If you own a blog, you are probably familiar with the concept of pinging. In essence, when you publish a piece of content, you want to let syndication services such as Technorati to come and pick up on your new content. This is all fine and dandy if you do it moderately (don’t do it 5 times a day and when you have no new content as you will get banned). Pinging allows you to get extra links and traffic from around the net and who hates that, right?

It all looks harmless really. You publish content, you let others know about it, and you get traffic and links that can help you climb up the rankings. If you are just pinging sites such as Technorati, then you should be fine. But be aware of pinging tools that are out there. You have probably seen tools such as Pingoat. The problem with these tools is that some of the directories that are posted on them are unreliable. So you need to be extra careful which ones you Ping. I have personally had my site penalized for pinging the wrong service (a Japanese service). The truth of the matter is that there are many who don’t want to work hard to create content for themselves, so instead they steal your content (through web scraping). Sometimes, Google does penalize your site for that. You don’t get dropped by the engine, but you lose significant ranking. So you want to make sure you know the service you are pinging.

I  often hear people complaining about how doing search engine optimization is like flying blind. That’s simply not true. If you know you SEO basics (keyword research, tagging, link building, and …), you are not flying blind. Sometimes SEO efforts take time to show up in your results, and often you are outdone by an even more dedicated site.

All hope is not lost though. There are tools out there that can help you gain competitive edge and stay atop of your market. One underrated tool that you can use to help you figure out whether you are on the right track is Google Adwords Keyword tool. I often hear people talk about how they subscribe to WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery to do better keyword research, but you should never ignore the tool that is offered by Google itself. Google Keyword tool is an excellent tool to find out what Google thinks of your website.

Google Adwords allows you to find out two key important items about your SEO campaing. By generating keyword ideas based on description, you can figure out the top keywords that you can target in your market. Not only that, you can also check to see whether you have enough relevant content on your site to keep Google happy as far as LSI is concerned.

The 2nd option is absolutely powerful. So you create a site, and you think it is optimized for the word “SEO.” But how can you be sure? That’s where the second option comes into place. You can check your own site with the keyword tool to see what Google thinks of your site (keyword-wise). It’s amazing that many don’t even notice these options. But I guess we all want to believe that a paid tool is much more powerful than a free tool. Don’t get me wrong. WordTracker is a must have, but when combined with Google keyword tool, you can take your game to a whole other level.

Uncertainty is the nature of search engine optimization. Google provides us all with a guideline on how to keep our pages optimized for its bots, but it doesn’t tell us which factor is more important, or what truly determines the ranking for a site (for a specific term). So, it’s only natural for SEOs to make up stories to make more money. One of these unfounded claims is the fact that you can hurt your rankings by putting Google Adsense on your blog or website right away. Now that can’t be further from the truth. I have done numerous experiences with Adsense, and I can tell you that Google would not discourage its Adsense users from putting ad units on their sites. Having said that, Google does care about the quality of content that you put on your site. Google has been specific in the past about the fact that it hates “thin affiliates.” It’s easy to use software packages such as HyperVRE to create Adsense pages on the fly, but you need to make sure you add quality content to avoid ranking penalties. But if you are not just slapping useless content on your pages, then Adsense will not hurt your rankings. Anybody who’s telling you otherwise is either misled or trying to make some cash.

When I posted a story about the new search engine, Cuil, a while back, I never thought that Cuil had the potential to surpass major search engines in the short run, as far as driving traffic to my site. After testing Cuil for a while now, I am personally stunned that it is driving more traffic to my site than Yahoo! (I am actually getting traffic from Yahoo! and Live). I have a very small niche site that gets about 100 visitors a day from Google, about 20 visitors from Yahoo! and about 10 visitors from MSN. I do get traffic from Twitter, which is my 2nd highest traffic generator, but that’s pretty much the order. Cuil brings me about 30-40 visitors a day. It’s not huge traffic, but it’s still about the amount of traffic that I get from Yahoo! and Live combined. The results are still not significant enough for me to go out and focus on Cuil specifically, but if this trend continues, I may have no choice.

Are you seeing similar results with your sites? Have you had any success with Cuil?

You may have heard stories about how Digg can help you move up the search engine rankings and double or triple your SEO conversions. But is that really true? The simple answer is yes and no. Digg, Wikipedia, and all other Web 2.0 social networks have pretty much implemented the no-follow tag on their links. So you get a link but it is pretty much ignored by search engines. Does that mean that you should not go after these links? That’s not true at all. Unlike some SEOs claim, no-follow links are actually very valuable, if they are obtained from the right sources. For instance, Digg links don’t help your rankings directly, but if your story shows up on the front page of Digg, you can get a thousand or sometimes more backlinks from various sources. Not every story shows up on Digg’s home page, so you can’t expect to get those results. Nevertheless, adding Digg and other social media sites to your SEO campaign can help out a lot in the long run. But whatever you do, you want things to happen natually. Anythin that looks unnatural is bad for you and your business (Whether its adding 1000 links in a minute or digging 20 of your own stories on Digg).

The most scary thing about openning up a private Web 2.0 service such as Yahoo! Buzz? Simple! Aggressive marketers. We have seen it with MySpace, LinkedIn, and FaceBook. Now you can add Yahoo! Buzz to the list of online venues that will be targeted to generate millions of free visitors (or that’s what marketers will try to do). I personally like the fact that I get to try this good looking service as I don’t really have a site that can go against SI or ESPN, so having the chance to really test it out would be great. Don’t forget to get your codes here. Remember, this is not a marathon but a sprint. Whoever figures out how to effectively utilize Yahoo! Buzz will get the traffic advantage.

Any organization that you go to, you’ll find about 99% of its employees don’t know anything about SEO. I have talked to marketing managers, directors, and senior vice presidents who have no clue about how search engine optimization is done. But the funny thing that I have notices is that after 10 minutes of discussion about on-page SEO tactics that they could use to improve their sites, I almost always get this brilliant feedback.

“I have a great idea! Why don’t we just change the color of the text that you are suggesting to white. That way we don’t hurt the customer experience and make search engines happy.” So why is hidden text such a popular idea among marketers:

• Low Risk: hiding the text looks low risk to most people. Your copy doesn’t have to be perfect if you hide it. Besides, you can probably put things in there that you normally wouldn’t (if the text was visible).
• Damage Control: you don’t know what adding a paragraph of text would do to your customers. They may leave and don’t come back (it depends on the content you put on your site). So why not mitigate the potential damage by not showing them anything at all?
• Greed: everybody gets greedy sometime. You want to have everything and pay nothing. We all want to have our cool flash sites and put pretty images on our pages and avoid anything that search engine might like.
• Ego: everybody wants to be a genius. We all have egos and if we find some solution that no one has tried before, it will make us feel good. But here is the thing. There got to be a reason why people don’t use these so obvious tactics, right? Not everyone’s stupid!

Some of these obvious mistakes are just due to lack of proper knowledge. I really don’t blame people who suggest these ideas, but sometimes the top guys go ahead with these ideas without talking to a professional SEO. Now that’s when you can get into trouble.

It’s amazing how on-page optimization techniques get no love from SEO experts and marketing gurus. Of course, it all comes down to who you call and expert and guru really. It’s true that on-page tactics have been abused and abused more by search engine gamers in the past but there are still a few techniques that you should implement on your site regardless of what “SEO gods” tell you:

1. Title Tags Matter: title tags matter big time. Put your most important keyword first and go from there. Put you brand last if you can. Don’t try to make the title more than it should be. As long as your title is not a collection of random words, then you are fine but don’t forget your keywords.

2. Header Tags Matter: It absolutely does. I have tested a few sites and have seen significant results by using <h1> and <h2> tags on my site. I was actually moved from position 5 on page 2 for a highly competitive keyword to position 9 page 1. It may sound like a very small improvement but can’t beat being on page 1.

3. Bold, Italic Tags Matter: They do. You can give search engines cues about what is important on your page and what’s not. Use <strong> and <i> tags when you can (actually using <strong> is more effective than <b> for some reason).

4. Keyword and Description Tags matter: The so called “big picture” marketing gurus might disagree with me, but keywords and description tags absolutely do matter. I have personally seen results by implementing them (not just moving up the rankings but also higher conversion rates). Don’t ignore them.

5. Sitemaps Matter: creating a sitemap is not really that hard so it baffles me when SEO professionals claim that it shouldn’t be done as it’s not worth it. Why not?! Folks, it literally takes a minute to create a sitemap and you will have something that search engines love. Why not do it? Yes. You can use the time to focus on FaceBook, but if you spend 1 minute a day on your FaceBook strategy, then you are in deep trouble.

Remember that search engine optimization is not an exact science. Nobody really knows what works. We know what doesn’t work thanks to Google (Black Hat techniques definitely won’t work for long). But other than that, there is no book or article from Google that claims you shouldn’t do META tags. It’s tough and boring but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Yahoo! Directory is one of the most expensive directories that are out there. Directories or fossilized search engines used to be a great way to give credibility to a site and get ranked higher on Google and other engines. But over the years most directories have either lost their glamor or become less of a factor as Google has updated its factors. So, can one justify paying Yahoo! $299 a year per listing in Yahoo! directory?

I have tested Yahoo! directory a few times, and I believe it is still worth it to try Yahoo! directory for your site. With my tests, Yahoo directory has worked like a charm getting me higher on Google on terms that are not super competitive (but competitive enough to matter). I’d like to think of Yahoo! directory as a tie-breaker as this point really. If you and your competitors are doing everything right, then Yahoo! can break the tie. However, if your site is completely unoptimized, then you may not get value from Yahoo! directory. Also, don’t forget that Yahoo! does not guarantee you a spot in the directory so you can be out of $299 if your site is terrible.

What to do?

I would try Yahoo! directory for a year (especially if your competitors are using it as well). I wouldn’t expect a huge increase in traffic for being listed there, but if it helps you get a bit higher in search engine rankings, then it’s probably worth it. If it does nothing for your business, toss it after a year. It’s not as if it significantly matters.

A lot of people come to believe that you can compete with any site on the Internet for that top stop on Google no matter when you have started your website as long as you pay a good SEO professional to get the job done. The truth of the matter is even the best SEOs may not be able to get your site to the top of search engines if you have just started today and you are in a superhyper competitive market.

These days more than anything SEO is all about picking your battles. You may choose to choose a very broad term and use that as your main target keyword for your SEO campaign, but I promise you there is more disappointment in the horizon with that strategy than going after the long tail of search. Now if you are a huge company who have had a site for 10 or 12 years and have over a million customers, then you should probably be competing for those high positions.

The strategy is simply different when you are working with a very small business. For small businesses, it’s often better to go after niche searches and avoid getting into a war with the top guys unless you are an ambitious startup and are the hottest thing in the market. So here is my approach to helping small business get ranked high on search engines:

• Pick the right keywords: Pick keywords that are not too broad or too general. The phrase “small business credit card” or “cash back rewards credit card” gives you a better chance of getting ranked on Google than the word “credit card.” Even the two mentioned phrases are extremely competitive, but that’s due to the landscape of the financial industry where there are millions of affilites with valuable and sometimes useless sites who are trying to get ranked for every combination of keywords possible.
• Get the basics right: I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to SEO professionals who want to take shortcuts and do Web 2.0 marketing. Social media should absolutely be in your plans. You should have a content strategy for Digg, YouTube, Reddit, and Delicious. But you can’t not optimize your title tag and expect things to work out because you are doing Web 2.0 marketing. Web 2.0 is cute and can be very powerful but sometimes it’s just too cute.
• Don’t forget linking: Having the right linking strategy can be the difference between being on the first page and first on the second page. The difference may not look huge to you, but believe me it is. Once you are on the first page, you are going to be seen by a lot of people even if you are on position #9 or #10. But the 2nd page requires an extra click and people are very frugal when it comes to spending clicks. Get the right anchor texts from the right relevant sites, and you are on your way.
• Don’t forget automation: I love the old school method of doing everything by hands. Finding out how many backlinks you have by hands, and finding the number of indexed pages manually. It’s great. It reminds you how hard things used to be done before we got SEO tools such as Web Position, WordTracker, and … I am sure a few of you think of people who lived years ago and didn’t have cars. But I doubt you actually go to work with a horse to see how things used to be (actually you might want to do it with the gas prices skyrocketing). Use the tools. Time is indeed money.
• Don’t forget analytics: a few years ago, you could have argued that analytics is expensive, useless, or both to your business. Not anymore. If you want to have any chance of converting better and competing with the big boys, you can’t afford to do marketing the blind way. You can’t guess things or go with things that feel good. You need to track and test, and I am not just talking about pay per click marketing. You should test your SEO pages all the time. Change the way the copy is written. Move things around. Pick the keywords that actually do convert. What’s the benefit of ranking for the term “credit cards” if its conversion rate is 0.00001%. Basically out of each 100,000 people, you get one person who applies for your card. That’s terrible. Now, it could be that your site is so scary it drives people away. But you wouldn’t know it unless you have a good SEO analytics package in place. Google Analytics is for free. Go get it. No excuses!