Following in the footsteps of Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki, I decided to come up with my own list of don’ts. There is no shortage of don’ts when it comes to SEO copywriting. It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade. Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy. 1. Don’t shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible. It’s not about the sheer volume of search terms you include. Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about. Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher’s query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio. When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience. 2. Don’t lose site of balance. If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first. However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance… always balance. 3. Don’t let someone else choose the keywords. If keyword research isn’t a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research. Don’t just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way. Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically. Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy. 4. Don’t sacrifice flow for numbers. This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting. SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don’t work in a normal sentence. An example? “Candies samples free.” Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers. The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, “If you’re looking for candies samples free, you’ve come to the right place!” Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well. 5. Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page. If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don’t try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It’s a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience. 6. Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page. I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms. However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you’ve got a bunch of typos in the content. It’s just not professional. Some writers will go for the old, “We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town.” I don’t care for that approach. It’s just not natural. Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way? I think not. 7. Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time. This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it. (See #4.) There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: “Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate. Hawaii listings can be…” See? “Real estate” is at the end of the first sentence and “Hawaii” is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there’s no problem. 8. Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation. There are many ways in which this “don’t” applies. One quick example is that of an ecommerce site. It wouldn’t be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site. They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages. Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page. If you don’t understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you’re likely to have lackluster results. 9. Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes. These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link. Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6. 10. Don’t forget the chain of protocol. There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Just the opposite, in fact. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic. Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn’t likely to do a lot of good. Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags. When you avoid making common mistakes, you’ll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too. Need help with SEO copywriting? Karon has written 3 excellent books to help you learn keyword optimization techniques. Visit http://www.CopywritingCourse.com and click to the Order page for details. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources Top 10 Don’ts for SEO Copywriting Top 10 Don’ts for SEO Copywriting

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Top 10 Don’ts for SEO Copywriting

For many retail brands, we are quickly approaching the saturation point for email volume. My Retail Email Trends Index currently indicates that retail email volume is running 19% above last year’s. While that’s slower than the 28% year-over-year increases that we were seeing in July 2008, it’s alarming because we’re heading into the holiday season. Last year, retail email volume rose 43% during the holiday season — and during its peak week was up 76%, compared to the pre-holiday baseline. If this holiday season follows the same trajectory, retailers will average 3.4 emails per week, with a peak of 4.2 emails per week. Subscribers are unlikely to suffer such increases on top of the increases already seen this year. Email marketers are sure to experience deliverability problems like some retailers had during the first week of December 2008, when average retail email volume was pushing past 3.2 emails per week. (Note that figure is less than the projected average for this upcoming holiday season.) Imagine losing all the sales generated by your email marketing program during the first week of December — plus the distraction and expense of getting your email unblocked during the heart of the holiday season. That’s what some email marketers are risking if they increase their broadcast promotional email volume like they did last year. More than ever, the question is: How can we make each email that we send work harder? How can we minimize volume increases to avoid increased list churn and deliverability issues, while maximizing revenue? Consider these tactics: Additional opt-ins. Give your subscribers the chance to opt in to an additional email stream of daily or weekly holiday deals or your “X Days of Christmas” campaign. This way you’re focusing your additional volume on subscribers who want it and are most likely to convert. I spoke to a retailer last year who said his company only sent its “12 Days of Christmas” campaign to its best customers. Company strategists felt that insulated them from the downside of higher volumes, saying that their unsubscribe rates among those receiving the additional emails was no higher than their average opt-out rate. What they failed to take into consideration is that these were their best customers, a group with lower opt-out rates and higher conversion rates. Instead of holding the line on opt-outs, they actually drove their best subscribers away at an elevated level by over-mailing them. Preference updates. Use August, September and October to ask (and perhaps even incentivize) subscribers to update their preferences. You can then use that information during November and December to power your segmentation and dynamic content programs to ensure greater relevance and higher conversion rates for your emails. If you don’t have a preference center, there may still be time to launch one before the holiday season gets underway in earnest. If you have one already, now would be an excellent time to review all the selections in it to make sure they are up to date and feeding into your email system properly. Triggered emails. Rather than sending way more broadcast emails, launch new triggered emails or revamp the ones you have. Does your welcome email make the most of that first touch? Don’t forget to take advantage of your transactional emails to promote related products and get buyers back for another purchase. Also consider shopping cart abandonment emails and browse-based emails — just be careful not to come across as too Big Brother-ish. Good luck with your holiday campaigns. Chad White is the Research Director at Smith-Harmon, an agency focused exclusively on providing email marketing strategy and creative services. Visit his blog at http://www.retailemailblog.com/ Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources Christmas Advice In July Christmas Advice In July

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Christmas Advice In July

Barnes and Noble is no stranger to the eBook business. The first ‘go round’ was shelved six years ago but yesterday the retail bookseller announced it is reentering the market in a big way. As the storefront book business continues to fight for survival in the continuing move to online purchases and other formats Barnes and Noble is looking to make sure it is in the fight. All Things D covers the development: On Monday afternoon, the bookseller announced what it describes as “the world’s largest eBookstore,” an online storefront that boasts 700,000 titles. That’s substantially more than the 300,000 available for download on Amazon’s Kindle service, though half-a-million of them are public domain books provided by Amazon (AMZN). They’ll be compatible with Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, BlackBerry smartphones, and, when it finally arrives at market, the Plastic Logic eReader — a Kindle DX-sized E-book reader for which it will be the exclusive storefront With the major players in the marketplace being Amazon and Sony the Barnes and Noble offering of E-books will not be compatible with their players. Not a surprise but interesting to say the least. You always wonder if it is more important to own the platform or the renewable purchase market (the E-books themselves). We all know that little story about Microsoft and IBM right? While I report on this industry I am not E-book friendly at this point. It would take a lot to make me switch from a physical book to the E-book format maybe because I don’t read enough. I can say though that creating a proprietary platform that will limit where or how I could buy my books is not making me interested in getting involved. One thing that people look for is flexibility and when a company tells people that they need to make an either/or vs. a both/and choice I will balk. If I were to make a paradigm shift to a new format I would want the ability to see if one is better than the other. Making your E-book offering restrictive to a particular platform is not attractive but that’s me. So are you interested in the Barnes and Noble E-book play? If there is a larger library available would you switch to their platform? How many E-book readers do we have out there anyway?

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Barnes and Noble Wants Your E-book Biz

Reflections On My 30th Birthday As I type this I just turned 30 years old and if you’re reading this and it’s still Sunday July 19 where you are, make sure you wish me a happy birthday . I had a conversation leading up to my 30th birthday with a fellow 29 year old who was heading towards her 30th with a little trepidation. She had just divorced her husband, so needless to say she was experiencing significant changes in her life. Personally I don’t look at 30 as a big deal, although there was one comment this particular girl made that caught my attention. She said as people turn 30 they usually are in one of two places – they have their “shit” together or they don’t. I told her I was about as happy as I could remember in my life as I turned 30, so her conclusion was I was one of those people who has their “shit together”. Yay for me. It Was The Worst Of Times It’s natural to reflect on your life as you get older, especially at milestone ages. If I look over my twenties I can certainly say it has been a wild ride, full of highs and lows. I left my teenage years and entered my twenties while I was at university, not really enjoying my studies, not very motivated by much and just uncomfortable in my own skin. The problem when your own self worth is low, is that you have great difficulty digging yourself out. You generally attract experiences to enhance your low self esteem because you view the world in “sad” glasses. Until you can switch the conversation going on inside your head from negative to positive, your experiences in the outside world will reflect this, further enhancing your negative belief structure. In order to truly become confident, you need to have experiences that have a positive impact on you . There’s only so far re-framing your interpretation of events and thinking positive can take you, eventually you have to actually have the positive experiences to build your confidence. As a result of my dogged determination to remain unhappy, I experienced many low-points. I’d have to say my time with panic attacks and anxiety during my early twenties was one of my least-favorite periods. As always, thanks to the wonderful world of polarities that we exist in, the trauma caused by these experiences forced me to seek out answers to big questions. If I didn’t suffer the pain , I wouldn’t have gone looking for answers to certain questions either – you need the ying in order to see the contrast and thus fully experience the yang . I won’t go into detail here, but if you want to read more about my experience with panic and the resultant search for happiness, you can read this – The Key To Happiness During my early twenties I had a few part time jobs and experimented with different web projects. My most successful at this time was my Magic: The Gathering card game website, which I grew to the largest site of its kind in Australia and then later sold for $13,000, the first big website deal I made. I also started my proofreading business BetterEdit.com in my early twenties, which I would invest serious time into growing, including trips to university campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hawaii, Vancouver and Toronto to promote using posters. From 20 to 25 years old I spent a lot of time playing with different projects and gained a lot of experience. I also began my study of Internet marketing during this time, and delved into more philosophical and spiritual studies too, as a means to figure out why the world is the way it is and what I could do to be happier in it. I don’t look back on my first five years in my twenties as the most fun of times. Sure there were good times in there, but much of the experience was sabotaged by my attitude. I’m glad to have gone through that period for the growth it provided for me as a person, but I wouldn’t want to go back there again. It Was The Best Of Times A clear contrast to my first five years in my twenties, from 25 to 30 my life went from good to better to great, and thankfully, it’s still going! It’s funny how as you get your “shit” together, people start to look at you as if you have answers to a question that has been bugging them for a long time – what to do with their life . The answer to what to do with your life is simple – you need to experience . Your purpose is to gravitate towards activities that manifest joy for you, those around you and any person or living thing who is impacted by what you do. However, you won’t know what these things are by spending all your time wondering what to do. Surrendering to the process of living is the only answer, but if you don’t at least commit to participating in the process, you don’t get anywhere. I’ve read a lot of books that presented this wisdom as direct teachings from “god’s” mouth, or through the use of parables to explain ideas so you can more readily absorb them. Regardless of the source, reading about this is never enough, you need to BE it. Creating awareness is definitely helpful, but until you experience the belief, it will remain only a truth as long as you have faith. If you really want to cement a concept you need to have lived it. This is why the first five years of my twenties were so important. I needed to be lost in order to be capable of understanding what it feels like to find a purpose . The second five years were all about further refining and building upon the clarity I was discovering. From 25 to today, the day after my 30th birthday, I achieved many milestones. I bought and sold websites, including selling my main business BetterEdit.com for six figures. I bought my first house, paid off the home loan within two years, traveled the world and just a few days before my 30th birthday, moved into a dream apartment in my ideal living location. Most of this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t conduct one crucial experiment – I started a blog . Although it seems strange to give so much credit to one event, I guess I really need to thank my friend Ed Chalmers, because it was him who first uttered the word “blog” and suggest I investigate it. Starting a blog was just an experiment, but it led me to discover that I was capable of writing words that people wanted to read. It also allowed me to focus on activities that helped me to grow in so many ways. I realized I could forge a specialty by combining my experience growing a blog and studies of Internet marketing. Becoming clear on my purpose as a blogger meant that I could devote more time to what I wanted to do, sell off what I wasn’t interested in, and build a lifestyle business , which was ultimately my main goal (the freedom to choose lifestyle over work or money). During this time I further refined my attitude and it is this that I am most grateful for. Mindset is, and always will be, the key to everything . As humans we have freewill, which means we have the power to make the ultimate decision – how we perceive every moment and every event in our life. If you truly understand this, then nothing in your life can impact you in a way that you don’t want it to. Living this idea is harder than stating it, but during the last five years I’ve become a lot better at it. Just as my “ugly and sad” glasses made me think in negatives, see negatives and thus experience negatives in my life, by changing the colour of my glasses, I started to think in positives, see the beauty and live the wonder, regardless of the external reality. This switch in attitude helped every aspect of my business life too. When facing set-backs, if you just see them for what they are and then let them go so you can move on, your life is so much simpler. Dealing with jealousy, depression and loneliness, were emotions that plagued me many times growing my business in the last ten years. By seeing them for what they are (false judgments I’d made and thus decided to see as real), letting them go and then moving back on focus towards what I wanted, has made the road to success a lot more smooth. Business can be relatively easy when you just get out of your own way, learn some fundamentals about people and then put your head down and get stuff done. This is what I did during the last five years. I pushed myself to launch new projects, I learned what the key parts of my business are and what I should work to grow, and discovered my place in the business as it functions like a machine. The result of this was the creation of three fantastic products, Blog Mastermind , Become A Blogger (in partnership with Gideon Shalwick, a great new friend and business partner I met in the last five years as well) and Membership Site Mastermind . I owe a great deal of thanks to the pioneers in our industry. Without people like Jeff Walker, Mike Filsaime, Rich Schefren, John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan and countless others, who I learn a lot from by simply watching what they do, I wouldn’t have grown as an Internet marketer. Seeing what is possible by watching others do it is incredibly powerful because it makes what might be possible become a reality. When you see someone do something and get a result, then you know that’s attainable as an outcome for you too. That’s why it’s critical to participate in your marketplace and find people you can model. That, in many ways, is why this blog you are reading now is successful. That is very likely the reason why you have read this article up to this point. You know what is possible because I’ve done it. I’ve explained it right here in this article. You can model me, take parts of what I say and do and apply it to what you say and do. The Journey Continues If you go back to the very first blog post I made to this blog and read every word I have published up to today, you will take in almost five years of my life, five years that happen to be the most successful years of my life too. The entries in this blog are reflective of the journey I’ve been on in my life, particularly my business life, which is why I named it the Entrepreneurs Journey. It’s a chronicle of what I’ve done, what I’m doing and what I’m thinking as I live it. It’s my experiences in written form. More importantly though, this blog is a reflection of the key successes and failures I’ve had along the way. You can find the moment I learned how important it is to build an email list, the first time I used a squeeze page, how I launched my first product, my thoughts and experiments on profiting from a blog, how I bought and sold websites for profit, what I learned about the importance of my own thoughts as a key to success, my interviews with amazing people from around the world, and so much more. Ultimately though, none of this really matters because it’s about what has been. What’s important to me, and just as important to you, is what you are doing and thinking right now and how you have changed as a person as a result of the path you have walked. I hope as you have read any article in this blog at any point in time, if it has done nothing else, it has helped you to think and take actions that have lead you to become a better person, even if it was in just a tiny little way. I couldn’t ask for more than that. …And of course, the journey continues, we’re not done yet! Here’s to more adventures, success stories and even greater milestone achievements in the coming years. Yaro Starak Blogger Get your bonus copy of my book “How To Start An Internet Business & Make Your First $1,000 Online” Download Here

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How To Become Comfortable With Yourself

Duplicated content … Controversy … Myth or true?

All us SEO experts can voice an opinion on whether DUPLICATED CONTENT has an effect on your website or not. The best way however, is in my opinion to quote from the ‘horse’s mouth’:

Photo Courtesy: hubpages.com

I would suggest you check out the current thoughts of ‘Duplicate Content’ as many have suggested it is a myth … here is a comment from Matt Cutts from Google:

What I was saying was: I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site. However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/

Hope this helps in your quest to have this question answered.

Regards,

Andy Bolton

Today is part one of a five day long SEO series on increasing conversion rates by building trust and credibility . There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to take a step back, and look at the big picture. Today that big picture is your website, and by stepping back, stopping what you’re doing, and looking at your website from a wide angle lens can help you figure out what’s actually hindering you from succeeding. It allows you to reassess all the tactics you’ve used to increase sales in the past and revamp your plan for future success. As part of your re-vamped plan for future success, the two tactics I’ll go over today will help you reach your goals of increasing sales and conversions via your website. 1.  Easy-to-Follow Navigation: People read top to bottom, left to right. If you keep this in mind when looking at each page on your site, it will help you determine what to change. Best practice is to have your logo at the top left or middle of the page. After that, determine what you want people to look at next. Is it a new product, new service, special promotion or offer, or a form?  Whatever it is, make it stand out by switching up the color or making the font size larger and put it towards the left hand side of the page so people can see it easily. An easy to follow navigation makes people feel less confused about what they should do on your site. If you have too many calls-to-action or too many bold colors, people can easily get frustrated and exit the site altogether. Build trust and increase your conversions by creating a seamless flow of information from top to bottom, left to right, and make it clear what the purpose of your site is and what a new customer should do. 2.  Calls-to-Action: If you’re missing a strong call-to-action on your website, you’re missing out on potential sales big time. A strong call-to-action is a noticeable button or text that tells your customers what to do when they enter your website. Calls-to-action can be: Request Information, Buy Now, Sign up for a free trial, etc. There are several case studies out there on how calls to action can improve conversion rates, but I have a case study of my own to share.  A client of mine is a national seller of wheelchair vans and lifts. When someone goes to my client’s website, they’re looking for more information or dealers in their area for these vans. The website initially only had a tab at the top of the page that said, ‘Find a Dealer’. Through our Google Website Optimizer testing, we tested adding another call-to-action in the form of a large button in the middle of each page of their site.  After a few weeks of testing, it was clear that our conversion rates increased dramatically. Our original version of our test page did not include the call –to-action and had a conversion rate of 8.14%.  In the tested version of the page with the call to action button the conversion rate increased up to 16.5%. What would doubling your conversion rate do for your sales?  When you find yourself so busy during the day-to-day grind, remember to take a step back and look at the bigger picture occasionally. Remember customers want to buy from a trustworthy, credible website that is easy to read and follow. Too much text, too many images, flash, whatever will only cause frustration and lower sales. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Want More Sales? Enhance Your Conversion Rate With Easy-to-Follow Navigation and Strong Calls-to-Action

Welcome to our first blog series for SEO Boy! On our brother blog, PPC Hero , we have been doing blog series for quite some time and now we’ll be doing the same here. The purpose our these series is to explore one topic thoroughly and in depth for an entire week. Our upcoming series is going to focus on building and maintain the trustworthiness and credibility of your website. The goal of the series to help you increase the conversion rate on your website by enhancing the trust factors that create a sense of credibility. Users don’t make purchases or request information from websites they don’t trust. You have to make sure that users feel comfortable from the minute they arrive at your site. And with each series, we like post an image of one our heroes or foes. Sort of a visual element to accommodate the series. Above, we have the evil Dr. Schwarzerhut with a Pinocchio nose… obviously he’s not been telling the truth! But what else would you expect? Here are the topics in the series! Monday: Want More Sales? Enhance Your Conversion Rate With Easy-to-Follow Navigation and Strong Calls-to-Action Tuesday: How to Instantly Convey a Sense of Trustworthiness Wednesday: Tactics to Avoid Bad Design and Increase Conversions with Professional Website Tips Thursday: How Building Your Brand Name and Increasing Conversions Goes Hand in Hand Friday: How to Increase Your Conversions Rates with Customer Reviews Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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How to Increase Conversions by Increasing Your Website’s Trustworthiness and Credibility

Welcome to our first blog series for SEO Boy! On our brother blog, PPC Hero , we have been doing blog series for quite some time and now we’ll be doing the same here. The purpose our these series is to explore one topic thoroughly and in depth for an entire week. Our upcoming series is going to focus on building and maintain the trustworthiness and credibility of your website. The goal of the series to help you increase the conversion rate on your website by enhancing the trust factors that create a sense of credibility. Users don’t make purchases or request information from websites they don’t trust. You have to make sure that users feel comfortable from the minute they arrive at your site. And with each series, we like post an image of one our heroes or foes. Sort of a visual element to accommodate the series. Above, we have the evil Dr. Schwarzerhut with a Pinocchio nose… obviously he’s not been telling the truth! But what else would you expect? Here are the topics in the series! Monday: Want More Sales? Enhance Your Conversion Rate With Easy-to-Follow Navigation and Strong Calls-to-Action Tuesday: How to Instantly Convey a Sense of Trustworthiness Wednesday: Tactics to Avoid Bad Design and Increase Conversions with Professional Website Tips Thursday: How Building Your Brand Name and Increasing Conversions Goes Hand in Hand Friday: How to Increase Your Conversions Rates with Customer Reviews Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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How to Increase Conversions by Increasing Your Website’s Trustworthiness and Credibility

As search engine marketers we need to be able to access useful information quickly. For numerous reasons, SEO professionals and web developers use Firefox for their internet browsing. The Firefox browser alone is great, but they really seal deal with me because of all the useful tools you can utilize to gain more insight into your SEO initiatives. There are many SEO plugin tools for Firefox but today I am going to explore five that will you find helpful, and they’re easy to use! SearchStatus : This plugin has various features that are easy-to-use and very helpful. For any page displayed  in your browser, you can acquire the following information: nofollow links on that page, review the links to this page, view the meta tags, you can check out the robots.txt file, display the keyword density of the page, and there other additional features as well. All of these are very helpful. SEO Tools For Firefox : This tool, created by the folks at SEO Book, is very robust. Within the SERPs you can view Google cache date, Google PageRank, Del.icio.us comments, numerous Yahoo link data points, number of cached pages, as well as directory information from DMOZ and Yahoo Directory. This tool also has built-in features such as a keyword research tool and Google trends info. This is a pretty powerful tool. SEOQuake : With SEOQuake you can display additional information within your SERPs. This plugin can provide information in regards to Yahoo backlinks, the age of page, Google PageRank, Whois information, density of keywords, and there are other features you can add. Also, you can personalize how this information is displayed. Firebug : Firebug provides numerous development tools quickly and easily while you browse through the SERPs. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This plugin can be helpful for making quick adjustments to your site and conducting competitive analysis. Live HTTP Headers : This tool allows you to see ‘Headers’ and ‘Page Info’ for each URL. This plugin can be helpful for debugging net applications, seeing which kind of server a remote site is using, and viewing the cookies sent by a remote site. As I mentioned, there are many other useful SEO plugins for Firefox. But if you aren’t using any of these tools right now, this short list will get you started. Here is an additional list if you would like to see all of the currently available SEO plugins for Firefox . Happy browsing! Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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5 Helpful SEO Firefox Plugins

Last week I wrote on priority levels that you can add or change within your XML sitemap in order to increase the number of pages that can get indexed by the search engines. Today, I’ll dive into frequency levels in your sitemap and how you change them. Just to re-cap on last week’s post, setting priority levels within your XML sitemap will tell the search engines which pages you deem more important to be crawled and indexed. It’s merely a guide for the search engines. You can set your priority levels anywhere from 0.0 to 1.0. Your homepage should always be set at a priority level of 1. Frequency levels are set according to how often particular pages are updated on your site. If you have an FAQ page for example you could set it’s frequency level to ‘never’ meaning you’re telling the search engines that this page never gets updated, so move onto other pages that get updated more frequently. You can set your frequency levels from always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never. Again, using the same logic as with priority levels, setting your frequency levels tells the search engines which pages should be crawled over other pages. The search engines like content that is new, fresh and updated. The more new content you add to your site there is the potential for new inbound links which also helps increase your rankings. By default GSite Crawler sets your frequency levels to daily. However, I would recommend finding pages that haven’t been indexed yet or pages that you want to get ranked higher and leave those at daily, while moving all other pages to weekly, monthly or never. Changing your frequency levels in your sitemap to weekly, monthly or never doesn’t mean those pages won’t get crawled or indexed. But it may change how frequently they get crawled. And if you already have certain pages of your site indexed and in good positions, then you might as well remove the priority and frequency away form those pages so other pages can get indexed. You can use GSite Crawler, which is a free XML sitemap generator or there are plenty of other free sitemap generation tools out there. If you download the also free XML notepad editor that will allow you to change the frequency level in an easy to read, edit and save manner. All you have to do is click on the word ‘daily’ right under your page name, and select your preferred frequency level in the drop down. Making notice of the priority and frequency settings in your XML sitemap could yield some positive results for you. I would recommend using them together and really analyzing which pages should be considered more important over others before making any decisions. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Does Setting Priority & Frequency in Your Sitemap Help Increase Rankings? Part 2

Happy Independence Day! The 4th of July is SEO Boy’s favorite holidays. You get to eat copious amounts of hot dogs, hang out at the park, sweat in the baking heat and set off fireworks! As usual, our friendly neighborhood SEM superheroes take everything to an extreme! SEO Boy may have gone a little overboard with the fireworks this year. But more fireworks mean more fun! Happy 4th of July everyone! Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Happy 4th of July from SEO Boy!

Happy Thursday! Also, Happy Canada Day (late…). This week James Chartrand at Copyblogger celebrated the practical, friendly mindset of Canada and bemoaned what it means for marketers (sad- it hurts your business to be obnoxious and unethical). Additionally, the post put “ Blame Canada ” in my head for the rest of the morning, and I’d like to spread that little virus around. What does SEO have to do with Iran, Perez Hilton, and the US Open? The answer is relevancy . Frankie at Marketing Pilgrim has a great article about virality, blogging as PR, and the importance of keeping your content connected to the current trends and goings-on in the world. Here’s some end-of-the-week humor. Do you Google someone before the first date? Do you have more logins than you do pairs of socks? Do you find it unimaginable to not rank first for your name? Well, my friend, you might just work in SEM. Are you member of any professional organizations ? Are your clients? It’s something we don’t always think about from an SEO perspective, but Ron Kunitzky at Search Engine People gives us a bit of information about how to choose association memberships carefully and the benefits a good membership can provide. Always helps to think of more ways to interact within our industries! Just a bit of interesting news about a Bing-Twitter interaction from Search Engine Watch: if Bing thinks you’re “important” your tweets might be featured above the search results. Most of us probably aren’t as important as Ashton Kutcher, and as such won’t be seeing our tweets there, but it’s a kind of cool new feature that could have the potential to integrate twitter and search for everyone…and to read Bing’s post about it , it seems that there might be potential for wider implementation in the future. Interesting. Some excellent advice for everyone doing SEO- whether for clients, themselves, or both: Rand Fishkin’s list of 12 important things NOT to do if you want to find success & happiness in the SEO arena. Small business owners need to step up their game in the world of SEO and learn how to make their websites SEO ‘local’ friendly . This post has 44 resources (other blogs) that can help you learn how to make your own website more locally friendly in terms of SEO. Ever wonder if you should submit an XML sitemap for SEO?  A real case study on GrayWolf’s blog says that Michael himself created a new domain with minimal content containing no external links but an XML sitemap. Think the site got indexed?  Sure did.  Michael goes onto say that he thinks his experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of XML sitemaps, but not to ignore using anchor text of course. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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SEO News Round Up for July 2, 2009

Happy Thursday! Also, Happy Canada Day (late…). This week James Chartrand at Copyblogger celebrated the practical, friendly mindset of Canada and bemoaned what it means for marketers (sad- it hurts your business to be obnoxious and unethical). Additionally, the post put “ Blame Canada ” in my head for the rest of the morning, and I’d like to spread that little virus around. What does SEO have to do with Iran, Perez Hilton, and the US Open? The answer is relevancy . Frankie at Marketing Pilgrim has a great article about virality, blogging as PR, and the importance of keeping your content connected to the current trends and goings-on in the world. Here’s some end-of-the-week humor. Do you Google someone before the first date? Do you have more logins than you do pairs of socks? Do you find it unimaginable to not rank first for your name? Well, my friend, you might just work in SEM. Are you member of any professional organizations ? Are your clients? It’s something we don’t always think about from an SEO perspective, but Ron Kunitzky at Search Engine People gives us a bit of information about how to choose association memberships carefully and the benefits a good membership can provide. Always helps to think of more ways to interact within our industries! Just a bit of interesting news about a Bing-Twitter interaction from Search Engine Watch: if Bing thinks you’re “important” your tweets might be featured above the search results. Most of us probably aren’t as important as Ashton Kutcher, and as such won’t be seeing our tweets there, but it’s a kind of cool new feature that could have the potential to integrate twitter and search for everyone…and to read Bing’s post about it , it seems that there might be potential for wider implementation in the future. Interesting. Some excellent advice for everyone doing SEO- whether for clients, themselves, or both: Rand Fishkin’s list of 12 important things NOT to do if you want to find success & happiness in the SEO arena. Small business owners need to step up their game in the world of SEO and learn how to make their websites SEO ‘local’ friendly . This post has 44 resources (other blogs) that can help you learn how to make your own website more locally friendly in terms of SEO. Ever wonder if you should submit an XML sitemap for SEO?  A real case study on GrayWolf’s blog says that Michael himself created a new domain with minimal content containing no external links but an XML sitemap. Think the site got indexed?  Sure did.  Michael goes onto say that he thinks his experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of XML sitemaps, but not to ignore using anchor text of course. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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SEO News Round Up for July 2, 2009