Whether you have outsourced your SEO campaign or are performing it in-house, here is a quick list on how to lose ROI and create diminishing returns for your business. Why 13? Well, because that’s your lucky number!

1. Make and upload site changes using old un-optimized backup files rather than the more recent optimized page files. And forget to tell your SEO you have done so.

2. Upload a malformed robots.txt file that tells the search engines that all your pages are disallowed from being spidered and indexed.

3. Require visitors to login personal information before viewing your site.

I now propose to go right out on a limb and say that design has very little to do with search engine optimisation. This is a sweeping generalisation, I admit, and one to which my designer friends will take instant umbrage. But it is true to all intents and purposes. Design can certainly assist in achieving good optimisation. By that I mean it will assist if it doesn’t hinder the process with acres of code that the robots need to wade through in order to find the potatoes and gravy. Or if the navigation throughout the site is logical and easy to achieve. Or if the pages are designed to load quickly.

By Donovan Baldwin

Whether for business or personal use, before there can be a website, there must be a domain name, and one of the most important steps of a search engine optimization plan is to pick the right one.
So what IS a domain name? A domain name is that thing that people give you when you ask for their website. anything.com, for example, is a domain name.

Some things to consider in choosing a domain name are:

Correctly choosing the keywords that your website wishes to compete on is the single most important aspect of a search engine optimization campaign. Proper keyword selection can provide your business with an extremely solid foundation to build.

However, the opposite can be said for websites that make mistakes at this point. If your website dives straight into a competitive keyword selection there is a good chance of drowning in the oblivion of search engine results. Choosing keywords for your website requires a fine balance of research and modesty.

Web analytics is a quantitative indicator of behavior of visitors to a website. Simply explained, web analytics involves identification of visitor, analyzing the reason of visit and tracking his/her movement within your website until the time he/she leaves the website.

In essence therefore, web analytics provides a clear picture of the performance of a website so that the website owner can devise strategies to maximize acceptability of the website.
Web analytics mainly comes in two flavors in terms of collection of visitors’ data. The first concerns collecting data from server logfile, and the second by tagging each webpage with javascript. A third web analytics method is a combination of the two whereby more relevant data can be produced than what is possible with either of the two methods.

By Karon Thackston (c) 2006, All Rights Reserved

Automation is an odd creature. It usually seems, at first glance, that automating a process can make things easier, simpler and faster. But oftentimes, once an automated process is in place, trouble spots pop up. This is sometimes the case when looking at the copywriting aspect of Google’s dynamic keyword insertion tool.

In case you’re unfamiliar with dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), it’s a feature of Google’s AdWords program. It is often used for large campaigns in order to automatically insert the keyword into the headline of an ad. Truly, it’s a lifesaver for many pay-per-click (PPC) ad managers who have to stay on top of thousands of ads every day. It’s all done with a simple syntax command: {keyword:_______}.

Search Engine Rankings. Everyone wants to be number one, and there are millions of web sites out there. So how do you become number one and stay there consistently? Consistently is the key word here. Sure, you may apply the newest, best trick in the book today, but when someone else comes out with a better one tomorrow, you will be scrambling to get to the top again.

By Damon G. Zahariades (c) 2006 http://www.WebBusinessToday.com

Getting traffïc from the search engines for competitive keywords is a tough battle. And it’s getting tougher.
This article will help you continue to drive traffïc from Google, Yahoo and MSN while avoiding the sandbox where the bullies hang out.

There’s always someone with a biggër budget and largër staff trying to bump your site from the top ten slots on the search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, some keywords are so competitive that search engine optimizers (SEOs) resort to tactics that range from mildly scandalous to downright brutal.

Searching for Edina Realty on Google returns a top-of-the-page sponsored link run by TheMLSonline.com, and Edina Realty has sued the advertiser over use of its trademark.

Even though the lawsuit involved Google and keywords, for once no one has shown up at the Googleplex bearing warm greetings and a stone-cold subpoena. In Edina Realty, Inc. v. TheMLSonline.com, Marquette law professor Eric Goldman has blogged that the case equates keyword purchases to trademark infringement.

“That’s what makes this case significant. I think this is the first case substantively analyzing a purchaser’s liability for buying a competitor’s keyword,” he wrote in his post.

By Matt DeAngelis

Your domain name is the .com, .net, .org or some other dot something that people use to get to your web site. Affiliateblog.com is mine.
A group of investors headed by Jake Weinbaum (the guy behind Disney’s go.com) paid $7.5 million for the name Business.com back in 1999, aiming to make it a showcase B2B site. According to their own press they have succeeded. Yes, it’s a terrific name - short, sort of descriptive and easy to remember. There’s some cachet there, but is it $7.5 million worth? That cäsh could have bought a lot of promotion or branding for whatever name they could have had for ten bucks, or a hundred, or two hundred grand.