Parts For Your Car, a late model performance parts and accessories store, has contracted with The Info Group to improve their search engine marketing. If you are a owner of a late model Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, Oldsmobile or Pontiac, PFYC.com is your one stop for parts and accessories.

When I started my SEO career in late 1997 it was easy to obtain rankings by simply optimizing the keyword tag and it didn’t take long, maybe a year or two, before that tag was so abused it lost significant value with the search engines. Then the SEO world began to yell to anyone who would listen that the keyword tag was dead. So much so, I remember reading a comment from a poster at a major international SEO firm who said they were not even putting a keyword tag on the sites they optimized. Well, I’m here to tell you from real results the keyword tag is not DEAD!

You heard me (or read me), I have never stopped using the keyword tag for my clients BUT what I have done is to use it for very specific purposes.

How?

Well one example in particular is misspellings. One of my clients resides in the legal>medical arena and during the keyword research phase I found several misspelling of a particular medical disorder that generated good search numbers on a daily basis. As you can imagine the client had no interest in placing misspellings in the visible content on their site so I placed it in a keyword tag along with several dozen other misspellings. For the past 5 years the site has ranked on the front page of Google & MSN for the term and some of the others and bounces between the top three pages on Yahoo. There has been no link building done using the term, no alt tags or other means and certainly no Black Hat Practices are in play. That’s the facts maam, you can draw your own conclusion but I’m sticking by mine … the keyword tag is not DEAD!

What a wonderful response to our newly launched live SEO Training Class available from Smart On SEO. The SEO Starter classes in September have filled up and the response to the October 7 & 21 classes have been just as enthusiastic. If you are looking to learn the fundamentals of effective search engine optimization, REGISTER NOW!

In our SEO Starter course you will learn:

• Identifying technical website problems
• Keyword research
• Title and Meta tag development
• Content optimization
• Internal linking
• Increasing link popularity
• Analyzing your results

This class was built on 10+ years of real SEO experience, so learn from an SEO Expert and register today!

We are proud to annouce a new venture, Smart On SEO! Over the past 11 years many customers and prospects have express a desire to learn search engine optimization and so using the old saying “experience is the best teacher” as our mantra we have developed a one day class that leaves the attendee with a plan and the tools to fast track their SEO project.

If chat rooms, forums and online video just don’t hack it for you, join us and learn what it takes to provide a solid SEO foundation for your website. Our live, one-day class includes:

So if you are a entrepreneur, small business owner, or a sales and marketing professional interested in maximizing your online marketing budget by increasing the visibility of your website in the natural results of search engines, then REGISTER and get Smart On SEO!

We had a great time attending the AirHogs game last night. A small way of saying thanks to the hard working staff of The Info Group. Shout out to infielder Cody Merrell for giving the Mattiza boys autographed baseballs and to Fighter Pilot Ace Bacon for stopping by and giving hugs and fist pumps to everyone. To the gang at The Info Group I say, JOB WELL DONE and thanks for the dedication and enthusiasm you bring everyday.

If your company is located in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex and looking for a very family-friendly and affordable company outing I can’t recommend attending a Grand Prairie AirHogs game highly enough.
I’m not making a commission for this endorsement but give J Willms a shout for your event.

If you’ve not set your robots.txt file to exclude your image folder then you are probably receiving as much if not more traffic from Google images as you are from Google search. Why? Well Google reports that 15% of all queries made are conducted via their image search facility. So it’s possible to receive tremendous traffic from image search and in fact we’ve had clients who have come to us for SEO that are receiving more traffic via image search than content search.

So is the answer to exclude your images folder from being spidered? It could be but you can also take advantage of brand awareness and what we’ll call contact visits (visitors who start with an image search but will explore a site further upon landing from that image search). Brand awareness? Yes, with properly optimized images and rich media you can control how the image/rich media is displayed in the SERPs. Using relevant keywords in the file name and in the properties summary can have a dramatic impact on how your image or rich media file is displayed.

This same practice applies to pdf’s, word docs and almost any file you can place online. Taking the time to optimize your properties summary tab or file properties is a great way to increase brand awareness online.

With 2/3 of the search market Google certainly has acquired enough user data to understand trends, patterns and the like and it appears now that Google is using that data to focus ads based on queries. This story by Saul Hansell of The New York Times describes some interesting findings in Google search results as of late.

Apparently Google is using visitor search queries to push relevant ads. The example given in the story is a visitor who might search for diving and then do another search for vacation would be shown ads for diving trips. So what’s different than the diving company who has ads displaying via Adwords? This shows that Google is displaying ads based on behaviour not what keywords were purchased. Now that is focused.

Of course privacy concerns abound and we’ve yet to see how that will play out but if that issue can be safely bedded advertising will take a step forward.

In the past 18 months the volume of chatter regarding mobile search has grown into a low rumble and all indications are it will swell to a roar in the next few years. While the number of mobile surfers is not at a level comparable to pc based surfers it is growing and doing so at an alarming rate. So much so that Google mobile product manager Matt Waddell called it a watershed moment in a recent interview.

What does this mean to you?

Quite simply if you do not have a mobile version of your website in operation or on the drawing board you will get left behind. Mobile phones have now reached 75% penetration in the U.S. and 4 of 5 mobile phone users now request some sort of internet access when purchasing their phone. These kind of numbers combined with the increased energy from search engines to provide mobile friendly results (both in look and relevance, meaning why deliver search results that don’t look good and then send a mobile user a search result to a website that is not mobile friendly?) it does not take a rocket scientist to understand mobile search will impact the way people conduct business.

So the priorities of the business owner should now include a properly built mobile website to compliment their “pc” site and a presence in mobile search. Both of these tasks can be completed by The Info Group.

It’s not a surprise that Google made gains in every metric of the report released by Efficient Frontier or that it is still the dominate search engine when it comes to volume of searches but it is a nice surprise to read how healthy search engine marketing is despite the downturn of the economy. Read the press release or download the report.

Going green is the way of today and a search engine in Austrailia is trying to make searching a green affair. Launched in 14 countries, Ecocho promises to plant trees according to the number of searches made through it. Using Yahoo & Google search engines visitors have an opportunity to impact the environment. For every thousand searches via Yahoo up to two trees will be planted, searches via Google will deliver only half as many plantings.

The effort is funded through advertising revenue from the search giants.

So search today and help plant a tree!