Many webmasters have been wondering about the limits of what Google quality raters can do. Can they possibly cause a site to lose its rankings? Some have speculated that if multiple quality raters raise a red flag on a URL, it would lose its ranking. Matt Cutts has taken time to debunk that:

PotPieGirl goes on to speculate: “However, I do believe that if a certain percentage of raters mark one url as spam or non-relevant, that it does throw up some type of flag in the system that can cause something to happen to that url. Now I naturally do not KNOW this, but I get that sneaky feeling.”

That feeling is unfounded. Even if multiple search quality raters mark something as spam or non-relevant, that doesn’t affect a site’s rankings or throw up a flag in the url that would affect that url.

So you may be wondering what it takes for a site to lose its rankings?

But the search quality raters are strictly “read-only”–they don’t directly affect our rankings in any way. If you think about it, you definitely wouldn’t want to spamfight on the same queries that you’re using to evaluate your quality: you’d get skewed quality metrics as a result.

Make no mistake about it. Google does take action on spam sites manually and algorithmically. But getting red flagged by one rater or two does not “directly” affect rankings. The lessons learned from the feedback provided by raters could definitely cost some their rankings though.

Has Google decided to throw smaller publishers under the bus, since it is easier and perhaps safer to rank larger news sites republishing the mom & pop content? When a small site works hard to break a news story, only to have it republished by a well known news site, Google used to promise it could figure out which was the original. “trust us” to “sort it out”, they said. That seems to have changed.

This is something I very much agree with. Since the implementation of Google Panda changes, small publishers have a very difficult time competing with the big boys. We are not a small publisher by any means but even our company has had to fight hard and spend more than we ever to have any chance of staying competitive.  Let’s not forget that people are now gaming Facebook, Twitter, and G+ to get their content ranked higher than legitimate websites.

Will Google change its approach in the future? That is not very likely the way this has been going. Google has way too much power and has become even stronger with its recent acquisitions. With Google getting in the deal business, it will be interesting to see how deal companies cope. At this point, the best way to deal with Google is by putting your eggs in multiple baskets. The days of “write it and they will come” seem to be over.

• Write guest posts: guest posts are a great way to build links to your content portal and gain loyal readers in the process. Your goal should be to write for blogs that have an audience who may be interested in your own content too. Your posts should be of very high quality, something that would encourage people to visit your site and follow your other works. My Blog Guest is a good service to try here.
• Work on linkbaits: those of you who have spent a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook in the past have probably seen all those cheatsheets and infographics getting a ton of retweets. There are designers who can develop those types of content for your website. It may cost you a bit but can get the word out about your business.
• Improve your internal linking structure: don’t just focus on getting links from other sites. You have plenty of content on your own site to link to (hopefully you do). Every new post that you write should provide you with an opportunity to link to your older posts.
  
• Link to others: a blog that is all about and your own content can be pretty boring. There are other people in your niche that come up with good content on a consistent basis. There is no reason to link to those folks. Who knows. They may link back to you as well. Besides, who you link to can give search engines a better idea what the theme of your site is. Research has shown that linking to others can get you more links back and even help your rankings. Don’t be reckless though. Do your research and don’t link to spammy sites.
• Don’t forget traditional link building: online directories and social bookmarking sites can provide you with some useful links. Online directories may not be as popular and effective as they used to be once, but they are still the way to go for new sites.

Those of you who have made a habit of creating killer content on your websites won’t have trouble getting link love from others as long as you get your content found. The above steps should help you do just that.

WordPress is a powerful content management system and certainly makes it easy to manage lots of content with less effort. It is not perfect however. So you need to do some tweaking to get your posts optimized for search engines. Of course, you need to think about getting links to your blog as well. With that in mind, here are 10 ways you can optimize your blog posts for SEO:

1. Competitive Analysis: make sure you go after keywords and topics that are not too competitive. At some point, banging your head against other heavyweights in a niche becomes less than ideal. There are plenty of keyword research tools, analytics, and competitive intelligence tools that you can use to optimize your keyword lists and go after the ones that are worth your effort.
2. Title Tags: the most important ranking factor, even in 2010. You want to make sure your titles are optimized and target “one” main keyword per page. It’s OK to let your pages compete for spots, but if you want to get the best results, you are better off focusing on one main keyword phrase per page. Use plugins such as All In One SEO to make the process easier.
3. Page URL: I can tell you from experience that using keywords in your domain or page URL can help make a big difference. Have you ever noticed those under construction blogs that are ranking high on Google due to the keywords used in their domain names?
4. Header Tags: using your keywords in your header tag makes a difference as well. You do want to watch the number of times you use your keyword on your pages, but if there is one place that you should use your keywords in, it should be your header tags.
5. Alt Tags: not as important as they used to be, but it still is a best practice to provide alt tags for all your images. You don’t want to spam the search engines here, so don’t put all your hopes in your alt tags.
6. Internal Links: link to your other content on your blog and link often. Using keywords in your anchor text does help a lot as well. If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of scripts you can install on your blog to automatically link to your other stories on your blog.
7. Image Name & Caption: image names (and to be more general file names) and caption can provide you with another opportunity to let search engines know more about your pages and what they are all about.
8. Outbound Links: don’t hesitate to no follow links to websites that you are not too sure about. In fact, I would remove links to websites I don’t feel comfortable linking to. But do link to top blogs or sites in your niche. It never hurts.
9. Social Media Buttons: another great way to get people to your blog and get links to your content is by adding social media buttons to your blog. Fixed Social Buttons is a decent plugin if you are looking for something attractive.
10. Viral Link building: you need to be a bit creative here. Whether it’s throwing a giveaway on a hot gadget (e.g. iPad) or writing a controversial post, the formula for viral marketing is out there. Just be creative.

These are not everything you can do to optimize your posts for search engines, but they do help a lot. You don’t want to over-optimize your pages. At some point, you are better off working on quality content than changing the smallest details in your posts.

A lot of people assume that it’s too late to catch up as many have already optimized their websites for the search engines. That can’t be further from the truth. There are a lot of people who don’t even implement the most basic search engine optimization tactics, and those who do often give up before seeing any tangible results. If you are looking to enhance your website’s reach in 2010, here are 10 simple tactics you should implement in the new year:

1. Listen: if you want to create high quality content, you need to keep your ears more open than ever before. There are plenty of new channels that you can take advantage of to gather valuable information about your post, but you have to keep listening to what people have to say about your products and brands in your niche, and more importantly things people say about you and your business.
2. Keywords: there is never a bad time to expand your keyword set and target new phrases. Targeting long-tail keywords and phrases that you have not targeted yet is a good way to start the new year.
3. Title: I can’t tell you how many times I see people who talk about search engine optimization but still have not taken time to optimize their title tags. It’s the no-brainer move of the next year if you haven’t already optimized your title tags.
4. Link building: links do matter. The more relevant, quality links you get to your pages, the better chance you have of getting your pages ranked high on top search engines. Search engine algorithms differ on how they treat incoming links, but in general if your content is good enough for people to link to, you are on the right track.
5. Social Media: more people get Twitter and Facebook these days. If you have taken time to secure your presence on Twitter and Facebook and have your business pages set up as well, you should focus on upcoming web 2.0 services such as Posterous and niche social networks in your industry. Social media could be a game changer, especially for those who jump on board quickly.
6. Link Structure: so you are building all these links and sending people to your website from social networking sites such as Facebook. Don’t forget to fix your internal link structure to make sure you get the best treatment from search engines. You should not hesitate to link to your relevant internal pages, address duplicate content issue (e.g. using canonical property), and avoid those nasty parameters in your URLs when possible.
7. Hacker-proof your site: as your website becomes more popular and gains more exposure on the search engines, you can expect hackers to come after you and what you have worked for. No site is 100% hacker proof, so you should back up your data, follow online security tips, and install security scripts to protect yourself and your business against hackers. At least make life difficult for them if you can’t avoid being hacked.
8. Content management system: content is king, and if you want to have success with your SEO campaigns, you are going to need a decent amount of content. Do yourself a favor and pick up a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal already.
9. List your local business: if you own a local business, don’t hesitate to add your business information to local directories, Google maps, and other related services. The future could be more local than you think.
10. Other content: you shouldn’t limit yourself to textual content only. Creating a video, podcast, flash game, or an iPhone app could look daunting at first, but if it’s hard, it means you should probably do it.

These are not earth shattering steps. But if you haven’t done your home-work or have been lazy to give more attention to your SEO campaigns, 2010 is the time. You can’t put SEO off forever. Besides, you are going to be happy when more traffic starts flowing in.

There are many definitions for KEI, but Wordtracker has the best definition for it:

The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

Credit to WordTracker for providing KEI for their keywords, but everybody does that now. KEI does look effective on the surface as you can find terms that are less competitive and easy to rank for. The problem is that KEI does not factor in the quality of each search term. For instance, KEI cannot predict if your keyword attracts shoppers, information seekers, or buyers. If you are in business to make a living, you want to convert folks to buyers, but KEI has no way of determining that.

KEI also does not take into account the quality of competition. You might find a keyword that looks effective according to KEI, but if you have 30 Yahoo’s or Google’s in that niche, you pretty much have not much of a chance for getting ranked in the top 30.

In essence, KEI is not a credible metric on its own. It can be helpful if you do your research to figure out the quality of keywords but by its own KEI is just a big empty word. Now, I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t use it. It’s just that it is not accurate enough to build an entire SEO campaign based on KEI numbers, unless you don’t like your job.

Orphan pages do not hurt your search engine rankings but do not help it either. In fact, by having orphan pages you do not get the best out of each and every page on your site. Your goal should be to create theme-based websites to get ranked well on Google, and in order to do that, you need to do some serious inter-linking. So, do search engine penalize you for having Orphan pages? Not really! Should you do better and actually fix these pages? You betcha!

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.

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.

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.