SEOs wear many hats. They could wear Black hats, which means they will use underhanded tactics such as cloaking or doorway pages to trick search engine agents and achieve high rankings in a short period of time. White Hat SEOs are the good old ethical search engine optimization experts who focus on ethical tactics such as title optimization and link building to achieve the highest ranking possible for themselves and their clients. But while it is fairly easy to figure out if a tactic is Black Hat or White Hat SEO, Gray Hat SEO tactics are the ones that one should worry about. Gray Hat search engine gurus claim that they use border line tactics to achieve the best SERP rankings possible in the shortest period of time. In my opinion there are three types of Gray Hat SEO tactics:

1. Light-Gray
2. Heavy-Gray
3. Gray-Gray

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A recent survey by Shop.org indicates that online marketers have email marketing, search engine optimization, and web usability at the top of their agenda for the coming year. But which one is more important? E-mail is obviously the push strategy used by online marketers to push information out to their audience. Search engine optimization allows web marketers to pull people in rather than push information out. But push or pull will not matter to your business unless you are able to convert visitors that you are getting to your site. So, I would put Web Usability as the most important aspect of online marketing for 2007-08. Search engine optimization and e-mail marketing go hand in hand. In a sense, they complement each other, but I would give more priority to SEO as over 90% of Internet traffic is generated through search engines (Forrester 2006). Obviously this order could be different depending where your company is and what it wants to achieve, but the goal should be to have an integrated online marketing approach which focuses on all these aspects of online marketing and not just SEO. SEO is important but it is certainly not everything!

I have heard many consultants claiming that while SEO is based on science and algorithms, best professional SEOs are more artists than scientists. But is that really true? After all, a consultant will tell you everything you need to hear to give him/her the business or to continue getting those paychecks from you. So let’s bust some myths when it comes to SEO:

1. You can’t do SEO yourself: not necessarily true. Let’s not forget that search engine optimization is all about figuring out how Google, Yahoo, and other engines rank websites and trying to use such guidelines to design more SEO friendly websites.  Secondly, a major part of your SEO efforts is going to be developing valuable content to your users and keep the content coming to retain the visitors that you have attracted over the years. So you can certainly create content yourself, and it is also possible to do most things that SEOs might suggest by yourself. Keep that in mind though that while you can save money doing your SEO yourself, you will sacrifice your time and if you are better off focusing on your core competency, then outsourcing SEO is a good approach.

2. SEO at its best is an art: true and not true. I would not call innovation in SEO an art per se.  While thinking outside the box is not possible for everyone, it certainly doesn’t make SEO an art. Best SEOs are those who fully understand the guidelines and hints that they have gotten from their experience with search engines. What makes one SEO professional better than the other? A better understanding of algorithms could be one reason. It certainly gives you the possibility to come up with more ways to optimize a website but again that does not make you an artist, but a very good scientist at best.

While I do agree that some professional SEOs are exceptionally creative, in general the word “art” is an attempt to sell SEO to clients more than anything else. I personally would prefer to be called a good scientist than an artist, but that’s just me.

One of the major factors that Google and other search engines consider before ranking a site is its age. Website age is obviously different from Domain age. In essence, Google will give you preference if your site was first indexed much earlier than some of your competitors. But is Site age really a good indicator for the best search results possible? While I understand that Google wants to make sure that new sites prove themselves and are trustworthy to be displayed high on SERPs, I certainly don’t believe age is a good indicator for the quality of information on a site. Like the old saying goes, age does not equal wisdom or does it?

Keyword Effectiveness Indicator (KEI) is touted by many professional SEOs as a method to identify the right keywords to get ranked for a page. KEI is essentially based on the number of searches that are done for a term and the number of pages that are indexed for that search term. The higher your KEI, the better the keyword is for your niche. However, there is one major caveat when it comes to KEI. KEI tells you what keywords are easier for you to get ranked for based on the # of competitors and and # of searches. However, that is no how Google rank pages. What if your competitors are Yahoo!, MSN, Wikipedia, Digg, and a bunch of other high quality sites? Is it easy to beat those guys to No. 1 for a search term or is it better to go for a keyword that faces less quality competitors? KEI is a good indicator if you don’t want to go blind in your SEO journey, but by no means is a definite success indicator.

If you are new to SEO, you need to be careful what some consultants claim about the effects of Adsense/Adwords for your search engine rankings. Adsense which allows many publishers to monetize their websites is not going to help you at all with your search engine natural rankings. The same applies to Adwords. No matter how much money you spend with Google Adwords, you are not going to move an inch up or down the natural rankings. So, no! No benefit from Google Adsense or Adwords for that matter.

If you have had any previous experience with a SEO agency/consultant, you have probably heard of the concept of keyword mapping. Keyword mapping is the process of matching up the pages that you have with the keywords you want to go for. In essence, before you start doing any serious SEO, you need to know:

1. What pages you have.
2. What keywords they are getting ranked for.
3. How well they are getting ranked for them.
4. Should they be getting ranked for them.
5. Should they be  targeting other keywords.

I have seen companies that do not know how many pages they have on their sites! It may sound crazy, but that happens folks. Obviously, if you don’t know the pages that you have out there on the Internet, then you probably don’t know what keywords these pages are getting ranked for. Once you know what keywords your pages are getting ranked on, you basically have to figure out how well you are getting ranked for those keywords. More importantly, you need to figure out if you are getting ranked well for the main keyword that should go with that page. As a part of this process, you want to avoid keyword cannibalization phenomenon. As you know, you can have only 2 listings on every page of Google. So if you have three pages competing for those 2 keywords, you need to know that the right 2 pages are winning. Better yet, by only having 2 pages getting ranked on the first page for that keyword, you avoid the keyword cannibalization issue. One biggie is to avoid getting ranked for the wrong keyword. If you have a page that is related to let’s say summer trips, you should probably not get ranked for winter trips. In short, if your page is getting ranked for the wrong keyword, then you will have to find a way to either change the theme of the page or add the right keywords to them. That’s why keyword mapping is so important for your SEO efforts. I have seen SEOs that come up with a set of recommendations without analyzing their clients’ websites properly. You can not recommend adding pages to a website without knowing what you have already just as you can’t target a keyword on a new page without knowing if your existing pages are going for those keywords as well. So don’t forget to bring keyword mapping up if your SEO somehow forgot about it.

Many webmasters ignore the importance of page footers when optimizing their websites for search engines. When people see a useless piece of space in the footer, SEO’s see opportunity to optimize more for search engines. But some SEO’s actually push their luck by utilizing tactics that can get you de-ranked or banned by major search engines such as Google or Yahoo!. So here are the do’s and don’ts of footer optimization:

• Do use your main keywords in your footer.
• Do keep your footer to one or two lines Max.
• Do respect your brand by keeping your footer clean.
• Don’t put an ugly paragraph or two in your footer
• Don’t stuff your footer with unrelated or related keywords.
• Don’t make your footer hidden to your users (invisible text).
• Do use your judgment before implementing a dubious tactic

SEO is not rocket science. Some of it is just plain common sense. If you are told to change your footer but feel uneasy about the recommended changes, then don’t do them. If somebody promises you that you will get to the top of search engines by gaming Google and other search engines with your footer, just don’t do it. You may get short-term gains from these tactics, but the long-term effects will be devastating for your website. When in doubt, use common sense!

In many organizations, there are a few misconceptions about SEO and how it can affect an organization’s overall e-marketing strategies. Many organizations try to sell SEO as a marketing means to generate free sales and bring down the companies overall e-CPA. while that may be true in some cases, the way top executives go about understanding the benefits of SEO is often wrong. The notion that SEO will save you cost on your PPC campaigns is simply not true. Sure, you can stop your PPC altogether and bank everything on SEO, but if the past is a good indication, many companies will fail miserably with this strategy as many have in the past. SEO does not replace PPC people. But you already knew that!

One of the arguments amongst Search Engine professionals is about the importance of revisit tags to your site. Many novice SEOs get familiar with tags such as keyword and description and then graduate to revisit tag without knowing what it actually does for your website. Here is how you add a revisit tag to your web page:

<META NAME=”REVISIT-AFTER” CONTENT=”X days”>

The funny thing about this tag is that it can be used to reveal true SEO champs from chumps. If somebody came out and told you that you should not use this META tag as it makes search engines visit your site less frequently than normal, that is just a comment out of ignorance. The revisit tag was created for a non major search engine, and up to today I haven’t seen any positive or negative effect by using this META tag. Search engines visit your site on their terms and not yours. Imagine if you could force a crawler to come to your site more than it usually would. Now think again! Google does not give you that much control, and it really shouldn’t. So while I find revisit tag useless, I don’t have anything against using it if you absolutely have to! Feel free to enlighten me with your experiences with the revisit tag.