The backbone of all successful search engine optimization programs are the backlinks. The more backlinks, particularly quality backlinks, and the higher your page is likely to rank. Search engines such as Google demand ‘natural’ backlinks, that is, backlinks acquired due to the quality of the content, not those found by actively seeking them.

This creates quite a conundrum. If I create a new site tomorrow, it will never acquire backlinks. If it does it will be by accident. To acquire backlinks naturally, people have to find your site. Unless you actively promote your site and encourage people to link, your site will never be seen. This is one of the basic principles behind search engine optimization. Have your site optimized for the search engines then get out and promote it to other web masters.

Through your search engine optimization program and promotion of the site, your backlinks will start to grow. As they grow your pages will move closer to the top of the search results. The consequence of this is of course more organic traffic.

Once you start that momentum, you can attract ‘natural’ backlinks. This creates a snowball effect - more natural backlinks = higher rankings = more organic search traffic = more natural backlinks. A circle that can continue to grow for the life of the website.

However, as much as anyone wants natural backlinks as part of their search engine optimization program, the only way to get noticed and get that initial flow of traffic is by going out and looking for it.

SEO is a time consuming business at the best of times, however there are some SEO practices that are simply a waste of money. In fact, I would go so far as to say they are a total scam.

As you tour the web I am sure you have come across many ads claiming real SEO miracles - at a cost. Some suggest they can get your site to the front page of the search results in seven days. Others claim to be able to submit your site to hundreds of directories - for a fee.

The reality is that most of the activities mentioned will, in the long run, do more damage than good. One of the more recent search engine optimization scams is one that has been around for a long time. Over the last month I have seen an upsurge in the advertising including emails and advertising in newsletters. This is a claim to submit your site to hundreds of search engines.

They make the process sound good by stating that they will submit your site on a weekly basis - yes, for a fee. I can tell you now, submitting your site on a weekly basis will not improve your rankings. Search engines don’t need prompting to come and visit - they do it often depending on how frequently you update the content.

Most of these services are, to be friendly, a waste of money. They are unnecessary and in the long run likely to be counterproductive. If you want your site spidered by a search engine, submit a sitemap. As far as submitting to ’several hundred’ search engines, the reality is that 70-80% of all search engines rely on the big three for results anyway.

When it comes to SEO, you cannot buy a quick fix. You can however pay for a sustainable SEO program that will gain you extra traffic by lifting your search results placement on a long term basis.

The world of SEO is full of abbreviations and acronyms and many people find these confusing. One of the most confusing areas relates to websites (and blogs) and the search engines. Let’s clear up a few off these confusions:

Search Engine Crawler:
A search engine crawler is really nothing more than a piece of software that sends out feelers to websites. It reads the websites and notes any changes. It also follows any links to see where they are going.

Search Engine Spider:
The search engine spider and the search engine crawler are the same thing.

Search Engine Index:
The search engine crawler (or spider) visits pages on the web and ‘reads’ them. It passes that information back where it is stored in an index. When someone searches for a term, that search term is looked up in the index. In theory, the most appropriate answers are taken from the index and ranked. The ranking determines the order the results are printed in.

Search Engine Algorithm:
This is the heart of the search engine. An algorithm is simply a mathematical formula that takes all the small variables and creates a score based on the search query. Results from a search engine query are rated using the search engine algorithm.

These are four terms that you will come across a lot when attempting to undertake your own SEO program. Gain an understanding of them and you will help place your site above the rest.

There have been several times when Google have stated they have no problems with the search engine optimization industry or SEO consultants. However, Google seems lately to be pushing nofollow linking whenever they can which ultimately will lead to a showdown between SEO, Google and perhaps website owners.

Google seem to be pressuring social networks into apply nofollow to many of the links. The latest journey down this path occurred on Twitter. Within an hour of Matt Cutts tweeting Twitter’s founders, the nofollow tag was applied. If you build profiles on social pages as part of your SEO strategy, perhaps it’s time for a rethink.

The social networking website Twitter already uses nofollow in many places, but not in the bio sections. I am with many others who question why bio’s or profiles need to be nofollowed. More importantly, why it is that Google wants these links nofollowed - is it to thwart the SEO work of website owners.

In what is probably a strange twist, rumor suggests that Google builds their own profiles of all users, ostensibly to provide targeted advertising. However, there is also the scope to associate web sites with users by collecting data from profiles and bio’s. They don’t want to follow the link for ranking purposes, but they will for data collection. This could provide them with a lot of important data.

Social media over time could prove to be more valuable as a guide to authority than backlinks. Google it seems wants to be sure it is all done under their conditions. I can see a collision course looming here as those that undertake SEO become frustrated.

If you are operating an online business then you have an opportunity to create content that is not only of value to your readers, it can be an effective SEO resource to develop links.

Build a Resource Directory
If you are going to build a resource directory then you need to be sure it really is a resource directory and not just a list of links. A list of useless links will do more damage to your sites credibility and provide nothing of value to your readers. From an SEO perspective, all links in your directory should be to related sites in your niche.

When creating your directory, spend some time and do properly. A list of site names with links, while providing a resource to visitors, is no different to a blog roll. Good directories that will encourage others to link back needs to be informative and provide value. Include the following information in your link directory:

• link to their websites
• contact information
• a map and street directions to their off line business
• brief summary of services

It may take 20-30 minutes to create each link in the directory, however, once completed your directory will look very professional, provide a wealth of information for your visitors, and prove to be the perfect link bait for other sites. If you limit the number of links to only the best sites, you will suddenly find other related businesses requesting inclusion as part of their SEO program. You are in a position then to dictate the terms of your links.

Create an Industry News Section
If you stay up-to-date with all the news in your industry, provide a page or series of pages that publish all the latest information. Try to keep your reporting unbiased be sure to only publish facts. If the information is based on rumor then be sure to clearly state that it is a rumor.

If you are publishing news on a regular basis, others from within your niche will comes to recognize your pages as a one-stop-shop for industry news. With this reputation will come links particularly as others start using your news articles in their content (with links of course). News articles can also be useful to promote on social media sites.

Many businesses utilize a blog to publish directories and industry or business news. While the blog is a perfect tool for these tasks, it can be done through standard web pages. From a search engine optimization point of view there are pro’s and con’s to both. If you have the time and resources to maintain a blog then there are opportunities to publish information on a wider scale. Whether it is a blog or through your web site, effectively done, these two tips can really boost your search engine optimization link building strategies.

When you set out to get a website ranking well on the search results pages, it can be a good idea to set out goals and a timetable for your search engine optimization activities. There are times however when individuals set goals that are unrealistic and timetables for events that are out of their control.

Every webmaster would like to see their sites ranking at number one for their preferred keyword. In niches that are highly competitive, achieving number one may rather difficult. I have no problems with an individual setting that as a long term goal. In the short term you may only make page two or the bottom of page one despite a concentrated search engine optimization program.

Over time, with a lot of hard work and little relevant link building luck, you may reach that number one spot. In the meantime you need to set realistic milestones that are achievable. Your SEO program can only achieve so much.

Timetables are one area that can be a concern. Having a timetable of when you are going to have components of your SEO program completed by is fine. Setting a timetable of when you expect to see results can often be demoralizing and frustrating.

Achieving your timetable of task completed is a smart move. The results however are generally out of your hands. Yahoo! for example often takes longer to index new pages than Google. There are so many components that can affect your results that setting a timetable is not realistic.

The most important component is the search engine itself. You have little control over when and how often they visit and index your pages. While you may be able to prompt them, in reality they come and spider and index a site in their own good time.

Part of an effective search engine optimization campaign is to set goals and to establish a timetable. You should also understand that some of the components that go into establishing rank, components such as indexing and the discovery of inbound links can take time. I have seen pages rank well after only a couple of weeks while a similar page elsewhere has taken several months if not longer.

SEO is an activity that, like a fine wine, takes time to mature. As it matures it will grow and as your PageRank climbs, so too will your inbound links. One of the most important virtues to SEO is simple… patience.

If you talk to bricks and mortar business owners and suggest an online presence, their first reaction is often, “why, I don’t have the resources to sell online as well”. It can be difficult to point out the advantages of an online presence as a pure marketing tool, especially when you then need to encourage strong search engine optimization and social media marketing programs.

There are thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of businesses that are brick and mortar based, yet have an online presence that is purely advertising. There are far more that have developed both offline and online businesses.

Using the web as a marketing tool can be very effective. A simple blog that looks good and contains plenty of useful information can be a good start. Blogs can be easy to optimize for search engines, provide an opportunity for two way communication, and are easy to promote in social bookmarking and social networking circles.

If a blog is not your style, then a well designed website with links to content that visitors will find useful. Products reviews, store and/or personnel reviews, and maps to your bricks and mortar business are ideal subject matter. However, it doesn’t matter how good your site looks, or how good the content is, if people cannot find you, they won’t see it. This of course involves effective search engine optimization strategies designed to get your site as close to the top of the search rankings as possible.

When you think about an online presence, don’t just assume product sales. The internet has become the second home to millions of people around the world, this is makes it the perfect environment to market your business. However, just because you are not selling doesn’t mean you don’t need a strong search engine optimization program.

There are times when organizations question the need for search engine optimization. There can be conflicting information around that often confuses those considering search engine optimization and perhaps social media marketing.

One event that leaves many website owners, particularly those who also run a blog, is the freshness factor when it comes to the SERP’s. A lot of content does seem to appear at the top of the SERP’s within hours of publication. This is due to its freshness. Within 24 - 48 hours that content has often dropped out of the SERP top pages and gets lost amongst the millions of other pages. If there has been a decent search engine optimization strategy carried out on that page then over time it will steadily climb back. Many website owners and bloggers point to this front page phenomenon and question the need for search engine optimization. The 24-48 hour factor should answer that question.

If you are in any more doubt, then perhaps the statistics put together on invesp.com would interest you. Admittedly these statistics relate to blogs. However the same theories can be applied to any website.

The most important statistic was that of inbound links, take several major online marketing blog’s as examples: Online Marketing Blog had over 700,000 links coming in to their pages, the Matt Cutts blog almost 300,000 and Marketing Pilgrim almost 250,000.

While not quite as important, the number of pages also made an interesting stat. Online Marketing Blog had 2,779, the Matt Cutts blog 4,306 and Marketing Pilgrim 11,464. What makes these stats interesting is that there is little correlation between the number of pages and the number of links. In fact, Online Marketing Blog had the fewest pages of the three chosen yet the highest number of links. Other factors such as quality, search engine optimization and perhaps social marketing may have some bearing.

When it comes to PageRank, Matt Cutts has a PR7 whilst the other two register as PR6. The ultimate statistic however comes in the number of visitors. According to Compete and Alexa data, the following is an estimate: the Matt Cutts blog registered the most visitors with over 300,000 monthly unique visitors. Marketing Pilgrim registered over 160,000 and Online Marketing Blog over 120,000. Matt Cutts has an unfair advantage as his reputation as a Google employee helps to drag in visitors, particularly when he makes a Google related statement.

You may look at these stats and wonder about their relevance to search engine optimization’s ability to rank well and draw traffic. Online Marketing Blog may appear to receive less visitors that the other two blogs mentioned. They do, however have far less pages that could appear in the results.

Raw statistics are always difficult to draw conclusions from. However, what is evident with this group, (and the others mentioned in the full stats), is that the amount of content is important. Of more importance is the number of links coming in to a site. In previous posts we have spoken about the need to work on the off page search engine optimization strategies if you want to rank well. Every blog mentioned in the original post had inbound links number in the thousands.

While Google PageRank is not a key indicator these days, the top blogs all had PR rankings of five or better. They top dozen or so all had visitor numbers measured in the tens of thousands.

As a business building its rankings in the major search engines it is very important to look at all of the stats that you can locate for your online competitors.

There are times when you do a search and find the results less than stimulating. In fact, you have to wonder how these pages made it to the top of the SERP’s. Links are one of the major factors in determining a pages rank. When scraped content is making the first or second page of the search results, you know something strange is afoot. A link check will often find several thousand links coming in to these sites, links that often appear to be from link farms.

As an search engine optimization professional we never use or suggest unethical link building. This however, appears to put many sites at a disadvantage - at least in the short term. We know that over time the search engines weed out these sites. In the short term, they are able to capitalize on an apparent weakness in the search algorithms.

Search engines, particularly Google, place a high emphasis on penalizing sites that sell links, or sell Google PageRank as they phrase it. I am somewhat cynical at times when I see the same search engines profiting from the advertising of link selling and link farming sites. Google in particular talks a lot about ethical SEO and ethical relevant one way link building - where are their ethics when it comes to profiting from sites that promote unethical practices.

The one thing you can be assured off, with ethical search engine optimization strategies and link building tactics you will eventually gain your rightful place in the SERP’s. You may have to wait until the search engines remove those sites that have used unethical means. Is it fair, no. But ethical is at least safe - in the long term!

404’s otherwise known as Page Not Found errors can have a serious effect on your SEO efforts. Google have provided a little widget that may help resolve some of these errors while also helping your visitors.

Often a URL will get damaged in transit so a 404 error is returned instead. If the user is impatient they are just as likely to hit the back button or try a different site. This widget helps the visitor find the right page, make suggestions for appropriate pages on your site, or use the search box to find what they are looking for.

From Google WebMasterCentral:

There are various ways to help your visitors get out of the dead-end situation. In our quest to make 404 pages more useful, we’ve just added a section in Webmaster Tools called “Enhance 404 pages”. If you’ve created a custom 404 page this allows you to embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they’re looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL.

If you know what you are doing, or have a good web designer, then having a custom 404 page is the best option. Having employed a strong SEO campaign the last thing you need is to have your visitor leaving your site.

The Google option is good attempt at trying to provide one solution for the 404 error and is better than no page at all. Optimizing for any 404 errors should be an essential part of any search engine optimization campaign. There is a use for both.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is undergoing a makeover to provide a more dynamic interface for users. Whilst Site Explorer doesn’t offer anywhere near as much information as Google Analytics, the feature can be helpful in the right hands.

In the past, Site Explorer has enabled users to as submit feeds, delete URLs or report spam. One of their best functions has been the Dynamic URL Rewriting. The new look:

[ysearchblog]provides a more dynamic interface to accommodate future feature roll-outs. The new interface also includes a new Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites. On top of this, we’re also increasing the number of rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting that you can enter from 3 to 10.

Having had a short play with the new look, I must say it does feel more comfortable to use. However don’t expect a wealth of information unless you have set up for it previously.

Yahoo!’s blog mentioned future feature roll-outs. It will be interesting to see what they include in these rollouts. For now, Google Webmaster has far more options and provides a lot more information than Site Explorer. Maybe over time Yahoo! can compete - for now, those that like Site Explorer will stick to it and those that like Google Webmaster will stay on that side of the fence. There is a use for both.

Sounds like a novelty question - do you train your search engine optimization consultant? I would hope he would train me a little so I could recognize when their work was succeeding. Believe it not, if your don’t train, or perhaps a better word is educate, your consultants, they will struggle to get your pages to the top of the SERP’s.

When I talk about educating your search engine marketing consultants, I am of course referring to your business, your marketing methods and materials and product lines. You would be surprised how hard it is to get this information out of some website owners.

Get my page to number one, but I won’t reveal anything about my business! Hello - your consultant is part of a team now. You are all supposed to work together. It can help an SEO consultant if you sit down and have an extensive discussion with them through your business setup. What you sell. How you sell. What your products are and where they come from. This is all important information. If you have been marketing then what sort of marketing materials have you been using.

Then there is the organizational structure. Do you want to highlight important staff members? Will they be available to answer questions from customers?

As a website owner, your role is to educate your consultant on all matters relating to your business. They are in effect another new staff member that needs to go through some form of staff induction. Once an SEO consultant has this understanding, they are ready to go to work on your site.

We all use search engines from time to time, and if you are a frequent searcher you will know that at times the results returned can be quite frustrating. Is it the fault of the search engine, the websites, or the search engine optimization programs that are in place?

They are all to blame to a certain extent. You could also throw in the searcher too since their search phrase may have been vague. At present, this is the system we have. Users of search engines will be vague in their search terms. Search engines, particularly those that place a heavy emphasis on age, will often return stale, outdated or perhaps even irrelevant content. I can’t tell you how many times I have personally made a search and received results from 2005 or even older outdated information.
I often get a friend or colleague to undertake searches for me so I can monitor what terms they use and how they phrase their searches. This information can be important and very valuable to understanding the psychographic of your visitor that you might be targeting for your site.

One of the reasons that many website owners fail in their search engine optimization strategies is simply because they are too close to their own business. When they start to define keywords, they are naturally drawn to what is familiar to them. Searchers do not have that inside knowledge. They are not necessarily going to know jargon or technical terms.

A good example of this is when a customer rings up with a problem. Just getting to the seat of the problem can be a real lesson in how customers (and internet searchers) use our language to find information. If you have ever worked a customer service desk you will understand this issue.

Imagine the conversation:

“The machine isn’t working properly”
“Can you describe the problem to me”
“It makes a knocking noise”
“Where is the knocking noise coming from?”
“Somewhere inside the machine”

I could go on but you get the general idea. When searching for help this person would properly use a phrase such as “knocking noise in motor of ****”. If you have a page that handles problems and one of the problems is the knocking noise, the perhaps a long tail keyword phrase like this might be a good place to implement this.

People who use search engine seem to fall into two categories. They either enter in one or two word searches, or then enter detailed (often too detailed) phrases. Monitoring your own search activities, particularly when you are frustrated with the results, may help to define how you can best optimize your own site to snare those search terms.

Search engine optimization is often best developed by those who can stand back away from the business and develop keyword phrases on what users are likely to use; not based on what you would like them to use.

Search engine optimization is not a static field. There are no rules and regulations and the major search engines will not tell you how to optimize your sites. In fact the search engines change their ranking methods at will and leave us all trying to guess how to interpret the changes.

The one area where search engines seem to be going is in personalization and being able to not only read content, but understand it as well. These two issues may have a long term effect on search engine optimization strategies.

What is likely to happen in the future is that a search engine will look at the behavior of a searcher and return results based on that behavior. That is the ‘personalization’ of web search. The long term reality is that we cannot optimize a site for each individual human being.

The second aspect is a search engines ability to actually understand content. Keywords will have a lower value in rankings; it will be the content as a whole that is considered when matching a search query.

Loose headings and content that is not terribly specific will rank quite lowly, no matter how keyword rich or link heavy the page is. Quality content that is quite specific from title down to content and links to other relevant pages will rate highly, irrespective of keyword strength or link numbers.

For search engines like Google, this is their ultimate goal - being able to return results that are relevant to the search phrase and that solves the searchers query.

What will be hard for many sites is the creation of content that is specific from the heading down the content including any links. One of the areas that search engines will focus on for relevant quality is the other social sites.

Search engine optimization will then need to concentrate on content, ensuring it is tight, specific and can solve a problem or provide relevant information. We need to understand what is happening today and tomorrow and be prepared to make adjustment quickly.

Having a good search engine optimization program is fine and chances are you will rank well in the search results. However, I am finding that more and more websites are concentrating too heavily on search engines.

Before undertaking any website activity, your number one question has to be - “why am I doing this, who is it for?” If your answer is the search engines, then quit now, pack your website away and go home.

If your answer is the reader, then start to work on your search optimization first. By search optimization I am referring to what your visitors sees when they arrive. SEO can help deliver quality traffic. However, you have to have quality content to keep your visitor from fleeing, and perhaps take the next step be that buying, subscribing or bookmarking to return again.

When I first started computing many years ago, there was a simple saying:

“GIGO - garbage in - garbage out.”

The same principles apply to your websites today. Provide garbage to your visitors and you will get garbage in the results.

Create your site for the visitor first and foremost. It makes good sense to include good search engine optimization techniques along the way; however, the principle focus needs to be on your visitor. People are becoming far more sophisticated in their expectations today. If they find your site at the top of the search results, it almost indicates a vote of quality so that is what they expect to find.

Give them a site full of keyword stuffed content that makes reading difficult, the visitor will disappear. Some sites, because they insist on placing keywords everywhere, have content that feels and reads like a poorly translated instruction manual.

While ranking well in the major search engines is important to get those visitors in, search optimization is important to give those visitors what they now demand. If you let them down, ultimately, you let yourself down.