Keeping Up With the Tricks of the Trade: How SEO Professionals Stay in the Know

The ever-evolving search engine infrastructure poses a challenge for SEO professionals. How do you become an expert on a subject that is seemingly void of concrete facts? The answer is: consistent research and effective ranking analysis. There are several strategies SEOs use to stay hip to the times. What's more, because the industry standards are often changing, SEO professionals must stay abreast of the latest developments in search engine optimization. From attending major conferences to analyzing ranking success, informed SEOs rise to the occasion and ultimately delight in the rapid evolution of the industry. Additional SEO Research Techniques Books on SEO SEO Websites, Forums, & Blogs Tracking & Analyzing Personal Site Success SEO Consultants Networking – Mutual SEO Dialogue Social Media – Facebook & Twitter Experimenting With New Strategies Monitoring New Strategies SEO Professionals are creatures who thrive on perpetual learning. Equipped with calculating minds and a need to succeed, SEOs flourish in unpredictable environments. With a bounty of tools, literature, and advice available, optimal optimization is just within reach. To vote for your own primo SEO tactics, check out Lee Odden's, "17 Ways to Stay Current with Search Marketing."

Black Hat SEO: Duplicate Copy/Content

If you know anything about writing copy for websites, you know you can't pull (or scrape) content from other sites and put it onto your own. That's considered duplicate copy by Google, and warrants a serious penalty from the search engines that could sweep that page off their index indefinitely. Not to worry—Google tries its best to determine where the copy originated so that Webmaster is not unfairly penalized.

For most site owners/developers, this is old news. What a lot of Webmasters are still worried about is duplicate copy as it pertains to groups of URLs. When the same page can be accessed via multiple URLs, Google tends to group those URLs into a cluster to avoid redundant search results. If you don't tell the search engines what the best URL for that group is by including it in your Sitemap, they'll pick it themselves.

Check out Google's own article on this topic, which is eye opening but also unleashes a Pandora's Box of Webmaster interrogation:

Demystifying Duplicate Content

Keyword Density: Quit Mixing with the Dark Side and Move onto White Hat Techniques

Keyword density is key to a properly SEOed website, but what exactly does that mean? If your site content needs to be dense with keywords, then couldn't you simply repeat the same word over and over throughout the page? That may have been the case years ago, but now you almost never return a first page of search results filled with completely irrelevant links. The search engines have gotten too smart for that, creating crawling and indexing techniques using more complex and intuitive algorithms to measure keyword density. And the pages written using the recycle-repeat keyword density method? They're ignored (eventually) by the search engines and are sometimes never allowed again to appear as Google or Yahoo search results. We deem these methods black hat tactics.

White hat tactics for keyword density exist, which you can read about here, on Joe Eitel's SEO Chat article on Keyword Density, but the most important factor all website developers and copywriters stress is that the best websites are those written for the viewer. If you're putting relevant content on a page and organizing it in such a way that makes it easy for your site viewers to read, keywords should generate organically in your writing. That's not to say you don't have to balance site content with SEO best practices, though.

Coming soon from the Web Works SEO & Web Design blog: More on Black Hat SEO Tactics.

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