Search engine optimization is not rocket science, say some of its critics. Anyone can do it, they claim. Many people in the SEO industry have fired back, saying that while it is not rocket science search engine optimization is more complex than the average person knows. Not just anyone can do it, they say, because there is so much more involved than simply embedding choice words on a page. For example, many SEOs conduct extensive testing to test search algorithms. Some people publish lengthy reports showing their findings, but most SEOs — it is said — hold their data and their findings close and do not share information freely.

Search engine optimization therefore has a dodgy reputation and it is not likely to have improved any since Google engineer Matt Cutts revealed last summer that a favored trick used by many SEOs never worked. PageRank Sculpting arose in 2007 amid a storm of controversy. Several well-placed people in the SEO industry promoted the idea and other highly visible names opposed it. The debate was not resolved at conferences where attendees gave mixed reviews of the practice. The people most in favor of the practice included Dan Thies, Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer, and Brent Payne. The people lined up against PageRank Sculpting included Shari Thurow, Adam Audette, Vanessa Fox, Michael Martinez and Google employees Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik. Cutts and Lasnik were cautious in advising people only to try other methods.

As it turns out, the PageRank Sculpting opponents were right. Thurow’s prediction that “many SEO professionals will massively abuse the nofollow attribute and that [PageRank Sculpting] will no longer be valued” came true much sooner than anyone expected. During the summer of 2009 Matt Cutts announced that Google had changed the way it assigns PageRank for links on pages that include nofollowed links. Instead of squeezing more PageRank into the followed links Google simply “evaporated” the nofollowed PageRank, disbursing it across the Web.

This stunning revelation that PageRank Sculpting never worked took the SEO community quite by surprise. Many people doubted the veracity of Cutts’ comments until he confirmed his position on his own blog. Nonetheless, being wrong doesn’t necessarily dissuade people from trying again. Some of the original advocates of PageRank Sculpting have now unveiled new methods that they believe the search engine cannot identify or undermine. Hence, even though Google plainly said that PageRank Sculpting led many sites to lose content from its index, the PageRank Sculpting SEOs insist that it is a good and viable technique that will help many Websites.

Perhaps infuriated at the further harm this new round of nonsense will do to the reputation of the search engine optimization industry, Martinez fired back at PageRank Sculpting, arguing that “it is a scam” and warning that people who don’t change their position may find themselves at risk of being sued by disgruntled clientele.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know
that having quality inbound links from websites with
high page ranks can help you attain high rankings
in all the Search Engines.

But achieving this can be more difficult to do than can
be imagined.

Why will a website with high page rank link to you,
a website with low page rank?

That is the million dollars question.

And I have a million dollars answer for you.

Below are a few search engine marketing secrets to
help you.

1. Offer other web sites free content to post on
their web site. Include your link on all of your content.
The content should related to your web site because
it will be in front of your target audience.

2. When you visit a web site you’ve enjoyed a lot,
write a review for the site. Write about the benefits
you gain from the web site. Tell them they can publish
it on their web site if they link to your web site.

3. Allow other people to publish your e-zine on their
web site. Include your web site’s ad and link in each
issue you publish. This may also help you increase
the number of people that subscribe to your e-zine.

4. Market your web site as a free web book. Design
your web site with a title page, table of contents,
chapters, etc. Just allow other people to give away
the web book by linking to your web site.

5. Give your visitors an instant article directory. Tell
your visitors they can instantly add a free article
directory to their web site by linking to yours. Just
place your ad or banner ad on top of the article
directory for your main web site.

6. Allow other web sites to use your discussion board
for their web site visitors. Just have them link directly
to the discussion board. Include your web sites ad or
banner ad at the top of the discussion board.

7. Start a members only web site. Tell visitors what’s
in your members only site and what it costs to gain
access. Offer them a free membership if, in exchange,
they link to your web site.

8. Offer your visitors a free sign up to your affiliate
program. Pay them commission to sell your products
or services. Just give them an affiliate link to track their
sales. People will link to your web site to make extra
money.

9. Create your own award site for other web sites.
Give the winners a graphic or text link to place on their
web site when they win. This will link your web site
to theirs and draw more traffic to your web site.

10. Are you an expert on a particular subject? Offer
people free consulting via e-mail if, in exchange, they
either link to your site. People will consider this a
huge value because consulting fees can be very
expensive.

11. When you purchase a product and it exceeds your
expectations e-mail the business a testimonial. Make
sure your statement is detailed. Give them permission
to publish it on their web site if they link to your site.

12. Create a directory of web sites on a specific topic.
Give people the option of adding the directory to their
web site by linking to it. Put your business ad at the
top of the directory’s home page.

13. Exchange content with other web sites. You could
trade articles, top ten lists, etc. Both parties could
include a resource box at the end of the content.

14. Allow people to download software at no charge
from your web site, if they link to your web site. The
software could be freeware, shareware or demos.

15. Trade other forms of advertising to people that
link to your web site. You could trade e-zine ads,
print ads, autoresponder ads, classified ads, ebook
ads, etc.

16. Give away web space to people for free. Since
you are giving it away for free, request they link to
your site by placing your ad or banner to the site.

17. Join or create a web ring. A web ring is a group
of web sites on a similar subject agreeing to link
together. To find a web ring to join type keywords
“web rings” into your search engine of choice.

18. Create an online club or association. Tell your
visitors what’s included in the membership and what
it costs to join. Offer them a free membership if, in
exchange, they link to your web site.

19. Allow people to use an online service or utilities
from your web site if, in exchange, they link to your
web site. The online service could be an e-mail
account, search engine submission, web page design,
copywriting, proofreading, etc.

20. Offer a free e-book to your web site visitors. The
ebook should be related to your target audience.
Allow them to give the e-book to their own web site
visitors by linking directly to your web site.

May these search engine marketing secrets help you to
make a lot of money.

Warmly,

I-key Benney, CEO

I-key, a Millionaire CEO from New York City is the creator of “Mscsrrr: Millionaire Secret Cash System”,(investing online) program, which has helped thousands of ordinary people from all over the world to attain financial security and shining success during the past 2 yrs.

Mscsrrr Millionaire Cash System helps you to generate $1,500+/Week for life, from home or office, part time or full time. No large investment or hassles. Win $1000-$2000 free “cash”.

Finding the Correct Hosting

Apart from pricing there are a lot of characteristics to reckon when choosing a hosting company. The basic thing to be alert of is what kind of site you are starting to run on the server. If you’re projecting to run a dot net or ASP web site you have to take a Windows IIS solution and if you plan to run PHP or a Word Press web log, you must pick out a UNIX dependent Apache Host.

After choice of the right program you have to be positive you get infinite bandwidth and transfer and often it is also for your vantage to be able to setup limitless email accountings. If you run dot net or ASP you must have admission to a MSSQL host and be positive the price for that is reasonable. Operating PHP or Word Press site demands a MySQL database and of course a PHP5 installment.

Uptime is crucial, 99.99 % uptime is a must, no hosting company will assure you 100 % uptime. You will also claim to look at the servicing and backup from your host to properly operate your site as smooth as viable, which is also necessary for Google optimisation and SEO in general.

Word Press is advocated for a inexpensive and flexible web result and hosting your website on a UNIX based server running Apache and MySQL is an approved web hosting answer which is easy to maintain without programming acquirements and knowledge and Word Press is also easy to optimise for search engines like Google and Bing.

Your World Wide Web hosting company is the foundation of your WWW presence and it is very essential to select the correct web host from the start. You can change host afterward, but doing proper search to retrieve a good hosting company from the start is the smartest act, especially if you plan to get a vast amount of traffic which should be able to establish without the downtime which will take place during transfer from one server to another.

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later in this article I’ll show you a real case scenario and the design and SEO approach used.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

Design Can’t Be Ignored

If you have an existing site, you’ve probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you’ve allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can’t simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you are correctly understanding some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren’t alone if you have this disheartening thought–If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it’s so stale and boring I’m even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that’s not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.

Design is for brochures, instant results are for the web

That’s not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer’s attention in 5 seconds. It’s pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it’s not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you’re offering.

Construction 101- Attractive Design and SEO

Sadly, it’s very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You’ll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, “pumpkin bread recipe.”

>From a design standpoint “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn’t use CSS. Search engines don’t like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that “extra” code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.

SEO usually means REDO

In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.

Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.

You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords “pumpkin bread recipe”. Note- why did I use the number 30? It’s safe to assume if you’re not on the first three results pages of a search, you’re not being seen.

While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing it. This isn’t always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.

Aesthetic Importance vs. Traffic

Everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.

Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.

Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?

Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?

Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?

Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?

Chances are you wont have any single answers. That’s ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.

Real case of Design balanced with SEO and salability

If you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of that jewelry.

If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer’s attention. If it’s very expensive jewelry, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it’s home made jewelry, the site shouldn’t look home made.

However, as you have no store front, if the online community can’t find you, you’re business will fail. So I’d have a very optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you’ve got a cool to look at, content rich, well optimized layout.

I’d make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent. Note the catalog is not the homepage. I’d also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing so you’re creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.

The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and you have the foundation to build your search rank.

Planning Your Site

If your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to work with your designer from the initial development stage of your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name around, then you will have to optimize.

However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren’t the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship.