Search Engine Optimization Journal wishes all our readers a Happy New Year. If you haven’t made your resolutions yet, feel free to tell us what they are here on our comments thread. But before you do, read our New Year’s resolutions for 2009.

• We aim to increase the search positions and sales for all of our clients
• We will stay on top of the latest techniques and employ them when necessary
• We will only recommend the very best optimization tools and products
• We will become the go-to place for SEO knowledge and consultation
• We will strive to build better relationships
• Ethics, ethics, and more ethics!

Go ahead, tell us your New Year’s resolutions for 2009. Add them to the comments stream below.

Are you game for a good joke? Here goes: How many search engine optimization experts does it take to rank a web page? Answer: Only 1; you’ll never find two SEOs who’ll agree on anything.

OK, it may not be funny, but there is some element of truth to it. There are thousands of search engine optimization consultants out there and you’ll be hard pressed to find a few who will agree on every aspect of SEO. In fact, sometimes it is difficult to find two SEOs that agree on any aspect of SEO. That’s why I always caution against working with two SEOs at the same time.

There are business people who shop around for a service by having two or more service providers work a project and see which one gets better results. I don’t recommend that approach because what will likely happen is you’ll get two SEOs whose style are completely different and you’ll get conflicting messages about what it is you’re trying to get accomplished. You’ll likely end up more confused than you were when you started. A better approach is to work with one SEM expert or firm at a time. If you find one that doesn’t work for you, fire them and get another firm, but don’t waste your time trying to work with two search engine optimization experts at the same time.

Everyone these days seem to be interested in more opportunities to gain traction with SEO and link building while the search engines seem to be getting stricter with their policies. If you are a blogger using WordPress to manage your blog content then you should know that commenters leaving comments on your blog posts will get no link juice unless you change the links to dofollow links. WordPress is defaulted at nofollow on the comment links.

A dofollow link is one that passes link juice while a nofollow link doesn’t. What that means is you’ll get credit from the search engines, Google primarily, for your links. That translates into a higher PageRank and better authority and could lead to higher search rankings.

WordPress has a plugin called the Dofollow Plugin. By installing this plugin you are turning your WordPress blog into a dofollow blog instead of a nofollow blog. That will encourage more comments. Many people will not comment on nofollow blogs because they are looking for the link credit. They may be very commenters and therefore you are missing out on their valuable knowledge.

So how does this benefit you? Well, the more comments you get on your blog, the more often the search engine robots will visit it and crawl it, but also more comments means more on-page content, which is good for search rankings. Blog posts with a lot of comments rise in the search engines more quickly and go higher in the rankings.

This is a decision you’ll have to weigh carefully, however. By making your links dofollow you are also inviting more spammers - people who are there just for the link and really have nothing valuable to contribute. Be on notice that you’ll have to spend more time filtering through comments to separate the spam from the valuable comments. If you’re OK with that then the Dofollow Plugin is a good plugin to add to your WordPress blog.

It’s the time of year when everyone starts making their predictions for 2009. While I’m not going to recap every prediction on the Web, I would like to highlight one prediction I found interesting. Mediapost predicts this for 2009:

Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site’s rank in the engines, to maximizing a site’s reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine’s results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers’ site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.

I’m not sure that’s really all that difficult to predict. Already, we’re seeing that this is the case. Many social media sites will outrank people’s own website’s for their names and brands. While this might seem like a bad thing, keep in mind that anything that helps a person find the information they are looking for is good. If you can optimize your Web presence then you’ll do well online whether your website is ranked No. 1 for your reputation or you have 10 social media sites that fill the front page.

Web Presence Optimization could become the next big term, although I like Reputation Management. They do not necessarily mean the same thing, however. While both have to do with managing reputations online, reputation management tends to be thought of as an after-the-fact strategy for dealing with damage control. Web Presence Optimization has a fancier ring to it and obviously means pre-emptive reputation management. Whatever you call it, I predict that search engine and online reputation management optimization will be big business in 2009.

Do your web pages have secondary keywords or do you optimize for a single keyword on every page? Do not overlook the power of a second keyword.

Secondary keywords are like back up bouncers. You may not need them, but if you do they are there and ready for the punch. And when they punch they tend to knock you out. They are really powerful and easy to implement into your search engine optimization strategy.

The secondary keyword should never be used more than your primary keyword (hey, that’s why it’s secondary, right?). But you should use it to “back up” the primary keyword. In fact, in many places on your web page where you use your primary keyword, it’s a good idea to follow up with the secondary keyword in near proximity behind the primary one. And note that your primary and secondary keywords are for pages, not sites.

To make the best use of your secondary keyword, place it near the end of your page title and head (because your primary keyword should be at the beginning). Also place your secondary keyword near the end of your first and second sentences (again, your primary keyword will be at the beginning). While your primary keyword should be used on average once per paragraph, or once every 100 words, throw your secondary keyword in to your page content about half as often.

Make sure that your secondary keyword compliments your primary keyword in subject. In other words, if your primary keyword is automotive services, don’t make your secondary keyword flowers. They don’t belong together. Your secondary keyword could be carburetor adjustment, tire rotations, or something else related to automotive services.

And that’s about it in a nutshell. Throw in a secondary keyword and see what happens.

Link building has been around for a long time. There are, of course, various ways to go about building inbound links for you website. No one way should be the only way. Every webmaster should seek to get links from a variety of sources so that your link portfolio is diverse and not too narrow. Squidoo can help you do that.

First, Squidoo offers a way for you to earn extra income through AdSense. That may very well be a way to go for you. But don’t discount it as a way to build your SEO links.

Squidoo itself is about search engine optimization. When you build a new Squidoo lens it should be around a single topic that you optimize well and as you do be sure to build links back to your website. Each link should use an important anchor text phrase for your website and point to the ideal page for that anchor text. It’s important also to optimize your Squidoo page the same way you would a web page on your website. That will only make your links stronger.

Because Squidoo is a recognized website with strong authority, your links will count very well with the search engines and help to push your web pages further up in the rankings.

Some of you will remember the day when you could Google “miserable failure” and be taken to the White House website bio of President George W. Bush. It’s called Google Bombing and it was all too real, and worked like a charm. Web pages were ranking for keywords that didn’t even appear on the page itself. All because of the anchor text of the links pointing in.

Anchor text is the text that is used within a hyperlink from one page to another. The best way to link from Page A to Page B is to use the primary keyword that appears on Page B as your anchor text. That anchor text goes a long way to ensuring that you rank highly for your important keywords and for webmasters who have performed link building campaigns around effective anchor text, they’ve been able to see great results, many times taking pages buried deep within the SERPs all the way to page 1. Anchor text is one of the most powerful tools in your search engine optimization arsenal.

While Google Bombing may have worked for awhile, the best anchor text has always been the use of keywords that already appear on a web page. It is possible to rank a web page for two or three important keywords or phrases just by performing that many link building campaigns focusing on separate but equal anchor text phrases. It takes planning, but your anchor text can improve your search rankings tremendously.

Did you know you can own the top 10 search engine positions for your name or brand simply by filling out social networking profiles? It’s true. Join a couple of dozen social networks and remain active in them and that’s mostly all it takes to have your name or brand appear in the top search results at Google. Some of the social networks whose profile pages rise to the top quickly include:

• Digg
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Mixx
• StumbleUpon
• Yahoo! Answers
• Folkd
• MySpace
• SocialSpark
• BlogCatalog
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• MyBlogLog

Even social networks that offer nofollow tags except in the user profile will often rise to the top of the search results for user names, but almost all of them will rise faster to the top of the search results the more active you are on them. If time is a factor and you can’t be active on all of the social networks (who can?) then at least fill out the social network profiles and let them do what they do naturally. If you ever do find the time to be active on them, you’ll already have your profile set up.

Eye tracking experts have figured out where people’s eyes naturally navigate to when they first land on a web page. Webmasters can use this information to their advantage in several ways. If you know that more eyeballs will see the top left corner of the page, for instance, then you’ll get more clicks on your ads if you put one in that location. The same principles hold true for links.

Let’s say you’ve built a web page that links to three other web pages on your website. Where do you place your links?

First, you should identify those parts of your web pages that are most viewed by the most people. Generally speaking, the top of the page is preferred because you’ll have more eyeballs “above the fold”. The reason for this is simple. No matter how well written your content is and no matter how well you do in building a great web page, there will always be people who land on the page then exit without taking any action or reading below the scroll point. That’s just the way it. But they will still see what you have above the fold at the top of the page.

You can use your bounce rate to your advantage. Place your most important links and ads at the top of the page where bouncers will still have their attention set. If your web page doesn’t provide them with what they are looking for then maybe one of your links will.

Aside from the top of the page, the section to the left of your web page just below your header is another hot spot for eyeballs. In that quadrant, typically where your first paragraph of content begins, or the sidebar right next to it, is a great place to put important links. If you draw a line diagonally from that point to the bottom right corner of the page, that’s where people’s eyeballs generally migrate to and those points along that line are usually the best places for your links.

What you need to think about is how people will scan your page because most readers will scan before they read. If your page is broken up into sections where you have three or four subheads on your page then the first paragraph of each of those subheads, the topmost ones most favorable, will be hotspots for eyeballs. Links in those paragraphs will generally do better.

When deciding where you want to put your most important links, think about where your visitors are most likely to focus their attention not only your search engine optimization strategy. That’s where your links need to be.

So many webmasters think that if they slip a keyword into their page title then all that’s all there is title optimization. But that’s not true. In fact, if you move your keyword to within the first three words of your title then you’ll do much better in the search engines.

It may seem like such an insignificant search engine optimization related change, but the benefits are huge. Move that keyword from the last place of your title to the first and see what happens. Here are three different sets of page titles. Notice that the first one in each case places the keyword at the end, but the one that actually does better in the search engines is the one with the keyword near the front.

Be More Productive With An Office Calendar
Office Calendars: Productivity, Efficiency, And More Happiness

Don’t Ride Around Town On Four Bald Tires
Your Tire Thread Could Be Hurting Your Gas Mileage

How To Find A Restaurant In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh Restaurant Guide - Who, Where, Why, and How

In all three of these cases, moving the keyword to the front of the title tag would produce better search engine rankings. Run your own test and see if it bears this out.

A friend asked the question, “If I use one of those auto-translate software packages to translate my website into another language, will my keyword density still be the same?”

Well, first, I’d be careful with auto-translate programs because they do not always translate a sentence correctly. When you move from English to many other languages, the sentence structure changes and most of those auto-translate programs translate text word for word, which isn’t helpful to readers in the translated language. That said, yes, your keyword density should remain the same if your translated keyword is the same as the English equivalent.

A second issue with this, however, is that the translated keyword for your web page might actually be different in order to communicate what you want to communicate. Some languages do not have English equivalents. The German word “Schadenfreude”, for instance, really has no English equivalent so if Schadenfreude is your keyword in German, you’ll be hard pressed to find an English keyword that matches. There are other examples, even some in the reverse.

You are much better off, if you are going to translate your web pages, hiring a translator who is proficient in both English and the language that you want to translate into. That way, the translator can choose the best keywords in the translated language that best reflect the ideas you want to communicate and that you have communicated in English. That’s the only sure way to ensure that your keyword density and on site search engine optimization is optimal and that you communicate effectively in both languages.

Here’s a great tip from Rand Fishkin.

Find multiple pages on your website that rank for a single keyword and redirect the lower ranking ones to the higher ranking one. You can find those pages by Googling “keyword site:yourdomain.com”. You can then redirect the lower ranking pages for that keyword to the highest ranking one. Let’s perform an example.

Let’s say your keyword is “auto parts store”. If you have three pages ranked on Page 1 of Google for that phrase, let’s say in positions 3, 5, and 9, then you can redirect those pages at positions 5 and 9 to the the URL that is in position 3. You do this with a 301 redirect. The effect will be any traffic you get on those bottom two pages will then land on the top page instead. The end result will be a higher ranking for that position 3 URL. You could end up in position 1.

Another effect will be the PageRank from those pages that were at position 5 and 9 will be redirected to the other page as well, giving it more authority. And since that higher ranking page will get more traffic than it was getting before, that will result in more authority and higher search engine ranking. So you are likely to find yourself in a better position all around.

Even while DMOZ is congratulating itself and giving kudos to its best editors, Google is saying that it doesn’t need to rely on The Open Directory Project any more for its information. Does this mean the love affair is over?

I think it does. One of the reasons that Google rose to prominence so fast in the late 1990s and early part of this century is because it relied so heavily on DMOZ for information about websites it was indexing. But somewhere along the line DMOZ got flooded with webmaster applications, and if you’ve been following the drama for the past four or five years, webmasters have largely lost faith in the directory. But earlier this year DMOZ set about to change that perception and started a blog. A bit too late.

One blogger took notice of a change in Google policy that essentially means the search engine is no longer encouraging webmasters to submit their sites to directories.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller said this:

I wouldn’t necessarily assume that we’re devaluing Yahoo’s links, I just think it’s not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it’s obviously fine to get listed there. It’s not something that people have to do though :-).

In other words, if you’re listing your site in directories to gain access to the traffic then that’s fine. But if you expect to get link juice and a rise in search engine rankings from it, don’t hold your breath. That’s how I’m interpreting that. So, it seems to me that DMOZ links aren’t as highly regarded by Google as they used to be. And if that’s the case then why bother submitting your site to the directory. No matter how much progress ODP may have been this past year, if you can’t expect to get link juice and search engine benefits from it then it might not make a difference. I’m not sure it’s all that heavily trafficked any more. Either way, I still recommend some quality directory submission as part of a long term link building and search engine optimization strategy.

It’s late in the day on Christmas Eve and Brick Marketing would like to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas. We will take Christmas Day off and come back on December 26th bright and cheery (and probably hung over). If you plan to work on Christmas Day (I know all you single guys out there are planning to spend half your day building the next big thing) then take some time to read some of our back posts. Keep an eye on solid search engine optimization principles and build for the future.

Until the day after Christmas, Merry Christmas and may all your SEO be right!

In the last couple of years there have been a plethora of social bookmarking sites pop up thanks to popular CMS Pligg.

Pligg is the Article Dashboard of social bookmarking. Webmasters who want to have their own social bookmarking website can use the Pligg template for a plug-and-play website that allows others to bookmark their favorite sites and share them with others. The problem is that many of these small bookmarking sites are spam magnets. But they don’t have to be.

If you have a social bookmarking site built on the Pligg platform, you can fight spam by adding the Akismet anti-spam module. Your users will thank you for this. Many users of such websites will not return if you do not find an effective way to fight spam. If you get a reputation as a website friendly to spammers, or unable to ward of the spam, then you will lose your reputation and status as a credible place for webmasters to bookmark their favorite websites. You can’t afford to let that happen.

Pligg managers should all install the Akismet module immediately and fight spam.