1. Ignoring SEO- While you don’t want to turn your blog into a bunch of keyword-stuffed filler content, you also don’t want to completely ignore SEO. Remember, the search engines crave fresh content because they want their search results to be as relevant as possible. By optimizing your posts for relevant keywords, you increase your chances of grabbing high search engine placement.

2. No Personality- The internet is brimming with blogs. There are over 100 million of them. How can you separate yourself from the pack? The best way is to use your personality. Blog posts aren’t like typical articles. What makes blogging so popular is the interactivity of it. That’s why you need to showcase your personality—to connect with readers. If you can connect with your audience, they’ll be likelier to continue coming back and to comment regularly on your posts.

3. Disregarding Your Comments- Of course, once people start commenting on your posts, it’s your job to respond. Don’t make the mistake of either not responding or replying with a thoughtless remark like “Thanks for the comment.” If you want to get the most out of your comments, you need to respond with a well-thought out point. Engage your audience like you would in a one on one conversation. This will spark new conversations, and it also gives your readers a sense of ownership in your blog.

4. Too Much “Me Too” Content- With so many blogs out there, it’s inevitable that you’ll write about something that’s already been covered. That’s fine, but make sure you don’t rely on just being another “me too” blogger. We have enough of those. Avoid falling into this trap by giving your honest opinion. It might cause some controversy, but your readers will respect your opinion and they’ll appreciate a fresh perspective on an exhausted topic.

5. Self-Promotional Writing- When you start your company blog, it’s easy to get stuck on the idea that it’s another marketing tool for your brand. Sure, your blog is great for increasing your visibility and establishing your brand, but that doesn’t mean you need to write posts that are thinly veiled advertisements. It’s called a blog, not an advertisement. Focus on creating insightful, useful content, and you’ll have much more success than if you write self-promotional pieces.

6. No Outbound Links- One reason people blog is to generate inbound links to their website. It’s a great benefit of blogging. However, in the pursuit of backlinks, don’t forget to link out to others. Forget about this notion of withholding your link juice. That’s silly. You have to be willing to link out to others. It shows your readers that you are providing them with well-rounded information, and it captures the attention of the bloggers you link out to. By making them aware of your blog, they’ll be more willing to return the favor by linking to you or even letting you guest post on their blog.

7. Boring Headlines- Earlier in this post, I mentioned there are over 100 million blogs crowding the internet. All of these blogs are pulling at reader’s attention begging them to read their content. Another way you can separate yourself from the sea of competitors is to create compelling headlines that make people click. Don’t get so caught up in the idea of SEO that your titles are overstuffed with keywords. You can use keywords, but make sure your headlines are enticing. Copyblogger has a great post about 10 headline formulas that work.

What mistakes would you add to this list? Share them with us in the replies. You just might help another blogger avoid a critical error!

Technorati Tags: blogging mistakes to avoid, blogging tips

Google Insights Bookmarklet: While Google Insights can provide very valuable keyword information, you can waste a lot of time switching from one window to another window in order to use Google Insights.  To eliminate the need toswitch browser windows , add the Google Insights Bookmarklet to your browser, and anytime you are browsing one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo or Live), you can instantly access the Insights data for the keyword you were searching with a single click of the bookmarklet.

Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin for Google Analytics: I know I’m not alone when I say that Google Analytics is one of my favorite analytics packages.  Although it’s not perfect, this package can provide you with a significant amount of very useful information.  In addition to the information that is already provided, you can increase the data you have at your fingertips by installing the Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin.  As you can see from the screenshot above, this plugin not only adds data for content from all of the major social media websites, but it also adds Yahoo’s backlink data directly for you to see.

Robots.txt Generator: A robots.txt file can be a very useful tool for blogs and large websites.  Because the Content Management Systems (CMS) for blogs and websites normally create a lot of pages that you don’t want indexed, you can use a robots.txt file to keep search engine crawlers away from these excess pages.  However, many people neglect to add a robots.txt file to their website because they are unsure of how to use it.  Fortunately, if you want an easy way to create an effective robots.txt file, you can use the Robots.txt Generator to create the exact robots.txt that you need.

SearchBoth Plugin: Although their stock price continues to plunge, Yahoo is still around.  While they obviously aren’t anywhere close to Google in terms of search popularity, as an SEO, there are times when reviewing data from Yahoo can be useful.  Since there is a good chance that you will also be reviewing data from Google, you can save yourself time by using the SearchBoth Firefox plugin.  As the screenshot above demonstrates, the SearchBoth plugin allows you to simultaneously search Google and Yahoo without the need to switch between browser windows.

Disable Personalized Search Plugin: When you are analyzing the SERPs for your website, a client’s website or a competitor’s website, it’s important to ensure that the data you are seeing is as accurate as possible.  In order to remove anypersonalization that your browsing habits may be adding to the SERPs you are looking at, you can use the Disable Personalized Search plugin.  In addition to working for Firefox, this plugin also works in Internet Explorer.

Leave a comment and let us know if you have any other unique SEO tools that you would like to share.

Technorati Tags: Google insights, Greasemonkey, Robots.txt Generator, SearchBoth, SEO tools

I have personally been using Google webmaster tools for only a couple of years now, however I could not imagine my life/career as an SEO professional without it now. For those of you who don’t currently use Google webmaster tools you should start right away. You can go here www.google.com/webmasters/tools and simply sign in with your Google account.

What is Google webmaster tools?

Google Webmaster tools is a very powerful tool that was created by Google a few years ago in response to popular demand of many webmasters wanting a better way to become more “Google Friendly”. Google webmaster tools can help you get a great deal of feedback from Google regarding how Google robots view and index your site as well as assisting you in diagnosing potential problem areas in your site.

Key features:

Site verification:

Google Webmaster tools allows you to cofirm ownership of your site by either placing a meta tag in the code on your site or placing an html file in your root directory. This will let Google know you are acting in good faith to become more “Google friendly” and will open up the doors to the other features that Google webmaster tools has to offer.

XML sitemaps Submission:

Google Webmaster tools allows you to register your XML sitemap making it easier for the Google spider to index and crawl your site.

Key Indexing data about your site:

Google webmaster tools gives you very detailed information regarding the indexing of your site. From the last time the Google spider crawled your site to any 404 pages that were found at the time.

Key Statistics:

Google webmaster tools Allows you to see the top search queries that were used to find your site in Google search results.

Other sites linking to you:

Google webmaster tools will display a detailed list of other sites that are linking to your homepage.

Internal links:

Google webmaster tools allows you to easily see the details of your internal linking structure. This is a very important part of on page SEO.

Generate robot.txt file:

Google webmaster tools let’s your create a robot.txt file that allows you to instruct Google as to what directories you don’t’ want crawled by the Google spider.

Set your preferred domain:

You can instruct Google as to how you would like your domain name to appear in the search results i.e. http://domainname.com or http://www.domainname.com.

Geographic target:

Google webmaster tools allows you to set a geographic target. i.e. We are a Houston based company and most of our customers are in Houston so we have our geographic target set to Houston TX.

To summarize if learn to you use Google webmaster tools to it’s potential your SEO will greatly improve and you will have a more “Google friendly” website as a result.

Technorati Tags: Google webmaster tools, Google friendly

• search engines;
• social networking;
• social bookmarking and annotating;
• user-generated content.

Compare CognitionSearch is a new enhanced semantic search engine.

Key feature: search Wikipedia using semantic search technology.

What’s so innovative about CognitionSearch? The tool allows to compare their search results with the "simple" search (i.e. Google. Yahoo, and MSN) giving a better idea of what behind the semantic search technology is and how it is different from the conventional or "simple" search. The difference is graphically represented showing you the overlap and the number of unique results for both cognition and simple search. What’s more, it shows you which exactly meaning of the term(s) searched the comparison was based on.

PeopleJar.com is a social search and connection tool that allows people from all over the world to find each other based on a huge number of searching parameters.

Key features:

• people are connected and found through networks of interests;
• people can create, host and promote their resumes (example: makeup artists job profiles).

What’s so innovative about PeopleJar.com?

• it is both user-generated and highly focused:
  • there is only one network per interest (there is only network for screenwriting, for example) - that makes connecting even easier and more effective;
  • it is moderated (networks and attributes are added by users but should be approved by moderators first to filter out duplications);
• it has a highly customizable search engine:
  • you can choose to search by any combination of relevant attributes;
  • you can create your own search and let the system update you of new members matching your search criteria;
• it creates a new concept of social connecting versus social networking: the site is not about socializing online but about building new (business, personal) relationships.

Middlespot: ok, we’ve seen hundreds of visual search engines, meta search engines and so on. But this one positions itself as a smart search engine combining bookmarking and sharing featurs.

Key features:

• see screenshots of each page in the search results;
• save and annotate individual results you in a "workpad".

What’s so innovative about Middlespot?

• it allows for many options and requires no registration;
• it lets you share your workload on your blog or personal page (multiple customization options are available).

Wordia is a user generated dictionary (see Urban Dictionary if you can’t imagine what it can be compared to). While the site database is comparatively small, the site is a real fun to use.

Key feature: compare user-generated definitions with the ones provided by official dictionaries (Collins dictionary).

What’s so innovative about Wordia? The site allows people to create video definitions for any word (see an example: philosophy).

By Ann Smarty, an Internet marketer and social media expert maintaining an SEO consulting blog.

Technorati Tags: Social Media, Web Startups, Web 2.0

Twitter: Follow Me!

is at the forefront of the current social media craze. If you do not already have a twitter account, you need to get one right now and you can do that here www.twitter.com. (Ok you can finish reading this post first).

Twitter is a very unique platform in that it is sort of like a combination of blogging and instant messaging. The purpose of twitter is to answer one simple question. What are you doing right now? Here is the way it works. You find other people to follow on twitter and you can see their tweets (status updates) in real time, and other people can follow you and see your tweets (status updates), also in real time. Tweets are simply short phrases that answer the simple question: “what are you doing right now?”

The best idea is to follow people with similar interests. So, when you read other people’s tweets it will be information that is relevant to your interests, and vice versa. It is a good idea to tweet information that other people will find either informative or entertaining, rather than just saying what you’re actually doing all the time.

I.e. if you are elephant hunting and you just took down a huge elephant with your elephant gun. “I just took down a HUGE elephant with my new elephant gun!” (Tweet!)

would make a great tweet! OK so what if you are not elephant hunting all the time? Well that is ok but the point is keep your tweets either informative or entertaining so people will want to read them. If you start tweeting stuff like “I just ate a bowl of cereal and it was delicious!” (tweet) People will eventually stop reading your tweets. Also it’s a good idea to not tweet only your own links. Occasionally you should tweet your own stuff, but you want to also tweet articles etc from other sources that people will find informative or entertaining, so people will see you as a worthy resource rather than a spammer and then they will gladly read when you post one of your own links. It’s ok to self promote on twitter but don’t over do it. That being said once you have your twitter account set up, feel free to follow me on twitter!

StumbleUpon: Discover Your Web

StumbleUpon is a great way to generate sudden qualified traffic to a website or blog or anything else that you might publish to the web. In addition to being a great social platform it is also a great way to discover new content and ideas from the web. StumbleUpon’s purpose as stated on their home page is to allow you to

“[discover] web sites based on your interests. Whether it’s a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more.”

I’ll elaborate on this a bit. Basically you set up a profile and during this process you tell StumbleUpon what your areas of interest are. Once you have finished this process you install the StumbleUpon toolbar. There is a little button on your browser bar now that says stumble. You simply click this button and it delivers a website, video or some other web content from one of your areas of interest. Now you will also have a little thumbs up and thumbs down icon on your StumbleUpon toolbar and you simply click thumbs up when you like the content that is delivered or thumbs down when you dislike the content you see. This helps StumbleUpon learn to deliver better quality content that you’re more likely to enjoy. OK, you’re probably thinking “this sounds like a search engine or something, how is this going to help my social marketing efforts?” Let me explain.

StumbleUpon allows you to search for, and connect with, other users with similar interests. So, you can share websites with them, you can subscribe to other users and other users can subscribe to you. You can visit other stumblers, visit their blogs, and stumble their favorites. The best part is you can also add and review sites that have not yet been put into the StumbleUpon database. This can sometimes generate some very good sudden qualified traffic for a new blog or website as other users stumble the new entry. Once you have set up your StumbleUpon profile and installed your stumble toolbar you can connect with me here Gerald Weber’s StumbleUpon

LinkedIn: Connect With Others

If you don’t already have a LinkedIn account you can get one here www.linkedIn.com LinkedIn has really blossomed over the past several years into a really nice social platform. Like other social platforms, LinkedIn allows you to search for and connect with other users. It’s almost like facebook for professionals. A nice feature of LinkedIn is that it allows you to set up a very detailed professional profile. There is a place for your website, your blog and your RSS feed. Another cool thing about this platform is that it allows you to write recommendations for your connections and your connections can write recommendations for you. This serves similarly to testimonials, which we discussed in our previous post 5 tips for increasing your companies revenues via the web Testimonials are a great way to establish credibility and build trust. Once you establish your linkedIn account you can connect with me here www.linkedin.com/in/semgroup.

Technorati: Search Engine for Blogs

You can register with Technorati and claim your blog(s) here www.technorati.com. With over 112.8 million blogs and now competing with Google and Yahoo, you can see why this would be a good place for you to have your blog. Once you have registered with Technorati the first thing you will want to do is claim your blog. You simply put a little piece of code into your blog and ping Technorati confirming that you are indeed the owner. All article posts in Technorati has a link to the author. This link leads to your profile on Technorati. Your profile will display all of your blogs, their tags and the top tags you blog about. Put together a meaningful profile to show other Technorati members/users that you are a problogger.

Plaxo: Address Book Gone Wild

Plaxo started many years back as a simple tool used to update your address book, however over the past few years they have blossomed into a pretty awesome social platform that is based on your email address book. Once you sign up and create your account, you can create a very elaborate profile that allows you to share all of your relevant links, websites, blogs, twitter status, facebook, Youtube etc. Basically anywhere you are on the net you can have on your plaxo pulse. Since this is based on an address book update tool, basically everyone in your address book will have access to this pofile and all of your relevant links. You can sign up for plaxo here www.plaxo.com

After reading this post I hope some of you find yourselves tweeting or stumbling new websites, or otherwise enjoying one of these 5 social platforms, either personally, for your business, or both!

If you have anything to add about any of these 5 platforms, please let us know by posting a comment.

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Plaxo, social media, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Twitter

Tip 1: Have an offer, along with a clear call to action

Your landing page was created with one idea in mind and that is conversion. Now a “conversion” can mean different things, depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Whether it is for the user to fill out a contact form, or to make a purchase, you need to have a clear call to action that very clearly informs your visitor what needs to be done. (i.e. “Call today!”,or “Fill out the form to the left!). It helps to give users an incentive such as a special discount or a free consultation (remember to put a time limit on your special offer).

Tip 2: Have actual Client testimonials on the landing page

Testimonials are always an awesome sales tool! If you can clearly place actual customer testimonials in plain view on the landing page, the testimonials will make the user less apprehensive, and make the decision to buy that much easier. People are always more cautious about making purchases online and testimonials can offer that “warm fuzzy feeling” inside. Seriously, testimonials can often times make the difference between a conversion and an “almost conversion” so use them wisely. After all how much money do you make on a sale? And, how much do you make on an almost sale? It’s these small details that often make the difference.

Tip 3: Make the key selling points easy to read

People that are scanning the internet don’t take the time to read every page word for word. So you should make your key selling points easy to read quickly when someone is scanning the page. A good way to do this is to have some of the text with the key selling points in bold and/or italicized text. This will make it easier for them to read and will result in more conversions and more money to the bottom line of your business.

Tip 4: Write an awesome headline

i.e. 6 Tips for increasing your Company’s revenues! (see this post’s headline)

This is your first chance to get the user’s attention and to get them to read your material. If your headline is dull and does not sound compelling, your website visitor is more likely to hit the back arrow than to keep reading. Not a good scenario. However, if your headline is eye catching and compelling, the reader will most likely read on or at least continue to scan the page. It sounds so elementary but this one key aspect is often overlooked. Different copywriters have different styles but the point is you want the headline to be enticing, not boring!.

Tip 5: Test different landing pages with different offers

Testing different offers and different landing pages is a key factor that can impact conversions. One offer may work well while another offer may result in a much different rate of conversion. It goes back to the old saying “if at first you don’t succeed keep on sucking until you do suck seed (succeed)” This is also an area where you can use Google analytics and data like the page’s “bounce rate” to see what landing pages and offers are keeping your visitors’ attention.

Tip 6: When using animation, please use moderation

There is a sound reason for this. Research shows that most internet users actually avoid or ignore over the top flashy animation. Still, many website owners still believe that the flashier it is the more it will sell. This simply is not true. If you must use animation please use subtle animation Remember, people don’t buy flashy graphics or animation, they buy good products, and are attracted to good offers (see Tip 1 above!)..

If you follow these six tips you will be well on the road to increasing your landing page conversions and thus your internet generated revenues as well.

Technorati Tags: increasing conversions, internet leads, landing pages

It’s actually pretty easy to check for plagiarism if you know how to look. The best way to see if your content has been duplicated is to use a service like Copyscape. The other way you can check your website is to copy and paste a single and meaningful line from your website into Google and if that line appears on a search engine results page (SERP), you will see it. Google Alerts also scans the web to look for duplicate content periodically.

If you do manage to detect duplicate content from your website, here are a few steps you can and should take:

1. Contact the thief and politely ask them to remove the duplicate content.You can use Domaintools.com to help find out the contact information of someone who owns a domain. If it’s a major site, then you can attempt to contact the web master directly. After getting the contact info, you should attempt to contact the plagiarist and politely ask them to remove the duplicate content.

2. Contact the search engines, primarily Google, and file a DMCA complaint with them. (The idea is to ensure that the correct site is punished by Google. Also Google may remove the plagiarists’ site from their index entirely.)
3. Contact the plagiarists’ hosting company and file a DMCA complaint.The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires hosting companies to remove the plagiarized content. However, you must prove the content is stolen. They are not going to just take your word for it. You can easily prove who published the content to the web first by using internet archive.
4. You can follow up with appropriate legal action if number 1, 2 and 3 do not get the desired results.

Interestingly, checking for plagiarism does not seem to rank high on most webmasters’ lists but it should actually be at the top of a webmasters’ to-do list, given the negative implications it can have on search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Technorati Tags: duplicate web content, plagiarism, search engine optimization

Make sure that your code validates and is W3C Compliant. Search engine spiders crawl your site and analyze the code. The idea is to ensure that html is neat, clean and error free so that search engine spiders can easily index every page of your website. Also, using CSS (cascading style sheets) to define look and feel rather than tables and font tags helps remove code that is unnecessary. Validation errors and excessive code can lead to only part of your site getting indexed by the search engine spiders, and ultimately this can result in sub-par search engine rankings.

Tip 2: Use Relevant Keywords

To reach your target audience, you must make use of very specific keywords. This website, for example is about search engine optimization and search engine marketing in Houston. Therefore, “Houston search engine optimization” and “search engine optimization Houston” are perfect choices as keywords, because they are very specific. The more specific your keywords, the less competition your site will have in search engine results, ultimately leading to a better, more targeted audience coming to your website.

Tip 3: Good Keyword Placement

Once you have done your keyword research and decided on these, keywords should appear in your title and header tags, as well as in the first few sentences of your opening paragraph. Keywords should also appear in the body or general copy of the site. However be sure not to overdo your keyword density in the content because this may be interpreted as spamming, and can actually harm your search engine rankings.

Tip 4: Get Quality Inbound Links

Relevant incoming links from other websites that are related but not direct competitors shows the search engines that your site is relevant and can be “trusted”. This is one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine search engine rankings. Avoid paid links and too many reciprocal links because this can also damage your search engine rankings (Google may punish you). Link farms are considered black hat SEO and could get you blacklisted from Google altogether.

Tip 5: Blog, Blog and Blog some more

Blogging is a great way to keep adding fresh content to your site. The advantage of blogging is that search engines like websites that are updated frequently and have new fresh content on a regular basis. This will make the search engines view your site more favorably and ultimately rank your site higher in the natural or organic search results.

Technorati Tags: Google, Houston search engine optimization, search results