You may have noticed when you do a search , a different kind of result appearing on your search page. These are called Google local results and they provide you with business listings relevant to your search term from around your area. These are effecting search results, but people should still not ignore any search engine optimization tips they have.

I have found that when Google local results are produced, there is a correlation between the number of positive reviews for the business and the position of there listing. It looks like that the number of genuine product reviews is definitely impacting the position of the local business listing.

I’m not sure as of yet if Google are taking any other SEO factors into consideration. I built a website : http://www.griffithsbrosplubming.co.uk and they were no-where to be found for the term plumbing wrexham, but as soon as Google started showing local business listings there traffic rocketed as they were right at the top of them results.

Obviously SEO companies are going to be taking this into account and are probably going to be offering review writing as a service. It will be interesting too see how Google will establish the genuine reviews from the ones written by SEO companies and if websites will see penalties as a result of this.

Looks like Google are doing a good job of trying to put SEO’s out of business (simply speculation) by making it even harder for them to get results.  Would anyone like to take a guess at what the future is like for SEO?

Watch this space!

Mistakes in SEO are more common than good practice. There is so much speculation of “magical meta tags”, “keyword density optimum percentages” and “ultimate unlimited backlinks”. The truth is none of these things really exist. So many people devote all there time to trying to find these, this time could be used to make your site better and more user friendly or to better the service / content you provide to your readers.

So what do you class as a mistake in SEO? Well I just think to myself, would I do that if I was just trying to design a website well? For example if I was designing a website, would I decide to keyword stuff for no apparent reason? If I thought I wouldn’t then I would class it as a mistake. Anything that goes against good web design practice is bad SEO.

Do you really think that you can get your site higher in the search engines by spamming blogs? Regardless of whether they are do-follow or no-follow? I really don’t think this will work, so don’t waste your time doing this. I would spend the time submitting your sites to directories or requesting links from other webmasters.

Another mistake that people think is “you will not get anywhere without backlinks”, this is partially true. However you shouldn’t just to decide to start a massive link building campaign. The best links that get you to the top are the ones that are formed organically. The ones when people link to your site because it is useful and not because you have asked them too. Do you think Google email people asking them to place a link to there site?, but yet they still have more backlinks than anyone else in the game!

Spend your time wisely with SEO, bettering your sites usability and accessibility, keeping your content up to date and maybe requesting the odd link every now and then and I promise you, you will get to the top with hard work.

Many people will pay people lot’s of money to perform SEO on behalf of them for there website. I was angry to hear that many people who did pay SEO experts to optimize there site, never even asked them what they got for there money. SEO has many different tasks that relate to it… link building, on page optimization, ppc.

For all you know you may be paying your SEO expert to do absolutely nothing , but yet you beleive you are getting your moneys worth, because your site has improved a couple of rankings (probably down to domain age).  If you do see big results fast, you should still question what he has done, black hat techniques often work short term, but Google will find you out in the long term.. meaning you can expect to see your site in the sandbox.

If you have had your website designed proffessionaly by someone who knows what they are doing, your site should already be optimized for the search engines, because all Google looks for is RELEVANCY and GOOD PRACTICE. So if your website is relevant to the keyword you want to optimize for and it adheres to Googles Webmaster Guidelines then you shouldn’t go far wrong. If you have had your website made proffesionally, then you may consider paying some on to build links to your website. Even then you still need to keep track of what there doing. If you pay them £100 and they spend £30 on using an automated program to submit your site to thousands of directories (takes about 5 minutes), they have just earned £70 and probably just got your site banned from Google ( even though you do have more links ). You should ask for a report for who they have asked to link to you, what anchor text they are using and then what sites have actually linked to you. You should pay them by how many sites they get to link to you and not for there time.

I recently just got home from work and was angry at hearing about one of Wrexham’s local web design businesses who is keyword stuffing for SEO purposes. I think that a couple of years ago that this would of been OK for smaller search engines, such as Yahoo and Alltheweb (any search engine that isn’t Google) and that it did probably work to an extent.

Working for local government, I have learnt the importance of accessibility and usability with web design. Keyword stuffing is probably one of the worst practices I could think of. It reduces both the usability and accessibility of the website.

If a blind person visits your website and has to have everything read out to him by a computer program, if you have spammed lot’s of un-necessary keywords then more than likely when the piece of software comes to this image, it would read out what the image is (because you haven’t used alternate text properly), it will read out the list of keywords you have spammed. This will loose you the respect of this blind person and you will probably get punished by Google for keyword spamming anyway.

You should try and focus on one keyword. You should include it in your title, meta description, maybe in one of the alternate texts and in the main body of your text. It is no good optimizing your page for loads of different keywords, if you can’t even rank well for just one. When designing your site, as long as you have got a main keyword in your title tag and your html is clean, don’t write your content for SEO, just make it read properly.

If you are blatantly repeating your keyword every 3 – 4 words then it won’t read properly, nobody will link to you, because your content is useless and you will get penalized by Google for spamming. Stay clear from keyword stuffing.

White Hat SEO is a term that is used to define good legal practice in SEO. All white hat means is that you follow the search engines rules. If you do not stick to these rules then you may gain a short term position in the search engines, but you will almost definately get found out in the long term and be penalized severely.

The opposite to white hat SEO is black hat SEO. This basically means that you don’t follow the rules (as you probably guessed).

So what are black hat SEO techniques?

Here are a few :

• Using link farms
• Keyword spamming your alt text
• Spamming your link on blog posts
• Sending automated spam emails
• Lots of affiliate links
• Buying cheap rubbish traffic
• Automated duplicate content

Using these techniques to better your ranking in the search engines will not do you any good long term. Google will realise what you have done when it goes to give your site a rank and it will put your site in the sandbox. The sandbox is the name of the place where Google put’s penalized sites. In theory it should remove all there search engine traffic.

Here are some white hat seo tips that you can use to better your site’s SEO.

• Write lot’s of good content that you don’t have to force people to link too, or link to it yourself by spamming.
• Keep your site updated regularly so you have a chance of your readers / viewers returning.
• Use breadcrumbs at the bottom of every page so it makes it easier for the user to navigate and gives you a better linking structure.
• Use your title tag and heading tags correctly, basic SEO is just generally good web design. Using web design properly will let you optimize your site alot easier.

By doing everything the genuine way, you may not see results as quick, but you will definately benefit from it in the long term. You should never look for short term results with SEO.

SEO (search engine optimization) is an increasingly popular task that webmasters are being forced to do. Without websites using SEO they would never be found in the search engines. The art of SEO is also a never ending task. There is no limit as to what is possible. Once you got your website or blog to the top of the search engines, you then should try and get your other pages are ranking well. Once all your pages are ranking well, you could make more pages and get them ranking well also. It’s just a never ending process.

Keeping on top of your SEO is also very important. Once you have gotten one of your pages to the top, you can’t expect it to stop there. Google likes your pages or blog to be regularly updated. If it isn’t then Google may view your page as outdated and reduce your rank.

Google’s ranking algorithm is also forever changing. What’s good practice in the search engines now, may be terrible in a couple of years time. You need to keep up to date with good practice for SEO. A good way of doing this is to regularly read SEO blogs such as this blog. Keep your website up to date and check the Google Webmaster Central Blog. This blog will have the most up to date and accurate information that you need to keep yourself update on modern SEO tasks. It will be the most up to date because it is Google’s own.

For now the main focus of SEO is getting backlinks that point to your site and pages within. This is the most proved method of improving your sites visibility in Google.There are talks of a Semantic Web which may completely change everything you know about SEO, but untill this comes into play I would stick to what you know.. with on page optimization and still focus on building high quality links to your site.

You might think what do I mean about modern SEO? well SEO is forever changing…aswell as everything else web related. Google are always looking for new things to improve there algorithm and search results that are delivered to the user. This means that webmasters have got there work cut out trying to keep there website up at the top.

With so many more people becoming familiar with SEO, it is natural that search engines are going to make it harder for people to get to the top. This means that the more dedicated people are to learning SEO the more likely you are to get where you want. If you don’t have the time to keep up with modern trends then you should definately consider calling in an expert to turbo charge your online business.

Google can now apparently automatically determine whether backlinks to your site are spam or genuine. People also say that they automatically work out whether you have asked the webmaster to put your link there or not.

Getting to the top in this day and age is hard. Stick at it and keep your content great and you shouldn’t have a problem.

1. Keep your links tidy. Links that return errors are always bad news for search engines. Making sure all your links work should be an important task and you should check them about once a month. It doesnt seem like much, but it should help avoid a sharp fall in search engine rankings.
2. Keep your code clean. Search engines like clean html, use the HTML Validation Service. Keeping your html valid will ensure search engine spiders will index your site correctly and indicates to them you are taking care of your website.
3. Using Correct Title Tags. The title tag of each page should be unique to each page. It should be a description in a couple of words that include your primary keywords that describe your page. For example this websites title is “SEO Tips” and not “Home”. This should bring you better results for the search term.
4. Relevant meta description tags. The meta description tag is not in Googles algorithm, however it will help your clickthrough rate. What is the point of your website appearing at the top of the search results if no-one is going to click on it because they think it isn’t relevant. You should repeat your keyword no more than twice to make sure it doesn’t look spammy.
5. Last but not least. DO NOT USE BLACKHAT SEO TECHNIQUES. For example do not use CSS to hide repeated keywords. If I repeated my keyword “SEO Tips” on a gray background with gray text to hope for a better keyword relevance, It is a no go! Search engines will realise this eventually and will penalise you severely, maybe even ban you. Do not use this website if you are going to consider cheating.

If you have got this far then keep going! The key to SEO is time. You need to devote lot’s of time to your website. You will not get to the first page of Google overnight. It may even require months, maybe years to get where you want. When you get there it is still an on-going task also. I beleive the further you get the more motivated you will become. So I wrote these SEO Tips that you will find on this website to hopefully put you on the right track and reduce the amount of time needed to get that ultimate placement from search engines.

In this day and age, getting a website live is easy. Getting traffic to your website is not. You need that all important front page result on search engines to get high quality traffic. So SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) is what does this to your website. SEO Tips hopes to help you do this. By careful keyword analysis, relevant meta tags, high quality unique content and lots of inbound links will rank your page highly. Without this your not going to get very far. A good ranking is about having all these. If you excel in everyone then it is likely to see your website ranking extremely highly in the major search engines.

Search engine optimization is an on-going job. With the millions of webmasters potentially in your field looking for that all important number one spot. So once you acheived a good ranking don’t stop the hard work. Make it your goal to go up the ranks. Never be happy and continue optimizing your site.

SEO can be very expensive if bought, but with some studdying then you may also be able to cater for yourself. PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing can also be a good idea for new websites that are trying to promote a product.

By weighing up all your options and optimizing your site for search engines, be prepared to watch your traffic and sales shoot through the roof.

By making the best use of SEO Tips you will learn to do your own search engine optimization ( SEO ) or will save money by seeking the correct SEO advice.