Semantic search has been mentioned for several years mostly within the intellectual community however with Googles recent patent application, semantic search is now here. Is this good or bad? As with any SEO topic you will find people on both sides of the aisle. Here is a fairly impartial article to educate you further.

I saw the first upgrade to a clients Analytics account last night and couldn’t wait to log in today to see if I had been dreaming. Business owners everywhere have just had their dreams answered when it comes to tracking your online marketing efforts. Whether you participate in SEO organic marketing or SEM paid search marketing or Interactive Marketing or … get the point, Google Analytics has taken the effort out of understanding how your marketing dollars are working for you.

When you login the improvements are immediately noticeable with an upgraded layout and graphical look from the charts which include much more interactive information on mouse-over to the overall information available on the page. For ecommerce and goal capturing users, the ability to understand what keywords and what campaigns are working has been taken to a new level. Help features are prominent and organized by 4 main categories instead of the single help link at the top of the page in the previous version. (you can still view the old version while in beta)

If you participate in online marketing and are not using a statistics package, you have no excuse now! As with almost everything Google does, Analytics is free. This version is a very nice step forward and I guess I should stop wondering why Google shares are what they are.

It’s is common knowledge an effective organic SEO campaign involves a linking strategy.  Linking has become an intregal part of search engine optimization thanks to Google.  They were the first engine to place a value on links that point to a website and reward those who establish credible links. 

However, this part of their algorithm has also generated a number of unexpected results.  For instance search the keyword chicken and you will find a site called Subservient Chicken in one of the top listings, why?  Links pointing to the site alone.  Try the keywords miserable failure and usually the first link is the White House website and in particular the page dedicated to The President.   

Just for fun I thought I would include a few more, search Google for these terms.

1. National Disgrace - Webpage of Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig
2. Terrorist Sympathizer - Television personality Bill O’Reilly
3. Waffles - John Kerry, former Presidential candiate
4. swivel eyed loons - UK Independence Party Official website (UKIP)

While this post is a bit light hearted it does show the value of link building when optimizing a website.

We’ve seen first hand what a malicious minded person can do when a site we were running an SEO campaign for had their entire content hijacked. Luckily the web developers were able to shut the unwanted intruder down and regain control of the content. Today our blog had several attempted comment posts that were obviously the product of an automated bot. Again we had controls in place to not allow the comments to be live and the only discomfort was the time it took to delete them.

Internet security overall is under attack every minute of everyday and with websites playing a growing role in the everyday operation of business security is a risk that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Those attacks are usually associated with credit card theft or identity theft. Would it surprise you to know there are a staggering amount of SEO related attacks?One such way devious, black hat SEO types are trying to circumvent the system is through XSS attacks.

Here is an interesting post on XSS attacks or cross site scripting and how you can work with your hosting company to protect against them.

For the sake of this writing I�ll assume a basic understanding of meta tags, what they are and their importance.� With that in mind let�s focus on properly constructing a title tag.

For any gains you might want to acquire in the organic rankings your title tag must be, well, optimized.� Now by optimized I mean simply it must contain the keyword or phrase you are trying to obtain for that page in an order that provides maximum effect while utilizing the limited number of characters that each search engine recognizes.� For example, Google only recognizes up to 65 characters while Yahoo & MSN recognize 70 and sometimes more.� For this example let�s use smashed cups and crushed cups as our two key phrases.

To simply optimize a title tag for these phrases you could place them in that order and call it a day.� � Believe it or not this is an optimized title tag that would serve well for those phrases in conjunction with a proper on-page and off-page optimization strategy.� That being said the tag would be great for the generic searches of those terms.� Let�s say the intent of the page is to actually sell smashed cups and crushed cups at a discount.� If that is the case you might try something like this. Although you lose the company name you are able to tell the visitor and the engine exactly what the page is about, keep your generic terms in play and bring in the keywords buy and sale all while staying within the Google maximum character count.� Now if you went ahead and added the company name you would fall outside of the Google character limit but still be safely inside the limits for Yahoo & MSN.

Optimizing a title tag to be effective involves more than placing keyword after keyword in it.� Character space is limited and thus every character must count.� As with any optimization technique, be creative but be sensitive to both the user and the engines.

As with almost any document on the web these days, pdf’s are “readable” by search engines. No you’re not going to gain top results from a pdf only site but you are probably losing out on traffic if you’ve not optimized your pdf’s. So how does this work?

As with any document you should properly use header tags, H1, H2, H3 and optimize the body text as you would an html file. Once you’ve distilled the document, bring it into a full version of Adobe Acrobat (6 and above) for editing. In Adobe Acrobat there are two places you can utilize to optimize the pdf.

1. File/Document Properties - There are several menus here but we’re looking for the Description menu. Under this menu are fields for Title, Author, Subject and Keywords. Fill each one out using keywords approprietly.
2. Advanced/Document Metadata - Again, several choices but we are going to focus on Description. Under the Description menu are the fields for Title, Author, Description, Description Writer, Keywords, Copyright State, Copyright Notice and Copyright Info URL

As with any optimization don’t keyword stuff use them effectively and place them in a manner that makes sense. Also make sure you place active links back to your homepage or the section of your website the pdf was referenced from. This will help the viewer should they find the pdf in a search result reach your website with a click. Finally don’t forget to brand the pdf, include your logo or at a minimum company name and contact information.

PDF’s are a popular means of distributing information online and through email so by optimizing and branding your document you take one more step in fully implementing a complete online marketing strategy.

An effective search engine optimization campaign never ends and the road to great results is littered with get to the top quick schemes so just as anything in life that’s too good to be true the ability to say no could be your best trait.

Take for example the task of link building. It’s well documented that acquiring links from trusted sources is a must to help your SEO campaign achieve wonderful results and every SEO expert knows it is a time consuming, sometimes frustrating task to accomplish but it is possible to do, we do it with every campaign we work. That being said, when the going gets tough and you’ve worked countless hours trying to get quality links and you get that email or see that banner ad that says “thousands of links for just $29.95” it’s easy to sit back and visualize the site you’re working on at the top of the serps and all you had to do was pay $29.95. But once you open your eyes and the experience that only having done this hundreds of times can bring washes that glazed look off your face you realize those tricks may work for a little bit but they won’t help you in the long run.

So take the time to optimize your site correctly and understand you are in for the long haul and above all resist the temptation of the fast fix.

Tempers flair in the SEO community when those for and those against square off in the big debate known as the “Google Sandbox Theory”. (this post is not to debate the theory which in a shortened version suggests that new sites are penalized by Google and must age before showing up for searches under their main keywords) Now valid points are made on both sides and while we fall on both sides within our own camp, there has long been some sort of waiting period to see rankings. That being said statistics from a new site we are working that launched less than 60 days ago back up stats from two previous site launches which indicate that an active blog can have a dramatic impact on rankings in Google for numerous secondary keywords and begin to generate very good organic traffic in weeks rather than months.

Shock of all shocks, right? It shouldn’t be as this goes to a basic tenet of search engine optimization … content, content, content. Combine that with the rss feed which allows other sites to link back to this one and you have a second basic tenet, links, links, links. Now it helps that the blogger in question writes quality content that is of value to members of his industry but shouldn’t that be anyone who is serious about succeeding online?

I’ve posted before on choosing keywords and thought the subject of niche keywords might be of interest. Niche websites are all the buzz in the search marketing world right now but my topic deals with niche keywords especially how they apply to the industry you may be targeting. Within every industry there is the generic keyword, i.e. Trucks and the niche keyword, 72 red Ford F150 trucks. Finding niche keywords that apply to your segment of an industry is a very effective way of driving traffic with usually limited competition.

When developing your keyword list look very hard at what you bring to the market, do you offer a service that can be applied to specific model or part? Does your service fit well with a niche market within a larger industry? After answering those kinds of questions you will begin to find additional words that fit your main keywords. Again, Trucks is a good generic fit for you but you found that Ford F150 trucks was as specific as you could find for your niche so expand out and you can use F150 truck, Ford F150, f150 Pickup Truck and suddenly you have 30, 40 or maybe hundreds of niche keywords that your product or service relates to. Let’s look at my little demonstration after some very basic research using Wordtracker.

“trucks” returns an estimated 6,480 visits with 139,000,000 competing web pages.
“f150 truck” returns an estimated 57 visits with 94,000 competing web pages and the other 90+ keywords that are related return over 250 visits with competition no more than 178,000 and many in the hundreds of competing web pages. Any good SEO would tell you that getting great rankings in a market that has 178,000 competing web pages is very obtainable.

Sure if you look at just traffic you’re at 5% of the generic keyword but the point is not numbers but targeted traffic and so the 5% you are getting is probably 90% targeted as opposed to the 95% that would probably not be targeted if you were going for the generic keyword and ignoring the rest. Also the opportunity to get great results is increased significantly with your niche words so your overall investment in time would be reduced.

Niche keywords are a great way to become competitive online and should always be discussed when the subject of keywords is on the table.

If the word Google does not come up in the first three sentences of any conversation I have with clients or potential clients I immediately go play the lottery because it’s a sign from the Big Kahuna that’s it’s a lucky day. Don’t get me wrong I have somewhat of an obsession with Google not only from a work standpoint but also from a personal standpoint. I love to see sites we work on ranked well in Google and I love to mess with anything new Google puts out. HOWEVER, during those conversations and at times during any optimization campaign, I must take a quick breath and remind myself and others that Google is not the be all end all in search. The fact is if you are not paying attention to what your site is doing in Yahoo, MSN and several other engines you are missing out on significant traffic. Let’s look at a case in point.

I recently optimized a site for a good friend of mine. He has a business that operates on a local level only and the only competition he has for his main keywords is Yellow Pages of which he not only advertises through but because he bought their advertising they gave him a website for free. (Note: TANSTAF - there ain’t no such thing as free) Sorry I digress. His site is brand new and as part of our agreement I’m not doing all the grunt work so the content is limited but growing and the links are few but growing and with that in mind he’s not ranking in Google yet for his main keywords, in fact he’s still fairly distant in Yahoo for his main keywords but in MSN he has achieved top rankings on numerous keywords. So should he be upset with the results so far?
Let’s see:
Before he ranked in MSN -

• Traffic was about 2 visits a day
• No emails being generated from website
• Phone calls were about 2 or 3 a week

Since he ranked on MSN -

• Traffic is about 25 visits a day
• 1 or 2 emails a week from website
• 4 or more phone calls a week

Let me clarify this is not all due to MSN as the site receives traffic from several secondary directories, local directories, etc but there is a definite connection to at least 70% of the traffic and at least 50% of the phone calls and emails. He told me the other day he had compared his business to date to last year and it was up about 80% and this is his slow season.

The point here is obvious while Google is king and probably will be for a while, concentrating all of your efforts to rank well on Google at the expense of the rest of the engines is a big mistake.