Anyone working in Search Engine Marketing knows that this industry travels at warp speed. If you’re trying to market your web site or the web sites of your clients via search engines, chances are your time is limited - severely limited.
To squeeze as much into my schedule as possible without resorting to self-cloning, my daily routine involves the use of a range of time-saving tools and software. I use such tools on a daily basis and I truly don’t know how I’d function without them. I’m not the only one. I’ve talked to other SEM experts and they also rely on various tools to help them through their hectic schedules.

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity. Web designers don’t really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand don’t like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

By now, you’ve all heard about Google’s new Universal Search concept, which combines all the information within its vertical databases into one index to serve a single set of Web search results. As you can imagine, this will require some adjustments to standard search engine optimization techniques. If you have been following the Bruce Clay methodology, then you should already be on the right track to optimizing every aspect of your Web site that is under your control. With the arrival of universal search, it’s not just a good idea; it’s a necessity.

One of the keys to obtaining top rankings, or ANY rankings for that matter is making sure that the search engines can properly spider and index your site. This means doing whatever you can to make sure the search engines are able to reach each page of your site as easily as possible.
When I talk to my clients about spiderability, I’m generally referring to two things…

1) Are all the links in the site true hyperlinks that can be picked up properly by the search engines.
2) Are all the pages within the site reachable within 2-3 clicks from the homepage.

Ten years may not seem like a long time, but at the pace of change in business, it sometimes feels like a lifetime.

For example: When Outsource Marketing first launched in 1997, outsourcing was not some trendy term for staffing CSRs and software programmers in India. It would be eight years before Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat was published and introduced people to the notion that the global economy had arrived.

Marketing has changed even more dramatically during the past 10 years than any other similar period in the past. Why? Technology and its incredible impact on how we access and process information.

The jury of search engine experts over at SEOMoz has weighed in, and here are the top factors affecting search engine placement, according to them, with my comments.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
I have said for many years that if I had a gun to my head, and could do only one thing to a web page to optimize it, my choice would be the title tag. Put your keyphrases in your title tag, and remember to optimize each page individually (i.e. don’t overstuff your title tag, and have different title tags for each page that reflect the content of that particular page - otherwise, you may suffer from a duplicative content exclusion and find yourself in the supplemental results).

While just about everyone agrees that informed key phrase selection is at the core of effective SEO (search engine optimization), many are surprised to find out that the self-same information also guides them to writing more effective sales copy.

How does researching key phrases help the quality of your sales copy? Because, by selecting the correct key phrases and building your copy around them, you’ll be answering the questions that are being asked by your potential customers.

To understand what I mean, think of why people use search engines in the first place - they’re looking for information and/or considering buying something. Every search has, at its core, a request or a question.

A woman switches on a tiny wireless chip that has been surgically implanted behind her ear, which then synchs up with the Web wherever she is in the world. The simple thought of logging on to the Internet triggers the system to turn on and connect to the Web. She could be on a bus or at the beach and from all outward appearances she’s just staring off into space. But she sees a three dimensional artificial world before her that she can manipulate any way she chooses by mere thought alone.

This article aims to provide readers with an overview of the very basics of information retrieval. Understanding these principles can help you to optimise your website content for the search engines and also help you to analyse search engine algorithm changes. However, the details in this article are not intended to describe how modern search engines work, as they use many additional factors, including link analysis.

Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for documents / within documents. Information retrieval techniques form some of the most fundamental elements of web search engine technology. This article will discuss information retrieval in the context of search engines.

When people refer to “organic SEO” (search engine optimization), they almost always use it as a blanket term to describe the unpaid, algorithm-driven results of any particular engine. However, a sophisticated search engine optimization company will often take the meaning of “organic” one step further. To such companies, the description of “organic SEO” is not to limited what shows up in the “natural” search engine results - it includes the methodologies used to achieve such rankings.