Some quick definitions of “Subdomain” and “Subdirectory”:

A subdomain is a completely different website (from the ‘main-domain’) and it looks like this, “http://subdomain.main-domain.com”.

*Note–For ease of clarification, I’ve used ‘main-domain’ instead of ’site-domain’ as the Top Level Domain (TLD): e.g. main-domain.com or Top-Level-Domain.com

The URL of a subdirectory looks like this: “http://main-domain.com/subdirectory.”

Search engines see subdirectory just that–subdirectory of the website’s domain. Basically, what that means is that the subdirectory belong to the site’s main domain or subdomain, which again is a different website from the ‘main-domain’.

So, if the main-domain has high page rank (PR), the page rank gets distribute throughout the subdirectories within the main-domain; but the subdomain does NOT, however, feel the PR love from the main-domain . This is, again, because the subdomain is a different website from the main-domain.

O.K. Now that we’ve gotten the subdomain/subdirectory definitions down, let’s go back to the question of whether a subdomain name or a subdirectory name is best fitted for your SEO blog.

To simply put, if you have have a main-domain site about cat, “www.cat-domain.com,” and you want to create a blog on “cat food,” then you should choose “cat-food” as a subdirectory for your SEO blog, “www.cat-domain.com/cat-food.” This is because “cat-food” is related to your ‘main’ website topic, so your subdirectory SEO blog will feel ‘more’ PR love from your ‘main-domain’.

On the other hand, if you want to create another site for “dog-food,” you should choose “dog-food” as a subdomain of the “cat-domain.com,” since “dog-food” has little relevance to your main-domain site, www.cat-domain.com.

And because a subdomain is a different website, you can actually have a subdirectory-blog in the subdomain (e.g. subdomain.main-domain.com/subdirectory-blog).

So, if you want an SEO blog out of the subdomain, you can have “luxury-dog-food” as a subdirectory name: “http://dog-food.cat-domain.com/luxury-dog-food”. And yes, if you have high PR for the subdomain “dog-food,” your SEO blog on “luxury-dog-food” also feels the PR love from your SUBDOMAIN, but not from your main “cat-domain.com”.

And that’s concluded my rambling on subdomain vs. subdirectory for an optimized SEO blog .

Anyway, to recap, if you have a blog topic (“cat-food”) that’s related to your main-domain website (“http://cat-domain.com”), for SEO purpose, you should choose the subdirectory route: cat-domain.com/cat-food. But if your blog is of different topic than your main-domain website (“dog-food”), you should choose “dog-food” as a subdomain name for your SEO blog: dog-food-blog.cat-domain.com.

O.K. Now, I really am finished rambling about the subdomain and subdirectory dilemma .

*Of course, you still need links (and other factors) to be able to rank in the SERP .

• Why Yahoo New Robots-Nocontent Tag Will Have Little Use
• Using Mod-rewrite to Redirect Non-www URL to www URL
• First SEO Report for My SEO Blog
• What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
• 3 WordPress Plugins to Safely Change Your Permalink Structure

LOL. You shouldn’t even ask that question =P. For one thing, it’s BLACK HAT! For other, well, let me first ‘introduce’ to you why people spam .

Perhaps very few things can illustrate ‘fierce’ competition as vividly as the “Web” and SEO. After all, how can one website compete with thousands of other websites ‘just like itself’–without any search engine optimization?

If the attention span of an average Internet user is as expansive as a search engine’s listing, then there’s nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. Very likely, a person conducting a search on the Internet will probably just browse through the top 3 to 5 SERPs (search engine results pages) and stop there. Website that get buried in the 10th page and onwards will probably not get too much attention if certain measures are not undertaken.

Those measures, of course, are search engine optimization (SEO). Experts in this field perform certain procedures which may be seen a “website boot camp” to get your website into fighting form that will compete in the top rankings of a search engine.

However, as it is with almost everything else, some shortcuts exist that are able to “cheat” search engines into placing a particular website at a high ranking, despite the fact that it offers no real information. These sets of shortcuts are called “spamming”.

SEO spam (spamming the search engine index or spamdexing) is a set of ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques that manipulate a website for the purpose of creating an unrealistic boost in its rankings on SERPs. Here are just some examples of black-hat SEO techniques used to spam the living heck out of the search engines. (Warning: Do not do this on your web-estate or any where!)

Black-Hat SEO Technique 1. Cloaking
When a website presents a set of information to a search engine different from a set the user is seeing, then cloaking has been done. What usually happens is that the web page’s code is relevant to the user’s search keywords, but when the user visits that particular web page, he user sees a document that has little or nothing to do with his search.

Black-Hat SEO Technique 2. Artificially Networked Sites
There is really nothing wrong with creating links between one site to another so long as the links are relevant and serve to connect useful information.

However, spammers who perform this black-hat SEO technique set up several web sites and link them together even the sites contain no real and useful information. The purpose for doing so is simply to create the illusion of a highly referenced site because of its density of links. If this is the case, then it can be considered spamming.

Black-Hat SEO Technique 3. Blog and Forum Spams
Online blogs and forums are a great source of information since it these formats are built to be updated within short intervals. This, in itself, what makes it a good reference for information, which is why search engines like to visit these sites and rank it well for the quality of information it holds.

However, spammers have taken advantage of this by flooding blogs and forums with irrelevant links to the websites they want to generate artificial ranking for. Not only are they cheating the search engine company by misleading a user to irrelevant information, they also interrupt the bloggers and the forum participants, which is downright rude.

Black-Hat SEO Technique 4. Hidden Text.
Similar to cloaking, hidden texts are meant to make search engines think that a page is about one thing, while it is actually about another. But it fools the search engine this way: the text that the search engine is able to reads is camouflaged by making the text font color the same as the background. What happens is that the user is unable to read what the search engine saw, and therefore may be looking at a document that is not related to the user’s search.

There are other black-hat techniques, too, but I don’t want to give you any wrong impression. O.K. O.K. Some other techniques are to create small, imperceptible links that a user can accidentally click on, thus generating more hits for a website even if the user had no intentions of visiting that site at all.

O.K. I hope you’re happy with ’some’ of those black-hat SEO techniques (not all of them!?! .

Anyway, by this time, you probably already know why people are spamming. It is basically a shortcut used by some “unscrupulous” website owners to make their website rank high on SERPs (with a high potential of getting their sites BANNED in the future by the search engines), or by some self-proclaimed SEO experts who use these spammy black-hat SEO techniques to get the arms and legs of their customers for doing little to no work .

BTW–now that you know who they are, and how they do it, here’s why you should not be tempted to the dark side and use these black-hat techniques for nothing than spamming:

1. The whole point of the Internet was to create a wealth of information that everyone can access and add to. The whole idea was to be able to create a place where information can be created and shared with others so that it can foster understanding without any physical boundary. Other results of this information have led to the development e-commerce and online businesses, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It still contributes to a community of information and sharing.

2. Spamming is fundamentally profiting at someone else’s expense. A spammer profits by using other people to make his website rank higher than others without taking the necessary time and effort to make his website useful and relevant as what others have done.

3. It speaks poorly of website owners who see nothing but their own bottom lines in using the Internet. It is basically exploiting the trust and the willingness to share, which made the Internet such a promising venue for everyone.

4. Finally, it demeans honest ‘white-hat’ SEO experts (like me ) who take the time and effort to produce quality website and make it a point to follow the rules. Search engine marketing is helping to level the playing field so it can allow businesses of any to advertise right along side each other. And that is a commendable thing, which everyone should gladly support.

5.*Note to the spammers/black-hat SEOers: search engines, with billions of dollars at their disposal, are ALWAYS developing smarter technologies to detect spamming and black-hat SEO techniques in order to give users the best list of information from the Internet. Eventually, the black-hat/spamming techniques mentioned above may be eliminated. (Unfortunately, it is very likely other more sophisticated ones will come up).

On your part, you can report spammers to these search engines when you encounter them. The more people like you who do this, the easier it will be to apprehend these cheaters and make it more difficult for spammers to ‘perform’ their black-hat SEO rituals .

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And no, I did ‘NOT’ mean the title to rhyme with ‘Firefox’ =P. But come on, I’m still wondering why so many Internet Explorer (I.E.) users don’t switch to Firefox ? (Please let me know if you have such reasons).

For one thing, if you’re browsing with the virus-prone Internet Explorer, you will ‘probably’ get tons of discombobulated pictures of gazillions of websites due to ‘browser incompatibility’ (mine included .

O.K. I may sound biased, since my sites aren’t looking too pretty in I.E.–but it’s true.

So, below I’ll give you–my fellow visitors who are still using the so-named I.E.–a list of 7 reasons why you should change to Firefox ASAP:

1. Firefox is very up-to-date and is extremely secure for browsing the web: Firefox automatically tells you what to download when there’s a security update. With I.E….what can I say: how many times have I/you gotten viruses, adwares, spywares, ect from using it? Why is it so? It’s because I.E. is the product of Microsoft, and because Microsoft has long established itself as the big CORP, you would understand that many have tried to successfully hack the living out of I.E.
2. With Firefox, you have ‘targeted’ pop-up blockers. With I.E., it’s a COMPLETE opposite. Just take this message from I.E. for example: “You’re about to view pages over a secure connection. Any information you exchange with this site [Yahoo] cannot be viewed by anyone else on the Web.” Whoo-pity-do, so it’s secure and no info can be viewed by others. What’s your point with the ‘pop-up’ I.E.?
3. If you want to have multiple tabs, multiple home pages, multiple etc, WITHOUT having to updgrade/buy more of MS stuffs, you need Firefox!
4. If you are serious about search engine optimization (SEO), you need Firefox.
5. If you want customization, versatility and management, then you need Firefox: downloads Firefox’s gazillion of plugins like you do with WordPress .
6. If you want me to show you how to use Firefox in your search & optimization effort, then consider Firefox.
7. And above all, if you you do not want to get annoyed by all the websites breaking up all over places in I.E., please consider switching to Firefox! Firefox is web-surfers & webmaster friendly .

So now you ask, “Why I have such a fired passion for Firefox?” Well, if you have seen all my sites in Internet Explorer, you’ll… …

So, please get Firefox now, if you haven’t Internet ExplorerS.

I personally recommend Firefox Portable: it’s free, and if you want to make your Firefox browser to look exactly like I.E. or any way you want it, check out this page .

O.K. Best of luck to your hopefully ’seamless’ transition to Firefox. O.K. then, adieu Internet ExplorerS.

*P.S. As you can see, from now on I’ll go ALL-OUT promoting

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This is the 2nd of the WordPress SEO Tutorials series.

If you don’t know it yet, your web page’s TITLE is one of the MOST important SEO factor in ranking high in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Check it out: go to a major search engine and type in search engine optimization (with/without quotations). What do you see in the 1st page of the SERPs? Most of the top results have search engine optimization near the very beginning of their titles, and these titles have the keyword phrase search engine optimization BOLD-TYPED!

*Notice the bold-types of the descriptions too? I’ll talk about this later but for now let’s get back to how to configure your WordPress blog’s title tag.

By default, most WordPress themes have your blog’s name BEFORE your post/categories/etc. title:

Your Blog Name » Blog Archives » Blog-Post-Title

This, of course, is NOT favorable if you want to have the extra edge over your competition in the SEO war. Anyway, here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how you can configure the title of your post/category/etc. to this (without any plugin):

Blog-Post-Title » Your Blog Name

*Note: The phrase “Blog Archives” has been deleted.

How to Move Your “Blog-Post-Title” before the “Blog Name”

In order to do this, you need to open up the “header.php” file in your WordPress theme folder. You need a ‘php’ file editor to do this; if not, DON’T WORRY–just do the following:

-First, change the “header.php” file extension to “header.txt“.
-Next, open the “header.txt” file and ‘find’ for the following code that begins with the < title> tag:

< title>< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>< ?php wp_title(); ?>< /title>

*Note: < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> is your Blog Name, and < ?php wp_title(); ?> is your Blog-Post-Title. Also, you only need these two “< ?php>” codes: just delete the rest of the other codes or texts (e.g. “Blog Archives”).

Now, all you have to do is moved the < ?php wp_title(); ?> before the < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>:

BEFORE:
< title>< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>< ?php wp_title(); ?>< /title>

AFTER:
< title>< ?php wp_title(); ?>< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>< /title>

That’s it you’re DONE! The last step is to save the file as a “php” extension, “header.php” (without the quotations), and upload it to your site’s theme folder and watch the transformation of your Wordpress Blog-Post-Title goes before your Blog Name:

Blog-Post-Title » Your Blog Name

O.K. That’s it for my tutorial on the configuring your blog name and title WITHOUT using any plugin. My next post will list a SERIES of SEO-related WordPress plugins, plus some optional ‘tweak’ for the best SEO results for the title tag .

O.K. Then, until the next WordPress SEO tutorial…

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This is the first of the WordPress SEO Tutorials series.

By default, WordPress gives you this dynamic URL for your post: “http://yourdomain.com/?p=SOME-ID-NUMBER”. The best SEO permalink structure is to have your post appears with ‘category’ and the ‘post title’ in the URL.

This looks something like this: “http://yourdomain.com/category/post-title”

Why is this the best SEO permalink structure compares to the other structures?

To simply put, this permalink structure allows you to have ‘more’ keyword loaded into the URL of your post. Since the category that you’ve placed your post under usually related to the post title (which hopefully is keyword-loaded itself), you will have the extra SEO benefit if other people use that permalink structure to link your post.

How to Change the Default Permalinks to ‘Category/Post-Title’ Permalinks

In order to change the default permalink structure, you need to go to “OPTIONS -> Permalinks” in your admin panel and paste this code into the BOX after “Custom Structure:”

/%category%/%postname%/

Next, click the “Update Permalink Structure >>” button; if WordPress does NOT automatically update the permalink structure to for you–don’t worry–just do the following:

-If you don’t have a .htaccess file in your root directory (public_html/.htaccess) already, just ‘create a new file’ and name it .htaccess and place it in “public_html” directory or whatever directory you have your WordPress blog installed (e.g. public_html/blog/.htaccess, which is equivalent to yourdomain.com/blog/.htaccess).

-Then, copy and paste the code WordPress gives you after clicking on the “Update Permalink Structure >>” button into your .htaccess file. *Note: You need to click on the some option (e.g. ‘Edit’) of your .htaccess file to open up a window to paste your permalink code in the file.

The code is same as following if you are using WordPress 2.0 or higher:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Just copy and paste that ‘mod-rewrite’ code into your .htaccess file, save it, and you are DONE!

Now, your old AND new post will automatically carry the category the post is assigned to, plus the title name of that post:

http://yourdomain.com/blog/category/post-title

*Note: That’s the default ‘Post-Slug’ structure after the updated permalink, but if you want to change the name of the ‘post-title’ in the post’s URL, just go to ‘Post-Slug’ (located on the right-hand side of the “Write” page) and input/change to what name you want.

Also, be sure to check out my post on “3 WordPress Plugins to Safely Change Your Permalink Structure” if you’re going to change to your blog’s old permalinks to a new permalink structure.

O.K. Now, that concludes my first WordPress SEO tutorial on permalink structure. If you have any question, just post a comment below…

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In the course of these Wordpress SEO tutorials, I’ll also mention various plugins that I use to power my blogs. I’ll probably ‘intensely’ post numerous posts per days on the subject, as I’d really like you all to start optimizing your blog right away. So–below is a list of topics that I’ll be covered, specifically for a WordPress powered blog:

1. Permalink: the best way to use it for the best SEO effect.
2. Home Page Title: need a ‘little’ template digging and/or plugin. Don’t worry; it’s going to be step-by-step remember =P.
3. Post Titles: some tips on how to ‘SEO’ them.
4. Duplicate Content Filters: if you posted in numerous categories, you need to filter ’some’ to reduce the duplicate effect.
5. Titles & Descriptions for Category/Archive/404/Tag Pages: need plugin(s) to do this.

*Note: I’ll add more to this list as time goes and will probably hyper-link them too, for easy navigation (just like a Table of Content .

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This has to do with URL canonicalization. What’s URL canonicalization you ask?

According to the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, URL canonicalization is “the process of picking the best url when there are several choices”:

* www.The SEO Blogger.com (same as www.The SEO Blogger.com)
* The SEO Blogger.com (same as http://The SEO Blogger.com)
* www.The SEO Blogger.com/index.php
* The SEO Blogger.com/home.asp

Most people think that those are the same, but on technical term, they are NOT!

*Can you see how the URLs are different, even though they may serve up the same web page?

Luckily, after a major update to “Big Daddy,” Google now is able to detect which one is the best URL for you/your website. However, you do have to help Big Daddy in the process.

How do you help make sure Google pick the URL that you want?

Well, for your internal linking, the URL that you use should be ‘consistent’. For example, if I’m planning to use “http://The SEO Blogger.com” as the consistent URL form for all of my EXTERNAL inbound links, it’s wise to use that URL form in ALL my internal linkings, as well. And, as you can see, I have done just that.

*Note: the reason you don’t want to have half of your links pointing to “http://yourdomain.com” and the other half to “http://www.yourdomain.com” is because you do NOT want to split the value of those links up. You want to have one ‘consistent’ URL form, so that your website (page rank) will receive the FULL benefits of ALL the links, not just HALF of them.

–But here’s the problem, you only have control over the URL form of those external/internal links if you are the one who’s placing those links (URL form). For many other people who link to your website, you cannot control which URL forms (http://www. or http://) they will link to you.

Thus, in order to receive FULL benefit of consistent URL, you need to set up a 301 permanent redirect from one URL form to another, which is pretty easy–as shown below:

Using Mod Rewrite to Redirect “Non-www” URL (http://) to “www” URL (http://www.)

In order to do this, you must have access to the .htaccess file via FTP or CPanel File Manager. Most Apache web server (Linux hosting) has this .htaccess file. If not, you can create and name the new file .htaccess and place it inside the root directory of your domain (e.g. public_html/.htaccess).

You must edit/add the following mod-rewrite script to your .htaccess file to redirect “http://” to “http://www.”:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www..*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.]*).(com|com/)
RewriteRule ^.*$ www.%1.%2%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

The above script will redirect:

http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com

Redirecting “www” URL (http://www.) to “Non-www” URL (http://)

This is the simple mod rewrite script I use to redirect “http://www.The SEO Blogger.com” to “http://The SEO Blogger.com“:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.TheSEOBlogger.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) TheSEOBlogger.com/$1 [R=301,L]

*Note: you should change “The SEO Blogger.com” to YOUR WEBSITE NAME! Also, if you have sub-domains, the above script will also work. Also, by ‘default’, I think WordPress gives your site URL as “http://www.yoursite.com.” If you want your site to be in “http://” URL form, you, of course, have to go to “OPTION ->General” and update your site URL to “http://yoursite.com” instead of “http://www.yoursite.com.”

Anyway, here is a live demo of those two scripts at work:

http://mint-tree.com >>> www.mint-tree.com
http://www.TheSEOBlogger.com >>> TheSEOBlogger.com

By using either one of these mod-rewrite scripts, you can have a consistent URL in your linking campaign. Now, you don’t have to worry what URL form others have used to link to your website. Now “http://” and “http://www.” are ‘consistently’ the same, although I think “http://” is a better URL form for your SEO linking campaign, just because that form is SHORTER than “http://www.” .

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Well, you’ll have to decide–whether these SEO tips can help you toward becoming a legit, ‘white-hat’ SEOer.

But first, let me clarify that the world wide web, search engine optimization (SEO) specifically, is a highly competitive market. Businesses & corporations vying for the attention of millions of search engine users have paid hefty sums to SEO services to conquer their ’search’ competitors.

A lynch pin to the Internet Marketing War is the Search Engine War.

Over the years, search engines have become the internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The kind of traffic the dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-etc companies receive per hour is phenomenal!

Accordingly, in order to maximize their search engine rankings and placements, companies employed every possible SEO tools and SEO services they can get their hands on–usually at exceptional fees. But their Return On Investment for free organic traffic is unexceptionally beneficial.

So, without further ado, here are a few fast SEO tips on various search engine optimization techniques to improve your search engine results:

SEO Tip 1. Expertise.
Follow your strengths. Webites you set up must be on subject you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

SEO Tip 2. Plan the site.
A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

SEO Tip 3. Research.
Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

SEO Tip 4. Decide on important keywords.
Decide on the most important keywords to use for your website. Include these keywords in the meta-tags, copy page, page title, file names, and anywhere where you can put them =P. Just don’t overdo it to an ‘abnormal’ status => keyword stuffing.

SEO Tip 5. The Search Engine is your friend.
Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your website up to your target audience. This means no black hat stuff, e.g. keyword stuffing with the same color as the color background . The search engines have already smelled this trick years ago. So, don’t do it if you don’t want to be banned by the search engines .

SEO Tip 6. Focus.
Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The rule is one topic or ONE keyword/keyword-phrase per page. You don’t want to compete yourself with the same keyword/keyword-phrase on another page.

SEO Tip 7. Submit your website to good page rank (PR) directories.
Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right/high PR directory may shoot your website up in the SERP ranking. Of course, make sure the website that you submitted to the directories is relevant to them (or in the right category).

SEO Tip 8. Start a linking campaign.
A most effective SEO method. This is a must to do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their websites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of the site based on the number of ‘relevant’ sites linked to it with the ‘correct/consistent’ keyword-loaded ANCHOR TEXT.

SEO Tip 9. Repeat: repetition is the key to victory.
Keep repeating the above SEO tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

Those are my FAST “9 SEO Tips to Out-flank Your Opponent in the Search Engine War.” I’ll go into more details later, but for now, for more SEO tips and information, please check out the SEO Tips category.

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With honed search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, any website can be listed in the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

This, of course, only happens when you know how to optimized site for the keyword/keyword phrase typed into the search box of Google, Yahoo, MSN, or other search engines.

Emerging on top of a search engine results page (first page) would unquestionably lead to more business for your company. That is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a “must”.

For years, BIG companies have employed services from numerous Search Engine Marketing (SEM) establishments or individual SEO experts to deal with search engine optimization. The price tags for these SEO services are usually astronomical for small online business owners who wish to ‘join’ the search engine race.

The SEO services provided by these search marketing experts usually involved developing a more informative and user-friendly website and also included pay-per-click (PPC)–as an additional ‘optional’ cost .

When compared to a PPC campaign (e.g. Google Adwords campaign) done by these SEO services, Do-It-Yourself SEO isn’t so bad–PERIOD . To simply put, optimizing your website YOURSELF for organic searches (search engine searches) can yield positive results at a ridiculously low cost, compared to those SEO services.

If you would like to have a hands-on experience with search engine optimization and can’t afford a third-party SEO service, below are some helpful SEO techniques/tips you can learn to “do it yourself” to rank high on the search engine:

SEO Technique 1: Take some ‘lots’ of time developing your website’s content.

“Content is king”–hopefully, you have heard that before. If not, now you have =P.

Anyway, for most search engine optimized websites, content–high quality content–is the key.

When writing the content of your web pages, remember not only to SEO the right number of keyword density (1% – 4%) but also to keep your readers interests in mind. Insert vital keywords which relate to your company’s products and services only when it’s appropriate. Again, you readers interests should come first. Why? Because–if they get bored, due to that bombardment of repeated keywords and your company’s products/services, they will RUN; and, then, you will have no ‘potential’ or ‘long-term’ customer to sell to (in the future .

*Make your SEO content brief but–above all–INFORMATIVE. (Just like this sentence .

The reason is that most Internet users do not actually read a website’s content word-for-word. They just skim through the text and concentrate on the ‘parts’ and ‘data’ that they need or find interesting. Yup, a 600-word article may be too boring or too long for the “average” Internet user .

Anyway, in addition to keeping SEO content and keyword density in mind, also remember to keep your FACTS up-to-date. Why? Come on–don’t you like things updated? I know I do, because this helps bring the visitors back to your website over-and-over again for more and more ‘updated’ information, a.k.a. NEW information (to them).

*By the way, don’t forget to include a lot of FREE helpful links, articles and guides when appropriate. Don’t be too stingy to give out external links to relevant sources .

(See how important this SEO technique is? It’s the longest that I have covered–and it’s the #1 technique of all SEO techniques I’ll discuss…more below).

SEO Technique 2: Make the overall design of your website especially user-friendly.

Let’s face it: if users can’t ‘use’ your website/navigate to where they want, THEY WILL LEAVE.

In most cases of web design, the rule–”The simpler, the better”–applies: K-I-S-S KISS! (Keep-It-Simple-Stupid!)

To ’simply’ put, don’t design your website in an overly-complicated way that users will find it too “frightening” to browse for their ‘data’ and ‘needs’.

Also, try to adapt your website design to your target market. If your target audience is of young teenagers, make sure that the colors and designs are funky, youthful, attention-grabbing, and appealing to their tastes.

For a more mature audience, you ‘might’ want to use subdued colors and have a more elegant theme for your overall website’s design.

So basically, a website that’s usable, accessible, and alluringly engaging to the target market will stay ’sticky’ to the targeted users (they’ll come back to your website over-and-over again–to be ‘easily’ entertained .

This–a site’s design based on the USER’S usability, accessibility, and interactivity–is probably the queen of “Content is King.” *Note how I emphasize USERS: site design may be queen, content may be king, but USER is GOD–at least to your income anyway .

SEO Technique 3: Vary the keyword for each individual web page.

Think of every possible keywords or phrases that will apply to your products and services. Each user, however, is different and may not necessarily use the keyword that you expect them to type in the search box/bar. There are free SEO tools that can help you find the ‘correct’ keywords for search engine optimization. This I’ll cover more in-depth in the SEO Keyword Research category. For now let’s move on to SEO technique #4.

SEO Technique 4: Make sure that your hyper-links are visible, accessible and informatively KEYWORD-LOADED to specifically relevant pages on your website.

Providing users with hyper-links or HTML links which are useful and easy to find is yet another way to optimize your website (your visitors that is . There’s another SEO technique, keyword-loaded anchor text in hyper-links, which I’ll discuss in details in the SEO Links category. I don’t want to stretch this post to a 700 words essay .

Anyway, for now let’s move on to the last SEO technique.

SEO Technique 5: Learn how to LEAD traffic to the right place of your website that lead to your Most-Want-Response (MWR).

Seriously, seek experts’ advises on this field if you do not know how to lead traffic to the ‘target’ of your site. You should consider developing a plan and investing in necessary tools (aside from the free ones) to drive traffic your way.

But, of course, you have to have a way to measure your Return On Investment (ROI), if you’ve decided to make the necessary investment. These not-so-free SEO tools (e.g. WordTracker, Link Assistant, etc.) are must-haves if you want to have the TREMENDOUS edge over your competitions without having to pay ‘astronomical’ fees to the third party SEO services.

These SEO tools are similar to what major SEO services use to empower their SEO techniques. Please remember that they are paid-to-use tools for a reason. These reasons, plus in-depth SEO tools’ reviews, will be discussed in my posts in the SEO Tools category.

Anyway, that ends my rambling on “Do-It-Yourself SEO Techniques and Third Party SEO Services.” I hope it’s not too long or over 700 words .

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