Update: After writing this article it has come to my attention from Nick James a fellow SEO, that E&P has removed the reference to the ‘500 times’. You can see the original article below. I’m glad to see they have cleaned this up for individuals who may have thought that the comment below was the right approach to SEO.

When I got in the office this morning I started going through emails and my RSS feeds. I saw an article on Editor & Publisher entitled Building Web Traffic Through ‘Search Engine Optimization’. I’m glad to see that Newspaper publishers are starting to see the value in SEO but I was horrified to see a particular quote in the article showing how there is still a lot of bad information floating around out there. Here’s the quote (with the wrong information being in the 2nd paragraph).

Manipulating meta tags also can affect search results. These tags of data (which readers don’t see) are computer code, a digital map of sorts, for what can be found on a particular Web page. “Meta tags will tell the search engines all kinds of information about what’s on the site,” says Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates in Williamsburg, Va.

He illustrates how meta tags work with this example: “Let’s say someone wants to index high with the term ‘pizza delivery.’ A programmer can type ‘pizza delivery’ 500 times in the meta tag. It’s basically a technical task where people who know the algorithms that Google and Yahoo use will work real hard to fool around with the tags to get you listed higher and higher.”

Are you serious?!?! You obviously don’t know the “algorithms” if you think that spamming up a meta tag with the same keywords over and over are going to have any positive results. I always thought of Editor & Publisher as very respectable so I’m surprised that nobody caught that quote before publishing this article. It’s a shame that there will be ones who read the above article and then ask their online teams to start taking this approach. I guess its articles like this, that keep real SEO’s in business.

Google just wrote something on the webmaster central blog about A Spiders View of Web 2.0. Most people at this point know that the search engines have issues with javascript and flash but there was a good tip on how ajax links and static links can coexist.

Here’s what it said:

When creating your links, format them so they’ll offer a static link as well as calling a JavaScript function. That way you’ll have the Ajax functionality for JavaScript users, while non-JavaScript users can ignore the script and follow the link. For example:

<a href=”ajax.htm?foo=32” onClick=”navigate('ajax.html#foo=32'); return false”>foo 32</a>

Note that the static link’s URL has a parameter (?foo=32) instead of a fragment (#foo=32), which is used by the Ajax code. This is important, as search engines understand URL parameters but often ignore fragments.

This technique is being referred to as Hijax

Until there are some better operations in place to crawl ajax it’s best to create a separate version for bots and also for people who don’t have javascript (mobile devices etc) for usability purposes.

A week ago I wrote a story entitled - How to Convert & Import a Google Pay Per Click Campaign into Yahoo. Before I go to far I have only had this site active for a couple weeks which means 0 page rank from Google etc. Now the whole reason I wrote this how to was because of experiences I had in trying to import from Google to Yahoo and the frustrations not only I had but others have expressed in forums. So I wrote this how-to and I made sure I gave it a title like someone would be searching with in one of the search engines. I then submitted this story to sphinn and digg. Here’s the results 1 week later.

The how-to article received nearly 100 views in just 3 days. I received 2 links from trusted sites: seroundtable.com and searchengineland.com.

How is traffic coming naturally? Well if you search for the phrases:

Convert Google to Yahoo
Convert Google PPC to Yahoo

(and these are just a few) my site is coming up on the first page of results sometimes within the top 3. You might be saying - But thats a really long tailed search. Well for the first phrase alone there are 3,630,000 results. I guess there’s a lot of people having similar problems :).

So here’s a few takeaways.

Even though this site is very new there are two things that I did in order to drive referral and natural search traffic.

1. I wrote for the web. Every person who does a search on the web is asking a question. If I write my article, posts, whatever you want to call them in a format that is based around a question and then actually answer that question, then you will be rewarded by search engines.

2. This is a huge one. GET LINKS! I really only had 2 sites link to me but these sites were trusted, and Google along with the other search engines put a lot of weight on links from trusted sites with related content.

This is just s simple example of using your head when looking to get traffic to your site.