One thing that you can be sure in this day and age is that there are always people who look for shortcuts to get ahead. Search engine optimization is a field full of people who do black hat all the time to get ahead. In fact, I have heard it from a few top notch search engine specialists that while White Hat techniques are the right way to do things, it’s always better to go with the cutting edge BlackHat techniques to make sure that you get the job done faster and in a quicker passion.

Google is usually good at catching people who are trying to spam their indexes. But even today they are not perfect at catching guys who are trying some wacky shortcut to get ahead. For instance, today I did a search on my own name (I have a funky last name that is pretty unique), and I was surprised to seem my name show up in listings that had nothing to do with my name. Here is one listing that was particulary interesting on the second page of results pages:

[my name] began Skype has decided to overwhelmed by your financial it is not helpless now an asset of to solidify its position spend even more money

If you check the listing, my name is not there anywhere on the piece. It just shows that people are still using dynamic keyword insertion with success. Why dynamic you may ask? Because my Dad’s full name replaced mine when I looked it up in the same fashion.

I am not saying that BlackHat doesn’t pay at all. But it pays only if you know what you are doing, you know how to protect yourself, and you are darn good. But if you are a newbie who need to go to Search Engine Strategies in hope of picking up Black Hat techniques, then you can be in trouble in no time at all.

If you talk to any of the big guys in the SEO industry, the claim to be above all the nitty gritty SEO stuff such as META Tags, META Descriptions, and W3C code validation. Not all of them do, but a few of these guys tend to just put emphasis on content and content alone.

I have worked in the SEO industry for more than 4 years now, and I can tell you that content is very important, but it’s not everything when it comes to getting ranked high on the SERPs. Everybody has heard the whole “content is king” rant. It’s true. Creating magnetic content on a consistent basis can guarantee you a top spot on major search engine results pages. It’s also true that not everyone can do that. If I were to guess, less than 1% of sites on the web actually offer anything that adds overall value to the web. Out of those 1% sites, only a handful of them are actually real difference makers (e.g. Problogger).

So if you can’t create magnetic content on a consistent basis and you are goning against the other 99% of the web, you should anything and everything that COULD make a difference. Are META tags discounted by some engines? That’s true. Should you ignore them? At your own peril.

If you look at SEO best practices, you can always find a logic behind optimization techniques. For instance, providing ALT tags for images is a usability must. Adding a sitemap could be helpful for someone who is lost on your site and looking for a specific section on your site. Adding these pieces to your site always adds some value, in addition to SEO ranking benefits. So the next time a big shot tells you that you shouldn’t “waste” your time with these things, just ignore!

Blogging is very hot these days. Almost everyone I know has a blog and of course has something to say about something. There are of course multiple blog platforms that offer different features and use different coding structures. It is true that search engines love blogs and forms due to the freshness of content on these items, but also due to SE-friendly struture of some of these blogging web application packages.

While Blogger, ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox are all good blogging platforms, Wordpress is truly the superstar of the show. Wordpress is an almost perfect platform for those of us who want to have the best blogging features plus the freedom to make changes as we wish (I am talking about a self-hosted Wordpress blog here). But due to its dynamic structure, Wordpress blogs are barely optimized for search engines from the very first day, so I thought I share 5 quick things that I have personally done for my own Wordpress Weblogs.

1. Post titles, post titles, post titles: Title tags are one of the most important factors that search engines consider when evaluating your pages. Having the right title tag with keywords that you intend on targeting can make a world of difference. I would put more than my title post as my title tag just to have the opportunity to properly optimize each and every post for search engines. You can either write the PHP code yourself or use a plugin such as SEO Title Tag from netconcepts.

2. URLs: Post URLs are also important for your search engine efforts. Wordpress does not optimize your URLs for you, at least not right from the start. So make sure you optimize your Permalinks using Wordpress’ interface. You can use something like /%category%/%postname% for your Permalinks (go to Settings menu and click on Permalinks).

3. 301 Redirects: you want to make sure that you take care of broken links and 301 redirect them to the right location. You can easily do so with the Redirection plugin for Wordpress.

4. No follow Links: You want to make sure that you are not leaking Pagerank by links that are posted in your comments. In addition, links to META pages can also be no followed to increase your link weight. You can take care of this using All-in-One SEO pack.

5. Finally, make sure you have the right robots.txt for your blog. While many SEO professionals discount robots.txt as an effective SEO optimization technique, it is still important for you to make sure that you avoid content duplication issues on Wordpress. For instance, http://www.example.com/category/post1 is the same as http://www.example.com/post1 in most cases, so want to make sure you don’t get penalized for duplicate content as a result of this. You can either do a change to your .htaccess file to achieve this or add the following to your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /category/*/*

There are multiple ways around this, but the point is to avoid having two exact pages with two different URLs seen by search engines.

Finally, make sure you keep the fresh content coming. Use the keywords properly, and you should see better results by implementing the above changes. There are a few other things that you can do that I will address in a later post.

SES Toronto is probably one the most underappreciated SES conferences that we have. For some reason, people prefer San Fran or NY to Toronto, which is fair enough. But if you have time & money to go to SES Toronto, you should definitely check it out. Here are the main topics for this conference:

• As with many other SES conferences out there, there is going to be a lot of talk about Web 2.0 and the state of business in a Web 2.0 world. Web 2.0 is one of the hottest topics out there. So it is going to be mentioned whether you like it or not
• There will be some talk about the Canada market, so don’t get surprised if this is your first time at a conference in a foreign country. These things happen.
• PPC and local/universal search will be the main topic of discussion for SES Toronto. Come to think of it, they have been in all SES conferences for the past year or so. Now that is going to be exciting.

In any case, it is going to be a very exciting show. Don’t forget the Expo hall as that’s where you get to meet some of the best SEM companies around the world. Have fun in Canada!

Finally, after two years of waiting, Search Engine Optimization For Dummies (third edition) is out! Believe it or not I ordered this book a year ago and received an email today that the book has finally shipped. When it comes to SEO, there are only two real books that you need to read to get started. Forget about all the hype and other fancy books with fancy titles and even fancier authors. Peter Kent and Aaron Wall are the best teachers when it comes to SEO.

Aaron’s SEOBook is still the top everyday resource for all your SEO needs. He is truly one of the few guys who provides you with information that you can use on an everyday basis to optimize your site and improve your rankings (check out his videos for a taste of his training material).

But Peter Kent’s book is the best book out there for the starters and for those who have some experience with SEO but want to be in a position to become an advanced level SEO professional. Keep that in mind that you don’t become an Aaron Wall by reading this book. When it comes to SEO, you should also check out the blogs and forums on an everyday basis and never stop learning. Having said that, if you don’t know the basic and intermediate concepts, you can’t build a solid SEO foundation and that could be problematic for your SEO efforts.

I personally can’t say good enough things about search engine optimization for dummies. The latest and best book on SEO is finally out. Now here is the challenge… Can you finish up reading it by the end of this week!?