(By Jim Hedger (c) 2005, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc)

Usability is already a critical component of successful online ventures but with the advent of Google Analytics and the implementation of the Jagger algo update, user-activities and behaviours are going to play an influencing role in search engine rankings. How people act when they visit a website or document is being measured and accounted for, even for sites without Google Analytics tracking codes in the [head] section of the document source-code.

Written by Glenn Murray and published in SEO News

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a foreign field to a lot of people. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t get asked a few questions on the subject. So I’ve decided to post this FAQ article in the hopes that it will help people understand the basics, and make them a little more comfortable with the whole domain.

Q: Why are Search Engines Important To Me?

Written by David Utter and published in WebProNews.com

Doc Searls wrapped up his Syndicate Conference in a keynote that discussed the Live Web of content, and some strange elevators in New York’s Marriott Times Square property. Only in California.

WebProNews publisher Rich Ord sent along notes from Doc Searls’ closing keynote at the Syndicate Conference, and the notes opened with Searls’ observations about the hotel elevators at the Marriott in New York, the site of the last Syndicate Conference.

Written by David Utter and published in WebProNews.com

A lot of people write blogs and place affiliate links on their sites, and we have a few suggestions to help make them work better. It’s easy enough to create a blog and toss some affiliate links into the blog’s site template.

Creating posts every day proves a tougher challenge, and the vast majority of blogs don’t last for very long. Non-writers who think writing is easy find out that one to three entries a day, every day, doesn’t just roll out of the brain and into the ‘post comment’ field of a blog.

Written by James Anderson and published in WebProNewsUK

SEO can seem like a long hard slog with little to no reward at times. Your mind often racing, constantly thinking about keyword phrases, H1 tags and links as you lay in bed trying to catch a few winks.

Six months down the line your SEO efforts are nowhere to be seen, not even a trace, except in the redness of what used to be the whites of your eyes. But what if, it didn’t have to be this way. What if, there was a method of seeing results sooner rather than later.

Written by Joel Walsh and published in SiteProNews

If you were writing a textbook on SEO linking circa 2001, you almost certainly would have included a chapter on web directories. They used to be the primary way of actively acquiring one-way inbound links, before content syndication, blogs, or the paid link market really took off.

Web Directories and SEO Links: What Went Wrong?

Fast forward a few years, and you’d have to rewrite the chapter on directories and web links. In fact, you would probably downgrade web directories from a chapter to a page or two. In the SEO world, nothing good ever lasts long, and so it is with web directories.

Written by Benjamin Wigoder, published in DevWebPro

Learning to use valid html code is one of those website building techniques you decide to use. It is a big step requiring the use of validators, doctype declarations and often lots of extra work.

But now for the big question: Is it worth all the effort?

Benefits of valid HTML Code

* Valid code renders faster than invalid code!

* Valid code will render better than invalid code!

* Browsers are becoming more standards compliant, and therefore it is important to write valid standards compliant HTML.

* The search engines understand better/prefer standards compliant code!

By Paul J. Bruemmer (c) Nov. 2005, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Published in SeoNews.com

“SEO is still a tiny portion of the total search marketing spend.” So states MarketingSherpa in its recent Search Marketing Benchmark Survey. I find it hard to understand the under-utilization of organic SEO compared to PPC (pay-per-click) advertising when organic listings are preferred by 5 clicks to 1. The natural organic listings convert better, too. So what gives?
MarketingSherpa also states that organic results are “better noticed, read and clicked on than paid listings.” The report notes that organic listings convert as well as, or even better than, paid listings (4.2%, versus 3.6%). Study after study continue to demonstrate the power of organic links.

Written by Jason Lee Miller & taken from SmallBusinessUK

The 21st Century, where all things tech, software, media, and e-business will converge and boom with deafening force, is creating a new realm of specialization that is vital to an evolve or die type of market. That realm, as many are learning through litigation and deflated new product hopes, is intellectual property rights.

Intellectual Ventures, a company spawned by two former Microsoft employees, recognizes the potential of this burgeoning market, collecting patents rather than products.

Written by Jill Whalen (c) 2005 for SeoNews

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn’t hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are my latest and greatest tips to get you started:

1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to. Due to Google’s aging delay for all new domains (see this forum thread), your best bet is to use an existing domain/website if at all possible. If you’re redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect to wait a good 9-12 months before your site will show up in Google for any keyword phrases that are important to you.