Ideally your site soars in the rankings naturally, and you start to receive higher traffic and more importantly higher conversions. That is what everyone is after, right? Everyone wants traffic, conversions, great page rank and top slots in the SERPs. A recent conversation in a forum I frequent got me thinking about it all though. The two people involved in the conversation were an SEO and a freelance writer.

The writer was shocked that the SEO had provided a service and was patiently waiting for payment instead of demanding instant release of funding provided. The SEO kept saying. ‘No – it’s cool. They’ll pay me when they see the results’. The writer couldn’t wrap their head around the idea that the SEO was willing to let their work be judged by its results. The SEO knew that what they had done would deliver the desired result, and that the proof was in the pudding. In fairness though – the SEO did take a portion of the payment and held the rest in escrow – it wasn’t strictly and honor system deal, but you see the point.

Demand more than empty words from your SEO. Don’t be satisfied with vague promises such as ‘we will make your site rank #1′ or ‘we will get you a thousand back-links’. There is more to it than that, and anyone that gives an iron clad guarantee of #1 on Google is either exceptional or foolish. You need to find out which one they are, because if they are a fool, you are as much a fool to entrust them with your SEO.

Ask the following questions to see if what you are told will meet your needs and makes sense to you:

Will you be using organic SEO or PPC to make my site #1? This does make a big difference in your wallet!

Where do you get links from? Are they from directories, submission sites, a combination of those and others, etc..

What kind of PageRank do the sites my back-links come from have?

How much will my traffic increase? Can you get a rough estimate of what to expect – even in terms of a percentage?

How much will my conversions increase?

When can I expect to see results? Is this going to be something I see immediately or will it slowly grow over a period of weeks or months? Knowing this can take a lot of stress out of your life.

By asking all these questions, you gather valuable information about what your SEO actually knows, what they can do, and how fast they can do it. Your LAST question should be ‘How much will it cost?” – not your first. Stick to this formula and you’ll do well!

Quite a few people have questions regarding what the difference is between SEO and SMM. SEO and SEM are inextricably linked – or should be, in any good campaign. So what is the difference between the two and how are they linked together? ?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is really just one part of  SEM, or Search Engine Marketing. Think of SEM as a big tree, and SEO as the trunk that everything springs forth from. Search Engine Optimization generally refers to the practice of optimizing your site with  keywords to make you more visible to search engines and users.  This is what helps your site get crawled, a part of what helps it get ranked, and ultimately what helps you convert. Some of the more common keyword based SEO tactics include:

Keyword optimizing each webpage

Using keyword in titles, subtitles and subheadings

Using keywords in domain names and urls

Using keywords in meta tags, and in alt tags to tag images

SEO also includes good linking practices:

Linking to relevant sites

Securing backlinks from relevant sites

Securing backlinks from .gov or .edu sites

Building other sites or blogs and creating a network of links

Creating a solid internal link structure

Each of these components can be thought of as the branches that grow from the main trunk of our figurative SEO tree. While you can get away without a couple of the branches in the short term, eventually they all need to be present to have a full, healthy tree. Without them, you have what appears to be nothing more than a dead tree. You don’t want your site to look like that.

Search Engine Marketing involves the more sales oriented promotion of your site to search engines. This includes:

Using SEO to make your site appear as relevant as possible

Using article marketing to increase link power and give you added results

Using video marketing to capture the image search market

Using social networks to build brand recognition

Advertising using paid ads, PPC and other avenues to drive extra traffic to your site

The primary goal is to generate high quality, relevant content on both your site and other sites with back links that point back to you so that you are well indexed and crawled. Google and the other search engines use the factor of how many back links you have from original quality content to determine how relevant you should be in Google’s results and page rankings. The more you have, the more relevant you are. The better your content is, the more backlinks you are likely to get.

Spamming services or link sites should not be used to build backlinks. That is as sure a way as there is to get sandboxed by the SERPs. Black hat actions like these cause  Google to penalize you and possibly even black list your site. Keep it all white hat, and use proven tactics to improve your rankings and conversions. It takes time to grow a good site just as it does a tree, but if you play by the rules good things will come to you!

You have to have content, which is creative, but you also have to have an idea of keyword density, rewrite rules, and other data driven numbers and percentages. Creative, original content on it’s own can get you only so far. You need to have the science mixed in with it to get the best possible results. This is where your professional SEO copywriters come in.

SEO is subjective at times – there will always be differences of opinion, and trial and error is a god part of certain aspects – but objectivity is certainly not absent. Algorithms change, competition changes, and even your keywords may change over time, but the process, science, that is SEO remains fairly static.

The algorithms change, but they do exist, and at any given time there are definite rules which must be followed to achieve results. If you aren’t in the industry, or willing to spend a fair portion of time following each change and how that will impact searches, you are not going to get very far – unless of course you outsource it.

Google, Yahoo and Bing’s algorithms are ever changing, which is why there is always a need for SEOs who are full on geeks, to reverse-engineer those algorithms and find the cracks to exploit. When you are able to define the algorithm enough to formulate a plan of attack, you are in essence working out your own algorithm to analyze your site and pages and turn the tables. If it sounds difficult, it is. The search giants guard their algorithms and try to stay one step ahead of everyone trying to crack them.

This means using all the data you can gather to make decisions. You have to create a benchmark against which to score your Content, Keyword Choices, PageRank, Indexation, Internal Links, Inbound Links, Hierarchical Linking Structure, HTML Templates and CSS. Everything plays into the formula that makes for solid SEO that can withstand most changes the SERPs may throw at them.

Examine all urls, title tags, internal anchor text, keyword prominence, H1s, and meta descriptions, Deconstruct your site and distill all the data you can from each component to figure out what your algorithm should be. Then and only then will you be able to compete effectively. Don’t skimp on your SEO – if you do you can bet that your competition will not and they will get the advantage.

1.Research your keywords and develop a niche market. Targeting your audience is half the battle. If you don’t know what audience you are writing for, you aren’t going to reach them. Doing your homework is the foundation that everything is built upon.

2.Make sure that you have landing page copy that reminds visitors of their problem, offers a solution and presents a call to action. This is what gets people engaged and compels them to act. If they never leave the landing page, you aren’t doing your job. You need clickthroughs to have a successful site and convert.

3.Provide helpful, to the point information that is on topic and that will generate interest in the rest of your site as well. Once you deliver people to interior pages, you have to keep giving them what they want.

4.When using your keywords, make sure that you use them naturally in your text. If you can pinpoint one primary (to be used in the title, the first and the last paragraph) and several secondary phrases (to be sprinkled in where appropriate and unobtrusive) then you can make great use of your keywords without being spammy which will turn-off your readers.

5. Add content often – daily if possible. You can get indexed more often if you add content more often. This is also the best way to keep people coming back. You can’t expect repeat visitors for long if they don’t have reason to expect something new.

6.Make sure your content is readable, and doesn’t contain too much flash. High concentrations of textual content help the spiders know what your site is about. Being readable is a basoc need – if your content is just keywords strung together and makes little sense to a human reader, regardless of what the spiders think you won’t keep human readers.

7.Share your content, and become an expert. Be helpful to people, and your site will become viewed as helpful. The more you can get your content spread around, the more available it is and more valuable it will become. Use sharing buttons wisely!

8.Spread content across the web, through articles sites, blogs, Squidoo lenses, etc. This goes back to the above – give people reading your content easy to use ways to share it. The more places you get your content live, the better it is for your site.

9.Remember that content doesn’t do any good if no-one sees it. Publicize yourself and people will read your content.

10.Content is King. Content is information. That is what the Internet is – the information superhighway. Never forget that your content is for people to search for and benefit from. Make yourself an authority. Compile a reader base that follows your work. When your content begins spreading on its own, you have achieved great content!

To help get you on the right path, here are some tips on how to improve your internal links. Normally, our websites will have internal links in the form of a URL ripped from the navigation bar. You can enhance the effect of the navigation bar on internal linking by using keywords as the linking text in the navigation bar rather than some random text.

Also, the navigation bar should be plain HTML and should not be image links to the inner pages. One of the best practices in internal linking is to have the navigation bar on the left hand side so that the search bot will crawl the navigation bar as soon as it lands on your site. Resist the temptation to stuff the navigation bar with the keywords – that is not going to help you. The navigation text link should mirror the content of the page it is linking. Don’t try to fool the bots, in the end they always win.

Concentrate on getting internal links is the footer of your website as well – and this is very important. The footer navigation link is similar to the regular navigation bar we just discussed. For SEO purposes, they can be used as a means of getting a few extra internal links. If you want the footer links to work up to their potential, you cannot have too many of them because that will just dilute the effectiveness of individual links. Make sure that you have a link to your sitemap in the footer as well – and that is a very important step! The sitemap will of course have links to all the pages of your website arranged in hierarchical order.

Text or content contained on the web page gives us ample chance to create contextual internal text links. If you good content, this is not a problem. If you have poor content, the best thing to do is get a copywriter to provide you with content you can use better. These are bread and butter links and need to be done correctly.

An excellent page for internal linking is the FAQ page. FAQ pages cover all the aspects of your products or services in the form of help text. Instead of having all the FAQs and their responses in the same page, make individual pages and cross link the pages within the FAQs section as well as the services pages as in line text links. This is a great way to build strong internal links quickly.

News pages can also be a great way to introduce more internal links in the form of inline text. Since the news updates will be based on your products and services, you will find many opportunities to insert in line text links. You must remember however, that internal links are just a way of improving your keyword strength and good internal linking alone will not take you to the top of the search results page. To do that you need to have a concerted plan to enhance your site as a whole.

Think for a second of keyword density as porridge, and then see if it makes better sense when related just like that old story from when you were a child.

The Papa bear said:

“For the best porridge, you can shop for porridge and compare porridge until you find the best porridge for your porridge needs. Porridge can be found at major porridge outlets, but sometimes the best porridge is the porridge you make for yourself. You know what you need after all.”

The Mama bear said:

Do you like bowls of steaming hot yummy porridge? Check out this website, and enjoy a bowl of porridge while you play our poker games. You can eat porridge while playing easy blackjack and raking in online winnings which can be redeemed for great prizes! Just settle in with your porridge and enjoy playing to win big. Isn’t this the porridge ever?”

The Baby bear said:

I like my porridge warm and soft. Some people add in all sorts of things like milk, butter or sugar to their porridge to make it tastier. We eat porridge all the time because it is affordable and easy to make – plus, we’re bears!”

Get the picture? Without keyword optimization you don’t achieve the best rankings, but with too much of it you will be scrutinized to see if you are trying to game the system. You’ll be penalized for it and wind up with a big bowl of porridge that isn’t going to do you any good.

Some ‘gurus’ will feed you lines about ‘2-4% density’ or ‘5-10% density’ constantly. Formulas requiring a keyword phrase to be used every 100 words precisely or at specific places in each article are common. You can’t buy into those theories though because they don’t always work. Even if they do succeed in getting people to you, they may be so unreadable you can’t keep people on your page.

Google maintains that a properly optimized article should flow naturally, without significant effort on the part of the writer at all. What that basically means is they should be natural. Your visitors should be able to read what you write without having to decipher it through a sea of keywords. However, until Google stops using algorithms to determine the value of your content, you have to pay some attention just to stay abreast of the competition – they are trying to do everything they can to game the system.

You do have to optimize for keywords, there is no way around that. What you don’t have to do however is make that the sole goal of every article you write! Try to end up with the baby bear bowl, and you will be fine. It’s the right sized portion and it’s warm and yummy – just like your content should be.

RSS feeds are easy to make and are available on every imaginable topic. Most platforms designed for content sharing include and easy to use plug and play widget. Having multiple RSS feeds increases the chances of incoming traffic, and allows webmasters to attract greater incoming traffic. A webmaster can easily add a RSS feed that displays top search engine results for targeted keywords to help attract a particular audience. Contrary to popular belief, popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN offer RSS feeds that can be easily added to a website if your own site isn‘t equipped for it when you take possession of it.

By putting a feed on your site, webmasters can increase the keyword density of target keywords and  increase the search ability of a site. Inserting new RSS feeds helps ensure that content on a website is generated more frequently and is fresh. News RSS feeds are the best way to keep a steady flow of fresh content coming into your site. RSSmix allows you to blend multiple RSS feeds to create a single site feed which looks cleaner and is easier to manage.

Also keep in mind that an RSS feed on a website that is JavaScript based are not indexed easily by search engines, and are best avoided. JavaScript based RSS solutions are easy to implement, but they offer very little in terms of SEO. ASP, PHP, and HTML alternatives for RSS are readily available alternatives that suit both needs quite capably.

RSS feeds are the hottest phenomenon when it comes to search engine optimization and the number of webmasters looking to RSS feeds is always on the rise. If you haven’t tapped into RSS, you are missing out on a great resource that saves you time and money while providing great fresh content for your site visitors to take advantage of. If you are unsure of how to proceed with RSS, your SEO can take care of getting you properly set up.

Issues with accessibility that stop search engine spiders from crawling your site to index content are also stopping your human visitors from accessing your content as well. If access problems are present, visitors won’t be able to access deeper pages of your website which means they are stuck in a certain sense. For a complete crawling of your website, proper indexing and good traffic from visitors, your website should be made freely accessible.  Here are some of the most often ignored factors regarding accessibility that you may encounter:

Broken links are very common, but also easy to fix. Broken links aggravate search engine bots and human visitors equally! Linking to a page that is not live helps no-one, and can actually harm you as Google sees broken links as a sign your site is not being well maintained.  All links should have an active page linked to it and it should be the correct page, or your visitors too will be disillusioned and will leave. Misleading links can also harm your reputation.

SEO efforts may wind up being futile if you fail to run routine, basic checks on your website for broken links. You could even end up losing your ranking in the search engines for such a mistake if it is prevalent enough. It is not enough to validate each link before the launch. You must revalidate all the links to see how they are performing when they are actually online, and continue to do so on a regular basis. You may know what you’re doing, but you can’t know what another webmaster is doing on their site, hence the necessity for regular check-ups.

Know that web pages that are too heavy can also cause accessibility problems. Your web pages should be 150kb or less. (This does not include the image files). Search engines downgrade web pages that take too long to load because they are a nuisance. Avoid heavy files since they can slow down the search engine in fetching the right information.– Load time is also often increased, leading to penalties in PageRank and other algorithms. Split large pages into two sections if needed and you shouldn‘t have any problems in this area.

Your websites HTML and CSS coding should comply with W3C to be as safe as possible. Decrepit  HTML codes will often cause a search engine spider to turn and run like it saw a swarm of bats descending on it. If you have forms on your site, check them when you go live – never assume that because they worked in safe mode everything is okay – be thorough! If forms are not properly coded, they may result in wrong landing pages or page not found error – which, as mentioned above, is one of the worst problems you can have on your site.

Your SEO professional should be able to pinpoint problems early in your site build and help you correct them, testing before and after launch. It is something you can do on your own, but with such an important task, it is advised to use an experienced professional.

Social bookmarking can take many forms depending on the individual preferences of the person performing the task. Digg, Sphinn, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Technorati, BlogSpot and even an RSS fee from your own website or blog can be considered bookmarking if other people are subscribed to your feed, follow or friend you, or vote your content up. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Social bookmarking can be time consuming and tedious for some people. It can get extremely repetitive, but if done correctly it is well worth the effort. If the social network isn’t your scene, you can hire a professional social bookmarking service to take care of regular bookmarking on your behalf.

The Dos and Don’ts of Social Bookmarking as part of a full service link building campaign are as follows:

Always be selective. Having a huge array of buttons for every social network you can find at the side or bottom of all your content can overwhelm people and make them shy away from using even one sharing technique. People like choices, but they hate feeling overwhelmed or pressured. Use YouTube for videos, Flickr and Picasa for photos, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook for laid back personal messages, LinkedIn for professional shout outs, Digg and Sphinn for really interesting stuff that might go viral. Know your content and where it fits best.

Putting your content in front of the right audience for it is essential. Start by asking yourself if the Technorati crowd or the stay at home moms crowd are more likely to respond to what you are presenting and get them the right buttons to act on when you make your content live. In the opinion of many SEOs, the maximum number of social bookmarking site buttons that should ever be present on a piece of content is five – more than that and the reader figures ‘what’s the use’ and simply skips the sharing step because they either don’t know what to pick or feel overwhelmed and pressured to use them all.

Don’t start bookmarking then get lazy and quit posting new content for your readers. Your following wants to see new stuff every day or so, so space it out. Try to set up automatic updates to simplify things if that helps. Change it up and vary which bookmarking sites you submit to, as well as the type of content, and track your results so you know what works and what doesn’t. It takes time, but again, the data you collect early on can make life much easier for you later.

There are over 200 social bookmarking sites on the web to work with. Your job as the content provider is to find the ones that work for you and focus your efforts on them. You can always have a social bookmark submissions services firm submit en masse if desired – but figuring out where your niche customers like to hang out is the key to successfully generating extra links and traffic.

Everything you do in your social bookmarking campaign must be considered carefully, from how many social bookmarking sites to target, to what kind of content they will find valuable, to whether or not to employ a firm to ensure quality social bookmarking is being done on your behalf. If you outsource your social bookmarking, ensure that your online profile is being accurately represented and that your social bookmarking submissions are being handles correctly so you won’t be labeled a spammer. The last thing you want is to be booted from a site because getting back on is not the easiest thing to do – and that will cost you followers in the long run.

Google’s search quality guidelines plainly warn all users:  “Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.” If malware in your website is the result of successful hacking activity, it can be hard to prove it isn’t you and Google will want to get you out of the results quickly and may not give you time to find the problem. No search engine wants to direct people to a hacked site because it compromises their credibility. If you aren’t on the search indexes, you’re basically nowhere.

If however you are monitoring your  site regularly and detect malware early, it will not cause as much damage to your websites or your visitors. Google can actually help you, since they have the most effective tools for detecting hacked in malware on your website. In this type of situation, Google is your ally – they want to get rid of as much malware as they can as much as you do so that more sites and users don’t become infected.

To get started, visit  http://www.google.com/, and type in site: yourdomain.com (using your domain name where it says yourdomain). Use your domain name only, and don’t include www. so you will get the maximum number of indexed pages. Follow this step EXACTLY!

Google will then produce a list consisting of all of the indexed pages on your website. If you have a lot of pages, change the default view to 100 instead of 10 results per page (you can do this in “Advanced search” under “Need more tools”) to help speed the process up a little bit. Next, choose “repeat the search with the omitted results included” to display hidden results that you otherwise wouldn‘t be aware of.

If you see anything that says “This site may harm your computer.” it means that Google found malware hosted on that URL. This means you have been hacked by someone who managed to slip some malware onto your site. This isn’t good news, but once you know it is there you can start to repair the damage it has done. That is good news.

Go to your Google Webmasters account and then go to “Labs” in the dashboard. Once you are there, choose “Malware details.” If you get the response  “Google has not detected any malware on this site,” then there has not been a hack and you are in the clear – almost.

New methods employed by hackers include planting links in the site pointing to spammy websites or  malware domains. If link building is being done that you or your SEO are not responsible for, be suspicious! Links from unknown origins are not your friend and should be removed just to be safe. Tools are available to check external links, however, and you can also utilize your server logs to find out if unknown IP addresses are accessing restricted pages.

To do this, log in to your hosting account and copy and paste the access log into an Excel file or OpenOffice Calc. Once that step is accomplished, create filters to eliminate your own IP address and find URLs containing the word “admin”. If you find any and they return  a 404 (not found) or a 301 header that indicates a failed hacking attempt. That means your security measures are working, but also that breaches have been attempted so you may want to beef things up. A “200 OK” status may indicate a successful hacking attempt. Use server logs to trace where the hacker visited other restricted pages in your domain, and block them. If you fail to do this, they will backdoor you to death with hacks.

To protect yourself, enable logs for admin pages, update your web software, and sanitize user input. Also, use captcha to defeat malware bots planting links via comments or any openly available area. Once that is done, disable unneeded PHP functions, and use strong passwords and SSL. Never under any circumstances should you use the default passwords, and never store your passwords anywhere online. Scan your website regularly as described, and act fast if you think you’ve been hacked. it is better to be vigilant than a victim!