SEO in The Desert

By Richard V. Burckhardt

I recently had the privilege of contributing a couple of chapters on SEO and Social Media for Neil J. Mahoney’s new book, Practical Everyday Analytics & The Science of Sales and Marketing. I wanted to thank Neil for the opportunity and really hope that the information I provided is helpful to his readers.

Check it out!

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

By Charles Mburugu

No serious website can dare to ignore the significance of search engine rankings. Search engines provide more than 70% of the traffic for most websites. Therefore, if you rank high in search engines, you will receive more traffic.

However, getting and sustaining high rankings is not easy. It usually takes much hard word and effort to attain good search engine rankings. The following are three things you need to always keep in mind for better search engine rankings.

Content is king
Search engines love content. Without good and valuable content, you have little chance of success, no matter how great your website is or how much effort you have put into search engine optimization. It is important to have a lot of keyword rich content all through your site. Another great tip is to visit websites which are similar to yours. Read their articles and get ideas which you can make use of in your own site.

There are several reasons why content is vital for high search engine rankings. High search engine ranking will bring you a lot of traffic. However, to sustain the high traffic and retain a good number of return visitors, you need to have useful and well written content in your site. This volume of targeted traffic will be helpful in keeping your reciprocal links growing. read more »

By Philip Russell

Link building gets harder in every year. SEOs have to find a way to make their links work for their clients, and the type of links that will help your website are becoming harder and harder to achieve as Google finds different alternatives to their algorithms that they hope can help offset the totality of the weight of links (think Panda).

Many bold predictions were made in the beginning of the year in terms of where people thought link building would go in the year 2011. Not all of them came true. In fact, being an active link builder for the last year and a half, I found that the best results and money rely in one type of link building.

Forget the Link Directories

Unless you are willing to throw down some cash on some quality link directories, forget about them. Free link directories and “iffy” link directories will just prevent you from spending time on what you really should be doing with your day – which includes making your site more valuable by producing quality (the absolute best indirect way to build links) and taking care of all of your on-site SEO, which is often overlooked.

There is no better way to waste time than to spend countless hours filling out forms and submitting to free link directories. Their links hold very little weight, so little that even as many as 15 of them may not even guarantee that your website gets into the Google’s SERPs if your website is new and with zero links. read more »

By Michael Cash

Are you ready for your business to join the 21st Century? Before you answer this question, let me ask you another one: Are you ready to start a blog for your business? For many, the prospect of learning how to properly start, maintain, and optimize a blog for search engines is a monumental task that simply never gets done. But don’t let the enormity of the task stop you from doing it! You could be missing out on thousands of customers simply because your business has not joined the blogosphere. Setting up your business’s blog for search engine optimization (SEO) is the topic of this writing. The benefits of SEO far outweigh the labor it takes to set it up for your blog.

Basically, SEO is the foundation your blog needs to be ranked highly by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. It contains two parts: On-Page and Off-Page SEO. On-Page SEO are the things that you control about your blog, such as content, domain name, and plug-ins. Off-Page SEO are things outside of your control, such as links to your site from other blogs. Since On-Page SEO is directly affected by what you do, we will focus on that here.

Here are the things you can do to optimize your blog for search engines: read more »

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. read more »