How well is your website performing?

By chunking down search engine optimization (SEO) for your website into manageable pieces, you’ll move more quickly toward your goals. The first step is compiling basic benchmarks so you can determine your site’s current performance level. How will you know if you’ve succeeded with your SEO efforts if you don’t know where you started? Recording your findings will be useful later for gauging how well you improved organic search results.
Basic benchmarks include your site rankings on the major search engines, the number of indexed pages from your site, the number of quality inbound links, and the level of conversion your website produces.

How does your website rank?
Make a list of five to 10 keywords or phrases you think prospects, clients or customers would use to find your site. Then, conduct searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN using each word or phrase to see where your site places in the organic results. Keep a log and record the following information as a guide for SEO improvement:
On what results page was your site ranked for each keyword?
What page was ranked (e.g.-home page, a secondary page, an article)? Make note if more than one page is ranked.
On what pages were your top competitors ranked for the same keywords?
What competitive pages were ranked?
As you browse the rankings, make notes on how the top ranked website listings are different from your own. For instance, do the top sites include concise descriptions about the company, product or service while your listing does not? Assemble as much information as possible to help you gain a better understanding of rankings and how to improve your own over time.

How many pages are indexed?
Before your site can be found through search engines, it must be indexed. Robots, the software search engines use to gather web content, constantly feed the databases with information about websites. Web pages included in a search engine database, have been indexed, significantly increasing your chances of showing up in search engine results.
Find out whether your website is indexed:
Go to Google.com and type site:yoururl.com in the search box. Use your website address after the colon.
Go to MSN.com and repeat the process.
Go to Yahoo at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and type your web address in the box at the top of the page.
Each inquiry will show whether your site has been indexed. To find out if pages other than your home page are indexed, click on an important page and copy the URL in the address line. Use the same process you did for your main URL. For example, you might have a page with the URL www.yoururl.com/products.
Make a note of your findings as part of your benchmark information. If your domain name is new and has been registered with these search engines, it can take two or more months for indexing. If your domain name has been around a while, but not showing up in the indexes, you will need to register your domain name with Google, Yahoo and MSN.

How many inbound links are there?
One factor search engines use to determine how high your website should rank in search results is by the number of quality inbound links you have. These are links to your site from other websites.
Find out how many inbound links you have and record your findings as a benchmark:
Go to Google.com and type link:http://www.yoururl.com. Use your web address in place of yoururl.com. You can also do this for individual pages by including the page URLs. For example, www.yoururl.com/products.
Go to Yahoo at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and type in your website address. In addition to listing indexed pages, an "inlinks" button will appear. Click to see what sites are connecting yours.

Does your website produce satisfactory conversions?
Online conversion means the actions taken by web visitors. In this step, try to determine how well visitor actions match the goals you’ve set for your site. Conversions can include online sales, downloads or requests for information. Your conversions will be specific to how you expect your website to perform when visitors arrive. Do you want them to buy something? Download information? Request information? Complete and send a form?
What information, either statistical or anecdotal, do you on how well the website is contributing to your goals? Do you have a way to track website conversions? Write down any information to can find for your benchmark. If you don’t have any information, don’t despair. Today’s a good day to figure out how to start tracking and measuring your website performance.

What did you find?
Review all the information you collected and draw some conclusions. Is the site doing well in some areas and not others? Were there any surprises? How are you stacking up to your competition?
Now that you have basic information and a starting point, spend a little time thinking about how well your findings match your expectations for your site. Your next step will be developing an SEO improvement plan.

5 ways to make keywords key in SEO

The Internet runs on words. The words and phrases people use to find what they are looking for must match those you use to describe your products and services or you will not be found by valuable prospects. So, the most important part of your search engine optimization effort is carefully selecting and using keywords.

Follow these five basic steps and be on your way to improving your rankings.
Choose one page on your website you would like to work on to generate more traffic. Review the current content and pick out the relevant keywords you’ve already used.

Brainstorm another 10 to 20 words and phrases you think prospects use to search for your topic or product. To make sure your list is as inclusive as possible, ask current clients the keywords or phrases they would use to find a site like yours. To broaden your list, look at the source code of your highest ranking direct competitors to find the keywords (meta keywords) they use. You may discover clues to their success.

Divide the list into categories with three or four words per category. Don’t over analyze the categories as your only using them to manage your keywords. It’s a great way to make sure you cover the key topics you want to include on the website page.

Use a keyword tool to determine the popularity of each word on your list as well as variations you might not have included. In some cases the singular or plural form of a word can dramatically change its popularity. Different tools reveal slightly different information so use more than one for more thorough research. Free tools are a great place to start, but offer limited information. Subscription keyword tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery offer more in-depth information.

Try these free tools to refine your keyword list:
http://freekeywords.worktracker.com
http://adwords.google.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.com

Develop one major keyword phrase and two to three closely associated terms that best describe your product, service or topic. Use these in all aspects of a page’s content, particularly close to the top of the page and in lead paragraph sentences as well as in headlines, articles, and case studies. Create internal links using keywords to move your prospect deeper into your site. Think up as many ways as possible to increase the opportunities to use your keywords. In addition, insert the keywords in the meta tag, page title and page description.

Repeat the keyword exercise for every important page on your site. Periodically do a search using your keywords to see how your web pages rank against your competition and never let more than six months go by before repeating this process on every critical page. Keyword popularity shifts and changes and can tank your results unless you keep up with the trends.
Use keywords as many times as needed to create good content and take every opportunity to add keywords in the most natural and search engine friendly ways. Overdoing keywords for the sake of boosting organic rankings, however, is called stuffing, which may cause the search engines to actually penalize your rankings. You can significantly increase your rankings using these tips and without resorting to tricks.

No shortcuts to boosting search engine ranking

A range of search engine optimisation (SEO) tips have been issued to help firms boost traffic to their websites.According to Precision Marketing, webmasters often look for shortcuts and secrets when attempting to boost their search engine ranking.

However, the firm claims that while there are a few secrets to help promote a company on the web, there are no shortcuts. "Good SEO isn´t rocket science. A solid descriptive domain name, good quality content, plenty of inbound and outbound links, a few key site tweaks and you too, can be sailing to the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines," the firm stated.

The company said it strongly advises against using "black hat " techniques, such as overuse of keywords and using hidden text. According to Precision Marketing, techniques like that can get a website permanently banned from search engines – damaging the firm´s reputation and brand.

Meanwhile, a survey by Forbes magazine recently showed that SEO and email marketing are the most effective digital promotion tools available to businesses.

9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design

SEO: time-intensive, ever changing, and highly misunderstood. Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design.

If you’re a designer, are your designs really search friendly?

A lot of misconceptions about SEO still exist in the web design community and many designers, who have at least some knowledge, are often acting with outdated information. Once a designer understands the value of SEO, there is still the concern of how to keep a design attractive, while also being search friendly.

Designers love beautiful websites and SEOs love optimized content and code, but neither should fool themselves, because these days, both matter. In that spirit, I’ve put together a list of 9 SEO tips that help keep your stunning website optimized for search engines. Instead of focusing on SEO design basics, I’ll be covering some design-focused SEO tips, to show how SEO and beautiful design elements can co-exist.

1. It’s not the same old SEO

SEO can be hard to keep up with, because it is always changing. Today, SEO doesn’t mean a site has to be ugly.

First, forget everything you’ve learned about keyword meta tags and keyword stuffing, because those days are over. This is a great thing for designers, because search engines are looking for great content, written in natural language. Metrics, like keyword density, which make sites look hideous, are a thing of the past.

If you’ve been a designer for several years, start fresh and learn search engine optimization from a source that keeps up with all things SEO. Don’t let out-of-date SEO practices make you think pages have to be riddled with repetitive keywords.

2. Links talk

Links tell search engines what pages are about. This holds true on-site as well as off-site. The words you use in your designs to link to other pages do matter. The web has matured and no longer needs to be told “click here”.

This is just another form of the dreaded “click here”. There is an opportunity wasted here, where the designer could link out with the keyword-rich headings like “HR solutions”. The “learn more” link is great for users, but leaves search bots blind to what is on the other end of that link. As a human, we make the connection, and know that this link is about “HR Solutions”, but you’re telling search engines it is about “learn more”.

CSS can be used to keep the style, but the site would benefit from either linking the major headings, or changing the link text to something like “Learn More about HR Solutions”. This would drastically improve the site’s internal linking, with minimal impact on design.

3. Design is linkbait

This is great news for designers. Much of the life of an SEO is focused around baiting links from the link-giving portion of the web. The amazing thing is that this portion of the web loves great looking websites. Great design improves credibility and the user experience.

If you design great sites, use services like The CSS Gallery List to get your site submitted to CSS showcases across the web, or at least do it by hand.

4. Look at search bots as browsers

Earlier I mentioned how using “learn more” leaves a search engine blind. Considering a search bot as a disabled user or another type of browser, is exactly the type of approach needed for search friendly web design.

Search bots are extremely disabled and unintelligent users who use a dreadfully outdated browser. This user’s ability to understand your site may mean the difference of thousands or millions of dollars for a business.

One of the best SEO tips I can give a designer is to test as if Lynx was one of the web’s major browsers. If you can properly navigate your site, and understand its content in a browser like Lynx, then you are on your way to being a great SEO web designer. Other tools, like the Web Developer toolbar, really help test a site without elements like CSS, images, and JavaScript.

Keep up on the Google webmaster guidelines, so you know the limitations of this highly impaired user of your site. Focus on creating beautiful designs that gracefully degrade for this limited web user, “the search bot.” Or, instead of designing the site and working backwards, start with the lowest common denominator (the search engine), and work up.

Let’s Get Tactical

5. Smoke some hash

#

That little symbol, the hash mark or pound symbol, is an extremely powerful SEO tool in the hands of a developer who knows what to do with it. The hash mark creates an element in the URL that is not considered unique by the search engines, so it is dropped.

There are a lot of great ways to use this. I’ve seen it used well on sections where new pages hardly justify having a unique URL. One example I’ve seen recently is a “people” section where only minor content changes are seen on each page. The designer assigned each employee’s profile with “#name”. These multiple, near duplicate, pages are all seen as one page by the search engines. There are plenty of other great uses for the hash.

6. Use SEO friendly JavaScript

Any time you touch technologies like JavaScript, you need to tread carefully. I love Javascript technologies, and all the amazing things we can do with them, but they can create huge problems.

Traditionally, AJAX is not SEO friendly because calls are made through JavaScript, which cannot be executed well by search engines. The result is that the content is never rendered or indexed by search bots. I like what can be done with jQuery, since you can have html link navigation in place (for search engines), and still have jQuery effects.

If not done correctly, you can run into problems though. For example, jTip, which is a nice little Jquery Tool Tip, can create some nasty problems. The tooltip is nice and all, but the static html links point to a page that looks like this.

That is the whole page. This page has no title and no link back to the site. This can create multiple near duplicate versions, which can be indexed in the search engines. This also creates many hanging pages on a site. I did an audit on a site recently that used jTip extensively. The site had over 80 pages indexed in Google, with only one sentence per indexed web page. None had titles, and none linked back to the domain.

Creative design solutions can allow a designer to use jQuery while still being search friendly. Check out Jon Raasch’s post about how he used jQuery to Animate his portfolio in a very search friendly way.

7. Flash is OK, sometimes.

Ask your average SEO about flash and you’ll be told how horrible it is for SEO. Ask someone who casually follows SEO news, and they’ll tell you flash can now be crawled. So how should a designer approach flash?

While Google is improving, you should not depend on Google to figure it all out. Here are some basic Flash rules to keep in mind.

* Do not include an entire site on one page.
* Do not use flash as the navigation.
* Do not include important content in flash.

Search engines are nearly blind to flash, so do not use it for important page elements. Use of flash for design elements and non-important content is ok.

Flash can be used in a search engine friendly design. You can enhance web fonts by using slfr. Since the flash does not replace the HTML content, but styles it, search engines are still able to read the titles. It’s even Google approved.

8. CSS image replacement

CSS image replacement is one way to make a site look great, while also being search friendly. There are a couple different ways to do this, but the biggest concern boils down to intent.

Google says:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

The two words to focus in on here are “perceived” and “intent”. During a manual review Google will try to interpret your intent; a practice that has come under fire recently when Google profiled SEO.

I think CSS is a common tactic and a fine solution to SEO web design. If your intent is to improve the visual experience, and you make this intent clear, you should be fine. Do not use this method to stuff keywords or manipulate with hidden content.

9. Have great linking with footers

If you have a design that will be compromised by the inclusion of a robust navigation above the fold, a solid footer is a great solution.

Sometimes footers get the job done, like Yelp’s boring, but effect footer. And sometimes they highlight content you want to rank, like the footer over at We Build Pages. But, they can also look beautiful, impressive, and creative.

By Justin Briggs

SEO expert says Google is not out to get you

A growing number of companies have begun using search engine optimization (SEO) to help increase their online visibility, but when it doesn't work, some feel search engines like Google are out to get them - not true says one expert.

In an attempt to discover some ways to figure out whether a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is working, iMedia Connection's Michael Estrin asked some industry insiders for tips.

One suggestion, given by David Rahmel, chief research officer and executive vice president for SEO at The Search Agency, is to stop thinking that search engines like Google are working against companies and instead embrace what the engines do.

"The data that Google provides is invaluable," Rahmel told iMedia Connection. "The tools will tell you what keywords you are ranking for, which keywords are driving traffic to your site, which pages are in the Google index, who is linking to you, and if there are problems on your site."

A number of experts also suggest that to increase a company's search engine optimization (SEO) they should create a variety of original, quality content for their site. These industry insiders also note that the content should be written ADNFCR-1513-ID-19237347-ADNFCR

Print media continues to lose ground to SEO

Although many forms of advertising and marketing have taken a hit because of the economy, a new mid-year survey finds that companies continue to spend on online marketing efforts like search engine optimization (SEO).

In the mid-2009 Client-Agency Economic Outlook Report from Reardon Smith Whittaker, companies appear to continue to be shifting marketing dollars from traditional outlets like print and radio to online marketing like search engine optimization (SEO) and social media.

According to the report, 32 percent of clients said they have increased their spending on search engine marketing so far in 2009 when compared to last year. Of that number, 9 percent called the increase "significant."

For advertising agencies this number is even higher, with 50 percent saying their search engine optimization (SEO) spend has been higher than 2008.
At the same time, print advertising is taking a hit from both clients and agencies with more than half of each saying their spending on print had fallen when compared to 2008. On the agency side the fall is more pronounced with 73 percent saying they are spending less on print this year - of that, 22 percent said the drop off was "significant."

These figures seem to match other recent studies finding that online marketing continues to grow despite the recession. A recent study from [x+1] found that 65.4 percent of companies say their search engine marketing (SEM) spending will stay the same or increase in 2009.ADNFCR-1513-ID-19237345-ADNFCR

Self SEO - What and How To Do

SEO has always been a field of tough competition and deep interest amongst the netizen, especially webmasters. Today, I will let you in to my biggest SEO secrets related to Technology blogs. One top secret of SEO is the content. And I always prefer it in a compiled manner, point-wise. So here is Chinmoy’s SEO Guide to success.

• Choosing a good domain (Applicable if you do not have a domain yet)
  

• your domain will reflect your website content and your niche. Keep it relevant.
• Check over at www.domaintools.com for availability of your desired domain. Also look at the typo-domains. If they are huge in number with good ranks ,opt out. Chose a different domain.
• If your domain is available, check for competition in your niche with similar domain names.
• Keep your domain name easy to remember and avoid any break-up words. Try to keep it a single word.

• Choosing a good hosting provider

• Your server can make and break your website. If you chose a slow server, you will either have a low visitor count or a high bounce rate.
• A fast server offers faster page-loads on server-sided scripts. Chose a fast server to keep a continuous inflow of visitors and aiming for a rise.
• Visitors remember slower sites, they are reluctant to return-visit slow pages.

• Choosing a good design

• A professionaly designed website attracts visitors in huge numbers. Get a professional design and look. Make sure you mean what you claim in your niche.
• Check for broken designs and browser optimized design. Make sure your design is compatible with most web browsers. Check the css for broken tables or disjunctions.
• SEO on a light coloured theme is relatively easy. Also, make use of colours wisely. Keep your website soothing to the eye.

Your readers may come from all sections and ages, but you need to target a specific age group. This needs interaction with your fellow netizen and that needs buildig a strong social profile and online presence to promote your website. From this point onwards, I will focus on technology blogs.

• Link building through link exchange

• Link building is an important strategy to get noticed from search engines and from visitors on other site.
• the more you are linked from various sites on the internet, the more you get noticed, the faster search engines index your site, the faster you are in competition with fellow keywords.
• As you get into link exchange with related sites, you get a share of their visitors. This increases your pageviews.
• With quality links from reputed sites, you get a boost in PR, increasing your google rank, which is a marker of site content quality.

• The Content

• Everything fails without the content. A blog or a site without quality content is like a car without oil. You can only get it so far with pushing.
• Regular content will keep search engines busy on your site, gettting you indexed faster.
• If you apply all the other methods without any content, you will have high bounce rates combined with high visits, which is a negative marker.
• Keep your content comprehensive and make proper use of keywords in the content. The content can be of any length, but make sure it never at one point loses it’s focus on the topic.
• Check for the readibility and various aspects of the content at http://www.textalyser.net . It helps improve the content.
• Chose proper keywords. Check for rising trends in google, yahoo and use the keywords. Also check for keyword optimization at google keyword analysis tool and keep optimized content for appearing in top searches and for adsense optimization(covered later).
• Keep your content in a presentable manner.Use points to make your statement. People are more interested by five point lists nowadays.
• Keep your final verdict on the research you made on the topic, it not only reflects your hard work, but also your knowledge on the topic.

• Social Bookmarking

• Social bookmarking has become very famous in SEO. Social sites like Digg, Stumbleupon alone have sent me hundreds of hits in a single day.
• Keep your social profile on social bookmarking sites active and get a huge number of friends, this ensures your blog gets through social bookmarking networks and once it is in it starts travelling seeking you more audience, more visitors and higher ranks.
• Social bookmarking sites are also constantly crawled by serch engines, so posting content to them also gets you indexed faster, as the bookmarking sites have a good pagerakn, you get a share of the PR too.
• Sometimes, social bookmarks become more famous than the original URL to the post. Even then, it gets you search traffic in an indirect way.

• Directory Submission

• Directory submissions are a sure way of getting listed in search faster. Directories are used by search-engines to crawl sites. The more you are present in directories, better are your chances of getting listed in search results.
• Directories also offer god PR. So, if you want a good PR, a directory service is the best as they do not ask for link back, and submission to them is free. One way back-links are much more valuable than 2-way link exchanges.

• Writing Guest Posts

• Writing guest posts on reputed sites gets you recognized as a valuable contributor, and gets you indirect traffic to your blog. It also identifies your content quality as valuable and helps build a strong online presence.
• With guest posts, you also get a huge following of readers who are directed to your site, as traffic swarms.

• Commenting on other sites(Blogs)

• Commenting on other blogs can get you visitors as well.Always be the first one to comment on other reputed blogs. That way, follow-up comments are interested in you and visit your site.
• Some blogs and sites allow dofollow on the comments. That way, you get a share of their PR as a one way link!
• Commenting on other blogs also gets your blog in focus, and you get back comments on your posts, thereby getting popularity on posts.

• Using BB Forums

• Forums are a great place to advertise your blog. With forums, you can reach thousands of audience with a slight effort.
• Join a forum from you niche, create a good presence in it.
• Speak about you initiative, your blog.
• Get users on the forum to comment and post on your blog, host contests and giveaway gifts.

• Using microblogging

• Microblogging is another sphere which can get you numerous visitors in a few days. With microblogging services frm twitter, stumbleupon and others, your blog can reach a new level of SEO. Use it wisely, get a good progile and follow more to get followed.

• Optimizations

• Make sure your site is fst enought to handle all the load that is goind to get onto it as a result of this optimizations. Keep your javascript safe for safety on client side.
• Keep your server sided scripts optimized for faster serving of pages.
• Keep your database optimized for faster data retrival.
• Do not plan to host all the data on your server. Keep files like images and videos on a CDN(content delivery network) That will decrease load on your server.

• Things to do when not blogging

• Spread the word, really helps if you are in a company or a college. Spread the word. Let your blog be known. That way, you will get a new stream of local visitors, who keep visiting back out of curiosity.
• Fire up a technical discussion when amongst friends, quote lines from your blog, refer to your posts.

That is all you need to do to get an optimized site, so that next time you get a visitor, he sticks around for quite some time. Blogging is a big addiction and an even bigger knowledge resource. Make use of it if you have it in you.

What Really Mean By Organic Search Engine Optimization(Organic SEO)

While people concern to "organic SEO" (search engine optimization), they almost always use it as a broad term to describe the unpaid, algorithm-driven results of any particular Search engine. However, a advanced search engine optimization company/Individual will often take the meaning of "organic" one step further. To such companies/individual, the description of "organic SEO" is not to bounded what shows up in the "natural" search engine results - it includes the methodologies used to achieve such rankings.

There are more than one way to skin a cat (although I must admit that I do not know the one way that everyone else presumably knows), and the same is true for accomplishing natural search engine results. A search engine optimization company commonly falls into one of two camps. A "White Hat" search engine optimization company will use a largely content-based approach and will not violate the terms of service of the major search engines. A "Black Hat" search engine optimization company will use a mostly technology driven approach and often ignore the terms of service. Neither approach is invalid (as I have said many times before, there is nothing illegal about violating a search engine's terms of service), and both can achieve high rankings. But a search engine optimisation company that takes the word "organic" literally believes that the "Black Hat" approach is anything but "organic SEO."

SEO investment 'rising'

The Client-Agency Economic Outlook Survey by Reardon Smith Whittaker showed that nine per cent of marketers said their SEO spending is significantly higher this year compared with 2008, while 23 per cent said it is "somewhat higher" in comparison.

Other areas of online marketing identified by Reardon Smith Whittaker as seeing growth during the recession included social media, email marketing and banner advertising.

Commenting on the implications of the results, the company said: "If you don't have a good grasp of these newer media, you had better get on it.

"If you don't want to bring the resources in, there are plenty of other firms that can help you out."

According to eMarketer, it is likely that US spending on SEO will overtake expenditure on contextual advertising by 2013.

The firm said that this can be attributed to the fact that web users are more likely to click on organic listings than pay-per-click or other types of ads and also to the viability of SEO as a tool for finding new customers.

Affordable Search Engine Reputation Management Services

Online Reputation Management is a corporate service of SEO image. We focus on personal and/or business reputation online and we make effective strategies that ensure your reputation is given the credit it deserves.

When your reputation is at stake, our services work in a timely manner to ensure that you have a solution in place that will properly represent you. Its important to make initial steps that are geared to define and develop the right online reputation.

When it comes to presenting your company, your name or your brand in the right direction to the public, we can develop advanced strategies that will assure that your public presentation is professional and worthy of your name or brand.

Trust your reputation or your business reputation to an SEO firm that has a consistent clientele for years.

Online Reputation Management - How SEO Can Help In Reputation Management

Although the typical use of search engine optimization (SEO) is to increase the visibility of a company and get references to it to the top of a search engine results page, one growing trend in SEO involves bettering a company's reputation.

In a recent piece for BusinessWeek, Andy Beal, reputation management consultant at Marketing Pilgrim, notes that companies should regularly check what is being said about them on the web. If the content is negative, they should do something about it.

Beal points out that companies should create new content in an attempt to push the negative results off of the first page of Google or any other search engine. To do this, Beal tell BusinessWeek that companies should have a blog and grab a profile on any number of social networking sites currently populating the web.

Search Engine Reputation Management also know as SERM appears to be a growing need for companies as more people are expressing their opinion about businesses online.

One company, Visible Technologies, recently unveiled its TruReputation service which promises to help improve the online reputation of companies. Although the company doesn't say it will remove the negative comments, it does say it will push the content down on searches.

"If you have misaligned content, getting it off those first two pages and pushing it down is what we work with brands to do," says Blake Cahill, senior vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies. "We work with brands to outrank whatever is out there."ADNFCR-1513-ID-19230857-ADNFCR

What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO

Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it's not hard to understand why.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google's throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there's no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing
Microsoft's stance on search engine optimization really doesn't appear to be all that different from Google's. You're not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn't really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn't changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog."

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google's recent addition of "search options."

SEO perspective of companies may be change by a new search engine

When companies begin a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, they typically focus on getting content to page one on Google or Yahoo or another search engine - but if a new engine's popularity takes off, these companies may need to start considering the algorithms of all search engines.

Last week Search3 (www.search3.com) announced the unveiling of its new search engine which it says allows users to search for terms from a variety of sites including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter and even eBay.

David Fireman, cofounder of the site, says the new "meta-search engine" works under the theory that "three is better than one" and says the company is working on tools that will help people track their search engine optimization (SEO) performance.

"SEO professionals can use Search3 as a tool to benchmark clients' performance on search engines, and measure the impact of website changes they make on their clients' search engine rankings," he said. "Search3 will sell convenience to SEO professionals."

The fact that the new site allows users to search on Twitter shows the growing importance of real-time search.

Although Twitter currently appears to be on top of the real-time search world, Facebook recently announced it is testing a new search function which it says will give users "up-to-the-minute" results.

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How Chasing Bing and Google can Cause Fundamental SEO Mistakes

With Microsoft’s release of their new search engine Bing, some major changes by Google, and the much-hyped ascent of social media, more and more companies are trying to win traffic by reacting to adjustments in the SEO landscape. However, the center of an SEO strategy should be based on fundamentally sound principles, not reactions to frequent changes in the game. In a hurry to capitalize on untapped resources or temporary benefits, many companies lose sight of important best practices – things to do and things not to do.

An effective SEO campaign should find ways to continually improve performance through optimization and link building, while simultaneously avoiding penalties from the search engines. Best practices don’t promise success, but they do ensure that your time spent link building, researching keywords, and optimizing your sites isn’t wasted. Here are some common mistakes that people make in their SEO efforts and how to avoid them by using engine friendly, white-hat techniques.

Hanging Out With the Wrong Crowd
In their zealous race to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), many sites are a bit careless about where they get their links from. While getting links is an important part of Google’s algorithm, the quality of the sites the links come from can be more important than the number of links you get. If you are linked to from too many sites that have penalties, then Google is likely to associate you with those sites. This is called “the bad neighborhood” effect and will result in penalties for your site. This sort of guilt by association penalization means that you need to be careful about where you do your link building, and that not all links are worth having. Any site that has been penalized for link scheming, spyware, malware, or phishing is probably a site that you should avoid in your link building efforts.

Not Paying Attention to Search Engine Updates
As I said above, the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms. Not keeping a close eye on SEO news could spell trouble for your website. For example, just recently Google made a major change to the way their web crawlers treat no-follow links. In the past, many sites used no-follow as a way to conserve page rank. However, with the recent changes, Google won’t pass “link juice” through the no-followed links, but your other links on the page will still pass page rank normally. This means that if you have five links on a page and no-follow two of them, your other three will pass page rank in accordance with there being five links on the page. Previously they would have passed page rank as if there were only three links on the page. This is a pretty big deal, and it means that page rank sculpting is now a matter of cutting back on links, rather than just no-following everything that you’re not concerned with ranking. Whoever manages your SEO campaign should have the time and energy to monitor for these sort of changes and to make adjustments on the fly, or else you might wake up one day and find that you’re not even on page one for your best keywords.

Making It Hard or Impossible to Get Indexed
If you don’t get indexed, you can’t rank. While the best practices in terms of indexing won’t necessarily help you to rank higher, they will facilitate the ranking process by ensuring that engines index your changes more quickly. This will help you in the long run as you make numerous SEO changes over the life of your site. When you make changes, you’ll want them to be picked up quickly so you aren’t killing time waiting to see if you’ve affected any real change. Two good rules to follow are:

1.Use off-page CSS. This will keep your page light on coding, which will help search engines to index your pages more quickly. Using off-page CSS also has other benefits such as decreasing your code to content ratio, and pushing your content closer to the top of the html file.

2.Mix it up; don’t let your site feel like a template. This is especially an issue if you have a large site. With a high number of pages getting indexed, it’s important that they have very little content in common. If they do, search engines may label some of your pages as duplicate content and not index them at all. This also includes meta content such as your titles and descriptions. All of your content should have some degree of variation.

Targeting Redundant Keywords
Speaking of variation, it’s important that you target a variety of keywords throughout your site. The search engines don’t rank your entire site for keywords—they rank pages. This means that if you target the same keywords on all of your pages, then you’ll be competing with yourself. Your strategy for which pages to build links for will be diminished, and many of your pages will become a waste in terms of potential search traffic. By targeting a variety of keywords for each page you can tap into a wider range of search terms. Don’t be bothered if you find that the only keywords some of your pages can rank for are low traffic. Not all of your pages are going to be major conversion points or content wells. A high number of extra pages can still serve as a great source of traffic by ranking well in the long tail of obscure search terms.

Not Redirecting or Redirecting Improperly
One of the sure-fire ways to destroy your SEO campaign is to not redirect moved or non-existent pages. There are a variety of reasons why you might end up in this scenario. You could be rewriting urls, moving domains, or have simply removed old content. If you’re ever nullifying the value of a url by rewriting it or removing the page, it’s important that you redirect the old url to the new one. By setting up a 301 redirect you can still capture most of the link juice and send it to your new url. Another way to address this issue is to contact some of the webmasters who have linked to you and request that they point their link to the new address. Google Webmaster Tools will help to identify any crawl errors, including ‘not found’ (404) errors, and will even go so far as telling you how many pages on the web link to the page not found on your site.

Building a Deep Site Architecture
Many otherwise quality sites suffer from poor site architecture. Building a site that will rank effectively takes more than getting indexed quickly and avoiding penalties. It’s important that your site’s structure of internal links from one page to another is established in such a way as to get the most page rank to the most important pages. A good way to approach site architecture is by trying to build a “flat” or “shallow” site. The goal should be to reduce the number of clicks it takes to navigate the entire site to as few as possible. Having a flat site architecture increases the amount of page rank passed from page to page, makes the site easier to index, and increases usability for site visitors.

Conclusion

Check your SEO efforts for these mistakes; if you don’t have any of them, great! If you do, this is your notice to start making some changes and start ranking better. SEO requires a watchful eye, regular maintenance, and a thoughtful strategy. At times it can be confusing – unexplained penalties or poor performance may be a turn off to continuing an SEO campaign; however, by always designing for usability and keeping these mistakes in mind, a successful SEO campaign will be within your reach. - by Brian Easter

Bing best for SEO keyword research

Search newcomer Bing might offer the best tools on the market when it comes to highlighting current search trends, it has been suggested.

According to Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch, Bing's xRank feature seems to outperform Google Trends for displaying the most up-to-date trends in search queries, information that may aid companies' search engine optimisation campaigns.

While Google Trends has a three-day lag on all keywords except the most popular ones, xRank is able to display information that is current as of today, he comments.

For example, conducting a search for golfer Ricky Barnes yesterday (June 21st) on xRank shows that web users prompted a spike in queries for the sportsman after leading the US Open over the weekend.

However, Google Trends had no data for the search as of yesterday.

"One feature where Microsoft seems to be edging out Google is with displaying recent search trends," Mr Schonfeld commented.

"This may not be a major feature, but it shows a weakness in Google's armour."

Bing accounted for 12.1 per cent of US search results pages in its second week, up from 9.1 per cent in the week prior to its official launch, according to comScore.

How to avoid confusing your website visitors

Your website is your online business card giving your visitors the details about your offerings, information and resources, and most importantly the reasons they should purchase your goods and services. Once a new potential customer lands at your home page your site has approximately 20-30 seconds to make a positive Impression upon them, and then urge them with your helpful content to take your calls to action.

Even if your website is fully SEO optimized for Google and the other major search engines, if your site layout isn’t easy to use and navigate chances are you will be loosing those new potential customers when they click the back button on their web browser.

Is your site user friendly?
First and foremost your sites layout needs to have a straightforward design, with easy to see and use menu navigation, hyperlinks and content. Avoid using font sizes smaller than 10. If you are offering downloadable items, then make your download links prominent.

Don’t use Flash or other “splash” pages as your site home page. They are actually irritating distractions to many people and do not actually serve an important purpose. They are also inconvenient to web visitors since these intros or splash pages tend to load slowly, and a potential customers who has a slow Internet connection will simple click back and choose another website.

Websites with a large amount of animated images or excessive click ads actually drive potential customers away. When a visitor clicks through from the SERPs (search engine results pages) they are expecting to see the information they were searching for, not a maze of click ads wrapped around limited content or flashing banners etc. Make your home page the showcase for your goods and services offerings with easy to read headings for each topic you cover. Stay away from drop down menu’s as not only are they not SEO friendly, they can make finding specific information a potential customer is looking for difficult. Always use text based linking menus.

Enhance the user experience
Giving your potential customers what they want will always insure happy web visitors, and happy web visitors equal more sales! Make it easy to for your visitors to find the information that need by adding the ability to search your site. There are many free scripts and programs that you can deploy in minutes to your site. Using a text based sitemap with large title description headings for each webpage on your site will also make finding the information your visitors want easier.

If you are unsure what your visitors and customers want and need, try adding a simple user poll or survey on your website. Asking for your visitor’s opinions will help fine-tune your sites layout and also empower your visitors with the knowledge that you are truly interested in what is important to them.

Valuable information can also be found by investigating your top competitors. Knowing how their site layout and presentation of information is offered to their visitors can give you fresh ideas for making your more user friendly.

Keep it simple, friendly and exciting
With the possibilities in website design almost limitless, there is no exact right and wrong method in delivering your business information to your potential customers, but by asking for your visitors opinions, and looking at your website from your visitors point of view you will gained valuable insights that will enable you to find the right balance of ease of use and profession

Author: Rob Fleming

Connecting SEO, PPC Campaigns

Marketers know PPC and SEO campaigns will never live up to their full potential if they continue to run in silos. Information gained in PPC campaigns can help marketers improve SEO campaigns, according to Andy Heaps. He looks at ways PPC campaigns can inform SEO strategies, and vice-versa.

Working with keyword lists, messaging, tactical testing, blended cost per sale, positional analysis, multivariate testing and content network are a handful of ways marketers can stay informed. Knowing the words that convert the most in PPC campaigns can tell marketers what types of keywords on Web sites to focus on.

Should an SEO strategy be used for your twitter?

An increasing number of people and companies are using Twitter to boost their online visibility, but one expert says these users may want to consider a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy when it comes to the micro-blogging service.

In an article for Search Engine Journal, Joshua Odmark writes the future of search is in real-time results, something few search engines can provide at the moment - except Twitter.

With this in mind, and considering the amount of users on Twitter, Odmark says search engine optimization (SEO) and keywords are things everyone should be thinking about when they tweet.

"We all know how important keywords are in content thanks to Google. Twitter is teaching us how important these keywords are in our tweets," Odmark writes. "Relationships are created via the keywords that are in the tweets and people are finding tweets based on those keyword searches."

Odmark does say that Twitter is not foolproof, noting that it has difficulty with punctuation and that searchers may have to look for a number of variations of keywords in order to find what they're looking for.

If real-time results really are the future of search, Twitter may have some competition soon. This week Facebook announced that it has begun testing a new version of Facebook Search which is being designed to give "up-to-the-minute results."

Finding Qualified SEO Experts

Quality search engine optimization(SEO) skills are undervalued. That's according to David Dalka, who writes that companies still do not empathise on correct way to find qualified SEO experts. Many look for low-cost resources when they should focus more on perfecting success measurements, and integrating SEO campaigns into other marketing strategies.

Dalka looks at reasons why SEO might be misunderstood by many management teams, which often leads to a lack of financial resources and support. He writes that budgets are typically controlled by "individuals without a deep knowledge of search engine marketing," so it's significant to start by making a short prospect list of SEO vendors and reasons why the strategy is important.

Twitter SEO - the Future of Keywords

The future in search appears to be how real-time data is going to be accessed by users. Twitter is at the forefront of this with its enormous feed of status updates from its users.

As we speak, the data is being parsed by hundreds of websites that use the Twitter API. This data is manipulated in many different ways. However, there is one way to search this data that will always be true, keywords.

We all know how important keywords are in content thanks to Google. Twitter is teaching us how important these keywords are in our Tweets. Relationships are created via the keywords that are in the Tweets and people are finding Tweets based on those keyword searches.

There are two types of keywords on Twitter.

The first is actual keywords as you imagine them, such as “seo” and then the hash tag version of keyword, such as “#seo”.

The first version, the actual keyword, is where I believe the future of Twitter exists. Let us take Google as an example. As we all know, arguably, meta data holds very little to no weight with Google (specifically the meta keywords). Hash tags are essentially meta keywords.

But for this particular article, I will focus on the first version of a keyword (without hash tags). I will address hash tags in depth in a following article.
The future of keywords on Twitter.

In a character constrained world, timing and placement is everything. That is to say that where and how you use keywords in your Tweets is important.

There are a few things you must remember when using keywords on Twitter:

* Twitter search has problems with punctuation.
On more than one occasion, I have witnessed an exclamation point next to a keyword be picked up as part of the keyword. e.g. “apples!” Which means I did not show up for that search (apples) because I placed my intended keyword next to punctuation (in this case, an exclamation point). I would expect this to be fixed in the ensuing months.

* Twitter uses absolute match.
A search for “apple” will not yield results for “apples” and vice versa. Due to this, it is important to use different variations of a keyword in a tweet if it applies.

* Word recognition.
Twitter currently does not have the ability to understand that “closetdoor” is two words. It also does not understand misspelled words. However, “closetdoor” will show in search results for “closet”.

* Shortened URLs are fair game for keywords.
I recently did research into shortened URLs and found that keywords located in the shortened urls are as important as keywords in the Tweet, arguably more.

* Timing is everything.
In the real-time search world, the timing of your tweet is critical. This could be why popular tweeters blast out 5-10 tweets simultaneously at peak hours.

SEO to rise amid other search spending

Search is fundamental to customer acquisition. And search engine optimization (SEO) is projected to grow consistently, according to eMarketer’s Search Marketing Trends report.

One key finding is that brand loyalty is out the window in a down economy. Today’s customers are jumping online in search of the best deal. This has major ramifications for B2B companies with longer (thanks recession!) sales cycles that need to work even harder to keep the customers they have.

Paid search, or pay-per-click is where the bulk of the search marketing spend is, but eMarketer concludes that marketers are increasingly turning to SEO to acquire new customers. eMarketer isn't alone in this conclusion.

They project that paid search will roll back from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013. Contrast this with SEO, which they expect to grow from 17.7% to 20.3%.

India Emerging As SEO Hub With Exemplary SEO Services

Catapulting business websites to top search engine rankings and making it cling there by putting in consistent efforts- SEO services in India have empowered E-entrepreneurs and small businesses apart.

Catapulting business websites to top search engine rankings and making it cling there by putting in consistent efforts- SEO services in India have empowered E-entrepreneurs and small businesses apart to find a local as well as global market over the Internet.

Popular search engines return billions of results for every word that is searched and it is critical for businesses to have considerable visibility in order to have wide reach. SEO services in India underline the presence of of websites in such a manner that it remains visible and allow more and more of targeted traffic to hit the site. SEO services in India enable you to have a much greater rate of conversions that are lifeblood for your business to perform smoothly and flourish in a fierce competitive environment.

With modern day technology in their repertoire including Web2.0, SEO services in India offer impeccable services to attract search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL Search, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves and give your website distinguished treatment.Employing the right mix of on page and off page tactics, link building and tagging, SEO services in India keep a track of all the wavering factors that pull prospective customers to your websites and therefore they are able to provide flawless SEO services in India.The wide array of services of a reputed SEO company in India include competition analysis, identifying effective keywords and key phrases, content management, website optimization, Link building, directory submission, pay per click marketing and social media optimization. Social liasioning includes blog posting, micro blogging, news releases, forum posting and article submission.If you want that your websites stays there right there on the top of search engine listings, and unleash your business potential to zoom your sales figures substantially click here to know more.

Myths of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are much that is misunderstood regarding search engine optimization (SEO)including some myths that have been dispelled but seem to carry on anyway. Here are a few of them:

1) New content always helps improve rankings on search engine results pages – New content might increase the frequency of spiders returning to a site but it’s not going to do much for rankings if it’s not relevant. Optimized new content that isn’t stuffed with keywords will help, especially if done consistently.

2) Meta tags must be rich with keywords to help with rankings – One of the early black hat techniques stuffed irrelevant keywords into meta tags. Once the search engines figured it out, they classified the tags as spam and don’t give points for it anymore. Meta titles and descriptions do help with rankings

3) For search engine optimization (SEO) to be effective it must be submitted to the search engines repeatedly – Not true, the spiders are what count now. Search engine optimization, when properly executed and marketed, is very effective regardless of submissions.

4) Flash kills search engine optimization – Flash doesn’t kill SEO; it just doesn’t score with the search engines. Where flash hurts is when it is relied on exclusively. The spiders don’t read it so if there’s nothing to index there’s a problem. That being said, a little flash never hurt anyone.

5) A site that isn’t getting much traffic doesn’t need search engine optimization or marketing – Well, it may not be getting any visitors because it’s doing neither of these activities to drive traffic to the website in the first place.

6) Buying links will get a site banned – Black hat techniques used to manipulate the rankings can get a site banned but buying links isn’t considered to be one of those practices. If crawlers determine the link is paid, it won’t count the votes from that link but that’s a lot better than being banned.

7) Search engine optimization has failed if the site doesn’t rank as a number one – For SEO to be effective, it must deliver a return on investment. That return can be wiped out if optimization isn’t cost effective, which can be the case in going after number one rankings. Due to the drop-off from page one to page two on all search engines, a page one ranking is important, but a cost effective ranking in the seventh spot is much better than budget busting number one ranking.

The one thing that will always be true about search engine optimization is that it is constantly evolving. The algorithms and the general environment can change so quickly that what might be true today could end up on someone else’s “list of myths” tomorrow. The other possibility is that the myths written about today become truths at some point in the future, so stay tuned.

Quality SEO Pays for Itself

This question was posted on a message board recently:

Title: Wanted SEO/SEM Vendor Referral
Message: Does anyone have a COST EFFECTIVE SEO and SEM vendor referral. I am open to outsourcing, if referral for trustworthy vendor.
Thanks, "Uninformed Buyer"

I actually cringed in horror; just look at those capital letters on precisely the wrong attributes! Cost is usually the wrong question to focus on when choosing a search engine optimization (SEO) professional, as it implies you are buying a commodity. Strategic effectiveness and search marketing profitability impact are much more appropriate questions. A quality SEO is all too rare, and should be priced like fine artwork.

If search engine optimization is about organic ranking effectiveness on the web that drives relevant, converting and revenue-generating traffic – wouldn't online research of organic listings be a good first step? I'd assert it would be a good place to create a short prospect list of vendors to perform due diligence.

Yet many SEO firms receive sales calls from companies which don't have their SEO act together every day. Educating people to resist this is part of changing the industry's image, and quality SEOs share responsibility in creating this reality.

Quality SEO is presently a significantly undervalued skill set. Yet it can dramatically transform profitability of a business, as it has superior economics when compared to traditional media spending. However, since this value proposition is not yet understood by many management team executives, it often lacks the executive support it requires both in terms of financial resources and supporting needed operational changes.

It is also competing with large, highly entrenched budgets which are frequently controlled by individuals without a deep knowledge of search engine marketing which adds uncertainties to the selection process.

Content should be organized for better SEO

A growing number of websites are using tools like search engine optimization (SEO) to help increase traffic but just throwing content up on a site doesn't work according to one expert.

Writing for SearchEngineWatch, Hernandon Hasty says that websites not only need "tons" of quality content to help with their search engine optimization (SEO), but that content needs to be organized in a way that makes it easier for visitors to navigate.

"They'll come only if you have structured your information in a way that's easy for visitors to navigate, and for search engines to understand," he says. "You will see the traffic you desire only if your content complements your overall goals, your reputation feeds itself from top to bottom, and you've got good structure."

This is yet another example of someone in the search engine optimization (SEO) world pointing out that the purpose of SEO isn't just to make sure that a page turns up on the top of a search engine results page, but to make it palatable to the people who end up viewing the page.

Earlier this month in a piece for Search Engine Journal, David Risley noted that creating engaging original content can increase traffic exponentially, especially if that content goes viral through social media site. According to Risley, "if you write so as to provide maximum value to the READER, the message will spread through social media."

SEO Friendly Site Structure – If You Build it, Will They Come?

Your site's content is at the heart of what your site will rank for, and to a strong degree how well it will rank. Simply put, you need lots of it. I mean tons. Building authority takes more than a page or two, it takes a page or two or ten on every sub-topic of every category of a big idea or kind of product.

OK...once that's done, now what? You built it, now will they come?

They will come only if you've structured your information in a way that's easy for visitors to navigate, and for search engines to understand. You will see the traffic you desire only if your content complements your overall goals, your reputation feeds itself from top to bottom, and you've got good structure.

For most of you, this means your product categories. No matter what your content or end goal, the same rules and considerations apply whether you're looking for more units sold or more quality page views. Solid structure can bring exponential search engine value to good content, regardless of what form it takes.

Your ultimate goal is to organize your content from very high-level and broad, general strokes to the widest number of sub-categories that make sense for your site. Furthermore, you want to create quick ways for your customers and search engines to browse the entire selection and to drill down to the specific kinds of products they're looking for.

Here's how you get there, using a hypothetical shoe retailer as an example:

1. Start with an audit of your product offerings. What is it that you're selling at a very high level? In the case of our shoe retailer, we might list out that we sell dress and casual shoes (or is it "footwear" that your customers are seeking?) by major brands for men, women and kids. From this, we already have several ways to organize our products: By end user (men's, women's and kids), by use (dress and casual) and by source (major brands).

2. Take your list to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. While far from exact and with some gaps, this tool offers a free look at how people use Google to find your products. Start with the highest-level terms and note the searches that people use to get there. You should start seeing a hierarchy appear within these terms, starting from the top level (shoes) to more specific terms (men's shoes, women's dress shoes) to the most specific (men's black oxford shoes, women's cross training shoes).

3. Compare your findings to your product list. Now that you've seen how people search for the whole range of your site's offerings, start drawing out the categories that these can create – with pencil and lots of blank paper – or at least make sure to save your Excel spreadsheet regularly. It's not always as straightforward as it seems, but spending hours or even days getting it right the first time will save you weeks of making up for it later.

4. Classify your products. Start dropping your products into these buckets. Don't be afraid to classify a specific product multiple ways. As long as it will legitimately add value to your product offerings in that category to your customers, you're safe. Extra content for the page is nice for search engines, but it's more important to have a smooth and non-jarring experience for your customers.

5. Leverage your products. Your products will make up the bulk of the unique content on any given category page – so make sure that any information that will be included about the product helps to paint the intended picture to the search engines. For example, include 'loafers' – or better yet, 'men's loafers' – in the names of all of your products that fit that description.

6. Race to the bottom. Give shoppers – and engines – the ability to quickly get from the front page of your site to all of your categories and subcategories. Link influence flows from the top of your site, and the fewer number of links between the most influential page and any other point in your site, the more that can flow through to all categories.

Naturally, there's a lot more work to be done if you want to make a serious run at competitive keywords. A good structure, however, sets you up for success in so many directions: Title tags, internal linking, navigation and direction for other on-page content are but a few. Take the time to build a good foundation – and they truly will come.

Google's Cutts clarifies SEO PR sculpting issue

Google engineer Matt Cutts has attempted to clarify the issue of PageRank sculpting for search engine optimisation(SEO) purposes following comments he made at the recent SMX Advanced event.

The conference saw Mr Cutts reveal that Google had changed the way it dealt with PageRank going out to linked sites when some of the links on the same page had the 'nofollow' attribute assigned to them.

Previously, SEO executives had engaged in PageRank sculpting by using nofollow to control which of their website pages received PageRank from the original page.

However, in a blog post published yesterday (June 15th), Mr Cutts said that not all of a page's PageRank is divided equally between outgoing links when nofollow is used and urged marketers to avoid focusing on sculpting at the expense of creating a sound user experience.

"The first-order things to pay attention to are making great content that will attract links in the first place and choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike," he remarked.

Mr Cutts had said at SMX Advanced that PageRank that goes unused due to the use of nofollow can be said to be "just evaporating", according to WebProNews.

21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs

Ad Rotator – rotate ads anywhere on your site
This is actually the newest plugin added to Marketing Pilgrim. It allows me to set up simple text files with multiple ads in each. I then reference the text files anywhere in the blog template and the plugin will rotate between the ads found in the text file. Before using this plugin, I could only offer advertisers the option to manually switch out ad creatives every 2-4 weeks.

Akismet – best comment spam filter ever!
This should already be installed for your WordPress blog, but you may need to activate it. It’s secret? It aggregates information from all Akismet users–which means it will block you from a spammer, even if they’ve never commented on your site before. The only downside? Sometime it produces false-positives, resulting in legit comments heading to spam-jail.

Author Image – smiling faces on every post
If you like seeing the smiling faces of Pilgrim’s writers, you can thank Author Image. If you hate seeing the smiling faces of Pilgrim’s writers, you can blame Author Image. ;-)

Best Contact Form – a juiced-up contact form
If you’d like to know more information about those that fill out your blog’s contact form–like, which keywords they entered on Google to get to your blog–then you’ll want to check out Best Contact Form.

CommentLuv – paying it forward
We love to reward our readers when they leave a comment. With CommentLuv, every commenter automatically has their last blog post displayed below their comment on Marketing Pilgrim.

FeedFooter – little messages at the bottom of your feed
FeedFooter has so many great uses. On MP we use it to display ads at the bottom of every RSS feed item. On other blogs I use it to place copyright information and backlinks–to try and stop spammers from scraping the feed.

Force Word Wrapping – ‘cos some words are too long
Have you ever seen a 40 character URL posted on a blog, stretch across into the sidebar. Looks ugly, doesn’t it? You won’t ever see that on MP, thanks to this plugin which forces word-wrapping.

Math Comment Spam – when Akismet is not enough
Even with Akismet, MP would still suffer from around 100 bot comments each day. When I installed Math Comment Spam protection, the number of spam comments dropped to zero. Effectively, only humans can leave a comment on MP, because even robots aren’t smart enough to figure out 7+11. ;-) Bonus: this form of comment spam protection is much easier for human commenters than those hard to read captchas!

No Self Pings – does exactly what it says on the tin
Here at Marketing Pilgrim, we inter-link our own posts heavily. Without this plugin, we’d have dozens of trackback/pingbacks from our own blog each day. This prevents them from showing up in our comments section.

Post Teaser – because I’m a big tease
Want to de-clutter your blog’s homepage and increase click-throughs to post pages at the same time? This handy plugin automatically creates a teaser of each post on the homepage, with a link through to the full post.

Redirection – when it absolutely, positively, must get there
I love this plugin! Not only does it automatically redirect post URLs–handy for when you click “publish” only to realize your misspelled a word in the post slug–but it also has a 301 redirect manager. How hand is that? A few months back a large email newsletter link to this blog, but had a typo in the page name. Instead of that traffic hitting a 404 error page, I was able to redirect it to the correct destination! Oh, and you should already know the SEO benefits of using this plugin. ;-)

Related Posts – don’t leave home without it
If you’ve read this far into this post, the chances are, we have other posts that you’d love too! With this plugin, I can automatically suggest other great posts–on the same topic–that you’ll likely love. ;-)

SEO Title Tag – “Professor” Spencer’s SEO home-run
If you care about SEO, then you should care about the TITLE of your posts and pages. I don’t always use this on posts, but for our “pages” this plugin allows me to override the TITLE that is automatically generated.

Show Top Commentators – just add water for instant comments
How do you get your readers to leave comments? Add this plugin and you can reward your most vocal commenters with a non-nofollowed backlink to the site of their choice. Options allow you to reset the list every day, week, or month and you can also decide how many to show. A word of warning. While this does help to kick-start the comments on your site, you WILL attract more spammers–hoping to leave comments as “Viagra” and such. You’ll need to police your list, but the plugin also allows you to filter out those commenters that abuse this plugin.

Smart Ads – smarter than the average plugin
Another recent find. Smart Ads lets me auto-insert ads before and after blog posts. OK, nothing new there. However, why I love it is that it allows me to insert the ads only after a certain number of days have past. For example, we have it set to only insert ads on posts older than 20 days. That way, regular readers are not inundated with ads, while we get to monetize our archives. ;-)

Subscribe to Comments – “you just keep me hanging on!”
I wish more blogs had this plugin installed. As a publisher, I love this plugin because I can set the defaul to automatically subscribe a commenter to receive an alert when a new comment is added. This brings them back to the conversation–btw, they can un-check the box to opt-out. As a commenter, I love seeing this option–especially if I leave a comment and would love to know if the author replies to my question/comment.

Theme Tester – behind the scenes theme switching
This plugin was a life-saver during our re-design. It allowed us (Admins) to view the new WordPress theme, while every other blog reader saw the existing design. The next time you test a new theme, you can do so without risking your audience see the experiment!

WordPress Database Backup – a life saver
You do back-up your blog, right?

WP-Cache – legalized speeding
If you ever expect–or even if you don’t–to get on the homepage of Digg, Slashdot or some other high-traffic web site, then you’ll be glad you had this plugin installed. In brief, it caches your pages so that they load faster–which is handy when Digg sends you hundreds of visitors a second. There are lots of features and only a couple of caveats. Once a month it doesn’t play nicely with my Math Comment Spam plugin–resulting in the question and answers not matching up. Also, if you make changes to your design, you’ll have to clear the cache, in order to see the changes.

WP-Email – you’ll be surprised how often this is used
When I first installed this plugin, even I was shocked at just how often it was being used by readers. If your readers find something interesting on your site, let them email it to a friend or co-worker–you might just get another loyal reader/subscriiber!

WP-Notable – share, and share alike
There are lots of “share this” plugins available. You know, the ones that allow your readers to submit a post to Digg or StumbleUpon. I’ve used this one for years, but it doesn’t matter which flavor you use, just use it!

OK, now your turn. Why not share the love by leaving a link to your favorite WordPress plugin? C’mon spill the beans on that one plugin you think gives your blog an advantage.

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Why Video + SEO vs. just Video SEO?

You perhaps asking, why the “Video + SEO” vs. just “Video SEO?” Well, I get into that a bit more in the slides and without going on too much of a tirade about it – here is what I will say. I think that there is a lot of hype these days about Video SEO and it seems to me that there is an overall lack of understanding as to what effective Video SEO is. As for my definition, and I go a bit more into this within the presentation:

“Video SEO is the application of SEO best practices when publishing online video content to ensure maximum visibility across search engines and ultimately, your target audience”

While there are some clear advantages to utilizing video for search rankings; really, I feel that the focus should be on best practices as an overall strategy for both website development as well as video publishing.

Even as in the early days of SEO, there were techniques for getting easy rankings, with spamming meta keyword tags, multiple domain cross-linking strategies, etc… That soon disappeared and as most experts will tell you, the best lesson for SEO in general, is to create unique and valuable content, and to publish that content with best practices for SEO in mind. Nothing works as well for SEO as creating good, unique, and valuable content.

The same should be said about online video. Video SEO is not a means in and of itself, it is a strategy and a set of best practices that needs to be combined with best practices for producing, publishing, and syndicating online video content. Many of these best practices have already been established for SEO in general. Leveraging those best practices along with publishing quality video content is what good Video SEO is all about… OK, so I did go off a bit, didnt I? ;-)

Why Use Professional SEO Services When I Can Do it Myself

As with most things on the Internet, there is a panoramic difference between what constitutes genuine professed SEO services and what is provided by someone who claims to undergo the principle of SEO work. While most SEO services crapper be handled on your possess the pertinent theoretical and person background, the concern of professed SEO services changes regular as the cyberspace continues to rise and gild becomes more interdependent on it. Thus, modify though you haw conceive you wager the basics, sometimes the principle are meet not sufficiency which is ground you haw poverty to earnestly countenance into professed SEO services for your website.

The ultimate actuality of the concern is that SEO standards are cushy sufficiency to comprehend. The base employ statement of an SEO miss that every professed SEO services wage is to hold redesign and wage germane noesis so that a website receives a broad senior in wager engine results. Obviously, the higher senior that a website receives in a wager ask the more reciprocation it module draw which crapper coexist with the turn of profits that a webmaster is either to attain commerce adspace or an actualised product. So, ground shouldn’t you endeavor to action your possess SEO work?

For starters, SEO impact takes time. There is no road to SEO tactics that module impact in the daylong constituent and as wager engines intend smarter whatever older crooked tactics (known as black headgear SEO tactics) today actually perceive your website senior more then they meliorate it. Thus, before you commence on whatever SEO impact you hit to carry comprehensive investigate to wager what is unexceptionable and what is not. This is not a digit instance job, as you hit to meet adjusted into the SEO concern in visit to ready your senior erst you attain it.

Do you hit instance for this and managing every another characteristic of your website? For most people, the respond is a country revilement NO, which is ground uncovering professed SEO services at an inexpensive outlay crapper seem same a godsend. The actuality is that patch you haw be healthy to do whatever of your possess SEO work, you module never be healthy to correct the calibre or results that professed SEO services crapper provide.

Also, ready in nous that instance is money, so patch you are symptom your instance with SEO, you could be earning an accumulated acquire from the impact that professed SEO services crapper substance in a flash. Thus, modify if you are bolshy you haw poverty to verify a ordinal countenance at whatever SEO services if you are fascinated in making the most change soured your online stake as possible!

SEO Articles Or Evergreen Articles

SEO articles or evergreen articles? Before we could answer this question, let us know first the difference of the two. What do we mean by SEO articles? How about evergreen articles? The concept is still the same, writing articles to earn money online, however the main focus here is, which articles do make us earn money more. SEO articles are those that we write containing keywords which rank high in search engines. Most of these though are those topics which are current events like a recent sex scandal by a famous actress that circulated online without her knowledge, or the recent celebration of a famous festival, the current Olympics games or a newly released movie. Yes, these articles do make us earn money fast, however, the length of time is usually shorter. People stops talking about the sex scandal, the Olympic competition ends and we have to wait another few years for the next one, new movie releases do come and the one you’ve written about starts to be buried on your blog.

Evergreen articles on the other hand are those topics which don’t die in time. These articles may not bring us fast money as fast as SEO articles, however, we would earn from them forever. These keywords are those people usually search for from time to time. These topics are those that we usually encounter in our daily lives. Some of these are about jobs, health, travel, how-to articles or tutorials, reference content, to name a few. I Usually, I write evergreen articles and do write SEO articles from time to time. My monthly passive income comes from the evergreen articles I’ve written few months or few years ago. They generate income monthly. I do earn from their pageviews and from google adsense. Though I don’t earn that much yet like the pros but the additional income has helped a lot in my monthly budget.

Now you know the difference between the two. It’s up to you which topics to write about. The secret in earning money online are patience, perseverance and time. The longer you write, the more your income will increase. Just be patient. In time, you will reach your target.

Black Hat SEO Versus White Hat SEO

Some call it a question of ethics; others just call it business. The discussion is raging online and in marketing conferences around the world, but what exactly are black hat SEO and white hat SEO, anyway?

White hat SEO is the angelic version of optimization, that is, it employs only techniques as recommended – or at least, not barred – by search engines and their ever-changing guidelines. Typically, results in the form of more traffic and higher profits take anywhere from three months to a year. With this type of SEO, there is no fear of your site being banned by search engines.

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, is the impatient fraternal twin of white hat SEO. It utilizes techniques specifically banned by search engines like hidden text and hidden links. Some call this spam. Others call it business savvy. Whatever you call it, if the search engine gurus figure out your game then the gig is up and you’re blackballed. That means that you could type the name of your company and your name and business address into the search box and your site still won’t come up.

It basically breaks down like this: White hat SEO focuses on marketing and the text on a site, updating with keyword rich, informative articles that benefit their clients and build a solid following over time. Black hat SEO focuses on technology and IT tricks to get a ton of traffic right away.

The important thing to consider is what your goal is. Do you want high traffic or do you want high sales? With black hat SEO, you may get immediate results as far as visitors to your site but do these visitors want to buy what you have to offer? If not, who cares if they end up on your site? White hat SEO is more interested in targeted traffic, attracting the kind of visitors to your site who are actually looking for you and are ready to buy your products or services. Over time, your traffic and sales rise together as you build up a following through word of mouth and repeat customers.

So what’s all the fuss about? Mostly, the rules. White hat SEO follows them meticulously. Black hat SEO follows the numbers instead. Those who take the time to research and follow the rules are irritated by those who achieve high search engine rankings without taking the same pains. However, black hat SEO proponents point out that search engine requests are hardly laws and therefore doing what they like is far from illegal. It’s in this discussion that the white hat and black hat merge to become a grey hat.

In fact, white hat fanatics might charge that those who write articles specifically to utilize keyword repetition are manipulating the system and are dabbling in black hat SEO. The less fanatical may point to links as a grey area. Search engines don’t want links on a site purely to drive traffic. However, if links are related to the content on the site, then that’s okay. But what about those sites where there are paid links that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the site they grace? Paid links as advertisements are white hat. Paid links purely for driving traffic, black hat. True motivation of the webmaster? Grey hat.

When it comes down to it, everyone who utilizes search engines in hopes of gaining top rankings are going to use optimization in order to climb to the top of those rankings. If motivation is the only concern, then it is an issue of politics that need not take up your time. Just know that if you use technology, link farms, and other banned resources that are designed purely to drive traffic and you get caught, you will be blacklisted from the search engine. If it’s worth the risk to you, then do what you have to do. The choice is yours.