For those late to the party, negative SEO is when “Company A” can pay black hat agencies to set up massive amounts of links in bad neighborhoods linking to “Company B”. When Google sees these massive amount of links, they start penalizing Company B in the rankings because it looks like Company B is illegally buying links. Company A wins.  Google denies that it truly has this desired effect, but at the same time released a Disavow Tool for Company B to put in place to tell Google which bad sites to ignore.

Now Google is set to release Penguin 2.0 in the next couple of weeks and will continue in waves over the summer. Penguin 2.0′s primary focus is to clear out and/or penalize websites that are practicing the art of buying links or that try to essentially game Google‘s system, which is exactly what negative SEO is designed to make unsuspecting sites look like they’re doing to Google.

The question is now, how will Google be able to sort out which companies are victims of negative SEO and which companies are actually breaking the rules. Google’s Matt Cutt’s put out a video explaining that Mom & Pop stores shouldn’t worry (see the video on our previous post), but what if you’re not a Mom & Pop store?  And as mentioned, he then denoted that you could use the Disavow tool to indicate what websites have you listed on them that you want Google to ignore. The problem there is that you have to know those sites exist and by then, it’s too late.

While we know we sound a tad like Chicken Little here, this simply has bad news written all over it that Google would release an algorithm change that would play right into the hands of negative SEO. People should expect to hear more about this in the coming 1+ months as companies far and wide begin to fall off the Google SERP’s and start screaming foul. Just remember this post when all hell breaks loose in the coming weeks.

What Can You Do?
Unfortunately not much, because if you can find those bad links (if you have them), so can Google and they’re much quicker than you probably are.  Any bad sites that have your site listed on them are probably already indexed by Google. But if you haven’t experienced any bad effects of their presence yet, the time to act is now.

Use tools like Arelis/IBP to start looking to see if your website has been placed anywhere that you are not familiar with or didn’t setup yourself. You should expect to see certain growth patterns and an occasional bad anomaly, but if you start seeing placement on completely irrelevant websites or sites that contain questionable content, use the Disavow tool like your life depended on it because when Penguin 2.0 is in full swing, your companies online existence may very well be in major jeopardy.

If a black hat company could run a mass push to place links in very bad neighborhoods (porn sites, gambling sites, link farms, etc.) and do it so that it appears that the company is trying to buy links or acquire better rankings through techniques that Google greatly frowns upon, it could very well do what they say. Google could see those efforts and recognize them as tactics that don’t comply with the Google rules and regulations and hit the site with penalties or worse, de-indexing.

Google great Matt Cutts released a video (shown below) to discuss this practice referred to as “Negative SEO” and he mentions that it’s “very unlikely” and then uses statements such as, “We TRY really hard to create an algorithm that is resistant to those types of thing.”  Most of what indicates to anyone reading between the lines, that they know the practice of negative SEO exists and have algorithms in place to recognize it, but that it doesn’t catch it all.

So much so, that they’ve implemented a Disavow Tool which allows you to create a text file listing websites that you wish to, well, disavow. That way, Google can ignore those websites that you’ve listed and not consider them when deciding where you’re going to rank.

The problem with the disavow link is that you have to already be aware of where those bad links are, decide whether they are actually bad links (as best you can guess in Google‘s mind), and to have either already been a victim of a rankings hit or guess that the presence of your link on that website will have a negative impact on your rankings.

While Google may well be able to identify a huge percentage of the companies that are trying these negative SEO tactics, the very existence of the disavow tool only acknowledges and gives credence to those companies claim that it can be done. And with fees upwards of $5000, this also gives those companies some monetary “wiggle room” to buy links on those evil sites which adds even more validity to their claims.

While 90% of the black hats that claim it can be done, couldn’t pull it off if their life depended on it due to Google’s efforts, there still remains a 10% chunk that just may be able to do what they say. As Matt Cutts noted in his video below, if you’re a company trying to oust a competitor from the front pages of Google, your time would be better suited putting efforts into your own site to make it better. But it’s still disturbing to know that it can be done.

Back in the early days of website design, ranking on various directories and search engines was as simple as putting some info on a page and then crafting your meta tags. Search engines relied on what it said almost disproportionately to what was actually going on with the page itself.  Its influence was so weighted that it quickly became misused and frustrating for developers who were playing by the rules as they got outranked by people gaming the system by keyword stuffing.

As it became glaringly obvious that the “honor system” wasn’t going to prevail, search engines quickly began to disregard it and it became the bastard child of meta tags. There were some meta tags that were still useful such as the title and description which gave developers an opportunity to convey what the site was about and there was no threat of misuse as search engines simply wouldn’t rank the site if the content didn’t match.

Other meta tags like content type, robots tags, content language, etc. were also no threat of being misused because if they weren’t correct, a wide host of problems could occur including your website not being displayed correctly. Those tags gave the search engines some of the meat and potatoes of how your site was structured.

But the red-headed step child of meta tags was still supposedly disregarded. Dating back to as early as 2009, Google Guru Matt Cutts indicated that Google does not utilize meta tag keywords. But then this year, it was revealed by ex-Google employee Andre Weyher that they do indeed look at the meta tag keywords to help contribute to understanding what the site was about.

It’s insinuated across the board that the meta tags will have no impact on your rankings, but that it does still provide an indicator to the search engines (Google, at least) that it is being used to add to their understanding of what’s on the page.

Additionally, you should make different meta tags for each page you have indexed. Duplicating your meta tags keywords on every page wouldn’t hurt your rankings, but you’d only be doing a disservice to yourself by not taking advantage of an opportunity to give a clearer picture to Google about your site regardless of how insignificant it may or may not be.

Most importantly, Google can smell keyword stuffing a mile away. There will be many who will continue to misuse the keyword meta tag and they’re only shooting themselves in the foot. Andre Weyher stated, “You shouldn’t overdo it. I see a lot of sites with a huge amount of them in the META data. Webmasters need to remember that the more of them you have, the less each one of them is worth!”

To stuff your meta tag keyword area or fill it with useless words like various city names (Atlanta car dealer, Lawrenceville car dealer, Marietta car dealer, etc.), colors (blue car, red car, green car) is a crying shame to waste your efforts on that ignorant decision. Let’s not forget that somewhere in that algorithm lies the schematic of what was once Google’s Wonder Wheel. That essentially means that littering your code with a dozen unnecessary variations is worthless since Google is well aware of the keyword hierarchy.  Variances are fine, but within reason.

All of that being said, it’s time to start using those tag areas again, but to keep it in check. Keep your keywords to a minimum and a good rule of thumb may be no more than 6. Think of the top 5 keywords a customer or potential client would use in the search engines to find that particular page and use them. If the variations are too close, replace them with other possibilities. It’s not rocket science. Don’t overdo it and know that you will never be able to game the system for any length of time. We still can’t believe it’s back again.

As the browser wars continue, Google Chrome begins to take more of a share away from Internet Explorer, but the latest announcement that Google searches done via Chrome would utilize SSL layers has many SEO pundits up in arms.

According to the Chromium Blog, this change will hit with Chrome 25 which is currently in development and it will occur with both users who are signed in to Google and now with users who are not signed in to Google. To be fair, all browsers have implemented this action and most have been utilizing it for over a year now. The change protects users from information being seen by anyone malicious who might be trying to intercept their queries and use them accordingly. Once the newest version of Chrome hits the market, it’s affect on keyword research could take a nasty hit.

The problem that this creates is that it hides the keyword the person used from analytics programs, so instead of being able to see what the person is searching for, the keyword is shown as simply “not set” or “keyword not provided” since the data is hidden and not passed on after the click. Since a majority of searches are done via Google, this will make it increasingly difficult to analyze what keywords are working and which aren’t.

It’s said that Google Analytics shouldn’t take too much of a hit, but we found completely otherwise in our research with “not provided” showing up more than any others and increasing every month.  Some report double digit increases every quarter.  As for external programs such as IBP, Webtrends, SAS and others will become less dominant in that field making any keyword research data culled from Google searches useless. And what choice do the other search providers like Yahoo! and Bing have but to also follow the same trend or be seen as “not secure” and for the most part, they have already followed suit.

It’s hard to argue against user security, but it will make the task of keyword research even more difficult to pinpoint when trying to assess what works and what doesn’t.  How are you planning to accommodate for this change in your keyword research strategy or will this even affect you at all?

Maybe Matt Cutts, of Google fame, was in a rare Christmas mood, but in the middle of a Google forum post, he shook up the SEO world once again by announcing that press releases have virtually no effect on your rankings. Something we were well aware of, but still a relief when a Google rep confirms your assumptions. So since he brought it up, let’s talk about this briefly.

Press releases only serve to get your newsworthy item out in front of as many eyeballs as possible. The goal is to hopefully be picked up by a news outlet, be it magazine, newspaper, radio or TV and get the massive promotion blitz that only they can create.

The problem is that most businesses and others seeking to reap SEO benefits have always touted it as a great tool for ranking increases and truthfully, it’s never been effective in that manner.  It doesn’t mean that you should abandon press releases, because they can still be a powerful tool if it’s used effectively and realistically. But what exactly does that mean?

To start, the free press release sites are pretty much worthless. Not only are they misused by millions of marketers, but the media outlets almost never utilize them for their news. Use a true PR agency like PRWeb or PRNewswire for your press release because those agencies have wide distribution models that actually get viewed.  The unspoken media outlets perception is that any release worth reading should at least be invested in by its creator.  Even if your item doesn’t get picked up, you will still acquire a good amount of links on various web based news sites and that does have an effect on your rankings in some cases.

Secondly, make sure that it’s actually worth doing a press release.  Pieces worth a release would be big events that need extra promotion like celebrity appearances, major changes or acquisitions in your business and similar types of events.  Not only will it be worth the investment in time and money, but it will also have a larger possibility of actually being picked up by the media outlets.

The main confusion caused by Matt Cutts statement comes from the misconception that you can achieve a direct ranking push (or nudge) to your site by doing regular press releases and that’s simply never been the case. There are no case studies that we’ve seen that indicate that weekly press releases have any notable impact on rankings, so don’t waste your hard earned money.

As mentioned, press releases should be used only for big events and newsworthy items and submitted via professional press release channels in order to reap the most benefits. Those benefits would be a possible increase in links and increased visibility from individuals that could see the content of the press release.

Matt Cutts statement that you shouldn’t expect the release to provide any rankings impact is essentially true. Press releases are notoriously littered with link bait and keyword stuffing and that practice has severely degraded their worth over the years. Additionally, most of the sites that do re-post press releases are dynamically generated and that practice devalues the quality of the link unless the release is lucky enough to land on a site that is highly relevant to your industry and even then, the impact is minimal.

So with press releases, simply be careful about letting your expectations get the best of you.  If you find yourself constructing a press release for SEO purposes, you’re simply wasting your time. If you can’t imagine your local news anchor talking about it on the 6 o’clock news, it probably is a pointless venture.

Bing turned up the heat on Google with their new advertising campaign telling customers that if they buy ads on Google Adwords network that they’re getting “Scroogled“.

The campaign which is housed at http://scroogled.com takes several swipes at Google Adwords by using multiple quotes from Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page culled from past interviews to show how advertising is skewed and “not good for the consumers”. The Brin and Page quotes included in the Scroogled campaign include;

• “For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
• “But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”
• “In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.”

The Scroogled campaign then takes quotes from The New York Times including these;

• “The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair.”
• “But Google is walking a tricky line, which antitrust regulators are watching closely.”

And to add insult to injury in order to avoid the accusations of taking quotes out of context, Bing then pulled statements from Google‘s IPO letters, SEC filings and disclosures including;

• Founders IPO Letter: “we do not accept payment for [search results] or for inclusion or more frequent updating.”
• Google’s 2004 SEC Filing: “Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them.”
• Google’s 2012 SEC Disclosure: “After all, ads are just more answers to users’ queries.”

They then top it off with a “How Google Does It” PDF and the cherry on top, a Scroogled video;

It’s should be obvious to anyone that Bing is ready to play hard ball (as they have been for years now) and that they now feel that there is enough negative press currently to support this “Scroogled” effort. Bing does a lot to show how badly Google is handling paid advertising, but doesn’t do that thorough of a job proving how they do it better.

The truth is that there are always going to be complaints no matter what system you use. You either don’t have enough money to compete in highly competitive arenas or you have to spend an inordinate amount of time building up your site’s relevancy in order to perform well under the mysterious umbrella of Google’s Quality Score. And if you do the latter well enough, you’ll start appearing organically anyway which then negates a major part of the reason why people opt for Adwords in the first place (unless they’re shooting for the “trifecta”).  Bing needs to shift focus and show their advantages instead of spending so much time focusing on Google‘s disadvantages.

But while most of the campaign focuses on Google Adwords, the true battle continues to rage on as to which is truly the better search engine. Independent blind studies continue to show that people actually prefer Bing‘s search results over Google‘s. Bing has tried arduously to prove this with their “Bing It On” comparison tool where people can do random searches side by side and see just how many times they choose Bing over Google SERPs. Bing continually wins the studies, but still no one listens.

My own study had Bing as the winner 3 out of 5 times and I also randomly asked 4 others to try it and achieved the same result. Google didn’t win any of the contests. The same results also occurred from a study by Dave Davies on Search Engine Watch, where he too, ended up handing Bing the gold medal.

Even amid some of the “Bing is copying Google” scandals and Bing’s adamant denial of the situation, Bing continues to prove that their results are not only better than Google‘s, but that people also agree in blind tests.

All being said, Bing seems to have a winning formula for search results that work (and are proven) and paid advertising that they feel is more “fair and balanced”. Now the trick is figuring how just how far they need to go to get people to actually listen.

What are your thoughts on Bing versus Google?

Every now and then we get exciting news from behind the Google curtain and whenever we can get a clearer picture as to what Google’s expectations are, the better it makes our lives. Ex-Google web spam team member Andre Weyher provided some of the secret sauce with James Norquay and here are some pretty major takeaways.

Don’t keyword stuff or use “commercial keyword” hyperlinks freely.

It’s pretty common to litter your verbiage with hyperlinks using competitive keywords and keyword phrases like ‘car insurance’ or ‘wood furniture’ which he refers to as commercial keywords. Andre says to not do that and keep it to a minimum. “If 90% of the anchor texts on your backlinks are commercial keywords, it’s a dead giveaway of a spammy profile, especially if the links run in to the tens of thousands. This would never occur naturally. So ensure you have non-commercial keywords anchor texts in there too – like the url of the website and long tail keywords.”

Should you waste your time getting listed in these directories like DMOZ?

The short is answer is yes and no, but he does insinuate that it would be in your best interest to get involved with directories that cater to your niche. So if you’re a car dealership, get listed in a directory that is specific to dealerships or the brand of car you sell. As for general purpose directories, he does give some love to the directory list at SEOMoz as “good and up to date.” We agree.

The return of meta tag keywords?!

Of the most surprising revelations he shared was that Google does indeed read meta tag keywords. While it will not help you in regards to ranking, he says that it does help Google get a clearer picture of what your site is about. But he also cautions to the overuse of it saying that less is way more.

“You shouldn’t overdo it. I see a lot of sites with a huge amount of them in the META data. Webmasters need to remember that the more of them you have, the less each one of them is worth! The less of them you put in your META data, the more powerful each one of them becomes. They might not make a difference in the battle for the #1 position for the keyword “cola” between Pepsi and Coke, but they might give a head start to the bakery around the corner, competing for the keyword ‘bakery in Brooklyn’.“

What things would get your site labeled as spam by Google?

Keyword stuffing (using the same keywords way too many times and unnaturally) such as “We are an Atlanta furniture store selling furniture in Atlanta. Come find furnishings for your Atlanta home. Visit our furniture store today right here in Atlanta.”  Other indicators would be the above mentioned over-usage of commercial keywords which he says come across as unnatural. And as for linking, he says, “How many links are there in total? A very important one; what is the quality of the pages they come in from? Do the pages look ‘real’ or are they just there to host the links? What anchors are used? The commercial vs. non commercial ratio of the anchors.”

The number he threw out in the interview was 90%.  If 90% of the hyperlinks present on your site are commercial keywords, it may be a good idea to pull back.  You know which ones you set up for specific SEO reasons. Fix it.

Some people simply can’t help themselves. Truly understanding a customers intent is paramount to your online success. You should start being realistic that the terms that will make you the most money will not be the ones that are searched for millions of times each month.

If only 100 people a month searched for a “long tail” term, would it be worth it to you to chase that phrase? What if that phrase was so specific, that it converted 50% of the time? If each sale netted you a couple hundred bucks, would 50 sales a month be okay with you? Sure it would.

That’s why it’s bizarre to witness people throwing all of their money into campaigns to chase that magic keyword phrase that gets over a million searches every month, but is so broad, that it never converts. When that happens, it causes a “bounce” (when people leave your site almost as quick as they came to it).  When bounces happen, Google makes note of it and then not only do you lose a sale, but your rankings begin to dip heavily because Google doesn’t think that your site is relevant for that term and begins to push you further down the page.

Think about your own business and learn to pay attention and think like a search engine. If you’re a Chinese restaurant, don’t focus on the keyword “chinese restaurants”. The very fact that the term is plural already puts you at a disadvantage. If a user is searching for Chinese restaurants, they are looking for ANY chinese restaurant. The winner of these search results are going to be the websites that list multiple Chinese restaurants like Yelp, Zagat, UrbanSpoon, etc. You are not multiple Chinese restaurants. You’re just one restaurant.

Focus on adding in the geographic location of your business onto the service you offer. Buford Chinese restaurant, Lawrenceville car wash, etc.  This will give you great advantages if Google utilizes location data (assuming your business has a physical location) since most searches are done via mobile devices nowadays. We’ll be talking about that in the next day or so.

Next, find out what people are actually searching for. If you see terms trending such as “dry cleaning coupons”, “cheap car wash”, then you should set up pages on your site to help support those searched terms. Car wash coupons being searched for heavily? Set up a page that lists specials, offers and printable coupons and be sure to reflect the search phrase in the title tag,  in the text and at the top of the page in a header tag. Many businesses fight against the word “cheap” because it gives off the connotation of low quality, but that’s simply not the case. That’s just the term that people use in place of “inexpensive” or “doesn’t cost a lot of money” and you should embrace keywords in this arena.

Remember, someone searching for “cars” is just browsing. Someone searching for “1978 Chevy Impala in Atlanta” is looking to buy. For whatever reason that is. Maybe they’re shooting a rap video.

Remember, you need to pay attention to what people are actually searching for and stop running from good converting sales simply because only 1000 people are searching for it every month. That’s 1000 potential sales that you probably wish you had. The longer the tail, the bigger the animal. Kill it!

You can see the Google results pages literally changing right in front of you. What used to be plain text and links now have photos, reviews, and a wealth of useful additions that make it much easier for you to get to the true information that you want. Welcome to the world of rich snippets. How can your business take advantage of these coding wonders, what are they, how do you use them, and what can they do for you?

A rich snippet is a simple coding alteration that tells search engines a lot more specifics about what information is on the page. The practice has been around for a couple of years now, but don’t feel like you’ve missed the boat.  Search engines have really just started to fully utilize that data to alter the results and experiment with new uses for it every day.

A good example would be the recipe snippet for the brownie recipe example below. All 3 listings in the example use rich snippets to show you calories, cooking time,  photos, reviews for their brownie recipes, and other data. All of which are wrapped in rich snippet coding in the backend of their pages.

What may have even caught your eye is that Google can also analyze the data on those pages and separate out certain specifics which allow them to then provide the additional search options that you see on the left hand side giving the searcher the ability to then narrow their search by cooking times, calories, ingredients, etc. And all of this is brought to you courtesy of rich snippets.

Rich snippets can also envelope product reviews…

…contain information on specific people like positions, titles, and companies…

..show event listings for venues…

…have on page clickable links to media such as song clips…

And so much more….

But what’s even more amazing is that you have the capability to apply this to your own websites and get the advantage of having a better visual search result which will give you an amazing advantage over your competitors.

Implementation of snippets into your coding may be the most time consuming of the tasks, but the impact it offers is huge. You need to be somewhat familiar with HTML coding and if you’re familiar with CSS, you’ll find that it’s pretty much the same type of format.

A product page about a blender may normally look like this:

<div>
<h1>Super Blender</h1><br>
<img src=”best-blender.jpg”><br>
<b>Price: </b> $100<br>
<b>Description: </b>The best blender ever.<br>
<b>Reviews: </b>”This is the best blender ever!<br>
</div>

This code is obviously generic and not typical, but an example of what that same block of code would look like after you implemented rich snippets would look like so;

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://www.schema.org/Products”>
<span itemprop=”name”><h1>Super Blender</h1><br></span>
<span itemprop=”name”><img src=”best-blender.jpg”><br></span>
<b>Price: </b><span itemprop=”price”> $100<br></span>
<b>Description: </b><span itemprop=”description”>The best blender ever.<br></span>
<b>Reviews: </b><span itemprop=”review”>”This is the best blender ever!<br></span>
</div>

As you can see, you would simply reference the schema that you’re using (in this case, the one at http://www.schema.org/Products) and then wrap each piece of information (name, price, description, etc.) to properly identify it to the search engines. The search engines then take that data and use them in a variety of different ways.  A direct result of its use is the beautification of the search results that has been in place for quite some time now. But what may come next is unknown and it doesn’t look to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Google has released a bunch of videos to help you through the process, so re-explaining it here via text when humans like yourself are visually stimulated would be pointless. So take a look at the videos here and start coding your site accordingly. We’ve also included a great infographic from BlueGlass that provides even more visually stimulating info on the topic.

The diference that you will experience in the way your results look all the way down to clickthrough increases can be immense. It’s time to get coding!

Introduction to Rich Snippets

Types of Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets: Reviews

Rich Snippets: Products

Rich Snippets: Recipe Markup

Rich Snippets: Events

Rich Snippets: Breadcrumbs

Rich Snippets: Apps

Notifying Google of Rich Snippets

Troubleshooting Rich Snippets

There’s no doubt that SEO is a tricky business. The primary problem could be that people see it as just that. A trick. We’re viewed as guardians of some magic that we make people pay money for and it makes them mad because it’s the equivalent of your uncle’s disconnected thumb trick.

But true SEO professionals don’t use games or trickery to improve rankings. It’s a hard battle and we’ve offered tons of tips and guidance over the years. Many of which people simply choose to ignore. And just like Lady Gaga still can’t sing, the rules haven’t changed.

It’s a tad surprising that anyone is even remotely shocked at what has unraveled with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates. The warnings and signs have been in place for years and Google has been very forthcoming about its stance on strategies like mass link building, duplicate content, hidden text, and other website atrocities.

And even though it’s been said before, the problem is that most people don’t listen. We’ve already given you a rundown of what Google expects on previous posts as told to you BY Google. But since you refuse to listen to God, I mean Google, we’ll make this a tad easier for you to grasp by giving you the 11 best tips we can think of. It may cause some of you to scoff, but that’s okay. Scoff on.

1) Love what you’re doing.
Are you running a website selling baby clothes because you are obsessed with baby clothes, love to share ideas and want to sell some of your creations? Then by all means, continue what you’re doing. However, if you’re running a baby clothes site because you heard that it’s very lucrative, you must have recently shaved your privates too closely because nothing on the web is lucrative. It will drain every bit of energy you have to keep running a site that you don’t have a passion for. And eventually, your site visitors will notice. It is incredibly easy to spot a website that has been put up by someone that simply does not have any passion for the content.

2) Update content often and carefully
Update your website with new content frequently. And when you do, check and double check for grammatical errors and misspellings. What’s the first thing that you think of when you see a site with misspellings? Amateur. It also carries quite a bit of weight with Google who may give precedence to someone else’s website over yours if your site is littered with it.

3) Don’t be a copy cat
Don’t take photos or content from other people’s websites, even if you have permission. Websites that contain a lot of content that was duplicated from other websites around the web were the ones that got the biggest slap during Google’s Panda update. God forbid if Tom Bosley talked you into signing up with SMC or some other “build you own online storefront” package, but if you do, you’re almost doomed from the start. Your best bet is to sit down and rewrite all of the product descriptions that they sent to you. It will seem tedious and similar to killing an army of ants with a needle, but in the end you will definitely win the battle of the SERP’s. Additionally if you can purchase, photograph or locate alternate product photos (besides the ones that they sent to you), that would be a huge advantage over the other suckers.

4) Do your research
Find out what keywords people are searching for when looking for your product or service. Search the web for Google Keyword Tool to see a rough estimate of how many people searched for the keyword that you THINK they’re searching for. Then use those keywords in your meta tags, title tags, headers, descriptions and text, but…

5) Don’t overdo it
If your website is about Pitbull puppies, don’t litter the pages with that phrase repeatedly ad nauseum. “Welcome to my Pitbull puppy website. We sell Pitbull puppies and breed pitbull puppies. Want to buy a pitbull puppy? Choose from the list! Click here for white pitbull puppies, click here for brown pitbull puppies. Click here for black pitbull puppies. Click here for grey Pitbull puppies.” If there is anything that will get you penalized quicker than Michael Vick, it’s that type of old school approach to keyword stuffing. This was one of the focuses of Google’s Penguin update. The other was…

6) Mass linking madness
You’ve probably seen it before, but paying a service to acquire mass linking is a bad idea. Shockingly, even SEOMoz had supported a service that allowed you to buy links at one point back in the day, but this is never a good idea. Don’t buy links anywhere. If you simply have no way to acquire links because no one wants to link to your Blow Up Clown Doll website, sign up with a service like LotusJump. LotusJump will share ideas with you about where are good places to acquire links on sites like Yahoo Answers, various blogs, etc. While this is not the way that Google would prefer you to acquire links, this is a very “white hat” strategy to getting them.

And before SEO pros get all wonky screaming, “That’s not white hat!”, let me clarify this. If you use a tool like this, keep in mind that people will read your posts. Use the oppotunity to contribute to the conversation. That is the white hat way. Simply slapping your URL on comment sections is bad juju. You will rot in hell for that.  Use it as an online equivalent to networking. LotusJump simply tells you where your networking would help you the best.  The preferred method would be to post content that people would want to link to and that do so rabidly. As they would with a Blow Up Clown Doll website.

7) Manage your mess
If Google feels as if your website structure is just plain confusing, disorganized, or broken, don’t expect to rank well. Keep your information well organized. We’ve spoken about website siloing before using the silo strategies to keep everything uniform. Additionally, you should always pay attention to Webmaster Tools to spot broken links and clean up your act. And if it happens too frequently for you to keep up with because of insanely fast moving automated parts, then by all means create a custom 404 page that allows them to get to other locations within your site to find the information they’re looking for in case pages get broken.

8) Utilize social media and bookmarking
This will be our next post is to show you how to best utilize social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit and others to achieve greater visibility and potentially more incoming links. For now, sign up with a service like OnlyWire and get a list of services that you can post to and begin setting up accounts to them. This is yet another task that’s less fun than shaving a possum with rabies, but well worth it in the end. I mean, have you ever seen a shaved possum? It’s awesome. As for social networking, you already know that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are a must to have if you want to survive online. Build up your business presence on those sites as best you can and utilize their built in tools that will walk you through the process.

9) Take all that Google gives you
Use every service that Google offers. As Google continues to grow in size, they integrate their services into their new offerings. Upload your meaty content rich documents to Google Documents and share with the public. Make sure your business location is listed on Google+ Local and that all of the fields are used (videos, photos, address, store hours, description, URL, etc.). Use Google Adwords to get to those front pages until you start rolling and turn on those ad extensions! Sign up and actively use Google+ as much as you do Facebook! We think you get the point. Use whatever they offer because all of it is part of a bigger plan that you don’t understand. And never will.

10) Use microdata
While this could be a huge post all in itself (and will be soon), microdata is going to be imperative to have in your site to compete and it’s coming as quickly as a unicorn on fire. Instead of repeating what’s already been said, simply head to http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=176035 and get the entire scoop on microdata and how to implement it into your website.

11) Go mobile
Make sure that however you setup your site, that you’re prepared for mobile. You simply must have a mobile version of your site ready for people to view on their iPhone, Android tablets, iPad, etc. A majority of your searches come from those sources and as it gets more accessible, you will become less relevant if you’re not prepared.

So those are your 11 top tips for now. We could keep going, but those are the ones that will have the most impact.

But what’s the point of even having an SEO professional helping your business? Isn’t the point of hiring an SEO pro to have them deep dive into your website and flip a few switches and magically you’re number one? Trust us. If we could actually do that, we would be very, very rich.

The advantage of having a professional on your side is primarily because we are intimately familiar with all of the rules and guidelines of Google and what they expect to see. We know exactly what to change, how to change it, and most importantly, what not to do. We know the strategies. And even as we laid out some great ground rules for you, your head is reeling and you have no idea what to do first. See what we did there? We inundated you with a “to-do” list. But we actually do think that you can handle a lot of it.

Get a strategy in place and tackle them one by one or hire someone who actually knows how to do all of it. And by all means, don’t purchase anything that is touted as a quick fix. Great websites take a lot of time to put together and to build an audience. If you try to make it happen quickly, or take shortcuts, you could find yourself squashed and beaten. Of all of the tips we’ve given, the most important is to find your passion and focus on that. There’s nothing better than being able to say, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”