I don’t mean to be the messenger of terrible news, but here is a fact: The job market is officially dead. You can’t find a job to save your life these days. Every open position has 4000 people going for it. You have to literally share interview sessions with 5 other folks to even get a shot at getting the job. But that’s not all. Even if you manage to get an interview, the expectations have gotten so high that there is a good chance you won’t meet the qualifications. People are literally asking for God-like qualifications as they know they can’t hire too many people

I was going through all the in-house SEO jobs that are available in my area. Out of 10, 6 were looking for someone with 20 years of experience in SEO. And 3 of them were asking for 10 years of experience with the social media. The last one? only 2 years of experience in SEO. Sounds good if you think about it , but they also ask for 20 years experience in PHP and 10 years experience writing iPhone applications.

There you have it. Unless you are good and have gotten your site to #1 position on Google for the world “credit repair” or something totally general like “great,” you are probably not going to make it. Hate to disappoint you but the job market is rough, so brace yourself.

Bill Hunt’s second edition of his popular book, Search Engine Marketing Inc., is out. I remember reading the first book like it was yesterday. Search Engine Marketing Inc. does not claim to be an advanced search engine optimization book, but it is not a crash course to SEO either. You are going to learn techniques and concepts that you can apply every day to drive more traffic to your small business site. Whether it’s social media optimization that you are after or you want to figure out what works the best these days, you can get it all in Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

I like Bill’s book as it’s less about “cute” subjects and more about the underlying concepts behind everything we do in the SEO world. It’s surprising when search engine optimization professionals can’t tell you why they are suggesting what they are suggesting. They would tell you that Google “likes” those techniques. But there is a logic behind most things Google does when it comes to organic search. Knowing the logic can help you formulate sophisticated action plans for your clients (if you a pro) or your own small business. I highly recommend Search Engine Marketing Inc. for folks who want to know enough about SEO to be dangerous.

What if you could find a way to make everyone’s life a bit more difficult by making Google think that you are trying a DOS attack on it? That’s exactly what I did, not intentionally, the other day, and it is safe to say that not many people were happy with me. As I mentioned in my previous post, Google was showing advertising numbers once every ten times. So I ran over 1000 queries on Google for different search terms to get some inside information. Needless to say that I was blocked by Google and every time I searched for something, Google asked me to fill out a captcha form. But I sort of assumed that was something temporary and not on an organizational level.

The very next day I received a few tasty calls from my IT department about the script that they thought I had been running to get info from Google. Apparently they found it hard to believe that some one could put that much load on Google in a matter of minutes. Not only that, the IT team told me that Google was blocking everyone from doing searches on it without entering those dreadful curvy letters+numbers. So yes. There is such a thing as being penalized for over-searching. Of course, if Google allowed everyone to abuse it then there would be no Google.

OK. Maybe it’s not that new. But it has worked before, and it keeps working. Using forums content management systems to get a site into Google’s index is nothing new. It has been done before, and that is why Google is paying extra attention to people who are trying to game the system. What Google hasn’t done yet is penalize people who use a combo attack. So here is what I did for one of my brand new domains (age = 30 days).

I installed SMF forum on it, and added a few SEO friendly plugins to make the URLs look right. Then I added 30 short sentences as posts to it. I made sure they were keyword rich and relevant to the topic of my forum. Then I used Squidoo and Wordpress.com to create to links to the forum, and this all tool less than 30 minutes. In 48 hours, my forum was in Google’s index. The domain had never been used and was parked on 1&1 for a month, so I can’t say I had a head-start in this process. The moral of story here is Google is not perfect. There are thousands of ways that you can game the system. It won’t be long-term, and it won’t build you a business. But it’s fun to do regardless…

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!