Kick Your Competitor With Negative SEO?

The Saboteurs Of Search- Forbes

In Pictures: 7 Ways Your Site Can Be Sabotaged

Let me know;

FreelanceSEOPros.com

SEOCopywritersAssociation.com

SEOCopywritingAssociation.com

SEOWritersAssociation.com

SEOWritingExpert.com

SEOWritingSpecialist.COM

SEOWebWriter.com

I know as much as anyone how nerve-wracking it is to track your web site on the search engines while hoping that your business will become more visible. The sad truth is that it takes a lot of time and dedication to make sure your web site or blog does well in the search engines. Unfortunately, as we can see with what happened to my blog, another problem is competitors…how low will they go to hurt your business? 

Already Tired?

Dealing with clients I see how truly tired they are. Running a business takes all your energy and when I say things like  blogging is good, press releases can help and updating a site is crucial for optimization purposes I can see their head spinning. I am adding a lot more work to their load, but the bottom line is you have to continually work to do well in the search engines.

Affordable Prices Are Available Everywhere

I offer all the services I listed above and I am not saying this so readers will hire me (I am a bit busy anyway). My point is there are thousands of people out there, like me, that can help you. I think one of the reasons I am doing so well is because as a consultant or freelancer I don’t have the overhead other businesses have. I don’t need to charge more to pay for renting an office space and all the bills that come with it. I work out of a home office and my prices are about a fourth of my competitors. I am able to provide personalized service at a much lower price. When you call me you don’t have to press 4 then 5 and then 3 and then scream at the phone and press 0 over and over. When you call it is just me.

One Consultant to Do it All?

Not all consultants can do everything, you may need to hire more than one, but you can find affordable services such as web site maintenance, copywriting, blog setup, blog maintenance and press release distribution. You can even hire someone to come in and show your staff how to do things.

 I offer that service. I would make more money if I charged people everytime they need a site updated, but to me that really isn’t fair. If a client wants to know how to do something I will show them. If they don’t want to bother they can hire me. My point is there are options available to you and you can do everything that needs to be done to continue doing well in the search engines. As a bonus, you don’t have to do it your self.

Recommendations

• Find someone you can really trust- make sure the person you hire is someone you can trust with account (web)information and someone that really knows their stuff.
• You may not be able to find a consultant to do everything, but try to find one that can do as many tasks as possible.
• Find someone that respects you and your staff. You shouldn’t be talked down to period. You are the boss.
• You can save money long term if you pay someone to show you and/or you employees how to do things. It may seem like a lot of money to put out in at first, but when you are paying $50-$100 an hour on a regular basis things add up.
• Find someone that you will enjoy working with, someone that is friendly and asks how your kids are doing…hire someone that will not add stress to your day due to attitude or behavior.
• Hire someone that knows what they are doing.

I hated to move the blog because I loved the other one, but I moved for a good reason.

It appears that a competitor reported my blog as spam. I had to go through some things with Google and I did prove that I was not a spammer and they apologized, but every page of my blog went into supplemental in a day and when I posted a new entry it was immediately in supplemental. It ends up if you really want to hurt your competitor you can do what someone did to me.

I can’t use a blogging software- free or not- that does not have a system in place to protect the writer. So now I have this blog with paid hosting.  I avoid a lot of issues this way.

The Major Downside

I was up until 3:30 downloading new themes and changing all kinds of stuff. I am not a big fan of the overall look of this blog so you may see some major changes in the next few days.

If you have any wordpress design advice I would love to have it.

If you have a web site or blog you need to create a Google Account right now! The almighty Google wants webmasters to do two very important things that can only be done with a Google Account:

1. Submit an XML sitemap
2. Verify Your Site

Once you do these two things you have access to some great webmaster tools such as:

Diagnostic

Crawl errors
Web crawl
Mobile Web

Tools
robots.txt analysis
Crawl rate
Preferred domain
Enhanced Image Search
URL Removals

Statistics

Crawl stats
Query stats
Page analysis
Index stats

Links

External links
Internal links

1. A Wide Site- The days of a skinny site are over. You want something wide and appealing. Wide computer screens are in and skinny sites look cheap and terrible on them, so if you are going to invest in a web site tell your web designer that you want it wide from the beginning. If you already have a site you love talk with your web designer and see if it can be expanded. Remember, the appearance of your site is crucial! You want your traffic to stay and they won’t stay if your site is visually unappealing.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- I don’t care who you are and I don’t care what your web site is for. You need optimization for several reasons:- You need traffic to be successful and you can’t bring people in without SEO.
   - You want to show up on the search engines under words that relate to your site
   - You need SEO to compete with businesses in your local area and nationwide
   .
3. SEO Copywriting- If you want to have a site that is effectively optimized you need SEO copywriting. SEO Copywriting integrates your SEO strategy into the copy. The beauty of great SEO copywriting is that your web visitors have no clue that the copy they are reading has any other purpose than pleasing them, but in reality the copy was designed to please the search engines and the reader.
4. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)- Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language that separates the content of an HTML, XHTML, XML, SVG or XUL document from the presentation of the site. CSS saves web designers a lot of time because it allows them to create styles for all of appearance properties and keeps them in one place. CSS is also W3C compliant (this is very important). W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium and they create web standards internationally for the World Wide Web (W3). CSS allows web designers to structure a site according to HTML standards without ruining the look of the web site and Google wants sites that are properly structured and W3C compliant…CSS sites are.
5. Idiot-Proof Navigation- I am not using this term to be rude or imply people are idiots. I am just saying that ALL web sites need navigation that is so simple that any idiot, caveman or 1st-time Internet user can use. Do not make navigation difficult to steer through and PLEASE do not have drop down menus that are difficult to use/navigate through it. I have said this several times and I will say it again- People will not work hard to look through a site. If the navigation is difficult they will get frustrated and leave and unfortunately your competitor may have easy navigation so the client invests in them. I like pretty sites and attractive sites and even fancy sites, but there are many who could care less and just want to find what they were looking for quickly and easily.

When creating a site you want to try and please as many people as you can. This means they need to be able to find your site on the search engines (SEO + SEO Copywriting + CSS), your site needs to appeal to them visually (wide site), they need to believe in you and trust in you (SEO Copywriting) and they need to be able to find what they are looking for (Idiot-Proof Navigation-© Melissa Fach).

Well, to begin to understand what your meta keywords are you need to first look at your source page or any source page. (to view a source page you can either right click on a page and click “View Source” or you can go to “View” at the top of your screen and click on “Source”; a notepad page will pop up- some blogs do not have the defined areas I want you to see).

At the top of your (or a) source page you will see 3 very important areas that the search engine spiders or bots look at closely:

1. Title-tag
2. Meta Description
3. Meta Keywords

To effectively optimize your site you need to choose 2-3 keywords/keyword phrases to focus on per page. These keywords/keyword phrases should be in your title-tag, meta description and also your meta keywords list. However, other words can (and often should) also be included in your keyword list.

For example, on my main business site I have included several words in my keyword list that are related to the main keyword phrases I am focusing on in my content. I have also used many of these additional words in my meta description. So, when the search engines view my source page they see that the words I have included in my keyword list are used in my content (copy), my title-tag, my meta description my anchor text, and my headlines (bolded text that basically describes what the upcoming paragraph is about).

Basically, all the keywords and supporting keywords are being used effectively and they are placed in the areas the search engines want to see them in. I use my town, Sarasota, as a keyword. I would love to include Tampa as a keyword, but that specific word is used nowhere on that page. Therefore, I shouldn’t and do not use it as a keyword. However, there are effective ways to include other geographic areas.

Your title-tags and meta tags need to be page specific.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. When you enter a query into a search engine you receive a page with results and this is called a SERP.