Some SEO Techniques

hello

Here are some SEO advices for beginners i can say.

First of all i am in this field for over 3 years. I can say that i don't like the time spent and that's why i hired someone. But before that here is what i have manage to learn:

1. Link Directories - Good only for PR (google case)
Example: I paid about 300$ for links on many directories, on PR3-5 pages. All good. When google crawled some of them the PR went to 1 or 2.
Conclusion - Don't waist your time too much and especially the money on those.

2. Social Bookmarking - 100 digs for some pages
Example: I had a Web 2.0 Design Tutorial website and got about 100 digs for some articles, technorati, del.icio.us and so on.
When checking backlinks digg.com showed only 5 of them.
Conclusion - Pretty good but make sure your article is 110% original.

3. Article Submission - 20 articles on "famous" article directories
Example: As i was writing the tutorials i thought "let's publish them".
Backlinks - very few after so much work

4. Link Exchange websites - Paid about 50$/monthly for 3 link exchange websites.
Example: I added my website to this websites and received about 400 links every month. I added a link exchange script with the "nofollow" attribute ON. I even added the disallow rule in .htaccess. All good so far.
After 3 months i got about 10 emails from different people asking me to remove their links because their sites were banned from Google.
Conclusion: Don't do this kind of link exchange.REALLY DON'T. Your link will end on a 100 link page which of course will end to banning from Google and who knows others too.

5. Paid Traffic - About 50$/monthly for as they said " 3000 unique visitors"
Example - Because i did not had the time to surf other websites i paid for this services.
Conclusion: Google Analytics was telling me that from 3000 visitors/monthly i got only 200 from that site.
Alexa was the only one who showed that i had heavy traffic. But if you don't pay for 1 month the Alexa rank will go down too. Don't waist your time with this.

Now for the good things.

Don't know if i am allowed to say which software i used to SEO my websites but if an admin or moderator tells me i can..i will of course mention it's name. The license costs between 250$-450$ depending on your needs.
Believe me it's really unbelievable and you learn a lot of things from it.

1. Always or at least monthly change your website keywords positioning
2. Put h1-h4 tags on your website
3. Bold or underline your keywords and again change things on a regularly basis
4. For script users make your URLS search engine friendly
5. Try and write articles directly on your site and add a social bookmarking script for people to bookmark
6. If you do link exchange make sure the website topic is similar to yours and check their page source for the "nofollow" attribute. If it's there delete their link.
7. Create a google and yahoo sitemap and submit it.
8. Changing or adding Content regularly of your website is NO2.SEO RULE
9. the NO.1 SEO rule is to have patience. Really it is.

I just launched a template store and i can say that it's on top google and yahoo for 10 keywords from about 35 mil pages. And i did not even submit it to digg or had a link exchange with anybody..so far
There are plenty of other methods but these are the start ones.

If you find this useful please rate it.Thanks