In these tough economic times, more and more businesses are discovering that effective Search Marketing is crucial to their success.

Come to this free workshop on Friday 19th February 7.15pm – 9.30pm and learn the correct techniques to draw more leads and sales to your business. Click here for workshop details.

He’s a frequent presenter at Ultra Advanced SEO Symposiums, a meeting of select masters of the search engine marketing industry, at Search Engine Workshops and also a certified instructor at the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Search Engine Academy, an SEO certification program approved by the US educational system.

You can read the full interview here.

What are 3 SEO trends to watch in 2010?

1) Increasing complexity of sources of information in search results akin to Universal Search with Google incorporating new, video, audio etc. in normal search result listings.

2) The increasing importance of Mobile and Local Search.

3) The increasing influence of Personalization of Search.

What are 3 critical skills for any SEO professional to master?

1) Keyword Research

2) Competitive Intelligence – understanding strengths and weaknesses of competitors

3) Measuring performance through Web Analytics

You mentioned personalization of search. Can you elaborate on the impact of this on SEO?

The impact the personalization of search has on SEO should not be treated lightly. A quote from Mike Moran is worth noting here:

“Widespread personalization will doom traditional rank checking. The question won’t be ‘Does my site rank No. 1?’ but rather ‘For what percentage of searchers does my site rank No. 1’ or ‘What was my average ranking yesterday?’ . . . [I]t’s the biggest change in search marketing since paid search.”
- Mike Moran (Search is Getting Personal, Revenue January/February 2007)

Any traditional SEO methodologies or SEO Tools that depend heavily on traditional rank checking methods are similarly doomed. This means that any methods for:

1) Determining which competitors you should emulate, as well as how they should be emulated, and

2) Determining the effectiveness of your SEO efforts

that depend on traditional rank checking methods are destined for obsolescence. The overall thematic relevance of a page also becomes more important.

You also mentioned competitive intelligence research. What is SEO competitive intelligence (SEO-CI) and how could a local business with limited SEO budget use competitive intelligence research to compete against larger companies for top rankings? Would this work in ultra-competitive industries like the hotel, travel, banking and finance industries?

Competitive Intelligence is the process of determining the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors so that you can properly ascertain what the threats and opportunities are for your success in natural search against those competitors. When done properly, it can save you several months of trial and error in developing an SEO strategy, especially in very competitive industries and for very competitive keyphrases. The most accurate method would employ artificial intelligence similar to how AI is employed in multivariate analysis for optimizing landing pages with PPC.

A local business can use it to prioritize which target keyphrases are really worth going after and also to discover important components of a larger company’s SEO strategy, which of those components are most worthy of your attention and emulation, and which of those may be weaknesses that can be exploited.

Read the rest of this interview in which he covers SEO competitive intelligence and reveals the history behind his SEO software SEO Recon here.

This week, we are pleased to bring you an interview with Eyal Aldema, the creator of the SEO software SheerSEO.   SheerSEO is an unique online Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service that was created in October 2006. It allows you to automate the process of SEO analysis.

Can you tell our readers a bit more about yourself?
I am a software engineer from Israel.
My last jobs were managing development teams for companies in the internet industry.
While working as a software engineer, I had a hoby of developing my own small websites. This is where I’ve found the magic and power of SEO.
I couldn’t find good software solutions for SEO, and I knew I had a lot to contribute in this area.
So, I quit my job and started developing sheerseo.com, which is an online software for SEO.

What is the 3 biggest SEO challenges faced by consultants or business owners? Why and how did you create the SheerSEO tool?
The biggest challanges are:
a. Using your time wisely, by keeping away from tedious work. There are so many tasks that can easily waste your time for no reason, like getting back links, checking rankings, verify back links, check page ranks.
b. Develop your own strategy for SEO. There are so many opinions on what is right and wrong in SEO, that you need to decide what you believe in and make a lot of trial and error.
c. Adjusting your site to changes in the search market. It is simply not enough to do a one time SEO work. Things keep updating and you need to stay on top of things.

I’ve created Sheer SEO, so that there would be a complete automated SEO solution. SheerSEO is still a long way from this vision, but it could be exciting if we had softwares battling each other, SEO softwares against Google, head to head. Well, as I said, there is still a long way to go until this is achieved.

Your website states that you aim to provide tools to make the SEO monitoring process automated and easy.
How does SheerSEO assist in this and how easy is it to use?
SheerSEO assists mainly in tracking all indicators that influence SEO and the rankings of course. Nothing that you can’t get without SheerSEO, just the fact that you have it all gathered automatically without the need to spend time and have everything presented in a clear visual format, makes things a lot easier.

Let’s just take the rankings for example, you could just check your rankings yourself for a few keywords. But think about websites that have hundreds of keywords and they need to check each week all of them for the main search engines (Google, Bing & Yahoo), that would take a lot of time.

Also, that data isn’t worth much without knowing what is the change we made since last time and try to correlate that with the SEO actions that were done recently. With SheerSEO, you have all that data presented in easy to use tables and graphs, which makes it much easier to understand.

Sheerseo is very easy to use. You just fill in your details, keywords and main URLs and you’re good to go. All interface is very straight forward.

Two emerging challenges for the SEO industry are adjusting rankings for the effect of localized country search and personalization of search.
Does SheerSEO take these two factors into account and if so how?
I think SheerSEO answers them both. You can select which localization you want tracked for each search term, so say you are in Canada, you can check your rankings for US, Canada and Uk, regardless of your actual location. This is because all collection is done on our servers, which are located all over the world, as opposed to desktop application that will gather the info from your computer, which will in this example show you the results for Canadians.

As for the personalization, Sheerseo collects data that is not personalized, which is exactly what you want.

What innovation does SheerSEO bring compared with desktop based rank checking software like RankChecker or WebCEO?
There are many advantages in using an online service. I’ll try to bring a few main points here:
a. You pay per service and not for the application, so you can stop at any time if you think this solution is not right for you.
b. You don’t need to worry about the data getting lost. We keep the data on our database, which we backup regularly. In a desktop application, you might lose the info if something goes wrong with the computer.
c. Your data is available online, from anywhere. Since the data is online, you can see it in your computer, your cell phone, wherever you are. With a desktop application, you only have it on one computer.
d. Platform independent. We work the same from Windows/Mac, all you need is a browser.
e. Share information. Think of an SEO consultant, with desktop application, he’ll need to send reports to his client. With SheerSEO, he can just provide a login to the client and they can both login and see the same information.

SheerSEO looks to be a powerful automation weapon for any SEO expert to possess. What are the main features in SheerSEO and how should a SEO consultant use them in their SEO activity workflow?
Main features are the rankings reports, the main referrers which shows you a lot of information regarding your main backlinks. The backlink watchdog, that can help you make sure that your precious backlinks agreements are not compromised and the white label solution, that can provide a fully branded version of SheerSEO.

A consultant should use them to track the progress he is achieving for his clients. It makes it easier to prove your client the progress made with the online reports, that can show the historical changes to the rankings, the social media mentions etc.

The nice thing here, is that there is not too much to do, you just need to enter the details once you start working for the client, and the rest is done automatically. Then, the SEO consultant, can easily login to the account of the client, get a clear picture of the status in a few seconds, and decide on the actions to follow. We recommend this repetitive test & react is done weekly, but some SEOs do this daily.

Also, we recommend adding the newly created back-links to the backlink watchdog. This if good for having a record of the links added and also for verify that they are not compromised.

In the last few months you’ve been busy adding new features like Summary Snapshots, Localized Tracking, Twitter Mentions and Estimated Clicks.
What are some new SheerSEO features that we can look forward to in 2010?
I believe that in this year, sheerseo has become powerful in SEO tracking, and now is the time to start helping with the actual promotion of sites. So, you can expect to see us help you get backlinks and improve your pages quality. I leave the rest to your imagination, cause I don’t want to reveal my plans to the competitors, but you can expect those features coming pretty soon.

Any final SEO advice for our readers to kick-off 2010?
Pay attention to the new stuff Google is releasing these days. They promised surprises after the new year.

I also encourage you to try the 90 days SheerSEO free trial today to experience its power for yourself (no credit card is required):
http://www.sheerseo.com/seo-monitoring-tools/signup.html

Thank you for your time Eyal, and we wish you and SheerSEO another great year in 2010!

The project aim was to conceive and execute a SEO strategy that would help client understand its online competitive landscape and complement the online and offline activities relating to a global re-launch of the localized websites. To this end comprehensive keyword research and competitor analysis was done and the results presented in a SEO plan crafted to ensure client’s new websites were fully search optimized both content and code-wise.

The project led to a 68% increase in page one ranked keywords and implementing the SEO best practices framework and audit led to over 90% of new content being SEO optimized based on the detailed keyword research performed.

Client was “extremely pleased” with the quality of keyword research, benchmarked web metric data and SEO analysis performed, and extended the initial project to phases 2 and 3 to include new requirements on SEO best practices training, web 2.0 marketing campaign proposals and link building strategies.

We worked closely with our client to craft a winning SEO strategy, perform detailed keyword and competitor research, conducted SEO training and implemented web analytics for all websites under the group. Close attention was paid to competitive research and benchmarking, and a best practice framework was established and extensive training conducted to ensure client’s staff were well equipped with the techniques to ensure top rankings for all targeted keyphrases.

Project results from the first month-end reporting show that the websites are ranked on page one of the search engine result pages (SERPs) for over key 400 brand and medical industry terms, and are poised to make even greater gains as new and existing content is optimized under the new SEO framework.

Click here to download the local business online success checklist.

Questions? Feel free to contact us.

This is an excerpt of an article by Ivan Wong that was published by Web In Travel, Asia’s leading travel distribution, marketing and technology conference.

Read the full article here.

I started our WIT Ideas Lab workshop by posing the question “Is it possible to market online on a zero budget?”
One key premise was that marketers on zero budget would have to avoid paid advertising channels, and focus instead on attracting visitors through free traffic sources including the search engines, video and social media.

In this regard, some relevant quotes arising during the discussion included “content is king”, “social networks build trust and act as your personal information filter”, “content shapes the brand, especially user generated content”, “destination research is 70% of time online in travel” and “the ultimate aim is to convert lookers to bookers”.

We also considered some case studies of innovative use of social media for viral marketing, including the “Best Job In The World” campaign by Tourism Australia. Though not done for free, this campaign generated over US$150 million worth of media exposure on a US$1.2 million budget.

Some free tools were presented to assist in each step’s activities:
Market research tools: Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Kayak Trends, Google Trends.

Content creation/publishing tools: Free blogging software like WordPress, Animoto for producing viral sales videos.

Traffic generation sources:
For a typical travel business doing online marketing, there are a myriad of marketing channels to choose from. Citing the results of a recent HeBS survey in which hoteliers were asked to select their top three Web2.0 initiatives, I suggested that marketers start generating targeted online traffic by optimising for Google, using TripAdvisor, creating profiles on social networks and blogging on the hotel website.

Measure conversions: Use Google analytics to measure conversions and marketing success.

Read more at the WebInTravel Newsroom.

The acquisition will help the Internet search company to speed up efforts to develop more effective tools for creating and placing mobile ads on smart phones and other devices.

“Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time,” said Google vice president of product management Susan Wojcicki.

Google also recently reported some mobile ad stats:

iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else [Morgan Stanley], contributing to Google’s 5x mobile search growth over the past two years

And a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices [AdMob]

As noted in the stats, Google is doing well in mobile search (though there’s still plenty of competition).

According to the official info site put up by Google to coincide with their acquisition of AdMob, the deal

- will bring new innovation and competition to mobile advertising, and

- will lead to more effective tools for creating, serving, and analyzing emerging mobile ads formats.
will benefit developers, publishers, and advertisers by improving the performance of mobile advertising, and will provide users with more free or low-cost mobile apps.

- will make the mobile ad space remain highly competitive, with more than a dozen mobile ad networks. The deal is similar to mobile advertising acquisitions that AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo have made in the past two years.

“Have other relevant sites link to yours.”
“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”

Question:

The site content is excellent. However, it would be nice to first explain what a Permalink is. I have been using wordpress for so long and I have seen this but still cannot grasp what it is for.

Answer:

A permalink is simply­ the URL of a full, individual article posted on WordPress. In WordPress terminology, it can be either a post or page.

e.g. Both of these are examples of permalinks referencing a article on a typical WordPress blog:

http://yourdomainname.com/?p=123

http://yourdomainname.com/article-title/

After you install WordPress, you can navigate to the permalinks page by logging into admin, then selecting Settings->Permalinks (It may be different depending on which version of WP you are using).

By default, your permalinks structure will look something like this:

http://yourdomainname.com/?p=123

From here, things can get interesting. Your goal in general is to stick more keywords up into the URL and remove the fluff which nobody uses, to make the URL seach engine and people attractive.

So most people will choose a custom structure like /%postname%

This structure tells WordPress to use your post name in the URL for your blog posts.

e.g. If you write an article titled “Dog Training Tips”, WordPress will automatically create your articles URL as:

http://www.youdomainname.com/dog-training-tips

After you’ve changed the structure, you should click the save button. If you encounter any .htaccess related issues after saving, see this article:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Fixing_.htaccess_Generation_Issues

In summary using /%postname% is probably the simplest structure you can start with, but you can experiment with other structures until you find one that suits your needs.

Once you’ve selected a structure though, try not to change it (WordPress will allow you to), as it will have a negative impact on your websites SEO if your posts are already indexed on the old permalink name (unless you have a proper 301 redirect strategy, but this is a topic for another day). Changing it some time in the future will probably also invalidate all of your hard earned backlinks coming.

Do not read further unless you want to experiement with other features in permalinks.

Some General Permalink Tips

1. Include %postname% in your URL

Having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.

2. Get rid of useless tags

Don’t use %day%, %post_id% , %hour%, %minute% or even %second% in your permalink structure. None of these are necessary. Monthly posting archives are perfectly acceptable, but for the vast majority daily ones are not. Putting more “/*/” rubbish into your permalink URLs will make it harder to see the URL’s boldened keywords on search engine results, less emphasis is placed on your post title keywords (which are really great).

Bonus tip: want to go really mad with your permalink SEO? Try dropping date tags all together for %category%! It does away with your neat date tags, though, so you could even try keeping %year% and %month%.

On blog­style websites, you might want to keep the day, month and year in the permalink structure. However, ensure that the postname is always present so the post can be properly indexed by the search engines.

e.g. On www.WebAnalyticsAsia.com/news the permalink structure is /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/, which suits its usage as a news repository, and will show up in the search engines.

For www.internet­-marketing-­today.com/articles/, it’s just %postname%. This creates a SEO friendly page title, that is well indexed by search engines. If you are using mostly pages(as opposed to posts, see below for an explanation between WordPress pages and posts), then it is likely that your website is a CMS style website, and %postname% will normally be the best choice for the permalink structure.

Check out www.dowser.com for an example of such a website.

Advanced permalink structure tip (Don’t use this unless you need it)

The /%category%/%postname% permalink is the most commonly advised, but to the search engines your blog post appears in two places.

If you look at the URL as it shows in your browser, it appears as follows: http://www.your­blog.com/your­category/your­post/

But your post can also be found here: http://www.your­blog.com/your­category/your­post/index.php

To keep your permalinks constant you can force WordPress into naming posts with a URL which contains a suffix, for example you could use the following permalink:

/%category%/%postname%.php

Your blog post can now only be found at: http://www.your­blog.com/your­catagegory/your­post.php

To change your permalink structure, open your WordPress Admin Panel and click on “Options” then “Permalinks”. In the “Custom structure” text box enter the following: /%category%/%postname%.php

Then click on the “Update Permalink Structure” button. Next you need to rename the default category from “Uncategorized” to a phrase related to your blog under which all your default posts will be saved. It is not essential to name this particular category after a keyword phrase, think of your readers first. For example you could use the phrase “From My Point of View” as the name for the default category. Most of your posts will be fairly short, and often your point of view on some topic, making this the perfect place to file these posts.

You can change the default category by editing it in the “Manage / Categories” section of your control panel.

Any longer informative posts or reviews MUST be saved under categories which are named after a keyword phrase. For example if you had a blog related to promoting websites, you could name one of your categories “Increase Website Traffic” and all the posts you write about increasing traffic to a website should be posted under this category.

You can find full details on how to use permalinks at the official WordPress help here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

Article by Ivan Wong. Visit MapleCommerce to learn how SEO and PPC can be used to drive more targeted traffic and sales to your online business.