One of the key components of a search engine ranking is the number of quality pages that link back to your pages. Gaining organic links can be slow and relies on the goodwill of visitors to your site. One search engine optimization strategy is to request links from sites associated with your industry. Overall the best approach to link building is taking a blended and natural approach. While I do not recommend link exchange as a major part of link building, from time to time it may make sense as a small part of your overall link growth. When client’s ask me about this I normally say link exchanging is something that used to work well 4 years ago, but is not as effective these days.

There is no shame in requesting links with other websites that you have established a solid business relationship with. In fact it makes good business sense. If, for example, you sell printer ink cartridges, it would make sense to contact printer sellers, paper sellers and other allied businesses requesting a link to your pages - perhaps in exchange for a link from one of your pages. Because these businesses relate to your business and you have established a relationship with them means the search engine optimization value of these links is far greater than many of the organic links you may receive.

Requesting a link can be a fairly straightforward process. However Eric Ward wrote a telling post on Search Engine Land called the ‘Link Building Kiss Of Death‘ which details some of the right and wrong ways to send link requests. The post provides a good insight in how to enhance your search engine optimization link building program through link requests.

One paragraph struck a particular chord that I think should be taken further, if it is on a slightly different tangent. The basic premise of the article is that most web site owners, when looking for contact details, simply stick with admin@ or contact@ email addresses - addresses he labels the ‘kiss of death’. The paragraph stated:

Where this is leading is that it was apparent to me that whoever was in charge of this client’s link building at the keyboard level was lazy. That or not as sophisticated as they want to believe.

To extend on this paragraphs note, if you can do some research to find more direct or personal email addresses then you are more likely to first, have your email read and secondly, have someone act on it. The key is finding out who would be the best person to send the email to. But if you have a business relationship with a company, it makes it that much easier.

You could send the email to the site or business owner, however I believe this could also be a ‘kiss of death’ email. Link building is not just a SEO strategy, it can also be a marketing strategy. Where ever possible the two individuals who are ‘in a position of influence’ are the web page caretaker and the individual responsible for marketing.

Finding out who these people are and addressing your emails directly to them will result in far more success than just emailing admin@ or contact@. How do you find this information? Two possible avenues; do a site search to see if the details are listed; or pick up the phone and ask for the people responsible - talk to them and get their email addresses. Chances are they will respect you more for taking the time to contact them directly.

If you can spend a little longer planning your link request campaign you will find the results far more rewarding and the search engine optimization benefits far outweighing a quick email to admin, or filling in an online contact form…or give a call to your contact and set up the link!

Rumors have been around for months regarding Google’s possible acquisition of popular bookmarking site Digg. They resurfaced again this week, this time without any denials or comments from either party. If Google does acquire Digg, will it have an effect on search engine optimization strategies, past, present or future?

Digg has become quite a ‘clicky’ site. Either you are ‘in’ or you are not with the majority of users not ‘in’. If you are regular user of Digg you will notice that many of items that make the front page come from a small group. Perhaps a Google acquisition may resolve that little issue. However the bigger issue is whether or not SEO, and in particular, search engine rankings are going to be effected.

Will Google place a greater emphasis on pages bookmarked on Digg, particularly those that make the front page? Google is already toying with a voting system for search results so a marriage with Digg could see the Digg ‘votes’ being displayed as part of the search results.

I mentioned in an earlier post that perhaps we should change the name from search engine optimization to ‘search optimizers‘ as we now seem to spend as much time using some social sites to promote pages and gather backlinks.

Where I think a Google acquisition may hurt social media marketing due to the inside knowledge that they will have. Google will have a better idea of who are ’spamming’ the social bookmarking sites and perhaps discount links flowing from these sites. There is little doubt that Google uses the information gained from Feedburner. Digg seems the next logical step in their empire building.

Ultimately, Google wont spend a reported $200 million on a site like Digg unless they can see a clear way to get a return. Returns, whilst generally measured in dollar terms, can be also be measured in data and how much extra information they can acquire to help with their search results. Will it have a major impact on the search engine optimization industry? In the short term probably not. In the long term, that is a different question that only time will tell.

Does size matter? Will a site with 1000 pages rank better than a site with 100 pages? Not only that, what about content? Is 500 words better than 250 or 1000? We get questions about all the time and this one seems to crop up frequently.

The best way to answer a question such as this is to clarify errors in the question first. The biggest error; pages are indexed and ranked - not sites. With that answer the first question then becomes moot. Search engine optimization is done page by page. A site is just a collection of pages that generally share a common base URL.

The second question regarding the number of words is just as easy to explain. Search engine are looking for content that is in the first instance, unique. Secondly, they are looking for content that contains keywords on which to base their indexing. Search engine optimization is about steering the search engines towards our preferred keywords.

With that in mind, the number of words again becomes irrelevant. If a search engine can determine the value of 250 words then it will. Likewise with 500 or even 5000. What should be considered when it comes to content is the reader. Most users in this day and age want a quick fix. They are looking for quick answers. Search engine optimization helps in this area too by turning what could be droll content into easily scanned content that provides the user with answers.

The bottom line, size does not matter. What matters is unique content that provides value to visitors. Search engine optimization fine tunes the content and the page to help search engines index that page where we want to see it indexed. Otherwise the search engine would need to guess at where to place it.

One of the best ways to increase content is through a blog. A short carefully worded post every day is going to generate over 300 pages per year - that’s allowing for the occasional day off. Posting content alone is not enough; each blog post is a page and requires a search engine optimization program like any other page on your site.

Unlike normal web pages, blog posts are easier to create and do not require extensive knowledge of HTML to create a search engine friendly page. All that is requires is a blog application such as WordPress. However, each post still needs to include several SEO elements to help it rank.

Assuming you have done your homework and developed a list of keywords and keyword phrases, all that is left is to optimize those keywords for the search engines.

Title: Try to work a keyword or keyword phrase into the title. It also helps to place the keyword as close to the start of the title as possible.

Content: From a search engine optimization perspective, you should scatter keywords or keyword phrases throughout the post. From the readers perspective, keep it natural, don’t stuff a keyword in where it doesn’t fit the flow of the sentence. How many times? There is no hard and fast rule as to how many times you use the keyword. General consensus: Once in the first paragraph, as close to the beginning as possible; once in the last paragraph, as close to the end as possible; and once in paragraph - if it fits naturally.

URL: There are blog plugins for WordPress that enable you to craft the URL. Try to include the keyword or keyword phrase into the URL.

Tags: Whilst tags may not help your search engine optimization efforts directly, they may have an indirect effect as social media sites such as Technorati often rely on tags.

Description: Another blog plugin can help provide a description for the page’s meta tags. This is the snippet that may appear in the search engine results so word it in such a way that it draws the user to your site.

These are fairly easy steps to undertake and only take a minute or two to complete prior to publishing your post. The effect is similar to a standard web page that has been optimized. The finished result will have unique meta tags for that page followed by keyword rich content.

To put the final polish to your post’s search engine optimization strategy for your blog, use keywords to link both internally and externally to information that is relevant to the post’s content. Encourage a good range of inbound links and your page will start to rank well. How well? It depends on the competition and your use of keywords.

The search engines aggravate us a little from time to time; different search engines at different times for different reasons. However the one point it all proves is that your search engine optimization strategies need to target all search engines.

A member (trillianjedi) wrote a post reporting the state of his site. It had a PR5 and ranked at number one - even though the site had been dead for four months. Yes you read right - after four months of dead pages, the site still ranked at number one. Top search engine optimization program obviously. However the statement that tweaked my interest was:

Anyone landing on my site in the last 4 months would be greatly disappointed. In Google as much as me.

And they are right on both points - their reputation would not be enhanced and if they ever get the site back on line may struggle to get those visitors back. Google’s own reputation - well do they really care?

A second member reported their site as dead for 12 months and still ranking number one. I can understand a dead site still ranking for a period of time. However if the spiders are registering site problems over a period of time you would think the algorithms would drop those pages from the SERP’s until they were successfully spidered again.

There are two other issues to this problem. The first is a growing distrust of search results which could eventually impact on the activities of SEO consultants. If Google starts to lose credibility it may spread across all search engines. Users will start to use alternative methods to find the information they require.

The second issue that affects SEO experts is the trading of high ranking domain names. The domains are traded and not the content. This means you can effectively start your business with a well ranked site; this is fine if the domain name has been optimized and is used as a search term. Pages that are missing however, will require redirecting to a landing page, this may not meet with approval from the user.

Google is the one search engine that constantly talks about providing what the users want. We are technically supposed to create sites and content for the user - not the search engine. While spouting this philosophy, they themselves are serving up blank pages in the search results???

Finding the right and most relevant keyword phrases that users are going to enter in as search terms can be one of the hardest tasks when it comes to search engine optimization.

Keyword research using many of the keyword tools can provide you with a huge list of the terms used - but not how they are used. Knowing the relationship of a keyword and the search phrase used can help to fine tune your search engine optimization efforts.

Working hard on a keyword and getting it to number one in the SERP’s could be a total waste of your optimization efforts if the search phrase itself relates to a different area to your website. Here is a very broad example, but I am sure you will follow my rationale.

You have a football site and you work hard to get the term “football” to the top of the SERP’s. However you notice the traffic coming from organic search has a high bounce rate. The reason behind the high bounce rate and the keyword ‘football’ can be found in the actual search phrase entered by users.

Users may be looking for football results, how to play, where to watch, where to buy or where to place a bet. Your web site is obviously not providing the searcher with what they are looking for. Knowing the actual search phrase could be a huge advantage.

If you use a keyword search tool as part of your program then you may be able to determine some of the phrases used. In the above example a keyword tool may show high results for ‘play football’, ‘bet on football’ and other phrases. This is valuable information but it still doesn’t give us the whole story.

Sites such as Yahoo! Answers can help fine tune your research even further. Simply typing in football will return over 150,000 questions on the subject. By reviewing some of these questions you may get a feel for the kind of information being sort and perhaps the keywords that could be used in your SEO program to snare extra traffic.

Football is probably too broad an area to use in reality, however if you have a niche site then the information found in sites such as Yahoo! Answers could be invaluable to your search engine optimization strategies.

Are you a doctor that has found his or herself in the hot seat recently? Has your online image been tarnished with an angry client or employee? If you have lost business due to negative reputation online than its time to really clean it up otherwise it could only get worse for your practice.

More and more people are becoming extremely savvy when it comes to expressing themselves online and letting others know if they have had a bad experience with absolutely anything. Search for your name online regularly should be a part of daily life, especially for doctors. Almost all purchases start at a search engine and if your reputation online is spotty than you might be losing out on a great deal of business. Hiring a doctor reputation management firm that has the knowledge to properly clean up your brand or image online is very important to the survival of your practice. It not just necessary to take a reactive role when your name gets dragged through the mud but it is also important to take proactive approach in case things should go wrong in the future. Proactive brand management will allow you build a solid wall or cushion against negative press in the future.

As a doctor, here are several tips to help improve your online reputation management:
- Submission of your practice to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local and MSN Local.
- Creation of LinkedIN and Facebook profiles.
- Creation of profiles on Yelp! and Citysearch
- Get your patients talking online about how great you are!

For more information on how to clean up your reputation online please visit our website or call us at 877-295-0620 and we will put together a custom proposal for your specific situation.

The life and times of a search engine optimization consultant is changing and changing rather quickly. In the past we started by simply cramming keywords into a page, the more the better. How times have changed!

Today, rather than using brute strength to get a page to the top of the SERP’s, search engine optimization relies on finesse. We craft pages to suit the genre, the keywords and the purpose of the site.

It doesn’t stop there. Search Engine Marketing (which includes SEO and PPC) includes tweaking web design and helping to plan and implement pay-per-click campaigns, particularly if it involves Adwords or similar search engine advertising.

Many SEO consultants and experts now include other marketing activities within their portfolios including social media marketing, online reputation management, social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, etc.

Whether a user is using a search engine or a social media site, they are seeking something. That something is usually information. Our role is to help them find that information regarding your site and help drive sales. We are no longer SEO only consultants. Perhaps we could be referred to as “traffic controllers”; “web optimizers”; or my favorite - and really what our roles have now become - simply “search optimizers”…whatever the name, driving visitors and sales is the name of the game.

I enjoy watching a little golf occasionally to take a break from SEO. Greg Norman looked a possible winner of the British Open I thought I would spend a few hours watching the game. Do a search on British Open, or British Open Golf and while the number one spot was held by the tournament page, some of the entries where several years old. It begs the question whether or not age should be a relevant search engine optimization factor?

When I do a search I generally want the latest information, not information that is several years old. Even including a year in the search phrase can produce results that way of the mark. For general news and sport you have the ‘news’ option - however that doesn’t cover every situation.

We are told that age of a website is an important SEO factor. Obviously older sites have an advantage and will possibly have accumulated a lot of links. These links more than anything else boost the rankings of these sites and therefore they will appear in the search results ahead of any new site.

For many people, this is a flaw in the process and the search engine algorithms. More often than not we are looking for the latest up to date information on a particular topic not information that is several years old.

Search engine optimization can be a frustrating business particularly when you are trying to outrank pages that were once popular but not out of date. If it frustrating for us, then just think how frustrating it is for users trying to search out the latest information.

When it comes to search engine optimization, keywords and search results, there is one guarantee in life - they are ever changing.

You can check the search results for a keyword today and be in the top 10, tomorrow it seems like your history and all the your search engine optimization efforts have been for nothing.

The strange thing is, by the time you wipe away the tears and decide to check again, there you are back in the top ten again. Your search engine marketing efforts are paying off after all.

There are many reasons for search results jumping around. One is fresh content which will often appear for a day or two at or near the top of the SERPs only to drift out again.

This can occur on a regular basis and go unnoticed by most website owners because they don’t check their keywords in the search results. Some website owners are surprised to see they are no longer in the top ten. A part of your ongoing program should be to check on your placement on a regular basis.

If you notice you have lost your position and it doesn’t recover after a day or two then it is time for action. You will need to revisit those pages and tighten up your SEO strategies. It would also help to check out the usurper to see why they have unseated you from your position in the SERPs.

Search engine optimization is not a set and forget activity. It is an ongoing activity and part of that activity is to regularly check your place in the SERP’s. Act early and you may be able to recover your place and grow your long term positioning.

One frequent statement I see is that ’search engine optimization will help to increase sales’. Is this really true?

In theory the answer is yes. Undertake a strong search engine optimization program that will see your pages at or near the top of the search results pages and you are going to increase your visitor numbers - that has never been in doubt.

However, increased visitors have no bearing on sales. I could send a million visitors to sight and yet sales would not increase by one. Of course, chances are you may get lucky and score a few sales. Search engine optimization can only increase sales if it has the right direction from day one.

If you sell blue widgets, it is will be a waste of time optimizing for ‘bluish widgets’. Sure, you can get to number one for that term, but who is going to actually search for it? On the other hand, you may see that 1000 people search for widgets. You undertake a strong search engine optimization campaign on that term. Because the competition is so strong, you don’t even make it to page two let alone page one - still no increase in sales.

For campaigns to increase sales it must be done in such a way that it attracts the ‘right’ visitors - not just any visitor. This involves keyword research that is meaningful and related to your products.

Where a good SEM campaign can be effective is in finding keywords that are being used in searches but have little in the way of competition. Blue widgets may be have a lot of competition, however a term such as ‘blue widgets for Drupal’ may be used more often than some people imagine so the competition may be low. Optimize for that phrase and you have snared a specialized market.

SEO will not increase sales alone.. As the name suggests, you are optimizing your pages for the search engines. What you need to consider is what information (keywords) you are optimizing.

Many new website owners get confused over search engine optimization particularly when people talk about PageRank. I won’t go into PageRank except to say, ‘don’t worry about it - it is not worth the tears’.

SEO is not a confusing subject. As the name suggests, you are optimizing your something or web page for the search engines. The something is each and every page of your website. Notice I said ‘page’ and not site. Search engines really don’t give two hoots about your website, they are only interested in the importance of each page.

Search engines, in simple terms, place a score on each web page based on the keywords for that page. The higher the scorer, the higher that page will appear in the search results. Since most users only click on search results from the first two pages, your SEO strategies are designed to get as close to the top of those results as possible.

Ranking your website or pages of your site has two components with a third on the horizon. The first is on page optimization: this provides the content that the search engines crave.

The second is off page factors: this is the relevant one way link building that serves as a form of voting on the importance of your page.

Search engine optimization will need to consider a third aspect into the future, that of social inclusion. This is the inclusion of your pages in social media sites by visitors to your pages.

More information on each of these topics can be found in previous posts. Overall positioning the pages of your website well in the major search engines is not confusing - it can be tedious, however the process itself in it’s simplest form is very straightforward.

Last week Google hosted an online presentation of their search engine optimization tools, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer, and how you can use them together.

They have provided a video of the presentation on the official Google Webmaster Central blog. For SEM old hands there is nothing new in the video. For novices or those contemplating DIY search engine optimization then it is a good place start.

You can access the video either from YouTube from the blog itself. The video runs for an hour so grab a coffee and watch it over lunch.

Google Analytics is one of the most used tools for SEO. Learning how to decipher the data is one of the first keys to getting the most out of the tool.

The video will show you how to marry the three tools to get the best out of your website. These excellent tools will help to optimize your website across the major search engines.

Forums can be a great place to pick up pointers or to just toss ideas around and get a general consensus. DigitalPoint has a thread going at present that looks at the use of less favorable keywords in your search engine optimization program.

To cut a long posting short, he suggests using a keyword checker to find search terms with around 50-100 daily searches. Many website owners would not bother to undertake search engine optimization techniques for just 50 visitors.

The writer suggestion is not necessarily bad. If you take the low volume search term and ‘Google it’, you can find out how many other pages are indexed for that search term. Find a search term with less 200 pages indexed and target that keyword. Write a ‘good’ - and he does mean good - article using standard search engine optimization techniques. Once completed, submit to a social bookmarking system for faster indexing.

So far so good. The writer goes on to suggest that if you undertake a program like this for a month you will have 30 pages on low volume - low indexed - keywords. Keywords that you should perhaps be ranking well on. If each of these keywords gets searched 50 times per day, that is potentially 50 new visitors. Multiply that by 30 pages and you have 1500 visitors per day.

The content needs to be spot on when it comes to keyword relevance. You need the visitor to stay and look around. If your page has been set up tightly, it will have a well placed call to action. Convert 10% of that new traffic and that is 150 new sales - and its long term.

Less favorable keywords can be a real gem in the search engine oceans.

How important is your domain name when it comes to search engine optimization? I read a variety of views on this topic; some proclaiming that you must have a keyword in your domain name whilst others claim it’s all irrelevant.

On a scale of 1 to 10, domain names probably rank around 2 or 3 for importance in SEO, maybe even less. There are always two aspects to any activity involving your web pages and search engine optimization. Will help your site and will it harm your site. We always seem to concentrate on the former and not the later.

Having a keyword in your domain name wont harm your ranking efforts. The question then remains whether or not it will harm your traffic, branding or reputation.

The longer the domain name, the harder it is to brand and get instant recognition. However, given the age of link clinking, most people are never aware of the domain name unless they look for it. Whether it is in search results, social media, or advertising, your site is only a click away. Search engine marketing strategies are aimed at getting pages to rank highly, not sites.

In the bigger picture, domain names are not that relevant to SEO. They may help in situations where your page is closely ranked with another on - the small fraction of leverage that domain name gives to your rankings may help push your page ahead of theirs.

Domain names should be selected for reasons other than SEO. Can you brand that name? Can the name be associated to your niche? If you look around the web, most well known big name sites are not keyword domain names - yet they succeed and rank well - in fact some domain names have become keywords for everyone else, Google, StumbleUpon, Digg, I could go on.

Are domain names important to search engine optimization strategies? Yes, depending on your business model.