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I found this article and thought everyone here would enjoy it. It’s pretty funny!

How To Succeed At SEO (Not!)
By T. O’ Donnell

Here are a few tips to help a truly grrrreat site become even better. Try them all, you know you want to!

1. The Latest Grey-hat Wheeze.

Link farms, scraping, fake directories; whatever it is, get in there! If a newbie webmaster forum is buzzing about it, that’s the time to take it up. Put it on your main breadwinner, and wait for the hits to come in.

2. Over-optimisation.

Give the search engines what they want. Make damn sure they know what the page is about. Seven word image names, ten word ALT tags, hidden text, three H1 tags, that’ll tell the b*stards. Top of Google’s first page for you. Your clients swoon at your mAd skILLz. Respec’!

3. No Optimisation.

Google is run by Gods with brains the size of watermelons. Their algorithm is sentient. Whatever tricks you try won’t work. So don’t try any. And when your site gets booted in the next update anyway, defend their right to do so, piously.

4. Content Generators.

Life’s short. So much work, so many Stargate downloads to watch. Automate your content generation. Software is there to make life easier. Slap together RSS feeds, auto-generated text, free articles and Wikipedia pulls. Monetise with Adsense. Repeat for 300,000 pages. Is it time for that Pot Noodle? It’s _always_ time!

5. Reciprocal links.

Google loves links, and it’s too hard to get them unasked for. So ask! Send out 5000 emails cadging links to your .info domain. Don’t bother proof-reading it, they’ll only skim it. When they agree to a swop, you’ll be too busy to reciprocate. That’ll be a one-way link, then, ha ha!

Those sweeties at Google don’t mind reciprocal links. Lots of famous sites interlink, so yours should be OK too. WebDevDood on Leetwebforum.com said so.

6. Low original-to-duplicate content ratio.

People don’t read. Original content is too expensive to make. The Google algorithm ain’t all that. 200 words surrounded by the same header, footer and sidebars in a 20,000 page site will keep them coming back again and again. Have a pop tart.

7. CMS with same TITLE and no META description on each page.

There are so few pages on the internet these days that you can use any open-source CMS as-is. Just set up your forum, slap on the Adsense, let your visitors witter away, sit back and wait for the search engine lurrrve! You bad boy, have another Red Bull, you deserve it!

8. Because _they_ weren’t penalised, you won’t be.

So many webmasters say their site has X or Y, and Google didn’t mind, but funnily enough, _you_ got busted for it. Their content, backlinks, and site structure must be the same as yours, then, eh? Spooky!

9. Huge number of new links, in a short time, to a new domain.

DevWebDood says that if MySpace.com can get a million backlinks in a short space of time and not be penalised, then so can you. Just set up a travel or hotel site, join the Co-op and LinkVault, do a blog spam and watch your site race up the SERPs.

So what if it’s nowhere to be found next month? Better the fleeting taste of victory, than never having tried at all!

10. Got banned? Give ‘em Hell about it!

Write a long email to Google. State how great your site is, how they’re hurting your business, and how _you’re_ doing _them_ a favour by letting them list it. Admit no fault, it shows weakness.

Then get on as many forums as you can complaining about how the SERPs suck, how -> insert famous site here <- is doing just what you did, and _they're_ still in.

Google will be so hurt and ashamed, they’ll let you back in, and dial back that nasty update. You told _them_, all right!

I write these articles for fun. Pay no attention to my byline, and do not visit my site.

About the author: T. O’ Donnell http://www.tigertom.com/blog/ is an SEO genius, living in London, UK.

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After writing about Fall of the Gurus Manual last week got me thinking about some things to protect yourself from getting ripped off. If you sell your own products you need to have a robots.txt on your domain to protect your download page from being seen by the general surfing community.

A robots.txt is simply a text file that you place in the document root of your domain. What it does is tells the search engine robots what folders not to crawl and index. This is very important in protecting files and folders such as your cgi-bin that you don’t want seen by the general public.

If you promote and sell your own product, you definitely don’t want your download page listed on the search engines for everyone to see. The robots.txt will prevent that from happening.

The robots.txt in itself will not keep people from accessing your download page, it will just stop the search engines from listing it in their index. You need to take additional steps to protect it.

Most marketers, who sell their own products, use third party payment services. Pretty much all of them will require a landing page of some sort to where the consumer will be taken after payment has been made. This means that when the payment has been made the consumer must be sent to either a download page, a thank you page with a link to the download, or some type of instructional page on your domain.

The reason I mention the payment process is because the majority of websites that are compromised, are through these landing pages. If these web pages are not protected in some form they will inevitably be compromised.

Most of the time people who are looking to get stuff for free and can’t find the page that they are looking for in the search engines index will try to guess the most obvious directory and file names to where the download page may be.

My point is, don’t place your download page in an obvious place or give your download page an obvious name such as download/index.html or download/download.html or anything similar that can be easily guessed. Instead, place it several directories deep and use unique names for each directory that can’t possibly be guessed. You can use names that are total nonsense, which is probably the best way to go. Do the same for the download page as well. After all, you are not trying to rank for this page. You are trying to protect it.

If you have a domain other than the one that you are promoting your product from, you could also put your download page using the above method and redirect buyers to a download page on that domain which would further protect your product.

Another thing that you could do is password protect your download page. I used to sell some of my own products online. What I had was a script that would create a password and place that password on the landing page. When the user clicked away from that web page the password would be deleted. Scripts like this are pretty expensive and are really not required if you take the proper steps to protect your download page. If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t have bought that script. It does however add extra security.

Here are some of the things that you should have on your robots text.

There may be others that you’ll want to protect. Only you have that answer.

You can create a robots.txt by using an online robots.txt creator. Here’s one that you can use http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/robots.txt_creator.shtml There are many others. You can run a search to find additional sites that perform this function. You can also create one yourself manually if you’d like. There are several online tutorials that will show you how.

If you haven’t done some or any of the things mentioned here to protect your products, you really should go and take care of it by implementing the procedures mentioned here to protect them.

Have you read a headline like this or similar to this from spam emails, or on website pitch pages from marketers? I sure have. These marketers will tell you anything to get you to buy the next best thing on IM.

You are told that the new IM secret that will be revealed to you will change your life forever and is not just a bunch of regurgitated strategies that have been written over and over again by just about every marketer on the net. You get excited and eagerly give your credit card information to find that the big secret is not much of a secret at all and is generally just a bunch of made up nonsense. Does this sound familiar?

I can tell you that I will take regurgitated over any supposed secret formula that is supposed to change my life forever because there is a good reason that these strategies are taught by so many and that reason is they work. They have been proven to work many times over. Don’t let theses marketers confuse you by using the word regurgitated. They use the word to somehow down play or discredit good proven strategies in an attempt to make you believe that you need what they have to sell if you want to be successful.

I think I’ve said this before somewhere on this site that I am a sucker for a good sales pitch. I will admit that I have spent a fair amount of money on information products on and off the net throughout my adult life.

Don’t get me wrong. All information products are not crap. There are some that are very good but on the other hand do not contain the big secret that will change your life forever either. The well written and informative information products that are out there all have one thing in common. They all use the same formula of taking a proven strategy and adding their own twist to it. Forget about the idea that one day a light bulb went off in the author’s head that made them millionaires overnight. They may have become overnight successes but the chances of someone repeating it and having the same instant success is minute. There’s a reason for those disclaimers on their website. There are no guarantees. Remember that.

This site has only been here a very short time and already I have had a couple of people ask me how to make money online. Online marketing requires a combination of many things to make it successful. There isn’t one set thing that will make you successful. It’s a combination of all of them.

The best thing that anyone can ever do is learn. Don’t expect one information product to get you to where you want to go. Internet Marketing is an ongoing learning process. Those who are successful continue to learn about IM. That’s partly why they are successful.

There is a lot of good info right here on this site that will help you with that learning process. You will not find any hyped claim that you will be successful overnight or will be successful at all for that matter. I’m telling you in advance so that you don’t waste your time. IM requires quite a bit of time and work on your part before you will ever see any benefit from it at all. You will benefit if you stick with it long enough. You just won’t see it as quickly as you probably would like.

Free information is generally the best because the author doesn’t have some hidden agenda and won’t give you a bunch of hyped garbage. I can tell you right here and now that if you are looking for get rich quick information, the material on this site is not for you. The fact that several of my readers spend hours on this site reading through everything here tells me that I did a good job of presenting it. It’s nice to see that there are some out there that take IM seriously. Those who are willing to learn will do well.

I know that you’ve heard this expression over and over again when it comes to marketing on the Internet. While it is quite true, I believe that most marketers are missing something very crucial to the building of their optin lists. I believe that this very important point eludes most online marketers or they don’t want to do the extra work that is required. If they realized the added benefit, I believe that they would incorporate this into their list building strategy.

To me, it’s all in the content that matters the most. Without targeted quality content you will never have a list that will convert the way that it should. Adding content rich information to your website will give your visitors the feeling that they know and trust you because of the great content that you provided them on your website.

It seems that every website on the Internet has a squeeze page. If you want to see the content of the website you have to give your email address to see it. The problem with all of the squeeze pages that I’ve seen on the Internet is that the end user has no idea of what they are opting into. Most of the time what you end up with as the end user is a bunch of spam with no information at all and the website that you are taken to is usually just one big sales ad of obscure information. Unless you pay, you’ll never get the information that the squeeze page promises or you will get some ridiculous in a word or two answer to that promise.

In my opinion, this is not a good way to build a solid list. Tricking people into giving you their information will not gain trust nor will it convert many sales. The only thing that it will do is cause a mass opt out of your list. Supplying good information will get you a more targeted list and a list of loyal subscribers who will buy from you over and over again.