Or maybe you’re like most people who know just enough to be dangerous.

In either case, don’t feel bad; you’re in good company. In fact, there were even times when I fell into each of those categories.

Whether you’re planning to learn about search engine optimization so you can optimize your own website, or you just want to learn enough so that you can make an informed decision when you hire a search engine optimization company, by the end of this article you’ll have an above-average level of knowledge on the subject.

I’ll share the basics of search engine optimization, some of the common myths and even the tools that are worth investing in and which ones are a waste of money and time.

What is exactly is search engine optimization?

Simply put, search engine optimization is a collection of activities that seek to improve a website’s ranking for particular keyword phrases. At its foundation, this is made up of on-site and off-site factors.

Pretty simple so far, right?

Well, it gets a lot more complicated real quickly.

On-site factors

The on-site aspect of search engine optimization is rather simple, relatively speaking.

It consists primarily of:

• Unique and effective title tags. Ideally each page should have a unique title tag that is short and memorable. Most search engines can index a title tag over 1,000 characters, but will only display about 65 characters in the search results.
• Unique content added on a regular basis. The more unique content your website has, the better it will perform, and if you can add multimedia, such as video or audio, you can usually expect even better results.
• Fast-loading pages. Google has already admitted that the speed of your website is a factor in how well it ranks, but think of your visitors too – they’re more likely to spend more time on your website if the pages load more quickly.
• Original content that keeps visitors on your website longer. It’s speculated that the amount of time a visitor spends on your site has an impact on your ranking because it indicates the quality, or lack of quality in your content.
• Descriptive and relevant image names and alt tags. Images help draw in people with shorter attention spans, which is most everyone on the Internet these days. Relevant file names and alt tags help the search engines understand what the images are about since they can’t identify the contents on there own.

Off-site factors

Off-site search engine optimization is where it starts to get complicated.

The search engines are mostly looking at links pointing to your website and citations about your website, though the latter carries far less weight. It’s not as simple as just getting more links than the next guy though, because there is an algorithm that analyzes your link profile, looking into every data point you can imagine, and then some, for example:

• Anchor text. The clickable portion of the link (for example: widgets) is the anchor text, and it plays a large role in the value that the search engines place on that link as it relates to that particular keyword phrase.
• Rate of link acquisition. Link building (also known as link marketing) isn’t based only on the volume of links attained. The major search engines also consider historical growth. If you’re website used to get a few links each month, but then suddenly starts getting hundreds of links in large bursts, followed by periods of no new links, the search engines will quickly be able to tell that something shady is going on, and those links will have far less impact. It may also raise red flags that could cause a manual review and get your website penalized.
• Quality of links. One good link from a trusted website is almost always going to have more impact on your ranking that hundreds of links from questionable article directories.
• Link decay. Over time, some of your links will disappear. Websites may get shut down, editors may remove links and pages may be deleted, all of which result in your website losing a valuable backlink. Another form of link decay is when you spam links where they don’t belong, such as blog comments, forums and social networks to name a few. Some link decay is to be expected, but massive link decay is a sure sign to the search engines that you’re engaging in questionable link building techniques, as with the rate of link acquisition, this could raise red flags and cause a manual review that gets your website penalized.
• Citations can sometimes have the same effect as links. For example, if CNN mentions your company by name, that is a sign of trust from a reputable website. Even without the actual link, this can improve your TrustRank and thus, your organic ranking.

SEO myths

I could probably write an entire book on SEO myths, but we’ll keep it short here.

• Buying AdWords has a positive influence on organic ranking. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you think that Google or any other search engine is going to alter their organic results just because you spend a few hundred dollars per month, I’d like to talk to you about a bridge I have for sale.
• Linking to the search engines helps your ranking. Nope. Not one iota. The search engines already have plenty of exposure and a link from your website isn’t going to motivate them to rank your website any higher.
• Trading links is a great way to improve ranking. Maybe if this was 1995, but the practice of reciprocal linking has been dead for over a decade now.
• Optimizing meta tags is important for SEO. Meta tags were once used to tell search engines what a particular web page was about. Then they got abused so the search engines moved on to other, more effective ways to determine what a web page was about. The meta keyword tag has absolutely no value at all. The meta description tag still has value, but not from a ranking perspective. Instead, it’s used to provide a short description to potential visitors as they scan the search results.
• Repeating a keyword phrase improves ranking. This is yet another outdated technique that just won’t die. There once was a time when repeating a keyword phrase over and over (called keyword stuffing) would help get you a higher ranking. Those days, thankfully, are long gone. When you write web copy, write the same way you would write an article if search engines didn’t exist.

Tools and resources

In my opinion, most of the “so-called” SEO software is worthless. If a piece of software claims to tell you how to

• optimize keyword density
• optimize title, keyword, description, heading or alt tags
• build reciprocal link partners

then you should avoid it like the plague. If you simply write for your visitors, not the search engines, code your HTML properly (W3C valid) and keep your text to code ratio low, you’ll already be far ahead of most websites in terms of on-site search engine optimization.

And don’t waste your time building reciprocal link partners – that ship has long since sailed. It was a technique that worked about ten years ago but has little to no effect today. Instead, focus on link bait and guest posting.

So what tools and resources are worthwhile?

Well, you’ll need a solid SEO foundation to work from, so following the SEOBook and SEOMoz blogs is a great place to start. Both offer some of the most up to date information on the world of search engine optimization.

One thing you’ll want to check for and fix right away are any broken links on your website, and the best tool for that is Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which is 100% free.

You’ll want to be sure that the content you write for your website is something that visitors are actually looking for, so you’ll need to do some keyword research. A few great tools for this are Google’s keyword tool, and Wordtracker. Another option is to look for the keywords that competing websites are ranking for using SEMRush.

Next, you’ll need to track your results. Here at Wildfire, two of the tools we use everyday are Google Analytics and Aaron Wall’s Firefox Rank Checker plugin. You can also do a pretty good job of tracking your inbound links using Open Site Explorer from SEOMoz, although it’s data isn’t quite as complete as the now deceased Yahoo! Site Explorer used to be, it’s still an incredibly valuable tool that is constantly growing and improving. Majestic SEO is another great tool for tracking your inbound links.

Share your thoughts in the comments below, and if you’ve found this article to be useful, please share it or link to it :)

I am, and I’ve bought hundreds of them over the years. Most of the time, it was because I wanted the traffic or ranking they already had. Other times it was because it was just a damn good name.

The thing about buying an existing domain is that you’re hardly ever going to be able to buy it for the standard registration fee because even if it’s just an expired domain and the owner didn’t actively try to sell it, the registrar will almost always auction it off. You can easily spend anywhere from $20 to well over $10,000 but usually, you’re going to pay a few hundred dollars for a domain with a respectable amount of existing traffic and/or ranking.

More than a few times, I’ve watched my investment sour pretty quickly. Rankings dropped like a rock. Traffic disappeared. The domain became worthless to me.

After a couple of experiences like this, I was able to see a few common factors and realized how Google was able to tell that the ownership of the site had changed. Once they did, they reset it to zero. It was basically being treated like a brand new domain with no trust. Its age and back links no longer carried any weight.

So let me save you some headaches (and money) by sharing what I’ve learned along the way so that you can buy existing domains without the painful experience of watching your investment go down the drain.

1. Get the website back up ASAP

If your recently acquired domain was down for any period of time during the bidding/buying process, it’s critical to get it back up and running as quickly as possible. Especially if it was displaying a placeholder page from the registrar or web host. If Google indexes these pages, it’s a pretty sure sign that the domain is about to change ownership, and that puts it at risk of being penalized.

I once bought a domain that I had great plans for, but because of my schedule at the time, couldn’t put any time into it. A few weeks later, my once fantastic domain had lost all ranking and traffic because all that Google could find was a single place holder page. Don’t make that same mistake.

2. If possible, leave the hosting where it is

Google knows which host and IP address your domain used to live at, and changing that, in conjunction with other signals, can alert them that something’s up. If you have the option to maintain the previous hosting, by all means, do so. If not, at least try to stay at the same hosting company.

3. Keep the subject of the site the same

Nothing screams “I just bought this domain to abuse it” like a complete change in subject matter. Buying a domain about knitting and then filling it with content about Mesothelioma is a sure sign to Google that your only intent is to make a quick buck with AdSense.

There’s nothing wrong with changing the content of a site over time, but you have to treat it like dating – take small, slow steps at first. Ideally, you should replace as much of the old content as you can first, which you can often find at Archive.org, and then slowly introduce new content over a period of months.

4. Keep building links using the previous anchor text

Another sure sign that a domain has changed ownership is a drastic change in the anchor text pointing to it. Imagine this…for years, the anchor text to the home page of your recently acquired domain has been “The South Tampa Sentinel” but now new links are popping up all over the place with the anchor text “blue widgets.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that something is out of place. Keep that up and you can watch your ranking and traffic plummet faster than the stock market.

Instead, keep building links using the same anchor text as the previous owner, and slowly begin introducing new anchor text while adding new content. This will make a more natural transition.

What else should I know?

Change is usually good, but when it comes to acquiring a domain, slow and steady is always better. Over time, you can change everything, but it has to take place in increments. Think about it like buying a company. You’d rarely come in and completely change course. Instead, you would leave things the way they were and let the dust settle, then slowly begin implementing new policies hiring new employees and letting the unnecessary ones go.

Treat your new domain the same way and you’ll be on the path to success.

Some have placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Google while others blame online entrepreneurs trying to drive traffic to their websites. In reality, the blame falls somewhere in the middle.

On Thursday, Google announced a major change to its search algorithm in an attempt to solve the problem and weed-out low quality websites filled with useless or copied content, know in the SEO industry as content farms.

From the Official Google Blog:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.

But what does this really mean for website owners?

Well, first things first – what exactly is a content farm? Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder, but since Google is the judge, jury and executioner here, we’ll stick with their definition:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites.

If your dreams of retiring to an island while sipping mojitos depend on advertising revenue generated by a content farm, you should probably reevaluate your 5 year plan, because at best, you’ll be sucking down Slurpees in a 7-Eleven parking lot. There’s no question, some websites that should be considered content farms have dodged the wrath of the Farmer update, while many others have suffered a staggering loss in traffic and revenue.

A more realistic and sustainable approach is building your website with original, high-quality content in various forms, such as videos, infographics, white papers, etc., that your visitors will find useful, and then making it easy for them to share that content.

Equally important, you should never rely entirely on traffic from the search engines because every algorithm change brings unintended collateral damage. Focus on building and nurturing relationships with your visitors and other website owners to earn residual traffic from social media, email marketing and referring websites.

If you’ve been doing that, Google’s Farmer Update probably won’t have any effect on your website at all, so do a little happy dance and get back to work!

Is Linking Out Bad?

Years ago, the myth that linking out to other websites was somehow bad for your website started, and that myth quickly spread through the SEO community like some nasty virus until it was pretty much accepted at face value.

On the surface, it seemed to make sense, especially considering that it was born right around the height of reciprocal linking.  The idea behind it was that since one way links had already be proven to be more effective than reciprocal links, it should be beneficial to have more one-way links, but that created an entirely new problem. How do you get webmasters, who have become comfortable with the concept of reciprocal links, to link to your site with no incentive?

The Downside to the Myth…

The answer for some of the less ethical webmasters was basically to lie, as some of your link partners probably did to you. They would offer a reciprocal link exchange, but then use all sorts of tactics to hide the outbound link from the search engines, or make it useless for SEO purposes, such as:

• Using JavaScript links to prevent bots from even seeing the link
• Adding the “NOFOLLOW” meta tag to the page to prevent bots from following the link
• Hiding the link in an iframe, which bots can’t access
• Adding the “nofollow” attribute to the link to prevent bots from passing value through the link

Is This a Blessing in Disguise?

Most of these tactics no longer have the affect of hiding or blocking outbound links. The search engines have evolved, and can now see and pass value through JavaScript links, the “nofollow” attribute on links has been dead for a long time and many search engines reportedly ignore the “NOFOLLOW” meta tag, making it virtually useless.

Despite the fact that hiding or blocking outbound links never really had any positive benefit and most of the tactics for doing so no longer work today, webmasters will continue to do so for years to come. That’s good news for you, because all of the data that the search engines have compiled over the years enables them to quickly identify both natural and unnatural patterns.

That means shady webmasters trying to hoard their link equity lose trust and rankings because it’s obvious that they’re trying to unfairly take advantage of the search engines, while honest webmasters like you who link out to useful, relevant web pages become more trusted and rank better. In fact, a survey of major newspapers on the web showed that those who link out tend to outperform those who don’t.

Aside from earning some feel-good karma, by linking out, you’re also:

• Providing additional information to your visitors
• Gaining exposure to other website owners
• Increasing the likelihood of others linking to your website
• Encouraging participation from your visitors

Before long, visitors became annoyed at suffering through pointless intros and self-centered “about us” video introductions, and jumped from one crappy website to the next in hopes of finding one that provided some shred of value.

Thankfully, things have improved for the most part. More people understand the importance of a professionally designed website because it helps to increase the time a visitor stays on your site, and usually improves conversions, meaning you make more money. Over the last several years things have been slowly improving, and among professionals, website design has become more of a science with plenty of data to back up our decisions.

But most people’s primary focus is usually on traffic, and in most cases, that means PPC or organic SEO traffic. Their thought process is often “If I can just get enough visitors to my website, it will make up for any shortcomings my website has.”

That was something that you could get away with in the past, though not very profitably. Things are different now because instead of deciding whether they’ll click through to your site based only on the title and a snippet of info right below, search engine users can actually see a preview of your web page without leaving the search results.

It’s too early to say with any certainty, but I believe this will dramatically change the current ranking/traffic breakdown. In the past, most traffic would have gone to one of the first few results (with positions 1-3 receiving the lions share of traffic) but now that visitors can quickly and easily see each page without ever leaving the search results, I believe they will be more inclined to see what everyone else has to offer. If you have a boring, dated website, expect to be skipped over.

Keep an eye on your search traffic. If you begin to see a sudden and steady drop, your website my need to be redesigned to capture the visitors you’re losing out out on.

Here is a screen shot of how it used to look, and a screen shot of how it looks now.

Google says “Place Search is rolling out now and will be available globally in more than 40 languages in the next few days. During the roll-out process you can use this special link to preview the new results. Our goal is to help you feel like a local everywhere you go!”

I think it’s a major improvement in usability, but will it have much of an impact on marketers? I think so. If you’re not listed in the top results for local queries, you should expect a dramatic drop in traffic. Since Place Search now takes up a greater amount of vertical space, the standard organic results will get less exposure, leading to fewer clicks and less traffic.

These days, one of the most common myths seems to be that linking out to other websites is bad for your own website. You see it everywhere, from spammers/scrapers who use your articles for their own websites, all the way up to major news organizations like CNN.

People in this camp usually operate from a mindset of fear, greed or just simple ignorance.

• Those operating from a mindset of fear think that if they link out to other websites, they may somehow be penalized by the search engines. On the contrary, a website that doesn’t link out generally raises red flags to the search engines and while this alone isn’t a major issue, it can often trigger a manual review that uncovers other shady conduct.
• Those operating from a mindset of greed think that scraping articles from other websites or article directories, and simply adding the “nofollow” attribute to any links back to the original author will give them some sort of an advantage. These people have no moral qualms about using your hard work to benefit themselves but not giving you the appropriate credit for your hard work.
• Those operating from a mindset of simple ignorance are usually following the advice of the SEO guru “de jour” who tells them, for whatever reason, it’s the right thing to do. They don’t know why they’re doing it, but since they don’t know much about SEO, they just assume that the self-proclaimed experts must know what they’re talking about, and blindly follow their advice.

Linking out to useful and relevant website is completely natural. In fact, it not only helps add value for your visitors making them more likely to return, but it also helps indicate to the search engines that your website is a quality resource focused on helping people find the information they’re looking for.

So the answer to your question is no, outbound links do not hurt SEO.

Anyone who relies on organic traffic to their website should love this. Once the transition is complete, the user experience should be pretty much the same, but instead of Yahoo! using their own algorithm and data to return search results, they will simply use Bing’s. Now instead of worrying about ranking in three major search engines, you only need to focus on two; Google and Bing.

Most sites should see a moderate to generous bump in traffic since it seems to be easier to rank a website in Bing lately. Keep an eye on your stats and rankings, and if you see an increase in traffic from Yahoo!, you’ll know why.

Finding broken links within your website is simple and painless; you can either use W3C’s online link checker tool, or a more robust tool, like Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which is free and runs from your desktop. Finding broken links from other websites is equally simple, but takes a bit more work to fix them. First, you’ll have to dig through your server logs to find any 404 errors, then see which sites are linking to those non-existent pages and contact the site owners to have them corrected. If you can’t get in touch with the site owner, or he isn’t willing to correct the link, you’ll need to set up a 301 redirect to automatically send visitors and search engines to the correct page.

This is so important because if a visitors arrives at a non-existent page, they will usually just leave and visit one of your competitors instead. If a search engine finds several non-existent pages on your website, they may lower your ranking, which means less traffic.

1. Title tags

Optimizing your title tags is probably the single most effective, yet simplest part of your SEO efforts because:

• It helps the search engines see each page as unique content
• It’s where the click-able “headline” people see when using a search engine comes from
  
• It helps to influence the anchor text when people link to your web pages
• It carries a lot of weight in the algorithm that search engines use to determine where your page ranks

You can find your title tag within the HTML source code of each page, and it will look something like this:

<title>Your page title here...</title>

Your first step is to ensure that each page has a unique title, preferably beginning with relevant keyword phrases. If you must include your company name or tag line, it should appear after any other relevant information, but keep in mind that the search engines generally only index about the first 70 characters.

*Note: If you are using a content management system, you will need to modify your titles through your admin area.

Don’t go overboard with keyword phrases because it won’t help, and more importantly, people will be less likely to

2. Description tags

Along with your title tags, your description tags help the search engines to see each page as unique content while giving visitors a better idea of what they can expect to see when they click through.

You can find your title tag within the HTML source code of each page, and it will look something like this:

<meta name="description" content="Your description here..." />

To optimize your description tag, provide a brief (about 155 characters, or 25-30 words) description of the page, preferably containing relevant keyword phrases.

Note: As with your title tags, if you are using a content management system, you will need to modify your descriptions through your admin area.

3. Site map

The larger your website is, the more important your site map becomes. Although it doesn’t guarantee ranking, indexing or even crawling of your web pages, it does help search engines to easily find all of them, which makes it more likely.

If you’re using a content management system, there is likely either the functionality built in, or a free plug-in available to dynamically generate an updated site map any time you add, edit or delete content. If your website is coded in static HTML, you’ll have to use a service such as XML-Sitemaps.com to generate your site map.

4. Canonicalization

Canonicalization simply means transforming data that has more than one possible representation into a standard, or canonical form. As it relates to SEO, canonicalization means resolving the issue of multiple URLs for the same content because they can cause problems for search engines – specifically in determining which URL should be shown in search results. For example, all of these URLs point to the same page, but a search engine will only consider one of them to be the canonical form of the URL:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.php

You can fix your canonicalization issues by:

301 Redirect non-www to www , or vice versa

Edit (or create) your .htaccess file, using mod rewrite to either add the www to, or remove it from your domain.

To add the www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To remove the www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Consistent linking practices

Your linking practices should utilize which ever version of your domain you chose to use (non-www or www)

Then ensure that your internal linking structure is uniform by linking to pages in the same manner throughout your entire website. Check the link to your home page throughout your site – is index.html (or something similar, such as index.asp, index.php, etc.) appended to your domain name? If so, get rid of it. You should also make sure that any forum, e-commerce or other software running on your site uses SEO-friendly links rather than session IDs because they may cause search engines to believe that there are several versions of the same content on your website.