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Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

Habits of effective PPC Managers
There’s really no denying that it really takes a lot to be an effective and highly successful PPC manager. In this article, 6 common habits that are evidently found many successful PPC managers are discussed. These 6 habits are growing your keyword list, testing and tweaking, keeping a campaign diary, leveraging your web analytics software, eyeing your competition and staying informed of advertising policy updates and other search publisher news.

Brand awareness is great SEM
In this article, it is said that brand awareness is what fuels SEM. The writer argues that there are many things that traditional marketing and SEM don’t come in good terms about but one of the common links that are unifying both marketing techniques is brand awareness. The public is getting wiser by the minute, they do not only go to the popular sites or the sites which are most frequented by other people, they usually go to proven and established sites because their trust levels toward these sites are greater.

Great traffic trackers for your campaign
When it comes to SEO and SEM, the main determinant of how efficient and effective your over-all campaign is through the traffic that is being coursed to your site. Daily monitoring and live tracking is very important. To help you out with live traffic tracking for your site, there are three free tools that you can use which are SiteMeter, GetClicky and BLVD status. SiteMeter is considered as the simplest of the three free tools, giving out basic information about traffic to your site. On the other hand, GetClicky and BLVD status are more advanced tools, offering traffic analysis to the users.

How to do an SEO audit
An SEO audit is a much needed undertaking for any SEO practitioner. This is done to discover and potentially troubleshoot problems in your site. A framework in doing an SEO audit is given in this article and it covers everything from the title page to the big four factors of SEO which are URLs, site architecture and navigation, product label pages and site latency. Tools to help out in doing an SEO audit is also ennumerated.

Sources of duplicate content
Most SEO practitioners try to shy away from duplicate content as much as possible because having something like this in your site will spell SEO and ranking problems for you. But what some SEO practitioners don’t know is that there are many sources of duplicate content online. Here are some sample tell-tale signs that you can pick up in order to know if a content is a duplicated one: if the content has any type of disclosure or disclaimer, words that occur in your web template, navigation, footer, sidebars, your last name and address and contact form.

Do you think you have too big of a company for SEO?
Most large companies often think that SEO is just for small and medium enterprises so they don’t usually bother with it. In a perspective of an SEO consultant, SEO is equally important for a large company who has an already established brand name and a small company which is struggling to make a name for itself. If you want to convince a big company to do SEO, you must present them with the results. This is a tried and tested formula that will surely work in convincing them to incorporate SEO in their marketing plan.

Social Media’s history
We all know how prevalent Social Media is today but how it exactly went from being a never heard of term before to being incorporated in our everyday lives now is quite a mystery. In this article, the history of Social Media is discussed which points its roots back at the 1950s. This historical timeline threads through telephone phreaking, bulletin board systems, commercial online services, world wide web, instant messaging, P2P, social networking and real-time statusphere.

Writing for people, not for search engines
This golden advice reiterates that even SEO practitioners should keep their focus on ultimately writing for people and not for search engines. Most SEO sites are being written for the sole purpose of rising up the rankings of search engines but this should not always be the case as people are the ultimate end users of SEO sites and not search engines. It’s okay to make your site SEO ready but also keep in mind that you are also catering to people and not just search engines.

Bing controversy
It surely doesn’t take long for new things especially new tools which are being introduced over the internet to be criticized and be in the middle of a controversy. Not even two weeks into its launch, Bing (the newest search engine developed by Microsoft) is being hounded by complaints that they manipulate the search engine rankings to bring in higher click through rates.

SEO tools that you probably aren’t using now
This list summarizes the little known SEO tools that most people don’t know about. These tools include Google Insights Bookmarket, Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin for Google Analytics, Robots.txt Generator, SearchBot Plugin and Disabled Personalized Search Plugin. All these tools are also free of charge and can bring in great advantages for your SEO site.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

Usability and SEO

This blog is actually a review of Stephen Klug’s “Don’t Make me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. In this book, Klug highlighted the different elements that are always beneficial to SEO. These are: clear visual hierarchy, intuitive links and obvious clikability, eliminating unnecessary words and page names & title tags.

Framework of local search campaigns

The local search campaign is now kicking more than ever as it is becoming widespread before our very eyes. Big companies are now entertaining thoughts of going local instead of going global with their SEO campaigns. Here are some of the reasons provided by the blog: a local search campaign won’t take a lot of time before it can be up and running and there are many resources that you can use over the web to help you out with your mission.

Things you don’t know about online PR

The shift from paper to online media has also seen the shift in other media related things like PR in cyberspace. The two have become so interchangeable that it’s already hard to draw the line between them. Online PR is more concerned with client perception and building relationships with people who matter. There are many elements involved in online PR and here are some of them: developing key relationships, going social, writing for web, time for release and measuring impact. This blog also gives out examples of how online PR is achieved, the most popular of which is the Obama campaign before the elections.

More reasons why people are sticking up to SEO

We all have been reading a lot about the different reasons why companies use SEO. In this blog entry, 85 more reasons are being handed out. Some of these reasons are: designers and website owners think that SEO is all about keyword stuffing, submitting to search engines, creating mini-sites or a scam.

A way of determining useless links

We are all very much aware of the impact of link building and the ample effect it has on SEO. In finding links for the sites, it is important that you will be able to weed out the no follow and useless links so that the best links will be the ones you will keep. Here are some of the indicators that the link that you are looking at is possibly a no follow or juiceless link: no follow page level, robots.txt and 302 redirection among others.

How does URL rewrites and 301 redirects work?

Basically URL rewrites are done if you change the way a URL is written so that the way it is displayed in your browser is also different. But you have to keep in mind that the code itself will not change, it will remain the same. On the other hand, a 301 redirect happens after you rewrite your URL and you have to make sure that your old URL will point to the new one by using a 301 redirect. Steps on how to make URL rewrites and 301 redirects are also given in this blog entry.

Best practices of SEO blogging

Some of the best practices of blogging for SEO are highlighted in this entry. Some of these include choosing one key phrase, using a key phrase as your title, creating and using relevant categories, paying attention to key phrase replacement, creating and following a linking strategy and creating new tags.

Effectively writing a PPC copy

The success of a PPC campaign is heavily dependent on the Ad copy that goes with it, due to this much attention is given to the writing part itself. Here are several factors that you need to remember if you are writing a PPC ad copy: there is not a lot of room for your message, the text chosen should be very relevant, performance tracking is important and the right response to data presented to you is needed. Furthermore, there are 4 types of ads that you can create and these are: Keyword Focused Headline, Dynamic Keyword Insertion, Ad Copy Q and A, and the Wild copy.

Adding elegance to Wordpress

Wordpress is a popular favorite among bloggers because it is very user-friendly which makes life easier for bloggers and SEO practitioners alike. One problem when a Google inquiry is done is that it reflects the same wordpress page twice, making the searcher doubtful in clicking both because it might mean duplicate content. So as a Wordpress user, what should you do? You can do the multiple loops approach as stated in this blog entry.

Black Hat SEO and Google

In this video taken from SES London, 50 participants were asked what should be done by Google to those sites which have Black Hat SEO. A lot of ideas were thrown in, including sending the Black Hat SEO to Australia among others.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

Affiliate Links and Ethics

A lot of ethical debate is spawning out of affiliate links being featured in blogs and Twitter. While some might argue that this is purely excusable because really, once you put up stuff in the internet, it’s free for everyone to copy or link to. But, some bloggers have been waging the ethical debate saying that if you want to copy a link and make it as one of your affiliates, you have to do so with the expected amount of transparency and exercise full disclosure over doing so.

New things at Google’s Searchology

During the past week, Google introduced 3-4 new things in its Searchology brand. These new inclusions in Google’s ever-popular search engine includes: having suggestions under the assumption that the user mistyped or misspelled what he wants to search for, having mid-page breaks of other suggestions and the ‘did you mean…’ line found on the top of the page if Google thinks that there’s a more correct term for what you typed.

Statistical research and local search rankings

A study done by Brian Carter involved taking top three keywords from his clients and entering them during the following factors: reviews, number of incidences, photos and videos, user content and webpages and for the destination URL Brian tested them out on the following criteria: inbound links, page rank, number of pages in a site and number of incidences of parts of keyword in homepage title tag. The results of his study are as follows: more reviews have better rankings, and the correlation between inbound links and number of pages in a site are very weak.

What all SEO Rocket Scientists should know…

These three things are: starting out with a plan, thinking like a buyer and breaking all the rules in SEO. Furthermore, the article gives more rules to be successful in the SEO game and these are: writing for the web isn’t as hard as it seems, some gurus are more interested in your money and not teaching you how to succeed, absorb what makes sense, read and just write. The last tip that the write gives is to just unplug it and take some well-deserved rest.

7 deadly sins of social media

This insightful article shares that there are seven deadly sins when it comes to social media. These seven sins are: vanity, envy, lust, anger, sloth and greed. In order to stop committing these seven deadly sins, you have to exercise the following; balance, connecting, generosity and transparency.

Free tools for your site

We all want to have everything’s that’s free. Fortunately, this also translates in the free tools that your site can use in order to make sure that you are in good company. The three tools mentioned in this site are: domain neighborhood checker, backlink history and checking top pages. The bottom line is that you should be able to find a good neighborhood for your site, so you should definitely stay away from bad neighborhoods in the internet.

Golden rules in link building

We all know that link building is one of the top priorities that you have in SEO. The popularity of link building was known to have been a cause of Google’s introduction of PageRank. The golden rules in link building as stated in this article are as follows: relevant page and in-content links, domain trust, natural anchor text distribution, nofollow, juicy page, don’t spam and don’t buy links for PageRank.

The relation between link building and picking up a girl

This funny article shows us the link between link building and picking up a girl. In line with this, it gives a crash course on the different aspects training a link builder. Furthermore, the link building approach is likened to a woman, under the following premises: it is entertaining and memorable and finding a golden link can be incredibly sexy.

Discounts and promotions in link building

The recession has hit even the SEO world as discounts and promotions are being offered up by sites who want their links to be advertised in another site. Some of the directories offering discounts are UK Small Business Directory, RubberStamped, Avia Directory, Greenstalk and Global-Weblinks among many others. If you want to score discounts in link building, this is the one article that you should check out.

One link building secret that no one listens to

A lot of link building how-to-lists have been populated over the years but this article shares an insightful take about one link building secret that no one listens to. The thing is the author gets asked a lot of times on the top secret when it comes to link building but the truth is, there are no secrets whatsoever.

Top Ten Items in SEO and Search Marketing

The connection between an IP address and SEO

The term IP addresses seems to be very intimidating especially if you don’t have a particular experience when it comes to web hosting. IP address is a specific location that is given to a website by its hosting company. IP addresses are unique just like any other normal home address or e-mail address that we have. This article tackles the influence that IP addresses have to SEO. It differs in whatever which way you choose to look at it, but it definitely has significant impact on SEO.

Internet Marketing Skills that should be natural to any expert

This article gives a rundown on the top 11 internet marketing skills that should be natural to any expert. These skills are: XHTML and CSS, Search engine optimization, Pay per click marketing, analysis, usability, complete sentences, RSS and feeds, blogging and media, e-mail marketing, Statistics 101 and Marketing.

The link between SEO and Social Media

The terms SEO and Social Media are sometimes used interchangeably. SEO is linked in social media in such a way that without social media sites, SEO will surely suffer. Getting links is important in SEO and this can be done through many social media sites. Through social media, the makers of SEO will know their target audience well through analysis of user behavior used by popular search engines.

Google and sitemaps

Google recently conducted and completed a study about sitemaps during the WWW 09 Conference held in Madrid. The study’s aim was to measure the extent of the use of sitemaps in Google. Some of the interesting facts lifted from the study are 35 millions sitemaps were built as of October 2008, these 35 million sitemaps have billions of URLs in them and most popular sitemaps use XML, Unknown, URL list, Atom and RSS.

Ways on how you can use Google Calendar as a Productivity tool

Google Calendar is useful enough as it is. But this article presents more ways on how this program can be used as a productivity tool. The ten ways highlighted in this site include: using Gears so you can use Google Calendar offline, integrate with Gmail, integrate with Facebook, get to know more features of this program like calendar notifier and the milk, use Google calendar beautifiers and alternative management.

 Updates on Google Adsense policies

Updates on the Google Adsense’s policies were introduced this week. Some of the additional policies include banning sites which are: pornographic in nature, uses mature and violent content, content which promotes racism, excessive profanity, stolen or hacked content, content with drugs or drug paraphernalia and sales of beer and tobacco among others.

A look at shortened URLs

This article tackles the rising popularity of programs which offer to make your URLs shorter. Thanks to the number of characters restriction in Twitter. If you are entertaining thoughts on shortening your URLs, this article suggests that you do it on your own instead of employing a program to do it for you.

Pitfalls of small business when it comes to making their website

The common pitfalls of small businesses when making their website are as follows: they hire cheap designers, they hire some unknown person they know to make the website, they reinvent the wheel on the navigation of their site, the website they make have identity crisis, no call to action, they are led to believe that their site can be the number one website, copy content from another site, not search engine friendly, excessive advertising, link out to everybody and poor domain choices.

Sites that Small Business should go into

Small business usually doesn’t have the capacity and budget to hire big and popular consultants to help them with their websites. Due to this a small business owner should be creative enough to think of ideas that he can use to help his website. Four top sites that small business owners can use to help them out are Yahoo Answers, Twitter, Wordpress and Flickr.

Sources of link intelligence

As SEO practitioners, we all know that links are very important in any site so that it can improve the rate of traffic to your site. It is important that you find sites in which you can get popular links to be used in your site. Different sources for link intelligence are: Google, Yahoo Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, SEOmoz Linkscape and Alexa among others.

Alternative Keyword Suggestion Tool

Keyword research is very important in SEO and this is the reason why a lot of keyword suggestion tools are very popular right now. One specific keyword tool is reviewed in this blog and that is Actual Keywords. It is a newly launched keyword tool which offers list of keyword phrases and full package for popular phrases, free of charge.