On the other hand, off-page SEO services concern link building and marketing.  Link building is an important aspect of SEO.  The number of websites linking back to your own website is considered by search engines.  The more quality links that your website has, the higher it could boost the website’s ranking.

SEO Guru is a company based in the United Kingdom and specialising in SEO services such as search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and SEO consulting services. We offer SEO services on two levels: on-page and off-page.

SEO Guru has a team of professionals dedicated to providing quality and ethical SEO services for you.  Our prices and packages are competitive yet very affordable.  Not only will we ensure that your website has a high ranking in search engines, but we shall also monitor the performance of your website continually and perform fine tuning to ensure your website’s success.

Why do you need to use Google Sitemaps.
If your site has hundreds of pages, then a compressed version of the file can be created. You are required to create an account with Google in order to take advantage of this feature. Two things to consider before uploading the sitemap file are to verify that your robots.txt allows Google to craw the site for this to work in the first place, and that you check for 404 error pages in your site. Now to why you need this: Google will crawl your site more frequently to verify changes in the sitemap file, and index files that normally it wouldn’t. So keep it up to date with your weekly changes. It saves Google time, since it will only concentrate on updated content, and getting new or updated pages indexed as a benefit.

The importance of Web Analytics.
Keep track of your optimization and log results by understanding your analytics. It is essential that you monitor your visitor paths and exit pages. Make all necessary changes through your pages to make sure you are improving those pages that are top exit ones. One way to achieve this is by creating stronger offerings, guarantees, and calls to action among other things. SiteCatalyst is a very robust solution with a lot of features. SiteCatalyst provides data related to navigation, ecommerce, content, and other detailed visitor information. It also has a pretty flexible dashboard and it is very data intensive. One of the great features that it provides is comparison, which allows you to compare different campaigns and groups to see how they are doing so against each other, so that campaigns can be optimized. If you are looking robust features such as customizable dashboards, then Omniture SiteCatalyst might be right for you.

Staying out of the Supplemental Index.
Sites of any age, size, and rank can end up in the supplemental index. For the first 2 factors, it is related to the update ratio or duplicate content. For the last one, because of missing elements. The number one reason to be listed in this index is the update ratio. So how do you fix this? Update the content of the page. Change the body content mostly. Title changes and Heading tags also helps. Number two reason is that the page is no longer internally linked from home or main category pages. So, the fix? Self explanatory. Last reason, your site is online but less than six months old. If this is your case, please read my 2 part article on “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics” were you will be able to find out what to do to get out much quicker.

Closing Statement about Google Optimization.
To recap… Make sure that your site is compliant, stays true, stays natural, and stays organic. Focus on content, and bringing quality traffic to your site. If people are attracted to your site and buy, Google will be attracted to the site too and the site will naturally rank well. Make it easy on Google, and they will make it easy on you.

Reciprocal linking does not have the effect it used to.
If you are asking for links right now, stop sending automated link requests. Instead, focus on getting natural links from related sites by using “link bait”, in other words, content that is worth linking to because of its value. When offered a link from partners, make sure their page doesn’t have more than 100 links already in it, look for 20 links max when possible, and also that their site is related to the theme of yours. At last, check that you are getting traffic from the link, or drop it.

“Article swap” and “article partitioning”.
Engage in “article swap” with link partners, and break articles in parts to create a series of them for your visitors to follow (partitioning). Include comments when applicable in all articles (in a different color to distinguish, hint: blue) since it gives visitors great commented content and overcomes duplicate content penalties.

Your internal linking structure.
You want PageRank to be passed to your traffic pages, so avoid absolute links to “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, etc. Here the have a good combination of absolute and relative links is a must. Use absolute links within your content areas, not in you navigation. The PageRank score is directly affected by this. The “run of site links” filter includes internal pages now, so keep this in mind. Also make sure you have a relative link to your home page from every page. You should link to directories or portals that are authoritative as far as your external links. Always use your targeted keyword phrase for the anchor text. It is also wise to vary your anchor text when linking to your internal pages, and it always should match your unique phrase.

A few more words on PageRank.
Any PageRank of less than 4 is not counted by the algo. That explains why Google shows much less back links for any domain than other search engines. You need to gain good incoming related links, not just any links. Again, the “less is more” concept could be applied here as well. Few good quality links always out weight lots of low quality unrelated links from other sites. Outgoing links are viewed from a different angle, and are related to “the theme” of your site. There is an optimal ratio between the quality vs. the quantity in links. You need to get as many links from pages with a high PageRank and a low number of total links in them.

Your link campaign goals.
Set yourself some achievable goals when it comes to links. Be realistic, and try to get one link exchange, article swap, directory submission, forum comment, etc. per day. Verify quality of all links, and use the “no follow” link attribute or directly remove all links from any site with 100 or more links on their page that is not an authority site.

The DTD statement.
This should be the first tag of the head section of your code. The Document Type Definition Statement allows faster and deeper indexing with Google, shortening the time your site will be in the “trustbox” as well. HTML 4.0 or 4.01 should be the standard, and for most cases, the Transitional type should be used.

The title, the most important.
Why? Because there are 3 elements in SEO: the listing (were title is the main element) the click-through (were title is the main reason) and conversion (which is the object of all optimization work) Also, if that is not reason enough (it should) it is the single element that gests indexed and used to list the link text in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). An average of 7 to 8 words length is optimal.

The description.
Used by Google to create a text summary in describing the page if available, so make sure the content of this tag is friendly to the searcher, not the search engine. If you are in a competitive market, this tag is not taken into account, but you should have it for your visitor. An average length of 150 characters is good.

The keywords.
Google actually uses this tag against you, by that meaning it is used as a spam check point for the page content. Also, do not include your niche keywords here, as you will be given your competition tips about your optimization. Put your main keywords across the content instead. Here use an average of 200 characters.
Make sure you are using different sets of keywords per page, in other words, that they are unique to each particular page.

The charset type.
Another element of the head section, this one tells the browser what to do when it encounters certain characters in your pages. Google indexes pages easier with the 8859-1 tag, since it will not do any data encoding, which can take a lot of extra time. The UTF-8 tag involves encoding and it should be used for forms that accept non standard characters, like foreign users from other countries.

Keyword research, the beginning.
Start with 5-10 keyword phrases, create content, optimize, post, maybe publish… Why? Are you building an authority? Then, wait until you have at least 100 pages. Otherwise continue. But 5-10 pages at a time can go a long way towards an authoritative site. Remember, what works… takes work.

Keyword refinement, the outgoing.
Following the previous though. After your initial research, primarily of some data you have form various keyword tools, you need to rely on your web analytics to see how focused your optimization is based on your visitors. That is what “outgoing” means here. You need to look at this information, especially search engine and searcher behavior, and refine your optimization even further, for the cycle of your site.

The importance of content tagging.
This is basically bolding or italicizing of keywords phrases in content. Don’t overdue it. It is recommended to use it for user experience mainly. Doing it right will bring good benefits.

Article marketing and its impact.
Writing articles is a great way to add fresh content to your site that is worth linking to. Now, for a good optimization of the content, add your keyword phrase within the first 20 words, at the of the page. Optimize one main keyword phrase per page.

The return of the niche… and off course authority sites.
Sites within 3-12 pages known as “niche” are OK in Google. You don’t need to target or optimize every page, but you should have one page for every target key phrase you want to rank for. If you are after an authority type of site, then you need daily fresh content with 450-500 words a page. This content can be in the form of daily articles you can host and syndicate for your site. Also, a blog or forum is another great way to generate fresh content.

First things first… the domain name dilemma.
Your domain name should be brandable. Keyword rich with hyphens type of domains are not longer relevant. Focus on a .com since it is the one searchers will enter when not sure about extensions, and is the easiest to brand. As far as registering it, do it for more than one year since this helps with the “trustbox” in Google. If you have many related domain names for the same content it is always good to only take one as the main domain and to redirect (301) any others to it. This way, you can make sure not to have duplicate content issues.

Less is more, when it comes to web design.
Your text content should outweigh your html code. Make sure your code is “search engine friendly”. That is a big different with being W3C compliant. The W3C is too limited, and a lot of code warnings will appear with perfectly acceptable code. Their validation system is simply outdated. You want to be search engine compliant, not W3C compliant. Keep this in mind.

Javascript and CSS, in code or out?
Good question. JavaScript and CSS should be in external files. They will increase page size otherwise. Specially when having the same code for menus or styles on multiple pages, when this can be easily fixed by doing it externally.

Demystifying the page size limit.
There is NOT page size limitation here. There you have it. The 101kb limit thing is absolutely incorrect. But do not take this the wrong way. You need to make sure the size of your page is about 40K on average. Up to 50K is OK. Consider loading time as a factor, and the text/graphics ratio is very important.

Web hosting solutions and their impact.
Use your own dedicated server whenever possible. Make sure you have a static IP address assigned to either individual domains or groups of domains, and make sure that it is clean, by not being in any blacklist.

As an SEO, I can see things from the other side of the table.  You see, despite trying hard to make it clear I’m a good, ethical, results-oriented, smarter marketing, white-hat SEO, I have gotten no end of inquiries from bad prospective SEO clients.  Sure, no one who gets cheated is ever entirely to blame, and some cheated businesses are entirely blameless.  But the bad SEOs would have too small a market to stay in business if it weren’t for almost-as-bad clients.

Shades of Bad SEO Clients

First, let me make clear what I mean by “bad” SEOs. Bad SEOs are bad because they either do unethical things to get e-marketing results, or because they consistently fail to deliver results.  A good SEO delivers results and does it without trampling over other people’s rights (like submitting automated comments to their websites or trying to get good sites de-indexed).

A bad SEO client, in turn, is someone who will only be satisfied (albeit temporarily) with a bad SEO.  Because they refuse to consider ethical web consultants or smarter marketing strategies, they are creating markets for the e-marketing charlatans and black-hats.   There are two basic types of bad SEO clients: crooks and fool–oops, I mean, ethically challenged and judgmentally-challenged.

Ethically-Challenged SEO Clients

I haven’t gotten so many inquiries asking for out-and-out unethical services.  Still, I’ve been asked about blog-sp@mming software and other shady internet marketing tactics a couple times. A colleague shared this gem with me: “Have you thought about just scanning a book from the library and using it for web content? Or is that too high-risk?”  (Seriously, someone asked him this.)

Of course, judging from the amount of comment sp@m and SEO-motivated hacking on the web,  there is plenty of demand for this stuff.

Judgmentally-Challenged SEO Clients

A much larger group of bad SEO clients are simply those who insist on putting themselves in the way of fraud.  Yes, that’s right: I’m blaming the victim.  Someone who goes looking for a $5 gold watch can’t cry too long if the watch turns out to be fake or hot.  With SEO, there are a few more nuances, but it’s the same essential idea.

The overwhelming majority of these judgmentally challenged souls are private individuals whose only business is the business-in-a-kit variety.  Yet they are also sometimes representatives of actual successful companies.  The real businesspeople tend to be quicker to let their misconceptions go (after all, they can afford the real SEO alternatives), but not always.  Let’s look at some representative types of this group, straight out of my own inbox (note: these are inquiries from prospects, not actual clients).

1. Something-for-(Little More than)-Nothing Clients

Really, I tend to think these people should be in the ethically challenged group, but maybe that’s just the remnant of my work ethic making me be mean  There are actually two kinds of these clients:

* The ambitious but cheap client: “I’d like to get to the top of Google for the keyword, ‘mortgage’ so I can turn over $100,000/month in revenue.  I can spend up to $1,000.”
* The Adsense-is-my-business-plan client: you wouldn’t believe the numbers of inquiries I get from people who only plan to make money off Adsense or other on-site advertising—they don’t even have a plan for getting repeat traffic, nor do they have content to synergize with the SEO effort.  By buying promotional services, they would essentially be buying advertising in order to make money off advertising—you see where that could be a problem?

Another way of looking at it: why wouldn’t I just create a site myself and keep all the profit from my efforts?  In fact, most SEOs do have their own project sites, which are often monetized by Adsense. The money we could otherwise get from Adsense is one very low baseline for pricing our services.  Legitimate SEO clients are typically selling goods or services at a profit rate that works out to ten or more times what they could get from Adsense.

In addition to the greedy, I also see a few other kinds of less common, but still problematic prospective SEO clients:

2. SEO-Starry-Eyed Clients: “Search engine traffic is definitely the best way for me to get pet-sitting clients in my tiny Himalayan village.”
3. The Little-Knowledge-Is-a-Dangerous-Thing Client: “Don’t tell me about keyword research, content, anchor text, or natural linking strategy, just get me the PageRank (or links, keyword density, or whatever the fad is).”
4. Gullible-and-Not-Letting-Go Client: “I know of at least two services that will submit my site to thousands of search engines for $29.95.  If you can’t do that, I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
5. I-Will-Never-Trust-SEO-But-I’ll-Consider-It-Anyway Client: “No one can guarantee a good search engine ranking so this is all pointless—I’ll just go with that $29.95 search engine submission package someone just emailed me about.  At least it’s cheap.”

In short, if you are going to find good SEO web consultants, you need: 1) realistic expectations; 2) a realistic budget; 3) solid information.  Don’t expect something for nothing, do a little reading, and it’s much less likely you’ll fall victim to bad SEOs.