I frequently come across SEO service providers who specifically offer “guaranteed top ranking on Google SERPs” to their clients. This sort of guarantee gets a thinking mind to wonder if it’s possible for a non-Google employee to reverse-engineer its search ranking algorithm, in order to bring a lowly-ranked web page to the top. The truth is while you can do some search engine optimization for a site, you can’t surely guarantee Google’s top ten ranking for a competitive keyword, because so many other webmasters in your niche are relentlessly optimizing their sites for the same targeted keyword. That’s assuming the keyword has a high search volume.

Reasons why non-Google employee without access to the search software cannot guarantee top 10 ranking on its SERPs:

• The search ranking algorithm is fully automated.
• SEO providers are outsiders and don’t have the means to reverse-engineer the ranking algorithm.
• It’s apparent that your competitors (other webmasters and site owners in your niche) are also working to get their websites to the top. And the ones already at the top continue to optimize their sites to remain there.

Some SEO service providers I talked to said the reason why they call the service “guaranteed top 10 SERP ranking” is to attract clients. They complain that their clients generally don’t want to hear “I’ll try” – they literally want guarantees that their websites would be among the first 10 listings on Google search results for their chosen keywords. So, as you can see, clients are also a part of the problem.

But can we call this a form of deception? Well, it depends on how you look at it. An SEO specialist who has brought numerous websites to Google’s first page for competitive keywords can defend his/her use of the term. Still, things can go wrong – they might not turn out the way you want them to. And when that happens, the client can rightly say this is a deception. It’s even worse for an SEO amateur to use that term “guaranteed top 10 ranking on Google SERPs”, because there’s likelihood things won’t work out the way it’s anticipated.

The fact is that serious clients who understand how search engines work don’t demand SEO service providers to guarantee top ranking before hiring them. They go to those specialists who have built strong reputations in the field and have easily-verifiable number of websites they’ve ranked in the past.

Simply uploading a newly-designed website to your server doesn’t guarantee traffic from your target audience. The main purpose of creating a website is not only to get your immediate friends to view it, but also to reach a wider audience. But you won’t get much traffic without promoting the site. You need to tell Internet users that the site exists and what it offers. In this article, we’re going to discuss various sustainable ways, including SEO and other means, to generate organic traffic. Unlike paid marketing, these techniques continue to yield positive results long after you’ve implemented them.

Create an affiliate program:
If you sell products and/or services on your site, setting up an affiliate program will help to increase sales. This means your affiliates will be marketing your products/services simply to earn their own commissions. So, just set it up and let others promote your products!

Create a blog related to your business:
Creating a blog related to your niche has lots of benefits: it will help you to position yourself as an authority in your field by writing tutorials, providing information, expressing your personal views on crucial topics, as well as getting lots of relevant backlinks with targeted keywords as anchor texts. If your writings are interesting, many readers will regularly use your blog as a reference point. But before you start writing, perform a keyword research for your niche, and make sure you blend keywords that have high click-through rates with the entire content. I especially prefer to use Google Keyword Tool External for my researches. Some of the keywords should be used as anchor texts while linking back to your business website.

To create a blog that will give you valuable inbound links, host it on a different account than the server on which your business website resides. This is because search engines assign lesser value to backlinks that originate from the same IP as the one being linked to. You can even use free blog hosting sites like Blogger.com or WordPress.com.

Now, you’ve seen that having a blog opens a way for your business site to get targeted backlinks, as well as a stream of visitors who enjoy what you write and want to know more about you.

Embark on article submissions:
Another viable way to get keyword-rich backlinks and huge traffic is to write unique articles and submit to article marketing resources, such as Articlesbase and Ezinearticles. I only recommend submitting to quality article directories that have large user-base and those that allow links in their author’s resource boxes. As a rule, only submit articles related to your niche, so that your backlinks will be relevant and visitors who follow the link won’t be disappointed when they reach your site.

Write and publish press releases:
Publishing press releases has also proven to be a major way to generate enormous, targeted traffic, and also to amass relevant inbound links. Whenever you release a new product and/or service, publish and distribute a PR to help a wider audience to know about it. A single well-written and meaningful press release has the potential to drive thousands of targeted traffic.

Post viral videos at Youtube:
Many businesses, including your competitors, use online videos as a way of marketing their sites. And you might be missing out on a lucrative, free advertising model that helps others to drive traffic to their websites, if you’re not yet involved.

Submit links to web directories:
Human-edited web directories provide a way to get backlinks from pages that relate to our websites. Just weed out the link farms before you start submitting to select few web directories.

The almighty question in blogging is: Why are some WordPress themes far better than others? There are some themes that are designed to maximize advertising income and boost search engine rankings without touching a single code, while there are some themes that don’t have these features. There are some fine WP themes like the Ultimate Blogging Theme and Zestle WordPress Theme that take out the “coding” part with their vast “in-theme options” that enable users to switch sidebars, change widths and heights, fonts, colors, etc, from the admin control panel.

As follows are the features the best blogging themes must include:
Premium blog templates help bloggers to easily personalize their web pages without touching code.

• Search engine-optimized design.
• It includes all the important tags (Title tag, Heading tags such as H1 and H2, Meta Keywords and Meta Description).
• Optimal advertising placement to maximize income.
• Striking color combinations and design.
• There’s no coding required for a user to customize the theme.
• Free Lifetime Updates.

When I first created my WordPress blog, I spent several hours everyday searching for a premium theme that combined all the features needed to boost search engine rankings, but was disappointed. Then I developed a theme that included far more advanced features than I anticipated. After designing my ultimate blogging theme, I found out how easy it was to run a WordPress blog that fulfills my needs, without needing to mess with coding. Now my blog is making four (4) figures every single month for me and I couldn’t have been happier! It’s a great fun and hassle-free using this theme. I’m glad it doesn’t demand any code tweaking from the user, since some of my clients and friends who are using it are not comfortable with HTML, PHP, CSS and stuff.

To me it just made a lot of sense to try a WordPress theme designed by a dedicated team of professional web designers, so that you don’t screw up your blog. Anyway, go ahead and get an SEO-optimized blogging theme that delivers what it promises, which is to help you create a personalized search engine-optimized blog, without you touching the code. Even if you already know some basic things about WordPress, a quality WP theme contains more advanced features that a blogger will never need any other plugin to go along with it.

Search engine optimization is defined as the process of improving the ranking of a website or web page in search engines via organic search results. This process includes on-page, as well as off-page techniques. Before you can become a search engine optimizer, you need to understand how search engines are programmed to function and the keywords Internet searchers type into search inputs. As a site owner, you should learn at least some basic SEO skills, if you have plenty of time to spend learning and implementing the techniques.

On-page SEO
a) Prioritizing keywords through HTML coding: For a site or web page to rank for any keyword, it must contain the term in its content. Include in the title <title> of every web page the keywords or key phrases it targets. This will help the page to rank well for the key terms, if it has quality backlinks that use the same keywords as anchor texts. Bear in mind that any keyword you use in your title should be present in the body of the web page. Make proper use of heading tags, such as h1, h2 and h3, to show search engine crawlers the important keywords on every page. Bing especially assigns higher priority to keywords contained inside these heading tags.

b) Creating unique and keyword-rich content: Create 100% original content for each web page and after that use Copyscape to check if it has any duplicate issue. Duplicate content attracts some kind of penalty from search engines. Ensure that each web page contains all the important keywords related to it. Nevertheless, never stuff keywords into any web page, to avoid triggering Google’s spam filter.

c) Canonicalization issue: Canonicalization issue occurs when multiple URLs can be used to access a single web page. This causes a colossal challenge to search engine bots in determining the canonical URL the webmaster wants them to index. This issue can be corrected by using 301 to redirect other URL variations to your preferred one.

Off-page SEO
In theory, off-page search engine optimization mainly deals with the process of promoting a website or web page to attract incoming links. But it goes well beyond that! Relevance of a backlink to the linked content is what actually makes a difference. Quality of the page where the link originates counts so much. High quality backlinks carry much more weight in the “eyes” of search engines than poor quality ones.

A sitemap is essentially a list of all the important URLs of a website that a webmaster wants search engines to index. Though major search engine spiders are able to locate all web  pages of a site step-by-step by following links, but that process may take a longer time for some deeply-hidden pages to be found. And this is also true for sites that have some unreachable pages by internal and/or external links. So, a sitemap helps to speed up the process of finding all your pages or even make it possible for web crawlers in the first place.

There are three (3) types of sitemaps, namely the XML sitemap, the HTML sitemap and URL List.

The XML (Xtensible Markup Language) sitemap is specifically created to help search bots to easily discover a site’s inner web pages.  An XML sitemap format may contain additional data that allow a webmaster to give extra information about any single page. For example:

• <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
  <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.seotreats.com/</loc>
  <lastmod>2010-04-02</lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.seotreats.com/search-engine-optimization/</loc>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.seotreats.com/web-development/</loc>
  <lastmod>2010-06-18</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.seotreats.com/web-hosting/</loc>
  <lastmod>2009-09-26T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>
  <priority>0.3</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.seotreats.com/link-building/</loc>
  <lastmod>2010-05-20</lastmod>
  </url>
  </urlset>

The loc tags (<loc></loc>) are required in every XML sitemap, as they’re used to identify the very location of the sitemap.

The priority tags (<priority></priority>) are optional, and are used to let bots know how important the corresponding file update is.

Changefreq tags (<changefreq></changefreq>) are also optional, and they help to tell search spiders the frequency with which the content of a corresponding file changes. Such changes can be hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. Having changefreq tags enable search engines to expect when the page’s content will likely change.

The lastmod tags (<lastmod></lastmod>), also optional, tell search engine bots when the corresponding file was last modified.

It is noteworthy that search engines do not perceive the lastmod, priority and changefreq tags as commands, but as citations. If you must add them to your site’s XML sitemap, make sure the information you provide is accurate, to avoid the sitemap being entirely neglected by these bots. So, inaccurate data in these tags incurs a negative effect you may not want your site to have.

An HTML sitemap is an ordinary HTML web page designed for both bots and humans to help them to easily locate all the web pages of a site in one place. It is a hierarchical visual model of the site’s most important web pages, which the webmaster wants search spiders and visitors to visit. An HTML site map is a kind of diagram which helps users to effortlessly navigate websites that have numerous pages and often confusing navigational issues. Being very similar to a book’s table of contents, it makes it easier for users to quickly find the information they’re interested in, without having to navigate through the entire site. If an HTML sitemap is well constructed and contains links that properly mirror the site structure, visitors won’t feel lost during navigation, but will easily understand the organization of the website, and to search for information accurately and quickly. In search engine optimization, an HTML sitemap makes it easier for a search engine bots to locate all the web pages of a website in one place.

URL List is a plain text file that lists the URLs of a website. This form of sitemap is supported by Yahoo Search, and it’s worth having in place.

All the three (3) sitemap formats, HTML, URL List and XML, play important roles in search engine optimization. However, the XML format is required by all major search engines and hence, it’s the one that carries greater weight.