The meaning is pretty simple to figure out, but here are some specifics. Duplicate content is a block of content which is very similar or the same that is contained on two or more domains. It can also include the similar or the same articles being displayed on your website in two different areas.

Duplicate content is becoming more relevant, especially with many Internet users now turning to their cell phones to access the Internet. In order to meet the needs of cell users, some websites choose to display one version of the site for regular users and another version for cell or

Before those questions are answered, let’s look into what good quality content on your website really is. When the text is being written for your website, you need to make sure that your target audience will be able to understand what they are reading. If your website is aimed at doctors for example, you do not want your content to be too simple. If the writing on your website is written below or above the level of reader that will be your main user, they are unlikely to make a return visit to your website.

One of the most important aspects of the writing on your website is the use of keywords and the keyword saturation. The writing should be focused around the keywords or keyword terms that your website is using. The keywords however, should only be used in three to five percent of the total content on a page. Any higher saturation than this, the search engines may believe that your website is trying to spam the search engine.

Now that we know a couple of important points about website writing that is search engine friendly, we can delve into whether or not it is all your website needs in order to rank well.

Yes, having high quality writing with proper keywords and keyword saturation on your website is really important. It is not however the only thing you need to do in order to rank well in Google and the other search engines. Google and other search engines have a number of factors which they take into account. Quality content writing is only one of the factors. Other factors include; inbound links, proper html code, important content and popularity.

If you have optimized writing on your website, it is surely not going to hurt. It will help a little but it will not move your website to the top. If you only have good writing but none of the other important factors that the search engines look for, your website may move up a spot or two but it will not necessarily make your website visible in the search engines. In order to have the biggest advantage, your website needs to be properly optimized in all SEO areas not just one of them.

It is nearly impossible to pinpoint an exact price for SEO services. Every professional has their own set of prices and provides quotes based on the project which is being presented to them and the time it is going to take them to complete the optimization to your website.

When SEO is concerned, most professionals work on an ongoing basis. Websites do just get optimized once and then the project is complete. It is a process which is continuous and ongoing. After the initial optimization is performed, you may not need a professional as often as you do in the beginning, but you still need someone to maintain and make future SEO changes to your website.

SEO is normally done in “campaigns” and can last anywhere from a month to years. An SEO campaign is a marketing campaign for your website. When looking for an SEO professional or company, there are many to choose from. Some have been in business for many years while others only for a few months. A professional who has not been in business for very long will usually cost less than those who have been in business longer.
SEO projects are normally contracted for a certain period of time. The time period can be as short as one month or as long as six months or a year. Most SEO professionals charge on a monthly basis. Some charge by the hour while others charge by the project.

Now let’s get down to the actual cost. In the United States, prices typically range from a few hundred dollars per month to over a thousand dollars a month depending on the professional and the total scope of the project. Larger websites (think major online shopping stores and major news outlet websites) can run thousands per month for SEO.

Do not let this scare you however. Most SEO professionals will tailor a package that will suit your needs. If your website is well optimized but is lacking inbound links and quality content writing, you can have a package designed around those two items.

Much like buying a car, with SEO, you get what you pay for. While good SEO professionals have prices which vary, you should be hesitant of any company which offers you prices which are way below what other companies have quoted you. You want a company that will get you results, not one which will provide you the lowest prices.

For small to medium sized companies who would like to use SEO to market their websites, the cost can be intimidating. The cost however is not any more expensive than traditional marketing methods such as print ads and television commercials. Your website needs SEO to make it to the top of the search engine results. After your website is at the top, the cost of SEO will seem minimal.

Deciding how many keyword phrases you should target can be a frustrating process. The first step is to find good quality keywords which are relevant to your website’s purpose. If your website is about car collecting, you may want to use phrases such as “car collecting”, “classic car collecting” and “collecting cars”.

Play around with phrases that users will commonly search for in the search engines. You want to be specific enough with your keywords that you will get users which are searching for the information you have, but you also do not want to use broad terms such as “cars”. If you use general or common keywords, you will be competing with every other website that contains that word. That’s a big market to be in!

Next, you need to decide just how many phrases you want to use. Remember, these are words and phrases that need to be included in the writing on your website. If you use too many phrases, the writing will look weird to users and it will not make sense. You will also need to pick keyword phrases for every page on your website. You do not just want to concentrate on the main page or the page which provides the most information.

If you include more than three to five keyword phrases, the search engines may view this as spamming. You never want to make a search engine think you are spamming it due to the fact that it could get your website penalized or even banned in the index. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you also do not want to use too few keyword phrases or the search engine may not be able to learn enough about your website.

The general rule of thumb is that you should use no less than two keyword phrases per page, but no more than five. Five is really pushing it but if integrated properly, five can work with pages that include a lot of content on them. When thinking about this, think about keyword density as well. As mentioned, you do not want the writing to look strange to users. If you have an article that is 500 words long and you are including 4 keyword phrases, it can be a stretch. You would need to repeat these terms within the 500 word article so that they consume three to five percent of the article.

Frankly, SEO does really work if proper SEO is used. Your website does need good search engine optimization performed on it if you want to give your website a fair shot of being listed high in the search engine results. Inbound links, quality writing, quality content and proper keyword use are all very important in natural SEO. Many spend thousands of dollars on banner ads and pay per clicks ads every month only to find that their products aren’t selling, their services are not being used or no one is reading their website content. Paid “unnatural” website advertising such as pay per click ads also need to be constantly monitored and tracked. Many website owners do not have the time to properly monitor their advertising on their own.

Good SEO can do the same thing as those expensive advertising methods. That’s not to say that you should never use pay per click advertising or banner advertisements, but they shouldn’t be the heart of your website’s advertising. By making a few changes to your website and gaining inbound links, SEO can give your website an excellent opportunity to be part of the top ranked websites.

If this is all true, then why does SEO sometimes get a bad rap? As with any business, there are those out there with practice unethical SEO techniques. These unethical SEO companies and professionals perform what’s called “black hat” SEO. Their SEO tactics include spamming the search engines and placing automated programs which try and trick the search engines into seeing something on a website that isn’t there or vice versa.

There are also SEO professionals out there that will take your money but will not optimize your website at all. If they do, it is very minimal and will not help your search engine rankings. These so called “professionals” prey on the people which know little to nothing about SEO.

There are bad apples in every business out there and SEO is not an exception. While SEO is not a scam by any means, you do need to check out the professional or company before you decide who you are going to use for your website’s SEO. A good company should be able to provide you with several references and provide you with solid statistics of past work they have done. You can also check on the Internet to see if any complaints have been filed against the company. When speaking with a representative from a SEO company, ask them what exactly they do to optimize websites. If they mention anything about automated programs or link farms, this will give you a good indication that they practice black hat SEO. Not many firms will admit this up front, but by paying attention to the words they use, you can get a good idea whether or not the company is ethical.

Last, when shopping for a SEO company, you should get price quotes from several different companies. Ones which offer really cheap quotes in comparison to the other companies may be trying to sell a scam. SEO can be time consuming and a long process depending on the website. No one is going to do all that work for next to nothing.

First, to have a properly optimized website it does not have to look the prettiest. You can have a properly optimized site without paying a boat load of money to have your website redesigned. There are plenty of high ranking websites out there that do not look glamorous by any means. You do want to make sure that your website’s design contains proper code that can easily be seen and read by the search engines.

You also have to look at your website from the user’s perspective as well. If you walked into a physical store and found it to be unorganized, unattractive or dirty, would you stay and shop or walk back out the door? Most Internet users will not spend quality time on a website which is not visibly appealing to them. Whether you are offering products, services or just your thoughts and opinions, if the design is not appealing, users may close the site before they even have a chance to see what the site is all about.

Since one of the factors that search engines look at when ranking your website is popularity and traffic, the look of your website can have a lot to do with how popular your website becomes. Going back to the example of a physical store, if it is not appealing to the eye, people will let other people know. The same goes with users who are looking for new websites to frequent.

If your website’s design is messy, unorganized or not appealing to the user, than it may be time to seriously consider a redesign. Normally a complete redesign is not necessary though. It can be as simple as changing the colors, reorganizing the content so it can be more easily found by the users or changing images and graphics which are being used. You want to look for things that will draw a user in and keep them on your website for a reasonable amount of time.

One design flaw can be fixed easily with minimal cost. If you have more than one design flaw, a whole redesign may be necessary. As I mentioned before, a good ranking website does not have the best the best looking, but a poorly designed website is seldom the most used either. Make sure that the code behind your design is solid and proper first. After that, explore how appealing your website looks to users. By looking at these two items, you can decide if a redesign is something that should be done to help your website.

You need to make sure that the keywords which are being used in the title tags of your website and your website’s content is relevant to what your website is about or the services it offers. Too many times, websites display well written content but have no keywords or keyword phrases.

Say for example that your website is about flower delivery services your flower business offers to the local community. What if you never mention the locality name that you deliver to in your content? Search engines are then going to compare your website to other websites with the words “flower delivery” but it will not know anything about your service area. When users search for flower delivery in the local area that you offer, they are never going to be able to find your website. But if you use “flower delivery to your town”, that’s a different story.

Another consideration with keywords is standing out in the market your business is based in. Using the flower example again, you do not want your only keyword to be “flowers”. Why not? Think of how many other websites use that keyword. If you base your keywords on simple every day terms, you are going to be competing with hundreds if not thousands of other websites which do the same.

So how do you find the best keywords for your business? First, you need to make sure the keywords and keyword terms go in line with what your business is about. Next, you can use an online keyword generator to find good keyword terms for your website. Do a simple Internet search for “keyword generator” and you will be shown several different programs which can help you out.

When using a keyword generator, the program will ask you what your website is about and it will generate keywords based on the information you provide. Good programs will also tell you how many clicks you can expect by using a certain keyword or keyword phrase based on current Internet data and trends. This can keep you away from using keywords or keyword phrases that users are not likely to search for.

As with any industry out there, there are ethical and unethical ways to optimize your website and make it search engine friendly. Unethical SEO hinges on a website having unfair advantages over other websites by being optimized in ways that are not highly regarded in the industry.
Some of the unethical tactics which are used include; cloaking, using the keywords too many times on the website, doorway pages, spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose and spamming the search engines submission process.

Looking at keywords for an example, how could using keywords be unethical? Using keywords in a proper manner are not unethical and matter of fact, they are vital to the success of your website. However, if you use keywords too many times on your website, the search engines view this as a desperate attempt to gain search engine rankings. If you have ever visited a website where the text just read as the same word over and over again, you know what I mean.

Why would I mention spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose? Those who use unethical SEO may have text on their website which resembles popular brand names of items or misspelled names of other businesses. For example, they may have the brand “Samsung Television” misspelled as “Samsun Television”. This is done in hopes that when a user is searching for the term spelled correctly, the website with the misspelled word may show up near the top of the results. Or it is done in hopes that the user will misspell the term when they search for it.

Unethical SEO tactics will hurt your website. Most search engines are smart enough to realize when a website is using unethical SEO tactics and it will either penalize the site or ban it all together. Search engines view unethical SEO as spam and they do not put up with it.

First, let’s look at relevance. Search engines like content which is relevant to your own website and other websites in the same market. If your website focuses on landscaping but you have an article on rock music stuffed in there somewhere, the search engines are not going to value this article as important nor consider it relevant. The more relevant your content is to your website’s focus and keywords, the higher it is going to rank in the search engines.

Ah yes, I mentioned that popular word “keywords”. In order to understand how content helps your SEO, you need to understand what keywords are all about. Keywords are simply the words that Internet users search for when they are looking for products, services or information. For example, if you need to find children’s clothing, you type “children’s clothing” into the search box on your search engine. The content on your website needs to contain keywords that users typically search for. Without the use of good keywords, users are not likely to find your website when searching.

In reference to keywords, it would look pretty odd if your website contained the words “children’s clothing” over and over again. Due to this, you need to know how to properly include keywords in your website content and at the proper saturation level. The point of optimized website content is to have the writing flow so that it looks natural to the reader, all while being search engine friendly.

When it comes down to it, search engines look for content which is relevant and important. By having content which is the proper length (between 300-500 words), strong keywords, proper keyword saturation and well written, you are upping your chances that the search engines will view the content as important and relevant. If your content does not make sense and doesn’t contain strong keywords, the search engines may never pick up on it.