Now if you search online, there is a lot of conflicting advice on the subject – some of it good and some of it bad.

The only tips that you should be following are the ethical SEO tips that actively help your site, without abusing the system.

SEO Has A Bad Name

For some people, SEO has a pretty poor reputation online.  It can be seen as a way to somehow “cheat” the system or gain an unfair advantage over rivals.

This isn’t helped by the fact that there are some people (a small minority) that do try to abuse the system to further their own cause.

This has led to some to even suggest that search engine optimization be called something different.

It Can Actually Be Good, When Used Right

The simple fact is that SEO can actually be used ethically when done right.  Search engine optimization is simply a way of getting your content to the most people possible.

Search engines are the number one method of driving traffic to a site, so it makes sense to make the most of them.

People have given a bad name to SEO by using negative techniques (or Black-Hat SEO) that abuse search engine rules, such as; keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages, etc.

They do this to try to boost their rankings quickly, but the joke is on them as these methods only tend to work for the very short term, if at all!

Thankfully, Google and others are cracking down on websites that abuse these rules, which is great for the rest of us that pride ourselves for following the rules.

You have to remember that search engine optimization is a long term strategy for your site.  There is no “quick” way or “short cut” to success, so you are better off optimizing your site for long term results.

So What Is Ethical SEO

Ethical search engine optimization is a term to describe all the good techniques and tips that you can use that are not in breach of search engine rules (or White-Hat SEO).

There is nothing wrong with optimizing your posts and pages to rank higher, as long as you do it right.

All search engines want to do is provide the best quality content to their users, as this is how they make money.  To do this, they need to look at sites (by crawling them) and establish what a post/page is about.

Optimizing your pages helps search engines to identify what your content is about, therefore enabling them to show it to the right people who are searching for it.

Ethical SEO Tactics

So now we know that ethical SEO is the right way to go, how do you go about optimizing your posts?

One of the key aspects of SEO is keyword placement.

Placing keywords and keyphrases in certain places of your site helps search engines to identify what your post is about. This is called ‘on-page SEO’ and can refer to things like;

• Page Titles
• Meta Descriptions
• Subtitles (H1, H2, H3 Tags)
• URL Address
• Image Alt Tags
• Internal & External Link Anchor Text (and the links themselves)

Whilst these are all good places to include your keywords/keyphrases, it is VITALLY important that you don’t overdo it.  Don’t place too many keywords in these places, as you risk keyword stuffing, which is bad!

A good rule of thumb is that keywords should not exceed about 3% of your overall article.  Think of your keywords as simple sign posts that help tell people what your post is about.

That way, you don’t need to go overboard with using them.

A great WordPress plugin that you can use to help you monitor your keyword density and other on-page SEO is the ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast’ plugin.

Now SEO is not all about keyword placement.  Search engines also look at things like post frequency, social media interaction, and PageRank.

But for the purpose of this post, this is what I will be focusing on.

It’s All About Being Relevant

Another good ethical rule to remember is that things should always be relevant to your content.  Whatever keywords, keyphrases, internal links, external links, videos, images, etc. that you include in your posts, they should be relevant to what you have just written.

For example, if I were to write an article about a certain actor, let’s say Matt Damon, then linking to reviews of movies that he has been in would be totally relevant, therefore justifiable.

If on the other hand I started including links to some car selling site, that wouldn’t be very relevant.

Search engines look at the terms, phrases and links that you use in a post to see if they are all connected in some way.

If they aren’t (as in the example that we just looked as) then they may suspect some dodgy behaviour going on on your site.

If you think about it logically though, you only want to be providing the best quality content to your visitors anyway, so why would you use/link to unrelated things.

Summary

Ethical search engine optimization isn’t too hard to get your head around.  Just remember to follow search engine guidelines and not abuse the system.

It can actually be more beneficial to concentrate solely on writing for your readers, as ultimately it is them that will determine whether your site is a success or not.

Plan out a long-term SEO strategy for your site and work at optimizing your site ethically.  It is much better to work with Google rather than against them!

What other ethical SEO tips do you use that I haven’t mentioned here?  Do you even do SEO on your site and if not, why?

Do you have a positive or negative view of SEO?  Please let us know your views by leaving a comment below!

Each blogger use a lot of sources and tools. A lot of them  are available online.

Below  is a list of Top 100 websites, which every blogger should know and use. I spent a lot of hours preparing this list, but some websites may be out of date. If you find such links, please leave a comment about it below this article.

For better navigation, I order them in such groups of links

Search engines

WP themes

Plugins for WordPress

Free blog platforms

Statistics

Hosting for blogs and websites

Advertising and affiliate systems

Photos and pictures for bloggers

Tools for keyword analysis

SEO tools and analysis

Mailing lists and autoresponders

SEO blogs

Blogs with tips & tricks about blogging

Motivation and self-help websites for bloggers

Lists of most important blogs

Reviews for bloggers

Boost visits on your blog

Outsource your work (or find a job as a freelancer)

“Knowledge” websites

Social & networking sites

Websites with other multimedia

Free time for bloggers

Top 100 websites for bloggers

Search engines:

1.       Google.com – most famous search engine in the world

2.       Bing.com – 2^nd search engine for English language market

3.       Search.com – aggregate in one place search results from best engines

4.       Baidu.com – 1^st search engine for China language

5.       Yandex.ru – the largest search engine in Russia

Wp themes

Some free WordPress Themes:

6.       WPdaddy themes – a lot of free WP themes (but be careful – some of them are not free!)

7.       Free WordPress  Themes 4 U (if you need to remove sponsored ads, you need to pay 19.95$ to get the key)

8.       TopWPThemes  – another website with some themes for WP

And some paid WP themes:

9.       Theme Junkie – premium WordPress themes with one-time fee starting at 29.95$ (but for 39.95$ you will get allWP Junkie themes and life time support). This blog is based on one of WP Junkie themes – Smart Blog theme

10.   Thesis WP Themes – pricing starts at 87$ for one website

Plugins for WordPress:

11.   WordPress Plugins – official WordPress.org site with thousands plugins

12.   WordPress Plugins from yoast.com – some useful plugins made by Joost de Valk, most of them are free

13.   WPMU DEV – WordPress plugins by WPMUdev team

Free blog platforms:

14.   Blogger.com – Google’s platform for bloggers, integrated with Google Accounts

15.   WordPress.com – it’s free and open source platform for bloggers.

16.   Xanga.com – network of blogging and social networking communities

17.   Tumblr. – you can share here everything you want – text, photos, videos, links, etc.

18.   Moveble Type – another social publishing platform

Statistics:

19.   Google Analytics – free statistics with huge amount of reports and tracking tools.

20.   Piwik – open source web analytics tool. It is really good tool, but needs installation on own web server

21.   AWStats – free tool for advanced web statistics analysis

22.   StatCounter –Statistics tool for your website with real-time analysis of the visitors.  It’s free for 250k monthly pageload. Above it, it’s paid monthly

23.   Site meter – this counter and statistics tracker has, similarly to StatCounter, 2 options. SiteMeter Basic is for free, and Sitemeter Premium is starting at 6.95$

Hosting for blogs and websites:

24.   Hostgator – this blog is hosted by Hostgator – it’s not free hosting (prices started at about 4$ a month) but it’s stable and easy to use

25.   BlueHost– another hosting recommended by some bloggers

26.   OVH – hosting for sites in Europe

27.   IQ.pl – hosting not only for Polish sites

28.   GoDaddy.com – another hosting for your website

Advertising and affiliate systems:

29.   Google AdSense is most famous advertise program(based on contextual advertisements), both for small and for very big portals. Google equivalent for ads publishers is Google AdWords

30.   Zanox.com – this network offers publishers and advertisers a lot of affiliates program. It’s European market leader in this area.

31.   Clickbank – it’s online program for buying and selling digital or information products. It’s one of the biggest affiliate’s network system

32.   Tradedoubler – this is also European program for affiliate marketing, with a lot of websites and ads publishers

33.   Chitika –  it’s non-contextual  online-ads service, which may be used simultaneously with Google AdSense ads

Photos and pictures for bloggers:

34.   Fotolia.com – one of the best stock with royalty free photos, images, videos and vectors

35.   Istockphoto.com – another website with a lot of royalty free images and photos. You can also get discounts on istockphoto with a promo code.

36.   Photoxpress.com – some photos and images on this website are free of charge

37.   Flickr.com – photo sharing and image hosting website

38.   Shutterstock.com – another stock with royalty-free photos, illustrations and vectors

Tools for keyword analysis

39.   Google keyword tool – It’s very popular keyword tool, feeded with data by Google. It’s not perfect, but it’s free of charge!

40.   Market Samurai – this keyword analysis tool has a lot of useful  functions  – keyword research, seo competition, finding domains, etc. This tool is used by more than 200 000 users (including me). It’s paid tool (price is not low – it’s one time fee of 149$), but there is 12 day trial – you can download it for free here! If you buy it in 5 days since downloading, you will paid only 97$ for it

41.   Keyword Research Suite from WordStream – it’s free only in very limited area, paid plans starts at 329$ a year

42.   Traffic Travis – another tool for keyword research. It has both free (limited for 5 projects) and paid (only 97$) versions

43.   Keyword Elite – it’s keyword Research tool by Brad Callen. It also cost 97$

SEO tools and analysis:

44.   Majesticseo.com – site explorer for your backlinks, neighbourhood checker and more. It’s better than Yahoo Site Explorer was!

45.   Alexa.com – it provides a lot of information about websites, their audience, traffic and keywords. Completely free and without registration

46.   Whois.Net – tool which help you reveal who is behind each domain

47.   WayBack Machine – it’s “time machine” for websites. If you want to see, how did web page look like in the past, you must use this time machine

48.   CleverStat – on this site you can find a lot of useful SEO tools for bloggers and website owners. Some of them are free (for example PaRaMeter, which allows you to check Google PageRank), some aren’t…

Mailing lists and autoresponders:

49.   AWEBER – email marketing software (used also by me) with prices started at 19$ a month (you can try it for 1$ for first month)

50.   Constant Contact – email, event and social marketing solution for you with 60 days trial

51.   Get Response – email marketing platform with powerful autoresponder with few pricing plans

52.   iContact – another autoresponder with additional features

53.   MailChimp – free email marketing service. It’s totally free for 12k emails per month (or for 2000 subscribers)

SEO blogs:

54.   Matt Cuts blog – blog of Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team

55.   SEOmoz blog– most famous blog (and not only blog) about SEO

56.   Search Engine Land – news, tips & tricks about Google, Bing, search engine marketing and search engine optimization

57.   Search Engine Watch – very helpful site about SEM, SEO, PPC and Paid Search advertising

58.   SEO Book Blog – another valuable blog about SEO

Blogs with tips & tricks about blogging:

59.   Smartpassiveincome.com – very smart blog about blogging and with very detailed income  reports, owned by Pat Flynn

60.   Johnchow.com – very interesting blog with one of the best free ebook: The Ultimate Blog Profit Model

61.   ProBlogger.Net – most famous blog about making money online directed by (maybe even more famous ) Darren Rowse

62.   Dailyblogtips.com – blog about tips & tricks for bloggers. By Daniel Scocco.

63.   Entrepreneurs-Journey.com – Yaro Starak gives here a lot of advises and tips for internet entrepreneurs

Motivation and self-help websites for bloggers:

It’s very hard to describe all the staff, which is on each of the site. But I strongly recommend to visit them at least one time, to see what’s inside

64.   PsychologyToday.com – a lot of articles, not only about motivation, but also about creativity, setting and achieving goals and lot more

65.   Brian Tracy blog – official blog of Brian Tracy, motivational and self-help specialist

66.   StephenCovey.com – website of Stephen Covey, author of bestseller: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Unfortunately his blog isn’t updated since some time, but despite this, there is a lot of motivational stuff  on this website

67.   FourHourWorkWeek.com – blog and site of famous author Tim Ferriss

68.   StevePavlina.com – website of Steve Pavlina, blogger about personal development. Another great website!

Lists of most important blogs:

69.   Technorati.com – list of top 100 blogs

70.   Bloggers.com – this website is dedicated for bloggers, categorizes blogs and bloggers

71.   List of top blogs by Wikipedia – no comments

72.   Top ten lists of blogs – top ten list of blogs by blogs.com

73.   Top blogging news with Alltop– news from most popular blogs and more…

Reviews for bloggers:

Unfortunately I didn’t use any of them, so there are only links to most popular reviews sites. If you have some experience with this type of sites, please share your knowledge and leave a comment

74.   Reviewme.com

75.   PayPerPost.com

76.   PostGenius.com

77.   SponsoredReviews.com

78.   SharedReviews.com

Boost visits on your blog:

79.   Digg.com – a social news site. Some time ago it was more popular than Facebook

80.   StumbleUpon.com – recommend your website to more than 20 millions of StumbleUpon users

81.   Reddit.com – social website, where you can submit your content and vote for another

82.   Delicious.com –(in the past – del.icio.us) – you can find here a lot of cool sites and shares your own links with others

83.   4chan – this site mostly concerns on sharing images

Outsource your work (or find a job as a freelancer):

84.   Elance.com – marketplace for freelancers and people (or company) which want outsource their work

85.   Guru.com – you can outsource your projects here or find freelancers for hire

86.   oDesk.com – another website, where you can find job as freelancer or hire somebody to your projects

“Knowledge” websites:

87.   Wikipedia – free online encyclopedia with more than 20 million articles

88.   Ask.com –most popular question-answering service

Social & networking sites:

89.   Facebook – most famous social site in the world. You must be in

90.   Twitter – share short messages with others. Follow friends, experts and celebrities

91.   LinkedIn – it’s world’s most popular professional  and business-related network.

92.   Google+ – another network, some people like it, some not

Websites with other multimedia:

93.   YouTube – free video sharing platform owned by Google

94.   Vimeo – another site, where you can find, view, download and upload  videos

95.   Live365.com – radio online with a lot of stations

Free time for bloggers:

96.   Dilbert – you don’t know, who Dilbert is?

97.   Demotivational Posters – you must see it!

98.   Break.com – website with funny videos and pictures

99.   Jokes.com – jokes for almost everyone

100.   Garfield – and everything is clear…

Disclosure – please note, that some of the links above are affiliate links and I earn a commission, when you buy something via them.