings. However, there is a set core of elements:

Page Title

The page title is one of the most important elements of search engine optimization as it provides the search engines with the most relevant keywords for the page. There are several good practices and bad practices when coming up with page titles. Do make your titles relevant and use as many of your most important keywords as possible. Don't be overly repetitive or long winded. Being too repetitive can be considered a "cheat" by search engines and result in a lower rank. Being too long winded in your title can also yield the same result or the search engines may simply concatenate your title and ignore everything after a certain number of characters.

A good title should look something like this:

A bad title would look something like this:

Page Content

This one is a little tougher to optimize. Your focus should be on two fronts. First, try to put as many of your primary keywords at the top of your content as possible. Obviously you should not just list your keywords at the top of your content. It still has to make sense to the reader. Second, repeat as many keywords or keyword phrases throughout the text as makes sense. Again, repetition for the sake of repetition is never a good idea.

There are other techniques that you can use to get the search engine's attention on your keywords such as the use of

tags but we don't have space to go into those techniques in this article. However, I promise we will cover some of those techniques in a future article.

Meta Description

This is simply a short summary of the content that is on your page. In most cases 2 to 3 sentences will suffice. When you write your description try to use as many of you primary keywords as makes sense. Again, don't go crazy on the repetition or you may just end up lowering your rank instead of raising it. An example of a good description would be:

Meta Keywords

This is precisely what you would expect, a list of keywords and keyword phrases. There are just a few simple things to keep in mind when putting your keywords together:

1. Do both keywords and keyword phrases
2. Prioritize your keywords from most important to least important (in case a search engine caps the number of keywords it will catalog)
3. DO NOT repeat keywords in the list unless they appear solo and within a phrase - e.g. "search, search engine" is fine but "search, engine, search, engine" is not.
4. Separate keywords and phrases with a comma
5. Don't worry about putting common misspelling in your keyword list. Most search engines will assist the chronic bad speller search with correct spelling.

An example of a good keyword tag would be something like:

What is Meta Data?

Meta data pretty much encompasses all meta tags such as description and keywords mentioned above. Of course, there are many more that you can use such as author and copyright as well as http-equiv settings which define things like your content type and language settings. Meta tags were actually designed with complete flexibility in mind which means you could make up your own meta data if you are so inclined. Keep in mind though, your custom meta data will be pretty much ignored by everything and everyone but you.

Putting It All Together

Now that you know about all the basic pieces how do you go about putting them all together for each of your web pages? There are many different schools of thought on this but I prefer to use my own checklist:

1. Read the content and compile a list of keywords
2. Prioritize the keyword list from most important to least important
3. Write the title using as many primary keywords as possible
4. Write the description using as many primary keywords as possible
5. Review the content and see if there needs to be any rewrite to bring primary keywords more to the front
6. Put it all together on the web page

When you are all done the top of your page should look something like this:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Getting Started

My content text…

At this point hopefully you should feel comfortable doing some basic search engine optimization to your website pages. It's not really a difficult or complicated process but it can most certainly be time consuming. Have fun and Happy Optimizing.

Tips & Tricks for Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Getting Started we explored the basic concepts of search engine optimization. We'll now take the next step and look at some of the best tips and tricks to improve your rankings even more. If you are new to search engine optimization we encourage you to read Part 1 in order to familiarize yourself with the meta tags, titles, keywords and descriptions before delving into these topics.

More is not always better

If you've done any kind of search engine optimization you've probably had the "What if…" conversation with yourself. For example, "What if I repeat my page description using my important keywords in different ways?" This results in descriptions like "Curious about search engine optimization (SE0)? We are all about search engine optimization (SE0). We give you search engine optimization (SE0) ideas. We also have search engine optimization (SE0) tricks. We know about search engine optimization (SE0)." Lovely to read and incredibly informative isn't it?

The fact is that this type of mind numbing repetition will probably not improve your rankings one bit. When optimizing there is one cardinal rule:

1. 1. Never try to "trick" a search engine because it's probably already been tried.

Search engines employ thousands of brilliant minds and they know how to filter out the tricks. In fact, using little tricks can often lower your rank or in some cases get you banned completely. The bottom line is that it is just not worth the effort or the risk

The power of the link

We've all done it - "Click here for details". It works and if the viewer reads the preceding content it makes perfect sense. However, from a search engine's perspective it makes no sense at all. The search engine ties the words "click" and "here" to the content of the destination page instead of relevant keywords that pertain to the destination page.

When creating anchor links always try to compose the wording in the anchor to contain keywords relevant to the destination page. A well constructed anchor to this article would look something like:

  Learn more about Search Engine Optimization 

The

factor

It may sound outdated but

tags still have some relevance when it comes to search engine optimization. The simple logic, according to search engines, is that if the words are bigger they must be more important. This is basically a holdover from the early days of the internet and internet search engines. With the now widespread use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) it seems like this type of optimization would have been phased out long ago but it still has relevance with most search engines.

Now, does that mean I should use

tags around all my body content and define H1 in my style sheet as content sized text? Absolutely not. Again, that is one of those tricks that search engines have already thought of and this type of practice will not benefit you in the least. Your best bet is to use

tags logically on your page and define the style as larger text within your style theme.

For some of you this will mean redefining your styles and page content to use the H1 style defnition instead of a custom style like "ContentHeader" that you have already defined and implemented. If you have a large site to optimize this can seem like a daunting task. In those cases I suggest you simply duplicate your custom style with a H1 style definition and then slowly change your content over time as it makes sense with your optimization goals.

Now, your next question is likely to be "Is this worth the effort?" That's the big question. As I have stated before, all search engines give different weight to different factors and no two engines are exactly the same. It's up to you to determine if the reward is worth the effort. My suggestion is that you set up an H1 style and test it out on about 10 pages then see how much it makes a difference before committing to a complete overhaul of your website.

The naming of the page

This one may sound a bit silly but the file name of your page can have an impact on rankings. Believe it or not, many search engines actually parse out the file name of the page and log any discernable keywords they find. So, if your page's URL address is something cryptic like "http://www.mydomain.com/pageset1/subset35/az-0982.html" then search engines are not picking up on anything useful in the URL. If at all possible it is best to create URL paths that make sense to a search engine. An example of a search engine friendly URL would be "http://www.mydomain.com/articles/ search_engine_optimization/tips_and_tricks.html". Obviously this type of naming convention is not always possible depending on how your page is served but it is a good practice when you can make it happen.

I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map

Always make it easy for search engine crawlers to navigate your website. Your best bet is to build a site map page and place a link to the site map on every single page of your website, usually in the footer. This practice will ensure that a crawler can easily navigate your website and catalog every page. If you have never created a site map before it's as simple as compiling a link list for all the pages in your website, organizing them into logical sections and then placing all those organized links on a single page. If there are pages you don't want to be cataloged by search engines such as unmanaged blog entries or administration pages, be sure to exclude them from your link list.

Getting linked

This is without a doubt the hardest optimization to accomplish, getting other websites to link to your website. It's even harder to get websites to link to your site using good anchor naming practices like we discussed in The power of the link.

So, how do you get other websites to link to your site? Well, that is kind of a catch 22 situation. You need good rankings so that your pages can be found and linked by more websites to improve your rankings. You always have the option of using services that contact relevant websites in an effort to get other sites to link to yours but that can often be cost prohibitive and have less than impressive results. You can also use link exchange services where your banner or text links appear on other websites in a random rotating fashion but this method is too hit and miss with no significant results for improving rankings or driving traffic to your website.

Your best bet for getting links of good quality to your website is to first offer a page that offers suggestions on how to link to your website page including the actual HTML script for the anchor link. This will increase your chances that other sites will provide links to your pages that use good anchor link text. Second, you should put a "link to our website" suggestion on every page that you are trying to get linked. Third, improving traffic through advertising or any other method that you can think of will go a long way in getting more links to your site. Lastly and most obvious is to have relevant quality content.

Now, there is one catch to all of this linking business. Just because you have more pages linking to your site doesn't mean that you will always have the best rank. The results generally factor in not just the number of pages that link to yours but also the number of unique domains. That simply means if a competitor website page has 3000 links from 2500 different domains while your website page has 4500 links from 1200 different domains that the competitor website will probably receive a higher rank.

But what about … ?

There are many other topics to optimization that we have not covered here. There are even topics within topics in this article such as XML site maps that we did not have the space to discuss. In a future article we take on some of the more advanced topics in search engine optimization in an effort to cover as many of the good search engine optimization practices as possible.

SEO is not an exact science

Don't expect your improvements to yield the exact same results on all search engines. When optimizing your website you should take more of a blanket approach. Try to improve your results across the board. Once you see the results that you are looking for you can then start making tweaks to improve results even further for your primary target search engine. Since Google currently handles more searches than all other search engines combined I would focus my efforts on Google.

Search engines are also continually redefining how they rank results and will often make changes without making public the changes. This makes it extremely difficult to keep up with trends. I suggest you make it a point to review search engine optimization trends and factors at least twice each year to maintain and possibly improve your rankings. Good luck and happy optimizing!