Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2010-03-12

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March 12th, 2010 Welcome to the SEO Chat newsletter! Google still means search to most people, but to a growing audience it means applications. The company highlighted that this week with its launch of Google Apps Marketplace, and eWeek has the story. Could the search giant finally be poised to beat Microsoft in the business applications sphere? That's not all Google has been up to by a long shot. Monday's SEO Chat article covered the company's Living Stories endeavor, and its implications for traditional newspaper publishers. If you're looking for a program that will both deliver web analytics and secure your web site, you might want to check out Tuesday's article; it kicked off a two-part series on CrawlTrack, open source software that gets the job done. Speaking of doing the job, if you need to employ some 301 redirects on your WordPress website, Wednesday's article can help; you'll see how to do them correctly, with a minimum of search engine issues. Many people are looking for work in this economy, and the SEO field certainly isn't immune to the ups and downs. If you're one of those people, or you've simply decided it's about time to update your resume, you'll appreciate this week's thread. It offers some great advice about what to include and how to format that all-important document in a way that takes account of the special quirks of this field. If you're looking for more information to brush up your skill set, stop by Tutorialized. It features more than 100 tutorials on SEO-related topics. Recent additions cover keyword research, website marketing and promotion, general SEO, Google optimization, and more. If you'd like to share your expertise (and get your name in front of our global audience), you can always submit your own tutorial. Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, deals with linkbuilding methods. Which ones should you use? The answer to that question isn't as simple as you might think. Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES WordPress 301 Redirect: Tips and Techniques CrawlTrack: Tips and Techniques for Webmasters Google`s Living Stories: the Final Nail in the Coffin for Paper Media? SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail

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It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Coming Soon - Tech News 2.0! Now with comedy included! Watch the video!

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WordPress 301 Redirect: Tips and Techniques by Codex-M 2010-03-10 There are several instances when you administer WordPress blogs where you will need to perform a 301 redirect. It is one of the most important corrective actions you can take when moving content. No other methods are as friendly to search engines, but it must be done correctly. This article will explain how. Other methods, such as doing a temporary redirect (302), using JavaScript or a meta refresh redirect, are not friendly to search engines and can result in improper crawling of website content. In most cases, your redirected content (at its new location) can never be found by search engine spiders because they will not follow any type of redirect unless it is given a clean 301 redirection status. Other reasons why you should do a permanent 301 redirect are to maintain search engine rankings, such as in Google. If you have an old, ranking URL in Google and move to a new, permanent location, a 301 redirect can pass the search engine ranking score of the old ranking URL (not abruptly; it will take time) to the new URL. Hence the new URL will appear and start to rank in the search engine results, replacing the old URL. Read WordPress 301 Redirect: Tips and Techniques

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CrawlTrack: Tips and Techniques for Webmasters by Codex-M 2010-03-09 If you're looking for a web analytics program but don't want to use Google Analytics, you might want to give CrawlTrack a look. This web application goes beyond simple analytics to help secure your website. Let's take a closer look. CrawlTrack is a web analytics and security web application for PHP-MySQL powered websites. It is similar to Google Analytics in the way that it tracks visitors and traffic sources. However, one of the positive aspects of this application is the ability to block website hacking attempts. Aside from offering traffic analysis/monitoring and security benefits, it is open source, which means you can implement it in your website for free. One of the most serious security problems on the Internet is website hacking. Unfortunately, a lot of web applications are still unsecured and do not offer anti-hacking protection. CrawlTrack has anti-hacking features that detect two of the most common hacking methods, namely MySQL injection and code/JavaScript injection. Read CrawlTrack: Tips and Techniques for Webmasters

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Google`s Living Stories: the Final Nail in the Coffin for Paper Media? by Joe Eitel 2010-03-08 Google has earned the wrath of publishers before. You'd be upset at Google, too, if it looked like the search giant was going to put you out of business -- or at least force you to seriously rethink your business model . Living Stories, one of Google's more recent endeavors, presents news in a whole new way...with repercussions likely to be felt at every big newspaper. Google is so financially successful that it appears as if the tech giant doesn't feel as if the rules apply to them. During a time when most companies are cutting down on their free services and applications, Google keeps churning them out. Nor do they stick with the safe bet. Now they look set to do news publishers one better. Their latest endeavor, Living Stories , is perhaps their most interesting and daring yet. A global study recently found that the age of the average Internet user is 28 years. It has also been found that those in their mid- to late twenties don't really read newspapers anymore. Even worse, online newspapers are severely struggling to draw readers in and generate any kind of revenue. Read Google`s Living Stories: the Final Nail in the Coffin for Paper Media?

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! Tips for SEO Friendly Websites Form follows function. Before designing a website there are quite a few important factors to consider. Read the tutorial. What Does Seo Stand For? What does seo stand for? Simply put SEO stands for search engine optimization. Read the tutorial. Submit Your Sitemap to Google Techniques you can use to submit your sitemap to Google. An imperative step to get good rank! Read the tutorial. 30 SEO Tips for Web Designers & Small Business Owners 30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. How to Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Crowd Quick tips to improve your blog from every aspects! Read the tutorial.

How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.

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In this economy, it seems like everyone is looking for work. If you're an SEO trying to catch the eye of an employer or client, how should you set up your curriculum vitae? That's the question asked by the original poster of this week's thread; check it out for some great advice, and don't forget to stop by and add some of your own. thegodfather CV's Hi guys, I've been an SEO practitioner for 4 years now and I want to completely re-vamp my CV. Can anyone give me any pointers and what things to highlight? I know your responses will be generic but I appreciate any help. Aignam Couple of pointers: - Depending on what you've been doing, you may want to delineate your work experience into either Jobs or Projects - this is usually the difference between an in-house SEO and someone working on their own or for a firm. - In either case, use numbers. Don't tell what you did (built backlinks, edited HTML code)...who cares? Show us what change you were able to make - traffic numbers, conversion rates, bounce rates, ROI. Show us the impact you were able to make, how you were able to track it, and the value you were able to create. - Ranked well for some competitive keywords? I think most of us have a few million-dollar single word keywords under our belts. Don't be afraid to highlight these, or at the very least, bring them up in an interview. - Skills section - at the bottom of your resume, create a skills section and have 3-4 columns where you can list everything you can do. As much as I stress showing results, employers (and RECRUITERS) like, and look for, buzz words - linkbuilding, social media optimization, etc. Make sure your resume is well-optimized for these keywords. ;) himanshu160 Highlight your achievements. Use graphs and charts to show the results you have achieved in terms of traffic, sales, usability, user engagement etc. I know nobody uses that in a CV but I think this will have a very good impact on your potential employers. I use lots of graphs and charts for consultation and for virtually anything I want to sell. People love screen shots, those graphs in which they can see clearly how the traffic is increasing month after month. Use a slide deck for online CVs. Become a salesman. Remember you are dealing with businessmen and they understand only one thing, ROI. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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Which Link Building Advice Should You Follow? Conflicting SEO advice abounds, and when you're new to the field, it's all confusing. Even where experts agree, they also disagree. For example, everybody will tell you that it's important to build links to your web site and content, but there's some serious disagreement as to the best way to do that. Sharka, a recent poster to our forums, noted that a lot of SEO experts say that forum posts, social bookmarking, article marketing and blog comments are not good sources of links. Fair enough, but that hasn't matched his experience. “You see, I have an article published on my site that has received much praise from experts in my field and has acquired lots of good quality links,” Sharka noted â€" but that article sat on his site for seven months with only three low-quality links. It didn't start winning acclaim â€" or good quality links â€" until AFTER it was published in several article directories. “It was an SEO expert that advised me t! o have it 'respun' and submitted...In the first few days I had 11 links pointing back to my article and now it has 134 links from a variety of sites...” Since he can track where visitors to his site are coming from, he can tell that those links leading to the article are also leading to inquiries and conversions. What does this mean? Keep in mind that Sharka started with great content. Great content needs to be marketed correctly to really fulfill its potential for your site, however â€" and the best form for that marketing just might vary with your field, the kind of content, and where your target audience hangs out, among other factors. So knowing your audience is important in two ways: first, it helps you to figure out what kind of content they'll be interested in, and second, it gives you a clue as to where you might find them so you can give them a taste of what you have to offer. SEO Chat member Highland made an interesting distinction on this topic. SEO is ultimately about building traffic, but there are other traffic building techniques beyond SEO. Talking about your new content on Facebook won't necessarily win you new links or help you rank in Google (and if you do it the wrong way, it could get people annoyed at you). But it could make some people who follow your posts curious enough to check out your site â€" thus building traffic. As is often the case, respected SEO Chat forum member himanshu160 found the crux of the matter. Forum posts, social bookmarking, article marketing and blog comments may not be good sources of links, “but they help in building engagement with the target audience and influence the ranking positions to some degree, “ he notes. When your ultimate goal is conversions, you'll find there are many ways to get them. Quality links help in several ways, but so does engaging with your audience â€" and that's where getting social helps. Think of them both as means to the same end, and focus on each of them to the extent that they help you reach that end. Good luck! Read the relevant forum thread.

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