What is Search Engine Spam?

A comprehensive list of sixteen tactics that are considered search engine spam. These techniques include:

• Keywords unrelated to site
• Redirects
• Keyword stuffing
• Mirror/duplicate content
• Tiny Text
• Doorway pages
• Link Farms
• Cloaking
• Keyword stacking
• Gibberish
• Hidden text
• Domain Spam
• Hidden links
• Mini/micro-sites
• Page Swapping (bait &switch)
• Typo spam and cyber squatting

10 Free Tools to check Social Media Backlinks & Popularity of your website

1. PageBoss - Checks backlinks from all reputed social media sites. Clean interface. Supports four languages.

2. URL Matrix - Amazingly fast tool. Analyzes everything from Alexa to Technorati to Compete.

3. Social Scan - Quick and easy to use tool. Scans popular social media channels like Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg for backlinks.

4. Site Mention - Cool tool, digs up all possible social media mentions about your site on Twitter, Friend Feed, Youtube, Myspace, Flickr, Yahoo Answers, Digg, Delicious, Furl and Reddit.

5. Quark Base - Analyzes every detail possible about a website including its ownership, server details and a huge list of details from social media channels.

6. Website Grader - The popular grader platform. Does a pretty job in grabbing all the info related to a website right from on site optimization metrics to off site factors like inbound links to social media channels pointing to the site.

7. Back Tweets - This tool finds you all the backlinks from Twitter to your site. Amazingly quick !

8. Popuri.us - Nice tool with a great visual appeal, check major factors like Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc for mentions.

9. Social Meter - An average tool that checks the basic numbers from Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati, and Yahoo My Web.

10. Site Volume - This is a nice tool that will help you find the frequency of mentions abut a particular keyword on social media sites like Digg, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube etc, and make comparison charts, giving you idea about what content is popular on each site.

10 Quick SEO Tips You must follow

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.