Be wary of SEO firms that

• that send you emails out of the blue.
• guarantee a #1 ranking on Google
• if a company is secretive or doesn't clearly explain their intentions

More risks to be aware of.

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. This is not a comprehensive list, so trust your instincts. Re-think your vendor relationship immediately if the SEO:

• owns shadow domains
• uses links to their other clients on doorway pages
• offers to sell keywords in the address bar and doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
• guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
• operates with multiple aliases or falsified domain names
• gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
• has had domains removed from Google's index or is not listed in Google themselves

SEO Tips

What to Do

Your key to success in online marketing and promotion is your website. Your title, keywords, meta tags, content, and overall site design each play an important role in optimizing your site. As we all know, if your site doesn't rank in the top 10 positions of a search engine, your target audience won't be able to find you.

According to Research, 87%percent of all website traffic originates from the major search engines. Most of the time, users find what they are looking for in the first 10 results so achieving a top ranking and grabbing the attention of your audience is crucial. There are many components of your web page that you should pay close attention to when seeking to optimize placement in a search engine.

The first step towards improving your listing is selecting the best keywords and keyword phrases that reflect your web page. Keywords are the foundation of your web presence in most search engines.

Keywords

To help you choose effective keywords and keyword phrases, there are two important steps. First of all, use a thesaurus and investigate synonyms for the most important terms you wish to capture. Next, perform a search of your keyword and keyword phrases on the major engines.

Pay close attention to the websites that rank 1 through 10. View the source code of these pages and make note of the placement of keywords in the text and alt tags. Next, do a search for your competitor's websites and view their HTML source code. Noticing patterns is your key to ranking above the competition.

Image Alt

An image alt attribute follows your graphic address or url in your HTML code. These words will be displayed as tool tips for each image. To fully optimize your graphics, use several of your keywords in the alt tags of the graphics located at the top of your pages.

Title Tag

Effective title tags include only relevant keyword or keyword phrases. Avoid non-indexing filler words such as a, an, the, welcome and home page.

Meta Tags

Tags are a type of HTML code that enable some of the major search engines to determine what keywords are relevant to a specific site. The META tag will contain a description of your site. Make sure your description contains some of your relevant keywords. The META keywords tag will contain a listing of keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your site and enable a search engine to find you.

Main Content (website text)

HTML tags are an important part of optimizing your site, but it is just as important to add plenty of quality text to your pages. Your text should contain each of your keywords used in different variations.

 

What Not to Do and How to Prevent Getting Banned from Search Engines

Google places strong emphasis on the quality and relevancy of their search results. As the undisputed leader in the world of search engines, they know that in order to stay on top they must make sure their users are satisfied with the quality of the search results. Accordingly, Google does not take kindly to several techniques used by webmasters and SEO experts. These corrupt techniques can get a site banned from Google or at the very least result in a Page Rank (PR) penalty. A list of the most common fraudulent techniques follows:

Notably, submitting multiple URL's for the same site is problematic. For example, submitting mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html to Google's database, thereby trying to get two search results for the same page, is prohibited and will result in a penalty from Google.

Cloaking

Cloaking is having two separate pages, one optimized for the search engines and a different one optimized for the viewer. In other words the search engine sees one page, likely stuffed with keywords, but the user is redirected to a different page when the link is clicked. Google has no tolerance for Cloaking practices.

Doorway Pages

In order to get a positive ranking in the search engines, some webmasters will load the home page with keywords. A page filled with keywords, however, comes across as nonsense to a regular internet user. Therefore, the webmaster will do a redirect to another page that is much easier to read or have the user click a link to get to that page. Similar to Cloaking, Doorway Pages will not be tolerated by Google.

Hidden Text

Some webmasters will hide keywords on a page and make the font color the same as the background color. This renders the text invisible, but the search engine spiders can still see it. Hidden text is often used on a doorway page and using it is a sure way to get banned from Google!

Hidden Links

The number of pages that link to one of your pages has a direct effect on how high your page appears in the search results. As with hidden text, hiding links will also result in a ban or PR penalty.

Link Farms

A link farm is loosely defined as a page that lists links solely for the purpose of achieving a high Google PR. Free-For-All link pages are often considered link farms by Google. Be careful who you link to! Realistically, you can't control who links to you, so incoming links will not hurt your site's ranking. You can, however, directly control who you link to and Google will ban or penalize your site for linking to corrupt sites.

Spamming

Don't send unsolicited commercial emails.

Selling Page Rank (PR)

Advertising that your high PR site will sell a link to another site in order to boost their PR is not tolerated. Selling advertising in the form of a link on your site is, however, perfectly acceptable. Selling a link for the purpose of increasing a site's PR is not.

Multiple Identical Sites

In order to increase PR, some webmasters will create and interlink multiple pages all with identical or similar content. Again, this is prohibited.

Multiple Domains

Creating multiple domains that redirect to one page is also a trap for search engines. Creating multiple domains with similar content and interlinking them is forbidden and will result in a ban or penalty. If you have multiple sites, you must place unique content on each site.

Excessive Links

Google recommends having no more than 100 links on any given page. Having more than 100 links won't result in a ban but it can result in a lower PR.

These are a few of the most important practices to adopt and avoid when applying SEO. It is important to note that the variety of factors and nuances involved in each of these proceedings requires constant research and an extensive knowledge base. For this reason, you will benefit from bringing The SEO Guy into your business and SEO optimization project.

Contact The SEO Guy Today (1) 204.918 4340  Be a Winner Email: theseoguy@shaw.ca