Webmasters who wish to get as much traffic as possible to their websites often try to use any SEO tactics that they have at their disposal. While many SEO tactics are legitimate, such as the creation of quality content, other tactics are referred to as blackhat SEO tactics.

#1 Search Engine Submission

One technique that has almost no beneficial impact on SEO is the submission of a website to hundreds of search engines. This technique is useless because most traffic comes from one of the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

#2 Metadata

Another technique that is not necessary for search engine optimization is to optimize metadata. Metadata refers to information that was once used by search engines to index websites. However, most search engines do not rely on metadata to determine how they will index a website and will instead rely on the actual content found on the website to determine how the website will be indexed.

#3 Reciprocal Linking

For websites to get a high ranking, links can be highly useful. A link from a reputable website can give a lower ranked website a boost in their search engine rankings. If the link contains anchor text, the website might be ranked higher for keywords associated with the anchor text. However, one practice that has been used by websites and that is completely useless is the practice of reciprocal linking. This is where websites will both give each other a link. The idea is that they will both get a boost in ranking by linking to each other. This technique will have no beneficial results because search engines do not count two-way links.

#4 Link Farms

Websites should also make sure that they do not have links to their websites placed on link farms. Link farms are websites that are only created to give links to large numbers of websites to increase their page rankings. These websites often contain long lists of links. Instead of improving the ranking, they will harm the ranking of websites listed on them.

#5 Duplicate Content

One form of content that search engines do not like is duplicate content. This includes both duplicate content on one’s own website and duplicate content on another website. Duplicate content is seen as a mark of a poor-quality website. Even worse is the swiping of content from another website. When creating content, websites must make sure that it is always original.

#6 Keyword Stuffing

Websites should try to create original content. Many websites create content that is filled with keywords that users search for. At one time, including these keywords at a high density would increase the chances that the website would be indexed for a certain search phrase. But today, including an excessive number of keywords can harm the website’s search ranking.

#7 Cloaking

One of the worst SEO tactics used by websites is the practice of cloaking. This is when a website tries to create two different versions of the website, with one version that can be seen by a search engine and another version that is seen by the actual user. For example, the website could create a content-rich website that is visible to search engines and create a malicious, pornographic or the clients actual website that is viewed by the user. This technique can get a website banned from major search engines.

#8 Doorway Pages

Another one of the worst SEO tactics is the use of doorway pages. These are pages that are designed to be optimized toward certain keyword phrases. They are only designed for search engines and will contain links to other websites as a way to lure unsuspecting users in.

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

Intro SEO Questions

What is the first thing you’ll do when taking over the SEO account?
Bad Answer: It’s top secret…
Our Thoughts: Really…? Top secret huh…? Well, the first thing we’ll do is, after discussing the account goals, is performing our SEO keyword research. Knowing which keywords you want and need to rank for is essential before completing any on-site optimization or keyword targeting. We will review the website, competitors’ websites and various keyword research tools to find keywords that have high search volume and a lower number of competing pages.

What kinds of results should we expect to see the first month and what reports will you include?
Bad Answer: Anything in the area of “You’ll have so much work your gonna need to hire new employees left and right so you won’t really need reports”
Our Thoughts: Results can vary on a client-by-client basis. Meaning that depending on the authority (or page rank) of the site, hold new or old the domain name is, site history, etc call all either negatively or positively affect the performance of the account. Generally speaking though you should see a small increase the first month in position and traffic. As for reporting, any management firm should provide you with a keyword ranking report among the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) as well as a monthly performance report on visits, leads, bounce rate, time on site, etc. We also offer bi-weekly reports if requested.

What Is Your Website Ranking For At The Moment?
Bad Answer: “Nothing, I haven’t had time to work on my website. Too busy doing SEO for clients.”
Our Thoughts: Any legitimate company should be at least on the top page for some sort of keywords. Just our blog and articles generate traffic relating to SEO, and we rank on the first page for dozens of targeted keywords. Find out the target keywords they are ranking for, and check them out. (but remember to clear your history, cookies and any cached information before you do, because Google does store site information on your browser and what ever sites you’ve visited in the past will always show up first)

Google Local / Places Questions

Is Google Local included in your price, and name at least 3 elements critical to ranking well in Google Local/Maps/Places search
Bad Answer: “We will create a Google Places listing for you and it will grow in the listings as we build backlinks to your website”
Our Thoughts: We include the creation and optimization of Google Places with each of our campaigns. With that said, Google Places is a completely different animal then your website and is ranked in a completely different manner!
Registration/verification with Google Local/Places
Listing presence & consistency in Google Places sources
Ratings and reviews from Google Places users
Proximity to centroid and match on local phone number/address
Listing prominence in Google Places sources (e.g. Yelp, Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Dexknows, etc.)
Listings/references from sources that feature in “more about this place” (typically from local coverage websites)
Business listing title/name/domain name

Social Media Marketing Questions

Is social media included in our SEO program?
Bad Answer: “Social Media doesn’t provide any authority to your website because all of their links are no follows so don’t bother waisting time with that”
Our Thoughts: If this was 1-2 years ago, I would agree with the above statement, however, recent studies (plus a lawsuit directed towards Google favoring Googles new +1) have shown that Google is eating up everything coming from these social media Giants! Although backlinks coming from these sites are no follows, Backlinks are not the only thing that help a campaigns rankings! Imagine it this way, the more you do online (that pertains to your website) like a tweet, or a post, another person following or talking about your business, is like another square foot you add to your building – in other words, it exponentially grows your virtual profile. And since Google loves big companies/websites Google will grow to love yours more and more.

What aspects of social media marketing have a positive impact on search engine rankings (apart from the value of direct links from the social sites)?
Bad Answer: “Well as I stated before, Social Media is only reaching the market in their given respective cohorts, it has nothing to do with your websites rankings”
Our Thoughts: Social media is a form of awareness marketing and branding, which can bring a wide variety of search engine ranking benefits. The most obvious and direct is the potential for creation of links and references to the sites/pages that garner traffic and attention through social media. Another powerful influence is the use of social results directly in SERPs as seen by Google & Bing’s integrations with Twitter (and Bing’s integration with Facebook). Google also has connections, often via Gmail and other services to “results from my social circle” which can bring results to page 1 that otherwise wouldn’t appear). There’s also indications that tweets, in particular, may be directly influencing rankings and being treated as links, particularly for queries that call the QDF (Query Deserves Freshness; a component of the Google algorithm that pays special attention to queries that may need frequent updating, such as breaking news stories) algorithm. Finally, brand associations and mentions may be mined by the engines from social sources and used in brand entities or co-citation algorithms to help a site/page be seen as more relevant or related to particular keywords and more “important” or “popular.”

On-Site Optimization Questions

What will on-site optimization look like? List 5 tags/locations on a page where employing a target keyword can have a positive effect on search engine rankings.
Bad Answer: It tough to have a bad answer here as this is the basic addition and subtraction equations of SEO
Our Thoughts: One of the first things we do after our keyword research is write new page titles and meta descriptions that are keyword rich but not keyword stuffed. We also recommend that the title tag does not exceed 70 characters and meta description not exceed 155 characters. We then will look at each individual page on your site and incorporate relevant, targeted keywords into the copy – no I have to elaborate on this slightly – we in no way do keywords stuffing and are completely against any companies that utilize this method. It is a very ancient method to use! The copy we will optimize will never be keyword stuffed and should read easily to the user, not the search engines. We also will recommend keywords for flash elements and images so the search engines can read those too.

What are some ways to positively influence the ratio of pages a search engine will crawl and index on a website?
Our Thoughts: There are a large number of potential ways to answer this question, so experienced SEOs will have to use their judgment about the answers given by others, but here are a few of the most obvious/sensible ones:_
A) Reduce the quantity of low quality, low value and/or low unique-content pages.
B) Add and verify an XML Sitemap to send URL information to the engines.
C) Produce RSS feeds of pages/sections that frequently update with new content and use ping services to alert engines of changes/additions.
D) Reduce the click-depth required to reach pages on the site.
E) Eliminate confusing navigation and architecture such as high quantities of pagination, large numbers of faceted navigation or multiple versions of categorization/organization hierarchies.
F) Reduce or eliminate duplicate content (or leverage solutions such as rel=canonical tags).
G) Earn more links (or tweets possibly) to pages that are being passed over for crawling/indexing.

Backlink Building Questions

What’s your link building strategy and Who Owns The Rights To All The Work?
Bad Answer: “Our backlinking methods are top secret so we don’t show them to anyone”
Our Thoughts: Our link building strategy is to find highly targeted, relevant sites with high PageRank and request one-way links from them. We also have a very effective and very large netword of websites that we own rights to and use in link building. All of link building is 100% white hat and we do not explore any type of black hate link building. All of are backlinks a created within a 500-800 unique articles that contain only 1 link. No spammy comments or pingbacks are allowed on the sites your backlinks come from. And as far as who owns the rights to all the work, well the person that is paying for the work to be done, and that’s you. We highly encourage to make sure that this is talked about in the beginning of any contract!

Do you do any black hat SEO or grey hat SEO? Whats the difference?
Bad Answer: “There isn’t really anything wrong with black had SEO as long as it’s done the right way.”
Our Thoughts: Hopefully, after the Google Farmer update SEO companies finally learned to stop doing black hat SEO! However, that’s generally not the case. It’s very important to know the type of work the SEO company you are hiring is going to do!

About Them & Their Clients

Do You Have Any Live Case Studies I Can See and do you have any Current Clients On The Books Relating To My Business?
Bad Answer: “We don’t disclose any of our clients information, for privacy sake, but we do have multiple clients with #1 listings”
Our Thoughts: Remember it is very easy to rank for a keyword that gets less than 10 hits per month (double check on adwords.google.com – sign up for a FREE account – always make sure to click the “[Exact]” button on the left of the screen – http://screencast.com/t/hSLI70ynVI5 and see how many hits that keyword even gets!). Furthermore we only take 1 client per keyword – that way there is never any competition between clients!

How Did You Get Into SEO Anyway?
Bad Answer: SEO isn’t really a separate industry or skill, you just do it on websites later on. I do have a certificate I printed. Or I worked in the IT field – got laid off – and decided to do SEO (my personal favorite). This is a good one to spot shoddy/inexperienced experts.
Our Thoughts: As the CEO of Kayzoe, I come from a Marketing / Web Development background. I hold a MBA (Master of Business Administration) with an emphasis on Marketing from the University of Washington and received my BTAD (Bachelor of Technology in Applied Design) from LWTC. I’ve been in the web development field since my early days of High School & have had a passion for marketing for the past half decade or so!

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

Posting video online has become just as prevalent as blogging – with YouTube being the second largest search engine on the Internet, it’s no wonder that more users are choosing video as quick, appealing pathways to convey information.  The difficulty with video marketing, however, is making it visible.  Search engines read and rank text on a page, but not video.  This is a job for an SEO consultant!  Here are some quick tips and things to look out for when you’re dabbling in video marketing:

Organize your videos – First off, if you’re planning on having multiple video posts on your website, it’s always good to be organized.  Keep them in a directory, and use a sitemap so that search engines can find and index them easily.  Make sure that you create user-friendly URLs for your videos as well.  Think of something like “kayzoe.com/videos/video-marketing-tips” instead of something along the lines of “kayzoe.com/video/video734z9x08.”  See the difference?

Avoid Flash player – Sure, Flash makes enabling video on your website easy, but it’s difficult for search engines to read and register.  Flash can also be unfriendly to some Internet browsers, and will often require the user to download an extra plugin, which they might do, or they might decide it’s too much trouble and go elsewhere for what they’re looking for.

Finally, make sure that the viewers can rate, comment on, and share your video.  This is how users can boost your visibility, and how you can connect with the people searching for your services.  They can also provide you with invaluable feedback on how to improve their experience.

Ultimately, there are no secrets to video marketing, and it’s not much different from what SEO professionals already handle.  Videos should be made well and optimized, treated with the same attention and integrity as the articles and other content on the website.

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

As professional SEO consultants, we’re familiar with the disputes over what to prioritize in the process of building a website and garnering the attraction of search engines.  One argument that we’ve seen come up a lot is quibbling over what matters most when creating content for a client’s website, and right now, many are saying User Experience Optimization should be the new focus.

First, let’s boil down part of what SEO professionals do in regards to link building: they target, build, and use ranking authority in the form of external or off-site links.  Once that off-site authority has been established, it can be used as leverage on-site.  What it comes down to is, without off-site links drawing users to your domain, your site will never have any rankings.  Several SEO professionals have pointed out that, regardless of the quality of the site’s content, without the rankings given from those links, the site is worthless.  They make the argument that it should not be the priority of an SEO professional to chase after user experience, when the basics of their job cannot always place the needs of users first.

These are valid points to be taken into consideration, but the quality of the content on the site shouldn’t be disregarded so easily.  The content factors into the usability of the website, which in turn generates a valuable user experience.  An SEO professional should not disregard the character and value of a site because they only want to create content for links as opposed to creating content for users.  SEO and user experience can blend and be delivered together in a finessed package, pleasing for both client and users alike.

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

Once you’ve done some keyword research and decided what target keywords you want to use to draw a specific readership to your site, you need to know how to properly get these keywords to work for you without sacrificing the quality of your content.  As a professional SEO consultants, we know that you can’t just go around stuffing keywords here, there, and everywhere thinking that it will get you the hits and rankings you want.  Targeted keywords should be in the headings and throughout the page’s content, but search engines also want the rest of the content on the page to be relevant to the keywords.  That’s where latent keywords come into play when writing strong content.

When you’ve determined your target keywords, decide on some latent keywords to boost your content.  For example, a “personal injury attorney” could expand by including “Seattle personal injury attorney,” or “brain and spinal injury attorney,” or “construction site injury attorney.”  By getting more specific, you’re effectively tightening up your content and showing search engines exactly what kind of users you want looking for you.  Latent keywords enhance target keywords and quickly and accurately signal the relevance of your page to a reader.

Make no mistake; simply throwing more keywords in there doesn’t make up for poorly written or heavily keyworded content.  When grammar and spelling go out the window and a page is overly stuffed with keywords, it’s apparent that the content was written vying for the attention of search engines, not humans.  A real SEO professional knows the difference between generating interesting, relevant content to develop readership for a site, and plaguing the page with keywords.

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

There’s no denying that utilizing social media websites is practically mandatory on the Internet these days.  Considering how much social media can boost your online presence, if you’re doing any sort of search engine optimization or marketing for your company, it wouldn’t hurt to tweet every once in a while.  Social media sites can be an excellent tool for generating and sharing content, having an active online presence, and connecting with other users and potential clients.  Having accounts on a multitude of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, however, can be highly demanding and highly distracting.  In order to maintain a presence without spreading themselves too thin, some companies choose to use services that automate their social media accounts.  How do these services work?  Basically, you queue up the posts that you want to go out that day set at predetermined times, and the application makes sure that it happens.  As long as you set up your queue, you don’t have to actually post anything on your own anymore.  Can’t manage all of those social media accounts anymore?  You don’t have to!

Or do you?  If you’re never signing on yourself anymore, then what happens when someone retweets your post, or follows you, or sends you a question or shout out?  Nothing.  The automated responses just keep rolling out.  For the people who are actually trying to interact with you online, this is like calling someone and getting their answering machine every time.  The only information that’s really being conveyed there is, “Sorry!  No one’s home!”  This completely defeats the purpose of social media: finding and connecting with people, and forming networks of common interest.  These people are trying to connect with you, not your automated response service.  So, while the service may be convenient and can provide you a stress-free outlet for getting those posts out while you focus on other things, it should be used in moderation and you should still be signing on to connect with the people who are trying to connect with you.

Brought to you by the Seattle Search Engine Optimization Company, Kayzoe Marketing.

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

The tweet says, the Panda update is going to affect approximately 1.6% of the search queries across the web. 
The naming 3.4 is yet not decided from just a few words from the tweet.
 

1. High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements:

This is definitely a concern for many bloggers especially, if you are just writing outdated stuffs on your site. Freshness algorithm was previously installed for mainly News data, but now it has been installed for all search queries. Not just the freshness improvements, but also the high quality sites algorithm which can affect if you are not giving high quality stuffs on your pages. If the quality and uniqueness of your articles are par below the average level across the whole web then your pages may be ranked lower. Now, Google can easily detect, and rank quality sites higher with ease[The algorithm is in place]
Suggestion: Give unique titles and write unique contents which have not been written elsewhere. Sometimes, this is not possible[but suggests you to give the best when composing an article/tutorial to make it look original and informative]
 

2. More relevant image search results:

The algorithmic update for image search results is something really nice for people searching for images. But, as a blogger’s point of view making images SEO friendly is important to get listed better. Now, a good news for Blogger community is the image results would be as relevant as possible even if the pages containing the images are of low quality. That’s something cool from Google.
 

3. Tweaks to handling of anchor text:

The recent panda update has created a scoring system to determine the quality of the anchor texts used to link pages. Anchor texts are nothing but the text which appears to the users for a given link.
The robust scoring system for anchor text would score a webpage or site lower if the site gets linked with irrelevant anchor texts. That’s one of the prediction on the new algorithm.
 

4. Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages:

That’s something to ponder upon when it comes to blogs and forums. This is with regards to “Freshness algorithm“. Google can now easily detect the blog/forum’s dates to deliver the results based on the queries.
 

5. Improvements to freshness in Video Universal:

If you have a quality video blog, then you are going to benefit out of this venture from Google. Stale videos will be pushed down the results and fresh videos will be listed higher now.

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

What is blogging? And how in the world does that have anything to do with SEO? And if it’s important how often should I blog? Is it once a day, once a week or once a month?

What in the world does blogging have to do with SEO?

Well, for starters, lets begin with Google LOVES fresh content on websites nearly as much as Google loves backlinks, well proper, white hat, backlinks that is

There are two main purposes to blogging.
1. Blogging builds up content on your website and each post counts as another indexed page in the search engines.
2. Blogging helps you rank (as long as its done the right way) for long tail keywords, which is awesome.

The rule of thumb is “as long as you write unique content and stick to the main subject of your site” there are nothing but advantages to blogging on your website.

If it’s important, how often should I blog?

Well, Google tends to have a thing for websites that post regularly. Put it this way – the more you have to say about a subject – the more authoritative you must be on that subject… hence that site must be important…

At Kayzoe Web Marketing we try to post a  blog at minimum 5 times a week. To give you an idea of how important blogging is, our last post Multiple Domains- Good Idea or Terrible Idea? has helped move Kayzoe.com up in the rankings one more place for the keyword “SEO Companies” on Google.com

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com

It happens all the time, and causes me to scratch my head in complete confusion every time: Someone I’m working with on SEO will own multiple domains for the same business. I don’t mean that they have a couple related domains, I mean the same business and same offerings or services on more than one domain.

I usually find out about these domains in one of two ways: I find them through poking around and investigating the site (and the client usually acts like it’s some sort of dirty secret), or, they come to me about the domains and want more than one site to show up at the top of the search results.

I’ll be honest, I’m not usually a happy camper when I get this news; mostly because the secondary domains tend to have duplicate content (if you’re not aware, duplicate content is a bad thing). That being said, however, there is such thing as effectively using multiple domains (although I don’t recommend it). There are two main tactics commonly employed with owning multiple domains. Keep in mind that I’m going to keep an SEO perspective on these and only lightly touch on other marketing sectors.

The Defensive Domain Buyer

Some businesses are worried that competitors will buy keyword oriented domains thereby pushing their own site into obscurity. This can lead to a panic shopping spree of domains. The idea is that as long as they own the available domains, there is less chance of a competitor beating them in the rankings. While there is some merit to this tactic, it will have no effect on your SEO at all. Nor do I believe that it will really have much effect in blocking out your competitors. You can’t think of all the domain variations and buy them all, and if you buy too many, it can get expensive just to maintain them. Any competitor can rank better by offering better content and getting more links regardless of domain name.

As a side note, if you do this tactic, you had better make sure that all of your domains are redirected toward your main domain using a 301 redirect.

The First Page Domination Strategy

In buying multiple domains, some companies want to simply dominate the search results. Buy having multiple sites on the first page, you can get that much more traffic, right? In theory, yes, and it has on occasion happened. However, there are some fairly serious drawbacks to this:

• Doesn’t work on brick-and-mortar stores — If you have  a single physical location, it’s not a good idea to have multiple websites. You’ll confuse your visitors and customers, and I personally avoid having two websites with the same address. Google doesn’t want to have multiple sites from the same business (as it doesn’t provide good results) and I consider this to be one short step away from spam.
• Duplicate content woes — Because you can’t use the content from another site, you will have to write all new content. Considering how hard it is to write content for sites as it is, not to mention the allocation of resources to get it written, I wish luck to anyone writing content for a whole new site.
• Double branding all the way! — You have branding issues with two sites. Does one site become higher-end and the lower-end? Do you keep the prices the same? For that matter, what names are you even going to use on the site? If you have a phone number, how do you answer the phone? While there are certainly going to be exceptions (such as targeting different demographics), such a chaotic and divisive branding effort comes with a lot of risks and extra work.

Country Specific Domains

This is less of a tactic, and more of a “must do,” and is therefore my exception to multiple domains. It’s an exception because all of the problems above do not apply when you get into other countries. In fact, in order to have the best results in international SEO, you’ll need to have a country specific TLD (or top level domain). For example, if you’re doing business in England, you will have a hard time ranking without a .co.uk domain. You can still rank without a country level TLD, but it’s an uphill battle. And by uphill, I mean Rocky Mountains-type uphill.

SEO Resources and Indented Listings

One final (and big) point to that I would like to reiterate. If you really intend to own and run multiple domains and get these sites to show up in the search results, you will have to double your SEO work. There are no shortcuts, freebies, or quick rankings that you can get, even if you are already ranking well for your main domain. In fact, a new domain and site will be significantly harder to rank than a site that has history and some authority already built. I highly recommend that indented listings (or secondary pages for the same site showing up underneath the first main listing) be the primary goal before attempting to achieve multiple domains in the same search.

By Andrei Buiciuc
Andrei@Kayzoe.com