1. Go out and register a bunch of “keyword-rich” domain names. Duplicate the content from your main domain to each of these and link them all back to the main domain to “help” the main site’s popularity.  Make sure that you “Forget” to tell your SEO that you’ve done this.

Not only will this not help, but it may prevent even your main domain from being displayed in some search engines. While the search engines don’t actually penalise duplicate content, they will either ignore or eventually filter out the duplicates – and they might just decide that your primary domain pages are the duplicate ones!

If you haven’t yet done anything like this, but you’re thinking it might be a good idea, save your money.  You’re much better off spending your time effort and money on optimising your actual site rather than a half hearted effort on lots of sites.

2. Hire a web designer who knows nothing about SEO to produce a site for you. Bring the SEO in at the end of the process, after the site is already completed. Forbid your SEO from making any changes to the on-page display of your site.

Virtually any existing site, no matter how search-friendly it is, will need some changes. If your site isn’t search-friendly already, the changes may be significant indeed.

If your SEO tells you that you don’t need to make any changes to your site and everything can be handled “behind the scenes,” then you should think about getting yourself a new SEO! They’re either clueless, or they’re planning to use sneaky tactics that can eventually get you in trouble with the search engines (or both!). Solid, long-term results come from hard work, not trickery.

Of course, the best tactic is to bring your SEO and your designer together from the start, so your site will be search-friendly from the get-go.

3. Neglect to tell your SEO about previous attempts at optimisation, particularly if they involved questionable practices. After all, there’s no sense in dredging up ancient history.

If your previous SEO efforts managed to get your site penalised or banned, your present SEO needs to know this. There are things that can be done to try to rectify the situation, but those things won’t be done if your SEO doesn’t know they need doing.

Even if the tactics used haven’t yet caused any actual penalties for you, it’s important to let your new SEO know what went before, and what might still be lurking about in dark corners of the Web. This will help your new SEO get things cleaned up and avoid any unpleasant surprises on down the road.

4. Start calling your SEO approximately two days after they’ve first started work on your site, asking when you’re going to see your rankings go up for your favourite key phrase. Call back at approximately two or three day intervals from then on out until you rank number one for your chosen phrase, or the SEO jumps off a bridge, whichever comes first.

Optimization takes time to reach full effect. For instance, it may take up to a year before a new site will rank well on Google for competitive key phrases. Even for less competitive phrases, you could potentially be looking at a period of several months before your site’s natural rankings settle in. In the meantime, Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) can get your site on the first page even for highly competitive terms, as long as you’re willing to pay the cost per click.

5. Focus all your energies on a single phrase. No matter how much your SEO tries to convince you to diversify, or tells you this phrase isn’t going to be all that useful to you, insist on single-minded concentration on this one phrase. After all, your competition’s site ranks at number one for this phrase, and you have to beat them to get bragging rights.

Depending on its size, a well-optimised site should focus on dozens to hundreds of key phrases. There is simply no reason to limit yourself to one, or even a small handful of phrases. If your site doesn’t have enough pages to support all the useful key phrases recommended by your SEO, consider adding additional pages of content rather than shortening the list of targeted phrases.

Follow your SEO’s recommendations about which phrases should get priority. A good SEO will start any project by doing a detailed key phrase analysis to determine which words and phrases are most likely to be used by people who are searching for the kind of stuff you offer. There’s no point in ranking highly for phrases that no one ever uses for an actual search.

Don’t let your ego or vanity limit the potential of your site to rank well for multiple, valuable terms.

6. Check your rankings on a daily basis. Call your SEO to report (and, if needed, complain) about every fluctuation.

It’s a fact of life: rankings vary on a daily basis – sometimes an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis. Checking your rankings daily, or even more often, is simply a waste of time.

Sure, number one rankings are cool for bragging rights, but rankings alone don’t put food on the table.

The true measure of the success of an optimization campaign should not be rankings, or even traffic. It should be conversions – that is, how many people end up doing whatever it is you want your site visitors to do. (Buy your product, subscribe to your membership area, sign up for your newsletter, whatever.)

A good SEO will focus on this metric and will try to help you do the same.

Well, there you have it. Six easy ways to drive any good SEO insane. Now, of course, if you’d rather have a profitable web site, you might want to consider not doing any of these things. The choice is yours.

Reasons why Google drops web sites from its index

The most common reason why web sites are removed from Google’s index is that these web sites use shady tricks to get higher search engine rankings.

If you use cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages or any other technique that’s put in place for the primary purpose of tricking search engines then you stand a very good chance of having your web site  banned as soon as Google finds out. Don’t try to cheat or trick Google, it will almost certainly backfire on you.

Even if you don’t use shady tricks to optimise your web site, your site might be removed from Google’s index if your web site was down, or pages were unavailabe when Google tried to index it.

If you have a new web site, or if you have made major changes on your site, your web site might be put into Google’s sandbox. You then just have to wait until it comes out of the sandbox.

How to get listed in Google

1. Optimise your web page content

Google can only rank your web site highly for your keyword if it can find out what your web site is all about. To tell Google what your web site is about, you have to optimise your web pages for Google.

2. Get good incoming links

Google heavily relies on links to determine the ranking of web pages. The more web sites link to your site, the better your rankings. Make sure that the web sites that link to your site are related to your web site and that the links to your web site contain text that is related to your site.

3. Avoid dirty tricks

Only use ethical search engine optimisation methods to optimise your web pages. Using shady tricks will get you banned sooner or later.

If you used cloaking, doorway pages or hidden text on your web pages before, rebuild your web pages with the ethical methods described above and send a re-inclusion request . Tell Google that you have cleaned up your page and that you don’t use these unethical tricks anymore.

Getting listed on Google is possible. Just play by the rules and make it easy for Google to index your site by optimizing your web page content and by getting good incoming links.

The intent is that Yahoo will start to use Bing for their search results, and Microsoft will start to show Yahoo paid ads on their search properties.  It is early days yet and still not clear how many of their overlapping products/services are going to be handled.  My guess is that some may be consolidated, some will be retained and some may even be dropped all together.

In most cases optimisation strategies are not search engine specific, but there are some differences between the search engine ranking algorithms, and it is possible to tweak techniques to favour one or another search engine.   Because of it’s significant market share (particularly in Australia), traditionally most SEO efforts have been geared towards Google rankings.  Spending much time and effort on optimising for Yahoo or Bing was often put into the “nice to do” rather than the “must do” priority list.

With a consolidation of Yahoo and Bing Search Results, it may now be worth taking a closer look at Bing specific optimisation strategies.  If your site is currently ranking well in Bing but poorly in Yahoo you should be smiling, but if the reverse is true – then maybe you should be a little concerned.

The following video from WebPro News provides a great overview of the proposed collaboration – including some useful points from Danny Sullivan.  It is still early days, and if this proposal goes ahead, it is likely to take some time, so while there is probably no need to get nervous yet – you should definitely stay aert.

• when it was last updated
• how often it usually changes
• how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site

That information helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site. The Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

How can the Sitemaps protocol help your website?

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

The sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the pages on your website. Depending on how your website is structured, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your web pages if you use a sitemap.

How do search engines find my Sitemaps file? What’s new?

The big four search engines Google, Yahoo, Live/MSN and Ask will now automatically index your Sitemaps file if you add a link to your Sitemaps file in your robots.txt file.

All the major search engines regularly check the robots.txt of a website. Just add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http:/www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Of course, you can also actively inform Google and Yahoo about your Sitemap file. This is not possible with Live/MSN and Ask.

Does a Sitemaps file improve your search engine rankings?

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

A sitemap helps search engines to find your web pages but it does not help you to get higher search engine rankings.

When search engines index your web pages, they must find optimised web page content and good inbound links. Search engines will only give your web pages high rankings if they have both.

The Sitemaps protocol can help you to inform search engines about your web pages. Further information about the new sitemaps standard can be found on the official sitemaps web site.

When starting up a new link building campaign, there are two basic questions you should be considering :

1. What is unique about your site that others might want to link to?
2. Who might be interested in linking to you, and what information would be of use to them?

Gaining a good understanding of the answers to these questions is a fundamental starting point . It helps you gain an insite into the types of information that you may be able to offer the people in your space, or related spaces. It will very likely also highlight, extra contenmt that you may be able to provide, which will offer added value to your customers and potential customers.

Here are the five things that you should also think about when kicking off a new link campaign:

1. Start by identifying who the major media people are in the same space as you. At this stage dont’ be too concerned about their potential to link to you. This should form a complete list of traditional media, bloggers, government, school, and hobbyist sites that are related to your products/services.

2. Next prioritise the list ranging from top tier players to lower tier players. Links from from any of them will help, but getting a link from a top tier player is worth more effort.

3. Re-examine the current and potential content of your site to see how it matches up with the needs and interests of the top tier targets.

4. If necessary (and it usually is), put in place a content development plan to implement the right types of content to match up with the best targets. Several new articles may need to be written.

5. Begin the process of contacting your targets, and getting them interested in the unique cool content that you have.

Remember, good link building should always starts in the same place – Identifying the targets… Good Luck !

Below, a look at each of these potential benefits and some ideas on how you can make maximise them for your specific needs.

Links

Making use of social media for link building is relatively popular within the SEO community, and for good reason. Using social news sites as a platform to spread your content (linkbait) can relatively easily produce thousands of new inbound links to your site. Compare that with traditional methods of paying or begging for links, and you can quickly see why linkbaiting is so popular.

The of linkbaiting is to produce a piece of remarkable content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The big social news sites already have millions of users, so the concept is to leverage these sites to get your story popular enough so that it’s exposed to their user community. A popular piece of content on these sites is seen by tens of thousands of hungry bloggers looking for stories to blog about.

Sites that are best for link building are probably Digg, Delicious, and Facebook

Branding

Social media marketing goes further than just traffic and links. It is also great for improving brand awareness. It doesn’t matter if you have a new brand or one that is well established, using social media can help build or strengthen it.

Social media is also part of a brand experience when users interact in these channels. If the experience is positive, high-energy, interesting or funny, all of these elements will support a unique brand experience and support ongoing initiatives in this area. Positive or negative experiences here can really have an impact on a brand.

A few examples of positive experiences include funny videos, useful content, flash games, and contests based on user participation. Each of these methods help engage a deeper dialogue or interaction with the consumer and can help get closer to the customer.

Best sites for creating branding are YouTube Twitter and Facebook.

Sales

The primary aim for many marketing campaigns is to bring an increase in sales. Sometimes this is done directly and sometimes it can be a very indirect process. It can be hard to create a social media marketing campaign that will result in direct sales. This is because you’re reaching consumers in a non-purchasing stage of the cycle. It contrasts from standard SEO where consumers are looking for what you’re selling and at the point of purchase already. Social media is less intrusive, and part of the reason people engage is because there’s more there than just a selling message. Any content with a strong selling message will generally not be received well.

The best way to generate sales through social media is to show how good your product is in a creative way and compelling way.
Sites that are best for direct sales are YouTube, MySpace or any highly targeted social site.

Interaction

There are a lot of benefits to interacting with your customers through social media. Some of these include improving products or services, establishing trust, being viewed as the authority in your space and creating evangelists.

The most common form of customer interaction in social media is done through blogging. With a blog, your goal should be to establish an open dialogue with your customers. This means that should allow comments on the blog, and you should also be participating on other relevant blogs.

Blogging is not the only way to interact with your customers in social media. Consider reaching out to them in the communities where they hang out but be sure tread lightly as they can very easily have the opposite effect you are hoping for. Remember, social media is somewhere that consumers feel safe from marketers, so you need to have the right approach.

The above are examples for some of the ways social media marketing can be effective today. The environment is still evolving and growing. As we see more participation in different ways, the landscape will pose even more opportunity for marketing.

Here are the main points that Matt raises about Google’s PageRank:

PageRank is not a number between 1 and 10.

“It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.”

The PageRank number that is displayed in the toolbar does not influence the search results.

“At any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users. [...]

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point.”

You don’t have to care about the PageRank number.

“I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me. ”

The PageRank number displayed in Google’s toolbar is already outdated on the day it is published. It’s not important that Google’s toolbar displays a green line for your web site URL. It is important that you get visitors and that these visitors purchase something on your site.

What is the date of the backlinks update on Google?

“If you’re splitting hairs about the exact date that backlinks were taken from, you’re probably suffering from “B.O.” (backlink obsession) and should stop and go do something else for a bit until the backlink obsession passes.

I highly recommend keyword analysis, looking at server logs to figure out new content to add, thinking of new hooks to make your site attract more word-of-mouth buzz, pondering how to improve conversion once visitors land on your site, etc.”

The last statement is a very important point. You have to work on all web page elements to get good results. It doesn’t help very much if you focus on a single element.

Link building is very important but it is not the only important factor for search engine optimization.

If you do the right things in the right order then your web site will get the best possible rankings on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.