A search engine optimization company can be very important when it comes to your internet marketing strategy. These companies specialize in knowing what to do to raise your search engine rankings and even monitoring those positions to make sure you have the desired results. SEO can be achieved on your own if you have the time to learn the process, otherwise it might be in your best interest to let an outside source take care of that for you. However, just like any other business, there are good companies that won’t take advantage of you and there are those that will. Knowing the right questions to ask and what to look for will help you to choose the right search engine optimization company.

When you look at different companies, consider the approach they use to raise your rankings in the search engines. If the company uses cloaked, doorway or bridge pages to raise your rankings, stay clear of them. This practice is called black hat SEO. These companies always loose in the end. In fact those techniques violate most search engine policy’s and will probably get your site removed from the search engines index.

Another important element is to try to get a guarantee that who ever you choose as your SEO company will not work with your competitors while they are working for you. This would compromise how effective of the search engine campaign is. Check the track record of the company you choose to work with. Try to verify that they can do exactly what they say they can do. sometimes you can run across a company that will slant their results in order to sell their service to you.

Ask the search engine optimization company what search engines they have achieved the best results on. Ask them what keywords they are claiming results for. If they are getting results for unpopular keywords, what good is that doing anyone. Its easy to get high rankings for unpopular keywords. If the company is any good at what they do, they will be able to tell you the best keywords to use to get the best results for your company. What you are looking for is great results using somewhat popular keywords. A great tool to use for this is the brainstorm It tool by SBI and also The Wordtracker tool. There is much more information on choosing a good search engine optimization company and search engine optimization in general on our website.

Best method is generating quality backlinks from the relevant websites or blogs quickly. There are many 3rd party websites that are offering to create websites or blogs on their sub-domains. Usually these domains have pretty good PR already.  Your websites will be approved straight away. Just create a website, post one or few articles and backlink to your main site with an appropriate anchor text. Job is done.

Good idea is to ping your newly created mini website with ping-o-matic or something similar. Then you can do some social bookmarking for each of these mini sites you’ve created.

Also quick and effective way to build quality backlinks is forum signature. Just find few forums that are relevant to your website and start contributing. Don’t forget to create a signature linking back to your site. Anchor text in this link should be the main keyword you are targeting. My advice is, don’t overdo with this method. You better don’t look like promoting something. Ask questions, answer questions - help people and generate quality and quick backlinks in the same time. Backlinks from relevant forums are very valuable. Google and Yahoo think that if someone is discussing your website on forums, then this website is important and may bring some value to the public

The Competition Is Fierce

These days, it’s almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you’re doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day and gone the next. The problem is magnified for new businesses and new websites. If your site isn’t at least a few years old, your SEO efforts will be less likely to provide the results you want. This is one reason why your website optimization should always be seen as a long-term proposition.

It’s About Targeted Traffic, Not Rankings

As we move forward in this industry, webmasters, site owners, and SEOs need to shift their focus from asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers. Unfortunately, a large portion of those looking into SEO services are still seeing the small picture. For instance, on the contact form on our High Rankings site, I ask people to tell me a little bit about their “business goals.” A good number who fill it out want something like “top-5 rankings in Google and Yahoo for this keyword.” Huh? That’s not a business goal! A business goal is more like “Bring more people to my website who are searching online for the types of products we sell.” (As a side note, soon after writing this, I got an email from someone whose goal was to have their Flash site be “#1 in all the search engines for the word ’spring.’” I kid you not!)

Don’t get me wrong, I very much understand why people would love to move their rankings up from #11 to #1 for a highly sought-after and targeted keyword phrase. I’m quite sure it would very much increase their targeted traffic and their sales (assuming they’re doing everything else right). My frustration lies in the fact that there are people who believe that somehow an SEO company can magically snap their fingers or wave their magic wand and make it so.

Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

Does this mean that SEO is dead?

Absolutely not! But SEO that focuses on rankings for the most highly sought-after keywords in any given space is most definitely dying. This doesn’t mean that you have to settle for keywords that receive few searches. It just means that you have to broaden your horizons and see the big picture.

Almost every time I review one of those “put me at #1″ prospects’ websites, I see tons of opportunities for fixing the site in general so that it will work better for both their users and the search engines. They are almost always so focused on their “money phrases” that they completely neglect many areas of their site. Instead they put their special phrase on every page and never research the thousands of others that are being typed into search engines every day.

Content for Content’s Sake

Another trend I’ve been seeing a lot lately is the creation of content simply for the sake of creating content. What’s that all about? SEOs certainly throw the words “good content” around a lot, but why is it that nobody seems to know what that means? We now have a whole cottage industry of companies who will allegedly write “good content” for you. Worse, there are even some that will *rent* you content! Newsflash…good content has nothing to do with the history of your products. Nor is good content a bunch of madlib spam pages where you simply substitute keyword phrases from one page into the other. Good content isn’t stuff you write for the search engines.

What Exactly Is Good Content?

Good content is unique. Really and truly unique. It is creative ideas that simply popped into your head which nobody else in your space has thought of yet. The key to good content is creativity. Unfortunately, creativity itself seems to be a dying art. Being creative isn’t looking at what your competitor is doing and copying them. It’s being a leader, not a follower. It’s having your own voice and your own opinions and expressing them, regardless of what others might think. It’s pouring your heart and soul into your website, not looking for the next quick fix. And it’s (say it with me) making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines. It’s what brings targeted traffic to our own site for thousands of phrases, and it’s what will help your site gain traffic for whatever phrases relate to it. But it’s not easy, and it’s not fast. And it can’t be done with the flick of a switch.

Determine Your True Goals

So please…if your pet phrase isn’t ranking highly enough, don’t call me and don’t email me. In fact, don’t call or email *any* SEO company. Instead of calling, you need to reassess your goals. No SEO company in the world will be able to help you unless you are ready to forget about what you think you want, and learn more about what you really need. Read that last sentence again until you really understand it. Forget about what you think you want, and learn more about what you really need.

Beware of SEO Companies Who Will Tell You What You Want to Hear

And remember, there are plenty of SEO companies that will say they can do whatever you want them to do. You want to be #1 for “spring”? Sure, no problem. They will happily take your money, do some work, and promptly get no results. Don’t blame them though – they were just telling you what you wanted to hear.

Why Google Engineers Once Pushed Nofollow PageRank Sculpting

Originally Google created rel=nofollow in what was claimed as an attempt to minimize the effects of blog comment spam on their search results. But the tag never decreased blog spam, it only decreased the ability of bloggers to influence search rankings by leaving back-scratching comments on each other’s blogs.

Matt Cutts quickly extended nofollow’s purpose to include use on paid text link ads as well. But given that Google AdWords sells links (and often to scammers) some people may have seen trade issues with forcing the new proprietary nofollow tag onto the web. Promoting PageRank sculpting gave Google a way to legitimize a tag which otherwise added no value to anyone except search companies.

After enough time passed and Google saw too much collateral damage popping up from rel=nofollow usage, they pulled the rug out from underneath it. Nofollow already had enough momentum, and was a functional part of the web. After a Google employee slipped nofollow into a working draft of the HTML 5 specifications it was time time to clean up the mess and inform SEOs about the nofollow change that happened over a year ago.

Some SEO Professionals Claimed Huge Benefits From PageRank Sculpting

Over the last year many SEOs have claimed that nofollow tests worked amazingly well which show up directly in the bottom line. And ironically, sharing/hyping this incorrect information worked well from a marketing perspective because…

What the SEOs were testing on their high profile public SEO websites was more a reflection of branding and marketing efforts. As they made noise in the marketplace their brand spread and that made more sales. We recently (maybe a month ago?) added nofollow to some links on our site, and we failed to see the lift that other SEOs claimed. And the SEOs that claimed to see the obvious huge amazing lift failed to report the drop off when Google changed how they handled nofollow, which sorta shows the error in the testing method.

Anchoring Keywords

You don’t want to anchor your links like a newbie. This a basic concept in SEO link building, yet it is often forgotten or misunderstood. The basic idea behind Google is that links provide votes for your site and the words used in that link describe your content to Google. So if you want Google to know you’re about “credit cards”, then people need to reference you with the keyword phrase “credit cards”. I’ve shown this before, but I think Allyn Hane does an amazing job explaining the basics of linking.

Anchor Text Distribution

If you site is about “credit cards”, you may be tempted to run out and  only get links for that exact phrase, but this is bad for two reasons.

1. Creates a “Google Bomb” from spamming the same anchor text, which may result in a penalty
2. Limits your optimization to one exact phrase

Too often people only worry about the Google Bomb aspect of spamming one phrase, but it is actually BAD SEO independent of the Google Bomb concept.

The success of SEO is rarely tied to the ranking for one specific phrase. Getting hung up on one phrase is a newbie mistake. Take some time to read my posts on longtail keywords and semantics for SEO.

As an SEO, I would rather rank in the top 5 for 300 different terms, than rank #1 for the best term in the niche. The first scenario would likely provide me more traffic and that traffic is more likely to be targeted.

You can relate anchor text distribution to the idea of keyword density. Instead of repeating one phrase, it is better to mix in multiple related and long tail variations of your keywords.

Examples of Anchor Variations

•    Justin’s blog about Credit Cards
•    Student credit cards
•    Compare credit cards
•    Credit cards for people with bad credit
•    Credit card guide

And yes, every single one of these phrases helps for the primary phrase “credit card”, but they have the added benefit of picking up phrases related to: student, compare, guide, bad, and bad credit. This helps us dramatically increase the number of phrases we can rank for, while also avoiding a Google bomb penalty.

A Natural Link Profile

You’ll see a lot of talk about “appearing natural” when building links. If you anchor your links in a predictable way, it becomes obvious that you have manipulated your link profile. Google hates link manipulation, so you want to stay under the radar.

A lot of people give Google too much credit and claim they have amazing detection techniques. I’ll agree that Google is great at detecting linking patterns, but there are a huge number of sites that get away with it. The problem isn’t if Google can detect it today, but if Google can detect it in two years. I see a lot of sites ranking that are obviously manipulating. The concern for them is that a Google algo update may wipe out their site. The SEO community has seen this multiple times.

To reduce your risk, it is valuable to build a profile that “appears” natural.

4 Most Common Anchors in a Natural Profile

1. Site Name
2. Site URL
3. Owner’s Name
4. Page Title

The majority of webmasters link to other sites with one of the 4 anchors above.

A Fairly Natural Link Profile

Ranked by number of anchors for each phrase

1. Justin’s Credit Card Guide
2. Credit Card Guide
3. Justin
4. Guide on Credit Cards
5. http://awesomecreditcardguide.com
6. Justin’s Credit Card Guides – Tips & Advice
7. Credit Cards
8. Credit Card Reviews
9. Student Credit Cards

A Link Profile That Is Not Natural

1. Credit Cards
2. Credit Card Reviews
3. Student Credit Cards
4. Bad Credit Credit Cards
5. Credit Card
6. Credit Card Guide
7. Compare Credit Cards
8. Justin’s Credit Card Guide
9. Justin’s Credit Card Guides – Tips & Advice
10. Justin
11. http://awesomecreditcardguide.com

So anchoring is important, but be cautious when you anchor your links, so that you do not over optimize your backlink profile.

Tips to Improve Your Anchor Distribution

1. Don’t anchor the exact match of your main keyword more than 25% of the time
2. Use your site title as the anchor periodically. (If you do your title right, this should still be a keyword anchored link)
3. Get people to keyword anchor when they reference your name.  Instead of “from Justin’s blog”, ask them to say “from Justin’s SEO blog”
4. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to identify related keywords and work through them as anchors
5. Focus on having a diverse mix of anchor text combinations instead of many links on a specific term
6. Do stuff so you actually earn real natural links (lol…gasp…). If you have natural links being produced, then you don’t have to worry as much about “appearing natural” when doing SEO because your natural links are already creating diversity for you and will mask your link building.

I hope this helps you guys when you’re getting anchored links for your site. I have many more post coming in the better backlinks series. If you’re interested in keeping up on these posts, I recommend subscribing.

Besides delivering a critical blow to competitive balance of two highly recognized and respected companies, it has inadvertently created a new form of optimization.

That’s right. PDF optimization.

The main technology that Adobe wanted from Macromedia was Flash. Now that they have it, they will be able to incorporate all the power of Flash into a PDF. With one fell swoop, they have changed the face of search engine optimization.

As a site owner, I can now potentially have my entire site reside within the content of a PDF. Sure, it was textually available before, but now I can even have compressed video, dynamically generated content and visually appealing content conveniently wrapped up into the web’s only cross-compatible portable platform.

No more worries about having a Flash player installed - that will be incorporated into the PDF reading software. No more worrying about needing Quicktime and Media Player versions of video clips. They’ll all be in Flash.

Not only is the PDF web friendly, but it is also PDA and Kiosk ready. Now content can be delivered anywhere to any device that can read a pdf. It can also be included on CD’s, DVD’s and even your cell phone.

From a user perspective, this is awesome. From a search engine perspective, it is great to push boundaries, but we may also see the end of optimizing for client sites, instead a client will pay a one-time fee to optimize a pdf.

Anyone who makes a living optimizing sites can see the potential loss of revenue as companies move forward and place their marketing efforts into promoting a pdf instead of a web site.

Why would a company not embrace this? While it’s a true a site like Amazon would not be able to take full advantage of this, they could embed pdf optimization for dvd’s and cd’s sent to your cell phone, based on previous selections you’ve made.

It’s a marketer’s dream, and it makes a buzz agent’s job even easier. Word of mouth marketing will be coupled with a portable demonstration of the product or service being sold.

While the general public may not become aware of this technology for a few years, those who reside on the cutting edge will find great ways to use this in promotion.

Now instead of just watching a movie trailer, you could also have the script, actor bios and studio contact information. Maybe even after the movie gets released, you could get your pdf updated with box office results.

The benefits of storing information in a pdf are huge. Instead of storing all of that information in a database, you have everything you need as a portable document. No worries about server stability, access to the database or even an internet connection.

By embracing this new development, it will be another service you can add to your seo repertoire and allow for your business to adapt to this emerging technology.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem - you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Most article marketing programs on the Internet are cost very little and are worth even less. There are several factors that distinguish our article marketing campaigns for you:

Quality information: Even thought we try to rely on you to provide the bulk of the information (who knows your business better than you?), we organize the information into an article that is useful or unique or both – something that people would want to read and that other webmasters would want to post on their websites, unlike the majority of drivel that passes for “content” in the article banks of the Internet. Here is a sample article. Here is another sample.

Correct writing: This probably would go without saying, except that the Internet article banks are full of poor spelling and incorrect grammar and word usage. Guess how many webmasters want to republish that trash?

SEO Optimization: Our articles are optimized for the search engines, to help your website rank better. A quick browse through the article banks, and you can see how few such articles actually are properly optimized.

Natural link-building: This is so important. You get to place a link in your articles…or more than one if you pay attention. We pay attention, not just to the number of links, but to the quality of links. The big challenge the search engines have is to weed out and discount automation from its rankings. We automation-proof your articles, so that they will stand up to whatever algorithm changes the search engines will undertake to devalue the links your competition are building through automation (or what might appear to be automatic submissions). The extra work involved in automation-proofing the submissions process is why we can’t – and won’t – compete on price. We believe that every penny you spend on those cheap article submission campaigns will be wasted in the long run. Your article marketing campaign for just $1000 with us will stand the test of time.

If like all websites, unless you are in the dark ages, you have images on your website then make them work for you. By editing the ‘ALT’ tag you can give the images a name which contains keywords so to be useful when search engines spiders trawl through your sites html code.

If your website was on classic car sales and you label your images as ‘car 1′ this will have very little impact for the spiders but if you try naming a picture of an Aston Martin as ‘classic Austin Martin’ this would only serve to help your sites rankings. But also important to naming your images is that not all visitors to your website will see it the same way that you see it on your screen. Some businesses and users do not view images on sites and turns those functions off.

By turning images off on their browser this allows for faster speeds when visiting sites and controls what employees can see. By giving ‘ALT’ names to images that say what they are you will enhance the visitors experience as well as helping to increase your ranking. When working with images on your website, you will need to optimise images either using a program like Photoshop or one online. When a visitor to your website has to wait for photos to load, they may quickly decide against waiting even one second longer. Remember, the longer it takes for a page to load the quicker the visitor will want to leave. Keep page loads within a few seconds if possible.

Now look at your website. Many web surfers will visit a website for only a few seconds before they make a decision of whether or not this site will have what they are looking for. Some surfers don’t even wait for the page to load before leaving a website. You need to give them a reason to stay by telling them the most important information in a quick and fast way.

Think of a newspaper, they can not tell you the whole of the newspaper on just the front page. They put headlines that guide you through the paper. These headlines grab your attention. This same process can be used for website optimisation. Try bullet pointing the information so visitors can quickly see what your site can offer them

Put navigation links on the bottom of your sites pages too. Very useful if you have pages where users need to scroll down a long ways.

Don’t add useless pages or extras that distract visitors and confuse them. Your website will be wanting to either get contact details or sell something. Having an about us page is nice to have but trust me these are very rarely if ever read. The same applies to scripts which are not necessary like background music or snow falling on the screen. Incredibly tacky and annoying for visitors.

As a professional designer for many years I know that flash websites are just not going to rank as well as their ‘html’ counterparts. The reason is rather simple, search engine spiders can’t trawl them as there is no code there for them to read. They are also looked upon rather unfavourably as not everyone can view them unless they download the plug ins necessary to view flash video. Although this is becoming more common and more and more people are downloading the plug ins, it just is not currently viewable by everyone as the standard ‘html’ websites are. It’s all looks but no substance.

Now we get onto keywords, the hot subject. Choose key phrases rather than individual words. Think what would people type to find your website. Ask friends & family too. If you sold cars in Kent, UK don’t choose ‘cars’ as a keyword, try ‘Kent secondhand cars’ or ‘car dealerships Kent’, about 10 to 13 key phrases are sufficient. Don’t keep repeating words over and over again. Also, unless you are a major corporation such as Nike or Xerox, you need not mention your companies actual name in the keyword or description tags.

The description tag should also contain some keywords in there and be about 25 - 30 words but don’t over do it. This description is important as it shows up in searches. This brings me onto the title of your pages. Don’t just say ‘Home’, put in a few keywords there too. This title tag is shown above the description text on search engines so write wisely. For a car dealership it would be more effective for a visitor to Goggle to see a title tag that says ‘Find second hand cars in Kent, everything from cars, 4×4’s, to trucks’ rather than ‘Dales Motors’. See what I mean, which would you click?

It is very important to make sure you do not have any ‘dead links’ or ‘broken links’ from your website either linking within your site or to another one. This infuriates visitors and does not look good when search engines come to dead links while trawling your website. Dreamweaver can check for broken links with it’s own software but there are many free online broken link checkers out there.

As we end this article on Optimising Your Website, I would like to remind you to keep your sites navigation simple and its purpose clear. Do not add useless extras which will only distract visitors and maybe even persuade them into not coming pack. Get your free ebooks here.

On their own, SEO and social media efforts offer companies attractive opportunities for reaching new customers, which is how many marketers implement them.

When you look at shifts in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing, there’s no arguing with the intersection of search and the social web.  Searchers expect to not only find what they’re looking for on search engines, but to interact with the results, whether it’s through commenting, voting or sharing. As a result, social media affects SEO in numerous ways, creating opportunities for marketers.

For a step by step guide on creating a Scial Media and SEO Roadmap, take a look at this recent article from Mashable. Below is a partial exceprt:

From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways:

First, implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

For example, the popular blog about student loans and college financing from Wells Fargo identifies 29 keywords in its Keyword Meta Tag and doesn’t rank in Google’s first page for 26 of them. Those that do rank are variations of the blog’s name.

While there is a generous amount of cross linking within posts, a basic blog template optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments could improve search traffic for this site substantially - without any compromise in content quality or user experience.

Social interactions and media sharing amongst social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts, or other media. A good example is Stormhoek wines’ first page Google rankings including blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

On the flip side, implementing SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social web participation makes link building for SEO an uphill battle. The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting & linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.

As an example, the famous Blendtec iPhone video which as received so much attention on social media sites, has attracted over 6,000 links resulting in a top ten ranking on Google for the word, “blender”.
Throwing keywords at social media tactics isn’t quite the same thing as developing and implementing a plan to reach specific goals.   Link drop social media tactics can have impact but are difficult to sustain. For long term value from effort, marketers should follow social media best practices as wel as the fundamentals:

1. Identify the specific audience they’re trying to reach - behaviors, preferences for content, sharing, media types, etc
2. Set specific goals and objectives that can be measured
3. Work out a strategy for reaching those goals with the intended audience
4. Figure out which mix of tactics will support and execute the game plan
5. Put proper measurement tools in place and identify what events and outcomes to analyze

For a step by step guide to creating a SEO Social Media Roadmap, check out the full article on Mashable, “Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success”.