Pedro Sttau

SEO is all about following a couple of simple procedures, but above everything else, it’s about following your innate common sense.

The purpose of this post is not to tell you what you should be doing, but rather what you definitely should avoid doing.

1. Too many links in a short time

This is a very common mistake that even the most experienced SEOs seem make.
If you are marketing a new domain, and don’t want it to get sandboxed, and believe me you DON’T, do not get too aggressive with your link building efforts. Keep your inbounds under 20 per month.

2. Do NOT attempt to hide keywords using CSS

Google has automated ways of detecting this. Don’t do it, you will get caught and your site will get wiped out. It’s as simple as that.

3. Don’t buy links in the wrong places

The politically correct advice would be “don’t buy links, period”. But in the real World, everyone buys links, and anyone who will tell you otherwise is in denial.

At present, and despite claims otherwise, Google will not penalize your website for buying links, at worse it will neutralize the inbound that they suspect has been purchased.

I have never heard of Yahoo inbounds being “zeroed”, nor have I heard of Aviva Directory links having a negative impact on a site, and guess what, in one way or the other they are both link brokers, and Google knows about it.

Therefore, try and limit your investment to safe reputable directories/websites.

4. Don’t gather too many reciprocal links

A reciprocal link does not necessarily hold less value then a one way link, but too many reciprocal links might trigger a spam alert that could neutralize all your reciprocals.
So it’s ok to have a couple of them, especially if they are in context with the content of your website, just don’t over do it.

5. Keyword density, there is a limit

Having the proper keyword text density is a very important factor. By density I am referring to the ratio of keywords or key phrases to the total number of words on a page. I have seen evidence that a ratio above 5% will have a negative impact.

6. Don’t publish too many outbound links in a single page

Especially if the links are not relevant to your website’s content. This can be detrimental as not only will it affect your ability to pass PR juice to the site’s your linking too, as it will also affect the way the content is perceived by the bots.

7. Don’t spam the Header Tags

Header tags are interpreted by the Major search engines as indicators of the order of importance of the content. Abusing this concept will not help you at all, as it will trigger a spam alert.

I strongly believe that the content ratio within header tags is a factor that is analysed by the SE’s, either there is literally character count, which would mean for example, that a if you have too much text within a h1 tag, that specific content would be homogenised and wouldn’t benefit from being placed within a header at all, or it would simply be marked as spam.

Either way, it’s not a good idea to try and alter your content structure just to gain an advantage that in the end isn’t going to happen.

8. Duplicate content

Let’s face it; even though they have come a long way, the crawl process used by the SEs is still very much rudimentary in certain aspects, and good intentions don’t really seem to count. Sometimes you are duplicating your content without really intending too, and without knowing it.

Duplicate content within the same domain is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Be careful with your print versions pages, duplicate articles allocated to multiple categories, etc…

9. Too many inbounds from the same IP

I’m not even talking about Inbound Networks (which is naturally also an issue). But try to keep a track of your campaign inbound links, noting the IP address of each domain that is linking to you and do your best not to get too many links from the same Class C IP range.

10. Title Keyword stuffing

Let’s use our common sense here again, if the content in the title of the pages is extremely relevant to the SEs, abusing this element will carry the same degree of exposure. Stuffing your Titles with keywords is not the way to go.

Very disappointing to see Threadwatch close down. The owner Aaron Wall posted some of the reasons that lead to this decision, but I can’t help it feel that regardless of the valid points he makes, there is a place in the industry for ThreadWatch.

I’m curious to see what it going to happen with it. I can see many names lining up to take over the project, so it’s going to be an interesting couple of days.

Thread watch was part of my daily reading routine, congrats to Aaron to keep it going for as long has he did.

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/15907

Now for a little rant. I finally had the opportunity of listening to Netincome’s podcast that featured randfish from SEOmoz and Shoemoney.

As most of you know might already be aware by now, there was bit a little of “healthy” friction between both sides regarding a post made by shoemoney about blogger disclosure, later quoted and replied by randish.

When I first read the post, I immediately thought… link bate! But apparently I was wrong .

Whilst I love Shoe’s frontal approach to most issues, I admit that I was fairly surprised to see how he perceives the industry, and his perception regarding trust and confidence in business.
Whilst I’m not blind to the fact that it is “all about the money”, I do believe that like in everything, that there are boundaries that should not be surpassed in order to maintain a level of integrity and trust in our readers eyes.

If you’re building your business around trust, and if trust is built through impartial honest blog posts, putting this base at risk is a silly move in all aspects.

As an avid reader of Jeremy’s blog, I must admit that I am a bit disappointed to see him not understand this very basic concept of business and well, loyalty.
This is mainly because Jeremy, as a SEM, doesn’t rely on costumers, however, I do think this is about to change with Auction ads.

“Jeremy, I really don’t care that you admit the partiality of your advice and opinions, I just wish your conduct was different”

My view on the issue is simple, as long as you don’t device your readers; you have nothing to worry about, but telling an audience that has trusted you and has been absorbing the information you provide as an impartial well intended information, that the so called advice that you have been giving has an agenda behind it, is horrendous.

Not for a minute do I believe Shoemoney actually meant it down to the letter, and I think that stating that the content on shoemoney.com is no longer valuable because of a silly statement is absurd.

One thing I can assure you, every advice that is published in my blog is genuine advice. There is no hidden agenda. All of the links in the SEO tools section were published there because I feel they are valuable to my readers.

If I intend to sell you something, I won’t do it in a deceptive manner.

I woudn’t recommend missing a meeting with this poor chap!

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Okay, so I find Wiki to be useful in many ways, but for gods sake Google, stop making it compete for business terms.

If Wiki is a non commercial electronic knowledge base, why is it ranking for commercial terms?

Why is it that when I search for Web Design Wiki is beating the crap out of my companies website, that IS in fact dedicated to ..Guess what.? Web Design.

Isn’t the quality of the results in search dictated by relevancy?

So how relevant is Wiki for a user that is looking searching for Web Design?
What is the probability of this user looking for the meaning of the term rather then companies that offer the service?

Most of the times, if I want to look for the meaning of something and want a Wiki results I’ll just add WIKI in front of the term that I am searching for.

To understand this fixation of Google with wiki, take a look at Search Mash ( Google’s Search testing platform) and you will see Wiki as a default result on the right column of all your searches.
It’s still annoying, but at least it isn’t competing for the regular organic search results.

Just came a cross an article on Popular Mechanics about Microsoft’s new surface technology. This is something I had not seen before. It’s not an ordinary surface display like we have seen before, with this technology the surface actually interacts with the elements that are placed on top of it. Check it out, brilliant stuff.

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So last night I came a across a website that talked about a concept they called Bum Marketing.

To sum it all up, the website claimed that they would coach Affiliate Marketing newcomers teaching them how to literally double their investment, fast and without a lot of spent. They even talk about teaching them how to achieve #1 organic position. Wait a minute… but are we talking about SEM or SEO?

What a load of BS.

The web is a competitive Market – You will need to invest

In order to make money you will have to invest money. There is not short cut, its how business works. The more money you have to invest the more potential return you have.

Don’t expect to go very far if you are not prepared to invest money.

You will need a credit card

Still on the same note, in order to run in an efficient manner a PPC campaign you will need a credit card. Adwords for example allows you to pay via wire transfer, but it takes more time, and Web Marketing is all about less time.

Prepare yourself to burn some cash

Unless you’re extremely lucky, you will have to go through the arduous process of testing things out. A particular campaign will have to be readjusted a great number of times to start making a profit.

So be prepared to loose some money before you start to profit.

It’s easy when you know what you’re doing and when you have been doing it for a long time

Most of the websites this post is aiming at are so keen to state that it’s almost impossible not to make money through affiliate sales. If you have been in the industry long enough, making money through affiliate marketing isn’t that hard, but remember, most marketers that are making money are not the ones telling you that it’s a piece of cake.

It’s not a hobby

Managing successfully Affiliate Marketing campaigns requires a lot of time persistence, and a very short reaction time span. This means that you must be prepared to react quickly to changes. It’s not something that can be done only after you return from your day job.

In conclusion, and to end this in a positive tone, Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to monetize your organic or PPC traffic, but in order to success you will need to learn the trade and you must be prepared, like in every business, to take some loss in order to gain later.

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Most of you might have already seen this, but due to an email request I decided to post the requested videos. Enjoy.

So I had a presentation scheduled with a prospect client a couple of days ago, and was feeling pretty confident heading to the meeting.

I was going to make a brief presentation about our companies services and talk a little about the proposal that we had sent them and etc…

Arrived at the client’s office, waiting for me was a fantastic huge plasma screen where our client’s site was being displayed.

While I stood across the Plasma screen the client was going through every internal page of the site explaining to me what they wanted done. I can’t recall the particular reason, but I needed to explain a functionality that I wanted to apply in a particular page and asked the client to browse our company’s site.

I started to hear some giggles but tried to concentrate on my task and didn’t even think of looking at the Plasma screen to see what it was all about! The client didn’t interrupt me and I kept going on and on about how fantastic and scalable our solutions were and how we applied the technology to our site etc..
I turned to the screen to pin point a particular item on our site and BAM! Our site’s home page was completely shattered by IE7. I mean the top boxes were misaligned; the entire footer was dragged on top of the centre content area, pure carnage!

What the hell!? Our development processes are very clear on cross browser compatibility! We always test out our apps on IE 5 to 6, Firefox, Opera, Safari. Oh right… there is a new IE version!

In most countries, with the exception of Colombia, governments combat drug traffic by going after the source of the problem. They do this because it is quite simply the most logical and efficient thing to do. By cutting the supply chain you consequently create a market imbalance that although doesn’t solve the issue; it is highly effective in reducing the intensity of the problem.

If the offer is more scarce, the product price will naturally inflate, and will make it less accessible to buy. Doesn’t take away the need, but it makes it a lot harder buy the product itself. Additionally, the existing consumer base will not just go away, it’s just not that simple. Once an addict, always an addict, and as soon as Google realizes this better for all of us.

So what they are obviously looking into is the sites that are selling the links, hoping to impact the way the market is perceived by consumers who aren’t already in them.

As for us link junkies, I’m guessing at worse we will see many of our inbound links neutralized, but that is pretty much the worse case scenario.

Using the Narcotic analogy, marginalizing Webmasters that buy links like criminals is the same thing as marginalizing narcotic consumers, it won’t solve the problem, it will just help create more and more.

So the only way Google can fight this is by killing the supply chain, and I believe that it is exactly what they are doing, regardless of all of the Fire-works stating that they are after the buyers.


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I saw the article announced on Threadwatch and was completely confused.

Am I the only one who can’t see what an ad action system has anything to do with a PPC ad system?

Furthermore, if EBay were to do this, they wouldn’t be bringing something new to the Market. Shoemoney launched a kick ass Ad auction system called Auction Ads that pretty much does everything EBay wished a system developed by them would do.

The fact of the matter is, adwords is Pay per Click based, an auction ad system would work differently.

Upon further review of the thread, and after following the original CNBS article, seems that what the article is really referring to is the intention of Ebay of pursuing advertising on other Multimedia means such as Radio and Print.

Made me smile!

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Two weeks ago I talked about a post on WebStraction’s blog about the new Yahoo Class Directive.

The blog has a very interesting insight about how content should be dealt with by the SE’s. On a recent post webstractions reinforced the idea that the Bots should be told what constitutes content within a webpage. By doing so we are assuming by default that webpages don’t have content, but in reality, isn’t the primary purpose of a webpage to provide content?

I don’t necessarily agree with this concept.
So as far as I’m concerned, it makes a lot more sense to filter out what we don’t want indexed then the opposite,

On a more technical aspect Webstractions proposes the usage of the robots tag with new elements present and defined in an attribute within the tag. Very interesting read.

WebStractions Selective Page Indexing Directives

I am sorry for my latest absense but it seems that I got married on Saturday!

Will get back on track this week. Also, appologize for not responding to some of the emails that were sent to me (Mark, Anna, Ricky), will do my best to to reply to all of them tonight.

P.s will upload some pictures of the special day tomorrow.