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March 22, 2007
It seems that everyday I get a handful of emails trying to teach me about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Everybody and their brother are claiming to be SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts and for their fee or the price of their product, they will gladly help you get your Internet Business ranked at the top of the major search engines. Sounds too good to be true? Well it is! The fact is that most of the self-titled Search Engine Optimization experts are a waste of your time and money. There's a lot of blind leading the blind going on - don't get misled.
One thing that's an advantage for these so called experts is that the feedback loop for any changes you make to show up in the search results (or not show up in the search results!) of a search query is measured in weeks, not minutes or hours. This makes it easy for you to forget to follow up, or monitor how your site's doing. It also makes it easy to keep letting it slide by saying it hasn't been crawled yet, or just a few more days and we'll start seeing some results.
I'm working on a new product to monitor and track how a site, or group of sites, are performing for a given set of key words in the three major search engines, when it's ready, you'll definitely read about it here first!
What Works? How do I know Whose Advice to Take?
What about all that free advice that's available in forums? This goes back to some advice I give in my Making Money Online course: Be Careful Who You Choose to Follow! SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advice given in forums is rarely correct... people that really know what they're talking about on a given topic are not usually hanging out on forums calling themselves experts... they're usually busy doing their own thing.
What about all those advertisements that show up in my inbox? I'd pass on most of those too. You don't need to pay someone to submit your site to search engines... You can do it yourself - it only needs to be done once.
What Works:
No BlackHat: Don't try to fool the search engines or trick them by stuffing your pages full of hidden text with your key words, or Alt/Title tags that are 400 characters long filled with key words, redirects, hidden code, etc, or whatever the current "trick" that will give you a boost in ranking may be... it's only going to be temporary. It's easier to do it the right way.
Quality Content: Put something worthwhile on your web site or blog. Write it for humans to read and then tweak some of the words or phrases to reflect the key words you would like to have indexed by the search engines. Conservatively use these same key words in your title and Meta tag description. It's important for your content to read naturally.
Writing Articles: Write quality articles and do it often. You don't need to pay someone to distribute your articles, or even put them on the big article sites. Get my Artemis Pro Helper and do it yourself.
Exchanging Links: Search engines place just as much value on the number of inbound links to your site as they do on the content of your site. Spend time exchanging links with other sites. Writing articles and submitting them with my Artemis Pro Helper will help with this, as well as 3WayLinks Link Building Software.. Don't be concerned by people that tell you to only exchange links with sites in the same genre as your site... just don't exchange links with adult, crime, hate sites, etc. I'm working on a new link building product as well that will be out soon.
Leaving Trackbacks/Comments: Post comments (with valid content or feedback) on some of your favorite blogs and include a link back to your site if they give you that option. Some blogs have comments turned off and your only choice there is to leave a trackback to a post on your blog. Trackbacks are really good so consider using them even if you can leave a comment.
Creative Ideas like This: Eric Graham posted about a great way to get some traffic and inbound links too in his post about Eric Graham on Blog Memes.
Real Optimization: Yes, there are valid ways to optimize your pages and there are people who have that knowledge and the data to back it up. I'll share more about that and them in future posts. Your first steps should be to do the above items, and do them well!
Fred
Update: Read Michel Fortin's post where he answers the question: "Writing for the visitor is more important than writing for the search engines. Can both requirements be met without sacrificing quality?" Click Here for Michel's post.
About the Author
Fred Black is an experienced online business operator, programmer, web site developer, father, husband, musician, and songwriter. Visit his Internet Business Blog at: http://www.pqInternet.com.
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Posted by Fred on March 22, 2007 | Printer-Friendly
TrackBack: http://www.pqInternet.com/Blog/mt-tb.cgi/32
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