Want an easy way to know if your pages are search engine friendly? The Web Page Analyzer is a free and simple tool that will analyze the good and bad SEO aspects of your site.

Just type in the url you want to check and a target phrase. This tool will tell you if the target phrase appears in the header text, title, meta description and meta keywords. It will also give you some pointers in order to improve the SEO of your site. So go ahead and check it out now!

Maybe you remember a couple of months ago when Facebook accidentally rolled out some changes to fan pages, giving all of us a sneak peek of what was to come. Well, now those changes are actually here.

Throughout the day, I manage and monitor multiple fan pages. I just received a notification at the top of the screen to “preview” or “upgrade” to the new style of fan pages. Upon clicking “preview,” I was given a very useful tour of the changes that Facebook accidentally shocked us with two months ago.

And now I will give you that same tour with some explanations and interjections along the way.

1. Facebook Photos Change

Fan pages will now feature the most recent pictures in a bar across the top of the page just like new individual profiles. This bar will feature the photos added to the wall by the admin or any photo that tags the fan page.

The fan pages that we monitor often receive irrelevant or spam-like photos in the “Fan Photos” section of our page. The good news is that these pictures will not be featured in the bar at the top of the page. Also, as it stands now, individuals cannot tag a fan page in a photo, which prevents spammers from simply tagging multiple fan pages in a picture and as a result, receiving the most prominent space on those pages. I’m glad that Facebook anticipated these issues and prevented this new feature from becoming a spam fest that all admins would have to monitor carefully.

2. Facebook Navigation Change

A big change to the overall format of the fan page is the location of tabs, which are often where we and other marketers host campaigns and special features of the page. Instead of being located at the top bar of the page, these tabs are now available below the profile picture of the page. These tabs now feature an accompanying icon; it will be interesting to see if these icons will be customizable in the future.

Developers are thrilled with the updated model for building apps on Pages announced today, which brought the introduction of iFrames to pages. According to Facebook, “this means you can now build apps that run across Facebook (including Pages and Canvas applications) using the same simple, standards-based web programming model (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS). In addition, you can easily integrate social plugins and the Graph API within your tab.” Basically, developers now have much more freedom in tab creation and greater potential for interaction among fans.

One negative of this new tab location is a less prime real estate position on the page. It will be interesting to compare traffic to these tabs before and after this switch. Also, just as with individual profiles, there is no longer an “info box” displayed below the profile picture.

3. Facebook Wall Filters Change

This new feature is one that I have a problem with as the moderator of a page. Now, instead of posts appearing on the page in chronological order, it seems as if “top posts” and “the most interesting stories” will appear first. These top posts are determined by the number of interactions, which translates to likes and comments. This could make monitoring comments a nightmare because the spam could be hiding at the bottom of the page or it could be displayed prominently if it happens to attract comments and likes from fans. Moderators will have to regularly check deep into the page to ensure that spam or profanities aren’t lurking on the page somewhere instead of simply checking the most recent comments at regular intervals.

Fortunately, admins can still choose a default landing of either “Everyone” or just posts from the admin. By selecting a default landing of admin posts only, moderators can help eliminate the potential prominence of spam.

Luckily, Facebook also has a new feature, a moderation blocklist, in the works to block spam and profanities. Using this blocklist, admins can choose strong filters, medium filters, or none at all. Admins are not allowed to see the words or types of spam associated with each filter. However, admins can tailor the filters by “unmarking” spam that automatically goes into the Spam filter. This Spam filter was instituted in October 2010; it currently catches recognizable spam and places it into a filter only available for admins to view.

4. Facebook Admin View Change

This is the most interesting change for me. Before the switch, an admin could interact as the brand page ONLY on the page itself through comments and wall posts. Now it appears as though admins can log into Facebook as the fan page, which now opens up the possibility for the brand page to interact in the following ways:
Get notifications when fans interact with your page or posts
See activity from the pages you like in your news feed
Like other pages and feature them on your page
Make comments as your page on other pages

Basically, these changes give the branded page a bigger voice on Facebook by allowing them to interact with other pages through likes and comments. The first bullet point above is an interesting one, though. For pages with a lower number of fans, these notifications will be helpful so that admins can receive a quick reminder and remain active on the page without having to check for comments and interactions throughout the day. However, for pages with a large fan base, these notifications would come in overwhelming numbers, making this “helpful reminder” into an overload of notifications. Can you imagine getting about 500 notifications within 10 minutes of posting a comment?

5. Facebook Settings Change

This change is not too exciting – just a new location for managing admin controls and certain features of the fan page.
Facebook is now allowing admins to preview this feature for the next 4 weeks, but these changes will become mandatory on all pages starting March 10, 2011. Admins should note that after opting to the new version, they will not be able to revert back to the previous version.

There’s a lot of fuss surrounding social media these days. If you still haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and aren’t sure why so many people are making such a big deal about it, here are 14 benefits of social media for your business and you from Success magazine.

For Business:

Establish a Brand and Raise Awareness

Since the majority of the population is already visiting social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, getting your brand name all over those networks can help let people know that you’re around. If you have yet to create a company image online, social networks are the place to do it.

Create a fun YouTube video that entertains and informs. Funny videos tend to make their way around the Internet a lot faster than any other kind, so when making a video, keep in mind that you want it to be interesting enough for your target audience to want to share. Using Facebook and Twitter to create a fun online community that your customers will want to visit will boost brand loyalty and drive traffic to your Website, allowing you the chance to make more online sales.

Spy on the Competition

Follow your competitors on Twitter and Facebook and you’ll be able to see what they have up their sleeve. Just make sure to provide a better deal than whatever they have going on.

Pitch Products in a More Human, Interactive Way

Since people visit social media sites to get personal rather than be bombarded with ads, discuss your business in a fun way and engage your customers with questions. Ask their opinions and entice them to respond back. This way you’re making a valuable connection that will help grow your number of return customers.

Bring Attention to Your Products

Featuring a product on a social media site is one of the fastest ways to bring attention to it. Give a promotion along with it for your online community members and watch your sales skyrocket.

Incréase Customer Loyalty And Trust

Speaking to your customers in a personal way will make them feel like they are talking to a friend, not a company. This will help build their trust in you, which will make them do business with you rather than your competition. It will also improve the chances of customer recommendations.

Listen to Your Customer’s Opinion

Social media sites are an awesome way to see what your target audience is saying about your company or your products. Take their constructive criticism and use it to enhance your product to better meet their needs.

Conduct Market Research

Listen to what your customers say about your products and track what links they click on and you’ll begin to see what your customers like and respond to. People love to express their opinions on social media sites, which will allow you to hear the truth. Then you can use your new-found information to tweak your product or service to please them as well as continue to post more information and links that they will enjoy.

Strengthen Customer Service

Social media networks allow your company to answer your customers’ questions and concerns directly in a timely manner. This will improve customer satisfaction and also save you monéy on long distance customer service phone calls.

For You:

Build Your Personal Reputation

Social networks allow you to get your name out to the world and talk about things that matter to you. This will help you build a good online reputation, which is critical nowadays if you’re looking for a job or even a new business contact.

Display Your Resume

LinkedIn allows you to display your full resume online for any future employers or recruiters to see. This will help bring you new opportunities that would’ever have existed otherwise.

Find a Job

Jobs are posted every minute on social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter along with the links or information you need to apply for them.

Showcase Your Talents And Establish Yourself as an Expert

If you’re passionate about a certain subject, whether it’s work-related or a hobby, the Internet is a great place to show off your knowledge. Soon people will be coming to you for the breaking information on that topic, and talking about you to friends.

Enhance Your Business Contacts and Enhance Personal Relationships

Through professional sites like LinkedIn, you can build your number of business contacts and enhance your reputation as an expert in your industry. You can also connect with those long-lost high school and college classmates, old colleagues, and out-of-town family members.

Share Information with Like-Minded People

Connect with other professionals in your field to share information. Where else would you be able to connect with industry professionals across the globe to swap stories and advice?

While many bloggers and the media are calling Google’s search results out lately, most of the focus has been on the somewhat low-quality pages that show up for informational long-tail searches. My concern for Google’s search results is different, however. As I touched upon in the last newsletter, I’m tired of Google (and Bing) returning sites that use anchor text link spam to get on the first page of results.

For those who don’t know what anchor text is, here’s a quick explanation:

Anchor text is the words in the clickable part of any link. For instance, when someone links to my site, they typically use either my name or my company name in the anchor text, which looks like this:

Jill Whalen is an SEO consultant.

Or…

Visit High Rankings for SEO consulting.

But those links are not all that valuable in SEO terms. What would be better (for search engines) is for the links to be more like these:

Jill Whalen is an SEO consultant.

Visit High Rankings for SEO consulting.

…with the keywords that people might type into Google (or Bing) as the clickable anchor text link.

Search engines assign a lot of weight to the words that are in that clickable link. It does make sense because you’re telling both people and search engines what they’ll get when they click the link.

The problem is that it’s not a natural way for people to link unless they know a bit about how search engines work. It’s more natural to link using the company name, even through links that just say “click here” or “more information.”

Part of what I do as an SEO consultant is to train clients to think like a search engine. I teach clients to link more descriptively on their own sites via “internal” links as well as linking to other “external” sites. But to get honest-to-goodness natural links – that is, links from others just because they really like you or your company – it’s unlikely that the link will have the best anchor text for search engines. And yet, natural links are exactly what Google claims to value. It’s what their PageRank algorithm was originally based on.

But today, natural links and true citations are nearly useless in helping search engines show the best sites for the search query at hand.

For instance, this past Sunday I was quoted in a Washington Post story about Google’s less-than-stellar search results.

I spoke with the reporter for quite some time and also emailed him numerous examples of how some companies easily manipulate Google. He was kind enough to mention me and my company (on page 2) in the article, which was great — but there was no link. I don’t know if it is the Washington Post’s policy not to link, or if they just don’t think about it, or if they have not ever been taught to link. It seems to me that a mention in the Washington Post in this context provides me and my company some credibility, because the WP is a mainstream news outlet. Yet any credibility I may have gained with the people reading the article is completely lost on Google because there’s not only no descriptive anchor text link, there’s no link at all!

Instead, the links that Google (and Bing) end up valuing the most are those where people control the anchor text. Unfortunately, when anchor text can be controlled, it often means that the link:

* was purchased
* was traded for
* was added to a site that is controlled by the owner
* was added to a site in a network controlled by multiple stakeholders (like a link farm)
* was added into an article or bio of an article and posted to an article directory or similar site
* was used in a blog comment
* was part of a forum signature
* was obtained naturally, but the linker had to be asked to edit the anchor text.

Only the last one of those is truly in line with what search engines want to value, and even that one is sketchy because it becomes somewhat unnatural by virtue of requesting different anchor text.

May the Biggest Spammer Win

Most reasonable people would agree that it doesn’t make sense that the companies who own or take part in a network of interlinked websites should rank higher than those who don’t. And why should the websites that have people “writing” boatloads of blog comments outrank their competitors who have no desire to spam others’ blogs? If you’re commenting because you’ll possibly get some link value rather than because you feel the need to add to the conversation, it adds unnecessary clutter and should be counted as spam by the search engines (in my opinion). I wouldn’t be surprised if 90% of blog and forum comments fall into that category, as do most articles submitted to article dírectories.

Here’s the Rub

All of the above types of links still count very highly in Google (and Bing). While links and their anchor text are by no means the only ranking factor for how sites show up in the search engines, they are a very large one at the moment. And surprisingly, neither the relevance nor the quality of those links appears to play as big a role as search engines would like you to believe.

You can take any product search query (both highly competitive and somewhat competitive) and review the backlinks of the sites that show up in Google’s (or Bing’s) top 10 to 20 results and see what I’m talking about.

Random Example

Let’s look at the search query “baby furniture,” which I just randomly thought of as I was writing this. I’m not going to call out any of the sites by name, and your results may differ slightly from mine, but you should get the picture.

The first site to show up in Google is a big brand, which makes sense. In fact, I wasn’t even going to check the backlinks because I figured they likely deserve to be there based on their brand. But then I noticed it’s just a random catalog page from their site. So I looked at their backlinks, and sure enough, there are 357 links pointing to that one page, most from completely irrelevant sites. Some are even hacked sites. But they’ve got keyword-rich anchors that Google (and Bing) love. Many of the links are in blog comments and others in “pártner site” areas (paid links). Wonderful.

Let’s check the #2 site that shows up in Google (which for me was the #1 site in Bing). Looks like there’s a whole network of interlinked baby-related sites that use keyword-rich anchor text links to get all the various sites to rank well for those words. While it’s possible that all those sites have different owners and they really just want to recommend (using juicy anchor text) all those other baby product sites, it sure smells fishy to me! At least in this case they seem to be on relevant sites, unlike the big-brand one above.

The #3 site that I see on Google is also a big brand, and it looks as if many of their links are purchased from mommy blogger-type sites, based on my random clickthroughs of their backlinks. While they at least seem relevant, most are anything but natural. I would consider them akin to ads, aka paid links. Nothing wrong with them purchasing ads on relevant sites, but it’s Google’s job not to count paid links, and yet they do.

About The Author
Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Services Company in the Boston, MA area since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen.

The first real step to anything is research, and lots of it. The most important step to any SEO campaign is keyword research.

The first step to consider is the niche you are in, and the products or services that you are promoting. You should come up with a list of potential keywords that your customers would use to find you on the web.

After that you could use the Google keyword search tool to analyze your list, checking the competitiveness, number of monthly searches and the strength of the competitors currently on page one.

A competitive market analysis is the next important step you should take. After you have your final keyword list, create a spreadsheet with all the keywords, and then list all the competitors from page one of Google.

You could use a program like SEO quake to collect some of the data that you will need, such as their page rank, number of indexed pages, inbound links, whether or not they have a site map and much more. This will tell you how difficult and how long of an SEO campaign you will be embarking on.

Next step should be the on page SEO factors of your website.

First and foremost is content, if you are not providing quality content that solves people’s problems then your efforts will be in vain. Great content will keep your visitors coming back on their own which will greatly assist your SEO efforts.

Make sure all the on page dynamics such as header tags, meta tags, alt tags for images and HTML code is done correctly.

These are the simple things that improve your ‘findability’. You also want to ensure that you have a proper site map created and submitted to the search engines, this will increase your chances of all your pages being properly indexed.

Number four is off page SEO strategies.

The biggest and most important overall here is back linking. Google views every back link your site has as a vote for your site from someone else. The best back links you can get are called one way links. One way links are where another website links to you without you having to link back. Good examples of this are article marketing, blog commenting and directory submissions.

Reciprocal linking is where you link out to website a and website a in turn links back to you. These are also good links but you should only focus on the ones targeted to your niche and those having a higher page rank than you. Good back linking takes time and effort, this cannot be accomplished over night.

You should also avoid any link scams, link farms or questionable linking strategies. If you have to stop and wonder if it’s ok to do it then it probably isn’t.

The last step that is very crucial to your SEO success is the overall promotion of your website. There are several ways of effectively promoting your products and services via the internet.

1) Video marketing
This can be promoted in conjunction with your website or separately for added exposure.

2) Email marketing
This allows you to keep track and communicate with your customers and potential customers.

3) Web 2.0
These are blogs, hub pages, wikis and such. Also a great source of quality back links for your site.

4) Article marketing
If done correctly this will establish you as an expert and help you to generate back links and additional traffic to your offers.

5) Local search marketing such as Yahoo local and Google places
If you have a business in the offline world you certainly want to use this method to promote your business. Google places for instance typically will come up first in the search results.

These are just a few of the strategies that you can use to begin a successful SEO and web promotion campaign. The most import step you will take is to take action. Everything you do should be with the intent of growing your business.

It’s a no-brainer that changes on your web pages influence the position of your website on search engines. However, it’s not so clear how search engines react to the changes on your site and what exactly causes the changes in the search results. A new search engine patent might have some answers.

Several search engine patents deal with the changes on your site

Google published a patent that described how the changes on your web pages influence the rankings of your site 6 years ago. Last month, Microsoft was granted another patent that discusses the influence of web page changes on search engine rankings.

This new patent shows which elements on your web pages might be monitored by search engines.

Which web page elements are monitored by search engines?

According to the new patent, changes of the following web page elements can influence the position of the page in the search results:
Keywords that are included in a web page.
Keywords that are associated with a web page
The anchor texts that are used in links on the page.
The colors and the sizes of images on the page.
The position of text or images on the page.
The frequency of document changes over time.
The amount of the web page content that has been changed.
Tags that are assigned to the page.
Search queries that are used to find the page.

How exactly do changes in these elements influence the rankings of a page?

According to the patent, searches are classified into the two categories “informational” and “navigational”. The effect of the web page changes depends on the category of a search query.

A navigational query is a query that is used to find a particular site. For example, a search for “ny times” will lead to the home page of the sites. Examples for information queries are “how do I fix a broken bicycle tire” or “who won the 2011 XYZ awards”?

If the searcher is looking for information about a recent event (2011 XYZ awards) then pages that recently added the keyword could be boosted in the search results.

For navigational queries, pages with static content might get a boost. This methods works fine with some type of sites but it could cause problems with home pages that update their contents regularly (for example nytimes.com).

What does this mean to your website?

This patent was granted to Microsoft but it’s likely that Google uses similar methods. Search engines don’t just look at the current version of your website.

They also remember how it was in the past. The changes on your website could indicate a change of ownership, they could indicate that you try to keep your website up-to-date, they could be a signal for spam and more.

When you change your web pages, consider which signal you might be sending to search engines.

When you optimize the pages of your website, do not optimize a page that already has high rankings for one of your keywords. Better optimize another page of your site for the new keyword.

The more pages of your website you optimize, the better. Optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords to show search engines that your website is relevant to a particular topic.

Keep some of the pages fresh and leave others as they are to offer search engines different kind of pages for different search queries.

Every owner of a website on planet Earth knows that getting a constant flow of traffic is the key to making money online. The world wide web attracts such a massive number of buyers that regardless of what you sell, you will make some really good money when you have lots of traffic.

Internet marketers are constantly coming up with newer ways to expand their reach across the Internet because no website can survive without enough specific traffic. In their quest to obtain more of the elusive traffic, the website marketers have come up with some rather creative ways to bring in greater amounts of traffic in a short period of time and with little effort.

My email inbox has been flooded with sales letters promoting some automated software or seldom used secret that promises an explosion of website visitors within 30 days. The disturbing part of all this is that it goes against the teaching of our early years; that nothing good comes easy and there is no quick path to building a successful business. As a result of these promises of abundant website traffic and exploding sales figures, many have abandoned those time tested methods of attracting real targeted website visitors that are prepared to take some kind of action. Keep in mind that website traffic isn’t something that you can just get, but visitors will come to your website when you have something to provide, enticing them to click on your link.

Too many people are cashing in on a person’s desire to get to the top without much effort by offering some really useless website marketing techniques that could actually kill their search engine rankings. The fact is that these are nothing more than ‘Marketing Fads’, that may produce some huge results in the beginning, but when the newness wears off their effectiveness will fade away forever just like the telephone booth.

Remember when pop-ups and pop-under advertising came out years ago? This was the hottest marketing tool since the time of placing fliers on cars in parking lots. However, when people around the world started using pop-ups to promote their websites there were windows popping up every time you visited and exited a website. Internet users worldwide got so sick of all those pop-up windows that someone invented pop-up killer software. The search engines even started penalizing websites that were using pop-up scripts and soon after that method of website promotion faded away.

I will attempt to identify and explain some of these useless website promotion techniques that should be avoided at all cost. Using some of these bad website marketing techniques could certainly kill your search engine rankings.

Automatic Search Engine Submission Services

These free search engine submission websites allow you to put in your URL, keywords and a description of your website. You then click Submit believing that your website is on its way to being indexed on thousands of search engines. Not so! First of all, the major search engines require manual submission by hand and even implement coding script to prevent auto submission. Secondly, when you click on that Submit button you have no idea where your website link will end up going. Your website link could be automatically posted to illegal or international directory websites that are nothing but a colony of spam links. If Google crawls your website and finds out that you have links to your website coming from other websites with rotten content, then your website will pay the price in low rankings.

There is absolutely no substitute for manually forwarding your websites to the search engines. You will have complete control over where your link is going, and the search engines will automatically crawl your website to get your title and description.

Auto Submission to Directories and FFA sites

You may have seen those places that claim you can blast your website to over 2 million websites and directories. As a general rule, please stay away from anyone that uses the word ‘Blast’ because this is just another way of saying Spam. It sounds like you are literally placing your link on millions of other websites and getting tons of instant backlinks to your website. Those FFA or Free For All websites are nothing but a link farm containing links from sites with bad or irrelevant content. The search engines won’t ever see your website as being respectable enough to rank high in the search results if it is affiliated with that type of environment.

Lead Generation Software

I once got an email that said, “Héllo Webmaster, My name is John. I have been searching the Internet for some business opportunities and came across your website. I just wanted to know if you are still in business today. Please email me at this_email@emailaddress.com and let me know. Thank you.”

I replied to the person giving them more information about one of our websites. That particular email was forgotten until I got a few other emails with the same content from different names and email addresses. This matter sparked my curiosity and prompted me to do some further investigation to find out why these emails turned up so frequently.

I discovered that this was the work of lead generation software that extracts website links and email addresses from the Internet for any category. You just type the keyword in the search box and the software literally pulls in millions of email addresses. The software even allows you to email all those addresses. On the surface it appears to be the perfect way to put your website link in front of millions of people in the same industry as you.

This has the look and smell of spam, but because the one sending the email does not attempt to sell you anything, it’s not quite spam. This marketing technique is not very effective because the email is generic, impersonal and did not give the reader a reason to respond. Your emails should speak to a person’s needs and not just at them. Readers respond to emails if you find a way to reach their interests, giving them a reason to take action.

Backlink Generating Software

Google loves websites that have lots of quality backlinks, considering such links votes on the importance of those sites. Somebody got this crazy idea to automate the link building that Google loves, hoping to get huge numbers of valuable links and move to the top of the search engine results. Google has now gotten smart and has found to way to detect how you are getting your backlinks and even the speed at which you are getting them. So, if you are still buying links or using software to get instant backlinks, then chances are Google will find out and penalize your website. Nothing can substitute for writing valuable content that will automatically attract quality backlinks.

Automated Article Submission and Article Spinning

Writing high quality articles is a great way to attract targeted visitors to your website. Again, someone invented a way to automate this process as well. They came out with article submission software that they claim will automatically send your written articles to hundreds or even thousands of dírectories. There is even software that will take one written article, spin the title and words around, and send them to more directories. This software sells like hotcakes because people don’t want to do the labor intensive work of writing their own articles and sending them manually to article dírectories.

The real, authentic article directories that can syndicate your articles are getting smart and have installed a special code that disallows auto submission of articles. They have also installed a special script that can detect articles that have been spun off from the original. Most of them manually approve articles before they are published in their directory and can easily detect duplicate and spinned content.

Conclusion

Widespread use of these automated website marketing techniques has taken away the need to apply really genuine website promotion that gets real results and replaced it with push-button marketing. You may see some quick and positive results, but only for a short period of time. Treat your website like an infant; give it lots of attention, feed it some healthy content, protect it from dangerous spam activity and let it grow naturally over time.

Be Less Like a Brand and More Like a Human

Social media has walked the fiery coals of skepticism and has brilliantly performed as a marketing, customer service and relationship building tool beyond expectations.

All size businesses have taken the polar bear plunge into what felt like an alien way of communicating with their customers. When businesses began using Facebook fan pages, Twitter, engaging on forums, blogging, creating videos on YouTube and more, they realized that being a less like a brand and more human created real long lasting relationships with their customers.

It isn’t free: Social media costs time – a lot of time. If you have someone that is customer focused, understands how to write headlines and reaches out to the right audiences, then you are starting out solid.

Be Creative: Social media isn’t sell media. Be social. Have fun engaging your community, from congratulating them on opening their new business, to commenting on their blog and attending networking events with them.

Have a Team: This isn’t a one person show. Just like customer service everyone needs to be trained and have at least a basic understanding on how to help customers, sell the product as well as assist with customer concerns.

Start with Employees: The people that know how to talk about your brand, company and culture the best are your employees. Treat them as family, acknowledge and appreciate and make them feel as they are an important part of your business. Employees are the first to share with their communities and network their experience with your company and brand.
Listen First: Enough with the megaphone blasting your message to customers and employees. Start by spending some time listening to them instead. Reach out and connect with your customers, employees and fans of your brand and make them feel that they are the center of the conversation.

Customers Turn into Marketers: Customers that feel acknowledged and appreciated are loyal, excited to help and eager to be your brand evangelists, at no charge.

Consistency Matters: Have your pixel pixie help you create a Twitter background that matches your website branding, and a Facebook logo that fits, little things that your graphic designer can do to enrich
Connect online then in real life: Find ways to connect offline, have an open house, attend a networking event and then share the experience with your social media communities.

Seek Guidance: Look for someone who understands the tools, language, has experience and passion working with social media to give you an hour or two to give you a tour. Learn about social media management tools, ways to monitor effectiveness, help with content strategy and ways to find your audience.

Looking forward to a prosperous 2011 of seeing your business being social online and off.

I get this question all the time from clients and people I work with. “Derek, what exactly is SEO, why do I need it and how does it work. More importantly, what specifically do I need to do about SEO?”

Well, let me explain it in very simple and easy to understand language so you can incorporate the right SEO strategy online for your business that will help you authentically build your list and get more clients.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Simply put, SEO is the process of optimizing your website by improving the internal (behind-the-scenes web techy stuff) and the external (web content, pages, images, etc.) setup in order to increase traffic to your site from search engines like Google.

Why does my website need SEO?

The big commercial search engines – Google, Bing, AOL and Yahoo, drive a lot of web traffic. If your site cannot be easily found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their database, you miss out on an incredible opportunity available to websites who appear in the search engine results for the keywords you want to be associated with. As a result, less people who want to have what you have will be visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all people online.

How does SEO work?

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site, carry huge value. These “keywords” dictate what sites the search engines deem worthy of appearing in the results. To do that, search engines really have four main functions – crawling, building an index, determining relevancy & rankings and providing results. Crawling and indexing the zillions of documents, pages, files, news, videos and media on the Internet – and – providing answers to user search queries, through lists of relevant sites / pages via search results and rankings.

What do I do about SEO?

It comes down to doing what I call the ABC’s of SEO.

A is for Architecture

The architecture of your site is critical for SEO success. And, I don’t mean having tons of funky widgets and menu options on your site with flashy design or cool features. Your site needs to have the right framework – like a solid design and well-implemented architecture (i.e. like a house) to support the content and links within the site.

Think of the site like a house where the rooms, stairs and other internal parts of the house require a solid foundation – floors, walls, wiring, mechanics, etc. Without a solid internal architecture, the house (i.e. your site) won’t support it. Equally as important is the external architecture of the house to support the roof, siding, doors, windows, etc. The architecture matters on both the inside and outside.

B is for Back links

The more your site and individual pages are referenced by other sites – the more “back links” you have and the more the search engines will favor your site. It’s basically like other sites giving your site the “thumbs up” indicating they recommend or endorse your site.

One of the best ways to get back links is by submitting your articles to article directory sites. As a result, the search engines will “listen” to their recommendations based on the articles submitted on their site and linking back to your site and content. (Tip – always have a call to action at the end of your article to refer people back to your site so they can opt-in to your list!)

C is for Content

Any site won’t really amount for much in terms of SEO unless it provides good content. The content has to be keyword “rich” for the search terms you want to appear for and be extremely relevant and valuable for your visitors. Be sure to include the keyword terms and phrases in your content that would be relevant and valuable for your visitors.

For example, if you portray your site to be all about “skiing” in terms of the URL, site name and page names, etc. and you only talk about “underwater basket weaving” and nothing about skiing, people will click on your site and then click away. This tells the search engines your site is not providing useful content or relevant information for what it portrays to be providing. You have to provide high-content and high-value information using very useful and authentic content.

Follow these ABC’s of SEO and you’ll be on your way to improving the rankings of your site in the search engines and as a result – improving your authentic online marketing to build your list and get more clients!

Until next time… Learn It, Love It, Live It!

Your Assignment:

Follow my model of the ABC’s of SEO to review what’s in place for your site.

[A - Architecture] Do you have a solid architecture in place for your website with the right menu items, images and content? If you’re using a stand-alone website, can you easily change it and update the content with new and fresh information?

[B - Back links] I’m a huge believer in a solid article marketing strategy to ensure your high-quality and high-content articles are being distributed and picked up by high-profile article directories which the search engines love. Follow my recommendations for some of the article marketing sites above and ensure you have a call-to-action in each of your articles.

[C - Content] You’ve got to put out really excellent content – nothing else. Make sure you’re giving as much as possible in the content you’re putting out – don’t hold back or think you’re giving away too much. I’m a firm believer the better the free content you provide, the better potential clients you will receive.

I receive a lot of SEO questions from business owners who want to spruce up their aging websites, but are dead afraid of losing their existing search engine traffic. And for good reason. Going live with a redesigned website without considering the SEO implications is like being ensnared in a nasty trap that you cannot escape from. It’s hard to make monéy while stuck in a trap!

With that in mind, here are a 3 SEO traps to avoid before, during and after you develop your website:

SEO Trap #1: Your Content Management System

If you are switching to a different content management system, (CMS) it often means that the URLs from your current site will have to change to something that fits with the new system. It’s likely that the new URL naming convention will not match your old one.

The Escape: If this is the case with your new back end, then 301-permanent redirect all of the old URLs to their new counterparts if you can. If this is a practical impossibility, then review your analytics to find the landing page URLs within your website that receive direct search engine visitors, and redirect those. Also redirect any URLs that have links pointing to them from other sites. While it’s best practice to redirect all URLs, those that don’t receive any direct search engine traffic and don’t have any external links are less important.

SEO Trap #2: Your Site Architecture

Your new website is likely to be sporting a brand new navigational scheme as well as an overall change of its site architecture (how each page links to each other). This is a key element in determining whether pages from your website will show up in the search results. For instance, if you take a page from your website that is currently featured in the main navigation (meaning that every page of the site links to it) and you feature it less prominently within your new website, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t show up in the search results for its targeted keyword phrases as it used to.
The Escape: You can tell the search engines which pages are the most important ones on your site by how you link to them. Be sure that the pages you are optimizing are linked from your main navigation so that they will receive the internal link popularity they deserve. They’ll stand a much better chance at bringing you targeted visitors than those that are deeply buried.

SEO Trap #3: Your Content

If you hadn’t previously optimized the content of your old site, I highly suggest doing so with your new site. This means that you research the keywords that people use at the search engines to find products or services like yours, and then use them strategically within each page of the website. Doing so will likely boost the targeted visitors to your site fairly quickly after going live.

On the other hand, if your existing site was fairly well optimized and already bringing targeted visitors, you’ll need to be careful about the content that you change. While you shouldn’t be afraid to make your content better, it may not be a good idea to completely rewrite old content that was working for you. You’d be surprised how many marketers decide to change their website messaging without even realizing that it was previously optimized to bring in targeted visitors.

Still, your website redesign is a good time to work on increasing your website conversions. All the targeted visitors in the world are of no use to you if they don’t take any of the actions you’d like them to take. Rewriting some of your content to convert more visitors into buyers is a good thing as long as it doesn’t decrease the number of those visitors. Again – this is where you’ll need to review your analytics reports to determine which pages were your best performers.

The Escape: If you find that your existing page content was bringing in search engine traffic and conversions, think 10 times before changing it! If you’re certain that your new content is much better and more in tune with your company’s message, then try testing it against the old copy through a tool such as Google’s Website Optimizer. You may be right, but you won’t ever know for sure unless you test it.

The Booby Trap!

Don’t forget that title tags are an important part of your content as well. Sadly, one of the most common mistakes during a redesign is to inadvertently lose all the previous title tags.

The Escape: Don’t go live with your new site without proper (unique, relevant and keyword-rich) title tags in place on every page. You will absolutely take a huge traffic hit if you do. Make sure that your new CMS allows you to customize the title tags of every page as needed. If it doesn’t, then find a new CMS that does. I can’t stress this enough because title tags are so important to SEO. It’s fine to dynamically generate them based on specific rules, but some pages may need their titles to be customized for best results.

These 3 traps are just a few of many you may face as you redesign your website. Don’t be one of the many who wait to go live with their site and THEN call an SEO consultant for help. Bake your SEO into the new site from the start to avoid any loss of search engine visitors, while ideally increasing them. There’s no reason why your visitor count should take a hit with a new design — but only if you are prepared to avoid the traps!