General optimization of a website is one thing, but total domination of Google SERPs is an entirely different thing that requires unparalleled SEO finesse and dedication. In this very article I will only concentrate on result-oriented off-page optimization techniques. I’m assuming that you know the right keywords to optimize, your site’s web pages do not have coding issues, Meta tags are used wisely and your target keywords are properly prioritized using Heading tags.

• Only acquire links from related websites: Do not go about accumulating thousands of irrelevant backlinks without any clear objective, as many webmasters ignorantly do. I have seen many PR5 websites that have only one backlink each. Yes, you heard me right; each has a single backlink from the same authoritative site. These are not dropped domains – their backlinks come from a high quality website in the computer niche. Actually the sites are local distributors of HP, and the PC manufacturer linked to them naturally. They dominate Google SERPs in their locale for their chosen keywords. So, be focused when you campaign for backlinks and strive to get them from web pages that have content related to the page you want linked to.
• Build links using targeted keywords: Generally one of the best ways to dominate search engines is to concentrate on using the most important keywords a page targets as anchor texts while acquiring relevant inbound links. As a rule of the thumb, ensure that those keywords are contained a couple of times and prioritized appropriately on the linked web page. Search engines use matching algorithms to compare anchor texts with the text content of linked pages. Thus, an anchor text will not help much, if the linked web page does not contain it.
• Article marketing: Article marketing has proven to be a very effective way to gather a lot of relevant incoming links, if the main keywords are used as anchor texts. Regularly write articles related to the content of your site’s web pages and submit them to top article directories like Ezinearticles and others. Blend your keywords well with the entire content – make sure the article is keyword-rich, but not stuffed. Most article directories allow authors to place one or two links in their resource boxes. So, use your keywords as anchor texts appropriately.
• Study your competition: Take a closer look at your competitors’ websites which perform better than yours on SERPs, to find out why it is so. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to see which sites that link to them. If you can, try to get better quality backlinks than theirs. That will surely help your site to outrank them sooner than you expect.
• Get a qualified hand: SEO is a very tedious work and needs to be properly done, so as to generate a desired outcome. If you’re not experienced in search engine marketing arena and truly want to outrank all your competitors, it is best to hire the services of a well experienced SEO firm or an individual to do the job for you.

In reality search engine optimization is easier said than done. The more you optimize a site, the more it demands from you. But the effort is worth it, if you do it well. Inspecting and fixing every element of web page coding, writing and submitting articles, competitor analysis and acquiring backlinks consume a lot of useful time. That’s why I prefer to hire a search engine marketing specialist, sit back and watch my site’s ranking skyrocket to top five (5) on Google SERPs. Once you conquer Google, every other search engine will follow accordingly, without doing any extra work.

Page Speed is a tool incorporated by Google that assists webmasters to optimize their sites’ pages by implementing the best practices of web performance. It measures the time taken for web pages to load on web browsers. This tool has become important since Google included web page loading speed as its ranking factor. A site that has loading issues might be depriving search engine bots from crawling and subsequently indexing its web pages. That will effectively have a negative impact on the website’s ranking on Google SERPs.

How Page Speed Works:

This tool measures the loading speed based on the moment a user requests a web page and the very moment the page fully renders on the user’s web browser. The factors that affect loading of web pages are resource downloads, DNS name resolution, TCP connection setup, HTTP request transmission, fetching of cached resources, parsing and executing of scripts, and object rendering on web pages.

Recommendations:

1. Google recommends that webmasters optimize their sites’ caches by enabling HTTP cache of files that take considerable time to load on web browsers, such as CSS, JavaScript and image files. As an added bonus, HTTP caching helps a site owner to significantly reduce his hosting account’s bandwidth usage.
2. Since HTTP headers are sent in an uncompressed manner, it is recommended to minimize your site’s request overhead by reducing upload size as request header data.
3. Minimize the number of round trip times (RTT) a client is required to make.
4. Since HTML, JavaScript and CSS files need to be loaded, interpreted and rendered by web browsers, it is important to optimize your site’s rendering and performance on clients’ browsers by placing links to CSS files in the document head (<head> </head> section, specifying the sizes of images to avoid unnecessary reflows, implementing early specification of character sets to enable web browsers execute scripts without any delay, using efficient CSS key selectors and by avoiding CSS expressions which degrade rendering performance.
5. In shared hosting environments where bandwidth is a major issue, it is wise to minimize the size of cached web pages, downloads and responses. The best practices are to delete unused CSS files, enable compression, and trip down image, CSS, HTML and JavaScript files.

You’ve seen from what I explained above that SEO, website design, script development and web hosting play important roles that affect web page loading speed. Page speed can be either positive or negative depending on underlying factors. A website that loads too slowly on web browsers can cause the owner loss of business, because web surfers generally lack the patience to wait for slow loading files. To make matters worse, Google assigns poor ranking to slow loading websites.

Page Speed is an open source tool which is available in Google Webmaster Tools, as a Firefox add-on and can be downloaded on Google’s site freely. If you’re confused about the numerous metrics it uses to evaluate loading speed, contact an SEO expert who specializes in search engine-optimized web design to check things out for you.

Search advertising campaigns are designed to match targeted keywords searched by search engine users. The effectiveness of keyword targeting and high conversion rates help search engines to win more advertisers. This form of advertising is lucrative because prospective buyers mostly use online search services first to find and compare different products and services. Hence, these targeted paid ads tailored to match immediate interests of searchers are presented to them more prominently than organic search listings, in order to entice them. This tactics result to more click-through rates to advertisers’ sites than unpaid listings.

Even though paid search advertising helps advertisers to beat their competitors whose sites rank better than theirs on regular SERPs, the effectiveness of every campaign depends on how well it is created and managed.

How it works:

1. An advertiser selects a set of keywords of choice to target.
2. He/she bids on the chosen keywords.
3. There’s a specified or rather an agreed amount of money charged whenever a searcher clicks on the sponsored link.

Sponsored listings in search engine results pages are run on keyword basis and their popularity. Very competitive keywords cost more money for every click through than less popular ones. Search engine algorithms use ad popularity as a ranking factor to assign positions to advertisements according to their click-through rates. Sponsored ads that perform more than others for chosen keywords are placed above the others, while poor performing ones are placed at the bottom.

Although an advertiser pays only for the number of times his/her link is clicked on, search ads algorithms give some benefits to advertisers that implement certain cost control measures and optimized selection of keywords. Without proper management and control, one can inadvertently spend a whopping amount of money on PPC without getting the expected return on investment (ROI).

Generally all these search engines that provide PPC (pay-per-click) or CPC (cost-per-click) advertising services encourage advertisers to simply use their keyword tools to select targeted keywords. However, a thorough keyword research and analysis is needed, in order to increase one’s ROI. Bidding for keywords can also be a tricky business for someone who doesn’t fully understand how the system works. Having in place good cost control measures, excellent keyword research and analysis, keyword bidding and implementation, ads traffic analysis and detailed reporting of key performance indicators help advertisers to spend their ads budgets effectively. If you cannot manage your ads campaign properly, it’s a very wise decision to hire a firm specialized in PPC management to handle it for you. That’s the best way to increase your ROI in a paid search advertising campaign.

Search engine algorithms do not employ magic or pure rocket science, but use the type of common sense we humans use to make calculations.

Types of Content Duplication on The Internet:

• In extreme cases unscrupulous webmasters deliberately attempt to manipulate search engine ranking algorithms, in other to gain more traffic to their products and/or services. This can be by posting a sizable amount of the same content on multiple web pages, domains, and/or sub-domains. Copying a huge portion of text content from a web page and pasting it into another is tagged as duplication by search spiders. These multiple web pages do not provide any real value for user experience, other than pure manipulation of search engines. When uncovered, those web pages will instantly be removed from the search index for a long period of time.
• Canonicalization issue is a common form of duplicate content headache for crawlers. I see a lot of homepages that can be accessed by any of the following examples: http://yourdomain.com, http://yourdomain.com/index.html, http://www.yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html. Spiders view these URLs as being different and since their content match with each other, the URLs will be subsequently flagged as having duplicate issue. This causes their rankings to drop significantly. Although, this form doesn’t attract any penalty, the link juice any of the URL gets will be split among all the URLs. The remedy to this problem is to choose a preferred URL and set up a 301 redirect and point the others to it.
• Syndicated content with no backlink. If you syndicate a news content, make sure the sites where the content appear include links pointing to the original copy on your site.  If no link to your site exists and the site where you syndicated the news gets crawled first, search bots will certainly give originality credit to the other site and mark your original publication as a duplicate content. Another way to avoid this problem is to ask the sites where you syndicate your publications to add a NoFollow tag to their versions, so search crawlers will not index theirs.
• Some blogs and news sites also unintentionally have duplicate issues. Such problem occurs when a script like WordPress displays a post on the homepage, category, archives as well as the details page, without implementing the NoFollow attribute on the category and archives. Inspect the software you’re using and make sure it does not have such issue.

There is a popular myth that search engines give authenticity of content only to authoritative websites, if such content is found elsewhere. This assumption is totally wrong. You have seen that some duplicate content issues are intentional, while others are not. Whatever the case, make sure your site doesn’t have it.

The Advantages of Link Exchange:

• It is one of the easiest ways of acquiring a large amount of backlinks. We all know that inbound links play a significant role in search engine optimization (SEO). So, the more links you get, the more your link popularity grows.
• It helps to get a site crawled and indexed by search engine crawlers.
• Reciprocal linking does not cost money. You do not have to pay anyone to secure a link exchange with that person’s site.
• Link exchange is a good form of link building strategy that helps webmasters to get targeted relevant links. As long as one only gets these links from sites that are related to his/hers, the links will help to get that site to at least indexed, if not rank well on search engine results pages.
• For someone who doesn’t have money for SEO or is on a very tight budget, link exchange is one of the best ways to get his/her site out there on the Internet.
• If the reciprocal links are done with related sites, their visitors might as well be genuinely interested in what you offer. And that might mean more business for you.

We have seen the advantages of this method of search engine marketing strategy. But that doesn’t mean everything about it is good. After-all, all that glitters is not gold. Now we’re going to see its demerits.

The Disadvantages of Link Exchange:

• The link juice a site gets from inbound links gets diluted by the links it gives away to other sites. According to the ways major search engine algorithms are programmed to work, every link you give away causes a “leak”. That’s the reason why seasoned webmasters do not easily give away links.
• Link exchange can result to diversion of traffic to competitors’ sites. Even though relevant link exchange might help to rank a site well on SERPs, it can cause you to lose some customers and potential ones.
• Your website can easily be flagged as a link farm, if you overdo or carelessly do the exchange. This is very true with those who create dedicated web pages specifically to add external links that have nothing to do with their sites. Once such site triggers the spam filters of search engine algorithms, it will subsequently be penalized. This type of ban means your site will be de-indexed and will stop appearing on search results.
• It is time-consuming, in the sense that you have to first of all send a message to every site owner to request for reciprocal link.
• There’s no binding guarantee that your link will remain on others’ web pages for a long period of time. Some people will even remove your links shortly after you validate them, while theirs remain on your site.
• It is generally unacceptable to send unsolicited emails to others just to request link exchanges. It is seen as one of the worst forms of spamming.

While link exchange might be a good starting point for search engine optimization, its demerits outweigh the merits. If you choose to do it, only a few links from quality and relevant sites are better than thousands of irrelevant links from spam-infested sites. A rule of the thumb is to get backlinks from related sites, but never exchange links with your direct competitors. Sincerely, SEO specialists who are worth their salt do not engage in reciprocal link schemes. Some even claim that link exchange is very old fashioned.

The Drawbacks:

At least in theory, Yandex.ru indexes only websites hosted in Russia and/or Russian-speaking countries, like Ukraine, etc. So, any site that has an IP address belonging to any of these countries will certainly be indexed, as long as it adheres to Yandex guidelines for webmasters. But what if your site is hosted outside of what it considers its territory? This is where frustration sets in. But relax, I will tell you how to get your site listed in Yandex and ranked, even if it is hosted in the US or UK, or even Africa. The best thing about this SEO strategy is that it’s not a black hat technique. It totally conforms to Yandex rules, which means you don’t have to worry about ever getting penalized.

Getting Listed In Yandex:

• If you’re a Yandex user, you must have noticed that some non-Russian language websites do well on its SERPs. That’s no magic, but apparently because of sparse presence of Russian language on their web pages or other reasons. It is advisable to add some Russian text content to your web pages and enclose it with the proper W3C HTML markup, like the following example:   <span lang=”RU”> Ваш русский язык идет здесь </ SPAN>.
• If you really want to compete favorably and overwhelm your competition, create a Russian language version of your site, and insert the following language Meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags of the web pages: <META http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”RU”>. This declaration helps Yandex search spider to easily ascertain that the associated website is actually relevant to Russian Internet audience.
• Submit your site to Russian web directories. Enlisting a site in top directories hosted in the country and its territories helps to get it noticed by the Russian web crawler.
• Embark on a serious SEO campaign specifically targeting the Russian market. This can be a tricky business and hard, if you don’t speak Russian language. However, you can still get it done correctly by hiring an experienced Yandex search engine optimization specialist.
• Finally submit your site to Yandex. To accomplish that, visit http://webmaster.yandex.ru, click on the “Add Site” link and register before you can be able to add your site’s URL. If you can’t read Russian language, use Google translation tool to translate from Russian to English.

There are numerous benefits of getting a website listed in Yandex and ranked. If you haven’t done so, you might be missing out on something very lucrative. Many webmasters like you are taking the advantage of this SEO treasure trove. Why can’t you do the same?

Drawback:

Baidu is adamant for its dedication to only websites that have Chinese content. So, if your site has nothing to do with China, the possibility of it ranking well on Baidu SERPs is very remote. You can rightly say it is a search engine programmed by Chinese for Chinese. But don’t worry, because I will tell you later a totally white hat method that details how to beat that.

Why optimizing for Baidu?

• China is a fast-growing economy and an emerging market that has even overtaken Japan. Making your website visible over there can mean more business for you. Chinese people are always searching for people outside their country to collaborate with.
• Baidu is the only search engine majority of people use in China. It is the most popular homepage of millions of computers across the country. If you’re looking for Chinese business partners, it makes a lot of sense to optimize your site for Baidu.
• Baidu is the sure-fire way to build an enduring brand in the world’s fastest-growing economy.
• Your competitors might be optimizing their sites for Baidu, without your knowledge. So, get on board and get even!
• A greater number of Chinese people speak only Chinese language and Baidu is their window to the outside world. Majority of them don’t care about foreign search engines, out of patriotism.

How to successfully optimize a site:

• Create a Chinese language version of your website. This action alone will authenticate your website as having content related to China.
• Add the following meta tag in the head <head> section of the web pages (the Chinese version): <META http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”zh-CN”>. It is the standard Simplified Chinese language declaration tag. This tag will help Baidu search crawler to easily identify your site as Chinese. I’ve seen a few sites that use “zh-Hant” instead of “zh-CN”, but the later is more widely supported.
• Get backlinks from Chinese websites. Try your best to gather a tangible amount of quality backlinks from website hosted in mainland China. These incoming links should originate from sites related to your site’s content. Links from Hong Kong and Taiwan-based sites will also help, as they’re parts of the Chinese territory. All these inbound links will surely help your site to rank well on Baidu SERPs for your chosen keywords, as long as they come from quality and relevant sites.
• Hire a Chinese-speaking SEO expert to do off-page optimization for you. Because of the language barrier, it is recommended to get a Chinese to do off-site SEO for the Chinese version of your site. This will guarantee the work will be properly done.
• Submit your homepage officially to Baidu through its URL submission page: http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html. Though Baidu does not guarantee that your submitted link will be indexed, it will certainly do that, if you followed my guideline properly.

You have seen why every webmaster needs to optimize his/her website for Baidu, as well as how to do it. Once your site complies with Baidu’s relevant standard, submit the homepage, and wait for approximately one month to crawl and subsequently it.

There are several ways to get backlinks, which include reciprocal linking, blog posting with links embedded, web and article directory listings, blog commenting, forum posting, profile link building, DoFollow social bookmarking and controversial paid link schemes without NoFollow tag attached. While the other forms of link building are time-consuming, paid link building is not. Except some directories that charge for the time editors spend while reviewing sites, others are generally free of charge, except paid links.

A paid link strategy is a system of paying money to a site owner in order to get a link pointing to one’s website in return. This means that there’s no editorial discretion or review involved, as long as the site owner accepts the money. He/she is obligated to keep the link in place on the site throughout the duration of the pre-agreed time.

Generally people who are on very tight budgets do not buy links, whether DoFollow or NoFollow. It is mainly big spenders that buy high PR links, in order to generate targeted traffic to their sites. There’s nothing wrong with a paid link, as long as it carries a NoFollow attribute tag. However, a paid link that doesn’t have the NoFollow tag is wrong, as the sole purpose is to use it to outrank other sites in the same niche for certain keywords. Even though such practice is against the guidelines of major search engines for webmasters, these big spenders still indulge in it discreetly. And it is extremely difficult for search algorithms to differentiate between paid links and legitimate ones. The elusiveness of the colluding parties has helped the business to thrive for a long time.

While search engines are having numerous obstacles in detecting paid links that have manipulative intentions, we will investigate here if one can actually find success with buying such links.

If there’s no success in purchasing links to outrank others, the trend would have died away a long time ago. So, I would say many defaulters have got their sites propelled to the first of pages of search results, simply through those means. These fellows only buy links on high PageRank pages and use only their targeted keywords as anchor texts. Apart from better ranking on SERPs, DoFollow paid links help the linked web pages to gain high PR. So, I would say it has a lot of benefit, though it is not acceptable.

On the downside, any day a paid link is removed, your search ranking and PR will eventually drop as a result, unless you have money to find a good replacement. And if Google catches you in the act, your site’s ranking and PR will be subsequently dropped into abyss.

There are thousands, if not millions, of this type of Web 2.0 sites and majority of them do not place NoFollow tags to external links on profile pages. Several webmasters use these profile pages to enhance their search engine optimization efforts. If you’re not using profile pages to your advantage, it’s high time you joined the bandwagon. The backlinks one gets from them are totally free of charge. And thousands of them are high PageRank websites.

Even though the links you get from them are free, you have to put in some manual work, in order to reap their full benefits. I will list the general rules one has to follow on these websites, though, each one has its own set of terms of service. Before you get started, make a list of the ones that allow DoFollow links.

• Manual Registration: Visit each one and register manually. Never use an automated bot to create an account. Bots cannot fill Captcha validation codes, and even if they do, the account will look like a spam. Immediately after registration, proceed to edit the newly-created account.
• Edit Your Account: While editing your account, enter some of your targeted keywords as your “Profession” or “Occupation”. Under your “interests” field, enter some other keywords of yours.
• Your URL: This is the most important reason for creating the account in the first place. In this writable field, enter the URL of your web page that is relevant to the keywords you entered under “Profession” and “interests” fields. If the site allows anchor text in the URL text field, use the keyword that matters most to you. It is important you choose one of the keywords you used above. This will make the profile page relevant to the content of your linked page.
• Add Your Bio: This is where the main SEO trick is done. Write an interesting biography about yourself and craftily place your targeted keywords among the content. This has to be an effortless blend of keywords with the entire text. Majority of these sites let members Hyperlink their chosen keywords. Check their stance on this matter, before you proceed. If their TOS permits, Hyperlink some of those keywords you inserted earlier in the biography.  Personally I make my bios around two hundred (200) words, but yours can be any length you choose.

The more text you add to your profile that relate to the content of the linked pages, the more authority you add to the linking (profile) page. This will surely enable search engine algorithms to “believe” that the profile page’s content is truly relevant to the theme of your site. It makes no sense in terms of search engine optimization to create a profile page and only place your link, without adding substantial amount of text content that relate to your site’s theme.

Since in-content text links has become vital in gaining value and authority on the Web, SEO experts who really know how to get sites to rank high, are not taking it lightly. As algorithms change, SEO trends change with them. This has given birth to the tide of blog posting simply to acquire backlinks.

Targeted blog posting is in vogue! These days it doesn’t matter if one has passion for what he/she is writing about or if the person is knowledgeable on the topic, as long as in-content links can be gotten from the posts. In the early days of blogging, bloggers enjoyed what they wrote and they had substantial knowledge of each article. They cared less about links, but not anymore. Things have changed over the years in the blogging arena.

Due to how search algorithms work and our obsessive pursuit to amass inbound links, blogging scripts like WordPress are in very high demand. Thousands of Internet users download these software every day simply to get links. This gets me to question the way search engines work. Majority of their ranking factors revolve around backlinks, making it tempting to webmasters and site owners.

Do we blame the search engines that are incapable of using other forms of better calculations to rank web pages or do we blame the webmasters who go all out to amass these links, in order to please the search engines? These algorithms created the loopholes in the first place and webmasters are exploiting them. Both parties are responsible for the rat-race.

The main issue is that there’s no known way to rank web pages without backlinks coming into play. Yet, I believe there must be a better way to do things in the search arena than the way it is done now. As it stands now, there is no better ranking factor in sight. This has led many to wonder if Google has reached its peak. Or is it working behind the scene refining its ranking factor in a way to disregard backlinks? We shall all wait to see what happens.

It is extremely hard for search algorithms to decipher the blog posts that are made purposely to plant links, since the links reside within the main content areas and are mostly relevant to the linked page. The blog posting trend helps webmasters to accumulate a lot of backlinks over a short period of time, without spamming the writable areas of other people’s sites. But that doesn’t mean the importance of blogging links will last forever. If Google starts to assign less value to links from blog posts, where will the next SEO tide go?