Learn Something New Every Day –V7N's SEO Tip of the Day
 

Welcome to V7n’s new SEO Tip of the Day Thread. Stop in every day for a fresh new idea to improve your site's position in the SERPs.

We will present both basic and more advanced tips, and we want you to help out! The member who posts the first unique tip of the day will get some green rep points from me or one of the mods. Yes, that will mean you will need to read through the thread and keep up with what’s been covered!

• Do make sure you are on solid ground with any tip you offer – if you only think it’s good SEO, please double check first.
• Please make sure your tip is ethical and white hat. Think "Best Practices SEO."
• Please Remember The Higher Quality The Tip, the Better You Look! And we want you to Look Good!

SEO Tip of the Day for Saturday, March 13, 2010 - Google Alerts
 

Set up Google Alerts for your target keywords, as well as your company name. You’ll get tons of ideas for blog posts and articles, you’ll be able to see where your competition is getting links or posting and you’ll find new places to be a guest blogger or publish an article. An added bonus, you’ll see all the new links your site has attracted as Google indexes them. If you’re tracking your SERP position on the keywords that are used in a new link’s anchor text you might be able to see the effect, if any, of that link.

SEO Tip of the Day for Sunday, March 14, 2010 - Working Internal Links
 

Make sure your internal links are working for you. Vary the internal anchor text to your home page. Let’s say you sell widgets (for a change). From your info page on red widgets, link back with “red widgets” to the home page, perhaps. Use "blue widgets" to link to the home page from your blue widget page, and so on. You get the picture. Make sure you are linking contextually between pages, too,not just in navigation. And be sure to have your most important pages one to two clicks from the home page.

SEO Tip Of The Day: Stop by the V7N every day and spend a few minutes truly interacting with others interested in SEO. Yes, now and then you will have to sift through the poo to get to the good stuff, but it also helps you begin to look at different viewpoints to clarify your own thoughts. Do I get any points for this one? ;)

SEO Tip of the Day for Monday, March 15, 2010 - Buy That Domain Today
 

Do you have plans in some distant future to start another website? Don’t wait until you’re ready to purchase your domain. Google seems to assign some weight to the age of a domain, so buy yours as early as you can. Many registrars will give you enough space “free” to put up a minimal site. Add a couple of pages with a small amount of related content. Find a link or two to get the “place marker” indexed. You’ll find it easier to get ranking when you’re ready to fully developed site with your aged domain.

Check the Webmaster Guidelines Yourself!
 

The only way you are going to know if the information you find is valuable and won't cause you a problem is to check the Webmaster Guidelines yourself. They are basically the same but with a few tweaks you can cover your bases when one does not support one thing but another does.

Google Webmaster Guidelines
Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Yahoo! Webmaster Guidelines

SEO Tip of the Day for Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - (Early) Provide Quality Content
 

The most important tip I ever provide to people is to provide quality content that their target audience is looking for. When you do this, SEO becomes sooooo much easier because so much starts happening automatically.

It doesn't matter what kind of product or service you sell in order to use this concept. If your site sells gifts, you can write articles (for your site) about gift giving and receiving etiquette. If your site offers home improvement products, then you should have a million decorating tips and ideas, and maybe even offer free plans for small projects. The key is looking at things from the viewpoint of your target audience.

Are you starting to get the idea?

Why is this so important? Because these are additional topics that your target audience is likely to search for. Not only does it increase traffic to your site, it increases the relevance of your site for your primary topic. And as the icing on the cake, people will start linking to you naturally. Your site will be talked about more often, and shared on social networking sites.

SEO Tip of the Day for Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - Hooking Up Your Press Release
 

Finding the Hook for a Press Release. Coming up with a good idea for a press release can be a challenge. Sometimes we’re too close to our own business to recognize what’s news.

Keep your eyes open when you read the business section of the newspaper and the smaller local weeklies. Peruse the online press release sites in your field. What topics make the news? Promotions? New employees? New products or services? An important piece of equipment or new way of doing something? What about news in your industry applied locally? Are you going to a business conference? Write a newsy report, especially if you can find a local angle.

If developing a press release campaign is on your to-do list, you might be interested in this free webinar this Thursday by Lisa Manyon 1 pm Pacific / 4 pm Eastern. Register: http://writeoncreative.com/prlomo

SEO Tip of the Day for Thursday, March 18, 2010 - Go Offline and Local
 

Press releases don’t have to be sent through the regular online sites or channels. Try writing a release and sending it to your local newspapers by email - or even snail mail. If you read the paper, it’s easy enough to figure out which writer is on the technology or real estate beat or whatever your niche is. You might find it tough to get a story at the local daily paper, but give it a try first. No luck? Pitch the smaller weeklies; they're almost always hungry for copy. Send your release and follow up with a phone call – it’s what professional publicists do and writers and editors are used to it. Just don’t call when they’re on deadline. If you’re pitching the weekly rag, call the day the paper hits the street. Chances are that’s the quietest day of the week. Be prepared with another idea if the writer says they aren’t interested. Say, okay, well, how about … and tell them your other idea. Do make sure your website link is clear in the story; most small papers have online versions – and you want that link!

SEO Tip of the Day for Thursday, March 19, 2010 - Social Media
 

I am finding that using social media to build brand awareness has brought SEO weight. Google is following Facebook and Twitter well. So I think of my Website>Blog>Facebook>Twitter as a circle. I post links from one to another.

EXAMPLE: When I bring in a new child safety product, I make a new page on my site for that product. Then I post a blog article about the new product and link to the website page. Then I post on FB and TW linking to the blog article. Google picks up all 4.

Excellent post, thanks. Green rep points added.

I do this, too, and I go one more step. I bookmark it first and then use the bookmarked URL to post to Tweet/FB.

Just like to add "and the names of your competitors."

SEO Tip of the Day for Saturday, March 20, 2010 - First Things First
 

Do your SEO first. Don’t build a site and then consider the search engines. That's putting the cart before the horse - and it's also so 20th Century. ;) If you keep one eye on the user and the other on the search engines as you plan your site, you’ll find your site higher in the SERPs from the very beginning. Your keyword research will virtually choose a domain, plan the content and dictate much of the architecture of the site. If it's too late and your site is already built, take the time to pretend it isn’t and plan it all over again. You won’t be able to change everything you’d like (at least not this week), but the fresh approach will show you lots of ways to enhance and optimize what you have for both users and search engines.

Don't Use Doorway or Splash Pages
 

Full article: Doorway Pages - Splash Pages

SEO Tip of the Day for Sunday, March 21, 2010 - Google's SEO Starter Guide
 

If you are brand new to SEO, before even considering listening to what others have to say, take the time to truly understand the basics first. This will give you a foundation to work from. I recommend starting with Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. It's a PDF file, so make sure to save it to your computer.

Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
http://www.google.com/webmasters/doc...rter-guide.pdf

SEO Tip of the Day for Monday, March 22, 2010 - Unique Title Tags
 

Give each page on your site its own unique title tag. The title tells the search engines and the user what your page is about. If you have multiple pages with the same title tag, you’re telling the search engine that your content is pretty much the same on all those pages. If you’re not sure the duplicate title tags on your site matter, check your Google Webmaster Tools. Under Diagnostics | HTML Suggestions Google will show you which pages have duplicates. Google says: “Meta description information can give users a clear idea of your site's content and encourage users to click on your site in the search results pages.” If you have a lot of duplicates, this is a great time to think about optimizing for some longer tailed keyword phrases. Do make sure your new titles reflect the content of the pages and have "click appeal." Join the discussion on Writing Titles With Click Through Appeal in our new Writing for the Web forum.

Include the Keywords Meta Tag
 

What is the Keywords Meta Tag?
The keywords tag is a meta tag located in the head section of your web page/blog post. It looks like this for HTML:
For XHTML you do it like this:
In each of these examples you replace Your set of keywords for the page with your set of selected keywords (which are actually in the page) to target for the page. Select an unique set of keywords for each page. If your ecommerce or blogging software does not accommodate this, complain or switch to one that does. ;)

But Google Doesn't Use the Meta Keywords Tag

Although Google formally announced on September 22, 2009 that Google does not use the meta keywords data in your web pages for their web search analysis that doesn't mean that the "other" search engines and directories don't use them.
Reference: How do I improve the ranking of my web site in the search results? at Yahoo!

Further reading:
Keywords Meta Tag

SEO Tip of the Day for Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - Make Content Unique Again
 

It's always good to reference your sources when presenting information that is not your own. But rather than just copying and pasting statistical data or reports as others might have, you can make the content unique to your site by presenting it differently.

Use images such as graphs or charts to present the data and provide your own analysis or explanation of the data. While the information may not be original, it can be unique to your site.

HTML Tables and Search Engine Optimization
 

Although using tableless designs is easier to manipulate how the search engine bots read your content, sometimes HTML tables can't be avoided.

If you just must use HTML tables for your website's design then make sure that you use the least about of tables possible. i.e. Don't nest tables inside of tables, inside of tables to manipulate the content of the page. Instead, use a table for the main framework of the page and use CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) to format the content of the page.

Important point to keep in mind:
Source: HTML Tables and Search Engine Optimization

Construct your table layout to present the web page content first. (explained in the article referenced above)

This I must take issue with.

Setting aside the fact that 'bots do not parse file content, but merely retrieve it, indexing engines evolved well before CSS, and have no more trouble differentiating between contextual data and HTML code than between such data and CSS code.

Indexing engines do not care about matters of style, regardless of how such is effected.

An indexing engine is, from the standpoint of it "reading" function, no more than a text only browser. Any page whose contextual content is properly rendered by a text only browser, such as LYNX, is eminently suitable for any indexing engine worth its salt.