Hash tags are an integral part of Twitter. A hash tag is simply a way to associate your tweets to any given topic. This makes searching for tweets on a particular topic much easier by grouping those tweets together and keeping them all relevant to one another.

And Google loves relevancy which is why we are now seeing more search results that are coming directly from Twitter feeds. Using hash tags can assist Google bot by telling it that your content is relevant for a particular search term.

So not only will this help you in Twitter’s own search function, but also, and more importantly, it could give you a massive boost for your targeted keywords if you start using hash tags in your tweets.

There are already thousands of hash tags that have been created and you can leverage these for yourself or you could create a new tag if you don’t find anything useful that already exists. A great way to find out which hash tags are popular is TwitScoop. This service monitors trending topics on Twitter. Keep an eye on TwitScoop to discover new opportunities.

Another benefit of hash tags are the thousands of bots that monitor twitter and retweet any content that it finds using the hash tags it monitors. For example using the #SEO hash tag would likely result in your tweet being retweeted by a good number of bots.

This may not seem like much at first, but if you consider that almost all Twitter users are following at least one bot, you can effectively increase the exposure of your content by a large percentage simply by having these bots retweet your tweets. And supposing you’ve posted a link to your latest piece of content, the more retweets, the more back links to your content giving you more authority on that phrase.

Start using hash tags right away to get the most benefit from this Twitter SEO tip and combine this with my other 5 Twitter SEO Tips to ensure that your Twitter marketing and promotional efforts deliver the maximum results possible.

Do you have a different view of hash tags? How are you using hash tags right now? Let’s explore the possibilities together in the comments.

Nor is it ever permanent. But the fact remains that if you want to spend less on advertising, and make gains with more organic traffic, you need to be on top of your SEO game.

A few months back SEOMoz released their annual search ranking factors report and there was some very mixed opinions about what exactly are the biggest performance indicators for maintaining good results in all the engines. But for the most part, much of that information will become somewhat distorted with the sweeping changes taking place in search.

So what can we expect in the coming year and where is search heading in the next decade?

Watch this video (courtesy of Web Pro News) where Matt Cutts gives some brief explanations of some of the most significant changes we can expect. Then read on to better understand these and other important changes you need to make to your SEO strategy in the coming year.

Google Caffeine

As most internet marketers and webmasters already know, Google has been developing and testing some very significant changes to it’s search algorithm. The sandbox, or testing version, was codenamed Caffeine and according to Google, it’s purpose is to allow Google to index sites much faster, but also to improve on the quality of the SERPs.

While there has been a lot of speculation, Matt Cutts has stated several times that this updated algorithm is not likely to be fully deployed until mid January. It has currently only been released in a single data center.

Page Load Time

One of the most important revelation to come out recently is page load time, or the speed of your website. Currently page load times are only considered for Adwords landing pages and have a significant effect on your bid price. However this currently has no bearing on organic search listings.

It looks as though that’s about to change and page load times are going to become an important factor for top ranking in the near future.

According to Matt Cutts, this will be changing next year, and page load times are to be included in ranking factors. In fact, Cutts went on to say that Google has been looking at page load times for some time now and it’s likely that it will become a major factor in 2010.

Take the time you have available to make sure your site is well coded and that your hosting provider can handle your traffic. Failure to do so could see you move from the front page to the last page on Google.

First Link Priority

Something that seems to have gone under the radar within many SEO circles is the recent introduction of a first link priority. This is good news for legitimate webmasters and bad news for spammers. But you need to understand how it works and adjust your deep linking strategy accordingly.

The way it used to work is that every link on a page was counted, indexed, and followed (where allowed). This meant that placing the same link URL on a page many times would distribute page rank, as well as take into consideration all of the anchor text as well as that highly sought after link juice.

The playing field has now changed and this is no longer possible. It’s likely that this change was made to circumvent any page sculpting methods that are in play today. Google is not a fan of page sculpting.

What all this means is that the first link on a page is the one that Google bot will take notice of. No longer can you link to the same site or page multiple times and expect the bot to take notice. It’s now only interested in the first link it finds on a page.

So for instance if you look at the average header navigation menu, most sites have a link to their home page with the anchor text ‘Home’. Since this is the first link that is encountered, any subsequent instances of that url will be ignored, including the anchor text.

This is going to have a major effect on the SERPs for almost all webmasters and you need to be taking action now if you expect to compete.

Snippet Links in SERPs

Saving the best for last, Google is now including snippets into some results. These snippets links are added to your result in the SERPs at no extra cost.

Snippet links (some people are calling them breadcrumbs) can be added to a listing to assist the user to find the most relevant information available on a site.

For example, lets say your selling blue widgets, and you provide free shipping. You listing will show your page title, and description with a link to your page. Inside of your listing though, you may also see another link with your ‘Free Shipping’ anchor text linking directly to you shipping page.

I believe this is going to have a major impact on CTR and user behavior and allow lower placed sites to receive a larger share of clicks based on these snippets of information that was previously unavailable. Let’s also remember that those links attract people therefore increasing the likely hood of a click to your site.

SEO Resources

If you’re still struggling with SEO, and trying to get a solid grasp of how it all works, you should review these posts so that you know exactly how the game is played.

Definitive SEO Guide to Search Engines
3 Steps to Better SEO Performance
Twitter SEO Tips

Conclusion

As you can see there is a lot to deal with. Some action should be taken right now. Other things can be adjusted in the next few months. However you approach this new age of search, be sure to take action sooner rather than later and secure your position in the search results.

I’d like to know how you think these changes to search will effect SEO as a whole, and how you will take advantage of this changing of the guard?

What you are about to learn are important fundamentals for effectively executing your SEO strategy… by building upon your knowledge of how a search engine actually works.

This is a long post, but if you’re serious about learning exactly how search engine optimization or search engine marketing works, then stick with it. You’re going to find some nuggets along your way.

Bookmark this page or print it out so that you can always come back and review what you’ve learned.

Starting With Some Facts

Before we can begin to properly understand  search engines, there are some things you need to get you head around. Right now I’m going to blow the lid off some popular misconceptions about search engines.

• MYTH: Search engines store web pages. BUSTED! Search engines don’t store web pages. They index the words in the content of those web pages and also keep track of link information and document locations.
• MYTH: Spiders or bots index web pages. BUSTED! Spiders, or bots, don’t index web pages. They find and crawl the contents of web pages and send that data to the search engine.
• MYTH: Search engines read and then rank web pages. BUSTED! Search engines don’t read pages and decide how they should rank. They receive a search query and rank the best matching pages to that particular query.
• MYTH: Search engines are smart enough to work out what a searcher is thinking. BUSTED! Search engines are just big dumb computers. OK maybe not completely dumb, but you get the point. It’s a computer program, executing a predefined set of instructions, and it doesn’t think.

As you read through the sections of this post you will learn how and why each of these myths are SO BUSTED!

Anatomy of a Search Engine

Search engines have 2 functions. Firstly, finding new content, or crawling the web. They use computer programs, known as bots or spiders, to wander through the web on an endless pilgrimage, in search of content. A search engine spider uses the system of hyperlinks that appear on web pages, to navigate its way through. Just the same as we do.

It reads and collects all the content that it finds on each web page, and then it follows those links to other web pages, where it repeats the whole process endlessly.

Secondly search engines provide search results. The aim of the search engine is to provide the most relevant results to a users query. It considers and ranks each page using the collected data, and makes it’s best attempt at providing the user with the location of the most useful websites for the query.

Some of the factors used in ranking are more important than others when it comes to SEO, but since this is not strictly an SEO lesson, we’ll keep that to a minimum. You won’t need to know every last detail about all of these factors, but you will become familiar with some of the most important ones as you continue to learn about how to perform absolutely bulletproof SEO.

For now just stay focused on the two primary functions of the search engines.

How Search Engines Find and Index Web Pages

There are several ways that search engines find and index pages. Some work better than others. None are guaranteed…except one!

The Old School Way

One way is to do a manual site submission via a web form. The search engines provide a web form to submit your site to their index. This tells the search engine that your site exists but won’t necessarily get any pages indexed.

The New Cool Way

Another way is to submit an XML sitemap. XML sitemaps tell the search engine about all the pages that exist in your site by providing it with a document map. But there is a big misconception about the XML Sitemap priority field.

The myth goes that setting a higher priority for certain pages will cause the spider to crawl your page faster or more frequently. The only problem with that is the search engines can choose to ignore it completely.

The priority field is more of an indication to the search engine about what you consider to be your important pages.

The Expensive Way

Another option to get your site indexed faster or more frequently might be paid inclusion into a web directory. There are a small number of directories that Google still considers as reputable.  One example would be Yahoo! Directory paid listings.

Generally speaking though, Google considers directories to be bad neighborhoods. Besides if you learn SEO properly, the cost of paid inclusion seems massively inflated.

The Guaranteed Way

As I said there is one way that is absolutely guaranteed to get your page crawled and indexed. In fact it’s not only the most favored by spiders for crawling and discovering new pages, it’s also considered the top factor in how well a page ranks.

The main way that search spiders find new content on your site, is by following the links to your site from other web pages.

As the spider crawls web pages, it discovers links which are then analyzed for any META data like nofollow or noindex, and then follows that link to the next page which it then begins to crawl. So if you want the spider to crawl your site more often, get more links.

Now some of this might not be news to you so far. Well that’s all about to change as we dive deeper into how search engines actually work.

A Closer Look at Crawling

Get this in your head now. The spider is not responsible for indexing your site. In fact on close inspection the spider is more like a drone. It simply crawls the pages, reads the content, page location as well as a ton of other data, and stores it all to be processed later by the ‘actual’ search engine.

Whatever name you want to use; spider, robot, crawler, it’s all really the same thing. A big old computer program that wanders around the web, jumping from link to link, site to site, searching for content to tell the search engine about, which is just another big computer program and a massive database.

But…that’s really all it does.

Spiders do have to follow a few rules that are defined in the ‘Robot Exclusion Protocol‘ telling the spiders about content they can or can’t fetch. They also have to follow another protocol. HTTP, which is the same language your web browser speaks is how the spider crawls the page.

The main thing to know about spiders, when it comes to optimizing your site, is that a spider is a computer program, and effectively, so is your web page. Computers read code systematically starting from the entry point at the top of the code and reading it line by line. Programs execute each instruction as it is encountered. That means it doesn’t view the content the same way we do.

Images for example are replaced with alt and title text. They also do a bunch of other things with some of these types of files, like video and images, but that’s far too advanced for this guide.

What you need to grasp here is that the role of the spiders is only to fetch the contents of pages and store them to be looked at some time later for indexing by the search engine.

What The Search Engine Really Does!

It’s all really quite complex and thankfully you don’t need to know all the fine details. The simplest explanation is that the search engine is the index. It’s a set of automated programs that connect to a giant database to analyze and collate all of the data its spider retrieved from each web page. That data is then processed and indexed.

Get Ready Because This is The Stuff That Most People Just Don’t Get.

Peeling Back the Layers

The very first thing that the search engine does is to process or, parse, the data that it has collected from your web page. It strips back all the information that the search engine regards as useless. Things like I-frames (and their contents), Javascript, most of the formatting etc., leaving only what is useful to the indexing process.

The result of all this leaves a collection of META data, URL locations, anchor text, and other information such as the heading tags, underlines and italics, and where the word appeared on the page. It will also take notice of the words surrounding each other word. This is particularly useful when dealing with anchor text.

Most importantly for us though are the words from your content that the spider has collected from your page.

Words That Count

If you’ve read this far then well done! You’re on your way to knowing more about search engines, search engine marketing and search engine optimization than most people ever will.

Most people think that search engines actually store an entire web page, and then read it whenever people do a search.

The truth is, it doesn’t work that way!

A search engine indexes each of the words that it found on your page. They are stored along with the results of every other web page using that word.

Think of it like this.

Every word has it’s own container. These containers are used to store all the data collected by the spider. This happens for each word, on each web page, across the entire web. This is what we will call ranking data.

As the search engine indexes page content, it places ranking data about each word on a page into each word’s container. This includes all the links, anchor text and and all those other pieces of data we’ve already discussed that are used for ranking purposes.

So if the word “widget” is found on your page. A reference to your page is now placed in the “widget” container, cataloging all of your ranking data for that word, along with all the other sites that are using the word “widget”.

It’s likely that anchor text and urls are placed into a separate index, but there’s no proof of that..yet!

A search engine index is a no more than a collection of words, with information about each site where each of those words appear.

How The Search Engine Decides

It all comes down to the ranking data. This is why it’s so important to learn more about exactly which ranking data is worth spending time on for better search result and higher placement.

Each time a user queries the search engine, it then goes on to query it’s database, the index. Using all of the ranking data that it collected and sorted, it analyzes and compares that data to produce a result that is hopefully what you were looking for.

SERP’s, or Search Engine Results Pages are made up by listing the pages that rated as the most likely page to be relevant to the search query, when compared to every other site that corresponded to that search query.

Taking A Different View

There are different types of searches and a broad search is how most people use a search engine. Broad searches run a query for each of the words that occur in the search query. It’s then filtered even further to find a winner amongst all of the best sites for each word. For example the search ‘I want blue widgets’ will conduct a query for each word in that phrase.

A phrase match searches on the exact phrase forcing the search engine to include all of words in the phrase by surrounding the query in “double quotes”.

Some words are considered to add no value to the search and are referred to as Stop Words. Words like; I, and, of, if, at, the, to, are excluded from the final search query.  In the example above, the word ‘I’ would be ignored leaving a search query of ‘want blue widgets’ if doing a broad search.

Altering the search type can be done using search operators. To perform an exact match search you would need to use the double quote operator like so: “search for this term”. If you’re keen you can learn all about stop words and search operators.

Considering most people perform a broad match search, most results pages are comprised of the best result for the occurrence of each individual word in the query. This has to make you wonder if chasing the long tail is actually helping much? I’ll leave that story for another day.

The actual algorithms that the search engines use are very closely guarded secrets. It’s unlikely anyone will ever know anything for certain besides the people who design them.

What we do know is that there are many things that we can do to ensure that your web pages are ranking on the front pages of the search results. As you learn more about SEO you will become very familiar with them.

What We’ve Learned

Understanding the fundamentals of how a search engine works is critical in establishing an effective search engine optimization strategy or search engine marketing strategy.

Distinguishing the facts from the myths it vital to your success. There are many popular myths that should be properly understood and ignored. What we can and should always do is test everything that we can think of.

Any of the information that you are reading here that didn’t come directly from the search engines documentation, came from testing. And it’s important to note that the only real way to know anything about search engines, search engine optimization and search engine marketing is to Test, Review, Adjust and Repeat!

In a nutshell:

• Search engines don’t index web pages, they index each of the words on a page.
• Search engines don’t query web pages they query their own index.
• Spiders don’t index web pages. They collect and store the content for processing.
• Most web pages are found through links on other sites.
• Search results are decided by comparing the overall relevance and authority of all the data for each word on each indexed page. The page that has the most points wins.
• Search engine submission is more or less a waste of time. Your site will be indexed without a submission as soon as you have links to your site.
• XML Sitemaps are used to quickly let the search engine know about new pages. This means the spider is not required. But it does not mean you can influence the spider.
• XML Sitemaps cannot prioritize pages or influence the spiders behavior in any way. Priorities in XML Sitemaps are more like a suggestion or recommendation you give to the search engine.
• Surrounding text is considered to have some great value where the words and phrases you use can help to promote the relevance of your overall content.
• Writing content for humans makes more sense because a natural and logical grouping of associated and relevant word usage occurs. It can still be keyword targeted, while not losing sight of human visitors. And that’s exactly what the search engines want to see.

Now it’s time to take what you have learned and look at your own SEO or SEM strategy. How to use this knowledge to improve your strategy and rank higher on the SERP’s?.

Search Engine Optimization is like an art form. Like all great arts, understanding what’s required to shine far above the crowd is by far the most important thing to learn. Many will attempt to make a career from their respective arts, but only a small few will ever have any real success.

The same can be said for SEO. The big difference though is that the SEO stage is much larger and can accommodate a much larger cast. Making it big in the art of SEO is far more achievable.

The one thing that remains the same for both is the reason why those few are so successful. The answer is actually much more simple than you’d expect.

It’s because in both cases, the artist understands why some things are more important than others. When it comes to SEO there are many myths about what is important and what isn’t. Working out the facts is often time consuming and tedious.

So I’ve gathered up all the best information and found the 3 things you should know about SEO to get the best rankings and traffic possible.

1. Competition is Good, Improves Profitability Outlook

You might be thinking I’m completely crazy but have absolutely no doubt that competition is not something to run away from. Ask yourself this: Would I rather be targeting keywords that have few searches, and fewer buyers? Or would I prefer to target phrases that have high traffic volumes with people who are already selling products and services?

If people are searching for it, then give them what they want. If a lot of people are trying to rank for it, GREAT! It means that it’s a profitable place. Where there is competition, there is cash.

You can try to be a trail blazer and go after all the hyper-extended long tail phrases to find that one gem that no one has found yet. Good luck with that. It makes far more sense to find what the people want, and give it to them.

Competition tells us one very clear message. That people want it, and others are having success providing it. No matter if your trying to sell a product, build a list, or simply drive traffic to a landing page or blog. High competition tells you what the people want and which phrases to go after.

2. Content Is No Longer King

If you didn’t think I was crazy before you will now. Content might be king for blogs, for building readership, and RSS subscribers but that’s where that magic stops. Your content will still need to be compelling and entertaining enough to engage and connect with your readers, but content is not what got them to visit. When it comes to SEO your content is no longer king.

Headlines That Attract Searchers, and Drive More Traffic!

Your headline is 100 times more important to SEO, and visits for that matter, than anything else. The only way to attract visitors is to have compelling and attention grabbing headlines. The page and blog title is your short form headline. Whereas your description is the long form, or extended version of your headline.

In both cases, it won’t matter if you get a first place ranking in the SERPs, if your headlines suck, you might as well be on page 100 because no one will be clicking through to your site.

So trying to pound more keywords or even trying to write titles for keywords rather than titles that attract people, is wasting a lot of time and effort. Try writing your headlines to grab attention and see if you can fit your keywords in so that it reads naturally without diluting the headline.

If you need help on writing great headlines that almost always work check out this series How to Write Magnetic Headlines on CopyBlogger. I know it’s a little older, but the information is as current today as when it was written.

3. Canonicalization Done Right Gets Site Out of Sin Bin.

Canonicalization, or having only one version of your site available to the spiders, has been talked about to no end. I won’t just rehash tired old information. If you need to learn about canonicalization you can read this article by Matt Cutts. But I still see people making one major mistake that effectively destroys all of their other efforts.

If you don’t get it right the search engines, particularly Google, will view your site as one big pot of duplicate content stew. The reason is because most CMS systems, webmasters, and blog platforms will at some point reference your default page, instead of your default site.

This means that your home page, the one that has all that link juice from those inbound domain links, has 2 URL’s indexed that point to the exact same page. Here’s an example:

Joe Blog is working to fix his canonicalization on his blog. He sets his Google Webmaster tools to prefer the www version of his site. For good measure he uses a .htaccess file to set a 301 redirect for any non www request to be forwarded to his www version of his site.

Joe Blog then decides to install a pluging that uses some PHP code to call the default page. Since the default page is index.php the URL generated is http://www.joeblogs.ext/index.php which is the same page as http://www.joeblogs.ext. This now leaves him with a duplicate content issue on the home page.

The simple solution is to add a 301 redirect and forward any requests for any part of the site calling index.php to redirect to the same location without the index.php in the url. Do you have a 301 on your default page?

This might seem a little ‘newbie’ but just checking around some sites I can see just how many people are making this horrible mistake. When you think about it, an entire site could be penalized simply by overlooking this important but subtle change. And it’s like…newbie…information.

Take some time and focus on some of the finer details on your site.  SEO is a complex animal, and making these 3 simple changes to your blog might just be what you’ve been looking for.

Another important set of data to take into account when considering where the future of SEO is headed, comes from SEOMoz. Every 2 years SEOMoz releases critical data, comprised of responses to over 100 question that are submitted by those who are considered the top SEO experts from around the globe.

Earlier this week I began to study this data and to consider the findings of the experts and the report as a whole. Some interesting revelations came to the fore. However I couldn’t help but notice some very clear inconsistencies with the resultant data. In some cases, experts are clearly contradicting each other and so I felt that the data, while still a useful insight, is far from conclusive.

The idea behind the Search Engine Ranking Factors report is an attempt to better understand how the 800 lb gorilla (Google) thinks. Understanding how the algorithm works is vital to earning you place on the first page of the SERPs.

The most interesting revelation for me, was that 48% of all the participating SEO experts stated that’

Links will decline in importance, but remain powerful, as newer signals rise from usage data, social graph data & other sources to replace them.

Other interesting data that came from the report was that 51% beleived that the algorithmic changes in February, known as ‘Vince’, resulted in an unintentional preference towards well-known, public brands. Not good news for the small business owner. But blogging still remains a prominent contender with 66% rating Blogging and Engagement with the Blogosphere as having a high value.

I also noticed two very distinct issues with the data set, although one of these was most likely not foreseen. That is the relationship and the importance of social media particularly Twitter traffic and more importantly the inbound links from Twitter.

According to the report, none of the experts believe that links from social media sites are any great importance with regard to SEO and improving both page rank and search results. However, from the data being collected from many sources, as well as my own testing with Google Caffeine, it would appear that the experts are completely wrong on this front.

The second area of focus for me was that there were many references in the report to LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing. Now while it is true that Google  did register a patent that may appear to comprise LSI, there has been much debate over whether or not that patent is in fact for LSI.

More importantly however is the fact that much testing has been performed over the past year to determine if LSI is in fact being used in Google’s algorithm. To date, there is no conclusive evidence that LSI does actually exist.

As you probably know Andy Jenkins recently left the team at Stompernet to pursue other ventures. But many months before Andy departed, he produced a video that was release at the Stomperblog which went to great lengths to discuss the validity of LSI, if it fact exists and he even discussed how it could be tested and the resultant set of data the should logically be retrieved if LSI was in fact part of the algorithm.

The test failed at every point, and it became abundantly clear that, while LSI may very well be in the works for Google, there is no sign of it in the wild.

So where does that leave us?

Actually it leaves us all in exactly the same place. SEO experts don’t have all the answers. Most of what that they say is guess work excluding some very tried and true methods such as link building, relevant content and a few other techniques that are known to work. But beyond that, it comes down to that same old story. Test, test, then test some more.

The SEOmoz report is a great source of information. Some of the contributions are quite enlightening but as I said, in almost all of the commentaries, there was at least some contradiction. I’d encourage you to review the report if SEO is important to you. You will no doubt gain some valuable knowledge and hopefully we’ll see you on the front page of Google before too long.

Google has pointed out on its blog that the code is not complete and some areas are still currently being worked on so it’s unlikely that we will see the new algorithm put into production for some time. Also keep in mind that Google loves to implement changes without telling us about it.

Though that doesn’t seem to have stopped the speculators. Already the web is buzzing with a huge amount of talk and speculation about what this will all mean. And by all accounts this code update appears to be targeted toward real time search.

According to Google:

It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Matt Cutts says:

“most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings. Lots of users won’t notice a big difference”. “we’re not looking to make huge changes in ranking with this new infrastructure. Some rankings will change, but that’s not the main thrust of the infrastructure”.
http://www.mattcutts.com

It remains to be seen how indexing speed and accuracy will be affected until the code is released into the wild but all preliminary tests are pointing to a dominance of real time search. But many who have already been testing the alpha version are in fact noticing a big difference.

That likely means that Google sees the power of real time search, and that they see the power of the Bing real time search facility, which currently provides a more comprehensive result as a threat, and is making its play for that portion of the search market.

Whatever the final outcome, with all of the developments in the SEO world during 2009 it is certain that the playing field will be changed permanently. Google outwardly denounces the practice of SEO and prefers that sites are left alone for Google to make the final determination about its ranking and relevance. Of course that is less likely than convincing the world that G.W was a great president.

No matter what if you want to stay on top of your game you will need to learn about the new system, prepare your sites for the new algorithm, and make more use of social media, particularly twitter, if you expect to see you site being placed well in Google’s search results.

Try out the new Google Caffeine yourself. Stay on top in the future of search rankings by mastering web 2.0 sites. You can get a free copy of my ebook detailing how to profit from web 2.0 websites today.

Choose Optimized Username

Your choice of username is quite important when taken from an SEO perspective. Obviously your username should be relevant to you and/or you brand. Wherever possible though you should consider if you can use one of your targeted keywords in your username.  Searches performed against your keyword will have a greater chance of including your tweets in the results.

Optimize Your Bio

Your bio should be considered carefully because it is constantly being indexed. Make the best use of your bio url and include your keyword(s) within the bio. You should still write your bio for humans rather than search engines but clever use of keywords within your bio can help to improve your overall relevancy in searches.

Include Your URL

Unfortunately for spammers the URL in the bio is a ‘nofollow’ so you won’t be getting any link love. That’s no reason to overlook the importance of your URL in your account. Even with nofollow, the link will still be indexed and with Twitters authority in Google, there is an implied amount of juice that will come with that even without direct love from Twitter.

Tweet With Keywords

Try to write your tweets with keywords in mind. Don’t just pad your tweets with keywords, but do think carefully about what you tweet. Try to get your keyword into the first couple of phrases in the tweet. This will even further enhance your relevancy. Keep in mind that everything is archived and your grand kids will still be able to see when you tweeted about your breakfast, 40 years from now. Think of the kids and give them something useful and relevant to read about you.

First Words

Carefully consider the first few words of your tweet and try to get your keywords in there. It appears that the first 40 characters or so are given a lot of weight with Google’s indexing of tweets. This has a big impact on what Google displays as the title and description in the search results. You can use this tactic to move up the results pages for your keywords.

Combine these tactics to create more relevancy and the best search results for your tweets to improve your overall PR and SERP ranking. A good combination of keyword rich username, bio URL, and tweet text should improve your results in relatively short time. The more you tweet using these simple tactics, the better and faster your results will improve.

This post commemorates my 50th post here on Incomes International. Help me celebrate this milestone by spreading this post far and wide. Share your own SEO strategies for twitter with a comment and remember to share or bookmark this post with a tweet, digg, stumble, technorati or any way you like.

If you need proof just take a look at the back links that Yahoo has listed for my Incomes International blog. Remember its only been online for 2 months half of the sites that are now linking to me are not even indexed yet.

Use this list of 489 web directories to get listed and increase your Alexa and Google rank.

If you want back links to your blog or website to improve your sites authority from a search engines perspective just start submitting to free directories. You should note that a lot of these directories will be listing many low quality sites so you might also want to look at using some paid directories as well.

You may not get any link love but Google, Yahoo, MSN/BING, and Alexa will still count all those links as as sites linking in.

http://www.internethow.com

http://www.alistsites.com

http://www.addyoursitefreesubmit.com

http://www.web.thehealthzone.co.uk

http://www.another-directory.com

http://www.apnadir.com

http://www.arakne-links.com

http://www.awesomedirectory.com

http://www.backlinksforyou.com

http://www.businessplexus.com

http://www.clarib.com

http://www.clickthese.com

http://www.click2directory.com

http://www.daredirectory.info

http://www.directorybin.com

http://www.yeandi.com

http://www.turnpike.net

http://www.joeant.com

http://www.geniusfind.com

http://www.somuch.com

http://www.abilogic.com

http://www.tsection.com

http://www.pegasusdirectory.com

http://narff.com

http://www.foxdirectory.net

http://submit2.jayde.com

http://linkcentre.com

http://www.directoryvault.com

http://www.webworldindex.com

http://www.submiturlhere.com

http://www.addyoursitefreesubmit.com

http://www.addurl-free.com

http://www.wwws.org

http://www.fourseek.com

http://www.searchmydirectory.com

http://www.netdung.com

http://www.dirfire.com

http://www.azlisted.com

http://www.dmoz.org

http://link-beam.com

http://www.add-url.googlepagerankings.com

http://linkitup.weightlossinfo.us

http://www.drazr.com

http://directory.forgematrix.com

http://www.free-website-directory.com

http://www.yahoodirectory.net

http://homepageseek.com

http://www.linksm.com

http://onebestlink.com

http://search-o-rama.com

https://www2.galaxy.com

http://www.leadingdir.com

http://www.anydomainhere.com

http://www.linksarena.com

http://www.ilinkr.com

http://www.freewd.org

http://www.textonlyweb.com

http://www.globalreportage.com

http://www.suggest-link.net
http://www.addlinksuggest.com

http://www.ewebdirectory.info

http://www.ivicawd.com

http://www.freewebsitedirectory.com

http://www.digitaldir.eu

http://linkageplus.com

http://www.plentylinks.com

http://www.niche-listings.com

http://www.traffic-directory.net

http://www.deeplinked.com

httphttp://www.1stopdir.com

http://www.nwparks.net

http://www.network-room.com

http://www.the-free-directory.co.uk

http://www.irotater.com

http://www.centraldirectory.net

http://www.onlinebusinessdir.com

http://d4y.us

http://www.apexultima.com

http://www.backbond.com

http://www.iscoreball.com

http://www.bmvg.info

http://www.geekyspeaky.com

http://www.linktobuy.com

http://www.f7w.net

http://www.onlinedir.org

http://www.onlinedirectoryworld.com

http://www.directoryworldonline.com

http://www.newlocks.org

http://www.hifilive.com

http://www.prolinkdirectory.com

http://artoolinks.com

http://directory.allaboutadtips.com

http://www.webmasterclub.us

http://www.alexadirectory.com

http://www.blackdhalia.com

http://www.diralicious.com

http://www.directory-link.info

http://www.directoryws.com

http://www.directswift.com

http://www.dirworld.org

http://www.domaining.in

http://www.earth-directory.info

http://www.evenseek.com

http://www.flexengine.com

http://www.freeurldirectory.com

http://www.gdotz.com

http://www.getinsearchengines.com

http://www.goodprdirectory.com

http://www.gwdir.com

http://www.hi5.in

http://www.ilushkin.com

http://www.imomlinks.com

http://www.infiniteinfo.net

http://www.ipsarion.com

http://www.itlent.com

http://www.iwebdirectory.net

http://www.iwebinfo.com

http://www.kingoftheweb.net

http://www.klottra.com

http://www.lambslinks.com

http://www.like5.com

http://www.linkshoster.com

http://www.lostdirectory.com

http://www.mercury-directory.info

http://www.mydentify.com

http://www.mygreencorner.com

http://www.pblake.com

http://www.pernocto.net

http://www.playground3.com

http://www.prdir.net

http://www.qos-team.com
http://www.redapplelinks.com

http://www.seocourt.com

http://www.seoweblink.com

http://www.skaloosh.com

http://www.skypemedia.com

http://www.sloppylinks.com

http://www.smartdir.info

http://www.sun-directory.info

http://www.thalesdirectory.com

http://www.thevividedge.com

http://www.topsearchengineranking.us

http://www.uanix.com

http://www.urlshack.com

http://www.viesearch.com

http://www.webdirectory-submit.com

http://www.weborizon.info

http://www.websitehandyman.net

http://www.xland.info

http://www.yvir.com

http://www.zoizo.com

http://474.sytes.net

http://linknom.com

http://taterlinks.com

http://www.000harrydir.info

http://www.1abc.org

http://www.1stchoicesearch.com

http://www.26portal.com

http://www.2addlink.info

http://www.5lbs.com

http://www.71k.net

http://www.a2adir.info

http://www.a2zdir.org

http://www.aaadir.info

http://www.abigdir.com

http://www.add2dir.info

http://www.agiledirectory.info

http://www.alldirectlinks.com

http://www.allthelinks.net

http://www.amwart.com

http://www.asklistings.com

http://www.best-net-sites.com

http://www.bestfreedirectory.net

http://www.bizyads.com

http://www.blackdir.info

http://www.blin.biz

http://www.blognblogs.com

http://www.choiceww.com

http://www.coolestdirectory.info

http://www.costumwebsite.com

http://www.crawlr.net

http://www.dallasdirectory.biz

http://www.directoryjp.com

http://www.dirsubmission.net

http://www.doublemasti.com

http://www.dpbtin.com

http://www.duanegartman.com

http://www.dynn.org

http://www.ewebdirectory.info

http://www.ewebindex.com

http://www.firebrand.info

http://www.getprbacklinks.com

http://www.gimiktayo.com

http://www.goobz.biz

http://www.greatdir.info

http://www.gulqro.com

http://www.imdirectory.net

http://www.internetweblist.info

http://www.inwebdirectory.com
http://www.jello.no

http://www.k1t.org

http://www.koranto.com

http://www.lazymandirectory.info

http://www.link69.org

http://www.linkaddurl.com

http://www.livedir.info

http://www.londovor.com

http://www.maddir.com

http://www.matrixsolutnz.net

http://www.miriblack.com

http://www.mybillionlinks.com

http://www.n1directory.com

http://www.nelspruit.com

http://www.netcandy.info

http://www.nonar.com

http://www.nuclearland.com

http://www.oriency.com

http://www.ourlifexp.com

http://www.placeyourlinks.com

http://www.pr3plus.com

http://www.properdirectory.com

http://www.r-fd.com

http://www.redwebdirectory.info

http://www.samsdirectory.com

http://www.searchenginepro.us

http://www.seowebindex.com

http://www.sitelinked.com

http://www.sitesurfdirectory.com

http://www.skydir.net

http://www.smartwebdirectory.info

http://www.subko.com

http://www.submit-url.org

http://www.submitlink.info

http://www.submitweblinks.com

http://www.tfwd.org

http://www.theshoppings.com

http://www.topwebdirectory.info

http://www.triplewdirectory.com

http://www.twmd.net

http://www.urlmoz.com

http://www.urlvenue.com

http://www.w3look.com

http://www.webdirectoryworld.com

http://www.websitejoint.com

http://www.wideon.net

http://www.worldofdot.info

http://www.wowdirectory.info

http://www.x-travaganza.net

http://www.xpseo.com

http://www.zoomdir.com

http://sanory.com

http://url-submission.org

http://www.0mg.us

http://www.1morelink.com

http://www.999viva.com

http://www.addyourlinkfree.com

http://www.businessdir.net

http://www.ccislinks.com

http://www.cheapdirectory.net

http://www.choicedir.com

http://www.circlezoom.com

http://www.crazylinks.org

http://www.delightsquare.com

http://www.dir4u.info

http://dironline.info

http://www.dotsterdirectory.com

http://www.ewebdir.com

http://www.find-a-site.com

http://www.findsome.info

http://www.firstdir.info

http://www.fobe.info

http://www.freelistingdirectory.info

http://www.general-website-directory.com

http://www.directory-global.com

http://www.premiumsites.org

http://www.weburls.info

http://www.worthful.info
http://www.za7.org

http://www.zyberroom.com

http://www.backlinksforyou.com

http://urlbacklinks.com

http://www.bouncedirectory.com

http://www.businessgujarat.com

http://www.crexweb.com

http://www.chillycool.com

http://www.combinari.com

http://www.directorystation.org

http://www.directoryworm.com

http://www.diryou.com

http://www.doubledirectory.com

http://www.easyrankdirectory.com

http://www.findallinone.com

http://www.thetopsites.net

http://www.hotlinksdirectory.com

http://www.sitetutor.us

http://www.xtlinks.com

http://www.webodirectory.com

http://www.inter-directory.info

http://www.speedydirectory.com

http://www.seekpick.com

http://www.searchworth.com

http://www.1linkdirectory.com

http://www.busybits.com

http://www.seotester.info

http://www.seofriendlydirectory.info

http://www.seodirectoryworld.com

http://www.seobacklinkdirectory.com

http://www.sadhweb.com

http://www.rapok.com

http://www.mylinkhub.com

http://www.myhugedirectory.com

http://www.maddirectory.com

http://www.linkupdirectory.com

http://www.linktoyour.com

http://www.linksdirec.com

http://www.linkmybusiness.com

http://www.linkbasement.com

http://www.knm1.com

http://www.highdirectory.com

http://www.gigalinks.org

http://www.friendly-links.com

http://www.weblinkdir.info

http://www.weblinkindex.com

http://www.w3directory.org

http://www.urlweblist.com

http://www.toprss.net

http://www.thewebregister.org

http://www.submit2dir.info

http://www.somedirectory.com

http://www.worthful.info

http://www.za7.org

http://www.zyberroom.com

http://www.backlinksforyou.com

http://www.bestwwws.com

http://www.visitlodz.com

http://www.eastdirectory.net

http://www.ebusinessdirectory.biz

http://www.webmasterdirectory.net

http://www.webmastercatalog.com

http://www.bigwebmaster.com

http://www.webmasterstreet.com

http://www.senaia.com

http://www.irkawebdesign.com

http://www.voisd.com
http://www.inslink.com

http://www.geldirectory.com

http://www.gwebcity.com

http://www.linkedout.info

http://www.linkspremium.com

http://www.nori.us

http://www.openlinkdirectory.com

http://www.reddir.info

http://www.seket.com

http://www.sitesindex.info

http://www.svxr.com

http://www.techdir.net

http://www.txn.ca

http://www.vipdirectory.biz

http://www.virtuedirectory.com

http://www.webalfa.com

http://www.zbay.info

http://www.zoomdirectory.info

http://ninjadirectory.com

http://www.abotdirectory.com

http://www.addsite-submitfree.com

http://www.apltcanton.com

http://www.arsmose.com

http://www.belistednow.com

http://www.bestdirectorysites.com

http://www.bghkg.com

http://www.bhdirectory.info

http://www.directorylair.com

http://www.diryou.com

http://www.premiumsites.org

http://www.nodp.info

http://www.linkwebdir.info

http://www.linkpedia.net

http://www.linkonup.com

http://www.ewebdirectory.info

http://www.easydownloadcenter.com

http://www.getprbacklinks.com

http://www.gulqro.com

http://www.homedecorgiftshop.com

http://www.stopat.com

http://www.google.com

http://www.scrubtheweb.com

http://www.addyoururl.org

http://www.gotlink.info

http://www.bestbusinessdirectory.com

http://www.softzdirectory.com

http://www.suaffiliates.net

http://www.kingbloom.com

http://www.sitetutor.us

http://www.gdirectory.info

http://www.secrethole.net

http://www.itzalist.com

http://www.flexengine.com

http://www.searchwiz.org

http://www.iconcave.com

http://www.cantufind.com

http://blogtrap.com

http://www.albinotreefrog.net

http://www.seoboom.com

http://www.webmixture.com

http://www.1stsearchdirectory.com

http://www.webmasters.am

http://www.helpinweb.com

http://www.n1q.net

http://www.webfav.net

http://www.inversoweb.com

http://www.cashflobusiness.com

http://www.circlo.com

http://www.mixnmingles.com

http://www.pakdir.net

http://www.wannaberichtoo.com

http://www.dir.seo7.net

http://www.addsite-submitfree.com
http://asabove.com

http://www.dironline.info

http://www.123listfree.com

http://www.piggymoo.com

http://www.freewd.org

http://www.stpt.org

http://directory.webtechvision.com

http://www.perfectdir.info

http://directory.seo-supreme.com

http://www.jamjaa.com

http://www.reloadlinks.co.uk

http://zimple.info

http://josh.nu

http://pr8.wsouk.com

http://ignite.frih.net

http://www.directoryjp.com

http://www.linkarchive.org

http://www.ehuman.org

http://www.circlezoom.com

http://www.visitalink.com

http://www.placeyourlinks.com

http://www.mobiledevs.net

http://www.fobe.info

http://www.goldlinks.org

http://www.goodlinks.org

http://www.thewebregister.org

http://www.bratseek.com

http://www.gadoozie.com

http://www.vivadirectory.com

http://www.gimiktayo.com

http://www.firebrand.info

http://www.pickedlinks.com

http://keepscrolling.com

http://www.ewebindex.com

http://www.extremedirectory.net

http://www.kinds.biz

http://999pro.com

http://www.urlhyperlinks.com

http://www.vipdirectory.com

http://www.friendlyweb.info

http://www.urlwebdirectory.com

http://www.linkpark.org

http://www.links-factory.com

http://ninjadirectory.com

http://www.seekzap.com

http://www.freecomplex.com

http://www.lazymule.info

http://www.linkspub.com

http://www.d911.net

http//www.getinsearchengines.com

http://www.xland.info

http://www.clickmybrick.com

http://www.infiniteinfo.net

http://www.bloglisting.net

http://www.addnewlink.net

http://www.viesearch.com

http://www.droolingmonkey.com

http://www.links4rank.com

http://www.netkushi.com

http://www.alistdirectory.com

http://directory.on-net.info

http://www.sun-directory.info

http://www.a1dir.com

http://www.domaining.in

http://www.webdirectory4all.com

http://www.poozl.com

http://www.allthelist.com

http://www.majesticdirectory.com

http://www.himalyan.net

http://www.beedirectory.com

http://dir.profseo.com

http://www.sitereviewer.net

http://www.links-to-us.com

http://www.onemilliondirectory.com

http://www.digitaldir.eu

http://www.zoizo.com

http://www.itlent.com

http://www.itlent.com

http://www.iwebinfo.com

http://www.seodirectorys.com

http://www.directoryws.com

http://www.submitzoo.com

http://www.26portal.com

Today I want to debunk the top SEO myths you have probably read about and most likely followed because you were listening to a Guru who told you that if you don’t follow what they say you will get penalized by Google.

Understand though that, while I have ethics and have no issue admitting that I am not a self proclaimed guru, the same cannot be said for a large majority of the gurus that you will likely come across while you do your research. The internet, and blogging in particular has one very unfortunate and serious side affect. It provides the opportunity for anyone to proclaim themselves as a guru. I never take anyone’s word for gospel and I suggest you take the same approach. Certainly listen and consider the information they are giving but think logically about it and see if it makes sense. Then take action and run tests to see if the theory actually holds water.

SEO Myth #1 – Backlinks must come from related sites

This is the biggest myth out there. Most of the so called gurus will tell you that when you are building backlinks to make certain that you are getting your backlinks only from sites that are within your niche.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Logic alone can tell you that this is simply not the case. However further analysis proves that the theory is bogus.

Consider the ‘Drudge Report’ for a moment. The site was put on the map when he broke that infamous story of a US President who was having indiscretions with an intern. Literally thousands upon thousands of sites link back to that story and a large proportion was outside of his niche.

And what was the affect? Was he penalized? Absolutely not. In fact the opposite was true. The site, in Google’s perspective, quickly became the ubiquitous authority site, simply due to the number of high ranking authority sites that were linking back to him.

It will certainly help your SEO efforts if you have backlinks from related sites, but if you are not linking to other authority sites simply because they are not in your niche then you are missing out on a lot of traffic that you might otherwise be attracting.

SEO Myth #2 – Don’t Build More Than 10 Backlinks Per Day

Many of the Gurus will tell you that if you build more than 10 to 30 backlinks per day then you will get penalized for it as being a spammer. This is simply another myth and we can use the same ‘Drudge Report’ example here.

Once the news broke, and the internet soaked it up within hours, literally thousands upon thousand of sites were linking back to that story. Was there any way possible to control that? Absolutely not! And Google takes this into account.

Now obviously there are spammers who are using automated tools to build backlinks. Google can easily tell the difference between spammers and genuine breaking news that is popular. Imagine if I knew something about Madoff that could prove his innocence. Within minutes there would be hundreds of thousands of sites linking back here. This is natural link building and it is expected by Google.

What is not natural is if all of a sudden Google notices that you have hundreds of thousands of links pointing back to the same page, using the same keywords and anchor text all occurring within the same niche. Doing something like that will almost certainly get you penalized and possibly removed.

Remember the golden rule to successful blogging and getting higher in SERP is good, original content. When you produce that content, particularly if you are using link baiting techniques then you would naturally get thousands of sites linking back to you and that is the desired result both of yourself and of Google.

SEO Myth #3 – I Must Have a High Page Rank

This one is a little more involved because page rank does matter in some circumstances. Particularly if you look at a lot of the directory sites, they in fact demand that you have a page rank of 3 or more. This is simply a fallacy.

Firstly a new site will usually take up to 3 months before it even has a rank. It may have thousands of pages of content but Google does certain things to avoid listing and ranking spam sites that you could wait that long just to get PR let alone get a good PR.

Secondly, that little PR meter in the Google toolbar cannot be relied upon for accuracy. That meter uses delayed and cached data that can be up to 2 weeks behind. So you might visit a site that shows PR8 on the toolbar but in actual fact on it could be higher or lower because of the delay and caching.

PR is important to an extent. It gives an indication of how and where you will appear in SERP. Certainly do take measures to improve your PR but relying on it as the be all and end all is a huge mistake and you could be leaving money and visitors on the table for someone else and you don’t want to be doing that.

There are number of other SEO myths that I will write in about in follow up articles but if you want to begin increasing your SERP and PR begin by following these methods along with your existing SEO strategies and you will quickly see improvement.

If you can prove me wrong on any of these theories then I’d love to hear from you. Please leave your comments with your actual findings. Rember though that testing combined with conclusive results is the only way to prove me wrong not just opinions or rants.

From an SEO standpoint, one of the worst possible things that you can do is allow duplicate content, because if Google in particular recognizes duplicate content on your blog, all your other SEO efforts immediately go to waste.

Duplicate content on another domain is something you definitely want to avoid. There is some debate about the algorithms that Google uses to check for duplicate content. It would appear however that Google, and most other search engines now determine who published the content originally and give rank to the original copy.

Duplicate content on your own site though is a completely different situation and will have heavy consequences to your overall SEO efforts. So you need to plan in advance and take appropriate measures to ensure that search engines only index one instance of every page on your site.

2 Simple Methods To Avoid Duplicate Content

There are 2 very simple methods you can and should use right now to avoid the duplicate content issue on your blog. Setting a custom permalink structure, and using a robots file.

What is a permalink?

A permalink is simply the name given to the url structure used by your blog. By default when you first install WordPress the permalink structure is pretty awful. From an SEO perspective its in fact pretty  useless and counterproductive.

The default permalink structure will dynamically assign a unique ID to each of your posts. For instance: http://incomesinternational.com/?p=123

So as you can see this is not very helpful to the search engines or to people searching for your content. There are some basic default option settings that you can use but this doesn’t help much in the way of eliminating the duplicate content.

The main problem is that when the spider crawls your site it can access the same page from various entry points. That could be any one of archives, category, tag, or even author. That means that when you include the original article, the spiders can in fact index 5 copies of the exact same page.

If you want to make sure that only one instance of each page is indexed, simply set your permalinks to only use your domain name and the post name.

To do this go to the settings menu in your WordPress admin area and select the Permalink option. Select the ‘Custom’ setting and insert  /%postname%/ in the text box. The resulting url now looks like: http://incomesinternational.com/get-this-fantastic-book-for-free/ . So you can see here that there are massive implications to making this simple change.

There are several advantages to this method over other methods of custom permalink structures. The main advantage is that no matter how the spider crawls your site it will only ever resolve to the same url for each page. It doesn’t matter if the spider comes in via your archives, tags, categories or authors because every time the page is indexed it will always be at the same location from the spiders perspective.

The robots.txt File

If your not familiar with what this is or how it works let me explain quickly. A robots.txt file is a simple text file that tells the search engine spiders which urls it can and can’t follow and index. An example of a robots.txt for a WordPress blog is:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes

What this does is simply tell the robot not to crawl any of these file or directory paths. You should always be certain to include the cache. In fact the example above should be the very minimum you use for your WordPress blog. This will not only tell the spiders what not to crawl but will also help in giving more page rank equity to you important pages but thats another topic so I won’t go too deep into that here.

So you might decide that you want to use a permalink structure of /%category%/%postname%/. In that case you would adjust your robots.txt file to accomodate this to ensure that the spiders always crawl the same path to any given page.

It’s always a great idea to review your site and see what the spiders see on a regular basis to ensure that you don’t get penalized for duplicate content. Doing this can mean the difference between showig up on the first page of a Google search or on page 47. I know where I’d rather be.

Also take a look at the Conanical URL plugin. This is a very simple way to help in the fight against duplicate content issues.

I recommend this watching this clear and informative explanation by Matt Cutts of Google.

[pro-player]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM[/pro-player]