When the economy turns sour just about every company starts to cut expenses and usually the first thing that goes is the one service where the perceived value is less. Search engine optimization is one of those services that could be threatened by the recession.

I would strongly caution against cutting back on your SEO for your business. Companies that I’ve seen do that have in the past regretted it. Typically what happens is they’ll see their search rankings decline. After dropping off the first page they’ll see fewer and fewer visitors to their websites and that will result in fewer conversions and less overall sales. Almost always these customers restart their optimization and they have to claw their way back up the search engine ladder to top rankings. That takes longer usually than the drop off and takes more resources long term.

It may seem that a recession is the time to cut expenses, but you don’t want to cut your marketing expenses. It’s really the time when you should be marketing more, not less. If you think of search engine optimization as a part of your overall marketing strategy then that puts it a little more into perspective. Don’t you think?

I heard of a good idea yesterday for you Twitter people. You know how your Twitter profile will only let you post 140 characters? Expand your profile by building a Twitter landing page on your website and link to it from your profile.

The benefits to doing this are two-fold:

• Increased traffic to your website from Twitter
• Increased followership on Twitter

If you optimize your landing page well for keywords related to your niche - not your name - then you’ll get additional search traffic to your Twitter landing page. You can even optimize it for Twitter related keywords in addition to your niche keywords. But the search traffic will help you build followers on your Twitter account. Make sure that you have a Twitter “Follow Me” button on your landing page.

If you are a good Twitterer then people will visit your profile page on Twitter before they follow you. They’ll click the link and see your landing page, which should give them more information about you than your Twitter profile can. Make it count because you can also give too much information and screw things up. A good example a Twitter landing page is this one by @Pistachio.

In summary, a Twitter landing page can lead to more visitors on your website, help with your search engine optimization efforts and generate more followers on Twitter.

One of the discussions that new content writers like to engage in is the keyword density discussion. Somewhere along the line someone told them to make sure their keyword density was at least 1% and not more than 7%, or something like that. Is there any truth to it?

Not really. What’s really important to getting rankings in the search engines is not how many times you use a keyword in your content, but where you use your keyword and how you use your keyword.

In terms of search engine optimization, one keyword placed in the title of your content - an h1 tag at the top of the page - is worth about half a dozen of the same keyword filtered throughout your content. That’s pretty powerful. By the same token, one keyword placed inside an anchor text link is equal in value to about three or four of the same keyword repeated in your content. Again, that’s fairly significant.

Keyword density may have been important at one time, but it’s not important today. You’d be much better off learning what the search engines are looking for overall and forgetting about keyword density.

You know when you search Google and you get a little red note above a search listing that a particular listing may contain malware or other malicious software? Well, Live Search is once again catching up to Google in another area. It is now able to detect malware on your website and any website you link to. That’s good news for searchers, but it’s also good news for webmasters.

You may inadvertently include malware on your website in a number of ways. If you borrow a script from another source and fail to clean it properly then you could be feeding your site visitors with malicious code and that’s bad. But now you can have that detected by the search engines, both Google and MSN Live Search.

Get more information on malware detection at Live Search here.

If you’re browsing the web and you click a link that takes you nowhere, you’re likely to be hit with an error page. The most popular error page is the 404 page, but it’s by no means the only one. Here are some error pages that you are likely to find and that you might be interested in customizing for your own website to be more helpful to your site visitors:

401 Error - This error code is to tell visitors they do not have the proper authorization to view a certain page. If you have a membership site and an individual tries to access a page that requires signing in and their username and password are incorrect then you might deliver a 401 error.

403 Error - This is the forbidden error. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. It usually is a reference to a script that won’t allow users to access a certain page. Even if a user authenticates with a password and username, they could still see a 403 error if there is a problem with your script. You can fix the error at the server level, but you can also customize your error page to be more helpful.

404 Error - Not found. This is the error page you are most likely to see if you a particular web page is not available. Typically, a user types in the wrong URL in their browser window, but you could have also had a typo in the domain name you created and marketed another spelling of it. Easily fixable, but a bug nonetheless.

500 Error - Internal Server Error. I hate these. They typically mean the server had problems, but it can’t tell you want the problem is. It’s unidentifiable and isn’t one of the above. Picture asking a sales clerk at a local retail store and a question about the merchandise in the store and she says, “Sorry, can’t help you and I can’t tell you why.” That’s a 500 error.

To customize any of these error pages you’ll have to open the page in your html editor and add the elements that you wish to add. I’d recommend that you download your index page and cut out all the text content but leave all the design elements so that the page looks like the rest of your website. Then where your text goes, type in the error code and message that you want visitors to see. And that’s about all there is to customizing your error pages, though you may have to access your .htacess file to direct browsers to particular pages when they encounter one. That’s another lesson.

There are two types of redirects that you need to be familiar with as a webmaster: Permanent redirects and temporary redirects. 301 redirects are the permanent kind and the most often used. 302 redirects are the temporary redirects. Here’s when you should use them:

301 Redirect - The permanent redirect is best used when you are redesigning your site and you want all of your URLs on one domain name to point to all of the corresponding URLs on another domain name. For instance, you could redirect all traffic from http://www.mydomain.com to http://mydomain.com and if you use the 301 redirect then you are sending all of your traffic to the new domain name on a permanent basis.

Another benefit to this type of domain name is it transfers all of the historical data (PageRank, link popularity, etc.) to your new domain name. So you don’t lose any site authority with this type of redirect. It is often used when a webmaster or company decides to change its domain name for branding purposes. In other words, if you wanted to change your domain name from http://www.mydomain.com to http://www.keywordspecificbrandname.com then you could use a 301 redirect.

302 Redirect - The 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and does not transfer PageRank, link popularity, or any historical site search engine optimization authority to your new domain. This type of redirect is best used if you are running a holiday promotion and you want to send all of your traffic to a holiday promotion landing page. So you’d use the 302 redirect to send traffic from http://mydomain.com to http://mydomain.com/holidaypromotion. After the holidays, you’ll remove the redirect and all traffic will go to your index page as normal. You will still retain your historical data as long as you don’t maintain the redirect for too long (ie a couple of years).

Let’s say you have an event coming up and you want to promote it online. Can you write a press release and optimize it so that it ranks in the search engines? Yes you can.

In fact, optimizing a press release is much like optimizing anything else - website, article, blog, etc. You have to have the right amount of keywords in the right places, links, etc.

The first place to optimize your press release is in the headline. Make sure you write an attention-grabbing headline that uses your keyword and put the keyword near the beginning of the headline. Also, write a killer first sentence using your keyword and sprinkle the keyword throughout the press release too.

Links are not essential, but if you’re going to include links (and I recommend that you do) then make sure that you include the right number of links. Don’t overdo it. And make sure that they point to the right websites and web pages. You’ll also want to include your keywords in those links to get the anchor text. As you can see, all the same rules for SEO apply to press releases so just follow the rules of good clean white hat search engine optimization and you should do fine.

Are you aware that every web browser looks at your website a little differently? It’s true. What happens through the Firefox browser doesn’t necessarily happen through the Chrome or Internet Explorer browser.

Of course, every browser looks at the basic information - text, graphics - about the same. The problem is that they all carry different resolutions and specific nuances of command, especially with regard to elements like CSS and JavaScript. You may need to give specific browsers special commands within your website code so that they’ll read what you want them to read correctly.

So how many different browsers are there? Here are the top ones:

• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Safari
• Chrome
• Opera
• Mozilla
• SeaMonkey
• Konquerer
• Camino

There are a few others out there but they are not important enough to worry about. Test your website in the top browsers before you upload it just to be sure that users of that web browser see what you want them to see. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches later on and you likely won’t lose sales due to browser incompatibility.

Boston SEO firm, Brick Marketing will be introducing a series of internet marketing workshops scheduled.

Brick Marketing will be holding these Boston area SEO workshops aimed at allowing business owners to take their business online by teaching the basics to get them started with everything from SEO, email marketing, blogging, social media marketing and much more. The upcoming events will give Boston area business owners the understanding on how to successfully have their business website optimized in order to generate more online business through organic search.

Brick Marketing president, Nick Stamoulis will be teaching topics from SEO to blogging, social media marketing and much more. This Boston area SEO marketing event will be broken up into two sessions offering a Q&A along with time for lunch.

For more information on how these Boston area SEO workshops can help you or to sign up please visit our website and read our workshop page for further details at the following link:
http://www.brickmarketing.com/internet-marketing-workshops.htm

Headlines are one of the most important pieces of online content. Whether you are talking about web page headlines or blog headlines, you want your headline to stand out, grab people’s attention, and be optimized for your keywords. Can you write a headline that does all three?

I think you can.

Remember to put your keyword as close to the front of the headline as possible, but that’s not all there is to it. You also want your headline to be memorable. You want it to reach into your readers’ guts and yank out an intestine. OK, that’s gross, but it should have that effect. If it doesn’t touch your reader then chances are you won’t have any readers.

Writing a headline that kicks ass is the first step to writing a good blog post or web page headline. Get their attention first then bop on the head with doggone ass-kicking content.

Thanks to Josh Fialkoff for commenting on yesterday’s post about Google’s Search-based keyword tool.

This tool is mostly good for using to optimize your pay-per-click campaigns, but you can use it for search too. What it does is analyze your website, or specific pages on your website, to help you uncover keywords that you can target but may not be targeting. In other words, you can discover missed opportunities.

What you do is type your website URL into the first field and your most important keywords into the second field. The tool works best if you limit your keywords to a tight keyword group then the Google Search-based Keyword Tool will return a list of related keywords that can target. Those keywords may or may not be a part of your current search marketing campaigns and it’s a limited list, not exhaustive. But it can be useful in helping discover new keyword phrases you currently are not targeting.

If you find a phrase or two that you can capitalize on, build a new landing page and start a new PPC campaign.

Webmasters love tools, but how many do you need? Do you need every single tool available or can you get by with just a few. Search Engine Optimization Journal has compiled a list of essential webmaster tools - the ones you can’t get by without:

• Keyword Research Tool - You can spend thousands of dollars on some fancy gadget with bells and whistles or you can opt for the free version that does the job. Google’s Keyword Research Tool works for everyone.
• Link Popularity Check - You’ll need to check your link popularity from time to time. Again, you don’t need a bunch of fancy tools with bells and whistles. Marketleap not only reports your link popularity but it also tells you what your search engine saturation is. Two tools in one.
• Analytics - You can’t fix what you don’t measure. Know your stats. Again, you don’t have to spend a lot of money when you can get it all for free from Google.
• Code-to-Text Checker - Code-to-Text ratio is a very important measure of how well you’ve SEOd your website. Too much code could slow your load time. Know whether your website passes must with SEOChat’s code-to-text checker.

There are other really cool tools you could add to your arsenal. If you thought I was going to say an HTML editor or CMS, well, you can have them but are they essential? If you build your site with a CMS then you don’t need the HTML editor, and vice-versa. But if you want to build a website and you need tools, these tools are the bare minimum essentials. Don’t do anything without them.

So you’ve built your website and you’ve SEOd it to the hilt, but what if it doesn’t work? First, you have to determine why it isn’t working, if it is indeed not working. One mistake new webmasters make when they don’t see instant results is to assume that it isn’t working. But quality search engine optimization takes time. If you don’t see results from your SEO you might want to wait awhile to see if it actually isn’t working because you may not have given it enough time.

But let’s say you’ve waited a good six months and you don’t have any pages indexed at any of the search engines. What could be the problem? Honestly, it could be any number of things:

• Do you have a sitemap? If not, you may want to add a sitemap
• Are you doing any link building? You should try to get some inbound links to your website
• The obvious thing is your keywords; is your website optimized properly?
• How much code do you have? Some file types use a lot of code. If your site is made up entirely of Flash then it likely won’t get indexed.
• Are you using a template? Check your template files. They may be poorly SEOd

Rarely will a website just not indexed at all. You may be targeting the wrong keywords and just don’t see your website’s ranking because your optimization efforts hit the wrong targets. If you need help identifying the problem, seek a qualified search engine optimization professional.

Don’t assume that if you use the singular form of your keyword that it will also cover the plural. That is likely not the case. I have tested this several times. You can rank well for the singular form of a keyword and not so well for the plural. If you really want to rank well for both then you should target both simultaneously. There are several ways you can do that:

• You can make one your primary keyword and the other your secondary
• You can use a blog to target each keyword in separate blog posts over a period of time
• You can use articles to market your website and use each keyword as anchor text in your author resource box links
• Similarly, in your directory submissions and other link building campaigns, use both keywords as anchor text
• You can build separate landing pages for each keyword

However you decide to do it, make sure that you use both plural and singular forms of keywords.

One Twitter user recently said Google SearchWiki seems “game-able.” I’m not sure what he means by that. Simply put, it’s a way for Google Personal Search users to customize their own results. You have to be signed in to your account to use it, but you can move individual results to the top of the search results for any given search query, delete results you don’t like, make notes on results, and see the notes that other users make to the Search Wiki.

Those of us who make our living in search have been looking for this level of customization for some time. I don’t know that we necessarily expected to roll out as a wiki, but I like the streamlined way you can just move things around on the search results page. Since no one else can see the changes you make to your own search results, it may seem that SearchWiki has no practical marketing applications. But you’d be wrong.

Down at the bottom of your search results page, you’ll see three links:

• Add a result
• See all my SearchWiki notes
• See all notes for this SearchWiki

Again, no one else will be able to see any results you add to the search results page. That’s your customization. Ah, but that third link - take a look at it. You can actually see the notes that other people make for a particular search results page. And that’s where the “game-ability” comes in.

Anyone not logged into their personal accounts will not be able to see the notes you make to the search results for a particular SearchWiki, but anyone who is logged into their accounts, if they view a particular search result on a query they make, will be able to see the notes that you make. They just have to click that third link at the bottom of the search results page. Unfortunately, public notes don’t show up immediately.

But here’s how you can use SearchWiki to market your website. Make a search query for a key term that you know you rank for. Click on the notes icon next to your listing and make a note about it. Then save the note as a public comment. Other SearchWiki users will be able to see your comment when they make the same search query.

Taking a popular search query - “SEO” - and clicking on that bottom link, we can see that there are already notes for some of the search queries. SEOBook.com has 18 comments. SEOmoz has 3 comments. MattCutts.com has 12 comments. I can also see that 39 people moved SEOBook to the top of the search results and 2 people deleted it from the search results. If I click on the 18 comments, I can see who made those comments. I also have the ability to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” each comment in the SearchWiki.

Scrolling down, here are some of the comments that I saw:

Comment by: Searcher, Jul 15 - searching: seobook
“What is going on with this poof it’s gone, promote thing! WOW”

Comment by: Alexander Popa, Nov 22 - searching: seo
“Aaron for President.”

Comment by: Searcher, Nov 21 - searching: seo
“hjkhl”

These comments are likely from Internet marketers testing the new SearchWiki to see how it can be gamed. All one need do to game the SearchWiki system is create a bunch of personalized accounts at Google and make a lot of public comments to give the impression that you have a lot of people who support you or believe in what you are doing. I hope that Google figures out a solution for killing that.