Is getting distracted an art? I don’t know about you, but after a few years of dealing with all kinds of distractions I am pretty certain that there is such a thing as the art of distraction. It’s simple really. The latest buzz in the SEO world is about the new tool that SEOMoz is going to be releasing soon. It’s called Linkscape, and it’s a very powerful tool. Basically, what it allows you to do is to find out how your competitors go about the business of building links.

The Unparalleled link intelligence advantage that you can get with SEOmoz’s tool is great. There is no question about that. But to most of us, Linkscape is like killing a bee with an elephant gun. Now folks new to the art of SEO want to have the most cutting edge tools in the world. After all, if the tool is branded as “Unparalleled link advantage,” then it must do magic. I call it distraction.

Linkscape is a great tool, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. But at the same time, it can be a big distraction for folks. Everybody in the SEO world is talking about how Linkscape will revolutionize the way SEO’s done. That’s all great. But I rather get the job done with my free tools and let folks talk it out.

Here is the thing. We all love “cool” things. In other words, we all want to be distracted, one way or another. The challenge is to stay on the ball and keep your goals in front of you. You can have the best tools out there on the market. But I rather be a producer than a consumer. If you want to take your business to the next level, just pick a few tools that let you do the job and keep your time investment in new tools to a minimum. Again, Linkscape is going to be great, and the next tool after it will be even greater. But the cold hard facts about SEO still remain: relevant valuable content gets the job done!

P.S. I am the master of this art (getting distracted). Are you?

If you have been reading SEO news lately, you have probably heard webmasters complaining about getting penalized for duplicate content. Search engines do frown upon duplicate content. The reason is, it is a short-cut to add content to your site, and it adds no value for the searcher. But how serious is the penalty for having duplicate content?

No one can say for sure. Some experts claim that you won’t be penalized but you won’t also get any benefit out of these duplicate pages. Some others believe that you may end up in the supplementary index if your content is deemed to be duplicate. I personally believe that the nature of your content determines where you will end up.

I have seen folks getting their sites ranked high on Google by using articles from e-zinearticles. The key here is to use articles that are not reused by other members. These benefits will be short-term if others also join you in putting those articles online. But the most serious offense is done by content scrapers. If you run a scraper bot on top sites to create a site of your own, you risk getting kicked out of the search engines. I personally have been a victim of content scrapers stealing my content. But none of these sites actually have shown up the SERPs.

Duplicate content on blogs is another issue that SEO professionals have to deal with these days. The truth is, it’s better to change the robots.txt file to make sure only one content URL is crawled by engines. But I wouldn’t worry about this issue very much as search engines have gotten smarter, and they do not penalize for having two different URL structures for the same content (but you should take care of it regardless in case they change their mind!).

The best practice here is to write original content. If you have access to PLR articles, you may want to significantly change them to make them unique to search engines. Duplicate content can limit your presence on search engines if used the wrong way, so you should make sure you add plenty of fresh content to your site to negate the effect of any of your duplicate articles.

One of the most interesting aspects of SEO industry is the fact that there are so many self-proclaimed experts who claim to know everything about search engines. Some of the consultants swear on their parents’ graves about the effectiveness of some of their techniques. Now here is the thing. Nobody knows for sure what works and what doesn’t on major search engines, including Google. We can all provide a best guess based on what we have seen work on search engines. I personally have had a lot of success getting ranked by tweaking my title tags, but I wouldn’t come out and say that title tags are the only factor you should work on.

Optimizing with Google means spending a lot of hours in SEO forums and in front of computer. Things change quickly and rankings fluctuate with Google. But two things have stayed the same in the past few years:

• It’s all about content: it’s all about content. Content is still king. If you have good solid content, people will link to you and search engines will love you. But if you keep putting up junk articles on your sites, there is a good chance that you won’t achieve consistent success on Google. Most sites that are getting ranked high on Google have magnetic content that is refreshed with even better content on a consistent basis.
• It’s all about links: have you wondered why people get ranked for a search term that they have not used in their text body or in their title tags? It’s simple. It’s the incoming anchor text that is responsible for that. If you don’t have the keyword phrase anywhere on your page nor in your domain name, then how can you explain getting ranked for a search phrase?

At the end of the day, you should spend most of your time on content and link building activities. Working on other factors is important too, but don’t spend too much time doing it.

Here is a heads up that we are launching a newsletter campaign that will include tips and hacks for small businesses and those new to SEO. We will be launching that shortly, so stay tuned. In the meantime, don’t forget to let us know what topics you want to hear about.

I love search engine optimization. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s amazing how we find ways to create new business for ourselves. Dynamic URLs are being used on many sites these days. If you are running a Wordpress blog, there is a good chance that you are using the mod_rewrite syntax to optimize your URLs. After all, all respected search engine optimizers claim that static URLs have an advantage over dynamic URLs. I never thought the advantage was much and Barry Shwartz piece now suggests that as well. But now Google is suggesting that webmasters should not use a rewrite method to map dynamic URLs to static ones. Here is what Google has to say:

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

So should you listen to Google? Yes and no really. Google says a lot of things that are simply not facts. Even if Google had trouble crawling dynamic URLs, they are not going to flat out admit it. In this case, I agree that Google is able to crawl dynamic URLs. I have seen it done. I remember when I told the SVP of my previous company that dynamic URLs are not the reason our SEO campaigns were not performing well. Let’s just say he wasn’t impressed by what I had to say and thought I was a complete you-know-what. But here is the thing. Dynamic URLs work almost as well as static URLs.

What Should I do?

Google does claim that dynamic URLs make it hard for them to crawl your pages properly. If you’ve had a Wordpress blog, you are probably familiar with Wordpress’ duplicate content issues. But I would still optimize my URLs to look static and have my keywords in them. Google will not be penalizing folks for going static. Google’s goal is to bring the best information to searchers. Having a static URL is not a dis-qualifier. It should never be a dis-qualifier unless you are doing black hat. But if you just have blog, and you are afraid that Google might ban you for playing with Apache mod_rewrite, think again. What about Google’s recommendation, you may ask. It’s just a guideline, and it doesn’t mean anything. Stop wasting your time worrying about things that really don’t matter and instead focus on creating content that folks will link too (like the above piece by Barry :))

There are a few things that are certain. Death, taxes, and the fact that web designers just don’t get search engines (actually, a select few do). These days a lot of folks build websites that are cool, colorful, and Web 2.0ish, but not optimized for search engines. Leaving SEO to your web designer is like asking an astronomer to do a surgery on you. There is a good chance it’s not going to work.

Web designers are good at finding the right contract of colors for your site or designing attractive layout for your sites. But what they are not good at is how to design a site that is search-engine friendly. A lot of people go rentacoder.com and and post a project asking for someone who can design a site that is good looking and search engine friendly. The truth is a whole lot of designers don’t know what you mean by that. Unfortunately, many designers are not willing to accept they don’t know something. So they design your site, and then ask you for a few thousands more to make your site search engine friendly.

Web designers are not stupid. They know SEO is a hot topic these days, and they can’t afford to acknowledge their lack of knowledge in that area. In addition, a few designers actually think they know SEO when in fact they have no idea what they are talking about. You can’t fault web designers here. You need to be as specific as you can be with these guys, and even then expect your site to be less than optimized. But it’s better to know the facts beforehand than putting your complete trust in someone who will probably not provide you with what you are looking for. When it comes to SEO, most web designers do not get it. That’s just a fact of life.

Search engine optimization is now being used by more companies to take advantage of the so-called “free traffic” on search engines. So the obvious general terms are becoming super competitive. It’s not to say that you can’t get ranked for broad terms, but the conversion won’t be that great even if you manage to rank well for a broad term such as “laptop.”

But what most people forget about is the long tail of search. Think about it. If you are optimizing for a specific model number you can get a whole lot of traffic that is more targeted. At the end of the day, SEO shouldn’t be about ranking but about profit in my opinion. If you are getting a million people to your site but are not making much profit, then your traffic is useless. You either have to find the way to convert that traffic or you better focus on terms that do convert.

Optimizing for more specific terms such as “brand + model” or SKU numbers can be huge for your SEO efforts. Sure. It will be boring to create extra pages just for SKUs and models, but it will be worth it.

That’s what I wanted to believe when I started with search engine optimization. I knew that you could block bots with htaccess but I thought the more bots get the my page the better. But the truth is you should always protect your website against content scrapers. One way to access your website’s content is by using Wget command. There are thousands of people these days that want to take advantage of the hard work of yours and mine to make a quick buck. What they do is write robots that go across the net and pretend to be from legitimate sites such as Google and MSN and grab your content. Now who wants that?

The problem with these robots is not just the fact that they are stealing your content, but also the bandwidth the consume. If your site is highly on demand, then you can expect these robots to take away your bandwidth and slow down the process time for your website. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that only legitimate sites get access to your valuable content. Using robots.txt allows you to at least protect yourself against most scraping attacks. Read on more about it here.

I have seen and read many SEO books in my short SEO career. The books by Peter Kent, Aaron Wall, and Bill Hunt. But until now, I had never read a book that was so focused on the practical side of things rather the theory side. There is no question in my mind that Aaron Wall’s SEObook is the most comprehensive SEO resource in the market. But Building Findable Web Sites is a unique SEObook that could be a perfect companion to SEObook. Building Findable Web Sites is not about teaching you how important web directories are or how you should distribute press releases to gain links back to your domain. It is more way more practical than that. This books comes with code inside that shows you how to optimize your htacess file or how to make your Wordpress blog more SEO friendly. Rather than focusing just on theory, Aarron Walter decides to share how things get done in this business.

Overall, I was very impressed with Building Findable Websites. It was one of only books that gave me goosebumps as I had a few chapters of material to learn. I don’t know about you but I am not impressived with all the repititve content that is available on some of these “great” search engine optimization books. But Building Findable Websites’ practical approach to SEO simply impressed me. But don’t take my word for it. Take a peek here.

Folks keep asking me about my favorite SEO tools that I use to get my job done. It’s true that I have a subscription to Wordtracker. Who doesn’t. But to tell you the truth, I use a dozen of free tools out there to complement what I get with WordTracker and SEO-Elite. One of my favorites is the toolset provided by MarketLeap.

MarketLeap provides the following tools:

• Search Engine Saturation Tool
• Keyword Checker Tool
• Link Popularity Tool

These are all great tools that provide a lot of value for free. For instance, by using the SES tool, you can figure out how many of your pages are indexed by Google and compare that to that of your competitors. In addition, you can figure out if there is anything wrong with your website that makes search engine unable to index some of your pages. That is simply too valuable to be free.

The keyword checker tool helps you get your ranking for a keyword. It’s quick, sweet, and easy, and you don’t have to shell out $300 for Web Position if you don’t have to, though I strongly suggest it.

Finally, the link popularity tool shows you how many links you have on major engines and how your competitors are doing. If your site is deemed to have a limited presence by the tool, you know you will have to work on getting more links. But you can figure out how many links you will need to catch up with your competitors. That’s the beauty of this tool. It gives you the goal and the measuring stick, so you can figure out where you are and where you should go.

MarketLeap tools are free for now and have been for quite a while. I have seen other free tool programmers ask for a premium after a while, but these guys have kept the tool free, and it’s a wonderful decision for us all.