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Here are 5 very costly mistakes that webmasters make when optimizing their web pages for the search engines. The search engine bots are getting smarter all of the time and bad SEO practices no longer go unnoticed. A poorly or incorrectly optimized website will kill your online business with the search engines.

1. Not selecting the right keyword.

It is very important that you use keywords that are targeted to the content on your web pages. Using keywords that are similar is totally useless and will send the wrong traffic to your website. Your keywords must be exactly the same as your website content.

2. Keywords Spamming (Using the same keywords over and over).

Never use keyword spamming or stacking. The search engines will downgrade and penalize your website for doing this. Instead, use keyword rich content on your web pages.

3. Using a free domain name or web hosting service.

Never use a free domain to host your business website. You want a domain that you can name whatever you want. You can’t do that with a free domain. You will have to use the free hosts domain name. Search engines generally will index free domains as a whole but not individual websites, which will do you no good. Spend a few bucks and get a real hosted domain that you can call your own.

4. Using hidden text to make your web pages more relevant.

Hiding the text within your web pages to make it appear that you have a laser targeted website doesn’t work with the search engines anymore. You will be severely penalized by the search engines for doing this. Even if you remove the hidden text it will take a long time, if ever, to recover from it. Don’t do it. It’s not only bad for your search engine ranking. It’s unethical.

5. Using keywords that have nothing to do with your website.

Putting popular keywords on your web page for the sole reason of attracting people to your website is a huge mistake. Using unrelated keywords can get your website banned from the search engines.

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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COPYRIGHT: You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the byline above is included. You must publish the article AS IS. Do not modify, alter or edit it.

You are allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display in your website or ezine, so long as the text, hyperlinks and paragraph breaks are not changed or deleted. If presented in an HTML document, any hyperlinks present must be active, clickable, and go direct to the websites they represent i.e. no re-directs.

Notifying the author is NOT required, but doing so is appreciated, at http://www.tigertom.com/contact.htm

If your website doesn’t use RSS you really should consider setting up one for your website.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Since you have a website, I assume that you want to get visitors to your website. An RSS feed will help you do just that. An RSS feed provides short descriptions of a website’s content. If you were to take a run over to technorati and run a search on anything you like, you will get a snippet of the most recent content for each website that is displayed.

Here’s the importance of using RSS to you. Every time that you update your website with new content or with whatever change that is made to your website, your RSS will announce to the world, including the search engines, that changes have been made and in return will send people to your website to check out those changes.

Bottom line, using RSS will help drive new, as well as returning traffic to your website. Another great benefit of having an RSS feed setup on your website is that when someone visits your site and if he or she likes the content on your website they can subscribe your feed via email or through a feed reader. This is a great benefit because you can bet that this person will be returning to your website sometime in the near future.

As we all know the more often people come back to our website the better the chance there is that they will buy something. The returning visitor’s come back because they trust you and see you as an authority on whatever it is you do and some of them will tell others about your website as well. There’s nothing better than word of mouth. It really gives you, and your website, credibility.

RSS is probably mostly responsible for the increasing number of blog sites popping up because they have RSS built right in. You don’t have to have a blog to run RSS on your website. Any website can use RSS. If you are interested in setting up an RSS feed on your website, you can use this form to help you set one up. http://www.webreference.com

One last thing that you need to understand about RSS, if you don’t have a lot of content on your website and you don’t intend to update it on a regular basis, RSS will not do you much good. Regularly updated websites are the sites that do the best with the search engines and in general for that matter. RSS will help you get the most out of your updated content.

In a nutshell, RSS will help get you noticed with the search engines along with your visitors.

It seems like a lot of people think that there is some deep secret to getting their website indexed on the major search engines really quick. Most think that there is something special that some do to get their websites indexed really fast. I can tell you it is really easy to do and there is nothing special to doing it at all. What course of action that you decide to take will greatly depend on how long it will take to get indexed with the major search engines.

The site that you are reading this post from took 11 days to get indexed on Google. You can do it faster than I did, but to me, the way I did it is the best. You will see why as I explain the options available to you.

The number one thing that you should not do is use the search engines add URL feature. It is better for the search engines to find you than the other way around. Filling out those submission forms is nothing but a waste of time in my opinion because you will do nothing but wait and probably get nowhere.

Here are the two best ways to get indexed really fast without having to go beg other webmasters with a high PR to link back to you. Unless you have something of value to offer, you probably won’t even get a response. Don’t waste your time with something like this. There are better ways.

Here’s what the search engines do to find websites. They will go to a website that is already in their index and follow the links on the website that they are looking at to see where they lead. If there is links on that website that lead to an outside source then the search engine will go to the website where that link takes them. This process is known as crawling.

You may be thinking why that is important to you. Well it’s very important because that’s exactly how the search engine is going to find your website when it crawls the already indexed website. The objective here is to get your website linked to the website that is already indexed which will result in getting your own website indexed.

The first way would be to link to a linking service. They are just what the name implies. They will link back to your website for a price. What you want to use are websites that have the highest page rank as possible. I wouldn’t link to anyone who has a page rank of less than seven. You only need to link to one site. Once you are linked to one of these sites you should be indexed with the major search engines within 72 hours. Sometimes within 24 hours. Link with them for one month only. You won’t need them after that. Below is a short list of linking services that you can check out to get a price of what it will cost you to get a link back from a website that has a page rank of 7 or better.

http://www.textlinkbrokers.com
www.text-link-ads.com
www.linkadage.com

One last thought about linking services. Try to find a website that is as closely related to the topic of your website as possible because it will carry a lot more weight with the search engines.

While using a linking service may be the easiest way to get indexed, it’s not the best way to go because it will cost you money to get indexed. If you want to get indexed within a couple of days it is probably your only option.

If you don’t mind doing a little work you will get your website indexed within a couple of weeks using this next method. This is what I used to get this website indexed with Google and the other search engines in just 11 days.

Write an article and submit it to a bunch of article sites. Make sure that you write about something that relates directly to the topic of your website. Your article does not have to be a literary masterpiece. It only needs to be informative and written in a legible way. If your website topic has an appeal to a certain group of people, it will have the same appeal in the form of an article as well.

Because most article sites are very highly ranked, you will get the same result as you would if you had linked back from a PR linking service. The search engine will treat that link back the same as they would PR linked sites. The only difference is, you won’t have to pay for that link.

The only reason that it takes a bit longer to get indexed using article sites is that your article will need to be reviewed and accepted before it will go live on the article site. Most will take from a week to ten days before your article will go live. Once your article goes live, it shouldn’t take more than a few days for your site to get indexed with the top search engines.

You’ll get an added benefit using article sites because article sites are there to give webmasters a place to get content for their websites. If your article is picked up and posted on other websites, you will get additional link backs to your website without having to do a thing on your part which will help you with your ranking once you are indexed.

Unless you are pressed to get your website indexed within a couple of days, submitting to article sites is the best option for the better benefits it will bring at no cost. The extra work is not that much. It only took me about an hour and a half to get it all in place. Considering what you get back from it is more than worth the extra time and effort.

The only search engine that you will need to submit to will be MSN because they require you to fill in a security code. The only thing that you will need to supply is the URL to your main website page. MSN will do the rest. Here’s the URL. http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=SUNO

Below is a decent size list of article sites. Submit your article to all of them because many of them will have your article live within a few days. The faster your article goes live on as many sites as possible, the faster you will get indexed with the top search engines.

Good Luck!

http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.article-directory.net
http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles
http://www.magportal.com
http://www.isnare.com
http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl
http://www.webarticles.com
http://www.webarticles.com
http://articles4content.com
http://www.article-buzz.com
http://www.free-articles-zone.com
http://www.newarticlesonline.com
http://www.articletogo.com
http://www.articleworld.net
http://www.impactarticles.com
http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.directorygold.com
http://dir.salon.com
http://www.articlefever.com
http://www.content-articles.com
http://news.collectors.org
http://article-niche.com
http://blogtelecast.com
http://superpublisher.com
http://www.articlecentral.com
http://www.article-directory.net
http://www.article-emporium.com
http://www.ebooksnbytes.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.internethomebusinessarticles.com
http://www.site-reference.com
http://www.stickysauce.com

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Some quick notes while this is still fresh on my mind. If you have contemplated hiring an SEO service here’s a few things to keep in mind before you go ahead and do so.

Run searches that are SEO related such as SEO, web page optimization, search engine optimization, etc. to see what comes up. There are plenty of people out there that offer this type of service.

Do some homework before you decide on which SEO to go with. I wouldn’t even consider an SEO service that is listed in the ppc section. I’d have a problem with a service that needs to use ppc to be found. If they can’t rank on the search engines for their own site how can you expect them to get you ranked? I’d stay away from this kind of service.

I wouldn’t hire anyone that isn’t in the top five of the search results for the searches that I run. They may cost a little more than the lower ranked services but it will be well worth it because chances are they are a lot better than the other guys.

Personally, I wouldn’t go that route because it’s not that hard to do it yourself. There is nothing mysterious about optimizing your web pages for the search engines. Besides, no one has your best interest at heart more than you do.

Wordtracker just launched a new keyword search tool. I read about it yesterday at http://seobook.com

With all the problems that marketers have had for the past several months with Yahoo’s keyword search tool, this is great news. The Yahoo tool has not worked at all for the past week which leads me to believe that Yahoo has no intention of fixing the problem.

People are talking about the new tool on other blogs and are all saying how quick the new search tool is. I tried it myself and it is a lot faster than the Yahoo tool was. Because the search tool was just launched, I would have to assume that many people are not aware of its existence yet. I’ll be interested in seeing how the keyword search tool performs when there are as many users using the tool as Yahoo had using their tool. I’ll withhold my opinion until then.

You can find the new wordtracker search tool here. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

If the only SEO that you are doing is optimizing your web pages and leaving it at that, then you probably are not going to get much traffic to your website. SEO is a lot of work and takes time and patience to see any real results. Too many webmasters spend all of their time and efforts optimizing, and probably over optimizing, their web pages and overlooking the rest of SEO which is just as important as web page optimization.

SEO is not just about popping keywords all over your web page. SEO requires many other components to be effective. I know that I will be giving many who are reading this rehashed SEO information that many webmasters already know about but I think that it’s worth saying again for those who don’t know about these strategies. Besides, just because people know about them doesn’t necessarily mean that they employ them. Are you doing everything that you should to optimize your website? That’s a question we should all ask ourselves and address the answer accordingly.

The first thing in your SEO strategy should be consistent and well written content that is related to what your website is about. I know everyone and his brother have said this already. Still, most websites out there have little, or no, content on them at all and most never update the content they do have. They just upload their web pages and do nothing after that. Those websites will sit in limbo forever or until the website owner decides to update his or her content. Adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis is a must.

Quality back links are important but they must be from websites that are relevant to your website. Submitting to directories is a good way to get good back links to your website. There are thousands of them on the net and you may want to consider submitting to a fair amount of them. Find directories that have high page ranks and submit your link to them. The higher the page rank, the better. Chances are sites with a page rank of 5 or better get a lot of traffic. Just be sure to submit to the category that is the most relevant to your website and do not use software to do your submission because most directories require a code to prove that you are submitting directly from their website. There is no software that I know of that can get around this. There are too many ways to get back links to give all of them here but here are a few more good places to get good back links.

There are so many ways to get really good back links to your website. You just need to find them. What I have given you here will keep you busy for some time to come.

I’ve given a couple very important SEO ideas here, which is really not the point of this post. The point here is that getting your site known through good regularly updated content and from other avenues is just as important as search engine optimization for the search engines themselves. The more often you update your content the better the chances that your visitors will return to your website and the more people who know that you exist the better the search engines will rank you.

If you expect to get any traffic to your website you will need to get some incoming links. I read a really garbage SEO technique that tells you to run a search for your keywords to see who is ranked at the top of the search engines and then email the webmaster and ask him or her for a link. Now, let’s step into the real world shall we? There is no way a top ranked site is going to give a virtually unknown website an incoming link unless there is something really valuable in it for him or her. Begging for links is a waste of time unless you have something in return that you can offer.

There are top ranked sites out there that will give you an incoming link for a price. I don’t recommend this because it is very expensive and definitely not for anyone who is just starting out. I would stay away from using the pay for link back services because you could go broke very quickly. Besides, these are temporary links. Once you stop paying, your incoming link source will be gone anyway. What you want are permanent links.

There is a better way. There are actually a couple of really good ways to get incoming links. Before I tell you what they are you need to understand that you want quality incoming links. By quality, I mean that you want incoming links that are directly related to your website theme. If your website is real estate related, you want incoming links that relate to real estate.

As I said before, there are a couple of good ways to get quality incoming links to your website. The first is submitting articles to article sites. It’s a little more work writing articles but it is well worth the effort you put into it because these are really targeted high quality incoming links from websites that are highly ranked. The fact that article sites by nature, are very content rich, which is what the search engines are looking for, you will have really high quality incoming links from the article sites that you submit to. You don’t need to submit to a bunch of article sites because each article that you submit and is accepted will give you a new incoming link. You really don’t need to submit to more than a few. Just make sure that you submit your article under the correct category otherwise the incoming link will be useless because the search engines do look for link relevance. In the real estate example that I used above, you’d want to submit your articles under the real estate category. Before attempting to submit to any article sites read this post first. You will also get a list of the 3 best article sites that have worked the best for me.
http://the-truth-about-internet-marketing.com/category/articles

The second thing that you should do is start submitting your website to as many directories as you possibly can. Like the article sites the directories are listed by category as well. You would submit your website to the category that relates to what your website is about. The only thing that you will be submitting on directory sites is the link to your website. There are thousands of free directories on the Internet that you can submit to. Most of these directories have a paid version, and a free version. I’d use the free version because you want to submit to as many directories as possible and if you paid for each and every one of them, it would cost a fortune. How long it will take for your website to be accepted for inclusion depends on the directory that you are submitting to. Some will include your site immediately, to up to a month, while others can take several months to include you in their directory. Keep in mind that almost all directories will check your site to see if it is worthy of inclusion into their directory. Unless you have a really bad site or it is porn related or illegal, most directories will include you. Some directories are more picky about who they accept and you may be declined by a few. For the most part, you should be accepted.

So start building your incoming links because it is one of the most important parts of your SEO. Here’s a link to a list of directory sites. Keep in mind that some of these directories may not have a category that relates to your website. If that’s the case, move on to the ones that do. http://www.strongestlinks.com Some of these don’t have a free submission option. Skip over the ones that require payment. There are others that are conditional meaning that they require something in return such as linking back to them or becoming an editor. I’d skip those as well. Linking back to them really doesn’t do any good and you will have a link mess on your website. I would only submit to the directories that offer one way links. The above link sorts the directories with the free directories listed first.

One last comment; this is a lot of work and will require some time and a lot of dedication on your part. It is well worth doing this because this is the single best way to get your website noticed by humans and the search engines. You really should submit to both the article sites and directories.

While optimizing your website with good keywords is an important part of your search engine strategy, I do think however, that too many webmasters spend way too much time tweaking it to death. I don’t think that this is a good idea nor do I think that it is beneficial to their website. All that time spent on one thing while neglecting the rest of their marketing strategies in the long run is hurting their online business. So much time is wasted getting those keywords just right actually hurts the quality of the content on their web pages.

I know that most of us are taught to find a main keyword and build your website around that keyword. I know that’s what I did in the beginning. I think that’s a big mistake because it takes away from the quality of the content on the website because too much focus is put on the keyword trying to fit it in to get that web page optimized for the search engines. I’ve seen so many websites where you can tell that the website was built around specific keywords because so much of the content is really hard too understand and that it doesn’t make much sense at all. You can actually pick out the keywords because they are used so many times. While you need to use your keywords throughout your content, you don’t need to overkill them. Using your keywords too often will actually hurt you with the search engines more than it will help you.

There’s a better way to optimize your website without hurting your content. I have found that the best way to optimize a web page is to use just one keyword that is super targeted to the content on that web page. Use the best keyword that you can possibly find and put it aside for the moment. Using a good word processor go and write the content for your web pages. Forget about using your keyword or writing any html tags altogether until you have finished writing the content. When you have finished writing your content, read through it to make sure that it makes sense. Also check to see if your content doesn’t already have a keyword that you may have already written unintentionally that may be better than the one that you have already chosen. I have found many great keywords by going through this process. It is advantageous to check to see if there are any hidden gems sitting there in the already written content.

If there is not a better keyword within your content, you can now go back and start inserting your keyword in the body your web page. The main objective when doing this is that your keyword blends in with the content in a way that it makes sense. You will probably have to make some changes so that it does blend in, and that it does makes sense. Of course you will need to put your keyword in the normal places. It should appear in the title, description Meta tag, keyword Meta tag, heading, and the body. The body is where the keyword is most abused by webmasters. While the keyword needs to appear throughout the body, it doesn’t need to be there hundreds of times. Using your keyword two to three percent of the time within the body is more than sufficient.

Repeat the above process for all of your web pages. You will find that you will have a well optimized website that makes perfect sense.

The last and probably the most important thing that you need to do when you are finished is to forget about doing any more optimizing. It takes time to see if your chosen keyword will be of benefit or not. If you use a super targeted keyword it will be. Forget about it and go focus on the things that you need to get done with your online business that you may have been neglecting