The Good and Bad Of SEO Techniques by Leonid Singha

Anyone who is familiar with search engine optimisation (SEO) will know that the practice has undergone a number of changes over the years, many of them a result of people failing to use the techniques properly. Whilst SEO is a popular way of getting your website to rank higher in search engine results, it is of the utmost importance that you have used the techniques correctly, otherwise you risk your website becoming banned or blacklisted.

Keyword Research

Good – It is considered a good SEO technique if you strategically place keywords throughout your website, providing that they are relevant to the information on the page and they haven’t been used so many times that they are considered spam.

Bad – Targeting a single keyword on every page throughout your site is considered spam, as is hiding keywords in the background (by making the font the same colour) and using the keyword way too many times than would be considered natural.

Meta Tags

Good – Creating user friendly meta title tag using a relevant keyword phrase and that is 60 characters or less is considered good SEO, as is keeping your website traffic in mind so that your message can be heard when people read your description.

Bad – Stuffing your meta tag with keywords will not work in your favour when trying to rank higher in search engine results. If you forget about the user experience and just try to spam Google, you will quickly find your ranking lowered.

Content

Good – For the optimisation of your content to be considered ‘good’, you will need to include keywords into it in a way that is understandable and relevant to the website. SEO is all about making the content users want much easier to find.

Bad – If you have so many keywords jammed into your content that it is nearly impossible to read, however, this is considered spam. It is also considered bad SEO if you have used keywords that aren’t relevant to the information on the page.

Directory Submission

Good – When listing your website on directories that will make it easier for people to find you, you should only choose highly trafficked and respected websites. This will ensure that you are getting relevant and high quality links back to your site.

Bad – Using a software program that promises to distribute your website to thousands of directories is essentially useless for SEO if no one looks at the listing and it can actually be detrimental if the directory is proven to be less than reputable.

Facebook Marketing

Good – Building a Facebook fan page that is inviting for your audience and allows you to spread your message is very handy for SEO, as engagement is something that plays a major role in optimisation today. It also gives you another place for links.

Bad – If you attempt to send thousands of friend requests from a personal Facebook profile that has been structured to come from a business, however, you will damage your SEO efforts and Facebook may even shut your account down.

Whilst there are good and bad approaches to many other SEO techniques (such as blog commenting, video marketing and the use of Twitter), the five areas that we have outlined above tend to be the most abused. When it comes to getting your website to rank higher in search engine results, it is important that you ensure you have used the correct SEO techniques in the right way otherwise you will run into a few problems.

Courtesy of  Business 2 Community

Link Building: It’s Not What it Used to Be by Scott Gombar

Link Building

In my blog post about the 6 things to focus on as part of your internet marketing plan I talked about link building. This used to be as simple as adding as many links to as many resources as possible, no matter the quality of the site. It did not matter if the site was related to your site content. It did not matter if you spammed blogs with random, unrelated posts just to add your url to one more website. Today you have to be selective about who links back to your site. There can be severe ramifications for what Google determines to be spam, whether intentional or not. It’s not only important to ensure careful link building but also to check on those links from time to time to make sure they’re not hurting your search results. Fortunately there are tools that can help with managing your back links.

Six ways to build links back to your site.

Wikipedia lists six methods of building links back to your sites. Some of these methods are no longer recommended as noted.

1. Reciprocal Link-This is the act of placing a link on an associate or friends site and having them return the favor by placing a link back to your site. Google has stated that these types of links are no longer relevant as reciprocal links are not considered authoritative. In other words it does not truly indicate the popularity of the resource and therefore cannot be considered to be useful to someone searching for that item on the internet. It is important to note that you will not get penalized for this type of link building, but the search engines will not consider it when crawling the internet. Google does allow you to link up to 5 of your own sites. For example, I own techsrus.com and nxtlvlllc.com so I am able to link from one to the other without being penalized by Google. Again, it may not help your overall search results but if one of your sites receives significant traffic it could prove helpful to the other.
2. Resource Link-When someone is developing content and adds a link back to your site as a source for further information, or as an authority on the matter this is called a resource link. Resource links are probably the most important type of link you can have. Google and other major search engines see this as someone else telling the world that you are the expert on the subject. Google has gone on record as stating Quantity and Relevancy of the link will count towards your site rating.
3. Forum Signature Linking-This is as simple as it sounds. This is the act of including a link back to your site as part of your signature within a forum. Just make sure that the forum is related to the site you are linking back to or the search engines may see this as spamming.
4. Blog Comments-Search engines tend to ignore links in Blog Comments because most blogs add a no-follow property to the link. So while adding your link to a blog comment is not very useful for search engines, writing quality comments may result on clicks from readers of your comments. Speaking as someone who frequently reads blog posts that interest me, if a comment appeals to me I will click through to the writers site.
5. Directory Link Building-There are probably thousands of directories on the internet, but don’t waste your time adding your link to all of them. Many of them charge and will probably not help your search results. Two of the directories you will want to add to are dmoz.org and dir.yahoo.com. Note that Google shut their directory down about 2 years ago.
6. Social Bookmarking is when someone adds your link to their list of social bookmarks. The major search engines take these links into consideration when crawling the web as this effects the popularity of the site in their eyes. The bookmarks are stored publicly and have anchor text making it easier for search engines to read them. Of course you should add your website URL to your social media profiles as well, especially if you have a large following but don’t rely on this to help your search engine results.

Don’t do that
There are some things you will want to avoid, some of them mentioned in the six link types above. Matt Cutts (Google Chief Spam Engineer) has gone on record stating that spamming of any kind will negatively impact your search results. Updates to Google’s search algorithm combined with Google shutting down 2 link farms have proven that they are taking this very seriously.

1. Commenting on blog posts for the sake of adding a link back to your website. I see this all the time (mostly on Yahoo pages) and they not only get ignored by people reading the article or blog post but search engines, especially Google, will punish the site you are trying to link back to. As a rule I almost never add a link back to my site when commenting on a blog. If the reader wants to find my site it really is not hard to do. If you have set up your website and social media profiles properly then anyone trying to get more information will have little trouble finding your site.
2. Adding your site to all of those unheard of search engines, also known as submission sites. We have seen the advertising for getting your site on 100 search engines for $39. These search engines will hurt your search ranking as Google, Bing and Yahoo will most likely see them as spam.
3. Link rings…avoid these. These are groups that offer to place reciprocal links on their sites if you do the same, or if you pay them. The links will be irrelevant and will hurt your ranking.
4. Link Farms are sites that just have massive lists of links, often advertising themselves as submission sites or directory sites. Avoid these like the plagues as Google is actively searching them out and shutting them down.

How can I check my links?
Google offers a tool for free as part of their webmasters tool suite. The Disavow tool allows you to download all the links to your site, and then upload all the links you want to disavow. Google recommends this as a last result after trying to remove low quality or spammy links through all other methods first.

There are add-ons to browsers that you can use to check links as well. I have added SEOQuake to Chrome which allows me to see SEO statistics including links for any site I navigate to. This allows you to check your links and try to resolve bad links yourself before trying the disavow tool.
There are tons of other ways to checks using tools, toolbars and websites, many of which are free. If you use and SEO tools they likely have something similar built in to the tool.

Courtesy of Business 2 Community

Need help with YOUR Link Building? Contact us and visit: http://www.janetpennconsulting.com/link_building.html