Dave Davies wrote a 10-step search engine optimization process in 2004 that consisted of the following steps:

1. Keyword Selection
2. Content Creation
3. Site Structure
4. Optimization
5. Internal Linking
6. Human Testing
7. Submissions
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras (all those things that didn’t fit in the first 9 steps)

He recently updated his list and now it looks like this:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competition Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

I like the update for several reasons. First, competitive analysis needs to be right up there at the top, near the beginning of the process. In his first list, Davies didn’t even include that, possibly because in 2004 most industries didn’t have a lot of competition. From this point forward, though, most businesses going online will have a lot of competition, and most of it will be stiff. Competitive analysis is very important.

I also like the addition of PPC, statistics analysis, and conversion “optimization” (though “tracking” may be a better word) to the list. But I’m not sure I like social media being where it is and I’m definitely sure I don’t like content optimization following site structure.

To me, content optimization (aka creation) is a part of site structure. In some ways, I understand why you need to structure your site before you create the content, but it’s also a repetitive process that you will come back to. You have to make sure that any new content you develop down the road conforms to your site structure so be sure you’re planning for the long term.

Link building and social media go a little bit hand in hand. But I think you need to specify what you mean exactly by social media. Does it include bookmarking and blogging? If not, it should. Or maybe blogging should be in its own category. I would definitely include blogging as a part of my overall strategy, but you can fit it into link building as well as social media. In fact, a lot of these categories flow into each other and are difficult to define.

If I were to create a list, it would look like this:

1. Keyword Analysis
2. Competitive Research
3. Keyword Selection
4. Website Template Design
5. Content Creation/Site Structure Tweaks
6. Article Marketing and Blogging
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Other Link Building Activities
9. PPC/Other Online Advertising
10. Analytics
11. Conversion Tracking & Optimization
12. Maintenance

I’d be anxious to see what the process looks like in five years.

Google Maps now has a new search feature. When you land on the Google Maps page you’ll see the usual set up, but if you look to the right of the search button there’s a link. It says “Show search options” and a drop down box appears. Click on it and it says “Hide search options.”

In the drop down box you’ll see four options:

• Everything
• Location
• Businesses
• User-Generated Content

These are interesting choices. A search for York County, Pa. (history buffs will know this is where the U.S. Constitution was signed) under “Everything” will bring up several choices as wide and varied as you can imagine:

• harley davidson
• giant
• memorial hospital
• york hospital
• yorktowne hotel
• bae
• sheetz
• marcello’s
• wellspan
• manor care

These choices appear as links. Click a link and you’re taken to a page that shows all the locations for that entry in Google Maps and pinpoints on the map showing those locations. That’s a useful tool.

Add one of those business names to the “york county pa” distinction and search under Locations. You’ll get exactly what you asked for: A list of locations for that business within York County, Pa. It’s just as if you were searching for the same item under “Find Businesses.”

The interesting way to search is under “User-Generated Content.” When you create a search under that criteria you’ll get a list of choices under Community Maps, and new Google Maps feature that allows content creators to collaborate.

Google Maps’ new features should enhance the user experience. Try it out and see how you can use it for your business.

For the past year-and-a-half about all you’ve heard is social media, social media, social media. Either it’s StumbleUpon, or it’s Facebook, or it’s Digg. Now it’s MySpace.

The once wacky hangout for high school kids with nothing better to do is now developing its own development center. The strange this is that back in November of last year MySpace and Google announced that they were partnering in a join social application called OpenSocial. With MySpace stretching out to improve its social networking capabilities and partnering with Google - in fact, all the search engines now seem to be interested in social media of some kind - it only makes sense that the search engines and the popular social media sites will start figuring out ways to work together to increase member benefits and improve user experience. The big question is what will that look like?

Google now owns YouTube. Yahoo! owns del.icio.us. MSN adCenter is partnering with the Wall Street Journal. Ask has 3D. Google has universal search. The race is on to get social media and search engine optimization mixed together in some fashion.

If natural language search ever catches on, and I think it’s just a matter of time, then I say watch out. Web 3.0 will be at our doorsteps before we can say Google. I’m already all google-eyed over it.

If you redesign a web page and change its URL, you’ll need to perform a 301 redirect so that you don’t lose any search engine rankings. To do that you need to access or .htaccess file or create one. If you use a CMS, this may pose a challenge for you. If possible, contact the company that manufactured your CMS and ask them if they can help you with a 301 redirect. If you can make an .htaccess file then you can make sure traffic to your old page URL is transferred to the new page URL with no issues.

To create a new .htaccess file, you’ll need to open Notepad and save it as a blank page with the name .htaccess. Make sure nothing follows the final s. There is no extension to the file name. It has to be .htaccess. Otherwise, browsers and search bots won’t be able to read it.

If there is already an existing .htaccess file on your server then download it to your desktop so you can work on it. Add the following code to the file:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

Change old/old to the name of the page that are you moving. In other words, if your domain is www.mydomain.com and the specific page you are moving to a new URL is /thispage/thispage.html then /thispage/thispage.html is what you need to put right after redirect 301. The same thing goes for you and new. You is your domain name and new is the name of the new page.

Put that code at the very end of any other code in the .htaccess file. Be sure to skip a line before you add it. Then save the new .htaccess file to your desktop and upload it to your server. Be sure to run a test by typing in the old page URL into your browser and watch to see if you are taken to the new page.

If you haven’t heard yet, Sam’s Club, owned by Wal-Mart, is now offering search engine optimization and SEM services to its small business customers. This is no joke. Besides website hosting and design services, Sam’s Club is also offering pay per click management and search engine optimization. The pay per click services start at $50 per month “for any budget.” That’s funny because most pay per click services run 15%-25% of your budget, which means on a $200 per month budget you’ll be paying $30-$50. But that’s the low end of Sam’s Club’s PPC management service, and remember, Sam’s Club is a wholesale club for small businesses. Some wholesale.

Another interesting tidbit: Their SEO service actually claims to provide you the benefit of hand submissions to all the major search engines. It’s like Sam’s Club took a Wayback Machine to 1995 and decided to go online. No one does hand submissions any more. Search engines have robots that crawl your website and all you have to do is build one. Either Sam’s Club executives don’t know that or they are planning to bilk their customers of their hard earned money.

A word to the wise: Don’t shop at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club for your Internet services. Not SEO. Not PPC. Not hosting. Not web design. Seek a specialist. You’ll likely get the services cheaper and get higher quality. Go figure.

Google has announced new experimental views:

• Map View
• Timeline View
• Info View

I must confess. The timeline view isn’t exactly what I expected. From the Official Google Blog:

Timeline view does the same thing as map view, but for dates found on the web. This includes dates of upcoming or historic events, or even biographical information — all generated automatically from your search results.

In other words, you can search a timeline of your particular query. If you are doing research on corporate tort law, for instance, then you can search a timeline of relevant events related to that topic. That’s a useful search tool, I admit. But what I would consider just as useful, or even more useful, is the ability to filter search results by time of publication. If when making the same search on corporate tort law, I find that a post regarding an important historical development was made in August 2003 and it appears too high in the search for my tastes, I can search for results that were made more recently. So if I only want blog and website content searches related to corporate tort law dated from January 2006 to present then I can make that specific query and the search engines would return a SERP with results that meet that criteria. Then I’d like to have the ability to organize those search results by time or relevance.

I can see a time when such searches are possible. But for now, I guess we’ll have to settle for the timeline view.

(Kelsey Group) So what are these search engine optimization tactics? One example some clever SMBs (and search engine marketers) have started to use is to have the video on their Web sites linked to the same video that has been uploaded to YouTube. When Google sees that the copy and tags surrounding the video are the same as the corresponding video on YouTube, it will rank the video highly as part of its general favorability of YouTube content. Clever.

Brilliant post on The Kelsey Group blog. I was just thinking myself earlier today about new ways to optimize video for the coming search explosion.

If you’re not up on it yet, the search engines are gearing up for the expansion and growth of video search. Ask calls their package Ask 3D, Google calls it Universal. What it’s called, the idea is to return results for searchers that do more than just list links. You’ll also get a list of relevant photos, videos, and other types of content. This should make video marketing a much more powerful medium than it is now.

Savvy search engine optimization experts will have to devise a strategy for marketing their businesses through video. They’ll have to think outside the proverbial box and beyond the shores of YouTube and Google Video. Chances are, Google (if none of the other search engines) has already thought ahead on this one. What will video marketing look like?

I think the above solution presented by the The Kelsey Group is on the right track. I also think that niche video sites will begin to spring up within the next year or so. YouTube and Google Video will get saturated with videos on every imaginable topic. And you’ll see many more videos on other websites as well, including traditional company websites, blog directories, and article directories. But how will they be search engine optimized?

This is really a problem for the search engines and the question should be styled, “How will they be indexed?” Will YouTube continue to enjoy top rankings while everyone else plays second fiddle, only to see prominent rankings when YouTube can’t muster the search juice? Will YouTube enjoy top rankings for the same video that exists on another website even if that other video was there first? Webmasters will want to rank higher for the videos if they exist on their own websites. But that will depend partly on their ability to search engine optimize the videos properly. Linking to YouTube may be a temporary solution, but it won’t last long term. The question is, what will replace that practice?

People don’t read online. They scan. Sometimes gravitate. I swear, one time I think I saw a searcher float, but she was drinking.

OK, all jokes aside, people don’t read your web pages. They either scan them - if they’re scannable, or leave. Only some of your scanners will actually stop and read something if its piques their interest. Otherwise, they scan and move on.

So how do you gather their interest? Well, first, you have to attract them to your page - either through a well optimized pay per click campaign or a well optimized organic search listing. Let’s assume organic for a moment.

You first need to make sure that your page title is optimized and says exactly what you need it to say to get the click. Remember, your searcher is on the SERP at this point and has not even been to your web page. You must get them there. You have two tools:

• Page Title
• Page Description

Your page title should use your keyword and say exactly what users will find on your page in a way that doesn’t bore them stiff. Succinct is the key idea. Your page description should be a little longer, not much, and achieve the same purpose. Searchers will use these two items to make a decision as to whether they should visit your site or not, and you have about five seconds to get their attention.

Assuming they click on your link and visit your web page, what will they find? Here’s what they should find:

1. A well optimized, attention-getting headline, very visible, at the top of the page
2. Several subheads spaced far enough apart down the page that scanning by scrolling is easy; and it would help to have each subhead optimized with your keyword
3. Bullet points; ordered and unordered lists make scanning easier and give your readers a synopsized view of your points, allowing them to see at a glance what you consider important (make sure these are optimized with keywords)
4. Information of special importance should be called out and shown its level of importance with block quotes, bold, larger font, font colors, and italics; these elements should be used sparingly, but used effectively can make your web pages more attractive and give your readers something to scan aside from your main body text

Don’t just give your readers information to read: Give them well optimized web pages they can scan. Readers who want more information can go back over the finer points and read the full page after they’ve had a chance to scan it.

One could get the impression by reading some commentary on keywords and SEO that the most important aspect of a web page is keyword usage. Don’t be fooled, keywords are important, but let’s not inflate their importance.

What’s really important in SEO is that you convey a sense of language and stick to an original idea expressed in a unique fashion. SEO is more than keywords and links, although it does utilize both. Keywords are important, but so many SEOs rely on keyword stuffing and too much importance on keywords will lead to their overuse.

That’s why I always recommend one or two rewrites of a web page before you settle on it. Write your web page with all of your keywords in tact first. Put as many keywords in there as possible. Write for the keyword so that you get it in as many times as you can. On the second rewrite, go back through and see where you can take a keyword and change it to something else without changing the meaning of the text. You don’t want to do that too many times or you’ll strip your content of all of your keywords, but you do want to do it enough so that your content is not keyword dependent. The idea is to convey useful information to your readership. Make your content interesting for human readers first and keyword-rich for spiders second.

Some WordPress bloggers, I’ve discovered, try to take their limited knowledge of HTML and apply it to their blogs. You can’t do that. The reason is real simple: You aren’t building a web page.

If you want to build web pages, that’s fine. Do it in a text editor and ftp it. WordPress was not designed for that. You can build really cool web pages in WordPress, but not in HTML. All you have to do is create a page and start typing. WordPress does the rest. That’s the beauty of the software program.

That said, there are some limited HTML code that you can use to enhance your blog posts. Even then, WordPress has tag icons that you can click on for most of them:

• b for bold
• i for italics
• link for hyperlink
• b-quote for block quote
• img for inserting an image from another place online
• ul for unordered list
• ol for ordered list
• li for list time
• more for creating jumps

All you have to do to use any of these icons is highlight the text you want it to apply to and click the icon. You’ll get bold text or a hyperlink, or whatever it was you were trying to create. Other tags you can use for which there are no buttons include:

• p align=”right” or “left” for text or images you want aligned and wrapped a certain way
• center is a tag you can use to center photos and text
• strike is a tag you can use to strike through certain words, like this
• u is the code for underlining a word

Beyond these, there are certain tag attributes that you can use as a part of your tag and code strategy. Title attributes, target=”new” for opening a link in a new page, height and width dimensions for graphics, and other similar attributes that you can add on to your tags are acceptable. You can even create tables as long as you don’t get too complex with your codes. But that’s about it. There aren’t a lot of other HTML options for you.

WordPress does not play well with CSS, Javascript, DIV tags, and other languages. Don’t even try it. You could screw up your templates and wreak havoc in other ways if you try to do too much coding. WordPress already has all the code it needs to translate your simple text into great web pages.

For more tips and rock solid information on writing and maintaining a blog, go visit Brick Marketing’s blog service page.

I read so much that I forgot exactly where I read this this morning, but I did read somewhere that technical SEO was going to die. SEO of the future, the bloggers point was, is going to include marketing tactics and strategies. I would argue that it already does.

This morning’s SEOJ post discussed this in part. Many new SEOs focus a great deal on keyword writing and links. What they fail to see is that SEO also incorporates a certain level of selling. Your website must sell. If it doesn’t then you are wasting your efforts.

Here are some helpful tips to ensure that the website copy, the SEO, does more than just filter keywords onto your page, but actually does something on the sort of selling your business, product, or service:

• Plan your site architecture before you start (which pages will link to which other pages?)
• Write each web page with a goal in mind
• Every web page should have a call to action - what do you want the reader to do?
• Use trigger words - people purchase emotionally and justify their purchases with logic; therefore, appeal to their emotions with trigger words
• When possible, fuse your important keywords and trigger words into one
• Use color, bold and italics, links, photos, and other page design elements intelligently
• Grab your visitors’ attention and keep it
• Sell the benefits, not the features

It would help if the person writing your website copy studies more than just SEO. They should also study sales techniques. They need to understand what makes people buy. When they can do that then they write a web page that sells.

Does your SEO know how to sell? Can he put together a marketing plan for your website? These are skills that more and more SEOs will have to learn in order to be more competitive. Soon, SEOs who know how to SEO a web page, but they don’t know how to use that web page to sell a product, will fall out of fashion. In essence, your website is a sales brochure. Either it converts traffic into money for you, or it’s useless.

SEO is fine and dandy. Yes, you should write your content so that you rank well for your key terms, but does it make much of a difference if you get tons of traffic and no sales? It should.

Unless your website is an AdSense site, you’ll want people to buy your product or service. To get them to do that online, you’ll need to sell them on it, and that means you’re going to have to learn how to write sales copy. That’s what a website is. It’s sales copy that is SEOd. Sales copy that is written in such a way to attract human buyers and search robots.

The fundamental truth to all web writing, and too many SEOs forget this, is to write to two audiences: human visitors and spiders. You’ve got to feed both targets what they want. If you don’t, you’re just writing hack content that isn’t worth the bits and bytes it’s printed on.

Rand Fishkin stared something he calls “Whiteboard Fridays.” I think he’s trying to compete with Matt Cutts. Whatever his motive, though, I think his videos are pretty cool. He has one for today and I’ve got to admit, for a pretty basic understanding of search engines, he gets right down to the brass tacks.

The score of his feature film is Technologic by Daft Punk (great selection, Rand!). Rand takes the whiteboard and explains in easy-to-understand, very simple language, just what happens when searchers create a search query as well as the kind of information they need to have on hand before addressing the query.

The video is very, very basic so if you know this information already then don’t bother, unless you just want to see Rand’s whiteboard use the ‘F’ word. But if you don’t have a clue and you really want to know how search engines catalog information and what they do with it when you search for information, well, Rand’s the man. Watch the video here.

So far it’s just a rumor, but WebProNews is saying that Google is considering a move that will restrict sites less than 5 days old from publishing AdSense ads. I think that would be a good move.

Google has always maintained that it’s function is to keep the search results pure. Well, that isn’t happening, and domain tasting is one reason why.

Domain tasting is the practice of purchasing a domain name for the purpose of testing its ability to earn income by throwing AdSense ads on it. Domain tasters will place ads on new domains within that five-day period and if they make enough money to make it worth their while then, and only then, will they keep the domain for long-term sustainability. If the domain name fails to meet their test for income potential then they drop it. Current rules for domain name registration allow purchasers a five-day grace period in making a decision to keep a domain. That means, effectively, that domain tasters can invest in new domains with “no money down.” If a domain isn’t any good, they’ve invested nothing but the time it takes to throw up AdSense ads and drive traffic to the site.

The practice is controversial and has drawn the ire of many legitimate content producers. If Google does pass the measure it would mean a loss of revenue for the search giant, although a relatively small loss compared to its entire asset portfolio. I for one believe Google should stop funding domain tasters and further would encourage the company to stop allowing AdSense to run on web pages that contain no original content.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with SEO, consider this: It gives love a bad name.

I kept an eye on the SEMMYs to see if I might have magically been teleported from unknown status to finalist, but to no avail. I wasn’t there.

Nevertheless, there is some great material that made the finalists of the newborn SEMMY awards. In the SEO category, you have the following content titles:

• “Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 2″ by Rand Fishkin
• “Five Reasons To Aim Low When You’re Just Learning SEO” by Jennifer Laycock
• “Advanced Keyword Research - The power of understanding your visitors” by Hamlet Batista
• “SEO Linking Gotchas Even The SEOs Make” by Andy Beard
• “Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact” by Stephan Spencer

In the Online Marketing/General category, the following titles were selected as finalists:

• “17 New Rules For Successful E-Commerce Websites” by Rand Fishkin
• “Why Testimonials Do (And Don’t) Work” by Holly Buchanan
• “How A Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away” by Bryan Eisenberg
• “See With Web Designer Eyes - 9 Evident Errors” by Miriam Ellis
• “58 of the World’s Greatest Offers (4 Part Series)” by Dean Rieck
• “5 Things People Want To See Before The Sale” by Mason Hipp

In the Search Tech category, the finalists are:

• “What To Look For In A SEO Friendly E-Commerce Application” by David Wallace
• “Which Is Better For SEO: Shared Or Dedicated IPs” by Lisa Barone
• “When Choosing An eCommerce System, Remember The Search Engines” by Bill Slawski

Reputation Management finalists include:

• “Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Tools You Must Have” by Andy Beal
• “Own Your Google Reputation With These Ten Suggestions” by Andy Beal
• “Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation” by David Wallace

The Link Building finalists are:

• “Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide To Linkbaiting And Social Media Marketing” by Andy Hagan
• “The Paid Links Economy” by Philipp Lenssen
• “The Relevant Link Myth” by Michael Martinez
• “Revisiting Your Linking Strategies For A Link Health Check” by Jennifer Slegg
• “Help! I’m New, I Need Links, What Can I Do?” by Debra Mastaler
• “Revealing Your Competitor’s FULL External Relevance Profile - One Of My Best Kept Secrets” by Hamlet Batista

This is just a small sampling of the articles available in the SEMMY awards. You’re encouraged to vote on them, evidently. It looks like users like you and me will be picking the winners. There are real gems here, I must admit. Enjoy! Now I’ve got a lot of reading to do.