One thing I believe in is don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see. This is a protective philosophy but applies to many aspects of the Internet. Anyone can make a website and tout themselves as an expert in this and drum up some spreadsheets showing why their "system" is right.

As an alternative to sitting around the campfire telling stories with the SEO cowboys why not get your information straight from the horse's mouth. Want to know the latest information about Google? I follow the blog of a Google engineer Matt Cutts. He is very well known in the SE world as he and his team are at the forefront of Google Technology.

Recently on Matt's blog he discussed recent updates to Google's documentation....

After reading through his post dated June 3, 2008 I found one very useful piece of information that everyone who wants to have a great site should read and follow. Published by Google about how they do their searching and how they figure their results reporting. It is called Making the Most of Your Content.

A few of the most important items I found in this guide:

Page 3: "Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the 'Page Rank' for a given page."

 This is important. This means that there are 199 other factors that we should be considering!

Page 5: "You don't even need to submit your site to Google."

That is true with most of the large search engine companies. If you are building your site one thing you want to consider is linking with other like-minded sites. Then when their site is visited by the SE's they will also find your site. It is rare when a search engine does not automatically find your account. Don't believe the pitch about SE submission from them SEO cowboys.

Page 12: Increasing visibility: best practices

What to do:

1. Create relevant, eye-catching content; visitors will arrive at your pages via various links, so make sure each page will grab their attention.
2. Involve users; can you add a comments section or blog to your website? Building a community helps drive regular usage of your site. Getting your visitors involved helps boost visibility and user fidelity.
3. Monitor your site; use Webmaster Central to see what queries are pushing visitors to your site, or to track ranking changes in search results in relation to larger site changes.
4. Aim for high-quality, inbound links.
5. Provide clear text links; place text links appropriately on your site and make sure they include terms that describe the topic.

What to avoid:

1. Don't fill your page with lists of keywords.
2. Don't attempt to 'cloak' pages by writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users.
3. Don't put up 'crawler only' pages by setting up pages or links whose sole purpose is to fool search engines.
4. Don't use images to display important names, content or links - search engines can't 'read' images.
5. Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs with the intent of misleading search engines.

When in doubt, consult Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Want to know how "Search Engine Friendly" your site is? Contact me today for 50% off a standard website evaluation. That is a savings of $50 off the cover price. Your website evaluation will comprise of reviewing your web page and providing email feedback on specific pages and plans of action to improve or maintain that pages 'friendliness'.

If you are interested please use the Paypal or Google checkout on the home page for $50.00 and I will email you for further details about your site before I begin my evaluation.