1. The Content/Article Writer – This is the juicy stuff. Good article writers come few and far between, but our industry is overpopulated with content providers who fill websites with useless information. We have a core need for writers who can produce quality content. I feel the article writing business should come with no-strings-attached.  Too often, marketers and business gurus want something in return for providing such content, but I don’t believe this is the place for it. In a world where web surfers will leave your website in a blink of an eye, it’s important to continue to provide exactly what the users are looking for. With the help of an SEO, I find it is useful when this content is written by your subject matter experts.
2. The Call-to-Action: Copywriter – This person writes strategically to get a user to do something. This may include obtaining an e-mail address, making a sale, or any other call-to-action. This is especially important in regards to search engine marketing because when you pay for traffic, you want to be sure you get the lowest bounce-rate for the keywords you bid on. Getting a user to complete an action is the best way to quantitatively measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. It’s also a way to attribute a dollar amount to each of our users.
3. The SEO - Search Engine Optimization increases a website’s search engine ranking placement, also known as a SERP, in an effort to optimize the flow of traffic for certain keywords that users are searching for. This can include generic keywords (like Web Design, Information Architecture, User Experience Design) that are combined with a relevant location (like Washington, DC), or long-tail keywords (like “Top 5 User Experience Design Issues”). The point is to strategically expose web content to as many relevant users available. An SEO is usually involved with other writers to make changes to improve website quality.
4. The Multimedia/Social Media Consultant - This is a fairly new form of content provider who specializes in the development of other important mediums of content, such as video, podcasts, e-mail, etc. They’re often involved in social media, like YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, and other video sharing sites to provide information to users. Be sure not to push this person aside, video marketing and other social media platforms are some of the most effective forms of internet marketing. You should consider including this into your strategy.
5. The Editor – This person makes everyone look good. They edit for consistency, grammar, spelling, and ensure a professional product.

As information architects, we bring all of this together to improve the products we develop. We specialize in organizing, generating the correct metadata and taxonomy, and ensuring consistency. Although writing content isn’t necessarily in our job description, I think it’s necessary to step up to the plate and fill these roles when needed.

Google Insurance is a series of methologies geared to protecting your business from frustrated customers, nasty competition, and slander via blogs, forums, and other venues that can be used to negatively impact your company’s image. It is important to perform a series of best practices to prevent a bad situation from happening. This can easily be done through regular SEO maintenance.

Consider the following doomsday scenario: You have a profitable business, several employees, large accounts, and a fairly high retention rate. While most of your customers are very satisfied, you have one client who is difficult. This client verbally abuses you, is never satisfied, and spends every waking moment making doing business with them as miserable as possible. You make a decision that it is time to let this particular client go and cut your losses.

The client decides to get revenge and writes a negative rant about you in their blog. A bad situation gets worse when Google crawls the blog, which has a better PageRank, and their blog entry ranks higher than your website. Suddenly, when your company is Googled, that blog entry ranks higher for all of your targeted keywords–including your company name.

New business comes to a complete halt and current clients decide to take their business somewhere else. You consider suing the blogger for slander, but you realize that there is no use. You have no choice but to restructure under a different name and start over.

Although you may not hear about it often, this situation happens every day to companies who fail to take the proper precautions to ensure their website is optimized for the search engines. Proper SEO could have prevented this bad situation from becoming a corporation killer.

Here is a list of things every company should be doing:

• Make sure your PageRank is not “0″. That PageRank is reserved for websites that are new and have not been ranked yet. Sometimes, a “0″ ranking is a result of being delisted from Google because of blackhat SEO.
• Check to see who is linking to you and who you are linking to. Use “link:www.yourdomain.com” in the search query to see what your backlinks are. You should have backlinks with high PageRanks, this will ensure that your PageRank is high and your website is healthy.
• Consider hiring an Internet Marketing firm to manage all aspects of your website’s health.

SEO is not just a method of bringing traffic to our website, it is also a safety mechanism. It is important to understand that in this economy, many companies are getting nastier and many are investing in Internet Marketing firms to enlarge the gap between them and their competition.

1. If you don’t have any content, don’t create the page. It’s all about content nowadays, so ditch the under construction page and pages with little or no content.
2. Make sure your website is submitted to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Next, find someone with a good PageRank to link to you. Submit also your website to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and other reputable directories. Send out press releases, if necessary, and submit your articles to social bookmarking websites (ie. Digg, Slashdot, etc)
3. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster tools to train Google how you would like them to crawl your website. Also submit your sitemap to Ask and Yahoo.
4. Create an HTML version of your sitemap to assist other search engines in crawling your website.
5. Have one domain only. Don’t scatter your content throughout subdomains and alias’s. Have fresh and quality content and make sure it is not duplicated.
6. Target only relevant keywords in your copy, keep it dense, but not too dense. Your content should be natural to read.
7. Replace your images with plain text anywhere you can throughout your website. Text menu items, for example, are more SEO friendly than images links.
8. Include your most relevant keywords in your TITLE tag and ALT tags.
9. Keep the TITLE meta tag between 60-80 characters
10. Keep the DESCRIPTION meta tag between 160-180, about 25-30 words
11. Keep the KEYWORDS meta tag between 15-20 words maximum.
12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.
13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.
14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines’ spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.
15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.
16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)
17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.
18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.
19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robots.txt file.
20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.
21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.
22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.
23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.
24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.
25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your visitors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.
26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.
27. Make your site useful and informative.
28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.
29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.
30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.
31. Do not buy or sell links.
32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

Steps to getting quality traffic to your website:

1. Before developing your website, make sure it exists in a quality niche that is both competitive (but not too competitive) and profitable. Do keyword research to see what people are searching for and try to solve their problems. A good friend once told me that in this world, there are two ways to make it in business: (1) by giving and (2) by taking. I encourage you to make your money using method number one. You’ll find a sense of pride and comfort when building your online business.
2. Create a very high quality design that is optimized for SEO, keeps people wanting more, and drives visitors to return. To find this “design”, simply find a website that you admire who is doing very well and mimic the layout. Replace their graphics for your graphics, make this your own design. Work with a web designer (to hire me, just click the contact form) to get your ideas together in Photoshop and get the ball rolling.
3. Layout your design into individual web pages. Make sure every image has an ALT tag, make sure every page is keyword dense, make sure that every <A href=”"> body fits in with relevant keywords. Never include a hyper link that says “click here”. Make sure every page is filled with TITLE tags, META tags, and that you’re utilizing valid XHTML in your code. Make sure that you’re Section 508 compliant as well. Avoid using the TABLE tag if you can accomplish the same thing using simple XHTML tags and CSS.
4. Begin to write content for all of your pages. Make sure you have a page for free resources that will help you get organic traffic from the search engines. Hire a copywriter to write keyword dense articles for you. You need at least 20 to see an impact on your traffic. Make sure these articles are answering the questions that web surfers are asking the search engines. Lay all of your articles out on your pages and remember to continue adding articles at least weekly to keep the traffic coming in.
5. Start an Article Marketing campaign. Write an article that isn’t on your website and begin to distribute that article to article directories. Try Article Submitter for a great application that does it for free. Submit only to article sites that have good PageRanks. Sometimes it might be a good idea to “spin” your articles prevent getting held up in Google’s duplicate content penalty. Write a few articles if necessary and submit them on different iterations to remaining directories.
6. Create a squeeze page on your site where you’re trying to sell your product. Make sure that the squeeze page is making conversions from your current SEO campaign. Once you find a good conversion rate…
7. Start a Google AdWords campaign and begin to direct traffic to that squeeze page that has a good conversion rate. At this point, it’s a matter of spending money to make money–fueling a money making machine.
8. Begin to promote that same squeeze page on as many advertising services as possible. Consider starting a Site Targeted Campaign on as many relevant website as possible.
9. And finally, rake in the dough!

This is my “formula” and it works every time for me. Keep in mind, I didn’t include time periods in this because the amount of time you should spend on each step is contingent upon Google’s time to crawl your website, the time for you get a PageRank, and the time it takes for you to complete your tasks (like writing articles, designing website, optimization, etc.) I recommend that if you’re interested in marketing your product or service, begin optimizing your website for SEO. For the most part, SEO is completely free and sometimes has better conversion rates than PPC. Start your PPC campaign when you know the results are coming in and that your converting traffic.

Anchor tags are very important for this search engine. If you want a high search result, you need to remember to use the correct keyword within your anchor tag. You should greatly avoid using text like “click here” to describe your hyperlink and you should also more time focusing on the content of your website than anything else (like the other two important search engines).

You should really avoid URLs that have query strings built into them (which you’ll find out more about later in the book). Query strings are used when you want to pull dynamic content from your database into your website’s design parameters. Their robots do not do the best job at crawling nested websites, so a good sitemap will help you a long ways.

Like Yahoo! and Google, Meta tags are pretty irrelevant in this day and age. Not to say that you should avoid using them, but you shouldn’t count on them either for the purpose of SEO. The most important Meta tags to use are the Title and the Description tags.

The most important thing to remember with the MSN algorithm is that it focuses on the quality of your website, including the page content, the number of pages that link to your website, and the relevance of keywords to that correlation. Too many back links can also be a bad thing when your website is irrelevant.

However, the most important aspect is the content in your web page. You are more likely to achieve success whenever the content of your website is clearly written in proper English and free of spelling and grammar errors.

Yahoo still makes up around 20% of search volume on the Internet. Although they are greatly inferior to Google in the amount of traffic and usage, it is important to consider the quality of the Yahoo! searcher and its relation to the Google searcher. Yahoo! searchers seem to be more uneducated (in my opinion) on the internet, they seem to be beginners, and they seem to be less knowledgeable to Information Technology. I know this because I’ve launched several advertising campaigns in the past that have greatly reflected that of Google AdWords and the results were absolutely horrible. These are a different quality of person that uses the Yahoo! Search Engine over the Google Search Engine and it is important to remember this.

But don’t let this fool you! Yahoo! is still very important in the advertising world; after all they are the number one visited website in the world! Just because the search engine usage is less than Google doesn’t mean that it is irrelevant and shouldn’t be optimized for, so it is a beast that shouldn’t be reckoned with and should be considered a marketing priority.

Sometimes, Yahoo! will actually give you higher results for the keywords you are marketing. Yahoo uses a distinctly different algorithm than Google after all. The most important thing to remember is that the Google and Yahoo are direct competitors and are changing their system every single day to improve their search engine-which means it’s important for you to make the right decision as a webmaster to ensure that you get good placement in both search engines.

Here are some key differences from the Yahoo! and Google algorithm:

• Yahoo uses a spider to search pages on the internet and index them into a very advanced database. While it is unknown what they do with this information, most likely it is rated (by seeing how many websites link to it) and ordered by importance of popularity.
• Google goes through a series of mathematical formulas (which you will learn about later in the book) and chooses the right result based on hundreds of factors.
• Yahoo uses their directory to first display search results-so if you are able to place your website into their directory (which costs hundreds of dollars), you can achieve a higher result more quickly.

Since you’re an Internet marketer and you’re becoming an internet marketer, you are going to save a lot of money by not having to hire an SEO specialist. They are very expensive and are able to charge outrageous prices because they’re effective, fast, and know all of the tricks that I’m about to reveal to you. Here are some words to live by:

• If you can help it, do not register a new domain name. Google’s aging delay causes new domains to have a very poor PageRank for several months until the website is found to be relevant. If you already have a website that is well established or you have means to acquire one, my first recommendation to you is to do that.
• SEO takes a lot of time; therefore, if you expect to see results soon you should pick another field. Many SEO specialists recommend waiting almost a year before the keyword phrases will show up the way you intend to in the search engines. This is why it is important to build a website with keyword dense paragraphs and lots of quality content that people are interested in.
• Pick a niche market. If you pick a target audience, you will be able to target more people. Instead of worrying about what the GoogleBot is crawling, worry more about helping people get the information they need-the traffic will always follow.
• Research your audience and keywords. Do not consider using keywords that are not going to guarantee you traffic and try to avoid writing articles nobody is interested in reading. Sometimes controversial issues, press releases, and following trends are the best ways to secure traffic immediately.
• Once you’ve chosen your audience, you can target your keywords by visiting other websites, communities, forums, chat rooms, or other sources to find out exactly what people are looking for. If your target audiences are parents of children with autism, find a forum, find out what the issues are, and start writing about them. This is a great way to research your niche.
• Find out how much competition is out there for the keywords trying to optimize with. The idea is to have low competition and high popularity for these topics.
• Organize your website for the keywords you’re using. Make sure everything is categorized as best you can and try not to randomly place articles throughout your website.
• Make sure your navigation menu is search engine friendly. Avoid using images and if you do, make sure you take advantage of ALT tags.
• Worry less about the search engine and more about being user friendly. Remember, Google is not your potential customer; it’s the visitor that comes to your website.

Black hat SEO has been around since the inception of the internet. For every measure Google and Yahoo take to overcome these schemes, there will always be someone who figures out how to beat the system. You will even find that many people will try these methods and find great success, but what these people don’t know is that they will eventually get caught. When you get banned from the search engines, you get banned forever. To a Spammer, this is irrelevant because they will just find some new scheme to get around it, but to a businessman, it’s the worst thing that can happen.

In 2006, BMW was caught using black hat SEO methods to rank higher in Google. When they were caught, they were banned from the search engines. Their German website was the one that drew so much media attention because their website looked like a normal website, but when JavaScript was disabled, hundreds of lines hidden keywords were found in the page. This was the text that the GoogleBot used to craw the site. When they were caught, they were given a PageRank of 0 and had to rebuild their ranking from scratch.

Build high quality websites filled with quality content that people want to read.

If your website is built solely for changing the rank of another website in Google, you will eventually get banned. However, if your content has been created just for your visitors to enjoy, you’ll find much more success in your online business.

Use ALT tags on all of your images that accurately describe the image you are referring to.

ALT tags allow you to describe an image with words. It is especially helpful for individuals who have disabilities and require screen readers to surf the internet. It is also useful for search engine optimization, but you shouldn’t take advantage of the “hidden” text. Google can penalize you for having several images with irrelevant text in the ALT tags. Here is an example of what an ALT tag should look like:

<img src="http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com/wp-admin/Jessica.jpg" alt="Jessica, posing for the camera before graduation." />

When testing the keyword density of your website, try not to go overboard on placing random text throughout your copywriting.

When picking out keywords to use in your online marketing campaign, keyword density is essential for the search engines to rank your website highly. Among several other factors, the amount of times a keyword is placed on a particular web page will rank you higher in the search engines-assuming that the keywords are properly placed throughout the copy in complete sentences and in an ethical manner.

Write descriptive titles for your content!

Your title tag has a very big impact on your search engine ranking. Avoid titles only containing “Home Page”, you need to be very descriptive and use your keywords within your title.

Use appropriate anchor text.

Anchor text is a common mistake many webmasters make when creating links. When getting back links to your website, not only is your URL important, but your anchor text as well. What ever you do, DO NOT do this:

<a href="http://www.amazingdesignsecrets.com">Click Here!</a>

Unless you want to rank in these results, you will not achieve a relevant keyword ranking in the search engines by doing what you see above. The search engines use many factors when ranking you in the results, including, your title text, your anchor text, your keyword density, and the categories of sites that back link to you.

When describing a piece of content, use header tags (<H1>-<H6>)

If you are creating some kind of heading for your content, DO NOT use any tag but the heading tag. The search engines really tend to like titles like <h1>HTML Anchors</h1>.

Your header tag should also contain your keywords.

Use search engine friendly URLs, loose the dynamic URLs.

This might not apply to very many people, but your URLs need to be static and your filenames need to be relevant and clear. Do not name your contact page “7.html”, name it “ContactUs.html”. Also, avoid URLs that contain database query information. Do a search for a keyword of your choice, you won’t find very many results that look like this:

http://g.msn.com/0AD00036/931292.1??HCType=1&CID=931292&PG

Try to avoid the query type URL seen above. It should look more like this:

http://shopping.msn.com

Only trade links with relevant websites-this is very important.

Trading links with websites that are not relevant to your website is a bad idea. It will rank you higher in the search engines temporarily, but the search engines are getting smarter every day, I recommend keeping all of your links as relevant as possible. Avoid link farms. It may be tempting to trade links with thousands of people, but it will get you banned.

Build a compliant website.

Make sure that your design follows the W3C’s guidelines to website development. Make sure that your content is U.S. Section 508 compliant for the disabled. Google will rank you better for having accessible content.

The old way of getting listed in search engines is to manually go to every single search engine, locate the webmaster area, and hand-submit your website to be crawled by filling out a form. This used to take hours (and it’s what those companies that charge for guaranteed listings want you to think they do). The truth is, guaranteeing a search engine listing is impossible because it can sometimes take months to show up in search results, but these companies know the same method I’m about to reveal to you.

To get listed in as many search engines as possible, simply DON’T SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE! Instead, find a very popular relevant website (that relates to your product or service) and simply arrange for a direct link to your website be posted on their website somewhere the search engines crawl frequently. On very popular websites, search engines will crawl their website consistently all day long. So to guarantee the fastest listing, simple have a popular website feature a link to your website.

You don’t even need to contact the website owner to do this sometimes. Type in keywords that relate to your business in Google, choose a website on the first few pages that feature a forum or blog. Find a topic to reply to, but don’t SPAM, instead write a detailed and relevant response to the article or question. Under your response, put your hyperlink. This is usually called your signature. It’s that simple. Your website will be crawled within a few hours by several of the top (and most important) search engines and you will have a quick and easy listing.

Once you have a listing, I recommend you write many articles for your website and post them for the search engines to crawl. The more content, the better chances you’ll get quality traffic to your website from organic search results.

This is just a small sample of all the amazing secrets you’ll learn with my course. I hope that you’ll take the time to develop your successful money making website and make a commitment sticking to your plan.