Jeff is a real estate agent who sells vacation rentals in The Outer Banks. His clients range from one time renters to repeat vacationers who bring their family and need large homes. Since his profit comes from repeat business Jeff offers a different level of service to repeat customers who rent his luxury homes consistently than he does to a new customer who is looking for something inexpensive for a quick getaway.

With the help of his SEO Company Jeff put a different call to action on his rental pages based on which visitors he wants to see them. He offers only an online reservation tool for inexpensive rental homes and live chat and a 1-800 number that goes directly to his cell phone for more expensive rental homes.

Jeff’s SEO firm developed a strategy to optimize the luxury rental pages with high end keywords and his cheap vacation rentals with keywords that reflect cheap, discount, or bargain rentals.

After collecting 6 months of data, Jeff’s SEO Company noticed that repeat customers didn’t usually return to his site by typing the URL into the address bar or book marking the website. They actually came to his site by searching in Google for the name of his website. Jeff optimized a select set of pages on his site for the company name and website name that he would most want his returning buyer to find in the search engines. By using this optimization strategy Jeff created membership without having to develop private log in/password driven components to his site.

There are 3 primary ways Google gets your description tag for the search results.

The first being the meta description tag that is in the header of the code. This will show up most of the time if the keyword being searched for is in that tag (which is why we put the primary keyword first in the description tag in the header).

The second way Google builds the description tag is generating it based on the search term. Google goes through the on page content to find the keyword you searched for, and pieces together the keyword, and a word or two on either side of it, and uses this mash-up as the description tag in the search results. You can tell when this technique is used because the description tag does not read fluently and looks like random sentences pieced together.

The third way that Google generates a description tag, which is used least out of the 3, is from entries for the specific page in dmoz or the yahoo directory. This is why it is important to keep that entry up to date, just in case it needs to be used.

For many years alot of SEOs, including myself, have known that each engine targets a unique type of person and the recent release of the top 10 searches for 2008 on the 3 major engines has been released. Having a psychology background, this information definitely interests me, probably more than it would others. As you can see there is definitely a trend as to what people are searching for and this info can give you insight into the type of person who is searching.

Hereís what Yahoo has as its top 10 searches: One could argue that these show a definite affinity to a searcher who wants more entertainment based information, is most likely is younger and female.

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

Here’s what Ask has as its top 10 searches: This could show that this is a reference, general information and social person who uses this engine to find their targeted information. I don’t think this shows an affinity to an age range or sex but it shows some intent to be social.

1. Dictionary
2. MySpace
3. Google
4. YouTube
5. Facebook
6. Coupons
7. Cars
8. Craigslist
9. Online degrees
10. Credit score

Google’s most popular searches are not available (yet?), but Google’s most popular product searches are public: Google’s top product searches shows alot about the user of Google. They are most likely younger, technology focused and probably not into the social side of things as much, possibly a little introverted.

1. nintendo wii
2. wii fit
3. ipod touch
4. xbox 360
5. nintendo ds
6. ipod nano
7. uggs
8. nikon d90
9. zune
10. digital picture frame

“Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a dealbreaker.” - Seth Godin

This is so true and the main reason we have chosen to remain a small web design agency. Our team consists of myself (SEO), Dan (programmer/Database Expert), and Doryan (Designer/CSS) and we have been delighting customers for many years by keeping cost to the client low while outputting great projects that meet their vision.

5. RankQuest: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations. Get it at www.rankquest.com

4. SEOHand: It activates when the working area of the site in the location bar. The area gives to user opportunity to identify Google ranking for his sites. This operation does this add-on. Being called it performs request to Google server for obtain PageRank, Backlinks, Saturation, identify placement of your site at Google and Yahoo for any keyword. Get it at www.seohand.com

3. Nichewatch: This wonderful SEO extension provides you the technical information required to beat your competitor websites in serps.It gives you backlinks number, indexed pages, keyword occurences on the page, page rank, all in anchor, all in title and all in text rank for both domain and webpage information.

This cool firefox extension is very useful for webmasters and seo professionals for analyzing niche keyword competition for ranking at top in Google. Get it at www.nichewatch.com

2. KGen: KGen retrieves every words of a page and lets you know how many time they appears on her and their weight in the page (a word in the title of a page has a stronger weight than a word in a paragraph).

So, you can easily know how to optimize your pages, know what’s the secret of your competitors or simply know what’s the main subject of a webpage.

You can also select some words and transfer them to your clipboard and paste them on tag fields on your favorite social network or fill meta-keywords of your web pages. You can also generate a tag cloud for your blog. Get it at kgen.elitwork.com

1.SEO for Firefox: This tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market. SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this tool also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data. Get it at seobook.com

I just thought I would write a quick post about something I had been thinking of for a couple weeks now. Recently as you know, or don’t know, Linens and Things and Circuit City are closing their doors to many of their stores.

As I was driving around the Chicago suburbs there were low wage workers standing on the street corners with signs advertising “Going out of business, 20-30% off everything in the store”. This normally would have been just another advertising message I would have ignored after the initial exposure, but as I passed these stores on my drive each morning I noticed human nature in regards to its shopping habits change drastically because of this new information about the stores.

This got me thinking, most people see “store closing” and think they are going to get an amazing deal, right? What I don’t understand is these stores send out coupons on a weekly basis for the same offers they are giving now that they are going out of business and the return rate is minimal. I had driven past Circuit City almost every day before this started and at most there were 5 cars in the parking lot (all of which were probably staff), and yet when you put up “going out of business” or “store closing” it attracts people to the same savings they saw the week prior in the newspaper or on TV.

So has the magic word gone from “Free” to “Store Closing/Going Out Of Business” and how are people in general so easily duped into the mindset that just because a store is closing they will get better deals.

After I had written this there was a news story in Chicago about this exact phenomenon. They shed light on the fact that when a store goes out of business the merchandise in the store does not belong to the store anymore, and in fact a 3rd party liquidation company comes in and manages it. What this tv station uncovered was when the 3rd party takes over the merchandise they actually mark the price up (sometimes 50%) and then give you 30% off the newly marked-up price. So in reality you are paying 20% more than the original store would have charged you, yet people will pay it based on the phrase “going out of business”.

SEO is on the rise even though the economy might not be. In the past couple months we have received an increase in requests for seo consulting and seo web designs. Why? These are just 5 reasons that might explain why seo is not affected by a slow economy.

1. The market does not affect search traffic
Sales might decline, conversion rates might dip a bit but a downturn in the economy does not mean that people stop searching the web. With our clients we are not seeing a decrease in traffic to their sites and most are seeing an increase. I would think this is due to more people looking for deals and not venturing out of the house to shop.

2. Web performance and analytics
In a down economy the paths a customer takes to the sale and what channels is providing the best ROI are more important to companies and their bottom line. So when the panic from a downturn in the economy presents itself people tend to check their web analytics and go over it with a fine tooth comb to see where revenue is coming from. When they dig through their analytics, it becomes clear that the web is one of the top performers in metrics such as ROI and LTV.

3. Cost of PPC campaigns lead to interest in SEO campaigns
Paid search spending is still on the rise, and when companies evaluate the cost and its ROI, the little voice in the back of their head gets louder, saying 70%+ of the clicks don’t even happen in the ads; use search engine optimization to drive free traffic.

4. SEO is getting a better reputation
Google is releasing SEO guides, Microsoft and Yahoo! both have in-house SEO departments and the SEO is fluff crowd have lost a little of their swagger and a lot of their arguments.

5. Redesigns and SEO reworking
Companies have consistently used down shifts in the economy or downshifts in seasonal trends to rework or redesign their website and how its marketed in the search engines. This downturn helps them minimize SEO risk and traffic loss, and gives their new design and SEO campaign time to mature in the search results before their busy season.

1. Determine the goals of the new site - will it be an informational site, a lead gen site, or an e-commerce site? The goal of the site will impact what keyword themes you will focus on, how the site architecture is designed, and how in depth the content needs to be.

2. Do keyword research - this is one of the most important aspects of a new site design, or any web design for that matter. Primary keywords on your home page, secondary focused on category pages, and long tail keywords for your product or article pages.

3. Competitive analysis - once you have found the keyword set you want to target, do some competitive analysis for those keywords to get a more focused set. This refined set of keywords should show you the difficulty of obtaining rankings for your initial set and where content will need to be built.

4. Create a search engine friendly architecture - based off these keywords and competitive analysis you can determine layout, navigation structure and how link juice distribution should be focused within your site.

5. Content - with the research, goals, and architecture determined you can now build out your content based on this data.

6. Do usability testing on the new site design - Once you have the basic design completed and the outline established, do usability testing on the design before it goes live. This will show you areas of improvement that will help the overall conversion rate, user experience, and community branding of the design.

7. Keywords in the url are more important with Google over the last few months so make your urls descriptive but not long. Make sure if you decide to rewrite your urls you 301 the old ones to the new ones.

8. If your site is dynamic make sure your urls are all in lower case. Mixed upper case and lower case is a recipe for disaster by causing duplicate content.

9. Don’t use marketing fluff. When writing the copy speak how your customers speak and not how you speak.

10. Understand what your ranking for now and make sure your ranking for the same term later.

10.5 SEO is an ongoing thing. Sharpen the saw, make sure you have a strong base line of what the previous site is doing, watch for 30 days, and revise where need be. Or in other words Wash, Rinse, Repeat

What SEO is NOT:

Submitting urls to the search engines
Sitemaps do not get you any benefits
Tricking the search engines
Following Google guidelines
Stuffing keywords
Optimizing for one keyword phrase
Optimizing for the long tail
Creating validated xhtml with a tableless design
Submitting to low quality directories
Attempt to increase toolbar PR
Placing a page in a specific position in SERP
Proprietary methods and automated tools

What SEO IS:

Making your website the best for the site visitors and the search engines by having something remarkable (content, idea, product).

What is a submitted or off-site Sitemap: A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Submitting a Sitemap helps make sure the search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by normal crawling process.

There has been alot of discussion lately about why a site should or shouldnt submit their sitemap to Google’s Webmaster tools. So lets break this down and first look at some myths about submitting your Sitemap.

Myth Or Fact: If you submit your site to Google Webmaster tools it will automatically get indexed?

This is not true and Google even says: “submitting a Sitemap does not guarantee indexing”

Myth Or Fact: Submitting a sitemap will help your rankings?

This is not true. Submitting a sitemap to Google has no bearings on rankings, because being indexed and being ranked are 2 different things. Rankings come from on-site content, inbound links, and creating well engineered and well SEO’ed pages.

Google Says: “Submit a sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover”

I say: “If your not creating sites that can be crawled and indexed you are doing a disservice to your online business.”

Myth Or Fact: Submitting your sitemap will help Google crawl your site?

Crawl frequency and crawl rate is not based on indexed URLs or URLs submitted. It is based on clean code, page size, and inbound links, and page rank.

So should you submit a sitemap to Google?

3 Reasons You Should Not Submit Your Sitemap.

If your site has indexing problems (poor navigation, poor internal linking, Flash, Ajax) it could cover these problems. You need to know a websites weakness so that you can fix it.

It gives Google the URLs without having to find them through natural methods such as internal and inbound links which helps with rankings.

Google does not need to come to your site to find pages and therefor the crawl frequency of your site might go down. If the current thinking by SEO’s is correct (that indexing and caching rate gives a better representation of page rank than the little green bar) than you want Google coming to your site often.

So basically if you have a well designed site that is engineered well, has good internal linking and inbound links you should not need to submit a Sitemap.

When should you submit your sitemap to Google?

I think the best time to do this is if your site is within the top 5% of the web for total pages. If you have thousands of pages and most of your traffic is gained from long tail terms then I would say submit a sitemap because the long tail is no as dependent on page rank to drive traffic, so any increase in indexed pages will help.