I will not name any of the companies, but hopefully for those that are relatively new to SEO, this will shed some light on some techniques you should avoid.  It may also help some to recognize when a bad SEO comes forward and gives some bad advice, and when to walk away from such shady black hat SEO methods because they can (and will) hurt your Google rankings.

1. “It’s a good idea for us to begin by building toxic links to your competitors, this is a good way to damage their reputation and force them down in the rankings”.  I couldn’t believe this when I first saw the e-mail but it was a genuine suggestion.  Building “toxic links” is somewhat of a gray area, and is difficult to show that it does a lot of damage to your rankings.  I would never recommend building toxic links (these are like comment links or links from “dodgy” websites) to your site because there is every chance you could get noticed, and then penalized by Google.  However building links to a competitor is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard.  There could even be a chance that they get some benefit out of them, not to mention that no work is being done on your own site!

2. “Put as many keywords in your Title and Meta Tags. This is a great way to show Google that your site is relevant to specific key terms”.  I don’t even understand this proposal very well.  Spamming your Meta Tags!  Wasn’t that something that worked 230 years ago?  Seriously, Google pays barely any attention to the Description Meta Tag, and absolutely none to the Keyword Tag.   These have no benefit to your site, but you can be sure that if you put 500 words in each one, your site isn’t going to rank very well in Google.  The Title tag is one of the more important attributes on your site.  You need to use this wisely.  There is a character limit set at 70 for the top optimized Title tag, and you should stick to this, only use 3 keywords that work best for each page, spamming this, will get you penalized.

3. “Your site is quite dull and we have evidence to show that a lively site attracts more visitors. So we recommend using Flash, and this will help to bring the site into a more favorable and aesthetically pleasing view”.  Right, *Sigh* having a lively site will help with fresh content, but I promise you that there will be no SEO benefit what so ever from adding Flash to your site.  Google and I hate Flash, it can’t be easily read, and Google’s Bot actually disregards most of it.  Not only this it is also filled with so much messy code, slowing down your website (which has now been confirmed as a ranking factor).  Bringing fresh content onto your site is a good thing, Flash is one of the worst!

4. “We strongly recommend that you buy at least 15 domains, preferably with some age and power.  We can send you a list if you would like, we would then redirect them to your site”.  Excuse me for saying this but “OMG”.  Satanic Black hat devil worshipers, this is what is known as Parasite hosting in the SEO world.  The redirect they are talking about is called a 301. It is quite literally where all the power from these older domains is passed through to the new one, to give it a boost.  It is extremely easy to identify, and even easier to penalize.  Google isn’t stupid and neither are you guys, don’t fall into these traps!

Being able to spot these SEO myths is crucial to making sure your SEO campaign is headed in the right direction. Below, you’ll find 5 common SEO myths debunked, but I’m sure there are several more SEO myths I’m overlooking. Please leave a comment with other SEO myths you’ve heard and come across.

Myth #1: Keyword density plays an important role in your search rankings

Simply put, keyword density plays NO ROLE in determining search engine rankings. There’s no magic keyword density that you have to hit if you want Google to push your website to the top. Keyword density is a poor way to gauge a page’s relevance for a particular keyword, and it’s far too easy to manipulate for any search engine to take it seriously.

That being said, I do think keyword density serves some purpose. It helps you see if you’re using your keywords so much that it disturbs the natural flow of your website copy. But you can also just read your copy aloud to find that out.

Myth #2: A high Page Rank automatically means you’ll rank well

Susan Moskwa, a Google employee, recently said “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it [from Google Webmaster Tools] because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. ”

Instead of worrying about your toolbar Page Rank, you should be focusing on building quality links to your website, creating optimized copy, and making your site easier to crawl for the search engines.

Myth #3: Buying PPC ads increases your search rankings

You can’t pay Google to give you a high organic search engine ranking. They won’t reward you for having a huge PPC budget. All search engines have dividers between their PPC and organic search results. Paid campaigns never directly affect organic rankings. Period.

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to buy PPC ads. If you aren’t currently ranking well, a PPC ad can place your website above the fold in the search results. PPC ads can also drive targeted traffic to well-designed landing pages that convert clickers into buyers.

Myth #4: Your website copy needs to be at least 400 words to rank well

I do a lot of copywriting for various SEO/internet marketing companies and their clients, and to this day, I still hear this. Some SEOs still swear that every page on a website needs to exceed a minimum word count (400 words is the one I typically hear, but I’ve also heard people say having at least 250 words is a must).

This one is fairly easy to debunk. Just Google a few different keywords, and see which websites turn up on the first page of the search results. You’ll probably find everything from 50 word pages to 1,000 word pages. So, instead of focusing on hitting a certain word count with your website copy, focus on providing clear, easy-to-scan copy that clearly communicates benefits to your customers.

Myth #5: You can guarantee search engine placement

If you ever come across an SEO company that promises a specific ranking—whether it’s #1 ranking or a first page ranking—in the search engines, run away as fast as you can. No SEO can guarantee a specific ranking. They don’t work for Google, and they don’t control how the search engines will grade any particular website.

Honest SEOs will never promise a specific search ranking. However, they will tell you that by using proven SEO techniques, your website should increase its search engine presence, but there are never any guarantees.

Do you agree that these are SEO myths? What other SEO myths have you heard? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Organic Search Traffic – Organic search results get 90% of the total clicks a search engine gets. People love organic search traffic because of the obvious reasons – it is free (You definitely have to hire SEO’s, link builders, content developers etc if you don’t have knowledge about SEO or don’t have time to do all these things) and converts well. But getting top rankings for your website in search engines for desired keywords can take few weeks to many months depending on your competition. Since getting organic traffic requires lot of time you can’t expect overnight results from it.

Pay-per-click Traffic – As the name says you have to pay for it. It is the most popular source of traffic amongst internet marketers because the traffic you will get is of high quality and converts well. Also, you don’t have to wait for months like organic search traffic as visitors will start coming within few hours. Although PPC campaigns are getting expensive every moment due to high competition but still with proper keyword research, proper targeting, effective sales copy and high quality landing pages you can easily achieve a positive ROI for your campaigns.

Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking could be great source of free traffic if you have high quality content to share and have few friends on such websites who can give an initial push to your content. The main thing which you need to understand while using social bookmarking is that people don’t visit websites like Digg or Delicious to buy anything. They go there to find some useful content. So if you are trying to use social bookmark website to sell your products then you are just wasting your time because the traffic you will get won’t convert most of the times.

Social Media Traffic – Social media websites like Twitter and Facebook grew at the staggering rate in 2009 and are still growing every day. Although social media traffic is not interested in buying anything but it converts at a good rate once you establish yourself amongst your communities on these websites (Obviously you need to share useful content with them and help them to establish yourself) and have a good following on these websites. Various studies here and here about the impact of social media on consumer behavior shows that the decisions of more than half of the US adults when it comes to buy online are influenced by the information they get from social media websites.

RSS Readers Traffic – The traffic you get from RSS are your loyal readers. This traffic won’t convert well with Adsense and other similar programs because they come to your website for content and are not interested in the ads. Although, since they are your loyal readers and trust you, this kind of traffic converts very well if you are trying to promote an affiliate program or trying to sell your own product.

As you have seen, the traffic originated from different sources behaves differently and needs different techniques to monetize. Instead of jumping from one source to another you need to focus on the traffic source which works well in your niche and can help you to accomplish your goals. What is your main source of traffic and how do you use it to accomplish your blogging goals?

At the FTC’s Journalism and Internet Workshop in December, Murdoch said, “There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite, at times without attribution, the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks or even months in their stories—all under the tattered veil of ‘fair use.’”

It is no surprise that a News Corp. publication would block a site like NewsNow, and this could just be the beginning of a long string of similar moves from News Corp. and other like-minded publishers. The real question is – will they follow through with the blocking of major search engines (namely Google)? That would be a much bolder move.

NewsNow founder Struan Bartlett is not exactly backing down from the fight. He has gone so far as to launch a campaign called Right2Link, the premise of which is essentially – linking to online content is a basic right, or officially:

Whether you are a consumer, an NGO, a blogger, an independent researcher, a concerned citizen or a business, your right to link needs protection.

Bartlett offers the following video to make his case:

Bartlett picks out the following as “the threats” of media owners stopping people from linking to content:

- Serious damage to the ease of access to digital information that drives the economy.
- Media owners cherry-picking organisations to target, accusing them of copyright theft, or demanding cash — this is already happening!
- Media organizations with significant economic power cutting deals with selected corporate search engines to guide the public to their online media, their opinions and their political and commercial allies.
- Media with the power to enforce it levying additional so-called “license fees” from any business or organization using or linking to their websites.

It should be noted that NewsNow offers a paid service, and this is probably the biggest reason News Corp. targeted it out of all other possibilities (of which there must be an astonishing number). But does that matter? If the linking site isn’t stealing actual content, and is simply linking, does it matter if they charge for their service? Nobody is saying media owners don’t have the right to put up paywalls around their content, but if that content is freely available, why shouldn’t anyone be able to freely point to it with a link? What do you think? Would you ever want to BLOCK someone from LINKING to your content?

Blogging

Hope you liked this first ever round-up post on TechChunks. Stay tuned for more such posts in other categories soon.

Numerous studies have proven that, when presented with a list of potential related sites, a web searcher often scans a page from top to bottom and from left to right. Obviously, being ranked higher and having your blog/website appear closer to the top of a Search Engine results page will, in turn, increase the likelihood of the searcher visiting your blog/website – something where Link Building can help you in a big way.

Increasing the likelihood for your blog to appear at the top of Search Engine Results Page (SERP) through link building can take a variety of forms, some of which are obvious and some of which are not. However, here goes ten ideas that have worked for many blogs:

1) Ensure that the content of your blog is of good standard and contains information that other websites and blogs would be happy to be associated with. If another potential blog is considering links in your industry/niche, they are more likely to favor link building with a blog that is informative and well-written. As it has been said numerous times – Quality is still the King.

2) Include a regularly updated section in your blog, devoted to industry news. If you can provide useful and interesting information on a regular basis and if you can become one of the very first people to bring such news, people will be drawn to your blog as a source of informed content.

3) Distribute press releases. Most businesses achieve something that is newsworthy at some time, be it a particular award or the gaining of an important contract. Syndicating this news through sites such as PRWeb.com and PRNewswire.com can generate a lot of traffic from within and outside your industry. If you think that being just a blog, you don’t have anything that is newsworthy, how about hosting a blog contest and spread words about it via press release?

4) Include Comments in your blog. If you have space for readers to leave their comments, your blog will be seen to be popular with users and as good link-material. Make sure you interact with readers who leave comments and give them some incentives via plugins like “Top Commentator” and “CommentLuv” to show your appreciation

5) Create an Ezine article. Ezine is very highly ranked and can offer your article, with its associated links, the chance to be seen by thousands of users (and Search Engines).

6) Subscribe to free online directories. Some of the most successful link building campaigns rely heavily on free online directories as a way of exposing their blogs. Manual directory submission can be a time taking process but it can boost your web presence and your Search Engine ranks by a great deal if done right.

7) Research your competitors and find out who they are linked to and more importantly who are linking to them. You can then approach these companies and offer to link to them.

8 ) Use your social contacts. If you have friends or relatives who offer a service or product that may in some way be relevant to yours, offer them a link in return for a link from them. Use social media heavily to reach your potential readers who in turn may link to you if they find your blog interesting. Use your online persona to your advantage and make use of your online friends for your link building success.

9) It is also worth approaching existing or previous clients and service providers. In the case of clients, if you have done a good job for them, you can ask them to link to your blog, thereby supporting the work you have done. Service providers may also wish to associate with a blog that they feel uses their products to great effect.

10) Top 10 lists (like this one) are a great way to generate traffic! They don’t have to be industry/niche related, but can simply be a point of interest that will draw people to your blog and perhaps encourage them to explore further thereby increasing your chance of being linked.

What is your most favorite link building strategy?

It might have happened that you like a song but don’t know the name of the song or the album. Or the tune you heard in a local cafeteria recently is catchy and you really want to listen to it, but you just can’t figure out the name of the song, damn. Worst still, you remember just one or two lyrics of the song, but you forget the exact name of it. And situations like these made you wonder if there was a way to help you to somehow remember the song. Personally, I have spent many half-awake nights trying to remember such songs/music.

Thankfully, not any more… To help you solve this with a single click,  Google has announced a new search feature today to make search more musical.

Much has been made of this new feature, and it certainly will make it easier for users to get straight to a song they’re looking for, but it’s not something we’re getting all that excited about. We’ll admit that finding and playing back a song when all you’ve done is search for lyrics is kind of cool. Still, Google already puts video results from YouTube in the search results page, and more often than not they’re what you’re looking for, anyway.

Right now we’re not seeing the updates in our results when we try Google search, but chances are you’ll start seeing them soon if you aren’t already.

What do you think? Are you all excited about the new music-in-Google features, or kind of lukewarm? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.

This is a secret that your SEO Company will never admit even exists. I am going to make this real quick and crispy. But the probability that this off-page SEO technique will work for you largely depends on the uniqueness/usefulness of your content. Unless you are spamming others and unless you are going to try this with your mediocre content, there is great chance that you will be able to get some really targeted visitors (and some quality backlinks) to your all time best pillar articles. This can prove to be one of the best off-page SEO tactics, if you make sure you are doing it in the right way and most importantly NOT overdoing it. Now without further ado, let me introduce this little trick (which I discovered just recently) that can help you to use Google to get some targeted traffic and relevant backlinks to your quality posts! This one is super simple and can bring you hundreds of extra visitors.

Here’s how it works:
First, you will have to go to Google and type-in the following search queries:

“Daily Link Roundup” +“your niche here”
“Weekly Link Roundup” +“your niche here”
“Monday Link Roundup” +“your niche here”
“Friday Link Roundup” +“your niche here”
“Link Roundup” +“your niche here”

For example, if your blog operates in the “technology” niche then the first search query above will translate to:

“Daily Link Roundup” +technology

Searching for this key phrase will give you around 11,500 search results in Google with a list of blogs that do daily link roundups of good content from around the Web. And there are thousands of blogs that do this on every imaginable topic/niche. Just use your imagination and change the above search queries according to your blog niche and within minutes you should have a good list of blogs that do daily/weekly/Monday/Friday… link roundups in your OWN niche!

But, how to use this list? You can go to Google and look for a related blog that does link roundups and then send the blog owner a link to your best content. Yeah, I know this sounds like pitching. But, unless you are already famous like John Chow and don’t need Google to send you visitors and unless you are stupid enough to wait for others (visitors and search engines) to find your blog on their own, then probably this is the most efficient way to get some free and quality traffic.

And what’s wrong in contacting fellow webmasters and offering them with some of your all time best content to linkup in their roundups? If you’ve published truly great content, then they are very likely to link to you in their link roundup thus sending you extra traffic and giving you a high-quality backlink. This can be an extremely powerful technique that I see VERY few people using right now. It’s super simple and can send you lots of highly-targeted traffic. Your only job is to create truly valuable content, use Google to find a list of blogs that do such link roundups, approach the blog owners with your best contest, sit back and enjoy when loads of free traffic and backlinks start coming your way. Isn’t it awesome? You catch 3 birds with one bullet – social networking with blog owners, exposure to new visitors and backlinks! Try it yourself and let us hear how it works for you!

“Wait, isn’t that what many other similar services offer?” Not exactly. What they do is give every blog a fair opportunity to get exposure by resetting their Top 100 blogs each month. (So, the big blogging sites aren’t on there year round.)

Also, you get exposure from their “Random Pages” and “New RSS Feed Pages”.

To get your blog listed into their database, there are two options:

1.) Simply write a blog post/review about RSSHugger and you get in for FREE! (Yeah you figured it out correctly; kind of this particular post.)

2.) If you don’t want to write a post on your blog, or you’re just too lazy too busy, then you can pay a one time fee of $20. This fee entitles your blog RSS to be enlisted in their database for 10 years, thus bringing your per year fee down to a measly $2 per year. Isn’t that cheap?

If you have a blog, RSS Hugger is a good opportunity to get your feed out where people can find it. So, may be you should give them a try. In case you have already tried them, let us hear about your experience.

“In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines.

Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn’t apply if it’s only set to ‘Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)’. This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

Google Indexing Your Publicly Published Docs! Evil or Not-Evil?

Yes Google, you bet this is a very exciting change for people who had shared their documents publicly in the past and never cared to foresee such a possibility. Moreover, two weeks seem incredibly short notice for such a big change. IMO, users who have “private” but published documents are going to be quite upset to find they are suddenly being indexed by Google! How would someone know for sure if a publicly crawled web page has linked to her published document? It would be much better if one could CHOOSE whether or not her documents should be indexed. At the moment the only way to ensure that your published document doesn’t show up in search results, is to actually unpublish it. This, however, may not be an easy and practical solution for many publishers; especially those who have been using Google Docs and Spreadsheets for years now and have published hundreds of documents via these services.

While Google continues to display its power through these sudden dictatorial decisions, it makes one wonder if it is worth the trouble for the search engine giant to annoy its loyal user base. As the line of privacy becomes thinner, Google is taking yet another step to make sure that web user’s privacy is once again breached in the name of transparency and data accessibility. Dear Google, isn’t it Evil?