7 SEO Secrets Your Webmaster Wont Tell You

By Bob Bly and Becki Dilworth

Web Exclusive: 4 More Secrets!

8. Look at collective keyword rank.
You may not get a top position for a short-tail keyword because of the competition. An alternative strategy for traffic generation, then, is to optimize multiple pages on long-tail keywords so the cumulative traffic from the multiple long-tail keywords exceeds what you’d get with the No. 1 spot for the short-tail keyword. There’s always less competition for long-tail keyword phrases, “1957 restored Pontiac Indian Chief” for example, vs. short-tail ones, such as “classic cars.”

9. Keep up with 301 redirects.
The webmaster or your content management system must create 301 redirects when pages are renamed, ensuring engines find the renamed page and attribute the established rank to the revised page. Without a 301 redirect, the new pages remain unranked until Google spiders get around to finding and rating them again.

10. In SEO, content is king.
The most powerful tool you can employ for SEO isn’t technology or software. It’s hiring professional writers to write your web content, since high-quality content is a key factor in attracting search engines.

Research-oriented writers or journalists are your best bet here. They’ll take pains to find the right keywords and incorporate them into your content with integrity. Yes, it costs some money, but the SEO results and value to visitors far outweigh the investment.

Don’t load your websites with stock articles from free or cheap article sites. These will end up on many other sites, and Google discounts pages with duplicate content.

11. Don’t neglect social networking.
Blogs are content-generating machines that help you get more organic search traffic. Having a blog, and posting to it once a week or more, helps search engines find you.

Many social networking sites, on the other hand, don’t produce content that search engines rank. Yet social networking can generate positive return on investment by marketing your content and making sure more people see it. Use Twitter and Facebook to alert followers to new articles, posts or other content on your site or blog.

The more people who discover your content, the more traffic you’ll get, and more sites will link to yours.

Put 10 search engine optimization consultants in a room and ask them how to optimize your site. You'll get 10 different answers.

So, how do you separate fact from fiction when implementing an SEO program to raise your rankings on Google and other search engines? Here are 11 truths, strategies and rules of thumb that are proven to optimize sites and generate a flood of organic search traffic:

1. Don't overdo link directory submissions.
Yes, having respected websites in your category link to your site is something Google's algorithms look for. Yet submitting your site to every single link directory in existence can actually be very detrimental to your SEO efforts.

This ploy for more attention can be seen by Google as an attempt to manipulate your ranking, and it may penalize you for it. It's better to submit your website to one or two of the horizontal link directories that humans actually visit, such as the Open Directory Project, or vertical directories serving your industry or niche, such as Healthlinks.net or iCivilEngineer.com.

2. Optimize for humans, not search engines.

Google detects and rejects most blatant attempts to mechanically optimize sites for search engines.

Since Google's algorithm is designed to "think" like a human, optimizing your site for human visitors instead of robots will result in higher rankings.

In the early days of SEO, clunky copy stuffed with keywords sometimes resulted in higher rankings. Today, while you still should use meta tags and keywords in your page copy, it also should contain good content that reads well and is relevant to your audience.

Simply put: The copy shouldn't be crammed with keywords in a clumsy effort to boost PageRank.

3. Focus on optimizing pages that are already well-ranked.
Approximately 80 percent of search engine users click on one of the first three results on search results pages. You'll get the most traffic leverage by focusing your optimization efforts on pages already ranked for your target keywords, incrementally improving their SEO.

Search Engine Optimization: 7 SEO Secrets Your Webmaster Wont Tell You