In a lot of ways, what worked a decade ago for SEO still applies today. But intentional SEO, such as over optimising your website, too many backlinks with keyword anchor text, lack of diversified backlinks and other tactics, can actually get you in trouble with the search engines. Google can distinguish, for the most part, what’s natural and what’s not.

One thing to remember is that Google likes sites and content that other people enjoy, find useful and share with others. When was the last time you shared a site that felt like spam or had little content on it?

Here are four tips that can help improve your website’s SEO, without doing any SEO:

1. Create killer content. Just because you offer a service or are an expert in a particular industry doesn’t mean your website deserves to rank on the first page for your particular set of keywords. What ranks is quality content and resources that people find useful and want to share.

As a business owner, your time and money is best spent on generating original, useful content for your site. Try to post a new piece at least once a week, if not three times a week. Google loves fresh, original content.

2. Include your keywords in your articles and titles. Let’s say you’re a manufacturer of solar panels and one of your keyword phrases is “solar panel manufacturer.” You’d want to write an article on what to look for when seeking a solar panel manufacturer, and work that phrase into the headline. This isn’t SEO rocket science. It’s about properly labelling your online content.

3. Incorporate social media share buttons on your site.Increasingly, social signals are being taken into account by search algorithms. Why? Because people share content that’s worthwhile. Having social media buttons allows your online visitors to share your website and its content.

You’ll also want to incentivise people to share. Host a contest or product giveaway to get people tweeting and sharing your website URL.

4. Offer expert advice on other websites. Most blogs, magazines and news sites welcome content submissions. Offer to contribute an article or post explaining something related to what you do. These sites often receive a lot of submissions, so make sure that yours is authentic and informational.

Not only can contributing to other sites help generate awareness about your brand, it’s an effective way to getting high quality, non-spammy links back to your site. If you do it right and people like what you write, this can help establish you as an industry expert as well.

The SEO experts here at the Search Engine Strategies Conference are trying to shed some light on these issues for business owners, as well as fellow online marketing professionals. One of those experts is Mike Grehan, group interactive publishing director for Incisive Media, the London-based company that owns the conference, as well as marketing news sites ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. Before joining Incisive, he spent nearly two decades as a search marketing consultant for a number of major brands.
 
The biggest one is that there is some secret SEO code somewhere that you can use on your website to rank higher at Google. There is no magic bullet.

Do as many searches as you like and analyse the top ranking sites at Google. The one thing that makes them stand out more than others is that they’re really good at marketing themselves online, and most likely offline, too.

What’s a business owner to do about the frequent search engine algorithm changes?
My advice is to not lose sleep over anything regarding algorithm updates. Be aware that it happens, but don’t change your entire business or marketing plan every time Google burps.

For Google, the critical analysis in their information retrieval algorithms is based on relevance feedback. What that means is that given you’ve done all of your SEO fundamentals and you have other websites linking to yours, the end user data kicks in. How many times do people click on your link in the search results compared to others? How long do people stay on your pages compared to others? Those are basic examples, but the real secret to success is still based on creating compelling, relevant content that is both informative–and maybe even entertaining–in order to provide a richer experience.

Google has penalized many websites for trying to game the algorithm. In my experience, the two most important things are to design your website for human beings, not algorithms, and to gear your business toward multiple sources of traffic, not just from Google.

How are tools like Apple’s Siri changing local search?
Siri is the forerunner of what you could call concierge search. It’s not just about voice-activated commands. It’s about multimodal search — information which is aggregated from many sources to suit a given environment or set of circumstances. This is a glimpse into the new “information provider” as opposed to search engine of the future. Google’s new Nexus smartphone has a similar feature called Google Now. It proves this type of search is going to be big.

“Data” seems to be a buzzword at the conference. What’s that about?
Data is the modern equivalent to black gold in digital marketing terms. In much the same way that Google has been able to take implicit data about end users to provide more relevant results, marketers use this “big data” for exactly the same reasons. I use an analogy sometimes about Google. People look at Google and it’s a mysterious black box and nobody knows how it works or what goes on inside it. Yet, it is looking at you, the end user, and you’re a mysterious black box, and it has no idea how you work or what goes on inside. But if you share some data together, there’s a much richer and more personal experience. Mining data is a way of personalizing information for you, and that includes advertising.
 

What’s the key to managing SEO on top of everything else an entrepreneur has going on?
SEO doesn’t have to be rocket science. If you choose to set up a business online, then you should know something about how the Web works. So the jargon involved in SEO and the process is something you’ll pick up pretty quickly along the way.

The hardest part of the job for most people is understanding why links are so important. Search engine algorithms begin with an analysis of how many other Web pages link to yours as a sign of popularity. The big mistake is to start thinking about “how do I get links?” The better your marketing is online, the more links you’ll gain as a by product.

Even for smaller businesses, it’s possible to do all of this in-house, just as they would probably handle their offline marketing. It’s more of a case-by-case thing than it is a rule.

Last week Google announced 3 upgrades that will make testing with the tool significantly easier and more powerful. Below I discuss each of the upgrades and how they can enhance testing with Google Analytics

1. Ability To Copy Experiments

This new functionality is valuable as it allows marketers to perform additional tests to the same page without modifying the codes, which makes the process much shorter. In order to copy an experiment, go to your experiment results page and click on “View settings”.

2. Support For Relative URLs For Variation Pages

This upgrade is extremely important as it allows website owners to test different page versions without having to create multiple URLs, they can simply create a version that has a different URL parameter (either using a “?” or a “#”). This is critical, for example, for ecommerce websites that want to test different versions for a product template page. Using relative URLs they will now be able to to that.

In addition, it is important for websites using multiple domains (such as Top Level Domains) where the URL is the same with the exception of the domain. According to the help article:

Relative URLs offer more flexibility in defining the location of the variations. Content Experiments takes the concept of relative URLs as used in hyperlinks since the early days of HTML and applies it to the definition of variations. This means the variations may inherit parts of the original URL (e.g. the domain, the domain and path, etc.). Using relative URLs doesn’t conflict with parameter propagation. This means that any parameter not specified in the variation will be copied over from the original page at runtime.

3. Improvements To The Experiments Report

Google added standard report capabilities to the experiment reports, such as: Site Usage (Pages/Visit, Time on Page, Bounce Rate and % of New Visits), Goal Sets (includes all goals), Ecommerce, and Adsense. This means that from now users will be able to compare the page variations based on all the metrics, not only the goals defined while setting the experiment.

Google will improve the tool in fast pace.

A keyword or keyword phrase is a word or series of words that a user enters into a search engine. Keyword research refers to the process of choosing a few of the infinite number of possible keyword phrases to use in search engine optimisation efforts for your website.

For example, if you’re planning a family trip to Disneyland and want to find the weather forecast, you might search for the phrase: “average Paris weather in June.” Google takes this text and compares it against the billions of web pages in its index, using its complex algorithms to determine which sites represent the best matches.

Here’s a look at what you need to know about keyword research for your site, why you should care and how to get started:

What makes a good keyword?
Getting a high rank in search engine results pages is important, but it’s the specific keywords you’re ranked for that can determine how successful your website will be.

To understand the difference, compare a site that’s ranked for “make money online” to one that gets a high ranking for “online tutorials on underwater basket weaving.” Because more people are searching for the first phrase, a search engine ranking for that term can generate significantly more traffic and hopefully enable the site to make more money.

Two important concepts help us determine which keywords to target: search volume and competition. Volume refers to the number of people who enter your chosen keywords into the search engines. Greater search volume is usually better, enabling your site to draw more natural traffic.

But search volume should be tempered by a careful analysis of the competitiveness of the keyword phrase. In the example above, the keyword “make money online” receives significantly more volume, but it will be much more difficult to get your site bumped into the top 10 search results for that phrase than for “online tutorials on underwater basket weaving.”

How do I conduct keyword research?
The first step involves researching potential keyword phrases to target. There are plenty of tools that provide this data, but one of the easiest to use is Google’s free Adwords Keyword Research Tool.

You can enter phrases related to your website or just your site address, and the program will generate a list of keywords to consider. The tool also will provide data on how many global and local searches occur for a particular word or phrase each month, as well as Google’s estimate of the difficulty of getting ranked for the keyword.

Unfortunately, there are no “search volume versus competitiveness” rules to follow when choosing keywords to target from this list. But keep in mind that while the competitive keywords will require more time and effort to build a high ranking, they can pay off in increased search traffic to your site.

As you research keywords and integrate them into your site, you should start to see a pattern in terms of the ideal mix of search volume and competitiveness. Much will depend on how big an investment you’re willing to make in search engine optimization.

How do I integrate keyword research into my website?
Once you’ve identified a few potential keyword targets, start integrating them into your site. To increase your chances of getting ranked for your chosen terms, you’ll want to follow standard search engine optimization practices, including any of the following:

• Create pages on your site featuring helpful content based on your target keywords.
• Incorporate your target keywords into your page’s HTML in various places, including your site’s title, heading and meta description tags.
• Build backlinks pointing at your site using your target keyword as anchor text. The anchor text of a link refers to the part that remains visible and underlined on the referring page. For example, the link <a href=”https://www.yoursite.com”>keyword phrase</a> would appear like this: keyword phrase. This lets the search engines know that this phrase is relevant to your site.

It will take some effort to target particular keywords but, over time, your research should yield significant improvement in search traffic volume.

I do all my keyword research through a really useful tool called Market Samurai. I couldn’t imagine keyword research without it now.

Here is a list of the features you’ll get access to:

• Rank Tracker track your website rankings over time instantly
• SEO Competition Analysis analyse the strength of competition in any niche
• Keyword Research find the right keywords to control your niche
• Domains choose a domain that will boost your rankings in the search engines
• Monetisation turn traffic into cash with instant affiliate ads, published straight to your site
• Find Content research articles, and find content to republish immediately
• Publish Content write, schedule and publish content straight to your blog
• Promotion build high-authority backlinks to improve your site rankings

You can download a free trial to find out just how useful Market Samurai really is.

With the number of updates Google and the other search engines make to their algorithms, it can be daunting to stay current with best practices for search engine optimization (SEO). Should backlinks still be a priority? What is Google’s Penguin update and how can I stop losing traffic because of it?

But no matter how much search engines change their ranking equations, there are a number of basic SEO mistakes you’ll want to avoid. Here’s a look at the five most common errors and some advice for how you can avoid making them:

Mistake No. 1: Failing to conduct proper keyword research.
The Internet runs on keywords. Websites show up in search engine results only when they’re relevant to keyword queries.

If you’re posting web content based on whatever you feel like writing rather than based on proper keyword research, you might be limiting your opportunities to generate search results traffic. A keyword is a word or series of words that a user enters into a search engine. To research keywords for your industry, use tools such as Google’s free Adwords Keyword Researchservice to look for search queries that generate an adequate volume of website results without being so competitive that your site won’t rank high in the search results.

Mistake No. 2: Building low-value backlinks.
Although link building can be an important part of online marketing, you won’t want to put quantity ahead of quality. Low-value backlinks — including those from spam websites, irrelevant sites or sites built solely for the purpose of disseminating links — could do damage to your site’s SEO, especially in the wake of the recent Google Penguin update.

Google Penguin is an algorithmic change designed to weed spam sites out of search results. The quality of a site’s backlink profile is one of the key factors believed to play a role in identifying a site as potential spam and penalizing it. Therefore, focus on pursuing links from authority sites in your industry rather than take the easy way out by acquiring low-value links.

Mistake No. 3: Developing sites that can’t be properly indexed.
The listings on search engines’ results pages are pulled directly from their massive indexes of web pages, which are then analysed according to the latest ranking algorithms.

How do you get into an index in the first place? Your site must be indexed by the search engines’ robot or spider programs, which digest its textual content and store it for potential display in future search queries.

This represents a significant weak spot for many sites. If the search engines’ spiders can’t index your site accurately, you can’t attract the right kind of traffic from searches. A variety of issues can prevent a website from being indexed correctly, but the following are most common:

• Overuse of images. Search engine spiders can’t read text that’s included in images. If you store important elements like your site’s name or headlines in pictures, such information may not be indexed properly.
• Flash animations. Search engines also struggle to digest the information stored in Flash animations, so use them sparingly.
• Javascript and other code elements.These features can provide great functionality, but they can’t be indexed. To prevent indexing problems, format your site’s robot.txt file to display an alternate, text-based version (instead of your Javascript or code elements) to the search engine spiders.

Mistake No. 4: Failing to regularly update your site.
Out-dated content reduces your site’s perceived value and can lead to fewer return visitors and decreased sales. The search engines care about your content’s freshness, as well. Adding new content to your site exposes it to a wider range of keywords and potentially more search-generated traffic. New postings also can help your site get ranked for search queries that fall under Google’s recent freshness update.

For queries with a timeliness factor, such as the current U.S. presidential race, this algorithmic change places a premium on providing the most recent results and not necessarily those with the most traditional SEO ranking factors in place. Without regular updates, your site obviously won’t qualify for inclusion in such results.

Mistake No. 5: Focusing on search engines instead of your visitors.
While search engine optimisation is important, your visitors matter most. Your SEO activities shouldn’t undermine the quality of your content to the point that readers no longer want to stick around and engage with your site.

Follow established SEO guidelines where you can, but keep the focus on providing value to the people who actually arrive on your site. Make their satisfaction your ultimate priority, and you’ll likely be rewarded with both high search rankings and increased revenues.

Measuring your conversion rate or number of top 10 rankings can tell you a lot about how well your website is performing. Obsessing over your social influence, on the other hand, isn’t as productive.

The following five commonly-tracked SEO metrics, for instance, don’t tell you that much about how your website is performing. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the number of metrics you’re tracking, consider cutting them out of your data collection process entirely.

1. Toolbar PageRank
Many website owners who live and die by toolbar PageRank — the score that appears in toolbar plugins and extensions designed to provide SEO data — even though Google spokesman Matt Cutts has all but deemed this metric irrelevant.

Although Google’s servers run PageRank update algorithms that determine how much authority sites should receive in relation to one another, they only push these scores out to the general public a few times a year. As a result, the number displayed by toolbar SEO tools may be woefully out of date, rendering the metric meaningless.

By all means, check your toolbar PageRank from time to time. A significant decrease could be an indication that Google has detected and penalised unsavoury activity on your website. But when it comes to regular management of common SEO metrics, you can leave this one off the list.

2. Top 30 rankings
Some webmasters measure their SEO success by how many times their websites appear in the first 30 Google results for their target search phrases. But the percentage of natural search users who ever navigate past the first page of results is so small that this metric is nearly meaningless.

Instead, focus on top 10 rankings. Getting on the first search engine results page is really the only way to build exposure for your company.

3. Social media shares
Social media signals play a role in your site’s SEO because both Google’s and Bing’s ranking algorithms currently factor in link shares and the relative authority of the sharers. But there’s a big difference between publishing content that will attract these social signals and obsessing day after day over exactly how many Facebook “likes” or Twitter “re-tweets” you’ve attracted.

Realistically, whether your website has 50 “likes” or 500 isn’t as important to your natural search performance as focusing on other aspects of your marketing strategy — such as how well your social media referral traffic is converting into buyers or email newsletter subscribers. Check your site’s social shares every so often to ensure that they’re trending in the right direction, but don’t waste time worrying about minute changes in your numbers.

4. Daily visitors
Of course website traffic is important, but knowing the number of daily visitors arriving on your site at any given point doesn’t make much of a difference.

Think about it: It doesn’t matter if your website receives 100 or 100 million visitors a day unless you have a method for determining how many are converting into subscribers or buyers. If you haven’t put a conversion rate optimization strategy in place, there’s no reason to worry about attracting more subscribers because you can’t guarantee that your efforts will pay off in increased revenue.

Instead of determining whether you attracted a few more visitors to your website today than you did yesterday, focus on how and when conversions are occurring. Then, feel free to track traffic flow — and conversions — to your heart’s content.

5. Social influence
Sites such as Klout and PeerIndex have been popping up recently in an attempt to quantify the relative authority of individuals and brands in any given industry. Some people get wrapped up in tracking this metric and trying to increase their scores, but I can’t think of a worse way to waste your time.

While services like these might have potential in the future, they currently are nothing more than online popularity contests. Rather than spending time trying to win these superficial contests, focus on the areas of your business that will actually enhance your bottom line.

Link Removal Fees:

With this, there are many out there trying to capitalize on this fear. Here’s an example of a directory with a special landing page specifically designed to collect money from webmasters in order to remove links from their site. The site offers you to pay them and in exchange, they will remove the links they have pointing to your web site from their site. Yes, people are charging others to remove links that they put up.

The site reads:

We have been getting many requests for removal of links. We will happily do that for you. It is a manual process and we have about 100 directories.* So for $25 we will remove your URL from all our 100 directories. You just need to pay on PayPal below * If you are just after the list of 100 or directories we have then the fee is a token $2 to stop all the freebee hunters. We need to live as well. * Do you want us to search our directories for your link and give you a report then that cost is $10. This is perfect for people with few resources to check themselves. Especially as there are 100 directories which takes time.

Here is a screen shot just in case they pull down the page:

Should You Pay For Link Removals?

Things you should know before you pay for a site to remove a link? There are alternatives. You can threaten to sue, you can wait for Google to release their disavow link tool (which Bing has already), you can relax and maybe feel that not all paid links hurt you but some are ignored or the most extreme is to 404 the page.

Ultimately, it is up to you to decide if paying a fee to remove the link is worth it. Or if one of the alternatives are better for you.

Personally I’ve always avoided paid for backlinks prefering to do the spade work myself and build high quality, relevant backlinks manually. It takes time to do and time to filter through on your SEO, but once it’s done, it just keeps on giving.
On top of that, if you’ve built them properly, any search engine algorithim updates targeting bad backlinks won’t affect your rankin.
You’ll also have saved yourself the stress and mad panic that comes when suddenly you disappear off Google and you have to run around figuring out whats gon wrong and rush through a fix trying to recover your ranking.