I like keeping things simple. And, although there is much to learn in order to do SEO properly, knowing a little about these four key components will help you avoid silly mistakes in optimizing your web site and get on your way to healthy, consistent web traffic.
Healthy External Links
Sometimes called back-links, external links are links from other web pages to pages on your web site (usually the home page but sometimes to internal pages). The more links from other webs sites to your web site will increase your site’s “Link Popularity”. Google considers each valid external link as a vote for your site. Some of these votes carry a lot of weight and can help your site move up in the rankings. The best kind of links to get are those that carry traffic with them. Try to think of each link as an “Ad” for your site and do your best to ignore promises of “PageRank” or “PR” as these tend to end up being worthless in the long run – bringing little or no traffic. Be sure to read The Right Way to Build Inbound Links before you start building up links. Anchor text will be an important key to getting a good ranking.
Smart Internal Links
By Smart Internal Links I mean easy to follow by both humans and robots. One type of internal link is your site’s menu. Not all menu designs are easy for robots to read (or humans for that matter). It should be easy to use for humans first, robots second. In order to be SEO friendly your site must have some way for robots to find their way around. This can be done several ways. One way is by making your site navigation text-based and easily readable by robots. Another way is to use Google’s Webmaster Tools and enter a sitemap to ensure all key pages are crawled by googlebot. Either way you are accomplishing one of the primary purposes of internal links: to get your site fully indexed by Google.
Great Page Titles
Your page title is Google’s introduction to the page. “Hello Google this is page <title>”. That title should be an exact description of what the page is about. Get your title right the first time and Google will reward you. If I have a page on which I am selling battery chargers for Nokia Cell Phones I will likely have a page title very similar to what I discern the main keyword search term will be for that product or group of products (i.e. “Battery Charger Nokia Cell Phone”).Be as specific as possible. Some people try to cover 27 possibilities in a page title “nokia battery chargers and accessories along with every other possible charger product in the uinverse”. Your page title is only as strong as the incoming anchor text links supporting it. So choose wisely. Decide what the page is truly about and set the page title. It is highly unlikely you will have 10-15 word anchor text links coming in to te page so a realistic page title is much easier to support with incoming links.
Proper Keywords
I do not advocate stuffing a page or web site with keywords, However you must be aware of your subject and be sure the theme you are writing about is well covered in the page text. For example: if the page you are working on has text content about Florida Vacation Homes it would be appropriate for you to use this phrase a reasonable amount of times within the page text. If you never used these words in the text, do not expect Google or any other major engine to recognize the theme of the page.
I always encourage my web clients to write naturally about their product, service or subject. Usually the keywords they are trying to cover come out naturally. Typically a little tweaking will help them fine tune a page for a specific keyword but quite honestly most traffic on any site comes from naturally occuring peripheral phrases. For example: although Florida Vacation Homes may be a great keyword phrase, it is likely the competition for that phrase is HUGE. It may be a client gains far more traffic for phrases such as “low cost florida vacation home” or “inexpensive vacation home near tampa”. These may be naturally occurring phrases within the site text for which there is little competition. Writing naturally and having ample and rich content will always win out over going after a single high competition keyword.
Like Music to Google’s Ears
Although I’ve mentioned only these four major SEO components, there is obviously much more to SEO than these. When all the major and minor components of SEO work together they become like music to Google’s ears. Google gets a clear message and knows exactly what your site is about and where it belongs in the search engine as regards categorization and ranking.
The most important lesson you can learn about SEO is: great content will bring traffic. Over time you will learn the secrets of how to publicize yourself and the world will beat a path to your web pages.
Link building is one of the most important aspects of 
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6 Social Search Tools You Should Know About
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The World Wide Web is like a huge ocean filled with various currents, tides and hidden reefs where your company’s reputation sails along pushed by the winds of opinion. You can influence that opinion somewhat by blogs, articles, trade shows, your web site, radio shows, endorsements and countless other ways to get your message out to the public eye & ear, but how can you really know what effect you are having at a grass roots level?
Enter these 6 wonderful Social Search Tools. These little wonders will be the savior of small to medium sized business marketing professionals as they pick through search results, take the pulse of the marketplace and allow you to adjust your market focus to protect the reputation of yourself, your product, or your company.
All of these tools are effective at scouring the Social Networks for information – but not all display the results in the same way or take the same approach to how it should be managed. Some make a few decisions for you, while others just display raw information and let you decide what to keep and what to throw away.
Here is a basic review of each tool to help you decide which may be best for your reputation management needs.
Delver
As of this writing Delver is still in it’s Alpha development stage but it’s an interesting little critter. Basically you “hand feed” Delver information about yourself from your blog URL, your Linkedin profile, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Hi5 etc. and it builds a profile of who you are, then returns relevant results based on “the collective wisdom of your social world”. Assuming your friends really do “know what’s best” this could be a very handy too for some who want to find relevant info quickly.
In the words of TechCrunch: “The objective behind Delver is to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs—an area that Google’s Marissa Mayer has indicated to be an essential part of Google’s future search offerings.”
As Delver continues to grow it promises to fill an interesting niche for those who like to stay within specific social niches. and feed heavily on user generated content.
WhosTalkin’
WhosTalkin only recently came out of Beta and is one of my personal favorites. It doesn’t make decisions for me, it simply searches 60 of the Internet’s most popular social media gateways and finds what I want – I like that. Another thing I like is how it breaks the results into categories such as Blogs, News, Networks, Videos, Images and Forums. I can then browse through the posts to see what people are saying about me, my product or my client’s products in different areas of the Social world. A very handy tool for checking on reputation trends for small to medium sized businesses who may not be prepared to pay big time reputation management firms.
On the horizon it promises to allow subscribed members the luxury of “saved searches”, RSS feeds and (wait for it Bloggers) a WordPress plugin! Yummm.
SocialMention
SocialMention pulls it’s results from numerous sources including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixes these as a single stream of information. The default sort is by most recent first but you can adjust the list to view by Source.
SocialMention assigns a Social Rank to the term you search and lists the actual sources it found them in. I searched the term “dog training” and according to this search engine it had a mention every 31 minutes in the social networks and a Social Rank of 93/100.
SamePoint
Like the other Social SE’s, SamePoint pulls from all the major Social Media sources and categorizes them into it’s own categories: Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Networks, B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web. All you have to do is click on one of the links across the top of the page to have it display it’s findings under each category.
At the base of the Home Page is a “Trends” link, which leads you to a list of the latest Social Search Trends. The page says “updated very often” but no specifics on how often that actually is. Still it gives you an idea what the hot topics are for the day or hour allowing you to keep on top of what is happening in the Social world.
SamePoint has a search plugin for your browser toolbar and you can follow their development progress on Twitter
Serph
What I like about Serph is you’re not digging through last weeks or last months listings; you are looking at what was listed today in the Social Networks. If what you want is the most current information, Serph seems to have it’s finger on the pulse. Not that the others aren’t up to date. But Pulse doesn’t seem to care about what happened yesterday so the search results return quickly and one might hope Serph’s focus would be on keeping their content very current so for those whose job requires up to the minute information, this may be the tool for you.
On the right side of the search results page you’ll see “RECOMMENDATIONS” and a little blurb “Your search lead us to these possible queries.” with clickable keywords complimentary to your search string. A helpful little extra. They also have a search plugin for Firefox.
I can see myself using Serph on a regular basis.
OneRiot
If you want to know what’s popping hot on the web OneRiot has the temperature gauge to tell you. It tracks what people are talking about and returns search results based on what is hot in the Social Networks right this minute. In their own words, they find the “pulse” of the web and rate search results as emerging, surging or raging.
The home page has a running list of “Today’s Hot Topics”. OneRiot offers RSS feeds, has a toolbar plug-in and you can log in using Facebook
No doubt one of these tools has most if not all the things you may need to track you or your business’ reputation. Get out there and start influencing the winds of change.