There’s only one thing worse than doing no search engine optimisation and that’s doing too much. When setting up a website or wanting to promote an existing one, many people go absolutely overboard and begin slamming in the keywords and building up the back links.

Trouble is, if you suddently appear on the scene with a website that’s quite obviously trying too hard, Google may penalise you more than if you’d done nothing at all.

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One of the most infuriating things a web designer has to deal with is the constant questions about how much money a website will make and how long it will take for it to be number one on Google. It’s become so bad now that every question like this just phases me out and all I hear is a slight buzzing noise at the back of my head.

Seriously, please shut up.

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I love the Internet to bits. Just when you think you’ve pretty much got every avenue covered, someone drops in a little gem of information that makes you sit up and think “D’oh, why didn’t I think about that?!”

Gregor Spowart has just blogged about something that you should be aware of that had completely slipped my mind, simply because I hadn’t realised it still went on. Namely, the “we’ll submit your website to hundreds of search engines” nonsense being spouted by lots of web firms.

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Google are at it again!

They’re not content with just offering up search results that they think you’ll be interested in, they are now giving you the choice of altering the results, saving them and remembering your favourites so they can serve you better in the future.

For example, if you searched for ‘Sandwich Shop’ and you weren’t happy with the results, you could promote the results you preferred above the ones you didn’t. Sounds odd, here’s it in action:

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Many people dismiss web marketing as a fad or something just for geeks and nerds. If we’re in a meeting with a marketing or managing director discussing their web presence, when the conversation moves on to the search engine aspect of promotion, a quick phone call is then made to the IT department and a ‘translator’ is summoned to the room.

I.T. strikes fear into the souls of many people. It’s seen as an impenetrable fortress of acronyms, thick manuals and buzzwords created solely to ensure ‘normal’ people will never really understand it. In some cases, rightly so. Accountants spend an awful lot of time learning their trade so you don’t have to do your own books, IT people spend an awful lot of time learning their trade so you don’t have to bother with computers. But why is search engine marketing tarred with the same brush?

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In our last newsletter I explained how using our DIY SEO book principles I’d managed to get a completely new website on to the first page of Google within a couple of weeks. Well, it seems that if you type ‘Birmingham Laundry’ into Google, the website I created is actually at number one!

Want to do this for your site?

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The one rule of blogging, presenting or just talking to potential customers is “never say sorry”. However, I’m going to break that rule because what I’m about to show you is appalling. I’m really, really sorry.

I feel so bad to have let the side down, it was a moment of weakness. I should never have been allowed near paper and pen. In fact, they’ve now been taken off me and all copies of PhotoShop locked away (not that I could ever use it).

What I wanted to do was to explain how bad SEO practices should never be used. I wanted to do it in a fun way that conveyed humour with an art form. I ended up with bad stick characters.

You decide:

There, I did it.

You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson, but no, I never learn my lesson and I’m off to write another one. I should be ashamed.

At the beginning of October we were seeing a lot of people download our ebook and it was getting some great reviews. However I’m never satisfied with that; I want facts and when someone invites me to read an ebook I view it with skepticism. Very often those peddling information are just looking for methods of making money because the techniques they’ve written about don’t work. If they did, why write a book?!

OK, ours was free, but it does come loaded with ideas and promises that many will assume are wrong or just plain inaccurate. I don’t blame you. On the face of it, it was a piece of marketing that has resulted in us receiving a lot of calls and so we are now helping even more people with their websites, it worked.

But I wasn’t happy. I’m guessing that many of you having read the ebook and laughed out loud at the amazing humour, simply closed it down and didn’t do any of the things it suggested. I reckon you thought ‘Hmmm, interesting’, maybe sent it on to your IT friend who said “it’s rubbish” and the consigned it to the recycle bin.

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We get some odd phone calls y’know, usually from people with some very strange ideas about what Google does and how it indexes your website. It’s not their fault, obviously, us techie types have spent the best part of our lives trying to make anything computer related as impenetrable as possible to the layman.

We’ve done such a good job that anyone who does understand what we’re talking about is usually labeled a ‘geek’ or a ‘nerd’. Well, at the risk of embarrassing a few people who read this blog, I’m going to tell you about some of the bizarre things we’ve been told about SEO and then I’ll explain how it should be done.

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The most important goal of internet web marketing is to increase traffic to your web site. You can think of your web site as your shop front; and the more people you can entice to come into your shop front, the more customers you will have. The best way to increase traffic to your website is to increase your search engine rankings. This can be a challenge, but with some work and persistence you shouldn’t have too many problems.

(Before you carry on, you might want to download our new DIY SEO guide)

A great tip for increasing search engine ranking is to build your internal and incoming links. Internal links are simply links on your site that link to other pages on your site. It is important that each of your pages contains links to the all of the other pages on your site.

This can potentially increase the page rank of every page on your web site. To increase linking value even further, you can also create links from other websites you own - especially older sites that are already well known to the search engines.

Another thing you should keep in mind in Internet web marketing is that you can improve your search engine ranking using some simple HTML tricks. You should already know that the Title tag goes directly under the Head tag. In this Title tag you have an excellent opportunity to place some good keywords.

Don’t just put them in a list though; make a coherent sentence that explains what your site is and what it can do for the visitor. Put four or five of the best keywords in this sentence. Make sure you have one or two keywords in each of your Heading tags (described here) as well.

Next, you should know a little bit about Meta tags. These tags used to be search engines’ most used method of ranking webs sites, however today, they are barely used as search engines have moved on to use different methods.

Meta tags are still used occasionally and it will only take a few seconds to put them in, so most people agree that you should have Meta tags in your web page. Use the META NAME=”description” tag directly under your title tag and make a list of the most relevant key words for your site. Don’t use popular key words that have nothing to do with your site; search engines do not like this.

The final thing that needs mentioning regards the keywords on your site. The text on your web pages should have some keywords in that relate to the products or services that you sell and also to the type of search your customers are likely to use.

Don’t put too many in though,  if you put too many keywords on your web site then search engines will just see it as spam and ignore it. Also, never put keywords in where they don’t make sense. If you keep these and other internet web marketing tips in mind, you are certain to have great success in the promotion of your website.