SEO Don'ts

If you have been following my posts in this blog, you probably noticed that I removed my last two previous posts because I got penalized by Google for scrapping the contents of my other blogs which in turn dropped the rankings of my web pages on the SERP.

Since I have several blogs and I don't have much time posting on each of them basically because I am too busy with my personal life. I was planning to combine the posts of my blogs into one blog, which apparently turns out bad for me. Hopefully, by removing those posts, it will help me get back my web pages to the spot where they were before on the SERP.

Even though I know the fact that a site can get penalized or much worst banned by Google for having duplicate contents, it turned out that I got careless and didn't even thought about that. I hope that this serves as a warning to all webmasters and bloggers out there.

On this post, I'm going to share some SEO DONT'S that I know to avoid getting your site banned by Search Engines.

Here are some of them:

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique which delivers content based on the IP adresses or the user agent HTTP. When a user is identified as a SE spider, it delivers a different version of web page not presented to an internet user. The purpose of this is to deceive Search Engines, but Google and other SE's say they can detect it.

Doorway Pages are web pages made for spamming the index of SE's with the purpose of sending internet users to a different page.

Keyword stuffing is the act of adding too many keywords to a page. This is either meta tags or web page content.

Duplicate Contents is when several websites have the same contents. Normally, Google will give a penalty for this and the keyword of the web page won't rank high on the SERP.

Bad Neighborhoods are those websites that uses unethical SEO techniques to get high search placement in the SERP. For more info, see What is a bad neighborhood?.

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How to Optimize Your Images for Search Engines

Today, on this post, I'm going to share to you guys how to optimize your images for search engines using Google Image Search.

What is Google Image Search? It is a search service made by Google to allow users to use images to search the web for any topic of interest. i.e. events, movies, etc.

Images are not just something that will make your site visually attractive and more appealing to your readers. It is also a way to drive more traffic to a site.

Nowadays, optimizing images is becoming more and more important in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A lot of people use Google image search to find images for a variety of topics. In Google's webmasters guidelines, they encourage webmasters to use alternative text for the images. The reason behind this is that search engines can't see images.

Also, highly relevant images show at the top of Google's search result page when it matches the search query that can bring more search engine traffic to a site. See the picture below.



How To Optimize Your Images For Search Engines

1. Use keyword in your Alt text.

Alt stands for alternative text. This is the most important thing in image optimization. You should include a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the image, but take note that you should not stuff it with keywords that many inexperienced webmasters do and unethical SEO's do to avoid penalties from Search Engines. To make it more clear, here's how it looks:

<img src="imagename.jpg" alt="descriptive text here">

2. Use relevant text around your images.

Make sure that there is a descriptive text with your keywords relevant to the image and placed it before or after the image.

3. Name your images.

Instead of going with the original file names that looks like this one g521.jpg, name your images. Let's say you have a picture of Chuck Lidell. You could use chuck-lidell.jpg for that pic. You can use hyphens in the file name, but avoid using three hyphens. Also avoid using underscores as well.

4. Use anchor text keywords in image links.

Use a keyword when linking to a specific image instead of using Click to view Full Size. You can use something like Chuck Lidell Training.

5. Make your image folder accessible to SE.

6. Re-upload your images to keep them fresh.

7. Use .jpg as the image formatting.

8. Use Social Site Tag for your images.

If your images has little or no textual content, it would be more helpful to tag it using social tags like Technorati. It adds more weight to your image to help it rank better.

9. Use reliable photo sharing hosting like Flickr and tag your images.

It is said that it helps yahoo image optimization.

These are just some ways on how to optimize your images for Search Engines. Take advantage of these tips to help your site's ranking on the SERP and drive more traffic to your site.

Related Topics

• How to Remove No follow Attribute on Blogger

• More SEO Tips and Tricks

• Free SEO Tips and Tricks

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Which one is better SEO or SMO?

I came across one of the forums discussing about which one is better, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Social Media Optimization (SMO)? That's why I decided to have a say about it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting high search placement in the organic or natural listing of search engines while Social Media Optimization (SMO) has the ability to drive huge amount of targeted niche traffic to a site quickly. It is also another way to network with potential clients and build a good reputation online.

Which one is better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Social Media Optimization (SMO)?
To answer this question will compare the advantages and disadvantages of both Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization.

Advantages of Search Engine Optimization

• Targeted traffic

• Works almost all niches

• Long term traffic

• Great Return on Investment (ROI)

• High quality traffic

• There's no need for a popular profile to get traffic

Advantages of Social Media Optimization

• Quick traffic
  

• Helps SEO in building backlinks

• Increase popularity of website

• Can create brand image of a website

• No need to optimized the site structure for search engine spiders
  

• You'll get valuable contacts

Disadvantages of Search Engine Optimization

• The process of SEO takes time and effort

• Contents need to be readable by search engine spiders

• The site structure should be optimized for search engine spiders

Disadvantages of Social Media Optimization

• Contents should be readable by human readers
  

• Needs to have a popular profile to get lots of traffic
  

• Will work on some niches
  

Both are great internet marketing tool and have its own benefits. Some people believes that SEO is better than SMO and some believes that SMO is better than SEO. Well for me both plays a great role in driving traffic and the two work together rather than separately. It drives traffic to our site so why not combine them to get a much better result since SEO benefits from SMO through the backlinks that gives significant impact in search engine rankings. If both done correctly will work like a needle in a thread. SMO works great if your topic is about entertainment, music, sports, technology, and other internet related stuffs. It can give you plenty of traffic in short term while in SEO, it works great with almost all of the niches and it can give long term traffic to your site though, the process of doing it takes some time and effort.

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SEO Glossary

Algorithm is a programming rule that tells how search engine indexes contents.

Alt Attribute is the alternative text description for images.

Anchor Text is the text part of the link. This is used by search engines as an important ranking factor.

Back links are inlinks, inbound links, incoming links (whatever you want to call it) pointing to a web page.

Banned this happens when search engine blocks your site from appearing in its SERP.

Black Hat SEO this is the optimizations that are against the guidelines of search engine.

Blog is a website also known as "weblog". It is an online diary with regular entries of commentary, description, events, or other materials. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

Bot short for robot.

Cache is the copies of webpages stored on internet user's hard drive or in search engines database. This is why web pages loads quickly when they hit the back button in their web browsers.

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different than the content presented to visitors.

Cookie is the information stored on searchers computer by a web server while accessing a particular webpage.

Directory is where websites are group into categories with description by group of human editors.

Forum or message board is a place where discussions on related topics takes place. Forums are also used by search engine optimizers and webmasters for information exchange.

Google is the world's number one search engine founded by Standford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998.

Google bot is a search bot used by Google to collect documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.

Gray Hat SEO is an search engine optimization using both Black Hat and White hat techniques.

Heading tag is an HTML tag often used to denote a section heading of a web page. SE pays attention to text marked with a heading tag.

Home Page is the main page of a website also known as front page or web server directory index. Usually the home page accumulates the most page rank score since other sites usually links to it the most.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is a computer language used to create pages and content on the web.

Hyperlink is a text or graphics that, when clicked on takes the user to another web page location.

Inbound links are links that point to your site from other web pages, also inbound links are important asset that can improve your site's PR (Page Rank).

Inlinks another synonym for back links.

JavaScripts a programming language most commonly used to add interactive features to webpages.

Key phrase a search phrase composed of keywords.

Keyword is a word that search engine user use to find relevant web pages. It is also the term that captures the essence of the topic of a document.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or key phrase appears on a web page.

Keyword popularity is the number of occurrences of searches done by internet users of a given keyword during a period of time.

Keyword research is used in search engine optimization to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines.

Keyword stuffing is the act of placing excessive amounts of keywords into a page for the purpose of boosting page's ranking in SERP. Its use is strongly discouraged.

Keyword rich is when a given page is full of good keywords rather than bunch of meaningless words.

Link bait or Link baiting is one of the great ways to get backlinks. This is something on your site that naturally attracts backlinks from other web pages.

Link farm is a group of websites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group for the purpose of inflating link popularity or Page Rank. Participating in a link farm could get your site banned by search engines.

Link Popularity is the number and the quality of the inbound links pointing to a given web page.

Links are text or graphics an internet user clicked to get to another web page location.

Meta description is a hidden HTML code that describes the content of a web page in search results. It should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 words is suggested.

Meta keywords is a hidden HTML code pertaining to the web page content. It is now ignored by most of the search engines because search engine spammers have abused this tag.

Nav bar stands for navigation bar. It is a web site's navigation icons usually arranged in row down the left hand side or along the top and plays crucial roles in getting site's visitor to go deeper in the site and also directing the spiders to the most important content of the site.

Outbound links are links from your web pages to another web page in different domain.

Page Rank(PR) is an algorithm use by Google search engine to measure the authority or relevant importance of a web page.

Reciprocal links is the practice of trading links between web sites.

Search Engine is a web site that offers its visitors to search for information on the World Wide Web.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are strategies and tactics that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of getting high search placement in organic or natural listing of search engines.

Search Engine Result Page (SERP)is a page where results of search query are listed.

Spam is a manipulation technique that violates search engine guidelines.

Spider is a robot sent out by search engines to catalog websites on the internet. It is also known as a bot or crawler.

Tagging is a non hierarchical keyword assigned to a piece of information such as bookmark that helps describe an item and allows it to be found by searching or browsing.

Title tag is one of the most important bit of text on a web page as far as search engine is concerned. It can be found at the very top of the browser window, above "back", "forward", "refresh".

Traffic is the number of times a website is viewed by a unique visitor within a stipulated time.

Unethical SEO is a search engine optimization tactics which violates search engine TOS, term of service that can put a site at risk of being penalized or banned.

Unique visitors is a term used to describe the total number of visitors to a site over a certain period of time.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the address of a web page in the world wide web.

White hat SEO is the ethical SEO techniques approved by the search engines.

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is a simple, very flexible text format used to syndicate or format information using technologies such as RSS.

Yahoo is one of the top 3 search engines. It is also one of the oldest and most established directories on the web.

If you know other SEO terminologies that are not included in the list, you may leave it in the comment section and I will be glad to add it in.

Related Topics

• How to Optimize Images for Search Engines

• How to Remove No follow Attribute on Blogger

• What is a bad neighborhood?

• Free SEO Tips and Tricks

• More SEO Tips and Tricks

• Google Page Ranking

• Link Building Strategy

Continue reading...

How to Remove Nofollow Attribute on Blogger

Another way to generate quality links and traffic is by removing the rel="nofollow" attribute on your blogs. In doing this, it will give you an opportunity to join do follow communities and also you can get additional amount of traffic for your blogs because it will attract more users to participate in your blogs and sometimes your blog will be listed in do follow blog lists like the ones listed in my previous post do follow blogs list, but doing this can also gives you a spam problem; however, you can choose what comments to approve.

On this post I'm going to share to you guys how to remove nofollow attribute on blogger.com since last time, someone commented in my other post claiming that his blogger blog is a do follow blog and after I checked it out, it appears to me that his blog is not a do follow blog.

Blogger.com by default automatically adds the rel="nofollow" tag to all links coming from user generated content. In order to remove this tag on your blogger.com blogs, just simply follow the steps provided below.




Note: This procedure can only be done to new blogger-styled layouts.

Login to your blogger account.

Click Layout.



Click edit HTML.



Then backup your template in case something goes wrong. Click Download Full Template.



Check Expand Widget Templates since the items that we're going to delete are inside of sections, which in turn are inside the widget, so that we can see anything inside of the widget.



Search for a nofollow tag in your template. Just simply press F3 or ctrl + F
and a small dialog box will appear then type in nofollow and enter.

When you find a code like the one below, just simply delete the part of the code that says rel='nofollow' then save your template and you're done.

<b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'>
<data:comment.author/></a>

Your code will appear like the one below when you're done removing the nofollow tag.

<b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'>
<data:comment.author/></a>

Related Topics

• How to Optimize Your Images for Search Engines

• Do Follow Forum Sites List

• Do Follow Blogs List

• SEO Glossary

Continue reading...