Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

If you use Firefox 3.0 or above you must install this new SEO tool. It will detail competitive data for you in a snap. Here are just a few points it gives us:

• how the on page optimization of any page looks (headings, meta description, page title)
• the keyword density of the page and popular phrases on the page
• how many links point into a page (total links, or links from external resources)
• how many links point out of a page (as well as the anchor text of these links, nofollow vs follow, internal vs external - all exportable in CSV format)

SEO Book published a great how-to-video …take the time to watch it and install it today!

• You have to be using Firefox to get this to work. If you have not yet used Firefox go download Firefox, and then come back to this page using Firefox as your web browser.
• Click Here to install the SEO for Firefox extension.

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Do you remember the time when the only thing that mattered in SEO was that you got your Web site submitted to hundreds of engines and directories? SEO was heavily reliant on Meta tags and on page factors. Now don’t get me wrong on-page factors still matter as the bases of good SEO but it takes more these days to be successful on the Internet. 

The search engines became polluted with the on-page spam and they needed to start to look at your trust from other sites so link building was a requirement. Now days those links that you get easy have disappeared from the Web, through no follow tags. More important Goggle has recently removed the recommendations to submit to directory submissions and link building from their guidelines.

These are the two guidelines that have been removed from their guidelines:

1.  Have other relevant sites link to yours

2.  Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as other industry-specific expert sites.

That was the old face of Search Engine Optimization …the new face looks like this.

Every new link you create to your site and each additional page published makes Google smarter.  The Web is becoming a big social network and the search engines are starting to follow people.  Once you start thinking of the Web as being a big social society then you will have an advantage over your competitors who are still building one link at a time.  

So what does this all mean?

It means that the search engines especially Google wants your site to be well connected throughout the social society. 

The new face of SEO now looks like this: 

·     search engine submission

·     on page optimization

·     link building

·     and a big one on ….advertising, viral marketing, public relations & social interaction 

So to recap …on-page optimization is still very important as well as targeting the correct keywords with your keyword research and the structure of your site.  But as you continue to build your sites visibility on the Web you need to keep in mind the social interaction such as blogs, bookmarking, PPC advertising and belonging to on-line communities

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If you are trying to stay ahead of the game and including a blog on your Web site and using WordPress to process that Blog, Google is on your side!

Google just announced that they now are helping Web site owners keep control of hacks made to their Web sites.

They just released that there’s been a recent trend of spammers hacking websites, and most of the time that happens because the webmaster or site owner didn’t update a piece of software that runs their website. If you think you can install a piece of software on the web in 2008 and run it forever without upgrading, I’m sorry to say that your website will be at much higher risk of getting hacked.

If you log in to the webmaster console and we think your website is running WordPress 2.1.1, you’ll soon see a message that looks like this:

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While Google has condemned buying and selling links that pass PageRank, they’ve encouraged listing in paid directories like Yahoo for years. It seems that era may have come to an end.

They have updated their guidelines concerning linking to directories.

Once your Web site was ready they used to encourage us to: 

*  Have other relevant sites link to yours. 
* Submit it to Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html. 
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your web pages. 
* Make sure that all the sites that should know about your pages are aware that your site is online. 
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

They have updated the guidelines to encourage us to follow these steps when your site is ready:

* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. 
* Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages. 
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

So what does this really mean to us?  It was asked of one of Google Techs and his response was this:

This line was removed because we feel that you should not “force” other sites to link to yours. Obviously it’s good that sites link to each other, it’s fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don’t think we need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should “have other sites link to yours” — they should be willing to do that on their own, it should be their decision not yours.

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