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What’s the big deal about search engine optimization? Isn’t it enough that you’ve put up a website, purchased some Google AdWords, and sent out an email to everyone you know announcing your site? In short, no. There is an art and science to search engine optimization (SEO), and it is critical for web-based businesses to know, understand and utilize if they want to drive quality traffic to their website via the Internet.

Where do you begin, though? How can you possibly know whom to trust or what to do first with so much information out there on SEO? Do you buy links or not? Pay per click or go organic? And what about those SEO companies who are aggressively promising #1 rankings? When it comes to search engine ranking, there are a lot of rumors and myths about what will increase your rankings and what won’t.

Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths

- Pay per click (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)

Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.

- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.

Debunked: While it’s a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.

- Websites are banned if they buy links.

Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren’t counted.

- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.

Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don’t do anything for ranking.

- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.

Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.

- Reciprocal links won’t count.

Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.

- SEO companies can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work.

Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.

According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn’t magic and isn’t a crap-shoot. “SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines.” Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.

Seven Ways to Get Your Website Crawled

1. It’s better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.
2. If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.
3. Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.
4. Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?
5. Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.
6. Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: “keyword phrase” in your browser and check the number count.
7. Once you have your keyword phrases validated and checked for competitiveness, use them in anchor texts, clickable image alt tags, headlines, body text copy, title tags, and meta descriptions. Meta tags aren’t all that important for crawling.

SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it’s hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it. Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.

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Business Coach & Consultant for entrepreneurial women starting up small businesses, Dr. Susan L. Reid is the Award-winning author of “Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success.” For ideas, tips, and support for your business journey, sign up here for our free e-Zine.

Tags: seo, seo optimization

SEO blog posts are one of the best ways to get your links out there on the Internet. Search Engines love them and people can follow them easily to your site.

As an example I will link this keyword  ”Ghost Writers” here. Notice the link takes you to a site that offers the service related to it. I could have linked any word here but I choose to link one that is relevant and that will help improve keyword traffic.

The big problem for most is how to make the most of their blog. I have found tons of articles about how to seo your blog software, but not much on the topic of optimizing your blog posts.

I will give a few simple things to consider when adding your blog posts:

Post Slugs or Permalinks

Post slugs are how your URL is displayed for each post. In most WordPress Accounts there is a setting for Permalinks. If you login to your admin and click “settings” and then “Permalinks” look for the words “Custom Structure” and put this line of code in:

/%category%/%postname%/

There are many ways to do this, but this way allows the category name and title of your blog appear in your post. If my category was Ghost Writers then the link would be: /ghost-writers/optimize-your-blog-post/

Now, that you have your permalinks in place, click on “write” to add your post now. Depending on your version of WordPress you will either see the words “Post Slug” or “permalink”. Post slug is on the right column and “permalinks” is under the title bar. Either way you can change the way your post URL title will appear.

This is important to follow because some times people use character in their titles like:

How To Optimize Your Blog Posts!

The (!) character will cause your URL to show funny, or if you use (- , “) or any number of characters. So in your post slug or permalink, make sure you remove those characters. Play around with this a bit and see how the URL reads after you change the Permalink or post slug portion.

Keyword linking

This one is simple but very often over looked. Don’t go crazy here with this, but make sure to link 2 or 3 of your keywords to your websites home page and inner pages as well.

The keyword “SEO content” is not very effective if not linked properly. Notice that I linked the word “seo content” to my site. I also added a title tag to the URL for better keyword positioning. In your word press when you highlight a word or phrase you can click on the link icon and it will give you an option for the URL and Title. The title is for your keyword. Since I linked “seo content” I then used that word as my title tag as well. Notice that if you put the mouse over the link a title appears.

Proper Credit where credit is due!

Since many people are not truly inspired writers, many will find content out there and copy and paste it into their WordPress program and revise the words around to make it more original. Though using someone else’s content does not require creative thought, it can help if you convert over 50% of the content around and put them in your own words.

However, it is not professional of you if done without giving credit to the original writer. In your article you don’t have to say this came from some site, etc… You simply choose a keyword in your blog post and link it to the source where you got it from. Don’t be greedy, it looks better anyway when you do this properly and helps with SEO as well. If you are not willing to give up a link, then come up with your own content.

Add a Picture

Very simple, add a photo to your post. Upload a photos, add an alt text and a title tag, it is all provided for you in wordpress. It not only makes your post look more attractive but it again helps with SEO.

Give you photo a file name that is keyword based as well. Download your image, rename it and upload it.

If you hire a ghost writer to write your content, make sure they provide you with the original source and a photo to match the blog content and upload the post yourself or train your writer to do this for you. You will find this is very effective for online marketing.

Tags: blog writing, blogs, ghost writers, Linking Strategies, seo

I frequently rant on Internet marketing and some of the gurus who try to bend your ear. Why? Because many of these so-called gurus trash everything that makes sense in this Internet world, especially when they realize that they cannot make money from the techniques being recommended.

I don’t preach marketing concepts solely for the purpose of selling my products and services. (If you happen to buy my products or services, then awesome, but that is not my point when I share information from my SEO and other marketing campaigns.) I preach the concepts that I have used for myself successfully. Either you can trust me and test the things I recommend, or you can listen to the gurus and drown yourself in pity, when you realize you are not finding the success you seek.

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Tags: article writing, Writing