Advanced Link Building: The Secret Art and Techniques Used by SEO Pros. See how advanced link building experts help corporations and SMBs turn their websites into a link magnet with white hat SEO techniques.

There is a lot of talk right now on the short-term and long-term impact of Google’s Instant Search to SEO, with panic’d advertisers and nervous agencies at the top of the list. Please calm down, SEO is absolutely not dead and your traffic isn’t going anywhere. Stop for a moment and look at your analytics from the last two days. Do you notice a significant change from Google-sourced traffic? I didn’t think so. Feeling better yet?

Now let’s look at the forecast of what this recent improvement means to your long-term SEO strategy (less keystrokes is an improvement,to me anyway). According to a recent post on Quora by former Google PM Avichal Garg,

• Page titles start to matter a lot more because you can capture a user’s attention with a highly relevant title as they’re in the midst of typing their query
• Snippets will start to matter more, and so controlling your snippets may be a more important strategy
• There may be unexpected, second order advantages to sites and domains that mirror how users construct queries. For example, if users search for [xyz amazon] then xyz.com may all of a sudden be more noticeable to users
• Sites that target the long tail may benefit because they will gain sheer exposure over other sites as users will be more willing to refine queries on the fly

Should You Be Worried?

If your website hasn’t been reviewed by an SEO Expert, and you’re relying on the age of your domain and click-through history to see you through the Google Instant transition, you might want to get over yourself and at least review the three basic principles of SEO. If your website has structured content relative to the query, is linked to and mentioned by other websites, and is the final decision of the searcher after selecting a search result, you’re golden.

So you’ve purchased one of our turbo-charged SEO websites powered by WordPress and have tricked it out even more, with new plugins, new permalink rules and maybe more. Suddenly, while writing a post, you discover that WordPress stalls and will not allow you publish new content. Not to fret, I know the solution.

This happened to me before and it took some researching by my AWESOME hosting company, LiquidWeb, to find the answer. If WordPress is stalling after you click Publish when writing or editing a post, simply shoot an email to your hosting company with the following text:

There may be a problem with mod_security that is tripping the modsec rule, preventing me from updating WordPress posts. Please exclude the wp-admin section from modsec at your earliest convenience.

That’s it. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.

I get this question frequently, along with questions about keyword proximity, keyword repetition, and keyword prominence. How important is Keyword Density as it pertains to Search Engine Optimization? The answer is simple: if you’re thinking too much about keyword density, you’re probably using your keywords more than you need to.

The basic rule of thumb has always been 3% to 5%, or 1-3 repetitions for every 100 words used on a page. That being said, one should take into account the use of the keyword in the HTML title, meta descriptions, ALT and TITLE attributes, and use of the keyword in the category or global navigation.

The idea around keyword density has historical value for organic search engine ranking (for engines such as meta crawler-based search engines) and Bing, engines that care less about inbound links and more about on-page relevancy (keyword themes on page or latent semantic indexing).

Since Google carries a 65% market share according to the 2010 Comscore results, we as SEO’s should be focusing more on how to get people to link and mention our brand and website, and less about keyword density. That being said, make sure your keywords are in these specific focal points and not used more than once with the same descriptive text (example: if your keyword is Nike shoes, don’t use “cool Nike shoes” more than once or that phrase may be picked up as your keyword theme).

Where to Have Your Keywords

• Your HTML Title Tag
• Your Meta Description
• Your Meta Keyword (for other engines)
• Your Main Heading (h1)
• Possibly in a Variation with Subheadings (h2-h6)
• Once, Maybe Twice Within the Paragraphs & List Items

It’s also a good practice to you use your keywords in the first paragraph and last paragraph of your article or content. Remember, try not to think about keywords when you’re writing content, as the reader may find it very difficult to read and may even list the page as spam as new social websites are allowing users to vote on shared content. Keyword density isn’t rocket science, but shouldn’t be something that you have to worry about when writing great content.