Search Engine & Social Media Optimization

How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

2009-11-10T03:40:00.000-08:00

1. Engage your CEO in social media. Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers. But for a CEO, the typical routes to social media can be hard. Especially if you are a larger or global company. A CEO typically has little time to write a blog or answer lots of messages and friend requests on Facebook. I cannot tell you how many CEO blogs I have seen with only 1 or 2 posts because the CEO never had time to update the blog after the first couple entries. But, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments. If your CEO can send a text message, they can use Twitter from anywhere in the world as a marketing and PR tool. Twitter is actually perfect for CEO or founder who is always on the road meeting with people and who has some interesting opinions on your market.

2. Keep in touch with bloggers / media. It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you'll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well. In fact, I have lots of people I consider "famous" in the marketing and PR worlds following me. In my opinion, this is a way easier way to connect with influential people in the media than calling and emailing them.

3. Monitor your company / brand on Twitter. A while back we noticed that Guy Kawasaki mentioned Website Grader on Twitter. Well, of course we had to let him know a bit more about Website Grader and maybe ask if he would also blog about it? The result was this blog article on Website Grader which drove a good amount of traffic and leads. (See below for a cool tip on how to easily monitor people talking about your company on Twitter.)

4. Announce specials, deals or sales. If you are a retailer or anyone who often has special offers, you can use Twitter to announce these deals instantly to a large audience. You know those commercials from Southwest Airlines about that "Ding" application you could download and would then alert you about specials on flights? Well, Twitter can be used as a kind of free version of that. Dell and Woot have done just this type of marketing, with a lot of success.

5. Live updates on events or conferences. If you participate in a large trade show or run your own corporate event, you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes, cool events that are happening ("Just announced, David Meerman Scott book signing in the exhibit hall until 11am") and more. It is a great last minute marketing tool.

6. Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more. Its really easy to post a link to something in Twitter, and I often post links to blog articles on this blog, or other news articles relevant to HubSpot. A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your business, like a customer success story or other PR coverage. If you have other content that is appealing to your audience like a free webinar, post links to those too.

Using Twitter for Marketing & PR - A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Sign-up and post a profile. Visit Twitter and click on the "Get Started - Join" button in the middle. The rest is simple enough that I think you can figure it out without my help.

2. Write some updates. The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer - I am about as good of a writer as Shakespeare on Twitter. Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner. Just write something.

3. Make friends. Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy. Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people's Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it. That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the "Follow" button on the top left and you are now following them. Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person. You can get started by following me: Mike Volpe on Twitter. You can also click on the people that other people are following to find more people to follow.

4. How to post URLs. Twitter is based on 140 character updates. If you have a really long URL, that doesn't leave much room for Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short. Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter.

5. Monitor conversations about your company. Even if you don't join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand. This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint. Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this. For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about HubSpot on Twitter. You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated. Another tip is that you can "follow" all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile). If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.

6. How to "chat". Using the @ symbol before someone's Twitter username is how people have "conversations" in Twitter. This makes their username a link to their profile so other people can follow the conversation (sort of). For example if you wrote "@mvolpe thanks for the cool blog article about Twitter today" that would be a way of telling me you liked this article. Try it out. It's not IM (instant messaging), but it is sort of like a publicly broadcast IM service.

25 Link Building Tactics to Improve Blog Search Engine Rankings

2009-11-10T03:39:00.000-08:00

Blogs are often touted as good for search engine optimization. The reality is, blogs are simply software tools and what you get out of them from a SEO perspective is in proportion to how well you know how to use them. Good keyword categorization and content are a start, but blogs are not much of a SEO asset unless they attract links.

The myth of “Build it and they will come”. Not many businesses that start blogs have the patience to create great content and wait for others to find that content all on their own as a linking strategy. Without clicking on a link or finding it on a search engine, how will others find your blog? Content is King but only if you promote it.

Links from relevant, credible sources balanced with on-page keyword optimization make it easier for search engines to find, index and sort blog posts in search results. If there’s an expectation for a company blog to rank well in search results, be sure to consider some of the following link building tactics:

1. Create content worth linking to. No matter how many tactics you find here and elsewhere, there simply is no substitute for creating content that others may find useful. Take the time to look at blog posts that already rank well in search results and notice their structure, quantity of words and word placement.

2. Conduct backlink analysis on competing web sites or blogs – find out who is linking to competitor sites that are not linking to yours. Ask sites linking to multiple competitors to link to yours as well. If another web site or blog is already linking to multiple competitors, there is a chance they’ll link to your blog as well.

3. Make useful comments on other blogs that don’t have rel=nofollow. Comments should always be useful, but if you become aware of a topically relevant blog that does not discourage search engine spiders from crawling links in comments, it’s work spending the extra time to provide helpful insights a links to resources that you’ve published on your own blog.

4. Encourage social bookmarks & news submissions of your content using services without rel=nofollow. Show links to those services like Folkd, Spurl or Feedmarker in the blog post template code so they are visible for blog readers to use. Some social bookmarking services will make a copy of what you bookmark or a static web page of the bookmark including a do follow link back to the source (your blog).

5. Get listed on other blogger’s blogrolls. It never hurts to ask another blog that you’re active with to see if they’d consider adding your blog to their blogroll or curated lists of blogs.

6. Guest write on other blogs and include a link to your blog in the bio. In the course of getting to know blogs that already rank well on the keyword phrases you’re targeting, you may notice that they often accept guest blog posts from others. Contact the blog owner and suggest a compelling post that would be first and foremost, valuable to their readers. If it makes sense editorially to link from within the guest post to your own blog, be sure to use relevant keywords as the link text.

7. Submit to blog & RSS directories. Many directory links have no follow links or are not visited by a large volume of people, but making sure your blog and RSS feed are included in niche categories and collections of blogs can be a positive signal to search engines as well as to long tail users. Many bloggers that aggregate large lists of topically specific blogs will cultivate blog directories as a easy way to find blogs on similar topics. If your blog isn’t on the niche list in those situations, you won’t be included.

8. Submit to regular web site directories like botw.org. While there are blog specific directories (BOTW has one of those as well) many don’t discern web sites from blogs. If a quality directory has a relevant category with other reputable web sites in it, then it makes sense for your blog to be among them as a useful information source.

9. Be sure to include your blog URL in profiles and bios on social media sites. While most social media sites that allow users to add links to their profiles add no follow to the links, there are many that do not. Public profile links on LinkedIn and YouTube channels for example, are good links. Rather than focus on registering with 300+ sites using Knowem, just make sure that of the social media profiles you do set up inlcude a link back to your blog.

10. Write testimonials for services and software that you use. They may publish with a link back to your blog. Testimonials must be well written, genuine and specific in order to be useful for the service/product owner. Get at the essence of what’s great about the product or service and even add something unique. If you’ve written a review of the product/service on your blog, that can also get you a link from their press page.

11. Job listings should always have a link back to your blog. Blogs can be useful recruiting tools that help candidates understand the culture of your company. When purchasing job listings on other web sites, add a link to your blog. The listings may expire, but may also introduce your blog to candidates that write their own blog and decide to write about a listing with a permanent link to the hiring company blog.

12. Event listings should always have a link back to your blog. Blogs can be effective tools for promoting events and if you are listing your event with 3rd party services, a link back to your blog post with more details will be useful to readers that want to know more. That link can also be useful to search engines.

13. Contributions to non-profits often have a donor page with a link. These links are now very rare but you should contribute anyway.

14. Article syndication can still result in a few good links. Include your blog URL in the article bio. Take some of your best tips oriented blog posts and re-write them for specific industry verticals or applications. Then submit them to article repositories. When others re-use those articles, the bio link back to your blog can be picked up by readers and search engines.

15. Distribute press releases via a wire service with a link to your blog included. Our client, PRWeb, is a pioneer in providing competitive SEO value with press release distribution. Many blogs and some news web sites will re-publish your press release exactly as it was distributed, including good links back to your blog. Journalists use News search to look up past press releases and research on stories, which presents an opportunity to be found and included.

16. Contribute Op Ed pieces to Mainstream Media web sites. Contribute a link to your blog of course. If you suggest content to another web site such as a letter to the editor, why not keyword optimize the title? Why not include a link back to your blog where you’ve written many more articles on the same topic?

17. When you get media coverage (or placements) in online publications, be sure to ask the journalist for a link to your blog. Again, it never hurts to ask. Many publications have a policy not to link out from stories. Many leave it up to the journalist or their editor. If you don’t ask, you will never get the link.

18. Develop social networks and share especially useful content from your blog where relevant. Be useful to others and they will useful to you by promoting your content and attracting links. Don’t be gratuitous when sharing links to your own content, but when you have something particularly special and valuable that’s highly relevant to a particular network, then by all means, share it with them. Some are bloggers as well and may link to it from their own blogs as well as pass the link along to others.

19. Linkbait. Create or aggregate disparate content that provides value and is not easily found elsewhere. Promote it to those that would be interested and in a position to distribute to the right audience. Again, create useful content, but be thoughtful about packaging it in a way that makes it unique and is easy to pass along. Look at other blog posts in your topical category that have “gone hot” on social news sites and understand their structure, format and tone. Leverage what has worked for others in your own content to be promoted.

20. Sponsor content on web sites or newsletters archived to the web that allow you to include a link. It may be a nofollow link, but it may not. Many newsletters sent via email are archived to the web or have landing pages on the web. Ask those newsletters if you can buy an ad or even contribute a short article. The article credits should include a link to your blog.

21. Hire bloggers to write content for you. They’ll often cross-post it to their own blog with a link back to yours. Of course, you should be considerate and simply mention that this is ok, don’t ask them or require them to do it.

22. Run a contest that may involve others deciding to link back to your blog. This can be tricky, but Marketing Pilgrim does a great job of this with their SEM Scholarship Contest. Readers write blog posts and the first cut is based on which posts get the most traffic and presumably, links among other criteria.

23. Offer a widget, when posted to others’ web sites, includes a link back to a credits page for the widget on your blog. TopRank’s Thomas McMahon created a RSS buttons tool and it’s use by other blogs has resulted in over 322,000 inbound links.

24. Review other blogs and offer a badge for those that get included. We’ve done this with BIGLIST and it has resulted in over 64,000 inbound links. Focus on quality and be consistent. Also offer a version of the badge that does not include a link for those that want to display the “blog flare” but don’t or can’t link to it. You should include your logo on the badge for improved brand awarness whether there’s a link or not.

25. Create an exceptionally useful tool. Others will link to it simply because it is useful. (See step 1) TopRank created a Social Bookmarking Tool several years ago and still has over 50,000 links as a result.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

2009-11-01T07:47:00.000-08:00

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)

2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you'll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.

3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter's search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?

• You'll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they're selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?

• Since every link has 'http' in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.

4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter's search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your house email list. Invite these people to join.

5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.

6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.

7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you're at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you're doing and invite people to visit you in person.

9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.

10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep you and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven't already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don't only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.

9 Innovative Ways To Build Links

2009-09-09T04:48:00.000-07:00

Link building is 90% of the battle when succeeding in the search engines and properly succeeding at search engine optimization. In this article, we are going to break down some innovative techniques that other top SEO’s use to find and obtain quality links to their website. Let’s get right down to it!

1: Use Google Alerts – You can use Google Alerts to find certain phrases that are highly relevant to your website. For example, if you are a company that offers solar panels, you can set up Google alerts to tell you whenever their are websites listing companies that offer solar panels.

For example, you could create an alert for phrases like “Solar panel companies”; “solar panel providers”; “solar panels”; “solar providers”; “solar links”, etc. This will allow you to see what people are talking about in your industry and request links or to contribute information to active and relevant websites.

2: Find Top Commentators or Top Commentator widgets on relevant websites… Start reading the blog and make a daily post. As long as the widget isn’t a “NoFollow” widget, you can get some great links from the home page of the blog. Not bad, not bad at all!

3: Get links that produce traffic. Surprisingly, websites that produce traffic often times are trusted a lot more by the search engines as well, so chances are the link will be higher in quality.

4: If your industry is a popular industry that has a lot of organizations involved that talk about or support your industry, you can always find websites looking for sponsors. Often times popular organizations link value can be incredibly high and trusted.

5: If you are an ethical company, get involved in the Better Business Bureau and they will actually provide a link to your website – and this will likely increase sales as well since you will be seen as a reliable company.

6: You can offer to guest post quality information on relevant and popular blogs in exchange for a link back to your website. These links often times carry a large amount of weight and value.

7: Get involved in popular and relevant forums and always place a link in your signature to your website.

8: Look at the links pointing to your competition’s website. For example, use Yahoo and search for inlinks:www.website.com

9: Do a simple search for company lists. For example, if you are a dentist in Phoenix Arizona, search Google for terms like Phoenix Dentists, List of Phoenix Dentists, Phoenix Oral Surgeons, etc. You can also repeat the search for surrounding cities and you will find some websites that are authoritative directories.

Be creative, there are hundreds of ways to get quality links and they are often times easier than you think. You don’t need thousands of links to succeed. Work on getting one quality link per day and you will be beating your competition in no time.

10 SEO Tips For Maximizing Facebook Visibility

2009-09-08T22:02:00.000-07:00

1. Search results continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook pages, groups and applications. Therefore what you’ve done to date still works. The gravity of Facebook groups, which some thought lame, will increase as Facebook internal search is adopted.

2. Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors. Read it and understand. Stay up to speed on changes in the Facebook blog, as they will certainly occur. Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy. As people learn to spam these results, Facebook will react and SEOs will want more information.

3. In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever.

4. Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag. If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

5. If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select “everyone” in privacy settings > search. Though it’s possible users might not be happy if they were aware, existing accounts default to “everyone,” understanding this is a cool inside tip for early success.

When “everyone” is selected, others may see your data regardless of whether or not you are friends. Reciprocally, users should uncheck if they want to exclude their profile from wider Facebook SERPs. It would not be surprising if users protest when folks start to discover that all of a sudden some of their personal sharing is visible to everyone.

7. Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.” It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function.

8. Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot.

9. Contribute continually. A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

10. Be there or be square! Stay tuned for attributes, in and out of Facebook, may factor in the search results as Facebook evolves.

9 SEO Copywriting Tips

2009-09-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

Use Bold, and Italics: Just like a regular old human reader the search engines give more weight to words and phrases that are in bold or italics. Just don't go too crazy or you'll irritate the search engines and give your reader a headache (unless you're selling aspirin, but that's a different article on subliminal copywriting!).
Hyperlinks: You are your own best resource, so use and to a certain extent abuse yourself. Hyperlink to other resources/pages of your site which are relevant to the copy you are writing. This will benefit the reader, increase the amount of time they spend on your site and help you with the search engines. Don't forget your ALT tags.
Hyperlinks: Incorporating links to external resources which will benefit the reader can help you in two ways (a) they provide a third-party validation to a certain extent of your "expertise" and (b) afford you the opportunity to pick up some extra coin if that resource provides reciprocal linking or has an affiliate program.
(4) Use Bullet Points: Using a bullet point or numbered system helps break up your copy into consumable pieces, aids in the clean design of your page and makes it easy for the reader to "go back" and reference previous points without wasting time reading through denselinks copy.
Content "Mass": Never have less than 400 words on a page. If the content you are providing is in fact valuable you should be able to come up with around 1,000 words.
Use Examples to beef up your content with relevant keywords. (See #8).
Keyword Density: I like to try for 7% density for no more than 4 sets of keywords or phrases per page. Segway to #8.
Break your keyword sets/phrases into tiers or alternates to enable a better flow while maximizing density and penetration (based upon Yahoo!'s Keyword Selector Tool, WordTracker, WebCEO or a like keyword recommendation program).:

Example: Target: SEO Copywriting Tier 1: SEO Copywriting Tier 2: SEO Copywriter Tier 3: Writing copy for SEO Tier 4: SEO copywriting services

Example Sentence: "Instead of spending time evaluating SEO copywriting Services become a SEO copywriter yourself by following these guidelines and you'll be writing copy for SEO in no time."
Write for what the reader is searching for, not what you think they should be searching for. Remember that your job is to provide the "solution" to the problem, not create a greater problem by making the reader/searcher feel dumb. If they are searching for Ham and Green Eggs instead of Green Eggs and Ham, give them Ham and Green Eggs - "The Searcher is Always Right" to paraphrase a service industry mantra.

source:www.searchengine-weblog.com

10 SEO Tips to get higher search engine rankings

2009-09-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

source:www.ezau.com

3 Awesome Social Media Optimatization Tips

2009-09-08T04:43:00.000-07:00

3 great ways to make the most of your social media optimization plan can enlist the following methods:

1. You can build your profile in many communities in order to connect with others. This is a great way to build the two way communication and establish trust at the same time. This is one of the fastest ways to get the communication ball rolling.

2. Give your business a blog. There are many powerful social media tools that can allow you to make the most of your time. These are essential for businesses these days and prove to be very beneficial to anyone who may use them and prove to be an extremely powerful tool to aid your business in succeding.

3. Consider podcasting. This is a great way to get your point across and make your business prosper. Simply another way of recording your thoughts with actual speaking words is a great way to make the most of your time.

You may wonder why bother with all this but you must understand that is the latest way to make your business a success. People love to connect and feel like they are not alone; it doesn't matter whayou may be selling you can profit online from this.

Source - www.articlesbase.com

7 tips to become a better SEO

2009-09-08T04:42:00.000-07:00

1. SEO for glory not for money. What separates the good from the bad is that great SEO work for the results. If your sole focus to become an SEO is for the money, than my last 9 tips will seem like a nuance. Great SEO work for the glory of the results. The pride of seeing their hard work bare fruition is something most people don’t understand, sure you shouldn’t get too emotionally attached to your work. But the driving force of good SEO is their passion to deliver the results.

2. Willingness to learn. No great SEO will claim they know everything there is about search engine optimization, those that do should be questioned about their knowledge and proof be shown. SEO has been and in my opinion will continue to be an evolving industry. As the world demands better search results from search engines, companies like Microsoft and Google will continue to change their services to fill the demand. It is a pre-requist for any SEO to constantly educate themselves. A simple question to ask when hiring an SEO. ( what publications, blogs, websites do they frequent and contribute to )

3. Willingness to share. SEO is a community based industry, a lot of work comes from referrals. And if you are unwilling to share your ideas with others and join discussions. You will find yourself a very lonely SEO with no work. I am not implying that to divulge your company secrets or all your knowledge to the world, once you become part of the community and build solid relationships with other SEO’s that you trust, this is where sharing of ideas can really bring great benefits.

4. Under sale, over deliver. We have all come across the loud mouth, Cr*p talkin salesmen that promise the world but can’t deliver the product. Don’t be that person, if you are in a client facing role, a great SEO presentation will include facts, accurate projections and great presentation skills. Always be honest with your clients when dealing with deliverables and results, sure most client won’t understand what it is exactly us SEO’s do but a great SEO should have the ability to ‘dumb’ down the answers. Be conservative in your traffic projections because when you over deliver results, everyone is happy.

5. Develop your analytical skills. A great SEO needs to possess an analytical mind, be able to gather data from different sources and combine / analysis the data to determine a favourable outcome. How can you perform an accurate keyword analysis, traffic projection or simply how many backlinks to acquire if you don’t have good analytical skills.

6. Learn to use these tools. Your job as an SEO will often require you to use these programs. Don’t rely on sys admins or designers to do the work, otherwise you could be waiting a long time, SEO is a time dependent service. The quicker you start, the faster you will see results.

* Google and other search engines. ( pretty obivious, but you would be surprise how many SEO’s dont know the basics )
* Cpanel / Plesk
* Server based traffic statistics programs ( AWstats, webalizer, mint, pikwik )
* FTP programs
* Basic HTaccess knowledge
* Google webmaster tools
* Google Analytics
* Basic HTML editors ( dreamweaver / notepad )
* Popular content manage systems ( wordpress / joomla )

7. Develop your creative mind. No one likes a robot or a drone, SEO is a creative process that requires you to create solutions for many different clients in different markets. If you are a freelance or inhouse SEO, having a creative mind will help you with your sales pitch, if you can consistently put forward new ideas to your clients that will increase their traffic, they will love you for it. Ideas can be big or small, such as these simple creative link-building concept.

The 7 Points of Do-It-Yourself SEO

2009-09-08T04:40:00.000-07:00

Ever felt intimidated at the convoluted, jargon-ridden information about Internet marketing for small businesses available on the Net? Ever been horrified by the huge fees the experts charge, putting search engine optimization beyond your own means? Ever thought: What exactly is search engine optimization anyway, and can I do it myself?

The answer is: Yes, you can! The basics of search engine optimization in applied web marketing are simple. It's all to do with the keyword content of your text copy, and can be summarized in seven points.

1. Register a good domain name which reflects what your site is about. Even if you are an established business, don't register www.FredJones.com if you make widgets. Rather, you want to register something like www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire confidence in people looking for quality widgets who would not necessarily have heard of Fred Jones the widget-maker.

2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to the above for your web promotion, except now you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of the sales pages.

3. The text in the title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keywords in your title tags, using both the singular and plural versions (people will search for both) and make these tags different and specific for each page. For example, "Widgets and After Sales Widget Services". Whatever you do, don't call the home page "Index", but treat it almost as a mini-description.

4. The other tags (at the top of the html page) between the two "HEAD" tags are not as important as the title tag, but the description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don't use the description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of the main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page. So you may as well treat the description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in the short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag. The ALT tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines. The COMMENT tag is never displayed on the body page, and is used by coders and designers as an instruction or reminder to themselves about what that section of html coding should be doing; in the past, some webmasters in their quest for website promotion and search engine ranking used to stuff keywords in the comments tags, but now it is generally acknowledged that the main search engines pay little or no attention to these.

5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help the search engine understand what the page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as spam or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in the headings tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on the page, therefore less relevant to what the page is about.

6. Don't forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge the importance of your web pages to some extent on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. Ask other webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some Page Rank, and that it just "feels" good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don't want to be associated with a "bad neighborhood"!

7. Make sure that important keywords are included in the anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your pages. The inbound link from the other site should take the form of something like this (I'm using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html): (A HREF="http://www.Yoursite.com") your important keywords included here(/A). You should definitely avoid something like (A HREF="http://www.Yoursite.com")click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about "click here". Be careful!

Article Source: http://www.a1-optimization.com/articles

Complete List of Best SEO Tools

2009-09-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

Alexa

Alexa-Ranking
Alexa page-rank-and-rating-results

Backlink

Anchor Text Backlink Checker
This tool is to check your backlinks and the anchor text used in those backlinks.
Backlink Analyzer
Research and analyze websites for link quality. Checks for Indexed Pages, Links to Website, EDU & .GOV Links, Domain Age & Expiration, Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, DMOZ Listing
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
This tools help you determine the backlinks of your website and link text used by your backlinks to Link to your website
Backlink Builder
Building Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization…

Domain Popularity, Domain Stats Tools…

Domain Age Tool
This tools displays the approximate age of a website on the Internet and allows you to view how the website looked when it first started
Domain Dossier
Investigate domains and IP addresses
Domain Popularity
This tool shows you all backlinks for the given domain, including up to 10 subpages per backlinking domain, host IP and Google PageRank
Domain Stats Tool
This tool helps you get all kind of statistics of your competitor’s domains. The statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc.
HTTP / HTTPS Header Check
This tools allow you to inspect the HTTP headers that the web server returns when requesting a URL. Works with HTTP and HTTPS URLs
View HTTP Headers
This little tool lets you view the HTTP headers for a HTTP request
View HTTP Path
This little tool lets you view the path/redirects a request takes to get fulfilled

Google Page Rank Checker, Adwords Keyword Tools,Google Banned Tools…

Advanced Google searches
Use this tool to search google in many special ways. A useful resource for search engine optimization (especially keyword research) among other things
Check Google Pagerank
Now you can check the Google PageRank of any web page without installing the Google toolbar
Check PageRank by Google data center
With this tool you can check the PageRank from different data centers
Free Google Adsense Keywords & YPN Keywords Search Tool
With the ability to search a growing database of tens of thousands of high-dollar Adsense keywords, Iotaweb allows publishers to find the keywords and key phrases that will allow them to focus their content to monetize their site most effectively.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Keyword tool from Google that provides Specific and Similar keywords.
Google Banned Tool
This tool uses two methods to check to see if a URL you enter is in the Google database. Its a great way to check to see if you have been banned by Google for various reasons….
Google Keyword Ranking Tool
Search with list of keywords from differnet Google search sites
Google Page Rank Checker
Instantly check the PageRank of any website or web page
Google Page Rank Checker
A simple tool that checks and your PageRank so you can display it on your website
Google Sets
Automatically create sets of items from a few examples.
PageRank Authenticity Check
This tool shows you the PageRank of a given domain. Also the PageRank will be checked of authenticity
Page Rank Tool
Our PageRank Tool will query and return the Google PageRank values for submitted URL from various Google datacenters…
Visual PageRank
The Visual PageRank – Tool shows all links and there corresponding PageRanks

Keyword Analysis Tool, Keyword Density, Keyword Suggestion Tools…

McDar Keyword Analysis Tool
Enter URL and keyword, it will display Pagerank and Back links pages for the Top 10 websites.
Keyword Density
This tool shows you how often appears which word in content of given domain
Keyword Density
The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters and SEOs achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms.
Keyword Density Checker
Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your webpage. This tool will crawl the specified URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and Analyze the density of the keywords.
Keyword Difficulty Tool
The keyword difficulty tool is used to analyze the competitive landscape of a particular search term or phrase, this tool issues a percentage score and provides a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at Google and Yahoo…
KwMap.net
A Keyword Map For the Whole Internet
Keyword Suggestion Tool
This keyword suggestion tool will help you with the choosing of the right keywords for your website. You can see which keyword combinations are more popular and also get ideas for more keyword combinations..
Website Keyword Suggestions
This tools tries to determine the theme of your website and provides keyword suggestions along with keyword traffic estimates.
Ontology Finder
Related Keywords Lookup Tool

Link Popularity Check, Site Link Analyzer, Link Value…

Deep Link Ratio Tool
This tool was created to analyze how the deep link ratio of a site affects its rank in search engines. We can use this tool to compare the DLRs for the best ranking sites for a search phrase.
Link Popularity Check
Link popularity check is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website’s online awareness and overall visibility…
Link Popularity Checker
The Link Popularity Checker tells you how many websites are linking to yours…
LINK VALIDATION SPIDER
Free Online Broken Link Checker
Link Price Calculator
This tools will help you determine the approximate amount you should be paying (or charging) per month for a text link (ad) from each and every page of the specified website
Link Value
This tool calculates the link value per month of a given website.
Reciprocal Link Check
This tool helps you ensure that your link partners are linking back to your website. It also determines the anchor text used by your link partners to link to your website.
Site Link Analyzer
This tool will analyze a given web page and return a table of data containing columns of outbound links and their associated anchor text…
The Link Reputation Measurement Tool
Reveals backlinks pointing to your target url along with the following: Link Survey – Link Reputation Score – Text used in links pointing to you – Alexa traffic analysis for the site corresponding to each backlink
Outbound Links
This tool shows every outgoing link from the given domain. Separated in external and internal links

Meta Tag Generators

Meta Tag Generator
Our Meta Tag Generator will read the page you specify, remove common words from it, and pick the most used words on the page. It will then generate a Meta Keywords tag using the words it has found…
Meta Tag Generator
Use this tool to generate a search engine friendly Head Tag for your web site
Title & Meta Tags Generator
his code generator will build the title and meta tags for your site to help improve your website’s search engine ranking using our Meta Tag Generator

Miscellaneous Tools

Directory Submission Manager
Use this free tool to track your submissions to various web directories….
Copyscape
Search for copies of your page on the Web
Site Analysis including Link Popularity
This tool generates a complete site analysis e.g. amount of backlinks, indexed sites, Google PageRank and also if your domain is listed in DMOZ and Yahoo directory
Sitemap Generator
Create your Google Sitemap Online
Similar Page Checker
Search Engines are known to penalize websites that contain Duplicate / Similar content. Your content could be similar to other websites on the Internet, or pages from within your own website could be similar to each other. This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages
Speedtester
This tool shows the duration of a given website. This value can be used for showing how long a website take to load and if it is better to optimize the website or change a (slow) ISP.
mod_rewrite RewriteRule Generator
Our mod_rewrite RewriteRule generator will take a dynamic url given to it, and generate the correct syntax to place in a .htaccess file to allow the url to be rewritten in a spiderable format
URL Rewrite (mod_rewrite)
With this tool you can generate dynamic urls to search engine friendly urls..
URL Rewriting Tool
Create Search Engine Friendly URLs
User Agent Cloaking Detector
This tool simulates the Googlebot (based on User-Agent) to detect cloaked content
What is Hosted on that IP
This little tool lets you view the virtual hosts on a particular IP

Search Engine Position Checker, Spider Simulator, Ranking Report, SERP Tracker

Google vs Yahoo Graph
This tool looks at the results from Yahoo and Google, finds the similarities and then gives you a graphical display of what results are in both search engines
Search Engine Position Checker
The Search Engine Position Checker tool will automatically query the search engines you specify and check if your URL appears in the first 50 results for your chosen keywords….
Search Engine Spider Simulator
With this tool you see all informations a search engine spider receive from a website.
Marketleap Search Engine Verification Tool
Our verification tool checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword
Number of pages indexed
This tool will generate a report showing how many pages of your website has been indexed by the search engines so far. It supports all major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alltheweb, Hotbot and AltaVista.
Search Engine Ranking Report
Input key phrase list get Google rankings
Serps Position
Use this tool to find out, on which position your domain is ranked for the given keyword and compare the first 100 results by Google, search.MSN and Yahoo.
SERP Tracker
The SERP Tracker reports on search engine results and charts performance over time

SEO Analyzer, Scanner

Free SEO Tools
SEOToolSet
Cool SEO Tool!
This internet marketing tool checks the top 10 sites that rank in Google. After that, it checks to see how those 10 sites rank in Yahoo and in MSN….
SEO Analyzer
The SEO Analyzer is a FREE tool that uses a sophisticated algorithm that detects how optimized your web design is for search engines
SEO Scanner
An all-in-one advanced SEO analysis, tracking, and reporting tool

Robots.txt Tools

Robots Txt Generator
Use this tool to generate a simple robots file for your website.
Robots.txt syntax checker
This robots.txt syntax checker checks the contents of a site’s robots.txt.