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

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

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

* Do I have a penalty?
* Why do I have a penalty?
* How can I get rid of my penalty?

Unfortunately, they’re elusive to tie down. Since you get penalties (generally) for doing something wrong in Google’s eyes, they’re not very forthcoming about what they do to you when they catch you. If they had their way, I’m sure they’d like to just say BAD STUFF in their guidelines. As it is, however, penalties typically fall into a couple of distinct categories and Rand has a flowchart for determining whether you have a penalty or not. This flowchart has historically worked very well and covers the vast majority of penalties (thanks Rand!).

Read the full article

1. Repetitive Keyword Targeting
If you’re targeting a specific keyword term or phrase, it’s not necessary, and often ill-advised, to place that keyword in the title tag, H1 and body text of every page on your site. It’s certainly OK to use the term/phrase in passing and when relevant, but remember that pages target rankings, not sites – a good rule is to target one specific keyword term/phrase per page, sometimes more, but only in rare circumstances (like when you’re trying to get a secondary, indented listing) do you actually want to target the same term on multiple pages.

2. Splitting Efforts Across Many Domains
If you’ve found 10 reliable sources to get links, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can register 500 domains, get them all links from your 10 sources, then link from those sites back to your main domain and suddenly appear to have a diverse domain backlink profile. Splitting up your efforts on multiple domains is, in my opinion, rarely advisable (see this post for more) and can seriously detract from your goal of gaining rankings on a single site. The days of link farms and link islands are long gone – with link acquisition, quality is slowly but surely getting the upper hand on quantity, so use strategies that will get you the right links, not just any link.

To read the full article, click here

What Does Errorlytics Do?

* Tracks your websites’ 404 Page Not Found errors.
* Transparently redirects users and clients away from 404 Not Found pages.
* Increases your websites’ SEO (and users’ happiness!) by eliminating 404 errors.

If you have 1 domain to analyze it’s FREE
Errorlytics offers also a plugin for Wordpress !

Are you interested how it works ? Go to Errorlytics website

I found this article (of Gunjan Pandya) interesting and maybe helpful for guys who wants to organize their tasks.

Add Separate Column for Your Primary Keyword: after doing keyword research with Wordtracker or Google Keyword Suggestion Tool you can select your primary (base) keyword for your particular page and put it in this column.

Add Separate Column for Your Secondary Keywords: after you’ve selected your primary keyword for a page, you should select secondary keywords for your page.

Add Column for Google Competition: check the competition of your primary and secondary keywords in Google. So you can get the basic idea of your keywords competition in Google

Why we should add the column of Primary Keywords, Secondary Keywords and Google Competition?

When writing meta tags, if you can see what your primary keyword and what your secondary keywords are, that will be easier for you to create a proper title and description. Besides, you can always evaluate your chances of getting to Google first page by seeing your Google competition for each phrase.

Read more