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Links To Beat The Holiday Blues | This Month In SEO – 12/08

Steven Bradley — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 22:20:35 +0000

The last time we were together here we were celebrating Halloween. I didn’t make it for the Thanksgiving holiday. And now here we are again celebrating even more holidays and the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Seems only appropriate to dedicate This Month In SEO to the holidays. Happy Holidays everyone. Regardless of which you celebrate, I hope the holidays have been good to you.

As always you can find more links to great resources at my Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn. Now on with the show.

Social Media

It’s probably preaching to the choir, but in 2009 you’re going to need social media. You can use it to communicate with customers and network with peers. You might even use social media to find your next job. Myths still abound about the benefits of social media, but let’s face it, the social web isn’t going anywhere. Just remember your etiquette and remember you can learn how to make better use of social media from a variety of sources, even artists.

You’re convinced. 2009 is the year and you’re ready to learn how. So how about some tips to improve your social media results today. You really can get social media tips from a wide variety of sources. How about from an airplane 30,000 feet in the air? Yep. Some of the best effects of social media are through networking so why not build a small yet powerful network by following a template for growth.

Want another reason for needing social media in 2009? How about the fact that Twitter is poised to go mainstream in the coming year. But can it be useful for businesses? Absolutely, even if some days it feels more like a time sink. More followers usually means better results at Twitter so how can you increase your followers and get a few extra subscribers along the way?

Blogging

Many bloggers will probably tell you the hardest part of blogging is continually coming up with fresh ideas. How do you beat blogger’s block and develop unique post ideas? Being creative goes a long way toward keeping things fresh. Don’t stop there, though. Your creative side will help crafting your posts, but you can still learn a few things from journalists about editing those creative pearls. Just don’t get caught up counting how many posts you write.

Do you have a strategy for your blog? Why not? You should. You can apply the 48 laws of power to your strategy. Perhaps guest posting will fit into your overall strategy. Maybe your strategy will call for better optimization. Whatever you decide to include your strategy should help you create better content and help drive more traffic to your blog.

How does a blogger earn a real full-time income you ask? What? You didn’t ask? Oh. Well would you like to know anyway? Securing advertising is one common way for your blog to bring in revenue. Some might suggest writing paid reviews, but is it a good idea? For the most part paid blogging is a lose-lose situation.

WordPress

Have you heard? WordPress version 2.7 is out. Yeah it wasn’t hard to miss, was it? I’m using it on my development blog with plans to upgrade here soon enough. After a few minutes getting used to the new interface I learned there’s a lot to like in this latest version of WP. You might already be using it too so instead of trying to convince you I’ll simply let you read about some of the new features and tips to improve your WP blog. And if you haven’t yet upgraded there’s tips for you to make the process go as smooth as possible.

Regardless of the version you’re using you’ll probably want to extend WordPress with plugins. Curious about the plugins Andy Beal uses on Marketing Pilgrim and why he kept them all to himself till now? Maybe you’re only interested in some of the best seo plugins available to you. One new plugin called moderator will let you moderate your blog without even having to log in.

How about coding your own plugin? It’s not as hard as you think once you know plugin anatomy. If you’re a theme developer have you taken advantage of the fuctions.php file? The files offers a way to include plugin functionality directly in your themes.

Interested in taking your skills to the next level? Then watch some excellent video tutorials. There are 30 to choose from. Are you a theme developer? Do you have a checklist to make sure you don’t forget something when building a new theme? Even if you’re not looking to develop themes and just want to make improvements on your own blog there’s a lot you can do. You can add a Google custom search engine, make it so your Digg button only shows up on appropriate posts, and add an external feed if you want to promote other blogs or present the latest news to your readers.

Design And Development

It may sound like a bunch of psycho-babble at first, but understanding gestalt principles of perception can greatly improve your designs. You’ll probably find yourself using the principles to improve your user interfaces and they may help generate a higher click through on ads. Good designers should be aware of the latest design trends, but remember that trends come and go and it’s in your best interest to develop a library of design styles

A designer’s work is never done, which is why you’ll want to improve your productivity and add to your web design toolkit. Maybe you’ll be more productive with a new graphics editor or maybe you simply need to build a library of icons to save time.

Have you heard? CSS can do most anything. Of course it’s not without some fundamental problems, but you can certainly do a lot with css. You can create drop-down navigation and do some pretty cool things with css borders. And while you may prefer to hand code all your css there are still plenty of tools to make your life easier.

Designer’s may not have complete control over their client’s marketing, but design and marketing are inexorably linked. So what can a developer control when it comes to internet marketing? Quite a bit it turns out including designing sites that keep reader attention.

Link Building

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that links are important and I’m sure you know that all links were not created equal. The more you understand what makes for a quality link and a balanced link profile the more success you can have with your link building efforts. Is there an optimum growth pattern for links? Does the velocity at which you acquire links make a difference? Is deep linking in trouble? Maybe if the courts have their say. And can you really compare a link to an elephant? Apparently you can.

It’s much easier to get links to informational content than it is to sales pages. But there’s content and then there’s linkbait. How do you generate strategies for effective linkbait creation? And once created how do you actually get links to your linkbait. Could social media submissions be the key.

There’s more than one way to skin a link. It’s not all about linkbait you know. Look around and you’ll find many techniques and tactics for acquiring links. Some from 2008 and some for 2009. He may or may not come if you build it, but if you incentivize it you’ll increase the odds he’ll arrive. You don’t need to be a big business to get link building tips. Small businesses are welcome too. Just don’t miss out on some of the obvious.

SEO

Before you can optimize a web page you need to know what it is you’re optimizing for. It’s important to research and discover keywords and develop a strategy for building a list and refining it. On the surface you might think any word or phrase that drives traffic your way is a a good thing. No so. Some keywords will ultimately do nothing to improve your situation. In addition to the list of keywords you want to rank for, you’ll also want to build a list of negative words to stay away from. And yes, like it or not, keyword ranking reports can still be put to good use.

SEO Tools aren’t the end all and be all of optimization. Your most important tool will always be your own brain. Still tools can be very useful in collecting data and giving you a picture about a site. Are some tools missing from your arsenal? Do you even know about all the tools that are out there? One tool you likely know and use is Google Analytics. Have you set up advanced segments in your account yet?

Who owns the search page? You may hope your site is the owner, but isn’t it really the searcher who creates the page? Could it also be the mass of searches who help shape the results pages? Perhaps rankings could be affected as certain phrases have a sudden burst of popularity. The search engines themselves naturally have a say in the matter. They’ll attempt to correct your spelling or supply results based on synonyms to the words you searched for.

Search engines are adding video and other media to results whether you want them to or not. As a site owner are you optimizing for more than content? You should be. Search results have evolved over the years and they’ll continue to evolve in the future.

Site structure leading to accessible content, keyword research, link building, and social media. These are the fundamentals of SEO. Apply the basic fundamentals and you should start to see growth in your search traffic. When you make it to the second page of results don’t sit back and rest on your laurels. Now’s the time to take advantage of some advanced white-hat tactics to bring you up to page one. And when you’re getting the search traffic you want and building a name for yourself, be careful about outing other SEO’s. It may not be your best strategy to sustain growth.

Business And Marketing

The best thing you can do for your business is to build your brand. In fact the future of your business may depend on it. It doesn’t matter if your business is service based or if you sell products. Even affiliate marketers would do well to brand themselves. If you want to be a top marketer you need to establish your business brand and your personal brand too.

You know the term, but what exactly is viral marketing? Viral marketing is about ideas that spread on their own after a little push from you. It works better when it’s built into the product instead of being tacked on after. It’s about reaching the right people who can propel your message further. So get out there and ignite your viral marketing campaigns and learn the keys to make your message stick.

Traffic is one thing. Converting traffic into paying customers is another. Each is a lever in a successful ecommerce site. To increase conversions you’ll want to have a solid landing page that eliminates resistance and overcomes the objections your visitors may have to making a purchase. Creativity goes a long way toward helping you stand out and getting people past their objections. And if you do everything right you may be able to create subliminal connections between your site and the hot trends.

People are irrational and can’t always explain why they make one choice over another. That can make it tough on marketers since visitors may not always respond to our logical reasons for buying a product. Fortunately that irrationality is often predictable. By leveraging that predictability we can sometimes nudge people to take the actions we want. Sometimes all it takes is a few subtle things to make a sale or to convince clients to keep working with you.

Search Engine Patents

Want to know what the search engines were up to this past year? Or better yet, where they might be headed in the future? Then how about a look back at some 2008 patent goodies for some insight into the thinking of search engine engineers.

Is it really almost 2009? For some of you it might already be the new year. I still have a few hours left of 2008 here, but it’s about time to call it a day, a month, and a year all at once. Out with the old and in with the new I say. Enjoy the first day of the new year tomorrow and hopefully you’ll be starting the year off with a nice long vacation weekend. I know I will. Happy reading.

A Ghoulish Collection of Links | This Month In SEO – 10/08

Steven Bradley — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:49:19 +0000

Boo! Did I scare you? I didn’t think so, but today is Halloween so why not dedicate a month’s worth of links to the eve of all hallows. Nothing below should scare you. You may agree with what’s on the other side of the links or you may disagree, but there’s no reason to fear clicking any of them.

Plenty to get to and more at my Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn profiles.

Now on with the show and if you’re in the U.S. remember to vote on Tuesday.

Social Media

The election here in the U.S. is changing social media. More and more political conversations can be found and more and more mainstream media types are paying attention. Great for us, but that doesn’t help the sites become profitable. Enter Google with open social and some new patents to potentially mine social profiles for better ad targeting. People are paying attention and the money may be coming, but don’t overlook the Achilles heel of different types of social sites.

Micro blogging is still all about Twitter even as sites like Plurk attempt to take the mantle. Twitter is going mainstream and you need to take a look at it. Why? Maybe four months of thoughts from someone who used to think Twitter stupid will convince you.

What? You’re already using Twitter. How about some tools then to make the service more useful. Ok, you’re convinced and have enough tools. So are you conversing or broadcasting? Or are you so advanced in your Twitter skills that you practice mind control?

Digg banned your profile, you say. What kind of karma is that? Are you sure you didn’t do something to deserve it? Maybe you were pushing your commercial site a little too hard. Sorry about the ban, but at least the rest of us can learn something from your troubles. Maybe some who haven’t been banned are feeling a little naughty and looking to boost their profile into that space you just vacated.

Don’t worry about that Digg ban. There’s still StumbleUpon and it’s not too late to learn the most important things to do if you want to have success there. Are three things too much? Then just skip to the most important thing. Self submission isn’t limited to StumbleUpon, but should you do it? It may hurt you if you do. Then again is self submitting really all that bad?

Blogging

If you were starting over as a blogger with a beginner’s mind what advice would you offer your beginning self? Would you offer tips for starting out part time? Would you teach yourself to write better headlines? Could you and your beginner self occupy the same space-time without tearing apart the fabric of the universe?

Do you view your readers as a market or as a community? Think relationships before sales and think community before market. Then look for ways to build your community. It takes a community to build a blog or raise a child or something like that.

Before you begin marketing think strategy. There’s a lot of competition out there and you need to have a plan. With strategy in place you can look to get featured in mass media or drive easy traffic to your blog. Other bloggers will be important to connect with, especially if Microsoft has its way and gives links from blogs a boost.

With strategy and community in place and the New York Times and the blogosphere linking to you, it’s time to make some money advertising. Which ad server will you use? And now that the money is flowing in you can afford a better server. Do you know how to move your blog to its new host?

WordPress

Are you geared up for WordPress 2.7 yet? New look, new features. There’s a lot to like. Even if you’re not geared up for yet another upgrade it’s still a good idea. One reason WP gets a new version is to close holes that have been discovered and to make it more secure. No matter what version you use or will use you’ll probably want to optimize WordPress as best you can.

Ready to build your site completely with WordPress? It can be used as a full CMS you know. You’ll want to design and develop your own theme and consider some of the trends the popular blogs are using. Enhance your design with jQuery, tweak your navigation a bit and you’ll be all set.

Categories or tags, pages or posts. Which should you use? Whatever you decide you may want to show off how many subscribers you have. You can do it without needing FeedBurner’s help. Did you know there are many different ways to display content in WordPress? You can even change what gets displayed under different conditions using context includes. And if you prefer not to do your own coding you can create custom content types with the Flutter plugin.

Design And Development

Dreams can come true again, When everything old is new again. Could be what explains the retro and vintage look in modern design. More likely it’s the reaction against the web 2.0 style. Colorful is still in and can be a good source of inspiration. Art is another great source of inspiration for design. Have a look at some stunning images.

Web design matters. People will start making decisions about you the moment they come in contact with your site or worse in the agonizing moments they wait for your site to load. Logos matter too. They can communicate a lot and speak for your brand. If your site isn’t cutting it or your logo is saying the wrong words it’s time to think about a redesign. Just remember to include the key elements all top sites should have.

At some point your design will likely take a trip through Photoshop. Will your toolbox be ready? Does your toolbox include a color mixer for choosing a color scheme? Have you given any thought to how comments on your blog will look? Do you know how they can look? And there’s no doubt images will play some kind of role in your design. Where will you get those images from?

Sooner or later your design is going to ask to be turned into an actual site. Do you really need to use CSS? Can’t you stick with that table-based layout? Sure you can, well, sort of. It’s actually still CSS. And since you’re using CSS how well do you really understand positioning. Do you know your absolutes from your relatives from your fixed? Even if you know, how well do the browsers know. Time to get out those cross browser fixes and tools for testing.

You should be able to get your CSS to display cross browser, but sometimes a little JavaScript is needed to fix those browser headaches. JavaScript can do much more when folded into Ajax. You can add effects like search suggest or full featured shopping carts. And you can’t beat 20 earth-shattering tutorials from one of the best sources for tutorials. Ok, they may not litterally shatter the earth, but they are worth reading.

Link Building

Before you can move on to advanced concepts of link building you need a firm grasp of the fundamentals. With a basic understanding in place you can then develop an overall strategy. Directories might become one tactic in your arsenal and if so you’ll want to know how to identify the good from the bad. And perhaps most importantly you want to understand how to measure the value you’re getting so you can readjust both strategy and tactics.

Follow, nofollow, dofollow, don’t follow, let’s call the whole thing off. Are there benefits to PageRank Sculpting? Is PR Sculpting worth the effort? The answer might depend on whether your site is a Ferrari or a Gremlin. Since a followed link is preferable to one that isn’t followed should you turn your blog into a dofollow blog? Will it increase the quantity of comments on your blog at the expense of quality? No matter which side you lean on the nofollow/dofollow fence, one thing is certain. Internal linking does matter.

Link algorithms change. Today’s best tactics may be useless tomorrow. What works today could hurt tomorrow. Will the link you turn on today return the favor? Will it still return that favor next month?

Do you ask for links in emails? Should you? Is there really anything wrong with the practice or is it simply the implementation that’s awry? When you have control over the anchor text in a link how many words and characters do you use? Might be more important to know the answer than you realize? Maybe you’re tired of all these link building specifics and prefer to let links into your site grow naturally.

SEO

You have 5 goals when optimizing any page on your site. Do you know what they are? If you don’t you could always try a little Q&A with Google directly. Maybe it will help clear things up. Of course Google can’t be entirely up front about everything so myths will often prevail. They may not always be right, but that’s no reason not to learn from your fellow SEOs.

You can never have too much knowledge of keywords. Most any guide that comes your way is probably worth a look, though some guides are more comprehensive than others. Keyword Discovery is not enough. You’ll still need to measure the effectiveness of your keywords and go beyond the research to apply what you’ve learned. You can leverage keywords through older posts and then start the research anew by mining the conversation on social media sites.

How do you know when your SEO is done? Well it’s never done. You need to keep measuring where you are to adjust for where you want to go. You can use a checklist to make sure you’ve covered your bases, use advanced search operators to explore the current situation, and even spy a bit on your competitors without getting into trouble.

Not everyone has the same love of SEO tools of course. Fortunately the community is happy to share it’s opinion. And while tools can tell you where things are now and have been in the past, patents can give you some ideas about where things might be going.

So what should you measure with all the tools you’ve collected? Is PageRank the ultimate measure of online influence or is it a horrible measure of that influence. The reality is probably somewhere in between.

Business And Marketing

What’s step one in starting a business? A sound business plan, of course. It should be obvious, but sadly too many businesses neglect this necessary first step and fail. It’s not the only reason some businesses fail, though. There are at least 5 reasons your affiliate marketing business might not succeed.

Some do succeed so how about some inspirational stories about how they did. And while it may sound counter intuitive sometimes the way to end up with more is to give everything away.

Hand in hand with a solid business plan is market research. Where do you go to learn more about an industry. You might stop off at the magazine stand as part of your research or you might find the top sites in the industry to learn about the market.

There’s a psychology to selling. People make decisions emotionally, sometimes out of a fear of losing something they have. You want to persuade people instead of forcing them to see your point of view. Make them realize the truth on their own instead of telling it to them directly. Stories can be powerful persuaders and if you do everything right you’ll be consistently driving people toward closing the sale.

It’s getting closer to the witching hour. Day has turned to dusk and the night is beginning to fall, bringing with it ghosts and ghouls, witches and goblins. And maybe a few late night trick or treaters. Break out the big kitchen knife and carve up a pumpkin or slice into a piece of pumpkin pie.

Enjoy the weekend and happy reading.

A Playoff Worthy Lineup Of Links – This Month In SEO – 9/08

Steven Bradley — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:16:59 +0000

This Month In SEO almost wasn’t as my laptop decided last week was a good time to call it a day for good. Fortunately the laptop’s hard drive didn’t agree. Should we dedicate the post to Steven Jobs and my new Macbook? Maybe fall would make for a good dedication as the season’s recently changed.

Even better would be the Fall Classic. Baseball playoffs started a few hours ago. There’s only one October and a seamhead like me has to dedicate most anything this time of year to the greatest game every invented.

You know the drill by now. Lots of links below and even more at my Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn profiles. And once more I’ll throw a little love to my new Small Business Forum. I hope you’ll join the conversation there.

Now on with the show.

Social Media

Why get involved with social media? Because organizations and individuals who build a community around their brand win. The secret weapon in that win? Perhaps combining social media with a little empathy. So if social media is such a good thing, what’s the value of a social media visitor? Is the goal to bait people into linking to you and spreading your message? Is the value ultimately in how social media affects search? Maybe what we need is some quality metrics.

Many will tell you the goal of social media is branding and when it comes to branding you can’t beat microblogging through a service like Twitter. Not all is sunshine in Twitterland though as the company recently bowed to Google pressure and nofollowed bio links. Some would argue that Twitter was never about link building in the first place, but still…

Then again is microblogging really all that hard? It’s simple isn’t it. It’s just a dialogue after all.

Social media is more than microblogging. It’s actually two crazy monkeys and one clever fox. The monkeys are Digg and Reddit and if you want to influence social media you might want to first learn what drives Digg and Reddit users. And if you want to know what drives a top Digg user why not ask. Brian did. And Diggboss answered. The fox? It’s not Sphinn. Sphinners are a dysfuctional lot. The fox is StumbleUpon

Blogging

It might not be as important as the state of the union, but the state of the blogosphere seems to indicate it’s still growing and the lines between blogs and mainstream media are blurring. Blogs have attracted somewhere between 77 million and 184 million unique visits, depending on who’s numbers you believe. Either way it’s a lot and you probably want a piece of that pie.

It all starts with blogging ideas and here are 50 ideas you can adapt to your blog. What to do with those ideas? Follow these 7 steps and you can turn them into more coherent posts to attract some of those millions of visitors.

You have your ideas and know how to construct a blog post, but what makes for good content? Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how you say it. Be opinionated. Be emotional. You can even take a cue from politicians and launch a negative campaign on occasion. Just don’t be spineless.

No matter how well written, your post you can always add a few new dimensions to improve things. Your post design matters and could help lead to new visitors subscribing. Where should your calls to action be? Might they convert better at the bottom of your post? If you want someone to subscribe after reading it only makes sense that’s where the subscription form should be. Done right you could end up with one very effective blog theme.

With everything in place to convert visitors to loyal readers, now it’s time to promote your next post. Don’t stop at a single post, though. Mine the long tail to develop an overall seo strategy for your blog. With a little work you might be able to take your blog to the next level. But keep in mind through it all who you’re trying to attract. Is it eyeballs or brains you’re after?

WordPress

WordPress 2.7 is on the way and it aims to be another big release with some pretty major changes. The future of WordPress is looking good. Or is it? Not everyone thinks all is rosy in WP land. With all the love thrown in WordPress’ direction a little critique can be a good thing. Still it’s unlikely WP is going anywhere so make sure to keep building your WordPress developer toolbox.

Your toolbox could start with knowledge from more than 25 beginner articles. You could then include some advanced rss parsing so readers can subscribe to only those posts they’re really interested in. Toss in a little Ajax for a better auto completing search form. And did you know there are a variety of ways to display content in WordPress, giving you more control of what readers see on different sections of your blog?

With your toolbox full it’s time to start designing your WordPress theme. You can build one from scratch or use another theme as a framework and build on top of it. Magazine style themes are popular. Regardless of the style make sure to understand how WP handles and displays categories. There’s a lot you can do with categories. More than you might initially think.

If you work with themes you’ve likely spent some time customizing WP files. Stop. Instead of customizing the existing files, write a plugin instead. It’s easier than you think. Speaking of customization and plugins, have a look at the new Customize Your Community (CYC) plugin and give your readers their own profile page. Have you installed the AllinOne SEO plugin? Sure you have, but are you taking advantage of its full potntial?

Design And Development

Looking for design inspiration? Want to create outside the box? Would 40 layouts give you some inspiration? Maybe your design needs a little energy to make it irresistible. Maybe a deeper look at the color brown is all you need for inspiration. Working on a logo? Want to know the process one graphic designer uses to create them? Inspiration is all well and good, but remember others are being inspired by some of the same designs. It can lead to some techniques being overused.

Design aesthetics are important as long as you remember your design is meant to communicate. Are you aware of all the issues involved in website communication? Did you know that contrasting elements aids in that communication and enhances the meaning of design elements? One thing your design should aim for is to communicate a strong brand. What colors should you use to convey your message?

How well do you know JavaScript? If your JS skills are still a bit lacking you might find these 75 techniques really useful. Only 75? Ok, how about 10 more techniques to make your JavaScript smarter. Among the tips you’ll find is to adopt one or more JavaScript libraries to speed up development. jQuery is becoming one of the more popular libraries around and it’s about time you took a look.

Is a website ever truly done? All sites can be made more effective, but to do so requires some analysis of how it’s currently performing. You might think alternating table rows with color makes it easier for readers to absorb the information, but it it true? Does zebra striping tables aid or hinder communication. And why make people come to your site when you can send your site to them. HTML emails can be a great way to interact with your audience and remind them you still exist.

Link Building

The total amount of link juice in an isolated system remains constant. Oh way that’s the first law of thermodynamics about the conservation of energy.

Still link juice is a finite resource. It creates a gravity around a site the pulls search traffic to it. Build more links into a massive site and the gravity increases. What happens when those massive sites stop linking out. Much as light doesn’t escape a black hole, links don’t escape black hole seo. Then again a site that does nothing but link out can bring people back every day.

Once upon a time link building was synonymous with directories. Few would argue that’s the case today, but that doesn’t mean directories can’t be a valuable part of a link building campaign. They still have power so how can you get the most from web directories? All directories are not created equal. Before you start submitting your site know the red flags to watch out for.

Once upon that same time reciprocal linking was an effective way to build links. The future though, is in building relationships that lead to links. One way to build a relationship with a blogger is through their blog. Leaving comments that add value to a post is a great way to get to know someone. Don’t stop with bloggers. Start looking to build relationships with the general media. It’s not what you know, but who you know after all.

It’s still a bit confusing I know. Let some experts demystify it for you. You’re right, experts can sometimes talk over your head without realizing it. Why not let an SEO kindergartner explain things instead. You could always grab a guide to one-way link building or watch a video on developing hooks to get others to link to you.

No matter how you build links, please don’t be an idiot about it.

Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker

SEO

What are the top search marketing tools? Are they Firefox extensions? Do they analyze backlinks? Will they help you with more than PR and SERP analysis? Sometimes the best tool is your own brain. Amazing what real people can figure out when they put their mind to it.

Me no unnerstand URL rewriting. Google say no worry. They good at unnerstanding and figuring out. Ummm…no offense Google, but I’ll continue to rewrite my dynamic URLs and make them search friendly and people friendly. Most of the industry agrees with me too. Maybe next time you could just tell us how to redirect things the right way.

And penalty of not I’m still on the side that thinks duplicate content is a big issue and can hurt a site. Google, I know you’re trying to help, but sometimes that help confuses the situation more.

Should you be concerned with measuring search rank? There’s a loaded question. Instead of arguing it based on opinion, how about testing to see whether or not a given rank is worth holding onto. You can learn a lot from some time tested advertising strategies. You could also turn your attention to images and worry about how to get them to rank.

Once you get past the idea that your rank is the end goal you’ll be ready to write effective SEO articles. Sure they can improve rank if done well, but they can do so much more. And no, seo copy writing is not all about stuffing keywords. It’s not natural. Think about using phrases related to your topic instead. Everyone else is using that phrase, shouldn’t you include it too?

It’s tiring being an SEO isn’t it? So much to learn and as soon as you think you have a handle on the rules, the rules change. Might be time for a break from SEO. Go enjoy a bowl of fruit instead.

Business And Marketing

Need a lesson on affiliate marketing? One lesson you may be interested in is on the mechanics of arbitrage. You know to buy low and sell high, but how do you measure each side of the equation to understand if you’re going to make money.

Of course if your arbitrage is buying AdWords to sell AdSense you may not make Google so happy. A large audience can certainly help with marketing your affiliate products, but stop complaining that you don’t have that audience. Just grow a pair, will you.

Many offline wholesalers and retailers are moving their business online to expand their market. If your business is selling products through a website shouldn’t you spend some time analyzing the online retailers with the highest conversion rates. Are you still using manufacturer product descriptions? Why not take a look at how customers review those same products on your competitor’s sites. In the end you just need to be a better choice than your competition.

Mini or micro sites have lost some of their luster as the Google algorithm seems to favor large authority sites, but can you create a bunch of mini sites that funnel search traffic to your main site? WordPress makes setting up a mini-site easy and with some decent content you can make a few bucks from each. A network of micro-sites could even help build links and build brand awareness.

There’s a lot to know when it comes to building and marketing your website. Would a checklist help? How about the best damned checklist ever? How about 6 tips for making your message sticky? Did you know that listening to your market is one of the surest ways to success. It could help you craft a message and build your brand without having to spend a lot. And once your basic message is in place you can put some money into AdWords to extend your brand’s reach.

Search Engine News

What does search mean to you? To search engines, search means advertising. Google is expanding where they place ads. Look for some on NBC in the near future.

If the deal goes through they’ll be displaying ads on rival Yahoo. Does Yahoo need the extra ads, because more advertisers use Google or because Yahoo’s targeting is so poor? No question Google is the 800 lb gorilla in search, but is the company really a primate or would bees in a hive be a better analogy.

Oh yeah, did you hear Google released a browser? You downloaded it and used it and formed an opinion of it already. But just in case you wanted to read or reread the initial thoughts or compare it to IE8…

My first TMISEO on a new laptop. Seemed to go ok, even if I’m getting it to you a day later than usual. This was the post that almost wasn’t. Fortunately the old hard drive was in tact and a few weeks of collected links were able to be easily transferred.

It’s autumn I know, but summer’s still hanging on here in Boulder, at least on this Wednesday. Works for me since it should mean nice weather for softball in a couple hours. Enjoy your mid week wherever you are and know you’re closer to the coming weekend than the one that recently passed. Happy reading.

Hot Links To Beat The Heat | This Month In SEO – 8/08

Steven Bradley — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:30:21 +0000

Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James

I wonder how many 100 degree days Henry James lived through. I’ve experienced one too many the last couple of months. Still why not dedicate This Month In SEO to the end of summer. By the time we met again the leaves will be turning and fall will bring with it cooler air. A special shout out to my brother David who celebrates a birthday every August.

As always there’s much to get to and much more at my various social media profiles. Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn. And if you’re looking for a little more in depth conversation you can catch me at my new Small Business Forum.

Ok, enough about me. Enjoy the links and on with the show.

Social Media

Does your business “get” social media? Many still don’t and try to force traditional marketing methods on social networks with less than the best results. Whether your business is big or small social media marketing is a great investment of time.

Fortunately small business doesn’t need to live near the cutting edge. That’s not to say you should ignore the social web. Do so at your own peril. Maybe the secret to “getting it” is a little more reading to understand the landscape.

Ok, you do “get” social media and are playing in the space. You’ve likely realized you can learn a lot from using a service like StumbleUpon for a year. You might even have figured out a few of the ingredients for a successful Digg campaign. If not, you can always mimic some of the habits of those diggers who have a successful track record.

Looking past SU and Digg? Maybe the new features at Mixx will be more to your liking or perhaps new services like Social Browse and Social Median will be the ones to hook you.

Twitter is still the big name in social networking, despite challengers. You don’t need to be a big brand to make it work for you. Not all is rosy of course, particularly when it comes to Twitter’s business model or lack thereof. But Twitter’s problems aren’t necessarily yours and tips abound for getting the most out of the service.

One of the upstarts, Plurk, is finding it’s users come up with creative uses for the service that you should care about. With so many networking services out there it can be difficult to participate in all the conversations. If that describes you then FriendFeed may be just the thing to keep up with all the discussion.

Blogging

Reading is fundamental if you want to be a better writer, but do you know how to read? Of course you can read, but do you really know how to read to improve your writing skills? It might even help you find your passion so you know what it is you want to blog about. Passionate or not, at some point you’ll likely be stuck to find a new topic. Topic in hand should you follow best practice to keep your posts short? Screw that, just write for your audience.

You know how to read, you’ve found your passion, and you’re not worried about how long your posts are. How exactly do you craft these things called blog posts? Good thing for us Darren has a series going. Is it a list post you want to write? It takes more than a number of bullet points to make them perfect. And with all this writing you’re going to need something to write with. I use Scribefire, but perhaps another tool will be ~~write~~ right for you.

Great content is the foundation for a successful blog, but it’s not enough. You still need readers. It’s one of those if a blog post falls in the forest sort of things. If you want to grow your readers you need to understand the audience you do have. What do they want? What makes them tick? How do you get them to engage more with your blog? And if you’re a company blogger take a few tips from someone who blogs for one of the biggest companies around.

WordPress

The more I work with WordPress, the more I like it, and the more I realize how capable it is to act as more than just a blogging platform. WordPress has matured to the point where it can serve as a full content management system that’s truly customizable.

Working with it is not all that hard and will a little learning you can easily create your own WordPress template. The development community is active and you don’t need to look far to find themes, tutorials, and resources.

WordPress is not immune to comment spam, but with a few simple tweaks and a plugin or two you can seriously cut down on the amount of spam your blog receives.

Even if you’re not a theme developer you can still make improvements to your theme. You can make your blogroll more dynamic with the help of some script libraries, you can add an overlay login form, or you can add links to make social bookmarking your content easier for your readers. And again, with such an active development community it’s easy to find simple hacks for most common requests.

Ok, I love WordPress, but I admit the built in search isn’t that useful. Instead of complaining about it you can take search into your own hands by integrating something like Ligit into your blog. Too much work? Then just install a plugin to make WordPress search suck less. While you’re in plugin mode you can install one to manage your ads or take advantage of the many available plugins to improve WordPress SEO.

Design And Development

Hopefully you don’t need to be convinced about the importance of web design. Less is more and a simple design can really help your business. Assumptions can be costly and you should avoid common pitfalls with elements like forms.

Do look beyond the obvious, though. Just because every other ecommerce site has the same setup on their category pages, doesn’t mean you should too. Hopefully if you give your site enough attention you won’t see signs that it’s underperforming.

Form follows function. Your design should be functional first and pretty second. It should function for the average user as well as those with difficulty hearing. Your site should work well for as many people as possible and it should be easy to navigate. But it can still be pretty and your navigation can still be very creative. Just make sure it works.

Do you get tired of seeing the same fonts used on every site. I do. I’m even more tired of using the same few fonts when developing new sites. Sometimes I see a font I like, but don’t know which one it is. Good thing there are tools to help identify them.

But still it’s not like you can use any font you want, can you? Maybe you can. If you don’t mind a little Flash, you can always try sIFR3 (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). And if you don’t want to go the Flash route you can always use FLIR (Facelift Image Replacement).

JavaScript libraries are a great way to build extra functionality into your site’s interface. One library that’s quickly gained popularity is jQuery. If you’re not sure how to get started with jQuery has Yura got a guide for you.

One way to take advantage of jQuery is through simple css sprites that can add some nice effects to rollovers on your navigation. jQuery isn’t the only library of course. MooTools is another popular library and you might enjoy taking it for a spin to create a spectacular photo gallery for your site.

Site visitors probably aren’t viewing your source code, but that’s no reason your css should be sloppy. By following a few simple principles your css can be clean and optimized and by following a few more you can be a css master. It doesn’t end with your css though. You can and should learn best practices for the entire development life cycle; from preparing a contract to administering the site after it’s finished.

Link Building

Your content is great, but what are you doing to promote it? If your content falls in the forest…wait, didn’t we do this already. There’s a difference between building links to content and promoting content so it attracts links. So why aren’t people linking to your best content? Maybe you need to grow your network of influential friends. Then again maybe that great content wasn’t as linkworthy as you first thought and you’re back to building links to it.

So I link to Jenny and she links to Bill. Bill links back to me and also links to Suzie. What time does the train arrive in Chicago? Huh? No one said there would be any math in this post. Sure we all know links are important, but how different links might be viewed by search engines can get confusing in a hurry. How exactly does the link graph work?

Is it woven like macrame? Is it about being kind to others? I do know it’s not about being selfish and hoarding links. Jenny, Bill, and Suzie are more likely to link to you if you remember to link out to them.

Authority links are great, but what is authority? Does anyone really know? Could it be we still need PageRank to help us figure it out? Anchor text is important, right? Or could it be that Google is changing the algorithm to make it less important? It really does get confusing sometimes, especially if so many SEO gurus are teaching you the wrong things.

But you want more links don’t you? Maybe the answer is adding fries to your meal. Maybe all you need to do is expand a little on past techniques. Sometimes the answer is in observation. By keeping your eyes open could you really find something so effective you’re surprised it’s even allowed? And do you really need to wait for links? Won’t some link building methods provide instant or nearly instant links back to your site.

SEO

Once you start your keyword research when do you stop. You can dig and mine for words forever, but really how many keywords are enough? You’ll likely want to know whether your market refers to your products in plural or singular, but do you need to rethink stop words? You should try to own the SERPs for navigational queries and you might want to think about queries looking for the freshest results.

One reason to go deep into the tail with keywords is to help new sites rank. New sites simply don’t have the links to compete for competitive phrases. By digging deeper you can uncover those phrases with less competition that can drive traffic while you build links.

Of course you don’t need to settle for low competition phrases. As long as your patient you can spread the field a bit and little by little start pulling traffic from the head as well as the tail. You may not need to compete for everything though. Is your business local. Does it matter if people outside your area find your site? Local is where it’s at for many so don’t forget to add your location to your page titles.

Really, what is black hat anyway? Is it automatically unethical? I mean, Google won’t always penalize you for things like keyword stuffing. They even like to have a little bit of spam in their results, hard as it may be to believe. And let’s face it most black hats aren’t anywhere near as slimy as some internet marketers you’ve come across. Viagra anyone?

Business And Marketing

At the heart of every successful business is a solid business model. But could it be that having a bassackwards business model is the way to succeed online? Or is a seemingly bassackwards model not so backwards at all?

You do need to think about how you’ll monetize your site so choose your strategy wisely. Do you sell products? Did you know that some simple pricing changes can greatly impact your bottom line. There’s a lot to the psychology of pricing.

AdSense is a popular monetization strategy, but should it be? Is it time to say goodbye to AdSense? Or is success all about finding the right niche? A little split testing might be the thing to increase your ad revenue.

Advertisers tend to look down on the content network that is AdSense, but should they? Advertisers do have ways to make the content network work for them. And if you’re part of the network it might be a good idea to understand those ways in order to make your site more attractive to advertisers.

Like it or not you don’t control the conversation about your business. Product reviews count more than product descriptions. What do you do though, when a competitor leaves a negative review. Should you ignore it or fight back? One thing you don’t want to do is fake your persona. Genuine is what resonates.

Your time is limited so use it wisely. Learn to manage your time and do your homework so you know the right project to work on. Spending a little time up front to research your market can save you both hours and money down the road. Email is one way you can reach a lot of people in a short amount of time and get your message out. Some say it’s all about the list, others see it as spam, but before you make up your mind read Chris Garrett’s series on email marketing.

Search Engine News

Google made a few changes that will affect optimization. They’ve begun searching for synonyms, which should make all those advising to write naturally happy.

Google Suggest finally moved from the lab to the general public. Most people will see it as a useful way to save a few keystrokes, but the savvy will see it as a way to gain new insights into keywords. Google also released Insights for Search to compare search volume across regions, categories, and time frames.

Google is not the only search engine. It just feels like it sometimes. Sure there’s Yahoo and Live and isn’t that Jeeves guy still around in some form? Cuil is the latest competitor hyped to take away Google market share, but is it all that relevant. Maybe the biggest competition for Google will come from meta search engines, though given many of the meta engines are pulling Google results is it really competition?

And Now For Something Completely Different

If you made it this far, you’ve absorbed a lot of information. I thought you might like a look at the lighter side of the world we live in. Enjoy a fairy tale, some comical seo sales pitches, and the best answers anyone has every given to Google’s interview questions. Who says SEO can’t be fun?

Time to enjoy a long weekend if you’re in the U.S. If you’re not, expect a quieter Monday than usual as many of us are firing up the grills and saying an unofficial goodbye to summer. When August began Boulder was in the midst of 100 degree temperatures. August is leaving town with more bearable days and cooler nights. I’m looking forward to fall and don’t mind the summer goodbye.

Enjoy your weekend wherever you are, whatever you do, and no matter how many days you get to stay away from work. Happy reading.

An Engaging Collection Of Links – This Month In SEO – 7/08

Steven Bradley — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:23:18 +0000

When July rolled in I had every intention of dedicating This Month In SEO to independence. The United States, France, and Canada all celebrated independence days early in the month, but sometimes events happen that change your plans.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard that two of our own have fallen in love and agreed to spend their days together. Bill and Kimberly, this post is dedicated to you both. I can’t think of two people more deserving.

I collected more links this month than any time previously. There’s a lot, and I mean a lot more to be found at my del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn profiles this month.

Now on with the show.

Social Media

What’s the value in social media? Are you better getting 1,000 visitors from social media or search engines? Which brings more quality traffic? Many will probably tell you the smart road to success is consistent organic growth, whiles other will insist social media is the key. If your aim is the latter what traits will you need to market yourself through social media and how can you promote yourself without doing too much promotion?

Can you cheat your way to the front page of Digg? Cracked.com seems to think so in their tongue-in-cheek way. Of course Cracked.com does have success making the front page and Maki took a look at the template they use for crafting Digg friendly content.

Does Digg really offer a level playing field? Maybe what you need is a network of diggers to increase your odds of making it to the top. And if you’re going to build a network of diggers you need to speak the language of Digg.

So Google didn’t buy Digg and rename the company Giggle. It was still fun to speculate how the combined company would have changed things.

Social media is about starting conversations and building relationships. Remember to read between the lines and take some time to realize what you might be saying between those same lines. What’s unsaid is often as important as what is said. Are you following the herd or are you willing to let your ideas lead the discussion? Seriously, when you get down to it social networking isn’t all that different from trying to get your date in bed.

Twitter

Others try, but Twitter is still the king of micro blogging. Sure, you can engage in conversation, but Twitter is still a one way monologue at heart. That’s not to say you can’t build relationships through Twitter. You can even if you’re just a beginner. Perhaps the best news for Twitter is their recent purchase of Summarize. Could it be that Twitter now has a business model and does that mean we’ll see the fail whale a little less often in the future?

Plurk

As Twitter is to micro blogging, Plurk is to micro forums. The community is more welcoming and designed to promote dialog as opposed to monologue. Plurk is the smaller network at the moment, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s quietly achieving while others are whaling. So what insights have early plurkers learned and shared

Blogging

Traffic doesn’t mean much if it bounces right away. You want your traffic to stick. In order to get your readers to stick around you first need to hold their attention. If done well you may even find your readers participating and interacting more. Naturally you want your visitors to subscribe and become readers, but do you know how to measure what’s getting them to sign up? What’s your subscriber conversion ratio?

You’ve likely heard that guest blogging can be an effective way to build your subscriber base. It can also enhance your search engine presence and help grow your social networks. But does it really work? You bet it does if you’re properly motivated and align your guest posts with your goals.

Promote all you want, but your blog’s success still relies on your content. Don’t worry about word count, but do make sure you say something. It can be surprisingly simple to persuade and by following a few tips your blog will have all the signs of producing effective posts. You can’t miss.

You can avoid common mistakes and make your blogging stronger through bullet points. You can boost productivity with a template and learn by actively watching what other bloggers do. But in the end, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Your blog either has it or it doesn’t

WordPress

Are you using WordPress yet? Many businesses are, not only as a blogging platform, but as a full CMS. Still using Blogger? You have my sympathies. You also have some instructions for migrating to WordPress. Don’t stop with the migration though. There are some things you might want to do shortly after installing WordPress to make your blogging life easier and your blog running smoother.

You don’t need to be an database administrator to run your blog, but it’s still a good idea to become familiar with your DB. At the very least make sure to back up your database by sending it to your gmail account. With a few plugins you can simplify the administration of your backend and like it or not the popularity of WordPress makes it a target. Make sure to lockdown your WordPress installation to prevent unwanted breakins.

WordPress installed? Check. Administrative details accounted for? Check. Now let’s have some fun. Are you up for developing your own magazine style theme? No? How about starting with your sidebar?

What makes for an effective sidebar and did you know you can display different content in your sidebar on different sections of your site? Still more than you want to tackle? How about making sure all links to your feed are pointing to the same place? They are? Good. Then why not simply code your links so they’re all styling.

Design And Development

Navigation can make or break your site’s usability and effectiveness It can be a challenge to get right, but it’s worth it. It’s possible a few simple changes in your ecommerce navigation can lead to a significant increase in conversions. And how you architect your site can impact how well your pages and site rank. You may even be able to let search engines know which parts of a specific page are more and less important for them to take into consideration.

If you’re not yet developing with css and designing to standards, please enter the 21st century. CSS is not the latest thing. It’s a better way to develop websites. I know, I know, some browsers don’t want to cooperate, but there are plenty of tips to solve the most common css headaches.

You’ll find working with lists invaluable, especially when it comes to coding your navigation and as you find yourself reusing more and more blocks of code from other projects you can put them together into your own css framework.

Can everyone use your site? Do you know how it looks in a screen reader? Will everyone see the same colors you do? We all know making our sites accessible is the right thing to do. At least we should know. Knowing it’s right and understanding how are two different things. Fortunately Yahoo is helping developers simulate the experience of a disabled surfer.

Accessible design isn’t as hard as it first appears and you don’t have to lose your mind in the process. Remember, though, that accessible design isn’t SEO even if the two often overlap.

Depending on your perspective web design either got a whole lot better or a whole lot worse when Adobe announced they were helping search engines index Flash content. More to the point don’t expect much to have really changed.

Indexable Flash is a good thing, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You’re still better off using it as you always have, in limited doses. Flash isn’t as bad as some would have you believe, but it isn’t always good either. If you’re going to use Flash understand the pros and cons and use it appropriately.

Link Building

Links matter. We know that. We also know that all links are not created equal. Who links to you and how they link to you say a lot about your reputation. Do you know what your reputation is? If good links offer a better reputation for you, what exactly is a good link?

Are paid links good? Google doesn’t think so, but does Yahoo feel the same? Does anchor text increase relevancy? How about directories? Are there still good ones out there? And once you’ve finally figured out which pages will give you the best links should you get more from that same page or move on to the next?

Too much of a good thing isn’t so good after awhile. Same for links. You want to diversify your link profile so it’s more natural. Keyword research can help and so can a greater understanding of how to search. Through the power of search queries you can identify where the best links come from. It’s time to start collecting your favorite queries to find those known, quality linkers.

Would you trade a smarte car for a link? Depends on your perception and the authority of the link. Maybe you’d rather build links by giving away widgets. Be careful though or you could find yourself in trouble with the widgetbait police. Yes your content is important, but you still need to get the word out. How do you reach the messenger who’ll spread the word for you?

SEO

What’s the best way to learn SEO? Has How would you advise someone to learn SEO in 2008? Would you share some of your favorite analogies? Would you show them how to improve their ranking through content management?

Maybe what they need to know is how to identify how many pages of their site Google has indexed despite the seeming 1,000 page results barrier. Once they can see all the indexed URLs that don’t need to be there they could use a robots.txt file to block some of the duplicate content.

SEO shouldn’t be entirely automated, but there are a wealth of online tools available to help you collect data about keywords and links and most anything else that can be measured. If you prefer you can get some of the same functionality by installing a few Firefox extensions.

One tool that became more useful this month was the Google AdWords Keyword Tool as it began showing numbers. But are those numbers really as useful as they first seem?

One of the best ways to learn SEO is to talk to those who have been at it awhile with proven success. Fortunately we can do that this month as some of those successful SEOs happily responded to questions asked of them. For your enjoyment and education here are interviews with Aaron Wall, Tood Malicoat, Michael Gray, and David Harry.

Business And Marketing

You can’t have a site without first buying a domain. Ok, you can, but not if you want the site to be taken seriously as a business. Time to get started on your virtual real estate deals. You might even want to use Google’s content network to determine what a domain is worth to see if you want to invest. You’ll need to decide what to do with those domains and you may want to evaluate running an ecommerce store.

Article marketing has fallen on tough times in some circles. Can it still work? Can it still bring in the dollars or help increase your ebook sales? Are eBooks still a viable business model and if so how to you write and publish one? Think paid content can’t work? Wondering how to sell content when so many give it away free. All that free content and the misinformation associated with it may actually add value to the paid content business model.

Traffic that doesn’t convert is like holding 4 aces and watching everyone else fold before you can make a bet. It’s not quite as valuable as it could be. Conversions matter and you should be working to improve them. Creating a sense of urgency is one way to get people to take action. Scarcity is another way to increase the perceived value of your offer.

If you want people to talk about you it pays to be remarkable. It also helps if you look at how others have managed to get their ideas to go viral and identifying the design patterns they used. The key, of course is to effectively engage people in an emotional way. Before you begin your marketing make sure you understand what part of the tail you’re targeting and if you have what it takes to get through the dip.

Search Engine News

Can we put the Microhoo/Yicrosoft news behind us yet? Probably not, especially as Yahoo’s board is getting ready to meet. What happened in July?

Investigations formally began over the deal for Yahoo to display AdSense. Microsoft doesn’t want to buy Yahoo anymore, but they may be interested in buying Yahoo search. No they don’t want to buy it. Wait maybe they do. Carl Icahn wants them to buy something though for now will settle for a seat on the Yahoo board. Are you keeping up?

So what if Yahoo isn’t selling to Microsoft. They’re letting us play with their search technology so we can build search engines of our own.

Yahoo! Lets You “Build Your Own Search Service”

Meanwhile, back in Mountain View, Google launched Knol. Some like it some don’t and somewhere in the office of Wikipedia they’re counting the days till they lose all their traffic from Google.

And if you’re tired of all the major search engines you could always give Cuil a try. It looks nice, but you won’t be able to find what you’re looking for. Was the launch just hype or does Cuil really have something to make us pay attention?

Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?

I’m not sure how I managed it, but I made it through another post. Believe it or not this one started with a collection of over 250 links, which led me to think it might not make it’s scheduled publication date.

I wish I could say it was the weekend, but we have one more day to get there. The weather looks to be hot, hot, and hotter. We’ve now had 17 staight days with temperatures above 90 here in Colorado, a few of those days topping 100. Oh, how I look forward to the fall.

Enjoy the end of your week and the weekend that follows. Happy reading.

Father Knows Best When It Comes To Links – This Month In SEO – 6/08

Steven Bradley — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:50:04 +0000

Last month we celebrated moms here at This Month In SEO so is it any surprise that dads get the dedication for the month of June? Sure I could have dedicated this post to the change in seasons, but we have two parents and it only seemed fair to give each a post. Hopefully you had a chance to celebrate with dad a few weeks ago or had everyone celebrate with you if you happen to be the dad in the in the family. Either way this post is for fathers everywhere.

It was very difficult to cut posts from the month’s collection. If the links in this post aren’t enough for you feel free to visit any of my social media profiles where many more links have gathered. del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Sphinn. While you’re there don’t be shy. Reach out and friend me. I promise to reciprocate.

And don’t forget to follow me at Twitter and Plurk.

Now on with the show.

Social Media

Do you get social media? Your answer may depend on which side of 40 you’re on. Does social media truly connect us or is it missing one necessary ingredient for bonding? Maybe it’s all about the words we use on social sites. A little diplomacy can go a long way. Or is the problem the ethics we bring to the sites? Could it be that marketers can’t step outside the marketing and instead of seeing social media as a platform for promotion we’d be better off seeing it as a platform for communication.

Ok. Forget that last line. We’re marketers after all and can’t help looking for opportunities. Oh, the irony. Then again instead of always thinking about self promotion, why not promote someone else’s content. Your good deed may just lead to more traffic for you as well. If you do want to promote your blog (it’s ok I do too) maybe what you need is a guide to help you work smarter. Working smarter can also put you on the fast track to authority.

Of course, there are ways to market yourself without straying from your ethics. Observing what the community wants and then giving it to them is a win-win for everyone and it’ll increase your odds of success on sites like Digg. Sometimes all you need to do actively participate and use the tools the sites provide for you. Doing so could be the secret to landing your dream job through LinkedIn. Job hunting or no you may still want to set up that LinkedIn profile. It might be the one social network you can’t live without. After all it simply takes some curiosity about you to find B2B success.

Plurk? Twitter? Both?

Are you plurking yet? When most of your Twitter friends are posting links to a new social networking site it’s hard not to be curious. Plurk took many of us by storm this past month. At its core it’s another social networking site like Twitter. On top of that core is a timeline interface, threaded discussions, and a system of karma that either sucks you into plurking all day or makes you quickly run back to Twitter. Some like the new service, some don’t as you’d expect, but like it or not Plurk seems here to stay.

Plurk isn’t replacing Twitter though, by any means. Twitter may be a waste of time, but it’s still a great tool that can be used in many useful ways. New tools to increase its benefits are arriving faster than you can find them and it’s still the talk of the web. Tweeters are wishing for new things to be added and as long as Twitter can keep the service running we’ll likely be tweeting for a long time to come. Not everyone is enamored though, and some are still predicting the death of the little blue bird.

Truth is both services have their place. Each is essentially about connecting us to each other and when you get down to it I really don’t care where I connect with you as long as we connect. Both Twitter and Plurk are really about building relationships online. Each has a few things the other doesn’t and the main differences have less to do with connecting to each other than they do in how those connections appear onscreen. Then again maybe the two aren’t really playing in the same league.

Blogging

Many of us want to think our decisions are based on logic. Think again. You’re swayed by emotion the same as the rest of us. And if you want people to read your posts you may want to try using emotion-based headlines. Don’t push it too far, though or else no one will believe you. It’s the almost unbelievable promise that remains credible that gains the click. But don’t worry if you need a little help writing those headlines. There are plenty of headline starters going around to get your mojo moving.

Now that your headline is written it’s time to write that post. Blank page somewhat scary today? Maybe you need an innovative way to plan your posts so they write themselves. Shocking how effective old friends like pen and paper can be. Bloggers can learn a few things from Boy Scouts. Be prepared, right? If you get started on 3 things today you’ll find they have explosive potential for better posts a month or two down the line. Yes, it takes time to be prepared, which is why you should get your work done in batches. It’ll make you more productive.

Once your posts are written you’d like people to comment on them. Lets you know your time was well spent and helps you understand your readers better. Not all comments make us feel good, though. Do you give your readers any direction about what is and isn’t allowed on your blog? Do you have a commenting policy? How much moderation do you do when it comes to your comments? Do you use moderation as a way to control the conversation? And what do you do when a comment requires honestly, but you know that honesty could lead to some hurt feelings?

Why do you blog anyway? What are the reasons for sharing your content? Do you have specific goals as a blogger? Are they worth it? Any trends emerging to help with those goals? Just be careful with who you quote. Apparently the AP would prefer we all ignore them and wants to set new rules for what constitutes fair use. They quickly backed off their stance and settled the issue that started the controversy, but expect more news in the coming months.

Headlines? Check. Posting Process in place? Check. Comments flowing? Check. Links to AP stories? Umm…maybe not. Time to get your posts ranking. What you need is a definitive guide to WordPress SEO. Not enough? How about a few more tips thrown into the mix, complete with plugins you’d better use if you don’t want people questioning your intelligence.

Design And Development

How does your blog really look? You like it. It looks great in your browser, but does it look good in the browsers your readers use? OK, I know you did some testing, but couldn’t your blog stand a little more creativity for a more unique look. Maybe just a little bit of creativity like highlighting posts you want to feature? And what about all those widgets. You’ve got them cascading down your sidebar, but wouldn’t it be nice to widgetize your posts and pages too?

Testing your site in different browsers might have you cursing a few of them for their lack of css compliance. Well maybe it’s just the one browser that you’re cursing. There really isn’t a need to get angry, though. Not when you have solutions to more than 20 common bug fixes at your finger tips.

CSS coders make a lot of use of lists. They’re flexible and probably the best structure for your navigation. You’re not limited to the default bullet points as this post should make very clear. Do you get frustrated feeling you have to stick with the same few fonts on every site? I do. We don’t have to be frustrated anymore. Not when we can make better use of css font stacks. It all leads to better post formatting and design.

When you’re stuck with a design and staring at the blank page what do you do to get the creative juices flowing? Do you look offline for inspiration? Do you experiment with the look of elements like block quotes? Experimentation is good. Trends are always changing and so should you. 2008 is the year we put more art into our designs including hand-drawn images. Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration or studying the trends. Fortunately we can always turn to some “on the fly” design tools.

Design is more than aesthetics. No one is going to care about your beautiful site if they can’t use it. So how do you go about building a useful site? You can start with your directory structure. Done right you can please both people and search spiders. You can do a variety of things to help make your site more accessible, but that could leave an unintended consequence. When you make your site more accessible that includes making it more accessible to spammers. Where do you strike the balance? Maybe you can catch them by their footprints.

Spammers probably won’t honor your robots.txt, but others will and you can use the file to manage access to your site. Sometimes no matter how careful we are visitors to our sites can lose their way. What’s a 404 to do?

Link Building

Internal linking often gets overlooked. We seek to have others link to us, but how you link inside your site is very important. It’s the one place you have full control over things like anchor text. It’s a way for you to direct how and where the juice flows. One of the decisions that needs to be made in regards to your internal links is whether to use absolute or relative URLs. Both have their uses, though when it comes to SEO absolute URLs are generally the way to go.

How far should you take your internal linking? Is it worthwhile to use nofollow for PR sculpting? As with most everything SEO some will tell you yes and some will tell you no. Good arguments exist on either side, but whether or not you want to pick up a link chisel or wire sculpting tool you might want to at least know both sides of the argument so you can decide for yourself.

You may also want to add nofollow to the links you’ve sold. At least if you want to ensure staying on Google’s good side. But should you? Do you even have to? Probably depends on who you are as Google sometimes has different rules for different types of paid links. When you get down to it most every kind of link practice can be used for good or evil.

Link building is an often time consuming and tedious process without shortcuts. The lack of shortcuts makes for a good case to build relationships as opposed to links. If you want to focus on the links how do you set up your campaign? Perhaps a little backyard cleaning is in order. Remember to measure your distribution channels. Not all of us have the attention to get people talking by simply casting a few lines. Since we can’t always guarantee mass inbound links we need to think smarter and understand how much each link is really worth.

How many times has a client asked you how links work in SEO? Have you ever struggled to explain link-theory to a layman? I know I have and I’ve usually turned to an analogy involving a system a roads and highways to explain links. There’s a much better analogy you can use now thanks to Ken Jones. Think light. It’s a flexible metaphor that makes it easy to talk about the effects of various types of linking strategies. Read this post and you may never struggle again to explain how links work to those not in the know. Thanks Ken.

Shine A Light – How to explain link-theory to a layman

SEO

What kind of SEO are you? Do you work in-house or for yourself? Is your goal to rank or educate? What’s your SEO Business Model? Your answer might determine the strategy you pursue with the site or sites you work on. It might also go a long way toward defining what principles you consider ethical within the industry.

But who gets to make the rules of ethics? Do we all need to follow ethical practices as put forth by others or do we each get a say? And when it comes to the dark side of SEO and hat wearing is it really pure evil or is there a lot to be learned in pushing the envelope?

You can guess how Google would answer some of the above ethical questions or you could go directly to the source and read what they say. Matt Cutts announced the addition of some improved SEO documentation on the part of Google, including information about IP delivery, geolocation and cloaking, and duplicate content among other topics. That doesn’t mean you should see Google as the final word on SEO. Sometimes there are better answers to SEO questions than the ones Google gives.

Are Sitemaps an important part of SEO? Not the HTML sitemaps you should include on your site, but the XML version you submit to search engines. Some would say they’re as overrated as it gets, but you should probably know the FAQs. Me. I’ve never used one. I’ve also never had a problem getting a site indexed. I see Sitemaps as a crutch for not developing your site well, but others may disagree. Read the FAQs and nothing but the FAQs and decide for yourself.

Keyword research on the other hand are the building blocks of the SEO process. Do you know the basics of that iterative process? It’s important to remember that there are different approaches your research might take depending on your purposes. One size doesn’t fit all research. Where should you go to discover new keyword phrases? The answer could be the source now that Google has added a few features to Google Trends.

Do you know what to do with all the phrases you collected? How many times should you use them in your copy? How many phrases should you target on your page? Is your target in the head or in the long tail of search?

Local search is still an unknown to many. Hopefully that will change for the better thanks to David Mihm. In the spirit of SEOmoz search ranking factors, David presents the Local Search Ranking Factors. With a cast of local search experts the ranking factor discussion is a good place to begin your local search education.

Local Search Ranking Factors

Advanced SEO?

SES Toronto set off a debate this month about advanced SEO. Does advanced SEO exist? If so what it is? Is an SEO Ph.D only available at black hat college or do whitehats also have their advanced practices. Does advanced equal spamming? Are you an advanced SEO? And given that forums have usually been the place for newbies are they still necessary?

Business And Marketing

If a search engine revealed more about how people search and interact with ads would it inspire you to advertise more with that engine? If you would you’ll probably be interested in the Yahoo patent about how commercial different search categories are. With or without the info you’re probably interested in maximizing the impact of your search advertising. Is your AdWords account dying? Does it need an emergency fix? Hopefully you didn’t make one of the 26 mistakes that could cost your small business money. If your business is local, geotargeting may be the answer to revive your account.

Getting people to your site is meaningless if your copy can’t convince someone to buy. Your customers have questions and your copy better have the answers. Your copy needs to overcome objections to the sale before those objections are raised. But what’s the right approach? Should you throw the harpoon to strike quickly or is it a better strategy to gently cast a net and nudge people in?

You might try using better product images to boost conversions. A better looking pear can sell 147% more fruit. That pear images does look good, but am I the only one who sees the sexual imagery. Better image or sexual imagery? I’ll let you decide.

Did you write a marketing plan? How complex was it? How complex did it need to be? Could you have summed it up in five easy pieces? One thing is certain, you’ll do better if you create more value than you capture. And don’t forget to check out your competition. You can learn a lot of valuable lessons from them.

Search Engine News

Who owns Yahoo this week? Is it for sale? For rent? Can you buy it piecemeal? What’s the deal? The one with Google or is Microsoft still interested? Does Yahoo have a preference for who owns it and who’s left on the board? I’m as confused as you.

The answers change from week to week, but June seemed to indicate the deal is to use Google ads on Yahoo search. Some liked the deal and some think it’s the worst thing Yahoo could do. About the only thing certain in the continuing saga is that what we think we know today is probably wrong and we’ll be fed a new story next month.

Another month has come and gone and with it a host of educational and entertaining posts from around the web, or at least the part of it I hang out in. Another non Friday wrap up this month, which still throws me off. I’d like to wish you a good weekend, but seems we just started the week. Of course this week brings a couple of holidays to North America and for those of us in Canada and the U.S. it should be a four day week. For the rest of you don’t despair. We’ll be working the 5-day when it’s your turn for a holiday.

Enjoy the week everyone. Tomorrow it’s back to collecting links so I can share them again next month. Until then happy reading.

Links Only Your Mother Could Love – This Month In SEO – 5/08

Steven Bradley — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:24:03 +0000

Who to honor This Month In SEO? Two worthy candidates exist for the dedication of May’s roundup post. Fallen veterans who we honored just a few days ago on Memorial Day and moms who we celebrated a few weeks back. Got to support the troops for all they do, but no way I can ignore Mom. Something tells me I’ll be hearing from her much sooner and more often. So moms everywhere, this month’s post is especially for you.

As usual you can find more content worth reading at either my del.icio.us profile or my StumbleUpon profile. And it’s about time I mentioned my Sphinn profile as well.

Now on with the show.

Social Media

Twitter remains the social networking darling of the moment, though many still have doubts about joining. Are you a small business owner who isn’t tweeting yet? You might not realize why you need Twitter to take advantage of real opportunities for success. More followers usually means more opportunities, so how do you get more followers and build your Twitter presence? Maybe all you need is a few tools to see who’s following you, who you should follow, and what’s being said in the twitterverse about a particular topic.

Is the quality of Digg’s home page declining? And if so why? Could it be that the new algorithm favoring submissions by a more diverse group of users is leading to less overall quality? Could be. Is there a solution? Maybe Digg just needs to listen to the reflections of a recovering Digg addict. Then again quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Many in the Digg community would be happy to see core members go, regardless of the perceived hit in quality the site might take.

Speaking of quality content, is there a reason why great content fails to make social media front pages? There are at least 10 reasons why some content doesn’t do as well as it should and if you don’t follow some basic etiquette your submission may prove to be a complete waste of time. Does doing everything right guarantee success? Not according to the occasional skeptical loudmouth who says that social media in general might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

I’m thinking you’re not so cranky and you do believe in social media and understand the value of ‘friends’ on social media sites. Even if the front page isn’t in your future you know that social media can still lead to success. You probably even know that participating in social sites can result in more subscribers, fans, and clicks. But don’t take my word for it, ask social media legend Neil Patel

Blogging

When you write a blog post you naturally hope people will read it, but are they reading all your words? How little do users really read? Why aren’t they reading everything and how much do they actually read? Is the answer to use less words or does the volume of text on your page even matter when it comes to your success?

No one’s reading, but apparently we’re all writing to the point where blogging is no longer a unique business strategy. Unique or not, you probably still plan on blogging so how do you grow your blog? How do you write popular posts? How do you build subscribers and keep readers engaged? How do you make money from it all? A guide (or better two guides) would help don’t you think? Maybe the secret is in developing a blogging routine that works for you.

If you want people to read your post you need to first hook them with your title. Your work doesn’t end at the title, though. Try engaging your readers by quoting others, but do make sure to choose your quotations wisely. Regardless of the length of your post it’s always a good idea to trim the fat. It’s not just your midsection that could stand to be a little leaner. And remember that the success of your post could come down to how you frame your story. Select the wrong angle and no one will care. Select the right angle and your content could go viral.

Want to know how to highlight your comments on your WordPress blog? It’s easier than you think. Change one line of code and then style your comments however you want. Now that your comments have their own unique look think about using them to point your readers to some of your other posts. It’s a knockout strategy for keeping them on your site longer. You could have styled your comments with a plugin, but even if you opt to change the code yourself there are still many seo plugins you can add, including one to handle the various user roles WordPress assigns to registered members of your blog.

Design And Development

The larger your site the harder it can be to maintain. You can ease your workload by following a few crucial tips. One reason for difficult site maintenance is trying understanding all the code you wrote months ago. Why not use a style guide to improve code readability? It might be the difference in no longer being a bad or a lazy coder. No matter how you write your code you will need something to write it in. Sure you can use the generic Notepad, but you’ll probably find one of these 35 code editors more useful.

Coding is only one part of website design. It’s a process to build an effective site and your design project will be headed for success if you take the process one step at a time. What colors to use in your design is a choice you’ll make on every site. How much color do you real need to use? Could less color be the right choice for your project. Give a monochromatic palette a spin. Typographic choices are also important, yet often overlooked. Perhaps some examples of great web typography will get your creative juices flowing.

Your design choices are important. A well designed site will guide your visitors and persuade them to take action. Of course as a field persuasive design still has a long way to go. Perhaps a site clinic is in order. Learn to create a professional design with easy navigation if you want to see conversions increase on your site. Or don’t. But do know that design may just be the next search marketing battleground. If your design isn’t good you may find you aren’t getting the clicks.

Before creating the visual design of your site you should make some decisions about how you’re going to organize your content. (You do have your content written don’t you?) How your content is organized and how your site is structured do play a role in how well your pages rank. The time is now to learn more about your information architecture options. Search engines are looking to understand the various segments of your pages, shouldn’t you do what you can to make it easy for them to understand what your site is about?

Link Building

Does link building scare you? With all the methods for acquiring links are there some you wouldn’t touch with the proverbial 10 foot pole? Afraid to buy links or trade them with other sites? That’s ok. You don’t need to engage in every method of link building in order to gain more links. Maybe some linkbait will keep the terror away. But is any of it really search engine optimization?

I think link building is search engine optimization too, but not all of it. Don’t forget the basics if you want your link juice to taste sweet. Don’t forgot your content either. Before others will link to your site you need to give them a reason to add that link. Your best bet is to create remarkable content. Do remember that while great content attracts links you’d still like to optimize the anchor text if you can. The lack of optimized anchor text could be the Achilles heel of gaining links naturally.

Is it ok to create fictional content in order to quickly build links to that content? I suppose if your a fiction writer it’s perfectly fine. What about for a piece of content that seems to be implying it’s factual? The question has been debated all month and will likely continue into next month. I won’t offer any moral judgments, but I will leave you with a handful of links so you can judge for yourself.

SEO

When targeting keywords should you look to the search head or the search tail? I agree you should be looking toward both. Keywords in the head do drive more traffic, but keywords in the tail tend to lead to more conversions. With a little practice you can learn to write better long tail copy and convert that longtail traffic into sales. Your long tail writing should also lead to traffic you might not have expected as search engines substitute related search terms in user queries.

Is your site growing? Do you know how to compare month over month or year over year traffic in your Analytics program? If you use Google Analytics it’s pretty easy to track your traffic over time. How well is your analytics recording data? How many visitors did your site get this month. The answers might depend on where you locate the javascript code that does the tracking and could lead to different measurement of the ROI of your SEO. Remember that analytics won’t tell you everything, though. Sometimes you have to do the analysis yourself by looking at your web pages through the eyes of an SEO.

How much does Google know about spam? Quite a lot I’d imagine, though probably not everything. Is duplicate content spam? Sometimes, though certainly not always. Too much duplicate content can hurt how well your pages rank, spammy or not. Is it due to a dup content penalty? Maybe, maybe not, but penalties do exist. Google basically admitted there is such a thing as the minus 60 penalty, which raises the question how many penalties are there?

Fakebait wasn’t the only hotly debated topic in the community this month. Shoemoney set off the expected controversy by proclaiming seo has no future. Lot’s of people weighed in on the subject as you’d expect and a few of the reactions are below. I find the whole debate somewhat pointless since most every opinion is based on a different view of the definition of seo. Until we can all agree on what seo is, is it even reasonable to think we’ll agree about its future. Maybe it’s an indication that educational seo standards aren’t such a bad idea.

Business And Marketing

Does being in business automatically make you dishonest? I don’t think so and neither does Michael Fortin. When it comes to marketing I know what I know. What do you know and what should every good marketer know? One thing you may or may not know about is the gulf between passion and pop. You can appeal to the passionate or you can appeal to the mainstream, but can you successfully appeal to both?

Do your landing pages load quickly? I hope so, because starting in a few days your page’s load time will affect that page’s quality score at AdWords. It might be a good time to test your pages with and without some slow loading images to see if they’re necessary. Make sure you’re testing the right way. A/B testing could be costing you profits at every step. Perhaps it’s time to try multivariate testing. Testing isn’t just for AdWords, though. You might want to split test the AdSense ads you display to improve your earnings.

Any idea what a #1 ranking on Google is worth to your business? Aaron Wall attempted to figure it out. You know the usual “if you’re only going to (blank) one (blank) this month?” Well this is that link. It’s also a sample of what’s inside Aaron’s seo training course that evolved from his seo book.

What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

How much profit would it take to declare your new ebook a success? Would $2,952 without spending a dime be enough? I’d like more, but if 4 days work resulted in almost three grand I’d consider it a success. If you want those same results you might need to put on a show. After all every successful marketer is really just a storyteller in disguise

Search Engine News

It’s been at least 20 minutes since someone mentioned Microhoo or Yicrosoft so you’ve probably forgotten what’s going on. The deal is off. Or is it? Is Microsoft playing a waiting game? Are they now only interested in Yahoo’s search technology? Is Jerry Yang wishing the original deal went down? Did Jerry make a big mistake holding out for more or will Yahoo be worth $50 a share sometime in 2009? Will Jerry even be in charge this time next month? Not if Carl Icahn has his way.

Does Microsoft need Yahoo? They could just pay us to search. Or maybe they should air some new tv commercials.

With all the talk about Yahoo and Microsoft where does Google go next? Sure they want to keep improving search quality, but do they even need to? Is it possible Google is already untouchable when it comes to search marketshare?

So we’re still living in web 2.0 and we’re somewhere inside of search 3.0, right? Is it too soon for Danny to be gearing up for search 4.0 then? And what happened to all the minor revisions in between? How come no one wants to write about web 2.3.1 or search 3.4.1.12?

Search 4.0: Putting Humans Back In Search

Seems that getting an early start on this post today means I’m finishing a little earlier than usual. Who’d a thunk it? Guess it means I can get an early start on the weekend. The weather is looking to be very summery the next few days here in Boulder. Hopefully it’s the same in your part of the world. Good weather or not enjoy the weekend, don’t work too hard, and happy reading.

Don't Be Fooled By April's Links – This Month In SEO 4/08

Steven Bradley — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:54:57 +0000

The first This Month In SEO on the new site. Does it feel any different? The post should look familiar, but the title is new. Some constructive criticism from Lyndon Antcliff after last month’s post is responsible for the change.

I guess we should dedicate this month’s links to Lyndon for his suggestions, though it was hard not to dedicate this one to myself for once as April not only is the beginning of a new site for me on a new domain, but it also marks the month of my birth. Maybe we could call it a tie and dedicate things to both Lyndon and myself.

As always a number of great posts just didn’t quite fit in here. You can find some of them at my del.icio.us and StumbleUpon profiles. Now on with the show.

Social Media

As more people sing the praises of social media, more people are asking where the value is. How do you use social media to market yourself and your business? You’d certainly choose a different strategy than if you were marketing directly. And while it may be difficult to measure, the ROI is still there. All in all there are opportunities for small business to succeed using social media. There’s even a natural fit for artists.

Want to increase the chances your content makes the front page of Digg? Understanding the milestones your post needs to go through to get there might help. No luck with Digg? Maybe it’s time to give Mixx a try. Some think it could be the next Digg. So why doesn’t it have the following it deserves yet?

Maybe StumbleUpon is your thing. If so you might want to pay close attention to who you friend. Clean out your closet before SU cleans out you. Of all the profiles on all the social sites on all the internet she visits mine. How do you keep track of everyone you want to follow? It’s time to give FriendFeed a try. But remember you don’t have to be friends with everyone who asks. You do have your rights.

Maki has certainly built himself a strong social media profile. What seven essential characteristics of successful profiles did he observe along the way? You’ll need a strong profile if you want to get noticed. It’s hard to be everywhere, but you can be in more places than you think and it’s not illusion. You publish an RSS feed of your blog posts, but are you taking advantage of the RSS feed your social media profiles offer? Those three letters could just improve your success.

Twitter

The best way to understand Twitter is simply to use it for awhile, but that’s not stopping people from doing their best to explain the service and tell people why it’s so great or how essential it is as a social tool. Twitter is like sex, it’s a blogging sidekick, it even writes posts for you. Still if you don’t get it yet, just give it a try. Follow me and a few others and see what it’s all about. Joining is really the best way to see the benefits.

Twitter isn’t just for marketers. It’s gone mainstream. Presidential candidates and British Parliament are tweeting. So how come the journalist community hasn’t joined in on the fun? Are they afraid someone will trash their reputation? Probably not. Perhaps by year’s end they’ll be just as enamored with the twitterverse as the rest of us and twittering right along. Hopefully the won’t make the eight mistakes some bloggers do.

Blogging

Should your small business be blogging? The answer of course depends on several factors, but those of us who are blogging would probably lean toward answering yes. If you do take the plunge remember that the first rule is you don’t have to do anything, though there’s plenty you should do. One thing you should do is engage your readers and along those lines you may want to give podcasting a try.

Not all of us can pick up 3,000 subscribers in a few weeks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones picking up piles of links and comments as your subscriber base grows. A great way to reach new audiences and pick up new readers is by guest blogging for others. Commenting on other blogs in your industry helps too. They’re about more than quick traffic you know. Still there’s a right way and a wrong way to leave comments.

There’s certainly a lot more to running a successful blog than guest posts and comments. How about a big resource of tips. With links to 60+ articles you’re sure to find something to help improve your blog. 60+ tips not enough? How about an additional one for optimizing your post titles? Is a forum the right addition for your blog? It could be just the thing to keep readers at your site longer. Before you jump right in and add one think about how the code from different sources works together. Applications like WordPress and others may not be as secure as you think. Are they appropriate for SEOs?

Design And Development

Every time I start a new design I seek a little inspiration, often from css galleries. I’ll also spend time looking through some of the best tutorials to learn a few new tricks. Maybe it’s your contact forms that could use a little more creativity, maybe it’s your footers that could use some out of the box thinking. Maybe it’s your entire blog theme that could use a little guidance on style.

Your logo isn’t your brand, but it is a visual symbol of your brand and as such might be the most important graphic created for your site. You might want to think how your logo will look as a favicon while you’re creating it. Are you getting tired of seeing the same old RSS icons everywhere? You don’t have to make your visitors feel that way if you opt for something a little off the beaten path. And while you’re working on all those images, perhaps it’s time to get a little more transparent with them. You can get around those pesky browser limitations with a little know how.

Don’t forget who you’re designing for, though. It’s not you, it’s your visitors, so make sure your design is usable. Please stop abusing Hx tags and using them as design elements. Take the time to use them properly and both your page and your visitors will be smiling. Treat your other html tags well and use them how they were meant to be used. Pretty soon you’ll start to see the convergence of usability and seo on your site and everyone will be happy.

Link Building

Can you define a list of best practices when it comes to link building? Apparently not, as one size really doesn’t fit all. But let’s say you wanted to try. Might you include some thoughts about deep linking and anchor text? Would you include some link development shortcuts? Maybe backlink checkers would make your list or maybe you’d offer up ways to find new links through Google Alerts.

Of course you could skip the whole ninja thing and focus your efforts on developing linkbait even if the name has never been the best. Be careful with your widgets, though. They might get out of hand and if you go so wild that Google defines you as a black hat they may never trust you again.

SEO

Speaking of losing Google’s trust, can you force that on your competition? Are there things you can do to penalize your competition? What if they’ve done it to you. How can you tell if your domain has been banned and shown the door from search results. Then again maybe it’s not your competitors who’ve gotten you in hot water. Would your site pass a manual Google review?

All this banning talk is depressing. Let’s look at the positive side of things and start improving our situation. The first step is diagnosing the health of your current site. You have to know where you are before you can decide what direction to take to your goal. Your analytics can help in determining what’s working and not working now. Your stats can help you decide if you can compete for competitive keywords or if you still need to work the long tail. And when choosing keywords to target it only makes sense to target the ones people actually use. Why not let Google tell you what those keywords are?

Is your business local? Could people be searching for you in local directories? If so you may want to do a little more than submitting a quick profile and forgetting about it. And why limit yourself to local. There’s no reason you can’t try to dominate your market a few months down the road. A little bit of seo experimenting along the way will help you see what’s working and what’s not. That testing might even suggest some advanced ideas you can put to good use.

An aged domain is often preferable to a new domain. A link from a popular and trusted domain is usually preferable to a link from one not so popular and trusted. Is Microsoft adding another layer of complexity? Might the age of the domains linking to you also affect how well your domain ranks? How about user performance metrics? Has Google confirmed it analyzed queries as part of the ranking signal? And what about duplicate content? Has Yahoo finally figured out how to handle duplicate pages at different URLs? You’ll have to read the patent coverage from Bill and Dave to find out.

Business And Marketing

Everyone wants their sites to be more valuable. So how do you get more value from your site? You might ask someone who consistently buys sites and find our what he generally looks for. You might also ask that same person what kind of business models he turns to after buying a site.

Was your tagline an afterthought? If you’re like me you know they’re important, but aren’t quite sure how to come up with a good one. If you can manage to capture your mission, your promise, and your brand in a few words you might just end up with a tagline that truly works. It’s certainly not the only thing you might change when making over your site. The landing page makeovers are no more, but Roberta has started anew with complete marketing makeovers. The first two debuted this month.

How well does your copy sell your products and services? Can a simple 3 part formula help you help your copy? Could following 4 essential rules make your copy more persuasive? Maybe the problem isn’t your copy. Could your site be doing one of 50 things to discourage conversions? Perhaps you need to apply one of 7 strategies that have been proven to increase your site’s conversion rate.

Google doesn’t have its hand in every business…yet. But they sure use their web supremacy to get into as many markets as they can. They’re taking their natural competitive advantage and using it to expand. Don’t be mad at them. Learn from them and see if you can follow their marketing strategy to grow your own business.

You’ve probably heard that advertising isn’t quite working as hoped for many. You might be struggling to build a site around the advertising model. No worries. Affiliate marketing to the rescue. Instead of serving ads people don’t want, help them find the products they do want. Do you have an affiliate program for your products yet? Yes or no you may find it helpful to discover the advantages and disadvantages of different affiliate management software. And while you’re setting up your affiliate programs and sites take the guesswork out of PPC and follow along with step by step instructions for setting up your campaign.

Search Engine News

All month long I had been collecting stories about Microhoo or is it Yicrosoft, but let’s face it you already know what’s going on. How could you not. So instead of links how about a quick summary.

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo so they can compete with Google. Yahoo either wants to remain independent or appear like they want to remain independent so Microsoft will raise the price of its offer. Yahoo is working on all sorts of deals with companies like Google and AOL in order to show how much more valuable they are than Steve Ballmer seems to think. Microsoft has never taken ‘no’ very well so they’ve thrown down the gauntlet and insist it’s either sale or hostile takeover. Now that the deadline has passed they seem awfully quiet.

Stay tuned next month for more in the sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying search engine acquisition drama.

How about quick and useful things from Google and Yahoo?

Google is giving small business owners more control over the address that’s displayed in the plus box. They did the right thing in selling Performics and revealed a few secrets about how Google News works. Perhaps the biggest news was that googlebot can now crawl and fill out web forms, which opens up both worries and possibilities for SEOs. And Udi Manber offered an interesting interview to Popular Mechanics.

Yahoo is becoming more open revealing details of it’s new ad system while it tests selling Google’s ads. They’re looking to improve social search and unifying profiles across social properties. It may lead to a new sticky, viral, and friendly Yahoo.

Well I made it through the first round up post on the new site. No weekend in front of us just yet, but hopefully I’ve helped make hump day a little more useful or enjoyable in some way. The good news is the week is more than half over and the coming weekend is closer than the previous one. Thanks again to Lyndon for making some good suggestions after last month’s posts. Hopefully you like the new title idea. Feel free to let me know what you think and make some suggestions for next month.

This Month In SEO – 3/08

Steven Bradley — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:05:22 +0000

Spring is in the air. Can you feel it. The lion is gone and the lamb is arriving. And the best new of all for me is baseball is finally here. This month’s post is dedicated to the national past time. Back when This Month In SEO was a weekly the title of the series derived from the old Mel Allen show with the game’s highlights so how could this post be for anything other than the greatest game ever invented. I admit it. I’m a seamhead. I’ll live and die with the sport right up through the dog days of summer and to the end of the Fall Classic.

But we’re not all here for baseball are we? How about some links to a collection of the best posts from the month that was. As always more can be found via my profiles at del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. Now on with the show.

Social Media

Some see social media as all about the traffic you can get. Is that what it’s really all about, though? Are there other advantages to social media? Sure there are and you should have a social media marketing strategy in place to meet your desired goals. Maybe it’s branding you’re after or maybe you’re looking to grow readers on your blog. Maybe you’re a freelancer and simply need to get started. No matter what your situation there’s more to social media than traffic.

Since your site is unique so too will be your social media strategy. With so many sites out there how do you know what communities to participate in? How do you avoid the social sites that suck? Let Dave guide you. He’s found 108 sites that don’t suck and even has ideas on how to connect with the influencers on those sites.

Didn’t I hear something about Digg being sold? Was it rumor? Was it fact? Who owns Digg now? Maybe I do. I’ll have to check with my accountant. Whoever owns Digg now or tomorrow you’re still an active part of the community, right? If you are Maki has a dozen tools you should check out. It’s not just about the tools, though. If you want to do well on Digg (or any social site) you need to really want to be part of the community around that site. You need to digg Digg if you want to get dugg if you know what Skellie means. One way to be part of the community is to comment on submissions. But you can’t leave just any old comment. There’s an art to commenting and you want to say it right.

LinkedIn or Facebook? Facebook or LinkedIn? Which is better for your business. Both can be good and Loren has some tips for using both sites to network with others.

Twitter

Have you heard, Twitter is the big thing in social networking? I admit to taking longer than I should have to get Twitter, but now that I do I’m seeing Twitter posts everywhere. So many that they needed their own section this month. Are you tweeting yet? I am and if you want to know what I’m saying you’ll have to follow me.

So what exactly is Twitter anyway? Is it the new Google alternative? The new Facebook? How many ways can you visualize Twitter? 17 at least. You can have your RSS feed posted automatically to your followers, you can track the general conversation for phrases of interest, and you can even do some very original and cool things with the services.

Twitter seems to be different things to different people and everyone has their ideas what it does for them. Some promote blogs. Some generate traffic, but most everyone who joins gets hooked quickly.

You can maximize your networking and marketing on Twitter without being a spammer, but don’t get upset if someone you follow doesn’t follow you back. They generally have their reasons.

Not everyone is enamored of course. Some are only begrudgingly part of the conversation taking place. I would suggest if you tweet while bathing you disconnect the power supply for safety. Bring along a book on Haiku while you relax in the tub. The ancient art seems perfect for staying within the 140 character limit.

Hello my network
Twittering in the tub
Conversation good

Somewhere Bashõ rolling over in his grave.

Blogging

Monica O’Brien divides blogs into three general classifications so you can personalize your growth strategy. Skellie sees 25 paths to a popular blog. Chris Garrett has 41 tips from 10 years of blogging. But how many readers do you really need? Maybe it’s not ordinary readers we’re really after. Maybe what we want is 1,000 true fans instead. How do you get those 1,000 fans? Brian has a 20-step process and yes those 20 steps are the curriculum for Teaching Sells.

Of course if you want to capture true fans or even ordinary readers you need to have great content. First you’ll need some ideas and if you can gather enough you’ll be on your way to writing posts in advance, perhaps far enough in advance to set up a blogging account. That advanced writing will give you time to brush up on your grammar and help you fight the enemies of clear and direct writing. It also allows you to be more agile so you don’t need to get everything right the first time.

Your strategy is in place, your content rocks, and yet your business blog still sucks. Want to know the reason? Maybe you need to be more aware of the Dos and Don’ts of business blogging. Maybe it’s a lesson in attracting and converting prospects that you need. Maybe you simply need to get your fellow bloggers to start writing about you to attract all those readers and fans in the first place. Sure, it’s hard. No one said it was easy. If you don’t like it I guess you can always stop blogging.

Design And Development

WordPress has long since moved beyond it’s blogging origins. It’s more than capable of serving as a light weight content management system. You can do a lot with WordPress, especially if you’re willing to get your hands dirty and hack the system. Want to use it as a membership system? You can. Want to make WordPress faster? You can. While you’re at it, remember to lock your blog down to prevent intruders from getting in.

Think today’s faster internet connections mean you don’t need to worry about download times for your site? Think again. Google confirmed that load times are part of quality score. Faster sites means less money spent for traffic. Since it also means you’ll keep more traffic on your site, what are you waiting for? It’s time to make your site faster.

Designers sometimes forget we’re not typical users. We know how the site works because we’re so familiar with it. Our users may not be. We need to learn to bridge the gap. We need to take care that visitors can understand how to use our sites, especially if it’s their first visit. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expand our skills and try to add a little design “wow.” We need to grow and challenge ourselves with every project. Why not start your learning now with 20 free design ebooks.

One goal of design is to make your website stand out from the crowd. How do you balance visuals that stand out with organizing all your information. You might try using a grid structure to organize and then break out of your grid to make your design pop. Whatever you do don’t require your visitors to sign up before they can use your site. Do style your text links in a way that makes them obvious and also adds to your overall design. If you get it all right who knows, you might just have your customers singing yet.

Link Building

PR sculpting through nofollow is the latest link building tactic promising the riches of better ranking. But is it really all that new? Hasn’t this been going on for years through other means? Is it really necessary if you properly structure your site in the first place? Some SEOs swear by it, others think it’s unnecessary. Some wonder what the fuss is all about since they’ve been doing it for years and one thinks no one has sufficiently created a test to prove anything. Varying opinions, but well worth reading.

Would you think a post that’s over two years old could still offer great advice about getting links? It does and when you get down to it all you need to do is go back to kindergarten and be creative. Could it really be that simple? Once you’ve graduated from the crayons and finger painting step up to a class on the fundamentals of link building. And after you’ve passed the primer you’ll be ready for some secrets from the experts

Class is over and you have some questions. Should you acquire links organically or should you pay for them? Can you gain links through email marketing? What role do directories play in today’s link building campaigns? Is it spammy to build links through blog comments? So many questions, and so many ways to build links. Remember link building opportunities are all around you if you’re paying attention.

Also remember that it’s not just about links. Sometimes you need to think beyond the link and look for exposure. Sometimes you need to think about the other and original PR, public relations. Keep in mind the balance in where you get links, how fast you get them, and how many you ultimately get. Think of what the anchor text of your links tells search engines about your site. And now that our link building education is coming to a close you probably want to know who’s linking to who so you can analyze all those links. Good news. Patrick Altoft created a free tool to give you all sorts of competitive link data.

SEO

Speaking of tools how about some that aren’t necessarily about links. Lauren Vaccarello put together not one, but two great lists of tools to help make your seo easier. One list deals with competitive research and the other with keyword research. Ann Smarty has some tools to use to check your rankings and she also tells us about her favorite seo extensions for Firefox. And just last night Aaron Wall released rank checker, a new extension to check where your pages rank for your keyword phrases.

What’s that? You want to know why you should be checking your rankings and doing competitive analysis. Look no further than the two links below.

Are there really secrets in seo or does it all come down to building a usable site for your visitors? There is more to seo than usability, but usability does play it’s role. Yahoo filed a patent to provide a list of factors that might help determine how usable a page is. Yahoo is also interested in your page layout to help them decide which sections of your page are more important.

Hmm? Deadly questions for Matt. Breaking sites to fix them. Does that mean SEO really is the worst thing ever invented?

I don’t think it’s the worst thing either. I want to know how to write better page titles and how to optimize my images. I want to understand the internal linking power of my site and know if it’s important to have a dedicated IP or if a shared IP is just fine. I figure you do too so I’ll link to some posts that will help in all of the above.

Business And Marketing

It’s no secret that Aaron Wall has a strong grasp of what’s going on in marketing and when he tells you what’s to come he’s more often right than wrong. So where does Aaron see future growth areas. You’ll have to read his interview with Gabriel Goldenberg to find out. Aaron also gets a little more in depth with thoughts about the future of outsourcing.

What do you do when you hit a plateau with your marketing. Skellie tried turning inward, but found the key is to consistently share your content with new audiences. You need to be nomadic if you want to keep growing. More isn’t everything, though. Better is just as important. It’s not all about traffic, but the right kind of traffic. And if you do it right you may just find your site has exactly what advertisers are looking for. If not then perhaps a group interview with the people who spend advertising dollars will tell you what you need to do.

Who doesn’t enjoy a good success story? How about one that involves cake? Matt McGhee interviewed Jesse Heap about the success of Pink Cake Box. It’s not what you know, but who you know so how do you get to know all those people. Ben has some tips on successful networking. What are your customers really looking for? Not to fill an existing need, but rather they’re looking for an achievable dream and it’s your job to sell it to them. Of course no one likes to be sold to so how transparent should you be? And when someone buys a cornflake for $1,350 isn’t that a bit of idocracy in action?

Search Engine News

Google’s deal with DoubleClick finally passed the last hurdle and now the two companies are one. Danny called for Google to do the right thing and divest themselves of the conflict of interest created by the acquisition of Performics. It’s not all good news for Google. The stock has gone down with the market in part due to the decline in paid clicks. In fairness to Google they’re reworking things to provide more quality in their ads including new demographics.

Yahoo and Microsoft are still two separate companies. Seems to be how Yahoo wants to keep things, but Microsoft has no intention of backing down. Things have quieted down for the moment, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing more twists and turns in this story over the next few months. For now Yahoo is forging ahead with business as usual. Perhaps it’s more than usual as Yahoo has been releasing something new a bit more often of late, including support for an open ecosystem for search.

Ask on the other hand can’t seem to decide if it is a search engine or not and if it is who it’s users are. Ask let go 8% of its workforce, went back to a 1996 algorithm, and decided it was best suited to Midwestern moms. They tried to backtrack off that last one shortly after the announcement, but it’s not surprising that there’s been little news about them since.

Normally I’d be gearing up for the start of the weekend now and wishing you all a happy couple of days away from the office. Unfortunately it’s Monday and we’re only now beginning the work week. I think I’ll have to speak to the calendar about making the last day of every month a Friday. It feels like it should be don’t you think. Monday or Friday I’m still in a good mood today. The baseball season has started for real and to me that’s a national holiday. Enjoy the week and I promise we’ll get to another weekend in a few days. Happy reading.

This Month In SEO – 2/08

Steven Bradley — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:23:15 +0000

I could have sworn we should have been here yesterday. Isn’t it 28 days in February? What’s that? Leap year? Oh yeah the extra day we get every few years. 29 days may still a shorter month, but there was no shortage of links This Month In SEO. Football ended as the month began and baseball is starting as the month heads out. Spring is almost here, but spring training has begun. Still it’s only fitting to dedicate this post to all the people who are born on this day and have to figure out when to celebrate their birthday the next three years. Happy birthday to all the leap babies of the world. This post is dedicated to you.

Plenty of good stuff this month as always and as usual you can find more at my del.icio.us profile and my StumbleUpon profile. I’m also known to post a link or two at Twitter so feel free to follow along. Now on with the show.

Social Media

“Suicide is painless. It brings on many changes; and I can take or leave it if I please.” If you didn’t sing the previous line you didn’t see the movie M*A*S*H, but that’s ok since we’re talking social media and and the point is you need a social media marketing plan or else you could be DOA. You do want your content to be bookmarked and attract links don’t you? Then again is social media all we want it to be? Is the truth about social sites inconvenient to our plans for monetization? What exactly is the value of social media marketing anyway?

Some of the value is in the networking opportunities. Services like Twitter allow you to connect with people in ways you may not find elsewhere. I admit I was slow to adopt Twitter, but now I’m beyond sold. So is Jennifer Laycock. Jen gave us a 5 part series on why she embraced Twitter. Don’t be a Twit. Most Tweeple will notice Twitter going down once in awhile. Sure it’s annoying, but is it inevitable? Maybe, unless you want the service to use a proxy. Proxy or no the service is working far more often than not and Kevin Dugan has 10 tips to help you get the most out of Twitter.

StumbleUpon is the hot site to drive traffic, assuming your content is deserving. Skellie shares some ideas on creating incendiary content that will turn up the heat at StumbleUpon. If I only knew then what I know now. That thought must have gone through Ciaran’s mind while offering 10 simple SU tips. StumbleUpon isn’t the only site to send visitors and links your way. Matt has some great ideas for getting both traffic and links, if your willing to part with a few photos and answer a few questions. Have a question for Kevin Rose? Ben offers a recap of Digg’s first town hall complete with videos and time tags so you skip ahead to the more interesting parts.

Blogging

Having a loyal audience opens up a lot of doors. So how do you score more subscribers? Adam Singer has 8 tips to help. Once your audience grows large enough it’ll promote your blog for you. Like a butterfly your blog will break out of its cocoon and begin a second stage of life where it can glide on the wings of your readers. But don’t erect barriers in the path of your butterfly. An unexamined life is not worth blogging or something like that. Do I detect our second series of the month? Is a pattern forming?

Promote your blog all you want, but it’s success will still come down to the quality of your content. But what is good content? Maki gives us a working definition and Chris Garrett promotes the idea of having authority or flagship content to get readers coming back. Creating all that great content isn’t easy and it requires plenty of new ideas. Let Tibu Puiu show you where to find ideas for your freshly squeezed content. As great as your content is a little push in the form of a great headline never hurts. Quadzilla needed something to do while waiting for a plane so why not look through some airport magazines to find 54 headline templates that work.

Your wonderful content and smart marketing has led to more readers. Now what? Perhaps selling advertising is your thing. How do you find private advertisers? Daniel knows. James Mowery would like to help advertisers find you and shares his advice in a guide to creating your own ‘Advertise Here’ page.

Your business will only scale so much. And you’ll scale even less as an individual. Chris Brogan tells us how he managed to scale his skillset. One way to help yourself scale is to make use of the resources of others. Amanda Fazani put together more than 40 such resources so you can get more done. You may find you can get more done by recording your posts instead of writing them. If you’re ready for video blogging Michael Martine shows you how to get started in 5 easy steps.

Design And Development

Speaking of videos not everyone is going to hear them. The 35 million people in the U.S. who are deaf or hard of hearing won’t. They can still enjoy your videos, though. Stephen Hopson tells you how to add subtitles. Wish something other than your most recent posts was on the home page of your blog? If you use WordPress it’s simple to set up. No matter how you structure your blog or site you don’t always want search engines to access every page. Rand shows how to control access through cookies and session IDs. And even with the pages you do want spiders to see you don’t always need them coming back and hogging your bandwidth. Sebastian tells you how to let spiders know if your dynamic pages have been modified.

There are many different things to learn as a web designer and whatever your current skills they can always be improved. It’s never too late to step up your skills. Choosing colors is one I can use work on. If you’re like me maybe seeing 25 beautifully colored websites will give you an idea of how to use different colors together. 25 sites not enough? How about 100 css galleries filled with stunning design? I visit several of these when I’m looking for inspiration and now have many more to look through. Of course to get the whole right you need to get the parts right. Michael recently changed the sidebar on his blog and shares his thought process for the changes. Michael it looks great.

What would This Month In SEO be without one of Roberta’s landing page makeovers. We’ll find out next month since this I think will be the last makeover. I’m looking forward to the new series Roberta. Eric Enge also knows a thing or two about landing pages. This month he teaches how to execute tests to discover the better design. The eagle has landed, but did it buy? Smashing Magazine looks at shopping carts and presents some examples and good practices.

Shopping carts aren’t the only applications suffering from poor design. Jakob Nielsen discussed applications in general and presents his top 10 design mistakes. Philipp Lenssen looked at how designs are often presented to clients. Sometimes the more effective tool doesn’t make for the best presentation. How do you know when you’ve got it right? Carsten Cumbrowski has 50 questions you can answer to evaluate the quality of your site.

Link Building

Links aren’t all about the external. Your internal linking is important too. Aaron has ideas on how to determine if your internal linking is effective. Nofollow has become the latest greatest tool in shaping your internal link flow. Rand tells us sculpting with nofollow worked rather well on SEOmoz. Umm…Rand…did you mean siloing? Lisa wants to know. All the nofollow talk has led some to wonder if using the attribute will set off a red flag and mark you as an seo. Still there are situations where you should use nofollow. As search engines get better at dissecting the parts of a page will some of these issues eventually go away. Bill looks at ways Google might determine ‘boilerplate’ code.

Where do your incoming links come from? If you’re willing to put in the time you might get some from social media. Is the line between seo and social media marketing blurring? Are your linkbaiting efforts focused on your niche? Ryan Caldwell shares his experience of a successful linkbait with proof that targeting multiple niches brings more links. Do you buy links? Eric Enge doesn’t and tells you why.

The best links are the ones your competition can’t get. If we’re all analyzing the same metrics though, our links may end up being similar. It’s time to start looking at some unconventional link attributes. Finding link sources takes time. Why not automate things a little and organizes your sources better? You might not be able to automate the entire process, but there are plenty of tools you can use at steps along the way. But don’t let all those tools make your decisions for you or else you might end up with link building and development mistakes.

SEO

It’s easy to get lost in the details of seo and just as easy while lost to lose site of the big picture. Stoney gave us a series on strategic seo planning. Here’s part 3, which also brings us to 3 series so far this month. I sense a trend. One part of forming a plan is understanding the competitive landscape. Analyzing your competition will reveal how long it will take to rank and how much work you might need to get there.

Before you can rank for something you need to know what that something is. Brian Clark created a comprehensive guide to keyword research in 5 parts giving us series #4 for the month. Brian Terry discovered a simple way to get more keywords with less effort and Jennifer Slegg wants to know if we’re covering all the angles in our research. One angle Jennifer didn’t mention is using social media buzz to mine new keywords. Search engines are getting smarter when it comes to keywords too. Bill covers a Yahoo patent on phrase-based indexing detailing ways Yahoo might better understand phrases in documents.

SEO is made up of many disciplines and Hamlet Batista says security should be one of them. Understand why you must learn internet security by reading his post. Shoemoney sees a lot of confusion in posts about cloaking, masking, and redirection. What’s a good Shoemoney to do? Write a post defining each and showing how they’re used. Sugarrae goes one better giving us everything we could want to know about canonicalization (C14N)

How many search engines can you name? Now how many are you hoping will rank your pages well? Esteban Panzera has 11 tips for appearing in Google Definitions and Tamar shows us how to find out when Google first discovered one of our pages. Kurt Krejny is out to stop weeds, the kind that suck the life out of your Google garden that is. Will Google ever stop being associated with PageRank? Why should they be? Andy Beard says it’s the primary Google search ranking factor.

Whatever you think of PR it’s always good to remember that search engine algorithms evolve. What works today might not tomorrow. If you’ve forgotten let Rand remind you. And in the end keep in mind that no two sites are alike. Different sites mean different tactics. Treat each as an individual.

SMX West

All week long I felt out of the loop on Twitter. So many of my tweeps were at SMX this week while I was home working. If like me, you missed the conference, no worries. Barry covered all the SMX coverage for Search Engine Land.

Business And Marketing

With spring training underway the Super Bowl may feel like a time long ago, but it’s only been a few weeks since the big game. (Go Giants!) Do you remember the commercials? Yeah, me either, but how did they score with social media? Julie Kent provides a review of the big game ads. The internet makes it easy to copy most anything. More copies means less value per copy until they become free. It’s not the end of business online, though. It just means you need to be better than free. I’m guessing you prefer to make money. If so Daniel has 28 ways you can monetize your site.

Do you have a reputation? If you’ve ever done anything in public you do. How do you manage your rep? Tamar and Lee Odden have advice for monitoring and managing how others see you and Lee adds a little public relations for good measure and good seo.

One of the best roads to success is to become the authority and have your brand be the first people think about when thinking of your niche. Maki offers 8 content development tactics to become the authority in your niche. By their very nature a niche is less competitive than the larger industry, some more so than others. Skellie walks us through surviving an under-served niche. Crowded niche or empty niche you still need good copy to sell. Simon Townley will hypnotize you with his. With the rising cost of clicks and increased user awareness about ads, one way you can please users and cut costs is to feature your own best content more and sell ads to yourself.

I leave you with an interview to close out the month’s business section. Chris Garrett interviewed Rae Hoffman on a variety of topics and we all get to sit in, listen, and learn a lot about how to be successful.

Sugarrae Interview

Search Engine News

The news of the proposed takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft has quieted down a little bit since the beginning of the month, but this is one story that will be hanging around until it’s resolved one way or the other. And any resolution will only lead to a host of other stories of what’s next for each company. Here are a selection of stories, mostly from the first half of February and mostly from Search Engine Land.

We made it through another month even with the extra day. I’m tired. How about you? We’re moving into spring, which for Boulder could mean anything from 70 degree days to several feet of snow falling. The weekend is supposed to be the former so I’ll see about spending some time outside. As always there’s some work to be done. I’m getting close to moving this site to a new domain with a new design and if I can knock off a few hours of that work on a Sunday it’s that much sooner till the move. And sadly I still need to work on my taxes. I’ve been putting them off this year so I’ll see about making a dent in the forms. Have a good weekend wherever you are and whatever you do. Hopefully you’ve gotten taxes out of the way and can just enjoy. Happy reading.