Yes Social Media is officially here, 500 million worldwide facebook users and growing makes social media the new buzz term in the industry.

So how exactly can you exploit it for your site/business to gain full advantage.  You will notice on lots of sites, that social bookmarking sites are popping up, or people are asking you to add them on facebook, or follow them on Twitter.  But ultimately, social media is very much the same as content on your site, in that it will only be interacted with, if its informative or interesting.

Make sure that if you are opening yourself up to a social media community, you are constantly aware of what is going on, and that you are able to react to both positive and negative comments quickly.  You will soon learn how quickly a story can snowball in a small community, and grow like a bushfire through the use of a platform like Twitter !!

Embrace the future, but beware of the pitfalls !!!

Lots of wordpress hacks been going on recently, so its important that you ensure if you have a site or blog built in the wordpress platform that you adhere to a couple of general housekeeping tasks on regular basis.

Plugins/updates – always ensure that all plugins and updates are the most recent and have been checked prior to going on the site.  Do not leave a vulnerable point of entry to the site this way.

Passwords – make sure you are using a very safe password system with a combination of letters and numbers that doesn’t leave you open to being targeted by packet sniffers or just a random attack using attempts at guessing well known passwords.  For example, the use a user called admin and password of password.

If in doubt always check the wordpress forums, subscribe to their twitter or rss feed and keep up to date.

Worst case scenario is all your hard work down the drain due to a malicious hack.

If I say it once, i say it twice, if not three times a month.

Duplicate content is a big no in the world of SEO, so just think before you decide to copy content from somewhere else.  You may think that it is an easy thing to do at the time, but when Google catches you, the penalties for your site could range from a mild filter through to a full site penalty.

Surely the last thing you want to see is years of hard work down the pan, just for the sake of spending time writing your own content.  I am not saying that it is the easiest task in the world to fill your site with lots of unique, relevant content, but look for novel ways of doing rather than attempting to ‘cheat’ the system.

Always stop and think before you contemplate duplicating !!

Your blog/site starts to get a bit of traffic and a few regular readers, so the opportunity will come along to accept or provide links for your site.  The idea behind links can be two-fold.

Firstly you are looking to obtain links that will pass ‘link juice’ to the site and strengthen the PR of the site, thus helping to stabilize and improve rankings within SERPs.

Secondly you are looking to gain links that may attract visits, so you may find relevant sites that are within same industry/sector, where people interested in your topic may decide to visit your site.

The most important thing to remember when linking is to make sure you get a nice varied portfolio of links, remember natural link building is the way forward.

so you have started your site and you keep hearing the term ‘keyword density’, and you feel you should really know what it means.

Well its quite straightforward really, as it relates to the amount of times that your keywords for the site appear in sections of the site.  You will normally be optimising anything up to 7 keywords on each page and it is important that the distribution of these keywords looks as natural as possible, whilst also engaging the reader, so that the text is readable.

Ideally you want the keyword density for the body of text on the page to be anything between 2.5 and 5% of total text.  Anything over this could be determined as spammy by a search engine and could lead to a negative view on the site.

Think clever, not spam !!!

The first one I have chosen is Header Tags. I have chosen this as it is a small be very remember-able part of SEO. I think that anyone in SEO will know what I mean by me saying that this is important but it is one of the 200 plus factors that make up search engine optimisation.

When using header tags for search engine optimisation you should always use header tags ranging from 1 to 3. These are generally the ones that are preferred in use to optimise for a keyword. I would recommend that you have 1 h1, 2 h2′s and the rest header tag 3′s.

The short answer to this is yes, as the domain will most likely have a good age and links which will increase the ability to rank quickly in the search engines. However it certainly pays to fully research the background of the domain before purchasing as the domains previous occupants may have used it for spamming. It’s also good to find out what type of site occupied the domain before and keep the content of the new site in a similar or relevant industry as this information will help you to keep most of the inbound links the from the previous site. There are several online tools that can help you to demine if the domain has had any bad history, the whois.domaintools.com/ site might reveal some good information on the previous site as well as using www.archive.org to find out what type of content the previous site had. In ninety nine percent of cases you will most likely benefit from buying an old or expired domain as well as the points made above it will also have a reduced or none existent sandbox effect.

Google has announced that they have come under attack from hackers from china resulting in intellectual property theft. As part of the main investigation Google found that the attack was not just aimed at them but was also aimed at other sectors such as finance, media and technology, however they have claimed that the security breaches were outside of their infrastructure. In hindsight of this Google has said that they will be monitoring there polices for china.

Welcome to my new site, Not In DMOZ.

I will be discussing and analysing SEO and the latest techniques. White hat. Black hat. Grey hat. And even Blue hat!!

Many SEO tips will be posted here and some awesome tools. Also the latest news in the SEO industry will be posted. Get subscribed and keep up-to-date with all the news in the SEO World.

Occasionally I will also touch on many SEO points which are not know to many people and especially beginners in SEO.

A bot about me? I work as a professional SEO on many sites, daily! And so I’m kept up-to-date with SEO!!