The Profit Shack

Takes you by the hand and shows you step-by-step everything you need to know about optimizing your WordPress blog for the search engines so you can start getting traffic. This Video Series Features: * A Collection of 40 Professionally Recorded Videos, 2 Hours of Content – This complete video series will teach you everything you need to know about optimizing your  WordPress blog for the search engines. * The Importance of SEO – Before you start applying SEO to your WordPress blog, you need to understand why it is so important. * The Power of Keyword Research – If you aren’t creating posts that are focused on specific keywords, you are literally taking a stab in the dark at achieving natural search engine rankings. Follow along as I explain keyword research in detail, and perform a real live case study. * What Free Plugins You Absolutely Need to Make Optimization a Cakewalk – There are a ton of free plugins out there that make SEO a breeze. I will show you the best one’s that you’ll need, and how they operate. * How to Create an “Optimized Post” – I will take you step-by-step through creating an optimized post from the ground up. * How to Create a Google Optimized Sitemap – I will show you how to setup a Google-friendly sitemap that will update on its own. * How to Setup an Effective Navigation Structure – Learn how to structure your blog to make it easy for the search engines to understand exactly what you are offering. * How to Encourage Visitor Interaction – Engaging your blog audience is very important. I will show you (along with the help of some excellent plugins) how to do this effectively. * How to Harness the Power of Social Networks – Social networks are becoming increasingly important. Learn how to use them to propel your blog to new heights. * How to Track Your Blog Statistics – I will walk you through installing Google Analytics, and talk about how to understand it. * How to Generate Powerful Backlinks to your Blog – I will share seven powerful ways to get high quality backlinks to your blog. * Plus Much, Much More - Read More: WordPress SEO Secrets Revealed SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "WordPress SEO Secrets Revealed", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2010/02/22/wordpress-seo-secrets-revealed/" }); Read More →

Private Label Rights to Twitter Traffic Swarm Video Course. Find Out How This Well Established Copywriter & Marketer Gets More Targeted Traffic From This Newly-Tapped (And FREE) Source Than Most Big Spenders Blow-Through In Their Paid Accounts! This is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity to grab private label rights to a super hot product still in it’s prime! Usually private label rights are on products that have already been sold and resold and no longer have value, but today is not the case…We are offering you a unique opportunity to sell a super hot product that is at the height of it sales! Internet Marketing Is A CASH RICH Environment, But Not Without Alot of Competiton… You Need The Upper Hand if You Want to Compete With the “Big Boys”And Claim Your Slice of The Pie. Read More: Twitter Traffic Swarm PLR SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Twitter Traffic Swarm PLR", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2010/02/15/twitter-traffic-swarm-plr/" }); Read More →

What’s the hardest thing about blogging? Coming up with fresh, new content! And you have to publish new posts frequently – twice a week at the very least – to keep readers interested and earn search engine love. If you’re feeling stuck, here is a list of 50 blogging ideas that are sure to inspire you to come up with new content for your blog. Most of the ideas can be used more than once, so you won’t run out of blog posts for months to come. Learn how to make money on Blogs And by the way, if you want to make more money from your blog, Blogger’s Paycheck shows you how to make passive income from your blog without spending all day at it. 1. Special events – Relate your blog topic to a special event, national day of, or holiday. 2. News – Subscribe to Google news alert on your keywords and write about the latest news in your niche. 3. Book review. 4. Respond to a post on another blog in a niche similar or related to yours. 5. Blog milestone – Write about your blogging milestones, such as publishing your 100th post, getting your 1000th comment…. 6. Niche heroes -Blog about a person who made a positive contribution in your niche. 7. Blog memes – Join in blog memes such as “Wordless Wednesday”. There’s at least one for every day of the week! 8. Product review – An excellent way to work in some affiliate links. 9. FAQs in your niche – Write a short Q & A based on FAQs about your niche. 10. Blog comment response – Write a long and expanded response to a comment on your blog. 11. Predict trends – What do you see happening in your niche in a year? 5 years? 12. Historical view – What was your niche in the past? Or what past event influenced your niche? 13. Top tips on any topic of interest to your readers. 14. Best of… – A good year ender, make a list of your best posts for the year. 15. Contests – Organize a contest for your blog readers, or make a list of contests your readers can join. 16. What I learned from… a current event, a person you met, or an experience you had. 17. Definitions – Define terms that are commonly used in your niche but a beginner may not understand 18. New products – Not a review but simply an announcement of a new product relevant to your niche. This is another good opportunity to drop in some affiliate links. 19. Biggest problem – Ask your readers what their biggest problem is about your blog topic or niche. They post their answers in the comments section. 20. Biggest problem follow up – Summarize the comments from #19 in another post. 21. Biggest problem follow up series – Write a separate blog post tackling each question from #19. 22. Interview somebody knowledgeable in your niche, or has succeeded in it, or is otherwise interesting to your readers. 23. Big list – Compile a big list of various resources, just like this one. The bigger the better! 24. Reader Survey – Put up a brief survey online and blog about the results. 25. Be provocative. Challenge a common belief or widely accepted idea in your niche. 26. New idea – What new idea about your blog topic or niche have you come across lately? 27. YouTube – Embed a funny, moving or insightful video on YouTube. You can even have a “video day” once a week. 28. YouTube version 2 – Make YOUR own YouTube video. Publish it on YouTube then embed on your blog. This way, you can attract traffic from YouTube to your blog. 29. Freebie – Scour the ‘net for freebies that your readers will love. Or create a freebie of your own, such as a checklist or special report. 30. Personal story – Use a personal story to illustrate an important concept or principle in your niche. 31. Free to publish articles – Check out relevant articles in article directories such as Ezine Articles… but don’t publish them entirely on your blog. Instead, use an article or a group of articles as your take-off point for a blog post, or several. 32. Link love – This is a post with links to other blogs. Some bloggers set aside one day a week to publish a list of the best blog posts on their topic. 33. Photo – A picture is worth thousand words, right? Search Flickr for creative commons pictures that your readers will like. 34. Hot topics – Look at Digg for hot topics in your niche 35. Pros and cons – Examine what’s good and bad about something related to your blog topic 36. Respond to relevant questions you find in Ask.com 37. Guest post – Invite another blogger to write a guest post for your blog 38. Reader’s post – Invite blog subscribers to submit an article or post to be published on the blog 39. Inspirational post – Write a motivational post for your readers. 40. Update an old post with fresh ideas, new learnings and current research findings. 41. Beginner’s guide – What do beginners in your niche struggle with? Write a post to guide them through it. Best list – Patterned after “best dressed lists” make a list of the best ___ in your niche. 43. Worst list – Make your version of the “worst dressed list” for your niche. 44. New uses for – Think of new ways your readers can use gadgets and other stuff. 45. Write about a live event that you attended and what you learned from it. 46. Bribe post – Bribe your readers with a freebie in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter or RSS feed. 47. Around the world – Compare how people in different countries do something related to your niche. 48. Seasonal – Relate the month or season to your blog topic. 49. Blog carnival – Join or host a blog carnival, where several publish posts about the same topic on the same day. 50. Host a virtual “conference” on your blog – Invite “speakers” to publish their post on a specified date and time. Q&A happens in the comments section. Now that you’ve got a steady flow of fresh content, how do you actually make money from your blog? Visit Blogger’s Paycheck for a step-by-step guide on blogging for profit. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Are You Stuck On Blogging Ideas?", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/28/are-you-stuck-on-blogging-ideas/" }); Read More →

In the last post we talked about how SEO and 301 redirects work together to preserve your search engine rankings. In this post we are going to talk about how you can become a SEO content writer, so that you can achieve the search engines ranking you are shooting for. Image via Wikipedia As we well know, search engine optimization is one of the best ways to get traffic to your website and it is a skill that you must learn if you want your site to get high page rankings in search engines. However, knowing what type of content you should write about on your pages in order to achieve good rankings and make sure that you are keeping your visitors happy too is a completely different story. Creating content for your site that helps boost your search engine rankings requires a different set of skills, and demands more than simply writing and posting articles. There are certain things that you must learn if you want to create content the makes both the search engines and your visitors happy. The first thing that you should learn is how the entire SEO process works so that you will be able to create articles that have relevant content to what users are looking for, as well as creating articles that will help funnel and direct traffic to your website. As we have discussed before, search engines focus on text and not images, so the written content of your page will receive the most of the analysis from search engine spiders, and if they like what they see your site will then get indexed in to their database. This is why you need to make sure that your content is not only relevant, it also has to be good if you want to get better results with search engines. When you are writing content for SEO you must learn how to use keywords and phrases properly throughout your content. Keywords play a vital role in all S EO content because they help pull in users that are searching for a particular keywords or phrases. You need research and take into account the keywords and phrases that users will be typing into the search engines to find your website and incorporate them into the content and articles that you will be creating and posting on your site. You also need to know where to place these keywords or phrases in the article, such as in the title tags and in the body of the articles, in order to help search engines find your content so it can get indexed in their database. You should try to avoid overusing keywords as well. Don’t flood your article with your chosen keyword or phrase. A good rule of thumb is to include your main keyword in your title and add 3 – 4 keywords per every 500 words. Stuffing to many keywords in to an article not only makes for bad copy it may also be considered spam by the search engines. Remember the quality of your articles will play a major and important role on how your site will rank during the entire SEO process. Keep in mind that if you cannot offer visitors content that is relevant to their searches, they will most likely find it somewhere else, and all of your work getting them to your site will have been for nothing. As we have talked about before there are rules when it comes to writing articles for your SEO campaign. In order to avoid making mistakes and errors that will hurt your chances of ranking well in search engines you need to follow them. Research is key if you want to write about a particular topic in a way that it will actually generate good SEO results for you. Your articles should be original and engrossing for the visitor as well as being optimized for the search engines if you want to achieve listings that rank high on the search results page. It is extremely important to offer fresh, new content on a regular basis so that your visitors and the search engine spiders will come back to visit your site often. Following the basic SEO content rules will greatly improve your chances of getting better rankings and more traffic for your website. The Free SEO Book can help you get your website ranked higher in search engines. It will show you exactly how to find the best keywords for your website, target the right search terms and get more incoming links to your website. Best part is, it’s FREE!  Click Here now! Related articles by Zemanta Significance Of Search Engine Optimisation (ronmedlin.com) Search Engine Optimization For Bright People (ronmedlin.com) Why You’re Not Blogging – And Why You Should Start Today (slideshare.net) A successful blogging plan is like a road map (opencircle.co.za) SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Search Engine Optimization Basics – 12", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/13/search-engine-optimization-basics-12/" }); Read More →

In the last post we talked about SEO strategies that you should learn and use. In this post we are going to talk about how SEO and 301 redirects work together to preserve your search engine rankings. Image via Wikipedia One of the worst things that can happen to your site is to have an Internet user try to locate it through the use of the search engines and they encounter a “page not found” or a “404” error screen, simply because you changed the content or moved the page and you forgot to provide a way for your them to find what they were looking for. This can be disastrous for your business as well as your website rankings. Keep in mind that it is very easy for people to click away and go to another, more accessible and easier to find website. One way that you can actually prevent this from happening is by providing them with a 301 redirect that will basically lead them to the location of your new URL even if they try to access your old URL that they found on search engines. What is a 301 Redirect? Before anything else, we first need to discuss what a 301 redirect is in order for you to get a better idea as to what steps you need to take for the entire process. A 301 redirect, or a permanent URL move, is actually the most efficient, and the only acceptable means of redirecting URLs or web pages from a search engine standpoint. Using other types of redirecting can get you in trouble with most search engines, so if you want to preserve your search engine rankings, make sure to use this type of redirect if you are planning to move pages or content on your site. When do you need to use a 301 Redirect? When you decide to retire an old page, change a link or folder name, or you just need to move page positions around on your server. That is the time that you should use a 301 redirect since it will help you preserve your site’s page ranking in search engines. Using the 301 redirect basically lets the search engines know that all links currently on the web will now belong to a new web page. This is also a great tool if you want to consolidate websites and avoid duplication. It can also be useful when you have affiliate sites linked to your home page’s unique URL since you will be able to let the search engine spiders know that these affiliate sites are actually the same page. This can actually benefit your site’s search engine page rankings since you get credited for the other affiliated links to your site, while preventing the search engine robots from indexing them, creating duplicate contents in its database. Another good place to use this type of redirect is if you have purchased or shut down another website that is still receiving traffic. You can simply use the 301 redirect to get all of the traffic going to the other site redirected to your main site instead. You can actually achieve the same type of redirecting process using other types of redirects, such as a 302 redirect, Java script redirect, or a meta refresh. These will be able to redirect traffic to your site just like a 301 redirect, but only the 301 redirect will inform the search engines that the other sites actually belong to you, thereby avoiding any problems that may arise later on, such as getting flagged for having duplicate content. There are a number of ways that you can use the 301 redirect, depending on what you need to redirect and where you need it to go. The most common type is to redirect your old URL to a new one. To do this all you have to do is go to the control panel of your web host, and select the “redirect” option from there. Then fill in the blanks with the necessary information and select the “permanent” redirect option to activate the 301 redirect. I hope that you have a better understanding of how you can use 301 redirects to preserve your search engine rankings, but remember it is up to you to keep up to date with all of the different SEO methods as your site grows and changes. Make sure you look for your next issue soon. We will be talking about how you can become a SEO content writer, so that you can achieve the ser arch engines ranking you are shooting for. The Free SEO Book can help you get your website ranked higher in search engines. It will show you exactly how to find the best keywords for your website, target the right search terms and get more incoming links to your website. Best part is, it’s FREE!  Click Here now! SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Search Engine Optimization Basics – Lesson 11", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/12/search-engine-optimization-basics-lesson-11/" }); Read More →

In the last post we talked about four of the most common SEO myths. In this post we are going to talk about more SEO strategies that you should learn and use. Image via Wikipedia If you want your business or website to get and maintain a high page ranking in the search engines, you need to continually review and improve your education to include both the standard and new strategies that will help you achieve your goals. Keep in mind that mastering search engine optimization is crucial if you want to have a competitive edge against other sites or businesses that offer the same type of services or content as you. The better your search engine page ranking is, the better chances you have of getting high volumes of traffic to your web page or website. Higher volumes of traffic can lead to a higher number of possible customers, translating in to higher profit for you. Today we are going to revisit some strategies that we have discussed before and touch on some that we haven’t, so that you can implement them and get high page rankings and maintain them. First things first, if you don’t have a quality web hosting provider you should probably find one. You need to have a reliable web hosting service that will guarantee that your site is up and running 99% of the time and will give you the ability to assign an independent and unique IP address to every domain you want to rank well. This will help ensure that your avoid any problems, like all of your sites getting knocked out of the search engine database after they have been visited by crawlers during the time that one of them was down or if one of your sites happens to get penalized and removed your other sites won’t suffer the same fate. Yes we are going to talk about keyword use again! This is one of the more common, but nonetheless important, SEO strategies that you should learn in order to fully reap the benefits of all of your hard work getting your site listed and ranked. Make sure that you choose the good keywords to use in your site’s content, from the title to the body. It is important that you place your best keywords in your title or tags. You don’t need to put them on every page of your site, but only on those pages that are relevant to that particular keyword. Let’s say that the keyword that you decided to use is the word “ipod nano sale”, make sure that you only link it to your site content that has its focus on the ipod nano sale, so when you direct traffic to your site using that keyword, they will come across your site’s content about the ipod nano’s that are on sale. Creating links will also help direct traffic to your site, thereby improving your chances of getting more possible visitors and customers for your business. However, linking to other sites is not necessarily enough to get them to visit your site. What you can do is to actually make sure that you are using your selected keywords in the text links that will help point to the content located within your site. This way, if people are looking for particular content, they will be directed to your site from the content pertaining to the keyword that they are looking for. The more pages that you have on your site, the more chances you have of getting your content discovered by your potential visitors and the more opportunity you have to increase your keyword choices and density. One way that you can keep your page volume up is by simply creating new content every week, offering a different perspective, if not new, on a particular topic or keyword that you have on your other pages. This will help improve your chances of making content that has some relevance to what the users are looking for when they chose to visit your site using keyword links. While having a lot of pages can help improve the chances of having increased traffic to your site, if your site cannot offer quality and relevant content on what the visitors are looking for, then the they will simply click back to the search engine and look for a site that does. As you can guess this has an adverse effects on your page ranking. Search engines will take note of this, and will perceive this that the visitors did not find anything relevant in your content and often penalize you for it with lower rankings. Make sure you look for your next post soon. We will be talking about how SEO and 301 redirects work together to preserve your search engine rankings. Are you ready to learn exactly how to optimize your webpages for search engines. The Free SEO Book will show you how use on page and off page optimization to target your market and attract free quality traffic all day long! Grab your free copy today!  Click Here now! SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Search Engine Optimization Basics – Lesson 10", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/11/search-engine-optimization-basics-lesson-10/" }); Read More →

The REAL reason why your website isn’t getting enough traffic is because a critical piece of the Traffic Generation ‘puzzle’ has been kept from you. ==> http://www.theprofitshack.com/x.php/1272 And the odd thing about this ‘missing piece’ of the puzzle, is that it’s actually hidden from you in PLAIN SIGHT! Let me explain. There’s ’something’ all the ‘gurus’ do to get a massive amount of traffic to their websites and it’s in plain view for all to see, but only those on the ‘inside’ actually know what it is. It’s like watching a magic trick… Image via Wikipedia If you ‘know’ the secret, it’s pretty obvious how the trick is done. But if you don’t, it’s just plain mystifying. The good news is, you too can be in the ‘know’ and start creating an avalanche of FREE targeted traffic to your website! Here’s the answer to your traffic woes… ==> http://www.theprofitshack.com/x.php/1272 Imagine being able to: * Have tons of red hot visitors ready to whip out their credit cards visiting your website. * Manipulate the search engines and have your website rank tops above your competitors. * Unleash massive traffic from multiple sources through 1 simple tweak in your traffic generation strategy. If any of the above points interest you, then take a look at: ==> http://www.theprofitshack.com/x.php/1272 It wouldn’t take longer than 3 minutes…and you’ll thank me for it. =) SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "How Do You Generate Unlimited FREE Targeted Traffic Quickly And Easily?", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/09/how-do-you-generate-unlimited-free-targeted-traffic-quickly-and-easily/" }); Read More →

In the last post we talked about good content strategies that you could use in your SEO campaign. In this post we are going to be talking about four of the most common SEO Myths. Some people follow the book carefully when it comes to SEO. However, you have to understand that there are common myths that may be detrimental to the growth of your website. Some of the approaches that used to be effective before may no longer be useful today, since the market and search engine spiders keep getting smarter. Once you recognize these basic myths you can make the necessary improvements on your site to boost your rankings. Image by hongxing128 via Flickr Myth #1 – SEO involves techniques that will fool the search engines. Fooling the search engines also means that you are also fooling your human users. Real SEO techniques involve more than just optimizing content, using marketing techniques and getting additional links. A number of tactics can be used depending on the market you are trying to reach. Some of the strategies that can be used for SEO will produce long time results including benchmarks, competitive analysis, search marketing, keyword analysis, web design, user experience, creative copy writing, server side issues, ongoing link building, code optimization, information architecture, ongoing content development, web analytics and SEO and conversion analysis. Myth #2 – Search engines aren’t really used that much. Based on research, around 4.9 billion searches are done every month by 133 million unique searchers. Search engines have become one of the most common tools used by people all over the world when they are seeking information. The majority of Internet users rely on search engines to get to different web sites, pages and companies. Search engines lead you to different online businesses and shops where you can instantly shop and get the information you are looking for. To be successful with your SEO campaign you have to determine how much useful and relevant content is available in the market, then focus on becoming an a uthority on that topic. Myth #3 – SEO doesn’t work because you don’t have very many visitors. Keep in mind that SEO doesn’t promise instant and significant results. You have to use the different marketing tools and strategies together with the approaches and SEO to make everything work together. Experts recommend that you spend about 6 months after the implementation phase to evaluate the results of SEO. You also have to ensure that your web site can back up all the methods you have incorporated. If your site is not easy to navigate, does not have sound and unique content and is not relevant to the people you are targeting, then your SEO efforts will be rendered useless. Myth #4: SEO is something you only have to do once. SEO takes time to develop and you need to evaluate and assess each approach that you are taking frequently to determine if they should be improved. Search engines view about 100 to 200 factors or when they visit your website to decide how to categorized your search results. It is very important that you continue to seek out and improve your techniques. It is also a good idea to integrate your SEO campaign with your other offline and online marketing campaigns. You can do this by creating new content, building new links and refining your optimization approaches. If you have spent time, money and effort creating the groundwork for your SEO campaign you must take the time to ensure that it continues to function and drive the right visitors to your web site. SEO is not a one time event. You have to keep an eye on your site ranking, keep track of the search engine rules and make needed adjustments every now and then if you want your SEO campaign to be a success. Make sure you look for your next post soon. We will be talking about more SEO strategies that you should learn and use. Are you ready to learn exactly how to optimize your webpages for search engines. The Free SEO Book will show you how use on page and off page optimization to target your market and attract free quality traffic all day long! Grab your free copy today! Click Here now! SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Search Engine Optimization Basics – Lesson 9", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/08/search-engine-optimization-basics-lesson-9/" }); Read More →

In the last post we talked about the difference between black and white hat search engine optimization. In this post we are going to talk about good content strategies that you can use in your SEO campaign. The entire search engine optimization process is often misunderstood by a lot of people, which is why they often commit a lot of SEO mistakes as we have discussed before. These mistakes can cost them not only their page ranking in search engines, but also their traffic volume of possible customers. As you know SEO can help you direct traffic to your site, but getting them to stay is a whole new different ball game. The entire SEO process basically revolves around the idea of getting a good page ranking in search engines by employing certain strategies so that people can find your site easier. The better your page ranking is, the easier it is for visitors to find it, the more appealing it is for them to visit your site, thereby increasing the amount of traffic that your site is able to generate. However, if the visitors do not find any relevant content in your site, then your efforts to get them to your site would just have been in vain. Image via Wikipedia If you want to ensure that you can get visitors to stay on your site, you must learn some basic content strategies. As I mentioned earlier, getting people to your site is one thing, but to getting them to stay is another. When visitors are looking for a specific content, they will perform keyword searches on search engines. Once they are directed to your site using those keywords, they expect to find relevant content pertaining to that keyword, so make sure that you have content or you will lose them as fast as they found you. Avoid using keywords that have no relevance to your content. Using them anyway simply to gain more traffic to your site only based of the popularity of the keyword will only result in visitors clicking back to their search engines, and won’t necessarily have any positive effect on your page ranking. The more content or articles you create about a particular topic or keyword, the more chances you have of getting tagged and linked by other sites, as well as increase your chances of answering a visitor’s search for relevant content. Just like fishing, the more bait you have, the better your chances are of catching a fish. You also want to create articles and post them on other sites so that you can generate a lot of back links which can lead even more people back to your site. Creating and posting new content regularly can greatly improve your site’s chances of getting recommendations from other sites, especially those that are linked to your site. The more times you offer new and fresh content, the more opportunities your visitors searching for a particular content will have on finding one that is relevant to their search. Building links is also another content strategy that you can employ to help visitors searching for a particular content to find your site offering relevant content to their search. Try to link to other sites that have similar content, or at least uses the same keywords in tagging their site’s content. This way, any visitor searching on those sites will be directed to your site’s similar content, making it easier for them to find you. Make sure you look for your next post soon. We will be talking about some of the most common SEO Myths so that you can recognize them and make the necessary improvements needed to boost your rankings. The SEO Press Formula uses the power of WordPress to quickly and easily create high ranking websites that convert your visitors into buyers. You’ll learn from SEO expert Brian G. Johnson exactly how to set up your website and ensure it ranks well in the search engines from the start! Grab Your Free Seo Mini Course Today! Click Here Now! SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Search Engine Optimization Basics – Lesson 8", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/06/search-engine-optimization-basics-lesson-8/" }); Read More →

In the last post we talked about effectively using SEO on your website to reach your target market. In this post we are going to talk about the difference between black and white hat search engine optimization. There are so many methods available when it comes to search engine optimization that webmasters have actually categorized them in to two types, white hat SEO and black hat SEO. There are certain SEO tactics are accepted and those that are not accepted by popular search engines when it comes to optimizing your website and getting free traffic from them. There is white hat SEO and it best described as methods that follow the guidelines and stipulations set by the search engines. Search Engine Optimization Basics - Lesson 7 Black hat SEO is best described as approaches that go against the guidelines and stipulations set by the search engines and that they disapprove of. There is an ongoing battle between individuals who use white hat and black hat SEO. Black hat SEO may not be what you can immediately consider as negative ethically. The fact is search engines may be manipulated by black hat practitioners, and according to them the approaches they use are highly acceptable and their sole intent is boosting site rankings. Black hatters also say that there is no good or bad in trying to achieve the same goal of making their site relevant and ranked high. The benefits can extend to the users as they seek for the most useful information. Some big search engines may allow a number of websites to function opposite to the stated rules, but is it really worth the risk? Cloaking is one of the allowed black hat methods that a lot of webmasters use. A cloaking policy may be enforced by big search engines, but still needs updating to fully become consistent. The cloaking method is accepted by the search engines, since it does improve user searches instead of provide them with just any kind of result. Cloaking cannot immediately be referred to as a negative influence, considering that it aids searchers in getting the information and websites that they need. There are a number of methods that you should avoid if you want to rank high and get on search engines’ good side. Invisible text should be avoided. Do not place light yellow or white text against a white background. Engines can detect these and will only put you in more trouble. Avoid keyword stuffing. In the past, overstuffing articles and site content with the same keyword may help improve ranking, but search engines are smarter now and can determine if your content is natural or no longer of good quality. As we know automated robots visit every page in the index. The content is acquired to be analyzed at a later time. Cloaking involves giving the automated robot a different page, while assigning a completely new one to human users. Search engines greatly detest this practice. You should also stay away from doorway pages. Doorway pages are described as trying to create a page to rank high on search engines, but truly having no real good content. Orphaned pages may also be considered as doorway pages by search engines and they can incur penalties. As we have discussed before you want to avoid spamming. One method of spam is by putting up useless pages with no content that is just created to rank high on search engines. Ultimately the type of hat you wear when you optimize your website is completely up to you, so you have to make the decision weather or not you want put on your white hat to play it safe or wear the black hat and risk it all! post soon. We will be talking about good content strategies that you can use in your SEO campaign. Discover How SEO Press Formula Makes It Easy To Build Money Making Sites simply by harnessing the power of WordPress. This course was created by SEO master Brian G.Johnson and he will show you how easy it is to get your new sites up and ranking fast! Click Here Now! SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Search Engine Optimization Basics – Lesson 7", url: "http://www.theprofitshack.com/2009/12/05/search-engine-optimization-basics-lesson-7/" }); Read More →