Why search engine optimization ethics is important

Because the SEO field is unregulated and operates in the virtual world, some SEO specialists have been known to take the money and run. This is where SEO ethics hits you where you feel it most -- in the pocketbook. We are often approached by website owners who say, "The previous SEO took my money and did nothing."

To make sure you hire an ethical SEO specialist, always check that he has a physical address posted on his website. That is a sign that he is less likely to disappear. Most reputable search engine optimization specialists will ask for some of the payment up front. Some will bill in arrears. There should be no reason to give full payment up front to a perfect stranger.

Another typical scam is to use dirty tricks, called "black hat SEO", to get your website ranking highly. You are pleased as punch, hand over the money, then five months later you wonder what happened to your rankings when the search engines get wise and ban your site.

It is important to ask an SEO specialist about his methods before hiring him. I wrote an ebook about what should be avoided when optimizing a site (see image to the right).

Another common trick, often in conjunction with a false guarantee, is to choose poor keywords.I could get your automotive site to rank #1 at every major search engine for the term "double-decker bus sundae delight". Unfortunately, not too many of your customers are searching for that term.

Be careful, however, not to demand the most competitive terms, either. For instance, if your automotive site is for a chain of repair shops in Pennsylvania, you probably do not have the financial means to compete for the term "automobiles", nor is that the most effective term to target your most likely customers.

Ask an SEO specialist how he plans to select the keywords for you. If your bottom line is not his top priority, find another SEO specialist.

Another search engine optimization scam is to guarantee placement within a short period of time, and to buy pay-per-click ad space. Pay-per-click ads appear as "sponsored" listings in the search engines. While they will attract some targeted traffic, only 40% of Internet searchers click on the sponsored listings. Worse, they are temporary listings that end when the account is depleted.

A similar scam some SEO specialists do is to place temporary links on their own sites or buy paid advertising links on other sites. Once the money is paid, they remove the links on their own sites, and once the ads expire on other sites, your site loses those links and rankings also fall.

Hire an Ethical SEO Specialist

In 2006, three satisfied former clients returned to us for additional SEO work

Yes, it's true. There are a lot of freelance SEO specialists and SEO firms taking innocent webmasters for a ride. This page is about how to avoid being a victim of a scam.

The first thing to consider is the importance of hiring an ethical SEO specialist. SEO ethics is not just about being nice little boy scouts. An ethical SEO specialist will make sure your website is not penalized or even banned from the search engines.

To the outsider or the novice, SEO (search engine optimization) seems a bit like voodoo magic. Not surprisingly, website owners want some kind of guarantee. This makes them easy prey for the most common scam: a false promise.

How can you tell if a guarantee is false? Any guarantee is. A reputable freelance SEO specialist or SEO firm will not provide a guarantee, because too much is out of his control. Consider the following professions:

• A stock broker cannot guarantee that a stock will rise. The economy could tank, the CEO could skip the country, or the product could be discovered to cause cancer in children.
• A baseball player cannot guarantee the team will win. The pitcher could give up too many runs, the other teams could be really good, or he could have an off-season.
• A lawyer cannot guarantee you will win your case. The star witness could die or leave town, the judge might be in a really bad mood, the other lawyer might be a whiz.

Your search engine optimization specialist cannot guarantee results either, because the search engine algorithms can change unexpectedly, the competition might be better entrenched than appears, or the competition might start getting better optimized, too. Such promised are 100% unethical and most likely illegal.

SEO Tips

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

The acronym "SEO" can refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, uses methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

5 Simple Tips for Better SEO Value from Your Feeds

I've been connecting with a lot of site owners who are re-entering or ramping up their efforts in the blogosphere. I suspect this has something to do with the focus on content creation + linkbait in the SEO world's dialogue as well as the potential new traffic streams bloggers are feeling from the surge of linking via Twitter. Whatever the case, there's a few critical pieces that can help make for greater SEO value from blogging and feeds in general (and most of these haven't been covered in my previous posts on blog optimization).

#1 - Control Your Own Feed

It's hard to write something better than Danny Sullivan's terrific piece on Staying Master of Your Feed Domain. The concept is that you can utilize services like Feedburner, but you want those feed URLs to originate from your domain (so you keep the link juice you're earning):

To make this work, you need your hosting provider to create a CNAME entry for a new subdomain you’ll create. If they can’t do that easily for you, find a new hosting provider. I highly recommend ours, Tiger Technologies. Cheap, easy for you to do this yourself, plus Digg-tested.

For me, I simply make a subdomain called feeds for any domain I’m dealing with. Since searchengineland.com is our main domain, our feed domain is feeds.searchengineland.com.

Once I’ve created this, the MyBrand magic lets FeedBurner take control of where the domain points to. That let’s me turn the FeedBurner feed address for us intohttp://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland.

But wait — I thought it was about keeping control? Relax. I’m giving them control because I want to. If they went all evil, I’d just change the CNAME record and point that subdomain to wherever I want. I own the domain. I control where it ultimately points to.

Sadly, SEOmoz doesn't do this, and it's a pain to switch (though at some point, it may be worth that trouble). If you're new to feed publishing or are early in the game, it makes a lot of sense to move now, before it becomes more painful.

#2 - Get Your Feed Listed Across the Web

There are some great directory lists like this one from TopRank Blog and this one from Ari Paparo. However, my advice here would be to go after not just the generic lists, but the more specific feed lists, aggregators, portals and yes, other blogs & news sites that can put your posts in front of an audience that's passionate about your topic.

In the technology field, for example, places like Alltop, Techmeme, PopURLs, even the NYTimes technology page list feeds from a variety of sources. Those are amazing links and incredible sources of traffic, too (Alltop recently entered SEOmoz's top 30 referring domains for traffic to the site). If you're committed to getting the most out of your feed, you need to identify the portals in your niche that command share, traffic and page views, make a feed worthy of being posted and get their attention. Emails are surprisingly effective, butnothing beats an in-person conversation.

#3 - Use Absolute URLs in Your Feed

Scrapers, both good and bad, are going to scoop up your feed and re-publish it, including the links. If you use absolute URLs in your markup (e.g. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rand-loves-the-nfl) rather than relative URLs (e.g. /rand-loves-the-nfl) your chances of getting link equity and PageRank back from those who re-publish goes up significantly. Note that this is a general disagreement with JohnMu (who posted on this topic last year, though not specifically as it relates to feeds).

#4 - Record Feed CTR & Links You Earn as "Conversions"

Through feed tracking, you can determine the posts that received the greatest/fewest clickthroughs. You can also use your web analytics or tools like Linkscape, Yahoo!, Technorati or Blogscape's SMM Prototype to see how many links each post has earned (Backtweets is another good one if you want to record tweets). Treat those links andd clicks like a conversion - write more posts like the ones that have success and shy away from the posts that don't earn much love/attention. Great bloggers don't start out great (I certainly didn't). They learn over time what's successful and effective and get consistently on that track.

#5 - Full Text Feeds are Generally Better for SEO

The argument over partial text vs. full text tends to be about earning the clicks and interactions on your site (full text means people can read off-site and may never click through, while partial text really annoys some subscribers), but from a raw SEO perspective, full text has a few benefits.

• All things being equal, you tend to get more subscribers with full text than partial, which boosts your numbers, gives you wider distribution and increases the liklihood you'll earn a link from those readers.
• Full text feeds get re-published in full, and that means links further down in the content potentially pass value back to you.
• Blog and feed lists are sometimes picky about partial feeds, and may opt not to include your site.
• Potential distribution partners like full text, because it gives them the opportunity to keep the visitor on their site (but if these deals get done, they almost always mean link juice back to you).

Obviously, business goals may overrule this recommendation, but it's wise to be aware of the possible impact.

SEO

Why SEO content writing? There is a simple truth about web content that although many would acknowledge, even more seem to ignore. It is this: however great your content is, however helpful it may be to potential readers, if no one can find your site it might as well have been written on a cigarette packet and left in your bedside drawer.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the key that unlocks the door to your site and will significantly increase visitor numbers and general traffic. So however great your website content is, without content marketing you might as well be using sign language in the dark.

So how do you improve your SEO content writing? The good news is there are a number of key points that if you use, will greatly improve the effectiveness of your site.

Improve SEO Content Writing

1. Headings
The first is, well, headings. Search engines love them and so do readers. They are easy on the eye and help browsers “lock” onto your site and commit to reading its content. Just make sure they are well chosen. If you are writing an article on Jane Austen’s novels, there’s no pint using a heading that says “Introduction”, it’s simply far too vague. Try “Jane Austen’s Early Work” and you’ll be much more likely to let the search engines know exactly what is contained within the content.

2. Variations
This is an often-overlooked tool, but when you think of it, it makes perfect sense. Imagine you’re searching for an online article on Frank Sinatra. Of course, you could search using the singer’s name, but if an article had headings that were variations, your chances of capturing the searchers eyes would greatly increase. So for this example, you may have headings such as Frank Sinatra: Ol’ Blue Eyes or Frank Sinatra: Chairman of the Board.

3. Think Like a Web Browser
What would you type in a search engine in to look for an article on Snoopy? Sure, you’d probably start with the beagle’s name, but others might search under “Peanuts” or “Schulz” or “Charlie Brown’s dog” or even “the Red Barron.” Using these terms in your article’s content will create many more hits and greatly increase traffic.

4. Title Tag
This is vital. Make sure you use the exact words in your title tag. This is a tried and tested way to optimize your content and is one of the best ways of moving your site up the rankings.

5. Be Bold
Or to be more precise, use bold keywords. These can go anywhere, but are best suited at the top of a section in your content. They help draw the reader’s eyes to important points and may be the difference between staying and moving on.

6. Be Natural
The last point is one that is frequently overlooked, even by those with SEO strong sites. Following the above rules is important, but remember to keep the text natural and flowing. It needs to read like a human and not a robot have written it. After all, if a reader can’t make sense of your site, they won’t come back. Incorporate the above in a natural manner and you’ll be well on your way to creating a site that is as easy to find as it is enjoyable to read.

Steve Lazuka is the owner of Interact Media, a SEO content writing company based in Ohio. His knowledge of content writing and experience has proven successful for both clients and his own site. He also writes on his company blog and provides useful information for content marketers. You can also write guest posts and share your SEO tips.

20 Ways to Increase your Alexa Rank

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.


2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.


3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.


4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.


5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.


6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.


7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.


8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.


9. Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace doshdosh.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.


10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.


11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.


12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.


13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.


14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.


15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.


16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.


17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.


18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.


19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.


20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.