Yes, I'm certainly going for the sensationalist headline with this.

But one of my formerly-favorite personal finance bloggers, who has not been heard from on his blog in 5 months, lost $75,000 more on his portfolio since I last wrote on it. I calculate PFBlog's investments at $737,000, where they stood at $896,000 in May. That's down $160,000, or 17%. Ouch.

I'm not sure he could have picked a worse batch of stocks to invest in: AIG, eBay, and American Express. Coupled with steep 30-40% losses in international mutual funds.

Recently, a blog I enjoyed reading stopped blogging. Well two of them actually, but Jason Calacanis announced his retirement from blogging. The MM from PFBlog just stopped with no announcement.

PFBlog was interesting to me because he's been documenting his path to an early retirement and becoming a millionaire. He's been open and public about his net worth, and the month-to-month machinations in his financial status. I could never do this so openly, but it's fun to watch. Or was until he stopped.

When financial bloggers stop blogging, you have to wonder... is it because the stock market is down? Is it painful posting about your fifth (or eighth) consective monthly decline in net worth? As an outsider, there's a certain fascination to seeing someone who lost $60,000 on the stock market last month. But obviously as the person who lost $60,000 in one month, it might not be as fun.

MM's last post was in June, to report his May net worth. His total portfolio at that time was reported at $896,000. I wonder how he has done since then?

Well, since he's so open about his investments, I did a calculation. Entered his investments into Excel and got the current prices from Yahoo Finance.

The PFBlog investment portfolio is currently worth... $814,668. That's a $81,427 decline in just over two months (-9.1%). And the stock market is actually up over the last month or so.

So I can see why he stopped blogging. Just wish he hadn't, and it's time for everyone to learn how to handle how to invest in down markets, including short selling, stop loss orders, and the like.

In the world of SEO, the rule of thumb is generally that you should aim to make a great site first and foremost. Have great content, and people will link to it. Be relevant to what searchers are looking for, and Google will try to send people to you. Sure, there are ways to make a good site better. But ultimately if you have a web site no one really wants to visit, you should focus on improving it and not worrying about SEO.

But we live in a world where web traffic equals money. If a web site can attract a millon visitors a month, with advertising and other forms of revenue generation, it can often lead to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pocket of the owner. So people are always trying to find ways to get rankings that they don't deserve.

These techniques are sometimes called Black Hat SEO. While some people engage in them, there are penalties for doing some of these things on your web site can get you dropped from Google or relagated to the 60th page of results.

1) Keyword stuffing.

Let's say you are trying to make the worlds premiere site on basket weaving. If you created a web page that used the word basket weaving 200 times, you'd think that you would appear higher in search results than a page that only used the term 5 times. And you'd be wrong. Repeating a keyword dozens of times is looked at as clearly spamming, and can work against you. And it doesn't look good to viewers of your web site to see the same words repeated over and over.

2) Invisible text.

So you think you can add some keywords to a page, by using white text on a white background. And somehow that would make your site look better to visitors and trick Google into thinking those keywords are relevant. Anytime a technique is to "trick Google" its generally black hat.

3) Google-only content.

Perhaps you're a clever php developer, and you can recognize when the Google spider comes to your site and serve special optimized content for it. But when a real visitor arrives, you can deliver different content (and tons of ads). Again, tricking Google is a bad idea and can lead to penalties.

4) Link farms.

So you remember reading somewhere that Google counts the number of links pointing to your page, and that gives it a higher PageRank. That's partly true. But if you register 200 domain names, create one page sites that simply have links to your main site, that would be a "link farm" and you'd be penalized for using them. The sites that link to your site need to have their own credibility. Having hundreds of non-credible sites linking to you does you no good.

5) Auto-generated content.

Let's say you sold cars. Obviously it would be very difficult to rank highly for "cars". Could you rank for "Canada cars". Maybe not even that. But could you rank for "Toronto cars"? Perhaps. Could you rank for "Toronto Queen Street cars"? More likely. Spammers figured this out too, and developed a technique of creating auto-generated web pages. A program goes and creates one web page for every city and every country in the world for their keyword. And then they submit those to Google and wait for the traffic to come. In fact, to take it further, you could create a site with one page for each street in every city in every country in the world. And you'd think therefore you'd rank highly for "Toronto Queen Street cars". And again, you'd be wrong. Sites with millions of pages are rarely (never) relevant, and Google is smart enough to remove those from its index.

6) Bad neighborhoods.

Finally, if your web site is linking to hacking sites, spammers, porn, drugs, illegal activities, and generally to anything questionably moral, you could be penalized in terms of google ranking compared to sites that do not do those things. It may not be fair depending on your point of view, but who said life is fair?

Perhaps, this seems self-evident. But the same could be said for the previous SEO tips (title tag and meta tags). But you have to ask yourself the question, why would anyone want to come to my web site? And why would they want to tell others about your web site?

The answer is usually content.

If you think of the web sites you personally visit frequently, what is it about them that keeps you coming back? Some of the common ones are:

• Continually updating content (articles, blogs, news, stock prices, job listings)
• Source of reference materials, or vast amount of information (wikipedia, imdb, google maps)
• Useful features (applications and tools, email hosting, calendar, portfolio tracking, to do lists)
• Community (forums, comments, friends)

So does your web site have ANY of these features? Some web sites do, and some don't. If you web site does not have content that ever changes, and does not provide any useful features or community, why would someone want to come back there a second time? Why would they want to send their friends there?

Not all content types are useful for all web sites. Trying to build a web site that incorporates all four of the above types into one site might cause a case of "jack of all trades, master of none". Specialization and niche are not bad things on the Internet.

So ask yourself, why would anyone want to come back to this site after the first time? Why would they ever want to publish the URL to their site and recommend people come here? Answer that question, work on improving your content along those lines. And that will be an important element of your SEO game plan.

HTML <meta> tags are used to provide supplemental information about the page, but not actually change the way the page is viewed in the browser. It is mainly used to denote keywords and description, but can also be used to list copyright year, author, which software was used to create it, et cetera.

Meta tags are easily abusable, so search engines don't rely on them to any great degree. There is certainly some debate about their effectiveness. But since meta tags are easy to add, and can only help and not hurt, they are generally regarded as a required element for SEO.

Keywords

Obviously, if a site could pick it's keywords so easily, every site would use every word in the dictionary and the whole thing would be useless pretty quick. Someone with a site about SEO consulting services could include "web site design, programming, advertising, marketing, free money, gold, britney spears, U.S. Election" and go on and on to areas that are totally not related to their site. So search engines do NOT generally trust a site to pick it's own keywords.

But, it can't hurt to have them. Don't put too many, and keep them closely related to the page content. For bonus points, each page should have slightly different keywords.

Description

The description given in the meta tags is actually used by Google to describe your site. It should be something written to entice a user to click on your site. Obviously, it's tempting to go to either extreme, either with a completely boring description ("A site with my thoughts on things") and one full of marketing sales junk ("I am the greatest programmer in the world, and let me share my secrets"). The best written descriptions probably entice the user to come to your site based on what you're likely actually going to provide them ("A site devoted to sharing concrete SEO tips I have learned over the years, that lead to measureable results.").

To the best of my knowledge, most search engines do not take the description into account when assigning a ranking to your web site, but it does help people get there.

Robots

A relatively new meta tag is the Robots tag. The purpose is to help search engine (and other automated web crawlers) know your site policy on indexing content. Do you even want crawlers viewing your site? If you don't, this is where you can tell them. And do you want them giving additional credibility to sites you link to (called Google Juice)? Both the indexing and link-following attributes can be set with this one tag.

In general, here are some tips for setting up meta tags:

• It's good to have them, even if their value is debatable
• Don't have too many keywords, 10 or 12 at the most
• The description is sometimes shown by search engines, so make it entice the user to click on the link
• Sites that may contain a lot of links to questionable areas of the internet (spam) should turn on the NOFOLLOW robot attribute

At first blush, this SEO tip seems pretty basic. The right title tag can make a big difference in your search ranking. Basic advice like that makes you kinda want to skip the rest of this entry, doesn't it?

Well the importance of <title> tags to SEO is obviously more than just "have one". Your choice of words is important, as it relates to your site, as it relates to the content of the page, and as it relates to other pages on your site.

Be Descriptive

The title tag should obviously be a reflection of the content of that particular page. If the page contains a list of your favorite movies, a relevant title tag would obviously be "My Favorite Movies" or "The Best Movies of All Time" or something along those lines. A bad title tag in that scenario would be "What I Saw Last Week".

Draw People In

The title tag is displayed to users in search results, and so it should be written in such a way that makes people want to click it - draws their attention and draws them in. So "Movies" may be a bit to cryptic, but if you used "Top 10 Movies You Won't Find on Anyone's Top 10 List" as your title, that makes people want to click it.

I see some sites where the URL is the title tag on every page, like if "--: mydemos.com :--" was the title tag on every page of my site. I generally think this is a bad idea. First, given how important title tags are, it seems a bit silly to waste it on repeating the URL. If they want to know the URL of your site, they can look at the address bar. You also lose the opportunity to draw people in, and lose the keyword matching opportunity as well.

Now, given that search engine will likely match the keywords search to a title tag, why wouldn't you just stuff all your keywords in the title? Well, at least two reasons why you shouldn't do that. There might be more. 1) It takes away from your title being relevant to the content of that specific page, and 2) search engines will notice that your title doesn't match your content and might penalize you for that.

Tips For Writing the Perfect Title

1) Each page of your site should have a different title

2) The title should be descriptive, to draw a searcher to click on your page

3) The title should contain some of your keywords, but not any irrelevant ones

4) Longer titles are sometimes better, up to 10 words

5) Optimizing your title tags might be the quickest and easiest way to improve your search engine rankings

6) Don't put your URL in the title, but do put the name of your site if it's different than the URL

I've been getting a few clients interested in improving the ranking of their site in search engines. Most of what I do at this stage is basic SEO. I actually like doing site reviews and SEO, and am able to send out pretty informative reports to my clients on ways they can improve their site - both overall and specifically for what search engines are looking for. I monitor statistics, I track trends month over month, and I am constantly thinking of ways to improve my clients' sites.

So does this make me an SEO? I think it does. Am I the greatest SEO who knows the secret formula to guarantee #1 rankings in Google? Not yet (keyword being yet). I have a way to go in terms of picking up knowledge for advanced SEO techniques. But every month I do this, I think I get a little better at it. Things just start becoming more intuitive, and I can often tell just by looking at a site what the likely problems are going to be with the layout and/or content in terms of getting top index rankings.

Let's be honest. The majority of web sites out there (more than 99.9% I'd guess) are not perfectly optimized for search. That means almost every link in the search results is beatable (almost). And somewhere north of 90% of web sites aren't optiimized at all, which means many of them are easily beatable with a little effort. Most sites were developed for primarily for content, and then for style, and the developer didn't give too much thought into how the search engines are going to rank their site.

Here are a few basic tips for improving a web page ranking. I call this SEO 101, it's really just the basic stuff:

1) Use <title> tags. The web page title should be descriptive of the page contents, and not just your web site URL repeated.

2) Use <meta> keyword and description tags. This is 1999 SEO, but it still applies. Make sure your keywords are relevant, and don't just stick the phrase "free money" in there, when your site has nothing to do with giving out money.

3) Use external CSS files, external JavaScript, and keep the HTML clean. If you do a View>Source on your site, is the first 4 pages unreadable garbage? It shouldn't be, your main content should start within the first 2 pages of source code.

4) Get rid of spam. If you run a blog, chances are someone trying to sell something has tried to infultrate your comments. Get in there and delete that stuff, because the quality of your outgoing links is important.

5) Fresh content. New content should appear on the site every week or two. Every month at a minimum. Sites that never change for years are not as relevant to search engines.

6) Relevant content that uses your key words. What is it that you or your company does? Do you offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services? Do you even say that the way it's commonly said, so that a search on the phrase (in quotation marks) would lead to your site? Do you say it 2 or 3 times? Do you say it a few different ways, because one person might say SEO but another might called it Google Optimization, and someone else call it Search Engine Optimisation. (Love to the brits, but you all need to use Z's more.) If each page only contains one paragraph of content, honestly not too many people (let alone search engines) are going to find it useful.

7) Post things people want to link to. Why would someone link to your site from theirs? Really think about that. Really focus on that... give people things to link to. Funny things. Smart things. Things lots of people would be interested in.

8) Avoid spammy techniques. Don't have hidden text that humans can't read (white text on white background). Don't overuse your keywords - by repeating them 100 times per page. Don't link to bad areas of the web. Don't add hundreds and hundreds of pages of useless content - ie: one page for each country, state and city that basically says the same thing. Don't rely too much on flash.

9) Use a program such as Google Analytics to track which pages of your site are the most popular. Add the Google Analytics tracker to your web pages, and then come back in a month or two. See what's popular, and do more of that. See what's not really working and do less. Repeat your successes and stop what's failing - a novel idea!

10) Define your goals. Measure where you are. Makes small improvements to your site. Give these changes a chance to set (at a minimum, when Google reindexes your site), and then measure again. Keep making improvements, and keep measuring. Slow and sure wins the race.