If there is a really hot potato that divides SEO experts and Web designers, this is Flash. Undoubtedly a great technology to include sounds and picture on a Web site, Flash movies are a real nightmare for SEO experts. The reason is pretty prosaic – search engines cannot index (or at least not easily) the contents inside a Flash file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of course, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were plain text, these workarounds are just a clumsy way to optimize Flash sites, although certainly they are better than nothing.

Why Search Engines Dislike Flash Sites?

Search engines dislike Flash Web sites not because of their artistic qualities (or the lack of these) but because Flash movies are too complex for a spider to understand. Spiders cannot index a Flash movie directly, as they do with a plain page of text. Spiders index filenames (and you can find tons of these on the Web), but not the contents inside.

Flash movies come in a proprietary binary format (.swf) and spiders cannot read the insides of a Flash file, at least not without assistance. And even with assistance, do not count that spiders will crawl and index all your Flash content. And this is true for all search engines. There might be differences in how search engines weigh page relevancy but in their approach to Flash, at least for the time beings, search engines are really united – they hate it but they index portions of it.

What (Not) to Use Flash For?

Despite the fact that Flash movies are not spider favorites, there are cases when a Flash movie is worth the SEO efforts. But as a general rule, keep Flash movies at a minimum. In this case less is definitely better and search engines are not the only reason. First, Flash movies, especially banners and other kinds of advertisement, distract users and they generally tend to skip them. Second, Flash movies are fat. They consume a lot of bandwidth, and although dialup days are over for the majority of users, a 1 Mbit connection or better is still not the standard one.

Basically, designers should keep to the statement that Flash is good for enhancing a story, but not for telling it – i.e. you have some text with the main points of the story (and the keywords that you optimize for) and then you have the Flash movie to add further detail or just a visual representation of the story. In that connection, the greatest SEO sin is to have the whole site made in Flash! This is is simply unforgivable and do not even dream of high rankings!

Another “No” is to use Flash for navigation. This applies not only to the starting page, where once it was fashionable to splash a gorgeous Flash movie but external links as well. Although it is a more common mistake to use images and/or javascript for navigation, Flash banners and movies must not be used to lead users from one page to another. Text links are the only SEO approved way to build site navigation.

Workarounds for Optimizing Flash Sites

Although a workaround is not a solution, Flash sites still can be optimized. There are several approaches to this:

• Input metadata
  This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.

• Provide alternative pages
  For a good site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages.

• Flash Search Engine SDK
  This is the life-belt. The most advanced tool to extract text from a Flash movie. One of the handiest applications in the Flash Search Engine SDK is the tool named swf2html. As it name implies, this tool extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash file and writes the output unto a standard HTML document, thus saving you the tedious job to do it manually.
  However, you still need to have a look at the extracted contents and correct it, if necessary. For example, the order in which the text and links is arranged might need a little restructuring in order to put the keyword-rich content in the title and headings or in the beginning of the page.
  Also, you need to check if there is no duplicate content among the extracted sentences and paragraphs. The font color of the extracted text is also another issue. If the font color of the extracted text is the same as the background color, you will run into hidden text territory.

• SE-Flash.com
  Here is a tool that visually shows what from your Flash files is visible to search engines and what is not. This tool is very useful, even if you already have the Flash Search Engine SDK installed because it provides one more check of the accuracy of the extracted text. Besides, it is not certain that Google and the other search engines use Flash Search Engine SDK to get contents from a Flash file, so this tool might give completely different results from those that the SDK will produce.

These approaches are just some of the most important examples of how to optimize Flash sites. There are many other approaches as well. However, not all of them are brilliant and clear, or they can be classified on the boundary of ethical SEO – e.g. creating invisible layers of text that is delivered to spiders instead the Flash movie itself. Although this technique is not wrong – i.e. there is no duplicate or fake content, it is very similar to cloaking and doorway pages and it is better to avoid it.

There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you’d like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can’t go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In ‘Introduction to Sitemaps‘, Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

Why Use a Sitemap

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.

Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).

If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.

Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.

Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.

Generating and Submitting the Sitemap

The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.

Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.

The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.

After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.

Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

Sites like digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com etc can bring you a LOT of traffic. How about getting 20,000 and more visitors a day when your listing hits the front page?
Getting to the front page of these sites is not as difficult as it seems. I have been successful with digg and del.icio.us (and not so much with Reddit though the same steps should apply to it as well) multiple times and have thus compiled a list of steps that have helped me succeed:

add to del.icio.us

1 Pay attention to your Headlines

Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don’t make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small.
Here are some examples to start with :-

Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence

Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse

Here is a good blog post that should help you with your headlines.

2 Write a meaningful & short description

The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.” visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based.

You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you’d better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.

3 Have a great first paragraph

This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User’s Attraction game, don’t let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.

4 Content is king

However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users’ attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don’t count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.

5 Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site

It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages.
Here is a link that should help you add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to your pages.

6 Know when to submit

The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You’d better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.

7 Submit to the right category

Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don’t submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.

8 Build a top-profile

Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.

9 Cooperate with other social bookmarkers

The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.

10 Submit in English

Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don’t understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong. Check this link for a list of non-English sites.

11 Never submit old news

Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday’s news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.

12 Check your facts

You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven’t got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts - or your readers will do it.

13 Check you spelling

Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.

14 Not all topics do well

But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don’t sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories - about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can’t know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.

15 Have Related Articles / Popular Articles

Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.

16 RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing

RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.

17 Do not use automated submitters

After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn’t. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don’t care about the fate of your profile and don’t mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.

18 Respond to comments on your stories

Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.

19 Prepare your server for the expected traffic

This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally!
I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally.
Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you’d better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!

20 The snowball effect

But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.
An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update.

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is the lion’s share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you do, topping Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not literally but in terms of effort and time) to top Google and keep there is too high. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate SEO nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can’t use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about possible alternatives.

What are Google Alternatives

The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for the other major search engines, if you have not done it already. Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors, though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, do not expect much.

Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.

Naming all Google alternatives would be a long list and it is outside the scope of this article but just to be a little more precise about what alternatives exist, we cannot skip SEO instruments like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.

Web Directories

What is a Web Directory?

Web directories (or as they are better known – search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop directories, where you gather files in a directory based on some criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.

Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind (otherwise it will be impossible to browse thousands of pages for let’s say Computers), search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore) and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search directory.

The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.

Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.

Examples of Web Directories

There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites. Other popular general-purpose search directories are Google Directory and Yahoo! Directory. The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites.

Besides general-purpose Web directories, there are incredibly many topical ones. For instance, the The Environment Directory lists links to environmental sites only, while The Radio Directory lists thousands of radio stations worldwide, arranged by country, format, etc. There are also many local and national Web directories, which accept links to sites about a particular region or country only and which can be great if your site is targeted at local and national audience only. You see, it is not possible to mention even the topics of specialized search directories only because the list will get incredibly long. Using Google and specialized search resources like The Search Engines Directory, you can find on your own many directories that are related to your area of interest.

Specialized Search Engines

What is a Specialized Search Engine?

Specialized search engines are one more tool to include in your SEO arsenal. Unlike general-purpose search engines, specialized search engines index pages for particular topics only and very often there are many pages that cannot be found in general-purpose search engines but only in specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for every imaginable topic and it is always wise to be aware of the specialized search engines for your niche. The examples in the next section are by no means a full list of specialized search engines but are aimed to give you the idea of what is available. If you search harder on the Web, you will find many more resources.

Examples of Specialized Search Engines

Probably specialized search engines are not that numeric as Web directories but still certainly there is no shortage of them either, especially if one counts password-protected sites with database accessible only from within the site as a specialized search engine. As with Web directories, if there were a list of specialized search engines it would be really, really long (and constantly changing), so instead, here are some links to lists of search engines: Pandia Powersearch, Webquest, Virtual Search Engines, the already mentioned The Search Engines Directory, etc. What is common for these lists is that they offer a selection of specialized search engines, arranged by topic, so it is a good starting point for the hunt of specialized search engines.

The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for is the first and crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your client’s) money and time. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all - which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to increase your chances of success, additional research is never too much, especially when its results will save you the shots in the dark.

Dreaming High - Shooting the Top-Notch Keywords?

After you have made a long and detailed list of all the lucrative keywords that are searched by tens of thousands a day, do not hurry yet. It is great that you have chosen popular keywords but it would be even greater if you have chosen keywords for which top positioning is achievable with reasonable effort. If you have many competitors for the keywords you have chosen, chances are, no matter how hard you try, that you will hardly be able to overtake them and place your site amongst the top ten results. And as every SEO knows, if you can’t be on the first page (or on the second and in the worst case on the third one) of the organic search results, you’d better think again if the potential gain from optimization for those particular words is worth the effort. It is true that sometimes even sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can’t count on that. And even if you somehow manage to get to the top, do you have any idea what it will take to keep the good results?

You can feel discouraged that all lucrative keywords are already occupied but it is too early to give up. Low-volume search keywords can be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition. Other SEO experts confirm that it is possible with less effort and within budget to achieve much better results with low-volume search keywords than if you targeted the high-volume search ones. In order to do this, you need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.

Get Down to Earth

The best way to estimate how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword is by using the appropriate tools. If you search the Web, you will see several keyword difficulty tools. Choose a couple of them, for instance Seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, Cached’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and Seomoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool and off we go. The idea behind choosing multiple tools is not that you have so much free time that you need to find a way to waste it. If you choose only one tool, you will finish your research faster but having in mind the different results that each tool gives, you’d better double check before you start the optimization itself. The Seomoz’s tool is a kind of complicated and if you want to use it you need to make several registrations but it is worth the trouble (and the patience - while you wait for the results to be calculated).

You may also want to check for several keywords or keyword phrases. You will be surprised to see how different the estimated difficulty for similar keywords is! For instance, if you are optimizing a financial site, which deals mainly with credits and loans, and some of your keywords are finance, money, credit, loan, and mortgage, running a check with the seochat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool produces results like these (the percentages are rounded but you get the idea): finance - 89%, money - 76% credit - 74% loan - 66% mortgage - 65%.

It seems that the keyword finance is very tough and since your site is targeted at credits and loans and not on stock exchange or insurance, which are also branches of finance, there is no need to cry over the fact that it is very difficult to compete for the finance keyword.

The results were similar with the second tool, though it does not give percentages but uses a scale starting from Very Easy to Very Difficult. I did not check all the results with the third tool, because it seems that the seomoz report on keyword difficulty for a particular word needs ages to be compiled but the results were similar, so it becomes clear that it is more feasible to optimize for mortgage and loan, rather than for the broader term finance.

You may want to bookmark some of these tools for future use as well. They will be very useful to monitor possible changes on the keyword difficulty landscape. After you have optimized your site for the keywords you have selected, occasionally check again the difficulty of the keywords you are already optimizing for because the percentages are changing over time and if you discover that the competition for your keywords has increased, make some more efforts to retain the gained positions.

It’s never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are barriers of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the barrier is called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don’t rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new domains is on average 6 months, although it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.

Sandbox and Aging Delay

While it might be considered unfair to stop new sites by artificial means like keeping them at the bottom of search results, there is a fair amount of reasoning why search engines, and above all Google, have resorted to such measures. With blackhat practices like bulk buying of links, creation of duplicate content or simply keyword stuffing to get to the coveted top, it is no surprise that Google chose to penalize new sites, which overnight get tons of backlinks, or which are used as a source of backlinks to support an older site (possibly owned by the same company). Needless to say, when such fake sites are indexed and admitted to top positions, this deteriorates search results, so Google had to take measures for ensuring that such practices will not be tolerated. The sandbox effect works like a probation period for new sites and by making the practice of farming fake sites a long-term, rather than a short-term payoff for site owners, it is supposed to decrease its use.

Sandbox and aging delay are similar in meaning and many SEO experts use them interchangeably. Aging delay is more self-explanatory – sites are “delayed” till they come of age. Well, unlike in legislation, with search engines this age is not defined and it differs. There are cases when several sites were launched in the same day, were indexed within a week from each other but the aging delay for each of them expired in different months. As you see, the sandbox is something beyond your control and you cannot avoid it but still there are steps you can undertake to minimize the damage for new sites with new domains.

Minimizing Sandbox Damages

While Google sandbox is not something you can control, there are certain steps you can take in order to make the sandbox effect less destructive for your new site. As with many aspects of SEO, there are ethical and unethical tips and tricks and unethical tricks can get you additional penalties or a complete ban from Google, so think twice before resorting to them. The unethical approaches will not be discussed in this article because they don comply with our policy.

Before we delve into more detail about particular techniques to minimize sandbox damage, it is necessary to clarify the general rule: you cannot fight the sandbox. The only thing you can do is to adapt to it and patiently wait for time to pass. Any attempts to fool Google – starting from writing melodramatic letters to Google, to using “sandbox tools” to bypass the filter – can only make your situation worse. There are many initiatives you can take, while in the sandbox, for as example:

• Actively gather content and good links – as time passes by, relevant and fresh content and good links will take you to the top. When getting links, have in mind that they need to be from trusted sources – like DMOZ, CNN, Fortune 500 sites, or other reputable places. Also, links from .edu, .gov, and .mil domains might help because these domains are usually exempt from the sandbox filter. Don’t get 500 links a month – this will kill your site! Instead, build links slowly and steadily.
• Plan ahead– contrary to the general practice of launching a site when it is absolutely complete, launch a couple of pages, when you have them. This will start the clock and time will be running parallel to your site development efforts.
• Buy old or expired domains – the sandbox effect is more serious for new sites on new domains, so if you buy old or expired domains and launch your new site there, you’ll experience less problems.
• Host on a well- established host – another solution is to host your new site on a subdomain of a well-established host (however, free hosts are generally not a good idea in terms of SEO ranking). The sandbox effect is not so severe for new subdomains (unless the domain itself is blacklisted). You can also host the main site on a subdomain and on a separate domain host just some contents, linked with the main site. You can also use redirects from the subdomained site to the new one, although the effect of this practice is also questionable because it can also be viewed as an attempt to fool Google.
• Concentrate on less popular keywords – the fact that your site is sandboxed does not mean that it is not indexed by Google at all. On the contrary, you could be able to top the search results from the very beginning! Looking like a contradiction with the rest of the article? Not at all! You could top the results for less popular keywords – sure, it is better than nothing. And while you wait to get to the top for the most lucrative keywords, you can discover that even less popular keywords are enough to keep the ball rolling, so you may want to make some optimization for them.
• Rely more on non-Google ways to increase traffic – it is often reminded that Google is not the only search engine or marketing tool out there. So if you plan your SEO efforts to include other search engines, which either have no sandbox at all or the period of stay there is relatively short, this will also minimize the damages of the sandbox effect.

Even if you are not looking for trouble and do not violate any known SEO rule (but only half of them), you still might have to experience the ultimate SEO nightmare - being excluded from Google’s index. Although Google is a kind of a monopolist among search engines, it is not a bully company that excludes innocent victims for pure pleasure. Google keeps rigorously to SEO best practices and excludes sites that misbehave.

Not Present in Google’s Index

First, it is necessary to clarify that the fact your site is missing from Google’s index can mean two things:

a. You have not been included yet, though you have submitted an inclusion request.  It is normal to have to wait some time before being indexed for the first time. You can’t to anything to speed the process but wait.
b. You have been excluded from Google’s index because of violation on your site. As said, this is a real nightmare for any SEO and you will need to take some steps to correct this most unfavorable situation. The rest of the article explains how.

Why Does Google Exclude Sites?

There are many reasons that can make Google exclude your site(s) and all these reasons are related to a violation of some kind. For instance, your sites are over-optimized and this makes them very suspicious. Over-optimization has many faces.

Besides over-optimizing the onsite content, some of the other reasons for being excluded from Google are SE spamming, hidden text, hosting illegal content, linking to bad neighbors, inter-linking, etc. There is no an exhaustive list of SEO sins that Google does not tolerate, nor you’ll get a letter from Google to inform you that you have been a bad boy and that’s why you have been kicked out of its index but if you resort to any forms of SEO manipulation and you attempt to mislead search engines, you might expect that sooner or later you will have to deal with reinclusion.

Reinclusion Steps

After you discover that you have been excluded from Google, the first step is to analyze why. You need to know what made them angry with you and correct your mistakes. Check for links to link farms and bed neighbors, for doorway pages and keyword stuffing. It is unlikely that you don’t know your own sins.

Next, you have to contact Google with a reinclusion request. Go to Google Sitemaps and from the Tools menu on the right, select Submit a Reinclusion Request. On the next screen, read carefully the instructions and explanations, fill in the required data (you may want to have a look at the next section - Reinclusion Tips for ideas what to write) and submit your request.

After you submit your inclusion request, there is nothing more you can do than fix your errors (if you have not already done it) and wait patiently for the answer.

Though the process of submitting a reinclusion request is pretty straightforward, there is some general advice, which can help you. The following tips can improve your chances of success.

Reinclusion Tips

• Admit your errors and fix them
  This has already been said but it is a big mistake to write to Google and play innocent. You can lie to yourself but this way you will not convince them that you are a martyr who has been suffering because of their cruelty. And above all - fix your mistakes before you submit the reinclusion request. It is a very stupid situation to have your errors unfixed and wait for reinclusion because you will simply never get reincluded this way. What is more, you are undermining your chances for success in the future as well.

• Be polite.
  The worst mistake you can make in your reinclusion request is to be rude. Threatening Google with lawsuits or hinting that you might boycott their AdWords program in revenge for being excluded from their index is a deadly mistake. Anyway, Google are not obliged to provide you with free traffic, so being included in their index is not a special privilege they had granted you for your AdWords money.

• Look at their Webmasters Guidelines.
  It is unlikely that they have changed them recently and you do not comply with them anymore but it does not hurt to double check that you have done what Google recommends to do.

• Don’t spam them.
  Google receives heaps of e-mails and it is not possible to answer each incoming e-mail an hour or so after it had been submitted. Bombarding Google with tons of e-mails (even polite ones) could only make your situation worse.

• Is it your first time?
  Google may not keep statistics of its recidivists but if it just happens that your site gets bans several times a year, this gets very suspicious. If you are banned for the first time, you can account on amnesty. But if you have been banned many times, you can be out of luck with reinclusion requests about the same site.

• Reaasure them that it is not going to happen again.
  This is also very important because if Google gets the impression that you violate their rules very often, they might be reluctant to reinclude you. In some cases, when it was not your personal fault - e.g. webmaster you hired sent many spam letters or your site got hacked, you can explain what happened, giving a detailed timeframe of the events.

• Consider AdWords
  If you really rely heavily on traffic from Google, consider buying AdWords. This is not a blackmail (we ban you, you pay for AdWords) because many sites just do not pay for AdWords but rely on other traffic-generating schemes instead.

1. Dependent on search engines

It is true that in any career there are many things that are outside of your control but for SEO this is a rule number one. Search engines frequently change their algorithms and what is worse – these changes are not made public, so even the greatest SEO gurus admit that they make a lot of educated guesses about how things work. It is very discouraging to make everything perfect and then to learn that due to a change in the algorithm, your sites dropped 100 positions down. But the worst part is that you need to communicate this to clients, who are not satisfied with their sinking ratings.

2. No fixed rules

Probably this will change over time but for now the rule is that there are no rules – or at least not written ones. You can work very hard, follow everything that looks like a rule and still success is not coming. Currently you can’t even rely on bringing a search engine to court because of the damages they have done to your business because search engines are not obliged to rank high sites that have made efforts to get optimized.

3. Rapid changes in rankings

But even if you somehow manage to get to the top for a particular keyword, keeping the position requires constant efforts. Well, many other businesses are like that, so this is hardly a reason to complain – except when an angry customer starts shouting at you that this week their ratings are sinking and of course this is all your fault.

4. SEO requires Patience

The SEO professional and customers both need to understand that SEO takes constant effort and time. It could take months to move ahead in the ratings, or to build tens of links. Additionally, if you stop optimizing for some time, most likely you will experience a considerable drop in ratings. You need lots of motivation and patience not to give up when things are not going your way.

5. Black hat SEO

Black hat SEO is probably one of the biggest concerns for the would-be SEO practitioner. Fraud and unfair competition are present in any industry and those who are good and ethical suffer from this but black hat SEO is still pretty widespread. It is true that search engines penalize black hat practices but still black hat SEO is a major concern for the industry.