A previous post referring to the benefits of linking out created a number of comments. What is important in the modern internet world is to realize that we are not in a vacuum. SEO cannot be done entirely alone. By its very nature, link building, one of the essential components of SEO, requires the involvement of many other website owners. Every website has partners. They may not be active partners, in fact they are often partners without even knowing it.

I come across a lot of blogs offering SEO advice and probably the biggest area of confusion appears to surround the use of meta tags. You can think of your meta tags as being advice notes to the search engines and one of the most important tags is the description mete tag - not for SEO purposes however, it is for SEM or search engine marketing purposes. SEO is the work you put into getting your site ranked highly in the search results pages.

One of the least considered aspects of SEO is page loading speed. In the normal course of events, speed is only a small consideration. However, as your page gains authority and climbs to the front page of the SERP's, speed can become an important factor. If your page appears near the top of the SERP's, you are going to receive an increase in your traffic volume. If, however, your page load speed is slow,

SEO Book has published an interesting view on site that don't link out too freely, calling it 'black hole SEO". It's a fairly apt phrase too. These are the sites that welcome, in fact seek, backlinks to their pages. The link juice flows in and disappears - no different to a black hole. There are many website owners that don't link out and they do so for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons does relate to SEO,

I am not a big fan of link exchanging so when I receive an email suggesting an exchange, I usually say 'thanks, but no thanks'. More often than not these days are the requests for one-way links. One-way links have obvious SEO potential so long as they are from the right sites. What irks me most is that when requesting a link back, there is no reason, no SEO strategy and no benefit to me mentioned. I have had requests for links from specific pages,

There seems to be three groups of website owners. The first group work hard at incorporating good SEO strategies into their web sites. The second group either optimize in a half hearted way or don't optimize at all. In the middle sits the third group who think they optimizing their pages, in reality they are missing the mark. Many of those owners place an overemphasis on their SEO to bring in traffic. SEO, while providing a major source off traffic,

There are times when we pay too much attention to link building and not enough to the many other SEO factors that go into ranking well in the search results. This can be particularly true if we are trying to climb above one of our competitors in those search results. It is quite easy to find information on our competitors. One piece of important information is how many backlinks your competitors have. If you find that you have far more backlinks than your competitor,

One of the hardest areas to optimize from an SEO perspective are images and videos. The ALT function does help to provide data for the search engines, however the data can be easily gamed - and has been. You can tell the search engines, through the ALT tag, what the video is all about. However, search engines cannot read a video too confirm that data, it is all taken on trust.

If your noticing that the organic traffic coming from Yahoo! going crazy, don't stress and don't blame it on your SEO. Yahoo! are going through another update of search rankings. It seems like a monthly task now. The general consensus of opinion is that the update this time around is positive with most people reporting increases in traffic. There are bound to be losses on some sites,

Social media is becoming used as both a marketing and link building option by many SEO proponents. There are many different types of social media outlets ranging from forums through social bookmarking and social interaction sites like Facebook and Myspace. It often appears that individuals who use these sites do so on a one way basis. The want the links and traffic coming into their pages, but not going back out again.

The backbone of all successful search engine optimization programs are the backlinks. The more backlinks, particularly quality backlinks, the higher your page is likely to rank. Search engines such as Google demand 'natural' backlinks, that is, backlinks acquired due to the quality of the content, not those found by actively seeking them. This creates quite a conundrum. If I create a new site tomorrow, it will never acquire backlinks. If it does it will be by accident.

There are times when forums provide for interesting conversations, even if you sit back and eavesdrop on others. This last week has seen an interesting conversation on WebMasterWorld on how keywords and duplication in Meta data can impact optimization. I say interesting because what started as a fairly innocuous question wound up with a long conversation that did deviate a little. I had to reread it all two or three times to find an answer to the original question.

There are times when forums provide for interesting conversation, even if you sit back and eavesdrop on others. This last week has seen an interesting conversation on WebMasterWorld on how keywords and duplication in meta data effect SEO. I say interesting because what started as a fairly innocuous question wound up with a long conversation that did deviate a little. I had to reread it all two or three times to find an answer to the original question.

Local search has been on a lot of people's agendas over the last 6-12 months. Search engines them selves have been improving and promoting the features. Delivering an SEO program for local search is no big deal, however, I think it is wise to really think through your options before going down that track.

Whether you love them, hate them or simply couldn't care less, it is Google's birthday and you do have to hand it to them; like Microsoft and Apple, they all started with humble beginnings and have all grown into juggernauts. The other similarity is that they all had the right product at the right time. As a search engine, Google's birth and future were problematic. They struck the right chord and today lead everyone else.

SEO is a time consuming business at the best of times, however there are some SEO practices that are simply a waste of money. In fact, I would go so far as to say they are a total scam. As you tour the web I am sure you have come across many ads claiming real SEO miracles - at a cost. Some suggest they can get your site to the front page of the search results in seven days. Others claim to be able to submit your site to hundreds of directories - for a fee.

Every domain name requires registration and that registration can be made public, or kept private. Most website owners are unfamiliar with this option, simply filling in their contact details and putting ticks in boxes they think appropriate. SERoundTable discussed this issue and whether or not it would affect your search engine rankings. There are many valid reasons why you would keep your registration details private.

The world of SEO is full of abbreviations and acronyms and many people find these confusing. One of the most confusing areas relates to websites )and blogs( and the search engines. Let's clear up a few off these confusions: Search Engine Crawler: A search engine crawler is really nothing more than a piece of software that sends out feelers to websites. It reads the websites and notes any changes. It also follows any links to see where they are going.

I notice at time that website owners take on a paid search traffic campaign, often using the same keywords as their site. I can understand why since they have optimized those pages for organic search results. However, if your going to get heavily involved in search engine marketing, you need to be sure you have a good analytics package on hand. Side by side testing can often reveal some rather startling results.

There are many tools in the search engine optimization cabinet, keyword stemming is just one of them. To many website owners, they will be saying, 'keyword what?". Keyword stemming is the fine art of extending a keyword by using plurals, suffixes or prefixes. It can also include the addition of words either side to extend the keywords scope. A major factor in search engine optimization is the hunt for relevant keywords that are under optimized by competitors,