For some reason Search Engine Optimization has developed the reputation of a bad scary boogeyman among non-technical folks. I can’t tell you how many talks folks come up to me and talk as if I am a rocket scientist (don’t get me wrong, I am not going to pretend I am not). Whether you are absolutely new to SEO or know just a bit about it, you should first try to put your fear aside. Search engine optimization is not rocket science, and it’s definitely not the exclusive knowledge of super geeks. Search engine optimization is a set of practices that you can use to put yourself in a better position to get ranked high on the search engine results pages. No black magic involved.

Google, as always, is your friend if you are just starting with SEO. You should definitely read the Google Webmaster Guidelines (or what I call SEO bible). Google pretty much tells you what it expects you to do. Now, advanced SEOs disagree on a few things, but that just comes down do different interpretations for the rules set by Google. You should also try to learn the basics of HTML. You don’t have to become a programmer, but it does always help when you know what a title tag is (I do recommend studying W3C’s HTML tutorial).

Perhaps the toughest part of getting started with SEO is putting things into practice. A lot of us keep reading and reading and reading, but when it comes to actually putting things into action we either procrastinate or just talk ourselves out of it. Of course, if you own a small business, you are going to have to do what it takes to succeed, and SEO is a must do. SEO Book by Aaron Wall is one of the most practical courses on SEO that teaches you exactly what you need to do to get yourself ranked high on search engines. If after watching Aaron’s videos, you still feel overwhelmed, then I do recommend you logging on to rentacoder.com and hiring a SEO expert to do the job for you.

I am not going to pretend that everyone is going to do SEO by themselves. Some folks just won’t feel comfortable tackling SEO challenges, and that is just a fact. You can still use services such as rentacoder to outsource your SEO for cheap. Either way, search engine optimization is one business process that you can’t ignore.

The year 2008 is almost over. The year started with a bang for me, but it got a little bit slow towards the end. Now that I think about it, this year has been awfully short. I don’t know about you but it seems as you get older, the days start going much faster. 2009 promises to be an interesting year to say the least. The state of economy is expected to get worse before better, and the job market will be even tougher than it has been in 2008 (as a self-employed person, I’ve got to always be alert when things are not working out). But I can’t be more excited about the prospects in the new year. It’s still fun to go over things that did go right in 2008.

Here is the list of what I am thankful for 2008:

1. Thankful for still being in business so far. The year has been tough on many folks, so I am thankful that I can still provide for myself and my family.
2. Glad to be still healthy. Another year has passed, and I am not getting any younger. And while I am not exactly in the best shape of my life, I am still healthy! Yay!
3. Thankful for somehow managing to stay on top of most things going on in my industry. Some folks start becoming stagnant as they age. Hasn’t happened to me yet, I hope
4. Grateful for Facebook and Twitter. The amount of stuff I have learned from folks on these communities are just astronomical.
5. Still single and going strong. I am still glad that I can take risks without thinking twice about it.
6. Thankful to my previous company for offering me a chance to work with them. Those guys were great, and I made great friends there, but I moved on, and they did too. Every-one’s happy!
7. Wordpress is a big part of my life, and I owe those guys a lot. I don’t know most of them, but that doesn’t mean I can count them as my friends.
8. Thankful I got to hear about the God particle experiment. Science has always been my first love, but I never got to pursue it as a full-time career. But I keep up with the most important developments, and that was one!
9. I am lucky to have had the chance to attend a few events earlier this year. Hopefully, I’ll go to more conferences next year.
10. And I am extremely blessed to have my close family members healthy, alive, and kicking for 2008. Hope for the same in 2009.

Probably missed a bunch of things as I had a lot to be thankful in 2008. What are you thankful for this year?

I have been lucky enough to be involved in affiliate marketing, PPC, and other marketing segments in the past few years. What I have realized is most affiliate marketers don’t pay enough attention to the ABCs of SEO. In other words, they don’t get the basics straight and go in expecting to get ranked on top search engines regardless. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen monumental affiliate sites that do not have optimized title tags. The concept behind these sites are great, but if you forget the most important SEO tactics, you are not going to get ranked as well as you should.

A lot of affiliates argue that SEO is not their “cup of tea.” That they are good with marketing, but not with the technical “stuff.” In reality, you don’t need to be a super geek to be able to implement the basics of SEO. Advanced SEO often requires some technical knowledge but even that shouldn’t be an issue if you have the drive to learn (There are plenty of sources such as AffiloRama that can teach you how to implement advance SEO tactics).

In order to achieve higher traffic from organic search, you should at least take time to do the bare minimum. In essence, you should be prepared to:

• do proper keyword research before setting up your affiliate site. Choosing the right keywords can bring you lots of targeted traffic and who doesn’t want that.
• optimize your website tags (including title, meta, alt, header, and robots) in order to give yourself a better chance of getting ranked high on search engines.
• optimize your website structure (URLs, file names, and directory names) to get the most out of your content.
• optimize your sitemap and robots.txt files to help engines find your pages, and  reduce content duplication issues.
• feed your website with fresh, optimized content in order to keep search agents coming back for more.
• use the social media to drive extra traffic to your website (through providing valuable content to your readers).
• optimize your website linking structure (internal links) to help Google understand the theme(s) within your site.
• gather incoming links (inbound links) from article directories, web directories, blogs, forums, and other sources.

The above steps are a general blue-print on how to optimize an affiliate site for the search engines. Most of the above steps do not require you to be a super geek, which means there should be no excuse for you not to do them. Are you getting the most organic traffic out of your affiliate sites?

The year 2008 was a wonderful year for the blogging community. The community grew exponentially, and people who wouldn’t even think about writing on the web just a year ago caught on with the concept of blogging. The truth is, all the free and premium tools available on the WWW have made it easier for ordinary Joes and Janes to get started with blogging. Whether you are using Blogger or Wordpress (or another CMS for that matter), you have a wonderful piece of software at hand that makes writing and managing content easy and more efficient. But just because writing a blog has become easy, it doesn’t mean you should not take time to optimize your posts for search engines.

The SEO process remains the same for blog posts. Each blog post is a page of its own, which means you are going to have to optimize it properly to get free traffic through organic search engine listings. In fact, it’s always better the do a big chunk of the SEO work up front in order to get the best out of your posts. Here are the steps that I take in order write blog posts that are not only optimized for search engines but also have the best chance of getting ranked:

• Topic: figuring out what to write about is not that simple. If you have been blogging for a while, you probably have realized that. I personally use tools such as WordTracker, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and Google Trends to figure out what to write about. Another useful tool here is WordTracker questions.
• Keyword Phrase(s): once I have figured out what I want to write about, then I will try to figure out what keyword(s) I should go for. I use SpyFu and WordTracker to find out keywords that are worth going for and the ones that my competitors are going for. SpyFu Kombat is one of the best tools you can use to figure out what you have in common with your competitors, and where they are beating you.
• On Page Optimization: Once I have decided what keyword phrases I am going for, I will try to stick with 3% keyword density and write my post around these keywords. I will also make sure the keywords are used in my title and in my URL (if possible). After I am done, I will update my Site-map to include the new page. Finally, I will make sure to link to other pages on my site, if possible.
• Off Page Optimization: Once you have taken time to write content, you want to make sure you give it a chance to succeed by promoting it on the Social media sites such as Twitter and FaceBook. I also write articles and use an article distribution service to promote my content.You can also work your network on Delicious and StumbleUpon to get some more eyes on your content.

The process above is the simplified version of the blueprint I use for my blog posts. At the end of the day, you should try to develop a blueprint that you comfortable with. For instance, some folks prefer to use Wordze, Keyword Discovery, or SEO Elite to come up with keywords. That’s perfectly fine if you are comfortable with those tools (you can see a list of SEO tools here). Some folks even pay to show up on Facebook or Stumbleupon. It really all comes down to your budget and what you are comfortable with. Having said that, you should never write a blog post without proper SEO Planning.

So today has been a really busy day for Google. I just noticed that they have added the search box to sites such as Amazon. Basically, if you search for the word Amazon on Google, you will see that little search box under Amazon.com’s listing. It’s pretty cool. For a second I thought I was seeing Google subscribed links, but this thing is for real. Very cool!

Before you jump the gun, you should know that there is no way to buy your way to the top of the search engines such as Google. At least, no ethical way.But PPC can certainly help you with choosing better keywords and gain more conversions:

• If you are very good in analytics, you would know that a big part of web analytics is A/B testing. So how do you A/B test a page that you are hoping to get ranked for on Google? The answer is you can’t, unless you use a paid campaign. A/B testing is necessary to find the landing page that works for your business, and you should not “not” do it just because you are doing SEO. Here is where PPC can help you. You can run test campaigns on your A and B pages to figure out which one performs better. No need to create dynamic pages and confuse crawlers.
• PPC can help you with choosing the right keywords. Just because a keyword get a lot of traffic doesn’t mean it’s high quality. You could be better off if you choose keywords that convert the best for your industry, and you can certainly test your keywords with paid campaigns. Best of all, you can turn your campaign on and off quickly which makes testing much easier to manage.
• In some cases, pay per click can generate returning traffic from your site. Sometimes people see something interesting on the web but bookmark it for later. That could happen if someone happens to find your brand through Google Adwords. So paying money now could help you later.

I know a lot of people claim that their traffic is completely organic, but in almost most cases you can’t live without your PPC campaign. Things change quickly in the search world, and using PPC and SEO together to maximize your traffic is the best way to go.

This may sound like a strange question coming from someone who lives and dies by SEO. Search engine optimization has been a very good field for me, and it has certainly opened doors for me. However, when I look at the big picture ( and I do that a lot, mind you) I see many search engine optimization professionals who spent numerous hours trying to maximize their client’s visibility by trying to feed the engines what they are looking for. The concepts such as keyword density, keyword research, and search engine optimized content are all great, but search engine optimized sites which show up at the top of search engines are not necessarily the results that users are looking for.

Search engine crawlers have gotten very smart in the past few years, and they don’t act like the good old “stupid” machines. At the same time, you can still trick them into ranking you higher by following the guidelines that search engines have provided you with. The question becomes how do you tell a good site from a rubbish site, if they are both optimized for search engines? Google is addressing that by having a trust factor in its algorithm. Trust could mean links from authority sites, and so on. So as long as you have great original content that is getting links from authority sites, then you are good. But, what happens when a quality but not search engine optimized site is competing against a rubbish but highly optimized website? You may say that, the first guys should pay more attention to SEO and that is true in a sense. But I feel as though optimizing pages for search engines has become easier than creating content (at least for some people). For every 1 quality site on the web, you see probably 100 terrible, useless sites. Search engine optimization has obviously somewhat contributed to this. In a sense, you are looking at probably 50 rubbish sites that having nothing but garbage (optimized garbage) on them. Obviously, the authority sites who know how the play the game will still rule the engines, but my feeling is that some smaller but good sites are getting ignored or pushed to the second or third pages and are replaced with search engine friendly sites. Why does this matter? Because searching shouldn’t be about how optimized your content is, but how useful it is to your readers.

I know. I know. You have probably heard this question before, and nobody seems to have a definite answer to this question. But the funny thing is that nobody asks why this questions comes up so often when discussing search engine optimization. Search engine optimization has become one of the hottest field and a few SEOs are making crazy amount of money for offering their art to those who want to gain more visibility on the web. But the truth is, search engine optimization is a science period. Search engine optimization by definition is a process that you go through to optimize your pages for better visibility on search engines. A process in my mind refers to something that is more scientific.

So why SEO consultants want you to believe otherwise? The answer is simple. A scientific process can be done by anybody. Sure, it won’t be easy, but as long as you know the rules and follow the rules, you will be fine. An art however indicates that you may need some special talent to pull it off. There is no question that we have very good and very bad SEO professionals, but their level has nothing to do with their talent. Those who have simply worked hard on improving their SEO knowledge usually are more effective than SEOs who try to wing it. Search engine optimization is a science, and you can absolutely do it yourself. Anybody who is telling you otherwise is just plain wrong.

Many companies underestimate the amount of planning and deliberation that needs to go in order for an SEO initiative to be a success. Many marketing mangers and directors have limited technical knowledge and as a result do not quite understand how SEO needs to be implemented in their organizations. Slapping META tags and title tags on pages can bring you just so much success if you don’t plan properly beforehand. It is always better to find out who your audience is, what your business goals are, and where you want people to go. That’s right. Just because you know how to find the more popular keywords and do KEI or other keyword analysis doesn’t mean you can actually bring you SEO effort home. Unless you bring technology and business together, you SEO will not reach its max potential.

So here is the most common SEO dilemma that many face everyday: say you have a great website and you want to add a new section to it. Would you put it as www.yourdomain.com/mysite or mysite.yourdomain.com? I have heard many stories about how sub-folders are better than subdomains and vice versa. Many claim that since a subdomain is treated as a completely new domain, you will feel the effect of Google Sandbox for a while. Personally, I have not seen this case and I can’t say it’s true. What I do know is that it comes purely to strategy when you are adding a section to your site. Subdomains give you more flexibility and are in general easier to manage. At the same time, they may be complicated to implement, especially by bigger companies. I have seen companies that would take months to just implement a subdomain for their site. That would seriously slow you down if you want to hit the ground running and fast. Technically, as long as you are getting the linking part right and use a good keyword in your subdomain, you should be alright. But the difference is getting smaller and smaller by the day. In fact, Google is starting to treat subdomains and subfolders the same way. There are millions of things that you could do to realize small advantages in the SEO game, but wasting time arguing about small details should not be on your agenda.