Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends is running a short information-packed webinar entitled:

Getting Found in Search Engines, for Beginners

These two bullet points jumped out at me, since I have clients who are trying to navigate this new frontier:

• Simple techniques you can do yourself to improve your website so you can get found by potential customers in the search engines more easily

• When and how to hire SEO professionals — over the years I have hired a number of search optimization and marketing experts and I will share some tips for what to look for

I’m planning to listen in and tweet about it. Please join in, if your schedule allows. If not, you can check the Twitter feed using the hashtag #SMBTOOLS. I’m a fan of TweetChat.com for these sorts of events, so you can use the hash tag to enter the room, as they call it.

In great news, Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed upon a XML sitemap standard.

What’s this mean to you? Well, you just need to create one XML sitemap and you can submit it to all three engines. I’ve been doing that for a while and didn’t seem to have any problem but now it’s official.

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In the cutthroat world of search engine optimization, site owners, designers, and webmasters are looking for every advantage to improve their search engine rankings. Their efforts have even extended to adding keywords to the lowly ALT tag. Does it work? Yes and no.

The ALT tag is used to provide extra information about images. By putting an ALT attribute in your image tags, you can use text to describe the image. This is helpful in a number of scenarios:

* Users on slow connections will see the ALT text until the image downloads.
* If the image fails to load in the user’s browser, the ALT text appears.
* People using text browsers or browsers with images turned off will see ALT text instead.
* Vision-impaired people using audio browsers will hear your description of the image.

But search engines also read ALT information. Because search engine “robots” — the applications that crawl the Web and compile information about its contents — can’t “see” the images, they depend on the ALT tag for information. The search engines compile ALT tag information with all the other elements of the page, including meta tags, keywords, file names, and myriad other factors, to determine the content of every page of the Web.

This has led some site owners to “spam” their ALT tags, or load them with keywords. While this practice may have worked to briefly improve the search engine ranking of the site in question, search engine technologists quickly caught on. They lowered the weight of ALT tags in their ranking schemes and developed ways to discern between “good” ALT information and spammed ALT tags. The moral of this story? The techs are never more than a step behind the people who seek to exploit the shortcomings of search engine technology.

So what should you do with your ALT tags?

Do: use ALT attributes to accurately describe your images, for all the reason listed above. They may even help your search engine rankings, and they certainly can’t hurt it.

Do not: spam your ALT tags. Search engines are way too sophisticated to fall for that — and abusing the ALT attribute may even get you labeled a spammer and lower your search engine ranking.

As with any aspect of Web design, the goal should always be to make your site easy for users to navigate. This will help ensure that users find what they’re looking for and complete whatever transaction you want them to, be it to register, purchase, or just return to your site later. Judicious and proper use of ALT tags can contribute to a good overall site experience, which will help keep your users happy. Source

According to Shah, some slight-of-hand tricks you should avoid include:

Link farms. Most SEO professionals agree that the number of inbound links plays a critical role in search rankings. Some less scrupulous practitioners, therefore, create a group of dummy Web sites for the sole purpose of linking to the actual Web site.

Keyword stuffing. Once upon a time, the constant repetition of certain keywords might have manipulated rankings. But no more–search engines got wise to this practice, and it’s now a wasted effort.

Hidden text. Placing white text on a white background–visible to spiders, but not to humans–is a seemingly invisible way to load a page with rank-improving content. But, he notes, “Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point.”

The Po!nt: “An Internet strategy that is predicated on outsmarting Google is not a smart strategy,” says Shah. “Working with search engines instead of trying to exploit them is the only approach that works in the long term.”

Do your research! Properly choosing the right keywords for your website can be very helpful in increasing your websites ranking in the search engine. Well, a lot of companies have an idea about what keywords are relevant for their products or services for their company, but these keywords may not be what users are searching for in the search engines. Doing your homework, and research to find what your potential clients associate with you products and services can be very helpful in increasing traffic to your site.

If your website is optimized for the keywords or keyword phrases that people are actually using to find solutions that your company offer, you will increase traffic to your site and in turn lead to increasing sales.

Here you can find out more about choosing keywords and search engine optimization.

If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to post them below. I will do my best in responding and answering them.

Creating a website can be a fun time. There are millions of personal and business websites on the internet, including this one. Of course, if you want your website to be viewed by other people you must get past a lot of competition.

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Google gives you the options to list your business website as your homepage, along with your business name, physical address, and phone numbers.

New features have been recently added to your Local Business Center, showing you analytics. You can now see detailed useful information about your search terms, your business location and what drove them to your site. Very similar to Google Analytics.

While your setting this up don’t forget to take a look at the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide to learn how to help Google crawl and index your site for higher search engine ranking.

is very vital for your online marketing campaign. Do your due diligence and you will reap the rewards, especially when that traffic starts rolling in. Here is a great article for you to get started with. Title, Anchor, <h1>, <H2>, What Matters? What Doesn’t?

By Mike McDonald – Tue, 06/16/2009 – 15:31

Search Engine Marketing and SEO have always been very dynamic fields.  Search engines make changes all of the time.  Sometime they announce their changes, sometimes we are left to guess at them.  In either event, more often than not, we are left  largely to our own devices in terms of assessing the impact of these changes and what to do about them – if anything.

This makes sessions related to ranking factors pretty popular at shows like SMX Advanced.  This year was no exception and I was able to get a few minutes with one of this years speakers, Rand Fishkin, to chat about the state of SEO ranking factors.

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In an article for the Legal Intelligencer, Gina F. Rubel writes that some law firms are shortening their names for online marketing and public relations reasons at the advice of marketers.