So it’s almost the ‘dog days of summer’, baseball is in season, the Tigers haven’t been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs (yet).  Why is it a good time to be focusing on search engine optimization in the month of June?

I’ll tell you why, because the search engine optimization elbow grease that you put in now will position your website for the Christmas 2011 season.  It’s too late to be making effective changes to your website during the holiday season, you need to get busy early so that you will see the effects of your work during the season.

Anyone can run massive, expensive, ad campaigns during the holidays but the smart folks are already gearing up for the Christmas 2011 rush.

Here are 3 specific things that you can do to ensure that your business gets the lion’s share of search engine traffic during the holiday season:

1. Create content focused around your Christmas 2011 goods and services now!  Now is the time to create and upload good content focused on your business, this will give the search engines plenty of time to find it, index it, and give you rankings for it.  Heck, if you’re not a writer, there are plenty of people out there who will ghost write good keyword focused content for you.
    
2. Now that you have the content that you think will drive plenty of traffic to your website it’s time to add the content to your site.  Make sure to format your web pages in a search engine friendly format.  Use H1, H2, H3 tags appropriately to highlight the terms that you would like your website to rank well for.  Additionally, using bold and italics (strong and em) tags strategically will help your content to rank well.
    
3. Get links to the content that you just added!  This is the most important thing that you need to do however, all of these tips need to be taken together.  Don’t cheat and do one of them, do all of them and you WILL SEE RESULTS!  Seriously, get yourself some inbound links coming into your site, to the new content that you created.  I can’t stress this enough.

Overall you need to get working now!  Heck, since this is traditionally the ‘slow time’ as far as the internet is concerned you can get ghost writers for next to nothing. 

It’s my prayer that you do well in your online business endeavors, I’ll keep giving you great tips, you keep implementing them!

Coming Tomorrow:  Marketing Disasters: A Seattle’s Best Case Story

Click the image above to see the gaffe!

Being the geek that I am, I was looking at an article over on SearchEngineWatch about this new collaborative effort by the major search engine players Google, Yahoo and Bing.  The article is about new web standards that they are trying to get web developers to implement on the sites that they build (which is a great idea BTW) so that the SERPS can index that content better. 

Pretty cool huh?

So I went over to Schema.org to check out the site and all of the great info that they have regarding standards.  When I got there I thought that it kind of looked like a site built with Joomla! so being the Joomla! geek that I am I took a look at the source code to see if I was right.  I then noticed that thier "better search and index structured markup" had some goofs in it.  If fact, the homepage alone has 19 errors on it according to the W3C validator at the time of this writing.

If you look at the graphic above you'll notice that there is an extra closing of the head tag and quite a few other markup errors.

Overall, just having a bit of fun at their expense on an otherwise uneventful Friday afternoon!

Here's a link to the original article by Thom Craver at SearchEngineWatch.com

A common 'proverb' in the SEO community is: ‘Content is king’

However, all content is not equal, a better proverb would be: "unique, informative, helpful content is king". Many webmasters have only one thing on their mind, SEO. The problem with that kind of thinking is when you go down this road you tend to forget about the person consuming the content. We do our best to kill two birds with one stone (SEO and great information) but sometimes you can't optimize content for search engines and people at the same time.

Additionally, not all content is beneficial to your site, posting articles that are already on many other sites won't help your SEO rankings, it can actually hurt them. Don't get me wrong, search engines love well written content! However, it’s only the unique content that gets indexed well in the search engines. SEO will help to increase the web traffic to a website by creating high rankings in search engine results, an important part of this optimization depends on content. Be sure to use catchy titles, meta-descriptions and laser specific targeted keywords.

"Put your important keywords in the title tag, the h1 tag and any subsequent h tags. Doing this help a search engine robot figure out what your content is about very easily."TIP THAT WORKS: Put your important keywords in the title tag, the h1 tag and any subsequent h tags. Doing this help a search engine robot figure out what your content is about very easily. Additionally, think 'copywriting' when you create your meta-description tags! Use a catchy line that will encourage users to click on your site when they come across your listing in the organic search results.

Using keywords and other optimization is a great way to improve your ranking however, on-page optimization is a very low measure of how well your site will perform in the search engines. Most of your ranking ability comes from having one way links linking to your content. For example, you create a well written page on 'blue widgets', all of the on-page optimization is done right yet you still might not rank well for this phrase. You should then take the time to get other sites linking to yours using the anchor text 'blue widgets'. If you do well on this step you will see results but keep in mind that results don't come quickly!

If you are new to the internet and website building, there are a bunch of keyword tools that can help you drill down into your market and find the most popular and well trafficked terms. One good tool that I use often is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can use this to find a plethora of terms related to your product or service but be sure to keep your keyword grouping very tight, sometimes it will return results that are completely unrelated to your market.

Additionally, there are commercially available tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Elite that make the job much easier.

Don't overdo keyword density in your articles!

"Write for people and not computers (ie. search engine robots) a well written article will get people linking to you organically." Write for people and not computers (ie. search engine robots) a well written article will get people linking to you organically.

Here are some additional pointers that you can use when writing articles for your website:

• Stay within your website theme, for example yout site about 'plasma tv's' should not have articles related to 'gardening' on them, they have nothing in common and this could cause you problems when trying to optimize well.
• Your content should provide a good description of the product or service that you offer.
• Another great trick is to put some information related to the city that you are trying to optimize in. For example: "In Detroit, dry cleaning is our number one passion!" In this example I would be targeting the term 'Detroit dry cleaning'. The comma between the 'Detroit' and 'dry cleaning' won't matter, it's still counted as 'Detroit dry cleaning'.

It's All About Me!

One of the hard lessons that I learned what people want to hear how you can benefit them, not how great I am (even though I think I'm pretty cool)! Make your content focus around the customer and their needs, their problems and how you can help them! Keep in mind that the customer is just one click away from your competitor's website!

Before you write about your business ask yourself a few simple questions:

1. Are there benefits to using your product? Write about them...
2. Why does my product or service stand out from the crowd of competitors?
3. What is the best sales presentation?

Some of the best feedback (and passionate responses) that I get from clients is usually when I as them "Why should I choose your product or service over your competitors?"

Give people a passionate response to the benefits of your service! Do you believe in your products? Convey that message to them like you were talking to a friend who is honestly stuck between purchasing your product or one of your competitors.

It's possible to write effectively for your customers AND search engines. Keep in mind the tips that I mentioned above and you will be well on your way to excellent results!

Most, if not all, website owners would like to get as much free traffic to their sites as possible. This free traffic will come via the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If you also would like to improve the free traffic your website receives, the following SEO tips just might be useful.

If you read the guidelines all the major search engines make readily available to any website owner, they all pretty much say you should do the same things to your site, which the major ones we will list below.

However, unfortunately in most cases following these recommendations will not be enough to propel your website up the rankings to the point it will be getting as much traffic as you desire. Therefore, below the basic SEO tips, we will provide you a few advanced helpful hints that just might be able to get your site to where you want it to be.

Basic SEO Tips

Tip #1 – Make sure you site does not have any errors. You can use Google’s webmasters tool to check for them. It will tell what pages are not working properly, or which pages might have duplicate titles, etc.

Tip #2 – Put a sitemap on your site. There should be two different versions. The first will be a (HTML) type that all of your visitors can view. The second will be a (XML) kind, which is specifically for the search engines. Each and every time you add a page to your site, you need to update both of your sitemaps.

Tip #3 – Be sure to give each page of your site a different name. This should not be something like (Page1, Page2, Page3, etc.) But, you want to name it according to the pages content. An example for the page this article would appear on would be the following, (SEOTips).

Tip #4 – Be sure to fill in the keyword description for each page of your site. This will help the search engines identify the content you are trying to promote.

Tip #5 – The search engines all want to see your site updated on a regular basis. This means you should be adding content daily, if at all possible.

Tip #6 – The search engines all state they want to see one-way back-links from respected sites, that are relevant to your websites content pointing at your site. This is by far the most difficult, if not impossible aspect of SEO to accomplish.

When the search engines first posted this requirement you were allowed to trade links with other sites to build up your rankings, this is not the case anymore. Next came article marketing, where you could write articles and post them to different directories, and get a back-link for each directory it was published at. Now, they only credit one back-link per article, regardless of how many directories your article is published at.

Finally came the blogs, where you could post comments and get a back-link. Now, most of the blogs are (No-Follow), which means the search engines disregard these kind’s back-links.

Above are a few of the most important basic SEO tips. If your website is not in a very competitive market, and you work on it for a year or two, it might improve to the point you are receiving some decent traffic. But, for those of you that are in competitive markets, and want to get more that just decent traffic, the following advanced SEO tips just might be what you need.

Advanced SEO Tips

Tip #1 – Make sure you follow all of the tips that are mentioned in the “Basic SEO Tips”.

Tip #2 – If you are just starting a website, you might want to consider buying an old URL. The older the URL, the more the search engines like them, and the faster you can move them up the rankings.

The reason for this is that the search engines think that if it is an old URL, it has been around for a while, and it is not just going to drop off the face of the internet.

Tip #3 – This is without question the BEST tip we are going to provide you. However, it is also the most costly, in addition to being the most difficult one to get right.

If you really want your traffic to surge rapidly, hire yourself a SEO company to get your site back-links. These firms already have 1,000’s of sites in their catalog where they know they can go and get back-links. This saves you spending endless hours searching for back-links, and only being disappointed when they do not end up moving your website up the rankings.

The tricky part of hiring a SEO company is that a very few are great, some are average, whereas most are just terrible. The best advice for this process is to try one out for a month or two, and if they are moving you up the rankings, keep them, if not, find another firm to try out for a while.

If you follow all of the above advice, and are able to find a great SEO company, with any luck your website should be able to increase its traffic flow considerably, even if it is in a competitive market.