Sales and SEO. SEO and Sales. Same thing? No. They’re not.

Too many webmasters, and some of them are darned good at SEO, have a bad habit of confusing SEO with sales. They are, like, totally, NOT the same thing.

So why is this mistake so easy to commit? I think there’s a very good reason. If you are good at search engine optimziation and you hit on a really good success early on then you could mislead yourself into believing that your SEO made you sales. Yes, you can say it made you money. But it didn’t make you sales. SEO never makes sales. Landing Page Conversion Content is what makes sales.

Sometimes you can create great landing page content by accident then drive a successful campaign and that creates an illusion that SEO creates sales. But you need to think of these as two separate activities, two different sets of problems, and two completely and set apart methods of marketing. Yes, they overlap and compliment each other; there’s no doubt.

SEO is so very important. And sales is important too (it is what keeps you in business!).

Here’s an interest post on Marketing Pilgrim about things you should learn if you are going to be an Internet marketer. And I agree with them. But where’s the SEO?

Let’s run down the list:

• Fake it like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally
• Be persistent and focus, focus, focus
• Get hyped up and know that people LIE! - a lot
• Never stop learning
• Build the brand, not the traffic, links, etc.
• Choose e-commerce
• Find and exploit niches yourself
• Learn the basics
• Crowdsource (outsource) as much as you can
• Learn to program or find a programmer who can do what you need
• Brainstorm before you do anything
• Utilize all the channels that make sense for you
• Repurposing isn’t always necessary
• Build true virility when link building
• Go underground when you can

So where’s the SEO part? Buried in the ‘learn the basics’ line.

While this list is written for Internet marketing entrepreneurs, it’s a good list for small business owners who want to build an online presence to understand as well. Maybe you don’t need to follow every bit of advice word for word. But understanding how Internet marketers operate successfully online can help you better choose the strategies and tactics that you use in your business. And, yes, search engine optimization is a part of that. Just get back to the basics.

Mike McDonald at WebProNews wrote a great article on SEO ranking factors and which ones are most important right now. Of course, it’s not all encompassing. It only touches on a few of them. But one thing I noted was that Mike and Rand Fishkin agree that H1 tags are not that important for ranking. Here’s what he says about the subject:

H1 Tags - A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue. The rationale was the search engine spiders interpreted H1 tags as a signal that ‘hey, this text is important because it’s bigger’. Of course the proliferation of .css meant that you could throw H1 tags pretty much anywhere and everywhere on your page and just take care of how things looked to people with stylesheets.

That this was ever an effective ranking tactic or strategy is somewhat debatable. However, currently, while H1 tags aren’t going to hurt you, they don’t seem to be much of a factor.

First, let’s clarify something. H1 tags in and of themselves aren’t that important. No H1 tag is going to push you up to the top of search engine rankings. But H tags in general, if used properly, can be a benefit. The problem with some webmasters is that they have misused H tags.

Spam hurts. Can we all agree on that? Even H-tag spam is self-dustructive. It’s like sticking a needle in your arm. You may not be an alcoholic, but if smoke crack then you’re still destroying body. Misuse H tags and you could be killing your SEO. Plain and simple.

So What’s The Proper Way To Use H Tags?
The best way to use H tags, in my humble opinion, is in the classic newspaper style. Newspapers have always published the largest headlines at the top of the page and made the headlines increasingly smaller down the page toward the bottom. Using this classic design style for your web pages still works. It’s a quality content issue. Such decreasing h tag styles makes reading easier on human eyes and search bots don’t seem to mind either.

Now, will that make your pages rank better? I don’t think it will make them rank any worse. But if you have 12 H1 tags down your page because you think they’ll give you special search engine favor then you are likely to find out that such H-tag spamming will just end you up in the SEO gutter. Therefore, H tags can help you if they aren’t hurting you. In other words, the absence of a negative is a positive.

So, with that in mind, how’s your H1 tag hanging?

When it comes to search engine optimization, it used to be about 2 things: Keywords and Links. Well, there’s really a lot more to it today than there used to be, but in some fashion SEO can be boiled down - as can Internet marketing - to 3 things. We can call them the 3 prongs to your SEO tuning fork.

What are those prongs? Glad you asked.

1. Keywords
2. Links
3. Traffic

Keywords are the basic currency of search engine marketing. You don’t have to count out strict density patterns. But how you manage your keywords - placement, quantity, the specific phrase you choose, etc. - determines how well you have optimized your on-page content and even, to some degree, your off-page content.

If keywords are the currency of search engine marketing, links are the currency of traffic authority. Specifically, I’m talking about inbound links. But your link management should consist of outbound and internal links as well. And when you manage your linking well, you’ll be judicious in how you use your links. If you use them the right way you can channel traffic to the pages you want it and increase your search engine benefits through the use of anchor text, and placement on authority sites of relevance to yours. Links are the glue that hold the other two prongs in place, the center prong, if you will.

Traffic. A lot could be said for that. It isn’t often thought of as an element of SEO even though every webmaster knows its importance. Without traffic you don’t have a Web business. You won’t make money. Who’s going to buy what you have to offer if they can’t see the offer? Still, conversions aside, traffic does affect your search engine rankings in some way. Though it’s not known just how much, stats like bounce rate, time on site, time on page, and other such relevant metrics could give you SEO points in some search engine algorithms.

How well do you manage the three prongs of your SEO tuning fork?

Increasingly, SEO is becoming more about the quality of content and not just quantity of keywords. At one point in the past, your content could have been total smack and you could have achieved great search engine rankings by using keywords correctly. That’s a lot harder today these days. Sure, in some cases you can still get away with keyword spamming, but in general it’s not a good idea to even try.

The search engines have become a lot more sophisticated. Google, in particular, analyzes much more than keyword quantities. During the migration of Google’s rise to power, we’ve seen emphasis on keyword densities move to keyword placement for on-page optimization elements and from number of links off-site to link quality and relevance. While Google still emphasizes link relevance and quality to some degree, even those factors are beginning to lose effectiveness. Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms to keep SEOs on our toes.

Now we’re seeing traffic factors much more important. Time on site, bounce rates, traffic patterns in terms of quantity and even traffic sources can effect your search engine rankings.

Going forward, anyone who wants to rank well in the search engines will have to spend considerable time keeping up with changes at the search engines that effect how your sites are perceived, indexed, and ranked. Otherwise, you could see your pages fall in the rankings in a heartbeat.

I’ve been reviewing notes for HTML 5, the 5th generation of major changes to the Web’s standard programming language. It doesn’t look to be a complete overhaul, but there are some changes that appear to be for the better. Currently still in development, under W3C committee, HTML 5 is still a work in progress, but I find the following elements to be very welcoming from a search engine optimization perspective:

• Section tag instead of Div tags to divide a web page into sections
• Header and footer tags
• Nav tag for navigational menus
• Article tag
• No alt tags for defining images
• Video and audio tags

I think HTML 5 will be easier to learn for most people than HTML 4 is. I also think it could have some impactful SEO implications. The audio and video tags, for instance, will make optimizing for those elements much more easier. Also, web pages will likely begin to take on a more magazine-like appearance.

When will HTML 5 be available publicly? Who knows? But I’m looking forward to it.

It has been some time since Google announced that it can crawl and index Flash files. Even then, the capability was very limited. The search engine has recently expanded on that ability, however.

From the Webmaster Central Blog:

* Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
* Discover links within Flash files.
* Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
* Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
* Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

So it looks like video optimization is moving a little closer to photo optimization only better. As of now Google can’t crawl or index content within photos, but it does use text near the photo to better understand what a photo is about. The primary ingredient in photo optimization, however, is the alt tag.

With video, there’s no alt tag, but Google can crawl an SWF file and detect links, which is a huge move forward. Webmasters should have a heydey with this one.

Copyblogger had a great post on when the right time is to kill your blog. It gave me a great idea.

I’m not advocating murder here. I’m talking about your SEO campaigns. When should you put a bullet in their heads and just start over?

Sometimes it isn’t working and you know it isn’t working. So what should you do? You know you should keep plugging away, but your current direction is all wrong. It’s time to pull the plug. You just know it.

Here is a list of times when it might be prudent to just pull the plug on your search engine optimization campaign and go back to the drawing board:

• You find yourself ranking for all the wrong keywords - I’m not talking about hitting No. 1 unexpectedly for a few keywords you hadn’t planned for. I’m talking about your No. 1 rankings being for keywords that are all wrong for your business. They’re good keywords - they’re just not right for your business. And the keywords you should be ranking for, you’re not. You’ve obviously gone in the wrong direction. Time to start over.
• You’re ranking well but you aren’t getting any traffic - OK, you may not need to start over, but you definitely need to work on your meta tags. Is your description being used as the snippet? What is? Take a good look at your on-page content and see if you can make any improvements.
• You’ve run out of money and you aren’t make any either - You’ve likely hit a brick wall. Something isn’t working. You either need to go back for more seed money or pick another niche. It’s OK, all of us fall flat on our faces from time to time.
• You’ve totally lost interest - It happens. You thought it was a good idea when you started but you’re no longer interested. You probably chose the wrong topic to begin with. Go back to the beginning and try to find something you’re really interested in.

Rarely would I suggest just trashing everything and starting over. But sometimes it’s the right thing to do. If you find yourself in a tough SEO spot and need a way out, consider killing your SEO as a last resort.

Do you know how your website attracts traffic? There isn’t just one thing. There are many things that can drive traffic to your website. But let’s write off anything that isn’t search engine optimization related. What SEO tasks can you perform that actually drive traffic to your website?

Content is the first and obvious response. But what exactly is content? Photos are content, right? Do photos deliver traffic? They can - if they are optimized.

OK, let’s move a little closer to the basics.

Keywords. Do keywords deliver traffic? No. Not by themselves. Keywords only deliver traffic if they are utilized properly.

What really delivers traffic are three things:

• Well-written optimized content that achieves search engine rankings.
• Inbound links with the right anchor text and call to action
• Keyword-rich titles

First off, content is your bag of tricks. Your content must be well written and optimized. If that is the case then you’ll attract traffic. Beyond content, however, you need inbound links. Without links you’ll never see traffic. Finally, titles. Titles are the most important content element on your page. A well-written highly optimized page title can do more to attract traffic than anything else.

If the Internet didn’t exist and you found a way to drive thousands of people to your brick and mortar store in one day without spending a dime and you knew that way would work every time you did it, would you take advantage of that opportunity? Who wouldn’t, right?

Well, that’s essentially what search engine optimization is. Do it yourself and it doesn’t cost a dime. The only commitment is the time it takes to optimize your website properly. Otherwise, there’s no expense. And the traffic is targeted traffic. Do it well enough and you’ll get a lot of targeted traffic. Why wouldn’t you do that for your business?

There are a lot of reasons to perform on site optimization for your website. I can’t think of any for not doing it. But is SEO alone enough?

I’m probably one of the few SEOs that will tell you that you should probably do more than SEO your website. Optimization is the place you should start. But, generally speaking, you don’t ever just want to rely on one marketing method alone. You want to get the word out about your company as far and wide as possible. That means using social media, pay per click advertising, display advertising, offline advertising, local networking, and as many other ways as you can find as well. Try new things. Keep the things that work, toss out the things that don’t.

To hear Aaron Wall tell it, small businesses don’t have a fighting chance on the Web. Funny he should say it like that. Here’s one of the most famous search engine optimization experts online - heck, he practically wrote the book on SEO (or something like that) - and he’s calling himself an “humble web business.” He’s talking like he thinks he’s one of the small fish. Isn’t he the one that has the big companies paying him to do their SEO?

I don’t know. Maybe he his humble.

But he’s right about one thing. Google likes the big guys and their money. There’s no doubt about that. But I’m still convinced that even the small business owner has a better chance at a level playing field online, even with Google sleeping with the megacorporations. You don’t need a lot of money to succeed at online marketing. You just need a good plan and the right advocate. Good SEO works for the small guy too!

Google have announced that its search engine optimization starter guide is available to 98% of the world population through various languages. I would highly encourage webmasters, both new and veteran, to download the starter guide and read through it. I doubt that you’ll find any sweeping surprises and there’s no better place to learn how to optimize your web pages than from the world’s leading search engine.

Google has always done well with its webmaster guidelines. The intent is to help webmasters and site owners to make the most of the tools available to them to rank better in Google. By encouraging legitimate SEO practices, Google can encourage friendly competition and establishes fair practices in search.

It’s also important to note that the guide won’t necessarily assist you in ranking at other search engines. It’s intent is to help you to rank better at Google. While other search engines perform some ranking functions similar to Google, not all the search engines utilize every ranking factor in the same way, so don’t expect the guide to tell you how to get indexed and rank at all the search engines.

While I don’t think you’ll learn everything you can learn about search engine optimization from the starter guide, I do believe it’s a great place to start. If you start with the search engines themselves then anything you read that contradicts what they have to say should be suspect. Google has no incentive for passing on irrelevant or bad information on this topic. They may not tell you everything you could know, but what they do tell you will be solid advice. If you are new to search engine optimization then I’d suggest downloading the search engine optimization starter guide.

There are few guarantees in life. Search engine optimization is one of them. Try as you might, you’ll hardly find any consistency in the way the search engines rank web pages. That makes it rather difficult to predict how they will react to yours. But what makes it so difficult?

A number of factors, actually. For starters, every search engine have their own ranking criteria. Some place undue importance on meta tags while others don’t consider them at all. Some consider keyword placement in the URL while others don’t. Some are based largely on link relevance and quality while others emphasize on-page optimization methods more. It’s a mixed bag of nuts.

To top it off, each search engine consider a large bevy of ranking factors for every page. Type any combination of search queries into any one of the search engines and you are likely to find the top 10 spots for a key phrase populated by different sites that rank for different reasons. None of them will have gotten to their place of prestige in the same way and for the same reasons. So unpredictable.

If all of that is the case then how can one ensure that one’s site ranks well for the key phrases you target? Well, you can’t. Just like spiking the kool-aid, search engine optimization can often lead to uncertain behavior. You just don’t know what will happen when you toss that bottle of vodka into the jungle juice.

Well, we’re not all drunk, but I hope you get my drift. It can sometimes feel like you’re dancing with a room full of drunks. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to the party.

Every SEO consultant or firm has a unique style and emphasizes different methods for obtaining rankings. You have to do what works for you. Perform your own tests and conduct your own experiments. Then keep doing those things that work.

In auto racing there is a concept called slingshotting where you follow the lead driver until you are ready to make your pass. If you watch NASCAR or Formula 1 racing, you’ll see this happen often. The following auto “hides” behind the lead vehicle just close enough to catch the pocket of air created by the wind sheer factor. The lead vehicle catches the wind and therefore has the most resistance. But when its time to make a pass, the following automobile can swish into its follow lane, accelerate and use the leverage created from the lead vehicle’s wind resistance to propel itself forward. Crafty auto racers can pull out last minute victories in a heartbeat.

So how does this apply to search engine optimization? You can use a similar tactic to sneak up on your competition and overtake them in the search engines.

Let’s say you have your eye on the coveted No. 1 position for a certain keyword, a position that’s been held for a long time. How do you take that away from the company that owns it? First, let me say that it isn’t easy, but it can be done. Here’s a recipe to help you get started.

1. Study the competition. Look at every page of their website and take note of what they do well. Look at every on-page SEO factor that you can and determine how well each is employed. Next, study their inbound links and judge them according to quality based on relevance, anchor text, linking site authority, etc.
2. After performing a thorough evaluation of the competition (ensuring that you include a list of the keywords they are targeting), start your own SEO campaign
3. One by one, write a user focused web page targeting each keyword that your competition is targeting; be sure to write your content so that you focus on capitalizing on the on-page weaknesses of your competition while matching their successes
4. Engage in a solid link building campaign that focuses on link diversity, link relevance, site authority, anchor text, and mimic the link building patterns of your competition that you deem a success.
5. Focus your primary efforts on winning long tail keywords and keyword phrases. Look at it as a marathon, not a sprint.
6. When you see yourself creeping up on page 1 of your competition, that is the time to start your slingshot move; increase your link building campaigns focusing on relevant anchor text and premium quality links from premium websites within your niche.

Taking over the competition in the search engine race is no easy task. It can be done but it requires patience, strong search engine optimization skills, and a diligent work ethic.

Brilliant! I thought this was brilliant:

If I sit down with you and you can tell me one reason why you rank the way you do, that right there is your weak spot.

There should be no singular reason why you rank. [Ed: Emphasis added, because relying on a single point makes you easy to reverse-engineer and means you have no barrier to entry...]

From an interview with Ruud Hein.

That’s pretty smart stuff. If you can say with any definition why you rank so well then you should be looking over your shoulder. Because if you can tell why you rank that well then your competition can figure it out. And if your competition figures it out then a lot of other people are going to figure it out too. Pretty soon, everyone else is doing it.

That’s why Google changes the rules. And then no one doing what you’re doing is going to rank very well. So don’t put all of your eggs into one basket. Instead, get a bunch of baskets and every now and move the eggs around. But do it intelligently. Because if one thing works today it likely won’t work tomorrow. There’s too much at stake to rely on one search engine optimization method every time.