We really enjoyed this insightful post by Renata Tibiriçá on SEOmoz this week.  Forgetting to optimize your website from a usability standpoint is a big no-no.  What good is it for people to find your stuff if they get there and are immediately turned off by your lack of organization, speed, relevancy, and message?  Renata gives a brief overview of conversion-oriented SEO to get you started, along with links to some helpful tools for testing and analytics data.

SEO begins from the birth of your website, and there’s no more obvious sign of that than your domain.  A good domain will drive traffic to your site, give your branding a leg-up, and yes, even be rewarded by Google’s search engines.  A bad domain can do the exact opposite: hide your site from searchers, make it easy to forget you, and cause a few headaches that could have been avoided.  So if you are thinking of building a new domain soon, check out Michael Gray’s article on how to choose a new domain from his Graywolf’s SEO blog.  His tips will save you time and trouble while giving you a good SEO strategy from square one.

In order to see the fruits of your tedious SEO labor, this requires a bit of help. Fortunately, there are many free tools available to help you get there. According to The Wpromote Blog, Blekko beta has a few handy SEO tools that are worth checking out. The featured tools enable you to monitor inbound links daily and see how your anchor text is distributed, just to mention a few. Blekko’s SEO tools are free and easy to use, which is always good. Curious? Check out the article for the complete story.

According to the writers at Searchenginejournal.com, there are some definite reasons why the SEO Industry changes so often. The industry isn’t just a ball rolling downhill with no real direction—there are a few factors that influence it indefinitely. The first reason is that spammers always find a loophole to exploit; any advancement has to deal with spammers. The second reason is that social media has revolutionized the world of SEO and continues to do so at breakneck speed. And finally, search engines are constantly evolving to combat both of these two factors. So what to do as an SEO firm? Well, for lack of a better term, adapt and evolve or get out of the way!

Neither users nor search engines like it when a search ends up at a 404 page error.  However, sometimes a 404 cannot be avoided – especially when it results from user error.  So how do you keep your users happy when a 404 gets in the way?  Shimon Sandler recommends, on his self-titled blog, to customize it!  This can put users in a good mood, and more willing to move onto your main website.  This is just another example of how a bad situation can be turned into a branding/user experience opportunity…just look at what other companies have done to customize their 404s.

Google’s PageRank algorithm can be a difficult subject, especially when we consider the fact that they are constantly throwing changes our way. In fact, it was recently rumored that there was a new PageRank algorithm in effect. However, this was actually not the case as Val Danylchuk’s assumption backfired. In his article, he explains what really happened and clarifies the mistake. As it turns out, Google’s PageRank system has been known to lag substantially after an update, so you should keep this in mind. Thanks to the help of a few different SEO experts, everything is clear once again. Check out the full article for a more complete overview.

Whether you are launching a new website or redesigning an existing one, drastic changes to a site’s structure can have a significant impact on SEO.  Fortunately George Aspland at Search Engine Land laid out 8 essential steps to maintain SEO performance when redesigning a website.  Aspland suggests that the best approach is to begin with a site audit and then start examining things like a site’s keyword structure, navigation, error pages and inbound links.  These are all things that can be impacted by a site redesign, but can be managed effectively with the right planning. Read his post to find out how!

Uh oh, JC Penny!  This week, the retailer made headlines in the New York Times for some blackhat SEO techniques landing them at the top of the SERPs for nearly every available item they sold.  According to the paper’s investigation, JC Penney had thousands of unrelated sites linking to them.  Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, tweeted that Google took manual action on JC Penny’s tactics.  Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land sums up the issue, including detailed explanations on paid links and schemes.  Obviously, these sorts of blackhat methods aren’t worth it, as JC Penney’s organic results and reputation are hurting (and their SEO firm has been fired).

Having issues with your homepage having multiple URLs? It is a bigger issue than you think, according to Shimon Sandler of his SEO Consultant blog. The problem, he writes, is that Google views this as duplicate content. Also, incoming links are split up among the multiple URLs. Shimon suggests using a 301 redirect for the duplicate pages that don’t have as much link juice so that your page rank doesn’t suffer due to duplicate content and the splitting up of incoming links. Check out Sandler’s post for more insight into this issue.

Mark Collier with Search Engine People has written a pretty controversial post this week about SEO and Twitter. He ran a 30-day experiment marketing on Twitter and calculated how may visits he got per hour spent marketing. He compared his Twitter result to that of guest blogging and forum marketing and came to some pretty blunt conclusions. Check out his post to find out why you (might be) wasting time with Twitter right now.

Link building is one of the most contentious activities within SEO.   It is tempting to want to just sign up for cheap free sites and get it all over with, but as Michelle Adams of Search Engine Journal writes, taking the time to gain more from your link building is always worth it.  Her article gives four tips to making your efforts count so that you don’t waste time developing a strategy that can’t stand on its own.

Time is something we can’t seem to find enough of these days, especially in the SEO industry. Raven’s SEO tools are one item that helps us battle this problem and create more time for other things. New to these tools? Not a problem! Graywolf started a tutorial series this week to help you get the most out of Raven tools. In the first part of his series, he takes you on a step-by-step journey on how to set up your account and getting started with keyword analysis. According to Raven’s website, you can give it a test run free of charge!

More and more people are beginning to recognize the importance of link building, but they also realize how overwhelming of a task it can be. Consequently, taking creative approaches to link building can be helpful.  Ryan Schmitz, shared his unique approach to link building on his post at Daily Blog Tips.  He was able to generate links by crowdsourcing opinions on the best personal finance books from bloggers in his industry, compiling them, and then publishing them with links to his site on those bloggers websites.

Tablet devices are becoming overwhelmingly popular in today’s market. Apple introduced the iPad and Motorola welcomed the Xoom (Android), both of which are capable of high quality audio/visual media. According to Greg Habermann, it isn’t uncommon to see people pull out their tablet devices for note taking or reviewing websites during a meeting. Wouldn’t it be nice if your SEO data was this easy to access from a portable device? You’re in luck because now it is! Habermann takes a look at the top 5 free iPad SEO apps, which can be very helpful for collecting SEO information on the fly. Although his article focuses primarily on Apple apps, you can almost guarantee that Android will develop similar tools.

Mobile SEO is becoming increasingly important. If you’re new to SEO for mobile, you’ll definitely want to read Jtkaczuk’s Beginner’s Guide to Mobile SEO on the SEOmoz blog this week. He discusses search engine transcoding, which causes your pages to look visually unappealing on phones. But he doesn’t stop there! He also writes about transcoding exceptions and he offers ways to prevent this unwanted process. He also discusses advantages of mobile SEO and speculates about if it’s worth investing in. Get the SEO Mobile beginner’s download from his post.

Keeping up-to-date with industry trends is important, especially in the fast paced world of SEO.  If you work for an agency, you know that making sure everyone is trained can be difficult, especially considering the range of experience and expertise.  This week, Rob Millard gives us some SEO training tips on the SEOmoz Blog.  Developing your training program by trying new things and getting feedback is important for large and small SEO agencies, as not every method will work the best for every team member.

Adcenter’s blog has a recap of the Top 10 Social Media Tips to Build International Brands from Social Media Week, London. Now, all of the takeaways are rather valuable, but a couple stand out in particular. One is that people access information on the Internet differently across the world, so what works in one place may not work in another. A second great point is that if you are using social media in a B2B sense, don’t be discouraged by numbers because you aren’t looking for volume in this sense of social media. Be sure to check out the article for all the takeaways.

We all know that SEO is very friendly to do-it-yourself-ers.  Whether you just love doing things on your own or you have to do things on your own, your budget is typically a significant consideration.  If you are wondering where to get started with doing SEO on yourself, Jon Wade of Search Engine People, put together a great guide this week with some tips and tools for doing SEO on a budget.  As he points out, using blogging platforms like WordPress and taking advantage of some of the basic features of search engines, you can really go a long way in doing SEO by yourself.

Link building is always an important aspect of SEO, but something that is often forgotten is the importance of internal linking. In order to assure that Google is indeed putting your preferred landing page into the SERPs, it is important to have many internal links pointing to that page. A good way to find out about this is to use Google Web Master Tools. Specifically, look at the left sidebar on the dashboard, and click “Your site on the web.” Then, click “Internal Links.” You will be able to see the internal links, and you should have a “target URL” or the page you want to show on your SERPs. Be sure to check out this blog post on Shimon Sandler to see the importance of internal linking!

How mobile-friendly is your website? In a recent article by Michael Gray of Graywolf’s SEO Blog, he indicates the importance of adapting your websites to better cater to the mobile consumer in the upcoming year. As this technology continues to grow, Gray recommends techniques like building your own mobile app. Apple and Amazon have created excellent examples of these for you to take a look at. However, this is not the only way to adapt to mobile commerce. If your company has not gone mobile by the end of 2011, you might just end up missing out on a huge portion of the market.

Ever wonder what the future holds for search engines?   Sentiment analysis may be a feature that will become increasingly important in the coming years.  Sentiment analysis is a newer ranking metric that focuses on whether comments on a subject are positive or negative. Mike Moran of Search Engine Guide took a look at some of the shortcomings of the sentiment analysis measurement. As he points out, the measurement currently is not able to pick up on things like sarcasm or when expressions are used that do not directly reflect an opinion.  Only time will tell if Google and other search engines find a way to address these issues.

We all know the impact videos can have on web users’ engagement with your content. If you create video content it is important to you that web users can easily find your stuff.  Stephanie Woods of Search Engine People wrote an excellent guide on how to optimize on-site videos for search engines. In order to get your videos to show up on Google SERPs, Woods recommends that you create a video sitemap, place keywords in the video’s title, strengthen your URL structure, embed links in the video to your site, and make sure that relevant text surrounds the video.

Social media is not a giant killer when not utilized effectively, and it can hurt your budget if you focus too much on it. So, dcgloballlc of the YOUmoz SEOmoz.org blog writes about getting on the social scene without neglecting traditional SEO practices such as link building. He splits the article into three sections of how to integrate social media into traditional SEO. First, he says you need “fuel,” which can be equated to link bait offered by a social media outlet. Then, you need “accelerant,” which is a social media following with which to ignite your fuel. Finally, you need a “trigger/timer,” which means offering your link bait at the proper time. This is a creative and interesting post on how to incorporate a more integrated SEO campaign.

SEOs have it tough.  Part of you just wants to make sure the search engine bots are munching away happily on your keywords, and that if someone wants to peruse every product manual your company ever produced, they can.  However, the other part of you wants to be fresh, hot, creative and new.  So, how do you put the two together?  Video blogs!  As Scott Cowley from Search Engine Journal writes, video blogs can jumpstart your SEO content, whether this is by adding in passion, freeing you from your formatting fears, or syndicating your name across various video hosting sites.  In fact, we’ve already incorporated video blogs into PPCHero…and you should try it too!

In respect to what has been considered the standard for web-based video, Google announced that it will no longer support H.264 video formats. Tavis Hampton of Search Engine People reveals the controversial nature of this shift, outlining two major sides to the formatting debate. On one side, there’s Mozilla and Opera who advocate an open style format, whereas Apple and Microsoft defend their claim that the H.264 format is the future of web-based video. Google’s addition of open video formatting (WebM) essentially sides with the lesser players (Adobe, Mozilla, Opera) and leaves Apple and Microsoft on the defensive. As Google’s YouTube dominates video web traffic today, this leaves royalties like Microsoft and Apple with no other choice than to tread carefully.

It is always good to audit each element of your SEO efforts.  An important element to always keep in mind is a website’s internal link structure. In his guest post on ProBlogger, James Hay of Fasthosts Internet Ltd. shared five tips to improve the link architecture of a site to strengthen your rankings. Using text menus, adding sitemaps and using static URLs are just a few of the suggestions he provides in his article. Of course, there are many other facets of SEO for a site owner to worry about, sometimes it is necessary to go back and review the basics.

If there’s one good thing bad economic times do, it’s that they force businesses to evolve and adapt to get through them. This time, SEO is one of the tools that’s emerging for business development. Stoney deGeyter’s post over at Search Engine Guide discusses the reasons why small businesses can’t afford to not utilize SEO.  Many businesses have a lot of money invested in other marketing tools (Yellow Pages is one example given), and they’re hesitant to invest more money in SEM. Consequently, deGeyter suggests gradually shifting your budget to SEM so as not to disrupt any gains achieved through more traditional marketing programs.

According to Sarah Arrow of Search Engine Journals, you should be sure blog on what’s trending every now and then. Arrow decided to blog on what was a hot, trending topic according to Google Trends, and even though it was off topic compared to the general theme of her blog, it still generated a huge traffic spike. Also, she saw her subscriptions increase as well. She expounds upon this phenomenon by explaining that people aren’t necessarily looking for topical blogs, but articles on topics of their choosing; so, if given an easy option of subscribing, they could subscribe based on one good article, which will help your rankings.

Do you have a client who wants you to do SEO for them, but their product or service has virtually no search demand? As Randfish of SEOmoz notes, this would be an SEO mountain. Luckily, Randfish offers some great advice for how to climb the SEO mountain of no search demand. He suggests using substitute keywords, or, if a product or service isn’t a direct substitution, you can make a comparison with your content. He also encourages SEOers to think about attracting the audience instead of the search queries, and, finally, he suggests an age-old tactic—brand building. Check out his post for the details.

Everyone likes a fad: reality television, tech vests you name it. But, as Michael Gray of Graywolf’s SEO blog warns, building a website around short-term content does not usually lead to long-term success. While it’s a very good idea to incorporate trending topics into your existing blog or website, building an entire SEO campaign around one popular, but fleeting, set of keywords will result in “a lot of glory but not a lot of payout.” Gray suggests to instead build websites around evergreen content, or content that’s devoted to driving traffic to a website for a long period of time.

As we’re still in the first month of the New Year, search engine marketing consultants are looking for new ways to ramp up their SEO campaign. Before you get too excited about your brand new list of strategies, be sure to check out Lindsay Wassel’s post, 32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011 at SEOmoz. From keyword stuffing, all the way to link network schemes, it’s all here. Lindsay writes about ways in which we can minimize our to-do lists by suggesting tactics to avoid. So what are you waiting for? Take a look and learn how to truly optimize your SEO campaign.

Kevin Gibbons of the SEOptimise blog gives some great advice on how to improve your search rankings with social media. He offers 10 great tips. He suggests that you use social media buttons, as this will make it easier to share your content. He also recommends building fan pages on Facebook, using images, creating a branded Twitter profile, using hashtags to weigh in on important trending topics and have great content. Check out his post for more helpful tips. If you utilize them, you could see your ranking skyrocket!

As SEOs, we end up spending a lot of our time writing interesting, informative and original website content. But sometimes, we take our comments for granted and even ignore them completely. Darren Rowse’s guest article on ProBlogger might have you start considering how to get more comments on your next blog post.  Through his research and experience, he has found that the more comments a post receives, the more conversions, traffic, and sign ups follow. Best of all, he then goes on to list three techniques you may not have thought of – such as leaving your article semi-finished and closing off comments. This post is a surprising, worthwhile read!

Patience was a key principle Simon Heseltine of Search Engine Watch stressed in his latest post on the six biggest SEO mistakes people make. He reminded us that SEO is not a one and done activity, but rather an ongoing process. As he points out, things like “Click Here” buttons and duplicate meta tags don’t help a site’s SEO because they don’t tell search engines what each page or button is really about. He also recommends using a more descriptive title for your home page than just “Home.”  After all, not everyone is in the residential real estate industry.

What can Kim Kardashian teach search engine marketers?  Why, how to be a Twitter authority, of course! In the most recent Graywolf SEO Blog post, Michael Gray shows us search engines preference social signals, and how gaining links from authoritative, trustworthy and far-reaching Twitter accounts (such as Ms. Kardashian’s) weigh in more with search engines than smaller users. As a bonus, Gray suggests that besides trying to find get these high-ranking tweets and retweets, you can boost your own Twitter importance through tools such as Knowem and Klout. That’s one way SEOs can be keeping up with the … oh, you know.

The New Year is about looking forward, but you can’t make successful changes if you keep repeating past mistakes. This week, SEOmoz’s Joanna Lord wrote a great piece about fully utilizing your year-over-year data to reach your goals for 2011.  Sure, you want to look at your site’s basic stats and get a feel for how the year went, but you can also use your YOY data to better understand fluctuations of the site, and whether you’re looking at a seasonal trend or an underlying problem.  Fully understanding your YOY data puts you on the right path to making accurate predictions for your company and site.

Have you been thinking about utilizing a CMS for an SEO client? If you don’t currently use one or are still in the decision phase, I highly recommend it. Mike Moran with Search Engine Guide does too. He’s written an informative post that explains how a CMS can help your SEO. There are many benefits, but Moran does warn that not every CMS is set up effectively or efficiently. He recommends having an expert configure the installation so that you can simply sit back and enjoy the perks.

Randfish of the SEOmoz blog offers some innovative ways to overcome common SEO problems that he has been asked. He writes that in order to overcome reputation issues where a brand has problems with negative feedback, and that feedback is getting high SEO rankings, you should throw out some content with similar terms that are more neutral as opposed to positive, as this will look more legitimate. Another highlight of his post is his answer to overcoming a competitor with a much stronger link profile—try to find keyword holes in your competitor and use these as your targeted keywords. Check out his post for more inventive suggestions.

To a large degree, SEO is all about content. Google rewards sites that are original, useful and well organized – but even so, having these qualities doesn’t always ensure that your blog will go viral. Luckily, Brandon Connell’s guest post on Problogger.net lays out some clear tips to Creating Effective Link Bait Content on your website. From originality, to layout to types of articles, Connell’s points are interesting and applicable to websites of all kinds, from small personal blogs to those for big industries.

It looks as if Google is starting on its New Year’s Resolutions list for 2011. Earlier this week, Matt Cutts (the head of the Google spam fighting team) tweeted that the first quarter of 2011 will involve Google looking more closely at the issue of cloaking. Google’s current definition refers to cloaking as presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land offers us his thoughts on the topic, and points out concerns popping up on forums among SEOs and Webmasters about what Matt Cutts’ 136 character Tweet will actually mean.

Asking a blogger to write a guest post, or posts, for you can be a little awkward… Maybe even intimidating depending on who they are. You go to compose an eye-catching, you-want-to-read-me email and…well what do you write? How do you convince the blogger that they have something invaluable to offer, and that you would be forever indebted to them if they would just write a fantastic post. Well, Tristan Higbee with Search Engine People wrote a great post this month: How to Ask Someone to Write for Your Blog. He draws from his own experience to help you craft winning emails.