Top SEO Expert Shares Trade Secrets

Effective SEO is important for any website to stay on top of Google and get high search engine rankings. Mani Karthik is a top SEO consultant and professional blogger in India, and shares his SEO secrets which can increase your website traffic easily.

Why did you decide to become a SEO expert?
It wasn’t a thought-out decision really. Fascinated by the web, in my college days, I used to run a couple of websites. They were amateurish but in the struggle to develop them, I kept experimenting things (which I didn’t know was actually SEO) , but they gave me a lot of insights, which I could use later on. So it was sort of natural learning I’d say.

And I’d never call myself an SEO Expert or Guru for that matter, those are people’s perceptions, and I go with it. I’m a learner and I’ve never really understood why one would call himself an SEO expert, when there’s always, a lot more to go.

How did you learn SEO?
As I said, I learned from my own experiments. In fact, that’s the safest and the most effective way to learn SEO. Over a period of time, you get to know what’s the real stuff and what not.

Are there any formal college courses to learn SEO?
If you’re talking about universities, none in India, but there are online courses that promises to teach you SEO.

What is the best way bloggers can learn SEO?
Trial and error method. If you’re really keen about learning SEO, keep a blog (or more than one) for trials. Experiment with your learnings and theories. You must have a lot of patience and also a habit of recording things, so that you can cross check what triggered what.

What are the dangers / dark side of SEO?
You know, more than the “black hat methods”, the danger is of over optimization or undue importance given to SEO by obsessed webmasters. The search engines out there are really smart in finding out patterns and artificial elements from your site, and when you over do things, its easy to detect patterns.

I’ve seen that neither all the 100% perfectly SE optimized websites are doing well, nor are the poorly optimized. You got to hit a balance, and work more on creating a good website, a healthy one. SEO can give you the best foundation to build your website. SEO shouldn’t over power the rest of the legs on a website, when it does, things inflate to a dangerous level, often proving fatal to the website.

Can you suggest some must-read SEO articles for webmasters?
Read Google webmaster guidelines and Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths. Can’t really point out the rest, may be the archives on DSB itself is a good reference.

What are the 5 best SEO practices for WordPress Blogs?
- Page Titles
- Curbing duplicate content occurrences
- Internal linking patterns
- Theme with the best SEO optimized code
- Effective, non competing use of plugins

Tell us about your favorite SEO tools?
I don’t rely much on tools, they haven’t been consistent, although there are some powerful SEO addons to firefox, which do a neat job.

What the 5 most common SEO mistakes?
- Over optimizing.
- Poor linking structure.
- Negative elements in design.
- Keyword Density formulas
- Poorly developed content

Why should I hire a SEO consultant?
Gone are the days when you could hire someone to get ranked for 5 keywords in 2 months. It doesn’t happen that way now. You should hire a SEO consultant if you have long term goals, and want a healthy, authority website that can survive competition. If you’re looking for quick fixes, then I am afraid SEO isn’t the right thing to go for.