Search Engine Optimization Tools - Do You Really Need Them?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 15 of April , 2008 at 7:35 am

There are a lot of sites that make search engine optimization tools available to web owners. I often wonder how many of these tools are really needed and how many of them distract you away from what needs to be done.

I have seen web owners caught in a time loop, spending hours going through each and every tool that these sites offer, and one site I know of has 120+ search engine optimization tools. The problem is, you can be so caught up in checking on your web site, you don’t spend enough time working on it or promoting it.

Some tools do come in handy. However there needs to some commonsense in place when using these tools. Search engine optimization tools are really only useful if they provide information that you can directly work on.

Tools such as PageRank check, whilst the information may be handy, is not something that you can change (besides you can use a browser toolbar anyway). However, there are areas of your web site that affect PageRank. Any search engine optimization tools that help you improve those areas may be helpful.

Keyword position checks can be an important tool. If your keywords are not ranking well then you can work a little harder in that area. Another tool that is handy to use occasionally is a spider simulator. This tool will show you what the search spiders see. You can see whether or not your page breaks down at any point. If you have a piece of code that stops the spider seeing all of your page, then all your search engine optimization work will be for nothing.

There are so many search engine optimization tools available it would be hard to go through them all. There are keyword density checkers, link analyzers, page comparison checkers, and these are just a couple of them.

If you use search engine optimization tools then use them wisely, use them sparingly, most of all, use them as a guide to improving your web site. If they have no value for site improvement, don’t waste your valuable time chasing them.

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Category: SEO Tools

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: What Should You Do If You Receive A Violation Notice?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 13 of March , 2008 at 7:00 am

Most webmasters will inadvertently break one of the search engines’ guidelines at some point. What should you do if you receive a notice that you have violated one of Google’s webmaster guidelines?

First, you should know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure. Be familiar with the guidelines before you start building your website. You don’t have to memorize them. That’s why they’re posted online for all to see. But as you are building your website, make a point from time to time to go back and visit the guidelines. Read them about once or twice a year to stay current.

Google’s webmaster guidelines are broken down into three key areas:

  • Design and content
  • Technical
  • Quality

If you get a notice that you’ve violated any of Google’s guidelines, it will likely be in one of these three key areas. Google will be very specific about what it is you’ve done to violate their guidelines so pay attention to what your notice says and address that issue.

Your best bet is to fix what Google has said is wrong with your website right away. Do this as soon as possible. You don’t want lingering issues and the longer you allow a violation to sit the harder it will be to gain any rankings you might lose. If you address them soon enough you might not see any loss in rankings, PageRank, or other loss of benefits. Wait too long and you could lose ground against your competition that you’ll have to fight hard to get back.

After fixing the problem, log into your Google webmaster account and click on Request Reconsideration under the Tools tab. Google will re-evaluate your website to see that it meets the guidelines and if you’ve managed to do that then they will re-include you in the search listings and you can continue with your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

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Category: SEO Tools, Search Engines

A Bevy Of Cool Tools (And Stuff) For Webmasters

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 2 of March , 2008 at 3:28 pm

Don’t you just hate it when rumors are untrue? Especially if they’re somewhat plausible as is the case with Ask ditching Teoma for Google’s bots. Evidently, those are rumors are completely false.

YouTube’s personalize home page is now available. What a great opportunity!

You can now put your Webmaster Tools stats on your iGoogle page.

You can also cross submit sitemaps via robots.txt.

Jotspot is relaunched at a part of Google Sites. Need a wiki anyone?

I encourage you to try some of these cool webmaster tools for Search Engine Optimization. All of them appear somewhat useful, though some may not be for everyone. Nevertheless, it never hurts to experiment with new things just to see if they willl work for you. It’s the weekend. Have fun.

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Category: SEO Tools

Enhance Your Website With Google Gadgets

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 1 of March , 2008 at 2:03 pm

One way to enhance your website is to add a gadget or two. Google Gadgets helps you do that so easily. There are more than 45,000 Google gadgets to choose from in several categories, including:

  • News
  • Communication
  • Tools
  • Finance
  • Sports
  • Fun & Games
  • Lifestyle
  • Technology

You can choose from gadget currently available or create your own. You simply choose the gadget you want to add to your website and insert the code where you think it fits.

It’s easy to search for the gadgets you want. You can search by category or by keyword simply by typing in the keyword into the Google Gadget search box and seeing what’s available. Through the Google Gadget interface, you can contact the gadget developer or view the source code. Then you just copy/paste the code into your web page and your visitors can benefit from the gadget.

Google gadgets make your website sticky and can also increase the Search Engine Optimization as many gadgets related to your niche operate on keyword usage. Get a gadget that closely matches your niche topic and your Google juice goes up as well.

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Category: SEO Tools, Webmaster Tools

Using AdSense To SEO Your Website

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 20 of January , 2008 at 8:53 pm

Most webmasters don’t think about AdSense as an SEO tool, but it can be. Once you’ve established your website’s keyword focus and you’ve built enough pages to run your test, place a test ad or two on a couple of pages and let them sit for a week. Go back and take a look at your ads at various times of the day to see if they “match up” with your website’s content. If they don’t then it could be that you are not using the right keywords for your website.

To make this work, you have to sign up for AdSense and set it up for the right keywords. Make sure that your are AdSense ads target the right keywords because if they don’t then you’ll be running the wrong test and you won’t have any accuracy. The test works best on information publishing websites, but it can be done on just about any type of website. If you plan to use it as a test on your service-oriented website, don’t leave the ads up for too long because you’ll send your customers off to other places on the web and they’ll never do business with you again.

Remember, when you set up your AdSense, configure it to optimize with your content. You can opt to allow any type of ad to run on your site, but that won’t help you optimize your site for the type of visitors that you want. After you have determined whether your site is optimized properly, you can take your AdSense ads down and move on to the next project.

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Category: SEO, SEO Tools

Which Toolbar Is The Best?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 18 of January , 2008 at 10:27 am

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz wrote an excellent post this morning reviewing 12 browser toolbars. He details the benefits and features of each toolbar and measures their useful to the actual user as well as the SEO or Internet marketing professional. The 12 toolbars he reviewed his post include:

  • Google Toolbar
  • Yahoo Toolbar
  • MSN Live Toolbar
  • Ask.com Toolbar
  • AOL Toolbar
  • Alexa Toolbar
  • Compete.com Toolbar
  • Netcraft Toolbar
  • StumbleUpon Toolbar
  • Firefox Toolbar
  • Microsoft Developer Toolbar

I agree with Rand’s analysis for most of these tools, but I disagree heartily with one of them. In fact, I only had two really strong reactions to two of his reviews. One was positive and the other was negative.

The Toolbar That Makes Stumbling Fun
The positive reaction was to StumbleUpon. This is one of the few toolbars that is useful to the average user as well as the Internet marketer. It is very user-friendly and has a lot of cool features. I particularly like the vertical stumble features, which allow you to search and find (by “stumbling”) videos, photos, and other topical information. You can also vote up or down your favorite and least favorite websites when you find them. It’s not only fun to Stumble, but as an Internet marketer, you can Stumble your own blog posts and information and see how much traffic you get as a result of it by taking a look at your analytics (you are using analytics, right?). The only thing I’d disagree with Rand on about SU is that the traffic you get from it not always valuable. If you target your information correctly then you can get good traffic, but StumbleUpon traffic can sometimes be hit or miss.

The Toolbar That Is Crazy Like A Firefox
I also had a positive reaction to the Firefox Toolbar review, though not as strong as the reaction I had to the SU review. I agree with Rand that the Firefox Toolbar isn’t particularly useful to the average user, but it is extremely useful to Internet marketing professionals. With this toolbar, you can see Google PageRank, Alexa ranking data, and Compete.com information together side by side. That alone makes the information moderately useful. But the real gem with the Firefox Toolbar is that it will show you which links are “nofollow” links. How many times have you submitted a link request, offered to pay someone to link to you, or trackbacked to their blog only to find that the links you get are “nofollow” and therefore useless to you? That feature alone is worth downloading the Firefox Toolbar.

Alexa: The Most Worthless Toolbar In The World
OK, I may be overreacting. The Alexa Toolbar isn’t really that bad. But I was surprised to see the way Rand recommended it. This is straight from his review:

There are enough uninformed decision makers at businesses, ratings services, investment funds and competitive firms who still trust Alexa data to make it worthwhile to game the system.

Did I read that right? Rand Fishkin is encouraging people to game the system? Has he flipped? That’s probably the worst advice I’ve seen since Gene Marks told small business owners not to worry about anti-virus software. Let’s see, you want your market to trust you so you game them into believing a lie? Yeah, that’s a great business practice.

Sorry for the strong reaction, but Alexa started out a good concept. Unfortunately, it’s turned into a totally useless tool. The whole idea is to give Web publishers an idea of their standing relative to their competition. But the concept relies upon data received from other Alexa Toolbar users. If hardly anyone in your market is using the toolbar then you don’t have a realistic picture of where you stand. As Rand states in his review:

The Alexa toolbar is designed to be a competitive information tool, and as such, offers virtually no functionality, other than the ability to get (highly inaccurate) website popularity data and contact information (which is also spurious) for the sites a user visits. It’s too bad, because the value of Alexa’s data lies in the number of people they can get to adopt their toolbar. The more ordinary and “average” those users are, the better Alexa’s data will be, yet they really fail to serve this market effectively.

He rates the toolbar’s value to the average user as low, and I agree. It is low. Which diminishes the value of the toolbar for Internet marketers. If you are looking for competitive information and your target customer isn’t providing you the information you need in order to analyze your competitiveness then all your efforts are useless. You might as well just stand on a street corner with a clipboard and a survey because the information you gather will be just as useful. I’m sorry, but I think Rand was just way off on this one.

Why Not Create Your Own Toolbar?
You can, of course, create your own toolbar. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend this for everyone. You really have to market your toolbar and it has to be useful to your target market. If you do take this suggestion, don’t try to create a general toolbar that is targeted toward everyone. The search engine toolbars and the SU Toolbar have done that to relative success, and chances are you’ll create a toolbar that isn’t nearly as useful. Instead, create a toolbar that is very useful to your target market. One place you can go to create your own toolbar is Conduit. But don’t tell anyone I told you that.

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Category: SEO Tools

Twitter: A Powerful SEO Tool?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 17 of January , 2008 at 12:32 pm

One of my favorite blogs, Marketing Pilgrim, wrote up a nice piece today about Internet marketers using Twitter. I’m assuming you know about Twitter by now. The interesting thing about the article is that it lists 75+ Internet marketers who use Twitter. Now, I know there are more than 75 Internet marketers in the world. But I also know that the best Internet marketers don’t jump on a bandwagon unless there is some value in it. I was surprised to see some of the biggest names in SEO and Internet marketing on the list. Here are just a few:

  • Andy Beal
  • Brian Chappell
  • Andy Beard
  • Bill Slawski
  • Duncan Riley
  • Graywolf
  • Greg Boser
  • Jason Calacanis
  • Jennifer Laycock
  • Jill Whalen
  • Jeremiah Owyang
  • Lee Odden
  • Lisa Barone
  • Problogger
  • Rand Fishkin
  • Rene Lemerle
  • Rusty Brick
  • Robert Scoble
  • SERoundtable
  • Sugarrae
  • TheNanny612
  • Vanessa Fox

And that’s not even the whole list. There are many more!

Twitter has a PageRank of 8. That’s at least as high as many social bookmarking sites that have been around a lot longer. Del.icio.us is at a PR 8. Digg has a PR 8. StumbleUpon has a PR 8.

With a PR comparable to the most trafficked social bookmarking sites online, you know there has to be some serious link juice in using Twitter. I know that’s not why these savvy Internet marketers are using it. The social benefits are just as powerful as the SEO benefits, but that does give you something to think about, doesn’t it?

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Category: Internet Marketing, SEO, SEO Tools

Gene Marks Is Back And Better Than Ever

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 14 of January , 2008 at 7:55 am

Gene Marks wrote an article in BusinessWeek that drew the ire of every SEO and Internet marketer in the business. All you had to do was Google his name and you’d see the backlash. Even my post about him hit Page 1 on Google.

Interestingly, there’s at least one person agreeing with him and search marketer Jaan Kanellis is taking issue with that defender on yesterday’s WebProNews.

I’ll have to agree with Jaan Kanellis again. The only reason Gene Marks wrote the article that he did was to get link bait. Either that or the man is a total and complete idiot.

I focused my last article about him on his misrepresentation and lack of understanding of SEO. But he was wrong on so many other counts as well. Jaan Kanellis only mentions a few of them in his latest article:

  • RSS
  • Blogs
  • SEO
  • CRM
  • PPC
  • Web 2.0

Interestingly, Jaan and I both agree with Gene Marks’ comments regarding Web 2.0 and CRM. So we really don’t have an argument on those points with Gene Marks or with Adam Senour. CRM is pretty much useless for most small businesses. A simple spreadsheet will meet most of your needs. And hardly anyone can agree on the definition of Web 2.0. It’s just some buzzword that some marketers are capitalizing on to make themselves appear more important.

But blogs, RSS, SEO, and PPC are marketing tools and strategies that anyone and everyone can benefit from. OK, maybe you’re not interested in running PPC campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t benefit from it if you were. Blogs are such simple tools to run and operate that Adam Senour’s comment about the time it takes to maintain a blog is simply ludicrous. But I love Jaan’s point even more:

If you’re not willing to learn and work with the components that make the web what it is then forget about all together. Keep yourself in a box far, far away from technology.

The bottom line is this: Are you using the tools of the Web most effectively? Most small businesses are not. There are things they can do to improve their marketing effectiveness as well as their efficiency. Tools like RSS feeds allow you to do that. Instead of spending hours visiting blogs just to see if you want to read what they have to offer today, you can get all of your news feeds in one place and scroll through them to see which ones you do want to read and which ones you don’t want to mess with. Is that a time saver? You bet it is. A huge one. So why ignore it?

Gene Marks doesn’t have a clue. Neither does anyone who is defending him.

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Category: Internet Marketing, SEO Myths, SEO Tools

Preventing Search Engines From Crawling Your Web Pages

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 10 of January , 2008 at 7:51 am

Matt Cutts has a good video today on Google Webmaster Central explaining how to prevent certain pages on your website from being crawled by the search engines.

You really need to be familiar with four methods of preventing the spiders from crawling your pages:

  • htaccess
  • noindex
  • nofollow
  • robots.txt
  • password protect

Your htaccess file is a ticket to solving a lot of your search engine problems. Not all of them, but some of them. It’s a file on your server that gives instructions to browsers and search engine spiders, telling them how to read your web pages. One common usage of this file is to use it to redirect old web pages to new web pages. Frequently, webmasters will update their information and when doing so will change the URL of a web page. Well, if you do that then you still have that old web page indexed and when people try to visit that page they will get a 404 error page. To prevent that from happening, you can add a 301 redirect command in your htaccess to redirect traffic to your new page.

But the htaccess has other uses as well and you can actually use it to tell the search engines certain information that will prevent them from crawling your web pages. More on this later.

Perhaps the most common way to instruct search engines not to crawl certain pages of your website is the robots.txt file. You can use this file to tell all the search engines, or just some of them, not to crawl specific pages. You just give the URLs of the pages you don’t want to be crawled and specify which search engines are not allowed to crawl those pages.

The noindex meta tag is a bit different than the robot.txt file. It tells the search engines not to show a page in their index. They’ll still crawl it, but they won’t show it in their index so anyone searching for a key term will not see that page on that search engine. Again, you can specify specific search engines or make it general for all search engines.

The nofollow meta tag is a tag that tells the search engines not to crawl certain links. So you can actually have a page that links to one other page on your website and make that link a nofollow link then the one page that spins off will not be found because of that nofollow link. You can nofollow all the links on a page or just some of them.

Finally, if you password protect certain pages, the search engines will not crawl them. They cannot guess your password so those pages are safe. Users of your website can get to them, but the search engines cannot. You can password protect your pages using the htaccess file that I discussed earlier.

Keep in mind that there are complications with each of these methods. The safest and most powerful of all of these methods is the htaccess. The least effective is the nofollow tag because while the links aren’t followed, that page is still on a server somewhere. If you access that page from your browser then move on to another page on your website and you have an analytics program that shows links for referrers, that link could get crawled and you’ll still get traffic to the page. Not a lot, but some, and you’ll run the risk of someone else linking to it. You have the same problem with noindex tags and robots.txt files, so be careful.

For more information on preventing your pages from being crawled, watch Matt Cutts’ video on that topic. He also discusses how to de-index certain URLs you have mistakenly indexed.

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Category: Meta Tags, Robots, SEO Tools, Search Engines

Wikia Search: Is It Unique Enough To Compete?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 7 of January , 2008 at 1:49 pm

This morning I talked about the new Wikia Search search engine. What I didn’t discuss is the real benefit of being included in a search engine’s database. If Wikia is to be successful then it must meet the minimum benefit requirements for search engines and that means providing webmasters as well as searchers with benefits - not just searchers only.

Google does this well and that’s why it’s the No. 1 search engine. Google first gained a reputation by beating all the other search engines in providing relevant results for search queries. But it also grew in stature by providing webmasters with useful tools and benefits as well. Some of those benefits include:

  • Link-Building Based Algorithm
  • Webmaster Tools
  • Vertical Search Categories
  • Advertising Products
  • Ancillary Products like Blogspot.com, Pikasa, YouTube, etc.
  • SEO Awareness

Many of the benefits that Google has provided to webmasters have been intangible, but the tangible benefits should not go unmentioned. The Google toolbar with the PageRank tool has been invaluable to many a webmaster. Every webmaster knows that you can use certain Google tools and services to improve their websites and increase their rankings, not only at Google but at the other search engines as well. Google AdWords’ free keyword research tool has proven to be tremendously helpful to helping webmasters improve their organic listings as well as their pay per click ads.

Yahoo! and MSN have also included tools and benefits for webmasters. Ask.com was one of the first search engines to get in on the local search game by providing searchers with a platform for making local searchers through its vertical search tool AskCity. All the search engines now provide a similar service.

It really doesn’t do to call these search providers search engines any more. They are really search portals. All of them to some degree provide searchers and webmasters with benefits outside of the range of organic search. If Wikia Search is going to enter the search field and compete on a respectable level then it must able to leverage its search tools with other products and services that provide benefits to searchers and webmasters, but it must do so in a way that gives it an advantage over the existing search portals. That means, it must define its uniqueness. Is being open source and user-generated going to be enough to satisfy that requirement? Only time will tell.

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Category: SEO, SEO Tools, Search Engines, Search Marketing

Optimization Tools: Three Things You Can Do In 2008 To Increase Your SEO

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 6 of January , 2008 at 6:27 pm

If you’re a webmaster who has been around for awhile then you likely have done a few things to increase your website SEO. You’ve probably optimized the dickens out of your web pages. Good for you. You’ve got your keyword density down, your code-to-content ratio optimized, your internal links are perfect, your site structure and architecture are near perfect. Now what?

Well, let this be the year for your website optimization efforts. There are three things that you can do to increase your SEO for the coming year. I recommend them all as a complete package, but if you can only do one of these then do the first one. But all three of these practices are very powerful:

  1. Start An Offsite Blog - I mean start a blog, but don’t put it on your website. Instead, buy a separate domain name and put your blog there. In the sidebar of your blog link to each page of your website using your best keyword anchor text. When you write each post on your blog be sure to link to a page on your website. This kind of blog is excellent for building inbound links to your website, which translate into SEO and particularly link building.
  2. Article Marketing - Don’t start any paid link building programs. Article marketing works far better and you get great links by engaging in this kind of advertising. It’s free if you do it yourself.
  3. Directory Submissions - Apply for a listing to every directory you qualify for. Niche directories, general directories, e-zine directories, blog directories, Yellow Page directories, you name it. If it can be called a directory and you meet the minimum qualifications for inclusion, apply for a listing.

These are called off-site SEO. They are good for link building and links are important. A good number of quality inbound links are perhaps one of the most important aspects of SEO. However, it is getting harder to find good sources of links and the search engines, particularly Google, have made their link quality guidelines much, much stricter. Still, find good links and they are invaluable.

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Category: Link Building, SEO, SEO Tools

Search Engine Optimization Journal’s Top 20 SEO Blog List

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 12:40 pm

We have researched and compiled our first annual list of some of the most useful Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Blogs…other than the Search Engine Optimization Journal!
Please feel free to visit these blogs as they provide excellent information! Please let us know if we missed any blogs off of this list.

1. Matt Cutts: Google, Gadgets and SEO
Blog URL: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
SEO news and tips coming straight from a Google employee who is recognizably one of the biggest names in the SEO industry.

2. Search Engine Watch Blog: Search Marketing News
Blog URL: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/
Not only does SearchEngineWatch.com give you everything you need to know as a whole about SEM, but this blog is definitely a great addition to the impressive website.

3. Marketing Pilgrim
Blog URL: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com
This site has new content rich posts per day. It also has a job board and other valuable parts of the site. It has a comprehensive e-book you can download as well to learn more about online marketing.

4. Graywolf’s SEO Blog
Blog URL: http://www.wolf-howl.com
Not only does Michael Gray offer consulting services, he also offers his own fun and unique and personal insight on SEO and all that is going on in the business.

5. SEO Scoop
Blog URL: http://www.seo-scoop.com
SEO-Scoop is a well written and interesting blog that offers SEO tips, theories and news.

6. Ask the SEO Guru
Blog URL: http://massa.techndu.com
While there is less glitz and glamour on this page when it comes to colorful ads, fonts and photos, it provides valuable information on SEO based on questions asked. You can submit a question and if it gets chosen, the author will answer it with a thorough blog post.

7. SEO Refugee
Blog URL: http://www.seorefugee.com
A funny and interesting approach at an SEO blog, SEORefugee provides comical cartoons and other interesting articles that you are sure to enjoy reading.

8. Search Engine Roundtable
Blog URL: http://www.seroundtable.com
Six well rounded individuals write in this popular blog. Each new posts offers invaluable insight in a different voice.

9. Mr. SEO
Blog URL: http://www.mr-seo.com/wordpress/
Mr. SEO offers not only a blog but a very interactive one. He also hosts a podcast in which he will actively do an SEO strategy on a site or two.

10. Search Engine Journal
Blog URL: http://www.searchenginejournal.com
Arguably one of the most popular blogs about search engine marketing out there. With several posts a day written by various authors, the content on this blog will never leave you looking for more.

11. SEO Service Provider
Blog URL: http://seoserviceprovider.com/seoblog/
Just as the tagline says “Just good SEO - no hype.” It’s a to the point blog that updates you on the SEO news and tips.

12. Small Business SEM
Blog URL: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com
This blog offers an alternative to small businesses who simply cannot afford to get consulting services on their own. The content is extremely thorough and provides various links and resources to other useful websites and tools.

13. Search Engine Land
Blog URL: http://searchengineland.com
Website has good quality content and several pages with SEO, marketing and other information. It has detailed sections of the site dedicated to everything Google, Yahoo and MSN related and contains tons of new articles posted each day.

14. SEO Wife
Blog URL: http://www.seowife.com
An interesting look on SEO through the eyes of a wife and SEO marketer. Not only is there search engine optimization news and tips, there is also some other interesting reads!

15. Hybrid SEM
Blog URL: http://www.hybridsem.com/blog
The authors fuse old school and new school SEO techniques together to maximize your ROI.

16. Natural Search Blog
Blog URL: http://www.naturalsearchblog.com
Natural Search Blog provides articles on search engine optimization including keyword reasearch, on-page factors, link-building, social media optimization, local search optimization, image search optimization, and mobile SEO.

17. Search Marketing Gurus
Blog URL: http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com
This site not only contains valuable articles but also useful links and resources. It has an emphasis on women within internet marketing with a weekly column.

18. Deep Linking from the Desk of Bluebert G. Peabody
Blog URL: http://blog.cre8asite.net/
The Gurus at Cre8asite have teamed up to provide you with an upbeat SEM blog that has content that will certainly get you thinking.

19. Zunch Search Engine Marketing Blog
Blog URL: http://searchenginemarketingblog.zunch.com
A blog with facts and opinions from the search engine optimization / search engine marketing teams at Zunch Communications, Inc.

20. Scotland SEO Blog
Blog URL: http://www.scotlandseoblog.co.uk
Here is an SEO blog based out of Scotland giving a fresh look at the current SEO industry. The blog is updated daily and is always worth reading.

Have we missed any? Please leave a comment of other Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing related blogs that might be worth reading.

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Category: SEO, SEO Tools, Top SEO List

SEO As A Branding Tool

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 9 of December , 2007 at 2:19 pm

Typically, when you hear marketers talking about SEO and branding, they’re not connected. Sure, you can brand yourself online. You also need to SEO your website. But did you know that you can use your SEO as a branding tool?

It’s true. The most effective elements for using SEO as a branding tool include:

  • Your domain name
  • Anchor text
  • Alt tags
  • H2 and H3 tags
  • Trademarked keyword terms

I’ve talked about each one of these before, except for the last one. Just to review, a keyword-rich domain name can brand you. It also gives you a tiny edge over the competition. Of course, anchor text is always useful for SEO, but for branding? If your brand is keyword-rich to begin with, yes. H2 and H3 tags with keyword terms in them make your content stand out more. Add a color that becomes a part of every tag and you’ve got instant branding. Alt tags - same deal. Use your keywords.

Consider Google’s PageRank algorithm. It’s trademarked. Any idea why? Because it’s a branding term. Now, page rank isn’t trademarked because it represents an idea behind the PageRank trademark. That’s what makes the trademark such a powerful branding item for Google. It’s based on a popular keyword.

Of course, you can’t trademark a keyword. But you can trademark a branding version of a keyword. Let’s say, for instance, that you are a salad chef. Your most popular keyword phrase is salad chef. You can’t trademark the keyword, but you can trademark SaladChef as a variant of the keyword and use it as a branding item. Doing this prevents anyone else from taking the same variation and using it to capitalize on. It’s a powerful branding technique. Try it!

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Category: Branding, SEO, SEO Tools

Link Price Calculator: How Much To Charge For Your Links

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 10 of November , 2007 at 10:47 am

If you sell links there is one tool that you cannot do without. The key to making any money selling links is to place a reasonable value on the links you are selling. SEOChat’s link price calculator can help you.

Some other tools offered by SEOChat that every webmaster should be aware of? Glad you asked:

  • Code To Text Ratio Tool - Just as it says. Check your code to text ratio. Is it too fat?
  • Future PageRank - Gauge the future PageRank of any website or web page on the Internet
  • Keyword Density - Just like any other keyword density tool, but it’s free
  • Link Popularity - Sure, you can check this somewhere else, but since you’re here
  • Meta Tag Generator - Just type in your keywords and a description of your page then let SEOChat generate your meta tags

SEOChat has some of the best free tools online. Google may not like link selling, but you’re free to do as you wish with your own website. The SEOChat link price calculator can help you determine how much to charge.

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Category: SEO Tools

Search Engine
Optimization Journal

Search Engine Optimization Journal is an SEO Blog that discusses Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Ranking and Positioning for the new and advanced reader. Written daily by expert Nick Stamoulis, SEOJ is owned and operated by the website marketing firm Brick Marketing.
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