Alice "White Hat" Seba Has Been Banned by: Alice Seba

Look at this...3 blog posts in less than 36 hours. That's not a common occurrence for me, but I had to come back because something happened that I thought you might want to know about. This has NEVER happened to me in the history of my online career, so I was a bit shocked.

One of my websites has been banned by Google.

I haven't a clue why it happened. In fact, I didn't even know that it had happened until my friend, Derrick Pizur sent me a private message yesterday asking me about it. Well, very surprised, I checked it out. I saw that I had no PageRank and when I tried to look for pages from the website in Google - there were none. The site had completely disappeared form Google.

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Are You Ready To Hire A Search Engine Optimization Firm? by: Scott Buresh

Search engine optimization is a growing industry, and increasing numbers of companies are becoming interested in hiring search engine optimization firms. Unfortunately, many of these companies become interested in search engine optimization for the wrong reasons, and many also have unrealistic expectations. This article should help companies determine whether they are ready to hire a search engine optimization firm.

Have a strong business case for SEO.

Too often, companies decide to hire a search engine optimization firm simply because they can't find themselves on search engines. While this may be a sign that further investigation is warranted, it does not by itself make a strong enough case for SEO. This is also true for companies that want to hire a search engine optimization firm because their site does not get much traffic. Again, this may be an indication that SEO is something to...

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At last! A Fast & Easy Way to Increase Traffic! by: Lieven Van de Vel

In the mid 1990's - the "early days" of the internet so to speak - adding content to your site was about the best way market your site. But in 2000, this "content bubble" burst. Other exciting profit models like e.g. banner ads came into fashion and were the way to go. Now, five years later, this has all changed back into the advantage of content marketing. Especially since the arrival of Google Adsense, it's become fashionable and most importantly profitable again to build content rich websites. Okay, then the big question becomes: how do I get this content? There are several options to do this. Writing material yourself is probably the best solution BUT ...
"But wait a minute, I don't have time to site back and write so much; this will take me weeks, no even months! And I'm already a very busy person right now!" There are a few possibilities to overcome this problem. I believe the second best option is to join a membership site that offers content you can use and/or public domain material for a specified membership fee. You can either publish the material right away 'as is', or alter and 'personalize' to your needs. Now, before you start complaining about the fee, still consider this: There are indeed also some sites out there that offer content for free. "Wow , that's great!" Yes indeed, at first sight, this seems like the perfect solution:

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Are Search Engines Worth It Any More? by: Philippa Gamse

My most pressing argument for not spending too much time on free search engines is that it's a very passive form of marketing. You're relying on a prospective visitor waking up in the morning, and realizing that they need something that you might provide. Then, you're relying on them choosing the precise keywords that you've targeted for search engine optimization. It's a fairly hit or miss business.
When do I disagree with myself?
There are some exceptions to all this. I do believe that search engines are well worth it when you have a niche product or service with extremely unambiguous and well-defined keywords. For example, an audience member in one of my recent programs was working on a Web site to sell some incredibly advanced yoyos. I did recommend a search engine strategy to him - after all, if someone puts in "yoyo" as a search term, they'd almost certainly be a qualified lead!

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All you ever wanted to know about Meta Tags by: Serge Thibodeau

To be sure, meta tags are not truly necessary when a webmaster writes or creates new web pages, or makes any kind of modifications to them. There are a few observers in the search engine optimization industry who claim that meta tags are completely useless. Such strong statements can be a bit misleading. Of course, you are still free to believe them if you like, but that may not be such a good idea. While not technically mandatory, Meta Tags can, in certain cases, help the rankings of a given website, provided certain other essential rules of SEO are maintained.
Once a new website is created and put online, search engine crawlers (spiders) will visit that site and try to index it in their database. Most major search engines operate differently and, by the same token, they each weigh different parameters of a web site according to their own (proprietary) algorithms. As a few examples, Google places a lot of emphasis on its Page Rank algorithm, Alta-Vista will place a lot of importance on the description tag and Inktomi tell you in their terms of use that it indexes both the complete text of the particular web page submitted, as well as all the meta-tags of all pages.
At the other end of the scale, there are other search engines like Exact Seek that are "pure-vanilla" Meta Tag search engines which will spell out that: "Your site will not be added if it does not have Title and Meta Description tags." Inktomi also makes an extensive use of the keywords tag. Naturally, as can be expected, not all search engines work the same way nor do they have to. Certain search engines will place their importance on the actual overall content of the site.

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