Well, finally decided to add Digg functionality to SEOABC after preaching it for quite some time now. I didn’t want to get down and dirty with Wordpress’ PHP code, but it turned out that Digg integration is fairly simple and straight forward except you want to pick the right color. The moral of story here is to implement these social media widgets earlier than later on your website to get traffic and precious links from Digg and other social media sites. Let me know if you need help with the code. Happy new year everyone!

Affiliate Marketing has become a hot topic in recent years and many have quit their day jobs to try their fortune in the affiliate marketing world. Advertisers have also become more aware of techniques to strengthen their sales through Affiliate marketing. Successful affiliate marketers act as an extension for the advertisers marketing teams. While affiliate marketers are focused on increasing their revenues, the successful ones achieve that by thinking and acting an external part of advertisers. Many SEOs would tell you that affiliate links do not give you any SEO juice. That is true especially with the redirect links that you get from LinkShare and CJ. However, companies that maintain huge affiliate networks have the opportunity to offer incentives to affiliates who are willing to give them a direct link. Now think about that for a second. If you have a network of 5000 affiliates and you get only 20% of them to give you a link, you are certainly increasing your opportunity to get ranked higher on search engines. Why companies don’t try this is beyond my comprehension (though it could be the tough contracts that some of them have signed with LinkShare and CJ). But I am willing to bet that they will start doing so soon!

As we go deeper and deeper in the Web 2.0 era, new traffic strategies come out everyday. One exciting way to drive organic traffic to your website is using StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a web 2.0 community that allows people to find terrific sites in their interest categories based on what the community has voted for. In essence, StumbleUpon is Viral Marketing 2.0. With StumbleUpon you could also advertise your site for $0.05 per impression which is pretty cheap. The ingenious aspect of this model is that you are not relying on a 35 word headline to define what your site is. On StumbleUpon your site will be your listing, and once you get people to your website, you can expect your traffic to grow exponentially if you offer quality content. I have seen sites that have increased their traffic by anywhere between 2 to 4 X, which is pretty good considering how cheap it is to get an StumbleUpon campaign up and running. Not a conventional SEO method, but it is well worth it!

SEO is a science and an art and in a sense all of us make mistakes that can be avoided. That’s why companies that have used multiple perspectives on SEO have realized more bang for their bucks. Here are some of the mistakes that I think can be easily avoided:

1. META Tags are important but not that important: There is no question that META tags still matter. However, as Google and other search engines refine their algorithms, these tags are having less and less determining ranking value. Companies that focus too much on META tags waste your money. But beware of those that claim you should not even bother with this!

2. Title Tags and keyword prominence: Many companies use naming conventions such as [Company Name - Keyword...] for their title tags. Why not move the name of the company to the back of the title in order to achieve a higher prominence ratio.

3. Keyword Mapping Matters: I have seen consultants that come in to companies and decide to implement the first day. As mentioned before, SEO is a science and art at the same time, but you can’t play Einstein with some company’s SEO initiative without properly planning first.

4. You can’t do SEO yourself: That is certainly a myth. You absolutely can do your SEO by yourself and you do not have to be super technical to be able to do that. However, you should consult with people who are experts if SEO is not your thing.

5. SEO can’t be tracked so why bother: You should absolutely work with your analytics team to figure out ways to quantify the results that you are seeing as you optimize your pages for search engines. Sometimes having more traffic to your site exposes the other flaws that your pages may have. Work on your landing page if you have to convert better as SEO can get people to your door only.

Aaron Wall had a cool collection of SEO tools that used data from Overture and WordTracker to provide keyword estimates. The tool was not functioning quite well for a while due to Overture keyword tool becoming unpredictable. Now Aaron has relaunched his SEO keyword tool set and I highly recommend using it if you are in keyword research and discovery mode. Check the SEO toolset here.

A few days ago, I was asked this rather unusual question after offering a SEO copy to a company. I was told that the company’s e-commerce team needed to test the SEO copy against their current landing pages and do some A/B testing on the SEO page that I had presented them with. So basically to put things in perspective, they would show different content to different users on the same page. It sounded a little bit strange to me, and knowing that crawlers would have so much trouble doing anything with such page, I immediately mentioned that was a “no-no.” There are several things that could happen in this so called A/B testing process. First of all, one should avoid writing code that would show different versions of the page to let’s say crawlers and people. That is Black Hat SEO. But even if you are not doing that, how are crawlers supposed to evaluate a page that changes its content on a random basis. I think the best way to go about this is to test a page using adwords or other paid search services and keep that separate from the page that you want to get ranked for search engines. Dynamic pages are technically very difficult to deal with so why add complexity to your SEO initiative when you can find a way around it?

Just had a chance to browse Amazon for the latest SEO books, and SEO Bible seems to be the latest SEO book available on Amazon.

The funny thing about this book is that it was supposed to be released on December 13th, but Amazon claims that there is one more left in stock! I am not going to get into the conspiracy theory that is behind Amazon’s timely stock related alerts. But this book seems to be a decent search engine optimization book. I haven’t read the book yet (which is why I don’t post a full review of it today), but here are the topics that search engine optimization bible promises to readers:

• How Design and SEO go hand in hand.
• How Behavioral targeting can help your SEO efforts to drive more acquisitions.
• How Web 2.0 and Social Media could help your search engine optimization efforts.
• Yahoo, Google, and MSN search engine specialization tactics

There are also some interviews with industry experts that I find extremely helpful, but overall this book seems to have the right topics. I have not read this book and until I read it (wish the author was kind enough to send me an evaluation copy), I can’t judge how well the book is written. A full review will be on the way in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Just using a keyword is not going to rocket you to the top of the search engines. Knowing what keywords to target is essentially one of many pieces of your SEO strategy. Once you know the keywords that you are targeting you need to use in the right place and on the right page. Keyword prominence is one of many factors that come into place. Basically, you should always try to target the beginning of your title tag and paragraphs to put keywords that you are targeting on a page. So technically, [Keyword] [Rest of your sentence] beats [Rest of Sentence] [Keyword] and [Keyword] [Sentence] [Keyword] in prominence. The same applies to paragraphs, and tags. It’s such a small thing that many people forget about but apparently it is very important to search engines.

I have been meaning to write a series about how to properly use WordTracker, and why you even need a subscription keyword research service. But before I get to that, and that could take a while, you may want to take advantage of the promotion that WordTracker is running for December. They are giving 15% off on their subscriptions and they also are offering 9 mini-courses on keyword research which could be helpful if you need some SEO keyword research drills. The final price on one year of WordTracker will be $255, down from $299.

Search engines are smart and stupid at the same time. While search engine algorithms are fairly complex, there are certain things that search engines have trouble with. For instance, Homophones or words with multiple meanings can trouble search engines. Imagine talking about a baseball bat on you blog and getting ranked for the word bat on a search engine. But searchers may not be looking for a baseball bat but for a bat that lives in South America. If you are not careful enough and don’t give search engine agents enough hints so they could figure out the context in which you are using Homophones, there is a good chance that you will target the wrong audience. A credit card is different from a debit card but if you only target the word card on your blog, they will be treated the same by agents. It is true that search engine agents are getting smarter everyday, but you may want to avoid Homophones if you can.