• Multple navigation elements – I’ve seen websites with a fancy navigation menu at the top of the page and the same navigational elements in the sidebar followed by navigation links in the footer. Why? Pick one method of navigation and stick with that.
• Too many pages in the navigation element – Do you really need links to your archives, categories, tags, author pages, and related content? Some of this is overkill. Usually, if you nofollow your navigation links to your archives, categories, and tags pages, then you’ll get much better optimization.
• Complex site structure – Keep it as simple as possible for the type of website you have. That’s easy when your site is only 10 pages. But what if it stretches out to 100 or 200 pages? Or worse, to a couple of thousand? It’s OK to have different navigation menus for separate sections of your website, but keep the navigational elements simple. Don’t overcomplicate them.
• Over-Optimization – Generally speaking, any time you include a navigational element solely for optimization efforts, then you are setting your website up to fail. Ask yourself if it helps your site visitor? If not, eliminate it and look for other ways that you can optimize your website.

Navigational menus are established for users, not search engines. That doesn’t mean you can’t optimize them, but optimizing your navigation menus is really simple. Use the best key phrase for each page on your website and use that key phrase as the link in your navigation menu. If your on-page optimization is spot on, then that should be good SEO. If not, you might need to re-write your on-page content or pick another key phrase to optimize for.

Here are 5 reasons creating link bait might just be the biggest waste of your time.

1. You think keywords aren’t necessary – Content is searchable. Even link bait. You must think about how your website visitors are going to find your content before you decide to publish it. What will make them think your article is worth a link? If it isn’t the keywords and it isn’t the way your content is written, then what is it?
2. Link bait isn’t a magic carpet ride – No link bait is ever just created and published without a plan. If you’re too lazy to plan your content, how it will be written, what it will look like, what graphics will accompany it, etc., then there’s no use in creating it.
3. You think it will promote itself – Even link bait needs to be promoted. Will you push it out with social media? Video marketing? Your blog? Will you share it with high profile bloggers in your niche? Include your promotional efforts in your plan for your link bait.
4. You expect too much too fast – You can’t predict how many people will link to your content and when. You can write it, you can publish it, and you can promote it. The rest is up to everyone else. Focus on what you can control.
5. You think quality doesn’t count – All link bait is based on quality. If you don’t think that’s true, then you shouldn’t be trying to create link bait. No one is going to link to content that doesn’t provide value.

Link bait is more than just some fancy SEO trick. It’s a content strategy. Build your strategy on sound marketing principles, not crazy viral hype.

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.

Pinterest is an interesting social media experiment. And it looks like it could become one of the powerhouse websites, especially for women, its largest set of users.

The cool thing about Pinterest is that it is highly graphic. Take a look at its home page and you’ll see all the photos and images, and it isn’t cluttered.

The way it works is you set up your own pinboard. You can have one for your company just like Mashable has. And just like Mashable’s, it can be branded.

Notice how Mashable’s pinboard has the Mashable name in it. That’s great for reputation management and branding. Then, on the left, you can see the big Mashable logo with the website URL underneat. Again, that’s great for branding, but the URL back to the website provides a useful inbound link for SEO purposes.

If you look at the pins that Mashable includes on its pinboard, they’re not all self-promotional. They spend a great deal of time promoting other items around the Web. That’s great stuff. It’s the way that it should be done.

You don’t have to be a rabid self-promoter to be successful in social media generally or at Pinterest in particular. You just have to have a solid strategy for your online content, a strategy that includes promoting others while branding yourself. That’s the best social media strategy in the world, and your company can make that happen.

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.

You can fix that. Discipline and a little bit of time organization is all it takes. You can write a blog post every day in 20 minutes or less. Here are the steps to take to ensure that you can have a blog post every day and have it written in less than 20 minutes.

1. Keep a running idea list – Every time you get an idea for a blog post, write it down. Keep a running list. This is easier if you create a keyword list before you set up your blog. Come up with 10-20 blog post ideas for each keyword on your list, and your keyword list should have 50-100 good keywords.
2. Let good ideas sit – Instead of trying to write about something the day you come up with the idea, let it sit a few days. You’ll think of other ideas that can go with it. Write them down. Start with your running idea list and go from there.
3. Cut unsupporting ideas before you write – If you keep a running list of ideas and related ideas, you’ll start to see that some of the ideas you thought initially supported each other are actually not related enough. They could be their own blog posts. Cut them out and separate them. Remember, the goal is to write fast. A nonsupporting idea doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
4. Use lists – You can say a lot with ordered and unordered lists.
5. Keep your posts short - Remember, you’re trying to write fast. So keep your blog posts to under 500 words.
6. Write in bursts – If you get stuck on a blog post and can’t think of how to finish it, save it as a draft and come back to it later, when you can think of something fresh.
7. Write about your best ideas now - Why save your best ideas for later? Save time now. Just knock it out.

This blog post took 15 minutes to write. It’s less than 500 words and more than 250, so it should pass Google’s search engine optimization guidelines. Yours will too!

I’m talking about your videos.

High quality shorter videos seem to attract a great response from viewers and have the best potential for going viral.

The reason shorter videos work best is because people in today’s fast-paced global marketplace are crunched for time. A thirty second video will go much further than a one hour documentary. Especially if your goal is to attract attention and drive traffic for marketing purposes.

If you want to provide in-depth videos on a given topic, you are better off using short videos to attract attention to your business and website and using them to drive traffic to your longer pages. You might even put those long educational videos behind a paywall and charging admission. Then you know that someone interested in that kind of time commitment is willing to pay for it. When people put their wallets on the line, that’s a commitment.

Put your marketing budget into your short videos. They don’t provide any more SEO benefit than longer videos, but they are also don’t provide any less SEO benefit. But they do work for driving traffic.

Online video marketing isn’t rocket science. You can be effective with just a little forethought and some respect for your prospect’s time. Draw them in with short videos and close them with your on-page content.

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.

So what does it do?

In a word, it looks at a web page on your website, or any website you want to test, and tells you whether or not that web page is using microformats to present your authorship of the page in the best light. Specifically, it will:

• Tell you whether the page is linked adequately to your Google profile.
• Let you know if the page is linked to your social media profiles at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, Quora, and other social networks.
• Show you a preview of your Google snippet for that page should it be returned in a search results page for your author name.
• Give you the extracted rich snippet data from the page.
• And show you what a custom search engine would see if it were to look at your rich snippet data.

That’s a lot of information. More importantly, it’s a lot of useful information.

Rich snippets are very important for authors and other creatives who spend a lot of time creating content in their own names. Even if you employ a ghostwriter to create your content, you are its author. You should test your rich snippet data on a semi-regular basis to ensure that you are making the most of your microformatting opportunities. It not only has reputation management consequences, but it can affect your SEO as well.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t submit press releases. Submit them. You’ll get your inbound links and if you optimize them well you’ll likely see some inbound traffic when searchers find your press release in the search engines. You may even get a call from a reporter or see your press release re-printed somewhere – maybe even off line. But don’t expect your press releases to do all the work. Public relations goes beyond a mere press release.

Good public relations involves some level of relationship building. You need to find out what publications cover your industry. Make a list. Then find out who the person is in those publications who reports on topics that are important to you. Again, make a list.

When you’re ready to start your public relations campaign, contact those people on your list and make a personal pitch. The personal pitch is a lot more effective than a press release. It shows that you have the ambition and the incentive to go an extra step. Most of your competitors are submitting impersonal press releases. But you will be more direct, more personal, and more effective.

When you make a pitch, tailor it to the specific needs of the person and the publication you are pitching to. Is it a lone blogger in your niche? Find out what he likes to write about (you should subscribe to his blog and read it every day) and pitch to that.

Are you pitching to a national news magazine in your niche? What kind of stories do they run? What are their biases. Play to those.

Public relations is about more than building links and sending press releases. If you really want it to be effective, make it personal.

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.

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?

First and foremost, SEO is definitely not dead. You shouldn’t give up on that yet. But it has changed in the last five years.

For instance, if you are out prowling for links and looking for high PR do-follow links, then you are probably wasting your time. But if you are focusing on placing your unique articles on high profile, high traffic websites where they will be seen, then that is a much better way to go about link building in 2012.

Social media is another online marketing tactic that isn’t going away. However, don’t just sign up for a bunch of social media websites and forgetting about them. Stick the large sites with current traction and high traffic. For most businesses, that means Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. If there are niche-specific sites that you can focus on, join them too.

Whichever social media websites you decide to join, stay active.

Video marketing and mobile marketing are two other online content strategies that are gaining ground and look to be effective in 2012.

Online marketing hasn’t changed much in the last five to ten years, but it has changed. Make note of the changes and keep promoting your content far and wide.

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.