Bing Introduced Bing Editors’ Picks: A Guide to Great Sites

Looking for travel tips or great food blogs? Or, maybe you need to know the best place to get advice on party planning.
We all start with search to find answers to these questions, but with so many websites out there, knowing which ones are worth your time can be challenging.
Now if you dont feel like going through all looking for a quality website. Bing has launched Bing Editors’ Picks. Editors’ Picks were designed to enhance Bing results by bringing editorially selected sites to your search experience. Bing team stated " Our goal, whether delivered by algorithm or by editors, is to help you find what you’re looking for faster and to get stuff done."

I personally like to going through the websites list and looking who put the effort into content to be on top  of the page.  I also wonder if Bing will accept money from companies to have their website in editors pick.  I feel like it could be useful for an a beginner to average user that doesn't want to go through many pages or has hard time choosing, trusting websites and rather have someone else pick for them. Editors’ Picks are small collections of relevant sites that our online editorial experts think will be useful to you, but may not always make it to the top of the search results page.

How Bing editors choose sites
For example, when you’re looking for something really specific — like “How to use a semicolon” or “Free clip art”— Now Bing will provide a list of editorially selected sites on that specific topic (in addition to our algorithmic results) to help you find what you’re looking for faster.
Bing teams says" We see lots of interest in seasonal topics, like Thanksgiving recipes and crafts, so we’ve put together a collection of sites dedicated to that topic".

How to find Editors’ Picks
Simply start a search as you normally would anywhere on Bing. If Editors’ Picks are available for your search terms, you may see an Editors’ Picks tab appear in the top rail or an instant answer (shown below) in the search results. Clicking on the tab or answer will bring you to a page that includes all the sites we’ve selected for that topic (as seen in the previous image). Visit Bing.com/editors-picks to find the full list of topics and browse for other interesting content.

Search Engine Rankings& Personalization Of The Search Results.

Years ago, everyone saw exactly the same search results. Today, no one sees exactly the same search results, not on Google, not on Bing. Everyone’s getting a personalized experience.
Of course, there’s still a lot commonality that’s shared. It’s not that everyone sees completely different listings. Instead, everyone sees many of the same “generic” listings. But there will also be some listings appearing because of where someone is, who they know or how they surf the web.

 What Country?

One of the easiest personalization ranking factors to understand is that people are shown results relevant to the country they’re in.
Someone in the US searching for “football” will get results about American football; someone in the UK will get results about the type of football that Americans would call soccer.
If your site isn’t deemed relevant to a particular country, then you’ve got no change of showing up when country personalization happens. If you feel you should be relevant, then you’ll probably have to work on your international SEO. The articles below offer some tips on this:
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What City Or Locality?

Search engines don’t stop personalizing at the country level. They’ll tailor results to match the city or metropolitan area that someone is in.
As with country personalization, the same holds true. If you want to appear when someone gets city-specific results, you need to ensure your site is relevant to that city.

Beyond that, there are dedicated local search engines that people specifically use when they “overtly” want local results (rather than the search engine guessing they may want these, even if they issue a query that might not seem local in nature).
Those interested in this should check out the Local Search Ranking Factors survey that’s done on a regular basis.

 Personal History

What has someone been searching on and choosing from their search results? What sites do they regularly visit? Have they “Liked” a site using Facebook, shared it via Twitter or perhaps Google +1′d it?
This type of personal history is used by both Google and Bing to help determine influence what will show up for someone. Unlike with country or city personalization, there’s no easy (or easier) way to try and make yourself relevant to them.
Instead, it’s largely a case of first impressions count. If you’ve been in front of them at some point through “regular” search rankings, you want to ensure you’re presented a great experience so they’ll come again, reinforcing your site as one that they should be shown more frequently. Even better, perhaps they’ll favor you with a Like or a +1.

 Personal Social Connections

What do someone’s friends think about a web site? This is one of the newest ranking factors to be impacting search results. Someone’s social connections can influence what they see on Google and Bing.
Here, you have both a case of first impressions counting plus the need to ensure you’re participating in social networks. If someone can follow you, or easily share your content, that helps get your site into their circle of trust and increases the odds that others they know will find you.

Checklist Of The Factors That Affect Your Rankings With Search Engines

1	Keywords in <title> tag	This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the <title> tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning.	+3
2	Keywords in URL	Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. - http://seattle-localseo.net, where “SEO services” is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts of the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.	+3
3	Keyword density in document text	Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.	+3
4	Keywords in anchor text	Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.	+3
5	Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)	One more place where keywords count a lot. But beware that your page has actual text about the particular keyword.	+3
6	Keywords in the beginning of a document	Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.	+2
7	Keywords in <alt> tags	Spiders don't read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.	+2
8	Keywords in metatags	Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and Bing still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.	+1
9	Keyword proximity	Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. “dog food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “dog” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “dog food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.	+1
10	Keyword phrases	In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. “SEO services”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“SEO” and “services”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.	+1
11	Secondary keywords	Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “real estate new jersey” might have thousand times less hits than “real estate” only but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably better targeted traffic.	+1
12	Keyword stemming	For English this is not so much of a factor because words that stem from the same root (e.g. dog, dogs, doggy, etc.) are considered related and if you have “dog” on your page, you will get hits for “dogs” and “doggy” as well, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them.	+1
13	Synonyms	Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well, when ranking sites but for many other languages synonyms are not taken into account, when calculating rankings and relevancy.	+1
14	Keyword Mistypes	Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings (i.e. Christmas and Xmas), you might be tempted to optimize for them. Yes, this might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better don't do it, or do it only in the metatags.	0
15	Keyword dilution	When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.	-2
16	Keyword stuffing	Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.	-3
	Links - internal, inbound, outbound
17	Anchor text of inbound links	As discussed in the Keywords section, this is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text but even if you don't, it is still OK.	+3
18	Origin of inbound links	Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.	+3
19	Links from similar sites	Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.	+3
20	Links from .edu and .gov sites	These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain.	+3
21	Number of backlinks	Generally the more, the better. But the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. Also important is their anchor text, is there a keyword in it, how old are they, etc.	+3
22	Anchor text of internal links	This also matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links.	+2
23	Around-the-anchor text	The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates the relevance of the link – i.e. if the link is artificial or it naturally flows in the text.	+2
24	Age of inbound links	The older, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.	+2
25	Links from directories	Great, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar directories is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links.	+2
26	Number of outgoing links on the page that links to you	The fewer, the better for you because this way your link looks more important.	+1
27	Named anchors	Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors look like this: <A href= “#dogs”>Read about dogs</A> and “#dogs” is the named anchor.	+1
28	IP address of inbound link	Google denies that they discriminate against links that come from the same IP address or C class of addresses, so for Google the IP address can be considered neutral to the weight of inbound links. However, Bing and Yahoo! may discard links from the same IPs or IP classes, so it is always better to get links from different IPs.	+1
29	Inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites	This does not affect you in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don't get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault but in any case you'd better stay away from link farms and similar suspicious sites.	0
30	Many outgoing links	Google does not like pages that consists mainly of links, so you'd better keep them under 100 per page. Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse.	-1
31	Excessive linking, link spamming	It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. In the best case only some of the links are taken into account for SEO rankings.	-1
32	Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites	Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and vice versa.	-3
33	Cross-linking	Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.	-3
34	Single pixel links	when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.	-3
	Metatags
35	<Description> metatag	Metatags are becoming less and less important but if there are metatags that still matter, these are the <description> and <keywords> ones. Use the <Description> metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still rock on Bing and Yahoo!, the <Description> metatag has one more advantage – it sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results.	+1
36	<Keywords> metatag	The <Keywords> metatag also matters, though as all metatags it gets almost no attention from Google and some attention from Bing and Yahoo! Keep the metatag reasonably long – 10 to 20 keywords at most. Don't stuff the <Keywords> tag with keywords that you don't have on the page, this is bad for your rankings.	+1
37	<Language> metatag	If your site is language-specific, don't leave this tag empty. Search engines have more sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page than relying on the <language>metatag but they still consider it.	+1
38	<Refresh> metatag	The <Refresh> metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. Only do it if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for a long time, the <refresh> metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. In any case, redirecting through 301 is much better.	-1
	Content
39	Unique content	Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site's rankings.	+3
40	Frequency of content change	Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content.	+3
41	Keywords font size	When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable, so therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text.	+2
42	Keywords formatting	Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect.	+2
43	Age of document	Recent documents (or at least regularly updated ones) are favored.	+2
44	File size	Generally long pages are not favored, or at least you can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic, so split long pages into multiple smaller ones.	+1
45	Content separation	From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content, search engines get confused what the actual content of the page is.	-2
46	Poor coding and design	Search engines say that they do not want poorly designed and coded sites, though there are hardly sites that are banned because of messy code or ugly images but when the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all, so in this sense poor code and design can harm you a lot.	-2
47	Illegal Content	Using other people's copyrighted content without their permission or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines.	-3
48	Invisible text	This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.	-3
49	Cloaking	Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.	-3
50	Doorway pages	Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.	-3
51	Duplicate content	When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned – i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper.	-3
	Visual Extras and SEO
52	JavaScript	If used wisely, it will not hurt. But if your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes it more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a mess and spiders can't follow it, this will definitely hurt your ratings.	0
53	Images in text	Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is a SEO sin. Always provide in the <alt> tag a meaningful description of an image but don't stuff it with keywords or irrelevant information.	0
54	Podcasts and videos	Podcasts and videos are becoming more and more popular but as with all non-textual goodies, search engines can't read them, so if you don't have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines.	0
55	Images instead of text links	Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you don't fill in the <alt> tag. But even if you fill in the <alt> tag, it is not the same as having a bold, underlined, 16-pt. link, so use images for navigation only if this is really vital for the graphic layout of your site.	-1
56	Frames	Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.	-2
57	Flash	Spiders don't index the content of Flash movies, so if you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description.	-2
58	A Flash home page	Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide.	-3
	Domains, URLs, Web Mastery
59	Keyword-rich URLs and filenames	A very important factor, especially for Yahoo! and Bing.	+3
60	Site Accessibility	Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can't be indexed.	+3
61	Sitemap	It is great to have a complete and up-to-date sitemap, spiders love it, no matter if it is a plain old HTML sitemap or the special Google sitemap format.	+2
62	Site size	Spiders love large sites, so generally it is the bigger, the better. However, big sites become user-unfriendly and difficult to navigate, so sometimes it makes sense to separate a big site into a couple of smaller ones. On the other hand, there are hardly sites that are penalized because they are 10,000+ pages, so don't split your size in pieces only because it is getting larger and larger.	+2
63	Site age	Similarly to wine, older sites are respected more. The idea is that an old, established site is more trustworthy (they have been around and are here to stay) than a new site that has just poped up and might soon disappear.	+2
64	Site theme	It is not only keywords in URLs and on page that matter. The site theme is even more important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme.	+2
65	File Location on Site	File location is important and files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below.	+1
66	Domains versus subdomains, separate domains	Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com, register a separate blablabla.com domain.	+1
67	Top-level domains (TLDs)	Not all TLDs are equal. There are TLDs that are better than others. For instance, the most popular TLD – .com – is much better than .ws, .biz, or .info domains but (all equal) nothing beats an old .edu or .org domain.	+1
68	Hyphens in URLs	Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. This applies both to hyphens in domain names and in the rest of the URL.	+1
69	URL length	Generally doesn't matter but if it is a very long URL-s, this starts to look spammy, so avoid having more than 10 words in the URL (3 or 4 for the domain name itself and 6 or 7 for the rest of address is acceptable).	0
70	IP address	Could matter only for shared hosting or when a site is hosted with a free hosting provider, when the IP or the whole C-class of IP addresses is blacklisted due to spamming or other illegal practices.	0
71	Adsense will boost your ranking	Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your search rankings.	0
72	Adwords will boost your ranking	Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way.	0
73	Hosting downtime	Hosting downtime is directly related to accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it can't be indexed. But in practice this is a factor only if your hosting provider is really unreliable and has less than 97-98% uptime.	-1
74	Dynamic URLs	Spiders prefer static URLs, though you will see many dynamic pages on top positions. Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are really bad and in any case you'd better use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in something more human- and SEO-friendly.	-1
75	Session IDs	This is even worse than dynamic URLs. Don't use session IDs for information that you'd like to be indexed by spiders.	-2
76	Bans in robots.txt	If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site.	-2
77	Redirects (301 and 302)	When not applied properly, redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page.	-3

Get More SEO Value From Your Social Profiles

Social media and SEO go hand-in-hand when it comes to building your online brand. The two disciplines are intertwined more than ever and the most successful websites are the ones who have managed to leverage social media for SEO and vice versa. No longer existing in separate silos, the lines between social media marketing and SEO are slowly disappearing.
In order to give your brand the best chance at succeeding in the online world, here are 3 ways you can derive SEO value from your time spent on social networking sites:
Link between profiles
Think of social media marketing like the wheel of a bicycle. Each social profile is one of the spokes and your website is the central hub linking them all together.
You never want the visitor’s journey to end at any given social profile. By interlinking your social profiles with each other, as well as with your website, you are encouraging visitors to extend their interaction  with your company and your brand. The longer you can keep them engaged the better chance you have of getting them to convert.
Linking between profiles also gives you the chance to connect with your target audience on more than one platform, increasing the amount of touch points your brand has in their online lives. For instance, if someone connects with you on LinkedIn, why not send them a message inviting them to follow you on Twitter and to Like your Facebook page? You don’t know which one of these social profiles plays the most important role in their online social lives, so by  creating a loop between all of your social profiles you are helping ensure your message gets heard at least once.
Keep in mind that the end goal of social media marketing should be getting your social connections over to your site, not driving traffic from your site towards your social profiles. Don’t dedicate prominent real estate on your website to giant “Connect with us on Facebook!” buttons. Your site should focus on converting your visitors, not turning them into fans/friends/followers. Keep the “connect with us” buttons on your site, but don’t let them overshadow the other goals of your site.
Promote your content
Content marketing forms the backbone of your SEO and drives most of your online marketing tactics in general. But creating great content is only half of the battle. It doesn’t matter how unique, informative, inspiring or useful your content is if no one sees it. That’s where social networks become incredibly valuable from a marketing perspective. Social media marketing thrives on fresh content and gives your social connections a reason to interact with your social profiles. It keeps your brand top-of-mind and present in their online social lives.
Every time you (or one of your connections/readers) share a piece of your content on a social network that creates a valuable inbound link for your site. Not just ways to drive traffic, these social signals are being used by the search engines to determine the importance of your content. The more times a piece of content is shared across various social networking sites the more valuable it becomes and the better it will rank in the long run.
You don’t have to publish the whole blog post to your Facebook wall either. A small snippet and image is enough to attract the attention of your network. It’s a teaser to get them interested and give them a reason to head over to your actual blog/site to read your content.
Customize and optimize profiles
Social profiles can rank in the search engines like any other webpage. Make sure you take full advantage of this opportunity and properly optimize your profiles like you would your site. For instance, Facebook allows users to create custom URLs for their pages; this is a great place to target your most relevant keywords. You should also focus on targeting relevant keywords in your biography or info sessions.
Not every profile will allow you to post the same amount of information, so it’s important to ensure consistency across your profiles. Before you start getting really heavily involved in your social media marketing, write a few company biographies of varying length that all focus on the same core message. You want to present a unified brand across all of your social profiles so you don’t accidentally confuse your audience.

Secure Search Service from Google

ON the the 18th Google announced a new feature they are rolling out. 

Anyone following search engine news would be perfectly normal to feel a bit of déjà vu since Google’s had secure search options way back in early 2010. The latest announcement that is stirring up responses is the fact that they are now dropping header info that would normally be passed along to the destination site which could then be tracked and analyzed for SEO purposes.
Google has plenty of good reasons to make this move and only a few reasons against it. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pros/cons:

• Most searchers are not logged in and won’t be effected
• Estimates fall between %3-%7 of current search traffic is logged in
• Tracking the “not provided” searches in Google Analytics will show the missing traffic
• Mobile users connecting from public WiFi networks can search securely
• Users of free internet services will have additional privacy
• HTTPS Everywhere is crucial and backed by Google
• Webmaster Central still provides search terms to registered owners

Cons:

• Mobile searchers tend to be logged in
• Traffic projections for mobile search are growing
• Google has to make the data accessible to it’s paid users
• SSL is now becoming a much larger ranking factor

Amy Chang over on the Google Analytics blog had the following point to make:

“When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site..”
“Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”

Thom Craver, Web and Database specialist for the Saunders College at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was quoted on Search Engine Watch as noting:

“Analytics can already run over https if you tell it to in the JavaScript Code … There’s no reason why Google couldn’t make this work, if the site owners cooperated by offering their entire site via HTTPS.”

Personally, as you can tell from my lead-in, I feel like this is much ado about nothing. Unless competing search engines are willing to risk user privacy/safety to cater to SEOs in a short term bid for popularity, this isn’t going to be repealed. I don’t like to see the trend of money = access, but in this case I don’t see much choice and I’ll stand behind Google’s move for now.

How to spot a bad SEO client

How to spot a bad SEO client

Any business is a good business or as long as  you get paid those are some rules that we have when it comes to clients  specially if you’re a freelance SEO specialist or a newly started company. However not every client can be profitable for you. In some cases it is better for bussines to walk away from a client in order to make more money latter on.  A bad client will try to get free work out of you, have you agrovated, and waste your time.  In the end you will end up spending more of your time trying to get information from them, waiting to respond to your emails and ect. I have came up with a list of warning signs you can look in your client that can tell you that it maybe batter to move on even if the money are good.

·      Ask for you to do a keyword reashearch for free

·      Ask you to do a keyword reashearch but then insist on the keywords that they think will represend their business batter.

·      Un willing to listen to your advice.

·      If you have to go trough a middle man.

·      Ask if they have a webdeveloper, wedesigner how will you communicate with them and have a meeting with them to see how SEO friendly they are.  If the webdevoper knows how to write a clean code and if they worked with SEO before and if webdesinger is a SEO friendly.  If not then you be frusturated trying to convince them to change something but they be relactunt either from luck of knowledge or not wanting to compromise their design.

·      If the designer of the website is related to the owner or whoever is going to make decisions. If that person and the designer are family all your suggestions will feel like attacks to them. They might feel that they will have to protect the honor family and will be unwilling implimanting change.

·       If they ask your advice and then argue with you about every detail.

·      If they treaten you that they leave you cause there are many software options and other places that offer lower rate.

·      If the clinet don’t respect you, your time.

·      If they want you do something that  goes against yoru beliefs or something shady or illegal

·      If they realy on SEO/online marketing to bring all their leads.

·       

In conclusion meet with the client multiple times and see if you guys click on or not present them with your plan of actions. Ask them as much questions is possible about what they expect from you and how involved they are planing to be in the  compain. In the end its your decision does the client fit in with your goals and where you see your bussines going. Is he going to take up to much of your time.

Link Building Strategies That Are Proven To Work

Hello everyone in SEO field  we all have our own ways of doing link building. Here are some tips how to save some time and make sure that your links are quality stuff.

Ranker.com

Ranker.com is a content hub where you create a list and rank all the items on it. It's not exactly like Suite101 or Associated Content because all that is expected of you is a title, opening paragraph, and a list of items, give or take a description of each. So, what's the difference in terms of link building? Time. It could take you 15-20 minutes to create a quality post on this site whereas it would take you upwards of 45 minutes on the two examples previously mentioned. You not only get a quality anchor text link at the top of the page right under the title, but you also start building authority in your niche. In reality, it's a win-win.

Empirical Article Linking

Essentially, this technique is article marketing but with a twist. WHAT? I thought you said these were 'unorthodox' linking strategies? Yes, this is one, but hold on before you get skeptical. In a nutshell, this strategy involves interlinking all of your different submitted articles. For example, if I submit an article to The Free Library, instead of using all four backlinks to point back to my site, I might use one or two to point to other articles I've submitted, such as on Ezine Articles or GoArticles. What this does is increase the quality of your links on those sites. Here's the best way to do it - use your best keywords on Ezines & GoArticles, and try and build up 10 links to each article. You'll see some serious results if you do it right.

Dofollow Blog Commenting (the right way)

Skeptics - hold on before you start criticizing again. This tactic involves commenting on blogs that don't have a nofollow attribute on their comment links, so what you get in return for a comment is a quality link (not super high-quality, but it's better than most comment links). First, you need a list to start off (My blog has a list of solely SEO & Internet marketing dofollow blogs). Then once you find a couple high page ranked & high quality blogs, you need the SEO Quake add-on for Mozilla Firefox. Once downloaded, you will be able to sort your search results in Google by different metrics. For this strategy, you will be sorting results based on page rank.

So, here's what you do - type into Google "site:exampleblog.com" (replace 'exampleblog.com' with the blog you want to comment on). Then sort your results by Page Rank. I know it's not a flawless tool, so you will still have to go page by page to find high PR posts, but you get the idea. Now what you have in front of you is gold - a list of high page rank blog posts you can easily comment on & get in on some of that link juice. Obviously, go for the high page ranked posts first, and move your way down. REMEMBER: contribute to the conversation; no one wants just another "great post!" comment, and chances are it won't get approved.

.Edu Blog Commenting

Another form of blog commenting, but this time the strategy will net you a few .edu links. Yes, they will be nofollow links, but they will help build some trust. Here's how to find the blogs to comment on:

Type this into Google: inurl:.edu inurl:comments/feed

What this query will do is get a list of results that have Wordpress on a .edu domain. You will get around 2,000 results, so you'll first have to find which blogs are approving comments on a regular basis, and which ones are higher authority. Since the results you are finding are comment feeds, by clicking on the results and looking for the date of the last accepted comment, you can get a good feel for which ones are currently approving.

Using LinkChecker to Build High-quality Links

This is one of my top link building strategies in my arsenal. Let's just say I've netted a few PR 5 blogroll links over the past couple weeks. Here's how to do it - First download LinkChecker for Mozilla Firefox (another add-on?!). This tool will help you check pages for broken links by right clicking and choosing "Check Page Links". Next, you will have to find medium-sized industry-related blogs that have large blogrolls. The easiest way to do this is to just find one, and then check all the blogs in their blogroll, which leads to more, and so on. Now, I say medium sized for a couple reasons. The first is that large-sized blogs rarely have broken links and probably don't want to link to you for any reason, and the second is that smaller blogs are still good, but medium-sized blogs are obviously more valuable.

So here's what you'll be doing: Find these blogs, check their page links for broken links, and once you find a couple, you're in. Find a contact email, create an email titled "Broken Links" or "Broken Links on Blog", and say something like this:

Hi!

I was on your blog when I came across a few broken links that I thought you should check out. I know you've got a lot on your plate with the blog and all, so I listed them:

* Broken Link
* Broken Link
* Broken Link

Broken links are never a positive sign for a blog, so I hope this helps. Also, do you think you could replace one of the broken links with a link to my blog? It's myblog.com.

Cheers

*Your name*

Bam. Doing this ten times will usually get you 2-3 responses, and usually one or two say yes. Notice that the broken links are usually found in their blogroll (hence finding blogs with large blogrolls), so they're more willing to replace a bad link with a link to you if it's already external.

How to Pick an SEO Friendly Designer

A Web designer is one of the persons without whom it is not possible to create a site. However, when SEO is concerned, Web designers can be really painful to deal with. While there are many Web designers, who are SEO-proficient, it is still not an exception to stumble upon design geniuses, who are focused only on the graphic aspect of the site. For them SEO is none of their business and they couldn't care less for something as unimportant as good rankings with search engines. Needless to say, if you hire such a designer, don't expect that your site will rank well with search engines.

If you will do SEO on your own, then you might not care a lot about the SEO skills of your Web designer but still there are design issues as we'll see next, which can affect your rankings very badly. When he or she designs the site against SEO rules, then it is not possible to fix this with SEO tricks.

When we say that you need to hire a SEO-friendly designer, we presume that you are a SEO pro and you know SEO but if you aren't, then have a look at the SEO Tutorial and the SEO Checklist. If you have no idea about SEO, then you will hardly be able to select a SEO-friendly designer because you won't know what to look for.

One of the ultimate tests if a designer is SEO-friendly or not is to look at his or her past sites – are they done professionally, especially in the SEO department. If their past sites don't exhibit blatant SEO mistakes, such as the ones we'll list in a second and they rank well, this is a recommendation that this person is worth hiring. Anyway, after you look at past sites, ask the designer if he or she did the SEO for their past sites because in some cases it might be that the client himself or herself has done a lot to optimize the site and this is why the site ranks well.

Here is a checklist of common web design sins that will make your site a SEO disaster. If you notice any or all of the following in the past sites your would-be designer has created, just move to the next designer. These SEO-unfriendly design elements are absolute sins and unless the client made them do it, no designer who would use the below techniques deserves your attention:

1 Rely heavily on Flash

Many designers still believe that Flash is the next best thing after sliced bread. While Flash can be very artistic and make a site look cool (and load forever in the browser), heavily Flash-ed sites are disaster in terms of SEO. Simple HTML sites rank better with search engines and as we point out in Optimizing Flash Sites, if the use of Flash is a must, then an HTML version of the same page is more than mandatory.

2 No internal links, or very few links

Internal links are backlinks and they are very important. Of course, this doesn't mean that all the text on a page must be hyperlinked to all the other pages on the site but if there are only a couple of internal links a page, this is a missed chance to get backlinks.

3 Images, not text for anchors

This is another frequent mistake many designers make. Anchor text is vital in SEO and when your links lack anchor text, this is bad. It is true that for menu items and other page elements, it is much easier to use an image than text because with text you can never be sure it will display correctly on users' screens, but since this is impacting your site's rankings in a negative way, you should sacrifice beauty for functionality.

4 Messy code and tons of code

If you have no idea about HTML, then it might be impossible for you to judge if a site's code is messy and if the amount of code is excessive but cleanness of code is an important criterion for SEO. When the code is messy, it might not be spiderable at all and this can literally exclude your site from search engines because they won't be able to index it.

5 Excessive use of (SEO non-friendly) JavaScript

Similarly to Flash, search engines don't love JavaScript, especially tons of it. Actually, the worst with JavaScript is that if not coded properly, it is quite possible that because of the use of JavaScript your pages (or parts of them) are not spiderable, which automatically means that they won't be indexed.

6 Overoptimized sites

Overoptimized sites aren't better than under-optimized. In fact, they could be much worse because when you keyword stuff and use other techniques (even when they are not Black Hat SEO) to artificially inflate the rankings of the site, this could get you banned from search engines and this is the worst that can happen to a site.

7 Dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs

Well, maybe dynamic URLs is not exactly a design issue but if you are getting a turn-key site - i.e. it is not up to you to upload and configure it and to create the links inside - then dynamic URLs are bad and you have to ask the designer/developer not to use them. You can rewrite dynamic and other SEO non-friendly URLs on your own but actually this means to make dramatic changes to the site and this is hardly the point of hiring a designer.

These points are very important and this is why you need to follow them, when you are choosing a SEO-friendly designer. Some of the items on the list are so bad for SEO (i.e. Flash, JavaScript) that even if the site is a design masterpiece and you promote it heavily, you will still be unable to get decent rankings. SEO-friendliness of design is a necessity, not a whim and you shouldn't settle for a SEO-unfriendly designs – this can be really expensive!  

Five SEO Tips You Should Know.

Traditional search engines are the searchable results of automated programs that index the web using multiple “spiders” or “bots”. The web marketer should optimize for these bots by knowing how spiders read a page, index it, and rank it. Marketers should know how to read the SE results and glean optimization ideas from them for basic SEO techniques. Spiders need a path to follow in order to find pages. This is why inbound linking is so crucial to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines, that “sniff out” a site from multiple quality links, will rank that site higher in link relevancy.

Stress link quality not link quantity.

Search engine optimizing no longer means maximizing. In the past, web marketers would create mirror sites on similarly-named domains that all pointed to a system of ad pages. Web marketers would also create a formidable volume of interlinked “doorway pages”, the theory being that this improved their chances of being spidered by the big search engines.

Doorways and mirror sites are no longer in the wise SEO arsenal of basic SEO techniques. Multiple sites with low relevancy linking to a site may give a site a temporary boost, but for long-term results, quality links are necessary for the website to be well-ranked. The marketer will also want to stay away from scripted methods that attempt to masquerade as blogs or similar quality sites to the search engines.

In large part due to all the spamming, Google eventually downgraded the value of link quantity in favor of link quality. For instance, Google places much greater emphasis on “trusted” links or “content-rich sites”. Yahoo.com is a “trusted link“. Modern examples of “content rich links” might include one-way links from blogs, lenses, information hubs, content articles, and similar sites. It is also beneficial to remember, in light of basic SEO techniques, that Twitter is a search engine and will be more and more in play in days to come.

Keywords ARE important in basic SEO techniques.

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing (filling a page or tags with keywords. Keywords are still vital, but they must be placed in the text, and in proper context with relevancy to the site itself. Relative keyword density is now the important factor. There are many excellent keyword search utilities on the web, even a couple of free ones. There are many theories on keyword choice. Some web marketers prefer less-popular, more targeted keywords. Others say it is better to rank #192 on Google for the keywords “free stuff” than #1 for “free eyeglass cases”, for instance.

Domains.

If a domain has been around for more than two years, its “ranking karma” is improved. Domains are a great help with basic SEO techniques. Purchasing domains from the drop list (the list of domains that have expired and are no longer held by the database), with more than two years of history, may be one low-radar way to improve your site’s Google credibility. A domain with keywords that match the site’s is also helpful.

Who is your visitor?

In order to find the right traffic, it is important for the web marketer to know what type of traffic he seeks. Who is your customer? To whom must you market? From which types of sites are they more likely to come? Has the site been listed in high relevancy directories? Can you post your link to forums and blogs that deal with the topic of your site?

The best basic SEO techniques include search engine optimization for the future.

A marketer who builds the best site possible, with regularly updated unique content, and thereby has other sites linking to them, will not have to do a lot of optimizing. The site will optimize itself.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is very important. It can make or break a campaign. All of your web pages should have targeted keywords, but which ones? How do you research and choose the right keyword for your project?

It is very hard to have a successful search engine optimization campaign without proper keyword research. Your main objective, when selecting a keyword is to get your website to show in the search results for key phrases that will benefit your project or business.

How Do I Find The Right Keywords?

There are specific keyword research tools online that help SEO  find the right keywords for their campaigns. There are free and paid tools available.
Below is a short list of the ones I recommend (free and paid).
Free Keyword Research Tools

• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker

Paid Keyword Research Tools

• Market Samurai
• Goodkeywords

Market Samurai is a reasonably priced product and most importantly, it is a very powerful tool for researching key words.

A free alternative would be Google keyword tool. It features a high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database. 

Wordtracker is also a good alternative but it is limited to 100 results. If you want to see all the keywords, you will have to pay.

How Do I Choose The Right Keyword?

Because it’s free, I will use Google keyword tool for this article.
Basic keyword research is fairly simple.
First, you will have to enter a keyword or phrase that best describes your project or web site. For this example, I will use the phrase “Real Estate”.

As you can see, globally, over 30 million searches are made for the phrase “Real Estate” every month. Ranking on the first page of Google for this phrase would be very profitable but to do so will take an extensive amount of money and time.

Be realistic with keyword selection

If you sort the results by global monthly searches, you’ll see that the phrase “real estate in new jersey” has only 246,000 monthly searches. It has significantly less searches than the phrase “real estate” but, selecting a longer tailed keyword like this will be more targeted to your business (if you have a real estate business in New Jersey).

This keyword will take less time and cost less to optimize for because there is less search volume and less competition. You can use even longer tailed keywords like “buy real estate in new jersey” or “new jersey real estate for sale”.
Remember, just because the keyword has less search volume doesn’t mean it will be less profitable.