Outside of this book, you will get a lot of information telling you what matters in SEO and what does not. To keep you on the right track, we have compiled some of the most important, and some of the more useless, points that can either advance or deplete your SEO efforts.

• Quality content matters. For the two reasons stated previously! Content needs to be organically optimized and highly attractive to readers. You just cannot use spinning programs, poor quality content, or mass produced content in a valuable SEO campaign.

• Design and code must be readable. Your site’s development and design elements must be readable by crawlers, so they must contain text. That is why WordPress is such a popular CMS—it helps you generate html text for multimedia and on-page content.

• SEO metrics matter! You need to constantly keep an eye on your SEO goals and results so that you can tweak them to perform better online. No one launches a five-star SEO campaign to begin with, but you will get there quickly if you learn the value of tracking, monitoring, and adjusting your campaigns.

• Using bold keyword text. In your on-page content, strong evidence exists that suggests placing your targeted keyword in bold carries more weight with the search engines.

• Structure of links. If your link is confused and full of random words to weird code, it is time to neaten them up. The search engines like to see your targeted keyword in that link, accompanied by a short overall definition of the page content. Streamline your links!

• Having a fancy, wildly interactive website DOESN’T matter. You will hear that interaction is everything, so you will spend thousands creating little extras on your website. Moving images, little pop-ups, flash shows—these just do not matter to SEO. Quite frankly, they don’t matter to anyone. It is better to be simple and interactive with your text rather than with design and code.

• Link EXCHANGES don’t matter! Unless they are done because both sites are relevant to each other or the site owners have become friends. Ignore the companies that offer you instant page one results from random link exchanges. Never put a link on your website if it has no business being there.

• Fast article sites like Buildmyrank.com are a waste of time, and they can actually damage your SEO progress. Instead, invest in high quality, varied article campaigns on sites like Ezine, ArticlesBase, Hubspot, Squidoo, and Helium.

• Content republishing is also a waste of time. If you think you can get away with publishing the same article on multiple domains to build SEO power, think again! Search engines can recognize duplicate content, and they will penalize you for it.

Your only REAL choice is to stick to WHITE HAT SEO, or ETHICAL SEO.