Yahoo was the double-secret 800-pound gorilla in the room, along with AOL and MSN, until now.  It looks like Facebook is now besting Yahoo!, Mr. Old Reliable, according to The Next Web and Comscore:

I use many of these fine WordPress SEO plugins on Marketing Conversation and Chris Abraham – Because the Medium is the Message. I never got around to collecting the modules list; however, that’s cool because Mashable’s  Sean P. Aune created his own list in the form of 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress:

All in One SEO Pack- One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this. Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

Via Search Engine Journal, Oscars Predictions for 2009 Winners Online:

• AOL’s MovieFone 2009 Oscar Predictions : AOL has put together a slideshow of their Oscar Pool predictions and have picked Penelope Cruz for Best Supporting Actress & Sean Penn as Best Actor from the film Milk.
• Oscar Frenzy : A blog crazy about the Oscars with their predictions list and a vibrant commenting frenzy, Oscar Frenzy has gone against the grain and predicted that Revolutionary Road will win the Best Picture.
• MSN Movies : MSN, like most other online entertainment sites, is not predicting that Mickey Rourke will win Best Actor, and feels that Sean Penn will win it for Milk, although they say Rourke should win because he has earned it.
• Oscars on Go.com : Of course since ABC is hosting the actors they can’t really predict the winners without there being any controversy, but they have set up the Official Oscars site with live streaming of the Oscars and the Red Carpet festivities.

Email: cja@well.com
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I met Lori Gottlieb years ago now and I am a passionate fan. There are even rumors that I will be mentioned in an upcoming Atlantic article, “Marry Him:  The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” which will be coming out in the March issue available online this Friday.Forget about me me me for a minute — this is about Lori.  Lori was just on NPR today and will be on the Today Show tomorrow.  Here’s an excerpt from her email:

“I’ll also be interviewed about the piece on The Today Show this Friday, 2/8 (NBC, between 8 & 8:30 a.m..).  And NPR ran my commentary today that speaks to some of the points in the Atlantic story.  You can hear that at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18751687.”

I think Lori is smashing and I am so happy to be a part of this article and this project.  When the article comes online on Friday, I will reveal all of the awful details of my interview — what I said about love, marriage, etc.  Egad! To quote Lori in her email:

“Thanks again for your great quotes and insight.  Either we’re all really cynical, or we’re just depressingly reality-based, and true love, like religion, is indeed the opiate of the masses.”

Amen, sister! Anyway, if you’re not yet a Fan of Lori Gottlieb, please check out her Official Lori Gottlieb Web Site. Also, check out all the magazine articles she has done in the past:

• Glamour UK (Jennifer Lopez cover profile) October 2007

• MSN (“Are You the Last One Single?”) October 2007

• Grazia magazine/UK (Nicky Hilton interview) September 2007

• Grazia magazine/UK (Courtney Love interview) July 2007

• MSN (“Left Out in the Cold”) April 2007

• The New York Times (“Teaching Movie Moguls to Wipe Drool”) March 2007

• Grazia magazine/UK (Eric Mabius “Ugly Betty” profile) February 2007

• MSN (“Valentine’s Day Survival Guide”) February 2007

• The Los Angeles Jewish Journal (“When D-A-T-E  Becomes a Four-Letter Word”) January 2007

• Women’s Health (“It’s All Relative”) December 2006

• The New York Times (“My Mother the TV Writer”) November 2006

• MSN (“First Date Fumbles”) November 2006

• Glamour UK (Sarah Michelle Gellar cover profile) November 2006

• Glamour UK (Christina Aguilera cover profile) October 2006

• MSN (“Got Kids?”) September 2006

• MSN (“Single Parent Pickup Tricks”) August 2006

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Snips and Snapshots”) May 2006

• Glamour (“Party of Two and A Half”) April 2006

• The Atlantic Monthly (“How Do I Love Thee?”) March 2006

• Elle (“Who’s Your Daddy?”) February 2006

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “Sense and Sensitivity”) October 2005

• The Atlantic Monthly (“The XY Files”) September 2005

• Red magazine, UK (Teri Hatcher cover story) September 2005

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Once Upon a Heeb”) July 2005

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Mama Said…”) June 2005

• The Los Angeles Times (Calendar: “As Biological Clocks Go, His is More Like a Travel Alarm”) May 2005

• The Los Angeles Times (Calendar: “Please Leave a Hidden Message After the Tone”) April 2005

• Fresh Yarn (“Sleepless in JFK”)

• The Los Angeles Times (Calendar: “Don’t Make Me Laugh”) March 2005

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“The Court of Cupid”) February 2005

• Elle (“Insignificant Other”) November 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Political Bedfellows”) October 2004

• The Los Angeles Times (Calendar: “To Win With Defeatism”) September 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Guilty of Being Too Guilty”) September 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Wandering Back Into the Fold”) September 2004

• Glamour (“Little Black Book”) September 2004

• People (“Colors Insulting to Nature” Review) August 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “SWF Seeks Same”) August 2004

• Redbook (“Sweet Revenge”) August 2004

• People (“Grosse Pointe Girl” Review) June 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “Competitive Coupling”) June 2004

• People (“What to Keep” Review) May 2004

• People (“Like the Red Panda” Review) April 2004

• Glamour (“Why I Love Going to Work”) April 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “Vanity Body Plates”) March 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “V-Day Gestures”) February 2004

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “Full Disclosure”) November 2003

• People (“Save Karyn” Review) September 2003

• People (“Family Trust” Review) September 2003

• Glamour (“Bed Test”) August 2003

• People (“Sushi For Beginners” Review) June 2003

• L.A. Weekly (“French Fry Nation“) June 2003

• People (“Rescuing Patty Hearst” Review) March 2003

• The Los Angeles Times (Sunday Calendar: “A Degree of Humor“) March 2003

• The Los Angeles Times (Sunday Calendar: “Out of the Deep End“) February 2003

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “Prozac Jewess“) February 2003

• Farallon Films: Odds & Sods (“The Penis Diaries“) January 2003

• Glamour (“Tummy Troubles”) January 2003

• Redbook (“My Big Mistake that Turned Out Great”) December 2002

• Stanford magazine (“A Blonde’s Bombshell”) December 2002

• Minnesota Monthly (“Father Knows Best”) December 2002

• The New York Post (“Teens on Film”) November 2002

• People (“All is Vanity” Review) November 2002

• Redbook (“You Won’t Believe Who I Married”) October 2002

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Inside the Cult of Kibu”) August 2002

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “Literary Speed-Dating”) August 2002

• People (“Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber” review) July 2002

• Elle (“The Ex-Girlfriends Club”) July 2002

• People (“Angels” review) June 2002

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (“Faith in Unique Places“) April 2002

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “Will the Real Jew Please Stand Up?“) April 2002

• People (“Slave to Fashion” review) April 2002

• People (“Advanced Sex Tips for Girls” review) March 2002

• This Side of Doctoring: Reflections From Women in Medicine December 2001

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “L.A. Jew”) November 2001

• People (“Last Year’s River” review) November 2001

• The New York Times (“A Home Office Needs Its Boundaries”) October 2001

• ChickClick (Interview with “7th Heaven’s”Beverley Mitchell) October 2001

• The L.A. Jewish Journal (Singles: “The Rabbi-Bad Boy Complex”) October 2001

• San Jose Mercury News (“The World Below” review) October 2001

• Mademoiselle (“Brunch With…” columns) September, October, November 2001

• People (“Long Time No See” review) September 2001

• Mademoiselle (“My Childhood Friends… Today”) September 2001

• Redbook magazine (“The Most Hated Women in America”) August 2001

• Modern Bride (“Destination San Francisco“) August 2001

• Seventeen Magazine (“Forgive or Forget?”) August 2001

• Mademoiselle (Health News) July 2001

• The San Francisco Chronicle (“High Maintenance” review) July 2001

• iLife (“Wired Women”) July 2001

• Farallon Films: Odds & Sods (“Fish Girl“) June 2001

• Time Magazine (“Thirtysomething meets ER“) April 2001

• The San Jose Mercury News (“A Stethoscope on the Soul”) April 2001

• Mademoiselle (“Cocaine in the Corner Office”) April 2001

• CosmoGirl! (“Disordered Eating”) April 2001

• The Industry Standard/Year In Review (“Inside the Cult of Kibu“) December 2000

• Time Digital (“Is There a Geek in the House?”) December 2000

• The Industry Standard (“Seeking Seclusion“) November 2000

• The New York Times (“When Six Figures Add Up to Zero“) October 2000

• The Industry Standard (“From Glitterati to Digerati“) September 2000

• Webdelsol Editor’s Pick (“All the King’s Horses”) July 2000

• Salon (“But Enough About Me: Does Writing a Memoir Give People Carte Blanche to Analyze Your Life”) June 2000

• Salon Table Talk (a week-long online chat with the author) June 2000

• Oxygen.com (Breakup Girl: “Hooking Up at 35,000 Feet”) May 2000

• DrDrew.com (“Liposuction Lessons”) April 2000

• Oxygen.com (Breakup Girl: “Club Med School”) April 2000

• Stanford magazine (“Left for Dead”) January 1999

• Selected Columns from Salon Magazine, 1998: •Bad Chemistry: When your lab partner is an obsessive compulsive, not even the data is safe •Breasts on the Brain: Anatomy is grueling enough without a gang of unweaned college boys drooling over the specimens •Horrible Harvard: An interview at Harvard Medical School reveals the ice behind the ivy •Behind Closed Doors: When my favorite professor revealed that he was human, too, I knew I’d never look at him the same way again •Survival of the Earliest: Competing for grades is one thing. But facing off for parking spaces means all-out war •Penile Ponderings: In search of vestigial vaginas and other ethical dilemmas •Ghosts on campus: Within the cozy community of campus life, there are plenty of cracks to fall through

• Slate (Guest Diarist) August 1998

• The Outlook (“15 Minutes”) February 1998

I worship Hill Holliday. They have their required Flash “brand presence” with all the fancy “interactive” requirements, and that takes up 800×600. Were that all, I would blanch and spit on the ground.

I hate Flash because I am highly textual. So, go to Hill | Holliday and then… wait for it … scroll down. Yes, the entire Hill Holliday corporate site is a simple header on the top of a powerful and admired blog. A powerful and admired vertical and industry blog. Brilliant! Bravo!

Here’s why this is all so important: Google and the other search engines don’t see Flash-based sites: they’re invisible. Read this…

Make Your Invisible Graphics-Intensive or Flash Site Highy Visible to Google

Chances are that your corporate website is beautiful and expensive. Beautiful websites tend to be rich in graphics, images, photos, and Flash content. They also tend to be shallow with few pages and very little copy. Sites like this are almost impossible for Google to find. If Google can’t find you then neither can your customer. Until now. This article helps you turn your invisible corporate website into a high-profile and highly-effective medium for communication.

This article is designed to help you turn your stealth website into a big, loud, impressive, bomber of a website with plenty of payload capacity, the payload being your company, your message, your products, your services, and your story.

Corporate websites that are highly graphics-intensive or are built using Macromedia Flash or Shockwave rich content are pretty much invisible to every search engine because search engines want nothing more than lots and lots of descriptive and rich content. In general, the prettier the site, the more impossible it is to actually find unless you know just where to look.

Websites are delivery vehicles and their payloads are your company message, your products, your services, your brand, your culture, and your story. Is your company website an F-117 stealth fighter, only visible to people who know where to look and only carrying a small payload, or is your company a C-130 Hercules, filling the sky with its size and noise and carrying a massive payload.

There are some important things to consider when optimizing a web site for search engines, using Google as the gold standard. SEO requires three things, two of which most web developers and companies do good jobs: rich textual title content, rich textual metadata content (in the form of meta tag keywords and description), and rich body textual content.

Most websites suffers from a strong lack in rich body textual content because they are in general built like brochures: very shallow and very graphical. Sites that rely heavily on either image files or Flash content suffer disproportionately when it comes to search engine ranking. Why?

Because search engines can only index the content that web sites offer them and the only content that the search engines can use is plain text. Although handsome, graphically-rich sites don’t have either the diversity or the sheer volume of keyword phrases that text-rich sites have. In addition to pure volume, search engines also need to find all keyword variations of your service – all variations of the service that your potential clients might use. Search engines also care about what is called “keyword density?? which means that the most readable of copy isn’t necessarily the most findable.

Keep Pronouns to a Strict Minimum

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.??

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.??

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorithms. Of course, I am exaggerating in order to make a point. I removed all the pronouns and made sure that everything is completely contextualized – not for your visitors, but rather for the search engines.

For my example, I made sure that there was a broad diversity of all the ways people might search for this content. In addition, I made sure that I also mentioned all the buzzwords and key terms that I could imagine. Brainstorming with your sales and communication team or looking at the kind of words and wording your competitors use is always a great idea.

The Controversial Image ALT Tag

Although there is much debate over whether Google pays any attention to ALT tags for images, I always recommend adding ALT tags to all image files, even when the web page is made up of a “sliced image.?? The only ALT tags that exist are usually in the banner of the site. No other parts of a highly graphical or flash-based main page are usually textualized using image ALT tags.

Your company slogan, tagline, phone number, guarantees, products, services, the menu choices (navigation) should be included in the image ALT tags. Even if Google doesn’t care about ALT tags like the rumors say, the site will be way more navigable, especially to the blind and seeing impaired – and don’t they deserve a break? don’t they need your services, too?

Google’s “Eyes” Focus on Where Your Eyes Do

Google give favor and weight to headers and emphasized text. No matter what anyone says, Google cares about formatting. Strong, Bold, Emphasized, Italicized, and Hyperlinked text is favored by Google. Also, Google looks at header tags, too. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, and Header 4 are important to use. This is especially important because when the same desigers who have you that “sliced” graphics-based site, they might have designer the CSS style sheet without concern for these thing. CSS styles can change the look of regular HTML tags as easily as they can customized DIVs, SPANS, and STYLES.

Corporate Blogs

Corporate blogging is essential to the growth of online properties for a number of reasons, including access to the blogosphere and its interested and passionate community of bloggers and blog-readers. Blogs offer built-in useful tools such as RSS syndication, comments, outgoing links, blogrolls, trackbacks, a richness of text and textual content, and the ability to build celebrity and personality online through a first-person relationship with said blogosphere, current, and future customers.

Since potential and future clients are clueless as to how the company works, how you have grown the company, why you chose to go into this business, and what your vision is, this is a great opportunity to share yourself as the owner, as someone who has his finger on the pulse, and also to directly respond to the curious and the unconvinced. It would also allow you to accept and then publish shameless testimonials from real fans like me. It would also allow you to publish any and all positive or neutral mentions (testimonials or otherwise) about the blog or your official corporate website.

Corporate Blog as SEO Strategy

The Search Engine Optimization of your official corporate website will aid in the site’s “findability?? in Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. There are other things that Google and the other search engines consider in addition to the textual completeness of the entire web property. The most important are the depth of the site (more pages are better), number of links and interlinks to and from the site (can be within the same site), and the frequency with which the site gets updated. A traditional corporate web site is shallow, poorly-linked (especially to external sources) and can oftentimes go for months without being updated. If Google can figure out that your site isn’t changing, it passes it over for constant indexing. It does this because Google has a finite number of resources and will revoke any resources it can in order to preserve them. Since the Internet is vast, Google give priority to web sites and web pages that are constantly-updated such as blogs. Blogs are constantly-updated, deep, many-paged sites that are constantly being updated and constantly being spidered by search engine robots.

Corporate Blog as Community Outreach

No matter how many cool offers there might be online and no matter how much of a your company’s products and services might be, a real angle in the entire blogosphere and blog world is in not only letting your service speak for itself but also that people are even more attracted to story, personality, and the behind-the-scene experience of both the people who run companies and their clients than they are to the services themselves. If you have the time, passion, and wherewithal to put the time and energy into really reaching out to the blogosphere and the community of readers and bloggers, you can get quite an amount of influence and sway – real impact and market penetration – by just building a relationship with the blogsavvy, wealthy, young, and the professional – people with money, in other words. These types of people, 25-45, are the same sort of people who spend a lot of time reading blogs.

Blog Community Outreach

One powerful technique for building community on blogs is to first find a compelling item about your industry, products, and services then search for the blogs that are already talking about it on Technorati. It is much easier to message on blogs that are already having friendly conversation.

Technorati as Strategic Tool

Spread the word online: People are already talking about how busy they are, how awful their places look, and so forth — tell them about your company, your culture, your history, your story, your products, and the services you offer – and do it openly and honestly and place your own name, your own email, and either the URL of your web site or the URL of the blog itself. Here’s how:

1) Go to Technorati.com, a blog search engine.

2) Type in one or more of the keyword phrase in your Meta Tag keywords

3) Go to the blogs that are talking about your company, industry, products, and services

4) Where appropriate, leave a short note about your company or your corporate blog

5) Come back the next day (or as often as you can) and do the same thing but be sure to follow-up with the conversation because dropping a message without coming back is considered spam and in the blogosphere, an ounce or prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Submit your Blog and Website to Search Engines

I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

The Services You Might Want to Employ

Although I have not used the services, one respectable way of increasing your link popularity and prestige in Google is to use a service like Text Link Ads. What Text Link Adss offers is a link-buying service that does double-duty. The double duty is as follows: in addition to creating clickable links on the popular sites that can choose and afford, it will also allow you to legally create Google bombs that will heighten the probability that your company website or your corporate blog will turn up when people search for your company, your industry, your market, your products, and your services.

Employing “localized” Google AdWords, content-based Google AdWords, and search-based Google AdWords is a no-brainer. There are other advertising solutions available now, including finding the advertising networks that might be placed on some of the blogs you find the most focused or relevant, including BlogAds, etc.

Okay, I hope that helps. I am tired of writing but if you have any more questions, please feel free to ask me questions below in the comment section and I will both answer them and also use your questions, comments, feedback, and suggestions to fuel future articles.

I collected all of my personal blog articles to-date on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and have been handing them out to folks who still believe that SEO is snake oil and I thought I would share them with you, too, since most of you students of blogging actually want your words, your passion, and your voice to be heard.

Make Your Invisible Graphics-Intensive or Flash Site Highly Visible to Google

Until now. This article helps you turn your invisible corporate website into a high-profile and highly-effective medium for communication.

This article is designed to help you turn your stealth website into a big, loud, impressive, bomber of a website with plenty of payload capacity, the payload being your company, your message, your products, your services, and your story.

Corporate websites that are highly graphics-intensive or are built using Macromedia Flash or Shockwave rich content are pretty much invisible to every search engine because search engines want nothing more than lots and lots of descriptive and rich content. In general, the prettier the site, the more impossible it is to actually find unless you know just where to look.

Websites are delivery vehicles and their payloads are your company message, your products, your services, your brand, your culture, and your story. Is your company website an F-117 stealth fighter, only visible to people who know where to look and only carrying a small payload, or is your company a C-130 Hercules, filling the sky with its size and noise and carrying a massive payload.There are some important things to consider when optimizing a web site for search engines, using Google as the gold standard. SEO requires three things, two of which most web developers and companies do good jobs: rich textual title content, rich textual metadata content (in the form of meta tag keywords and description), and rich body textual content.

Most websites suffers from a strong lack in rich body textual content because they are in general built like brochures: very shallow and very graphical. Sites that rely heavily on either image files or Flash content suffer disproportionately when it comes to search engine ranking. Why?

Because search engines can only index the content that web sites offer them and the only content that the search engines can use is plain text. Although handsome, graphically-rich sites don’t have either the diversity or the sheer volume of keyword phrases that text-rich sites have. In addition to pure volume, search engines also need to find all keyword variations of your service – all variations of the service that your potential clients might use. Search engines also care about what is called “keyword density??? which means that the most readable of copy isn’t necessarily the most findable.

Keep Pronouns to a Strict Minimum

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.???

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.???

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorithms. Of course, I am exaggerating in order to make a point. I removed all the pronouns and made sure that everything is completely contextualized – not for your visitors, but rather for the search engines.

For my example, I made sure that there was a broad diversity of all the ways people might search for this content. In addition, I made sure that I also mentioned all the buzzwords and key terms that I could imagine. Brainstorming with your sales and communication team or looking at the kind of words and wording your competitors use is always a great idea.

The Controversial Image ALT Tag

Although there is much debate over whether Google pays any attention to ALT tags for images, I always recommend adding ALT tags to all image files, even when the web page is made up of a “sliced image.??? The only ALT tags that exist are usually in the banner of the site. No other parts of a highly graphical or flash-based main page are usually textualized using image ALT tags.

Your company slogan, tagline, phone number, guarantees, products, services, the menu choices (navigation) should be included in the image ALT tags. Even if Google doesn’t care about ALT tags like the rumors say, the site will be way more navigable, especially to the blind and seeing impaired – and don’t they deserve a break? don’t they need your services, too?

Google’s “Eyes” Focus on Where Your Eyes Do

Google give favor and weight to headers and emphasized text. No matter what anyone says, Google cares about formatting. Strong, Bold, Emphasized, Italicized, and Hyperlinked text is favored by Google. Also, Google looks at header tags, too. Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, and Header 4 are important to use. This is especially important because when the same desigers who have you that “sliced” graphics-based site, they might have designer the CSS style sheet without concern for these thing. CSS styles can change the look of regular HTML tags as easily as they can customized DIVs, SPANS, and STYLES.

Corporate Blogs

Corporate blogging is essential to the growth of online properties for a number of reasons, including access to the blogosphere and its interested and passionate community of bloggers and blog-readers. Blogs offer built-in useful tools such as RSS syndication, comments, outgoing links, blogrolls, trackbacks, a richness of text and textual content, and the ability to build celebrity and personality online through a first-person relationship with said blogosphere, current, and future customers.Since potential and future clients are clueless as to how the company works, how you have grown the company, why you chose to go into this business, and what your vision is, this is a great opportunity to share yourself as the owner, as someone who has his finger on the pulse, and also to directly respond to the curious and the unconvinced. It would also allow you to accept and then publish shameless testimonials from real fans like me. It would also allow you to publish any and all positive or neutral mentions (testimonials or otherwise) about the blog or your official corporate website.

Corporate Blog as SEO Strategy

The Search Engine Optimization of your official corporate website will aid in the site’s “findability??? in Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. There are other things that Google and the other search engines consider in addition to the textual completeness of the entire web property. The most important are the depth of the site (more pages are better), number of links and interlinks to and from the site (can be within the same site), and the frequency with which the site gets updated. A traditional corporate web site is shallow, poorly-linked (especially to external sources) and can oftentimes go for months without being updated. If Google can figure out that your site isn’t changing, it passes it over for constant indexing. It does this because Google has a finite number of resources and will revoke any resources it can in order to preserve them. Since the Internet is vast, Google give priority to web sites and web pages that are constantly-updated such as blogs. Blogs are constantly-updated, deep, many-paged sites that are constantly being updated and constantly being spidered by search engine robots.

Corporate Blog as Community Outreach

No matter how many cool offers there might be online and no matter how much of a your company’s products and services might be, a real angle in the entire blogosphere and blog world is in not only letting your service speak for itself but also that people are even more attracted to story, personality, and the behind-the-scene experience of both the people who run companies and their clients than they are to the services themselves. If you have the time, passion, and wherewithal to put the time and energy into really reaching out to the blogosphere and the community of readers and bloggers, you can get quite an amount of influence and sway – real impact and market penetration – by just building a relationship with the blogsavvy, wealthy, young, and the professional – people with money, in other words. These types of people, 25-45, are the same sort of people who spend a lot of time reading blogs.

Blog Community Outreach

One powerful technique for building community on blogs is to first find a compelling item about your industry, products, and services then search for the blogs that are already talking about it on Technorati. It is much easier to message on blogs that are already having friendly conversation.

Technorati as Strategic Tool

Spread the word online: People are already talking about how busy they are, how awful their places look, and so forth — tell them about your company, your culture, your history, your story, your products, and the services you offer – and do it openly and honestly and place your own name, your own email, and either the URL of your web site or the URL of the blog itself. Here’s how:1) Go to Technorati.com, a blog search engine.

2) Type in one or more of the keyword phrase in your Meta Tag keywords

3) Go to the blogs that are talking about your company, industry, products, and services

4) Where appropriate, leave a short note about your company or your corporate blog

5) Come back the next day (or as often as you can) and do the same thing but be sure to follow-up with the conversation because dropping a message without coming back is considered spam and in the blogosphere, an ounce or prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Submit your Blog and Website to Search Engines

I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

The Services You Might Want to Employ

Although I have not used the services, one respectable way of increasing your link popularity and prestige in Google is to use a service like Text Link Ads. What Text Link Adss offers is a link-buying service that does double-duty. The double duty is as follows: in addition to creating clickable links on the popular sites that can choose and afford, it will also allow you to legally create Google bombs that will heighten the probability that your company website or your corporate blog will turn up when people search for your company, your industry, your market, your products, and your services.

Employing “localized” Google AdWords, content-based Google AdWords, and search-based Google AdWords is a no-brainer. There are other advertising solutions available now, including finding the advertising networks that might be placed on some of the blogs you find the most focused or relevant, including BlogAds, etc.

Okay, I hope that helps. I am tired of writing but if you have any more questions, please feel free to ask me questions below in the comment section and I will both answer them and also use your questions, comments, feedback, and suggestions to fuel future articles.

Control Your Google Listing

I control all the aspects of the following return — title and description (and maybe even placement). You should too!

How did I do that? Well, I just wrote some code and pasted it into my blog template, above the opening tag, between the and tags. Simple but mightily effective!

Holler!

If you optimize your blog you can control the way Google shows your site to the world.

Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags.

If you want to see what meta tags I use, they’re listed at the bottom of this article. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

(For you newbies, the meta tags all go within the header tags in your blog template. So you will need to do some template editing.)

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Quick Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips You Can ControlGoogle, Yahoo!, and MSN already love you, blogger, so just write, write, write. If you have more time and an inclination you can continue reading.

Without doing anything to your blog, you have an advantage which is lots and lots of text that is generally topic-centric and frequently updated. You are already ahead of the game. Add to that that Google loves you and cares about keeping up with the blogosphere and you can safely stop reading now and be fine. Just make sure you write something twice a day.

Although the most important part of SEO is getting Very Important People to link to you, there is a lot you can do on your own that I will go into below (I also go over how I think Google works in How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion).

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms. To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorythms.

Third, optimize your blog as though it were a traditional website. Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.

Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.

Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.

Six, make sure you use a ping server. If you don’t know a thing, start with filling out Pingomatic as best you can. That should be good enough for now. Blogger and WordPress.com offer a checkbox you can use to send out the ping. You can probably build it into your submission using the WordPress “Update Services” under Options/Writing, then scroll down. On MT it’s in Settings/New Entry Defaults/Publicity/Remote Interfaces. I use a long list that I will post under the Meta Tags below:

Ping Server List for ChrisAbraham.com

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping(I was Inspired by BBC’s More Blog Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks)

What is a Ping Server?

Whenever you post a new entry to your blog I am pretty sure you tell all your friends. It is also important to tell blog search engines and news aggregators so that they too can check out all your new content. Telling them you have fresh content is called pinging them.

According to the definition on Feedster, “A ping server is a bit of software infrastructure, a server program to be specific, which lets a feed tell us ‘I’ve just updated; please index me now.’ What it receives is a small tidbit of information from a blogging or publishing tool which is called a ‘ping’. Hence the name.”

The simple solution is to make sure you visit Ping-o-Matic every time you publish a new blog entry. I have already published a comprehensive list of available ping servers and I will discuss other solutions in future articles.

Depending on which blog service or which blog software you use, there are simple ways to automate the act of pinging all of the ping servers.

I plan to delve much more deeply into this very very soon.

Search Engines Favor RSS Feed Supported Sites

To paraphrase Lee Odden, “RSS feeds get blogroll, inclusion in RSS directories assist with link popularity, Updated RSS feeds are indexed more frequently, RSS output contributes to your freshness, The format of most RSS feeds provides content that’s easier for search engines to understand.”

Basic SEO for Bloggers Comes a Little Short

Thanks to Darren for the link to Basic SEO tactics for bloggers. That said, it is too basic.

It doesn’t talk much about SEOB (Search Engine Optimization for Blogs) so much as just how to architect your blog. There are so many other tips and tricks.

I am opening up a text page right now to start writing my own Basic SEO for Blogs because if I am going to tell you that this article is severely limited, I had better suggest something better, right?

I Have Power Over Algorithmic Search Engines

“Some time ago, I realized that I have power over google, yahoo and other algorithmic search engines. I can choose words and phrases. And then I can get top ranking for those words in search engine results.” Me too, and I couldn’t say it better myself. PC4Media via ProBlogger.

How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion

Google indexes web pages and then ranks them based on three distinct and equally-weighted aspects.

The first aspect is a trinity which is based on the content of each page: page title, page description and keywords (meta tag data), and page full-text content. A page that has similar content wording (and density) is considered to be legitimate. If a web page has all three components it generally a reliable resource.

The second aspect is that Google favors web sites that are continually-updated; therefore, a blog is always indexed more often and considered more timely than a static “brochure” web site.

The final and most-important aspect Google uses to favor (and thus rank higher) web pages is each page’s (and site’s) link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many other sites link back to a site; in addition, Google goes one step further and considers a number of things to insure that the link popularity isn’t abused: prestige.

If an old, high-prestige, high link-popularity web site (or sites) links to a site, it is more beneficial to the site’s link popularity than if a host of insignificant sites link to a site. Old, popular, and well-trafficked sites always lend their prestige to the site to which they link.

The three taken together result in the ranking of the site based on a typical Google keyword search.

You need the content (flash-based and highly graphical pages without well thought out meta tags are virtually invisible to Google), you need the link popularity, and when it comes to it, you need to have new content to show up in the top-ten on Google.

A popular upstart blog or message board can oftentimes achieve better ranking than a big corporate website, especially if that website is new or has changed the architecture of its website recently (Google considers the sudden and complete change of the architecture and file-structure of a web site really fishy).

Never Use Pronouns When You Blog

First, never use pronouns. Keyword density is essential to how Google ranks you. Second, use variations on search terms.

To illustrate the first two points, I will take a bit of copy and optimize it for search engines and their love for keyword density. Instead of this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential strategy for every firm. It has become as essential to small and large firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, it has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Try this:

“Viral marketing is now an essential marketing strategy for every marketing firm. Viral marketing, also known as relationship marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, conversational marketing, and passion marketing, has become as essential to small and large marketing firms alike, both for its relative affordability and its potentially high effectivity. With the advent of the Internet, viral marketing has become amazingly efficient: all you need is a laptop and a compelling message.”

Yes, you’re appalled by its inefficiency and wordiness. Your boss would never approve, nor would your writing coach. Tough. This is not about winning the PEN/Faulkner, its about arousing Google’s algorythms.

Invest in Google Sitemap as a Tool for SEO Analysis

Investing in Google Sitemap is worthwhile. For example, the top search query for chrisabraham.com is ladder theory and the top search query click is nicole richie diet.

Brand Protection on Blogs

Andy Sernovitz is spot on when it comes to how to control and manage brand online, especially when it comes to online brand protection.

It boils down to this:

Blog search engines such as Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse only really care about the last word. If you can reply to a negative, hurtful, brand hit, then you can dominate the conversation and win the debate, in most cases.

Google cares about everything but the latest word isn’t always indexed yet, so therefore, in the world of Google, the better indexed site always wins. Learn about SEO and Google Sitemaps if you want to compete here.

You can’t control online conversation unless you participate. The only way to get indexed by Google or to show up on Technorati, Feedster, and BlogPulse is to be an online opinion leader who has a site that has made it out of Technorati, Feedster, BlogPulse, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google’s sandbox, and has an SEO and a Blog Search Engine strategy.

You have to initiate membership, become part of the conversation, build street cred, have an SEO and blog strategy, and become a respect online opinion leader before something goes awry.

To quote Mr. Sernovitz, , “you’ll never be able to control the blogosphere conversation. Don’t even try. You’ll never be able to manage your blog coverage like you manage the press. Don’t even try. But what you can do is participate, earn respect, and tell your story. Jump in, join the conversation, and be a part of it.“

This is my response to a very brilliant and spot-on article. I have nothing to say in contest to it, so stop reading me and go read WOM Tactics: Blogs are Upside Down.