I’m a visual person so this easily qualifies as one of the better practical explanations for how SEO works and how you can start using it today. If you’re a relative newcomer to the world of SEO, take a look at this diagram created by Aaron Wall at SEO Book:
[full flowchart]
26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
Basic SEO advice: Submit your site to the search engines, but don’t stop there. Submitting your site to Google, Yahoo et. al. won’t hurt, but it won’t do much good either. Like a handshake, it’s what follows that counts. Search engine spiders still have to crawl your site for it to be included in the search indexes. (When you enter a query, it’s compared to an index of the Web, not the Web itself.) And you get spiders’ attention by having simply designed, content-focused pages. If you don’t submit your site, they’ll likely crawl it anyway. So focus on optimization,…
It helps every so often to repeat that designing a site for optimized search results means keeping the design clean and simple. Here’s another blog post making that point. Nothing fancy, limited graphics, attention to content. Insuring that keywords reflect content on each page. (Consider them virtually as separate pages for seo purposes.)
“Search engine optimization at its heart is simple and clean. Don’t worry so much about the scary technical stuff if you’re just starting out. Start slowly, read, learn, read some more. Most of all, be patient with yourself. Learning search engine optimization takes time, just like any other subject.”…
Digital Response Media quotes a blog post on developments in search engine marketing likely in 2009. One that resonates strongly with me is, “Natural search will also evolve to become more about optimising a company’s web presence across a range of social media sites rather than simply tweaking the firm’s own website.”
It will always be important to optimize your home site (not just home page) for effective search results. But, for me, 2008 has been “the year of Twitter.” I’ve only been tweeting for a few months, but already I’ve seen an amazing impact in having my presence out there on social…
JEFF COTRUPE
I just launched a new site for my business. Same domain, http://marketpowerLLC.com, but anyone who saw the old site may not even recognize us as the same company today. In planning the launch I realized one of the first things I look for as a site visitor is a search capability. Not of the whole web; I can get to Google or Yahoo! via my own bookmarks, thank you, and I never understand companies who provide web search but no search of their own site. Or, as is still the case at a surprising number of sites: No search at all.…
It might seem elementary, but this is a good reminder for anyone who is thinking about site design and good SEO practices: tables for layout affect your SEO efforts.
Tables are so 1998, right? Everyone uses stylesheets now, don’t they? Unfortunately, not. I’ve been around enough web platforms to see that some still continue to base their architecture around table structures. And then when you try to perform SEO on top of that it makes you wonder just how effective those practices are in the end.
If you happen to work with a web service that continues to live in tables or…
Blogger Steve Rubel is upset at what he sees as “the sorry state of Blog Search Engines.” He lists seven of them – Technorati, Google Blog Search, Twingly, Sphere, IceRocket, BlogPulse and Ask.com – and gives his dismayed take on each. These may be far from conclusive findings, but they’re interesting reflections, especially when Steve says of IceRocket “This might be the true dark horse. It’s slowly been improving and it’s got a spiffy new design…”
In his excellent 2007 book on social media, The New Influencers, A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media, Paul Gillen cites veteran PR executive and blogger Katie Paine on how to measure the return from a minimal investment (except maybe for time) in a blog associated with your business. 
In addition to possible media coverage of your blog posts, says Gillen, inspired by Paine, “…consider the value of search, a source of free exposure that many marketers still discount. Internet users conduct more than 50 million searches every day. Search engines love frequently updated information, and that’s one reason blogs…
Here, from Resource Nation, are ten more tips for website design for legitimate SEO benefits. 
