Getting started with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO Videos: Introduction to SEO | SEO News 2010-11 Just getting started with your Savannah SEO efforts? Are you considering SMO as well? (Social Media Optimization) Whether located in the USA or located internationally, each search engine provides helpful information to guide webmasters in creating and maintaining search engine friendly web sites. This information is dynamic (and the links change) so use the search engines themselves to locate the latest information - they should be the best source of information about themselves [SCIK] - is your web site the best online source of information about your content, services, or business? Some basic caveats for working on your web site's natural (organic) SEO: 1. it takes time... to develop, test, implement, and evaluate your SEO approach - the organic aspect of your web marketing is not a simple one time, one size fits all task - consider hiring a consultant :) 2.superior content is king [SCIK] - it can't be ignored by you OR by the search engines :) 3.it takes time... budget weeks to months to get natural search results - until you reach your organic SEO goals (you do have them, don't you?) consider using SEM or other approaches. 4.geographical location will/does affect search results (see predictions below.) Google Webmaster Help Center - Some current topics: Creating a 'Google Friendly Site', Guidelines for webmasters, How to use a Sitemap, adding a site to the Google index, verifying a site, Google 101: how Google crawls, indexes and serves the web (all of these topics are highly relevant to anyone concerned with SEO - highly recommended reading/research.)*Yahoo! - (still crawling but now tied to Microsoft Bing...) * Bing/MSN/Live - quite a mix of solutions. * Ask.Com - nice presentation and usually good relevance - but searches currently limited to 200 results (which is probably fine for many search users.) In the fall of 2010 it appears that Ask.com may leave the search bot arena and outsource search results/crawling (i.e. use data from Google, Bing or some other provider instead of having their own bot/crawler gather information...). * Since the larger (currently) English language search engines are USA companies, paying attention (tuning web sites) to SEO metrics for those engines can provide benefit to your web sites. After reviewing the information from the search engines themselves you should also review the information presented by other 'SEO-related sites' - chances are good that the information is a re-hash of what can be found at the search engines themselves. Note that all of the major search engines require you to sign up for webmaster accounts in order to access their tools. Note that practices/approaches used for USA SEO (or perhaps English language SEO, EL-SEO?) may not be appropriate for all markets - you will need to develop what works best for your language/country. 2010 is almost over - so, what is king now? There is lots of noise about 'social' and 'the conversation'... Guess what? SCIK! Several videos from USA events related to SEO are provided below - they contain some interesting comments about both the impacts of video content (more recent) and the basic premise of this site - SCIK!. One of the secondary items of note for the year is 'page speed' - how long does it take to get content from your web server? A new module for the Apache web server may help many sites reduce their load times: mod_pagespeed (an Open Source project sponsored by Google...) The videos below are close to cutting-edge trends, strategies and thinking, and of course there is a theme - quality. 2010 USA SEO - Latest trends - Predictions for 2011 SEO Events in the USA - Short Video Interviews with SEO/SMO or related topic Experts (~2009-10) A third major search engine? Blekko.com - Ceo Rich Skrenta - 11/2010 More WebProNews Videos Finding ROI in Social Media Chris Brogan - New Marketing Labs - 11/2010 More WebProNews Videos Patrick Starzan - Funny or Die (2010) More WebProNews Videos Greg Jarboe - SEO-PR (2009) More WebProNews Videos Chris Brogan - New Marketing Labs (2010) More WebProNews Videos Ellen Gerstein - John Wiley & Sons (2010) More WebProNews Videos Nut-Shell SEO - ~20 minutes well spent