I’ve been seeing a lot of products being sold that’s related on “how to rank #1 in Google” subject.

This is a scary! Lot’s people are being scammed here. Save your money simply by reading this entire blog post.

Here are some tips to check if it’s the website or product is bogus:

1. If the sales page is saying that they’re ranking in certain keyword in Google as their proof, check first the competition and how many people are searching for this keyword. Obviously, it is easy to rank on keywords with little competition. That’s no brainer! What they’re going to sell to you is likely to be worthless information.

Don’t be deceived with number of websites in SERPs. This is not accurate and I’ve showed it to hundreds of my “Digging for Gold” customers on how to know accurately measure the competition.

2. If all they talk about in their sales page is link building, it’s crap. Why? Because incoming link is just a tiny fraction of complex Google algorithm.

3. If they promise you that you’ll rank within 24 hours. Well, yes you may rank within short span of time, but for what keyword? It’s likely on less competitive keywords. Anybody can do that.

Another thing is, even if you rank 1,2, or 3, how long will your ranking last? That’s a BIG question.

4. If they don’t talk about building a website for your customers or readers. Website is for human first and robots second.

So, save your money and subscribe to this blog to learn more on how to rank in Google in Google’s way.

There has been hundreds of questionable SEO companies and freelancers offering website submissions from hundreds to thousands of web directories in a measly couple a bucks.Not to mention lots of people are creating senseless web directories on either to flip the site or monetize it through PPC programs like Google Adsense.

If you are thinking that having links to these directories will increase your page rank, think again.

The truth is, this may hurt you even more. Why? Because Google in particular, does not brings you Google juice from just any directory that you know out there.

In a blog comments from Matt Cutts of Google, he mentioned that you should check the quality of directories you intend to submit your website. Not every directory, if not most of them, is worth to submit your site to.

So how do you know if a web directory may potentially damage your seo effort:

1. If a web directory accepts all or any kinds of URLs. These directories serves no value to Internet users and so with search engines. If so, then why submit their sites to them?
2. If a web directory accepts low quality and spammy websites. They may be filtering submission but in a low quality standard. You want a directory with high quality standard.
3. If a web directory is asking for reciprocal links. There are paid per link directories that reciprocal links is required. If you have paid for it, why ask for back links?
4. If a directory is not managed properly. Websites listed in a directory can morphed from simple, innocent looking site to become a spammy site. The directory owner should regularly check his listings to maintain the ranking and quality of the directory.
5. The directory itself is engaged in black hat. If this is the case, any site that is link to the directory will be suspected as involved to any scheme to manipulate search engines. It’s important to link good neighbor as they say.

These only serves as a guideline and only Google can really tell which and which site not to link to.

The two safe known directories are Yahoo Directories and DMOZ. The rest, extra effort to scrutinize them is necessary. So don’t just submit your site to these bad directories. Your extra effort may serve as your advantage over your competitors.

On the other hand, with thousands of domain squatters out there, it is nearly impossible for new websites to acquire keyword rich domain. How can they then possibly compete if domain is such a big factor.

Should you buy an expensive keyword rich domain or a verylongkeywordrichdomain.com for search engine optimization purposes? I will recommend no.

The money to spend on buying expensive domain should be pour in instead on creating unique and valuable content for your website or for advertising.

Using very long domain that it is hard to remember does not make sense either. You are missing the point of Internet Marketing campaing if you fall in any of the two.

Google for example is considering more than 200 factors for ranking a certain website. Even if a keyword rich domain will give a website a point, it will be very small fraction of the total. With the risk in the near future that search engines will not credit a domain completely.

Go ahead and search for few terms in Google and compare the domain names of the top 10 results. You should see variety of results that will tell you the value a keyword in a domain.

If you will Google the term “domain registration”, you should see only 2 out of top 10 results has the phrase “domain registration” on its domain. Go ahead and try to search for couple of other terms.

In conclusion, you are better off to save you money for more valuable things. The focus, effort and resources should be spend in developing a website that is really useful for your visitors and for the Internet community in general.

There is none and yes it is a myth.

Everything else that you may have read that specify that a keyword must have a density of a certain percentage or should be mentioned number of times is just a guess that has probably nothing solid to back up the claim.

Now you say, If I don’t have enough keyword density on my site, rankings may suffer. Too much keyword density, I may also suffer as search engines may see it as keyword stuffing and it’s a scheme to manipulate them. What should I do?

Here’s my take on this and guideline that I use that never failed me.

Read your articles or content without thinking like a search engine bot (can you actually do that?). Think like your website visitors. Put yourself in their shoes. If you are annoyed with redundancy because of keywords are mentioned too often, then you over do it. You may want to remove some of them or at least use a different word that is synonymous. This way, you also increases your chance to get some visitors using synonymous words. Like “internet” replacing it with “online”.

Keyword density(if it does really even matter) is just a tiny factor with more than 200 factors that search engines are considering. So don’t waste your precious time in your search engine optimization. Think of your readers first and bots will love you.