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Will search engines ignore my site? That’s a very good question. And there is no simple answer for it. Search engines ignore Web sites for a number of reasons, including:

• Inappropriate use of robots.txt
• Use of “rel=’nofollow’” on internal/navigation links
• Lack of indexable content
• Lack of fresh content
• Lack of trusted inbound links

And there may be other reasons but these five reasons are, in my experience, the most common reasons why search engines might ignore a Web site.

PageRank sculpting causes search engines to ignore your site – Many people who don’t know any better have listened to the bad advice that come from several corners of the SEO community about “sculpting PageRank”. And now, even though the voices once raised high to advocate that dumb idea have largely fallen silent, they haven’t removed all their old, stupid, misleading advice articles from the Web. Hence, many people who don’t bother (or perhaps don’t know how) to look for the latest information on a topic find those old articles and follow the bad advice they give.

This calamity will continue to plague Webmasters for years to come, just as abuse of reciprocal linking will continue to plague Webmasters for years to come. While reciprocal linking itself is not bad, the search engines have made it pretty clear they intend to NOT reward sites that rely exclusively on reciprocal linking for link building. PageRank sculpting, PageRank hoarding, and PageRank consolidation are all names people use for Really Stupid SEO Trick No. 3. If you’re doing this through robots.txt, nofollow, or use of meta tags — stop doing it.

Lack of indexable content – Experienced SEOs usually draw a deep breath when photographers ask why their Web sites don’t rank well. But the lack of indexable content is not unique to photography sites. Many other sites can paint themselves into this corner, too — including eCommerce sites that rely on images and briefly articulated product descriptions. The problem here is that images sell the idea, not words. Of course, if you use ALT= text you can often embed a helpful keyword-rich description for each image in your page, but not if you’re using Flash as your presentation medium.

ALT= text has its practical limits, however. Originally intended for browsers that cannot render images, ALT= text has been abused. SEOs should practice writing ALT= text that uses no more than 10 words. But photographers and Web designers need to find tasteful ways to include more user-visible text on those gallery pages. And eCommerce sites need to bear the expense of creating unique product descriptions that users can read.

Lack of fresh content – This is a controversial point, as it does not apply in all cases. Some well-linked so-called “static” sites don’t need fresh content. Search engines get this. But if a site is structured so as to present fresh content often and regularly but it does not, that can be a problem. Think of a blog that doesn’t publish any new content. Why should search engines continue to treat it the same way as other blogs that are more active? Search engines now seem to be smart enough to prioritize blogs and forums and other fresh content-capable sites according to their productivity.

How do they do this? Good question. I suspect it has something to do with RSS feeds. I leave it to the community to speculate on all the possible implications of that. But many of us have noted in the past that blogs should ping as many blog ping servers as possible.

Lack of trusted inbound links – Many people in the SEO community still don’t seem to understand that most links are not helping them. One sees this all the time in SEO forums: “Help! I’ve been building links but my site is nowhere to be seen!” Upon analysis the sites are usually not penalized — they just don’t have any really good links pointing to them. The SEO community tends to pitch the idea of building links as if that is all you need to get your site noticed, crawled, indexed, and ranked. That’s pure bunk. You need two things: good links and good (indexable) content. You cannot succeed without one or the other.

Unfortunately, many people still don’t know how to achieve that magical balance of (good) links and (good content), and so the search engines do ignore their sites. If you’re one of the people asking “will search engines ignore my site”, maybe you should ask yourself, “Have I done anything on my site to prevent them from noticing it?”

Asking more than one question sometimes helps us find the right answer because it helps us look at a problem from more than one angle.

It seems that many of my peers are falling back on cold calling more and more these days in order to build up their SEO portfolios. I reach that conclusion on the basis of the email that is sent to the Xenite.Org Administrators. We seem to be receiving several SEO inquiries a week now.

Some people in the SEO industry feel that cold calling is a sign of a bad SEO. Not in my opinion. After all, if you don’t have clients to begin with, how can you possibly get those referrals you need in order to avoid cold calling?

Sure, there are other ways to drum up business, such as:

• Write a really killer SEO blog that impresses the heck out of people
• Build a really great SEO forum that impresses the heck out of people
• Write a really cool SEO newsletter that impresses the heck out of people
• Speak at SEO conferences
• Buy some PPC ads and hope people click on them

I could go on, but why do that? Frankly, the old “blog-and-they-will-come” trick has probably been milked for all it’s worth. Like any typical pyramid scheme, those who get in at the beginning of the rush are the ones who make the most benefit. It’s now much easier for people with popular SEO blogs to tell newbies to create popular SEO blogs than it is to actually create a new popular SEO blog. Why is that? Because everything that can be said about SEO has been said. Right?

Same thing for forums. Forums are SO 1990s. Everyone tweets now. If you don’t already have a popular SEO forum you’re pretty much left by yourself.

Email newsletters are dying, too. Why? Twitter and all the already popular SEO blogs, forums, and newsletters have sucked up all the potential clients.

And what about speaking at SEO conferences? Well, don’t piss off Danny Sullivan and you might have a shot at that.

So if you suck at managing PPC campaigns or just cannot afford to spend $2000 a month on advertising, you’re left with cold calling. Here’s a few tips about cold calling:

• Check out who owns the site and make sure they’re not a well-known SEO with 1 or 2 popular SEO blogs
• Check out the site owner’s personal Web site and make sure he doesn’t claim to be an SEO theorist or something
• Do a site search on the site and see if any pages come up for “SEO services provided by”
• Do a site search on the site and see if “seo” is in any page URLs
• Go to the front page (that’s also called the root URL) of the site, grab the title, and find the most important expression on that page and see if it ranks on the first page of any popular search engine for that expression

Okay, that might keep you from trying to contact someone in the SEO field and telling them how great you are. Here are a few more tips:

• Does the site use a contact form instead of just posting its email address on the page for scrapers to harvest?
• Read the warnings on the contact form. Do they say anything like, “Do not contact us about links?”

Finally, here is what I would do, if I were cold calling:

• Make a list of local businesses that are not on the Web but which could benefit from having a Web site
• Write up a custom 1-page letter outlining the benefits of being found in search engines for each business
• Mail that letter using a full-price stamp
• Call 1 week later and say, “I sent you a letter about being on the Web. Let’s set up a 20-minute appointment to discuss it.”

Now, I’ve done cold-calling. I’ve cold-called as many as 50 businesses a day. You get a fair number of hangups. Some folks are having a bad day and they can be rude. That telephone, I’m told, can be a real scary thing. But if you’re polite, professional, and persistent, you should end up with a few appointments. If you’re polite, professional, confident, and not too pushy, you should close some of those appointments (at least by getting a second appointment).

That’s how cold-calling works. Now, can you make it work by sending email to people? I don’t know. I never tried. But I know that, being one of the people who doesn’t like receiving those emails, anyone who fails to do their homework or ignores the huge glowing neon signs that say “Don’t send link-related emails” is not going to impress me with either their knowledge of link building or their business acumen.

And cold-calling an SEO professional — well, that just doesn’t make sense.

Normally I don’t reply to these messages but lately I’ve been sending replies along the lines of: “You don’t get out much, do you?”

One last tip to those SEOs who contact me wanting my business: if you started an SEO blog earlier this year and stopped posting after 10 days, take your blog down. No one but you is going to link to it no matter how great a link builder you claim to be.

To people in the SEO industry the idea of creating multiple domains to host the same content is anathema — you just don’t do that. Why? Because the search engines see it as being abusive and misleading. Most people who ask in SEO forums if they can do this don’t really have deception on their minds. They’re thinking in terms of coverage (of keywords and trademarks) and productivity (getting as much bang for their buck as possible).

In some forums people who are new to search engine optimization can expect to be laughed at, ridiculed, and treated very badly by the so-called “experts” who are supposedly there to help them. When a naive idea like using multiple domains is broached, a new round of carping and belittling is as likely to start up as not. That’s hardly fair to the people who don’t know what they are risking and who took the chance to ask complete strangers for help.

The SEO community often overlooks what is so obvious to people who know nothing about search engines and search engine guidelines. That is, your content needs multiple entry points because you cannot control how people will find it. Intuitively a lot of people get that. And then they make contact with the SEO community and they are indoctrinated to think in terms of Toolbar PR, one domain, one entry point. Many SEOs pay lip service to the long tail of search but when they look at other people’s sites they hardly ever look beyond the first page.

And SEO-designed or optimized blogs are usually very badly “optimized”. They turn off categories and tags, nofollow half the pages, and install useless SEO plug-ins that interfere with a site’s crawlability. These are the people that everyone else turns to for help and advice. Is it any wonder the Web is screwed up in the search results?

The truth is that if you want to SEO multiple domains, you can do it. And it’s not rocket science — not even close. If you have a 20 page site and you want to spread it across five domains, you can do that. Just put 4 unique pages on the five domains. And then have the domains link to each other.

But then they would be INTERLINKED DOMAINS! Oh my, what a sin! Interlinking domains. Whoever thought of interlinking domains must have been a “spam genius”. Why? Because many SEO experts and gurus believe you’ll get banned or penalized for interlinking your domains. I only know of one search engine that ever objected to interlinking domains and that was Yahoo!. They refused to accept multiple listings in their directory for interlinked domains.

It’s not the interlinking that gets Webmasters into trouble. It’s the link manipulation. If you have five domains and link them all together the search engines won’t care. If you create 50 domains or 500 domains and they only link to each other, that’s something different. That’s a link farm. What’s the difference? Call it a matter of scale and intent. No one is going to twist the search algorithms with 5 interlinked domains (especially if those domains have the good sense to link out to other sites that don’t necessarily link back).

When you start pointing 50 links with identical anchor text at a page — or 500 — then you get into link manipulation. That is the core process that every “white hat” link building SEO practices. It’s manipulation, it’s manipulation, it’s manipulation. Accept it for what it is and get over it.

The truth is that if you SEO multiple domains, using the same site under different names, you can do it a right way and a wrong way.

The right way to spread your content across five domains is to give each domain its own brandable function. The content on each domain focuses on what that domain is trying to achieve.

The right way to interlink your sites is to let people know you have other sites. Show them a list of “Other Sites” or “Network Sites” or “Sister Sites”. Don’t intermingle your navigation because that confuses visitors and you may screw up your crawlability.

The right way to show you’re creating something other than a link farm is to link out to other sites from each of your domains. Don’t link to competitors if you don’t want to. You should be able to find relevant, informative content that doesn’t compete with your own content in your targeted keywords.

The right way to make the decision to use multiple domains is to understand the distinctions between the query spaces you’re optimizing for. If you’re optimizing only for a single query space then you’re most likely just creating microsites to support a single site. There’s nothing wrong with this strategy but you still have to build value into each of the microsites. If you’re optimizing for multiple query spaces then you really are creating multiple brand values. It’s easier to create distinctive brands for separate domains than to try to gather them all under one domain.

You don’t want to use the same content for multiple domains. On the surface that looks like the easy way to get a lot of work done but all it does in the end is create even more work for you. Spammers automate the process so they don’t care about the work. Real, legitimate businesses don’t have the inclination to create thousands of spammy sites. They have honest reasons for wanting to grab those five domains.

The best thing an SEO can do is listen to what those reasons are and help the client shape a strategy that requires no more effort than write-once-post-five-times but which achieves the desired result of placing unique, brandable content on each domain.

It’s wrong to simply dismiss the idea of creating five Web sites for one business. Until you know what the business leader is thinking, you’re in no position to judge his motives or methods. He may have the right objective in mind but he doesn’t know how to achieve it. Professional “best practices” SEOs show their stuff when they step up to the plate and help the client achieve the objectives.

There may indeed be pros and cons to weigh. There may be no business case for making multiple brands. Nonetheless, the worst possible thing an SEO can say is “That’s the wrong idea”. The first words out of your mouth should be: “What are you wanting to achieve?” Help the client elaborate from there.

Signs you have a quality Web site – “Quality” is a completely, totally subjective concept. It has nothing to do with who knows more than who, who is right about anything, or who is better. It just means people associate value with your work.

• People search on your Website’s name and click through to your site.
• People who find your site by searching on its name visit more than 1 page.
• People search for the titles of articles you wrote 1-2 years ago.
• People link to your site without you asking for links.
• People tweet about your site without you asking for tweets.
• People link, tweet, or visit your site even if they disagree with you.
• You wake up every morning and think, “What can I do to make my site better?”

I’m going to paraphrase a question several people have asked me over the past few months. It goes something like this: “When I look at all the sites that [a well respected SEO] recommends for linking, I get a sick feeling in my stomach (because they are so plain and ugly). Are they really worth getting links from?”

I swear, at least four people have raised this issue with me over the past 2-3 months. My answer has been different every time but I’ve been searching for the best way to make my point. I think I now have it.

Ask yourself this: Would you create your personal flagship Website on blogger?

Most people in the SEO community would say “No”. You don’t have to tell me why you wouldn’t do it. All that matters is that you know deep down in your heart that you would not create your personal flagship Website, your brand value site that represents you, on Blogger.

But you know what? Millions of other people DO create their brand sites on Blogger. Furthermore, many of those sites are very successful and they accrue links and they do very, very well in the search results.

Why? Because quality really has nothing to do with aesthetics except for people who care about aesthetics — and most people DON’T care about aesthetics on the Web.

It’s that simple and anyone who offers an “if”, “and”, or “but” just doesn’t get it. There are NO “ifs”, “ands”, or “buts”. It’s all personal, subjective, and completely internalized. Your uncle’s best friend’s sister may hate your site and never link to it but the guy down the street will. That’s just the way it goes. The best you can do is choose which demographic you want to appeal to the most. And good luck with that strategy because it doesn’t always work.

If you don’t believe in your site, why should anyone else? Everything else follows from there.

Yes, I’m being self-promotional (and engaging in a little experiment). This Best SEO Blog post is recapping three SEO Theory posts. Hm…I wonder what those SEO Theory posts could be about.

You see, a while back I was walking down the yellow brick road–Ooops. Sorry. Wrong movie.

Two years ago I was driving to work and thinking to myself, “OMG I have to write an SEO Theory blog post and I don’t know what to say! Whatamigonnado????”

As many of you know, I was trying to maintain a 5-articles-per-week pace, and I usually stayed on top of that. But there were days when I thought I’d never write about SEO Theory again. And then there were days when I wrote several posts at a time and scheduled them forward.

On this magic day in October 2007, I decided on a whim to just write up 20 bizarre things an SEO could do to improve their skill. Think of it as a sort of “Body By Jake” workout for SEO — only it’s more like “SEO By Michael” or something like that.

So here in reverse order (starting with today’s article) are the three SEO Theory articles that provide hard core SEO tips.

• Another 20 Hard Core SEO Tips
• 20 More Hard Core SEO Tips
• 20 Hard Core SEO Tips