Let’s face it. The SEO industry has always been a comfortable haven for unscrupulous business people. There are lots of shady SEO companies and contractors out there who lure unsuspecting customers in, take their money, and don’t deliver the results they promised. It’s a sad but true state of affairs.

Perhaps the saddest part is that when the unsuspecting client finds out he’s dealing with an SEO snake oils salesman, the client almost always writes off the entire premise of SEO as nothing more than a scam. They think that just because one SEO company ripped them off, the whole idea of search engine optimization is a farce. And that’s a total shame.

If you’ve been the victim of an SEO scammer, I’m strongly encouraging you not to give up. SEO isn’t a farce. And not all SEO companies are out to rip you off. In fact, the vast majority are run by good people who really can help your business build a more profitable online presence.

Instead of writing off SEO, here’s what you should do:

• Realize the importance of building a strong search engine presence. Just because you got ripped off by a shady SEO company doesn’t change the fact that having a strong search engine presence is essential to your business’ success. Remember, the majority of internet users start their internet session with a search. And more and more consumers use search engines to help guide their buying decisions. You need to make sure your site gets found when customers are searching for the products and services you offer.
• Learn the SEO basics. No, I’m not telling you to handle your own SEO. You probably don’t have the time for that. However, I do believe it’s a good idea to have at least a basic understanding of what good SEO is. If you understand the SEO best practices and basic theories, you’ll be able to tell when a company doesn’t know their stuff and is trying to rip you off. I recommend checking out SERPd to keep up with the latest news and best tips in the SEO industry.
• Learn from the mistakes you made in hiring the last company. Where did you go wrong last time? Did you hastily hire the first SEO company you came across? Did you enter into a long-term contract? Did you not ask your SEO company for references or case studies of their work? Learn from these mistakes so you can make an informed decision this time around.

Have you ever been burned by a shady SEO company? Share your experiences by leaving a comment.

A lot of the mystery about SEO can be solved simply by getting the information straight from the horse’s mouth. Yes, that’s right! One of the best SEO resources comes direct from Google. Specifically Matt Cutts. For a few years he has been uploading very helpful videos on the GoogleWebmasterHelp channel on YouTube. There are over 300 in fact. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel, I recommend doing so. It’s personally one of my favorite resources and something I place the a lot value in.

The channel has a variety of different videos, but the ones that I like the most are the QNA videos done by Matt Cutts. In these videos Matt answers questions that people have sent in. Matt has an excellent way of explaining things. He often breaks things down in ways that everyone can understand. You can quickly tell that it’s important to him that his message is understood well. The videos are recorded in a very relaxed and casual setting which really allow you to concentrate and absorb the information being shared. Here are a few examples.

In the world of SEO, often you hear about link building. It’s an important aspect of SEO. It’s so important that there are a slew of products, services, and tactics that claim to help people with building backlinks. Some of these products may work, but it’s a safe guess that many do not. Most of the services are very expensive, and I suspect that most fail to deliver what is expected. Lastly, it seems that there are only a few tactics that are truly effective. That said, have you ever considered learning more about different ways to build links yourself? Matt Cutts has recorded an 8 minute video that talks about just that. Here is the video below:

What about keyword spam? Specifically using multiple versions of the same phrase and rewording it multiple times in your content? (i.e. SEO Hosting, Hosting SEO, Search Engine Optimized Hosting, Optimized Hosting For Search Engines, etc.) In other words, does Google consider it keyword spam when you target multiple variants of the same keyword phrase? The reason why people do this is because in most cases each variant can return different results in the SERPs. Let’s see what Matt has to say about that:

A couple of years ago there was a lot of interest with converting a standard WordPress blog into a DoFollow blog. Meaning, the nofollow tag is either manually removed from the code or a plugin is used to achieve the same result. The purpose is to reward people by passing PageRank in exchange for leaving a comment on your blog post. This is still done today. But what does Matt Cutts have to say about this? Let’s find out. Pay attention to the point made at 2:00 minutes into the video:

Have you ever wondered why it takes a long time for Googlebot to come back to your site to reindex it? I have personally played around with this a few years ago and jokingly have called this Training the Googlebot. In other words, after Googlebot crawls your site, a short period later it will return to check for new content or changes in existing content. Over time, if new content isn’t available, or if the existing content hasn’t changed, Googlebot will stop visiting as often as it did before.

Knowing this, I “trained Googlebot” to visit many of my sites quickly by controlling the flow of new content being published. Meaning, if I wanted Googlebot to index new content FAST, I would train it to believe that my site was busy simply by published new content very often. The result ended with new content getting indexed within minutes of being published. A great example of a site that has a fast recrawl rate is Digg.com. New content on Digg will get indexed almost instantly. A great of a site that doesn’t get recrawled very often would be an old GeoCites webpage –if they still existed of course. Here’s what Matt Cutt has to say about Googlebot recrawl rates:

These are just a few of 300+ videos that can help you with solving the mystery with SEO. Many of these videos have less than 10k views. I really find that strange because the information is extremely valuable. The great news about the low view counts is that you will be learning from a resource that many other people don’t know about. This gives you an advantage over your competition. As mentioned in the beginning of this post, I strongly recommend subscribing to the channel. It’s a very valuable resource to have if you’re interested in learning more about SEO.

Out of the box WordPress is very search engine friendly. However, there are a few adjustments that can make WordPress a search engine magnet.  Over the next few weeks I am going to be publishing a series of posts that will teach you how to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. No advanced skills are needed to make these adjustments. This first post covers permalink structures and the All in One SEO plugin. If you have any questions, or need assistance, you’re invited to share them in the comment section below.

Step One: Permalink Structures

WordPress default permalink structure creates URLs that look like this:

?p=123

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. But the real bonus is SEO.

Google and other search engines look for keywords in web page URLs. It’s not known exactly how much the keywords in the URL influence ranking, but in my experience it appears to hold a lot of weight.

Here is a video of Matt Cutts talking about keywords in URLs.

Adding keywords into WordPress URLs is a quick and easy SEO enhancement. In your WordPress Dashboard scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the left column for the Settings section. From there you will see the Permalinks section.

Here’s a screen shot:

You can adjust your permalinks to display the day and name, month and name, numeric, or custom structure. Using the day and name setting adds the full year, month, day, and post title into the post URL. Using the month and name setting adds the full year, month, and post title into the post URL. The numeric option doesn’t add the post title into the post URL.

Custom structure is the option I choose. The reason I choose the custom option is because I don’t like to display the year, month, or date in the URL. I only want the keywords. In the past I have used this code:

/%postname%/

Lately, I have started using this code:

/%category%/%postname%/

You can learn more about using WordPress Permalinks here.

Here are some additional references that may help you:

• How to Use Permalinks to Enhance Your WordPress SEO Blog
• Tweaking WordPress Permalinks For Best SEO
• SEO Friendly URL Structure for WordPress Blogs
• The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog
• Best SEO WordPress Permalink Structure
• Setting Up Your WordPress Permalink Structure

Step Two: Install All in One SEO Plugin

Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Plugin has really stood the test of time. I have personally used this WordPress plugin for many years. The plugin gives you the ability to customize the structure of your article titles, optimize the titles of your category, tag, search, and archive section, and auto generate meta descriptions and keywords. There are many additional features that you should learn about as well. I recommend paying a visit to Michael Torbert’s home page and learning more about the All in One SEO Plugin. Michael also has a PRO version which might be worth checking out. Personally, I have never used it.

Here is a helpful video tutorial I found on YouTube that will teach you more about the All in One SEO plugin and how to configure it:

By the way, the All in One SEO plugin is one of my personal favorites. Stay tuned for the next post that will offer you more information on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. All of your comments, questions, and even suggestions are welcome. You’re invited to share your feedback using the comment form below.

If you’re like me, then you probably have a lot of trouble reading blog articles, eBooks, and online written tutorials. The reason for me is I have adult ADHD. It truly makes things real difficult for me. A great example is a project I have been doing lately. For many years I have been fascinated with web servers. In part of wanting to learn more about web servers, I have setup a few personal web servers in my home. I have one web server running CentOS, and two running Ubuntu Server. Progress with this project didn’t come until recently, despite wanting to do this for years!

The reason for slow progress is due my lack of ability to read, follow, and comprehend documentation and instructions. I simply can’t do it. Often I find myself reading the same sentence over repeatedly due to some kind of distraction. The things that distract me, typically don’t distract other people. The constant hum of a ceiling fan, people walking down the hall, the ticking of a clock, or water dripping from a faucet are all examples of things that cause terrible distractions. I have to completely isolate myself in order to learn something new. And this doesn’t happen to often because I live in house with kids.

I’m affected by the same problems with it comes to continually learning about SEO. I enjoy learning about search engine optimization just about as much as I enjoy learning about web servers. Ironically, the two some what go hand in hand. If you tend to have trouble like me, you may find yourself dependent on alternative means for learning and comprehending things. One of the best tools I use for learning things is watching videos. The invention of YouTube has given hope towards my continuing education. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But, it’s true.

I depend on visual aids. Video tutorials, screencasting, and articles rich in screenshots and pictures is what I need in order to learn. If alternatives to written content aren’t available, I even PRINT pages out. Holding a piece of paper in my hands makes a world of difference. A great example is when I recently printed the 740 page Apache HTTP Server Documentation manual. I didn’t exactly save any trees doing this, but in my opinion, this wasn’t wasteful because it helped me accomplish a goal. Junk mail, on the other hard, is an example of paper waste. And to help me conserve paper, I print on both sides. Doing that also keeps me from having to purchase wider binders.

The long story short is this. The Internet is an amazing place to gain knowledge. In the beginning, it started with sharing written data and written content. For those who can’t seem to focus, there are now many alternatives to written documentation. Instead of continuing to struggle doing something that obviously isn’t working, make a change. That’s the only way to push forward. One of the most memorable things my father told me when I was little was that you can’t continue to do the same thing over and expect to get different results. You have change something in order to change results.

Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy. If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll never attract quality traffic that converts, but you already knew that. However, just because you know the goals of keyword research, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it right.

Let me explain. I’m a freelance copywriter, and I often get called upon by clients to rewrite their website copy because it’s just not getting the job done. More times than not, one of the key problems with their copy is that it’s full of jargon and industry buzzwords. These are keywords that companies use to describe their products and services; they aren’t the same keywords buyers use to describe them. As a result, there’s a disconnect, and the website doesn’t attract a lot of buyers. And the few people who come to the website end up leaving because they can’t cut through the jargon to clearly understand what the products and services are.

Getting on the same page as your buyers is crucial to achieving true SEO success. Here are some basic tips that will ensure you’re using the same keywords your buyers use.

• Check your analytics to see how customers are arriving at your website. If you don’t already have analytics installed on your website, go get Google Analytics. With this tool, you can gain deeper insight into your website traffic. You’ll see which keywords visitors are using to arrive at your website and how they react once they land on your page. This is a good tool for understanding the types of phrases buyers really use when looking for your products and services.
• Use a keyword research tool to see what people are searching for. There are plenty of keyword tools you can use to better understand which terms buyers are searching for. Remember, it’s not always about going for the term that gets the highest search volume. It’s about figuring out which keywords will bring in interested buyers that you can convert more easily.
• Look at your competition’s website. I’m not saying you need to create a “me too” website, because that’s not going to convince visitors to buy from you. However, there are things you can learn by studying your competition. Take a look at the websites of your competitors, and try to figure out which terms they use to describe their products and services. Look at their title tags and source page to see which keywords they’re targeting.
• Search social media platforms to see how people talk about your products and services. As a copywriter, one of the biggest benefits I get from social media is studying the way customers talk. If you can study the types of phrases and tone your target audience uses when talking online, you can better target your copy to connect with them. You can also get an idea of which words they use when talking about your products and services.

Are you sure you’re using the right keywords on your website? What have you done to make sure you’re on the same page as your buyers?

My head literally had only hit the pillow for about 30 seconds before I re-realized this thought again. Second place is truly the first loser. And I came to realize that more than ever just a few moments ago. My son lost is cell phone in the snow last week and it stopped working. What I should do is probably punish him and not purchase a new phone, but because I am a common idiot father, I am going to replace his phone with something even better.

So, I logged into my AT&T account and like always, they offer an array of free add-on phones for my family plan. Many of these phones were actually pretty cool. One of the phones that I thought was nice was the Motorola Karma. I can get this phone free. But at any rate, in the process of reviewing these various phones, I decided to jump over to YouTube to see if there were any reviews.

Here’s the part where I re-realized that “second place is the first loser.” When I was doing my searches for these various phones, I felt very strong at clicking the first result. What’s crazy about this situation is that many hours later — once again, head crashed on pillow only 30 seconds — I was able to fully understand the power of ranking #1 for something.

In the case with the YouTube videos, I was clearly able to see the view count of each video on the search result page. In a few cases, the second and third result had more views and in fact seemed even more relevant than the #1 listing. Yet, what did I do? You guessed it… I clicked on the first result and watched that video. Reflecting back on why I did this, I remember saying to myself, “Well… if YouTube thinks this one should be #1, then that’s the video I need to watch to get the best review of this particular phone.”

Was that true? Well, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the fact that I clicked on the #1 result, and so do most people. So ultimately, the key to success is ranking #1. And this helps another point I have made many times before in the past. And that it is better to rank #1 for a keyword that only gets 100 hits per day than to rank on page two for a keyword that gets 10,000. No one looks at page two on Google. Not many people even look at the bottom first ten results.

Ranking #1 is the key. So that being said… when it comes to doing keyword research, or targeting various phrases, etc… remember to choose keywords, titles, and phrases that you feel you have the most chance at ranking number #1. Anything below that are simply losers…

Earlier, I wrote an article explaining how to use Google Analytics, and in one of the sections I included information about joining a Google Moderator series called, Web Analytics Question “Hour” with Avinash & Nick. If you don’t know what Google Moderator is, no problem, I wrote a post explaining about it , and how you can use it yourself to improve your own blog or website.

Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions. While they haven’t been exactly addressing these questions once a week, they have at least been addressing them.

That said, if you’re really looking to buckle down and learn the In’s and Out’s of Google Analytics, I totally suggest tuning in to this video Q’s and A’s offered by Avinash and Nick. Here is a recap of the items that have been addressed to date.

Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski: Part One

In Episode #1, published on October, 15, 2009 discussed the following items:

1. How is bounce rate calculated
2. Effect of search bots on data collection
3. Finding a benchmarking category for sites that don’t fit into any particular benchmark category
4. What is the best way to identify landing pages with high bounce rate
5. How to find new keywords to improve content performance
6. Effects of private browsing and incognito mode on data collection

Be sure to visit their blog post that goes hand in hand with the video. They include show notes and links that were referenced in this video.

Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski: Part 2

In Episode #2, published on November, 04, 2009 discussed the following items:

1. Strategies for non-bounced non-converted visitors (Macro vs. Micro conversion)
2. Ways to report total number of keywords over time
3. Benefits to tracking transactions as conversion goals
4. Tracking unique visitors to specific web pages
5. Path analysis for keyword reports — why it’s bad and what to do instead
6. How Google Analytics can be used on affiliate sites
7. How site owners can exclude themselves from being tracked by Google Analytics
8. How to properly track sites that reside on different domains but use a shopping cart on a different, common, site (cross domain tracking)

You’re going to want to view the blog post that correlates with the video because they include links to the resources discussed in the video tutorial.

Once again, if you’re looking to finally gain a better understanding of Google Analytics and how the program can help you, I suggest tuning in and listening to what Avinash and Nick say in these videos. While they said they’re going to be posting new videos weekly, it hasn’t been consistent. But that’s ok! I am pleased that they are doing them. That said, to assure that you don’t miss any of their new videos, I recommend subscribing to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel. Doing so, will get you a lot of great information in addition to the videos Avinash and Nick are providing.

Yesterday I wrote a post explaining about how Matt Cutts allowed the Google Webmaster Central team shave his head. I realized that some of the valuable information in that article that I wrote may have been hidden with all the excitement with Matt having his head shaved, so today, I want to bring the hidden jewels from yesterday’s post forward into this article. Specifically, I want to take a closer look at the 100+ short videos Matt Cutts published on YouTube and explain some things further that will help you understand more.

Should File Extensions be Used in URLs?

As most of you know, I am an avid WordPress user. Unless I am building from ground up, I use WordPress for all my website projects. That said, when I configure the permalink structure, I use the /post-title.php extension rather than /post-title/

The video provided by Matt Cutts confirms why.

Should nofollow links be used for Privacy Policy and Disclaimer Pages?

In the past, I have done this on my blogs. Usually I place sitewide nofollow links on my footer to my privacy policy and disclaimer pages. I am glad that I watched this video because Matt Cutts explains that the only reason why a webmaster would want to nofollow a page is to prevent the page from being indexed. The only reason why you would want to prevent a page from being indexed is if the page were to be determined useless. He further explains that privacy policy and disclaimer pages are very useful and they should not be nofollowed. An example of a page that should be nofollowed is a login page. Also Matt explains that it isn’t necessary to have site wide links to your privacy policy and disclaimer pages. A better idea could be to link to them from your home, about, and contact page instead.

Are Dates In URLs Search Engine Friendly?

I have debated about this for a few years with friends. I never believed that it was search engine friendly to include dates in URLs, if anything I felt like it placed important keywords too far to the right, causing some risk of them getting truncated in the SERPs. Matt Cutts explains that it’s a good idea to have a date stamp somewhere visible on your page for people, but it’s not something required by them, nor does it have any influence on ranking.

When I build niche sites that generate revenue using AdSense, typically I write 50 articles for the site and upload twenty of them immediately. From there, I use the WordPress scheduling feature to stagger the remaining 30 over the course of about three months. After watching these TWO videos, I suspect that doing this is unnecessary. Instead, I can now upload and publish all content in one session, and then use the extra time towards building quality backlinks.

How many pages can Google index from a single site?

Can I publish 100+ pages at once?

For now, that answers quite a few questions for me, I am sure that you’ll find this information useful as well. If you haven’t done so already, now would be a great time to subscribe to my RSS feed. As I drill down and watch more of Matt’s Grab Bag videos, I’ll piece more of them together here as I have done in this article today. Stay tuned… and in the mean time, you should take a look at his videos too. Be sure to check out the entire Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel as well.

You might be interested in learning how to become a better webmaster. Fortunately for you, Google has created a service called Google Webmaster Tools. It’s a free service which allows webmasters to check the indexing status and optimize the search visibility of their websites. Specifically you can use Google Webmaster Tools to check and set the Googlebot crawl rate, view lists of internal and external pages that link to your site, discover which keywords people search to find your site, view stats about how Google indexes your site, submit a sitemap.xml file, generate and maintain a robots.txt file, and set your preferred domain to www or non-www. If you haven’t started using Google Webmaster Tools, you need start today.

That said, if you’re interested in taking your first step towards becoming a better webmaster, I recommend reading the Google Webmaster Tools blog and subscribing to the RSS Feed. Secondly, I recommend subscribing to their YouTube Channel and investing time towards watching their videos. Just announced today, they have 154 videos with nearly 11 hours of footage generating one million views.

In celebration of this achievement, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, honored a lost bet by allowing the Webmaster Central team to shave his head and upload the video to their channel.

In a previous article I explained what Google Moderator was and how it could help you improve your website or blog.

It happens that Matt Cutts has been using Google Moderator to compile a list of the most popular questions about how to become a better webmaster. The end result was over 100 videos uploaded into the Webmaster Central YouTube channel in a play-list called Matt Cutt’s Grab Bag. If you’re serious about wanting to become a better webmaster, then I recommend that you invest time into watching these videos. That said, what advice, tips, and tricks do you have towards becoming a better webmaster? What are some other resources that can help too? Share what you know with everyone in the comments below.

Google suggests that it might be worth your effort to request to have links removed that are pointing from low grade sites to yours. The easiest way this can be done is by searching the site for a “Contact Us” page, email address, or a phone number. If none can not be found then a Whois search can be performed. A Whois search will typically return the contact information of the site owner. Sometimes site owners block their contact information with a private registration. If that’s the case, then it may be possible to pass a message to the owner through the hosting company.

Of course if it’s not easy to contact the owners of the sites linking to yours, then it might not be worth the time invested. On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they suggests that efforts be made towards having links removed; however, if there are sites less than desirable linking to yours, Google does offer some reassurance by stating that they have 200 factors when it comes to determining relevancy in the search results. I don’t recommend investing time towards contacting site owners requesting the removal of links. Instead, I suggest investing time towards increasing the number of higher quality links pointing to your site.

Controllable things are another thing that should be taken into consideration. Once again, Google points focus on their design, content, technical, and quality guidelines. Google implies that they understand that certain things fall outside your control. With that, explain that emphasis is given things that webmasters can control such as having a well maintained site with high quality and original content with an excellent linking structure. And I agree. I can’t think of a single popular site that I would consider to be a terrible site. I am sure they exist, and I am sure you can leave a comment pointing me to a few; but all in all, in my opinion, all popular sites I have seen, fall within these guidelines.

My advice to site owners is to maintain a clean, high quality, and organized site that genuinely interests people. Don’t invest time into removing low quality backlinks and only invest some time into high quality backlink molding. I think it’s more important to spread awareness about your site, instead. If people like what they see, then they’ll come back many times over, and also they’ll link to it as well. Additionally, encouraging people to share information is very helpful too.

So what do you think? Do you think that it’s worth your time to remove low quality backlinks? What about spending time towards backlink molding? And what about time spent marketing and promoting your site? Share your thoughts in the comments below.