1) Research your targeted keywords with Google Keyword Tool

Though the tool is not perfect, it will help give you an idea of the search volume for many keywords your targeting, as well as giving you  hints at advertiser competition with  Google Adwords. If Keyword A is only searched 200 times per month and Keyword B is searched 2,000 times, being ranked for Keyword B may result in up to 10 times more monthly traffic. Generally expect more competition and difficulty being ranked top page the more searches a term has.

2) Write quality meta tags, especially Title and Description.

Having your targeted keywords in your meta information will help search engines see that there’s a relationship between the search term and your site better. Do not fill the meta with only keywords, but write creatively to include you most important phrases.

3) Produce new content regularly

Nothing helps a  website grow more than by adding quality content and lots of it. Try to add a new page daily or a few times per week. Get in a routine where your site doesn’t go long between updates. If you allow comments, stay in touch with your readers by responding and staying active in your site. This will keep readers interested and your site growing over time. Think about how you feel about a site once you see the most recent post was 2-3 months ago or you ask a question via comment, and its never returned.

4) Add a sitemap and robots.txt file

A sitemap is a list of everything on your site, written so that search engines can easily find your content to include in their rankings.

5) Backlinks

Begin to find backlinks from websites in your niche.  An easy way to get a few free links is by adding your content to dofollow social media or directory websites. Remember that each link could be a future customers first impression of you and your site, so take the time to write quality information where your backlink will be found.

Obviously these tips alone will not get your ranked 1st page for all popular keywords. By following these steps and continuing to learn about more advanced  SEO, a new webmaster will be on their way to seeing more natural search engine traffic.

-Brian Jackson – SEO Florida

If you want to make money during November and December, take seriously look at the following elements that will impact your paid and organic listings.

1) Create a GIFT page: if you dont have it, just create one. If you sell clothes, segment the elements by men/women, categories, pricing
==> Dont forget to do keyword research: how are people searching for gifts ?

2) Linkpopularity: linkbuilding has been always an important factor for the rankings. Put some extra resources and work on your linkpopularity!

3) Plan your PPC (Google Adwords) campaign in september/october: start the 3rd week of october with your Google Adwords campaign. Build a history in Adwords and make sure your CTR is good and your CPC is low.
When holiday season starts you will pay less (if high CTR & qualityscore is true) as average CPC!
Dont forget to use attractive adcopy in your advertisements.

A good preparation of SEM campaign will make you money during the holiday season.

Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in their web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

To read the full article, click here

How to Embed SEO in your business…
…if you have an ecommerce website

* Make sure you add friendly reminders (otherwise known as calls to action) to link to your site in your thankyou emails. Rand wrote a great post on this over here. (By the way, while googling for that post from Rand I came across this which is also a nice read on order confirmation emails.)

* Keep keyphrase research in mind when naming both product categories and products themselves. Things have an annoying habit of ranking for their own name (e.g. wikipedia) and this is also true for the little guys so next time you’re going to release the awesome-o-matic-1200 spend a little time thinking if it might not make more sense to call it the awesome-curtain-rail-o-matic-1200 (assuming you’re selling curtain rails that is….). This can apply to many many different industries, think about which one of these is going to rank better in Google for [hotel in Seattle]; “The Westin Seattle” or “The Mayflower Park”

* Last but not least, check out this super-awesome post (that Sam also linked to in his round-up but it’s just so relevant here that I’m linking to it again): Surviving and Thriving as an Ecommerce SEO

…if you have a content website

* Motivate your content writers with analytics so that they get excited about writing content which gets lots of pageviews/SEO traffic.Brent is world class at this and has achieved some astonishing results with the Tribune and one of the major things he did was to educate and excite journalists about SEO so that they both understood and craved page views.Brent talks about the process he used in more depth in this amazing interview.

To read the full article, click here

Then OutWit has the Web collection engine for you: dozens of recognition and extraction functions fitting in a free Firefox 3 extension.

He starts the process with a simple WordPress MU install, to which he then adds the Multi Site Manager plugin, to be able to run multiple domains off of it. Now this is all pretty simple and straight forward. Then he used to have to build a theme in several languages, but he has recently developed some new stuff that makes that simpler.

Localized templates
Localized dates

Read the full “multilingual & multi domain corporate sites in wordpress” article

Google Insights for Search: March 2009 (Belgium)

Why would you search for www.carrefour.be ? What’s the reason behind this?

The trend in “Google Trends” shows us that especially Walloon people have entered the keyword “carrefour” in the searchbox of Google.

That’s remarkable and interesting.
Did Carrefour had a special promotion in March ‘09 ? I would like to know your thoughts about this interesting search trend.

This is a good marketing tool for Carrefour. If they know that Walloon people are searching more for their brandname they maybe could launch some special promotions in the Walloon region.

GA Notes

Any GA user who views a profile, and has the Firefox extension, will see the notes entered for the profile. You can add notes, edit notes and delete notes. Notes can also be exported in XML format for archival purposes.

Installation

Installing GA Notes is easy. Just download the following file to your computer:

https://ga-notes.appspot.com/ganotes.xpi

Once downloaded double click on the file. Firefox should open and ask if you want to install the extension. Click install and that’s it. You’re ready to start adding notes to your GA data.

Usage

The extension adds a ‘Show Notes’ button in the GA menu bar. Click on the button to view notes for this profile or to add a note or edit/delete an existing note. It’s not that complicated. We wanted to keep this easy and flexible.

How it Works

For those of you that are interested, GA Notes runs on Google’s App Engine. No data is stored on your machine or our servers. It’s stored on Google’s servers. The Firefox extension provides the interface to enter and display data. But all of the processing and data storage happens on App Engine. All data sent to App Engine is encrypted prior to transmission.

In a perfect world we would have added notes to the data-over-time graph at the top of each report. However, we can’t get inside that part of GA using a Firefox extensions (or Greasemonkey script). We thought this was a good compromise. If anyone out there knows how to dig into Flash let us know!

Road Map

This is obviously a beta version of the software. We have a number of features that we’re working on and hope to have done soon. These include:

* Sorting and searching notes by date
* Excel friendly export
* An admin flag for notes to separate admin changes to your GA account
* Some type of alert to show you how many new notes have been added since your last login
* A more graphical visualization of note

Here are some methods to build brand awareness and exposure online.

Contribute Articles

I’m not talking about submitting an article to 1,000 article directories. I’m talking about the more traditional marketing strategy of getting published. These articles could be how-to, advice, or opinion columns. Target all kinds of sites in your vertical and places your customers would frequent. These sites could range from nonprofit organization, to hobbyist, to newspapers.

Press Mentions

Want to get interviewed by the press? There’s a great likelihood they’ll contact you if your company has good online exposure. Just make sure it’s easy for them to contact you by phone. Often the media is just looking for a comment to add into their piece. That goes to the first person who answers their phone call.

One way to speed up this process is to start networking with colleagues to get an introduction to people in the press who cover your industry. LinkedIn is an excellent tool for this.

Forums & Discussion Groups

Those signature links have little value in terms of search engines — yet they can do wonders for building your company’s reputations. Keep in mind many bloggers are in forums looking for topics to write about. Either answer questions or contribute to the discussion.

Comments

Put together a list of the most influential blogs for your industry and audience. Then have someone contribute to the discussion in the comments. Expand on the topic that was written about and even point out additional resources. Make sure the comments are insightful and non-promotional.

Answer Questions

Gather a list of sites where people commonly post questions about your industry or product. Then be the first or second person to provide the answer. Just don’t be promotional.

Social Media

There’s no need to worry about social media anymore because the rumor is Twitter is replacing all social media. Read one of the thousands of blog posts written in the past day about Twitter for more information. To quote the Borg from “Star Trek,” “Resistance is futile.”

If you don’t believe the hype, then be brave and get involved in social media sites. You’ll find that they’re still vibrant and growing, and that there really is more to social media than Twitter. Many sites have groups dedicated to specific topics, such as travel, fashion, or careers. If there’s no topic for your vertical, start one today! Even better, get creative and start a better group with a unique perspective.

The trick with any of these strategies is to have the people in place to handle the workload. It takes dedication because this isn’t a one-time process.

An example would be having a person dedicate an hour each day to answering questions on forums. Another example would be to hire someone to handle your online public relations from social media, to getting your company published, to discussion forums. That really depends on your company’s needs and budget.

The important thing is to set up a regular schedule. Remember, good link development is just good marketing.

Source SearchEngineWatch