Anyone involved in SEO has heard Google can penalize you for having hidden text on your page, but when it comes down to it, it’s really not anything to be overly concerned with. Unless you are hiding in your alt tags for images the words Viagra cheap or Texas hold em poker, you’re usually not going to have an issue with Google. An easy way to see if you have harmless CSS or any other disguised advertising is to use the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox. Click CSS then – Disable Styles – then All Styles and you’ll see if you have hidden things the search engines (especially Google) doesn’t like on your page. These are things Google could potentially ban you for or put your site in the Google sandbox.
Submitting a site map is a great way to get some back links to your site, even though they come from your own website and not another site, Google will still display almost all of them in the back links check on Google. To submit a site map, it must be in XML form. There are example forms on Google you can create if you have all your links together, just do a search for create free site map for Google. To check your back links after you’ve submitted your site map, go to Google.com and type in link:yoursite.com replace your site with your actual site name. This will display around 1/10 of the actual back links you have to your site. Google displays the websites that are of more importance and the newest back links to your site, which is the top 10% of your back links. You will be able to find a list of all of your back links at Alexa.
In order to keep your page ranked high and not worry about a drop in rankings, make sure to keep a few different copies of your main index file to your site on hand and rotate those out twice a week. This keeps your site fresh and Google will crawl it more often as well. The second thing you need to do in order to maintain your rankings is submit new links every week, even if it’s only 5 or 6. But of course the more the better.
If you’re looking to gain more back links, make sure you don’t go with reciprocal linking. This went out of style around 2001-2002. Google is looking for naturally popular websites, not artificially popular sites that have been linked to reciprocally, it’s pretty obvious with that one. Google doesn’t even look at reciprocal linking anymore. Another thing many folks are still counting as being of really high importance with Google is the Google PR rank of their site. I firmly do not believe in this tool anymore, because for a percentage of websites recently it very much seems to be no longer accurate. Again, Google wants naturally popular websites, not sites that are trying to inflate their Google PR using artificial methods with non unique article blasting software or blog blasting software, etc.
Blog linking can be a great way to get back links but it’s very time consuming. Another faster way to get many links is by article writing. Using a good article submitter tool is key. If you’re good at writing and can come up with unique content, this could be a potential gold mine for you. The more interesting the article is, the more comments you will receive, and the more comments you receive, the more importance Google will place on the article you’ve written and will then move your article up in rank. With that said, make sure you choose an interesting topic to attract attention. Put all important search terms in the title and submit the article you’ve written to either egghead cafe (which by the way is offering cash for new unique articles submitted, if chosen to be displayed in their article directory) or xomba.com. Xomba is a PR 4 article directory which accepts most any articles, so you can rest assured this will rank fairly high, or at least get you a good amount of traffic on Google. Even if you do not write an article about the products you sell or the services offered on your website, you can write an article completely off topic to your website if that is what it takes to make your article interesting to readers and/or gain high popularity. You can always put your link in the blurb/author area at the bottom of each article you write, so the topic is irrelevant.
Some SEO developers will tell you that article writing hasn’t been popular since 2005 and will not boost your rankings anymore on Google’s engine. This statement is actually only half true. Duplicate content articles will not get your site ranked higher. The most common problem regarding article submission is duplicate content and Google duplicate content penalties. This can be avoided by simply using a unique content article submission wizard. An example is Unique Article Wizard. Read the rest of this entry