So what happens when your website has broken links?

If allowed to linger for too long, broken links can be a ding against your website’s SEO ranking. In other words, they can count against you. One or two might not hurt, but hundreds will. And many webmasters will allow their broken links to continue because they don’t monitor them.

A simple diagnostic tool will tell you if you have broken links on your website. Google Webmaster Tools is free and does the job for you. Google will tell you if your site has broken links.

After you have determined that you have broken links, go to the pages where those links exist and analyze your content. Can you find another source to link to? If so, then replace the broken link with a link to a resource that is just as helpful, or more, to your website visitors. If you can’t find one, then consider revising your content so that the link isn’t necessary.

When you revise your content you invite the search engines back to re-crawl your pages. They will then re-index your pages based on the latest crawl and re-rank them. Some webmasters have seen increased page rankings based on fixing broken links.

If you are looking for more opportunities to increase your website’s search engine optimization, find and fix your broken outbound links. It’s a small thing, but it can matter.

1. Descriptive URLs – Let’s start with the URL. Instead of using dynamic URLs, use descriptive URLs that utilize your best keyword phrase for each content page. Your product name, a product description, or a phrase that best identifies each individual product is best for your product description pages.
2. Create Unique Content For Every Product – Every product page should have unique content, and I’ll add that each should have at least 250 words of content. If necessary, combine several like products on one page and give each one a unique description. Is there really that much of a difference between a blue widget and a yellow widget? Do they need separate pages? If so, make sure you provide enough content on each page that you give them maximum SEO value, and that means no duplicate content.
3. Use Category Pages – People don’t just shop for individual products. They also search for categories of product. If you sell cameras, have a section for digital cameras. Have another for camcorders. Make sure each category page has unique content.
4. Link Your Pages Together With Anchor Text – Link your pages together with appropriate anchor text. This alone can give your website a huge boost. Figure out the best internal linking strategy based on consumer buying habits, keyword phrase associations, and complimentary products.
5. Allow User Reviews – Every time you add new content to a page, the search engines return to crawl that page. When they do, they also re-index and re-rank it. Allowing user reviews, even negative reviews, can give your product pages a huge boost in the search engines.
6. Allow Social Media Sharing – Social media sharing can encourage your content to travel far and wide. That means more potential traffic, more potential product reviews, and better SEO overall.

Each of these specific on-page content solutions has at least one associated SEO benefit. If you want to improve your online shop’s SEO, try these on-page content tricks.

The key to this SEO philosophy is in the use of keywords and links. Keywords are the fuel in every search engine optimization strategy. You don’t want to overdo it, but you must do it.

What does that mean, exactly?

Keywords are a matter of targeting the right phrases for the right audience. If you are trying to reach people who purchase automobiles, then you have to target the right key phrases that attract automobile buyers. If you sell Ford vehicles specifically, then target your phrases to people who buy Ford vehicles. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

It is, but you’d be surprised at how many SEOs target the wrong keywords for their audiences.

When it comes to links, you want your links to compliment your keyword phrases. They shouldn’t dominate. Anything in moderation is better than the same thing in overdose. Use links that compliment your keywords by incorporating the keywords into the link anchor text and pointing them to relevant pages on your website. Title attributes can also compliment your anchor text.

By complimentary title attributes, I don’t necessarily mean repeating your anchor text key phrase. I mean use a phrase that compliments it and is a more nuanced way of using your important keywords.

SEO is not a science. It certainly isn’t rocket science. Your first concern should be in creating great content. Make the SEO compliment the content.

The question has its basis on the longstanding practice of many SEOs to build inbound links to pages on their websites. Such inbound links have often increased the rankings of their web pages in the search engines. But there are flaws in thinking the same practice when applies to a Google Places page would have the same effect.

First, a Google Places page, as Mike Blumenthal points out, is a search result. Linking to it would be like linking to a search results page for a query that is related to your business niche. That wouldn’t boost your web pages any and it wouldn’t make any sense.

Secondly, linking out from your website to an external page would drain link juice that you could put to better use on your internal pages.

While such linking might be detrimental in terms of your website’s SEO, there may be times when linking to your Google Places page constitutes good marketing. For instance, if you want your website visitors to see all the rave reviews your business gets on Google, then you could link to the page. But I wouldn’t do that from your home page and I’d recommend that you do it using a no-follow link.

Sometimes, detrimental or harmful linking practices can be good marketing practices, and vice-versa. This is where you have to do some weighing of pros and cons. Choose a value that is most important to you and perform the action that makes that value work for you.

The truth is, No. 1 positions are the most clicked-on positions. That’s true for PPC and organic search listings. But those are not the most profitable positions.

The most profitable positions are the ones just below the No. 1 position. Why is that?

What most people don’t realize is that most searchers will click on that No. 1 position, but if it isn’t what they were looking for, then they hit the Back button and click on another search result. SEOs know this. Clients don’t necessarily know this. So everyone is scrambling to get that No. 1 position.

There’s nothing wrong with being No. 1. But you should be seeking to be No. 1 for the right search queries. What questions does your website answer? Those are the key terms you should seek No. 1 rankings for.

SEO results fluctuate. But they are also much more personal. Google now provides videos, images, and personalized results based on who your Google+ friends are your past search history. Your search results are not my search results. That makes the No. 1 position just about unattainable. Trying to get there is an exercise in absurdity.

The job for search engine marketers in today’s search climate is to produce the best content and promote it in the best places. Rankings won’t cure all your ills.

And that makes us ask the question, are microsites good for SEO?

My answer is, they can be if done right. The problem so often is that website designers do not often do them correctly.

So, What’s A Microsite?

A microsite is a small website that serves a specific purpose. It is usually defined as a site that consists of only 3-5 pages not counting the terms of service and privacy policy pages. The focus is very narrow and specific.

You can build a microsite that targets a narrower niche within your broad company website’s niche. But what has killed many SEOs trying to use microsites is they linked them all together in a massive link building scheme. Google caught on and all their sites were de-indexed. Rather quickly.

If you build microsites, build them as standalone webites, not as link satellites for your larger site.

The Real Benefit Of A Microsite

The real benefit to having multiple microsites is not that you can use them to build links to your major corporate website. The real benefit is that you can use them as separate websites that achieve search engine rankings on their own.

If you have three microsites that each target their own specific keywords, that’s 6 times the number of opportunities to rank well for the keywords that you are targeting. That’s in addition to the ranking opportunities of your main website. And that’s if you don’t link them together.

You have to make sure your microsites aren’t associated with each in any way. Treat them like separate businesses and promote them as such.

Good links do two things really well: Provide SEO benefits and drive traffic. But how?

Let’s deal with traffic first. The best way to drive traffic through links is to make your links good calls to action. That means, they ask the reader to do something – click. That can be a direct asking as in “click here” or an indirect asking as in your link anchor text being enticing enough to say “click here” without saying “click here.”

So let’s talk about that anchor text.

Anchor text is the phrase you use for creating a link. It can be “click here” or “the best apple pie in Frisco.”

Notice how “the best apple pie in Frisco” piques your interest. You want to click that phrase because you wonder who’s got the best apple pie in Frisco and you hope the answer will lie on the other side of that link. That’s a good call to action.

It’s also good anchor text that passes SEO benefit. The benefit is the relevancy of the link to the page being linked to. If the linked-to page has valuable information about apple pies in Frisco, particularly the best apple pie in Frisco, then that phrase becomes valuable and relevant anchor text.

The best links you can create on your site from one page to another use great anchor text that passes the best SEO benefit AND it serves as a great call to action. Do both. You’ll come out a big winner.

Consider this:

How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really – more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.

What Cyrus Shepard doesn’t tell you is that Google knows its own algorithms better than anyone else. It has the inside information. Facebook doesn’t. And that’s one of the reasons that Facebook is at a disadvantage.

On the other hand, the SEO principles that Cyrus shares in his post are pretty much all common knowledge. They’re things that everyone – even Facebook – at this point should understand.

One really telling point is how Facebook blocks Google from crawling its profile pages. As Cyrus points out:

Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.

On the one hand, Google+ has an advantage in the search engines because it is owned by the largest and most popular search engine. On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t employ sound SEO tactics anyway, so if you take away the Google+ advantage, Facebook would still be at a disadvantage.

So what’s the lesson here? No matter what business you are in, think about how search engine optimization can help you reach your goals.

Yes, there is. It’s called Blogger. That’s Google’s free blog service.

You can use Blogger as your own article directory and there are two ways to do it.

First, you can start one blog and periodically post your articles there and link back to your company branded blog or website. The second way to use Blogger as an article directory is to upload each article you want to post to its own blog utilizing your primary keyword as the blog subdomain.

Both strategies work well.

Blogger has been listed as the second most trafficked social media website, ahead of Twitter by more than twice the traffic.

Of course, this Nielsen report doesn’t consider YouTube. Still, that puts Blogger into the high traffic arena, and it’s good for SEO as well. Being owned by Google, you’d expect no less, right?

The key to using Blogger as your own article directory is to not overdo it. You don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself as a link spammer, but you do want to use the tools at your disposal to build good inbound links. Blogger is great as a link building tool, and it could send you some additional traffic as well.

Two things stand out in this year’s predictions:

1. “SEO without social media will become a relic of the past”
2. “Google will make it very hard to do great SEO without using Google+”

These two predictions are intricately linked. If SEO and social media go hand in hand, then that includes Google+. If Google forces search marketers to using Google+, then that will enhance the need for social media overall. I agree with Rand. It’s coming.

Google could see this as a way to control link spam. Which brings up another one of Rand’s predictions: “Google will finally take stronger, Panda-style action against manipulative link spam.”

These three predictions seem to be linked in ways that make sense. If you are using Google+ to improve your website’s ranking prospects, then you aren’t out building questionable links. Link building, as we know it today, could be a thing of the past after 2012.

I think a lot of SEOs would welcome that change. A lot more will hate it.

But it could be a way for Google to finally kill link spam once and for all while improving the search results for users – especially users who are also on Google+. What do you think?

It’s called duplicate content.

Duplicate content is a phrase that has scared a lot of webmasters into unnecessary paranoia. The problem with duplicate content has always been scraping, not two articles by the same author that are somewhat similar.

Look at it this way. You have two articles that overlap. They are both on your website and clearly have you as the author. What’s the worse that can happen? In Google’s world, you could have one of the articles de-indexed. While that could be an inconvenience, it pales in comparison to an article you wrote being de-indexed while the same article with someone else’s byline being catapulted to a No. 1 ranking. That would hurt.

Google’s problem with duplicate content is knowing which version of an article came first. If they get it right, no problem; if they get it wrong, that’s a problem.

When you publish your content on the web, article directories may not be the best place to go to. That’s because you are competing with thousands of articles and if your article appears elsewhere on the web, there’s no guarantee that your article in the article directory will be recognized by the search engines. Send original content to niche publishers that link back to you with a bio. Make sure those article are indexed fairly quickly.

You’ll have to access your .htaccess file. That will require that you go into your server files and pull up the .htaccess file.

Log into your file transfer program and access your web server, then download your .htaccess file to your hard drive. Be sure to keep a backup of this file in case anything goes wrong with the page compression command. Then you can restore the file to its original condition and not miss a beat.

Add these two lines of code to your .htaccess file:

# Gzip – To compress websites
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript text/x-javascript text/php

Next, upload the .htaccess file to your server again. Be sure to put it right back in the same place again. Most likely, it was located in the root folder (you an actually have an .htaccess file for each section of your website, but you want your page compression command to apply to the entire website).

After uploading your .htaccess file with the page compression command, your website should load faster. Test it by going to http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php and enter your URL in the space. The tester will tell you if you have add page compression to your website or not. If not, go back and try it again.

That advice really sucks. I’ll tell you why.

Google has long caught onto the practice of spammy links that follow all the rules of the book. They’ve done changed their algorithms at least a couple of dozen times to prevent those links from helping websites that shouldn’t rank. So do all the crafty link building you can following all the usual rules. It won’t work.

What does work is linking out to other sites within your niche. Don’t worry about draining your authority juice. You probably don’t have any yet.

Rather, consider yourself an authority in your niche and act like it. Would an authority link to a resource off site that would help a reader more than anything else you can post on your own? Of course he would. Then do that. Real authority websites link out promiscuously. They link to websites that are helpful to their readers.

That’s not to say you should link everywhere you can. Be selective about your external links. You don’t want to send your readers to warez sites or sites where they’ll pick up a malicious virus.

Set your standards for excellence based on common sense. Link to sites that add value to your niche for your readers. Become a real authority, not some fake authority based on spammy links that get you nowhere.

In fact, for every SEO benefit you receive from any action, there will always be a loss of benefit somewhere else. Links get too old and become obsolete, content value is diminished because someone else did it better, social triggers raise and lower your reputation by the minute, etc.

About the only thing you can count on with best SEO practices is change. What works today may not work tomorrow. The action you take today may not show any results for a year. Sometimes, the best thing to do is wait.

Search engine optimization is not some magic pill. There is no formula that can catapult you to instant success, or any success. The best SEOs are the ones that experiment, test, and try something new when all the tried-and-true wisdom has failed. And I can’t tell you how many times a business owner has fired his SEO guru because the business owner read a book and became an instant expert.

The one unbendable rule in SEO is Change is Inevitable. This is not a “don’t rock the boat” industry.

SEOMoz has a great post on how Google looks at sentiment and how that affects SEO at the local level. You’ll be amazed at the technology the search engines now have.

Using something called stylometry, Google can determine whether your link from a third-party website is a positive endorsement, a negative endorsement, or neutral. And I find that amazing. It could affect your rankings.

Get enough bloggers to link to your website using negative references and you could see your search engine rankings plummet. On the other hand, get enough rave reviews and you could rise to the top. It’s pretty easy to imagine what you need to do to improve your rankings then, huh?

No, I don’t mean buy positive endorsements. I mean provide great customer service. Your reputation is more than just a few paid-for links. It’s how you do business.

Our answer: No.

The search engines won’t rank your content higher because you’ve placed it in multiple categories. In fact, they might gig you for duplicate content if you allow them to crawl your categories at all. And that’s why many SEOs put a nofollow, deindex command in their robots.txt files for the category and tag pages of their blogs.

Your categories and tags are for reader benefit. Fewer categories on a blog make for a cleaner, easier-to-follow blog. Limit your reader’s choices in categories and you’ll encourage more reading. Therefore, your categories should be broad catch-all organizational tools like the chapters in a book.

Tags, on the other hand, are narrower in scope and therefore it’s OK to have more of them. It’s also OK to give individual blog posts with multiple tags.

Tags are more like the index at the back of your book. You might have only 10 chapters (blog categories) in a book, but you’ll have hundreds of tags. And specific words or phrases may appear in several chapters of your book. Those words or phrases (tags) in your index will show which specific pages of your book those words or phrases appear in even if they are in different chapters.

The reason this happens is because you’ll give a full treatment of a topic in a book chapter, or a blog category, but you and your reader both recognize that all of your concepts are interrelated. Sometimes, due to that interrelatedness, you’ll mention a topic in a chapter that covers another topic with a fuller treatment. It’s only mentioned as it relates to the other topic. That’s where your tags come in.

Keep in mind that tags and categories are organization tools, not necessarily SEO tools.

I believe the answer is quite simple. Quite frankly, it’s the most effective and most cost efficient marketing channel.

SEO allows you to attract the type of customer you are searching for by “pulling” them in based on their own active search for information that you have to offer. And even today, the best converting traffic for most websites is traffic that comes from search engines. It’s almost a no-brainer.

But how many small business owners actually know how to conduct a search engine marketing campaign using the latest best practices for SEO? The answer: Not many. So who is going to do the actual work of optimizing their website?

It may be time for you to consider an SEO consultant. There are really three kinds of SEO consultants.

1. The do-it-all consultant who analyzes your website and looks for opportunities to better your on-page and off-page SEO for increased search results. Then they implement a strategy approved by you.
2. The assist-you consultant who analyzes your website and makes recommendations that you follow up on and implement.
3. The hybrid SEO consultant who uses a combination of these two strategies and the two of you work together.

There are pros and cons to each type of consultant. Whichever is right for you is your call, but now is the time to consider an SEO consultant for your business for the upcoming year.

What I think this infographic is saying is that Google is favoring big corporations at the expense of small businesses. Do you see that? Do you agree?

Something else that Aaron Wall does not mention in this infographic is Google+. I believe it is Google’s hope that everyone will start using Google+, then they will know what your interests are intrinsically. Link building won’t be necessary if Google can rely entirely on social cues to deliver you the content you’d be most interested in. And companies that spend their time building links for SEO purposes will just be wasting their time.

This makes me wonder what kind of Web we’ll have 2-5 years from now. Will link building be completely dead? Will the Web be entirely social and will the Web’s biggest search engine deliver all its results based on how you interact with Google+?

What do you think?

1. On-Page Content – On-page content is everything that appears on your web pages and is visible to human eyes. It can be Google AdSense, videos, articles, your blog, or a widget. It’s the content that either adds to or subtracts from your page’s ability to achieve high search engine rankings.
2. Off-Page Content – Off-page content is designed to do one thing – send visitors to your website. Some off-page content may also provide you with link building benefits. This, too, can be any type of content visible to human eyes. Videos, articles, blog comments, forum comments, social media content or anything that appears on a website other than yours and either serves to build inbound links to your website, boost your reputation, or drive traffic to your site – maybe even a combination of the three.
3. Code – In the code category of content is anything that is read by the search engines or rendered by Web browsers. This includes your HTML code, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, and other “behind the scenes” elements that are viewed only by the search engines and Web browsers unless your human visitors View Source.

All three types of content have the potential to affect your search engine rankings and your website’s reputation. Guard them well, present them professionally.

Here are 9 creative ways to encourage other webmasters to link to you with images.

1. Create an image resource center on your website and allow anyone to use them as long as they give you a link back to your website.
2. Use your own images in your blog and use a keyword phrase in the image’s caption to link to an internal page on your website.
3. Send an e-mail to websites that hotlink your images and ask them to download the image and upload it to their own servers, then link back to you. If they refuse or don’t answer, send them a follow up reminding them that your suggestion is better than being slapped with a DMCA complaint.
4. Start a Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa account and include instructions to anyone who wants to use your images showing them how to link to you.
5. Create an image widget and allow others to use it on their websites.
6. Run an image contest
7. Start an image blog
8. Send out a social media release to Pitchengine.
9. Send your images to photo bloggers and ask them to review your image gallery.

Link building is an important part of running a website, but doing the same old thing can get tiresome. Try a few creative methods of link building with images.