The truth is that Google, the biggest authority on SEO and search, provides all the information and strategies required for mastering your niche through search. The information they provide is surprisingly very simple and straightforward and will prove to be less hassle and reap more rewards.

So let’s do some myth busting to shed some light on the truth about SEO.

Myth #1: WordPress plugins like All-In-One SEO Pack Automatically Boosts Search Traffic

The idea of a plugin that automatically does your SEO is pretty cool, most automated features can do
more harm than good actually. For example, the auto generate meta description feature which creates an extreme case of duplicate entries in certain themes. Other than that, you will need to manually edit certain elements of your site like title and alt tags, etc. The plugin simply facilitates easy editing and does not automatically boost search engine traffic.

Myth #2: Linking To Authority Websites Will Help Your Reputation

Although linking to website within your niche or chosen topic is best, it will not help your reputation in search engines and improve ranking. If that were the case, then everyone would start doing it and then it would just not make much sense.

Myth #3: The Only Way To Get Indexed Is To Submit To Search Engines

I have proven this one wrong over and over again as there are many other elements that initiate the crawling and indexing process. For example, a healthy dose of incoming links from sites that are crawled and indexed quite readily will help your site get indexed too.

Myth #4: High Pagerank Guarantees The Best Search Traffic

Sam’s Web Guide is currently a pagerank of about 3 and receive targeted search traffic for specific keywords that outrank many popular websites. The pagerank score reported by google’s servers are different from what they use internally for their search ranking algorithm.

Myth #5: Meta Tags Will Boost Your Search Ranking

Because of the abuse of meta tags over the years by black hat SEO’s to dominate search engines, google no longer places any weight on them. In addition, the keyword tags, meta description, meta author, and meta robots do not carry much weight either so do not spend a lot of time editing them.

Myth #6: More Internal Links Are Better

Its not the quantity that makes internal linking effective but it really depends on how relevant the linked content is to the original. Relevance is most important.

Myth #7: SEO Is Set & Forget

SEO is not a quick fix and requires consistent and persistent effort in building back links and real authority. This is why it is necessary to continuously guest blog, promote your site and create link worthy content. If your content is solid and useful, then others will readily link to you which builds authority and popularity on the web.

Myth #8: Large, Deep Directory Structures are Bad For SEO

This is not true. Provided that your linking strategy is accurate and contain no broken links or endless loops you will be fine.

Myth #9: Crawlers Don’t Read CSS

The google bot especially does scan CSS for spam type activity and hidden divs.

Myth #10: Using Online Services That Promise To Register Your Site To Hundreds of Directories & Search Engines is Good for Rankings

I have tried this many times in the past with various websites with very little success. The links are not really placed and if they are placed, the linking structure is usually irrelevant and on pages that are not even crawled. Don’t waste your time or money.

Google actually ignores unnatural link building strategies and obtaining 100 or more links per day in directories and other listing sites is very unnaturally. However, this is not the case when you have hundreds of websites reporting similar popular news. These are treated differently.

Google & Other Resources

The best place to find the truth about SEO is Google itself. They provide the most concise, effective and simple techniques for mastering the art and provide guidelines on what to avoid. Here are some excellent resources to help you build your sites’ authority in the long-term, eliminating the need to hire an SEO professional to do the work that you could easily learn to do yourself.

- Download Google’s SEO Starter Guide

- Search for questions and tips on Google’s Webmaster YouTube channel

- Use Google webmaster central

- Read 26 Major Google Search Engine Ranking Factors Every Blogger Should Know

Discussion

What rumors and myths have you heard about SEO that is not listed here? What are your thoughts of SEO and its future practice? Share your thoughts and experiences with us by leaving a comment below.

So, my question is, when is the next pagerank update? Is it that google is changing its methods for ranking websites and determining their importance? Regardless of what google may have planned, basic search engine optimization tasks are quite necessary; not only for ranking well in google but other search engines as well.

How Does The Google PageRank Update Work?

Rather than trying to explain this myself, take a look at the short video below by Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, as he explains the process.

As we wait patiently on the next pagerank update, as we always do, we should never fail to employ the simple techniques for building search friendly web pages. Also, let’s not ignore the fact that social media presents massive opportunities for attracting dedicated readers to our sites, who will subscribe and share our links; in turn produces great quality backlinks.

Discussion

What are your thoughts of Google and the importance of PageRank for determining a site’s relevance and importance? Do you see pagerank being used in the future especially with the innovations and doors being opened through social media?

Leave your comments below, we would love to hear from you.

The SEO guide covers key areas such as:

• SEO Basics
• Optimizing your site’s content
• SEO for Mobile Sites
• Improving your site’s structure
• And more

Click here to download the Google SEO Starter Guide.

Since the launch of Sam’s Web Guide, I have experienced an increase of over 1,000% in search engine traffic and the method for achieving this was not very difficult but has been very specific. Although there are so many factors that search engines use for determining ranking, today I’m going to share the most important techniques I employed that have helped my blog to soar even in tough times.

Gaining Relevant Links

Acquiring relevant links is one of the most important and effective elements when implementing your SEO strategy. Quality backlinks to your site improves its trustworthiness and weighs your position excellently when they are relevant to the content they are pointing to on your blog.

My most relevant and powerful backlinks were gained through guest posting on popular blogs that have already acquired massive authority in search engines. Regardless of what others may be saying about guest blogging, it provides solid benefits for strengthening your blog’s position and promotes you as an online publisher / blogger. Ensure that you are able to include a few relevant links back to your site with the correct use of title tags and keywords.

There are blogs that I have guest posted on that resulted in an increase of up to 10% in search engine traffic within just a week, so gaining those quality backlinks is very important for your SEO goals.

External Links

Don’t be mean with your outbound links. In fact, use links whenever they are necessary and ensure that they are pointing to trusted websites that have maximum authority. So if you’re supporting your articles with outbound links to sources of information, use sites like WordPress.org, Google.com, Wikipedia.org or any other site that provides the best official material. When writing anything about WordPress, I always include relevant links to their official site.

These outbound links contribute to the relevance of your blog posts and thus rank better in search results.

Using The Right Keywords

I have realized that this is something that most bloggers either overlook or overdo. Aim for a keyword density of 3 to 8% and write with your users in mind, ensuring that your articles are understandable and easy to read. The keywords you use basically help provide a map for users to find your posts through search engines. Its very important that the backlinks you gain are supported by the right keywords in both the link text and title tag. Spend the extra time when creating your links to get these just right.

Posting Frequency

Although I have not been posting frequently recently due to some offline challenges, my blog has a very good history of posting consistently and on relevant topics and provides lots of data. Maintaining a healthy posting frequency indicates to google and other search engines that you are a provider of fresh content. In fact, your fresh content may even gain higher priority in search results at times than articles that are well placed on established sites.

The foundation built in the earlier days of my blog through consistent posting and other SEO techniques have been able to continuously capture a decent number of search engine visitors even though my blog was dormant for a couple of weeks.

So create a schedule and stick to it.

The Results

When my blog was first launched only about 10% of my total traffic came from search engines and most of my traffic was from connecting with other bloggers through blog commenting and social networking. My search engine traffic now accounts for 50% of total visits and the numbers are steadily rising each month. This figure can vary depending on your activities online and how you gain your traffic.

So I am quickly answering some of the questions posed in my previous article, “Will Social Media Marketing Consistently Outperform Search Engine Optimization?” I will soon be writing a report on my findings and how Social Media Marketing compares with SEO. So be on the look-out for it.

Conclusion & Discussion

Search Engine Optimization has become much simpler to implement and with plugins like the All In One SEO Pack, more labor intensive SEO tasks can be automated giving you lots of free time to focus on the tips and techniques mentioned above. There really is no secret formula but only consistent practice of some basic fundamentals.

How has your search engine traffic improved as your blog grows and how much has it changed since you first started blogging? Please share your experiences with us by leaving a comment below. We would love to hear from you.

Here are 26 major factors that Google uses in measuring up your site / blog and determining your authority. Although there are over 200 factors, the ones listed below provide more powerful results within the shortest period of time.

Keyword Usage

1. Using keywords in URLs and domain names
This refers to your post slugs (page name URL) and domain names with your targeted keywords. For example, www.telescope-sales.com, where telescope would be a main keyword.

2. Keywords in Page Title
Keywords must be used in your page titles and should be between 10 to 60 characters. Avoid using special characters.

4. Keywords in H1, H2, H3 Tags
In writing posts, ensure that you use your keywords in heading tag styles.

5. Keyword Density of 3% to 8% in the Body
Ensure that you are not spamming your articles with specific keywords. Use your targeted keywords in moderation and let your articles flow naturally.

6. Keyword Prominence
Ensure that your main keywords are used as early in your articles as possible. The higher up in the article your keywords are, the more attention google pays to them.

7. Keywords in ALT & Title Tags Text
All ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags for images and text links should contain relevant keywords.

8. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text
Internal links should have relevant anchor text

Internal Links

9. Efficient Tree Like Structure
Try to have no page deeper than 4 clicks to reach it if you want it to rank effectively. Try to have a maximum of 2 clicks.

10. Ensure that All Internal Links Are Valid
Use the free W3C link checker to validate your on-page links. This tool will let you know if any major internal links are broken.

Outgoing Links

11. Link To Only Trustworthy Sites
Linking to blacklisted or shady websites will harm your authority in the long-term. Be care how you approve trackbacks on your blog. My philosophy is do not accept, they are not necessary.

It can take several months to a year before google reinstates your authority and inclusion in search engine results.

12. Outgoing Link Anchor Text
Ensure that outgoing link anchor text are relevant to the site’s topic.

On-Site SEO Factors

13. Moderate Page File Size
Ensure that your page size does not exceed 100K. This does not include images.

14. New Pages & Fresh Content
Fresh content from established sites rank better in search results. Recency is a valuable asset when links are hard to acquire. Its also good to have a higher ratio of new pages to old, plus newer pages on old sites get better recognition.

15. Frequent Updates
Frequently updated sites are crawled by search engine spiders more frequently than others.

16. Domain Age
Older domains have more authority in google search results and shows stability.

17. Site Load Times
Faster load times for your site is a new factor that google has started to pay attention to. Faster times indicate a better experience for searchers. Follow these guidelines to ensure a faster loading site.

Off-Page SEO Factors

18. Incoming Links from High Ranking Pages
More incoming links from reputable, high ranking websites with improve your SERP authority significantly.

19. Link Acquisition Speed
Ensure that you are acquiring those incoming links naturally. Newer sites will get penalized if links are acquired too fast, in an artificial manner. A site going naturally viral won’t have any troubles.

20. Older Longstanding Incoming Links Are Better

21. Change of Anchor Link Text for Incoming Links
The anchor text of your incoming links should not be changed frequently and is bad in google’s eyes.

22. Incoming Links From Popular Expert Sites
Being featured on popular sites can boost your search engine traffic. This tells google your site is trustworthy and will rank you higher in search results.

23. Clickthrough Rate(CTR) on Search Results Pages
CTR on search results pages is a large cumulative factor and this data is collected by google to help determine authority.

Page & Site Metrics: User Behavior

24. Time Users Spend on your Site
The more time each visitor spends on your site, the higher the indication to google that your site provides relevant content and thus ranks you better.

25. Are Your Pages Bookmarked?
When visitors bookmark your site on social sites like Delicious.com, Reddit.com, Digg.com, etc google increases your trustworthiness.

26. Domain Registration Time
Register your domain for 5 years or more. This indicates that you are serious and here to stay, thus more trustworthy.

Conclusion & Discussion

Search engine optimization is very important to practice if you hope to gain any traffic through search engines. In most cases, the factors are common sense and are really easy to implement. In your practices, bear in mind that anything that seems to mislead search engines or visitors, is usually bad for your site’s authority and search rankings.

Also, bear in mind that each factor on its own is not enough to dominate search engine results but the consistent practice of each will lead to success.

Are there any other major ranking factors I left out? Please let us know by leaving a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

With the rate at which technology changes, I can’t help but wonder if SEO will be the same 5 years from now as it is today. Google continuously changes its search and ranking algorithms to better suit the end user and in the process knocks out thousands of sites from previously obtained rankings. Since the general idea is that; better search rankings = hundreds more visitors, webmasters must always be on the look-out for changes in the game and study how they can please google – Everybody is trying to please google, I do too, but what about other search engines and other methods of optimization? How about Community Optimization?

Other Methods of Increasing Traffic

Many successful blogs are receiving most of their traffic from referring sites. This is achieved by the communities that they have built by commenting on other sites and adding value to the niche as a whole. In this scenario it is more likely that someone will click on your link back to your site. For example, although my blog is new, 66% of all my site’s visitors are from referring sites and only about 10% from search engines. This is the case with many other bloggers, especially the very established blogs.

So, what should we be focusing on? Pleasing the search engines, or building and pleasing the blogging community.

Ok, so maybe SEO won’t completely disappear, but I think more thought should go into what best suits a particular website in its niche. A blog will not perform to its full potential unless it has an interactive community following it and yet a business website that sells computer parts may receive better results through search engines. It all depends on the type of site, its goals and niche.

Focus More on Building Relationships & Communities

Optimizing solely for getting better rankings in search engines means sitting and waiting for quality traffic to hit your website. Great SEO rankings are oftentimes difficult to obtain, especially if your blog is new. I’m now hearing that google also uses the age of your registered domain to calculate rankings and site trustworthiness; I’m not sure if this is true but its very much possible.

Instead of sitting and waiting, kick start your blog’s success and engage the blogging community. You can get great results by:

1. Commenting on other blogs within your chosen niche. Do not use spamming methods, your comments will be deleted
2. Engage in Discussions with other commentators; you will get noticed and other bloggers will visit your site
3. When other bloggers visit your site and start commenting Always Reply with a thank you and a thought
4. Always try to Add Value to other blogs through commenting. Don’t just leave a “Great post” comment, try to engage in discussion by expressing your point of view or share new ideas
5. Seek opportunities to Guest Post on other blogs. This can be a massive way to promote your blog especially on sites that receive lots of traffic
6. Ask other experienced bloggers to critique your site. You may think your blog is the ‘bomb’ until an expert opens your eyes to new ideas

I can guarantee that by practicing these few simple steps you will begin to see increases in your daily traffic and from new sources.

Should We Still ‘Please’ Google & Other Search Engines?

Most definitely, we should try to please them or better yet please ourselves by paying attention to their guidelines and optimizing our content in a manner that is search engine friendly and keyword rich. This should not be done, however, at the expense of reader experience. Great content = Rich reader experience = More readers = Successful blog.

Although community building is best suited for a blog’s growth, we cannot completely ignore search engine optimization, since it does send us a fair (Not massive) amount of traffic. So no door should be closed. By trying to see through a search engine’s eyes though, I can’t see how SEO will not be a part of the future.

Discussion

What are you thoughts? Do you think SEO will be necessary in the future or should we focus on other types of optimization?

Though link building is a very time consuming and tedious task, it is very important since search engines like Google use link popularity to determine the trustworthiness of a site and its overall ranking and relevancy in search results.

So, thanks to Seobook.com I’ve decided to make a list on my favorite effective link building methods and also black-hat practices to avoid.

Here we go:

1. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category and do some myth busting.

2. Create a list of experts/professionals. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the pros may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an “authority”.)

3. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. Its very important to provide proper explanations of industry jargons, not everyone is an expert and you need to relate to all viewers.

4. Syndicate an article at Ezine Articles, Articlesbase, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

5. Trade articles with other webmasters and bloggers

6) Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

7. Submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions. DMOZ is an excellent free open source directory, one that google regularly crawls to get information on submitted sites. The only issue that I have is that it can take up to 6 months before your submitted site is listed on DMOZ because it is run by volunteers and they receive thousands of submission requests. Also try to submit to paid directories. Quality Matters.

8. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own

9. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it

10. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other’s business cards. Try guest posting on other blogs as well.

11. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service (Free Links)

12. Submit stories to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page

13. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site and/or link to your site

14. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable and be specific where possible

15. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them

16. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it

17. Technorati tagged pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags

18. Swap some links on a small scale with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks. When swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

19. Become a sponsor. Many charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart

20. This is one works but proceed with caution Get sued by a company people hate. This can get you hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal

21. Host a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollars prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links.

22. Build a tool/free application collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

23. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire. Find successful professionals/guru in your field and request an interview. This also puts an automatic ‘stamp of approval’ on your site as it will seem as though they endorse your content/idea

6 Bad Link Building Techniques to Avoid

1. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 per submission) that send zero traffic and sell off topic run-of-site links

2. List 100 Web sites in your signature file when posting on a forum

3. Posting on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website

4. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords. 99% of the time site owners will be annoyed and delete your comments

5. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites

6. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you

And that’s all for today. Remember, there are many legitimate ways of building links, this list only provides a few of my favorites because of how easy they are to execute for even the newbie blogger/writer.

If there is anything you think I may have left out, feel free to leave a comment with your suggestion or question.

It is very important to get your website listed in the major search engines. This is a basic free submission that allows web users to access your website through organic search, provided that their search keywords match the ‘crawler accessible’ content you have on your site and your website has already been crawled and indexed. (We will discuss key word selection and search engine optimization in another post) A crawler/bot is a term used for search engine applications that search the web in a methodical and automatic manner for websites and new content and creates an index of the sites found. A copy of your site is actually stored on the search engine servers for easy access later.

Let’s get to it:

For Google Submissions go to www.google.com/addurl/ and simply add your site in the form provided, as shown below.

Once you have entered your site’s URL, hit the submit button and you will be good to go.

An important note: It is not guaranteed that your site will be crawled immediately, or as stated by the search engines – “any at all” considering that there are millions of sites on the web and once you submit your site, the request gets placed in a queue. Generally, with my experience, they always do eventually crawl sites submitted. It could takes weeks before your site shows up in searches though.

Tip: Using the google webmaster tools and submitting a site map there will help google to index your site much faster. After creating a webmaster tools profile for your site here: www.google.com/webmasters select your site’s profile name and then at the lower right corner of the page you will see a link to submit a sitemap.

On Google’s submission site, you will find lots of other useful links and guidelines on how to manage your web presence and the associated rules. I chose to refer to Google first because they have the most in-depth explanations of the different web standards and how to ensure that your website is a success through search. Very user-friendly.

For Bing.com Submissions, Microsoft’s search brand, go to www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx. The Bing brand is fairly new, but it does the job.

For Yahoo.com Submissions go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit.

Once you have submitted your site you are on your way to getting new visitors to your site. Do not take search for granted or rely on search alone to bring new site viewers though, as web search can be more competitive than what’s seen on the surface.

There are thousands of search engines active on the internet and manual submission on all may not be possible and some search engines are for specific types of content. If you wish to find more search engines, simply search for them or you may visit Search Engine Watch to see a more in-depth listing.

Please subscribe to our RSS Feed at the top of the page and stay up to date with our new blog posts. In the coming weeks we will be discussing Search Engine Optimization, Web Do’s & Dont’s, Beautiful Web Design and much more.

To gain access to this and many other features you must first sign-in to Google Webmaster Tools at – www.google.com/webmasters You will be able to create a profile for your website if you don’t have one yet. It is quite simple and all you need to do is read and follow instructions.

Once you have created your website profile, simply click on the ‘Labs’ tab to the left, as shown below and click Fetch as Googlebot.

There are also other diagnostic tools that will let you know if the googlebot experiences errors when trying to crawl your site and other useful statistics.

Note: The googlebot cannot interpret Flash content, so if you are an avid designer who wants to use lots of fancy flash to enhance your website, bear in mind that the googlebot does not see this content thus will not index it. Ensure that content placed in flash has supplementary text in other areas of the site.

The main goal in paying attention to these tools and statistics is to ensure that your site is search engine friendly and does not contain errors that will affect your website’s visibility online. By following google’s tips and tweaking your web pages according to google standards, you can rest assured that your site will be search and crawler friendly for the thousands of other search engines out there. So go ahead and take advantage of the many free tools on the net, just ensure that they are from a reliable source.

You can find other useful tools here: www.seobook.com

If you have found other useful tools out there on the web, that would complement the google webmaster tools, share with us by leaving a comment with links.