1. Duplicate content.
Googles overarching mission is to provide its users with high quality information which is relevant to the search query that they submitted, therefore it will come as no great suprise to learn the Google has effective measures in place to make sure that the top ten results for any given keyword do not comprise of pages containing identical content. One of the means that Google uses to achieve this is by penalising pages that contain content which originated on another website.

2. Cloaked Content.
The idea of cloaking content is not a new concept, infact it has been around for years. One of the oldest methods involves rendering the text in the same colour as the pages background to make it invisible to the human eye whilst presenting the same text as content to search engines. There are other methods of cloaking text through CSS. Each of these proceedures are against the terms of service of Google and as such, carry penalties.

3. Paid Links.
Many websites offer people the chance to obtain a link from them in return for cash, often these links can seem as though they would be very valuable for your SEO efforts, it is not uncommon to see PR6 and PR7 websites offering links for cash. However, before you grab your credit card and go off hunting, there is a catch, buying links is against Googles terms of service and carries hefty ranking penalties. Typically Google will penalise both websites involved in the paid link transaction, and additionally every pagerank update sees the PR of sites know to have sold links heavily downsized.

4. Linking To Websites Of Bad Repute.
Google and other search engines realise that no person can control who links to their domain, however the websites that your domain links out to is an entirely different scenario, these links are firmly within your control and google considers each of the websites you link to when it calculates your ranking positions. Linking out to websites of a bad repute will have a negative impact on your own rankings.

5. Canonicalization.
Canonicalization is the process of showing identical (or very simular) content on more than one url. Often this can occur through incorrect server configuration (not redirecting non-www. to www. or vice versa) but canonicalization can also come about on ecommerce websites that show the same product lists on more than one apge or even on websites that display the same products on pages which sell in alternate currencies. In this situation, use of the rel=canonical tag is recommended to let search engines know which page you would like them to index.

5 Common Negative SEO Factors was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

Submitting a sitemap to Google is free and simple to do. Ideally you should create your sitemap in XML format, once it has been uploaded to your domains root directory you can submit it by loggin into your Google webmaster tools account. Remember that you will need to update the sitemap and resubmit it everytime you add, delete, or move pages in your website.

A sample Sitemap containing just one URL and using all optional tags is shown below. The optional tags are shown in italics.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.widget.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2006-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

lastmod: This displays the date this file was last modified.

changefreq: Frequency that the page is updated.

priority: Here you can select the priority you want Google to give to spidering that page on your domain. A priority factor of 0.0 would be minimal and a priority factor of 1.0 would be the maximum. This factor is ONLY relative to your site and will not affect your rankings.

Google has provided a detailed helpfile on how to create XML sitemaps here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html.

The most simple way of creating a sitemap is by using one of the many free sitemap generators available online such as: http://www.sitemapspal.com or http://www.xm-sitemaps.com although for larger sites you many need to pay a small subscription fee as most generators have a 500 page maximum on free users.

Creating A Google Sitemap was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

The first think you should do is analysis, use an seo tool to check that your meta tags
are correct and relevant to the site, its simple to do and will ensure that you are not rowing against the current when it comes to SEO.
This tool will check your meta tags and also give you an indication of keyword density on your webpage.

Meta Tags are lines of html code and text contained in a website that tell the search engines about that site.

Keyword density means the amount of times a word appears on the page, and is shown as a percentage. This can be used by search engines to determine what the page is about.

Ok Now what ?

Once you have completed the analysis and determined that everything is ok, you are ready to start building backlinks, backlinks are links from other websites or blogs that point to your site.
Search engines like google use backlinks as a way of measuring how important a website is, the more backlinks that point to your site, the higher in google’s listings your site will be returned.

Are All Backlinks The Same ?

No. the value of a backlink is affected by many factors.

The higher the page rank of the webpage your link is on, the more powerful that link will be.

Other factors can affect the value of the link such as:

Page Being Blocked form search engine spiders by “no follow” in robots.txt
Pages Alexa Ranking.
Amount of links on the same page.
Relevant authority of the site.
Age of the Domain.
Amount and quality of the pages inbound links.

Keyword Anchored Backlinks

Keyword anchored backlinks will allow you to improve your position in the rankings of major search engines for any keyword you choose, for example if you used the keyword “chicken soup” as anchor text for your links, then you would see your website improve in the rankings under the search term “chicken soup”.
In order to learn how to make Keyword Anchored Backlinks just click the link.

Seo Basics was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.

This method is useful if for instance you have a website with price lists in different currencies there could be several pages with almost identical content, specifying a canonical page will not only allow you to avoid duplicate content penalties for these pages, but google will also view all inbound links for the simular pages as though they were linking the single page you specify in the canonical attribute. this can obviously have a major positive effect on that pages position in google’s results.

How to Specify a canonical page.

Fistly determine which page you want to use as the original vesion of your simular pages, this is the page that all incoming links currently spread across the duplice content pages will be attributed to.

once you have determined this you can go ahead and add the following attribute in the HEAD section of each of the other pages that has simular content: (do not add it to the one you have chosen as your original version)

<link rel=”canonical” href=”full_original_page_url_goes_here” />

There is another aspect to canonicalization, which applies to home pages on a domain and the variences on the url that can be used to link that page for instance:

domain.co.uk/my_website/index.html
domain.co.uk/index.html

In this instance it is feasible, and highly likely that you would have inbound links pointing to both versions of the same page although this would not attract a duplicate penalty, it would just result in only one version of the page being indexed therefore the link juice pointing to the unindexed version is going to waste. But heres the good bit, you can use the rel=”canonical” full_original_page_url_goes_here attribute to redirect the link juice from the unindexed version to the version that IS indexed, this could also result in a potentially massive increase in inbound links for that page and have a major effect on its search engine position.

Webmasters who host their pages on Apache servers have an altogether different solution made availiable to them to avoid the links attributed to a single page from being split between different urls although I would only reccommend this technique for brand new domains/websites, as it results in urls becoming unusable This is acheived by editing the htaccess file on the servers public root folder.

For instance, adding the following commands to the bottom of the htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http ://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

would stop anybody being able to access your site without using the www. prefix.
therefore nobody would create links to this url.

Canonicalization was written by: High Impact SEO Leeds For The High Impact SEO Blog.