During the early days of the Internet, much weight was placed on meta tags as they carry vital information that let users know of the content of a given website. Nowadays it seems meta tags are increasingly being deemed unnecessary.

A lot of people started implementing dubious means in an effort to push their rankings higher, often placing deceiving information in the tags. Meta tags are so susceptible to spamming that it practically renders the tags useless. Consequently, most of the major search engines like Yahoo and Google don’t really factor it in anymore when judging a website’s relevance and have altogether stopped using it as a criterion in determining site rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

The increasing importance of search engine marketing to online profitability has sparked debates in the industry on whether to use “natural” methods for SEO or opt for pay-per-click advertising.  The ideal strategy would be one that incorporates both methods into the SEO scheme as they both have advantages and disadvantages to them.  This is rarely the case though and for those that cannot quite decide on which course to take, the following is a rundown of the pros and cons of each method.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO is deemed more credible by people as popularity and traffic are gained through painstaking work and time investment.  Your search engine levels are acquired on the basis of relevance and content quality.  As long as your website keeps in line with search engine considerations, it continues to belong to the top search results.

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Link baiting is an important component of SEO and can spell the difference in the effectiveness of an SEO strategy.  While some people consider it a somewhat underhanded practice, it is simply a more creative method of building links.

To the uninitiated, link bait is any content that entices users to visit a webpage.  Link baits can come in many forms.  They could be free tools, an article, an image, a puzzle, an invitation to join a contest – there really is no limit to what you can use.
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While SEO has been implemented as part of the marketing mix for many years, a lot of people still do not wholly understand the ins and outs of this discipline. The intricacies of SEO can be very daunting which is why a lot of companies and webmasters look to hiring the services of SEO professionals. Following is a comparison between do-it-yourself SEO and those provided by an SEO expert.

Professional SEO Services

One of the biggest advantages there is to outsourcing SEO work is that this affords you the expertise that already exists in an SEO professional. An SEO professional brings proficiency in the field. And because they have an intimate knowledge of how SEO works they are also highly equipped to deal with problems associated with SEO. These fixes can be done faster than when you attempt to do them yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

To help keep you up to date with Free SEO Articles we have created a Google Desktop gadget which will allow you to have a box in the corner of your screen (or on your iGoogle) page which will keep you up to date with all of our latest articles.

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1. Make sure you update all of the pages on your site frequently. Unchanged sites can be dropped by some sites and nobody wants to go onto a site and see something last updated in 2005 do they? It could be a good idea also to put a last updated counter so it shows to people you update it a lot so they will check back.

2.  Allow customers and visitors to your site to be able to sign up for discounts and special offers. Put a form on your site to allow them to be able to sign up for a weekly, fortnightly or even monthly newsletter which they may be interested in.

3. Add a link to allow people to add your site to their favourites or send this to a friend, it will remind people about your site when they take a look in their bookmarks and think “Oh look, I wonder if this site has any updates”

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Here are a few tips that will help you design your website for SEO:

More Text:  Search engine spiders catalog words – not flash videos, images or other media.  Therefore, make sure you have enough text in your web pages for search engines to index.  If you’re going to use above-mentioned materials in your web pages, be sure to give them ALT tags (i.e. alternative text).

Relevant Keywords:  The quantity of words is not enough; quality also matters.  Thus, be sure to include relevant keywords in your web pages’ text.  This way, your web pages will be indexed and filed under relevant keywords and people who are doing a search using such relevant keywords have a greater chance of finding your website.  Be sure to use these keywords in the ALT tags mentioned above.
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It does not matter what your business does, it will have competitors. If it is from selling baby clothes to web design there will always be people trying to be cheaper and better than you. If they are online they will be fighting with you for that number one spot in Google and to be able to beat them, you must know how to successfully compete.

Search Engine Optimization is a hugely important way in which you can compete with your competitors online but to be able to do these you need to know who you are up against just as much as you know about your products and services.
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Getting Started with Social Networking SEO Style

The best way to start all of this is to sign up to different Social Networking sites such as Myspace or Facebook. It is quick, easy and very painless in signing up and getting started with your profile.

There are many premade layouts, themes and skins for Myspace so if you are not the best with web design and CSS you can use one of these and edit it but be sure to include plenty of back links to your website all over the page using anchor text for keywords for your site.

Once you have built your profile / page you have to remember you need to keep up to date with other users and especially people who visit your page.

The best way to do this is to constantly add new content which is relevant to the people / audience who view your profile to keep them interesting and maybe adding you as a friend (There is a link to your profile, in return links to your site from there)

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Writing an SEO article is never as simple as it seems, but with the
knowledge of what search engines look for in text of articles, you can
quickly learn how to write powerful optimized articles that bring in
big results.

How do the Search Engines find my articles and pick keywords?

Search engines scan your site and link to your articles based on the
keywords present in the articles, so before you start writing your
article make a list of the keywords you want to target. If you have a
website based on African Safaris, your list may look something like
this:

African
Safaris
Vacation
Honeymoon

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