A lot of people have asked me in the past to provide them with some foolproof methods to get ranked high on search engines such as Google. A lot of people tell you that all you have to do is have a great title tag, and you are all set. I don’t dispute the fact that your title tag is your best bet in getting ranked higher on Google. But in most competitive markets, you are going to have to work on your link building and social media campaigns to increase your incoming links and climb your way to the top of the search engines. But if you are in an emerging market, there are plenty of simple ways that you can get your pages to the top of the engines. And best of all, all you have to do is conduct proper keyword research to find keywords you can get ranked for. You won’t have to beg others to link to you, and you won’t even have to give something away out of your pocket. Now you may want to try other tactics to maximize your search engine traffic, but the below methods are the easiest ways to get started with the process:

• EzineArticles: everybody has heard of EzineArticles. It’s the best article directory out there, and you’d be surprised how easily you can get ranked for some highly competitive terms by writing a few articles for EzineArticles. Your title does matter a lot here, so don’t ignore it.
• Hubpages: hub pages are great to get ranked for those long-tail keywords. Your hub-page can show up in the first couple of pages of Google easily as long as you choose the right keywords.
• Clipmarks: a wonderful service that gets ranked high on the SERPs as well. Many have used Clipmarks to increase their presence on search engines, and you can too. Just have to be a bit creative.
• YouTube: having your own YouTube channel is the best way to dominate the SERPs. The videos are the future and many search engines are integrating videos into search results. The way to go is to optimize your video page for your top keyword terms. Don’t forget proper tagging and titles for each video.
• Twitter: having a Twitter username with your core keyword can pay big time on search engines. Unfortunately, there are a lot of spammers out there who use the same approach but don’t provide any value to the community. So please don’t use this approach to spam Twitter.
• Facebook Page: creating and optimizing your page for the search engines can pay big time in the long run. It’s much easier getting indexed and ranked with the help of Facebook than without it.

There you have it. 6 specific ways that you can enhance your presence on the SERPs. There are plenty of other tactics that one should use, but these are a good start, and you don’t have to be a SEO genius to get them done.

I admit that I am a serial shopper. I shop around and try to find ways to save money. I have done that with hosting, books, and everything else you can name. But one thing that you should know about is your hosting location does matter. So what do I mean by that?

Let’s say you live in the U.S. and you decide to host your .com domain in England. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with that. However, using an England IP for your site can throw search engines off a bit. After all, if your site is hosted in England, there is a good chance that it targets that area only. Now, I admit that search engines have gotten better with this, and you don’t get penalized as often as a few years ago, but this is still an issue that you should be aware of before choosing a hosting service.

I would personally stay away from messing with my hosting plans. Nobody knows what Google is exactly thinking when it comes to ranking sites, but you don’t want to take any chances, do you?

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.

SifR is perhaps one of the most underrated techniques in optimizing flash sites for the web. In fact, most SEO books don’t even talk about SifR as it’s considered an advanced techniques and something that consultants hold dear to their heart. But the technique has been around for a while but all of a sudden people in SEO industry are talking about it in conferences and seminars. Is it because Adobe is focusing on improving flash to make flash sites readable to Googles and Yahoos of this world? Or maybe because it is not a cutting technique anymore. I don’t really know the answer, but a few search engine conferences have made the habit of talking about old news but as long as you have people who pay $2000 to hear the old news, why would you share new content with them?

Well, if you don’t know anything about SifR, here is how it works:

1. A normal (X)HTML page is loaded into the browser.
2. A javascript function is run which first checks that Flash is installed and then looks for whatever tags, ids, or classes you designate.
3. If Flash isn’t installed (or obviously if javascript is turned off), the (X)HTML page displays as normal and nothing further occurs. If Flash is installed, javascript traverses through the source of your page measuring each element you’ve designated as something you’d like “sIFRed”.
4. Once measured, the script creates Flash movies of the same dimensions and overlays them on top of the original elements, pumping the original browser text in as a Flash variable.
5. Actionscript inside of each Flash file then draws that text in your chosen typeface at a 6 point size and scales it up until it fits snugly inside the Flash movie. [Via Mike]

You can also see an example of GE.com. Just check their code, and you’ll see exactly how they are getting indexed for their flash text. At the end of the day, SifR is not for everybody, but if you have a flash-heavy site, you should definitely consider using that (like always don’t go overboard as it can hurt your site’s performance).

One thing that most webmasters complain about is lack of enough real estate on their web pages to include SEO content. If you work for a company that has a flash site, you know exactly what I mean. You have to either get rid of flash (which the CEO will probably won’t like) or find a way to add some text to your pages.

One approach that I have seen being used by a few SEO professionals is stuffing the footer section with 2 or 3 paragraphs of text. The argument here is that less than 5% of people actually look there, so you are not leaving a bad impression for most of your customers. Besides, search engines don’t care where the text is, right?

The problem with this approach is that you are putting text on your pages not to add value but to trick the engines. Now this is not Black Hat or anything like that, so the chances are that you are not going to get banned. You may get slapped however if your site is visited by a Google agent (real people). I know people use CSS to put content on the header but make it show up on the footer all sneaky techniques right that. I guess what it comes down to is how comfortable your company is with such approach. I personally find this approach to reflect poorly on my brand, so I don’t go over 3 lines of text on my footer (max). But I guess if you are fine with this sneaky approach, you should try it. One thing that I suggest you do is provide real content and not just keywords in your footer as keyword stuffing will definitely get you banned.