How to increase conversions in just 45 minutes!
Redesigning a website, or even a single page, can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Re-opening a project that you so happily completed can take major mental willpower. However, improving a website doesn’t need to take weeks, or even days. I’m a believer in baby steps: making incremental progress, small victories, minor adjustments with big results.

Using microformats to improve local SEO performance.
Microformats are gaining popularity, and if you’re not using them, you should be. Google’s introduction of Rich Snippets in May 2009 is just another indication that microformats will continue to gain popularity. And as more sites make use of this structured content, small businesses can capitalize on the use of microformats to help feed relevant information about their business to other websites by using microformats.

Employing the 80/20 mantra for increased effectiveness.
By doing an 80-20 optimization of your website — whittling your pages down to the 20% of things that produces 80% of the results — you’ll not only have a simpler site that’ll convert better, but you’ll have less work in developing and managing it since there’ll be less to think about.

If you’re not using text citations already, you need to install Link Building Pro, now.

Wait, you want to know what it is, first? You don’t have time! I guess if I have to explain it to you …

Every time someone selects and copies text on your website, this script will automatically append a link giving you credit.

If you still need an example, just copy/paste the text in this paragraph to see what I mean. See, isn’t that awesome?

Download Link Building Pro, upload the .js file to your website, and start using it, pronto!

Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s some good SEO reading for you all to digest throughout the weekend! I’m going to be at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this weekend, so see you Monday!

• Becoming an SEO Ubergeek / Superweapon
• Using Google Brand Links To Your Advantage
• SEO (Usually) Does Not Create Demand
• How To Track Six Key Web App Metrics
• Leveraging Social Interaction in SEO Campaigns
• Ultimate Duplicate Content Guide

Search engine optimization is an ever evolving game, but there’s several fundamentals that are pretty key to any strategy for tuning your website for search engine takeover. Here’s a few rules I make sure to follow on any of my websites:

• Choose a memorable and relevant domain name.
• Carefully choose a few keywords and keyphrases to optimize your website for.
• Optimize TITLE tags on all website pages, aim for ~70 characters in your TITLE.
• Make unique and relevant ALT tags for all of your website’s images.
• Carefully craft META description tags and META keyword tags for each of your website’s pages, keep descriptions at ~150 characters or less, and keywords at ~10 or less.
• Employ proper use of H1, H2, and H3 tags to draw reader and search engine attention to important text on each page.
• Optimize the URL structure of your website through URL rewriting.
• Keep your keyword density between 2% to 6%, you can use Textalyser to weigh keyword density.
• Create and maintain quality backlinks, from relevant websites and web registries.
• Don’t rush to totally adopt and switch over to new metrics and audience measurement tools, but certainly do not be afraid to test them, as new ones often have new methods of measurement that eventually get standardized, if not by that application.
• Use Google Alerts to monitor search results for people talking about your website and specific topics in your niche. Being the first person to respond to comments or questions can often lead to a great influx of traffic to your website, as well as do wonders for your brand recognition

Information originally from a post on Ahmed Belal’s blog called Ultimate SEO Checklist, that I have paraphrased and appended to.

It finally here, the booster kit every SEO newbie has been waiting for, handed down to man by the Gods themselves … Okay so maybe I was being a little facetious, who cares?

Due to the repeated questions of many anxious webmasters yearning to climb the ranks of the Google results pages to that #1 spot, that gold mine of traffic, Google released a simple document that overviews what you need to know about search engine optimization, the basics anyway. Google’s Official SEO Starter Guide goes over proper title creation, good practices for title and meta tags, ideal URL structures, website navigation from a search engine spider’s perspective, proper user of anchor and header tags, image optimization, robots.txt, and more!

If you don’t know much about optimizing your site for Google (or any other search engine, for that matter) you should definitely give the PDF a read. Hell, if you feel like brushing up on your SEO fundamentals, you should definitely give the PDF a read.

Check out the post over at Google Webmaster Central or just download the Official Google SEO Starter Guide!

If you’ve heard Jason Calcanis speak, or keep yourself updated on his conferences, you might be familiar with his catch phrase, “SEO has no future.”

I think Jason might be right though, SEO has no “FUTURE” … but only a “PRESENT” … it is often too hard to look and plan a significant distance ahead of yourself.

PS: Sorry for the post drought lately, my boss has been working me dead the past several weeks!

Things around the bend are looking very exciting … DaftSEO will eventually be releasing its own suite of SEO tools, and as we go through the various stages of programming them, we will need people to test and help us debug our programs.

The suite will consist of various software, some will be like “Fast Blog Finder” or “Comment Hunt” to build backlinks, some will be diagnostics software for your blog, and there are some really fascinating ideas that we don’t wont to let everyone know about just yet … but you’ll see.

If you are interested in beta testing software for DaftSEO, then leave a comment to this post stating your interest, and you will be inserted into our beta testers pool, where we will select testers at random. Selected testers will receive an e-mail, so be sure to leave a valid address!

Cheers!

Some of these might seem they have been drug out and beaten many times, but you still see sites employing these methods, scattered across the internet.

Do not stuff the same keyword / keyword phrase into every header tag!
You will not pass search engine spider inspection, and your website will appear dull and boring to actual readers who might actually have an interest in your site.

Do not cram your title with tons of keywords!
Your title should be quick and to the point, and optionally include your site name at the end. It’s there to inform both visitors AND spiders of exactly what the page is about.

Do not bold the same keyword over and over and over!
Using bold to emphasize points you are trying to make is great, and can help visually direct a user along your idea’s path of progression. However, if used and abused, it can quickly turn the same visitor away.

Do not stuff keywords into the alt attributes of your images!
This is another SEO No-No! Alt attributes should accurately describe the image that it is describing. Nothing more, nothing less. Make sense?

Do not stuff keywords into anything, period!
It’s easily picked up on by search engine spiders, as we’ve all learned one way or another, and it can just as easily repel potential readers or customers.

Capiche?

There are many heated arguments on the internet (via message boards, blogs, social networks, and other community type sites) over which blogging software can provide the best seo optimization features for your own blog.

Well first of all, you have several options. You can use a free hosted service (the most popular being Google’s Blogger), use blogging software you can upload to your own server and domain (the most popular here would be WordPress, which also offers a free hosted version, but it lacks the customization options you will want), or using a CMS software to manage your post items and other integrated plugins that come with software like Joomla or Drupal.

Google’s Blogger is GREAT for creating and managing many blogs on a smaller scale. If you want to make a bunch of AdSense ready websites swiftly and with ease, I would recommend using this blogging platform. You can manage posts, themes, and advertisements from the Google Dashboard, and the new widgets coming in Blogger Draft look really appealing.

However, if you want to create one to a few really great blogs with decent traffic and authority, you should option for WordPress. It’s a fine piece of software with many built in features that Blogger does not have. It’s easier to customize themes (in my opinion) and create your own modifications to the software (or use a user created one that already exists and is widely supported) as well as better for handling larger loads of traffic and spam comments. Speaking of comments, I believe WordPress is better for user participation, when I moved to WordPress, my comment rate increased five fold … sure the spam comments increased too, but Akismet has literally filtered them all.

I hope this gives you a better perspective on how to choose your seo optimized blogging platform.

Arrivederci!

Many people complain that when they ask for links, or try to share their link on various communities, that they experience little to no success, or even get banned from the venue they are trying to reach.

Well, you have to make sure to follow the rules!

When you’re posting your links on forums, make sure it is allowed by the community to append your link to your signature. Don’t post your link in new threads and replies all throughout the message board, instead, look for an advertising or promotion specific forum where the administrators want these sort of threads to be placed. (e.g. a “post your link” forum, or a “review my site” forum.)

When posting comments to blog, don’t clutter your post with links to your blog, instead focus your energies on contributing something back to the blog (provide information, ask a question, etc.) and leave your link in the URL field. I can pretty much guarantee your comment will be approved and you will gain a relevant backlink.

I hope this has helped you out, following these guidelines has ensured that 99.9% of my comments get approved, and I’ve never been banned from a message board for promoting my website within a reasonable means.