SEO is still an often misunderstood profession, with many clients assuming your sole role is to get their site to the top of Google for the keywords they want. SEO is, of course, a much deeper endeavor than this, and often the first part of any SEO job is ensuring your clients are aware of exactly what they need you to do for them.

Optimizing the way your results appear on the search engines is one part of SEO that is often overlooked. While it may sometimes be forgotten, a few simple changes can help make your site and content more interesting, attractive, and even informational to your visitors. This can help increase your click through rate, and subsequently increase your traffic!

There are a few ways you can make your results look a little better in Google, and using them all really can help improve your click through rate.

Meta Description and Title

Always customize the title and Meta description. These are two of the most basic elements that will appear on the search results, they are also the most important. An eye catching title is the key to grabbing the attention of people searching for your keywords, and the description should tell whomever is searching that your webpage gives them what they need. These two items need to be a short, sweet, effective sales pitch.

An important part of a Meta Description is that as well as telling a potential visitor that you have what they need, you should think about what visitors will be searching for. Also, think about including a call to action. While this is not always possible, not many search results include a phrase telling the reader to click, and it can sometimes be an effective technique.

Social Media

The roll out of Google +1 means that you can now see what your friends like right there on the results. Google and Search Engine Land tell us that click through rates improve if your friend has +1’ed a page, which means social media and effective networking is becoming even more important.

While Google is using +1, don’t forget that Bing is doing something very similar with Facebook likes, with which you may see similar benefits.

Rich Snippets

Rich snippets, microformats, RDFa, they all mean the same thing, data rich search engine results. With the ability to display a list of ingredients, ratings, product information, prices and even availability, rich snippets let you show enticing information to your potential visitors directly on the search page.

Effective use of this early technology can help you jump ahead of the competition by providing more information, and taking up more search engine real estate.

Images and Video

Images and video now often appear in the search rankings, so make use of this. Be sure to fill in your image title attribute and name the file. Make sure to set up videos on your site, and include a video sitemap so even if your video is hosted elsewhere, your site will appear in the Google search results.

Oliver Whitham is an internet marketing consultant, and blogs at SEO Chemist.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 15 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/61379014/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-15

FeedFront issue 15 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2011/09

Why did J.C. Penny recently get punished in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page)? They were allegedly caught buying hundreds of links from spammy, low pagerank websites by the New York Times, who reported their findings to Google.

J.C. Penny took a black hat shortcut with their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign, which is a clear violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They could have avoided the violation if their campaign focused on the new SEO – content marketing and social media.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation and sharing of content with the purpose of promoting a product or service. The focus of this content may not specifically be about the publisher’s organization or its offerings. Assets created for content marketing include a mix of problem-specific information and thought leadership.

For affiliate publishers, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines recommends, “If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.” In other words, publish unique problem solving content.

Social Media

Social media acts as a distribution conduit for content marketers. By distributing content via social media, the distributor potentially has access to millions of eyes that may comment, share, consume and/or evangelize the content.

The New SEO

By no means does content marketing and social media distribution alleviate the publisher from doing basic SEO due diligence such as a keyword workshop, defining on-page conventions, competitive research, etc. Below are just a few of the SEO benefits that can be realized by deploying content marketing and social media distribution.

Link Building

Content marketing and social media distribution lessens the publisher’s need to acquire backlinks using “grey” or black hat methods, because quality content that is properly distributed creates backlinks naturally.

Crawl Rates

Publishing valuable problem solving content daily, even several times per day, is ideal for content marketing in order to maximize its SEO value. The more frequently content is published on a website the likelihood of the website being crawled more increases.

Social Media, Increased Social Authority & Web Traffic

A robust publishing schedule will also drive social media engagement on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Google and Bing recently admitted to SearchEngineLand.com that their algorithms do look at several social media metrics when ranking websites.

As a result, social media engagement around a publisher’s content is more valuable than previously thought. When properly executed this engagement will lead to increased web traffic as well as growing the social authority of the publisher.

The above SEO benefits of content marketing are not exactly “new.” They represent a more holistic approach to SEO while firmly remaining within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Rather than looking to game the system, like J.C. Penny supposedly did, consider the white hat strategy of content marketing and social media for SEO.

Chad H. Pollitt is the Director of Social Media & Search Marketing for Kuno Creative.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 14 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/52425616/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-14>
FeedFront issue 14 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2011/04>

There are approximately 100 blogs related to affiliate marketing, according to the 2009 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report. With all of these blogs, it’s hard to stand out, hard to get noticed, and hard to achieve success.

So how can you continue to increase your traffic, attract advertisers, and create a loyal fan base while competing in such a heavily saturated market? One of the best ways to do that is by guest posting, which provides a number of benefits.

Authority

Credibility is huge in this industry. As I mentioned before, there are many blogs out there (according to TechCrunch, over 100 million), so in order for you to gain a loyal audience, you have to stand out and prove that you are an expert worth listening to. The more people start seeing your name and content on other credible industry blogs, the more you will be acknowledged as a leader and expert in the industry. This will help you attract advertisers to your blog, sell your own products/services, build a reputation for yourself in the industry and in turn, open doors to many other great opportunities.

Relationships

Relationships are a key component to success in business. By guest posting, you are not only establishing a great relationship with that blogger/affiliate, you are also forming a connection that may lead to more connections and other valuable opportunities in the future. Furthermore, you will be engaging and creating relationships with a brand new audience, which is a great way to expand your network and build a loyal fan base.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another benefit to guest posting is that most bloggers will allow you to include a short bio with a link back to your site in the beginning of the post. This can be an excellent opportunity to increase your site’s rankings on Google for a specific search term, thus allowing you to capitalize on that traffic. Imagine how powerful it is to rank organically in the top 5 results for your key terms. So think about some terms you want your site to rank for and include them in your byline.

Free Advertising

There are tons of ways you can advertise your site, but the problem is, most of them cost money (some of them a lot of money). Guest posting is an effective way to advertise your blog/site for free to a very targeted audience, but can also be a lot more helpful in getting readers to click over to your site. Just make sure that you put your time in and write a powerful and informative article.

Now that you understand how beneficial guest posting can be, start writing some great articles and contact the top blogs in your niche. You may be surprised at how fast you start seeing results.

Eric Schechter is responsible for ClickBooth’s Social Media efforts and works hand in hand with industry bloggers and the company’s top publishers.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 8 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/20220412/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-8
FeedFront issue 8 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/10

“The greater the number and quality of Wikipedia articles, the greater the number of people will link to us, and therefore the higher the rankings (and numbers of listings) we’ll have on Google.” – Wikipedia.com

In January 2001, a feeder project to Nupedia with the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, and the supporting technology choice of using a wiki, gave birth to Wikipedia. By the end of 2001, with roughly 20,000 articles, Wikipedia overshadowed all but three websites in terms of SERP visibility.

Indeed, collaborative writing does create vast amounts of information, which, in turn, enhances visibility. However, Wikipedia’s organic search success is due to more than just content.

Platform and Automation

Highly search engine-optimized pages, navigation, technical readability, and linking structure are all vital. Two hundred and fifty million internally optimized links help Wikipedia’s SEO efforts tremendously. Search optimized internal links across related and high-quality pages make a world of difference, but manual coding is not an option to execute deep links consistently over time. Additional flexibility is needed because websites and lead generation mini-sites are not geared towards being know-it-all encyclopedias.

The good news is that search engines like when content is segmented across a number of domains (links spread across root domains is a sign of quality). Platforms that scale efforts across multiple domains work best. Wikipedia uses MediaWiki. What do you use?

Quality is Key

Content should at least be equal to that of sites one wishes to beat in SERPs. This requires ongoing thinking in the absence of hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians. Utilizing interns or offshore writers might be good sources to cost-effectively meet the quality threshold.

Volume Matters

Thirteen million articles filled with original and relevant content provide a good level of visibility. Wikipedia counts 165 million inbound links.

However, what is less known is that pages start with a nominal value, in terms of page rank. As a result, the more pages there are, the more page rank is created which can be passed throughout a network of pages and websites.

Manage Link Equity

Wikipedia works as a vortex that sucks out inbound link equity (a.k.a. Google Juice) from outside the network and never sends it back. This is due to the systemic implementation of the infamous rel=”nofollow” tag. Links should be followed within one’s corpus of websites as well as contextual outbound links to authoritative websites. “No follow” tags should be used for others. Most of this can be automated.

A technical framework built to scale should be selected and exceptions to the rules, managed. And, like Wikipedia, “the rich (will) get richer.”

Michel Leconte is the CEO of SEO Samba (www.seosamba.com), an automation platform that agencies, marketers and affiliates rely on to scale search rankings across an unlimited number of websites.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue6.pdf
FeedFront issue 6 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/06

Everyone is interested in increasing their search engine visibility, yet they often overlook the basic principles of Search Engine “Pessimization”, making it exceptionally difficult for Google and others to see their landing pages.

Before you invest time and money into fully optimizing for search, you must do these three very simple things to prevent Google and other search engines from overlooking your landing page or giving it an extremely poor rank.

Additionally, if you have already implemented an SEO project, you should check to see if these items were missed.

Google Doesn’t Understand Your Images
Titles, headings, and key quotations are not visible in graphics formats. Therefore, any content that needs to be searchable should always be in plain text form. If images are required, place ALT attributes on all graphics that take the place of plain text. Thus:

WRONG: <img src=”/images/headline.jpg”>

NOT SO GOOD: <img src=”/images/headline.jpg” alt=”This is the headline!”>

BEST: <h1>This is the headline</h1>

Correct use of plain text and ALT attributes additionally makes your site more accessible to anyone who is blind, has impaired vision, or is just using a low-resolution display or a low-bandwidth link. For free!

Google has Only Limited Understanding of Dynamic Content
If your landing page is simply a page consisting of only Flash design, create alternate search-friendly content, as well. Google executes some JavaScript, but not all, so be sure your key content is accessible without popups; or, put equivalent text into a <NOSCRIPT> tag.

If your menus are JavaScript, you should place HREF-style links to all menued content. Doing this not only makes your site more search-friendly, it also makes for a better user experience for those who do not have JavaScript installed or the ability to use it adeptly.

Create and Upload a Sitemap
Sitemaps inform Google of the URLs that are available for crawling, and to give search users a nicely formatted listing of the key pages on your site. A good Sitemap is easy to make just by following the examples provided by Google (search ” google sitemap protocol” in Google). Sitemaps are typically uploaded to the root (top-level) directory of your domain.

Implementing these fast and simple techniques will avoid making Google cry when it visits your site and help searchers find your content.

Mark W. Schumann, who makes software projects not suck, shares his paper on the eight ways that projects go bad, and how to fix them, at http://criticalresults.com/freestuff.html.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue6.pdf
FeedFront issue 6 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/06

If you can’t keep up with the conference of the month, last month SMX landed in the Big Apple. The Davits Center to be exact. Registration went smoothly, so I was off to the races and on to my first session.

It seems Internet marketing conferences sometimes struggle with balancing introductory, medium and advanced content in one event.

SMX advanced tends to lean more on the Intermediate level and that seems to fair well with most of the attendees.

That said, I still walked out of many of the sessions feeling like the 20 or so tips I gained made the cost well worth it. In fact, there is strong value there for most people.

Two speakers who really blew me away with new ideas, tools, and perspectives were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link. As someone who has been at this for 10+ years, I often go to these events to network, but their sessions taught me a lot and gave me plenty of food for thought.

The big news of the show was the launch of SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool, which will attempt to level the playing field by providing information to Webmasters on linking. It is long overdue, as running a link search in Google might only show you 1-5% of your links. This tool’s launch was definitely the talk of SMX, but time will tell if it is a strong as it claims.

New to me were the 30-minute educational sessions in the expo hall, with hosts from Google, SEOmoz, Apogee Search, and others.

These presentations were an excellent way for exhibit hall attendees to get a condensed version of the full breakout session, which they wouldn’t typically get to experience. Topics included linking, paid search, and analytics. Since the expo hall was a bit on the small side, this was also a great attraction for those companies with booths.

Advanced and basic tracks were clearly defined and labeled, which made it easy for attendees to follow. The in-house track was also very useful. It was geared towards helping companies that manage search internally (in-house) and raised issues and solutions for their specific needs. I especially liked the panel on “How To Break Up With Your Agency.” This was a unique topic and one that I think is important for attendees to understand when structuring agreements.

One of the sessions unique to SMX is titled “Give It Up”, where the rule is you can’t blog about anything that is presented for 30 days. It provides some exclusivity on the content and makes SMX distinctive.

All in all, it was a great show. I learned a lot and got to see some of the SEO royalty.

Wil founded SEER Interactive, a Philadelphia-based SEO firm in 2002.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 4 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue4.pdf
FeedFront issue 4 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/category/issue-4/

My 3 Favorite Blogs You May Not Visit

1. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ – An all around search blog covering SEO & PPC with great editors.
2. http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/ – I’ve picked up more than a fair share of PPC / SEO tidbits here.
3. http://www.ppchero.com/ – Great and practical PPC advice.

My 3 Favorite Tools You May Not be Using

1. http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends – Use this daily to see what is getting hot every day, jump on trends quickly.
2. http://www.seoquake.com/ – One of the best plugins out there to speed up your research.
3. http://oyoy.eu/ – new comer but has a bunch of great tools, and a good plugin to boot.

Wil Reynolds is an SEO expert and founder of SEER Interactive, a Philadelphia-based Internet Marketing company and a national leader among SEO companies.

Download issue 1 of FeedFront at http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue1.pdf.