And I thought that many SEO experts were leaning towards keeping silent about their expertise! (Remember my post on silence being the key?) Well, if I were to judge by the actions of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, I would say that there are SEO experts out there who would like nothing more than to help people out in their quest to learn more about SEO techniques.

He came up with a plug-in for WordPress that would display SEO tips. The whole idea stemmed from the default plug-in “Hello Dolly.” I am sure WordPress users know about this – every time you log in to your WordPress account, you will see random phrases from the lyrics of the song “Hello Dolly.” Van Zanten decided to play around with it and have it display SEO tips instead – much more useful, I should say.

So how did he come up with the SEO tips? He sent out an appeal to everyone to send in their SEO tips and, according to him, within 30 minutes, he was able to receive hundreds of SEO tips from other SEO experts! Talk about selfless sharing here, huh? These contributors even went as far as to help Van Zanten collect and fine tune the submitted tips. Now, with the plug-in anyone can view the tips anytime they want on their very own blog.

The best thing is that the plug-in is for free! You only have to download the plug-in from Van Zanten’s blog and you are good to go.

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I never thought I’d write something with this title. I am particularly adverse to exploiting this aspect of humankind to make waves. After reading SEOSMARTY’s post on SEO Slogans (Cool, Sexy, and Not Only That..), however, I think that I am willing to make an exception for this case.

He points out that it is a common knowledge that in branding one’s company, it is essential to come up with a catch phrase or a tag line that will stand out and be associated with your brand. Most articles and posts on this topic will tell you the same thing – be unique, catchy, short, succinct, etc. SEOSMARTY points out unique ideas though:

Consider language differences
You are catering to the whole world as your market. You may want to expand your horizons and think about people who may not be able to relate to language particularities. So as much as possible, make your slogan universally understandable.

Exploit English clichés
Some writers would say that this is a bad practice but for slogan writing, it just might do the trick. Of course, you’d have to tweak the cliché a little bit to suit your company.

Don’t overlook look slang and urban lingo
A word of caution when doing this, however. Slang may be specific to a particular geographical location. Another thing, some slang may be a bit on the rough (rude) side so be careful of this as well.

Coming up with a slogan (whether it is for SEO or not) is not an easy matter. Some have the knack for it while others don’t. If you are not sure about what you’ve come up with, don’t hesitate to bring in others on it.

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Well, at least, according to Rhea Drysdale of Search Engine Journal. She recently published an entry on Death of SEO Transparency. What she proposes is actually thought-provoking – SEO experts should not let it all hang out, so to speak. Her rationale is that there is too much talk going around, too much sharing of secrets. Here is an excerpt of the entry to give you a stronger picture:

This post is my plea to the community that you become a chef. Ingredients themselves don’t change and neither will the fundamentals of search, so being able to follow a recipe doesn’t make you great, it makes you competent and worth your salary. Being great only comes when you can take Fundamental A and Fundamental B and build something beyond anything else others are doing. And, while you’re developing that perfect recipe, are you going to share the process? When you’re done, will you teach everyone how you did it? Keep in mind that in the search industry, unlike culinary arts, if you give away your secret recipe, the meal is spoiled for everyone! Is it worth your five minutes of fame? What drives you? Fame, a comfortable life or the challenge?

However interesting the idea may be, I am not sure that I totally agree with the concept of keeping your mouth shut. It seems to me that what will happen if transparency is done away with is that the ideas and “secrets” of SEO will remain just that – secrets. Why should you keep your ideas to yourself? Why not just share them with others who can benefit from them? What do you think?

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Though SEO and all the concepts surrounding it have been around for quite some time, you’d be surprised at the number of people who still have misconceptions about it. I think this is one reason I still read blog posts on whether or not SEO is a one-time thing. Take this post on ifacethoughts. The blogger talks about his inexperience when it comes to SEO but he hit the nail right on the head with his question: Is SEO a one-time activity?

If you have been reading the many other previous posts in this blog, you would know the answer. SEO can be a one-time activity if you wish for it to be but you cannot expect the results to be satisfactory. SEO is all about making your web site available and accessible to all potential readers out there. It is about attracting new readers and keeping existing readers coming back.

Sure, you can always attract a reader with a one-time effort but do you think that you can keep them coming back for more without doing anything else? This is where content comes in. This is where link building enters the picture. This is when you realize that you have to continually employ SEO practices if you want more readers – both new and old. It is important that you realize that the SEO process is dynamic and so should your efforts. Once you start becoming complacent, thinking that you can stop your SEO efforts, then your readership may become quite static as well.

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This year, those of us interested in search marketing in general can look forward to several events sponsored by Third Door Media. The Search Marketing Expo will be held in different locations through out the year, the soonest of which is the Search Marketing Expo West which is to be held from the 26th to the 28th of February at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California.

An array of topics is going to be highlighted, including organic search optimization. Here are previews of the three keynotes that will be presented in the conference:

Program chair and SearchEngineLand Editor-In-Chief Danny Sullivan will kick off SMX West on February 26 with “Search 3.0, Search 4.0 and Beyond.” He’ll discuss the implications of blended search (Search 3.0), personalized and social search (Search 4.0), and what’s next for search and search marketing technologies.

Participants will also get some hints about new search technologies in the works at Cuill, a stealth search start-up with former Googlers as founders. During the February 27 keynote conversation, Cuill Vice president of products Louis Monier will describe efforts at Cuill to set new standards in search, in addition to providing perspective on developments in the field.

The day-three keynote will be “Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade”, a panel discussion with luminaries from the major search engines predicting where they see search headed. This session will be moderated by SearchEngineLand’s Chris Sherman and SEMPO Chairperson Gord Hotchkiss.

For more particulars about the SMX West, visit their site. Alternatively, you can look at more information on the different SMX events in other places.

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More than keywords – pay attention to content
In the first post, we took a look at how important it is for you to know the keywords that people are conducting searches on, in relation to your niche. If that is all that you want to think about, then I guess you can merely put in a jumble of words – as long as they are important keywords – in your site and you are good. However, your readers are not stupid, and neither are the spiders that search engines use to crawl web sites. If you do not provide good content, then the chances are that you will not have readers returning to your site. Worse, the search engine spiders will not give you the ranking that you need. An additional note on this, more than providing content, you also need to continually update your content. Old and stale content will not get you anywhere.

Mark your keywords
It isn’t enough to use keywords strategically in your content. You also have to go one step further and mark these keywords in all your pages. How do you do this? By using tags such as bold, italics, and underline. This practice would not only help you out with search engines but will actually help your readers identify the keywords in your pages. However, moderation is the key once again. Do not go trigger happy on the tags I just mentioned and over do it. Perhaps 2 to 3 marked keywords per page would do the trick.

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If you ask different people involved in SEO for a list of the best tips with regard to this activity, the chances are that you will get a host of various answers. The idea behind SEO is simple. As we re-established it in the last post, SEO is all about creating web pages that will get good rankings, no more, no less.

Actually implementing strategies and techniques to achieve the results that SEO aims for is another story altogether, however. Different experts would have their own takes on the subject matter so it is hard to say which ones are the “right” ones. Here are some basic tips to help you get reacquainted with SEO principles.

Keywords
If there is any commonality between varying opinions on SEO techniques, the knowledge of keywords would probably be it. I like how Mike Wayde says it in B2B Insights Blog. He writes:

A good SEO partner will have the tools to evaluate the right keywords that your audience is using to search for you. Just because you think your audience will search for you using a particular keyword or phrase, doesn’t mean that they will. Proper research will go a long way towards reaching your full audience.

I totally agree with this. Research is one of the most important steps when it comes to SEO – you have to know what people are using as search terms. You cannot merely guess or take it for granted that you know which keywords are hot.

Let’s look at other basic tips in the next post.

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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as we normally call it, has risen to the forefront of activities on the Internet. Anyone who is remotely involved in blog and web site development has at least an idea of what SEO is all about. Today, you cannot carry on your online activities without running into SEO of some sort. Yet what is SEO really about? Have you ever really thought about the core concepts of SEO? I thought it would be a good time to go back to the basics and understand the core principles behind SEO.

I like how SEO is defined by Netuser:

The art of creating web pages that will rank well is called SEO.”

Simple, isn’t it? You have to consider, though, what “rank well” means exactly. You and I both know that to be discovered on the Web, you have to have some sort of visibility. Your blog or web site should be found by other people through a search on any search engine, but most especially Google. These search engines provide search results through a system of ranking. The higher the rank of a web page, the more chances it will have to be in the top results of a search. That is where SEO comes in – it helps you achieve a higher rank in order for your web page to appear in the first few pages of a search related to your niche.

Now that we have re-grounded ourselves on what SEO is all about, it is time to go over the basics of how to go about doing SEO. Let’s look at this in the next few posts.

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