SEO in The Desert

By Richard V. Burckhardt

This is The Web Optimist’s Top 10 List of SEO Tips from the recent BlueGrass LA conference held in Marina del Rey. Vanessa Fox and Adam Audette provided incredible search engine optimization presentations and these are what stuck out above everything (at least in my opinion).

1. The TITLE tag is the most important tag. Ask someone NOT involved with your site to review your title. Is your title what they would be searching for?
2. Build your site based upon what people are looking for, NOT the other way around.
3. Clarify your business goal, brand objective and value proposition. These are extremely difficult to do, but essential to your success. Answer these first!
4. Make sure what is ranking for any given keyword is relevant and not a 404 or non-related page. We’ve all seen these pop up in the serps.
5. Solve a problem for your customer. Make sure the page does this with proper SEO and a call to action. It comes down to answering user questions.
6. Don’t put SEO front and center. Ditch the the huge list of links. Good SEO is unseen and should be an invisible layer. Make the best user experience, then leverage SEO.
7. Give the SEO team the power to do things.
8. Give the SEO team their own development resources (This is my FAVORITE!).
9. Make SEO part of the work flow, but don’t bring it into the development cycle too early. However, make the SEO team aware of product and value development as they progress.
10. Great content + Great User Experience + SEO = Traffic

Thanks to Loren and the whole crew at BlueGlass LA 2010. Fantastic conference!

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

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Does your business have multiple locations? Does each local location want to do its own PPC marketing? Then each local site needs its own domain to do local paid search marketing.

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

By Richard V. Burckhardt

I’m preparing to do a presentation as VP of Search for FramesDirect.com  for the Performance Marketing Expo in Miami this September and would like a local Palm Springs area test audience for “SEO Tips Even Mom Would Love” – a roughly 20-minute Powerpoint show.

Ideally, I’d like to do this for a business or organization group of at least ten people in a conference room. Yes, that’s the catch. You will need to provide the facility. A projector or large monitor that can be connected to a laptop will also be required.

And, of course, I am offering to do this free for the lucky group. I’ll take questions regarding the presentation and general SEO afterwards. read more »

By Richard V. Burckhardt

It’s been a while since my last post about WordPress plugins, so it’s about time to update some of the top ones on my current list. I haven’t had a chance to test all of these on WordPress 3.0, but all work fine in 2.92.

WPing.fm - This plugin, as you can probably figure out, works with Ping.fm. Every time you edit or publish a post (you decide to do one or both) it is sent to Ping.fm, which sends it to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace and a ton of other social sites (again, you set all of these up). Great for pushing out new posts across the social world.

Raw HTML in WordPress - For those of us blogging about SEO, web design or development, this plugin solves a world of headache. Since WordPress won’t allow you to display raw code in a post without totally borking it, this plugin wraps itself around the HTML so that it displays as, well, raw code in your post. For example, take a look at my post Top 10 SEO Must Do Tips and you’ll see this plugin in action in tip #4.

Page Links To - This one is a must for any blogger’s toolkit. This plugin allows you to redirect a page or post somewhere else. For instance, let’s say you want to create a link to an external site in your main menu where your pages are listed. You can create the page, name it what you like and have this plugin redirect the link to that off site location. The link in your main menu will have whatever text you set up for the page, but when clicked on, the link will 301 redirect to the URL of your choice rather than open the page (a 302 redirect is available, too, for those rare times it is needed).
read more »

By Wayne Barker

We all know that your inbound linking strategy is crucial to SEO and Internet Marketing – as well as being the most frustrating part of online marketing – and creating quality link bait should be high on your agenda.

Essentially link bait is just a form of content that will gently nudge website owners, bloggers and social media acolytes to link to your site. Matt Cutts himself said link bait is “interesting enough to catch people’s attention” – whilst this is true link bait should be something that is interesting enough for people to want to link to it.

How do you go about creating link bait?

The first step is to put yourself in the position of your potential fish (or audience) and ask yourself what it is they want. Usually the best link bait (or at least the link bait that is successful) can fall into a few simple categories:
read more »

By Nick Lewis

Blogs are often maligned as websites’ younger cousins. However, they can actually be very effective in getting your message out. The crown jewel of social media is to become an authority in your particular market and blogs are a great way to do that. Guest blogging allows your reach to extend even further.

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.
read more »

By Richard V. Burckhardt

My blog, The Web Optimist is a source of search engine optimization information for those new to SEO who want to get more informed on what works and what doesn't. I was recently asked what would be the top ten tips out of my popular 110 SEO Tips Even Mom Would Love article. It's kind of hard to separate them into single paragraph bites, so I am presenting them in a more categorized format below.

Understand that these are my personal top tips as an in house SEO. Another SEO would probably have a different list. You know how it goes, put two SEOs in a room and there's gonna be an argument! Heck, I even get arguments from my own SEO cronies!

Keep in mind that...

SEO is NOT Rocket Science

BUT, it is complex and an ongoing process that changes almost daily. There is no such thing as a permanent fix to magically send you to the top of the rankings for good. But here are some of the basics to look for when optimizing your site to drive more traffic, prospects and, hopefully, profit. read more »