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SEO CODE OF ETHICS
The discussion of any SEO Code of Ethics is like a discussion on politics or religion: there are more than two sides, all sides are strongly opinionated, and seldom do they choose the same path to the same end. Most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practitioners understand these ethics, yet not all practitioners practice safe-SEO. Too many SEO practitioners claim a bias towards surfers, or the search engines, or their clients (all are appropriate in the correct balance), and it is common for the “whatever it takes” excuse to bend some of these ethics to fit their needs. This page does not pass judgment, it simply states the obvious. Whereas all parties are working towards presenting relevant and high quality information in an easy to use format to information seekers, and whereas SEO practitioners are being contracted to assist clients in obtaining higher rankings for client pages, we (and those linking to this page) are voluntarily adhering to the below SEO Code of Ethics:

No SEO practitioner will intentionally do harm to a client.

This involves the continued use of any technology or procedure (without appropriate care) that is known to result in having the client site removed from search engine indexes or directories, or rendered inoperative. Questionable adherence to standards must be addressed via the Robots Exclusion Standard.
No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any specifically published and enforced rules of search engines or directories.

Should rules and guidelines change (as they often do), the SEO practitioner will promptly take action to comply with the changes as they apply to all clients. Where rules and guidelines are unclear, the SEO practitioner will seek clarification and await approval from the appropriate search engine before continuing to utilize potentially harmful technology or procedures.
No SEO practitioner will intentionally mislead, harm, or offend a consumer.

All individuals utilizing a search engine to visit a site will not be misled by the information presented to or by the search engine, or harmed or offended upon arrival at the client site. This includes techniques like “bait and switch” where the client page does not substantially contain and is not clearly associated with the optimized phrase, or may be reasonably offensive to targeted visitors.
No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any laws.

This involves the deliberate and continued violation of copyright, trademark, servicemark, or laws related to spamming as they may exist at the state, federal, or international level.
No SEO practitioner will falsely represent the content of the client site.

This includes the practice of presenting different versions of web pages to different users except where that information is altered solely to meet browser specifications and needs, sensitivity to regional factors such as language, or product specific needs. In general, ALL requests for a specific URL should be served identical HTML by the web server.
No SEO practitioner will falsely represent others work as their own.

This includes the taking of work from others in whole or in part and representing this work as their own. The SEO practitioner may not make verbatim copies of the work of others (instead of authoring original work) without the prior consent of the other party.
No SEO practitioner will misrepresent their own abilities, education, training, standards of performance, certifications, trade group affiliations, technical inventory, or experiences to others.

This includes quantifiable statements related to project timetables, performance history, company resources (staff, equipment, and proprietary products), and client lists. Guarantees will be restricted to items over which the SEO practitioner has significant and reasonable control.
No SEO practitioner will participate in a conflict of interest without prior notice to all parties involved.

This includes the practice of choosing to emphasize one client over another in competing keywords because there is more personal gain for the practitioner. All clients are treated equally and all will receive equal best effort in their Search Engine Optimization.
No SEO practitioner will set unreasonable client expectations.

This includes the practice of accepting more than a reasonable number of clients competing for the same keywords and implying that all will be in the top positions in the search engines. This also includes the implication that results can be obtained in an unreasonable amount of time given the known condition of the search engines, client site, and competition.
All SEO practitioners will offer their clients both internal and external dispute resolution procedures.

This includes the publishing of address and phone numbers on primary web pages, the inclusion of third-party dispute resolution links prominently placed within the practitioners web site, and contracts that include sections discussing dispute resolution.
All SEO practitioners will protect the confidentiality and anonymity of their clients with regards to privileged information and items implying testimonial support for the SEO practitioner.
All staff of SEO practitioner shall be bound to protect information that is not generally known as it may harm the client. The SEO practitioner will not include the publishing of testimonials and proprietary logos of client lists, press releases, and other collateral discussing the client without explicit approvals.
All SEO practitioners will work to their best ability to increase or retain the rankings of client sites.

Clients are contracting for fee with the SEO practitioner in order to obtain and retain search engine placement. The SEO practitioner is charged with an obligation to utilize appropriate and allowed technology and methodologies to improve and retain the rankings for their clients in the face of shifting search engine technology, competition, and client web site needs.

We comply with and support this Code of Ethics.

From http://www.bruceclay.com/web_ethics.htm

Copyright© 1996 to 2007 Bruce Clay™, Inc. All rights reserved.

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the result pages for searches made by internauts. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (way back when), SEM methods include:

• search engine optimization (or SEO)
• paid advertisement
• paid inclusion.

These days Search engine marketing includes creating HubPages, squidoo lens, uploading files to scribd, article submission with links back to your primary sales site, blog entries, audio and video submissions and so many more.

Paid search advertising has many controversies about it, especially since sites like Baidu and Yandex (both with more daily searches than MSN) like to include paid links and natural links in the same results. By some standards this is not an appropriate practice, but one country can not force its standards on the world, so this is going to stay. Rumor on the street says that Google will be including a mix of SERP’s with a mix of primarily natural results with advertised sites added in and not marked as such.

Search engine marketing is a topic that can be studied for months and still be a total waste of time. By the time you learn the tricks that are working - they no longer work. Each person should make the effort to find what works for them and use that method until it stops working.

It is easy to get a web site in the top 10 listing on Google, or at least I have done it for my clients over the last 6 months. Time for my method to stop working, so I am out trying new things - knowing that day will come.

You have finally decided to make the plunge and make the web design changes necessary to go after international sales. Your important web pages are ready to be created in the local language, you have looked at the aspects of the culture that are different from your own, and you need to cover the last little items.

Here are 4 web design ideas that you should follow:

1. Get your domain name in the target country

There are a lot of people that remain with the .com site, and this is respected in many countries. It is worthwhile to have the local domain when you consider the cost involved of getting a domain name and having you site hosted. You can have you country website designed so that it displays what is on your primary site if you are not ready to have 2 running site. Consider having your foreign website designed as a sales blog, pointing to you primary sales blog.

2. Make subscription options in the target language available and obvious.

RSS icons are pretty much standard in appearance, so use one. If you are not ready to have your feeds in the foreign language you can at least put the comment lines in the local language inviting people to sign up for the “English Language Feeds”. Making the offer in the local language will help you see to what point translating will be useful.

Make your subscriptions obvious, and ask for them. You should put the sign up option on each post and on the front page of your site.

3. Write articles for your niche in the local language

Knowing what your client wants and knowing your niche is the key to success on the web. Starting sales in the foreign market is a niche in itself, and you need to provide quality and useful information to that niche. If possible, deliver content in the local language. If you are writing blog entries it is entirely possibly to have them translated. You can use one of the many freelance sites on the internet to translate for you - often for as little as $2.00 per post. If you don’t want to pay for the translation, consider bringing on a person that speaks the local language as an intern or use one of the online translation tools. If you use a translation tool, include the original language after the translation and begin each post with a comment “Translated online by…”

4. Start a series of posts

The wonderful thing about having series of related posts is that it makes the reader want to come back for more. This can help get subscribers who don’t miss out on the next in the series. After you are done with the series, let it rest for a while, then email the series as part of your newsletter. Convert the series into one article that you can post online and advertise your foreign sales in the ‘author resources’ section.

Once a site is in a search engine, the search engine’s spider will revisit it and rebuild their index with the changed parts of the site. Some like to think that the spider will hit every page, but choose a very active site and look at the cached pages in the search engines and the cache dates will not be the same. A good way to encourage the search engines to hit every page it to make your site map be obvious on the site and if you can, use the sitemap that is generated by your search engine of preference. Given the choice between hoping the spider finds your cool little trick and staying with something that works - well I advise you stick with things that work.

Search engines were developed by people that know the changing (there, it just changed), so the search engines are always doing there thing with web pages. You will see a page move up, down and sometimes unexplainably vanish for different lengths of time. Although I have not experienced it personally, I have read of 2 people on different side of the US that searched a site and found it on 2 different positions of the search engine results page. This is because there is not just one server with page rank information and while one is updated right now, another will be updated in 30 minutes (Hey, there it goes again, the internet just changed).

In days of old, people were told to submit their domain to the search engines, but the search engines move so fast that a site just needs to be entered on any social media site and it will be spidered right away. I keep one video that is watched between 2000 and 4000 times a day just so I can plug in a domain name that I want spidered. So not only will every engine probably find your site on its own the first time, it will keep visiting it on its own - as long as you keep the site fresh. Update you site or the spider will stop coming to visit.

The major search engines appear to visit most pages in its database at least once a month. If a site I am working on is not spidered weekly, there is something wrong. Some pages get visited every day and a good objective for your site is to have enough content coming in that the search engines have reason to visit daily. Sites with a higher PageRank do get spidered more often than sites with a low PR. And sites which update more frequently get spidered more often than sites which does not have updates - and there is nothing wrong with an archive site that never updates.

If you have a Wordpress blog there is a tool built in that notifies the major search engines each time you make an update, it is called a PING tool. You can try to get spidered more often by updating your pages often. Minor changes are still changes, you don’t have to rewrite the site every day. There are disadvantages to changing your site daily - the first being you run the risk of human error. Make a mistake because you are making a change and you can take your site down, not a good idea.

Reprint of a letter published in the International Herald Tribune six years ago, and it still hold true. I have added a bit, but the idea stays the same.

Hackers take great joy in bypassing passwords, I’ve done it myself.

- Your job is to make passwords unpredictable.

It is wrong to tell people that passwords can be broken without explaining the proper way to choose one that will be more difficult to break.

- Given enough time every password can be broken.

You should choose a password that is seven or more characters long. Don’t use a word that is found in a dictionary - a program can be written to use every word in a dictionary.

Once you use a password that you consider good, don’t use a sequence of that password (Tolkien1, Tolkien2, Tolkien3)

Try making up an acronym - JDwfLTismf (”Jack Daniels whiskey from Lynchburg, Tennessee is my favorite”). Unless you know me well enough to know that I like Jack there would be no reason to consider that phrase. If you did know my like for Jack there is still no reason to consider this as a possible password.

Try and misspell a word using one or more special characters in the center of the word, like Disné#Land.

Since many passwords are case sensitive, use upper and lower case.

When it comes time to change passwords, I take the local newspaper and choose a word. The word for today is Doonesbury, which I modify to be D00n3sb_r. Or take the word lightbulb and spell it 1igh+b_1B. It is actually very simple, once you get the hang of it.

Take the word “automated” and on a US keyboard type one character to the right “siyp,syrf” and doing this means that you can use your family name if you want to.

For sites that do not have any money related information I use one password. I take an unnatural word combination, like an adverb and a noun (an adverb, broadly defined, is a word which modifies any word other than a nouns), combine them the make a word that does not exist in the dictionary. SlowlyTruck is a combined word that does not appear when searched on the internet. Slightly change the spelling and you really have a wonderful password - how about Sl0w1yTruck

I only use one password for sites like blogs. For sites that have money related things I use the ideas referenced above, but since I have a good memory I really screw the text up. I have also taken a text file and just typed a dozen or so characters, and whatever came out was a password.

Change your password at work every two months and personal passwords as often as you feel necessary.

Change your password now. Don’t wait for the prompt.

Internet user demographics are ever changing. More users are coming on the internet from more countries. Everyone needs to keep their website visible to as many internet users as possible if you are interested in new clients. It may be time to change some of your practices. When registering your company with online directories, it seems like most of the world relies solely on being referenced by Google.

Let’s take a closer look below at how well Google searches fare in two of the world’s largest markets. Remember if Google is not penetrating well into a foreign market, then your website will not be found in that market.

In China, Google has a 27% market share; but the local language search engine Baidu has a full 55%. Similarly, in Russia, Google is in a distant third place, with Yandex the leader and another Russian player - Rambler - holding second. Google holds only a 17% market share in Russia - behind two Russian Language sites that control nearly 75% of that market. In addition to the 140 million Russians, there are an additional 145 million people that speak Russian worldwide.More than 50% of growth in internet users from 2007-2010 is likely to come from China, Russia and India which are behind western Europe and North America - please note that these countries have more than 40% of the worlds population. It is probably time to find out how to get your site listed on these search engines.

Chinese and Russian Population & Internet Numbers

215 million Americans have internet access at present. There are 162 million from China and 60 million from India. The total Chinese and Indian users added together equals the number of users in the US. But this does not take the total populations of these countries into account. There are more than 2 billion other Chinese and Indians that are not yet on the internet.

China is the world’s most populated country, nearly 1.4 Billion people. Russia has the largest population in Europe, larger than Germany and France combined. Russia and China each have one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Internet penetration in Russia currently stands at about 20% - half the European average and less than a third of the 69.9% in the United States.

In China, penetration is just 12.5% (so there are a BILLION future clients that are not on the internet yet). When China reaches the worldwide average for internet penetration of 20% they will have passed the number of American internet users.

The penetration levels in Western Europe and North America appear to have stabilized and look unlikely to grow significantly in the future. As an example, Internet penetration is 55% and 65% of the French and German populations.

The majority of new world-wide internet users is expected to come from China and India. Their present internet user penetration is only 12.5% and 5% respectively. The bulk of new European users is expected to be from Russia, the Ukraine and Turkey.

It is estimated that in less then 2 years China will pass the United States as the biggest internet community online.

Is Google up to the Challenge

It is time for an interesting question. Have Google and Microsoft reached their search engine plateau? Are they about to begin the decline in worldwide search engine dominance? Most of the estimations place Google at more than 70% of the present market share world-wide.

What will be their global market share in five years time? Even if Google’s market share grows in Russia and China their overall world share may fall because of the increase in foreign script searches and the increased value of local language search engines.

Yahoo! is not mentioned here as word on the street says Microsoft wants to acquire them. Yahoo! has been on a decline for the last several years.

Get Better Ranks In Russia

And Here are a few pointers if you want to go beyond Google to get better search engine rankings for your website in Russia and China.

The current Russian search engine leader is Yandex. Yandex does not accept site submissions from sites hosted outside of Russia. This does not mean, however, that domain names have to be from the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan). They do have to be hosted with an IP address from a Russian speaking country OR with pages in Russian. By chance, Yandex offers free hosting services, so starting a Russian language site is not as hard as it may see.

Sites are indexed quicker if it is significantly linked to by sites hosted in Russia and Russian language sites, similar to the Google algorithm that gives greater value to a link to your site if the linker is in your field. You will need to read Russian to find out how to upload a site on Yandex

In China the leader is Baidu. Unlike Google, Baidu has merged all of their search results together - organic and paid. Even if this site is in Chinese you can still easily figure it out how to submit your site if you would like to give it a try; just mouse over links until you find one that has a link to submit.

Probably the best way to be a top 10 player in the Baidu SERP’s is to pay. Capitalism is alive and well in China, and with a billion future clients it may be worth your while. They do advertise Pay for Performance (P4P) and they tailor advertising solutions.

To be honest, the best way to be on the Google or Yahoo Front page is also by advertising. To improve user experience, Baidu has introduced “phonetic” or “pin-yin” search which allows users to type in Chinese keywords using English alphabets.

To rank well organically, you must first realize that the Chinese search audience is very Chinese oriented. Your landing page must be fully in Chinese and presented in the Chinese style. Similar issues arise in other countries; a Japanese website written and designed by a Texan will not be accepted in Japan.

So, plan on hiring a Chinese team to include a native marketing professional or copywriter - not a translator - and a graphic artist. These folks should be born and raised in mainland China, not American of Chinese origins. The Baidu site states that the Simplified Chinese language is their language of choice so do not be concerned (yet) about the multiple languages available for your Chinese website.

Like all search engines, Baidu does not guarantee your site will be crawled. Like all search engines, once listed on Baidu, you can improve your position by providing high quality content that you regularly keep up to date. Your Chinese site must have inbound links from other Chinese websites.

On a side note, the literal translation of the word Baidu is “hundreds of times” and represents persistent search for the ideal. Yandex is explained as “Yet Another iNDEXer”.

Get Your Website Submitted To The Leading Search Engines In Every Country

Should you be concerned about where your website is listed?

Online companies need to follow their internet user markets. They need to ensure their website is submitted and listed in all of the leading search engine directories in each of the appropriate countries.

By keeping track of your international visitors you will be able to prioritize countries. But internet user demographics is expected to change rapidly and you should look at prioritizing countries based these results.

Start a search engine submission strategy to get your website listed in all of the leading directories in each country.

The best SEO practices used to increase your search engine rankings are simple if you have never done it. All too often when people ask for help they are missing the basics. A site ranked high is assured of more visitors and subsequently more sales. If you have been looking for a way to kick-start your internet business it is imperative to begin working on this immediately.

Domain Name

If you are starting a new site, get an appropriate domain name. TheDirectMarketingSchool is not taken (maybe I should get it) neither is thefirstseosite for a person looking for that name. Think of a very short phrase and that can be your domain name. It works best if people will actually search for your domain name cheapusedcars is free.

Have a title on every page, and make that title a keyword phrase. Even more than the domain name, this is not optional. If you can, include your name or your business name, whichever is more appropriate. Every page should have a keyword title relating to the page should match up perfectly. Avoid common abbreviations; write out something other than FAQ as a page title, “Common Questions About Widgets” is much better than “FAQ” for a page title.

Keyword phrases should be no longer than what people will search. “Used Toyota Minivan Pittsburgh” is about the longest I would use. How many people type out “Used Toyota Minivan from the early 90’s in the Greater Pittsburgh area”? Keywords should be different for each page. There will be some that are common to your site, and some that are page specific.

Content

Search engines mostly list sites that contain quality content rather than graphics (you can read the content but not as easily the graphics). Your text should be written with different level headings, important words should be emphasized. The text on your site must contain the most significant keywords in the first and last paragraph of each page.

Your home page will have a link to your site map.

Every page will have at least 250 words unless there is a real reason to not have that many. A page with contact details may be less than 250 words.

There is debate on the value of Meta Tags, but you will use them because some search engines use meta tags in their ranking algorithm and every little bit helps.

Any image will have the appropriate alt tag associated with it.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful online marketing campaign. By review the information above and performing these best SEO practices you should be able to make major strides in bringing more quality prospects to your web pages.

Overview

Hopefully you are at least somewhat familiar with alt text. This is the text that you see if your image can not be displayed. The text that can be read for a person that is vision impaired. The text that search engines “see” since they can not describe your image, you have to do it for them. To be technically correct, this is the alt attribute of the “img” tag.

Guidelines for alt text:

1. Ensure that the text alternatives communicate the purpose of the graphic accurately and succinctly.
2. Provide empty alt text for graphics which do not convey content.
3. Provide alt text for both the main image and the hot spots of image maps.
4. Do not repeat the alt text of an image in the adjacent text.
5. Do not put important images in the background.

The Importance of Alternative Text

One of the biggest accessibility problems on the Web today is the lack of alternative text for graphics and images. Individuals who are blind often use screen readers or refreshable Braille devices that read the text on the page to them. When these technologies come across images without alt text, they are unable to communicate the meaning of the image.

When a screen reader comes across an image with no alt attribute, there are a couple of things that could happen:

1. It could simply skip the image as if it were not even on the page.
2. It could find some text that is associated with the image such as the file name and read that instead.
3. The exact behavior of the screen reader varies between brands and the Web page itself. In either case the end result is undesirable. The user either misses the image content completely or gets some text that is probably meaningless.

How Images Are Used

Images on Web sites are used in four ways:

1. a picture is worth a thousand words - it just helps you describe beyond words
2. an aid to visualize important concepts
3. to provide visual enhancements which offer no real content - just pretty
4. to link to other areas of the site (instead of anchor text)

The most appropriate alt text for an image depends on the way in which the image is used. In fact, the same image could be used for different reasons under different circumstances, and each instance of this image would have different alternative text. Keep the following rule in mind:

Communicating the Purpose of the Graphic

The most appropriate alt text communicates the purpose of the graphic, not its appearance, and the most important information to convey in alternative text is if the user can click on the image to go to another area of the site.

If the image or graphic contains information that is relevant to the content of the site, then the alt attribute should also provide that content, in a way that is consistent with the purpose of the image. Remember that the purpose of the image is not necessarily the same as the appearance of the image.

Remember the pyramid schemes of old? You get a letter in the mail that has a list of 10 names (and contact details), you erase the top name on the list, move everyone up one space and place your name on the bottom. Then you mail the letter to 10 people who do the same. By the time your name reaches the top you should get millions in the mail.

Blogs work the same way on the web.

You create your main site using a name that is one of your keywords, one that best describes your site and your product. For the sake of an example, the product will be shoes.

You create 3 blogs that you will need to feed with good content on a regular basis. A regular basis is at least once a day and for a real professional the recommendation is 3 articles a day posted once every 6 hours. Open one blog at each of the most popular blogging sites; blogger, wordpress and myspace.

Each of these blogs must have good content - and each has a name that is one of your most important keywords or keyword phrases. Shoes.BlogOfChoice… WeddingShoes.BlogOfChoice… and DanceShoes.BlogOfChoice…

Use http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion for your keywords. Here are the top 25 resluts related to Shoe (hopefully your #1 keyword less generic than shoe)

Searches done in January 2007

Count and Search Term

882388 shoes

171435 shoes store

82538 womens shoes

75069 jordan shoes

74012 shoes repair

65615 new balance shoes

52185 nike shoes

40455 vans shoes

37865 merrell shoes

37665 aldo shoes

37226 puma shoes

36458 dc shoes

34268 dance shoes

33952 wedding shoes

33280 running shoes

32397 clarks shoes

31936 bakers shoes

29708 sexy shoes

Pick your sub-topic, say Wedding Shoe and look at the results.

Searches done in January 2007

Count and Search Term

33952 wedding shoes

1843 cheap wedding shoes

1212 designer wedding shoes

1038 ivory wedding shoes

793 dyeable wedding shoes

Then you take your keywords and keyword phrases that are listed above and make a blog accordingly ClearWeddingShoes.blogger… you get the idea.

Repeat with Dance Shoes

make blogs like BallroomDanceShoes.blogger (5 or more for the Dance Shoe sub-topic)

Repeat with Sexy Shoes

make blogs like CheapSexyShoes.blogger (5 or more for the Sexy Shoe sub-topic)

Repeat with Running Shoes

Make blogs with names like BestRunningShoes. The BestRunningShoes blog finds a way to point to, or reference, the RunningShoe blog and RunningShoe does the same with the Shoe blog. This is time consuming, but there are tricks to filling blog content without your creating it, one is just to write an article and then re-write it changing the keywords. On a shoe topic this could be easy. You need content in each blog daily, twice a day is better, but spread your entries out by several hours or the search engines will see this for the trick that it is.

The tope site, the Shoe site I reference, must have great content that is updated VERY often and be your selling site.

aaa.Shoe should ONLY point to Shoe. The aaa.Shoe level must have content related to that subject, but perhaps less interesting than the Shoe level.

bbb.aaa.Shoe should only point to, or reference aaa.Shoe unless you have the occasional overlap like SexyWeddingShoe or WeddingRunningShoe and so on. The bbb.aaalevel is where your content may be of lower quality.

If you get to the ccc.bbb.aaa.Shoe (CheapSexyRunningShoe of reference) level then you are really working this for all that it is worth. At this level you may be able to find a connection with another site and share the work and each of your sites pointing to 2 higher level sites.