It’s been months since I’ve sat down in front of the computer and wrote a proper SEO article. Not even a few months maybe 6-7 months, at the least. But yesterday things have changed. I had a good friend who’s got an upcoming Men’s Lifestyle website join me for the day for a full introduction, SEO presentations and that has woken up a lot of muscles that have been sleeping deep inside my brain.

There are many ways of doing SEO. Link building to your website is always the easy path to go, especially relevant anchor texts – but you see sometime around June 2011 I decided to stop focusing my entire effort on SEO as I brought over 5,000,000 unique users to the site just from Google.com. The value of these users was poor and I am not sure whether it was because the site was poorly designed but here I am months later sitting on an actual brand and the user base is a lot of percentages less but suddenly I have what I was missing – retention, loyalty, and steady growth.

I am really not shy to share the analytic with you. Sharing is caring and if we all shared data then we’ll be able to understand and estimate, not just guess.

The traffic I brought from social media such as StumbleUpon, Digg was not good. 15 seconds to 1 minute average time on site, browsing an average 1.7. The traffic I brought from Google News, MSN, Bing and Yahoo was also, not the best, averaging at 2:30m average time on site with browsing 2.5 – 3.3 page per session. 4 page/visit if I was very lucky.

And here I am today, it’s October 16th, 2011 I am no longer focusing on optimizing every single title, or bolding keyword, nor building links (whatsoever) but basing my entire growth on natural growth, focusing on delivering the best navigation and getting a high retention. The hierarchy of the SEO is a given. I do make sure that I’m using the right H1′s, H2′s, that the code is clean and neat. I must make sure that my homepage is positioned right but most of all I have the user in mind. But yea, here it goes:

Today I am proud to announce that our user spends an average of 31 minutes on site with a high 7.7 page per session. Search engine traffic is still at high 43% but not as close as it was before.

So what have I done to change?

I stopped writing about trending topics, to begin with. I stopped writing about celebrity news and focused on material that’s “forever” and “timeless”. For example, photography blog is forever, Arts & Culture is forever, interviews, profiles and Q&A’s are forever. Am I ranking high in search engines? Honestly I don’t know and don’t care enough to bother. What I do care about is that I am delivering the best content and that my users enjoy to browse the site. And I am certain that they do because we are getting a massive feedback and the analytic speak for themselves.

So if you are breaking your head on SEO – you must understand the basic of all basics.

What is Google’s primary goal: Provide users the information they were looking for. And instantly.

If your site is optimized, not caring about what the user is actually reading – you will not get anywhere. You are most likely still using AdSense or another poor CPM network (will not mention names again but let’s just say VCN for those who know what I’m talking about) on 20cents CPM or even less (sorry) while we’re lounging on a $200 CPM campaign with half your traffic making 3000000% more revenue then your site will ever make. Unless you change your ways.

What’s my point?

Get to know your readers, become a good editor and make your online entity as best as possible. Enjoy the growth, the success – will come with it.

Understand the basics of SEO, but focus on what your user wants. Word to mouth is a hundred times more powerful then any SEO traffic. And remember, this article is speaking to those who run a website that is not based on sales and has no end-goals (e.g. e-commerce). This article is directed to those who are looking to make a brand over a high-trafficked website.

If I was to share a few additional tips. Let this article inspire you and not make you envious. Get a good editor, and get a good team. Last week I had a really great conversation with Qianna Smith of Fashion Q&A and she said something along the lines of “You cannot make it in this industry as a sole, you must have a good team and a platform” and that is the key for everything. You truly cannot make it on your own, or with a bad team. Which goes back to what I advised everyone months ago. Hire hungry employees, hire employees slowly, fire bad employees.

And of course: Good luck,

As always, feel free to reach out for any advise. I am here to help everyone grow.

When it comes to SEO everyone knows I am a walking & talking encyclopedia. When it comes to WordPress SEO there’s plenty I’ve got to say as well. But aside from SEO, today I’m going to talk about WP Plugins. I always tell my clients who use WP to try to eliminate as many plugins as they can from their site. For many reasons aside from the speed, JavaScript, AJAX and all that other stuff.

Today I truly felt like a kid opening a present when I discovered Joost’s latest project.

Until right this second I’ve always used by default the following plugins (on every WP installation).

1) Breadcrumbs
2) SEO Title Tag
3) Headspace2
4) All in One SEO
5) Google Sitemap
6) Google News Sitemap
7) Robots Meta.

And today, I’ve eliminated all of the above. Literally, disabled 7 plugins.

Yoast is my new Jesus. WordPress SEO is currently in beta. It’s a newly released plugin which literally combines all of the plugins I mentioned above plus it does more. I think the idea when he created this tool was to create something so powerful people will possibly feint. But that’s not all, because the plugin itself is so easy to configure and not overwhelming at all. It took me about 15 minutes to fully configure it.

From Yoast.com

The News SEO module, which is already in the download you can currently get from WordPress.org, is and will remain free. It allows generation of an XML News Sitemap, which you’ll need if you want to be included in Google News. More features will be added to that later.

The other two modules will be paid modules; they serve a more niche market and will require quite a bit of work to get right, hence the need for them to be paid. All three modules are developed by me in partnership with a subject matter expert, what they’ll do and who these guys are is outlined on the pages above. Trust me, they’re the best in the business.

Beta period
Second: this plugin is STILL in beta. It will probably remain in beta for at least another 2 weeks, maybe more. Your testing is very much appreciated and will remain to be very much appreciated. Whether you’re sending me technical things that don’t work or lines of text you don’t understand or could be improved: it’s all great.

Integration
I’m happy to say that Scribe SEO has been updated to work well with WordPress SEO, and the needed adaptions have been made to make it work well with Genesis too. The same work is underway for Thesis, and I’ve also been talking to the WPML team to make sure the WordPress SEO plugin is fully compatible with WPML as well.

Lastly, Nathan Rice of StudioPress has been so kind to promise to update his SEO Data Transporter plugin soon to work with the plugin too, so you can easily move data back and forth between this plugin and other SEO plugins, should you ever want to switch away from this one…

This is a very exciting time for me, and I’m very thankful for the help that everyone has provided so far, let’s make this a great success together!

My personal review of the new WordPress SEO plugin

In one word: OMG.

In greater detail: This plugin enters the top 5 must-have plugins for every WordPress user. You must have it by default in every WP installation you do. There are no words that can describe how powerful this plugin is. It’s literally the ultimate SEO solution and more. You can edit out your .htaccess files, and edit the appearance of your RSS feed. For example, I added a HTML banner code to my feed to display between every other post. Yes, it’s an easy deed but it eliminates other plugins, and eliminates the headache of going and editing the files.

You can control everything from meta titles, to meta descriptions just like in Headspace2, All in One SEO (which I find kind of useless). The WordPress SEO plugin is now a combination of Robots Meta and Breadcrumbs as well. So you do not need to have two additional plugins installed.

For those who are lazy and do not want to reconfigure their Headspace2 or All in One SEO Joost included a button that helps import all the previous settings from Breadcrumbs, to Robots Meta, to Headspace, to All in One SEO and by a check button he also helps you clean the unused MySQL tables that are now useless from the previous plugins.

Try it out now. Download the beta version today at Yoast.com

Many SEO people think they know how to do a proper On-Page optimization but when it comes down to it, it’s one of the hardest and most dedicated areas of the entire process. For me the entire process is fun but on page optimization could be the best part which I enjoy most. For those who are still afraid of search engines.. It’s not rocket science. There are three keys to good SEO: communication, content and back links

There are so many things to consider

1) What is the content speaking about?, What length is the content going to be? Which keywords will I highlight and will they repeat themselves?

Am I going to include an image? Two images? A gallery? Is there a video I can include? Does that even matter?

There are a few things I’ve realized in the past few months one of which is – don’t create too many pages. Many online companies do the mistake of creating several pages to define their company (About, Contact, Advertise, Staff, Shipping, Policy, Terms) etc. Creating all of these pages can heavily affect your on-page SEO and here’s why.

Each one of your pages is sending X amount of links. Perhaps even, XXX amount of links (hundreds). Once you realize that Google ranks pages and not websites your understanding of SEO has gained another level.

Let’s say your page is ranking PageRank #5 and that page is linking internally, to another 200 links (Navigation bar, footer links, sidebar links internal and external, on page links and hypered imagelinks that could also be banners) what you are actually doing is creating a formula

5pr/:200l=0.025

So you’re actually sharing the “Link Juice” with 200 pages, giving each of them a 0.025 PR. Somewhat like this.

Conclusion? Eliminate the pages! Combine, and combine as much as you can.

Take the pages like

About, Contact & Staff and put them together. Take the Terms & Privacy pages and combine them in one page and once you’re done with that don’t forget to redirect (301) all of these pages that you’re about to delete to the page that you will be combining with. And how do you choose which one to keep? Simple: the one that has the higher PR.

Next step. I always say choose your titles wisely. I’ve decided to make things a bit clearer now this is completely based on personal experience on what’s been working for me (September 2010)

X = Random word
Y = Keyword

Titles should look like this: (69 characters max)

X Y X X X X
X X Y X X Y
X Y X Y X X
X Y X X Y X
X Y Y X X X

Titles like this do not work for me: (69 characters max)

Y X X X X X
Y Y X X X X
Y X Y X X X

How to do a proper on-page optimization. First thing’s first. Every article you write, take it easy, take your time and research. I use Google Keyword tool for every article I write. I find the keywords i want to focus on and I never repeat the same keywords within the same paragraph.

Here’s an example of a paragraph I will write

We will focus on the following keywords:

[dog breeder] = 1600 Global Monthly Searches
[dog breeders] = 8,100 Global Monthly Searches
[florida dog breeders] 170 Global Monthly Searches
[texas dog breeders] 140 Global Monthly Searches
[dog breeders uk] 720 Global Monthly Searches
[local dog breeders] 480 Global Monthly Searches
[find a dog breeder] 210 Global Monthly Searches
[boxer puppies for sale] 12,100 Global Monthly Searches

And we’ll construct the article, let’s start with the title
I’m Searching for a Local Dog Breeder in Florida – Help me Find Him (total 68 characters)

Keywords we’ve got there:

Local Dog Breeder, (not breeders), Florida Dog Breeder, Find a Dog Breeder

And through out the article I will repeat certain keywords however I will not repeat the keywords Local Dog Breeder, Florida Dog Breeder, or Find a Dog Breeders. I will repeat the other keywords instead and have a good usage of bold on these keywords. Example of a paragraph:

|– Example Starts for SEO Optimized Content –|

[image goes here, perhaps even centered]

I’m right now in the process of looking for a [B]breeder[/B]. I’ve been searching for a [B]dog breeder[/B] in my area for quite some time now. I’m traveled to [B]Texas[/B] where I found several [B]dog breeders[/B] but I prefer to stay [B]local[/B]. I’m currently in [B]London[/B] area of the [B]UK[/B]. If anyone can help me [B]find a dog breeder[/B] please send me a private message.

Here is a video of the cutest Boxer Puppies for Sale <– this should be a H1 or H2.
http://www.youtube.com/videolink

Here is a great gallery of several puppies I’ve found across the web <– this should be a H2 or H3

– gallery code goes here — <– whatever WordPress code you choose to insert.

|– Example Ends for SEO Optimized Content –|

At the same time, I will also recommend to attach a large photo (not a tiny .gif icon one) and even be friendly with YouTube. Since I know that Google is YouTube, by adding a YouTube video I am actually enhancing the quality of the article itself, by providing video content. This should make the article more popular.

After that, I recommend even commenting on your own articles. (not more then once, since it’s your own IP it’s considered only once). But leaving a comment does two things

A) Enhances the “flaming comments” – in other words, someone will respond to you.
B) Enhances the “popularity” of the article itself.

WordPress acts in a funny way. Since comments are actually being pulled by wp-includes/wp-comments.php and within your Gabfire Theme as a “comment.php” search engines understand that your article has a comment on it, and they reward you for having more comments.

The more comments the article will have the more popular it will rank on search engine. Also the reason I’m recommending to add a good size image is because Google Image search now weights images. The better quality the image is the higher it will rank on Google.com. Now don’t get me wrong you don’t want to insert a 5000×5000 image that weights 3MB. That’s just wrong, it will slow your site down and Google rewards users who manage to have their site weight less then 100KB in HTML (excluding CSS, Scripts) and the faster your site loads the higher it ranks.

I am currently taking small projects to optimize WordPress sites for less then $500. If you are interested in getting your entire site checked and completely optimized feel free to contact me with your budget and expectations and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Last but not least – Remember: SEO is a noun, verb and adjective.

A few months ago I struggled to understand what script code a website was using that whenever I copied their content to quote them, and pasted it into my HTML editor it literally added a “Read more – URL” right below the text. I was amazed, what a great link bait. Heck I’m an SEO person myself so I will obviously be removing the link from it but a lot of other bloggers out there don’t consider this option and don’t even notice the automatic link bait.

So I present to you with the solution: Tynt Insight

Tynt Insight automatically adds a link back to your original content with every paste. The attribution link ensures you get credit for your work, drives new visits back to your site and improves your SEO results.

Get your Javascript code right here, and protect your content from being stolen without a link-back.

http://id.tynt.com/script/attribution_link

You must have heard the saying “Cash is King” in the past. It’s a simple expression that is sometime used in analyzing businesses or investment portfolios. It may refer to the importance of cash flow in the overall fiscal health of a business. For investors it may also describe times when it is advantageous to have a large percentage of cash or short-term debt instruments available either due to falling financial markets or due to the availability of investment opportunities.
In the SEO world, it’s “Content is King” and that is it.

Last year Google has changed about 500 things to it’s search engines, more than one change per a day – which makes our daily SEO research much harder but it’s a daily discovery because we learn new things every single day.

If you are planning to buy content via XML feeds for your site or just wonder how to get more search engine visits to your site you came to the right place and I know that many SEO sites claim “you came to the right place” but trust me, you came to the right place.

The following are the things you should consider for each page or article you submit:

UNIQUE CONTENT – Copying content from other sites, or buying articles which are duplicate content will not only not get you traffic but will hurt you on the long run with penalization of pages and low indexation from search engines.

Don’t ever use copied content on your site. Generate it your own, regardless if your grammar is pretty crappy like mine this is how my pages rank front pages for good keywords, it’s just because I write the content myself.

UNIQUE TITLE TAG: I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. The biggest aspect of SEO is your title tag. Make sure you do not exceed the 69 characters, ever. Do not repeat exact titles in any of your pages – that said, make sure that each of your pages has it’s own unique title and try to not replicate a title from another site as well – be creative but maintain the SEO keyword which you’d like to rank for even if it’s a high volume keyword. Because you must remember that Google does not read more then 69 characters of title so putting more then 69 characters, it is simply a waste of time.

CONTENT LENGTH: The recommended content length would be 300 + words for each of your articles. If you must copy some one else’s words from another site make sure you are using block-quotes, or italic and mention the source, with a link as well. That’s right!

META’S: Don’t forget to use Meta description or ‘excerpt’ for each of your posts. Even try to have a unique excerpt and do not just copy paste a paragraph from the article itself. The time consuming is worth it when you will have 20,000 visitors.

CONTENT PROVIDERS: Over the past year I’ve had the chance to meet with 10s of content providers who offered their services. Their services varied from $4.00 an article to £16,000 a year. I recommend that if you do choose to buy repeated content try to work a solution with your content provider to deliver you the news first – before the rest of his clients. If you’re buying XML feeds check out AutoBlogged plugin for WordPress.

BUYING CONTENT FOR WEBSITES VIA XML FEEDS

Here is a list of my recommended content providers in the entertainment and showbiz, politics and more:

BANG Media International – BANG Showbiz is the premier entertainment news agency providing the most exciting entertainment news all over the world. BANG is the leading supplier of global entertainment news for online, print and broadcast media outlets.

Associated Press – RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a popular way to get news and information from across the Internet. RSS software regularly pulls headlines from news sites and Web journals and presents them within e-mail software, Web browsers or standalone programs known as readers. Frequently Asked Questions about RSS. Our FEATURED FEED is changed regularly with new or topical feeds.

Press Association – As home to the national news agency of the UK and Ireland, the Press Association proudly takes its place at the heart of the UK media news providing a continuous feed of text, pictures, video and data into newsrooms around the country.

Brafton – Custom News Marketing: Brafton specializes in providing unique and exclusive custom content marketing solutions for businesses and their websites. Leveraging the power of breaking industry news, Brafton helps businesses engage and convert their target audience through custom news that is published in full and exclusively on a business’ website.

Bummers: Price tag, they are based in the US. Seem like good fellas to reach out to if you’ve got the cash.

What do you do now that you have built your website and optimized each of the pages for the search engines, but still are not getting the traffic you desire? You answer probably lies in your link building strategy or lack thereof. Here are vital steps to generate a great link building campaign.

1. Submit your website to quality web directories. Links from quality, authority web directories can give you inbound links and traffic. There are many directories to choose from, but to get the best results you should concentrate on those quality directories with authority.

2. Make a plan and designate time for link building. Plan an hour or two into your schedule every day for link building until it becomes a routine, or you could also designate one day per week as your link-building day.

3. Carefully choose the websites that you link to as search engines take relevancy into account. If a website is not relevant in some way to yours, you may want to avoid linking to it. If you link to bad domains the search engines may penalize you.

4. Find websites that are related to your niche and develop relationships with the Webmaster. Send them an email to introduce yourself and make sure they know you are a real person and not automated software. Let them know about your website and what you are hoping to accomplish.

5. Prepare the linking code to your website and give it out. When you do find someone wanting to link to you make it easy for them to do so. This way also enables you to choose the pages on your site that you want to gain additional links to.

6. Many websites may be willing to link to yours if you have something to offer them so learn how to trade. Maybe you can add a link to their website in exchange or swap an article. Offer to promote their website on a forum you are a member of. Any of these may work, but it should be customized to what you can offer of value.

7. Write articles and submit them to article directories. This can be a form of viral link building if your article is good enough as it is published with a link to your website in the resource box. Any other website that republishes your article must keep the link intact.

8. Offer a valuable tool, resource or information on your website as link bait. It would need to be something of value to your niche market that others would want to refer and link there. If you would like to learn more ways to generate links and build a high traffic website, there are more articles published at the Authority Directory.

I’ve been doing major research on the latest news for SEO and wanted to update everyone that’s been in our little yet superior community.

Let’s go over the facts

1. 1. In 2009 Google has made 500 changes to it’s search engines that is more then one change every day
2. 2. It seems that Google might be collaborating with Word Press to fight black hat spam. – Everyone, get ready to do some tweaks.

What do I need to know?

How a search engine works:

• More than 100 factors
• Information based

• Exact Phrase: are your keywords found as an exact phrase in any pages?
• Adjacency: How close are your keywords to each other?
• Weighting: How many times do keywords appear in the page?

The next one is

• Popularity

• External links (also known as back links, in links or inbound links)
• How many links point to the page?

Where do they come from? Why do they link to you?

• Social Buzz, online PR, social bookmarking, Twitter

The Building Block of SEO

Technical SEO

Code Optimization / Site Performance / Usability / Site Architecture

Content Keyword Research and Selection – Keyword Targeting and Allocation / On page Optimization content Development and Distribution

Popularity and Trust Link Building / Social Media

The SEO Cycle

1. 1. Keywords
2. 2. Strategy
3. 3. Implementation
4. 4. Monitoring
5. 5. Diagnostic

What you need to do

Make sure your articles have

1. 1. Main Heading (H1)
2. 2. Secondary Headings (H2)
3. 3. Tertiary headings (H3)
4. 4. Use of bold
5. 5. Internal Links – related articles
6. 6. Pages (products, articles, news)
7. 7. Images – USAGE OF Attributes

The anatomy of a link

Anchor text

• URL Value 5
• ANCHOR TEXT Value 5
• RELATIONSHIP OF A LINK Value 5
• Title Value 3
• Attribute Value 5
• Target Value 1

(1 lowest 5 highest)

Do not copy articles from other websites and repost – you won’t get any hits even if you are, and especially if you are in Google News. Work on UNIQUE content. Take an article, reword it and submit.

Don’t ever exceed the 69 character title.

Use “link bait”

Press releases, articles submission

http://www.prweb.com http://www.articlesbasecamp.com http://www.searchguild.com/redir/o.php?out=http:// http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art12838.asp

• Prizes, quizzes, contests, awards
• Widgets, schedules
• Tools – be calculator

And ANALYZE.

Conclusion

What you should do is go into your PHP and all the anchor texts that have ‘Read more, previous or next article’ ‘more information’ ‘privacy policy’ etc makes them no follow. The good juicy articles, titles, make them do follow. Use ALT for every button you have on your site including and especially your navigation bar.

Hi guys, I was recently asked a very good question:

“I am THE marketer for my company and wear too many hats. I can’t “do” SEO by myself. Any suggestions on a wallet friendly company that can help with our SEO needs?”

Since my reply was in such greater detail, I decided to share it on my journal.

Whatever it is, examine the links that you are getting yourself. It’s almost liked a “I can’t trust anyone, anywhere, no matter what”. Some links may hurt you when link building. A lot of services that offer SEO claim you are in a high ranked directory when it’s actually a auctioned domain with an average PR on it that they’ve installed a ‘Directory Template’ on.

You must always follow the steps, and examine one by one – and that process, costs money. So wallet friendly, I’d have to say you could do a nice link building for a company for approximately $5000 (without labor).

Look closer.

Take your time, spread approximately 200 – 300 directories which are good value, make sure they are indexed and get page rank, make sure you find yourself the exact niche within the directory – don’t be so quick to submit. Remember that if the directory itself, within the niche has pages (1,3,4,5,6,7) go all the way to page#7 which is most likely where you’ll be listed when approved and make sure that page#7 is getting a PageRank, and who else is listed there with you.

In regards to your question Alexander I would like to write this publicly.

Let’s take this domain for example

Http://www.skyalliance.net/ – looks like a normal directory right?

Let’s use the ‘WayBackMachine’ and see what this site looked like in 2003.

Http://web.archive.org/web/20021114152532/http://www.skyalliance.net/

You see what I mean? This is in some Asian language, nothing related to a directory. Which means the owners of this domain purchased it because it had a nice PR and it was auctioned at the time.

In 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20030210053650/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2005: http://web.archive.org/web/20040210060512/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20050109041248/http://www.skyalliance.net/

In 2010: http://www.skyalliance.net/

Other things you should take a look into when doing link building (if you do it yourself, and trying to search the directories by yourself) I would recommend to use a nice FireFox tool called ‘Flagship’ which declares where the site is hosted, and it’s IP.

Remember that if the site is hosted in Germany, and it is a .com – that might be a bad link for you.

If it’s hosted in Germany, and it’s a .de – that might be a good sign, and will help you rank in Google.de, but not in the .com engine.

If the site is hosted in USA, and it’s a .com – that will help you rank in the .com engines (or USA engines) but then the next directory you choose – make sure it is not hosted at the same place, with the same exact IP – that would not count as two different links.

Be VERY careful using SEO companies that charge under $500 for link building of 30-50 links. This amount does not exist, I saw a company offering $80 for 1000 directory, you will end up hurting yourself, and working double time because you will either get penalized, or have to manually go into these directories and remove the links yourself. And trust me when I say you will be hurt being listed in sites like that.

TIPS:

When a company offers SEO services for directory listing always ask for their excel sheet to see their plan, Examine the links, make sure they are not hosted same place, they are all USA, or European hosts, then carefully choose which ones you want and where you want to be listed. Send it back to them and tell them these are the links you are interested and how much they will charge you for them.

This narrows down their job, and helps you get efficient links, and powerful link building.

NOTE:

There are MANY more aspects when doing link building like making sure that Alexa, Compete and mozRank and PageRank and similar within values, If a website is pagerank #1 and mozrank is 5.8 – something must be wrong (either mozrank did not update it yet) but that page might have gone through penalization.

If the page does not get a PR, and receives Alexa, Compete and Moz – that means it might be penalized. Take the URL, and search it in Google like this:

Example #1: site: http://www.url.com/
example #2: site: http://www.url.com/subpage

See if the actual domain (not sub pages) comes up in search. (Or the sub page that is not getting a page rank).

Let’s do some SEO!

For more information about this thread please go to http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?vi…%2Egmp_2976409

Feel free to find me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhaim

Read about my progression in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/businesswire/2010/08/03/businesswire143344209.html

Every now and then I hop on these freelance jobs that assure me the quality time for SEO research, which is described best by my trademarked philosophy tag line

“If you wanted to learn SEO, all you had to do is search“.

This time a year, I’ve been lucky enough to be assigned to a new full-time job in New York City optimizing three very interesting domains that will assure me the continous exploration into Search Engines. Now I know that approximately 75% of my readers are very interested about SEO tips and if the company let me I will even pull hands-on examples to optimization.

The three new projects, which I’ve been assigned to optimize, are

1. Retail (E Commerce)
2. Wholesale (E Commerce with Login)
3. CMS Website (Hardware)

Very exciting! But before we begin let me summarize these three so you can quickly select which area you are most interested in reading about:

Retail E Commerce SEO – There are many aspects to look into when building a retail E Commerce website, especially with all the niched categories, landing pages and title tags. This post will cover all the necessary tools and tips needed to build a successful SEO optimized E Commerce website. Read more below

Username Protected Wholesale E Commerce SEO – While there might be a debate on which platform to choose for a wholesale, I will always stand by and recommend to create a few landing pages focusing on your wholesale material, and giving an additional back-end user-name and password afterwards. Article coming soon

Hardware Website (CMS) SEO – A regular 5-6 page HTML based website with no PHP or MySQL functions. How to optimize a landing page? Well, that’s a great question. Article coming soon

The journey for Search Engine Optimization for E Commerce site begins.

There are many aspects to look for when building a site, especially a E Commerce site. I’d have to say follow the first moves like I do. I keep a folder, that contains 3 different files, they are the site-map validated for the following engines: Yahoo! Bing and Google. Right after I create, I will always generate a site-map, and once the site is completed I will submit it to the following

• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Google Site-map
• Bing Webmaster

(You can also submit to more search engines like Ask.com, but most likely they will find you after you appear in the top three).

Tips for Optimizing E Commerce site

Avoid Manufacturer Product Description – RESIST THE URGE! DO NOT COPY PASTE! Building an online shop might be a pain to generate a lot of content however you should consider it a must. Search engines hold a grudge against Ecommerce based sites. Often times, I agree. Many online stores offer little useful content – if it’s Cellphones, just the main description (weight, color, type) the excerpt that is used includes dry manufacturer product description, poor internal linking and no unique user generated content. Without thinking about it twice Ecommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. As much tempting as it is to copy paste – avoid it. Even if you do copy paste, at least write your own unique content around it or change a few words here and there.

Create a SEO Keyword field in Product Database – Sounds confusing? It might just be as well. Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, SKU and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to your Ecommerce site, enter commonly search for keywords (use Google Keyword Tool to search Keyword examples and volumes). Remember: not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.

All products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page – Look, I’ll keep it very simple for you: The homepage is the highest ranked page in your site. It’s the juiciest highest ranked page, and the first page that an engine looks it every time they go into your site. You don’t want the crawler to have to go through 20 different pages to reach an item.   Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. I’ve seen many Ecommerce sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories and sub subcategories. Using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page can accomplish this. I recommend, at least 24 products per page if not 50 and try to not exceed 4 pages of products.

Use iframes for Duplicate Content – If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product description is not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that the data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalise you for duplicate content. It’s a win win.

Create a Product RSS Feed: Creating a product feed and submitting it to relevant content aggregators such as Google Base, which accepts an XML file like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. (‘Shopping’) Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages. Including Retweets.

Unique Keyword Meta Tags – Meta tags including keywords and description should be entirely unique on every single product of the page. Though Meta content does not directly affect your ranking (yet), unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties.

Product Reviews – A perfect strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user-generated content from customers who previously purchased, or just feel like reviewing a product they’ve seen or used before. Allow your customers to review products they’ve purchased.

Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many Ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the Search Engines to crawl. There are always ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spider without the session ID.

Crawlable Navigation - AVOID JAVASCRIPT based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In addition don’t rely on form-based navigation such as drop down lists since the engines can’t follow them.

Don’t stuff Keywords in your navigation bar – This is useless and very tacky. Keywords are placed in navigation bars are not as important as they used to be. Instead use keyword rich anchor text pointing to the landing page, which is rich with SEO, optimized content for that specific landing page.

Optimize your images – I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. Don’t upload images to your site that are called ’12498172.jpg’ or ‘iphone3333.jpg’ Be specific! People today are searching Google Images, or other Image search engines like crazy. And if they are looking for a specific Cellphone type, such as Nokia N95 they will Google it, and if you had changed ’12498172.jpg’ to Nokia-N95.jpg you will most likely rank for it. Another tip: only use – and not _, &, ~.

Use Alttributes in Links – If you asked me about link alt 1 year ago I would say avoid it, it’s just a hassle. But today it’s a very important aspect of a link, some might say more then the anchor text itself. Always use the link alt=”description”.

The question you should be asking yourself is this:

A. Do I want 1000-3000 PAID targeted clicks per month?

B. Do I want 50,000 FREE targeted clicks per month?

If your answer was A. please leave my site and go to hell.

Search Engine Marketing VS Search Engine Optimization.

Let’s begin with the basic – what is SEM? – Paid inclusion – Traditional Ads – Pay Per Click Advertising

In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don’t have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go. However your traffic will stop once the campaign stops.

SEO – There is no SEM campaign without a tiny bit of SEO, but this is “light”  SEO, simply Google Keyword research tool can do the job (see url, insert a keyword and see how many people Google it every month and if you should advertise for that keyword, URL:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Do you really need to hire someone to click a button for you? No.

SEO is much more constructed then that. We take pride in what we do.

SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic towards  your website from search engines via “natural” or un-paid, (“organic”) traffic as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive.

I’m including a Google engine heatmap that shows where people look, and where people click. Note that where the paid ads are is on the right side while the organic begins on the left.