We Do Search Engine Optimization.

All you search engine optimizers and affiliate markers should use this coupon code for shopzilla to get a $20 signup bonus and $20 credit for adding content to your site. This is a total of $40 credit for Shopzilla.com publishers.
I have tried Shopzilla and the CTR is good, but actual revenue generated is a little low. Try becoming a shopzilla publisher and add ecommerce contextual ad listings to your website.

http://publisher.shopzilla.com/partner_id/40/

Blogging has become an integral part of search engine optimization and is as inextricable from good SERP’s as inbound links. It is no longer enough to have a good corporate SEO website, online marketers must engage, inspire and inform users and the most common way to do this is to communicate by blogging.

SEO for blogs is more focused on giving people something to talk about and creating something worthy of attention. Blogs are social by definition, and you can trackback other related blogs to automatically seed your blog posts to the world.

Creating Controversy can help establish your voice and let you become a unique resource.

Becoming an authority on a single subject is good insurance against Google penalties. Google can’t afford not to list highly authoritative well read sites in its index, so large  corporations like VW can get away with spamming testing the limits with no fear of being blacklisted.
Many people let fears control their actions, but most successful people are guided by intuition and instinct more than fear.

• Nobody likes a bully. – Some bloggers are worried about getting sued or offending somebody. When I got sued my name, exposure, and profits grew overnight. That is not to say you should be reckless, but illegitimate lawsuits garner media exposure and organic trust.
• Creative destruction is part of business – In a few years people will pay to give away information that I sell today. Business people are worried about defending trademarks & copyright, but as the web gets more competitive one is lucky to receive enough attention to get copied.

In a few years we will pay to give out information that is currently being charged for. Information really has no value, just like the news. Unless you know unique and sensitive information, there is little value in basic knowledge.

Read the authority on blogging for search engine optimization from Aaron Wall.

Your auto shop has a 15 point inspection list for optimizing your driving experience (making sure you don’t break down 50 miles away from home) and SEO’s need a website evaluation checklist.

Proper on page search engine optimization starts with identifying your targeted keywords and keyword phrases. Once you have your keyword list you may begin optimizing individual pages

The 15 Point SEO Checklist 

1. Title tag starts with keyword phrase
2. Domain name or filename contains desired keyword phrase
3. Each content page or product has only one spiderable page – there is no duplicate content on the site and all pages have unique content
4. Each page has a heading element <h1> containing the targeted keyword phrase
5. Important site keywords should be linked to other internal pages. For example in this phrase ‘we have additional green lanterns in the gift section’ the keyword ‘green lanterns’ should link to a focused page on this keyword
6.  Your keyword phrase appears in the first sentence
7. Targeted keyphrases are proximate to each other. For example if your keyword was ‘auto parts’ and this  your sentence was ‘find auto parts in our Los Angeles stores’  the phrase ‘Los Angeles stores’ would become part of the secondary keyword phrase.
8. Main keywords should be highlighted/bold/italics/underlined
9. Keywords should be towards the beginning of a sentence
10.  Images should be links and use alt text. Alt text is indexed only if the image is hyperlinked.
11. Meta description tag contains keyword phrase
12. Title attribute is used in hyperlinks: <a href=”link.html” title=”additional keywords”></a>
13. Keyword is in the last sentence of the page
14. Outbound links to major authority site or link to trusted resources, government documents, or third party verification sites. An example of linking out to an authority site would be a CPA business linking to IRS.gov
15. You can include the keyword in the meta keywords tag, but this has no known impact on website ranking

After you have completed these 15 items for all website pages the next task is off page search engine optimization, which is defined as acquiring backlinks or simply getting people to link to you.

WordTracker the keyword research tool has a holiday offer for the month of December. In additional to 15% off the price of annual subscription, we’re giving away a 9 mini-course on how to use Keyword Research to maximize online profitability. This is a must read for any search engine optimization company or person looking to make more money online. Each part in the series provides another opportunity for your customers to purchase Wordtracker at the discounted rate.

No offer code is necessary with this offer. Find the landing page set up with the offer embedded.

You can review the discount wordtracker promotion page here:
http://www.wordtracker.com/promotions/affiliate-december

December Promotion from this great SEO keyword research tool. I find great value in WT, and also use KeywordDiscovery, KeywordSpy, SpyFu.com and KeyCompete.

Happy holidays from the Wordtracker Team!

There are also these free search engine optimization tools available:

• http://inventory.overture.com
• http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – this is excellent and my top pick for competitive keyword research.
• http://adlab.msn.com/KeywordContent.aspx good luck getting any meaningful data from MSN adcenter keyword research tools, I had no luck with any medium volume queries.

Aaron Wall also has a free keyword research tool, but I can never get it to work http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

If I missed any good SEO keyword research resources please add them in the comments.

The fine folks at grokdotcom have created a screencast showing how you can optimize your gift registry to help users find holiday gifts. All e-commerce shopping websites should have a gift specific section, and the gift giving area should be tailored for the company’s target demographic. All the major online shopping sites have a searchable gift section, but most are cumbersome and not helpful.

The company websites are analyzed

• Wal-Mart.com
• Barnsandnoble.com
• Amazon.com
• Etsy.com
• Target.com

Amazon.com has the best gift section of all the major online retailers.

Allow customers to gift shop using their own browsing habbits:

* By relationship
* By “most popular”
* By price
* By characteristic (i.e., type of gift)
* ASK your customers how they would like gifts sorted

Anthony Garcia created this gift shopping review video.

The search for links is a never ending quest by search engine optimizers, and we can use all the help we can get. Thankfully many talented SEO’s have created helpful tools for link building and analyzing competitor backlinks. Using these tools we can refine the manual process for finding high quality backlinks.

Search here for a keyword, for example search for ‘leather chairs’
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/top-competitor-tool.php

Then use each URL and search for sites that link to it. These are good places to find links, as they already link to similar competitors:

http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/

Another backlink checking tool developed by an SEO firm is the back link anchor text analysis from SEOmoz.org.
SEOmoz link analysis: http://www.seomoz.org/backlink-analysis
The Yahoo Site Explorer is currently the only major search engine that provides detailed backlink data. Many of the links shown by Yahoo.com are spam links/paid links/scraped links/unrelated links but it is a good public link repository. Also links are shown in descending order of quality, so the links on the first page of Yahoo search results are the most trusted.

Yahoo Site Explorer linkdomain command linkdomain:www.site.com%20-site:www.site.com

Basic Yahoo.com Query:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:mysite.com%20-site:www.mysite.com

I love linkbuilding, and with helpful tools like these you can learn to love it as well!

Matt Cutts give a great explanation of how Google search result pages are organized.

Here is the anatomy of a Google search engine results page (SERP):

The blue title is the actual page title. This is why page titles are the most important part of search engine optimization (in my opinion). The page title must have search engine friedly elements and include your targeted keywords, but it also must be readable, useful and interesting so that a real human user will click on it. A #1 ranking is useless if the page title is so unreadable that no one clicks on it.

the snippit can be pulled from the meta description tag, open directory description or a relevant phrase from the actual page.

The keyword is bolded.

Sitelinks for high traffic sites sometimes extra blue links will appear below the listing.

Matt Cutts Explains Google Snippits:

Matt uses a great example and one of my favorite coffee locations Starbucks.com. Unfortunately there is a fair amount of static in this video. Comment on Google webmaster central and ask them to re record it:)

Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org and Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com had a discussion about the next generation of search engines and how to optimize for them.

SEO’s are living in the world of search 3.0 which is a mixture of regular search results and vertical results. So for example a Google search on the term “form a business” may contain 8 results for individual websites and 2 vertical results, such as Business.com and Allbusiness.com. The vertical search results are really niche directories with a list of focused results

In general here is a breakdown of search engines

1. Search 1.0: on page content. this is the birth of meta tags, doorway pages and hidden keyword spamming. the 1.0 search engines are excite.com, lycos.com, infoseek.com, hotbot.com
2. Search 2.0 off page content which is mainly links and mentiones. The more links you get the higher your PageRank and site authority.
3. Search 3.0 integrating vertical, local and specific results. Google reserves the top 3 spaces on local searches for a map and local results. So if you search for “los angeles plumber” you will see a map with the business location of each plumber.
4. Search 4.0 personalization and further refining. My results will be based on my past query history and previous clickthroughs. Your results will look different than mine.
5. Search 5.0 live answers and human interaction. Yahoo answers is an excellent example of human help for information you cannot find from machine created algorithms.

See Rand Fishkin interview Danny Sullivan.

It’s really more Danny talking as Rand just sits and listens. Danny could be said to be one with the search engines, truly a Zen SEO, as once he starts talking about search he can’t stop!

The future of advertising will continue to move to the web and traditional ad agencies and media gatekeepers will need to drastically change their business models to succeed. Old school ad agencies have been frantically adding search engine optimization divisions but it may not be enough. The future will be niche publishers who have a solid stream of attention and a loyal audience. Good examples of content publishers with rabid attention and faithful usage is myspace.com and facebook.com.

The “voice” delivering a message, along with its perceived authenticity, will become as powerful perhaps as the message or offer.

This means that if you are a rabid facebook.com user, you will place more trust in information from facebook than other online media sources. Of course this will only work if facebook continues to offer quality information,news, privacy and connections. If the medium (faceboook.com) fails to remain trustworthy, it will not survive.

See a mindmap of the Attention Marketing Age: