Google wants websites to use nofollow tags to clamp down on spam comments and spam entries in guestbooks. But they don’t want sites to use nofollow tags to direct their “link juice” toward new or struggling internal pages of their own sites. And Google has convinced some of the hot sites right now (like Twitter) to make all the links from people’s bio pages nofollow, even if that person has Tweeted his or her heart out to build a real following with real content. As you might surmise, there are lots of Twitterers who resent this.

Google has not yet figured out a way of teasing out the sites that are using paid content to hedge their search engine bets for obscure searches, but I’m sure they’d like to figure out a way to do so. Google’s steady drum-beat is “content is king,” and though adaptations like the nofollow tag may have their usefulness in squashing comment spam, Google really can’t blame webmasters for learning to use these adaptive tools to help their own sites.

You have control over all those internal pages on your site, so why not make the most of them? There is a lot you can do from within to help your site climb the SERPs. Start by getting rid of irrelevant secondary keywords. Limit outbound links to 10 or less to keep each page sharply focused. If you have a page with way more than that many outbound links, consider dividing it into multiple pages (which you should optimize as well).

There’s a lot you can do to improve the strength of your anchor text too, like making sure your main keyword phrase shows up once on the page and in the title. You shouldn’t optimize any page for more than three keywords, and pages that are too long should probably be broken down into multiple smaller, more focused pages. And don’t stuff keywords. There are some keywords that will flow naturally onto a page with no trouble at all, but there are others that will appear “stuffed” even to the untrained eye, and these don’t help your position on the SERPs.

Nail down the on-page optimization and internal link structure, and you give your off-site optimization that much more of a boost.

We’re always saying, basically, “link farms: bad.” And that’s true. Links swapped for the sake of getting links with no consideration of quality or relevance is the unprotected sex of the SEO universe. You do it at your own (considerable) risk. There are, however, a few sites that people join in order to find other sites like theirs that they can evaluate and exchange links with. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines basically say that this is OK as long as you don’t do it “excessively” (see screen shot).

What’s the definition of “excessive”? Ask yourself if you’d be asking for the link were there no such thing as Google. If Google didn’t exist, and you still would have deemed a link with the site to be a positive thing, then go ahead. Otherwise don’t. The problem with even the good link exchange sites is that usually the link juice you’d get from just one high quality site that you approached independently would probably trump five or six links from the other sites participating in the link exchange. So while targeted link exchange sites aren’t necessarily going to ruin your site’s ranking, they’re probably not going to help all that much either.

• http://www.metamend.com
• http://www.jigsawinc.com
• http://www.searchengineland.com
• http://www.SEOmoz.org
• http://www.SEObook.com

If you take the time to print out the materials or otherwise pore over them with attention, you’re going to come away knowing far more about SEO than you do now, and all it will cost you is your time. There is a lot to be said for SEO self-education, particularly since there is so much information available for free out there. And once you’ve read it and inwardly digested the information, if you still decide to go to that paid SEO seminar, you’re going to be able to ask some really pointed, educated questions and learn even more than if you were going into it as a novice. Don’t wait for your competitor to soak up the knowledge first: make it your goal today to learn at least three new things about SEO.

There are several ways to make your press release stand out from the masses. First and foremost they must be editorially clean, with correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The writing has to be compelling also, and it should be newsworthy. Make sure that your press release passes the “So what?” test. That’s an editor’s first thought upon reading the headline of yet another press release. Make it clear why the information in your press release is newsworthy, or otherwise it will be perceived as nothing more than self-promotion.

Once you get a press release accepted at an influential publication (online or in print), consider offering the editor exclusives in the future for a better shot at getting your press releases picked up again.

• Make your landing page easy to read with white space, bullet points, and subheadings.
• Don’t ask for their life’s story in registration boxes.
• Sprinkle call to action buttons throughout the page so they don’t have to scroll all the way down (or up) to click it.
• Don’t overdo the special effects.
• Don’t give your visitors an easy way out by offering links to other pages on your site.
• Your landing page should welcome new visitors and let them know they’ve come to the right place. Its overriding aim should be to funnel them to numerous opportunities to respond to your call of action. Don’t make it difficult for them.
• As for testing the effectiveness of your landing pages, one great tip is to give different tags to each call to action button so you can see which ones are getting used the most and figure out what they have that the other buttons don’t.

With potential SEO companies, stay away from the ones that promise you that your business will rocket to the top of the search engines effortlessly, particularly if they don’t tell you how they plan to get you there. Oh, and when they say “search engines,” make sure they’re talking about the major search engines that people actually use. Think of it this way: if an SEO site is willing to engage in shady practices to artificially boost your search engine rankings, they’ll think nothing of rerouting your domain to a scary malware site if their relationship with you goes bad.

Many of the same principles apply when you choose a PPC company. Make sure their “results” have to do with the major search engines and stay away from cloaking and other deceptive practices. It’s bad enough to throw your money away on a bad PPC consultant, but it’s worse if they do things that get your site banned by search engines.

Having a sitemap is beneficial for a number of reasons besides the easier indexing of your site. A sitemap makes it easy for visitors to navigate the site, gets across the site’s general theme, and helps you, the webmaster stay on top of how your site is organized so that when you add new pages you can place them optimally within the sitemap, or else modify the sitemap to accommodate the new pages.

Some blog hosts, like Google’s Blogger, automatically create a sitemap for blogs started there. For other websites, there are a number of free online web tools that help you create a sitemap. One is http://tools.lilengine.com/sitemap-builder/, and another is http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp. If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, then you should make one and submit it to the major search engines. It will improve your site’s quality and rankings by helping bots and humans find their way around your site more easily.

Personalized search also works on a broader basis when nobody is signed in. With web search history enabled even when nobody is signed in to Google, the search engine will generate results based on 180 days worth of web history, regardless of who went where on the web. And with signed-out personalized search, the individual sites that influenced the personalization can’t be listed, so even a fairly nosy person can’t deduce much from it.

Webmasters wonder whether personalized search will doom their SEO efforts or actually help them. For those who avoid any and all deceptive practices and who concentrate not just on keywords, tags, and all the minutiae of SEO but on providing top quality content, then personalized search will only help, because it will boost a site based on people reaching it and bookmarking it (or visiting it frequently), regardless of how they found the site.

The “don’ts” of good text links are easier to rattle off than the do’s. Don’t anchor every text link on your page with the same keyword phrase. Not only will it not read well, search engines are starting to become wise to this and penalize it. Don’t use “click here” as your anchor text all the time, because when your visitors revisit the page, they’ll be wondering, “Was this the same link I clicked on last time?” And give your visitors a heads-up if you’re about to take them to a new window or to a page where a massive download will automatically begin.

Keep your anchor text natural and relevant, and deliver what the anchor text says. Link to high quality sources, and after your blog’s been around a while, start asking those high quality sources for back links. It may take time, but the link building process done well will eventually cause your site’s influence to snowball, picking up good links and back links with less effort as your site’s stature (and hopefully profitability) grows.