As a matter of fact, folks used to even run extraneous blog commenting campaigns, doing up to 100+ comments on a daily basis to quickly gather valuable back-links, drive more traffic and rank higher in the Google search results.

But, pretty soon the content king – Google realized the irony of the situation, and started penalizing websites that sold or gave away non nofollow links. As a result, even the default comments in all the newer versions of blogging engines like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and the likes of them, had nofollow links by default.

Ever since then it has become a trend, and currently everybody has started using “nofollow” link tag – and even from social networking sites like FaceBook or Orkut, all that you can get is only nofollow links. But, social media is now becoming a great way to drive massive traffic and expose your business identity to the public.

Blog commenting has become a dying art and it is only a good way to build good rapport with fellow bloggers and improve the daily traffic to your website/blog. Something similar goes with the social networking and social media platforms, as one can only improve the traffic not Page Rank and search rankings with these links!

When it comes to link-building with so many constraints, a word of caution would be to remember the sheer fact that links to too many directories can make your site look like a link-farm – so beware Google is watching you!

Article directories are definitely the best bets to generate good backlinks. You may try running an article marketing campaign at reputed sites like EzineArticles.com GoArticles.com, Constant-Content.com, ArticlesBase.com and generate some targeted traffic as well as quality links.

Then the social bookmarking services like Digg Buzz.Yahoo, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, can come in handy in exposing your website to a wider range of audience and getting more traffic!

But, the bottom-line is that quality content, on-page organic SEO, and seamless user experience are the most effective ways to improve the overall SEO and search rankings of your website.

Last, but definitely not the least, you may want to add a robots.txt file on your root directory to exercise control over the pages that you DON’T want to be indexed by Google Crawler, Adsense Crawler and other bots. For instance, in a WordPress blog, you don’t want Google to crawl the /wp-admin folder, so you can add following line in robots.txt file –

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-admin

Note: Adding a sitemap to your site is a must!

Well, in reality all the above-mentioned things can only drive a lot of traffic to your blog/websites, but it will never improve the conversion rate. The most important aspect behind higher conversions is an SEO-friendly web design. We’re not talking about the on-page SEO and working on Meta tags (you must have done it already, if you’re getting high traffic), but rather about the importance of using the right fonts, ad placement, and user-friendliness of the website.

Working with User Friendly Design

Imagine if your “register” option for the new users is located at bottom right corner of the page, who’d really bother to scroll down all the way and click on it? Likewise, if the visitors see only ads instead of the info they came searching for, they won’t bother scrolling down or browsing through your web pages.

Apart from good informative unique content, you need –

• Appropriate graphics to go along with the text,
• Nice SEO-friendly layout,
• Thorough linking between pages,
• Proper Website Structure
• Media like photos and embedded videos to add attraction to the site

Optimizing Your Site Better

A well optimized SEO-friendly website design includes appropriate and attractive design elements, strategic linking, structure optimization, meta-tag optimization, specialized keyword choices, and most importantly alt tag optimization!

Remember, the alt tag shows up in the image results and this is where most of the people lose out on. Imagine if you run an auto blog and you’ve written the latest post on the 2010 BMW 520d, and someone searches for images of BMW 520d, your blog may not appear in the search results just because the alt tag was not optimized.

And, if something similar happens with 100s of other posts, just try to figure out how many visitors are you losing out on?

Optimizing for Common Typos

What’s more, it is also not a bad idea to optimize your site for some of the most common misspelled keywords, for instance, acomodate and acommodate along with the actual keyword accommodate. But, you must optimize your site carefully otherwise this may turn off the regular visitors (as they may feel that these are unintended typos from careless authors).

Homepage is not the Best Landing Page!

Lastly, you must ensure that you’ve a good landing page for your visitors. One of the biggest misconceptions is that homepage is the best landing page! This is 100% WRONG by all means! Remember, people click on your site/blog searching for something on Google and again asking them to search once again on your site to display the info of their interest doesn’t yield good results!

At the outset, you should be thinking about optimizing for the “organizational whole”, which means you want rankings not just on key marketing oriented terms, but to attract potential employees and investors. Some companies, in fact many we’ve seen, tend to think strictly marketing. But truly marketing means marketing the whole company. So it’s good to optimize the content on the whole site (for some a massive undertaking for sure) and to think in strategic terms. Prepare for product updates and changes in the market. Put the processes in place so that your SEO work becomes as routine as the marketing calendar and budget planning process.

Secondly, make the time to ensure you have available resources to tweak your SEO work over time. Once a good foundation is laid and you have some in-house expertise, you shouldn’t have to fork out major budget allocations to SEO work from an outside agency.

If you don’t maintain your efforts, chances are your position in the search engines will decline. This is natural as much of SEO is really organic. If you’re regularly updating content and managing your site, focused on your customers and various audiences first, your rankings should stay quite steady.

So the key is to effectively plan for the Post-SEO work, making it part of your routine marketing processes and an element in your Marketing Calendar. Good ongoing SEO is just part of your marketing best practices.

It’s all about meta tags – In the 1990’s, search engines used meta tags to rank Web sites. Because site developers began to manipulate the system by loading misleading keywords or by “keyword stuffing,” Some search engines now discount or ignore them due to their irrelevant nature.
Hiding text will improve my rankings – Invisible keyword-rich text in page code is old news to search-engine spiders. Today, hidden text might prompt search engines to remove the site from their systems. Could be one of many ways to get no results!

Multiple domains will do the trick – This is a time-consuming and expensive strategy and since search engines easily detect mirrored sites, each domain must be uniquely created. Better ROI comes from putting all the effort into a single, well-optimized site.

I need to submit to 1,500 search engines! – Not so: five search engines bring in 99 percent of the traffic. Advertisers can safely ignore the rest.

We can do SEO in-house – This one is tempting for businesses that underestimate the complexity of the task. Executives should consider whether their candidate will have the time, focus and on-going networking and training opportunities to be effective.

All SEO firms are the same. – If that were true, high rankings would be a matter of luck. But SEO is a chess game, not a lottery. Beware of firms that promise the world and guarantee results. Top firms are committed to painstaking research, hard work and continuous training. Guarantees are false promises to win your business.

Thats some of the ones that I can think of and I’m pretty sure that the number of Myths exceeds 50 at least. Most myths are caused by SEO hacks and businesses that do not understand the process and requirements for good SEO.

If you know some more SEO Myths add them below. Hiring an SEO Professional do your research and don’t get excited cause they say they can deliver results, check out what they have done and even how they rank themselves.

Recently I was retained by a firm in Prague to help them select a local search engine or internet marketing professional and one of their first observations and questions to me was; How about we select one of the internet marketing firms listed in the ads.

Seriously people, select an SEO provider that places ads to get their business…. Are you kidding me? The most obvious observation is that the SEO firm or professional must suck. Rather harsh I know, but if your looking to hire someone to get your business to the top of Google or another search engine Do you really want to hire the guy that had to pay to get himself up there with an advertisement? No, you don’t cause obviously they can’t even compete in their own industry so what makes you think they can perform in others.

Anyways, we immediately discounted and excluded 8 SEO providers due to their inability to actually do any SEO on their own website and eventually found a professional organization who met the requirements. Requirements being a good reputation with their clients and the ability to SEO their own website.

I’m not totally opposed to ads, they can compliment the SEO efforts of a professional organization if done right. However if the SEO pro your looking at can’t get their own site ranked then I’d find someone who could.

Thats all for now on this topic. Something quick that was bugging me while I worked on my next post. The next post you ask? Well later this week I’ll focus on the numbers… I ran a poll with TechEast on the IT industry in Nova Scotia and I must say the numbers are terrible. Stay tuned for the post and hopefully some constructive feedback.