As you endeavor into the world of SEO, you will come across many tools and search engine optimization programs that will enable you to quickly generate pages, scrape other sites, and in general violate the terms of service with all or most search engines.

As a general rule, anything that is scraping other sites is a direct violation of most countries laws. You are in essence stealing copy-written work. More than just getting banned from the search engines can happen when you go this route.

Specific software will generate thousands of pages from your chosen keywords and it’s quite easy to generate a lot of traffic with these black hat methods, TEMPORARILY. For long term success cheating is not the answer in regards to raising your search engine rankings and PR.

We can’t stress highly enough to do your homework and learn how to be a successful webmaster with out cheating. You will get caught and all of your “hard” work will be for naught.

Your website should always follow the first rule of content. Write for people, not machines.

SEO – SITE PR AND HOW IT AFFECTS

Every website page is assigned a Google Page rank, based upon a mathematical algorithm. Pages rank on a scale of 0 (zero) the lowest, and 10 (ten) the highest. Linking between websites both internally and externally pass a value or Page Rank.

If site M links to site N, a percentage of Site M’s Page Rank is passed or credited to site N. Nothing is lost from site M in terms of Page Rank unless the link is to a banned area, or bad neighborhood.

The amount of Page Rank Site M passes is determined by the amount of Outbound links of site M’s page. The more Outbound links, the smaller percentage of Page Rank is passed. Pages with large amounts of outgoing links pass very little Page Rank and in some cases may cause more harm than good. Try to avoid linking to pages that have large amount of outgoing links, Like Link Farms etc.

A real life true example. Site M had a Page Rank of 4, there were only 2 outbound links on Site M. One of those outbound Links was to brand new Site N. Brand new Site N had 3 out going links, and NO other Incoming Links, besides the one from Site M. Google awarded Site N a new Page Rank of 4.

From this real life example, we see that the fewer outbound links per page, the more Page Rank is passed.

If Site M in the example above had a large number of outbound links on the page, then a smaller percentage of Page Rank would have been passed and New Site N would have received a lower rank then the equal rank that was passed.

It is also hard at times to get a quality higher Page Rank page to link to your site. Lower Page Rank sites are very important in Passing Page Ranks and link exchange. Their Page Rank usually grows with age and has more inbound links than outbound links, creating a higher Page Rank, which in turn passes to your site via it’s outbound link.

In general terms, an individual page’s Page Rank is determined by the amount of links going out of that page (outbound) and the amount of links coming to that page (Inbound). A general rule of thumb: you want to have more inbound links than outbound links.

Few things to avoid,

You can lose Page Rank and Search Engine Results by Linking to sites that are considered Banned, or Bad Neighborhoods. Be aware and check before linking.

Be aware to whom your site is linking to via outbound links. Periodically check your outbound links making sure that they are:

1)Still an active website.

2) Still a resource for the reason you linked to them in the first place.

3) They have not changed theme formats and are still a quality site.

When doing reciprocal linking, make sure you check the amount of outbound links that not only the page has but the overall site as well. Search engines such as Google doesn’t like Link Farms (1000’s of links on the site), gambling sites and pornography. Unless that is your business, don’t link to any of those types of sites.

Page Rank grows over time. Google updates visible Page Rank infrequently, like every 4-8 months or so. The best SEO strategy is to link to and link exchange with like themed sites or quality site.

SEO – Forum Signatures build back links

There are numerous ways to build back links. As you are now very much familiar with Directory Submissions, Article Submission, & Press Releases, The next simple easy and trouble-free way to get a back link as well as free traffic is the Forum Signature Tags.

Forums that do get indexed in the search engines create individual pages per thread. Your hyper linked signature tag is now a back link.

If you are not a member in any forum, find one that interests you and join as they are usually very informative and helpful.

Most Forums allow a user to add a signature tag line to their posts. Usually in the member’s area, you can edit, add and create a forum signature.

while creating your signature tag it is best to use your real name, also use a hyper linked URL and briefly describe your service or product. An example of a good signature tag would be:

The Authors Name

“Your Product line description in less than 10 words”

www.yourwebsite.com

Your signature tag can also be an Alt text hyperlink to create a keyword target back link.

For Example:

The Authors Name

“ Your Product line description in less than 10 words”

This entire phrase would be a hyperlink.

Your Product line description in less than 10 words

Each post that you make in a forum is now a back link to your site. Remember though not to spam and that your behavior in a forum can be extremely profitable or detrimental based on your attitude.

When posting in a forum, remember that you are in a public dome. If you are courteous, helpful, friendly, kind and post intelligently, you will get traffic from people clicking on your signature tag besides the back link. If the above does not describe you, then maybe you should avoid the benefits of a hyper linked signature tag?

Forums allow individuals to build trust and familiarity that is normally not present through the Internet. As trust grows, people will click on your signature tag and will purchase your product or service.

SEO – Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a value internal linking structure to your site. It is very spider friendly and can increase the amount of pages indexed by the major search engines.

Google now offers a way to submit your own site map directly to their search engine. Go here to find out more: google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

There is a site out that is a fun parody on SEO, and it’s also a great place to get a XML site map generated for free.

Now every site should have a sitemap. This should just be a page that has all the urls on the site.

Either way, if you don’t have links on your site to a sitemap or a page with all your links your missing out on a lot of search engine activity.

Learn how you can tell when the search engines spider your site map and site.

You should consider the size of your website files both for the benefit of search engines and your visitors.

Obviously, you want your visitors to be able to get your website to load fast, but you need to help the search engines as well.

You can reduce the file size in a couple of ways:

1.) Use External Style Sheets

2.) Use Validated Code

3.) Cut out all the junk

Most search engines spiders don’t read JavaScript unless you include it from another page, so consider making all your menus real hyperlinks with anchor text. Your pages will load faster and the SE’s will be happier.

Reducing the size of your pages will help with your overall search engine optimization.

Most webmasters don’t worry about validating their code as frequently as they should. Running validation through a service is a great way to make sure that your website is readable by the search engines.

Validated code means that all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes is laid out the way it should be. If it’s all good, the spiders don’t miss things.

SEO – Keyword Density

keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for, i.e. the keyword, against the total number of words appearing on a given web page. If your keyword occurs only once or twice in a page of 500 or more words, obviously it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that would occur six or seven times in a page of similar length.

The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters/SEO’s achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms/keywords.

As far as search engines are concerned, if a particular keyword has a higher density on that particular web page, then the chances of that page obtaining a much better search engine ranking increases almost exponentially.

Keyword density is important since search engines use this information to categorize a site’s theme, and to determine which terms this site is relevant to — the perfect keyword density will help archive higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for ‘keyword-spamming’).

Keyword’s should be chosen with care and you should use those keywords as often as you can ,and still “read” well. The amount of times your keyword comes up in your copy compared to other words is called keyword density.

Depending on who you ask, what search engine you are dealing with, or the phase of the moon, you will get a different answer from every SEO expert on what the right density should be.

Don’t try and “trick” the search engines. You almost always loose out in the end. Real content, written for real content usually ends up outranking sites that try and cheat the search engines.

Decide right now to play by the rules and when your competition begins to get banned, you will be up and running.

Improving the keyword density on your website is one of the fastest and simplest ways to increase your site’s visibility in the search engine results pages.

Linking within a site is an often over-looked yet very important part of SEO. This is especially true for larger websites. Have you noticed that when you search for a particular website, the homepage frequently comes up first? One reason for this has to do with internal linking.

Internal linking is your way of telling the search engines which pages you feel are the most important.

Even more important than having the proper keyword density is linking your pages correctly internally. It’s probably the most overlooked aspect of good SEO.

You can have every page inside your site link back to a single page and raise its PR just from the links you created. It’s better than nothing, right? A large part of SEO at this point is naming your anchor links and using them internally. You will notice through out this site we link to certain pages within our text. This is both to help you navigate through our internal SEO strategies, but to also help the search engines by showing them what pages are important to us.

Think about this SEO strategy from a e-commerce aspect. Would you rather have a high Terms Of Service page or a high Ranking Sales page? I know which one I would prefer.

A basic crash course into this internal linking strategy is to make sure that every page on your site passes PR back to your home page. This can be done by simply adding a anchor text link to the footer of your website (look we did it here).

You can also link every page on your site from your site map if you have “orphan” pages that need to be crawled by the engines that you don’t include in your menu. A sitemap is a basic page that has a hyperlink for every single page that you want the search engines to find.

We aren’t going to take too much time up on this, but many SEO experts feel that Italicizing your text also causes the Search engines to pay more attention to those words.

These experts also suggest that you should use Italicizing at least once on every page for your keywords

The code looks like this:

Italicizing

It’s easy to do, and of course since you are doing SEO for people instead of machines, only do it when it fits into your overall plan.

Bolding Text falls under the same rules, but should probably be used a little more often.

Some keywords should be bolded to point the search engines in the right direction.

When you are writing your web pages you will probably want to give importance to a certain word or two. Unlike header tags, using the option in your html code to make a word stand out doesn’t carry as much weight with the search engines. Don’t discount it though because it does matter.

Many WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) programs do this for you on the fly, but make sure you end up with clean website code.