However, there are some Google ranking factors that most professionals agree affect site positioning on Google SERPs. However, these are opinions, find out for yourself how these apply to projects you’re working on.

Recommended Steps to Improve Google Ranking

1. Use keywords in HTML title tags. Probably the most significant factor for a site regardless of the competitive landscape, the title tag must be consistent with content in the page for best results. The more keywords in your title, the less effective this factor, be judicious.

2. Create quality anchor text for inbound links. At one time, according to some SEO professionals, quality anchor text was an essential component of a well-ranked site. After all, this is the text the user opted to see by clicking a link on another site. Most SEOs still contend that quality anchor text is a highly significant, positive ranking factor. If not for spiders, for visitors clicking in as well. Obviously the text should be relevant to the destination page for best results; that’s where your on page optimization comes in to play.

3. Increase link popularity. Link popularity takes into account the number of inbound links present. Link authority has less relevance, though it is still a factor depending on the competitive landscape. Link popularity is based on a global count of links from all sites. However, quality links are still critical to creating site authority; authority means ranking for more phrases than you intentionally target.

4. Hang in there. The age of a site is an important positive weighting factor according to many SEO professionals. It’s certainly a reasonable assumption. Failed sites are dropped as soon as the hosting subscription ends. If a site has been around for 10 years, the owners must be dong something right, especially if link popularity is steady developed over the years. Unfortunately for site owners, there’s no way to speed up the aging process – except hanging in there.

5. Increase the popularity of internal links. These links direct visitors to helpful, related content. They’re important in providing visitors with a positive on-site experience. Search engines view on-site link popularity as a sign that visitors like what they see and want to learn more.

7. Build deep links. Deep links are relevant to the topicality of the target page or keyword. The relevance of these inbound links matters to a site’s Google ranking. However, please note point 3. The sheer number of inbound links is a factor as well. Quality deep links carry more weight and add credibility to a site.

8. Connect with sites selling to the same demographic. Create a number of links with sites within your topical community. This helps visitors further their searches – something Google likes very much.

9. Keep old links. Google looks for web stability. The older the link, the more trust it has. It indicates a happy relationship with the site owner linking in who recognizes the value of sending visitors off-site. Google watchers suggest a three to four month time window for spiders to determine that this is a well-established, long-term link that has value to visitors of both sites.

10. Use keywords in body text. Make sure that keywords receive prominent display in headlines, headers, sub-heads. It’s important that the keywords used in HTML text on page match with keywords used in the site’s meta data and title tags.

Not Recommended

1. Don’t use session IDs in URLs. It sounds like a good idea on the surface, an easy way to track customer information, but here’s the problem. Each time a spider crawls the site, a new URL with session ID is created. The spider now has two, or three or more URLs all showing duplicate content. Go back to Go, do not collect $200. Don’t confuse this with pages that may have a couple GET variables in them; avoid that when you can, but just avoid having your pages containing session IDs.

2. Choose a reputable web host. The most potent negative ranking factor is server accessibility. If your server, located in Timbuktu, is inaccessible to spiders, it’s inaccessible to visitors. Down time soon becomes down and out time.

3. Avoid duplicate content. Googlebots employ filters to detect duplicate content. Now, if you opt to post some syndicated articles, you’re providing a service to visitors. However, a bot will recognize that content (it’s already appeared on 400 sites) and you’ll see a drop in traffic rank.

4. Jettison low-quality links. Google assesses the character of your site by the company you keep so keep good company by unlinking from (1) links farms, (2) sites with absolutely no quality content and (3) otherwise low-quality sites; e.g. FFA (free for all) sites.

5. Avoid any kind of links deception. Googlebots aren’t smart, but they can detect some paid links and a variety of links scams, including generated links. If a Googlebot suspects links fraud, your site may be penalized and sent to the basement or banned altogether.

6. Avoid a log-in before visitors and bots access “the good stuff.” Log-ins can easily confuse a bot who won’t be able to access quality content hidden behind a log in. Even though users with Google toolbars will be unknowingly suggesting new URLs to be crawled as they surf about, having teasers for the content your monetizing by subscription will help your SEO.

7. Avoid using frames. Horizontal and vertical framesets frameset are commonly used by designers to present more than one page of a site on the screen at the same time. However, frames are also bot traps. They can get in but they can’t get out, making it impossible for them to index a site – at all! Tell your developer to look at using iframes if possible or absolutely necessary.

8. Avoid duplicate title/meta tags. Title/meta tags are a valuable resource for site owners to expand access points to a site. Using title tags ensures that more pages are indexed and listed in Google’s SERPs as distinct links. All good. Unfortunately, too many duplicate title tags on pages in which the content topic hasn’t changed, is redundant and a waste of the bots time. Use tag your pages uniquely and judiciously.

9. Do not keyword stuff. Even though search engines no longer give much weight to keyword tags, keyword stuffing continues. Select 20 to 30 keywords – top-tier and long-tail – and focus on them. Keep keyword density in body text at no more than 3%. The old 5% rule still led to on-site gibberish – obviously these figures vary by competitive landscape.

10. Do not let quality slip – even for a day. Spiders crawl sites with greater frequency and sophistication and index updates are common as changes to a site are implemented. During periods of construction, be sure to keep spiders out of staging areas that have yet to be completed nofollow or block with robots. These works-in-progress may cost you points in the ranking sweepstakes.

Google controls 46% of all searches. Doesn’t it make sense to give this search engine exactly what it wants and delete what it doesn’t want?

Rhetorical question.

Whether starting out with a new domain name, or a domain that’s been around for a decade, you can rank your blog on Google if you just do what Google wants you to do. So here are 25/50 tips to get your blog ranked by the world’s biggest SE.

50. Build your own or move to Wordpress. Wordpress is a blog platform that’s open source (free), robust, extensible and easy to use. Add Feedburner, which equips site owners to broadcast RSS feeds and develop user metrics. Next, synch up Google Analytics and a sitemap plug-in to simplify populating the blog and developing useful, actionable metrics. Also, make sure your blog is pinging Technorati and other social media sites like digg.

49. Don’t worry aboutpage rank. PR is highly over-rated as a yardstick of online success. Connectivity within a web community and expansion through content syndication and guest blogging are more critical to building site credibility than page rank. PR will take care of itself over time if you do it right.

48. Make a difference, or at least have a clear purpose. Differentiate your content on every post. Cover lots of editorial ground.

47. Use a conversational tone. Dry, starchy academic writing is strictly for the textbooks. Write words that people “hear” instead of read.

46. Provide a “Tell Your Friends” link on your blog. Birds of a feather do, indeed, flock together. So, if one of your regulars shares an interest in philately, chances are s/he has other friends with an interest in stamp collecting.

45. Study the competition. They’re studying you. Check out SpyFu to do a little undercover work on search analytics employed by competitor sites and their visitors. You can’t touch the content but you can’t copyright an idea, either, so pick up some new paths of thought from others in your site’s arena.

44. Remember SEO basics. Use provocative, keyword-rich title tags, meta keywords and descriptions, and only link to high-quality sites. Never over do it. Keep your posts relevant, natural, accurate and, above all, current.

43. Don’t stuff blog post titles with keywords. It’s a form of keyword stuffing and spiders hate keyword stuffing. The ratio in headlines should be ~40% keywords, ~60% non-keywords.

42. Submit your URL to blog directories. There are “best of the web,” and paid directories, like Yahoo, and free directories like the Open Directory Project. Every directory listing is another link to your site and another way visitors can find you. Just google them to find more.

41. Create blog categories that contain keywords, i.e., Ecommerce, SEO, Affiliates, etc. for use with a “site hosting” or “site design” blog.

40. Content quality counts. Research topics about which target readers want to learn. Write something new, useful and relevant. And don’t forget to regularly update older posts. Things change fast on the web so last year’s “next big thing” is this year’s hackneyed cliché.

39. Vary topics, content length, relevancy and posting times. However, be consistent, as well. Keep blogging. It can take time for a blog to catch the notice of a search engine spider.

38. Get guest bloggers. Add links from their blogs and establish your site’s link community. There are people within your web neighborhood with opinions and good information. Contact them to invite submissions to your blog and your site in general.

37. Don’t use duplicate content. The only duplicate content that appears in your blog posts are quotes, and they should be identified with quotation marks.

36. Call posters by name. If Bob M. from Athens, Georgia, posts to your blog, recognize his contribution with a “Thanks, Bob” at the end of your response.

35. Make friends with other bloggers in your commercial, business or NFP space. Ask to become a guest blogger, or seek endorsements from the “names” within your site sphere.

34. Send a personal note to posters. Not all bloggers have the time to do this but if you can send a personal email thank-you note to a poster, you’ve increased the chances of that poster becoming a member of your site community.

33. Encourage viral link building. Take a stand. Introduce the coming paradigm shift in web commerce, provoke controversy. It sells. Just ask Ann Coulter.

32. Ensure the blog is optimized for Technorarri. Claim your blog, set an avatar and pings, use tags where appropriate and be sure to ping various blog tracking sites.

31. Don’t place ads on your blog, yet. If you feel you must (you’re seeing nice PPC revenues), determine that your site’s HTML is optimized to position those ads at the bottom of each blog page.

30. If your blog isn’t pulling, have the code reproduced so it’s as semantic, accessible and code-to-content optimized as possible. Also, hire a code expert to position content above ads or any other content in the site markup.

29. Ignore Alexa. A lot of new site owners rely on Alexa for site metrics but remember, Alexa is a popularity metric since only Alexa toolbar users contribute data — and that’s a less-than-universal test population.

28. Build credibility. Publishing authorities on your site’s topicality usually does the trick. Once blog credibility is established, identify trends, solve new problems and gradually expand the topic range of your blog.

27. Buy or build a hot blog design and submit it to design galleries. Hire a site/blog designer, or bring your vision to fruition. This enables your blog to appear five or six demographic iterations from your home site, expanding the site’s reach outside the immediate site community. This creates new marketing channels fast.

26. Develop some friendly contacts on social media sites and participate in the community. Ask contacts to promote your blog content. Also ask for contributors. People love to express their opinions.

25. Focus on ranking for three key words or phrases to start. The keywords you select should appear in your HTML title tags and within the site’s content when appropriate. However, watch keyword density levels. Anything above 5% starts to sound like gibberish. 2% to 3% keyword density provides more creative latitude for the content developer, and still lets bots know what the site is about.

24. Only purchase ad links on relevant niche sites. This, by default, limits competitive links and delivers more qualified (knowledgeable and ready-to-purchase) visitors to your site.

23. Participate in your link community. Forum and blog links are ephemeral, lasting a day or two as web fodder, so there’s always the need for more green. Interact by posting to not only drive traffic with the link, but to also pick up another link from a credible site. All good.

22. Publish new content on weekdays. Even search engines need a break. Actually, more people are online Monday through Friday so your latest blog post is still the latest when posted on Monday rather than Sunday. A little thing, for sure, but little things mean a lot online.

21. Write content for various experience levels. For many spaces DIYs are the largest sector. Some readers are just starting out. Others have been at it for years and probably know more than you do, so post blogs to appeal to a broad range of skill sets — from green rookie to wizened old vet.

20. Cite the sources of your content. This adds credibility to your posts. It also provides a trail for a reader interested in learning more about the topic at hand.

19. Focus on contextual relevancy before quantity of links. Connectivity within a market or topic segment has more value than SEO anchor text, at least in the short term.

18. Poll your readers. Everybody’s got an opinion. Provide a platform to let posters and readers vote on a topic related to your site. It doesn’t do any good if you run a retail outlet and poll visitors on who they’d like to see in the White House. Stay on topic.

17. Create surveys. Surveys are more in depth than a poll. One survey you might want to try is one in which buyers rate the services and products you sell. Great marketing information. Consider placing a satisfaction survey somewhere on your site.

16. Write about popular brands or celebrities where possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re blogging short sales in the market or clothing for the over-sized human, celebrity and name brands get picked up by spiders.

15. Find free stuff to give away. Free still works on the web. There’s lots of open source software (OSS), mortgage calculators, real-time stock feeds and other digital goodies that visitors can download free. Free is nice.

14. Answer questions on Google groups and Yahoo Answers. People write in with all sorts of questions, some sure to fall within your area of expertise. By signing on as an authority in a field (your arena) you build credibility. Plus, it’s fun helping others from the comfort of your own work station.

13. Add imagery and video content to your posts. A picture is worth a thousand web words. Charts and graphs simplify complex information and don’t take up a lot of room. If you aren’t an artist, create a relationship with a freelancer. Never use clip art.

12. Use QA sessions in your blog. You’re the expert. Also, invite guest bloggers to handle questions beyond your skill set. Helpful, simple advice keeps visitors coming back and makes you a guru.

11. Syndicate content outside of your blog. Every site owner needs content. Fortunately, there’s plenty of it free for the taking. Sites like Helium, Ezine and Go Articles are content supermarkets. Post your piece and pick up non-reciprocal, in-bound links for your effort. Content syndication increases link popularity.

10. Direct (future) page rank efforts to well-optimized content on your home site. Don’t direct visitors and bots to the garbage bin of out-dated content stored in the site’s archives. Point them to the new news.

9. Update or create a Wikipedia page and link to your site. Another means of establishing yourself as an authority. Just make sure the Wiki piece is accurate, well written and typo-free.

8. Submit industry or topical news to general news sites. Not just industry related sites. If a small oil and gas company brings in a gusher, it’s of broader interest than to just industry insiders. Also adds credibility and another link.

7. Deep links or links to sub-pages are vital. There’s a tendency to link from a remote site to your home page. Not necessarily the best strategy. Consider linking to pages deeper in the site – pages related directly to your blog post. This way, visitors are in your site and less likely to bounce.

6. Respond to comments in your blog. This accomplishes three important objectives: (1) it shows that there’s a human behind the blog; (2) it gives you a chance to show your expertise; and (3) you can lead the thread in a new direction or keep the discussion going. Oh, it’s also the polite thing to do, as well.

5. Cross link your posts. Link amongst your related blog posts using the keywords you’re optimizing your blog for as the anchor text.

4. Get linked alongside related blogs on other sites. You can contact the blog administrator to swap links, you can become a regular guest blogger if your writing is good enough or your knowledge extensive. Niche sites are great for building blog links networks.

3. Bait your blog. Post unconventional and controversial articles to create lengthy threads that, in turn, create site stickiness.

2. Be consistent into month two. Keep the tone, style and topicality of your blog consistent for the first two months until spiders get it. Then, you can branch out to peripheral topics to expand reader interest.

1. Network offline. Helpful networking tools include LinkedIn, MeetUp and MyBlogLog. These sites provide real world contacts to simplify and streamline the process of networking. They’re also useful in building beneficial online relationships – not to be overlooked. Also reach out using conferences that are available in your area and abroad.

The keys to building a successful, well-tended blog run the gamut from good content to good contacts, and from credibility to controversy. There are lots of ways to expand your blog community and develop quality rankings at the same time

Once you’ve got all of this down your next steps are to begin monetizing your site.

So, blog.

Hosted Content
Hosted content, also sometimes called pre-sell pages, makes your site look very good. The problem is, there are usually costs involved. Here’s how it works.

You, the content expert, write an article. It should be longer than 600 words but no longer than 1200 words. It should be well-written, completely researched, edited, re-edited and finally proofed so that it’s letter perfect. Okay, now you have host-worthy content.

Hosted content is content that’s placed on another site for a fee. In other words, you rent a page on another site to display your work. Now, what do you get for your money?

First, position your article on a site that’s (1) related to the topicality of your site and (2) has a tons of one-way links to content that’s “deep” in the site (in other words sub-pages that rank well in SERPs based on their title tags, for example). These two factors are the best way to measure and quantify the strength your page has in the target site, and ultimately, the link love it creates passes to your site. As you already know hosted content creates editorial inbound links, also known as pure gold.

Second, because it’s your article and you’re paying for the space, you can embed text links directly to specific pages of your site. This does a couple of things. First, you spread your web net further. Links to your site now appear on other sites — some several incarnations removed from your own site. This, ultimately, increases your site traffic as people read your interesting commentary and click on those embedded links to see what else is on your mind. That’s good. More hits. More page views. Higher conversion ratios.

Third, if you spread your words across the web, you start to develop some name recognition within your niche. Unless you’re Dan Kennedy or Skip McGrath, it’s tough building name recognition. However, by crafting numerous, informative articles you’ll start to be recognized. And wait until you Google your name and find 15 SERPs because your articles appear on dozens and dozens of sites.

The downside is the cost. Site owners charge you for the use of their space. If you’re well capitalized, no problem. Spend the money to spread your words. If money is a problem, choose your host sites carefully. Use Google Analytics or ClickTracks data to determine not only number of unique visitors you create from these pages of hosted content, but quality of traffic as well. Look for sites that match the two criteria above. Very important.

Article Submission
Okay, money is a problem. You don’t have a lot. You can still get your name and your opinions out there through various article submission sites.

Once again, site owners need green content and many rely on article submission sites to pick up fresh content for free. Here’s the deal. You write an article and go through the same steps of researching, editing and proofing until the piece is pristine and makes you sound like a savant. Perfect.

Now you place that piece on sites like www.goarticles.com or www.ezinearticles.com for free use by other sites. The plus side is, if the content is solid, you’ll get picked up by literally hundreds (even thousands) of sites. And in return for the free use of your written brilliance, the sites that display your content are obliged to include a link back to your web site. So, you put out 10 articles on topics related to your business, each one gets picked up and used by 20 other sites and you’ve got 200 non-reciprocal inbound links. Well done.

But isn’t this the same model as hosted content except it’s free? No. There are two key points to consider. First, with articles you syndicate it’s much more difficult to embed editorial links to your targeted web site. Instead, you take advantage of the target link and anchor text in your bio box that appears at the end of the article.

What does this mean? Ultimately syndicated articles are not unique content like hosted content is, and ultimately it’s more challenging to place links to your own site editorially without appearing to be hyping your goods or services. So there’s a tradeoff when you go the article syndication route. The key, just as with hosted content, is to have killer, useful information in order to entice webmasters to repurpose the article for their communities and give you credit, a bio and a back link.

But, it doesn’t cost you anything but your time, assuming you can string words together into cogent sentences, or at least your brother-in-law can.

If you’re good at syndicated content or article submission, you control the anchor text — the actual links readers click on. You can also embed editorial links in syndicated content. Now, these aren’t links directly back to your site but they will take the readers to a target page that you want them to read, so if you’re building links for other sites in your portfolio, this approach has a proven track record.

Reciprocal Links
Sites still exchange links. The concept isn’t moribund but it certainly doesn’t have the impact a non-reciprocal link has. Reciprocal linking is simply an exchange of links. You link to my site; I’ll link to yours. And since spiders follow links, it’s not a bad arrangement.

A couple of warnings, however. Any site with which you exchange links should be related to the topic of your site. If you’re selling baby clothes on your site and you’ve got a link to transmission fix-it site, you’ll get nicked by the search engine. Remember, the whole purpose of a search engine is to provide useful, relevant content to users so any links you exchange should be considered from the point of view of the site visitor. Is that link going to further the search of the site visitor or is it a dead end?

If a site appears to have a significant number of back links, and better yet, ranks well in the SERPs, it’s a likely candidate for a link exchange even if it’s a PR 2. Look for quality sites, or at least quality characteristics.

One-Way Link Building
This comes a several forms. First, there’s the ever-popular ‘link begging’ where you contact a site owner (you can find that information in Whois, if it’s not on the contact page) and basically plead your case to have that site owner accept your link. This is a tough sell because, naturally, the site owner wants to know what’s in it for him or her. Custom written, tailored emails tend to do better than form letter emails, obviously, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with a phone call provided you make it abundantly clear what you have to offer.

There are paid links programs. For example, www.textlinkads.com lists web sites willing to sell links to your site. You can bid on the cost of the link, agree to the length of time the link will appear and where it will appear. There are other programs that will hook up sites — usually with decent PRs — with site owners looking for good deals on paid links. Again, don’t forget to buy links with relevance to your site.

You can pay to advertise on another site with banner ads, though this has been shown to deliver lukewarm results unless you know your market very well. Do a competitive analysis and see what’s working for the competition. The click-thru rate on banners is less than 3% but they aren’t usually too expensive.

Finally, you can post your thoughts and opinions on forums and blogs related to your site. Each post will create a back link, but one that spiders will recognize as a blog back link — not a bad thing, just not a gangbusters way to build site credibility, especially considering that most links have a nofollow added and forums capable of giving any link love tend to moderate (and eliminate link spam) quite heavily. Don’t be fooled though, links even with a nofollow attached still have some magic — even on Google.

From hosted content to blog posts, anybody can get a little recognition on the web. And if you’ve actually got marketing capital, you can pay for hosted content and watch your site grow quickly.

Very quickly.

• Easy Implementation
• Keyword and Campaign Comparison
• Create Custom Dashboards
• AdWords Integration
• Trend and Date Slider
• E-commerce Tracking / Funnel Visualization
• Email reports
• Improved Site Overlay / Heat Mapping
• Improved Traffic Segmentation e.g. GeoTargeting

All of these are extremely handy especially when you have the ability to track the results on your own to make sure everything is kept honest. I’m looking forward to a hands-on test drive. Check out the tour now.

First a definition:
“Foveal View” — The area of visible space where the user is best able to focus with maximum detail. The point here is that outside of the focal area the eye (and therefore the mind) is not perceiving color nor as much detail. Understanding this concept cascades into the takeaways that follow.

Now some highlights from Andy’s portion of the video + my two cents:

1. The traditional marriage to 800×600 optimized design is really on it’s way out (as many people have noticed looking at their site statistics). Instead wider screen layouts not only bring more content above the fold, reducing the amount of scrolling required to use a page, but they also compliment a user’s natural behavioral desires while using a site,
2. Page elements should be organized in such a way that relevant blocks of information are near each other so that the brain can make logical associations and accurately assess relevance while scanning a page,
3. “Information Blocks” should be wider than tall for easiest consumption — again this is in step with the wider layout point above,
4. Typography & whitespace use (contrast) are also as important as ever; when properly used they create a guide to lead the eye through blocks of content in the body of a page or in navigational areas.
5. Group navigation items to contain 7 +/- 2 options per group. This avoids forcing the user to stop and process the information. In other words, use this principle to create at-a-glance usability in your navigation, which is vital to conversion.

Heat mapping sites like the following are useful in understanding the result of the eye/brain interaction. Use the insight above to review your design and your heat map results to identify problem areas in your user interface design. Here are some popular tools:

• crazyegg
• clickdensity
• ClickTale

Let’s not forget Google Analytics (Urchin) is useful when using the "Site Overlay" view in also seeing which anchors are most clicked in your site.

However, what we’ve long called “EBO” or Eyeball Optimization is explained masterfully by Andy — Well done!

Since I’m not sure how long that video will be in place so here’s the “permalink.”

Ask Google, search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others. For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn’t have as much value to search engines and so, it doesn’t receive the same weight as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link — the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.

Article Syndication
In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offer these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the “about the author” section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the free use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.

Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It’s a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.

The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author’s site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links — somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.

In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author’s site. It’s still more valuable than a plain link exchange but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what’s a site owner to do?

Hosted Web Content
It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content — all basically the same idea.

The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the “eyes” of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.

Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hosting site get useful content.

This strategy isn’t new. It’s simply doing what search engines want us to do — produce content that’s useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.

Designing a Hosted Content Page
You’re paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.

Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword
savvy title, header <h1>, subheads <h2> and a keyword density
of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content
to be “spamish” regardless of where the content appears.

Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article’s text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it’s also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hosting your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offer real value to readers.

It’s Not Quantity, It’s Quality
It’s no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It’s not quantity, it’s the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.

Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more “natural” from a search engine’s perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site’s pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links — the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.

Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today
It’s being done everyday, successfully building small sites into larger sites, providing free advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hosting site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers — exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards — so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.

Start searching for websites that might be interested in hosting your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that’s unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won’t even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers — exactly how it should be.

MDAs can be obvious or very subtle. For example, the MDA on a commercial site is to induce visitors to buy something. That’s obvious. Other MDAs include providing an email address, providing additional personal information, opening an account, signing up for a service, asking for a quote or opting in for the monthly newsletter.

Less obvious MDAs include submitting a blog entry, starting a forum thread, referring new visitors, book marking the site or reading critical sales or informational copy. You could also include coming back again as an MDA for almost every site. That repeat traffic is valuable in building your online enterprise.

Identifying the MDA
Before visitors can perform any MDA, pyoup have to determine what the MDA is for each age of your sitep. And though that may sound like a simple task, it’s not.

Multiple MDAs
Multiple MDAs can cause problems if not presented properly. It’s difficult to persuade visitors to perform one task much less two or three. There are several reasons for this.

Visitors aren’t very patient. They want to determine if your site is what they’re looking for, they want to conduct their business and move on to Mah Jong solitaire. Asking a visitor to complete a customer satisfaction survey after a sale is like asking visitors to take their SATs again. Not very likely.

Ambiguous MDAs
You see this quite often on NFP sites and sites designed to provide informational content. For many of these sites, the MDA is to have the visitor make a donation. However, on the same page viewers may be offered the opportunity to become a member, to receive regular updates or to be bombarded with affiliate spam. (Can we send you useful information from time to time?)

More than one MDA per page will deter many visitors from performing any actions. Too confusing. Too much time.

Linear MDAs
A common aspect of many service providers’ web pages, linear MDAs require visitors to perform more than one action in a series.

For example, the first MDA for a site selling debt consolidation services might be to motivate visitors to click on a link from the home page that will take them to a form to be completed in order to access the debt consolidation services. In cases of linear MDAs, each page of the site must clearly state the MDA for that page.

Continuing to use the example of the debt consolidation company, if the MDA is to click a link to a form, the link itself would appear on the home page. It would be very large and well labeled, i.e. Click here to get started. The home page copy would be directed specifically to the MDA. Urge and persuade the visitor to click on that link.

The next MDA, completing the form, would be addressed on the link from the home page. In fact, there are usually several (many) MDAs for a single site and each page of the site must specifically address the MDA for that particular page.

No MDAs
More commonly found on personal sites and owner-designed commercial sites, the lack of a clearly stated MDA will leave many visitors scratching their heads and wondering just what they’re expected to do. Not only should you have a clear picture of the single-most important MDA for your site, you should make sure your visitors know just what that MDA is, as well.

Optimizing the Homepage for Maximum MDA Conversion
A site’s conversion rate is nothing more than the rate at which visitors perform the MDA. If one in 10 performs the MDA the conversion rate is 10%. If only one in 100 performs the most desired action, the site’s conversion rate is 1%.

The site’s homepage is the first place to clearly introduce and identify the MDA to the visitor. The MDA call-out should appear on the home page above the fold. It should be the first thing visitors see without scrolling. For example:

Welcome to Nutty Nick’s Wicker Hut
20% Off Everything You Buy

That header identifies the MDA &MDAsh; buy some wicker from Nutty Nick. Here’s another headline that defines an MDA. What do you think the action is here:

Sign up for our FREE newsletter and
you may win a free trip to Bermuda!!!

Obviously, the headline is intended to persuade visitors to opt in for a newsletter. It’s clear, unambiguous and it offers an incentive for completing the action.

MDA Incentives
“Why should I?” and “What’s in it for me?” are two questions many visitors ask when the MDA offers no clear benefit to them. That’s why incentives are useful in many cases.

What kind of incentives? Well, anything FREE is always good. Free shipping and handling, a free extended service warranty, free (and really useful) information, the chance to win something &MDAsh; there are plenty of incentives you can employ to encourage completion of the MDA.

Just make sure that the incentive and the MDA are closely tied and closely positioned as in the example above. The incentive doesn’t have to be expensive but it should deliver clear benefit to the visitor.

Also, when more than one MDA is the goal, limit the number of calls to perform an action to exactly one on the home page. Other, less critical actions can be introduced on landing pages, aka zone pages, within a site.

Optimizing Zone Pages for the MDA
Once visitors have navigated the home page (and performed the MDA), they next click a link that takes them to a zone page or landing page (same thing). Once again, the MDA should be clearly displayed above the fold on each zone page.

Zone pages serve different purposes. A link off the home page to a description of company services looks and sounds very different from the zone page for the check-out or contact us page. In all cases, visitors must recognize the personal benefit to them when they choose to perform the action for that specific page. They will save money. They will receive something useful. They will find a solution to a specific problem. Any discriminating visitor is going to ask, “How does this help me?” Provide the right answer and you convert. Provide the wrong answer, or no answer, and that visitor is a click away from gone.

That’s why every site owner must consider the MDA for each page of a site. MDAs must also be specifically targeted on individual pages within the web site. Directions for performing the MDA must be clear, unambiguous and persuasive. Finally, on every page of your site, the visitor must see the clear benefit of performing the MDA &MDAsh; even if the most desired action is clicking on the link back to the home page. Clear, straightforward and persuasive.

If you don’t have a clear understanding of the MDAs for the pages of your site, neither will your visitors. So, if your conversion rate isn’t where you’d like it to be, develop text for MDAs and optimize every page of your site.

A landing page is the page that visitors first see after becoming curious enough to click on a link to your site. The link may be found on search engine results pages, within a specifically-targeted email, on the site’s navigation toolbar or within another website.

In many cases, these are links you pay for. The organic results delivered by SERPs are free, but, unless your site appears on the first two SERPs, it’s unlikely that visitors will connect.

In many cases, the landing page is the site’s home page — but not always, even within SERPs. Landing pages can appear anywhere within a web site.

Paid Links Demand ROI
If your landing page receives prominent display within search engine results pages, congratulations. Upward of 50% of visitor traffic found that landing page through an SE query. However, only 20 to 25 sites can appear on page one of Google’s SERPs. What about the other 10,000 links Google delivers to its users?

Often, smaller sites employ paid links to drive site traffic. Google Adwords, for example, is a PPC (pay per click) means of building business. The important point is this: PPC programs have to more than pay for themselves in order for your site to remain a viable business.

Any form of paid linkage to one of your landing pages must deliver a nice ROI. And to do that, you need a fully-usable, engaging landing page. Otherwise, visitors won’t stick around long enough to read about your low prices and free shipping.

The Purpose of the Landing Page
While all site pages have a purpose (at least on well-designed sites) a landing page typically has a special or singular purpose: to sell a particular item, to announce a product sale, to entice visitors to opt in, complete a questionnaire or perform some other MDA (most desired action).

First determine the MDA the landing page addresses. Then, design everything — from headlines and text to graphics and pictures — to support the completion of the MDA.

Try to keep to one MDA per landing page. Again, the landing page has a specific purpose. Extraneous information, slow-loading videos and a confusing call to action are distractions, along with affiliate links, text links and unnecessary animations. All distract the attention of the viewer from your MDA.

Landing Page Design Principles

1. Create a headline that accomplishes the following:

   • tells the visitors that they’re on the right page;
   • clearly states the purpose of the landing page — the MDA;
   • engages the visitor, piques interest, encourages the reader to continue.

   The headline should be a grabber and appear “above the fold” — the top of your home page. That’s the most valuable real estate on your site.

2. Use short blocks of text and single sentences surrounded by negative space (white). Visitors tend to scan rather than read the entire page, even if the text is pure poetry.
3. And because readers scan instead of read site text, use lots of headers, sub-heads and bullet lists.
4. The first sentence of each block of text should provide the critical information you want to impart, again because visitors scan, often reading just the first sentence of a paragraph or block of text.
5. Employ an unambiguous call to action. “Order Now!” “Call now before you forget!” Leave no doubt what action is expected of the visitor. Calls for action can appear throughout the landing page text and a call to action should be the last thing visitors read.
6. Choose a type font that’s easy on the eyes. Avoid script fonts and fonts with lots of curly-Qs.
7. If the landing page sells one or more products, provide visitors with pictures of the products.
8. Prices, including shipping and handling costs, should appear below the fold. But they should definitely appear.

Creating a Prominent Landing Page
If your landing page is also the home page, by definition it has prominence to visitors and to search engine spiders. However, if your landing page or pages are within the site, it’s important to make sure search engine spiders recognize the importance of this page within the site — its prominence.

Spiders use a number of criteria to determine a particular page’s prominence within the context of the entire site. Location is one criterion — the more clicks away from the home page, the less prominent — at least to the limited capabilities of current search engines.

Text is another criterion used to assess prominence. Keywords, keyword density and an automated comparison of keywords in the text against keywords in various HTML tags is another indicator of a page’s prominence.

Finally, the number of links pointing to a particular page is an important factor in assessing page prominence. The more links connecting other pages to your landing page, the more prominent it will be to search engines when your site is indexed.

This is especially important when landing page product offerings differ significantly from other products sold on the site. Search engines employ a mathematical taxonomy to classify each site within a particular category. So, if you market educational toys but introduce a landing page offering children’s books, it’s important for search engines to reevaluate the site’s taxonomy and to expand the site’s classification to include ’sellers of children’s books’. One way to do this is to create links within the site all pointing to the landing page.

Landing pages are useful as motivators, as site directories, information sources and for many other valuable purposes. However, the development of an effective landing page takes careful thought and an understanding of what drives both humans and search engine spiders.

Generate increased site traffic and improve your conversion rate with a well-designed, well-written, well-placed and well-connected landing page on your site.

SEO Spam
Most of us think of spam as junk email — the come-ons for cheap vacations or off-shore prescription services deposited in millions of inboxes regularly.

SEO spam is different. SEO spam is any means of manipulating search engine spiders to artificially boost a web site’s page rank or positioning on search engine results pages. In other words, SEO spam is any tactic employed by site owners, designers and SEOs to fool search engine spiders. Not a good idea.

What’s Spam and What’s Not?
Hard to say, actually. Every search engine has its own definition of what constitutes SEO spam so, in essence, spam is whatever SE geeks say it is. However, there’s an obvious, widespread consensus among search engine professionals as to what constitutes SEO spam. Further, search engine information pages provide clear guidelines for what SEs consider acceptable and unacceptable practices.

Three of the most common SEO spam tactics are: hidden text, doorway pages and mirror sites. Let’s look at each one.

Hidden Text
Hidden text, sometimes called search spam, is text that is invisible to visitors but readable to search engine spiders. Drop a block of white text on a white background and it’s completely invisible to human eyeballs but easily readable by spiders.

Hidden text is usually just a slew of keywords, variations on keywords and other information of interest to SE spiders but not very helpful to humans. So, when you visit the site, you see nothing but white space. Spiders scan line after line of keywords which may well artificially boost the site’s page prank.

Another ruse employed by many SEO rookies is to hide text in the HTML code that supports the site skin. This is another wrong-headed ploy that will get your new site slammed faster than you can say “Welcome”.

Remember, search engines rely on the quality of their SERPs. The more useful and relevant the SERPs are, the happier the SE user. And, the more likely that user will continue to use that search engine. That’s why the management behind search engines takes such a dim view of hidden text and other SEO spam.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages and/or splash screens are nothing more than full-sized advertisements and though search engines have been able to detect these pages for almost 10 years, site owners and unknowing webmasters still employ this subterfuge.

A doorway page or splash screen is a stand-alone page in front of the main site. It’s purpose? To land high in the SERPs and get you to click on the doorway page link. So, let’s say you’re shopping for surf boards on line. So you Google surfboards, scroll down a few links and see what appears to be the perfect site for what you’re looking for. You click the link and you’re taken to a garbage page with lots of PPC adverts, usually some hidden text and the simple direction, “For Surfboards, Click Here.” You, web surfer, have been hoodwinked.

Doorway pages have one purpose — to drive traffic to a site. They don’t provide information, product listings or contact information. They’re like full-screen banner ads that you have to pass through to get to the actual site you’re looking for. Search engines hate doorway pages because they diminish the quality of their SERPs and annoy the SE user. That’s a very bad thing.

So, how do you distinguish between a doorway page and a very active homepage? Simple. The home page appears on the site map and can be accessed from other pages within the site. Not so with a doorway page. It’s strictly one-way — in! You can’t access a doorway page from the interior of the site. You can only access it by clicking on the SERPs link again.

Here’s what Google has to say about doorway pages right on the Google Quality Guidelines page: “Avoid doorway pages created just for search engines.” Simple advice. Good advice.

Mirror Sites
Mirror sites, at first glance, don’t appear to be a deceitful tactic. A mirror site is simply a duplicate site that uses different keywords and HTML descriptor tags. So, let’s say you sell sporting goods online. You might have one site with football-related keywords, the same site, perhaps with a different web host, with baseball-related keywords and another mirror (duplicate) site with nothing but keywords related to scuba diving. Seems like a reasonable approach to driving traffic with a variety of sports interests.

It’s not. Search engines take a very dim view of this duplicate content cluttering up their SERPs. Here’s what Inktomi states in its guideline for posting content to any of the SEs that employ the Inktomi search algorithm. (There are lots of them).

Inktomi considers the following as deceptive, undesirable practices:

• “Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages…” (within a single website)
• “Sites (employing) numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames…”
• “Multiple sites…(that contain)…the same content.”

The reason? Because this would allow any site to have an infinite number of listings on SERPs, simply by changing keywords in site text and HTML tags. And that would most certainly diminish the quality of results pages.

SEO Spam = SEO Slam
You may get away with deceptive practices for a while. Maybe even a month or two. But eventually you will be found out and the consequences could be lethal to your online enterprise.

Google, Inktomi, Yahoo and the other big search engines will ban a site that employs illicit black or gray hat tactics. In the case of mirror sites, one will certainly be banned from SE indexing. Perhaps all of your mirror sites will be banned. And with search engines driving most of the traffic to your storefront, it’s going to be extremely difficult to recover, if you can at all.

So, if you use mirror sites, take down all but your main site. If you employ mirror pages within your site, lose them. If you’ve got three doorway pages in front of your site, each employing a different set of keywords, eliminate all of them.

And, if your site is deep in hidden text, written for search engine spiders and not for human consumption, lose the invisible spider text.

A Final Word of Caution
One last word of caution. If you’re new to the world of ecommerce and you’re unfamiliar with the dos and don’ts of SEO, visit each search engine and carefully read their statements of acceptable practices. This is essential because what you view as a harmless marketing ploy may be viewed by a search engine as deceitful.

And, if you still don’t understand what SEs will and won’t accept after reading their content guidelines, hire a professional search engine optimizer to do the job.

You’ve spent a bunch of time and perhaps money to take your place in the realm of ecommerce and, indeed, you will need to optimize your site for consistently improving results. But there are plenty of ways to get your site noticed and properly indexed without resorting to SEO spam.

If you can do it yourself, perfect. If you aren’t sure of what you’re doing, even a completely innocent mistake can cost you. You’ll drop in page rank, your site will be mis-indexed or under-indexed and you could be banned altogether.

Play it smart and keep your sites SEO spam free.