SEO - Search Engine Optimization
What is Social Media Saying About You Today?
The title may ask an obvious question to search marketers but the reality is that most of your offline friends have very little clue as to what social media marketing, social media optimization and personal branding online are or why it is of any importance. Unless you are in a related vertical, or own/manage a website which is dependent on the traffic from online visitors, there is probably not much need to be well versed in these subjects.
What Your Mama Didn’t Tell You About Becoming an SEO Consultant
Miles Price from Search Engine Journal wrote a great article listing 10 tips for making it in the SEO community. It’s humorous, full of good SEO resources and pulls together tips and ideas for making a name for yourself in the SEO world. While aspiring to become an SEO guru, making the big money and getting your links on Search Engine Land regularly has to be on the mind of every SEO at some point, there is a lot more to the business than most people let on.
The Subjectivity of a Search Engine Marketing Recommendation
Or why good information can still lead to bad results
There’s clearly a difference between making a search engine marketing recommendation and implementing that recommendation, be it onpage search engine optimization, social media strategy, PPC ad copy, etc etc. Not only is the direct recommendation subject to varying degrees of interpretation, but so are the moving parts that are related.
A quick example:
- Create HTML Titles Tags with a Keyword Strategy In Mind
Let’s assume we’re targeting “holiday greeting cards” and “Christmas”
- What I envisioned: “Holiday Greeting Cards for the Christmas Season”
- What got created: “Holiday Greeting Cards, Christmas Greeting Cards, Holiday Cards for Christmas”
Recommendations for Cape Cod Businesses Assessing Their Search Marketing Strategy This Offseason
With the holiday weekend past us, dogs are once again allowed on Nauset Beach and most of the seasonal businesses on Cape Cod are assessing the success (or failure) of another tourist season on the Cape. Late fall and winter probably will get filled up with the obligations we’ve missed or delayed, preparation for the holidays and some time for business development. In addition to everything you’ll be doing offline, here are some recommendations for what you can do online, as it relates to the building your search engine marketing success for the Summer of 2008.
Your Path To Becoming an SEO Deity
I came across the SEOmoz Expert Quiz, testing your understanding of search engine optimization, and am happy to say that I can officially call myself an “SEO Master”. The quiz contains 75 questions and the percentage you get correct will rank you from SEO Novice all the way up to the SEO Deity status. Unfortunately, I kind of started to drift around question 50 or so (that’s my excuse for not achieving Godly status) and think the questions probably got more difficult as they went on, but I was definitely surprised at the diversity of questions and range of topics (it wasn’t your average 20 question free online quiz).
No One Will Know You’re a Leader If You Don’t Start Telling People
If you take a course in “Leadership”, you’ll have a round table discussion on the qualities of a “leader” and it’s highly unlikely that “self-promotion” and “personal marketing plan” will be traits that get brought up. But the context of most traditional leadership discussions are in relation to a immediate, micro-environment that you are working within or traditional, offline spheres of influence.
5 SEO-Related Blogs & Resources To Read and Why I Would Recommend Them
I had the opportunity to stop into the monthly meeting for the Cambridge SEO Meetup Group the other night and had an excellent time talking to other search engine marketing professionals, small business owners and folks generally interested in how SEO can become a component of their online marketing strategy. Among the questions and discussions brought up was the question on “what websites do you go to obtain search engine related information and resources?“. We ran out of time last night to really open that question up for discussion, so I thought I would provide my answer through this post.
Two Points of Reference Related to Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Glossaries
Search Engine Land recently published a quick post highlighting SEO and SEM Related Glossaries for marketers, website owners and anyone else interested in the world of search engines and search engine marketing.
- A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon, SEOmoz
- Search Engine Marketing Glossary of Terms, SEMPO
- SEO Glossary, WebmasterBrain
- SEO Terms Glossary – SEO Acronyms – SEO Abbreviations, SEO Consultants
- The Search Engine Marketing Glossary, SEO Book
- Search Glossary, Search Industry News (Seth is only 4 letters in as of the writing of this post, but he’ll get there soon – and he’s building a pretty nice reference list here)
Google’s Matt Cutts Talks About Web Address Management
Stephan Spencer reveals some key insights from Matt Cutts’ presentation at WordCamp 2007 last week in San Francisco on the CNET News Blog. One of the major points is that Google will begin to recognize underscores as word separators, which had not always been the case. That means that the usage of the term “search_engine_optimization” in a web address historically would not have been read by Google as “search engine optimization” (it would have been read as “searchengineoptimization”). Traditionally, incorporating hyphens in keyword specific terms is the SEO best practice for creating keyword sensitive web addresses. That being said, it’s unclear if Google is actually incorporating this functionality now, or in the near future, so I would still recommend using hyphens in the short term (if you are currently implementing keyword specific web addresses).
Evaluating Inbound Link Results in Search Engines
The creation of quality inbound links is the most important ingredient when it pertains to long-term search engine optimization success. The process for inbound link creation is a long-term commitment, which involves the creation of link-worthy content, effective link submissions and detailed documentation and reporting, among a series of other strategies and ideas (some good and some bad). As an ongoing practice, I recommend that website owners check their inbound links as recorded by the major search engines, in order to get a better understanding of what inbound links each search engine has found; but it’s important to realize that these queries may not always be accurate or up-to-date, so caution must be taken when evaluating this information.
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