If you are in the search engine optimization industry or you are trying to break into this incredibly saturated industry to make a name for yourself you might have a difficult time getting accepted into the circle of friends at the top of the food chain. The “elite” group that has been in the industry since day one and think they are the all mighty of the industry. The SEO industry leaders have become a tough group of individuals to become friendly with and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. All the “gurus” at the top that think they know every about everything seem to feel that they run this industry like they own it. The SEO industry is kind of like an open source program that should be treated like a group effort. There is plenty of business to go around. Lots of businesses out there that need help promoting themselves in the online space. People need to participate, communicate and get involved to make it a better place for everyone. One person tries something that works well they write about and things spread leading to better online marketing efforts.

I have been actively working in the internet marketing industry for over 12 years, have built Brick Marketing for 5 years successfully and have helped hundreds of clients in the field of SEO yet my educational comments that I leave on certain search engine marketing blogs get deleted, why do you think this happens? Leaving all names aside a certain someone contacted me not too long ago and asked me to stop commenting on a certain blog. Yes, I left a comment on each blog very frequently but isn’t that the whole purpose of starting a blog. These where all well written comments that where generated with real thought process adding to the overall message the blog post was trying to convey. Isn’t the whole idea of a blog to get the community interacting in your conversation? Since when is it bad to leave an educated comment on someone’s blog? Even if the frequency was high it shouldn’t really matter. I have seen this occur with other websites as well. I have seen the tone of this clique with others trying to make a name for themselves in the industry and I often see a certain nastiness resonating in the tone of a variety of online discussions. Don’t get me wrong I understand this is a tough industry and if you spend some time in it you get beat up a little but that doesn’t mean you have to be nasty to your colleagues and peers around you especially if they own and operate a successful search engine marketing firm. I apologize if I have not visited you at the trade shows and stroked your ego like many people do. Is it that I don’t kiss the asses of every individual in the “cool group”?

There is plenty of room in the school yard for everyone to get along. Is it because I am a threat to them or the industry? Sometimes I feel like this industry is a lot like high school all over again. You got your cool kids that think they are too good for everyone else and you got everyone else trying to shine in front of their eyes. I by no means want to break into the “cool” click and become one of those has to have their ass kissed by everyone else.

Why is it so hard for people in this industry to come together and work as a team? I understand that everyone is trying to grow their own business but there is no reason why so many internet marketing professionals have to have such a cold shoulder towards each other. We are all in the same game and we do the best we can to provide our clients with great service.

If you are an internet marketer or SEO person do you feel like our industry is heading in this direction as well? Please leave your comments and any related experiences or stories below!

Whenever you start to put together a marketing plan for your website you really need to take a step back and start by asking yourself if your website is ready for more traffic. What good is all that new SEO traffic if your audience doesn’t have a clue what to do when they make it to your website?

Conversion aspects and search engine optimization should always go hand in hand. If you are not sure about what elements should be where on your website ask a professional to take a look before you spend a great deal of time figuring out how to drive more eye balls to it. This step is vital to the growth of your business. Not only does it help the way your audience interacts on your website but it also helps in strengthening your search engine optimization efforts if the right conversion efforts are implemented correctly. If your goal is to have potential clients and customers call you than your phone number should be visible in more than one area of your website. It is always smart to include the phone number in the header, middle of the page and bottom footer so that if a user visits your website and they scroll through any of your pages they will always be reminded that you are reachable and you that they can call you whenever they are ready. You can never assume that your website traffic will search for anything on your website. People need to be given the choice of what kind of action they want to take on your website. Your business goals should always be laid out on a path for your traffic to follow. The same types of principals apply to whatever the goals of your website are. Whether it is newsletter subscribers or online website sales it is important to have your website optimized for not just search but also for your users. Make sure the path is clear that you are leading them down also. Make the focus of the path the focal point of that page. Too many other distractions could cause that web user to exit your website.

Having the right the conversion aspects in place can drastically increase the amount of activity on your website and also decrease your overall bounce rate. If you haven’t taken the time to analyze your website to make sure it is in its most optimal state you could be missing out on some very valuable opportunities.

Have you ever visited a website and seen the home page meta tag just jammed with keywords that runs the entire length of the top of your computer monitor? If you have that is a great example of how you don’t want to construct your meta tags and descriptions. There is a lot of argument in the industry on the importance of meta tags and how valuable they are. Meta information alone might not increase rankings but once your website has the power to rank well the keywords in your meta information will steer your website towards the right audience you are looking for.

Your meta tags should always be created tastefully. Each page should target 3-5 keywords for your content and your meta information and it should be custom crafted to what is occurring on that specific page. Remember that your meta information needs to offer an explanation to the end user. Your meta information is what appears in the search engine results when you are searching for something specific in the search engines. At the very least you want to keep it clean and to the point so that a person using a search engine will be enticed to click on your meta tag and visit that specific web page. Each meta tag gives a snippet of information for the user to understand what the information on that page is referring to. If you just cram it with keywords the user experience will be horrible and you will end up losing website visitors very quickly. Search engines really don’t like when meta information sections of a website are stuffed with more keywords than they should be. Some websites have been known to generate penalties in Google for over stuffing meta information with keywords and phrases.

When it comes to crafting well written meta tags and descriptions they need to have a very tasteful approach. Website users and traffic are getting much smarter and when they see these types of approaches where information is being jammed into the meta tag information area it deters them from wanting to do business with you. Always keep it clean and relevant and your website will over time find the audience you are looking for.

If you are making website changes or launching a new website you want to make sure the technical redirects and webmaster related pages are being used correctly, things like when to use a 301 redirect or when to use a 302 redirect. It might sound like not a big deal but the reality is if you get it wrong and the search engines assume you are trying to do something different than what you really are you might find yourself getting slapped on the wrist by Google.

If you own and operate your own website and you rely on its performance for your livelihood than you will have to play the role of your webmaster on more than one occasion. Google recently had a webmaster quiz and it was pretty interesting to see some of the results. Read more the quiz on the official Google webmaster blog.

Here are a couple of questions and answers that appeared on the quiz that might be very helpful to some of you:

Q: You bought multiple domain names and want them to all show the same website. What should you do with them?
A: Use a 301 redirect.

Q: Your website is not in the index 5 days after you’ve put it online; what should you do?
A: Continue working on the site.

Q: You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:
A: Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Q: Which of the following is NOT against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
A: Running tests on a site that result in some users seeing one version of a page and other users are seeing another version.

Q: Link schemes that can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results EXCEPT:
A: Links to other sites that you think your users will find interesting or useful.

These are just a sample of some of the most important Google questions and answers from a recent quiz. It would be in everyone’s best interest to not fight these and abide by what Google deems appropriate otherwise you could find yourself trying to dig your way out of a search engine penalty.

I saw a funny forum post this morning about a person asking the community in a an online marketing for the best SEO recipe. That person is already dead in the water right from the start. Let’s take a step back and emphasize how important taking a marketing approach really is when conducting a search engine optimization campaign for your business or website. When you start off asking for a recipe for your search engine optimization program, you are really setting yourself up for disaster. Your search engine optimization should never look like a science project.

The search engines have been evolving since their birth many years ago. When they first came on the scene, instantly many highly technical “marketers” started manipulating the algorithm to get web pages to appear high up in search results. Search engines really dislike it when people do this. Over time they have consistently tweaked and changed their algorithm to get these people to stop manipulating the system to get their bogus web pages to rank. Some have disappeared and some have evolved to find new loop holes in the system. Remember that rankings alone do not generate business. Rankings are just one factor out of a basket filled with other marketing factors that should be utilized as well. Online shoppers are changing drastically. Over the last few years during the economic down turn many people have realized that they need to change their shopping behaviors. Many have already made the change in slowing down spending affecting the way people market their businesses. Making many technical sweeping changes to get your website to rank is not the answer you need. Online customers want to bump in your pay per click ad, they want to see you communicating with your audience online, they want to see you branding yourself and making at attempt to be visible in front of them in many different ways before they decide to call you or pull out their credit card to make a purchase on your website.

The evolution of the search engine and the relationship it has with online customers is rapidly evolving. You should not be looking for an SEO “recipe” but rather an SEO internet marketing plan to help grow your business. SEO and marketing together are very powerful. They create many multiple quality pathways and links pointing to your website that can really generate a great deal of targeted traffic to any website.

Depending on what type of website or business you have you will most likely be conducting different types of keyword research during the initial onsite search engine optimization process. If you have a smaller service based business with ten pages on your website you will take a different approach than if you have an ecommerce site that has a thousand pages. Either way, I recommend that you use a professional keyword research tool, such as Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker.

When conducting keyword research for an ecommerce website you have to take into account all your categories and products. Don’t assume the search volume is going to be generic across the board. There will be many different types of branded keywords along with category based keywords that you will come up with. The goal is to not overwhelm yourself. If you are relatively new to the search engine optimization industry take things slow at first. Start with all your high level pages and maybe category pages and make a column for each URL in your spreadsheet. Now start conducting keyword research while thinking really hard what a person would type to make it to that specific page. If you are feeling good about it you can include all your product pages as well and get it all done in one swipe. Get ready for very large lists of keywords though. Don’t be surprised if some pages generate thousands and thousands of keywords. It will take some time to really sift through all of them and chose the cream of the crop. Remember that you should never target more than 5 keywords per page so if you see a page is generating hundreds and thousands of keywords and you feel confident with what you already have will work feel free to move onto the next one page.

Keyword research is a very important step when optimizing a website. Don’t worry though because if you find out later on that you missed a really good phrase or word to target you can easily introduce into the website at that point in time. In fact, I typically recommend keyword research is completed (after the onsite optimization is completed) every 1 to 2 years. This is because of the long term nature of SEO and also this will give you enough time to gather data about the keywords that you have incorporated on your website.

Some industries keywords change all the time because of new industry buzz terms springing up frequently. Imagine what those websites must have to go through. For the most part though once you optimize a website you don’t have to do it again unless you change your content or find that there are new buzz words in your industry that have made their way into search volume.

I think one of the best things I have ever heard a webmaster blog from a major search engine say is to build your website like a brand. Bing’s exact words state: “Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content”

To many people out there get all antsy to have their internet marketing look like a recipe. If it looks like a recipe it is a recipe for disaster. Bing’s official webmaster blog states that it is very important and vital to treat your website like a brand. How would a brand build its image? If you take that step you will build your business the right way rather than just go after rankings. Rankings are important but they are not the only and final goal you should be worried about for your internet marketing campaign. Building business is the most important aspect to your SEO campaign. Bing also recommends taking an approach that really utilizes a robust social marketing element into your daily routine. Link building is very vital to the success of a website and it is important to do it in a way that allows your business to grow and not just your rankings. Bing also refers to going “unnatural” in the search engines which states that an unnatural approach is one that blatantly attempts to manipulate the system in order to achieve higher rankings.

Bing’s exact words go as follows:
” So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you’re trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site’s content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms.”

Bing hasn’t been the first search engine to come out with this type of best practice’s guide. Google has been doing it for years now just not many people want to follow it. When the top two search engines in the world layout a best practices guide on how you should conduct your search engine optimization efforts it is time to listen.

Please take a look at the Bing Webmaster Post that talks about link building and SEM, it is a great read:
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/11/20/link-building-for-smart-webmasters-no-dummies-here-sem-101.aspx