Search engine optimization is one of the most sought after internet marketing services worldwide. There are several different techniques used by SEO’s around the globe. Some of these techniques have become stale while some of these techniques have expired way back in 2005-2006. A website which is ranking higher in search engine result gets more visitors than those which are not listed on the top pages of search results. Over the years several webmasters and SEO optimizers have been inventing techniques to score higher rankings on various search engines including Google, Yahoo and some other. Some of these techniques like submitting unique articles could really help your website to score higher rankings. On the other hand, several techniques like link exchanges could put your website in trouble (if done unscrupulously ).

There are some basic guidelines which everyone should follow while optimizing their website. The first and the most important one are Google webmaster guidelines. Google is regularly updating its ranking algorithm. Each day you will come across some update in the ranking algorithm OR you can say that Google is applying patches to its existing algorithm. One must ensure that you adhere to the guidelines laid by Google if you are planning to score higher rankings on Google.

Read Google Webmaster Guideline : Click Here

Let’s now start with the techniques which should be avoided while optimizing website on search engines.

A) On-Page Optimization

1. Hidden Text – Hidden text could get your website penalized on search engines. Google and other search engines are not yet fully equipped to detect and penalize websites using hidden text. However hidden text could be reported by your competitor, which could hit your website like a boomerang. If your website is detected by search engine crawler or is manually detected by Google team, then you have less chances of retaining your website rankings. SEO Tip: Avoid hidden text at every cost. In case your website has been penalized, then try to remove every single instance of hidden text from your web pages.
2. Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing should be avoided at every single cost. Over the past few years, search engines have shifted their focus from on-page optimization towards off-page optimization. Nowadays, search engines are giving preference to websites which maintain a balance between their off-page and on-page optimization techniques. Keyword stuffing can be easily detected by search engines including Google and Yahoo. Once detected, it will ultimately squeeze your rankings for your targeted keyword (or artificially stuffed keyword). Most of these websites get labeled as “Spammy websites” by search engines.SEO Tip : Make sure that your keyword density is natural. There are several websites which will put figures around ideal keyword density (ie 5-7% of the overall text). However, you should try to keep your website natural in terms of content and keyword density.
3. Cloaking – Cloaking is the technique to display different content to search engine spiders (based on their I.P addresses). This content is different from the normal format and content of your website as viewed by human visitor.Cloaking was widely used during 2005-2006, but in the past few years search engines have upgraded their algorithms. They are smart enough to detect any suspicious activities like Cloaking. If you are using cloaking technique, then you are preparing your website for a hara-kiri which your website will perform automatically. If you dislike your website too much, then it is the perfect way of getting rid of your rankings and search engine traffic ;). If you really want to get rid of your website rankings, then try adding some duplicate content.
4. Duplicate Content – Duplicate content is one of the most serious SEO offences. There are several webmasters who argue that duplicate content simply puts your website in supplement index. However if your website rankings are shifted from page 1 to page 500 then it cannot be termed as a shift towards supplement index. Duplicate penalty is one of the most serious penalties which can suck your website’s ranking power. Further, duplicate penalty will lower the Page Rank as well as Trust Rank of your website.
5. Doorway Pages – Doorway pages are artificial pages with artificial content. The sole purpose of having a doorway page is to gain higher rankings for a specific set of targeted keywords. These pages are specifically designed and kept outside the main navigation menu or links. These pages rely heavily on a particular set of targeted keywords. SEO Tip : If you really want to target a particular set of keyword, then try adding a blog section and add some useful content which is helpful for your visitors as well as search engines. Make sure you do not copy-paste articles from various ezine websites.
6. HTML/Programming errors - Webmasters should ensure that their website is error-free. This will help search engines to easily crawl your website. If your website designer forgets to close the <H1> tag, then it could make your website look spammy. However most of the HTML errors are accidental, and should it avoided. There are several websites which get penalized due to some serious errors in their HTML coding.There are several webmasters who use external redirection without waiting for a gap of 5 seconds. There are several websites, which get penalized due to this redirection issue. SEO Tip : You should create a Google webmaster account which will help you detect any serious HTML errors. Most of the errors get listed under your website profile and should be removed quickly. Further, you can try to make your website W3C validated, which will help to ensure that your html coding is 100% error free.

B) Off-Page Optimization

1. Buying Links – Buying links was widely popular in 2005, where some websites used to purchase links in tune of 10,000-50,000. However this started to jeopardize the real objective of search engines i.e to give preference to natural websites with best content and information. This is the reason why search engines have started to nullify back links which are purchased from high PR websites. The page rank (Google PR) of any website has no connection with the actual rankings of your website on Google, but still there are several hundred “ignorant” webmasters who simply want back links from PR3-4 websites alone. This could easily trigger sandbox on your website. If you are purchasing links in bulk, then it can be detected by search engines as well.Moreover purchasing bulk of back links with same anchor text is more like performing Hara-Kiri (suicide) on your own website. If you have made your mind to purchase back links from particular websites, then you should make it look natural. Try using wide variety of anchor text, but at the same time you must ensure that you are not going overboard in purchasing links. A website which is only concentrating on purchased links will suffer the consequences. You should try not to entangle yourself in the “Page Rank Matrix”. If Google or Yahoo launches a new directory, I am sure it will remain Page Rank 0, for a period of 3-4 months. Till that time, several “ignorant webmasters” will reject this free directory due to its PR0, but the smart ones will know why they must submit their link to this PR 0 website.
2. Link Exchanges – Link exchange technique was widely popular in 2005-2006. However in the past 1-2 years, search engines have started to give less significance to websites relying on link exchange techniques. Link exchange techniques were widely used in 2005-2006 where website owners used to create link directory on their website and exchanged links with several hundred or even thousand of websites. In the past few years, search engines have started to clamp down on websites which rely heavily on link exchange techniques. Link exchange can still be used, but you need to be more careful and vigilant. However, you must completely avoid automated link exchanges in any form. They will ultimately result in SEO penalty.You will find several emails landing in your inbox with text “Hey ! I got PR blah blah , do you want to exchange with my blah blah website”. It is disheartening to see that so many webmasters and SEO’s have entangled themselves within the boundaries of Google Page Rank. People are willing to exchange links with websites having higher PR, but they never give a thought about Trust Rank of the website with whom they are exchanging links.SEO Tip: Try to exchange links with websites which are related to your business theme. A web design related website can easily exchange link with another flash design website. However you should make sure not to exchange links with websites which are outside your business niche.

You should make sure that your optimization process is both natural and healthy. You should make sure not to use any hidden SEO Techniques ( especially on-page) which could result in lower rankings of your website. If your website is not adhering to on-page guidelines, then it could result in serious penalties as compared to off-page guidelines. There will be several instances where some unknown website will start linking to your website. These external links do not necessarily lead to penalty. There are several black hat techniques revolving around both on-page and off-page optimization, but you must always ensure that your website is following a natural pattern in SEO optimization process.

Google has been one of the most popular search engine, and its popularity is increasing day by day. Several webmasters are working day and night in order to score higher rankings. Bing.com is another popular search engine launched by Microsoft and there are plenty of users who have started to throng towards Bing. I truly love the look and feel of Bing as compared to Google.

Let us now watch video by Microsoft Dudes on some of the great features of Bing.com

Whatever may be going on in the search engine industy, but there are some few basic rules which have remained constant over the last few years. It doesn’t matter whether you are optimizing for Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo or any other. There are some basic rules which you need to keep in mind, and rest will automatically start to fall into place.

There have been several significant changes in search engine algorithms due to which several legitimate SEO techniques have entered the “No Entry Zone” of Search engines.
During 2005-2006, article promotion was quite popular, and was used to score higher rankings on search engines. Several webmasters used to write informative article and then they tried submitting their articles to several hundred websites. Article promotion was widely accepted and a popular technique which was used to score higher rankings on search engines. However, it has started to suffer consequences of duplicate penalty . If your same article is submitted to 100 different websites, then search engines will only consider 1-2 back links from the article website where your article was submitted/crawled first time. Most of the article websites have suffered duplicate penalty due to duplicate articles which were copy-pasted from other article websites. If you are serious about Google, then you should abstain from submitting same article to several hundred article websites. If you can manage to submit 100 different/unique articles to 100 different article websites, then it will help to improve search engine rankings of your website significantly.

On the other hand link exchange technique was widely popular during 2005-2006, but since 2007, search engines have started to nullify the effectiveness of link exchange programs. However, you can still try to exchange links with niche websites. You should ensure that your link exchange partner is related to the business theme of your website.

All these changes in the past 1-2 years have started to bring out some real issues in SEO including Sandbox, Duplicate Content Issues, and some others.

Search engines are working hard to secure their ranking algorithms in order to make more profits through PPC. On the other hand SEO individuals are working day and night to understand search engines and their ranking pattern.

If you search online, you will stumble upon several hundred or even thousands of forums and blogs discussing Page Rank and other issues. However the truth is that your page rank has no relationship with the actual rankings of your website. The only benefit which page rank can give you is to help your website appear on the top positions of various web directories (which organize their links according to PR). There is even a formula on how to calculate your future Google Page Rank .

Search engines rely on a hidden parameter known as “Trust Rank”. This parameter is used to gauge the real ranking strength of any website. A website with Page Rank 2 can easily overshadow website with page rank 5 due to its hidden but higher Trust Rank. You need to concentrate on whether you need a higher page rank OR more clicks and higher search engine rankings for potential keywords (i.e your website’s actual SERPS). If you are concentrating on the latter part, then do not entangle your SEO activities geared only towards increasing page rank.

Therefore one should try to concentrate on building a naturally popular website with quality content. If your content is good enough, you will automatically gain back links which will result in higher rankings.

Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving technology, and you should always abstain from artificial techniques in order to score higher rankings. Search engines are working hard to secure their ranking algorithm. They do not want anybody to abuse the effectiveness of their search engine algorithm which is programmed to present the most relevant content pertaining to any searched keyword by its search users.

‘
Search Engine Optimization is evolving at a fast pace. Several new changes have been incorporated to make search engines more efficient in terms of presenting useful information to their users.\r\nPage Rank (Google PR) and Trust Rank are the two main issues which are discussed frequently on various SEO forums. Although, both these terms are related to SEO, they have different relationship with the actual rankings of your website. Your actual rankings are known as SERPs in the SEO world which stands for the Search Engine Ranking Positions of your website/webpages on Google/Yahoo. Let us first begin with Page Rank.

a) Page Rank – Page Rank is the numerical value, weighting 1-10 for any single website or webpage. Page Rank represents the PR (Page Rank) strength of any given website. However, Page Rank should not be confused with the actual ranking strength of any website (i.e. your actual SERPs ). If you have installed Google Toolbar, you would be able to see page rank of several different websites .

Page rank is generally calculated by search engines by analyzing and calculating various back links pointing towards a particular website. Google Page rank algorithm uses its own complex algorithmic formulas to calculate Page Rank of any given website or webpage.

So far so good, but the real question comes up “Whether Page Rank has any relationship with the actual rankings of your website?” The answer is a big NO.

There are several hundred webmasters discussing increase/decrease in Page Rank on various forums, but none of them realize the importance of their actual SERPs as compared to Page Rank.

There are several hundred websites with low PR (1 or 2), and several of these websites genuinely overshadow other high ranking competitor websites with higher Page Ranks (generally 4-5 or even higher than that).

There is a wrong misconception among several webmasters that higher the page rank, higher will be their rankings on search engines. The truth is that your increase or decrease in page rank has no relationship with the actual rankings of your website.

There are several webmasters who will argue that if any website sees a steep decline in their Page Rank, then it could be an indication of drop in their actual SERPs. If your website is having some major SEO issue related to content or links on your website, then your actual rankings (SERPs) will drop first. Once you observe a drop in SERPs, your Page Rank will eventually drop after a period of 2-3 months. Till the next update in Page Rank, the Google Toolbar will keep pulling PR Data from its stored database.

Your SERPs relies on the current status of your website whereas PR relies on the stored database which gets updated only once in every 2-3 or 3-4 months.

Case Study: Take for example, Google and Yahoo launches a free web directory for webmasters around the globe. Now this directory will show PR 0 for period of 3-4 months. Does this imply that this directory is useless in terms of its importance? I am sure you won’t need explanation since the answer is NO.

After 3 months this directory will score a page rank of 6. This does not imply that this directory was worthless on a day before the page rank update took place. The PR for this directory was calculated somewhere in between 2-3 months, but only got officially displayed after 3 months in Google Toolbar.

These issues shift our focus from Page Rank towards another important hidden factor known as Trust Rank. This is the real factor which heavily influences your SERPs on various search engines including Google and Yahoo.

b) Trust Rank – The Google/Yahoo Trust Rank is one of the most important factors in determining actual rankings of your website i.e. your SERPs. Trust Rank is the Trust levels granted to any single website on the net. This Trust Rank helps certain websites to score higher rankings on search engines.

Let us try to anticipate some of the hidden factors which could influence Trust Rank of your website.

a) Age/History of your domain – The age of your domain is an important factor which can increase your Page Rank as well. There are several domains which are 5-6 years old and have higher rankings as compared to any other website within the same business category. Search Engines also rely on the history of your domain to detect any SPAM activity.

You can change everything in SEO, but you cannot change Age/History of any domain. Therefore search engines could rely on this factor to grant Trust status to certain websites.

b) Quality of your back links – Now quality of your back links doesn’t necessarily mean higher Page Rank links. In most of the cases it is observed that a website with Page Rank 2 is far much beneficial than getting a back link from a similar Page Rank 4 website. Search engines can easily detect any unnatural pattern in the back links of your website. If you purchase 50 back links with PR 3-4, then surely Google can detect it easily. The worst part is that your Page Rank is not related with Trust Rank, but these activities will lower your Page Rank as well as your Trust Rank. This paid link activity will increase your Page Rank, but it will lower you Trust Rank which ultimately decides ranking of your website.

c) Content on your website – There are several article websites which have observed steep decline in their traffic on both Google and Yahoo. The reason behind this decline is the duplicate articles which are submitted to several hundred websites by various webmasters and SEO. Several of these article websites have suffered consequences of duplicate penalty. Although there are several SEO’s who will argue that duplicate penalty is just a myth. There are some who will say that duplicate penalty does exist, but it is more like having your duplicate content in supplement index. However, the truth is that if your content goes into supplement index, then obviously it will lower your Trust Rank.

One should concentrate on producing high quality content, rather than having bulk of content. If your content is good and informative, other webmasters will automatically start linking to your website.

d) Optimization History of your domain – It could be possible that search engines store the optimization history of any single domain to determine their Trust Rank. If your website purchased 50,000 back links in 2006, then surely Google will keep an account of that activity to determine your Trust Rank.

Let us watch Dr.Matt Cutts live in action explaining and hiding ;) Trust Rank at the same time. The video gives good information, but surely something is too secret about Trust Rank.

On the other hand there are certain SEO techniques which could lower your Trust Rank. You should avoid these SEO techniques which will ultimately affect your actual search engine rankings or SERPs. Read about these SEO activities at : http://www.seohawk.com/blog/avoid-these-seo-techniques/

All these factors can help to determine the Trust Rank of your website. There is no tool to detect Trust Rank as compared to Page Rank. However, one should try to follow a natural pattern in search engine optimization. This will help you gain higher Trust Rank which will ultimately decide the actual rankings of your website. Trust Rank is the hidden factor used by both Google and Yahoo while determining actual rankings of any website. Page Rank algorithm is completely different from Trust Rank Algorithm. Trust Rank affects your actual rankings, whereas your Page Rank effects your PR within Google Toolbar. Page Rank can never be considered as a parameter to gauge ranking strength of any given website. A website with extremely low Trust Rank could show a high Page Rank, whereas a website with low Page Rank could have a high Trust Rank. This is the reason why there are several websites ranking above other high Page Rank websites. It is extremely important to understand the difference between these two aspects of Search Engine Optimization.\r\nTechnorati Profile
seo
Search Engine Marketing

Google Adwords is one of the most effective mediums of promoting your business on search engines. If you are focussing your efforts on search engine optimization, then it can easily consume around 6-8 Months ( even higher than that) to get your website optimized on top pages of Google, Yahoo and several other search engines.

Yahoo on the other hand provides similar feature which is bit more advance than Google. However, the popularity factor of Google is higher than Yahoo, but Yahoo’s Sponsored search provides you more flexibility in terms of selecting text, link, and ads. Similar to Google, Yahoo will also advertise your website on popular websites.

Watch This useful video which will help you optimize your Adwords campaigns

Following are some the tips offered by the internal team of Adwords optimizers which will help you generate more ROI from your existing adwords campaigns.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords.
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy.
6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

Let us watch another useful video on how to optimize your Adword ads.

You can read more about each of these tips including examples and instructions at http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics and you can also view these tactics in a pdf format at http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics/top_tactics.pdf. We hope these tactics will help you continue to see good returns from your AdWords investment.


Google SEO Adwords Guide : View (pdf)



Conversion Tracking Google Guide : View (pdf)

You must have saved several useful bookmarks in your web browsers. Even I have collected a large list of most creative website on the net , but what will happen if several users located worldwide try to access and view my bookmarks. This is simply not possible due to strict internet security guidelines.

However there is another way of making your bookmarks accessible to worldwide audiences by saving your bookmarks on Social Bookmarking websites. You can not only save your favorite websites, but you can also send them to your friends. This helps to exchange bookmarks with your friends just like sharing some nice stamp collection with your friends.

Social Bookmarking is a way to store, organize, manage and search useful bookmarks from a variety of business topics arranged in specific folders or tags.

Watch This Useful Video

So you can simply jump into Social Bookmarking websites to save your useful bookmarks. If you have found some useful article/video/news or anything, then you can save this link as a bookmark on a Social Bookmarking website. This will help others to view and access your saved bookmarks. If your article/blog or anything else was informative and helpful, then several other users will start linking your bookmark, thus helping you to receive clicks from several online users. Moreover links saved on Social Bookmarking websites receive instant exposure from search engines. Most of the bookmarked links are immediately crawled by search engines.

So, something that started as a way to send bookmarks to friends has now grown into social search engine. You don’t need to find a needle in a haystack. Now, you can just simply go to any Social Bookmarking site, choose the right category or tag that matches your interest, and find the most popular websites in that category.

Some of the popular Social Bookmarking websites are :-

• Digg - Digg is a place for people to discover new website and share content from anywhere on the internet.
• Technorati - Technorati is the most popular website that keeps you updated on what’s happening on the Web, right now.
• Del.icio.us - Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website which enables you store your bookmarks online and share it with your friends.
• Mixx - Mixx is a good social bookmarking website and simple to use.
• Propeller - Propeller is Social Bookmarking Website and is a part of the AOL Network .
• StumbleUpon - It is a Bookmarking website that helps you discover and share good websites.
• Reddit - This is a very popular Bookmarking website that lets you discover new websites and share it with other users.
• Fark - Fark is a Website,which is a news aggregator and a social networking news site.
• Mybloglog - Mybloglog lets you share your favourite Blogs and discover new ones.
• Slashdot - Slashdot is a fusion of Article submission and a Bookmarking website and it is owned by SourceForge, Inc.
• Kaboodle - It is a kind of social shopping community where people discover, share products that they like.
• Bloglines - Bloglines is a website for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and great websites.
• Newsvine - Get latest news topic wise,also you can share news with your friends using Bookmarking.
• Brinklist - This website allows you to save websites, share with others and you can also keep your bookmarks private.
• Netvouz - On Netvouz you can share your bookmarks with other users and, of course also benefit from other’s bookmarks.
• Clipmarks.com - On Clipmarks bookmarking, you can see clips of text, images or video about various topics that other people find while surfing net.
• Furl - Furl gives you ability to save the important websites you discover on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again.
• Mister-wong - This is a Bookmarking website that allows you to save ,share your favourite links online.
• DZone - Dzone is a favourite links-sharing community for developers,programers .
• Gnolia - It gives you ability to find new websites and build your online community.
• Shoutwire - On shoutwire you can share News for the masses that you feel important.
• Simpy - This is a simple Bookmarking website which gives option to save, search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links.
• BlogMarks - Blog Marks is a collaborative link management project which allows sharing and key-word tagging for blogs.
• Bluedot - It enables you to discover ,share websites from people like you.
• Linkswarm -This provides bizarre news, updated every day with fresh new links.
• Spotback - On Spotback you can add your website and allow users to rate everything that you publish.
• Plugim - On Plugim you can ubmit content, share articles, comment and promote your favorites .
• Mybookmarks - This website allows you to access your bookmarks online anytime, anywhere.