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.