Doug Heil of IHelpYou.com will be participating at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Chicago “Black Hat/White Hat” SEO panel. Doug is currently working as a search engine optimization consultant; before jumping on the internet in 1996, he worked in the lumber business for almost two decades, he says. I emailed Doug some questions on the subject of SEO.

What are the latest blackhat tricks in the industry which you think people get away with unpenalized in Google?

If a technique is truly blackhat and against Google’s guidelines, I don’t believe people get away with any of them. Eventually the site will be caught if they are spamming. It’s true that the site might get away with blackhat for awhile, but it’s not a long term solution if the site is serious about their online business. That being said; the paid links thing can be disguised, but I would rather not go into how. This might be something that comes up in our session at SES Chicago on December 11. I’ll be on that panel so things should be interesting.

At the DMA08 conference in Las Vegas this week, the “Search Engine Experience” panel on Tuesday was presented with a number of site reviews which are great sessions because the audience gets free SEO consulting advice and speakers get to demonstrate their expertise.

One of the questions that came up was related to a site that has most of it’s content behind a login. Because search engine spiders don’t/can’t fill out forms (with some exceptions) they cannot find the content behind the login to index and include in the search results.

We continue our series of weekly SEO basics questions and answer today with a question that acknowledges the value of approaching search engine optimization holistically, but indicates a desire to keep things simple and focus on the basics.

“… you mentioned to use a holistic approach to aid in a better SEO, but specifically what might be the “top 3″ things can I do or focus on my website to best help improve my search rankings on Google”

Never enough time in the day to complete all your tasks? Don’t worry your not on your own. Most small business owners and operators are in the same boat, trying to cram everything into the day which just seems to disappear as quickly as it started.

People are watching hundreds of millions of videos a day on video sharing websites like YouTube. In fact, every minute, around ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube alone. Online video has exploded recently and with Google’s universal search, it’s now another way your business can reach potential new customers.

If you’ve got a short advertisement, testimonial or any other type of video there are a number of ways you should be promoting the video online. In this post I’ll cover off some simple video SEO tips to get your content out there.

I have been asked this question quite a bit recently and thought I should probably answer the question in more detail on our blog.

Problem:
You create a brand new website and you want to get the search engines finding this website right away. What do you do?