Posted on December 28th, 2008 by DougBedell
Key SEO principles are nicely highlighted in a PC World Canada piece on the craft.
First, approximate tactics are the best that can be used to be congenial to search engines.
Second, pick keywords that people are using in searches. Use both the Google Keyword Tool and the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool for insights here.
Third, focus on title tags and URLs – Title tags are those at the top of each page of your site – and the tag for each page should be keyword-different.
Fourth, encourage links to your site from other sites. Consider using OnlyWire, which links to 20 social bookmarking sites with one…
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Posted on December 26th, 2008 by DougBedell
Paul Gillen’s take (in The New Influencers, A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media) on why blogs are so advantageous for small businesses: “It’s all; about search–Google and its competitors are the best thing that ever happened to small business. Companies that can’t afford to advertise can achieve international visibility in vertical disciplines through search performance….Blogs do exceptionally well on Google because of the search engine’s fondness for frequent updates and relevant page titles. A focused blog, podcast or videocast that stakes out an unclaimed niche in the market can come to dominate search resulots in a short time.…
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Posted on December 26th, 2008 by Jeff Cotrupe
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…
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Posted on December 24th, 2008 by DougBedell
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,…
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Posted on December 24th, 2008 by DougBedell
Search Engine Optimization reports that Google search results have now been optimized for the iPhone and G1 mobile devices. The revision avoids the need for zooming or sideways scrolling on the phones. Here’s a sample of what it looks like, courtesy of SEO: 
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Posted on December 24th, 2008 by DougBedell
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.”…
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Posted on December 24th, 2008 by DougBedell
Worio is a new engine that’s partly a social bookmarking site as well. It searches, in part, according to what other people have preferred in the same category. Sort of a search consensus builder. This is called “using recommendation techologies to improve the search experience.” 
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Posted on December 24th, 2008 by DougBedell
In another 2009 search prediction, this one from Bangalore, India, Dirhaj Sinha, of Perot Systems’ Application Solutions, says: “Serious effort to dislodge Google supremacy will be mounted - More serious competitors will emerge to Google even in its core search engine business. Search engines will innovate fast to become analytics tool and also use concepts of semantic web. Many of the not so successful Google ventures will get lot of attention and Google Chrome will continue to struggle against Microsoft Internet Explorer even in 2009.”
Dislodging Google? That would make 2009 epochal in search.
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Posted on December 24th, 2008 by DougBedell
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…
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Posted on December 23rd, 2008 by Jeff Cotrupe
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.…
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