So I was reading through some forum postings on SEO and came across a question on highrankings.com about plurals in keywords.  Everyone agreed in the forum posts that including plurals in your keywords will give more accurate search results. 

They recommend testing it yourself.  if you search for “search engine” and search for “search engines” you will get completely different results. 

I poked around some more, and found this great article on searchengineguide.com about plural vs. singular keywords.  Sumantra Roy outlined how each search engine handles the difference between singular and plural keywords.  And all twelve search engines reviewed have different results for singular and plural keyword searches. 

So there you have it.  When building a list of keywords, include singular and plural versions of keywords. 

Optimizing your page for search engines is risky business – one wrong move, and all of a sudden your site is de-listed.  There are three lines you can walk while optimizing your site, each with an increasing level of risk – White Hat, Gray Hat, and Black Hat.

White Hat

SEO experts that follow the path of the White Hat are abiding by the recommendations laid out by the search engines, such as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines , Yahoo’s Directory Help, and MSN Live Search Site Owner Help.  By following these guidelines, your site will slowly climb through the ranks , and there will be no risk of being de-listed.  Most techniques for optimizing content, keywords, and meta tags fall into this category.  Typically White Hat optimizers focus on content and customer first, then optimization second. 

Black Hat

Black Hat SEO is on the other end of the spectrum.  These techniques, if discovered by search engines, will have your site removed from their index.  You will need to make changes to your site to bring you into compliance with their guidelines before they will accept your submissions again.  Black Hat Techniques may move you through the search engine indexes much quicker, but at a higher level of risk.  Techniques for Black Hat optimizers typically leverage techniques such as Google bombing, cloaking, and redirecting. 

Gray Hat

This is not quite what one would expect, i.e. the hat in between.  Gray Hat optimizers are a lighter shade of black more than a darker shade of white.  They are taking advantage of techniques that are not as well defined as Black Hat, or are too new to be well defined as Black Hat.  These SEOs are accepting more risk and using questionable or discouraged techniques, but are not banned by the search engines.  Techniques such as link farms, automated blogging, and gaming social media and web 2.0 sites. 

Your Hat

So the real difference between the different SEO hats is the amount of risk.  If you think about it, the hats are better explained as more of a continuum, with many Shades of SEO.  What are your thoughts about the risk vs. reward of SEO Hats?

While I have surfed the web, trolled the forums, and read the blogs, I have compiled this list of SEO Tip Articles that have guided me in the right direction.

1. The SEOMoz article Beginner’s Guide – What is SEO outlines the following topics: why a company would need SEO, how search engines operate, some basic design and organization mistakes to avoid, a discussion on relevance and popularity, some top content tips, the anatomy of a hyperlink, paid placement, Overture, keyword terms and targeting, usability, design, content authoring, community building, metrics to watch, pro vs. do-it-yourself SEO, and an enormous list of resources.

2. Big Oak Inc’s series called 52 SEO Tips releases a tip a week for all of 2007. Topics range from tech tips, tools, reviews, content guidance, SEO community terminology, techniques to avoid, and new perspectives.

3. SearchEngineLand wrote 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques on June 28. The article is targeted at small companies, and covers lots of simple yet effective do-it-yourself SEO tips that will help shoot your pages through the SERPs. Some tips include how to leverage site map pages, building SEO-friendly URLs, opening a pay-per-click account, and copywriting tips.

4. SEO And Your Website by Digital Web has 10 basic, solid tips on how to make your HTML content better suited for SEO. This article covers spiders, spidering, robots.txt, title tag, meta tags, JavaScript, page body content, page titles, mouse-overs, tables, bold tags, and strong tags.

5. ifergan’s 7 Advanced SEO Tactics include syndication, translation, ROR Sitemaps, keyword phrases, GoogSpy, internal content links, and how to leverage your server log files.

6. Entrepreneur’s Journey – The Top 16 Yahoo SEO Tips From A Yahoo Insider, written specifically to target the Yahoo search engine. This article covers whois and domain registration, dashes in your domain, inbound links, content update frequency, Yahoo Site Explorer, press releases, run of site links, SEO blog resources, tool usage, and long term planning.

7. Hobo – SEO / Internet Marketing Tips Round-Up has 10 additional tips articles and great articles on the Hobo web site to read and hold on to. These articles cover things not to do, valid HTML concerns, Google’s Supplemental Index, ethical marketing, and multiple browser testing.

Getting people to your blog is only half the battle.  What do you do then?  You need to hold their attention.  As the old adage goes, Content is King.  Here are 7 steps to keep your content focused.

1. Pick a specific topic

Your blog should already have a general topic.  Now you must narrow your topic and deliver a persuasive blog post.  Ways you can employ to be sure your post is by following these steps:

• Ensure your post adds value
• Make your post stand out in the crowd with a great hook and headline
• Ensure you go beyond the what and give the reader the how
• Use lists to deliver materials as they are easy to digest
• Tell you persuasive story as a problem with a solution and positive results

2. Pull them in with a great headline

Great headlines take time to write.  You should write your title first.  It is the lynchpin for your post.  Or, instead of writing your own, you can use swipe files (a common practice in journalism circles).  There are lots of great examples out there:

• Internet Marketing Tutor – Headline Swipe File
• Rent-A-List – Attention-Grabbing Headlines
• Rent-A-List – Sit Up and Take Notice
• CopyBlogger – 10 great headline formulas
• CopyBlogger – 7 more headline formulas

3. Write an opening that grabs them

The headline may be what draws in a reader, but it is the opening paragraphs that keep the user reading.  Great ways to open your blog are:

• With an intriguing question
• An anecdote or quote
• A mental image the reader can associate with
• An analogy, metaphor, or simile,
• An interesting statistic. 

4. Structure your post logically

Structural elements that will break up your posts into logical pieces will make them easier to read.  Clear subheadings are great ways to section off your posts into smaller ideas.  Bulleted lists or numbered lists are great ways to convey information that is easily understood.  People will scan your posts, so you must convey your idea quickly and keep their attention.

5. Transition smoothly

Keep your ideas in your blog posts running smoothly from beginning to end.  Use transitional words and phrases to connect one sentence to the next, and one paragraph to the next. 

6. Convey your message

You can convey your message many different ways.  Clear and concise copywriting is critical to get your message to your readers.  But you can use other techniques too.  Metaphors are like images; show just as much as they tell.  You, too, can leverage their strength.  And stories are a powerful way to show your point. 

7. Close with a purpose

When you close, you must tie up all your ideas together.  This is where you wanted to take the readers when you started your post, so make it worth their while.  Leave with a call to action.  Another good way is with a cliffhanger, which will keep your readers reading into the future. 

Follow these 7 easy steps and your blog post content will be more focused, more concise, read more frequently, and bookmarked more often. 

Thanks to copyblogger for a great set of articles, and for the 7 steps of blog posts.

The job of search engines is to index every site out on the Internet, rank them according to relevance, and be able to return them based on free-form search. When you think about it, that’s a lot of data. When you perform a search, you want to see the most relevant listings first, and the not-so-relevant ones later. One of the ways Google has managed this is through the use of two different indexes – their main index, and their supplemental results index.

When Google crawls your web site, it determines if your site belongs in its primary index, or in the supplemental results index. Triggers that will get you put into the supplemental results index are:

• Current Google PageRank
• Complexity of your page’s URL
• Repetitive text that looks like you are trying to game the system
• Pages with no substantial content
• Pages with redirect links
• Orphaned pages
• Changes to the algorithms that Google uses to rank pages

This means that if your page is in the supplemental index, your results will show up further down on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), or when there are not enough results from the main index. As your pages change rank, they move from one index to another. This makes sense – as your page becomes more or less relevant, it will move up or down the SERP and move in and out of the main index. The pages in the supplemental index also have less constraints on how they are indexed, increasing the accuracy of the supplemental index.

Google has made some recent changes to the supplemental results index. They have streamlined indexing, increased frequency of indexing, and tweaked the algorithms that differentiate the two indexes. They have also decided to stop labeling URLs as being from the Supplemental Results index.

What this really means is that you can no longer tell whether your page is in the supplemental index, which was how some folks know that their pages needed some help. Some people think this is a good thing (whether a page is in one index or another has no real value), and some people think it is a bad thing (you are removing critical information from the users and the developers). What do you think?

References:

• Google Webmaster Central Blog – Supplemental Goes Mainstream
• Google Supplemental Results Index – A Word To The Wise
• What are Google Supplemental Results?
• SEO Roundtable – Google Hides Supplemental Results Label
• How I escaped Google’s Supplemental Hell

Following up on the Article by Avinash Kaushik, I thought it would be a good idea to detail what SEO resources I have been using. Below I have listed the web sites and the associated blogs that I read regularly, the free online tools that I use to check out the sites I work on, and a list of Articles that I have bookmarked that I refer to regularly.

• Sites and Blogs
  • Pandia Search Central – URL and Feed
  • SearchEngineWatch – URL and Feed
  • SEOChat – URL and Feed
  • SEOBook – URL and Feed
  • Matt Cutts – URL and Feed
  • Yahoo Search Blog – URL and Feed
  • Big Oak Inc. – URL and Feed
• Online SEO Tools
  • Google Webmaster Central
  • Yahoo Site Explorer
  • SEOBook Online Tools
  • SEOChat Online SEO Tools
• SEO Articles
  • A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon
  • SEOMoz – Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization
• SEO Organizations
  • SEMPO – Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization
• SEO Books
  • Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day
  • Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

Are there any SEO resources that you use, read, or participate in regularly that are not listed here?

• http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

This is a great article on the effective methods of Search Engine Optimization.  SEOmoz collected the opinions of the 37 top SEO experts, and compiled them into one document.  They broke them into the top 10 positive factors (i.e. the ones with the most impact), the most controversial factors (i.e. the ones the experts disagreed on the most), and the top 5 most negative factors (i.e. the things you should not do more than anything else).

Now, you need to take this article with a grain of salt… these are people talking about how they get paid.  Are they telling you the whole truth?  Did they pick the most complicated ones to boost the importance of their own services?  Some people say that there will be no need for SEO in the future anyway.  As long as there are search engines, there will need to be a way to categorize data and retrieve it.  I have digressed.  The future of SEO is for another day.