How to Optimize for Google, a 3-part Series from SiteProNews

The slashing of paid search advertising is just one symptom of the current economic situation. I'm seeing a lot of questions out there, from Twitter to direct inquiries, regarding the dark art of SEO. While optimizing the heck out of your META tags may never grow your "Organic Search" results to the volume they might have been at when you were spending thousands of dollars per month on Adwords, there are things that can and should be done to move your site up in search engine rankings.

One mantra to keep in mind throughout any SEO effort is: Patience, Analysis, Creativity, Implementation, Repeat. SEO combines many disciplines such as Marketing, Competitive Research, Customer Awareness, and Web Development. It also helps if you are selling/making/talking about stuff that people are interested in. If you build it, it doesn't necessarily mean that 'they' will search for it. Don't try to get it all done in one day, break your site into prioritized blocks, and work to improve successful pages first, then work through the full site over time.

You are responsible for knowing what your customers are looking for, and the terms they associate with that need. Here's a three part roll up by SiteProNews, that covers of a bunch of helpful ideas to help you build an SEO framework that can close the gap between your site and the people searching for what you provide:

How to Optimize for Google:

• Part 1 of 3
  
• Part 2 of 3
  
• Part 3 of 3
  

Competitious: New product in the works

Competitious.com: "Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft... The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we've received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months..."

Competitious is a great service even in its current form. It's a handy way to organize a group of related Companies / URLs and attach articles to them, create a comparison matrix for them, and also monitor Alexa traffic. You can create multiple "projects" which makes it handy for doing different competitive scenarios. I've even used it as a quick research tool when looking into topics or new market trends.

Amazon officially announces long-rumored DRM-free music store

"Amazon announced this morning that it plans to launch a music store later this year that will sell unprotected MP3 files from thousands of record labels."

This is great for consumers - from the healthy competition point of view. iTunes has the integration advantage, so I think that the one company which could be sweating it the most from this announcement is eMusic.com - because they've been the leading non-DRM MP3 store. Depending on just how deep the Amazon catalog is, and what kind of pricing structure it adopts, eMusic could see its subscription service really suffer. Shows you how much pull Amazon has in the market, since eMusic has been doing MP3 downloads for years and the only thing it has been lacking are big labels and per-song pricing.



read more | digg story

MySpace News: The Digg Killer?

"MySpace is launching a news aggregator called MySpace News in the second quarter of 2007. It’ll rely on both algorithms and user rating - basically a combination of Google News and Digg..."

Yeah maybe it will be like the parallel-universe kind of digg with a really ugly design, giant ads with scantily clad women, and constant intermittent outages! I know, I know, it will probably succeed due to the sheer volume of existing users... Add to the '_-killer?' watchlist :-P

read more | digg story

The 50 Most Important People on the Web

pcworld.com: "Despite what Time magazine would have you believe, you are not the most powerful or influential person on the Web. At PC World we love online personals, social networks, and videos of people falling on their keisters as much as the next person, but without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, much of the Web's potential would be lost among spam sites and other online detritus."



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Five Tools for Spying on Your Competition

"By understanding the marketing strategies of your competitor, you can always stay a step ahead of them. The key is knowing how to obtain all of this vital information without having to hire a PR firm, an FBI agent, or an undercover spy. Luckily for us, all we need are a few online tools to find out exactly how are competitors are running the show."

Spying is kind of a harsh word when it comes to keeping an eye on the competition. It's not like these sites are tracking down secret formulas. However, they appear to be some easier ways of tracking down info than completely manual processes. I find Google Alerts to be very handy. In fact, I suggest setting up google alerts related to your own business as a way to keep an eye on your own internet presence. Sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised to see a link on a blog or something you might now be aware of without the help of such an alert.