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.