What Does Google Want?

What Does Google Want?
Twelve years ago it wouldn't have mattered at all what Google thought of your website. Now when it comes to online search, Google is the big beast in the jungle with 60%+ of the market and what they think is very important to your success.

In order to keep Google happy, SEO specialists and webmasters have to jump through many hoops to get a website seen. If you want to succeed with Google you have to try and master the majority of them.
There is now a large industry built around guessing and searching for these ranking factors. Asking what is it that Google wants? How does Google rank pages and keywords? How would Google want you to build your website?


For years, webmasters have been trying to figure things out without much help from Google at all. Many techniques have been dreamt up to crack the Google Code, many of them under the banner of Black-Hat. Black-Hat being a set of techniques which aim to fool the Google algorithm and cheat a website to search engine success.
In recent times, Googler’s Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye,have been honestly answering questions about what Google requires webmasters to do regarding their websites. The obvious questions being - What does Google want from me? What does Google expect from my site? How do I get ranked highly in Google search?

What is Google's Prime Directive?

After you have gone through all the Google SEO checkmarks, taken into account the quality of your content, factored in the credibility and authority of your site and your back-links, you are left with the following bombshell!

"Always think of your visitors first when creating any content for your website."

Obviously, anything as complicated as getting top rankings in Google can't be potted down to a single phrase. You must also do your homework and a reasonable place to start would be to read Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
So, the basics still have to be observed such as keyword research, page title, Meta descriptions in order to get ahead of the game. However, there is an argument to be counter-intuitive when it comes to your website content. Always write for the visitor and forget impressing the search engines with your keyword density could well be sound advice.
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Google Links - The Ten Commandments

Google Links - The Ten Commandments
Following on from the Ten Commandments of SEO, here are some more detailed dos and don’ts for link building
1. Write interesting content geared towards humans and not robots.
2. Find and replace broken links and incorrect HTML coding.
3. Keep the links on a given page to a small number. I recommend less than seventy.
4. Avoid hidden text or hidden links. They are cleverer than you and I.
5. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines. You will get found out and penalized.
6. Don’t create multiple pages with substantially duplicate content. For instance the same page but with a different town mentioned on each
7. Never participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking
8. Avoid getting valueless links from unrelated websites. Get links from sites with a theme similar to yours (blogs are great)
9. Avoid getting links from low Page Rank pages with loads of outgoing links
10. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t get involved with anything that will get your site banned.

You can win the rankings race with great content and regular honest activity. Short cuts do not exist apart from in the heads of the SEO propeller heads.

For more of the same please visit my seo services website

SEO – The Ten Commandments

SEO – The Ten Commandments
You could write a very long book on this and still get lots of people disagree with you. If you do only half of what’s written below then you will be doing a hundred times more than most web owners!
1. Make sure that your website makes it very clear through content, page titles etc what it is about. Google is not sending human beings to look at your site, it is sending software driven robots. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck and enjoys a crust of bread then it is probably a duck. Make it obvious!
2. Do not make your website look and read like a brochure.
3. Add regular, original content written for people and not to impress the search engines.
4. Allow people to enjoy and share your website with others. Add a RSS feed and Social Bookmarking buttons if you can.
5. Let others add content to your site Build it as a Wordpress blog or integrate one into your site if possible. Add your original content to the blog where reasonable.
6. Submit your Blog to Technorati to get it out there in cyber space. Submit your site to as many RSS aggregators as you can (Google it)
7. Take your original content and make the most of it by submitting to article sites such as Ezine Articles and press release sites such as PR Web.
8. Have outgoing one-way links to authority sites such as Wikipedia to build your reputation.
9. Link as often as you can between your internal pages. Use anchor text to do this i.e. instead of ‘click here’ use the words that describe the page you are going to.
10. Get links from the best places. DMOZ is still the one to have closely followed by ‘do follow’ links from subject related blogs.
For much, much more on this and other SEO Services please visit my website (this is an anchor text link by the way)

Email Marketing: The Money is in the List!

The money is in the list! The money is in the list! No it’s not a typo because the money really is in the list. Collect your visitor emails anyway you can and keep in touch with new information and incredible offers just for them.

So here’s an example from a friend of mine who has a Lingerie site. He averages circa 500 new visitors a day and at my suggestion added a simple form to his homepage where visitors can leave their email address in return for special offers and the opportunity to visit special pages on his website with sale offer on it.

He found that 9% of visitors left an email address and he was collecting 1350 per month. Every month he sent a special offer and it was converting at 6% giving him 81 extra sales per month. At the end of year one he was making 972 extra sales EVERY month from his email list. Just do it folks or ring me to find out how.

How else can you get emails? Try giving something away in return. Another friend of mine had a gifts website and I advised him to offer special reports in return for an email. The special reports were either – 'the top ten gifts for men' or 'the top ten gifts for women'. He had someone else write the short e-books for him at elance for the cost of a meal for two. His conversion rates were crazy and his business took off because of it!

If you do want to know more about this subject and others relating to making your website a success then please feel free to visit my SEO Company website for SEO Services, SEO advice and free SEO tools.

Consider search engine optimization before launching a new website

Consider Search Engine Optimization before launching a new website. It will save you time and money as well as boosting your chances of success.


Some facts for you: Nearly 73% of new visitors to a website come through a search engine. The difference in the amount of traffic between position #1 and position #10 the search results is 1,400%. In fact the difference between #1 and #2 is still 350%
More traffic.

I spend my life looking at nice websites that will never get found because either the owners or the web agency do not understand SEO. Buying some SEO services from an SEO company would have made all the difference because search engine optimisation can make or break a site as a commercial entity.

If you remember nothing else, then please remember this. The biggest search engine is Google and they do not use human editors to decide what your website is about. Unless you make it blindingly obvious with your page titles and text etc what you do for a living then forget it. So if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and enjoys a crust of bread like a duck, guess what? It’s probably a duck! Remember the duck when building your website and you will not go far wrong.

So here you go; a few basic SEO guidelines for easy search engine indexing.

Don’t worry too much if you don’t understand the terms or don’t want to do the work yourself. There are many companies out there who can design you a SEO friendly website for not much more money than a regular site. Just make sure that they understand SEO please before giving them your money.

• Before starting out you need to decide which phrases are used when people search for your type of product or service. These words are called keywords and it is these that dictate how the pages on the site are described and also what text is used on the pages. There is a useful free keyword tool at Google to get you started.
• Design your site in html and minimise the use of java script and flash. The more complex you make the code, the more difficult it becomes for the search engines to read your content and allocate the appropriate Google PR to your web page.
• Make sure that your Meta tags are coded correctly and include the correct SEO keyword phrases that you want to be found for. If your Meta tags are search engine optimised and compelling, you massively improve your chances of a higher search engine ranking.
• Apply the proper tags to your page; ‘h’ tags are a great way to call attention to your content and promote your keywords. Try to use each tag at least once, but remember that you want your text to read well and appear normal.
• Add an html sitemap and an xml sitemap. Including a sitemap on your site makes it easy for search engines to access all of your website pages and index your site accordingly.
• Include a links page where you point visitors at other websites they might find interesting. Google in particular is keen for websites to offer a fantastic visitor experience and linking out is partly the proof of this. My own website links out to sites such as Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo! And MSN. None are in competition with me but all can add value to my visitor.
• Easy for some and difficult for others is the adding of fresh content to a website. Search engines rely on new content as much as we rely on oxygen to live. Now I absolutely realise that if your business has a single product that seldom changes then, unlike SEO there is not a mountain to write about. But why not consider case studies, customer comments, press releases or company news? All are perfectly acceptable as fresh content and the very fact you are trying does carry weight with the search engines
Starting with the strong foundation of a site that meets basic SEO standards will stand you in good stead for moving forward and for your website to be more than a glossy but often unread brochure on the web.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

Black Hat SEO

These Tactics Are Considered Black Hat SEO For A Reason.
These Are Not Legitimate Tactics And While Some May Work In The Short Term.
They WILL Get Your Website Penalised And/Or Banned Eventually.

Constantly webmasters attempt to "trick" the search engines into ranking sites and pages based on illegitimate means. Whether this is through the use of doorway pages, hidden text, interlinking, keyword spamming or other means they are meant to only trick a search engine into placing a website high in the rankings. Because of this, sites using black-hat SEO tactics tend to drop from these positions as fast as they climb (if they do climb at all).
The following tactics are not listed to help you "trick" the search engines but rather to warn you against these tactics should you hear they are used by other SEO's (this is not to say that all other search engine optimisation experts use these tactics, just that some do and you should be warned against them).
Due to the sheer number of tricks and scripts used against search engines they could not possibly all be listed here. Below you will find only some of the most common black-hat tactics. Many SEO's and webmasters have simply modified the below tactics in hopes that the new technique will work. Truthfully they may, but not forever and probably not for long.
Black-Hat SEO Tactics:

Keyword Stuffing
This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.

Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is set at the same colour as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same colour as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same colour as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and the site blacklisted.

Cloaking
In short, cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are too many methods of cloaking to possibly list here and some of them are still undetectable by the search engines. That said, which methods still work and how long they will is rarely set-in-stone and like hidden text, when one of your competitors figures out what is being done (and don't think they aren't watching you if you're holding one of the top search engine positions) they can and will report your site and it will get banned.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.

Redirects
Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site. As quickly as the search engines find ways of detecting such redirects, the spammers are uncovering ways around detection. That said, the search engines figure them out eventually and your site will be penalised. That or you'll be reported by a competitor or a disgruntled searcher.

Duplicate Sites
A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way.

Interlinking
As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done "correctly" (we cannot give the method for "correct" interlinking here as it's still undetectable at the time of this writing and we don't want to provide a means to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Please feel free to visit my seo services website for seo services, free tools and lots of advice.

Blog Marketing

Blog Marketing

Blog marketing can be an excellent tool in search engine optimisation because search engines consider a blog to be both an authority and a good content site..

Blog marketing is the term used to describe internet marketing via weblogs (Blogs). These blogs differ from corporate websites because they feature daily or weekly posts, often around a single topic. Typically, corporations use blogs to create a dialog with customers and explain features of their products and services. Because search engines look to blogs as both authority sites and great resources for fresh content, they can be excellent tools in search engine optimisation.

Many organisations use blogs with their user community. This allows them to share and preview product features, functions, and benefits before the products are released. Blogs are an excellent way to gather feedback and to make sure products meet the needs of users. Blogs have become the next generation marketing tool to corporate websites which merely post collateral and do not provide any interactive feedback. Blogs are also supplementary to a User Group. User Groups happen annually for example while blogs provide users constant daily and weekly feedback.

Blogs are Basic websites which are updated Regularly. They act as a Private news interface for any Company / Website. With regular updates being handled by the company executive team, product marketing, and product strategy teams. The need for fresh content on the web makes the Blogs a preferred destination for Resources. Blogs have been focused as a primary platform for Marketing since the early 2006. "Blogs are web sites that allow you instantly publish content about a certain topic or theme."

Blogging then is defined as the act of publishing content with blog. But...publishing content with a blog and publishing with a regular web site are like night and day both in how they work and in what they are used for.

So what is the difference then between a web site and a blog?

A regular web site is designed to publish content for all manner of reasons. Regular web sites are static and infrequently updated. Regular web sites are great at content delivery but they can also be impersonal in how they publish content and inform their audience.

Blogs are instant publishing tools that allow you easily update your content often. Blogs are said to be dynamic content delivery systems and even content management systems. Blogs are published as two-way conversations that are more personal than web sites and are humanized by the voice of the very human blog publisher who is generally the one actually publishing content and responding feedback from readers.Links from blogs can be a good source of quality back-links and also targeted traffic dependent on the nature of your website.