By Richard V. Burckhardt

Trying to see your way past all of the local search results? Here are some SEO tips.

This is a boon to local businesses as they now have the opportunity to appear on page one of the Google serps through their Google Places profiles. Of course, this is a big, fat middle finger pointed at non-local web-only sites without the local offices and locations that many of the big chains can leverage. (Image below)

Emphasis on local means fewer organic results appearing above the fold.

So, what is a web-based site to do? Here are five SEO tips that I have come up with to cope with this love affair with local that Google is having. I’m hoping that readers will contribute some of their own.

1. Stay in the Top 3: Yeah, this is a no-brainer, but Google has put the pressure on more than ever before to keep top rankings. They’ve always been the goal, but now they are a must. You can’t be content with being in the top five anymore.

2. Leverage Universal Search: Remember that all kinds of media can appear in the serps – video, images, news, etc. Optimize for all. You might not appear in the top three, but your images or videos might appear somewhere on the page. The more exposure for you, the better. (See image below)

3. Go for the Longtail: The local search results appear to come up more frequently for less specific queries like “tires” and not for more specific information like “snow tires” so optimize around keyword phrases for related queries. (See image below)

4. Cozy up to your PPC person: Do some research using Google Correlate and Google Trends and find out where you might want to target local PPC campaigns. This is a perfect example of SEO and PPC working together. For example, according to Google Trends, Burlington, VT would be the top city searching for “snow tires” so that might be a good target for local PPC if you sell that type of tire. And, of course, Google will be more than happy to take your ad money!

5. Submit a feed: If you offer items that qualify for Google Merchant Center, create and submit feeds so that you have the opportunity to appear in the Google Shopping results. Frequently these are at the bottom of the page, but sometimes they are higher up. Again, it’s one more opportunity for exposure on page one of results. (See image below)

Local search results don't appear to kick in on more specific queries.

OK, that’s what I have come up with so far. I’d love to hear ideas from readers, so please, post them here.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

+Richard Burckhardt

Five Non-Local SEO Tips is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Wayne Barker

What will the new year bring for your SEO?

So what is going to be big for SEO in 2011? In my opinion two of the biggest changes that have occurred this year were the changes to Google Places and the Google Page Previews. If you are unaware of what these are then I suggest you continue to read. If you are already familiar with the changes you need to make sure you are one step ahead of the crowd and get your thinking caps on.

The changes to Google Places

One day it was all fine and the next…Google made a massive change to the way they return the search results for location specific queries. It was a massive change and if you haven’t already it is time to start thinking about how you carry out your local SEO.

There were three major way in which the search results changed:

• The map for the old 7 or 10 pack jumped over to the right and started to scroll down the screen as you did (most of the time anyway – it looks like this may be dependent on screen resolution)
• If you had good organic SEO (and if it was locally good organic SEO that was a plus) we started to see blended results in the search engine results
• We started to see extra information in these blended results, this included addresses, photos, reviews and a link to your Google Places page

This was a huge leap for Google (and as normal panicky SEOs, well, panicked) but there are some steps that you should take if you have any localised search queries for your site. So for 2011 it is time to get local:

1. If you haven’t yet (if not, why not?) claim your Google Place page listing and get it verified via a quick phone call.
2. Optimise your Google Place page – you need to make sure it is 100% complete (include photo, video and the oft missed extra services section at the bottom)
3. Make sure your Places page has both a localised telephone number and address – you are not going to rank without them.
4. Make sure you have local signals in your organic SEO (the usual places – Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags, Headings, Copy)
5. Get your address and LOCAL telephone number in the footer of every page. If you have freephone or toll free numbers hide them in an image.
6. Make sure your Google Places pages have relevant categories – i.e. make sure that you choose two that Google recognises.
7. If you aren’t already get featured in local directories, try and get mentioned on the site of the local newspaper or government (and a link would be nice)
8. Actively seek out reviews from customer and point them towards the big review sites like yelp, tripadvisor or the ones that are relevant to your business.
9. Get on the sites that provide local data to Google.

Exhausted with the local stuff? It isn’t over yet! A lesser change that recently happened in Google that I feel is worthy of mention is the recent addition of the Google Page Preview. It could turn out to be another game changer for 2011.

Google Pages Preview

You may have noticed a little magnifying glass appearing next to the search results, you guys in the US saw this before us in old blighty (you always do!) Well hovering over the little magnifying glass will give you a nice big preview of the page before you even visit the site – which is great, or is it.

Screen shot of the new Google Page Preview feature.

If you think about it from an SEO point of view, now the searcher has an extra factor to consider before visiting your site. Before if you had your content right and the SEO right you could get onto the first page (maybe!). If you had a compelling Meta Description that backed up the content and the SEO then maybe you could further encourage people to click.

Now they get to see what the site looks like before they choose to click through to your site. We all love to say that beauty and aesthetics don’t influence our decisions that much but who are we kidding Design should not be a strong part of your SEO plan. Simple colours, appealing design – the box isn’t that big so you need to keep it simple to attract and pull searchers in. At the end of the day if a searcher isn’t convinced by the title and description of the search results the design could be a massive deal breaker.

It’s worth thinking hard about.

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

What’s Going to be Big for SEO in 2011? is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

If you have ever Googled your name, you should know how vital it is to manage your reputation online. Each day, thousands of people are looking online for information on others by searching using Google and other major search engines. Since information is very readily available online, managing your reputation is as vital as ever.

Fortunately, reputation management is not very difficult, though it takes much work. The following are tips which can help you ensure that your reputation online does not get impacted negatively by what is being said about you.

1. Establish where you stand

The first step towards reputation management is Googling your name. Try it with and without quotes. Check each of the results in the first two pages of Google. Are there any negative posts or comments that you would want removed?

2. Set a Google alert

Go to Google and set an alert for your name. Google will then send you an email to confirm that you want to receive the updates. When you accept the alert, you will receive a notification every time your name is posted on the web.

3. Contact website owners to have your name removed

If there are websites that have your name and an undesirable commentary, contact these sites and request to have that information removed. Quite often, website owners will be willing to remove your name and inappropriate information.

4. Purchase a domain containing your name

When you add web pages and sites associated with your name, negative search results will be relegated to lower Google rankings. Visit a provider of website URLs and purchase a domain with your name. Once you own the domain, publish a web page with your personal profile.

5. Start a blog with your name

There are several free tools in the web that you can use to set up your own blog where you can publish information about yourself. Major blog sites are usually picked up by Google. After your blog is published, you might want to sign up for Technorati. Submit your blog for review will increase its popularity, improve search engine rankings and push down undesirable search results.

6. Free press release

Use free press releases site to publish positive information about yourself. This type of reputation management is simple and costs nothing. Don’t forget to use your name all through the release and in the title.

7. Author articles in your niche

Publish articles related to a specific subject in which you have some experience. Use article distribution services to create online references for your content. Ensure your articles have an author bio section that contains a link back to you main site. This is a technique that I have used extensively in promoting my diet blog which features Medifast coupons, Bistro MD promo codes and Diet to Go discounts.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Tips for Managing Your Reputation Online is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Guest blogging can be a great e-marketing strategy and help establish you an an authority, terrific for SEO and social media campaigns.

A good blog can be the centre of an effective social media marketing strategy, and, particularly if it’s hosted on the website you want to promote; can be an excellent way of driving traffic. Websites are fantastic for pushing your message out there, but blogs allow greater flexibility in staying up to date and demonstrating your specialist knowledge in your particular niche.

Not only that, but a well loved blog can become a platform for guest blogging, which will allow you to spread your genius even further into cyberspace. If you contribute a knowledgeable post to a well-respected blog, traffic will follow you back to yours, which will have earned extra kudos as a destination for decent information by virtue of your guest post.

On the flipside, if you can attract guest bloggers to write on your blog, you not only get the benefit of having fresh content to appease the Google gods, but you are further entrenching your blog’s authoritative reputation. This can be spread throughout other social media channels to drive even more traffic to your blog, which will translate to traffic for your website (if it has been designed effectively).

The potential benefits to be reaped from keeping a good blog, guest blogging and attracting guest bloggers are obvious, and that is why a blog should be a key part of your web design. An orphaned blog will serve no purpose; you may attract readers but the end-goal is for them to click-through to your actual website. As such it is a good idea to host it on your website so that people are already there, and need merely follow header links to discover your services. Making blog integration a key feature of your web design will allow you to drive traffic to your products or services much more effectively than tacking one on at the end.

The marketing strategy of blogging and guest blogging is simple: become an expert and establish yourself as an authority. As every blog thrives on fresh content, most well reputed blogs will be open to the suggestion, and it is an easy way of showing off your knowledge.

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Guest Blogging as an Effective Marketing Strategy is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

There are certain things that you should not do while managing PPC campaigns.

Not thinking like a user while writing your ad copy – Write your ad copy from the view point of a buyer instead of from the view point of a seller. You’ve a limited number of characters to use so use them properly. Ask yourself why a user will click on your ad or what could be the reason due to which a user doesn’t prefer to click on your ad. Don’t overlook the importance of emotional triggers while creating your ad copy. Instead of speaking what you want to say in your ad copy focus on what your audience wants to listen.

Using broad match only - If you are using only broad match option (which is also a default option in Google adwords) for all your keywords then you are wasting lot of your money in buying irrelevant and low quality traffic. That said, you should not ignore the broad match completely because it can help you to identify some good keywords which you might have overlooked in your keyword research. Make you campaign a balanced combination of all three matching options.

Treating landing pages as a separate issue – Landing page are integral part of your online campaign so don’t treat them as a separate thing. The success and failure of your online campaign depends on the quality of your landing page. So next time if conversion rate of your campaign is not good, try to improve your landing pages first before changing your ad copy.

Not updating your negative keywords list - Update your negative keywords lists at a regular basis even if you are happy with the overall results. Use search query performance report feature at the regular basis and find out the search queries that triggered your ad and put the irrelevant keywords in your negative keywords.

Giving more importance to CTR rate that conversion rate - An ad with high click through rate doesn’t mean that it would be having the highest conversion rate too. The main reason due to which ad doesn’t convert despite of getting enough searches is the irrelevancy. Tune such ads and make them relevant to your landing pages and to the services you offer.

Getting satisfied with results and to stop testing - Don’t get satisfied with the performance of your campaigns and stop testing. There is always a scope of improvement. There would always be some underperforming keywords attracting irrelevant traffic, some underperforming ad copies and landing pages which don’t convert well. Check your search query reports at regular basis and identify the underperformers and improve them.

Ignoring Ad scheduling feature - View your search query performance report at the hourly basis to find out at what time of day your ad performs well. Schedule your ads for the more converting hours. Also you can adjust your bids for specific hours on basis of these reports. For e.g. – If your ads perform well between 9 pm to 11 pm then you can increase your bids for these hours.

Using default device settings – By default Google will show your ad on all devices including mobile devices. Opt out from this feature if the majority of your target audience doesn’t have internet capable mobile phones or your call to action link wants them to fill a long form which is hard to do from mobile phones.

Do you know about more not to do things while managing your PPC campaigns? Feel free to share them with us in the comments below.

Eight Not To Do Things While Managing Your PPC Campaigns is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Here are some easy, common sense, non-technical ways to optimize your web site that even mom would love!

UPDATED – Everyone loves a good tip, right?

Here are 110 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most novices with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

(Note: This list of tips is an update to the original post 55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love. I am republishing this expanded version for the attendees of local Palm Springs SEO training classes.)

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new graphics-based site after it is built won’t cut it.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html. Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings. Google says it can tell the difference between you and the bad guys, but why take a chance?

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newsletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines, but NOT necessarily more than .com domains. However, they certainly can’t hurt and are frequently authority sites that would carry good link juice. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. To NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results, click on Web History at the top right of a Google results page and then click “Disable customizations based on search activity.”

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary  forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

56. Use Google Alerts to be alerted about back links – http://www.google.com/alerts.  Add link:www.yourdomain.com to the Search Terms box to get notified by e-mail when someone links to you.

57. Optimize your press releases just as you would a web page. Use your keywords, keyword anchor text and headlines in a way that will  maximize your visibility without being spammy. In addition to possible pickup by major news sites, these releases are archived on the web. And, remember, don’t put out press releases to sites like PRWeb unless you have REAL news to share.

58. Move JavaScript and CSS to external files whenever possible. This will make your code tighter, move your content up higher, the page will load faster and the spiders will have fewer possible roadblocks in their quest to devour all that good content you wrote for tip #2.

59. Build pages around phrases like Where can I or How can I because there are a TON of searches for variations of these. Just search for one of these phrases using the free WordTracker Keyword Suggestion Tool and you’ll see what I mean.

60. If you write articles for distribution to article sites for mass distribution (a great way to get back links), be sure to publish the article on your own site first and give the spiders a chance to crawl it. That identifies you as the originator of the content. Then push the article out for distribution across the web, making sure you have a link back to your site in the article content.

61. Tweak and test. Make one change at a time and evaluate what effect it had on your ranking, if any. Changing too many things at once can confuse things to the point where you don’t know which change you made did what.

62. Local search is getting hot! Create a local listing for all locations if you have more than one. Don’t just create a local listing for the main one. Get them all in there! Start with local listings at Google (also known as Google Maps), Yahoo! and Bing. Include photos, videos, links, web pages and coupons if available. It’s quick, easy, free and gives you one more opportunity to rank. Frequently, a local map with business links will be the top search result. For example, try a search in Google for “palm springs bars” and see what comes up as the first results.

63. Don’t try to fake it. Those 50 domains you bought in 1998 with dummy content all linking back to your main site might have made you #1 last decade, but now they can get you booted from the rankings altogether. The “mini-net” is dead.

64. If you aren’t doing e-mail marketing, consider it. Not only is it the most frequently used form of web marketing, if done right it can be extremely effective and can indirectly lead to social bookmarking and back links to your site pages.

65. Test domains should be invisible. It you are using a domain simply for testing new designs, functions, etc., be sure it is not accessible to spiders or users, who will both be confused about which domain is the real thing. If the spiders can get to it, you could be in for big duplicate content issues. A simple way to block all spiders is with the robots.txt file.

66. For the most part, short domain names with your primary keyword or phrase are best. Something like your-keywords.com will work, but your-keyword-phrase-plus-more.com will be pushing it. The advantage to having your keywords in the domain name include perceived authority and keyword-rich back link juice.

67. Although there’s nothing wrong with .net, .org, .info and other domain extensions (search engines tend to give them equal weight), what you really want is the .com extension. People just assume a domain (especially in the USA) ends in .com, so understand that if you get any other domain extension, you’ll probably be losing at least some traffic to whoever owns the .com version.

68. Make sure your web server is fast. A dedicated server is best because if someone on your shared server gets slammed with traffic, it can affect your site, too. Plus, the faster the server, the more likely you’ll get lots of social media back link love. No one likes to click on a link and have it time out!

69. Google is NOT your competition. Your competition is the list of sites ranking above you for a keyword or phrase, so research what they are doing to outrank you rather than try to game Google.

70. Avoid link farms, where you participate in mass link exchanges. These are usually automated and frowned upon by the search engines. You can actually be banned for participation in these.

71. Need to do a redirect? Use a 301 redirect rather than a meta refresh or javascript redirection. A 301 redirect is seen as a “permanent” redirect that is more SEO friendly.

72. Offer a good, easy to navigate sitemap for your visitors. Not only will it help them find what they want on your site or blog, but search engine spiders will follow it, too.

73. Only bold text on a page when it makes sense to do so and use <em></em> or <strong></strong> instead of <b></b> which is apparently being deprecated, meaning you won’t get much value from it SEO-wise.

74. Be sure that the text in your meta tags match the copy on each and every page.

75. Select a keyword rich domain name (keyword.com) if possible. This makes every link to your domain a keyword anchor link, great for SEO.

76. Check your source code for any legacy or left over code that might include links that are invisible to the user, but visible to spiders. Sometimes web developers/programmers leave invisible code on pages that not only bloat the page size, but can contain links that only the spiders see. This can get you into trouble as it looks like you are hiding content whether you mean to or not. Clean up your code and offload any CSS or javascript that you can to external files as mentioned in tip #58.

77. Flash is like wine. When used appropriately (and in moderation), it can enhance the user experience. Used inappropriately, it’s a serious distraction that leaves the user with a nasty headache.

78. Want to link to a certain scene in a YouTube video? You can. Let’s say you want to jump 25 seconds into this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqXdDVqCQ10, to the scene where Olympian Kerri Walsh is featured. Simply add #t=0m25s to the YouTube link so that it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqXdDVqCQ10#t=0m25s. The extra code translates to zero minutes and 25 seconds.

79. Treat your YouTube videos just like HTML pages. In other words, give them a title, description, tags and make sure the very first thing in the description is the URL you want folks to land on.

80. There is no magic keyword density for a page. That’s so 1998! Make your text natural language with your primary keyword phrase included two or three times on a page, ideally above the fold. That’s it.

81. Keep your site structure as close to the root as possible. In other words, don’t create subdirectories that aren’t absolutely necessary.

82. Link to your social media profile pages. Make sure visitors can find your social site pages. Make your very first weighted link to your profile pages a link from your company site.

83. Realize that social search is different than web search because in social search, it’s about sourcing information from trusted people as opposed to general information that is dished out by a search engine.

84. Twitter is incredibly powerful for weighting in the search engine results pages, so use it! Just be sure to grab your name before someone else does!

85. Make sure your database is spider friendly. The last thing you need is to spend time, money and effort developing your site only to find the database or shopping cart functionality is not search engine friendly. Test before you commit. Use online tools like SEO Chat’s spider simulator tool or client spidering tools like the one built into iBusiness Promoter (IBP) to test spidering.

86. Get visitors to take action. Include clear calls to action on the page (Add to Cart, Shop Now links) and make them obvious and easy to find. Make the offer compelling with incentives (free shipping, bonus items, etc.) and make ways to contact you easy and upfront (800 number, e-mail link, address, online chat). Too many online sites make contact too difficult by hiding behind a contact form and providing no other way to be contacted. That’s not a recipe for trust from either the visitor or the search engines. And, to be an authority, you need trust.

87. Keep in mind that a log-based analytics tracking system will track every action on your site – clicks, server calls, spidering, whatever. If you want to use analytics that depend on tracking code on your pages, be sure you have the code on ALL pages. Anything without the tracking code will be invisible to your analysis software or service.

88. Customize your YouTube video thumbnail. YouTube gives you a selection of three images from your video to use as your thumbnail. These are pulled from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks in time in your video, so try to work it so that a scene in your video shows up in one of those points that would be appropriate for the thumbnail. Consider having your URL or telephone number show up at one of those points.

89. YouTube tells you popular related phrases in the search drop down as you type. In a way, they are doing your keyword research for you. Pay attention!

90. If you are planning to advertise with Google Adwords, make sure your landing pages don’t have the BACK button disabled. Google will not let you advertise sites whose landing pages disable the BACK button.

91. Buy text links. I can already hear the SEOs moan! There’s a twist to this recommendation, however. Buy the text links to point to, say, your video to generate traffic. As long as the video, podcast or whatever is on one of the major media sites like YouTube, you’ll have no fear of being penalized by Google since the purchased link points to the media site and not your site or blog.

92. Did you know you have a Personal PageRank? You do. Google assigns values to you as a searcher based on your search history (See tip #41 for opting out). Pages you stay on longer get more weight in your personalized search results. All the more reason to keep make your site sticky and keep visitors there. Google reads Google Bookmarks, too, so try to get your visitors to Google Bookmark your site.

93. Link out to authority sites of your choice. I know, conventional wisdom has it that you don’t want to leak link juice, but in this case, Google thinks the visitor found what they wanted on your site and gives your site the weight.

94. Use descriptive verbs in your body text. These are great for catching long tail searches. And remember to write for the reader, not just spiders.

95. Previously the Big 4 search engines said that 301 redirects carried 100% link juice, but Matt Cutts of Google now says in this interview that there is some decay when they are used. Bottom line is to only use them when absolutely necessary (in other words, don’t do a zillion of them).

96. Changing ownership of a domain should not affect search engine rankings.

97. Your search engine optimization strategy WILL be messed with by your I.T. department, so plan for it.

98. Try to keep your directory structure no more than three levels deep. Search engines will see links buried deep as not as important.

99. Before you request a link from a related site, check to make sure the links are followed and don’t have a nofollow attribute attached to them. A quick, easy, code-less way to check for nofollow links on a web page is with the NoDoFollow Firefox extension, which will highlight nofollow links on a page. You want to maximize the link juice you get back from links by getting as many as you can that are followed. With a link with a nofollow attribute, you don’t get any of that backlink credit from the search engines.

100. Make sure the page title, HTML title and ALT attributes match for each page..

101. Check case in your URLs. Let’s say you have URLs that look like this – http://www.yoursite.com/SamplePage-qamb-pr-l.html. Check to see if an all lower case version – http://www.yoursite.com/samplepage-qamb-pr-l.html – works, too. If it does, you have potential for major problems. First, all it takes is for one link to the lower case version to cause the entire site to be respidered in an all lower case version in addition to your upper/lower version. Second, not only do you wind up with two spiderable versions of your site, you’ll be splitting you link juice with some links going to each. If you see this issue, get with your I.T. folks and come up with a strategy to 301 redirect to your preferred URL version.

102. Use synonyms in your body copy. These are great for catching additional related search queries. One easy way to find synonyms is by using the “~” operator in a Google search. For instance, to search for synonyms to “SEO” on my The Web Optimist, I’d search for ~seo site:weboptimist.com .

103. Transcribe your podcasts and post the text on your blog. The search engines are working on crawling audio, but aren’t quite there yet, so post the textual content where the spiders can crawl it easily.

104. Same goes for video. Include a transcription of your video content on the page for spidering purposes.

105. Google can now crawl on-page javascript links, so use external javascript instead if you want certain links to not be crawled or even identified by the spiders as links.

106. Place the index page for every section of your site in the root. This keeps them higher up in the hierarchy. Other pages for each section can still go in the appropriate folders.

107. Robots.txt is case sensitive, so make all site URLs lower case. Less chance of spiders slipping through that way. See tip #101 for other good reasons to use lower case URLs.

108. Be sure your keyword phrase is included in the first paragraph and evenly distributed throughout your body copy. Use the keyword phrase in your header tags (H1, H2, etc.) but only as necessary. Don’t over do it.

109. Specify image dimensions. Always include the width and height attributes (width=”300″ height=”172″). This one is easy and can help optimize the page for faster loading. And these days, Google likes fast loading pages more than ever.

110. Be sure to also check out my Free eBook: The Web Optimist’s S E O 101

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

110 Quick SEO Tips Even Mom Would Love is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

SEO and Social Media optimization are pretty much integrated these days.

As promised, though delayed a bit, here is the follow-up to SEO & Social Media Integration with some tips for optimizing your social media and integrating it into your overall SEO mix. Naturally, the more social links you have, the more you’ll be noticed (Hey, I’m here!) and linked to and crawled, natural SEO in any book.

• Complete your profiles and put your web site or blog URL in ALL of your profiles. Including your web site link should be a no brainer, but LOTS of folks forget this. Social content is definitely showing up in search results. For instance, a search for my name in Google comes up with several of my profiles (LinkedIn, WebPro News, Plaxo, etc.)  as I write this. Include jobs, use keywords, never turn down interview or podcast opportunities that can be included.
• Check industry trends through services like Google Alerts. Jump into breaking subjects with blog and social media posts.
• Promote blogs, social media and RSS feeds of those who link to you through your own RSS feeds. This has a viral effect that sends more links to you.
• Develop a series of “How to” videos and post them on video sites like YouTube (now 25% of Google searches). People LOVE these and will embed the videos or link to them. Post them on your own blog and in the social sites, too.
• Content is king on Twitter, just like in standard, run of the mill SEO, so use keywords and hashtags (like the #bsg tag for Battlestar Galactica fans).
• Utilize Facebook fan pages. These can have unlimited followers and can be optimized.
• Subscriptions are gold! Social Media Content = Subscriptions + Links!
• Transcribe your podcasts and post them on your blog.  Include keywords and links.
• Create widgets that will pull your RSS feeds from blogs, social media and news feeds. As a rule, links in RSS feeds are direct links without redirection or the dreaded “nofollow” tag!
• Re-optimize blog posts after their “shelf” life. Rework them and monetize them for breaking subjects. Any given blog post URL or page has history and links, so update them to keep current, ranking and posted in the social media.

OK, as always, these just scratch the surface, but you can see the optimizing for SEO and social media are pretty much one and the same these days. What you do with one totally effects the other.  Anyone who thinks they can be an SEO and ignore social media is, well, NOT an SEO.

Next up: Optimization for Social Media Integration: News

Optimization for Social Media Integration is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Google software engineer and spam cop,  Matt Cutts, also the search giant’s spokesperson to the SEO world, gave the keynote address for the second day of PubCon South with the announcement of the Google Friend Connect API, which will integrate accounts like OpenID, Google, Yahoo or AOL Instant Messenger to make leaving comments on blogs easier.

It’s not just for blogs, but can be used for forums and other CMS systems, too. The idea is to make it easier to leave comments without having to constantly type in user names and passwords, etc.  Ultimately this will also combat spam.

Matt said that Open Source plugins for WordPress, Drupal and phpBB will be released later today. Matt says since these are Open Source, improvements from the SEO world for these plugins are welcome.

The API will allow you to join web sites so that you don’t have to log in each time to leave comments.

This was Matt’s eighth PubCon, including the very first.

Matt’s blog for SEO and related issues is http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ .  More information on the Google Friend Connect API will be available on his blog later today.

Matt Cutts at PubCon South is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

1. Keyword Tool - I have tried them all and this is the one I always go back to for my keyword research. Not only does it give you variations on the keyword phrase you are searching for, but also provides the WordTracker count and daily estimated searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN along with shortcuts to various tools like Google Trends, Keyword Discovery and several other online tools. And, you can export the thing as a CSV file. Way to go Aaron!

2. Check Server Headers Tool – Quick and easy way to check on whether your URL is being seen and followed properly by the spiders. For instance, I recently installed a WordPress plugin which appeared to work fine in a browser, but when I checked the page URLs that it produced here, I found that those pages were producing 404 errors, meaning the web surfer could see the pages, but the spiders couldn’t. Naturally, I ditched the plugin. The site also includes a batch URL processing capability (up to 25 URLs at once).

3. Web Page Analyzer – This online tool checks the speed of your site and lets you know what the download time would be at various connection speeds. Granted, most folks have broadband these days but you still don’t want a page to take several minutes to load on a 56k dial up connection. The test gives you suggestions on ways to speed up your site for visitors and spiders. Both will go away if your site is too slow.

4. Yahoo Site Explorer -Yes, Google gives you some information on sites that link to you, but not like Yahoo’s Site Explorer, which is easy to use and just requires a Yahoo login. You can filter inbound links to see internal or external linking, number of pages Yahoo sees and more.

5. Spider Simulator – Just one of many free online tools offered by this site, I jump here when I need a quick look at what the spiders are seeing. A more comprehensive spider simulator report is available in the iBusinessPromoter client software on my PC, but this online utility serves my purpose most of the time.

6. Tweetscan - These days keeping up with what is said about you and your clients is a must. I use Tweetscan to search for references to me or my clients in Twitter for reputation management, goodwill and networking opportunities.

7. SearchStatus - This is a Firefox plugin that, among other things, allows you to highlight and see nofollow links. This comes in real handy when checking backlinks or sculpting the links on your own site. The plugin includes utilities to check backlinks, Alexa rankings and so forth, but I primarily use the nofollow highlight feature.

8. MyBlogLog - Although the community aspects of the social site are free, I do use one paid service that this Yahoo owned site offers – statistics. For about $25 per year, I can get almost real time traffic stats coming off of web sites. I can see my site traffic nearly as it happens, where surfers are coming from and where they are going. From this, I can see if there is a trend or if something is wrong on a site now, not tomorrow when my Google Analytics stats are refreshed. I mentioned this service in my post on Web Analytics. This is the only non-free tool I mention in this list, but it’s such a bargain, I had to include it.

9. Google Chrome - Though not technically a tool, Google’s first attempt at a web browser has one feature that keeps it open on one of my monitors all day – the ability to log into different Google accounts in different tabs. I keep my domain e-mail, which is hosted through Google Apps, in one tab and Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics for my work accounts in other tabs. Now, if Chrome would just pick up some cool plugins!

10. Google Webmaster Tools - For something that I paid little attention to when first released, Google Webmaster Tools is now also open on one of my monitors all day. It just keeps getting better. From tracking down dead URLs on my sites to testing a robots.txt file, I can locate site issues that I wouldn’t otherwise know about. Though far from perfect, it’s just about the most valuable online tool I use these days.

SEO Tools & Tips is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

User-agent:*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /ar/
Disallow: /el/
Disallow: /ja/
SITEMAP: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

This tells all bots (that’s the * after User-agent) to stay away from four directories and also provides the location for the domain sitemap.

But, what if you want to give Google special instructions? You’d think it would be a simple matter of telling Google to do something since you’ve used the * wild card to tell all spiders to avoid certain files or directories. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Let’s say you add these lines to your robots.txt file to keep ONLY Google out of your /info-pages/ directory:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /info_pages/

User-agent:*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /ar/
Disallow: /el/
Disallow: /ja/
SITEMAP: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

You would think that Google would understand that it should stay out of the /info-pages/ directory and then since the * was used in the next User-agent statement, it would also avoid those designated directories just like all of the other bots.

Danger, Will Robinson!

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. In this case, Google will avoid the /info-pages/ directory as instructed in its specific category in the robots.txt file and ignore all other instructions found in the file. It would still crawl all of those other directories. If you want to give Google (or any other bot) special instructions, they have to be complete. In this case, you would need to add all of the other directories to the Google section to keep that bot out of the /info-pages/ directory AND the other four directories along with pointing out where the domain’s sitemap is located. This is what the complete robots.txt file would look like:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /info_pages/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /ar/
Disallow: /el/
Disallow: /ja/
SITEMAP: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent:*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /ar/
Disallow: /el/
Disallow: /ja/
SITEMAP: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

Quick robots.txt lesson: The robots.txt file has to be very specific. If you set up a category for a certain bot, it ONLY pays attention to the instructions for it in THAT category. All others are ignored.

For more information, see Robots Exclusion Standard.

Robots.txt: Powerful but Picky! is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO