Online marketer James Beswick has published “Ranking Number One: 50 Essential SEO Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results” with San Francisco web consultants One Uproar. This new book provides up-to-date information for online marketers including emphasis on social media, creating content and providing local relevance for visitors.

“Ranking Number One: 50 Essential SEO Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results” is now available at Amazon.com, and has a companion website at http://ranking-number1.com.

Like many of you I’ve been told to do more with less. Whether you’re a marketer or business owner we have smaller budgets and need to gain more traction. The landscape of how to communicate your business to the public has changed and shifted so much in the last five years. I find myself reading, tweeting, and learning. I love it. There is an amazing opportunity now to ramp up your companies’ presence online for very little spend. So, I thought I would share my results and what has been working for me lately.

• Get your website up to snuff. Whether you use Drupal or WordPress, do something. The platform doesn’t really matter. Get a good designer to help you make a splash but develop your site on a platform in which YOU can make edits, upload new images, change copy when you need to. You’ll look like a superstar—it will take minutes out of your day to upload that latest press release, news coverage, or new image. Plus you’re saving your company money by executing these small changes yourself. For me WordPress is what I use for my art website and Drupal is my company’s platform. If implemented correctly both platforms are easy to maintain and update.
• Advertising – If you want to skip print media for now try Google AdWords. It’s inexpensive but you will need to check and fine tune your key words. It will take some time to find the right ad content for your business so start out slow with a small spend per day.
  • SEO – I am no SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert but I’ve done the following to help my companies’ ranking and also employed the same techniques for other businesses:
    • Google Map Profile – It’s free—just go to Google and create a Gmail account for your business and a map profile. This helps index your site and elevate organic searches for your business.
    • Google Analytics – Also free—set it up on Google by copying the code they give you onto your website. You really be able to see who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, what pages they are visiting—the reporting is very detailed and you can cut and paste this onto any report for presentations.
    • Web copy – Writing the actual copy for your website does take a lot of time. Key words and repetition within the site is what Google and other search engines look for. Spend time thinking about what key words are revelent to your business and then see how you can weave these into your overall copy.
    • Website updates – It’s important that you update your website as often as possible. Whether you’re posting a news coverage, sending out a new update on Twitter, LinkedIn or posting to your blog this tells Google that your website is relevant and an active business.
    • Social Media. We’ve all been hearing about it. It’s free—yes it takes up your time but get your feet wet and start trying them slowly. For me I’m a one person show so I symphathize with many of you who are operating with limited staff. I started by creating our Linkedin profile initially and just recently started Twitter. Think about social media as platforms that work together. Twitter is your platform to send links to the world and short reminders. Blogs are where you should be posting longer content.

• Create your company’s Linkedin profile. It does matter—whether you’re an individual business owner or a large company—this is the online hub to “record” yourself to the world. If you’re an individual business owner—this is your online resume and fact sheet. It’s really the same for any size company. If you work for a larger organization rally employees to create profiles on Linkedin. Get HR to post that next job opening. This one is easy for you to maintain—once your profile is created you’re just editing and maintaining. Linkedin is a very standard profile all companies should have.

• Create a Twitter profile. Keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm yourself. For me it’s literally just me supporting Twitter so I sent out a tweet once a week. I also “build” content in the background and try to send out more content when I can. Take advantage of these platforms—they’re free and just require your time. This is another platform that you can get your subject matter experts within the company involved. Collaborate with your business experts and sales to create short, content subjects that your clients care about. It’s not about how great your company is. Put yourself in the seat of the customer—what do they want to know? What criteria or search is involved in reaching your company, your product, or your service? What’s your view on the your industry? This type of content will create traction and get those followers!

• Blogs. Do you need to post to your blog daily? If you can but try starting by posting once a week. Remember this is your platform to post longer content—at least 300 words. Test out different types of content you’ll find what will work for your industry. Keep it fun—post something that isn’t too time intensive on your part every now and then.

• Video. Many of us don’t have the budget to hire a professional video expert. Buy a video camera and tripod and start recording—for my company’s website it’s about our business process and value proposition so maybe we’ll record projects, brown bag seminars, public speaking events and even a quarterly “tv” spot to our customers–you get the idea. Post to YouTube and get it on your website.

Here are some great companies and sites to visit for services:

• 415 Systems – http://www.415systems.com – WordPress web design, SEO and SEM services
• Hubspot – http://hubspot.com – Online Marketing tools helping you to find customers
• Af83inc. – http://af83inc.com/ – Drupal web design, SEO and SEM services
• Google Tools – http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/services/var_1.html

See Wendy’s Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/wenbryant.

While Twitter is ridiculed by Twitnoobs and amateurs for mundane updates such as “I’m watching my cat… asleep”, the service has been taken to the next level by those who have embraced its realtime, geo-tagged, verbose and follower-driven world. Here are 10 clever ways to use Twitter that demonstrate its potential.

Use Twitter for Server Status and Job Reports

Twitter is, at heart, one big messaging system. If you have endless email and server jobs running that fire off success/failure emails, why not ditch the emails and get the cron jobs to Tweet out the result? You can create a Twitter ID with private tweets so only you and permitted followers can see the data. Personally, I’d rather receive Tweets than email for “this just happened” status updates.

Use Twitter for Inventory Alerts

Want to create some buzz among your customers when only 10 widgets are left, or there’s been a sudden price drop on a hot product? Rather than post updates to your website or print flyers, it’s simple to create a quick Tweet driven by your inventory system. There’s never been a more effective way to communicate time-sensitive price and inventory events to your customer base. And “once it’s gone, it’s gone”-style offers tend to generate a dedicated following.

Use Twitter to Find Your Most Effective Keywords

Getting traffic-rich keywords is the holy grail of SEO – it’s hard to do, but if you track your Tweets with tools such as su.pr, you can quickly start to see which topics interest your audience and drive your website’s content around those keywords. Su.pr provides metrics around which links are being followed (among many other things), and your most popular Tweets and keywords are probably not the ones you think they are.

Use Twitter Lists for SEO

If you use Twitter, you’re probably using lists by now, but maybe haven’t realized the inherent SEO benefits created by Google indexing:

• Make your lists public.
• Make lists selective (20-40 users).
• Embed keyword phrases in your list names (“Texas SEO advice”, not just “SEO”).
• Refer to your Twitter lists in blog posts and Tweet them (they have real URLs such as this SEO experts list).

Use Twitter to Monitor Your Competitors

Twitter for the most part is completely open and public. For many industries, it provides a rich source for understanding your competitors’ behavior, especially since you can mine their Tweet history. What time of month are they sending out specials? What kind of promotions are they pushing? What’s their retweet ratio (search RT @mycompetitor in Google)? While you’re there, take a look at their followers and followees, and follow the most active and appropriate users.

Use Twitter for Instant Crowdsourced Responses

On my private Twitter ID (@jbeswick), I’ve managed to get immediate and useful advice on topics as diverse from the best proconsumer camcorders to the best breakfast tacos in Austin. This isn’t restricted to your follower list: a properly tagged question will be found by thousands of other users who watch hashtags such as #canon #taco and #keepaustinweird. The truly remarkable part is the speed in which people respond, and the quality of advice crammed into 140 characters.

Use Twitter to Find Local Customers

Want to know what people around you are saying about your products, industry or services? The Twitter advanced search allows you to search for pertinent keywords, phrases or hashtags that are happening around a certain area (such as what people think about Costco within 50 miles of San Francisco). There are no other tools – online or offline – that could provide this realtime local insight to provide leads and potential customers.

Use Twitter to Find Employees

Companies are getting deluged with applications whenever they post open jobs in the traditional venues, and social media is starting to become the new way to match employees and employees more successfully. Amidst sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter is rapidly becoming an effective way to reach out into your network to find designers, programmers, kitchen staff, gardeners, copywriters, and pretty much anything else.

Use Twitter to Water Your Plants

Interestingly, MakeZine wrote a piece about how to make your plants Tweet when they need water – while this might seem a little esoteric, it’s representative of what happens as practically everything gets an IP address and becomes connected to the network. Imagine if your home security system could tweet a break-in or your car tweeted a schedule service request: essentially, anything that can’t communicate that needs regular attention could tweet for your attention.

Use Twitter to Write a Book

If the average book is 80,000 words with around 5 letters per word, it could take nearly 3,000 Tweets to reach the end. In 2008, 5 of the top 10 bestsellers in Japan were cellphone novels, built by one or many writers 140 characters at a time. Now there are over 1,000,000 cellphone novels so the Tweetbook shouldn’t be far behind.

James Beswick is the founder of One Uproar and the author of Getting Productive With Google Apps and The 50 Fastest Ways to Great SEO, neither of which are tweetable.

Here are 10 major reasons.

1. Your keywords are wrong.

One of the trickiest parts of creating websites isn’t technical – it’s keyword research. There’s little point to creating a slick, professional site if it’s built around keywords that have little traffic or are too broad to compete with established sites. There’s no magic formula for finding the right keyword phrases, but there are some great tools that help narrow them down and give you the best chance for success.

For example, if you are a veterinarian in New York, you would struggle to gain first-page placement for the phrase “vet New York”. But if you determined that the most popular breed of dog among your clients was a Maltese, or a certain medical procedure was common for a particular animal, using these in your keyword mix would make it easy to reach the first page.

Specific, popular phrases that reflect your specialties are essential to finding quality traffic.

2. Your website is SEO-unfriendly.

It’s remarkable how many $50,000 sites developed by web professionals have practically non-existent SEO features. By “SEO-unfriendly”, I’m referring to the overuse of Flash, too much Ajax, poor and inconsistent navigation, missing title and description metatags, missing ALT text, bad URLs, cloaking links in JavaScript and so forth. To do SEO well, it needs to be designed in from the beginning, and just because a site may look good in a browser window to a human doesn’t mean it will rank well in search engines.

If you have the opportunity to build from scratch, call the SEO experts at the same time as the design experts, since retrofitting the site later will be considerably more difficult.

3. There’s little or no content.

The days of having a website consisting of 5 pages, 500 words and a handful of pictures are over – sites like these are impossible in the SEO business, simply because there’s nothing there for a search engine (or visitor). Your site is much more than a marketing leaflet moved online, and you need to have regularly-refreshed content to make visitors feel there’s value.

“What could I possibly write about?” is a question I get asked all the time by customers, but it’s surprisingly easy to develop a program for building articles to attract visitors. While you can hire a web-copy professional easily, it’s generally better to develop in-house because you understand your business better than anyone else, and your voice is important in creating an authentic online presence.

If you’re stumped for ideas, think about what advice you give people at social events that has the most positive reaction – everyone has a point-of-view on their field of expertise that has value.  While a plumber may not think that plunging a garbage disposal is complicated or worth writing about, somebody Googling to plunge a blocked garbage disposal will find the content invaluable.

4. You have duplicate content.

Duplicate content is a real problem – both when it happens intentionally and unintentionally. Google’s concept of “duplicate content” doesn’t mean a word-for-word copy – it means “substantially the same”, so changing a few words doesn’t solve the problem. There are several areas that hurt websites, often without their knowledge:

• Several URLs resolve to the same page – such as http://www.mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com, http://mycompany.com/index.html and https://mycompany.com. Unwittingly, if you don’t define canonical names and redirects properly, your SEO suffers.
• You use product descriptions from manufacturers: cutting and pasting their descriptions causes the same problem, since other vendors do exactly the same thing.
• You have a review site for products based upon user-generated content (UGC) and your members cross-post to similar sites.
• Spam-bots steal your site’s page content and replicate it on another site with ads – there are tools to help locate these, and .htaccess methods to help block the problem (stopping this illegal copying once it’s happened is not easy, however).
• You use session IDs extensively, which create many multiple URLs pointing to the same content.

5. You may be over-optimizing your pages.

Personally, I believe that ‘keyword density’ is overdone as an SEO topic: the concept of repeating phrases to account for 3-5% of web-copy has been touted as a science and there’s very little to prove it (see how IMDB and Amazon and almost every major site all rank highly without doing this). Unfortunately, there’s also a belief that more is better, so webcopy develops into:

John Smith Sports Shoes and Clothing prides itself on supplying Sports Shoes and Clothing to the Midwest made exclusively by John Smith and his Sports Shoes and Clothing team. Do you need Sports Shoes and Clothing? If so, you’ll love our Sports Shoes and Clothing, made by……

6. Nobody links to you.

Inbound links – those where other people point to your site’s page – are the number one determinant in your site’s relevance and ranking. Inbound links are effectively votes for the quality of your site.  Designing a great site is only the start, and you need to find other sites that will refer you, such as:

• Trade associations, industry partners, vendors, customers and other firms you naturally deal with.
• Review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, etc.)
• Bloggers and content sites (such as About.com).
• Government and educational sites, where possible, due to the disproportionate influence their

Link farms and other fake mechanisms should be avoided: these will hurt your SEO. Inbound links from quality sites share part of their PageRank (relevance) with you, whereas thousands of links from link farms detract from your score.

7. You’re not promoting your site.

Unlike in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they won’t come – at least not if you don’t tell them. A poorly-promoted site is like a store with no exterior signage, and you need to use every available channel to funnel visitors towards you:

• Use offline methods: is your site on your invoices, brochures, business cards, POS receipts and flyers?
• Are you using social media to direct customers who might be looking for your services?
• Are you looking at how your competitors get traffic and where they are prominent online?
• Are you using search engine marketing – Google, Yahoo, Bing, StumbleUpon, Facebook and affiliate programs?

8. You’re being unrealistic.

Just as we don’t all grow up to be astronauts, so too not all sites can be a runaway viral success. The truth is that a good portion of businesses lack the sexiness that allows their elevation to Digg superstardom. You can do everything ‘right’ and still find traffic is slow – it does happen, and that’s ok, as long as you still receive quality traffic. While the market for pet taxidermy may be very small, an well-optimized site will still attract visitors that are really interested in the subject, and will have a great conversion rate.

9. You’re a spammer.

But you’re not, are you? You might find that you are, because you could be using a cheap hosting solution with shared IPs that are abused by other customers, or you bought a really great domain name that came with historical baggage you weren’t aware of. There are plenty of ways that legitimate sites can be caught in the spam net, and it’s a good idea to check this out.

There are ways to get around these problems: find a quality host, change your domain name or alert the search engines to a change of ownership. But it’s surprising how many times this is a problem for sites that never engage in anything particularly questionable.

10. You paid $99 to get a guaranteed #1 Google listing.

The Internet is the Wild West for SEO – and everything else – and if it sounds too good to be true, I guarantee you it is. Whereas most often you will simply lose your $99, some companies engage in blackhat SEO, which means using unscrupulous methods to improve rankings. Many of these work wonders in the short term, resulting in a near-overnight domination of the engines, but you will always – always – get caught out in the end.

The problem with this is that once you get blacklisted for taking advantage of Google (which is obviously against their Terms of Service), Google can and will punish your site by denying a listing for months, years and maybe forever. Blackhat SEO is an extremely poor strategy given the growing sophistication of their algorithm.

The truth is that good SEO is a long, hard and complicated process that stops all your competitors from doing exactly the same thing – if you work hard at it, you can reach page one for your chosen topics. Ultimately, your success on the engines will reflect your success with visitors, and there aren’t any one-stop shortcuts.

James Beswick is the Founder of One Uproar and loves everything to do with SEO, SEM and SMO.

Videos convert traffic at a rate between 2 and 6x compared with other media. It provides one of the fastest, easiest ways to build an audience and get traffic – and chances are your competitors aren’t using it.

Reel Social Media gave an excellent presentation called 5 Videos You Can Shoot in an Hour as part of the RISE Austin event yesterday. Weston Norton and Talmadge Boyd both had some great points that I’ve summarized here. The SEO world has been alive with chatter about video for a while now, so this is an ideal time to start experimenting.

Why does your site need video?

YouTube search now represents 28% of all Google searches – visitors are actively seeking out videos as well as text. For “how to”-style articles, video is often more understandable than text, faster to create, and provide a higher rate of conversions.

Putting your face – or your CEO’s and co-workers’ faces – on a site also creates a rapport than helps differentiate your organization from competitors. In the social web, your visitors will be more involved if they can see who you are.

What are the best practices for shooting video?

• Transcribe the content: search engines cannot index video content (yet) – providing a text transcript helps SEO and also allows viewers to skim for interesting sections of text to jump around the clip. One service that can do this for you is SpeakerText.
• Keep it short: the optimal length for video is around 90 seconds, in terms of maximizing the number of viewers who will stay until the end. Clearly the length will depend on the subject matter, but the video should be no longer than it needs to be.
• Invest in the audio: audiences will watch sub-standard video with good audio, but not the other way around. Make sure the audio track is as clean as possible by using a lapel microphone (see equipment below).
• Create a useful title: just as the title Titanic communicates the topic to the audience better than the name Ishtar, your title will determine whether visitors view your video or not. And also whether it gets found by Google, so flex those keywords.

What sort of video should you create?

Rather than shooting commercials, which are definitely more complicated and costly, there are various types of video that are useful to visitors and easy to create:

• Interviews: with colleagues and co-workers, providing insights, expertise or breaking news around your business.
• Testimonials: get customers to say how great your product or service is – it’s more genuine in video.
• Screencasts: for demonstrating either proprietary or third-party software, screencasts are popular on the net.
• How-to videos: show your expertise by solving niche problems or providing advice in your field.

What equipment do you need?

• External microphone: Audio Technica ATR-3550
• Video camera: Kodak ZI8.
• Video editing software: Final Cut Express (for Mac) or Premiere Essentials (for PC). There are many free editing suites available too.

Given the proliferation of cameras on devices, it’s no surprise that video is becoming more important in the social context of web marketing. The direction that Google is taking with SEO also means that you ignore these trends at the risk of losing your ranking. We’re going to start experimenting with video on all our sites in the next few weeks – more to come soon.

To install, log into your WordPress dashboard, click Plugins –> Add New and enter the name of the plugin. After finding a match, click ‘Install’.

So here are the 10 WordPress plugins that every WordPress site should have…

1. All-in-One SEO WordPress Plugin

Possibly the most popular WordPress plugin ever written, this handles 9o% of the basic mechanics of on-page SEO. There is a Pro version available, but the free version is fine for most sites. If there’s one single move that will improve your site’s ranking, it’s installing this plug-in.

2. XML Sitemaps Generator WordPress Plugin

This automatically creates a standards-compliant XML sitemap every time the content on your site changes, and alerts Google, Yahoo! and Bing. XML sitemaps are considerably underused on sites and offer an excellent way to ping the search engines when you want to be re-indexed. The beauty of this plugin is that it works automatically in the background and doesn’t require any additional work.

3. Easy Privacy Policy WordPress Plugin

Every site should have a privacy policy – there are many lawsuits landing on sites without them, due to the fact that your server collects personal data every time a visitor arrives. Additionally, if you are using Google Analytics or Google AdSense, a privacy policy is essential to ensure compliance with these programs. While this could be a headache to set-up, the Easy Privacy Policy plugin creates your policy in one-click. If you want to see the results, see the privacy policy for One Uproar.

4. WP-reCAPTCHA WordPress Plugin

If your site allows visitor comments (and it should), you are probably drowning in spam. Bots scour the web looking for sites where it’s easy to leave spam, and the only consistent way to beat them is to use a test to separate humans and computer programs. reCAPTCHA not only provides this visual recognition test, but the user interaction helps digitize words from books that computers could not read with OCR. This has the twin effect of beating most bots’ attempts at OCR (thus clearing out the spam), but also helping the digital library projects.

5. Exclude Pages WordPress Plugin

By default, every WordPress page appears in the navigation menu. But frequently there are pages that you don’t want in this menu (such as terms of use, privacy policies and landing pages from AdWords), and this plugin adds a check-box to the ‘Edit Posts’ page that enables exclusion. Very simple, but I have used it on every site I manage.

6. Google Analytics for WordPress

All websites should be using Google’s free Analytics software, which needs a short section of Javascript added to every page on your site in order to collect usage data. Rather than actually editing every page, this plugin automatically adds the necessary code. There are some advanced features for Analytics power users, but the basic mode provides immediate integration with no effort.

7. WPtouch iPhone WordPress Plugin

Serving different versions of your site for different user agents isn’t easy but this plugin generates a version of your site specifically formatted for users on iPhones, Androids and Blackberry phones. The surfing experience is extremely fast using this plugin, and instantly makes your site 3G-friendly (which those users really appreciate).

8. Cute Profiles WordPress Plugin

If you have social media accounts (and you should), then you also need to show the standard icons on every page linking visitors to those profiles. Cute Profiles provides a floating set of icons that doesn’t interfere with your template and ensures they remain in the same place on the screen regardless of scrolling. Simple, elegant and amazingly effective at boosting click-thrus to your social profiles.

9. Digg This Button Plugin

Who doesn’t dream of being on the first page of Digg? This plugin gives your pages a chance by allow the user to submit to Digg in a single click.

10. Constant Contact WordPress Widget

I really like the G-Lock Double Opt-In plugin for managing email lists, but if you have a Constant Contact account then this widget will connect your site directly to the mailing list. It’s simple to set up, easy to customize, and automates another important task on your site. Remember, when visitors don’t make purchases on your site, you should at the very least be collecting their emails.

If you need any advice in creating, configuring or managing your WordPress site, drop us an email at wordpress@oneuproar.com.

The vast majority of sites we see out there have glaring SEO errors that are very easy to fix and can make a massive difference to how Google – and other search engines – rank your site. SEO is all about understanding what search engines see when they visit your server, putting out the welcome mat and making it as friendly as possible to the ‘bots.

The final version of a page that you see in your browser is not what the search engine spider sees – they see the underlying HTML code like this:

Consequently, a major part of SEO is optimizing this HTML so that it gives the best representation of the content to the spiders. You can see what a page looks like in HTML from any browser by selecting the ‘View Source’ option.

Here are 10 quick-wins that will improve the index-ability of your site, and therefore improve your rankings, compared to not doing them:

1. Using the TITLE tag.

This is staggeringly important and yet so many pages are missing titles or, worse yet, have vanilla names like “Home” or “Intro”. Ensure every page in your site has a useful title – this is what determines the text that Google shows in the results as a headline. Don’t duplicate titles across the site – ensure each page has a relevant name (“My Company – Accounting Services – 401K advice”).

2. Using the Description tag.

Also so important and so often neglected. This provides the subheading for Google’s search engine results and if you don’t provide it, Google will select one arbitrarily. Try to produce a compelling and accurate description of the page in around 150 characters.

3. Using H1 tags for Headings.

And make them keyword rich. H1 is the highest-level headline tag and search engines know that they are a good guide to page content. The same is true of H2 tags, which are similar to sub-headings. Both H1 and H2 tags help provide a sense of structure for the document.

4. Use keyword-driven permalinks where possible.

If you’ve ever seen URLs like http://xyz.com/site.php?id=XXX?topic=12933484, you’ll know as a human these are hard to remember. For search engines, they’re also hard to interpret, since the spider doesn’t know what site.php does and what the submitted parameters do. Most web servers are capable of using permalinks, which look like http://xyz.com/shopping/shoes/nike, and this allows you to use keywords to indicate what the content is about. Keywords in URLs are powerful for SEO and are often overlooked.

Tip: If you use WordPress, permalinks can be switched to /%postname%/ from the Dashboard, which takes less than 30 seconds.

5. Buy a keyword-rich domain name.

If you haven’t yet established your domain name, this is a good time to look for domain names that contain the keywords you want to target. A limo service in Dallas called “John’s Cars” would have better success in SERPs with the domain dallas-limo.com than johns-cars.com. URLs are good indicators of likely content, so buy ones that reflect the keywords you’re targeting.

6. Check for broken links and errors.

The spider tries its best to understand your HTML, and then go to every link on every page. When it hits bad code, it may either stop or misinterpret the content. Check every page on your site for CSS validation and use Google Webmaster Tools to find where missing links and potential problems lie. Both services are fast and free.

7. Using descriptive links.

Links are the very fabric of the Internet, yet we often ignore their importance. “Get an full SEO evaluation by clicking here” is a great example of using a link poorly, since the destination is described by the word ‘here’. It’s better to say: “Get your full SEO evaluation now”, where the link is accurately described.

8. Add your pages to social bookmarking sites.

It’s free, it’s easy – go through your site and add every useful page to StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit. Not only will be adding inbound links, but users of these services may discover your website using those tools.

9. Add ALT text to images.

Search engines can’t see images well – so help them out by supplying ALT text. This is especially true for company logos or pictures of individuals, but should really apply to any image.

10. Add a sitemap to your server.

A sitemap is a small XML file that describes the contents of your site and the relationship between all the links. While the spiders can often figure this out, a sitemap is the easy way to help the spider out. Most CMS systems have automatic sitemap plugins, and there are services that will create these for you.

These are the main tactical and mechanical tips for helping SEO on your site, and while there are hundreds of other things you can do, just following these will give most sites a better chance of ranking higher in the results.

30 Free Webinars between Feb 26-28.

If you’re interested in learning about SEO, SEM, PPC, Social Media – and all the other things that determine your success online, The New Life Event is a great way to get immersed in the techniques and skills needed for e-commerce. With 30 webinars over the course of a weekend, you can attend from any computer with an Internet connection and the event is completely free.

Just register here and find a quiet room for a couple of days. This is a great way to familiarize yourself with everything that’s currently happening in promoting businesses online.

It’s no secret that Google is starting to look at an ever-increasing number of off-page factors, most of which are hard to control from an SEO perspective, in order to rank pages. So when there are off-page elements that are completely within our control, they should be the among the first tasks in getting a site ready for page one prime-time.

Google Local Business Center is one of those factors, and is the driver behind Google Maps – if you have a organization where the physical location is important to your customers (gyms, jewelry stores, retail, etc.), you should take full advantage of  your Local Business Center listing.

• Google Maps searches are a major source of traffic for sites – 10-30% is normal. Ensuring a thorough listing gives you the best opportunity of funneling visitors to your site.
• Rich information can be embedded, including business description, opening hours, coupons, business photos and so on.
• Keyword analysis shows how visitors found your listing, and quite often will reveal key phrases that you may have overlooked on your website and landing pages.

Yahoo and Bing have similar features – all of these are free and used as a driver to fuel site traffic.

The future is mobile

Aside from the excellent free traffic boost, and the factor that most of your competitors will have missed the opportunity, giving you primary placement advantage on most map services, appearing here is a great way to reach mobile users.

While mobile traffic is still a tiny overall percentage, the growth in smart devices means that they will become much more significant in the next year or two. This is especially true for navigational applications and anything location-specific, as customer use their phones to find businesses in a way that didn’t happen before.

Having a relevant a complete local business entry on all the major search engines should be the goal of every business that wants to improve their SEO.

This topic has been done to death in the SEO community, but it’s still surprising to see how companies will invest $100,000 on a Flash website with the express intention of improving their search engine rankings. There are some really innovative Flash sites out there, and it’s great to see the creativity, but while they will always be more interactive and, well, ‘Flash’ than traditional HTML/CSS sites, they will always rank lower in SERPs. Always.

100% Flash websites don’t rank well in search engines.

How GoogleBot sees a Flash site

The text and images of a Flash object are stored as a binary format, so what you see animated in the final rendered version doesn’t exist as ‘readable’ text in the containing HTML file. While Google and Adobe have both been getting better at making Flash movies more indexable, it’s still the case that Flash sites index poorly by comparison for 2 key reasons:

• Google’s sophistication of looking beyond keywords to understand context is lost in metadata used to describe the movie content. A 100% Flash site may contain dozens of page with visible text content, but this will be summarized as a handful of keywords. In many cases, designers don’t include the metadata at all.
• Great designers often don’t know much about SEO (sorry, but it’s true). In the example above, which I pulled from an unnamed 100% Flash site, the TITLE attribute is the default value “Intro”, and it’s even missing META DESCRIPTION. A search engine has no chance of understanding this site is for a national bar chain that specializes in jazz and martinis.

SEO is largely a text-driven business – robots can’t read images and Flash well.

Use Flash sparingly

There are some cases where Flash elements on a page will improve the user experience and won’t harm search engine rankings. Typically, these examples tend to be small and not central to the navigation or functionality of the page itself (such as interactive flight booking components on travel sites).

But aside from the SEO problems, there are myriad issues with using Flash:

• There’s no guarantee users have Flash installed.
• It frequently results in much slower loading times, and therefore higher bounce rates.
• Most mobile devices don’t support Flash (including the iPhone).
• Initial design is more expensive and maintenance is usually very painful.
• It’s difficult to make dynamic sites in Flash, compared with non-Flash.
• If you use Google Analytics, your designers probably hasn’t integrated methods to track movements around the site.
• RSS subscribers can’t see your content.
• It’s easy to get carried away with overly complicated animations and graphics and completely lose the user.

Flash is bad for SEO, but it can also just be a bad choice for creating a good user experience.