Welcome to the new face of Search Engine Optimization.

photo credit: quinn.anya

Here at Veribatim we've been following SEO trends for years, watching the gimmicks and trick used to put a site at the top of a list. We've done work in the optimization field before, but I'll readily admit its not been our forte. The trends and tricks changed too quickly to not devote a full time staff person to analyzing the right direction. While most of the basic principles of SEO have remained the same (see the four ares Google pay attention to in SEO), the unobtainable algorithm to get your page to #1 has been like the search for the Holy Grail.

That is until Google Caffeine started to break onto the seen. As a marketer who believes in purity of message I am pleased by what I perceive Caffeine to be. Caffeine depends more on your content than your meta-data, meaning that your site should reflect what you actually do. Right now some websites are written just for search engines, not for their market. Google is trying to reward people who write for their audience instead of trying to game the system.

To find out more about what Caffeine brings to the table and how it might affect the current standing of your website, check out Irbtrax's post on Caffeine.

I'm doing a series of workshops for the Center for Spanish Language Media at UNT.

Register

Facebook Event
Linked-In Events
CSLM Facebook Page

Contact Denisse Olivas (denisse.olivas@unt.edu) to attend multiple sessions.

Wanted to do a quick blog post. Last week I was a panelist at the Dallas SEO/SEM Meetup along with Damian Skinner & Erick Osia. We discussed a number of topics from social media to viral video to Blackhat SEO. I posted a recording of this event on the Meetup's Upload section here.

Feel free to go listen to it. I know some of the questions are hard to hear but the answers are great. (If anyone knows how to edit audio, feel free to fix it!) Some examples of questions answered:

• How do I use social media to make money for my business?
• What should I use for my business on Facebook: a profile or a fan page?
• Does Wordpress index its pages?
• What does "Black-hat" mean?
• Should I use forums as part of my social media outreach?

Also wanted to give a shout-out to all the Twitters there!

Panelists:

@erickosia - Erick Osia

@damianstweet - Damian Skinner

@Veribatim - Kat Rice

Our Awesome Guests

@blueprintrealty - Bill Nicholson

@mktgmaster724 - Scott Saldinger

@smartacusguys - Rudy Lopez

@gushin - Dennis Guten

@natefalconer - Nate Falconer

@Andiqa - Andrea Duncan

We had more guests, so if you attended and would like to share your twitter, please leave it in the comments below! Be sure to check out the Dallas SEO/SEM group. Its a fantastic group. And I'm not just saying that because I'm an organizer. Check them out, and consider attending once a month with us.

Just a quick link to a neat tool I found through Page Traffic yesterday. Check out GetListed.org. When you are first adding links to your website, the best place to start is on local business pages. GetListed can show you, in a matter of seconds, if your business shows up on the most common of these pages: Google, Yahoo, WindowsLive, and Best of the Web.

Even if you have optimized your site, take a moment to make sure your listings are current!

Usually my posts are of a more general nature but since our company is located in Dallas, I feel it is my duty to promote an awesome new resource for Dallas: Dallogy.

Dallogy is a blog site started by Matthew Rogers, who also organizes an awesome SEO meetup. The site is the combined project of everyone involved in the Dallas Interactive Marketing meetup and its goal is to be the premiere place for Dallas Technology.

The site is just getting started but it reviews the Denton Jelly, Free Software Day and the Start-Up Tech Happy Hour with Alexander Muse. The site allows anyone to contribute after a simple registration, so you can post your own tech events and news. The site also lists different tech businesses in the Dallas area and other tech meetings.

Dallas has long been on the verge of an explosion in the tech-industry. Now more than ever, sites like Dallogy are important to help everyone keep up-to-date with the wealth of events and information out there.

So stop by, list an event and show your support for the internet central of Dallas tech: Dallogy.

So I've been invited to speak on SEO for the Dallas Speaker's Co-op. I wanted to share what was talking about.

Listen Here

This podcast just covered some of the basic SEO dos and don'ts:

• First, Google breaks SEO into 4 categories: Keywords, Links, Coding and Content
• Keywords: make sure they are relevant, do research or buy a program or better yet pay someone with SEO background
• Links: Its all a popularity contest. Google wants to know who you know, who knows you and how many people they know. Any link is great, find directories, local searches, organizations and other similar sites.
• Coding: Stay updated, keep your coding clean and well labeled.
• Content: Not too much, not too little. Make sure you use keywords in your copy, but also stay interesting to your readers.
• Don't have a page just of "cool links". This is spam.
• Don't put invisible text on your site. Never. This is bad.
• Don't have a template website. They are very difficult to optimize. Pay for a real website.
• Don't repeat content either on your site or copy text to other sites. It will just be considered a duplicate and won't count for anything.
• Blog!
• Experiment with social media, any traffic, extra links will help your site.
• Think about your SEO goals: what is most important?
• Answer these 3 questions:

1. What goals do you have for your web presence?
2. Why is this important?
3. How are you going to accomplish this?

It's about time I talked about blogs. If you are reading this, you are obviously aware of them, and have at least a vague idea of what one is and why you should consider having one. Type Blog into google and you will find hundreds of sites that offer them. Wiki says Blogs started as online journals of people's personal experiences in life that they wanted to share. But that evolved. More and more people are writing blogs and more people are reading them, at least occasionally. There are personal blogs, niche blogs, political blogs, business blogs and anything else you can imagine. There are even photoblogs that don't even contain words.

The heart of the matter, of course, is why should you get one for your business? The great thing about adding a blog to your website is that it is possibly THE BEST way to optimize your website. Blogs contain their own keywords, they are an application, they provide new links and they add verbal content. This means they cover all four major areas that SEO wants to hit. That alone should make them worth it!

Plus blogs are fun. This is a personal, creative way to access your customers. Provide insight, samples, discounts in your blogs. List where you will be at so people can meet you. Make yourself available through a blog so your clients feel like they know the "real" you. You don't need to be pretentious, write what comes naturally and people will enjoy it.

If you are interested in learning more about Blogs and ways it can help your business, I have started a new social networking website with Ning.com. This site will highlight blogs and link to ones that are helpful as well as link you to other people interested in using the internet more effectively. Check it out: Word of Net.

Welcome to my soapbox. Pay Per Click might be the worst form of advertisement in existence and mainly consists of big companies getting rich off of little companies' money. Not that I have any direct issues with Yahoo or Google, they are offering a service that people are willing to pay for, but most business owners just aren't educated enough to know that it doesn't work.

I want to make the comparison to newspaper advertising. Before the internet many people put ads for their business in the daily paper. You could pay extra to have a bigger box or even a full page ad, and then pay even more to get it in color. But these steps all made sense, pay a little extra, get more notice. However, the internet doesn't work that way. There are lots of ways to advertise for free (I am more than happy to tell you about them, see last blog). Paying more does not mean getting more when it comes to the web.

What sparked me to write about Pay Per Click today was an article about a lawsuit against Yahoo. In the article it talks about fake clicks, Yahoo being aware of the problems and still doing nothing and ignoring repeated inquiries from the company. But here are some other good sites: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Understanding Click Fraud, Good Old-Fashioned Research, or you can be lumped in everyone who advertises falsely.

Of course, there are lots of companies out there to help you stop click fraud. But of course, you have to pay them too. So you pay for advertising and then pay another company to make sure your advertisment is working. Peachy. I might even go so far as to say, Pay Per Click could be considered the biggest scam on the internet today.

So if you are a small business owner and considering Pay Per Click, please, please, do research and consider the costs. This is not a newspaper ad.

When it comes to SEO, keywords aren't the only important thing. Linking to other websites will get your website noticed and also raise you in Search Engine results. So if your business has a physical location you should link your website to Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, the Yellow Pages and any other free directories you can think of.

Here is a link and some information about another directory I stumbled upon. Its called Localeze; it specializes in searches for local businesses. The article has a short video and also links to the Localeze website.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/spot/iMediaSpotMemberMain.aspx?PlayNow=1&VideoID=137&ClientID=33&AccountID=47