What Color is Your Hat?

That might seem like a strange question in the SEO world, but it’s important, if you remember this: good guys wear white hats, and bad guys wear black hats.

There is a phrase in the SEO world called black-hat SEO. That means that you’re spamming the search engines and pushing against every boundary you can find to try to increase rankings and bring interest to your site. A lot of people do it, but it doesn’t work for everyone and it’s certainly not the ethical way to do things.

You need to practice something closer to white-hat SEO, which means that you do things the way the search engines ask you to. You follow their guidelines and you pay attention to what they ask of you so that your site is optimized the way that the search engines want it to be – the ethical way. If you’re too purist, however, you might lose out because there are a lot of people out there who aren’t purists.

You’ll find that the best SEO professionals often wear grey hats instead. They stay within the ‘law’ but they know when to push against a few boundaries.

Little Known Secrets of SEO

Most people already understand how important SEO is to any business, but that doesn’t mean that they understand why, or that they understand everything that they need to know to be successful with SEO. There are some little known secrets that people need to pay attention to.

How often you use a keyword on your page is certainly something that you want to focus on. If you don’t know what keywords people are searching for when they find your page, find out. Then, make sure you continue to use those and related keywords.

Also, search engines look at the first paragraph and the last one, so keywords that are vital to your success need to be there. Don’t get spammy with them. They should come naturally in the sentences that you write, and they should be in each paragraph at least once. If you also put them in the meta tag, make sure that they are in the alt tag of an image that you put on the page, and put them in the title of your article as well as the body, you’ll be well on your way to complete SEO optimization.

Shear off the Tedium – SheerSEO Software

There are a lot of positives in SEO. My favorite part is that it allows me the opportunity to dust off my creative side.  Creating new and dynamic web sites, building networks, creating viral link bait…all fun and exciting.  Unfortunately, with anything there is an element of tedium.

Monitoring a web sites overall SEO performance can easily eat up hours of your work day.  This is time that could be used much more effectively in pushing your site or client’s company site up the SEO battlefield.  Creating reports, checking rankings and referrers are all information you need to have, but it is without a doubt a time sink (especially if you are trying to rank numerous key words).

The old addage of time is money is true in Search Engine Optimization too.  If you can cut out some of the tedious and not so fun time consuming work, why wouldn’t you?

I highly recommend using some type of SEO software.  It’s a smart and convenient way to save time and cut some of the mind-numbing day to day drone work that needs to be done.  I personally like SheerSEO for evaluating your sites overall SEO performance.

SheerSEO software is online software, so there’s nothing to clutter up or slow down your desktop.  Once logged in you can track your sites performance in Google & Yahoo.

SheerSEO offers a free 3 month trial, for all new users.  I highly recommend checking out this software.

Are Paid Links a Thing of the Past?

Paid links used to be ridiculously popular. They were all over the place. Now, however, it’s not nearly as popular and you see less people taking the paid link risk.

With the success of Google and the fact that so many people use that particular search engine, being in its rankings is extremely important. If Google sees something as ‘spammy’ it’s a problem for the owner of the site, and that’s the main problem with paid links. They aren’t viewed favorably. As Google continues to devalue paid links, you’ll see less and less of them. There are certainly still people who are using them, but that doesn’t mean they’ll continue to in the future or that they’re having the success with them that they used to. Right now, however, Google is mostly targeting link sellers, so link buyers are still able to profit, to some degree, in some markets.

As long as Google doesn’t change the algorithm it has and the way that it’s search engine works, the paid links will never completely go away, because there are still ways for some people to continue to profit from them.

Everything You Need to Know for Holiday SEO

SEO hasn’t gone away just because the economy is struggling. People are still spending some money, and you want them to spend it with your company, which is why your SEO is out there in the first place.

If you’re doing SEO for the holidays, you need to make sure that you get your keywords in order. Words like Christmas, Chanuka and other holidays are important. So is the word ‘gift.’ People search for those kinds of words, so put them in your SEO. You can find creative ways to do that or hire someone to do it for you, but you need to get the word out early and often, and make sure that if you give details about holidays, you get them correct. If you don’t it can really harm your credibility and how much money you might make from the traffic that you get to your site.

Driving traffic to your site is the point of SEO, but what people do once they get there will have a lot to do with whether you have good information for them, so make sure your holiday SEO is interesting and informative.