It does make sense when you believe in all this evil-google stuff some people believe in.

In my own experience I haven’t seen any push in the rankings on my site running adsense versus sites not running them and using other affiliate banners and such. Couple of weeks ago Google released this video below to put an end to the myth:

So now it’s up to you if you want to believe Google or not. I have made the decision to trust them on that specific issue (does not mean I trust them about everything though ) and believe that a website won’t be given a higher rank in the natural listings when using Google Adsense.

But that’s the naysayers.  For them, the only way to secure a Number 1 position for your website in Google and all the other search engines is by stealthily scheming their way up into the rankings.

Notice we say schemes.  The Internet is full of that.  In fact, a lot of what happens in the Internet is all rigged.  Just machinations and manipulations designed to launch a website into stratosphere, haul in a lot of visitors and traffic, and get us clicking.

Google Hates Unethical

Remember Google’s motto?  Do no evil.  They believe that.  That’s why they put it into action too.  They’ve even released  articles about their recommended best SEO practices.  Best meaning ethical and legitimate.

And that’s why machinations and manipulations just won’t work.  All the “black hat” techniques that the so-called search engine optimization specialists like to employ have already been sniffed out by Google, and Yahoo, and the other search engines.  We think we can outwit them, but the consequences for you and your website (especially one with an already established domain name) won’t be worth it.

Black vs. White

Hidden text, keyword cramming, nonsensical text writing, sabotaging a rival company, spamdexing and using redirects with multiple domains, shadow or ghost pages, link farm directories—these black hat tactics are so year 2000.  A decade since and people are still doing these.

Google hates unethical.  What do they like?  The white hat strategies of course.  Honest to goodness ethical search engine optimization.  There.  They readily mixed.  And here’s how.

A Better Kind of SEO

Google still values content.  Content is chief, content is boss, content is king.  CONTENT is capital.  That’s what really drives in the visitors and assures your website’s presence in the search engines.  Good useful content, not a bunch of keywords stuffed here and there.  Good useful content aimed at human readers, not at the search engines.

And trust me: this is way better than cramming your website with nonsensical keywords.  Not only does it promote a bad image for your company (yes readers are now discerning), it also puts your website in hot water.

In fact, Google can penalize your website should you persist in using the above-mentioned black hat tactics.  You’ll lose visitors, you’ll lose online visibility, and you lose those potential bucks.  You don’t want that to happen.

Die, Spam, Die

So enough with spam.

Enough with search engine optimization companies guaranteeing your website’s Number 1 rank.  No such thing.  At best, search engine optimization can influence that ranking, not control it.  And it’s always up to Google.

Do no evil.  Instead, be ethical in your search engine optimization, and you’ll reap the benefits in due time.

Make Google happy, and you make the Web a better place, if only one honest useful website at a time.

P.S:

Content is King.  We can never overemphasize that.

• You want to keep the number of competing sites for the keyword phrase under 100 000
• You want to keep the number of competing sites with the phrase keyword in the title under 10 000
• Avoid keywords with amazon, youtube or similar authority sites pages  in the top 3
• Avoid keywords with keywords rich domains in the top 3. For example, If your keyword is “dog food” and if you have a domain like dogfood.com
  on the first page, then you must understand that a you might need lot of backlinks to beat it.

All the plugins in the following list are free and can be easily found by typing their name in the search box for new plugins in your WordPress admin panel. Some of them need an activation code (namely the Maxblogpress ones) and I have linked them to their download pages.

So here you have it, 12 of the most useful WordPress Plugins:

• Headspace 2 (alternative: all-in-one seo): very useful to optimize your posts for Search engines
• cforms II: Creates a very fancy and easy to tweak contact page
• Feedwordpress: useful if you want to add content on your blog from targeted feeds
• Google analytics for WP: unables you to easily add Analytics to your blog
• Google XML Sitemap: creates a sitemap to be crawled by search engines, updates with any changes on your blog
• MaxBlogPress Favicon: To easily add a favicon to your blog
• MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer: (so that you are not flagged as a spammer, especially if you update your blog quite often)
• Max Banner Ads: to easily add and rotate banners in your wordpress blog
• Privacy Policy: it says it all, adds a nice privacy policy to your site
• Subscribe-remind: increases your rss subsribers by adding by adding some text at the end of each of your post inviting readers to subscribe to your feed
• Sitemap Generator: adds a sitemap page to your blog
• Yet another related post: gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site

Of course this list is not exhaustive so feel free to share your favourite WordPress Plugins in the comments below.

• I like to post comments on other’s blogs and like to get some link juice back to my own blog so it is only fair that I allow this on my site as well
• When a comment is constructive and somebody takes time to actually say something about what you have just written I think it is the least you can do to reward them with some backlinking love!

So now feel free to post your comments!!