As the search engine giant Google releases new technologies ever so often, the talk about real-time search is now a thing of the past. Google launched real-time search sometime ago, allowing users to search and view updates on major social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. At that time you were able to search for a particular topic or keyword and find out what the buzz was on that topic.

Even though Google has stopped using real-time search for some time now, you will still find them indexing Twitter profiles and tweets as if they were regular pages.  Some people may think there’s a secret to this, but only a few companies and persons have started optimizing their twitter profiles for great search engine performance.

By optimizing your profile page you will find that using Twitter will be a great and very effective way for you to build links naturally and increase traffic to your website and best of all, this works for almost all the major search engines.

So just in case you might want to start optimizing your twitter page for a better search engine performance, I have put together a few tips that will help you and your company, build quality links to your website and increase brand awareness.

Creating your Twitter handle

This is just about the most critical of all. Selecting a handle/username is not just about choosing a random name, but it should be something relevant to your brand name or a keyword in your niche.

Your choice of username must be done carefully as this cannot be changed and it will be used in your url when your profile is indexed by the search engines.

Optimize your profile bio

Another thing you should look at is the information contained in your bio. Twitter allows you to use only 160 characters in your profile bio, so you have to make it not only relevant, but interesting so that you could attract users.

This will be very helpful if done right as the search engines will use your profile bio as the description, and we all know how important it is to have a proper description.

Retweetable  Tweets that are keyword rich

When thinking about something tweet, always remember to try and make sense with you tweets, while on the other hand staying on topic.

Twitter only allows you a certain amount of characters per tweet so try and make good use of each update by including your keywords in each update. While you would like your updates to be keyword-dense, you should not stuff it with keywords, as this will seem to be a bit spammy and will be a major turn off to your followers.

Links to your twitter profile

Just as links to your website are important, the same thing goes to your profile. Increasing the links to your twitter profile will make it stronger in the search engines. You could start by linking to profile via your website hereby passing on some of your domain authority to it.

Another thing you could do is try an increase your followers, as they too give a link to your profile from theirs, under the list of people they are following.

Twitter should not be used as your main strategy when it comes to your seo link building, but it sure is a start of things to come. Social media is all about the conversation, and the conversation can turn a visitor into a customer, and keep them coming back.

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Google Plus is the latest social network to really catch wind; it is progressing at an increasing rate and is at roughly 50 million users. Facebook is however, on over 800 million users. Googles’ 50 million is not something to be sniffed at, it IS expanding extremely fast and is a contender in the social media world.

Taking into consideration it is a definite possibility that Google plus will dominate social networking, businesses need to think about how they can put set up the equivalent to a Facebook page, and not only that, but how to optimize it.

Google Plus is quite different to Facebook, in terms of rankings, there are things you can do to help you rank for search terms on Google +. I have conducted a case study which can be found on the SEO Positive Blog, this case study shows an provides examples of each factor and how effective they are.

The key points to take away from this study are that the introduction, Employment and Nicknames sections have the highest value. Something that is not mentioned within the study is that you should keep your profile optimization as white hat as possible, that means no keyword stuffing and so on. Remember the Big G created, owns and runs this platform. So if you want to play in their playground, you’re going to have follow their rules.

When we talk about Facebook page optimization, we tend to mean the appearance and usability for our fans… or potential fans. So there are a few things we can do here.

Content

Content is and will always be king, you need to include keywords for the ranking value, but make sure it is all legible and is actually useful information. If you have the rankings but not the content to convert, then all of your optimization efforts have been wasted.

Pictures

Googles’ albums are beautiful, especially when compared to their brother, Facebook. So make sure all your images are high quality and do justice to the platform.

Similar to Facebook, there is a banner section which is called the scrapbook. Unlike Facebook, Google does not randomize the images, which means you can use the banner space as an advert; the banner is also bigger which allows more information to be displayed. This is an area where you or your designers can really get creative and set yourself out from the competition.

Finally, your profile picture has a neat animation, it allows two images to be your display picture, one is set as your default but if you have two and click onto the display picture, it will switch to the second. In Chrome and Safari browsers, the image will actually rotate, which is a cool little animation. Again this is another opportunity you have to get creative with your profile.

Conclusion

These are all of the features Google has to offer right now, it is clear they are trying to keep the platform simple and not overcrowded. There is no doubt that there is more to come, but these are the different features of the network you can hone to your advantage, so make the most of them.

This article was written by the Social Media Manager, Lewis Austin, who works for SEO Positive, For more information about SEO Positive…Follow their Twitter Profile or Blog  

SEO is part science, part art – and all business. And when it comes to business, people need to get serious. After all, that bacon isn’t going to appear on your table by its own volition, is it?

When you what get to the summit of your niche, you need to find creative ways to vanquish all competitors. And in order to persevere over adversaries, you need to outmatch them. To achieve such a thing, you must be able to scrutinize what they’re up to, so you can do better than that.

Other articles will point out a bunch of tools that you can rely on for espionage purposes. The present article though, is all about understanding the essence of SEO espionage. You need to realize that to outmatch your rivals you must be able to scrutinize them with the whole of your being. All your senses must come into play, if you intend to perform a thorough analysis of a competing website.

Sight: Look at their surface information

This is the most obvious and basic piece of advice, and yet it will lay out the base of your subsequent investigations. To begin with, you need to look at the most obvious performance indicators of a website: PageRank, Alexa Rank, mozRank, Compete rank if you will. There are dozens of ways to check these, but if you mean business then you need to get a plugin for your browser that will conveniently display such information for all websites you visit. (If you’re using Firefox, we’d recommend the free plugin SearchStatus.)

Next, you want to take a peek backstage, and look at the Meta information in those competing pages. Granted, this information is not as relevant towards rankings as it once was, but there is certainly no harm in using it… and that’s just what most webmasters do; and by looking out to the meta keywords, meta description, meta titles, and even image alt tags (all of which you can access through your browser’s handy code view)… you may just get a clear view at exactly what your competitors have been trying to achieve.

Smell: Investigate what they are up to

How do you use your sense of smell to gauge your competition? Well, to begin with you need to bear in mind the present dissertation obviously hinges on metaphorical principles.  Now, what you’re going to do is effectively sniffing out the external optimization techniques used by your rivals. In specific, you’ll be looking at what they’ve been doing in terms of back-link building.

To this effect, you can start with a simple Google search using the “link:” operator next to the URL of your nemesis. Next, you can use a free resource such as Yahoo! Site explorer to get a clearer picture. If you’re up for some in-depth analysis, try some pro-grade solutions such as Open Site Explorer.

None of the tools and resources available to “spy” the backlinks on someone else’s websites are completely flawless, mind you. At best, you’ll get an approximation of a website’s back-link portfolio – and that’s plenty good to smell what the respective webmasters have been up to in terms of on-line promotion.

Listen: pay attention to the buzz around them

Okay, at this point we have told you to peek backstage and sniff out a website’s on-line promotional efforts, so you’re probably expecting we may follow-up with some really neat covert tricks, right?  Well sorry, but for the rest of the article we’re going the opposite direction. At this point, you need to experience that competing website not as a webmaster, but as an actual user.

So… to begin with, you are going to listen to the buzz surrounding this website you are trying to supersede. How do you do that? You Google, of course! Search for their brand name and see what kind of content comes up. Add search terms like +review, +feedback, or +opinion to get a sense of what people are saying about that website.

Look around forums and blogs (you can filter search sources in Google’s vertical left menu, if you didn’t know), and make a list with their strengths and weaknesses, as judged by actual users. This research can be invaluable, because search engines follow people. And if you make an effort to build a website that mimics their strengths while building up on their websites, in time people will come to you.

Taste: experience their user interaction mechanisms

By now, you have scrutinized your rival website from inside and out. Having done so, it’s time you actually… use it, you know? Get out there and participate in their comments section, participate in their forums, leave some comments, contact the webmasters asking any questions that randomly cross your mind…. If you’re serious about understanding your competition, you need to have a good taste of it, from the standpoint of a client.

If they’re selling something, buy it – just like a normal customer would. Observe how fast they deliver the goods, how organized the customer support happens to be. Call them of the phone for a little chat, and see how they react to any complaints you can think about, real or imaginary.

Take note of every impression you get during this process – both sweet and sour – since those will be your golden opportunities; your entry angle for outmatching your rival.

Touch: poke at their weak spots

If you follow all the steps outlined in this article, you will end with a good deal of information about your competing website. You will have a strong idea of what they’re trying to accomplish, and how successfully so. Most importantly, you will have abundant intel regarding their operative shortcomings. This is probably the most critical information you can hope to find.

Remember, any potential weakness you can get a taste for will potentially be one of your strengths, as you figure out a way around it for your own business. So all through your analysis, your main focus should remain upon uncovering the weak links in your operation. Not because you will use this information to attack them in any way (not directly), but because in order to be “numero uno” you will have to come up with something better, stronger and smarter than what they have in place.

Remember, the point of this article is not to show you specific tools. Rather, we want to convey the idea that you need to be creative and thorough in your research, if you ever want to be the best in what you do on-line. SEO espionage is a game that calls for all your senses, which ideally need to be rather sharp. So keep working on your spying skills, because they will surely become much finer with practice.

This guest post was written by authors from the “fix slow computer” website. Come see us anytime you need advice on how to improve your PC performance. And if you hope to spy on us, you’d better wait for the follow-up article on SEO counter-espionage tactics!

It can be difficult to know who your ideal client is until they have come to you. The obvious question is then how do we find the ideal client, especially when we aren’t exactly sure who they are. The simple answer is that your ideal client is actually actively searching for you right now.

Let’s examine a way that an ideal client might engage your business. Mark’s construction business is growing and he decides that he needs more help. He really needs to employ a bookkeeping or accountancy service. Good news, that’s what your business does. The next question is how Mark manages to find you.

Well, there’s a number of ways that Mark can find you.

1. Brand awareness – Mark has remembered your name from a really successful advertising campaign. How many successful bookkeeping or accounting services advertising campaigns can you recall? Not many. Even if there was one that came to mind for Mark, he’s looking for something small and local.
2. Almost pure luck – Mark has saved some form of letter or flyer you sent to his home or business. He did this because he was starting to see the need for your services approaching. The same applies for cold calls, if your call is timed perfectly to his needs then Mark will respond enthusiastically, otherwise the reception will be lukewarm at best.
3. Referral from a friend – Mark is looking for your services and asks one of his friends, employees or business colleagues to recommend a good service provider to him. This doesn’t help you much if you are just starting and don’t have good network of referrals in place already, and doesn’t help ever if Mark is completely outside your sphere of influence. Otherwise, it’s extremely powerful.
4. Search tools and directories – Mark jumps on the internet or picks up a paper business directory to look for your services.

Let’s look at some of the qualities of Mark, your ideal customer. Firstly, he isn’t much of a shopper. He knows what he wants and when he finds it, he will buy it quickly. Once he finds you and a friendly rapport is established, he wants to hire you. He probably won’t look anywhere else. Secondly, he trusts you (if you don’t know the value of this, try doing business with people who don’t trust you). What this means is that he might pay you to perform different services outside your normal area of expertise. This opens up opportunities for growth. Thirdly, Mark is a great referral source, he’s got a lot of mates in the business but none of them know an available or referral-worthy bookkeeper or accountant. If you keep him happy, he’s going to be an extremely rewarding and potentially business changing client.

Re-visiting the fourth method of search that your clients will use to find you, it’s important to understand the revolutionary changes brought about by the internet, the worldwide web, and search engines on the way people find each other. It goes without saying that there’s a massive amount of material to cover here, and an equally large set of implications, but that goes beyond the scope of this piece. Nevertheless, it’s important to appreciate that these tools are changing the way we communicate, and hence the way we do business.

HirePulse is a business providing free business advertising for Australian business, including contractors, consultants, freelancers and service providers. Article content by Living Online.

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The term social scientists and sociologist, is very soon going to acquire a new meaning. To jump in the bandwagon and stay ahead in the competition, you too can use it for excellent results. We know that internet really irritates, when it appears to be a cobweb of ID’s and passwords. But by using ‘Social Sign’, you can eliminate this frustration. If you want to create a dedicated fan base or base of registered users, you can use the existing Facebook and twitter accounts for registration.

The idea behind registration

Several surveys and studies claim that registered users are much more proactive and dedicated towards a website or forum. It not only gives them a sense of ownership but also helps them in bringing out the desired changes via several available options and mediums. There are four basic areas where registered users can create value to the brand.

Loyalty

The competition boils down to the fact that who has the most numbers. If Facebook has 600 million users, then it is a testament of the fact that it is the most powerful and popular social networking site on the internet. Loyalty not only as a quality but also as a behavioral trait plays very important role. Registered users are not only much more engaged than your average users, but they can also render the feedback that can make or break a website.

Word of mouth

Loyalty is the first step and the first benchmark. The next step is the ‘Buzz’ that results from word of mouth. To this date, no form of marketing or publicity has been able to replace the importance and impact of word of mouth. In a survey, it is revealed that almost three quarters of many e-commerce websites; that registered users are a big contributor in the brand promotion. It is also important to note that registered users feel a sense of ownership, especially in open networks, where they are allowed to make changes and give suggestions. So for a website like Wikipedia, the user will not only generate content but would also put individual efforts to promote it.

Targeting content

If you have a registered user base, then it is also easier for you to understand their demographics better. By the extensive use of user surveys, questionnaires, you can not only determine their age, location and sex. But through a series of psychographic surveys you can also dwell on their choices. This also allows the e-commerce websites to have better follow up services.

Bottom line

At the end, it all comes down to business. The figures show that 9 out of 10 customers are a registered user. This dedicated following of users plays a big role in making market leaders. All the websites that have a major market share in the e-commerce sector are also the one with the most dedicated followers.

About the author: Alia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and gizmos. Beside this she is fond of books. These days she is reading a book on landscape design.

Whether you’re a pro or amateur blogger, everyone wants traffic to their sites. And building links to your website is a great way to do this.

Not only can it improve the visibility of your website in the search engines, but also if you pick your sites wisely you can benefit from referral traffic.

Socialise: Build Relationships Not Links

As a blogger what makes you happy? Finding a thoughtful comment on a post, when you see a tweet about something you’ve written or if someone likes you on Facebook, right? Other bloggers feel the same, so get interacting with them and make friends online.

Not only does it make blogging more fun, but also it gives you an online social circle to call upon when you need help promoting your blog.

Don’t be cynical – engage with other bloggers that you genuinely admire, or they’ll feel the insincerity and it’ll get you nowhere.

Guest Blogging Link Building

Guest blogging has become a link building strategy of choice for professional internet marketers, but don’t let that put you off. A well-written guest blog posts puts you in front of tens, hundreds, potentially even thousands of new readers.

So how do you get your content on someone else’s blog?

Try emailing bloggers you love and suggesting ideas for posts, respond to requests for content (particularly common when bloggers go on their hols) or use forums like MyBlogGuest to connect with bloggers eager for good content.

Get a Swanky Design for Link Love

You don’t have to call in a pro, but a swanky blog design can boost your blog links. Either buy a great theme or pick something simple and customise it with your own photos and illustrations. If your artistic skills are lacking, why not turn to a creative friend, or better yet a fellow blogger with artistic flair?

Even if all you do is change font colours, include your own logo or photo and add a custom header, you’re already setting yourself apart from the crowd.

Beautiful blogs can be submitted to design galleries. Whether your site is for business or pleasure readers respond positively to sites that look the part.

Traditional PR Still Works

As magazines and newspapers fight to stay relevant, more and more are running features on their favourite blogs. Whether it’s a mention in a “what we’re reading” column or a full-blown feature on your blog, these can be great sources of new readers – even if no link is involved.

Think carefully about who you want to target, choose publications that your audience reads, and find out who to contact. Often magazines will have a staff list at the front, or explore online to find out who writes the columns that you like.

Once you know who to contact, decide on your pitch: Personalised press releases work well, or a short and simple introductory email. Don’t forget that you’re trying to sell yourself to the journalist so explain to them why they, and importantly their readers, should care about you.

Don’t be disheartened if you don’t get a response straight away. Next time you have a good news story to share approach the same journalist so they get to know who you are. It may take several attempts before they feature you. Just keep trying and be sure not to bombard them with news and you should see results in time.

Building a good readership for your blog takes time and patience, but with the help of these link building techniques you should see results in time.

James Harper is the marketing manager at Boom Online Marketing. He writes on a range of subjects including link building and SEO.

You have just gotten used to Tweeting updates about your website, and Facebook has been a resource for years, but now Google has come out with Google Plus (G+ henceforth) and you are wondering if it is a useful property for future promotions.

The short answer is that every avenue is useful, but the cost versus time equation comes into play. There are a few ways of looking at the real meat of the problem, so let’s break it down as best as we can.

Every Avenue Is Useful

This piece of advice is worth saying more than once. If you are serious about wanting to drive traffic to your website, then it shouldn’t matter what the rate of promotion is, all avenues should be explored. You know the type of person that is sitting on the other side of that screen, and they are using all ends of social media, too.

The push of G+ at first has been like-minded individuals having conversations about things, over just sharing them. Being able to talk to your clients or viewers directly can give you a exceptional amount of insight into their needs and wants.

It’s Good To Be An Early Adopter

The internet moves fast. Faster than any metrics is really going to give you information on at times. In the last few months, people have been leaving Facebook. This doesn’t mean that the ship is dead, but it does mean that there is a slow movement away from their business practices. In the longterm, this means that people are going to have to find a new place to go.

G+ is most definitely one of the prospects, and is probably the number one option. By being there early and ready as people start to come in, you already will have a fanbase that is touting your brilliance. That makes it that much easier for people to find you when they show up later.

Functions Features

Google makes it their job to be full of function. They want to be your all encompassing workstation, and they are well on their way. With G+ they are slowly integrating video chat, document sharing, shared graphical interaction, and tons of other potential ways that you can interact in a very personal way with your friends, fans, and clients. As G+ grows, they are only going to continue adding more integration to their other products. Every new way that sprouts up is a new way to introduce your content.

Whatever it is that your website provides to people, there is no reason to say no to a trend that has a bit of buzz about it. The worst you will lose is a little bit of your time, but even during that you might have made a few new fans or clients. Google has proven to be in the social media game for the long haul, and by investing your time into it, the return should become obvious. By giving your clients a new avenue to drive traffic to your website, your traffic can only increase. If your website is the product, social media is the billboard. Planting your message everywhere you can will always be the greatest form of advertising.

Jen Silva writes on various topics such as social media, the use of business cards, and top online fax services for ChooseWhat.com. Choosewhat.com is dedicated to providing various tools and resources to help small business owners start and grow their business.

During the early years of Rickenbacker, the pioneer of the electric guitar industry and the oldest guitar manufacturer in the world, it was clear to Sir George D. Beauchamp that his last name was not a perfect brand name for his products. He knew that his first chosen names for his company—Ro-Pat-In Corporation and Electro String—had no appeal to American guitar consumers.

He was certain that a famous name like Rickenbacker, his trade partner Adolph’s surname, was grand enough to carry their then struggling business. And he was correct. The name he had chosen eighty years ago is now a name of class, ingenious musicality, and artistic royalty.

Brand name makes a difference

Who would think that a brand that etched an unreachable grandeur, highness, and superiority into its name would collapse and found itself waning in the market? Goldstar, the second largest South Korean conglomerate company that focused on making less expensive yet quality home appliances, declined in sales during the Asian financial crisis in 1995 due to several revenue losses over other local low-end products that offered better quality and prices. Despite the downfall, the South Korean appliance giant regrouped and rebranded, renamed itself into a classier, shorter LG, the abbreviation of “Lucky Goldstar”, and found its place on the International business scene. But their rebranding wasn’t solely to bounce back and regain its name; the rebranding move was actually their initial step to join the pool of Asian players on the Western market, which was undeniably successful.

Aiming to get “Brandverbed”

Brandverbing, the personification of brand or simply using a brand name as verb and part of daily communication, was highly rejected by brand and marketing experts several decades back. It was unaccepted by many for vague reasons, yet more and more marketers have rejected the idea as well. But the truth is, the practice of brandverbing doesn’t come from the marketers but from its users and consumers. People nowadays are more accustomed to saying “Lennonized it” than “sing it in a rockabilly and rock and roll way”, or “Skype me” instead of “Video call me”.

Every brand today is aiming to get brandverbed by their customers. It’s now part of marketing analysis, wherein brand experts are choosing short and catchy names hoping to get the public’s attention and be part of the modern slang. Just last year, search engine runner-up Bing paid an American crime show to include their brandverbed name in its action-packed script. But it was all failure. The attempt made no change to public’s daily use of “Google it” than “search it on search engine”.

Brandverbing and word of mouth marketing

Brandverbing is a product of a powerful utilization of word of mouth marketing, a marketing strategy that remains the cheapest and the most powerful form of promoting, and advertising Therefore, to get brandverbed, brand experts always consider names that are easy to remember, resounding, attractive, and most importantly, short and appealing. As years go by, “brandverbing” and “word of mouth marketing” have become two inseparable marketing strategies.

Humor in brand names

But not everyone depends on the “once in a blue moon” effect of brandverbing; some, on the other hand, choose to risk on inflicting humor their name for one sole and same reason: to get the consumer’s attention. In California alone, 60 existing brands use “humor” to advertise their brands. Alongside the ever-famous Taqueria/restaurant Juan More Taco, Escape from New York Pizza, Leaven and Earth, and 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, has successfully incorporated humor in their brands, for they are remarkably popular among California locals.

If people recognize and remember you they will save links to you and use your name in search. Have your fans build your links for you, after all if you are providing a worthwhile site then you deserve this.

Written by Warner for this blog. I hope you like this post and comment. I work as an SEO consultant for Endless Rise, they supply SEO Reseller Plans only to resellers. Visit the SEO Reseller Overview If you want to learn more.

Promoting a hotel is not an easy task and I have learnt it the hard way. Coming from a small business environment, where I specialized in helping small, local businesses to establish their online presence, 6 months ago I started a new job as an SEO specialist for a hotel chain in the UK. In this post I want to offer you a few tips that I picked up over my time here so far about promoting and copywriting for an accommodation industry.

1. Focus on plural keywords.

It may be quite tempting to use the singular version of the keyword, not to mention that often it even feels more natural. However when it comes to booking accommodation, people almost always use the plural one. I can’t explain why it is like that but no one really searches for hotel in London, it almost always is hotels in London. By using the plural version of the keyword you are ensuring that you target the right audience.

2. Skip any warm ups.

Many of us SEO tend to use at least two paragraphs of the copy to introduce the meat in the text. However, when you are writing a copy that is supposed to convince someone to book a hotel, skip all that crap. Hit them with the main message from the start.

Unlike many other industries, in a hotel industry most people go through a lengthy research stage before they choose their holiday accommodation. Before they buy, they will check reviews on MK or other reviews site, they will check all the options they have and will buy only if they are 100% sure that your place is the right one for them. Therefore you have to give them what they are looking for early in the copy, otherwise they might trail off somewhere else to continue their research.

3. Top keywords do not always sell.

One of the most tempting things when promoting a hotel is to go after only the top keywords in the industry, at least that’s what I did. And to a point, that’s fine. However, many of the top keywords in this industry don’t sell at all. They assist during the research stage, but the sale happens somewhere else, often on the branded keyword level. So, mix your main keywords with smaller, low traffic ones and look after your whole branded presence and you should be fine. Go after only the top keywords and you might loose on a lot of sales.

Hotel industry is quite specific, it’s a fact. At least so it seemed for me, but nonetheless, it is an industry just like any other. There are certain things that are specific to it, and once you get to know them, you are fine.

Pawel is an SEO specialist and web content editor for stay manchester and looks after all aspects of the company’s organic online promotions.

If there’s one website that we can give credit for the enormous growth of Internet, it’ll be none other than the Google (AKA the big G). Whether the Internet had grown to such proportions without a service like Google is a tough call to make. But if it wasn’t Google, it’d have been another search engine, all things considered; Internet would have never served the users so good without having a powerful search engine like Google.

The reason for this monologue is that some might blame Google for the “right things turning into wrong” that I am going to discuss in this article. But the fact is, Google did what a search engine was supposed to do, and it was actually the webmasters infatuation with higher rankings and a little bit of desperation that resulted in this situation.

Let’s take a look at how this infatuation with SEO has turned some healthy practices into hysterical pursuits, making people take a totally different approach towards stuff that was quite right.

1. Content:

Let’s start from the all important “content” that happens to be the meat and potatoes of a website. For a website, content can range from text based information to images, videos, or any other thing that you’ve placed on your website for the users. But right now, I am talking particularly about the text based content, that’s the most common form of content on World Wide Web. Now, providing fresh and meaningful content was meant to be the right thing, in fact that was what Internet was meant for.

What actually happened after website owners got infatuated with Search Engine Optimization, the actual purpose of content was sidelined and everybody started focusing on the content that will help them rank higher for more and more keywords. That resulted in an influx of useless content generating ideas, adding heaps of spam to the cyber world. Even after Google Panda update, people are trying to find ways to dodge the search engine and find some new, cheap, and easy way to generate loads of content.

What’s the right thing to do?

Just think of the users, and aim for creating some content that will be helpful for your targeted users in one way or another. Rest assured, good, helpful content will find its own keywords to rank for.

2. Back Links:

Looking at how SEO professionals keep striving for back links, you might have mistaken link backs to be a thing introduced by Google. In actual fact, back links would’ve been an equally valuable asset, had Google or any other search engines have not considered it an important factor.

In fact, it’d have been better had it not been a ranking factor, because the rat race of getting back links has resulted in so many black hat practices, from creating link farms to selling links, and people spend the biggest portions of their budget to acquire back links that should be spent on improving their websites and services. Entire teams are reserved with a daily quota of acquiring a fixed number of links (and the quality of these links is anybody’s guess).

What’s the right thing to do?

Imagine for a second that link backs are suddenly discarded as a ranking factor, would you stop going out for links? I am sure you’ll reply in a resounding “No”, however your approach towards back links will change drastically. Now, you’ll focus entirely on getting back links from the websites where your targeted users reside and that’s precisely what you should be doing at the moment.

3. Social Networking:

Business networking has always been important and when search engines say that social signals can make an impact on ranking, they are actually highlighting the importance of making relations with real people coming from your industry.

But again, the infatuation with Search Engine Optimization results in a frame of mind that focuses entirely on increasing “likes” or “followers”. People use these powerful platforms to spam, and prefer getting “likes” from ten random people over forming one good relationship with some of your clients, partners, or customers. How weird is that?

What’s the right thing to do?

Establish relationships, as simple as that. Don’t underestimate the power of a good relation, from link backs to referrals; a good relationship can give a lot more than a random guy “liking” your page.

4. Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging is probably the most respectable way of getting back links from different websites. Thankfully, the method doesn’t allow for too much spam or fishy tactics, but still, we are starting to see some desperate guys trying to abuse this method.

For example, some webmasters have converted random domains into blogs and they are publishing low quality, “paid content” as guest blog posts. On the other hand, we have some guys who fail to comprehend the concept of guest blogging and keep spamming blog owners with posts which are nothing more than blatant advertising.

What’s the right thing to do?

When some blog owners roll out the red carpet for you, as a guest author, take it as a mark of respect and do justice to the privilege by putting your best foot forward. A guest post at a well reputed blog can give you a lot more than a mere back link, and you should aim for making the most of this opportunity, instead of ruining it with an ordinary write-up.

Natasha is an SEO expert, and writes on topics related to Internet Marketing. She’s working on smartpress.com that offers sell sheets printing services.