And, if you’re planning to attend Search Engine Strategies in New York next month, be sure to stop in on the workshop that Mary will be teaching, A Crash Course in Local Search, on Friday the 22nd.

Thanks, Mary!

New White Paper Released- SEO for Wordpress Blogs

1. Make sure the engines can see your content. The simplest way to do this is to use your web browser to view > source. Do you see your content in the code? More than 2 or 3 times in the last few months I’ve had people ask me to take a look at their site and I’ve found that the entire site was nothing more than images or was completely constructed in frames. If you view the source of your site and don’t see your page copy, neither can the search engines. Also, make sure you’re using keyword phrases that users are actually searching for in your page copy. To help figure out what those keywords are, visit: freekeywords.wordtracker.com.
2. Rewrite your title tags. The title tags on your site serve two purposes. One is to help the engines know what your pages are about, the other is to encourage users to click on your listing in the search engine results. Write a unique title tag for each page of your site that includes one or two of those keywords from step one. In fact, use that keyword first in your title and stick your company name at the end (unless you’re specifically targeting your company/brand name). Keep titles to around 70 characters. Send that list to your web developer or update them yourself, but make sure each page has a title that is unique to its content and assures users that your site is what they are looking for when they see it in their results.
3. Get more incoming links. Link building is a discipline in and of its own. Very simply put, you need quality incoming links to your site in order to obtain top rankings. To start ask friends to link to your site, next ask strangers to link to your site. Don’t spam strangers (or friends!), ask them nicely to trade or add a link to your site because you have complementary businesses or content. Join the chamber of commerce to get a link from their member directory. Put out your press releases through PRWeb or send them to bloggers and publishers of newsletters in your industry. There are hundreds of ways to build links, if you commit a few hours to it every week you will soon be reaping the rewards.

There you have it. Just a few simple steps that anyone can do to help their search engine rankings. Again, you won’t replace a search engine marketing expert with these, but they may help you get to the place where you can afford to hire one…

Robin Liss

Robin gave a highly informative presentation of content production for the web. She used a beautiful manufacturing analogy to illustrate her points. To summarize, she informed us that creating quality content is like manufacturing any product. As a manufacturing endeavor, both the quality of your end product and the efficiency of getting it to market depends heavily on the process you use to get there.

Robin is founder of Reviewed.com, a network of independent product review sites, including CamcorderInfo.com and DigitalCameraInfo.com. Her sites are known for their high journalistic quality, their stringent independence of thought and for meticulously sticking to a consumer advocacy mindset.

I was impressed with the discipline and attention to detail that Robin’s company brings to the content they put on the web. Not only does Robin understand the process to drive a piece of content from Assignment to Research, Research to First Draft, Draft to Edit and down the pipeline to a finished, ready for web document. She also has an expert grasp of the economics of this kind of endeavor. By meticulously tracking each step of the process, Robin insists you can arrive at a very accurate understanding of the resources necessary to keep your content pipeline full, whether you want to generate one or two quality articles and postings a week or ten million words of high-quality, valuable content per year.

Robin Liss is a bright light, and I was personally very impressed with and appreciative of her insights.

Michael Stebbins

Some people impress you by their breadth of knowledge and marketing acumen. Some people impress you with their generosity of mind and their willingness to share what they know in order to raise the overall level of our craft to new heights. In Michael Stebbins PubCon presentations, I was impressed with both. Clearly Michael and his colleagues at MarketMotive are doing excellent research, which benefits both their clients and the rest of the web marketing profession. His willingness to share key insights in a plain and easily executed manner is quite refreshing, and I really appreciated Michael Stebbins’s contribution to the conference.

I had a chance to visit with Michael at one of the cocktail receptions, and he is also a hell of a good guy.

Ted Ulle

Talk about a veteran of SEO and someone with a fantastic ability to convey in a clear manner the importance of adhering to sound Information Architecture and Design principles.

Ted encouraged and argued strongly that folks interested in creating websites should look at key resources from Information Architecture and print typography to gain an understanding of the appropriate methods of organizing and semantically categorizing information and for displaying the written word. As always, content is king, but Ted Ulle adds the important caveat that content is king, if and only if users can navigate and find your high-quality content and search engines can crawl and index your content appropriately.

Take a hard look at your design process was Ted’s big message that resonated with me. Consider the purpose of your website and of most websites. You are trying to provide valuable information to a user, or you want them to trust you enough to make a purchase from your company instead of a dozen other options. You are presenting your content to those users, one way or another. The way you organize and structure your website and its pages effects both the end-user’s ability to find what he or she wants and the ability of the search engines to appropriately identify, crawl, and index what is most important and meaningful about your site.

ALL aspects of your Information Architecture, Graphic Design, and coding should support the proper organization and display of your content. Page navigation, headers, sub-headers, internal page linking structure, and graphical page elements all need to support the user’s ability to quickly find what he needs and take the appropriate action to get from first step to final step in a logical and intuitive manner.

I was very impressed with Ted Ulle’s undeniable expertise in his profession, but I was more impressed with his ability to convey his wisdom in a largely unequivocal and authoritative way backed up by clear examples of why and how this matters.

And I have to say that I also appreciated Ted’s very humorous cautionary tales about things as simple as your site’s error messages. They’re important, and if your IT geeks wrote them, please review them today!

I wanted to call these three indivuals out in the marketing community. I learned a lot. I appreciate their contributions to our profession.

Patrick Soch
Marketing Manager
www.eBags.com

Here are a few of the general SEO items that Spencer notes:

• Underscores in URLs are now seen as word separators, just as hyphens have always been.
• Keep query parameters in the URLs to no more than 2 or 3 and Google will treat your URL the same as a static one.
• Directory depth of your pages does not matter to Google.
• Page file extensions don’t affect your rankings.  Do avoid using .EXE, however.

To read Spencer’s entire piece:

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Not using Google Sitemaps? Here are some reasons why you should be.

Here is the link to the tool:

Unlimited XML, Text, HTML Sitemap Generator – XML Sitemaps
*note: I’m in no way associated with this company or their products.

This is important information to consider when coming up with keywords to target for your search engine optimization campaign. One word keywords are also usually the most competitive too. So, the point is, don’t waste a lot of time trying to get a top placement for “travel” when it’s searched for less and has much more competition (Google currently has over 3 billion pages indexed for “travel”).

A better strategy would be to target 10 (or 20 or 100) two to four keyword phrases that more accurately describe your product, then create additional content to cover those terms. Your chances of a top ranking go up and you’ll be appealing to a wide range of searchers who are looking specifically for what you are offering.

Here is the breakdown according to OneStat’s data. The 7 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:

July 2006
1. 2 word phrases 28.91%
2. 3 word phrase 27.85%
3. 4 word phrases 17.11%
4. 1 word phrases 11.43%
5. 5 word phrases 8.25%
6. 6 word phrases 3.68%
7. 7 word phrases 1.59%

The data is also broken down by country. Most of the countries have similar search behavior with the exception being Germany. Germans seem to be stuck on shorter search terms with 28.89% searching for one word terms and just over 40% searching for two word terms. I wonder why the big difference… Any ideas?

OneStat.com – Press Box

There’s so much free search engine marketing info, both natural and paid, on the web via newsletters, blogs, etc. that I usually don’t find it necessary to pay for informational products related to SEO.

Tools are another matter; for instance, Word Tracker is well worth the $254 yearly fee. However, for most industry information, I’ve found that reading newsletters, blogs, and occasionally browsing the forums keeps me in tune with what’s current in the industry.

If search is not the main focus of your job though, keeping up can may be a daunting task. If that’s you, here is a short blogroll (list) of the search and/or marketing blogs that I currently follow:

Bloglines Blogroll

There are thousands more, but this selection has a good mix of authoritative voices as well as others who closely follow the industry and post on what’s being discussed. If you would like the OPML file for these feeds so that you can track them yourself or add them to your feed reader, you can find it here: www.bloglines.com/public/aarondalrymple – choose the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom of the left hand column to add it to your own RSS reader.If you feel the need to pay for a subscription, you should check out Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News, it may be the closest to a “one-stop” resource available:
www.searchenginenews.com

In the past week I’ve also run across two fantastic, free, in-depth guides on search marketing. One focuses on natural search and one on paid search marketing.

Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing – DM News

Defining Search Engine Relevancy – SEO Book.com

As far as forums, there are two that I actively troll. I’m not a big poster to the forums, I did for a while but it takes too much valuable time and sucks me into too many of the debates/arguments that seem to dominate the boards at times. If you need some info you can’t find anywhere else, though, you can usually find an answer in the forums. Just make sure you use the forums search function first and only post a new thread if you can’t find it already discussed. If not you will be nailed by the forum junkies that insist on taking time to tell you that you’re wasting their time by posting a question that has already been answered.

Here are the two I watch:

webmasterworld

searchenginewatch

Have a great 4th of July!

• How do I move my site to a new domain and keep my search engine rankings in tact?
• I’m going to take down some old pages/sites, will this affect my rankings?
• I’m redesigning my website and my directory and/or page names are changing, will the engines just point to the new pages?
• How can I tell the engines to send all my traffic to my home page?

There are answers to these questions, but first I usually say something like, “Are you sure you want to do that?” The reason I ask is that often times the pages or sites that the company wants to get rid of are older pages that have great link reputation and are well “aged” in the engines – they get crawled a lot, have a high Page Rank, etc. Plus, more content is usually better; can the pages be repurposed?

After assessing the need for getting rid of pages or moving domains or changing the page/directory structure (which are all valid and necessary in a lot of cases), using a 301 redirect is usually the answer. A 301 redirect won’t get you in trouble with the search engines as some redirects, like a meta-tag refresh, can. It tells the engine that a page has permanently moved and asks if it would please start indexing the new page in its place. It’s the safest way to change page names, domains, directories, etc. when changing these elements of your website. If you’re deleting an old mini-site or set of pages, you should consider redirecting each page you’re deleting to a similar page on your new or main site.

The next question is, naturally, “how do I do that?”

Here are some good sources that I’ve com across recently on redirects, 301s and how to implement them:

Steve Hargrove – How to redirect a web page, the smart way - added 6/20 

Wikipedia – URL redirection

TamingTheBeast.net – Giving search engine spiders direction

SEOBook – .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy

Bruce Clay, Inc. – Sorting out Redirects

Link Building Guide