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http://www.searchengineguide.com/jim-hedger/seo-101-basic.php

SEO 101 - Basic Optimization Techniques

Believe it or not, basic SEO is all about common sense and simplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible. It's really not that difficult.

How to do Keyword Research for Local Sites with AdWords Traffic Data

One of the problems with keyword research tools on the web like Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker is that their data is often unreliable, especially for low volume searches. How many times have you entered in a medium-tail keyword like “baltimore tanning”, only to be told that nobody ever searches on that term? Well I know that somebody out there is searching for tanning in Baltimore, they’re just not doing it in the right Meta engine or through the right ISP. If you’re an acupuncturist in Rockville, MD, how do you choose between targeting “acupuncture washington dc” and “acupuncture maryland”? Should you go after “acupuncture rockville md” or would it make more sense to target “acupuncture bethesda”? These results don’t tell us much.

“If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” While this classic parenting question is cliché, it makes a good point. And it’s one that search marketers could also learn from. Especially those who are thinking about eliminating brand keyword phrases from their paid search campaigns just because their competitors are doing it. According to a recent SEMPO report, search marketing investment is slated to grow to $19.3 billion dollars this year. That’s an increase of 16% — the largest increase since before the recession.

7 Reasons Why Nixing Branded Keywords Is Not The Fix For CPC Inflation

We all work hard at the SEO process - analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today's post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients. The list isn't completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don't personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/30-seo-bookmarklets-to-save-you-time#indexation

30 SEO Bookmarklets to Save You Time | SEOmoz

Earlier this week I spent a few days in Barbados as a guest of Global Directories where, along with Randy Orth & Vince Graziano of EM4B , we ran a local online marketing seminar for about 200 Barbadian businesses. As I went through my talk about how to get ranked for searches like “ Barbados car rental ” it occurred to me that emerging markets like Barbados are really interesting opportunities SEO-wise. It’s basically still 2005 down there: 3. Those that are doing SEO are using an offshore – and you can see their shores from pretty much everywhere – agency to do SEO and from the sounds of it are basically sending checks and not getting a lot of accountability in return. (damn, 2011 again)

SEO in Emerging Markets is Hot!

http://www.localseoguide.com/barbados-seo/

Having a search engine friendly website, a site with no barriers to the search engines is critical to success within “organic” search engine results. Here are some relatively simple SEO Site Review/Audit steps that should help you flush out the most important site wide issues within a small to mid size website. A SEO site review or audit should be conducted periodically; for example, a few weeks to months after a website is redesigned or after a major update, to allow enough time for the site to be fully re-indexed. Anytime organic search engine traffic takes a significant drop a SEO site review might help you determine the cause.

How To Improve Organic Search Results With A Simple Site Audit

When we search for websites to link to us, we often use inputs on Google in order to return results such as “KEYWORD resources”, “KEYWORD links” , or simply just “KEYWORD”. The problem with this process is that what we input is not what we are looking for. There is a fundamental disconnect between what SEOs frequently input into search engines for link prospecting and what results they actually want to see when they hit enter. These are frequently not the same thing. The reason is that Google doesn’t care that you want a link back to your site – Google cares about returning the results that are most relevant for your search query. Very often, keywords that are relevant for “KEYWORD” are not the same ones that will ever link back to your site.

Improve Your Link Prospecting With Reductive Queries

Google News: Too Much Formatting Can't Prevent Articles From Being Indexed

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-news-formatting-13001.html

I spotted an interesting thread at the Google News Help forum where one site was complaining their articles weren't being included in Google News and Google replied the reason was because some of the formatting tags weren't recognized. In reviewing your site, I found a couple of things that may be preventing our crawler from indexing your articles. In the HTML code of article pages, you use many formatting tags such as and that may cause problems for our crawler.

The holiday season is underway, and unfortunately many of us have waited for the last minute to attend to our SEO for the season. SEO for the holiday season really is best done in August, September or October. But what if you didn’t get to it this year? Is it too late?

Last Minute Holiday SEO Tactics

Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More

Last week, I covered a new command for the meta robots tag — one to prevent search engines from using Yahoo titles and descriptions. In doing that, a number of questions came up about the meta robots tag syntax itself. Google Webmaster Central has now posted “ Using the robots meta tag ,” providing some clarity from Google. In addition, both Yahoo and Microsoft have also sent me information on using the tag. I’ll run through what everyone says below, complete with charts for easy at-a-glance comparisons.

Writing HTML Title Tags For Humans, Google & Bing

I generally enjoy John Gruber’s writings, but today he’s dishing out SEO advice about HTML title tags. Some of it is bad advice. So with respect, here’s how I’d suggest you write page titles in a way that can please search engines and humans alike.

blockquote, cite and q Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

and tags have to do with citations within your web pages. They are used by those webmasters and SEO who want to play fair with search engines (indicating where they borrowed content from) and with the authors from which the content was borrowed (passing link juice). Well, we all know that things are not going like these nowadays, content scrappers and site cloners are spreading like wildfire, RSS syndication, blog farming and splogs are shitty tactics for long term results.

(I got my power back!) Before I start collecting feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, I want to talk a little bit about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc. so that we’re all on the same page. Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway? A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.

SEO advice: url canonicalization

A Link Building Blueprint: Utility Linking

Almost every SEO I know spent the better part of last week discussing recent changes Google made to its ranking algorithm. This update hit some webmasters hard while others went unscathed, and results still seem to be settling out. Nothing I’m working on was impacted (knock wood) probably because I tend to use a wide variety of linking tactics over a broad spectrum of sites. I think it makes a lot of sense to diversify my linking efforts, if any of my partner sites are dinged in an update, I’ll be fine since I have a lot of additional links out there working for me. This week’s blueprint tactic is known as “utility linking”, it’s a great way to increase your backlinks and help insulate your pages from algo shifts. (Previous article: A Link Building Blueprint: The Foundation .)

When you write a monthly column on how mobile impacts search and social, it can be easy to forget that most businesses still aren’t thinking about mobile as something that impacts them today, and aren’t really planning for a future in which most of our online activity will take place on mobile devices . For the few businesses that are taking advantage of mobile today, and not waiting until doing so is mission critical, it might not seem like much of a problem, especially when the competition has yet to catch up. Yet, when I talk to providers of the tools we all use and ask them about features to track the impact of mobile on search and social revenue, I often hear that the market isn’t yet asking for these innovations.