It is not nothing new, you have already read about these 5 points, maybe not all five at the same time, you have even thought oh I just learned something new when first read about them, but still..you got overwhelmed with link building and checking your sites SERPs that you have completely forgot about those small points that can cause you to waste time, get your site sandboxes and most likely lose money. Well nothing to worry about, if nothing else these errors people usually make when they are building a new site from scratch, design part and SEO optimization too. So, lets get to the point(s).

1. Accidental use of hidden text
2. Overwhelming with keyword density
3. Immediate keyword repeat
4. Forgetting to emphasize your keywords
5. Not using the heading tags (H1-H6) properly

I know you have already read about this, and i know that you have a new blog that starts to rank, then it disappears from the SERPs and you get convinced that its just a Google dance, that you first ranked because Google throw a bone to your new site and then place it back to its proper ranking page. Well before you go to that conclusion you better check twice your site just in case you have done one of the 5 above mentioned mistakes. As for now, lets see options of why you could have done one of the five mistakes or even all five of them.

Accidental use of hidden text

Most likely you already know that hidden text is something Google and other search engines would penalize a site for. Most of the times it happens that people hide a bunch of textual keywords in their layout to trick the search engines since those keywords are not of any use to the visitors.

Now the scenario of how you could end up writing hidden text without knowing that the text is hidden. You have a website that has a black background, the layout container that holds the content also uses a white background image and you have set the color of the text to black, the code would most likely look something like this

body {
background-color:#000000;
}

#container {
background:url(images/yourimage.gif) repeat-y top left;
color:#000000
}

From the visual aspect everything looks perfect. Body of your site has a black background color while the content container has a white background image and the text is visible since it is black. Everything is perfect you might be thinking. Well you are wrong, search engines can’t read images which means that they do not know what color the image is. The background color of your body is set to black, the color of your text is set to back, that automatically results to “hidden text” for the search engines. So make sure that you also add a color code to the background of your container. The correct code should look like this:

body {
background-color:#000000;
}

#container {
background:#FFFFFF url(images/yourimage.gif) repeat-y top left;
color:#000000
}

As you can notice the background color of the container is set to white, while the text color is set to black so search engines can recognize the background color used for the container. Problem solved, or rather…avoided.

Overwhelming with keyword density

We do all know that keyword density plays an important role in the process of on-page optimization. Often happens that we over use our keywords in the content and overwhelm our page/site with our keyword, that often happens it makes the content not to have sense at all. Over using our keywords in our layout and increasing the keyword density of our page will alert the search engines that we are targeting that keyword, and apparently based on their algorithm layouts that have a too high keyword density are possibly spamming, hence the result of sandboxing.

Immediate keyword repeat

Same as the previous point. You get concentrate on your targeted keywords so much that you are not even aware how often you are using that keyword in your layout. This will result in immediate keyword repeat, increase the keyword weight in page and most likely end up being sand boxed by the search engines.

A great tool that I recommend you to use to better analyze your pages for keyword density, hidden text etc is WebCEO which is also listed in the seo resource page too.

Forgetting to emphasize your keyword

It is recommended that we should emphasize our keyword at least once. This gives some weight to search engines that that keyword is actually important for the content that is sitting in that page and that search engines should pay bigger attention to that keyword. In some way by emphasizing our keywords we do communicate with search engines, but of course even emphasizing keywords has to make sense, it has to be in bold when you want your keyword to make a point of the sentence.

Not using the heading tags (H1-H6) properly

I have seen this in too many sites already, people using heading tags the wrong way. Heading tags are supposed to be the headline of a chapter (read: page), so if your book (read: site) is about Website Design, then keywords website design should be sitting in the first heading (<h1>Website Design</h1>). Every other sub topic within your site, which might be Graphic design or Logo design should be labeled as h2-h3 respectively. By using properly the heading tags search engines understand what argument is being treated by each block of content in your site.

Hope you enjoyed reading this post. In the next days we will discuss about each of the five points individually so don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me with the updates. A great and free seo analyze tool I recommend you is WebCEO, it can help you understand and help you resolve the 5 seo mistakes you could make, and even more.

Post from: SEO Optimization

5 Common SEO Mistakes You Could do While Optimizing Your Site

It is the time that the wordpress gets upgraded, even tho i just LOVE the current version, however there are some functions that the old wordpress doesn’t have included and I would need to use plugins for that, such as closing commenting on posts older then X days which would be very useful for me even tho the amount of comments are not too much that could put in danger my web hosting resources.

I do like more the interface of the wordpress version i currently have, i do like the fact that there are no security holes reported for this version as far as I have checked. The old but good interface it is what makes things to be user-friendly for me, while in the interface of the new wordpress that point has been somehow lost.

Now, before I rush to upgrade I need your thoughts on closing comments older then X days or no. Do you think it is good to “re-open” in discussion the older posts or they should be left at their place without the possibility to comment? Please, vote the poll and if you do have the time comment bellow about that why do you think they should remain open or why they should be closed.

Thank you for reading, do not forget to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Post from: SEO Optimization

Notice: The blog might be unavailable for tomorrow

Lets presume that you are just starting a blog for your self for some reason, you do have excellent content of which you are aware but you just need that touch to get notice by other bloggers or people that are looking for blogs similar to yours. I know also that you have already made your keyword research for your blog and got yourself a killer domain name with keywords in it to help you in your search engine optimization process. You have also optimized your title tag and done all the tips and advise you had read from various seo tutorials on the web. But yet, you fail to attract interest of other bloggers or of readers.

Tracking the problem in your SEO optimization process

The mistake that most bloggers do when they try for their second, third of fourth time to optimize their layout, without any real previous experience in search engine optimization is that they AIM targeting their main keywords and optimizing their blogs homepage. Doing that, I can tell that you have become obsessed with SEO and you have simply forgot about your main goal, which is to attract visitors by delivering them quality content, because thats the only thing that distinguishes two blogs from each other.

Forget about your blogs homepage and the main keywords for a second, you need those initial visitors to notice your blog, you need to tell these visitors that you DO have a blog and it is WORTH reading it because you share good information’s there. But how to do that? It’s pretty simple and the answer is… long tail keywords.

Long tail, to become visible

Long tail is actually a term to describe the strategy of targeting less competitive niche-markets. But to make it simple for everyone, long tails are those long keyphrases that consist 3-4 or even 5 words, for example a short keyword would be: Make Money Online while a long tail could be: Ways of making money online blogging (you get the point? They are longer but more descriptive).

Usually long tail keywords are less competitive, many would simply ignore long tail keywords until a year or two ago even tho people that do perform a search query very often use long tails (myself too, I often search long tail when I want to find a solution for my problem, its more specific and the results are often more accurate). Bill Tancer reported at SearchScape session that long tail search queries are increasing in 2009. That means you have a great opportunity to get visible to many readers and get your blog notice, bookmarked, shared or even linked by targeting the less competitive long tail keywords.

Aaron Wall also gives a great example why it makes sense to target longtail keywords first. In the chart as you can notice the work involved to target longtail keywords is smaller then targeting the main keywords. Your work is more concentrated on content and optimization of your content for the long tail keywords. It requires less effort on link building campaigns and yet it gives you excellent results by driving visitors to your site in a easier way, and you do need even those 2-5 or even 10 visitors a day to one page only.

If you have anything to comment please do so. Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to read more SEO tips.

Post from: SEO Optimization

SEO for New Blogs & Bloggers | Target Long Tail Keywords

This is not a April Fools joke, so you can go and check by yourself but your site is ready mate, it’s pagerank is going to update. You struggled for 3 months now in building links and the only thing you are actually waiting big time is pagerank. Right?

As pagerank update’s the value of links are supposed to be growing..no? Well I don’t care how you did with your pagerank, if it increased or it was wiped…what I want to hear from you folks is…

Have your search engine rankings improved since three months ago until today? Let me know by leaving a comment bellow.

P.S. Tomorrow is coming a SEO advise for those that are starting a new site, so make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed to follow me.

Post from: SEO Optimization

1Q 2009 PageRank Update

As you may know most of the big bloggers around here like John Chow or Jeremy Schoemaker or Darren Rowse or Sugar Rae are already on their dedicated server for their blog or most likely using large storage hosting plans with excellent speed servers, and that’s all mainly because as the success of your blog grows the need for a better web hosting is needed, storage, database query speed, load speed etc..all things that do require CPU usage.

The web hosting which I am reviewing in this post has never paid me to write this review nor I am doing this review for the sake of linking to their affiliate link, the point is I really like their servers, I really like their service, I like the fact that they do understand bloggers and are there to help you out at any time even with things that no web hosting company would ever bother with. I do run a small web hosting company of my own and I have never blogged about it, at least this should tell that I truthfully recommend you WordPress Web Hosting (but I will however link to their affiliate link).

The first time I heard about WP Web Host was six months ago when they approached me on my xhtml coding services website and offered to sponsor me with their hosting services. I was skeptical at the beginning as I didn’t wanted to place my business on a hosting company that I don’t know and that hasn’t been around for long enough. But since I was already planing to move that site to another host I thought the timing was excellent and accepted their offer but made sure my alarm to ring every 3 days so I backup the site (yeah I forget a lot).

After six months now I can really tell that I am amazed of their servers and of their support. For six months now only once I had a problem with their mailing server so had to open a support ticket on which I received a response pretty quickly with a positive answer that the issue was fixed (yeah, they saved me the hassle of reading a ticket like: thanks for contacting us, we will let you know once we resolve the problem). Not even once it happened that I ended up finding that the site was down (well I actually even never monitored it through one of the monitoring services I use but that is because I am often within the panel and in the webmail).

Aside their fast support and the excellent server speed the WP Web Host’s hosting package is pretty rich too

• 50GBs of web space
• 500GBs of monthly bandwidth
• Host up to 50 domain names
• With every hosting order, a premium wordpress theme exclusively designed for WP Web Host customers

That is a nice amount of disk storage and even more bandwidth then you could expect to be using. And all that for only $5 a month if you purchase a bi-yearly plan or $8 a month if you decide to rent the space monthly.

Just as with any web hosting company, before I (and probably you) sign up the first thing I do is read their Terms of Service..where I ended up in one unclear part to me, its about the Server resources usage where I read…

Should your account utilize an excessive amount of server resources (including, but not limited to, CPU processing time, memory usage and network resources) for a sustained period of time, WPWebHost reserves the right to request that you either upgrade your web hosting service package or reduce your account’s use of resources to an acceptable level.

The italicized terms, excessive amount and acceptable level of utilization of the servers resources is something that is not well specified. What is excessive for WPWebHost? What is acceptable? Well I have no clue, but perhaps they will be kind enough to update their terms of services page so we can know or at least they will pass by and let us know by commenting.

Aside that point I have nothing else to say about WPWebHost except that they are a great web hosting and the excellent place to host your wordpress blog. If you are planing to start a new blog based on wordpress or you are already thinking to migrate your blog to a different server i suggest you to consider WPWebHost (you can even try them for free for 30 days and make up your mind before paying).

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Post from: SEO Optimization

Web Hosting for WordPress

The first plugin I blogged about that was build from Aaron Wall was Rank Checker plugin for FireFox. But now, there is something much better then rank (ronk) checker plugin, its called seo toolbar.

The SEO toolbar plugin for FireFox gives you way much more information’s that you would expect, it has the rank checker plugin integrated as well, it gives detailed information’s about the site you navigate such as:

• Site pagerank
• Page pagerank
• Dmoz listings
• Yahoo Directory listing
• Total incoming links to site homepage in Google
• Total incoming links to site homepage in Yahoo
• Incoming links to current page you navigate (in Google and Yahoo)
• How many del.icio.us submissions for homepage of the site
• Total del.icio.us submissions for pages
• How many people have stumbled the site
• How many people twitter about the site

The SEO toolbar is an excellent plugin, something that I exactly need and is helpful when I try to analyze my competitors website and realize how much work I do need to dedicate to my site and rank.

Here is a video that Aaron Wall has made to guide you through his SEO toolbar plugin.

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Post from: SEO Optimization

SEO Book’s SEO Toolbar

Not long ago after I had a chat with my friend, trying to organize her business model so I could make a site that would suit better to her business model and highlight her main product in the site I got in touch with Ewan of roi.com.au, a SEO company that does offer SEO & Google SEO services (Google SEO mainly because they give high priority to rankings in Google). A pleasant contact at the proper time. After the email’s we exchanged I decided to take a better look to their site and see what are they up to really.

The first thing I checked was when the domain was registered (or rather, when did they got into this business), surprisingly .com.au domain names do not give information of the date registered the domain, but only the last modified date. Harsh, that made me look up deeper and find out archive results for roi.com.au since back in 2003 but the latest archive of their website as company results since December 2006, satisfying for me these first results. Now all I had to check was their testimonials and possible comments on webmaster forums about the company.

When I first landed on their website, I really liked their website design, then I did notice that roi.com.au is also offering website design services too and with a beautiful portfolio as well (well even tho their website design page’s title is Website Design Melbourne, Web Design Melbourne and my friend resides in Melbourne, I am not letting her go with the design part )

Another option we and my friend were discussing about is the primary investment and ROI. Practically she would be investing some money in her business and at least cover the first part of her investment. The solution I advised her to consider in that case was Google AdWords as it is the easiest way (but not also the cheapest) to drive targeted traffic to your website and possibly convert those visitors into customers. Again, who would give her or to any Aussie that is just starting a business advice on Google AdWords campaigns for the Australian market better then an Australian company?

I did recommend to my friend roi.com.au (haven’t heard back of her since then so not sure if she has contacted them yet), I am not quiet sure of their quality of services (but their portfolio spoke for them in this case, and several forum threads) but the information’s I managed to gather about this company made me recommend it to my friend and blog about it too. So if you are living in Australia and trying to open an online business I advise you contact a local company as they do know the market better then any other company that is across the ocean, they do have repeated experience from previous customers (which means they do know what they are into) and of course it is easier to reach a company that is located in your country easier then one that is in another continent.

Post from: SEO Optimization

roi.com.au SEO & Website design company

I do not know if this is something new or old actually, but today when I logged on my adsense account I did notice a link that was telling me that now I can link (integrate) my AdSense account with my Analytics account. In either case this is a great feature as it would give more space to webmasters to optimize their content, learn more about their users how did they found their website and how do the visitors actually interact with webmaster’s content, it also can help you optimize your website design and even optimize the position of your AdSense ad blocks.

That does sound cool doesn’t it? Actually it sounds incredible you would say, but hold on a second, we are talking about Google here, the master of “gathering data” and turning those data into cold cash for them.

It kinda turns out that this great feature you have dreamed about has a bad side too no? Well for sure it can help you learn more about your website, your visitors, your content, your design and even helps you to make more money online by optimizing all possible aspects of your site, but it also…in a legal way you give access to Google to actually share, compare AND use your traffic stats data and possibly classify AdWords advertisers on how much they are actually bidding on a keyword and on which sites would they get displayed too (The higher bidders on more traffic sites?!). Does it make sense to you? For me its crystal clear and personally I do not have anything against all that as it can’t turn worst, but it could definitively turn into better if your site grows.

However, lets leave the “presumptions” aside, for those that are interested to integrate their Google AdSense with their Google Analytics account, as always, Google has already thought about making a video tutorial for that (even tho it is too simple to be guided by a video).

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Post from: SEO Optimization

Integrate Google Adsense and Google Analytics

For those that don’t know what OIOPublisher plugin is let me explain it in few words. If you do have a wordpress blog and you are willing to sell services or advertisement on your site that have a flat rate then OIOPublisher will make that be possible for you. In simple words, it is like a billing system but made for WordPress platforms.

Currently OIOPublisher has integrated PayPal getaway but from what I read on their site soon enough there will be new getaways integrated too (i just hope 2checkout will be one of them).

OIOPublisher Coupon Codes

• Jan90-35 entitles the purchaser to buy for just $35
• Jan90-30 entitles the purchaser to buy for just $30
• Jan90-25 entitles the purchaser to buy for just $25

Use on of the above (bolded) coupon codes and obtain discount while purchasing OIOPublisher and turn your WordPress blog into a business.

Post from: SEO Optimization

January OIOPublisher Coupon Codes

So…when you don’t know what to do…the best thing to do would be to ask an advice from the others, no? At least that’s what I think.

Tell me what to do with 4000 Entrecards and win 500 credits

Thats right, I feel this is going to be interesting, not that fun winning the credits, as it would be fun to read what ideas people have, and the idea that I will like the most is going to be rewarded with 500 entrecard credits.

So, if you have an idea or a clue what you would have done with 4000 Entrecard credits let me know and I will reward you with 500 entrecard credits, but there is one rule tho. Your idea will have to consist something (if not everything) related to seo…traffic and/or blog exposure.

Any talented folks around?

Post from: SEO Optimization

4000 Entrecard Credits that I don’t know what to do with