Welcome to Land of Tricks

If you look at the list of domains banned by the socially driven news and content behemoth Digg.com, you will find that a majority of them are SEO-related sites. While many people think that Digg has an irrational vendetta against these sites, it’s not entirely irrational, rather it’s simply driven by a mentality of generalizing.

While I’m willing to accept that most SEOs and their websites are completely legitimate and not spammy, there are some that are quite the opposite. Rather than harp on about what differentiates the two kinds of sites, I present to you one YouTube video that covers every reason why Digg and Digg-like hate SEOs and their blogs, and why they are justified in their hate.

The bad advice the video gives you, that is sure to get your site marked as spam and eventually banned:

1. Submitting your content just to get traffic and to take advantage of these sites’ high PageRank, regardless of the quality of your content and without taking into account whether it would interest the community.
2. Making multiple accounts to artificially promote your content.
3. Using software programs to automate the process and spamming as many social sites as you can.
4. Paying him to do the above for you.

Like I mentioned before, the Digg community doesn’t have an irrational vendetta against SEO-related sites, it’s just that people like the gentleman in the video above, cause the community to generalize about SEOs and thus label all of them has having the same mentality and using the same tactics.

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While it is hard to argue that Twitter is merely a fad and will soon blow over, we are beginning to see signs that opinion-polarizing micro-blogging service’straffic may have peaked. As if that news wasn’t bad enough, now it appearsthat the 19 million member strong social networking site Facebook may put an end to Twitter.

Facebook made some changes to the way they display users’ statuses on their site on Friday. All three of the changes are very important because they are directly targeted towards micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaikuwhich have garnered a lot of attention and have developed a loyal following in the past few months.

The first change on the list is a newly created page that aggregates the status updates of all your friends (need to be logged in to see). One look at this page and you can clearly see the similarities between this and the previously mentioned services.

The second change is the ability to subscribe to the status updates of any of your friends via an RSS reader, or via SMS. You can collectively subscribe to the updates of all your friends by going to the ‘posted items’ page, clicking on ‘my friends’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posted items’. And conversely, you can subscribe to any one friend’s updates by going to that friend’s ‘posted items’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posts’ from there.

The third and most important update is the ability to post status updates from your cell phone to your Facebook status page.

Given Facebook’s generally liberal stance on their open API I have no doubt that developers will come up with a similar arsenal of tools that currently exist for Twitter-like services, rendering them largely superfluous. This instance, coupled with Google’s recent move to replicate StumbleUpon does make me wonder more about the perils of developing any new service right now.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be at the top of your Web publishing priority list. If Web surfers can’t find your site, they can’t read it, use it or share it with others.

One might think SEO is an arcane science that only a few experts have mastered. There isquite a bit to it, and there are times you might want to employ an SEO firm or expert to help you optimize your site. Often this is a costly solution that’s not feasible for individuals or small businesses.

The good news is Search Engine Optimization doesn’t have to be rocket science. There are quite a few things you can do on your own. I’ve got a few proven, and easy to do tips and techniques that will help people find your content and make it easy for Google (and other engines) to crawl and index your site.

Lead with good content.

My number one tip for SEO? Provide frequently updated content that people want to read. Incoming links are key and if you can provide content that people will read and get something out of, there is a good chance they will link to that content.

Research your keywords.

You can use a Keyword Suggestion Tool or simply put yourself in the mindset of your target audience. Learn which terms people will search with and get those into your content and meta information.

Provide a good, clear title.

If SEO is important to you make sure you don’t get cute with the titles for your pages. Write titles that are clear and contain your keywords. Once you’ve got that title written, make sure it appears in your title tag as well as in your top level heading tags (h1) on your pages.

Don’t use splash pages or Flash.

Search engines like text. A Flash or image intro can block an engine’s crawler right at your homepage. If you do use images, be sure to add keyword laden descriptions to your alt attributes.

Use Robots.txt

Make sure you provide a robots.txt file that will help tell crawlers what to index on your site. There are quite a few neat things you can do with your robots.txt file, so you might want to read up on them.

Code your pages with standard, clean and semantic markup.

The cleaner your code the easier it is to crawl. Use markup as it is intended with the proper tags tied to the proper information. For example, place your headings with in heading tags, paragraphs within paragraph tags, etc. Another good idea is to move all your presentation into a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file. This makes your code lighter, faster and easier to index.

Don’t get tricky!

Whatever you do, don’t try to “trick” your way into more traffic. Duplicate pages, hidden links and other less-than-honest techniques can get you seriously penalized and ruin any positive work you’ve done.

Be patient and don’t forget the people!

Search engines are constantly updating and re-indexing. It may take awhile after you’ve made some changes to see the results. Hang in there, keep working on your content and keep providing something that people find useful.

It’s easy to forget that the reason you want to optimize for search in the first place is that you want to bring people to your site and your content!

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