I want to be lazy and take things out of the iSEO book and make a SEO blog post, just to keep blogging.  Some of you know that Keith and I are exhausted working 10+ hour days almost 7 days a week for the last 22 months.  So working hard is in our bones, but if you don’t work smart, don’t work at all.  Same goes with SEO, and the Key to your eSuccess on SEO is always about the proper keywords. And, there is no more important Place for keywords usage than Meta Tags. I am shocked by how many companies just have their company name, and no keywords describing their business. What is wrong people, do you Not care about being found?

So here is an excerpt from the iSEO blog book. Enjoy the chapters or paragraphs:

4. A word about Keyword Placement It is very important that you place some of your best “keyword text” on your web page before your images as viewed in linear order from the source code. That’s because search engines page content via the source code in linear order and they don’t give a hoot about actual images. Instead, they look only at the text on the page as revealed by the source code. Although images may look nice at the top of your page, they do nothing to help your site’s findability on the SE’s.

Therefore, by placing meaningful small font keyword text at the top of your page - before your image - you can still place your logo near the top of your web site while favorably appealing to the SE’s that are looking for relevant keywords at the top of your page. Therefore, be sure to “Headline” your page with text that the search engines can recognize as relevant to what you are offering – AND place the text early in your page’s source code prior to where the images appear whenever possible. Remember, it is these keywords and keyphrases through which people will find you on the Internet. Keyword Selection Use a keyword tool to find the most targeted keywords for your site. Develop grouped themes of keywords that reflect the different sections of
your site. Keep an eye out for keywords longer than one word (phrases). Keeping within a grouped theme, choose different keywords to target each page.

5. Meta Tags For the novice it must be explained that Meta Tags are non-displayed text written into your HTML document intended to describe your page to the SE for the purpose of cataloging the content of your page. Although there is some debate as to whether or not Meta Tags should be included in your HTML document, let’s put the debate to rest. The answer is a resounding YES – the Meta description tag absolutely should be included in your document. Here’s why: many engines use The Meta description tag as the summary for your site when listed in the search results. It’s what tells a real person whether or not your site is relevant to their search. You should view it as a sales presentation for your link.

If the Meta description tag entices the searcher they will, theoretically, click your link and visit your site. Obviously that’s the purpose for being listed in the search engine in the first place. If you omit the Meta description tag then the search engine is likely to fabricate a description for your site based on arbitrary text gleaned from somewhere on your page. Here’s an example of a real-life “bad” description we found when searching for Hawaii scuba diving… Link Title: Hawaii scuba diving Summary Description: Click here to go …now, we’re pretty sure that company didn’t really want “click to go home” used as their site description but that’s what they got because they failed to use a meta description tag.

Another possibility is that the SE will omit the summary description entirely if it fails to find something useful within your page to use as a summary. In either case, a potential site visitor is less motivated to click your link if you fail to properly utilize the meta description tag. Meta Tag Character Limits Most search engines place a limit on the number of characters contains. Once the limit is reached they typically ignore In general, 250 characters – including spaces and commas thumb that falls within the guidelines of most engines. However, in case a search engine uses less than, say, wise to place the most important part of your description beginning in the event the engine truncates the tag. Meta Keywords Tag The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you’ve targeted for that specific page.

6. Turn Images From Liabilities To Assets - ALT Tag The problem with images in your web page is that the search engines do not index them at all. Therefore, your company logo may say what you are, who you are, and even state a benefit but the engines can’t index your images and therefore will not reflect their message in a keyword search results. In fact, if your image loads higher on your page (when viewing the source code) than your text, then your page starts out handicapped in a BIG way! This is a mistake. Whenever possible, avoid placing images higher on your page than keyword text. Regardless, when you do put images in your page, make them work for you, not against you by including the < ALT = here are some appropriate Keywords”> in your <IMG SRC = “image”> tags. The reason for doing this is because engines have been known to index the <IMG ALT = “Keywords”> tag.

By placing strategic keywords within the <IMG ALT = “Keywords”> tag, you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose. When a search engine’s algorithm is programmed to give credit for keywords within this tag, you win. If not, nothing lost – since none of the engines are known to penalize for using it.

Go blog your way to the Top, some of you noticed our post in the Blogging coach on Saturday about the Google Page Rank update, did you see that this page got a PR 4, just to start off with. Wow, thanks Google!

Link building is the single most important part of achieving a high-ranking web site in modern search algorithms, here is a list of tips:

**Read the bottom of this post first, yeah it’s all you need to blog about:-).  Links from a very few high PR sites such as blogs add the most.  Have me blog about your products, and you blog about my blog.  A blog market place, rent my blog for a $1 a day?  Ok, back to adding links the traditional way:-), still works.

1. Create something that legit webmasters interested in your topic would be interested in linking to.
2. When possible, try to get your keywords in many of the links pointing to your pages.
3. Register with, participate in, or trade links with topical hubs and related sites.
4. Be in the discussion or at least be near the discussion.
5. Look for free links from related sites and directories.
6. If you have some good internal content, try to get direct links to your inner pages.
7. Write articles and get them syndicated at other sites. Participate in forums to learn about what your potential consumers think is important. What frequent questions do they have?
8. How do you solve those problems?
9. Issue press releases with links to your site. Leave super glowing testimonials for people and products you really like. Oftentimes when the product owner or person posts the testimonials, they will include a link back to your site.
10. Leave relevant comments in blogs that do not send their comments through redirects.
11. Sponsor charities, blogs, or web sites related to your site. Consider renting links if you are in an extremely competitive industry. Adult, gaming, credit, and pharmacy categories will likely require link rentals and/or building topical link networks.
12. Mix your link text up. Adding words like buy or store to the keywords in your some of your link text can make it look like more natural linkage data and help you rank well for many targeted secondary phrases.
Page Importance - This factor is also referred to as PageRank due to the fact that Google produces a “rating” of pages by the same name. Google’s PageRank rating has become the industry standard.
Their tool you need is free, you can get it here: HYPERLINK “http://toolbar.google.com/” http://toolbar.google.com/ and downloading the Google Toolbar. Google is primarily driven by linkage data.
The Google Toolbar provides a 0-10 logarithmic scale to mimic the link popularity of pages. PageRank helps provide a quick glance how important Google thinks a site is. Google would like you to believe that their PageRank algorithm is the core of their search technology, but they also use many other technologies to improve their search relevancy. Many webmasters exchange links with as many people as they can, It’s not a bad idea, but a focused efforts with blogs will give you a better reward. There are algorithms for sorting good links from bad links, be smart about your choices. Many link schemes simply don’t work, the key is to get links from blogs and sites with good PR.

That is why we wanted to create a blog + Link market place for bloggers and Advertisers. So will you pay someone to blog for you, how about you should, $10 a blog. Pay per blog, instead of pay per post. People can also sponsor your blog for you. That is a solid way to say, I am sponsor of your blog, so you can link to my website or blog, right from there. Hence we have our best content driven links. Launching soon, check out our front page and link/blog your way to the top!

From our SEO Overview Chapter 6, here is an Overview the full chapter has it’s on Page above.  Search Engine optimization – Cracking The technical Nut shell:

If we don’t cover the technical aspects of Search Engine Optimization, I feel like we are not doing justice to the topic. The hard balance is what to cover technically and what to leave out. This is not a book for techies, programmers, or Internet Technorats as I call them. This book is targeted at individuals, entrepreneurs, self-help types, marketing consultants, and business people who want a primer on the sound and ethical search marketing strategies.

Having said that, and explaining this complex world of technical W3C standards, website structures, site maps, CSS, etc. is not covered here. We do recommend two book one is technical SEO for Developers via PHP. And, we also recommend Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent, written back in 2004, but it’s still a great primer, and if you want to be a SEO Pro, you have to buy the SEOBook by Aaron Wall. It’s $79 and a complete guide on SEO.

So below is the net net on the SEO Nut, it was written originally for MyTypes, Inc. by our SEO Expert Mishra, Saroj Kumar.

What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the Organic results segment of Search Engine Marketing, and it does not include any pay per click advertisement. It is considered the Organic and pure search results, and is considered by many to be much more powerful in traffic than Pay Per Click results. Getting Organic results is the science and art of Search Engine Optimization, and from now on we will write about it in terms of SEO. The word SEO is so common now days, and I think it will only grow, the key distinction between SEO and other Internet Marketing segments is that it does not involve any paid advertisements.

The science of SEO helps blogs and websites gets top results on Internet search engines under targeted keywords and phrases. It’s as important to know what to do, as well as what not to do. In this brief overview, we cannot cover all the rules and technicalities of What not to do. All we can say is, if you are trying to trick the search engines, DON’T, It will cost you way too much in the long term. We recommend only timeless strategies such as provide the best content to end-users. Make your website or blog fast, use images, videos, and build community with your site. The spectrum of SEO ranges from Black Hat, as the trickery side or White hat as the purest way. We think from a scale of 1-10 if 10 is black hat, and 5 or more would be considered black. So we recommend strategies of top 1-4. The penalties that search engines may inflict on your website is not worth the short term gain. Here are the Basics of SEO:

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. Domain Names, Titles and Keywords
2. Getting Your Web Page Titles Right 3. Keyword Selection Strategies 4. A word about Keyword Placement
5. Meta Tags 6. Turn Images From Liabilities To Assets - ALT Tag 7. Optimizing Your page content/copy
8. Use Keywords in Headings
9. Site structure: Naming File Paths
10. Be Fast: Using CSS to Minimize Page Load Time
11. Submission Strategies and Guidelines
12. Where to Get Links ?
13. Link Popularity, Page Reputation, and Page Importance
14. Six Major Rules to remember

Click On Link or iSEO Book Page Tab

Please do read the blog article as we have mentioned that Google Analytics, interesting features coming up, just thought you would want to know. Google Analytics is one of great SEO Tools to understand your web analytics.

Google Analytics Blog

Exciting Announcements at eMetrics Today
Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Today at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. Brett Crosby announced several Google Analytics features that will be rolled out over the coming weeks. Here’s a rundown.

First, you’ll be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity. Simply edit any of your Google Analytics profiles to enable “Site Search” and you can find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead. Located in the Content section of your Google Analytics reporting interface, Site Search reports show you the keywords and search refinement keywords people use, the pages from which people begin and end their searches. You can also see how search on your site affects site usage, conversion rates, and e-commerce activity. (BTW, if you don’t have a search box on your site, you might want to try the free and newly launched Google Custom Search Engine.)

We’ll begin a limited beta test of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics.

I am posting on all 4 of my blogs today, working at Tullys Coffee with my buddy Keith and business partner.  Why?  Today folks is Blog Action Day, and we all need to blog today and maybe eat Vegetarian.  What, did I just say?  I know, It’s a touchy subject, but just today eat vegetarian.  It supposedly takes 10x the energy to consume a meat based diet, and I would say that It certainly takes signficantly more.  What does this has to do with Blogging and SEO?

Everything, do you see the success of the Blog Action Day campaign?  You need to develop a campaign like that, that people will rally behind and support for a good cause.  The cause for today is for the environment.  So click on the Graphic below and read the top 50 things you can do for the environment.  Than, go submit a comment there, and you will get a high PR and powerful link and traffic to  your website.  Now that is SEO, did I not tell you that blogs are the #1 SEO Tool?

We at MyTypes have been busy, we launched our blogging community tools today, we are under staffed as you can tell.  We do miss Feng quite a bit, but i am planning to SEO blog templates soon.  Keith and I have been busy solving some technical issues to truly help, instead of just telling you about SEO and writing about it.  There is a great interview of Matt Cutts detailing some serious issues with Search Engine Optimization that some of you technical folks may find interesting, check it out with my quick introduction on my blog at mytypes.com/vipin.

I am writing every day on our Blogging Coach section, at least 2 hours a day.  So that is the main blog for everyone to read.  I should move things between this one, my CEO’s blog, and blogging coach, but i can’t seem to find the time.  So that me wonder, How many blogs do you need for SEO?  I think one, is sufficient, maybe 2 as you may want to have a personal off topic one.  I am stuck with 4 and two are getting the short end of the SEO stich.  Believe it or not this SEO blog Templates blog gets a ton of traffic.  And, since this really was not my original one, I have not fully grasped the passion for it.  So my answer for any great SEO blog is to just have one business blog, and one personal one.  That’s it, do check out our  Blogging Coach as that one gets enough traffic to keep this technical manual some competition, we have to stop the infighting of the blogs soon.

It can take decades to build a brand, but we don’t have that much time, so let’s do it today.  It took me over 14 months to crack Google top 10 for keywords “Seattle Real Estate” back in 2004. My traffic doubled and tripled in days, and i was already in top 10 in Yahoo and MSN at the time, wow, that is the power of Google. So months later, I learned the power of contextual linking, even from our own internal pages. Learning these skills with painstaking ways, and countless nights of waking hours, but hopefully you won’t have to.

Follow the key to your eSuccess, Blog almost every day, with the proper keywords, don’t trick anyone, just use the best keywords for your business. The topic here is to find those keywords this is something you have to do at least once a month.

Stop learning Google’s SEO rules of what not to do, read pages and pages of SEO books, Just keep things simple, ADD VALUE don’t try to trick anyone. The best way to keep Google and search engines happy is to provide great content for readers. What I am saying is “Google rules are very important and you can avoid them all, if your main mission is to provide great content” And, the word will get out that no matter what your page rank or link popularity, it’s still about great content via blogging.

The experts such as Problogger are saying it. Great blogging content and a targeted keywords with impactful blogging will win you the most respect and rankings from search engines. Rand Fiskin from SEOmoz.org and Darren from Problogger.net have recently talked about the same track of blogging.

They are two of the most respected people in the industry and I have been reading both of them for a while now. Actually Darren talks about forget about page rank and build a better blog.  Rand in his Linkerati article essentially says the same thing, and talks about targeting the connected/viral group on the internet. To make this technorat more common, I would like to call them the industry insiders, the techno-geek, the Nerd-herd, well yes most of us my friends and I do fall in to this. So here are two things you might want to think about always:

1. What are the most important keywords describing your business?

Second part of that is you need to find 5 keywords related to that as you will target the less competitive ones first. You should go to LinkMint.com and check out the keyword numbers in our SEO tools, and of course Google, links to both are there.

2. What is the emotional solution you provide?

This is what your brand should encompass. If you don’t know what a brand is, please do research on that subject, it’s a fascinating science. But here is quick over view. You need to come up with a couple of emotionally charged words, not just keywords to be in the URL. This is where I see people make the biggest mistakes in Marketing, they think they want to be known for that keyword, think Brand people, Brand like Coke, Miller, Harley what? For example when you think of bottled water, us old timers use to think of “evian”. Now when you think of bottled water, what do you think of? AquaFina comes to mind, Dasani comes in mind, actually I could not even think of how evian was spelled any more. You want to pick words or brands that people will remember once they make the connection with the solution you provide. A better brand example maybe “YouTube” your television, “MySpace” a place for friends, “MyTypes” the key to your eSuccess”.

So there are some tacitcal Key Word search guidelines for using our LinkMint SEO Tools, you can essentially do the same thing at adwords.google.com

Keyword Search Tool – This tool has great uses in selecting words for your URL, your site topics, and applying keywords in general text. This tool uses results listed in chronological order from yahoo search marketing and google page results to give you an idea of what people are searching for on the internet (yahoo) and how many sites are already listed with those keywords (google), thus allowing you to create your keywords accordingly. The results for the Yahoo Search Marketing lists how many searches took place on yahoo in a given month for the searched keywords. The google page results show you how many pages that are listed in google for the searched keywords. These two searches are important because you can make a comparison between what keywords are being searched and how many pages list those keywords on their site. This comparison will help tell you how much competition you can expect.
Choosing your keywords – this is an important step in SEO for your site Do your market research!!! Who are you competing against for page rank? What keywords are they using? How many other sites also list those set of keywords? What keywords is your target market searching for? Those are all basic things to consider when choosing keywords. An excellent scenario would be to have keyword that are searched frequently relative to your results but have a relatively low amount of pages that are using that set of keywords. Also don’t restrict your self to single words use “keyphrases in the same way. After you have determined what keywords / phrase you would like to use. Plan where you will use them. If you have not already chosen your URL try to get a URL with your top keyword or words in the title. If we were in the car business we would all like to have cars.com from a SEO perspective. Be creative! The next place to use your keywords are metatags.

We have had our SEO tools for a long time, but recently started to refine and bring them up par.  Mainly due to our success with the SEO blog templates, Wordpress SEO, and comments and respect from some professional Search Marketing Firms.

Check them out, and if anyone is interested in working with us to make them a plug-in for Wordpress and make them open source, we would love to hear from you.  Please email seoblogtemplates@mytypes.com