Been researching ways to get a website indexed faster than 48-72 hours. If a 2-3 day indexation time frame is OK for you, then here are fast, easy ways you can get your site indexed by Google.

1. Ping your website and individual pages using free tools like Ping-o-matic or Pingoat
2. Stumble it on Stumble Upon or other social discovery sites
3. Tweet it on Twitter
4. Syndicate the RSS feed to Friendfeed, and other RSS & blog directories. A great list of blog and RSS directories can be found here.
5. Bookmark it on Delicious or other social bookmarking sites
6. Link to it from well established website or blog
7. Hook the URL up to Feedburner
8. Include the URL in your a forum signature
9. Send out a press release
10. Submit the XML site map to Google

If your new website is a business, submit it to local directories, like the free Brownbook, or via a paid service like Get Listed, which will submit your listing to Google Maps, Yahoo Local and more. However, local directory submissions are a bit more time consuming.

There is no need to apply every technique, usually one or more will do the trick.

Submitting your XML Sitemap can Speed Up Indexation

If you want it indexed sooner, say, within a few hours, submitting the website’s sitemap to Google can speed things up.

• If your website is self hosted, you can easily create an XML site map in 4 easy steps using this XML Sitemap Generator.
• If your site is a self-hosted WordPress.org site, you’ll want to use the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin.

In order to submit your XML site map to  Google Webmaster Tools. You’ll need to sign up for a GWT account, verify your site, and then submit the XML sitemap through their sitemap submission tool.

XML Sitemap Submission for WordPress.com Blogs

If the new site is hosted on WordPress.com, then you can take advantage of their Tools and built in XML sitemap. Your WordPress.com sitemap can be viewed when you go to YourSite.WordPress.com/sitemap.xml. WordPress.com provides instructions on how you can get your Wordpress.com blog verified by search engines. Essentially you’ll need to:

1. Sign up for an Google Webmaster Tools account
2. Choose the Meta Tag option for site verification
3. Copy the verification code
4. Go to the Tools area in your account control panel,  paste the verification code into the appropriate field and save.
5. Go back to GWT and click  on the Verify button
6. Then submit your XML sitemap

In the old days, webmasters used to talk about the “Google Sandbox”, an effect whereby Google puts new sites “on probation” for x months, until finally including it in the index. I’ve never encountered a Google Sandbox effect with any of the sites I’ve built – applying the above tactics usually gets them indexed in a couple of days, maybe a week  if I do nothing.

It’s possible to use mass submission software programs, like the Website Indexer to get sites indexed within, some say, 5 minutes.  However, if you are not in a huge rush, any of the above methods should work without you having to download a software program onto your computer.

Related posts:

1. How to Optimize Your Green Business Website for Local Search
2. StumbleUpon New Ways to Drive Traffic To Your Site
3. SEO Best Practices for Coding Your Website

Search engine optimization for your small business website is quite a difficult process, especially when facing competition from older, more established giants. Larger websites often have strong domain authority and many pages of content, which makes it easier for to rank higher in search engines for competitive keywords, as well as rank for a plethora of long tail keywords, enabling them to capture more search engine traffic. But there are ways in which a small green business can easily compete with the bigger and more popular websites on various search engines, especially at the local level.

Nearly 40 percent of all searches include some reference to local information. Even when the search query doesn’t ask for  local information, search engines still provide local results. This is because, more often than not, when a consumer is searching for a product or service, such as “organic catering company“, chances are, they are looking for one that is local. Therefore, smaller and medium-sized businesses now have a terrific opportunity for local search engine optimization.

Now you may be asking yourself, what is local SEO? Local SEO is the art of driving geo-targeted search engine traffic to your business website. Local SEO involves whole combination of strategies and tactics that will ensure your website is found quickly and easy by potential customers in your geographic locale.

By optimizing your website to appear in local searches on the Internet, you’re adding yourself to a crucial virtual directory that millions of people access every single day.

How to Optimize Your Green Business Website for Local Search

As with regular SEO, local SEO is comprised of on page factors and off page factors. In other words, you need to add content to your website that tells search engines where your business is located. In addition, you need to get your business listed in search engines, directories, and linked to by other websites in a way that clearly indicates your business location. On page optimization is within your control, however, for it’s still possible to rank well in local search with low optimization. In highly competitive markets, however, on page factors are more important. Off page SEO are where you will need to spend most of your time and energy if you want to rank for local search.

Below are 7 steps important steps to optimize your green business website for local search:

1. Claim your local business listing NOW. Claim your local business listing on Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local, and. For branding purposes, you want to make sure that you control what’s yours – your own business profile -  and protect your geo-listing from getting hijacked by competitors.
2. Optimize your local business listing. Now that you’ve claimed your business profile, make sure you indicate your address, local telephone number (NOT 800 number) and associate your business listing with keyword rich catogories. Making sure your target keywords are in your business title and description also help.
3. Add your business to web directories. Adding your business to web directories like Yelp, SuperPages, infoUSA, CitySearch, BOTW Local etc,  increases the number of address citations around the web that contain your business name, your address, your telephone number, and your website. Every citation you get from a reputable source on the web is another vote of confidence that your business is indeed in that specific geo-location.
4. Include your address on every page. It’s a good practice to include your business address and contact information in the footer of your website. This simple step is not only great for user experience, as it eliminates visitors having to plumb the nether regions of your website to find out where your business is located and how to contact you. It also tells search engines where you are as well. If you cannot, for some bizarre reason, include your contact information in your website footer, in the very least, make sure your address appears on your home page, in your your about section, on your press page if you have one, and your Contact Us page.
5. Localize your title tags. Make sure your title tags include your target keywords, as well as your locale. For example,  you have a green landscaping company in Lagunitas, California, your title tag should read something like this, “Green Landscaping & Design | Company Name | Lagunitas, CA.”
6. Get local links. Get listed on local business directories, in your local chamber of commerce website, and solicit local business owners to link to your website from theirs.
7. Get good customer reviews, often. Frequency of customer reviews appear to be increasingly important for local search. A steady stream of good reviews will also be great for your business.

If this all seems like a lot of work, you may want to first hit up GetListed.org, a service that allows you to submit to several search engines and directories at once. GetListed also provides great information about optimizing your business website for local search.

Local SEO for your green business ought to be high on your online marketing priority list, because it is one of of the easiest SEO and least expensive tactics to implement. As your website begins to appear in local search engine results, your business will be more visible, and you should begin to see more search engine traffic.

Related posts:

1. The Complete Road Map to Launching a Green Brand Online
2. Why Your Green Business Needs a Green Business Blog
3. 8 Google Advanced Search Operators for SEO

I think I’ve researched every WordPress SEO plugin in existence. The list I amassed was daunting. I had plugin anxiety. All In One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO? Many of them had features that overlapped. The thought of having to install all those plugins and to get them to work with each other was a developer nightmare.

Due to some fortuitous Tweeting, Joost DeValk, the WordPress SEO Guru, picked up on my Tweet and offered to go over my massive list of 30 SEO plugins via Skype, and eliminate the chaff. Granted he wrote many of these – but that’s why he’s the WordPress SEO guru. If you care about WordPress SEO, you oughta mosey on down to Joost’s site and read his WordPress SEO Bible.

Must Have WordPress SEO plugins

The list of plugins below should have your site covered for all things SEO.

HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions “Google” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Friendly Images – Yoast is on the fence this. I kind of like it.  Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features. Some of the great things it does includes:

• Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
• Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
• Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
• Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions
• And more!

RSS Plugins

MediaRSS – MRSS is an RSS extension used for syndicating multimedia files (audio, video, image) in RSS feeds. MediaRSS is a way of embedding media into your feeds. This plugin is equipped to locate img tags in your posts and generate XML code that can be used by feed readers.
RSS Footer – This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit like this:

Social Media Plugins

Sociable is a social sharing plugin with big, plush social media buttons that you just want to press. It’s much more attractive and noticable than Share This.

Post Ratings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Twitter Plugins

Choices abound on Twitter plugins. I would do Retweet first and then the Twitter Box once your account is up and running.

Retweet Button – The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on twitter.  The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted.
Tweetbacks – People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
Twitter Box – Provides on how to create a fancy box that displays your latest Twitter rants in your sidebar without having to turn to clunky plug-ins that bog your blog down.

Content / Media

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include:

• An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
• Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.

Video Player Quicktags – This plugin adds a button to your editor that allows you to paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.
SlideShare – This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code.  It has one (!) setting, “default width”. If you set that setting, it will make all presentations appear at the width you set there, allowing you to easily adapt the width to your theme’s content width.
Smush.it – Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different. Smush.it optimizes images by:

• stripping meta data from JPEGs
• optimizing JPEG compression
• converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
• stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

Commenting

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog

WordPress Maintenance plugins:

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache is a performance optimization plugin for WordPress, in other words, it speeds up the performance of your WordPress site so that you don’t lose traffic and you rank better in Google. Written by Frederick Townes, a social media designer and  the CTO of Mashable, W3 Total Cache is designed to include every speed enhancing feature possible, and optimized to handle all hosting environments.
WP Database Backup – Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
No Self Pings – Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts.  Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.  So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.
Other
Zemanta – Zemanta provides contextual content recommendations to you while you write. It enhances your blog post with relevant images, videos, links, and SEO optimized tags. All recommended content is blogger friendly with clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).

Other Tips:

Sitemaps are now a part of core WordPress functionality. According to Yoast a traditional sitemap can actually be done within the theme, so there is no need for a plugin.

Breadcrumbs used to once require a plugin but are now incorporated into native WordPress functionality as well.

Related posts:

1. Essential Tagging Plugins for WordPress
2. SEO Title Tag 2.0 – The Best SEO Plugin for WordPress
3. Great Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress

Recently, Britta Meyer of Eurekster, which makes an embeddable custom social search portal called a “Swicki”, posed a question on LinkedIn about how one would go about defining a social media marketing roadmap, and how you would prioritize each social media channel.

There is no cookie cutter approach to social media marketing. Your strategy will depend on:

1) Your goals – SEO, PR, traffic ( to drive awareness? advertising click-thus? conversions?)
2) Your audience – where does your target demo hang out?
3) Your resources – you, you plus an intern, internal team, agency?

Here are 6 steps to help you design your social media marketing roadmap.

Step 1: Understand What Social Media Is

The best way to look at social media is to view it as one of many Internet marketing channels, one that has the amazing power to go viral. In the very least, it has the awesome ability to engage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand.

The social media marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 – basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as:

• Blogs and Forums / Discussion Boards
• Consumer Review Sites
• Social Networks / Online Communities
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Social News Sites
• Social Music Sites
• Video and Photo Sharing Sites
• Wikis

Step 2: Understand What Social Media Can & Can’t Do

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits. It doesn’t convert.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI but is great for:

• Brand building
• Relationship management
• Product development
• Reputation management
• Customer interaction
• Customer feedback
• Customer support
• Community building
• Defensive SEO – Yes! Bury your bad press with positive UGC

In some cases, social media can convert – usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. But that’s like being the D&D Dungeon Master.

Step 3: Determine Where Conversations are Happening

You will need to respond to conversations that are already happening. To determine where conversations are happening about your brand, you will need to have some kind of buzz monitoring or online reputation management system in place.

Prioritize these discussions, then hop in.

Step 4: Divide…

Next, you want to expand into unchartered territory.

Before venturing out into the vast unknown, create your social media road map – a map of the social web as it pertains to your business. Gather all the sites that would be most interested in what you have to say and segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and by target audience / topical interest.

Once you’ve done that, it will be more clear to you what your campaign specific marketing strategies and tactics ought to be.

Step 5: …and Conquer

Now comes the tactical deployment. Here are some examples of different kinds of social media engagements.

Blogger outreach & engagement – this is a top down, bottom up approach. To demonstrate a significant impact, this is best handled by a team. You will need to identify the A-List blogs, cultivate a positive relationship with as many as possible, persuade them to blog about your issue, or guest blog for them. You will need a team of conversation agents to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in MEANINGFUL conversations wherever conversations about your topic is happening.

If you have a call to action, relevant product, or web resource you are trying to drive traffic to, drop html links with target anchor text for an additional SEO lift (a % of the sites you will be hitting will be do-follow)

Disclose your identity, be courteous, informed about the subject, or you will be flamed, and that will live forever on the web.

Social networking – only hit the communities relevant to your issue, product, company, topic or you will get poor quality traffic, if any.

Are you infiltrating tight-knit interest-specific online communities? If so, you will need to ingratiate yourself into the pack.

Are you starting your own community on a hosted platform, like a Ning? You can drive conversation and awareness, your revenue options are limited (ad revenue sharing).

Do you own the community? Great – you can drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed calls-to-action, promos, ads, anywhere. If you’ve designed your site with SEO in mind, your users will create the content, and you will had an advantage in the SERPS, especially for long-tail keywords.

Social news marketing – thru social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine. These sites also have a unique culture and will work for you if your news item relates topics favored by the community. Digg, for example, veers towards the geeky. Write for maximum click thrus – think “linkbait”. Popular stories here can get picked up by bloggers, which will also give you an SEO boost. Traffic can be huge and fickle like a tsunami. Don’t expect it to convert. Avoid marketing here – you will be buried.

Step 6: Trust in the Force

Finally, trust is a huge factor in social engagement. Understand that social media marketing is most effective when users in the community know you. The only way for the community to know you is if you spend a lot of time online and invest managing your social web presence across communities.

Social media builds awareness and drives conversation. It’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer. Always remember, selling is a secondary or tertiary benefit of social media.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, seo, social networks, blogging, roi, lorna li[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
2. Social Media Optimization with StumbleUpon
3. What’s Your Buzz Share? 4 Easy Steps For Tracking Online Buzz

This is a great video y Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing on how to use Google Analytics to interpret data from your search engine marketing campaigns. The three most important pieces of information you will want to understand from your traffic statistics are:

1. Keyword data: Which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site?
2. Keyword value: Which keywords account for the most engagement in your site? Which keywords drive the most conversions?
3. Page context: Which pages receive the most search traffic? What keywords are associated with those pages?

Related posts:

1. 8 Google Advanced Search Operators for SEO
2. Google’s Top Search Engine Ranking Factors
3. Google Dominates Search in 2007

Google advance search operators are useful search queries that can help you determine your competitive environment and assess the level and degree of work that an SEO campaign requires. Here are the Google search operators most commonly used by SEOs:

1. site:

Site:www.website.com will show you the number of pages in your website that are indexed by Google.

If you find a large discrepancy (> 20%) between the number of web pages indexed and the number of pages you have published, you will need to identify and resolve the technical issues that may be blocking web crawlers.

2. allinurl

For a quick way to see if a specific page is indexed, you can use the allinurl:www.webpage.com query. Google will return the page in its results page if it is indexed or show no results if it isn’t.

3. link:

Link:www.webpage.com will display all sites linking to this particular webpage. Since link popularity is an important search engine ranking factor, it’s important to determine how many links you have, and how many you need. You should definitely use this search query on your competitors.

It’s important to note that Google link operator has taken a huge beating from the SEO community for its lack of accuracy. Many SEOs use Yahoo Site Explorer for more accurate link analysis.

4. allinanchor:

Allinanchor:keyword returns all the pages/sites that have links from other pages that contain those specific keywords in link anchor text.

5 allintitle:

Allintitle:keyword returns a list of websites that contain the keyword in its title tag.

6. allintext:

Allintext:keyword tells Google to display webpages that contain that particular keyword in the body of the page.

It tends to give prominence to documents that contain the keyword at the beginning of the body text.

7. cache:

Cache:www.webpage.com will show you the last time the Google crawled your web page and what version of the page it has in its cache.

Cache:www.webpage.com keyword will show you the keyword or key phrases highlighted within the cached content.

8. info:

Info:www.webpage.com shows a variety of data about that web page, such as the latest cache date, other similar web pages, web pages that link to your site, web pages within your site and web pages containing the your domain name.

You can use Google advanced search operators them to keep track of your SEO efforts and keep an eye on your competition. However, understand that the data these operators really just provide a ball-park estimation.

According to Michael Martinez, using Google’s advanced search query operators has its pros and cons:

Search engine results analysis has to focus on the most important factors for optimization. You need to know:

1. Which pages in your site are indexed
2. How often your page data is recached
3. How many of your pages pass value through their links
4. How many of your pages are receiving value from other pages

In some cases you can (and should) combine query operators to refine your analysis. If rank-checks and backlink profiles are all you’re doing, you’re running slower than the leaders in the field and they are way out ahead of you. You can’t understand a Web site’s performance simply by looking at a handful of targeted queries and running backlink reports on Yahoo!

The search engines look at hundreds of signals to determine how to crawl, index, and rank sites. You should be looking at hundreds of signals, too.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Top Search Engine Ranking Factors
2. SEO Analytics With Google Analytics
3. Google Dominates Search in 2007

What’s Code Got to Do With It?

Face it, while linklove is sexy, in SEO, code ain’t no second hand emotion.

SEO is a multi-faceted discipline, where keyword research, SEO copy-writing, linkbuilding, and code optimization work as a team in an attempt to address a variety of search engine ranking factors. Programming your website in a way that allows engine spiders to access, categorize, and index the content on your site so will ensure your other SEO tactics go the full mile. As an SEO best practice, you will want to make sure your code is as error-free as possible, from a W3C validation standpoint, and that you follow guidelines for semantically correct markup. Testing shows that good, clean, semantically correct code not only allows your site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows for faster indexing by the search engines.

W3C Compliance and SEO

There is a great deal of debate as to whether W3C compliancy will enhance search engine rankings. According to Michael Gray:

From my experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble. If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble. Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a bot to crawl your website. However if you can get it down to handful of errors, it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.

Even if you can’t enforce strict compliance, be familiar with Google Webmaster guidelines and search engine bot indexing behavior, and code your site accordingly.

Understanding Semantic XHTML Markup

Semantic markup (or Semantic coding) is the art of programming your website so that the code used is descriptive and representative of the information it contains…and more meaningful to search engine bots. Standardized markup tags define the content on a page better than generic elements like <div> or <span> tags.

For example, if you were creating a page heading, use this code:

<h1>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup</h1>

Instead of this code:

<div id=”page-title”>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup </div>

Semantic Coding Guidelines

Here are some great semantic coding guidelines, courtesy of Barry Wise:

• <h1> tags should only be used once on a page, to define the title and/or purpose of the page. It should be very close in meaning to the <title> tag of your page.
• <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> header tags should be used for subheadings, in order of descending importance. Try not to skip.
• Don’t use <br> to separate list items. Instead use the <ol> tag with <li> elements for ordered lists, and <ul> and <li> should be used for unordered lists.
• For bold or emphasized text, use <strong> or <em>, instead of the less descriptive <b> and <i> tags.
• Wrap paragraphs in <p> tags, and never use <p> or <br> tags just for spacing. Use the margin and/or padding attributes of the <p> tag in your CSS code to add visual spacing.

List of Semantic Code Elements

• ABBR and ACRONYM: For Abbreviations and Acronyms. They have an accompanying title tag which you can use to describe the actual meaning of the abbreviated word or acronym.
• CITE: Citation, used to cite a source of information.
• CODE: Computer or Programming code.
• DEL: Deleted word or phrase.
• DFN: Definition.
• DL: Definition List. Similar to UL and OL, but uses DT (Definition term) and DD (definition description) to show terms and definitions.
• EM: Emphasis, displayed as italicized text.
• INS: Insert, used to display text you have inserted due to an edit at a later date.
• KBD: Keyboard instructions.
• OL: Ordered List.
• SAMP: Sample output, used to show sample output from programming code.
• STRONG: Strong, or bold, emphasis on a word or phrase.
• UL: Unordered List.
• VAR: Variable, used to represent a variable in programming code.

Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme fails a simple test for truly semantic XHTML markup. One of the most common errors is that the blog title / logo is served within <H1> tags. Serving your post titles in <h1> tags is far better.

For a great info on how to correct your blog XHTML, visit master WordPress developer Cris Pearson’s blog post The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs.
For non-code related tactics on blogging SEO, check out my summary of the Blogger’s Guide to SEO meetup, hosted by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Freedom from Code Bloat

Code bloat occurs when the amount of code on a page greatly exceeds the amount of text on the page. Excessive code can get in the way of search engine spiders indexing your content, especially if your content is placed deep within your code structure. It’s harder for search engine spiders to crawl the content of the page and determine its relevancy of the page if there’s extraneous code in the way. Furthermore, code bloat can create longer than normal download time, which can impact how search engines rank your site, and cause visitors to navigate away from your webpage.

There are four types of code bloat to be aware of:

• On-page styling
• On-page JavaScripts
• Excessive table usage
• Poor HTML formatting

According to technical SEO consultants HiRank, you can reduce code bloat by moving as much javascript and CSS to external files. This enables your users to cache those files on first load, that way, search engines don’t have to download these files all the time. To fix these four common types of code bloat, visit Stoney deGeyter’s post on how to fix the Javascript and CSS that is jacking up your SEO.

Good web development involves minimizing code bloat and programming your website with a low code to text ratio in mind. While there is no agreement on an ideal code to text ratio, the lower the ratio, the faster the load time, and the easier for search engine spiders to determine the relevancy of your content.

[tags]seo, search engine optimization, blogging, blog seo, xhtml, semantic markup, code to text, w3c compliance, code bloat[/tags]

Related posts:

1. How to Optimize Your Green Business Website for Local Search
2. Google Earth Outreach – Best Practices on Mapping Social and Environmental Issues Accross the Globe
3. The Concise List of Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress

There’s a lot of resources that list all the on-page and off-page ranking factors that are important to search engine optimization. There’s only one list out there that is worth paying attention to: SEOmoz’s Search Ranking Factors V2.

Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account approximately 200+ attributes when determining the position of websites in search engine results pages (SERPs). In April 2007, SEOmoz published Search Ranking Factors V2, a survey of 37 leaders in organic search engine optimization on the most important factors in Google rankings. Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz CEO maintains that 90-95% of what you need to know about the Google algorithm is contained in the study. While a year old, most of this information is still valid.

Search Ranking Factors evaluates both positive and negative search engine ranking attributes on a scale of 1-5 (5 is “Exceptional Importance), and also indicates the degree of consensus between SEO respondents. Comments from the respondents also yield nuggets of juicy information that can help you refine your SEO and help you avoid landing in Google’s supplemental hell (index).

If you have a limited amount of time for SEO, be sure to focus on the factors that are given the greatest weight by Google’s algorithm. Below is a summary of the top 10 factors that influence Google search engine rankings:

Google’s Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag (4.9)
Exceptional Importance and High Consensus

Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.

If you only have time one SEO action on your site, make sure to create a good, description title tag that starts with your target keyword.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link (4.4)
Exceptional Importance and High Consensus

Inbound links that contain your target keyword in the anchor text will give you a strong boost in ranking for that keyword. While keyword rich anchor text is hugely important, the text adjacent to the link plays a role, as well. A wide array of naturally occurring inbound anchor text is the best scenario – inbound links that are close to identical could invite penalties. So if you’re dropping links…be sure to mix up your anchor text a little!

3. Global Link Popularity of Site (4.4)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

This refers to the overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity). I like Lucas Ng’s description, because it refers to Amazon tribes!

“Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.”

4. Age of Site (4.1)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

Age refers to the date indexable content was first seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership), NOT the date of original registration of the domain.

Age is a huge factor, which is the reason why a lot of crappy, old, barely relevant sites are hard to knock out of SERPs. According to Todd Malicoat, “The older the berry the sweeter the link juice.”

5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure (4)
Exceptional Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page. While somewhat masturbatory, internal link juice is a strongly weighted factor and, most importantly, one that you can control, especially with regards to the choice of anchor text.

According to Scott Smith, a.k.a Caveman, “Factors considered by Google include: Number of inbound links, importance (placement) of the inbound links within the linking pages, anchor text patterns, nav versus text links, and the content of linking pages.”

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site (3.9)
High Importance and Average Agreement

This refers to the subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword. Highly relevant links, from trusted, topically related sites carry more weight.

7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community (3.9)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world. Link love from the popular kids in the hood helps. A few links from authority sites can help a niche site rank above the authorities for niche-related keywords.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text (3.7)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.

Target keywords in the title need to be included in the page, especially in starting and ending paragraphs. Focus more on semantic variations than keyword density – repeating the same keywords over and over again, can result in ranking suppression.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site (3.6)
High Importance, But Highly Disputed

In general, a links from popular sites are better, but it’s hard to get an accurate read on how valuable this is.

10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page (3.5)
High Importance and Average Agreement

While all links help, links from topically related sites help more, though it’s hard to measure exactly by how much.

Other Important Search Engine Ranking Factors

11. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages (3.5)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages? According to Aaron Wall http://seobook.com, “Your outbound links help define what community your site belongs in.”

Benefit can be derived through anchor text tunneling, that is, when Site A links to site B with the keyword “widgets”, and site B links to site C the keyword “widgets”.

12. Age of Document (3.4)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporally relevant. An older document on an older, more trusted site will rank better than one on a newer site.

Says Aaron Wall, “Older documents may be trusted more, especially if they are well cited and do not have many broken links in them. For blogs and news sites new documents may tend to have high PageRank values due to internal site structure. New documents may also be given a freshness boost.”

13. Keyword Use in H1 Tag (3.3)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase

14. Amount of Indexable Text Content (3.2)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page. Sheer volume of content isn’t that important, but it is good to have some indexable content as opposed to all flash and images. Chris Boggs http://chrisboggs.blogspot.com thinks that content of 75-100 words can be effective in scoring points with Google. However, absence of indexable content can be mitigated by other factors, such as quality inbound links, quality outbound links, and intelligent keyword deployment across title, meta, hx, etc.

15. Age of In-Bound Link (3.2)
High Importance and Average Agreement

Age matters

16. Topical Relationship of Linking Site (3.1)
High Importance and Average Agreement

It helps

17. Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query (3.1)
High Importance, But Highly Disputed

The topical relationships between the full content of a website and a user’s given query. References to the Google’s neutering of the Google bomb effect, caused by complaints from miserable failures in high places, indicate a belief that this factor is more important now than before. However, the dominance of Wikipedia in SERPs is a powerful counter-example.

18. Keyword Use in Domain Name (3)
Moderate Importance and Average Agreement

Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com. Having your keyword in your domain name has little bearing on its own. The benefit comes from its propensity to attract inbound links with your keyword in the anchor text. You can use hyphens to separate works, but your url will look yucky, and it kills your branding.

[tags]search engine ranking factors, google, seo, search engine optimization, search marketing, serp, lorna li[/tags]

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2. SearchStatus Plugin for Firefox – Designed Especially for Search Engine Marketers
3. Understanding Google PageRank

by Lorna Li

Search engine marketers, bloggers, and social media fanatics wore their favorite hats at Search Marketing Salon’s “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Launch party at the chic and intimate Otis Lounge in San Francisco. Tips were swapped, secrets were traded, and product ideas were bounced around that would take search marketing to the next level.

Forest Kolb, Sharon Lin, and Julie Blaustein.

“We need a Google Adwords Editor that also includes Yahoo and MSN on a single UI,” stated Clay Schulenburg, Interactive Marketing Manager for Healthline. “This will take search to a whole new level.”

F*ck the Yahoo bulk upload, is what I say to that!

Hear that, web entrepreneurs? That’s big bucks for you!

Jacob Morgan, Search Marketing Alchemist and Nicolette Toussaint

Search-obsessed bloggers that dropped by included Michael Brito, who writes a fantastic blog about Social Media & Conversation Marketing, Lisa Whelan social media queen on Vox, Jim Yu on how to be a Search Marketing and SEO Maven, and Andy Kaufman, the real estate blogger and Twitter king.

William Gauthier, Alicia Lin, Damon White, and Lorna Li.

e-Storm’s William Gauthier, Lisa McGuire, and Daniel Riveong

Leon Krishayana and lovely lady in black beret

Leon Krishnayana of iSpionage, offers a technology platform that helps search engine marketers track competitors’ PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ads daily. It allows you to see the ad copy, keywords, and average rank on the major search engines side by side. Very handy indeed.

Vera Belenky and Alex Gamburg

Other attendees included Mark Fiske, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Gap, Pete Park of web advertising agency Vectorhaus, Yan Rozovsky VP of LeadClick Media, Jason Hart of the search-focused Online Marketing agency Domain Methods, Jeff Rohrs, VP of search marketing agency ExactTarget, Leo Haryono, Head of Natural Search of Shopping.com, Josh Pierry and Clay Shulenburg of Healthline, Biren Talati, of Sandalstore.com, Peter Koontz, Founder and CTO of Sprenzy, Vera Belenky of Walmart.com, Alex Gamburg Search Marketing Director of Trulia, specializing in real estate search, Gabriel Carrejo, the original sinner, Forest Kolb of BizzFlip who has cracked the secret of the Digg first page, Sharon Lin, Online Marketer for Web 2.0 companies, Irina Greenman, and Danny Cheung, who is about to revolutionize the world of WordPress publishing the Good Magazine way.

More pictures can be viewed on the Search Marketing Salon Flickr album.

Join Search Marketing Salon on Facebook!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: searchmarketing salon, e-Storm, iSpionage, Domain Methods, Good Magazine, Sandalstore.com, Michael Brito, Andy Kaufman, Jim Yu, Lisa Whelan, Sharon Lin, Josh Pierry, Clay Shulenburg, Peter Koontz, Jeff Rohrs, Biren Talati, Jason Hart, Gabriel Carrejo, Pete Park, Mark Fiske, Yan Rozovsky, Leo Haryono, Leon Krishnayana, Vera Belenky, Nicolette Toussaint, Lorna Li, Jacob Morgan

Related posts:

1. Search Marketing Salon’s Wear Your Favorite Hat Launch Party on Thursday March 27 at Otis Lounge
2. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
3. Ninja for Hire – Working YouTube to Break into Pictures

It’s time to wear your favorite hat, because Search Marketing Salon launches this Thursday. White hats, grey hats, and black hats are welcome – we do not discriminate.

If you are obsessed about search engine rankings, gaga about the SEO benefits of social media, and have a tale or two to tell about how you dominated the SERPs, have a drink with us!

When:

Thursday March 27 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Where:

Otis Lounge

25 Maiden Lane (b/w Grant & Kearny )

San Francisco, CA 94108

Join Us!

RSVP via Eventbrite for Search Marketing Salon’s Wear Your Favorite Hat Launch Party.

To become an official member of Search Marketing Salon, join Search Marketing Salon on LinkedIn.

You can also connect with Search Marketing Salon on Facebook.

[tags]search marketing salon, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, seo, ppc, social seo, web 2.0 marketing[/tags]

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