Article submission has long been touted as a valuable way to gain back links to your website, and back links are the central focus of any search engine optimization program. One of the problems with article submission is that a back link is not generated until someone picks up your article and republishes it - and also maintains the source links.

There is a growing interest within the online community, particularly bloggers, for a newish article directory by the name of Qassia. This directory is a little different. To start with, every article you submit has dofollow links from within the directory itself and there is no limit to how many articles you submit, or which page you want to use as your backlink.

Where Qassia is a little different is in the style of article they recommend - or rather, don’t recommend. They understand the power of SEO so their primary interest is to provide a vehicle for article submission that will provide at least one guaranteed link.

They will rarely reject an article except for certain taboo areas. However, articles that are pure promotional material, whilst not rejected, won’t offer of a lot of long term potential. Helpful articles is the recommendation and the writing style, imagine your telling a friend is the advice.

Qassia is not for everyone. Is does offer some valuable benefits in the way of back links and perhaps a trickle of traffic? Back links are back links and everyone helps in the overall strength

This past weekend saw another update of the toolbar Page Rank by Google and for the first time in a long time, there was hardly a blinking of the eyes from either the SEO industry or the broader web community.

While there has been mention around the forums, the conversation has been fairly light. As with all updates there are winners and losers with the losers generally having the most to say. Not this time. Even the losers are shrugging their shoulders and getting on with life. It may be a sign that many website owners have finally woken up to the fact that Page Rank has little to do with their long term search engine optimization strategy - what counts is where you appear in the search results and how much traffic you receive.

In fact, over the last couple of days there has been more talk focused on Yahoo!’s search results update than on Page Rank. It makes sense since results are the primary focus of any optimization campaign.

Hopefully we are starting to see a maturing of the online world and a realization that stats like Page Rank are no longer relevant. SEO will always produce results that fluctuate as websites compete for narrow search results.

These days we store video files, audio files and PDF files. In the early days we also stored documents created by a word processor or a spreadsheet. Come to think of it, we still do, and these documents can be optimized for the search engines just like a PDF (see our post on SEO for PDF’s), video or audio file.

Microsoft Office makes it quite easy to include SEO related meta information such as title, category, keywords and a description of sorts.

To include the right information, access the Document Properties section. There you will find areas where you can include the documents author; document title; subject; keywords; category; and comments.

When filling in these details, think about putting in relevant information. The document title should be keyword related. Be precise with the keywords and don’t stuff. Match the category to either the keywords or a category from your website. You can treat the comments section in a similar way to the meta description tag, sell the document.

Save the document with an appropriate name, remembering to include keywords where appropriate. If you publish documents to the web on a regular basis then it makes sense to optimize those using good SEO principles. This means your documents will be found and indexed by the search engines.

The majority of business owners who have a website prefer to use a more traditional form of advertising. For those with a local brick and mortar presence, it will be the traditional media such as print or radio. For those with only an online presence, it will be advertising in the form of banners or pay-per-click such as Googe Adwords. However, there are many more businesses that fail to use any form of promotion including basic search engine optimization.

The biggest barrier to employing an SEO expert is not cost. It is distrust. Cost then comes a close second. If you stop and think about it for a moment, how much money would you hand over for what is essentially a marketing campaign if your told the results may take a month or three too appear? It would take some convincing for most people, and it is understandable.

You can start to see results a lot earlier if you do incorporate a pay-per-click campaign, but of course that requires a larger budget to begin with.

What is important is that any search engine optimization campaign begins from very early in the businesses development. The older a business is the harder and more expensive it can cost. However, compare traditional offline marketing against search engine optimization and over time, SEO comes out well in front.

A newspaper or magazine ad can cost up to $2000 for a single day. Settle for a much smaller ad at $300/$400 and multiply by that by say 20 days you run the ad each month. That’s a tidy $6000. Believe me, you can run a good SEO campaign, a business blog and a PPC program for that sum, and probably have some lunch money left over as well.

It is all about simple math – the numbers tell the story. If you are current selling an item worth $100 each day, what would it be worth to sell 10, 20 or 50 or more? If you run on a margin of 20%, which is a small margin, being able to sell 50 per day would generate a profit of $1000 per day. Can you now afford to spend $200 per day to achieve that - you would still be left with $800 per day?

Sometimes, whilst the whole prospect looks daunting, and you may have to pay more than you receive initially, a good optimization campaign with some targeted PPC advertising can over time turn your business into a highly profitable enterprise. Unfortunately, whilst we can deliver the customers, it is your service and the product quality that will ensure your ongoing success.

Can you afford search engine optimization for your business? The question should be - Can you afford not to?

There is an old saying, “the world may think you’re a fool, it’s not until you open your mouth that you prove it”. Sometimes I think reporters should note that before they start espousing SEO concepts. Forbes recently published an article titled How To Build A Killer Small Business Web Site. Some of the concepts were fine; some were so terribly off the mark.

Take the following quote for example:

The key to SEO: selecting 50 to 100 key words most relevant to your products, services and target audience. The more those words appear on your Web pages (within reason), the higher up the stack your site will tend to appear

“The more those words appear on your web pages”. Hmm, by that logic, I should be able to fill my page with keywords and I will rise to the top? Oh, of course, I forgot the ‘within reason’. While the intent is not meant to be harmful, statements like those above can lead the unwary into a lot of trouble. The following quote from the end of the article sounds good too.

Simply ask your site host to attach meta tags–hidden programming code easily read by search engines–that include your top 20 keywords in order of importance to your business. The tags will drive traffic to your site when people search those keywords. Create a greeting that says something like “This site is under construction, but we will be up and running shortly.”

Google will ignore the meta keyword list, this statement doesn’t tell the full story, for example, the description tag.

There is no talk of keywords or any of the other areas of search engine optimization that need addressing. The article itself is not too bad when it comes to general advice for setting up a new web business. It just goes too far in the wrong direction and hardly ever goes in the right direction.

SEO is a complex business so if you’re not in it, it is almost impossible to write about it. I refer to my opening paragraph.

SEO is based on keywords contained within well crafted website content. From that basis stems everything else including content and link anchors. With that in mind, the announcement that Google Labs have just released a new toy which, while limited at present, could be a real bonus in the future.

Called “In Quotes”, it will allow users to pull quotes based on keywords entered. At present, it is limited to politics (what isn’t) but if released to the broader content available it will help content creation a lot easier. Imagine being able to enter a keyword and receive a pile of links to individuals who have used that keyword. You should never be stuck for content ideas anymore - or references to support or argue your case.

Not only will you be able to quote the words of others, the quotes themselves should be keyword rich further reinforcing the search engine optimization elements on your pages.

Like all things Google Lab related, it is in its infancy and there is no guarantee it will ever move beyond the Lab. It is also prone to errors at present as with all new experimental technologies. Give it a try, if you are into politics, and see if you can find some reliable quotes related to your keywords.

If there is one major flaw in Google Maps it is the fact that virtually anyone can claim a business and enter in the details. Once they do, they can put what ever details they wish. There are probably more unscrupulous people on the internet than there is in your local neighborhood and some of these have discovered the concept of hijacking unclaimed businesses in Google Maps.

What these individuals do is change the business information so it promotes their own affiliate sites. Finding unclaimed businesses these days is not terribly hard either. Mike Blumenthal on his blog he reported:

The spammers, using the end user edit tools, would change the phone number to another local number, change the location of the business slightly and then proceed to add a category, the URL and ultimately the name of the business. Apparently the small move in location convinced Google’s system that all subsequent changes were legitimate. The listing would retain the ranking and reviews of the actual business but redirect to a Canadian Florist fulfillment house via the affiliate’s website.

If you have a local business then be sure to claim it. The value in terms of traffic varies, however the harm in terms of reputation could be damaging. Trying to undo a hijacked site is not all that easy either so do yourself a favor and claim it quick - before someone else does.

SearchEngineRoundtable posted an article related to Tag Cloud pages and the way Google treats them. This follows a Google Groups thread on the subject. The issues raises certain questions including that related to Googles dislike of indexing ’search result’ pages.

Is a tag cloud a ’search result’ page is one of the first questions to be asked. It is probably a line ball call, however, Google does seem to be indexing and ranking these tag cloud pages so they are probably not considered ’search results’ pages at present - the future, who knows.

I don’t know if these pages actually offer any benefit to a user. I would certainly prefer a user to land on a page that was more relevant to their needs than a simple tag cloud. From an SEO perspective, perhaps a noindex tag could be considered.

My second question relates to internal links. Google have often stated that any more than 100 links from a page leaves that page questionable. It certainly heavily dilutes any possible link juice if the page is indexed and ranked. Larger sites can have over 1000 pages and a tag cloud could link to those pages using more than one tag - that is a lot of links leaving the one page.

For blog users, particularly those using WordPress, a sitemap generator may serve a more useful purpose for the user, and to prevent any search engine optimization pain, each page of a sitemap can have a limited number of links.

A tag cloud page may look good, however it does nothing for the visitor, except perhaps confuse them; they enter a search term expecting results only to land on a page of tags, it doesn’t look good from a business perspective. Tag clouds could almost fit into the gimmick class, their benefit is minimal if at all, so unless you really know what you are doing, there are far more important SEO and content related task that doing first.

First we had MicroHoo, are we now going to go through a round of YahAol negotiations that have everyone talking until it all fizzles out - yet again.

You would have to wonder if an acquisition of AOL would really help Yahoo! at this stage of their business cycle. They are on the back foot when it comes to acquiring search market share and one would have thought that concentration in that area would be more appropriate.

Yahoo!’s biggest problem to date has been it’s inability to market itself has a viable search alternative. Relevant search results, accurate indexing of content and a friendlier face are needed if Yahoo! is ever going to match it with Google.

Buying out AOL will not do a lot for Yahoo!’s search bottom line. It may bring some peace to boardroom, but then a new broom could do that as well.

Yahoo! has a good base of dedicated users. In fact the demographic of Yahoo! users has enabled many SEO advocates to optimize suitable sites specifically for Yahoo! rather Google. Yahoo! should be capitalizing and developing, then expanding that existing base. If the purchase of AOL can help in that area then an acquisition may be valid - I doubt that AOL can deliver anything that Yahoo! couldn’t do through other means. Still, it makes for interesting discussions in many forums.

As the web grows and develops, so to does the complexity of search, particularly Google. One aspect of search rankings that may take effect in the future is the social aspect of websites. User generated content has been term used in the past, its search engine optimization value into the future may be important.

If you have an ecommerce site then you should be encouraging your customers to write mini product or service reviews, or at the very least, leave comments. If social and user generated content does get included in the search ranking algorithms, your site will have a head start. It can make good SEO sense to incorporate it now for other reasons.

Your keyword lists should include your products. If they do, every comment or product review will include the product name. If the review title is used as anchor text to link to the product itself, you will have a well optimized internal link. If you prefer your product reviews to be on the product page, then the review will add to the number of keywords on that page. Either way, your search engine optimization efforts are being given a boost by your customer.

Product and service reviews can also be a perfect way to build a reputation. Even if the occasional review is negative, provided you have included the option to respond, you can provide solutions (not excuses) for the negative comment.

Product reviews that have been generated by your customers can be good for both your online strategies, your reputation, and of course as free on page independent marketing tools.

Many brick and mortar businesses that develop an online presence find it more economical to outsource their SEO and website maintenance to professionals in the relevant industries. If you wish to prosper online and you have little knowledge then this makes sense.

These same owners however, have never really stopped to learn about running that online presence. It is a rather strange approach. If they were to open another bricks and mortar branch, the first thing they would do is analyze the market, learn who the opposition is, and develop some form of business plan.

The online world is no different with the exception that maintaining an online presence is not about trading hours. The reason you employ an SEO consultant is to gain search rankings that will deliver visitors, and hopefully customers.

If, as a business owner, you take the time to learn some of the basics of search engine optimization, you can go a long way to assisting your consultant. You will also have an understanding of some difficulties facing your online business and why it takes time to see any real results.

Knowledge is power and with a good understanding of search engine optimization you can over time take over some of the day to day tasks thus reducing your reliance on outsourced assistance. This of course not only reduces costs, it also increases your power over you website. This is one of the biggest problems I hear from website owners who outsource their sites. Learn what is required and you can regain that control.

For many businesses, the question is often raised about whether their SEO should be done ‘in house’ or ‘outsourced’. There is no definitive answer to question such as this as there are good points to each. The bottom line is often $$$. How much can we afford?

There are a few pointers that may help to make a decision, but ultimately, it comes down to whether or not you have enough work to employ an SEO professional full time and whether or not the costs associated can be justified.

If you only have enough work to employ someone part time then the financial incentive may be to employ a consultant. If your funds do run to employing someone full time in SEO, the investment can well worth the effort.

Is in house better than outsourced? Different horses for different courses. A full time search engine optimization professional is on hand, in the business and bringing that in house knowledge to your website. On the other hand, in house can be too close to action. They can do things which are for the right reasons, but implement the wrong tactics.

Outsourced search engine optimization professionals bring new ideas and little in the way of ‘baggage’. There are no blind spots caused by too much information. Should outsource, or should you employ an in house professional? It’s your business - what can you afford; how big is your site; and can you justify the expense? You are the only one who can answer those questions.

The search giant known to us all as Google has once again confounded all SEO experts by changing their views on a particular subject. In the past, the recommendation from all SEO consultants was to ensure that URL’s looked more like a static URL than a dynamic one. Now Google says they prefer the dynamic!

So, after webmasters the world wide have spent hours carefully crafting titles and URL’s for the benefit of the SEO, Google says it would prefer a yoursite.com/?232 instead of a plain English URL? To quote the official Google statement on the subject:

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases

Should you now change all your static looking URL’s back to dynamic? I suggest not making any changes yet. If your pages have been indexed and they are ranking reasonably well, leave them as is. If your pages are not ranking well then perhaps making a change could help. If the page has been indexed then you will need to redirect. The problem, from an SEO perspective, is that any changes involving a redirect can take quite a while to take effect.

For the future, it is your choice. However, the same applies to future pages, if your pages are being indexed and you’re ranking reasonable well; don’t fix what isn’t broken - business as usual. If your pages are not ranking well, or not being indexed quickly, check that your SEO processes are okay, if they are then perhaps reverting to pure dynamic URL could make a difference.

This will become a major problem in the future. Not the URL’s, but Google’s ability to make drastic changes to the ‘rules’ at will and with little thought to the consequences. In this case, creating for the ‘user’ has definitely gone out the window. As a user myself, I would much rather see a URL that I can read, not a set of meaningless numbers and symbols. I think you can brace yourself for many more major SEO changes as Google tries to produce search results tailored to individuals.

There are so many tools around these days there is no excuse for not knowing what your competitors are up to. More importantly, it is not difficult to see where they rank for particular keywords. Rather than developing a set of keywords that you feel are perfect for your website, find your competitors weaknesses and focus your search engine optimization efforts on those keywords.

You may be fighting a losing race trying to target the same keywords as your competitors, at least the top of the range keywords. Traffic from several less competitive keywords can often outdo the traffic numbers for highly competitive keywords.

Keywords, links and search rankings are on top of every SEO expert’s minds these days. As the internet grows, the competition grows. Rather than trying to compete for the same tired keywords, smart operators are using the information gained from their competitor’s sites to help determine weaknesses that could be exploited.

Websites that have been around for several years are going to be hard beat for their main keywords. Target their secondary keywords in your SEO programs and you may outrank them. Target their primary keywords and you may give yourself a headache.

There are many website owners that simply don’t have the time, resources or finances to run a blog for their business. It could be argued that from a search engine optimization and social perspective they cannot afford not to have a blog - but that is a different argument. Let’s assume they cannot have a blog yet some of the benefits of a blog are appealing. Is there a solution?

For every problem there is a solution if you look hard enough. In this situation, there are numerous solutions. The first and most obvious is to find a blog in your niche and form a partnership. The blog includes posts on your products or services with links to the relevant pages. In return you pay the blog owner a small ‘retainer’ or perhaps a fee for post. Are these paid post products under the Google guidelines? However, if the blog is regularly writing and linking to your site it would be hard for and search engine to include in the same category as most pay per posts.

A second option is to form a relationship with a group of bloggers from within your niche. You could simply pay for advertising space with an agreement to produce related and linked content, or you could provide product samples for review. Again, the word caution springs to mind when it comes to pay per post and possible search engine penalties.

If you are looking for SEO benefits then you are going to need links from these sites. If you are looking for traffic rather than ranking then the use of nofollow in the links will prevent any possible penalties.

There are many opportunities for businesses to partner with existing blogs to further their own SEO programs while providing extra traffic. The future of links as a sign of authority may dwindle, however the relationships built between web sites, blogs and general internet users may be quite valuable into the future.

For those businesses that have toyed with the idea of a blog and shelved it, perhaps a blog partnership could be your first step. It can certainly give a boost to your SEO strategies along with your brand and reputation building strategies. It may well become the next wave in social marketing.