I often associate SEO with space travel – one wrong move and you can end up light years away from where you want to be!

There are literally thousands of ways that an SEO campaign can go wrong. What things should you always avoid if you want to be a success?

There are many things that you should avoid when doing SEO and here is my list of the top 10 no-no’s that you should always avoid if you want to optimize a website:

1. Using the Wrong Page Title

The first thing that the search engines will look for is your page title so when they send out their crawlers this is the first thing that they will encounter. Don’t use fancy titles that can be deceptive – you want the crawlers to know exactly what your page is about! Keywords should always be included and all pages must have a different title so that each page is unique.

2. Using the Wrong Keywords

Keywords are the most vital component of an SEO campaign so it is a must to get these correct! Using high ranking keywords is the most basic part of SEO and the rest of your efforts will be futile if your keywords are incorrect. Study the keywords and phrases that you use really target your market by optimizing accordingly.

Above everything – NEVER assume your keywords; always check them in a ranking tool

3. Using Wrong Content

Bad content is as useful as no content, in fact no content could sometimes be better! If there is bad content on the website then the crawlers will not rank your site and generating the best content can be done by concentrating on your chosen keywords etc.

4. Using Too-little Text

Too many videos and images and not enough text is never a good thing for a website. Websites need text in order to be ranked highly by the search engines and if you want to sell a product or service then you have to shout about it or the engines will never hear you!

5. Using the Wrong Target Audience

You can only manage an SEO campaign effectively if you know who you are aiming at. Without the correct target audience, how can you direct content at the right people? A website cannot be optimized properly if the target audience is wrong and this has a domino effect. Wrong target audiences = wrong keywords = wrong content = pointless website!

Ok, so you have got the hang of the top five things that should always s be avoided in SEO and here are the next five to think about:

6. Using Unnecessary Frills

Frills and bows should be avoided as much as possible on a website. The occasional cartoon or animated graphics can be used but if you overdo it – you will bore your customers and here’s why:

When you first visit a website the graphics and images look great but when you go back to it over and over again and you are greeted by the same flashing and moving images you will soon get very irritated by them. If you have children think about how annoying it is when you have to watch the Barney DVD for the third time in a row or how disappointed you feel in your self-pride when you realise that you know all the words to every song!

Crawlers are unimpressed by graphics so concentrate on the text if you want to get high rankings.

7. Not Using the Header Tags

Header tags: <h1>, <h2>, <hn>

These tags are hugely important and should never be left out! They highlight the main point of your pages so using the right keywords in the right tags is vital to an SEO campaign. The tags should appear in the same size font as the content and NOT larger as many people think.

8. Using Too Many Keywords

Keywords overkill is so easy to do! Many people assume that the more keywords you have; the better your pages will be optimized but that really isn’t the case at all! Your keywords should appear in your text as well as page titles and tags etc but for the bulk content they should only appear in the title, in the opening sentence, in the anchor text and meta description and then sporadically throughout the text – and I mean sporadically!

9. Using the Wrong Links

You may harm your rankings by using links that are indiscriminate. Outgoing and incoming links should ALWAYS be sourced from reputed websites and if you resort to buying 100 links for $99 then you will pay the price. There is nothing beneficial about purchasing your links and they should always be generated organically.

10. Not Using Blogs

Along with using the correct keywords, blogging is another hugely vital part of an SEO campaign. There is no reason not to blog on a website and now that everyone has seen the light when it comes to using blogs to boost traffic, links and rankings; if you don’t do it you will be left behind!

What techniques do you always employ to ensure that your SEO is really effective and how do you ensure that you keeping climber up and up and up…?

We are in the midst of a social media boom! Everyone is busy spending their days Tweeting away or updating their friends on what they had for breakfast – so how can we use the dominance of social media to boost our websites?

SEO is relevant to the social search engine and here’s how:

Search engines now use far more complicated methods when they rank a website. Long gone are the days when the engines would simply send out their crawlers and rank a website depending on keywords – they now even employ techniques to monitor the relevance of a search result! This means that searchers are offered far many more relevant websites in their SERPs than ever before is a bid to cut back on the amount of pointless websites that searches can throw up.

If our clients can improve their social networking skills then we as SEO experts will reap the benefits! Check out these handy hints and tips on how we can use social searches to our benefit:

1)   Insert links to your website through your social media

If you are a member of Facebook then you should be using to do more than informing your friends about how hung-over you are after a wild weekend away, what chocolate bar you have just eaten or what the bloody weather is doing… Update your friends about your business and add links to your website to promote more visitors. The same can be done on any of the top social media forms from Twitter through to myspace.

2)   Create a group

As a business you should have created a group for your business. Once a group has been created then you can start posting comments are your business, about your business, to benefit your business!

i.e. Your business name is Community Craft Charity Thailand and you have a sale on your handmade soaps this week so your social media update will be posted under your business name and whatever you are promoting will appear underneath.

3)   Be active with your accounts

When you are a member of the likes of Twitter you must make sure that you dedicate time every week to posting updates and promoting new products or money-off deals. Use keywords when you post updates and make sure that your business profile is set to public so that EVERYONE can see your business profile!

As well as these tips you can ask people to review your products and services and post useful links and comments about what you offer. Word of mouth via social media has the potential to spread like wildfire so make sure people talk about you. Social networking is big business and if you can tap into it as a means to generate more site traffic then you will continue to grow your online business.

Do you have any ideas on what you should do with your social networking in order to ensure that you increase your site traffic?

There are plenty of potential dangers with auto-correct….

We have all done it – predictive text on a mobile phone that leads us to say things that we never intended! Now that Word and various other processing forms offer auto format punctuation you must be careful if you choose to use it!

The main problem with using the auto format punctuation program is that it doesn’t convert properly by the programs that are working in the search engines so some punctuation is changed when content is uploaded…

Here are a few of the top examples:

• When using ordinals they change from 1^st to 1^st; and or 2^nd to 2^nd; and
• All fractions that are written as 1/2 will change to ½
• All short hyphens are transformed into long hyphens
• Straight commas, apostrophes and quote marks are changed to curved one

The simplest way to avoid these problems is to strip out the formatting altogether before the content is typed in. This is easy to do simply by clicking on the Tools section and go into Auto Correct Options. From here, click the AutoFormat tab and uncheck the boxes that you don’t wish to apply. It should look similar to the following:

• Straight quotes with smart quotes
• Hyphens – with dash –
• Ordinals (1st) with superscript
• Fractions 1/2 with fraction character ½

It is then up to you to select and deselect as you wish…

If you want your website to read properly then you must take care when using automatic text formatting programs.

Avoid Over-Flashing

The full-on movie treatment with flash and all kinds of other fancy flashing images that put Fox News to shame is always tempting but should be avoided if at all possible. Less really is more when you are creating websites and overdoing the continual rolling text and sales messages can put your customer’s brains into overdrive shortly before they completely shut down! Lure them into your website with great content and a simple layout rather than a page that takes three hours to load up. The internet is often viewed as a resource and not a place to have fun by older people while the younger generations enjoy being bombarded with messages and changing images so always consider your target age group as well.

Each and every website should be thought of as a marketing tool and getting it right will entail a range of skills and techniques. Search engine optimization plays a vital role in the success of a website and keeping it simple really works!

How do you ensure that your website contains enough images to be interesting but not so many that your customers have to wait half a day to see what your home page actually says?

Be careful not to overexpose….

Blogs are a vital part of any good search engine optimization strategy and making sure that they are optimized well is hugely important to their success rate. Blogging is just as popular as Tweeting nowadays and as an SEO tool it should never be left out of a campaign to get noticed by the search engines!

There are a few ways to ensure that your blogs are fully optimized and there are lots of reasons why blogs should always be used with your SEO and here are some of the most valuable pointers:

1. Blogs are a Magnet for Traffic

SEO is all about attracting traffic to a website and the best feature of a blog is that it draws in traffic like a magpie to silver!  They naturally attract traffic and this organic benefit is huge! Most blogs are already set up on optimized websites and they will inherit this linking potential that the website already boasts.

1. Use Directories

Blog directories are a really useful tool and should be used by all optimizers. One-way links are a great benefit to a website and these can be generated via blog directories. If your blogs are well optimized then you will enjoy the best keyword placement in the searches so ensure that your blogs are optimized with the appropriate keywords before you submit.

1. Choosing the Best Keywords

Deciding whether you should target keywords that attract lots of traffic but that don’t stand much chance of ranking highly and or whether you should try for a target keyword that gets medium-level targeted traffic but will be optimizable is tricky! This is always somewhat hit and miss but experience will always help with this decision and erring on the side of caution is usually the best plan so if in doubt go with the safer (latter) option.

1. More Traffic = More Sales? Only Sometimes…

Lots of people make the mistake of thinking that more website traffic means more sales and while of course there is more chance of making more sales with the more people you can attract; a high ratio of site visitors to sales can also be had with less traffic that comes from the less popular search terms.

1. Length of Search Terms

The best conversion rates of people who come from search engine traffic are those who use keywords that are four words long. You can ensure that your blogs are well indexed that will then mean you can appear for a whole range of relevant four-word phrases.

Optimizing your blogs to ensure that they are attracting traffic to your website rather than just using them as something for people to read is a great way to get your website up the rankings.

How do you optimize your blogs?

The future of SEO will mean free smart phones to everyone!

Mobile searches are all the rage at the moment and SEO is hot stuff! Combine the two and you should have a sure-fire way to be a huge success at the moment!

People use their mobile devices for a wide range of tasks such as checking emails, playing games, calling friends and family, emailing, downloading apps, using apps and browsing the internet followed by browsing the web some more! iPhones, Androids, smartphones and Blackberries are all popular mobile devices at the moment and the power of mobile tools is insane constantly getting cranked up a level. While we are on the go, search is almost the same whether we are doing it on a mobile device or on a laptop or PC.

However, mobile searches do perform more local searches rather than other types of search but not entirely. Many of the searches completed through a laptop or PC are also locally-based so accusing mobile devices of having a close affair with local searches is somewhat overhyped. According to new research just out, the top mobile searches last year (2010) are almost the same (and mainly non-local) as the top general searches performed in the year.

Clicks are similar, queries are almost the same, conversion rates are getting closer and click through rates are already the same for mobile searches compared to computers. Mobile tools are usually used for conducting research but this trend is beginning to change as we find new and improved ways to get online as we are on the proverbial ‘go’.

Here are some of the most popular predictions for changes in the mobile search sector:

·       One set of SERPs for all searches

·       More questions and queries via mobile devices

·       No separate mobile websites

·       Apps will become even more popular

·       Your geographic location will matter

·       Conversion rates will go up on mobile devices

The paid search results differ massively on mobile devices – unlike SEO. Searching for anything via the web is different when you use a mobile device in the fact that many people will keep their search criteria and keywords to a minimum as typing on a mobile phone is far more time consuming and fiddly than doing it on a keyboard. And while at the moment people tend to use their mobile tools to conduct their research; it is likely that as mobile devices continue to get more and more advanced that people will start to use them in new and un-thought of ways!

What do you think about mobile SEO and its future and what will the impact on search be in the coming years?

Social media is seemingly taking over the world but how do we make sure that we are getting the most from our Twittering when it comes to ensuring our website optimization plans are going smoothly?

We all have those friends who live for Facebook right? They are on every five minutes changing their status from what they ate for breakfast to what they want to eat for lunch or something equally as boring! We either end up de-friending them as we get sick of their constant and usually meaningless life updates or block them from our homepage so we don’t have to see their annoying face and even more annoying washing-up-antics messages.

So SEO professionals take not that there is simply nothing more annoying than repeatedly receiving updates from the same person over and over and over and over again! Subconsciously, the majority of the time these posts are simply skipped past in and to find someone new. A little bit like the boy who cried wolf; it gets to the point that it doesn’t even matter of these posts are interesting anymore – once you plagues people’s pages with a constant barrage of updates they will be skipped past anyway!

How Do I Promote a Business Through Social Media?

When you want to promote a business it is vital that you find the best balance when it comes to updates. Facebook and Twitter have proved to be the most profitable forms of social media and while you don’t want to use them too sparingly you certainly don’t want to irritate your public!

Social media is a great tool in the promoting of a business but they should be used in moderation.

Find that delicate balance of promoting enough bit not too much and make sure that every post is relevant to your business and not pointless whittle. You can post the odd witty comment to get attention but don’t overuse humor in your promotion as that can be equally as irritating.

Every customer is unique in that they will all have different breaking points as to the amount of posts they are willing to handle before pressing the delete button on your face but you can build a strong following by playing it safe and assuming that once or twice a day is enough for the majority.

In this case; less really is more!

How many times a day/week do you think is enough when it comes to posting updates and Tweets?

As a SEO expert it is really likely that you (as we all at some time) have experienced the frustrating task of researching for keywords that then result in zero organic traffic! You are left feeling somewhat dejected and confused as the terms that were optimized had search volume, so why did you not get a piece of the action?

Bad Research = Bad Optimization = Bad Results!

You don’t have to be a mathematician to work out this equation! Blog posts rely heavily on their credibility and engines always look to rank the most credible highly. A lot of blog posts out there are not even close to being credible but by gaining links will always help to gain credibility but not enough bloggers understand the importance of link building.

Blogs are so popular nowadays that the sheer amount of competition also makes it hard to gain credibility. The keyword tool from Google fails to offer ALL of the terms that searchers are looking for therefore bloggers within the same niche are all using the same keywords making them far less credible as well as making it almost impossible for newbies to get a ranking.

Apparent Keywords = Greater Competition.

The more obvious your keywords are; the less likely you will achieve a high ranking using them. The SERPs for the same or similar services and products offer many posts with the same keywords and phrases in proving that lots of companies are all using the same keywords making it harder for them to get ranked. Don’t get me wrong it is still possible to gain rankings but it will involve a lot of hard work and honestly I only just found the time to write this post!

Use Less Obvious Keywords for Best Results.

If you are not interested n building links up then you should look at targeting less obvious keywords that are going under the radar. They are being searched for and they are relevant but not everyone is using them so they are not appearing on the keyword tool finders.

Find some super-long terms to optimize your post with and you will rank in the top places and draw in loads of traffic!

Traffic + Excess of engagement + Natural links = Site credibility

Once you have built up credibility you can then start to optimize for the more obvious and more fiercely fought over keywords.

Keyword research should involve the following steps:

• Write a blog that is captivating and make sure it is well written
• Research the core keywords
• Find long-tail variations of these keywords that have search volume
• Use the Soovle.com tool to find longer versions of these keyphrases
• Use these keyphrases in Google to see what the results are
• Start optimizing!

Interesting Content.

All blogs should be well written, be grammatically correct, engaging to the reader, not too long or too short (around 300-500 words) and have a relevant and unifying focus.

Finding the Core Keywords.

There may be lots of core keyword terms but you center your main terms on the main theme of your blog.

Finding Longer Versions.

Make sure that there is a search volume for the long variations of the keyphrases and feel free to play with them to see if similar terms have a search volume too.

Use Soolve.com to Finder Loooonger Versions.

The results on Soolve.com are suggest results from a range of search engine like Bing, Google, Yahoo and YouTube as well as many others and they all have search volume and they are based on search behavior.

i.e. if you put in the term “How to do keyword research” you will get other suggestions such as “how to do keyword research on Google”, “how to do keyword research for SEO” and “how to do keyword research for SEO purposes” etc.

It is also a good idea to check out what the volumes are for your keywords/phrases with different verbs and adjectives placed in front of the phrases such as “best”, “do” or “good”.

Check out the Keyphrases Yourself.

Once you have identified your search terms you should whack them into Google and see what results you are working against. The fewer the companies using these search terms the better for you.

Get Optimizing.

Post titles should use the keyphrase as should the meta description and the main body while the content should also be relevant to the keyword. Previous blogs can be linked too and images can also be optimized by titling the same as the keyphrase or including it in part of the title.

This process is simple to get the hang of and master and it is a quick way to optimize. The idea is to gain organic visits from your keyphrases and this type of optimizing is not only easy but it is fun as well!

There are two types of optimizers; those who use too many keywords and those who don’t use enough!

As optimizers, we are all familiar with using keywords in text links and this has been a common practice for many years. But many times optimizers go way over the top with their keyword inclusions and use an excess of keywords in their website navigation making it tricky to scan and use. Then there is the other side of the coin where optimizers don’t use the important keywords in their website navigation–where is the healthy balance?

Various Types of Site Navigation

There are a few different types of website navigation available:

• Primary Navigation: This usually appears on the left column but sometimes can be found at the top of the webpage and it represents the top-level; informational groups found on a website
• Secondary Navigation: This appears in the same place as the primary navigation and this provides access to information that is centred on a specific category
• Utilities Navigation: This is often found on the upper right corner and contains links to the homepage, shopping cart, contact us etc
• Footer Navigation: This is usually global navigation and they can be additional links that users can use so they don’t have to scroll back to the top of a page to navigate away. They can also be used to group content.
• Locational Breadcrumb Links: This communicates the hierarchy of the page that a user is viewing
• Embedded Text Links: These links are usually found in the main body of content and the links offer context from page to page

SEO specialists shouldn’t put keywords in EVERY navigational element on offer to them. The key is to balance your keyword usage and this is a mistake that many very competent SEO specialists still make mistakes with.

Finding a Balance…

There are three primary words to use that should be thought about whenever you are creating a search-friendly navigational website:

1. Scannable
2. Clickable
3. Distinguishable

It is vital that navigational elements can be scanned and this is an area of SEO that commonly gets messed up!

Clickable items should always look clickable to both the engines and human users and items that are unclickable should also really look unclickable! The whole aim of using a link on a webpage is to encourage users to click on it so it has to look clickable in order to attract clicks.

Unique and distinguishable labels help to make a website more scannable but don’t make the mistake of thinking that keywords should always be thrown into the footers by the dozen as they can make it appear very clogged up.

Confusing labels = Lost customers

Word of warning: People don’t usually spend time messing about with a website but instead they will leave your site and search for another one.

Inserting Keyword Links

Two of the top places to insert keywords are in locational breadcrumb links and embedded text links. They provide a powerful context for users and these are often text links that appear in blogs or articles on a website. Research suggests that the ultimate links should contain 7-12 words so bear that fact in mind when adding your keywords…

If you can’t place keywords in your anchor text then why not place then adjacent to your anchor text?

Here is an example:

The phrase “learn more” is not a useful one to use as it is not clear what you will be learning more about. An improved text link may say “learn more about SEO and keyword placement” but this is lengthy and not always possible. The best way to get around this problem is to combine both by using a heading that states “SEO tips” and directly below use “learn more”.

SEO experts must be resourceful and find the balance between the detrimental use of too many and too few keywords inclusions. Search engine visibility is equally but no more important than usability…

SEO produces many problems that SEO specialists have to work their way around but it seems there is a lot of common ground when it comes to finding solutions to the tough challenges that optimizing often brings around.

Here are six examples that show how using the creativity from a SEO-minded expert will prevail over using techniques that others may not even consider:

No.1 – Reputation Management Issues with a High Budget

Many SEO specialists are involved in high budget reputation management, which basically means that a product, company or person is taking control of the search results for whatever brand that the company focuses on – all of this done with a big budget. The majority of management is done through link building, neutral and positive content with keywords focusing on the particular brand or product all in a bid to reduce the negative content.

However there are other ways to do this and one alternative idea is to create some diversity by using many different brands with the same or very similar names. i.e. if Mr Richard Richardson wants to reduce her negative feedback for his name searches then you may want to boost the results for other Richard Richardson’s. This would encourage the search engines to use diversity algorithms to ascertain the results.

No.2 – Issues with Indexing Large E-Commerce Sites

Many large e-commerce sites struggle to get deep content indexed and many choose to optimize XML sitemaps that craft the navigation of the website to drive links to the deeper pages but this can be somewhat exhausting!

Why not try the following:

• Take out large numbers of pages and make them accessible to those who are logged in and those who are cookied human users. Also products and pages that have a very low search volume or low margins can also be eliminated and the more you can get rid of; the easier it becomes to achieve full indexation
• Create some blogs of your product, your product category and anything related to what you offer. This helps to send indexing signals to the search engine that index your website and blogging about your main products is the way to get started. This can also be done with Twitter links but it is important to build these up over a period of time to enable better indexing
• Rewrite your content and make sure it s all unique as others may have copy and pasted from your website and if they are using your content elsewhere your content is no longer original and therefore needs replacing or reworking

No.3 – Creating Endless Unique Content

When your website has hundreds or even thousands of pages that all need to be indexed it can get a little overwhelming when you realize that you need unique and original content for every single page! Many hire out freelancers to do the job or find in-house writers but there are some other options available:

• Use labor resources such as Mechanical Turk
• Aggregate the primary phrases and words and use multimedia content from paces such as YouTube
• Prioritize which pages really need your attention as all pages are not equal. Determine which pages add genuine value to your website and add your primary content there and then move onto the less important pages

No.4 – Beat the Competition with a String Link Profile

Instead of always trying to beat your competitors with the classic link building game for primary key phrases relating to your product; why not find a way to get around the system?

• Try using less obvious and alternative keywords that are aimed at the same audience that are likely to prove more popular in the future than right now. I.e. if it is October you may want to start focusing on keywords such as ‘Christmas deals (xxx product) etc
• Use video to create video rankings for the same page
• Use blogs and news feeds as well as Tweets to set off the QDF algorithm in order to produce alternative content types ahead of the searchers
• Get top rankings by winning the branding, social and talked about wars that will usually turn into links and recommendations
• Use social media, news and content to influence the search queries

No.5 – Gain Natural Links through Optimized Anchor Text

White hat link building can earn ideal anchor text and don’t let any black-hatter tell you otherwise!

• Earn anchor text through biographical and profile paragraphs
• Use press releases as these can get picked up by news media websites that will usually leave the link anchor text in place
• Write as a guest on a blog website for a publication that is relevant to your product and leave a backlink
• Use widgets, embeddable content and badges as these have full control over the link anchor text as long as you avoid looking like spam
• When you give away or you license content you can require specific anchor text via citation to help build optimal link text
• Use your employees, family members, friends and co-workers to link to you

Possibly a noteworthy prediction for 2011 – Google is likely to scrutinize exact match anchor text to a much higher level next year!

There are so many SEO practices to use that it can be tricky to know which ones are the best but it is safe to say that there are other options other than just the usual tricks of the trade on offer… Thinking outside the box will ensure that you go from a good SEO specialist to a great one!