What My Kids Taught Me About Blogging

Anyone who has spent more than 35 seconds with a preschooler knows they have the attention span of a squirrel on crack. Holding their focus on any one toy, game, conversation or activity for more than a few minutes is a challenge. They're always looking for the next great adventure and the next fun surprise. Over time, they learn to focus a little longer and a little more intently, but in the early days, it's all ADD, all the time.
Internet users aren't all that different. We live in a world where the next exciting thing is a single click away.

SEO: Where Do New SEOs Go Wrong When They Set Learning Priorities?

An awareness of SEO usually comes about when a person launches a site, only to find that the site doesn't magically appear #1.

Soon after, the webmaster will likely find themselves knee deep in SEO forums and blogs, where everyone has a viewpoint, and often those viewpoints contradict each other. Contradiction is rife in SEO. To understand why, we need to understand the history of search engines.

The first step in setting learning priorities for SEO is to.....

The Gaza Conflict Turns into a Search Engine Optimization and Online PR War!

Facebook, Youtube and twitter started as online hangouts and communities to trade pictures, music clips and a way to stay in touch with co-workers and friends. The conflict in Gaza has morphed social media into a medium to express and promote political Views.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) hired an Israeli-American search engine optimization (SEO) guru to promote their PR efforts on facebook and Youtube to overcome the negative backlash of the public opinion amid the violent incursion into Gaza that claimed over 1,300 lives and 6,000 injured.

Top 7 SEO blogs by Daily Blog Tips

Top 7 SEO blogs by http://www.dailyblogtips.com/:


Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog - Bruce is an old name in the industry. His blog is a great resource for SEO news and tips in general. What keeps me coming back, though, are the hilarious in-post comment wars he has with Susan. Think we could do something like that, Daniel?

Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal’s got some great material on a variety of different marketing-related topics, including a lot of articles on SEO and blogging.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO - There’s nothing quite like getting news straight from the source. Matt works for Google. He’s a great read to begin with, but you just can’t beat his blog for authority when it comes to the internet’s #1 search engine.

Search Engine Land - Although the blog itself has only been around for a few months, Danny Sullivan has been an SEO bigwig for much longer.

Search Engine Roundtable - If you want to stay abreast of conversations on the hottest SEO discussion boards (e.g. Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, etc.) without, well, having to read them, this blog is your first stop.

Search Engine Watch - This blog is definitely one of the oldest and most respected sources for search engine news. It’s a bit drier than the others; good for information, bad for personality, but still useful if all you’re interested in are the facts.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog - Rand Fishkin and co. provide some great information. Be sure not to miss their whiteboard fridays.

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TOP SEO - Proven SEO Tactics

Proven SEO Tactics: How to Start Getting Up to 5,000 Visitors Daily

When SEO is mentioned, many times a listener's eyes will start to glaze over. They think search engine optimization (SEO) is complicated geek speak. But it’s really not. SEO is fairly straightforward and there are proven tactics that can pretty easily start bringing in up to 5,000 visitors a day.

Search engine optimization is all about getting your site to rank well in search engines like Google. Conventional SEO wisdom is that if you’re on the first three pages of results returned, you’re ranking pretty high. But, how do you get there? Following are 8 proven SEO tips that can start to pave the way.

8 Proven SEO Tips that Drive Traffic – for Years to Come

1. Keyword-Driven SEO Articles: If content is king on the net, then SEO content is pure royalty. SEO articles contain keywords relevant to your niche. If you have a good amount of content on your site that uses the words that information seekers type in when they search the web, then your site will rank higher than one that doesn’t employ this strategy.

FYI, the words that information seekers type in when they search the web are called keywords. And, you want lots of content with lots of these on your site. Professional SEO copywriters provide this.

As an example, if you were looking for used cars in your city, you’d probably type in “used cars” and “Atlanta,” (if you lived in Atlanta). If you wanted your site to be on the first few pages of the search results, a professional SEO copywriter can write articles with those keywords sprinkled throughout to push your site to the top.

Some SEO articles that come to mind using these keywords: How to Buy Used Cars in Atlanta; Used Cars Good on Gas in Atlanta; Where to Find Cheap Used Cars in Atlanta; Used Cars in Atlanta: What to Look for in a Dealer; Used Cars in Atlanta Under $5,000.

2. Quality, Informative SEO Content: While keywords are important in content writing, it must be written to be informative and educational. Professional SEO copywriters know how to incorporate keyword phrases so that the content not only drives search engine traffic, but gives them something useful to read once they land on your site.

Look at it this way, if your content is stuffed with keywords – which will bring in traffic – but is unprofessional, uninteresting, not informative and barely readable, how likely do you think visitors will be to return to your site?

You have to draw visitors to your site. Keywords do this. But to keep them coming back – which is what it takes to eventually make sales – you must give them what they want: ie, helpful, informative content.

How a Professional SEO Copywriter Can Help You Get More Traffic – and Increase Sales
This starts with knowing how to write eye-catching titles, which topics generate the most interest, how to write content that will be relevant five years from now, how to use “hot” news topics and make them relevant to your niche, etc. Professional SEO copywriters know how to do all of this.

SEO copywriting is about more than knowing how to spread keywords throughout a 300-500 word article. It’s about keeping the surfer (the potential customer) in mind and catering to their needs first.
New Media Words’ SEO copywriters always adhere to this internet marketing axiom.

3. Write Your Site’s Meta Tags: Some search engine optimization experts have theorized that if you fill in your meta tags, you’ve gained a 25% advantage over other sites already. Why is this? Because most sites don’t have their meta tags filled in.

Get an answer to the question, "What are meta tags?" Meta tags describe your site, and there are quite a few of them. The most popular ones though that every site should have filled in are the Title, Keyword and Description tags.

Some have very long descriptions, keywords and keyword phrases; others have short ones. Which one is correct? At New Media Words, we focus on the most popular, appropriate phrases for your site. Some will have more, others will have less. It all depends on the niche.

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Search Engines

I. How search engines work

Search engines are based on computer programs that explore the Net in search of webpages. They do this by using so-called "spiders," "crawlers," or "robots".
Like any human surfer, the robots are able to follow the links present on webpages. When finding a new webpage, they copy all or parts of the text present on the page into their search engine database.
Other spiders revisit these pages on a regular interval in order to register changes or dead links. The interval varies greatly from search engine to search engine and from site to site.

II. Ranking algorithm

The search engine will have billions of webpages in its database. In order to deliver relevant results, the search engine companies have developed special ranking algorithms that calculate the order of search query results.
By a search query we mean the keyword or keyword phrase the visitor enters into the search form of the search engine.
A special program analyzes the search query, and then searches the database for pages that contain this keyword or keyword phrase.
Next it analyzes every single one of the relevant pages in order to determine how important that phrase is on that page. The pages the search engine find most relevant will be listed first.
For instance, if you are searching for "Albert Einstein," and the search engine finds a main headline on that page containing the phrase "Albert Einstein," it will guess that this page is fairly relevant to your needs. If, on the other hand, it finds the phrase only once, buried in a long text, it will reckon it is less relevant.

III. Getting search engine points

The search engine gives each and every page points based on how often and where it finds the keyword phrase (the keyword location). Some locations give more points than others, the exact factor varying from search engine to search engine.
Search engines also take other factors into consideration, including link popularity. We will come back to that.
One very important part of search engine marketing is to know where to put the relevant keyword phrases in your webpages.

IV. Designing webpages for search engines

The search engine does not "see" the webpage the way we see it; it reads only the text-based code behind it. This is will help you to have an elementary insight into HTML, the coding language used to produce webpages. If you do not know any HTML, you could for instance read through one of the beginner's guides to HTML.
If you do not have the patience for this, by all means read on -- we will help you understand. Keep in mind, though, that an HTML file is a plain text file that contains the text you can read on a web page, as well as information on how the web browser is to format it. We are going to look at the elements of this text file.

V. On search directories

This guide is about search engines only. There are also so-called "search directories" produced by human beings that visit and consider websites for inclusion. The most important ones are the Yahoo! Directory and The Open Directory. In order to get listed in these, you have to use entirely different techniques.
See our article on "Preparing your site for the search directories") for more information.

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SEO SEO SEO!

SEO - Search Engine Optimization for Your Web Site.

Whether your Web site is brand new or ten years old, managing how it appears to search engines is crucial to its success. The typical Web site gets 61 per cent of its traffic from organic (nonpaid) search engine results, and 41 per cent of all traffic from Google alone.