When it comes to search engine optimization, we have two kinds of books. One group of books are designed for people who have no idea what search engine optimization is and how search engines works. These books are great for those who want to know enough to be dangerous. The second group of books is written for more advanced search engine optimizers. They are designed to teach the pros how to optimize sites based on certain technologies for search engines. Technologies such as PHP and Flash are not that difficult to optimize for search engines, but things can get a bit technical. No wonder these topics are not covered in beginner books.

If you have gone over your beginner SEO book or just want to learn more technical SEO tricks, here are 4 killer advanced SEO books you should read:

Search Engine Optimization with PHP: a wonderful book that teaches you how to optimize your PHP side for search engines. In case you haven’t noticed, software packages such as Wordpress are based on PHP, so this book is a must read if you have a PHP site or a Wordpress blog.

Search Engine Optimization for Flash: a lot of SEOs tell you that you can’t optimize Flash for search engines. Things have changed in the recent years, and Adobe is working hard to make it possible for developers to optimize Flash for search engines. If you want to learn the latest wasys to optimize Flash for search engines, this is the book to read. (more…)

Have you been trying to get ranked higher on search engines such as Google with no success? Maybe you have tried too hard. You have been pushing the envelope, going after directories, blogs, forums, and social networking sites. But are still not making any major progress. It’s not the fate that is holding you back. You are probably not going about optimizing your pages the right way. Search engine optimization has gotten the reputation of a magic pill. Many top executives assume that there is this switch that you can turn on, and the traffic floodgates will open. In reality, getting ranked high for keywords that matter takes time and effort. It’s not just about ranking high, it’s about having the right keywords.

You can get ranked for a two-word phrase that nobody searches for. That may give you confidence in your SEO abilities, but in reality you have wasted your time on a term that will probably never matter to you or your business. The industry has changed a lot in the past few years. A few years ago, we didn’t have all the information sources that we do now. Nowadays, you have Google Trends, Google Insights for Search, and Keyword Spy. So there is no excuse for not doing your homework before coming up with your killer keyword list. In early days of SEO, you could write up content and rank much better for those competitive terms. But these days, you can’t afford to play that game. Not if you don’t have enough budget to throw killer link building and viral campaigns. If you happen to be a blogger with a limited amount of budget, you are better off focusing on terms that you can rank for and topics that people are talking about. That’s why Google Trends and Insights should be a big part of your keyword research process. (more…)

Facebook has been a top player in the social media for quite a while, so it wasn’t surprising to see them for a deal for the ages and add Friendfeed to its rank. Friendfeed is certainly a very interesting service that I personally have used since its early days, but it was clear that for it to move to the next level, it needed to join hands with another big player in the market. It just happens that Facebook was that player. Facebook has had its eyes on Friendfeed for quite a while, and it can now use the engineers at Friendfeed to take Facebook to the next level by bringing the best of Friendfeed to Facebook. That includes but it’s not limited to content aggregation, better live search functionality, and better content and discussion management capabilities.

So what does this move mean for SEOs? It’s quite simple. Facebook has just gotten that much important for anyone focused on the social media. As a SEO, I have used Friendfeed, Facebook, and Twitter to get the word out about the sites I am trying push on search engines. One of my major avenues is now going to be discontinued in the near future, so Facebook will become that much more important. With the addition of best of Friendfeed features to Facebook, the social network is going to have so much content on its hand that it’s going to take a Google-like effort to index all that content.

Facebook has waited little time to introduce its new search that let users search for content across the network more effectively. And it can only get better once Friendfeed innovations are introduced on Facebook. Many experts are claiming that Facebook is slowing building up its resources for an all out assault on Google. Google is certainly not sitting idle as it is already working on new innovations with its own search engine. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Google comes back to the table with a fresh offer to buy Twitter.

Things are certainly going to get interesting for us SEOs. You can no longer afford to only rely on the traditional ways of building links and optimizing your content to get the most organic leads. Social media is a whole other animal, and it’s certainly the present and the future. Taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn should be a part of your overall SEO strategy. You may have to spend more time to get a handle on these communities, but at the same time you are going to have more ways to drive traffic to your websites, and that’s always a good thing.

If you have been paying attention to the news in the search engine industry, you know Bing, Google, and Yahoo-Microsoft partnership are the talk of town. But what people need to be talking about is Topsy. Topsy is a search engine based on tweets that lets you find out what people are talking about on Twitter, who’s tweeting what, and who are the influential players in any niche. Twitter is still growing fast, and a lot of people are jumping on the ship, making the community stronger than before. It’s true that Google has almost too many pages in its index, but tweets are easier to create than web pages, and that’s why Topsy comes in handy.

You only need 140 characters to create a tweet, so millions of tweets can be sent back and forth on a daily basis. That means there is a lot of data out there, which Google and other modern search engines can’t keep track of for now. That’s where Topsy comes in. Tospy keeps track of top tweets across the board and lets you know which ones are more popular than others. It also shows you who has tweeted and retweeted what stories, and how influential each twitterer is.

So as you can see in the above picture, you can find out who’s been talking about your keyword over the past few weeks, month, or the past hour. Next to each story, you are going to see the number of times people have tweeted about that specific story. Another feature that makes Topsy so exciting is the ability to find out more information about each twitterer. You can not only use Topsy to find new people to follow, but you can also retweet stories easily and same time in the process.

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