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.

If you are new to SEO, you need to be careful what some consultants claim about the effects of Adsense/Adwords for your search engine rankings. Adsense which allows many publishers to monetize their websites is not going to help you at all with your search engine natural rankings. The same applies to Adwords. No matter how much money you spend with Google Adwords, you are not going to move an inch up or down the natural rankings. So, no! No benefit from Google Adsense or Adwords for that matter.

In many organizations, there are a few misconceptions about SEO and how it can affect an organization’s overall e-marketing strategies. Many organizations try to sell SEO as a marketing means to generate free sales and bring down the companies overall e-CPA. while that may be true in some cases, the way top executives go about understanding the benefits of SEO is often wrong. The notion that SEO will save you cost on your PPC campaigns is simply not true. Sure, you can stop your PPC altogether and bank everything on SEO, but if the past is a good indication, many companies will fail miserably with this strategy as many have in the past. SEO does not replace PPC people. But you already knew that!

One of the first things that an SEO would mention about a site is whether it is using a redirect and if so what type? Many sites use HTTP 302 redirect incorrectly and get penalized for it. HTTP 302 means that you are using the destination temporarily whereas HTTP 301 means that you are actually having a permanent location for your page. In general, most SEOs would tell you that an incorrect use of 302 could lead to getting de-ranked by search engines or even banned. So when in doubt, use 301 redirect. Here is a great article on how to implement HTTP 301 redirect for your site. Of course, if you are PHP savvy, you can always use the following code:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.destination-url.com” );
?> 

So we all have heard of SEM, SEA, and SEO. Most of us anyway. But what the heck is SMO? SMO is social media optimization, and it is a pretty recent phenomenon. As Web 2.0 companies started to pop out of nowhere every second, a few smart SEOs decided to invent a new “big bucks” term to keep earning ‘em. Social media optimization is the process of using social networking and tagging sites such as Digg, Reddit, and even YouTube to promote a site. Obviously, you need to have the right message to be able to grab the readers’ attention. Social media optimization can help you in multiple ways. First, it gains you more visibility on the web, and that always helps. In addition, in most cases you get a valuable inbound link back from these social networking sites and that can pretty much help your site with its ranking. Not only that, more people can use the social media to link to your original content, and you reap the benefits of that overtime. But SMO is no rocket science. It is probably not as scientific as search engine optimization or even paid search, but it seems to be almost as valuable these days. That is till Google finds a way to discredit the links that are coming from social media sites.

When designing a Web Page, many users forget how important the title is to search engines. When I was reading the SEOBook a couple of months ago, it was interesting that a large number of websites on the web are named “untitled.” Aaron was even saying that some of these terms are becoming competitive. The fact of the matter is many Web site owners are not that tech savvy and simply forget to name their pages. But search engines pay extra attention to page titles. SEOs would tell you that first you need to have your keyword as a part of your file name. The name of the file could be something like keyword.htm, which is far better than XYZ.htm. Also, the title should include the keyword you are trying to get ranked for. Whatever you do, remember that your title tags are one of the most important ranking factors to search engines. Keep ‘em unique, keep ‘em targeted, and you are in business!