26. September 2008 by admin.

SEOptimise
Helping clients come up with SEO-friendly blog posts can be a chore, even for the most inventive search marketer, so Tad Chef serves up more than 50 suggestions. “Some of these ideas are the bomb and will bring you publicity and popularity,” Chef says. “While others focus on highlighting your expertise or are part of a social networking strategy.”

Post suggestions include checking your search engine referrers and writing posts for those keywords that currently have no matching content or asking a question on Twitter and summarizing all the answers in blog form.

Chef also says to try reviewing one of their industry’s trade pubs, reviewing a book that deals with the trade and “thinks outside the box,” and even highlighting the top female bloggers or experts in their niche. Of course, the key to boosting the SEO potential of any of these blog posts is to ensure that you incorporate your targeted keywords in the copy.

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25. September 2008 by admin.

High Rankings Advisor
While business owners may think that search will be a “quick fix” for reaching their target while they cut back on other types of ad spending, Jill Whalen cautions that SEO, in particular, is much more of a long term play. “While SEO is almost always a good idea, if you’re counting on it to save a failing business, you may want to rethink things,” she says. “The customers you receive from search engines should not be what your entire marketing plan consists of.”

Getting good results with SEO is not fast or easy, especially if a Web site wasn’t designed with organic search in mind from the onset. “It will take weeks to do the initial research required to even know where to begin,” Whalen says. Meanwhile, there’s no on/off switch, as site owners need to continuously update meta tags, craft keyword-rich content, collect inbound links and even select coordinating paid search ads.

SEO also needs time to age. “After your website has been put into perfect SEO shape (after many months of hard work), it will start to receive more targeted search engine traffic,” Whalen says. “But even that is a slow process.” Lastly, SEO works best in conjunction with other marketing efforts, whether it’s email, radio spots, events or even community outreach — as they’re all sources that can drive more traffic to a URL.

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23. September 2008 by admin.

aimClear Blog
Marty Weintraub explains why entrepreneurs should think long and hard about the search pros and cons before they come up with a company name. Using the example of a Minnesota-based company called “Masters Recording Institute,” Weintraub shows that it can be difficult to gain organic traction and costly to gain sponsored search visibility with highly common keywords or initials in a company name.

“To start: everybody loves initials. From our experience, a good percentage of future direct brand searches could occur on the initials ‘MRI,”‘ he says. “Sadly, searches for ‘MRI’ result in harvesting all sorts of information about ‘magnetic resonance imaging,’ which is useless in this context. Needless to say, ranking on the average search engine results page (SERP) for the keyword MRI might take a team of link-building-specialists months–and perhaps cost quite a bit.”

Meanwhile, for paid search, “the keyword ‘MRI’ could cost our friends a veritable fortune to defend over time because the commercial landscape is so contested,” Weintraub says. There’s even a conflict when it comes to local search, as entering “Minnesota MRI” would likely turn up doctor’s offices and even massive content sites like WebMD. He goes on to offer some “must read” tips to consider before choosing a company name, starting with a search to see what comes up.

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22. September 2008 by admin.

Search Engine Journal
So what do you do after you’ve researched a massive list of keywords? You manage that list with a tool that keeps it organized a little bit better than Excel does. Ann Smarty reviews Traffic Travis and Web CEO, two desktop apps that do just that.

Traffic Travis lets you organize key phrases into groups based on one specific keyword. There are a ton of filtering options (for example, you can find partial or inverted duplicate phrases), and it costs about $100.

Web CEO organizes keywords into baskets using whichever criteria you choose. Smarty says that the tool gives users “unlimited freedom.” “You can sort your keywords based on search volume or competition, term topic (e.g. general; location-targeted; brand-related searches; etc), query type (navigational vs informational), keyword potential (commercial vs informational) or any other you can think of,” she notes.

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17. September 2008 by admin.

Natural Search Blog
There has been a sustained debate about the merits of the meta keywords tag, and Chris Silver Smith argues that the tags aren’t even worth the effort it takes to create them in this post. In fact, in some cases, he says a poorly optimized meta keywords tag could actually get a site penalized.

Smith’s reasoning stems from an extensive post by Danny Sullivan that found that Yahoo and Ask are the only two engines that factor the tags into the ranking process — albeit as a last resort. “If they can’t find content matching a keyword search through other, preferable signals such as visible page body text, they might only then fall back on meta keyword content,” he says. “In this case, if you already have the terms in the visible text of the page, it’s just not necessary to have it in the Meta Keywords tag - your page likely won’t rank any better than it already does.”

Google and Live Search, on the other hand, don’t use the meta keywords tag to determine favorable rankings at all. But Google may actually be crawling the tags to help assess whether a page has been over-optimized by spammers, and that’s where a well-meaning Webmaster could wind up in trouble. “Pages with unrelated words in the meta keyword content or which are stuffed too much might be singled out for lower quality scores or penalizations,” he says.

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17. September 2008 by admin.