WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging and publishing system on the Internet. WordPress has a wide no no huge variety of plugins that gives sites a much needed boost in the search engine rankings.

WordPress performs really well when it comes to SEO and search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Out of the box, however, WordPress has a ton of duplicate content problems. For instance, if you’re not using excerpts on the home, tags, categories pages and you are displaying the entire post, that post is being shown not only on the homepage but also on the category, tags, and archives pages too. Google and other major search engines don’t think too highly of that and your search rankings will therefore suffer. Not to worry there are plenty of WP SEO plugins available to help you optimize your WP blog. Below are all the plugins, that I am aware of, that are aimed at improving WordPress SEO.

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Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn’t hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are my latest and greatest tips to get you started:

1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to. Due to Google’s aging delay for all new domains, your best bet is to use your existing domain/website if at all possible. If you’re redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect to wait a good 9-12 months before your site will show up in Google for any keyword phrases that are important to you.

1. Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their little search box. If those “someones” are typing in search words that relate to what your site offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience. You need to optimize your site to meet *their* needs. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide demographic information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

1. Research your keyword phrases extensively. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing data. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation,” as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about.

1. Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research. Your research may uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For instance, let’s say your site sells toys. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the toys they’re looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child’s stage of development? (Look for keyword phrases such as “preschool toys.”) Or are they more likely to be seeking specific brands of toys? Most likely, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in many different ways. Your job is to make sure that your site’s navigation showcases the various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific age ranges, specific types of toys, etc.

1. Program your site to be “crawler-friendly.” The search engines can’t fill out forms, can’t search your site, can’t read JavaScript links and menus, and can’t interpret graphics and Flash. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use these things on your site; you most certainly can! However, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to choose a category or a brand of something, the search engine crawlers will never find those resulting pages. You’ll need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you’ll need to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages. (Please note that HTML links do NOT have to be text-only links. There’s nothing wrong with graphical image navigation that is wrapped in standard <a href> tags, as the search engines can follow image links just fine.)

1. Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (aka alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (aka the anchor text) to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Don’t make them guess what’s at the other end with links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.

1. Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market’s needs, and make sure it’s copy that the search engines can “see.” This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. (This is where that target audience analysis comes in handy!) Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn’t going to cut it, and it just looks silly. (Purchase and read our Copywriting Combo for exact tips on how to implement this correctly.)

1. Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique Title tag. Title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with every search engine. Whatever keyword phrases you’ve written your copy around should also be used in your Title tag. Remember that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make sure that it accurately reflects the content of the page it’s on, while also using the keyword phrases people might be using at a search engine to find your stuff.

1. Make sure your site is “link-worthy.” Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site’s overall link popularity. You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anyone want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without your even asking. It’s fine to trade links; just make sure you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of related sites. When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

1. Don’t be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings. If you’ve done the above 9 things correctly, you will start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any specific keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. (You can sign up for a free trial of ClickTracks, which easily tracks and measures those things that truly matter.) It certainly won’t hurt to add new content to your site if it will really make your site more useful, but don’t simply add a load of fluff just for the sake of adding something. It really is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your products. Neither your site visitors nor the engines really give a hoot!

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it’s for your site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questíons:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffíc, more publicity etc.

2) What is the time-frame for this project?

3) What is the budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questíons will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.

Ready: How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?

Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site’s search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing.

I then provide a detailed report to potential clients with recommendations based on my findings. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible. It also helps marketing staff prove to an often stubborn programming department (or vice versa!) that SEO is necessary. You might consider preparing something similar for your site or clients.

Steady: Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client’s exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questíons answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScrípt, Flat HTML etc)

2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?” symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).

4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScrípt drop-down menus?

6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7) Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps ?

What is the current link popularity of the site?

9) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

10) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?

11) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

12) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

13) What are the site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

14) What are the site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

15) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?

16) Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

17) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

18) Do I have access to site traffíc logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

19) How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?

20) What are my/my client’s expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?

Answers to the first 10 questíons above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questíons BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questíons are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization project. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.

Go!

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You’re ready to tackle the job.

Following in the footsteps of Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki, I decided to come up with my own list of don’ts.

There is no shortage of don’ts when it comes to SEO copywriting. It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade. Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.

1. Don’t shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible.

It’s not about the sheer volume of search terms you include. Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about. Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher’s query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio. When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.

2. Don’t lose site of balance.

If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first.

However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance… always balance.

3. Don’t let someone else choose the keywords.

If keyword research isn’t a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research. Don’t just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way. Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically. Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.

4. Don’t sacrifice flow for numbers.

This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting. SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don’t work in a normal sentence. An example? “Candies samples free.” Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers. The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, “If you’re looking for candies samples free, you’ve come to the right place!” Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.

5. Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page.

If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don’t try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It’s a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.

6. Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page.

I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms. However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you’ve got a bunch of typos in the content. It’s just not professional. Some writers will go for the old, “We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town.” I don’t care for that approach. It’s just not natural. Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way? I think not.

7. Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time.

This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it. (See #4.) There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: “Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate. Hawaii listings can be…” See? “Real estate” is at the end of the first sentence and “Hawaii” is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there’s no problem.

8. Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation.

There are many ways in which this “don’t” applies. One quick example is that of an ecommerce site. It wouldn’t be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site. They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages. Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page. If you don’t understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you’re likely to have lackluster results.

9. Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes.

These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link. Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.

10. Don’t forget the chain of protocol.

There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Just the opposite, in fact. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn’t likely to do a lot of good. Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When you avoid making common mistakes, you’ll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.

Author: Karon Thackston

1. Write and submit articles. It is a classic, but it works. This will be indefinite traffic stuck in the search engines for you.

2. Write quality unique articles, not articles that are rehashed or provide no insight to readers, which is a huge problem these days. ..

3. Write and submit press releases, think prweb after you do one.

4. Write and ping blog entries. Always make sure to link back to your website with your blog posts. Try making multiple blogs and have them all link back to one main site.

5. Make sure your website is listed in DMOZ: http://dmoz.org/. .

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate categories at Craigslist. Try posting your ads in the most populated cities in the world.

7. If a niche related forum that you frequently visit allows signatures, then make sure to add your website url in there.

8. Make sure to view related products on Amazon.com. You can try and take some customers from your competitors here by providing your own url if the product is similar. Review websites in your niche on Alexa to try to take some of their traffic by including a reference back to your site.

9. Review some related products on epinion.

10. If you purchase a product that you actually like, then feel free to give an individual respect when respect is due and leave a testimonial. You should be able to get some traffic from that website if your testimonial is left with a url.

11. Whenever you send an email to someone, always add your website url as a signature.

12. Keep updating content on your websites/blogs… try at least once per week.

13. Tag blog posts at social bookmarking sites, especially at http://del.icio.us/. .

14. Add photos to your blog with appropriate keywords.

15. Tag blog photos at Flickr.

16. Politely ask your readers to subscribe to your rss feeds.

17. Try coining your own term. Might want to trademark it if you smell that it will become popular.

18. Encourage readers to comment on your blogs.

19. Include translation for your websites/blogs, especially in Chinese.

20. Do not be boring; write about something that a wide select of people would want to know about.

21. Make sure to edit your writing (unlike what I m doing).

22. Comment on other related blogs.

23. Make a custom 404-error page for your website. You can provide a link back to your main website or even try to monetize it by offering a related affiliate program within your niche.

24. Sponsor a charity, most charities will link back to your website, and you are also doing a good deed.

25. Sell an item on eBay as a charity auction. Most charities will link back to both your auction and your main website.

26. Start a publicity campaign, do something that individuals in your niche will take note of.

27. Brand your website with a logo and a slogan/catch phrase. Think IBM.

28. Hold a crazy contest that people in your niche will talk about. This will equal more links and traffic to your website.

29. Build a tool that individuals in your niche will love and enjoy. Then give it away for free. If the tool is helpful, then you will get quality one-way links to your website.

30. Contact small newsletters sources offline and submit articles to them.

31. Become friends with editors of an offline publication.

32. Give speeches offline. Start small and local. Also, do not forget to participate in toastmasters meetings in your area.

33. Have a GREAT product. All of the marketing/advertising in the world will do you NO good if your product is sub par.

34. Make something innovative. If you are selling information, what makes your content something you cannot get from the local bookstore, Barnes and noble or even eBay for that matter?

35. Is your product groundbreaking? Will you leave individuals with no choice but to talk about your product or service?

36. Are you selling something that wide groups of people want to know about but there is limited/scarce knowledge?

37. Write good content, if your writing is good then people will share it with their friends. In addition, webmasters will use it as content on their website with a reference back to your article, or at least they should.

38. Spark emotions. If you get people emotional about something then they will most likely talk about it.

39. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.

40. Build a list of subscribers. Your list is like a golden asset to you if utilized correctly.

41. Write tip articles, such as “Ten easy tips to blank-blank-blank.”

42. Buy traffic from the search engines by utilizing one of their PPC campaigns.

43. Open up a myspace account and find targeted friends so that you can promote your services to them. Do not spam people, myspace is cracking down on spammers and are starting to sue people.

44. Solicit a link from your local chamber of commerce.

45. Have an easy to remember domain name. If your domain name is too long or not memorable then people may forget your site.

46. Add a bookmark option to your website/blogs.

47. Purchase the misspelled versions of your domain name and have it redirect to your main one.

48. Use keywords in your image alt tags. For example, keywords go head

49. Make sure to include appropriate keywords in your title tag, search engines show more prominence or importance to keywords here.

50. Place appropriate keywords in your anchor text when linking.

51. If you have a profile anywhere online, always include appropriate keywords and link back to your website.

52. Try to get links from websites within your niche with a high pr (pagerank). Some The more one-way links (inbound links/backlinks) you have to your website, the higher your pr will become. Pagerank is important because websites with higher prs tend to have a higher search results in Google. It is a no brainier that if you can get number one for a competitive keyword then you will have enough traffic that you can handle… oh by the way its all free targeted traffic to remind you. ..

53. Outsource grunt work. Time is in essence money…. you can hire individuals at freelance services to send emails, request JV proposals, or to answer questions from prospective or current customers.

54. Offer something for FREE. Abracadabra is not the magic word, FREE is. It is like a worm on a pole for a fish in the water…. its bait! Offer a free mini course or free ebook to help collect more subscribers. You can always offer a backend to monetize on this opportunity, such as an affiliate product for example. .

55. After someone orders from you offer a one-time offer that compliments your product. For example, if I offered a traffic ebook, then after the individual purchase it would make sense for me to offer a traffic conversion bonus for a limited time only.

56. Become the virus within your niche. Make yourself the bug and have people talking about your product. When people talk about your product then you can induce the viral effect. However, you must give people a reason to talk about you, and being like everyone else is not one. ..

57. Do your research and find expensive niches to tap into. A good way to do this is to find how expensive someone is paying for a keyword on a PPC search engine. If you can sell items that are more expensive more often then it is a quicker way to get rich.

58. Become an active respected member of niche related forums. You can do this by offering quality posts. Hint, it is not the number of posts you make, it is the quality. Remember, quality or quantity. Many useless or negative posts will have people looking at you funny. .

59. Test, test, test. Your flushing money down the toilet if your not testing to see what campaigns are bringing you in the most money compared to which ones are costing you money. When you test, you can eliminate the campaigns that are costing you dollars so that you can properly maximize your marketing efforts. Without proper testing, you are pretty much lost and can’t improve. You can only guess to what has or what is working. With proper testing, you do not guess, you know.

60. Stay up to date on what is going on in the world, you can monetize off hot topic trends.

61. Network, when you know more people you can find people that can help you get what you need.

62. Offer an affiliate program for your product or service. Make sure to let your satisfied customers know that you have one, if they like your product then they will be even more delighted to know that they will get money for referring you.

63. Write and give away a free ebook or report. It does not have to be long as long as its quality information neatly formatted and put together. You can also make a brand able ebook or report and allow affiliates the opportunity to brand their affiliate links in there to pass on to the next individual. You can then send this ebook to your subscribers or submit it to ebook directories. ..

64. Add viral components to your blog such as social book marking options, and a refer a friend option.

65. Be funny, people like something that will make them laugh and they will spread it for you if it is a genius idea.

66. Syndicate your content by using an RSS feeds on your website.

67. Answer people’s questions on Yahoo! answers with a link to your website in the sources area.

68. Put a link in the “about me” section of your eBay profile.

69. Make and upload a viral video to you tube. Use appropriate keywords in the video description for your target audience.

70. Record an informative podcast and submit them to poplar podcast directories.

71. Provide helpful answers for Google adsense on their help forum with a link back to your website. Go here to check it out: http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help

72. Get people to comment and add content to your site. When they do this, they will provide you unique content, no need to pay for ghostwritten articles.

73. If you cannot get JVs, then try to bribe webmasters for sponsored advertising space on their newsletters.

74. Include a media section on your website so that you will give the media an easy way to stay up to date on what your company is doing.

75. Try to teach a class at your local community college or university. The more exposure you get in the public, the more credibility you will receive.

76. Make a screensaver and make it easy for individuals in your niche to download it. Have eye candy graphics combined with your company logo to brand yourself.

77. Write something controversial and spread it freely to your target market. It can be something as idiotic as the Da Vinci code, but as long people talk about it, its a successful campaign. A few hints, something controversial is something that goes against established beliefs in your market.

78. Write and publish a book. Having your own book is a quick way to gain credibility.

79. Take a guru in your niche out to lunch, and pay for it.

80. Start an organization or club about something. This can be done online through Yahoo! or Google groups.

81. Volunteer. Donate your time to a good clause…you can always network with people and form connections at the same time.

82. Get involved in your community and try to run some type of outreach program.

83. Offer good customer service, you may be surprised on how many referrals you get just be having a reliable one.

84. Consider adding a direct mail marketing campaign to your marketing ****nal.

85. Put an ad in your local yellow pages to get some local customers. Yellow pages tend to be more successful then newspaper ads because individuals are looking for a particular service when they are browsing through the yellow pages as opposed to newspapers.

86. Post bulletins in your local supermarket. However, since not everyone may carry a pen or pencil, place your contact information and url on strips on the bottom so that individuals can rip it off and take it with them.

87. Host your own commercial so you can put “as seen on TV” on your products.

88. Conduct surveys and publish them. These make you appear as an expert in your field of study.

89. Break a record or shoot to be in the Guinness world records for something.

90. Make a sitemap for your website.

91. Use a favicon for your site.

92. Make your visitors more involved in your website. You can help accomplish this by adding CGI scripts to your site.

93. Make sure you have no broken links on your site, and make sure that your website shows clearly in all browsers.

94. Find domain names that get traffic, purchase them, and have them redirect to your website.

95. Spell correctly whenever using keywords in writing.

96. Look at sites related to your niche to try to figure out how they get their traffic.

97. Properly optimize your website for the right keywords.

98. Try to avoid java scripts on your website as much as possible.

99. Do not use frames on your website.

100. If your website becomes popular and starts getting lots of traffic, try switching to a dedicated server. The longer you site is down equals the more lost visitors you will have

101. Accessible HTML is accessible to both search engine spiders and screen readers. The more accessible you make your pages, the easier it will be for search engines to read and rank your pages.

102. Even if you can’t get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.

103. Putting your keyword phrase in your domain name is a great way to optimize for that phrase.

104. While search engines won’t deliberately discriminate against a site that is down, if they can’t get to your URL because it’s down, they can’t index it. And if your site is down several times when the spider tries to access it, it could be flagged as gone, and then the spider won’t come at all. Find out from your hosting provider what their uptime rates are and what they guarantee. Less than 97-98% uptime is bad.

105. The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page. You shouldn’t try to optimize your entire site to one keyword phrase – instead focus on writing pages for specific keywords and phrases.

100 Hundred SEO tips and tricks you should and should not be doing on your Web pages to make them rank higher in search engines. This list looks at more than just meta tags and the basics of SEO, so even if you’ve got some of the factors, you may not have everything. Scroll to the end of the list to look at the things you should never be doing, as well as the things you should always do at the beginning.

Avid Szetela wrote a post on Search Engine Watch that discusses a PPC keyword matrix technique he calls “personas and buckets”.

Ken McGaffin wrote about basic keyword matrix technique for WordTracker in 2006.

Keyword matrix techniques have been around for a long time. When you deal with a lot of query data, organizing your terms into a matrix makes a lot of sense. Nonetheless, not everyone uses them outside of PPC marketing and there isn’t a lot of discussion about them even for PPC specialists.

Here are a few aspects of keyword matrix theory.

A matrix is an ordered list. Although a matrix can be comprised of a single vector (1,2,3,…) we usually think of them as 2-dimensional tables of data ((1,1),(1,2),(2,1),(2,2),…). A matrix is an array of n-dimensions. Most people limit their analytical work to 2 dimensions because that’s the easiest way to do analysis in a spreadsheet.

There are two types of matrices: passive matrices and active matrices.

A passive keyword matrix records data about keywords that other people use. For example, if you’re doing a competitive analysis you can build a matrix that maps which keywords your competitors are emphasizing on their pages. If you’re doing query research you can build a matrix that maps the keywords people use by month, search engine, or some other qualifying criteria.

An active keyword matrix is a design template. You use it to decide where you will optimize for specific keywords. You can organize the keywords by season, year, search engine, Web site, page, or even query space. You might define a working query space to consist of 200 related expressions. You could also call that a targeted query space or a query space segment — whatever you feel comfortable with.

PPC specialists use both passive keyword matrix and active keyword matrix analysis. Quite frankly, I’ve seen some keyword matrix work that makes my head spin. I don’t see how you can effectively manage a large PPC campaign without using keyword matrix techniques. But a lot of people get by on organic SEO without ever organizing their keyword data as efficiently as the PPC specialists.

If you’re planning a 10-page business brochure site (it sells nothing, provides no consumer engagement, and basically just creates an online imprint for a business’ brand), you can still benefit from working with a keyword matrix (actually, the more the merrier).

Let’s say your business site client is in a core production industry like oil well maintenance. Not too many people search for oil well maintenance services, but there are a lot of industries that have something to do with oil well maintenance: manufacturers, drillers, insurers, equipment transporters, mechanical engineers, etc. All of these industries may turn to the Web to find information for their own benefit.

Your 10-page oil well maintenance site can target relevant queries for all of those industries. You begin by creating a source matrix using all the keywords (jargon, product names, device names, part names, procedures, etc.) that are relevant to oil well maintenance. For each keyword you create a row of industry names where you know the word (or expression) is used in literature and normal discussion.

Example (for illustrative purposes only – these words may not really make sense):

mechanical grip — insurance – oil well maintenance – oil well design – oil well construction

top cranking — oil well operation – oil well installation – oil processing

You build the matrix to be as complex as your comfort level allows. It doesn’t do you any good to force yourself to strike for a level of detail that seems overwhelming. You can always start out simple and expand your research later after you figure out where you want to go with it.

Having created your core keyword list you now need to build two more lists: a query matrix and a content matrix. The query matrix shows you which of your core keywords people are searching for. The content matrix shows you which of your core keywords are being optimized. There is almost always, in every industry, a “sweet zone” where people are searching for stuff that hasn’t yet been optimized.

How do you determine if a keyword has been optimized? Use simple tests because most optimizers will cover the basics. Look for sites with keywords in titles and URLs. You can try inanchor searches but they produce inspecific results.

Although you certainly want to capture sweet zone traffic, there is no reason not to prioritize the optimized keywords because in SEO you definitely want to follow the money until you hit a glass wall. Just understand that some optimization is no longer necessary (the query space has evolved or the material is outdated), and that some optimization is put there as a smokescreen (a stealth SEO technique).

If you find a highly optimized set of sites that appear in one particular query for which there are few or no paid advertisements in the SERPs, ask yourself, “Is this normal? Should I expect so few ads for this query?” Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. You have to understand the market in order to know the right answer.

Anomalous search results pages aside, your keyword matrix work should now turn from documenting what people are searching for and optimizing for to what you’re going to build content for. Since your site is a 10-page business brochure site, your search optimization objective is to create visibility for your client in as many relevant queries as possible. Although the site doesn’t sell anything, putting the company’s name in front of insurance agents, oil well designers, drillers, and other people who may need to call upon a maintenance specialist should be the site’s primary Internet marketing goal.

Assuming your customer doesn’t have an esoteric objective in mind, you next need to allocate the target keywords across your content AND in your inbound link anchor text (if you’re going to complement the site design with a linking campaign, which many SEOs do). Depending on where you get your links you may need a high correlation between on-page use of keywords and use of keywords in link anchor text.

Although there is a fair amount of research and data entry, up until this point about 90% of your work should be mechanical and a bit mundane. You need to be creative when building your core keyword set but after that point the research guides you and you’re just entering data into a spreadsheet.

However, once you’re armed with your active keyword matrix that lays out where you will place the keywords you have to start working on the copy, the page design elements, and figuring out how to optimize a natural page for multiple keywords. Although a 10-page site may have the luxury of targeting no more than 2 expressions per page, I would regard that to be an inefficient and unambitious use of resources. There is no reason why you cannot optimize a page for 100 queries, although I would rarely see a need for that much complexity of body copy.

Just don’t lock yourself down into a “1-3 keyword per page” mindset. We tell people who are just starting out in SEO to follow that rule because it simplifies their task considerably. And to be honest if I were dealing with an eCommerce site I’d want to reduce the keyword complexity as much as possible. But if you need to squeeze 10 expressions onto a page, it’s doable. Just understand that you cannot always use titles and URLs for optimization so you need to know how to do it without relying upon titles and page URLs.

If you’re optimizing a page for 10 expressions, you’re going to focus on only 1 or 2 expressions in the page title and page URL. If you didn’t take my 20 hard core SEO tips seriously last year, now is the time to slap yourself on the head and say, “Doh!” Yeah, there are real-world applications for NOT optimizing through titles and page URLs.

Once you start working with keyword matrix data you’ll see whole new worlds of optimization opportunity open up for you. The mechanical process may seem a bit daunting. Your doubts may rise up and tell you that you’ll only create stilted, artificial, mechanistic copy. Maybe, but that’s a problem that’s easily cured by practice. Practice makes perfect. The more you write copy to keyword specifications, the better you become at placing keywords into pre-determined copy without losing the natural tone you need for good copy.

You’ll want to work with a good thesaurus and you’ll want to check your spreadsheet data from time to time while building the site. You may even want to invent your own scoring system to help you prioritize your selected keywords into “must achieve high results”, “probably can achieve high results”, “good to have high results”, and “would be nice but I won’t die if I don’t get high results”.

When you’re mapping your site you can use a keyword matrix to list all your titles, meta descriptions, keywords meta tags, page URLs, and Hx headers for every page. Some SEOs do this religiously. You certainly may find yourself doing it a lot if you work with large Web site clients who need clear and explicit direction on hundreds or thousands of pages (BTW — CHARGE ACCORDINGLY for that kind of detailed work — don’t give it away for free).

Chances are pretty good that you have been working with keyword matrices all along, but they’ve just been trapped in your head. When you start building the spreadsheets you’ll empower yourself to explore optimization in new directions you didn’t even know existed.

And if you’ve been using keyword matrix techniques all along, this is actually a topic where I think more online discussion would benefit the community. It’s a skill that should fall under open standards for SEO, in my opinion. So let’s talk about it some more down the road.

Author: Michael Martinez

Earlier this year I wrote a post about the stimulus package that passed Congress in February. I titled the post Government Stimulus Package because I thought the only thing it was stimulating was government. I got lucky with this, because apparently a lot of people searched for the phrase “government stimulus package” to learn about what was in it.

The post did ok on Digg and Reddit, nothing spectacular but it brought in some traffic. It may have gotten a few other links, but not a ton. A few days after the post was published, I noticed that I was getting some traffic the search engines. The post was on the front page of Google, around 6 or so for the keyword phrase “government stimulus package.” This is the first step in improving your SERPs.

Read Full Article…

Anyone interested in online marketing knows that web optimization is critical to a successful business. Web optimization comprises a number of different ideas, including search engine optimization, website analytics, and design factors, among many others.

However, optimization is more than just a standard set of practices. As every good interactive marketing agency knows, it is different for each business, and within each industry.

Those differences are one of the primary aspects that make ‘do-it-yourself’ optimization without an interactive marketing agency such a risky prospect. An interactive marketing agency keeps abreast of the ever-changing landscape in order to implement best practices to achieve good positioning and visibility for a website — they are also able to conduct in-depth research to understand what your competition is doing as well.

If you are learning from scratch and implementing as you go, you can be put at a disadvantage compared to competitors who hire professionals.

In this article, we’ll walk through some of the most common misconceptions about optimization. We’ll also look at what your company can do to see real optimization success.

Problem 1: Seeing Optimization as a Project With An “End Date”

Optimization, and online marketing in general, isn’t a destination. Rather, it’s a road, one that must be constantly traveled for optimal levels of success. There is no time when your optimization is “complete”, in fact, even once your initial online marketing plan sees success, there will be other ways that you can improve your online presence. The process can always be improved.

Problem 2: Not Planning For Optimization In The Long Run

Because online marketing is a process, wise companies will plan for optimization in the long run. Don’t think of it as a short-term investment, and don’t divert resources you are only comfortable diverting for a few weeks. Think about it more broadly, and give your optimization plan the time and support it needs to be successful. Like any company initiative, if the program is understaffed or underfunded, it won’t be able to thrive as it ought to.

Problem 3: Not Monitoring Progress

In the old days, it was next to impossible to know if your agency’s plan was doing the job. But now, tracking online marketing results are easy. Think of it like cooking: you have to test the food every so often to see how it’s going. If you need to make a change, you learn about it early on, and if the food is great, you know more about how to make it the next time around.

Web optimization is exactly the same way. Keeping track of what policies bring success and which don’t will help you in the short term and in the long term. You will have more to work with when you start additional campaigns, and you’ll have real results that you can point to. So much depends on customer preference, and only when you start to get a feel for that preference will you see the best outcomes.

Problem 4: Working Alone

It is the rare person who can successfully design and implement an online marketing optimization strategy without the help of an interactive marketing agency. Optimization is a very particular process, with a number of techniques and strategies to learn. Articles like this one can help, but it takes years of experience to become a real optimization expert.

Does it really make sense for you to spend your time learning, rather than hiring the expertise of an interactive marketing agency? In almost every case, focusing on what you do best – running your business – is the best idea.

Putting it All Together

Now you know some of the most common pitfalls that make optimization programs fail. Do any of them sound familiar? If so, then you’re now equipped with the knowledge to change the problem. You can start fresh, and get the optimization results you’re looking for. You might not see them overnight, but with time the effect will be noticeable.

Author: Christine O’Kelly

Too many SEOs focus all their efforts on Google search optimization. While that is bad for the industry overall (it makes us look unprofessional and ineffective), it does leave opportunities for people who want to bring more search referral traffic to their own sites.

2-dimensional SEO is search engine-specific. It doesn’t matter which search engine you’re focusing on (some people do focus on other search engines). You’re being 2-dimensional because your only looking at two vectors: the search engine’s algorithms and the query set for which you have targeted. When you expand your optimization to include more search engines you’re adding a third dimension to your SEO.

Here are a few tips for expanding your search space into 3-dimensions:

Track all the major search engines – Some SEOs do this as a means of looking comprehensive to their clients, but they don’t bother to research queries on more than one search engine. Hence, they often track non-performing queries on other search engines. You have to work with the demographics of each search engine and use its own keyword tools only to analyze its own market. Basing your 3-dimensional SEO on the Google keywords tool is a formula for failure.

Start using Quantcast, Compete, and Alexa services to analyze search engines. Ignore the number of estimated visits. Focus on when their peak periods are, who uses them, and what age/ethnic/income groups those search engines are popular with. If you can focus more of your content toward those groups you haven’t been serving, you should improve your referrals from the “weaker” search engines.

Use multiple tracking methods – Everyone has a favorite search metrics tool. All of them suck and none of them are any better than the others. Get your head out of Google Analytics and start learning some other tracking tools. Especially learn how to analyze server log files. You’ll learn more by using multiple metrics tools than by using one.

Pay special attention to long tail queries. Group them together so you can identify new query spaces that you have not previously optimized for. Break out your search referral data by search engine. And understand that Google Analytics does not accurately track search traffic. If you don’t get the real data from another source, you’re killing yourself.

Add site search from your weakest search engine – People use site search as a secondary navigational tool — on many sites (especially large content sites), people turn to site search first. If your site includes a lot of content in blog or forum posts the built-in search tools are completely inadequate. So put that third- or fourth-ranked search engine that constantly crawls your site to work and use it as a site search tool. Make the tool highly visible and easy to get to. Your referrals from Mr. 4th Place will increase dramatically overnight — literally overnight (unless you’ve foolishly prevented the search engine from indexing your content — many SEOs do make that mistake).

Use weaker search engines to feature query results in your copy – We all occasionally find the need to illustrate a point with search queries. The problem is that when you use the most heavily congested search results to illustrate a point, your point eventually becomes lost in the competitive shuffle. Make it a habit to include example queries in all your copy for your weaker search engines. Show people how visible your content is in search results that are favorable to you. If you’re concerned that they don’t look real because they lack advertising, buy some ads for those queries. The cost should be minimal until your competitors show up.

Leverage your microsites to help weaker search engines – I am not saying you should build microsites to strengthen other search engines. I am saying that — if you are already using microsites for valid marketing purposes — leverage them. Use alternative search engines as site search for the microsites. Embed links to queries on the weaker search engines that favor your content on the microsites. Use your microsites to openly endorse the weaker search engines. Teach people to use other search tools.

You can also leverage microsites by using them to focus on the different search markets. Optimizing a specific microsite for a specific search engine is okay provided you offer unique, relevant content. That is, don’t fall into the doorway site trap and just try to tweak your keywords for each search engine on engine-specific sites. Your microsites should be targeting audiences, not search engines.

In your offline marketing, wherever legal and appropriate, tell people they can use any search engine to find your brand. Your site should rank for your brand on all the major search engines. Mention all the search engines by name. Rotate them in your dialogue until you become comfortable naming any of the major search engines. Do this in your press releases, any interviews you give, any podcasts or broadcasts you participate in, any speeches you give, etc.

If you’re not seeing much traffic from search engines other than Google it’s not because they don’t send traffic to Web sites, it’s because you’re not optimizing for their search results. You have no idea of what you’ve been missing out on until you do it right. When you see that traffic come in, then you’ll understand that, yes, Virginia, there really are other search engines out there.

Written by Michael Martinez