You are probably aware of the value of writing articles and submitting them to directories as a valuable search engine optimization strategy. Articles that are submitted may well get syndicated across several websites over a period time providing you with some valuable link juice.

Have you thought about where you are going to link that article in your pages. Common sense would suggest that for premium search engine optimization value, you would link to similar articles within your site using keywords as your link.

Sometimes you can get better value by linking to other areas within your site. Dedicated landing pages have always been popular and can provide real value for visitors. They do not necessarily provide good value for your search engine optimization program.

Article submission directories are spidered on a regular basis by most of the search engines. They are most likely spidered more frequently that your own site. Linking an article to new pages can help get them indexed a little quicker. For search engine optimization value, I prefer to use the much faster social sites for indexing.

As most article submission directories allow more than one link within your resource box, why not give the search engine spiders something to really chew on, your sitemap. Place a link to your sitemap and the links will the flow to every page within your site - unless you use nofollow tags. That will provide a real boost to your sites link building search engine optimization program.

You hear a lot about content. It’s king. Understand?

Well, cliches become cliches because there is an element of truth in them. But what exactly is meant by “content” and how much of it do you need? Do your web pages need to be 250 words or longer? Should they be shorter than 1,000?

In a word, No. There is no limit to the number of words you can have in your content. Search engines don’t count the words and if your site visitors are counting then they need to find something better to do with their time. I’d say that site visitors are probably more interested in the quality of your content.

What it really boils down to is do you speak to your site visitors in a way that they like being spoken to? Does your content talk to them about important subjects? The idea that every web page needs to have 250 words in order to be effective is a myth. There is no lower limit on words per page. You just need good content as part of your Search Engine Optimization.

By the same token, long pages won’t help you either if the content isn’t good. I’d rather have one 150 word page that kills sales records than fifty mediocre pages that do nothing but driving people away from my website. Bottom line: Quality content is much more valuable than quantity, but there is no reason you can’t have both.

When it comes to creating content, many new webmasters get confused about Search Engine Optimization keyword usage. There are two ways to go wrong where keywords are concerned:

• Too many
• Too few

Many new webmasters read about Search Engine Optimization and think that you have to stuff your content with keyword after keyword. As a result, their content looks something like this:

Do you read books? If you like to read books then we’ll pay you good money to read books every day of the week in your spare time. You don’t have to buy books any more. You can now get paid to read books for free.

The problem with this kind of content is it turns people off. People know right away what your keywords you are trying to optimize your content for. They really shouldn’t be able to figure out. You should write your content in such a way that the spiders know what your keywords are but humans will not know unless they go through and count them.

Here’s what I mean: Content that is good, quality content reaches people first. It follows the rules of good writing. If you write good content then the search engines will know what your content is about. The keywords that you use will show up automatically in your writing because you are writing good content.

I recommend that you start with a first draft. Write down your thoughts then go back later and edit them. If you see that you don’t have enough keywords in your content then add one or two, but don’t overdo it because too many can hurt just as much as not enough.

CSS can be useful in building your website because it increases your code to text ratio. Code to text ratio is the amount of HTML code used to design your website versus the actual text on the page that site visitors see when they visit your web page. For instance, if you are still using tables then you might have a table that uses a lot of code, depending on how big the table is, but you can reduce that code with a CSS file.

CSS stands for cascading style sheet. You create a CSS file in Notepad. Or you can do it in your text editor. Either way, you need to figure what elements you want to include in your CSS file. Common elements that are included in CSS files include:

• Navigation bar instructions
• Sidebar placement and dimensions
• Page margins
• Background and text colors
• Headers and footers
• Other elements that might appear on more than one page

CSS is great for designing templates that will showcase features that will be common to multiple pages on your website. For instance, background color, text color, page design, navigation menus, etc. These elements might produce a lot of code and very little text. Your navigation bar, for instance, which could be highly graphic and include just a few links as text will have a huge amount of code. But by including that information in your CSS file and references the CSS file in your HTML file for the page, you only have one line of code versus several lines of code that the search engines have to filter through in order to find any meat.

Ideally, you want to increase your code to text ratio to as high as you can get it as it relates to your Search Engine Optimization. The higher your code to text ratio the more text you have on the page versus your html code. CSS helps with that. It allows you to put those code-heavy elements in one file and referencing them with a single line of code. This is especially important for web pages that have very little text on them. By using a CSS file to take care of those code-heavy instructions, you are doing yourself a favor and helping your website rank better for your important keywords and improve your overall Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Krillion performed a survey on consumer behavior and found once again that most consumers will research a product online and purchase it off line or purchase online and pick it up off line at a local store. Nothing surprising there. But how do you Search Engine Optimize your website to make product research easier for your customers? The answer may be in an article that appeared on SiteProNews today.

According to Angela Charles, the following copywriting tips will help the Search Engine Optimization of your website for product research and sales:

• Keyword research
• One topic per page
• Details, details
• Kill the sales brochure
• Create a content hierarchy
• Keyword density

SEO Copywriting Tips To Close The Sale

Keyword Research - Know the keywords that consumers will use to search for information about your products. They may not use the product name. They might instead use a feature of the product or search for a benefit that the product provides. They could also use a synonym of the primary keyword.

One Topic Per Page - Don’t water down your content. Stick to one topic per page. In other words, don’t put weed eaters and lawn mowers on the same page. If you do, make that page a catalogue-type page with links to separate pages for each item.

Details, Details - Consumers want information. Give it to them. Lots of it. The more, the better. They are, after all, researching your products. Give them what they want. You stand a much better chance of closing the sale, either online or off line, if you provide a lot of information.

Kill The Sales Brochure - Today’s consumers don’t want to find your company website and see a sales brochure. They want information that will help them make an informed decision. Kill the hype and give them rock solid information.

Create A Content Hierarchy - Understand consumers’ needs well enough to know how they will search for information about your products. Then organize that information in a logical fashion to make it easy for searchers.

Keyword Density - If you don’t use the keyword enough time in your online content then you won’t rank for it. Plain and simple. Use the keyword enough to make the search engines happy as well as the consumers. But don’t be a Search Engine Optimization spammer.

Angela’s article provides other useful information as well, such as these types of content that users of your website will find valuable:

• Product details, including features/benefits, specifications, data sheets, diagrams, flow-charts, video demonstrations and photos (with alt tags, see below)
• Technical tips, product troubleshooting guides, user manuals
• Customer testimonials, case studies
• Industry definitions
• Product selection guides, comparative information

See a common thread here? Consumers need information. Provide as much information on your website as possible. What consumers don’t find on your website, they’ll find somewhere else. The more information you can provide on your site, the more likely they will spend more time on your site and you increase your chances of making a sale. If consumers have to go elsewhere to find something that you don’t provide then you are making it easy for them to buy somewhere else.

Finally, Angela tells you where to go for information to put on your website. This is rock solid information. Here’s what she says:

* Competitor sites
* Industry portal sites
* Industry magazine sites
* Resource sites

If you are a retailer that sales products manufactured by another company, get information about those products from the manufacturer. They should be forthcoming about the information. If you can’t find it on their website, call the company and ask for a brochure. Don’t copy their information word for word. Include as much as you can but make sure it is original content.

The bottom line is, consumers are researchers. They want a lot of information to help them make an informed buying decision. Don’t disappoint them. Search Engine Optimization should be the tool to get them to your site.

I like reading Kalena’s Dumbass of the Week blog posts. They’re always entertaining and usually feature a real dumbass - someone who is a dumbass and doesn’t know it type of dumbass. In her latest post, however, Kalena’s dumbass actually turns out to be a dumbass who finds out just how dumb he really is after being outed by the Dumbass Identifier Queen herself. I must admit, though, after reading through the soap opera-like tale that at one point I thought the dumbass schtick had backfired on Kalena, exposing her as the Dumbass of the Week.

The brouhaha started when Kalena used her blog to expose a scraper. The industry joke is that this usually leads to the scraper posting on their own site the negative exposure concerning their own unethical behavior. It’s been effective for other Search Engine Optimization folks in the past and Kalena was just doing what we all at some point have done. As planned, and right on cue, Kalena’s scraper did just what she expected him to do - he outed himself on his own blog. How sweet is the taste of victory!

But, wait … not so fast.

Kalena, of course, did a victory dance. Wouldn’t you? You can see it here:

Some days, I really love my job. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if they scraped this post too?

Then, the awful truth came out. The “scraper” turned out to be some junior Search Engine Optimization person (a student) who built a fictional company to see how quickly he could rank in the search engines. Well, who hasn’t done that? Every Search Engine Optimization expert in the world - if they’re a real Search Engine Optimization expert - has done these types of experiments (and this is where I thought the joke was on Kalena). Then it dawned on me: Search Engine Optimization folks create fictional companies and perform experiments to see what happens when they employ certain techniques, but they don’t usually do that with other people’s content. That is, real Search Engine Optimization gurus don’t engage in scraping just to see how successful scraping is. If they do then they are at least up front about it in another forum or blog so that real people aren’t injured by their experiments.

And this is where the frayed edges unraveled. Kalena’s Dumbass of the Week post was Sphinned. A discussion ensued, which led to the dumbass’s boss making a confession:

Hello, I have just been alerted to this. What a lovely start to a Tuesday Morning.

One of the lads in my department asked if he could use the domain name webpropeller for some seo tests he wanted to do. AS we have no plans at the moment for the domain I did not see a problem. It would now appear I have been very naive. Our core business is a web design company

I have not seen the amount of contnet that was scraped from the sites. he removed the content this morning in a panic from his home before I was called by him explaining what he has done.

All I can do is offer my sincere apologis to both Hobo SEO who he aparently stole his copy from (he’s certainly no copywriter) and Kalena and Tim nash who he was scraping content via a wordpress plug in.

The Contact email was being sent to myself, I don’t recall ever recieving an enquiry. If I did, I would have paid attention to what was actually on the site.

anyone have any Suggestions for his punishment please?

He is due in in 8 minutes.

So it seems that Kalena had the wrong dumbass after all. She should have written about the guy who wrote the above post at Sphinn.

What’s the lesson here? If you have a junior SEO working for your company, DO NOT turn him or her loose on a domain that you own. If they want to run test experiments on their own without your knowledge, they’ll have to buy their own domain names and suffer the consequences of their actions on their own.

You’ll hear all kinds of advice about content management systems, or CMSs and if they are Search Engine Optimization friendly. Some Search Engine Optimization experts say don’t use them and others say it’s quite OK. But I’d be leery of any Search Engine Optimization expert that says any CMS is as good as the next. It’s just not true.

Some CMSs are good. Others are questionable. If I were to use a CMS I’d go with a free open source CMS like Joomla or Drupal before spending thousands of dollars on a system that might perform. But whether one uses a free open source CMS or pays to get a custom-designed on, you want your CMS to be search engine friendly. Keep these points in mind if you are shopping around for a content management system:

• Never, ever use a free web-hosted CMS like Geocities; these are the worst systems in the world and you’ll never get your website ranked in the search engines. Some industries sell local business owners websites hosted on their domains and I highly recommend that you don’t do that.
• Make sure that your CMS does not automatically generate meta tags; systems that do this usually generate the same meta tags for every page and that won’t help you at all - it will hurt you in the search engines.
• Take careful note that your title tag on every page uses your most important keyword, preferably at the beginning. Some CMSs use the name of the CMS as the title tag on every page and it’s the first word or phrase in the tag. Steer clear of those content management systems at all costs.
• Do you get to write your own page descriptions? If not, pass.
• How are your keywords generated? If your CMS generates your keyword tags site-wide then it isn’t helping you. You want unique keywords in the keyword tag on every page of your website.
• How much code does your CMS add to the content on your pages. This one is important. Some Java-based CMSs add extra code to every page on a website. If yours does this then that extra code could prevent your website from being crawled.
• Do graphics come with alt tags? If not, don’t use the CMS, especially if you are building a graphic-intensive website.
• How often are you allowed to edit pages? If you can’t edit your pages any time you want then don’t sign on with any service. They’re a rip off.
• Is your content original or are you buying “off-the-shelf” content? If you are buying off-the-shelf content then it is likely PLR and will be duplicate content, which won’t do you any good. Only original content will benefit you.
• What kind of add-ons are you allowed? Can you add a blog easily? What about a forum? Find out if you can add widgets and other elements to your website. You may not want to do that now, but what about 2 or 5 years from now? Think ahead and see what you might want to do down the road.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Search Engine Optimization for a CMS. Many new website owners don’t have any idea about what they need to do to get online and be ranked at the search engines. A Search Engine Optimization friendly website is the most important website you can have. If your CMS is standing in the way of that then it’s time to ditch it.

Content is a huge part of website development and Search Engine Optimization, but what is it? Lest you think I’ve gone and flipped my lid, let’s be honest: The definition and nature of content has changed since 1999. To hear some people talk about it, you’d think content was nothing more than words on a web page. But there’s more to it than that.

Essentially, content is anything that contributes to the essence of your website. By essence I mean its meta-qualities - not meta as in metatags, though it does include your tags - but meta as in over and above merely what you see on the page. There are three types of content within this definition:

• On-page content
• Off-page content
• “Behind the curtain” content

Your on-page content is anything that is visible to the human eye on each web page of your website. That includes text, photos, videos, graphics, your template or website design, etc. Those are your visible elements. Off-page content refers to anything off site that contributes to the essence of your website. That includes inbound links, blog content on off site blogs that you own and link back to your site, articles, social networking content, wiki entries, directory submissions, etc. I include these elements in my working definition of content because that’s what they are - in a word, they are content and they work for you.

“Behind the curtain” content is a little bit more mystical. It includes meta tags, of course, but it’s more than just meta tags. It also includes link attributes, site navigation paradigms, XML pages for your RSS feeds, sitemaps, and anything that contributes to user value but cannot be construed as either on-page or off-page content. In other words, your “behind the curtain” elements are primarily content fed to search engine spiders, but that also provide your users with some benefit. It is essentially, code.

Now what is your content supposed to do? Ultimately, your content - all of your content - has one job: To lead your site visitor to implement some action. That action could be a sale, a newsletter sign up, post a comment, something. Whatever it is, there needs to be a call to action. But not every piece of content requires a call to action. Some content - called pre-sell content - should actually be used to channel your site visitor to the place where you want them to respond to your call to action. You are actually canalizing them into responding to you.

So when you develop your content - whether it be off site link building content, visible on site web page elements like graphics and page text, or meta-content - each piece must contribute to the whole. Every piece of content must do its job or be cut from the team. The bottom line is, content teamwork is the most important thing. Every individual piece must work for the good of the team either by closing the sale, delivering traffic, or contributing to your Search Engine Optimization. If every piece of your content is working for the good of all then your content is selling. If not, then you need to rethink your content.

You’ve heard it said often enough: “Content is King.” But is it?

Second-rate Search Engine Optimization experts and followers all over the Internet will repeat this mantra over and over again as if it is true and add such silly wisdom - let’s call it Sisdom - as “If content is king then link building is queen.” Yeah, right.

Let me tell you why this is all wrong. Any schmuck can put content on a web page. In fact, a web page is not a web page without content. Try putting up a blank white screen with nothing but your html and body tags. Call that content and every goober with a hat on will laugh at you. (The goobers without hats will stare blankly.)

I’ve seen people build a five page website and just wait. “Yep, built a website! The business will come any time. I’m juu-uuu-uust a-waitin’. God bless my soul.”

OK, I’m being silly. But you know it happens. People build a website - they’ve got content - and nothing happens. Some king.

Content without links will get you nothing. I’m not saying start building inbound links and all your problems will be solved. But I am saying that you can take any crappy site with content, build links to it and at least improve your Google juice. Content alone will not ensure you any rankings. It won’t ensure you any sales. It won’t ensure you any traffic. But put one strategically placed link somewhere else on the Web and point it back to your crappy site with content and you’ll likely increase your traffic. You’ll likely also increase your PageRank and Google’s algorithms will jump for joy because they found something of value related to your content - even though it’s not on your crappy website.

Now, that’s how links are more important than content. Even a bad link - not a spam link or a “bad neighborhood” link (I’m talking about an ineffectual milquetoast link) - can increase the Search Engine Optimization juice on your lousy content website. Oooooh, but take that lousy content and rewrite it. I don’t just mean change a few verbs and rearrange your keywords. I mean really rewrite it. Rewrite it from scratch so that your content shines - like Patton’s combat boots. Spit polish your content until you can see your own reflection. Don’t do anything. Now you’ve got a website with valuable content - and that’s what will make a difference.

Lesson: Content is not king. Good content is king.

Inbound links to a lousy content site with crappy content is better than a website with bad content and no links. But take that website and make your content good and your good content site without links will outperform a bad content site with all the links in the world. Add links to it, however, and you’ve got one hell of a website to be proud of. And it will make you money as part of your Search Engine Optimization efforts. I think that’s what Rand Fishkin meant when he said that links are more important than content. To that I wholeheartedly agree.

Most people aren’t aware that search engines already perform some limited semantic language analysis. Of course, there is a long way to go, but you can get ranked for your important key terms with semantic language techniques on your web pages.

That doesn’t mean you can abandon your keywords. To make the best use out of semantic language search, you should still use keywords on your website content, but you don’t have to stuff your content with keywords. Instead, if you notice that you have a lot of your keyword on the page, substitute some of those keyword instances with synonyms for your key words and phrases.

For instance, if you are writing about internet marketing, try useful synonyms like “online marketing,” “online advertising,” “internet promotions,” “marketing your internet business,” etc. Don’t substitute every instance of your keyword on the page because that will water your content down and you don’t want that. But you should substitute some instances of it.

Places where you want to keep your primary keyword include:

• Your page title
• H2 and H3 tags
• Meta Tags
• First and last sentence on the page

Then you want to pepper your content is your keyword throughout your page content. But don’t overdo it. You’ll also want to sprinkle your synonyms throughout the content to give your content its semantic flavor. And that’s how semantic language for web pages works. It’s not hard, but it’s more than just littering your pages with keywords too as part of Search Engine Optimization.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz responded to an Search Engine Optimization manifesto of a former contributor. The disagreements between the two on critical Search Engine Optimization topics is quite enlightening, especially given how sharp and distinctive they are. I have to say that I agree almost entirely with Rand’s take on things and feel the same way that it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re right and his antagonist is wrong.

Basically, the gist that I got from the article is that Search Engine Optimization experts generally disagree on a number of things, but that we all agree on certain fundamentals. However, it seems that after reading this that we don’t agree on enough of the fundamentals.

Some of the striking things that I found Rand defending include:

• The usefulness of white hat Search Engine Optimization tactics and their staying power
• Keywords in domain names
• That Search Engine Optimization terms like “aged domain,” “relevant link,” “authority site,” and “SEO friendly” actually do mean something
• That Search Engine Optimization is all about links and content (I mean, this one through me on the floor)
• Content is important, but links are infinitely more important

I thought some of these were no-brainers. Obviously not.

While Search Engine Optimization experts can disagree on tactics all day long, there are some things that just don’t make sense to disagree on. Some of those things would be the importance of links (who would ever say links are not important?) and legitimate Search Engine Optimization tactics are legitimate for long term staying power and usually not for short term benefits. Kudos to Rand Fishkin for taking on the task of offering an alternative view on those topics. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization in the real world today, I’d like to lay this out as the basis for all real, legitimate Search Engine Optimization work:

Read Rand’s article here.

This is helpful, from Matt Cutts:

I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site.

In other words, if you have 2 or 3 versions of the same article on your own website and it doesn’t exist anywhere else then you don’t have anything to worry about with duplicate content. That’s because the search engines index the best version of an article or web content. That’s why you can have the original article, a .pdf version, another version for easy printing, etc. You won’t have to worry about penalties. That’s a very important distinction.

Even more importantly, I think, you need to seriously consider how much you syndicate your content. Here’s why:

However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

That’s a very important piece of information. These submission services that promise to submit your content to thousands of websites at one time may actually be hurting you. When it comes to content syndication, more is not necessarily better. That’s not to say that it’s better not to syndicate at all. There is an optimal level of syndication. For search engine optimization purposes, it is in your best interest to be weary.

I would encourage you, if you’re going to put content on your own website AND syndicate it, to put it on your own website first then wait a couple of weeks before you syndicate. I would also limit myself to a handful of article directories and websites. First, I’d pick the websites that I know I’d like to see my content on and I’d submit to them. After a couple of weeks (again), I’d submit my content to no more than a dozen directories and/or submission sites. I would stay away from the submission sites that submit to thousands of sites at once. The only exception would be if my content was in a niche that would intrinsically limit who will publish it and then I’d probably submit only to those mass submit sites. It’s usually better to submit only to mass submit sites or specific directory sites, but not both. The main reason for this is because any article or content that is syndicated to more than 100 places online has likely reached its limit.

You’ve likely heard of cookies and session IDs. The difference between a cookie and a session ID, briefly, is that a session ID expires after a user closes their browser or leaves your website. The cookie is downloaded to the website visitors hard drive and the next time they arrive at your site you are able to see what they’ve viewed or purchased in the past. That information can be extremely valuable.

1. With cookies, you can learn your users’ navigational preferences and tailor them to suit those preferences. In other words, if you have content on a tier 3 structure and there are multiple paths to a certain page, a cookie can tell you whether a visitor prefers to take Path A or Path B to get that specific content. You can then tailor your offerings to narrow down that navigational path for each user.
2. Cookies also allow you to maintain password-protected web pages, or membership sites, and show only those features that require a password to users with a cookie that has a password stored on it. Non-registered users will get the “plain vanilla” version while your registered users can enjoy all the benefits of your content.
3. Cookies can also restrict search engines from accessing and indexing certain portions or web pages on your website while allowing registered users the full benefit of the content.
4. One of the most powerful uses for cookies and session IDs is to tailor your product offerings to users based on past purchases. Amazon.com has gotten real good at this. If you know that a certain user has a preference for yellow widgets versus blue then if you roll out a new product called Super-Duper Yellow Widget then your cookie can let you know when visitors with that preference are on your site. Your content will then be tailored to make an offer to those visitors while ignoring the visitors who prefer blue widgets.
5. Cookies can also tailor your advertising toward visitors with certain content preferences - even on the same page. For instance, if that yellow widget customer decides to visit the blue widget page then they’ll still see ads for yellow widgets even though that page normally displays ads for blue widgets.
6. Of course, the most common usage for cookies and session IDs is to improve user experience. Cookies can remember your visitors’ passwords and allow them to visit your site without having to login manually every time. You can even program the cookie to give your visitors a choice about that as some users are more concerned with privacy issues.
7. Cookies can also help you tailor your advertising preferences to certain types of advertisers who have shows a tendency to prefer certain types of content over others for their advertising purposes.

Cookies are very powerful and can be useful to you, your advertisers, search engines, and your visitors. Information can be collected on all of the above from all of the above for all of the above.

Dave Davies wrote a 10-step search engine optimization process in 2004 that consisted of the following steps:

1. Keyword Selection
2. Content Creation
3. Site Structure
4. Optimization
5. Internal Linking
6. Human Testing
7. Submissions
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras (all those things that didn’t fit in the first 9 steps)

He recently updated his list and now it looks like this:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competition Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

I like the update for several reasons. First, competitive analysis needs to be right up there at the top, near the beginning of the process. In his first list, Davies didn’t even include that, possibly because in 2004 most industries didn’t have a lot of competition. From this point forward, though, most businesses going online will have a lot of competition, and most of it will be stiff. Competitive analysis is very important.

I also like the addition of PPC, statistics analysis, and conversion “optimization” (though “tracking” may be a better word) to the list. But I’m not sure I like social media being where it is and I’m definitely sure I don’t like content optimization following site structure.

To me, content optimization (aka creation) is a part of site structure. In some ways, I understand why you need to structure your site before you create the content, but it’s also a repetitive process that you will come back to. You have to make sure that any new content you develop down the road conforms to your site structure so be sure you’re planning for the long term.

Link building and social media go a little bit hand in hand. But I think you need to specify what you mean exactly by social media. Does it include bookmarking and blogging? If not, it should. Or maybe blogging should be in its own category. I would definitely include blogging as a part of my overall strategy, but you can fit it into link building as well as social media. In fact, a lot of these categories flow into each other and are difficult to define.

If I were to create a list, it would look like this:

1. Keyword Analysis
2. Competitive Research
3. Keyword Selection
4. Website Template Design
5. Content Creation/Site Structure Tweaks
6. Article Marketing and Blogging
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Other Link Building Activities
9. PPC/Other Online Advertising
10. Analytics
11. Conversion Tracking & Optimization
12. Maintenance

I’d be anxious to see what the process looks like in five years.

So far it’s just a rumor, but WebProNews is saying that Google is considering a move that will restrict sites less than 5 days old from publishing AdSense ads. I think that would be a good move.

Google has always maintained that it’s function is to keep the search results pure. Well, that isn’t happening, and domain tasting is one reason why.

Domain tasting is the practice of purchasing a domain name for the purpose of testing its ability to earn income by throwing AdSense ads on it. Domain tasters will place ads on new domains within that five-day period and if they make enough money to make it worth their while then, and only then, will they keep the domain for long-term sustainability. If the domain name fails to meet their test for income potential then they drop it. Current rules for domain name registration allow purchasers a five-day grace period in making a decision to keep a domain. That means, effectively, that domain tasters can invest in new domains with “no money down.” If a domain isn’t any good, they’ve invested nothing but the time it takes to throw up AdSense ads and drive traffic to the site.

The practice is controversial and has drawn the ire of many legitimate content producers. If Google does pass the measure it would mean a loss of revenue for the search giant, although a relatively small loss compared to its entire asset portfolio. I for one believe Google should stop funding domain tasters and further would encourage the company to stop allowing AdSense to run on web pages that contain no original content.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with SEO, consider this: It gives love a bad name.