Once installed, SEO Doctor appears in the browser status bar, providing at-a-glance statistics for each page that you visit. There’s a flag indicating whether there are any problems on the page (green means OK, yellow means non-critical problems exist, while red means there are critical problems).  The page is also given a score (marked out of 100) on how search engine friendly it is, based on the information in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you’d like more detail, you can click on the score and pop up a window with more information. Here’s SEO Doctor’s verdict on WebWorkerDaily, for example:

As you can see, WWD scored a creditable 91/100, but lost some marks for having too many links, taking too long to load, and a missing meta description. You can click the arrow next to any item to get a description of what it is and how it should be used. It’s a really simple and quick way to get an idea of whether there are any SEO problems on a site, and how to fix them.

Other than the scoring, SEO Doctor can also provides some other stats and links to other analytical services that are probably more useful to more experienced SEO practitioners. You can get information such as the number of visitors to the page each day compared to the number of search engine visitors (this data is from Compete.com and requires a free API key), the number of external links compared to the total number of links on the page, and the page rank flow of the page. The add-on can also highlight “nofollow” links on the page, and export a report on the page to a CSV file for further analysis.

You can download SEO Doctor from the Mozilla Add-ons site, and there’s a page with more information and instructions here. Note that although it has been updated to work with Firefox 4 beta 4, it doesn’t yet work with the latest beta.

What SEO tools would you recommend to beginners?

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“Auntie,” you reply, “I know the perfect book for you to read. It’s called ‘Attract Visitors to Your Site: The Mini Missing Manual’ by Matthew MacDonald, and you can get it as an e-book from O’Reilly for only $4.99.”

As a web worker, there’s probably not much that’s new to you in this book. But it’s well-written, and at just over 50 pages, it can be read in a hour, and it provides a good introduction to some useful techniques for improving the visibility of web sites.

The author makes it clear that he’s written the book for the proprietors of both hobbyist and small business sites. His writing style is straightforward, and he uses a bit of humor to lighten up what can be a pretty dry subject.

MacDonald starts the book by emphasizing the importance of putting together excellent content, “shameless self-promotion,” and a promotion plan. The author’s idea of a promotion plan is very simple, though — it’s really more of a checklist, with items like “1. Build a truly great web site.”

Once past the introductory sections, the author moves into basic descriptions of what can be done (and not done) with with SEO. The final third of the book is taken up with discussions of how Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and AdWords work, and how to use them. These last sections are slightly more technical, but are still clearly written, although they do assume some knowledge of HTML.

The book is not without its faults. I’m surprised that, in 2010, there is no mention of how social networks like Facebook and Twitter can be used to drive traffic to web sites. And there are some sections, particularly near the beginning of the book, that feel outdated and could probably have been omitted. The discussion of reciprocal links and web rings, for example, seems to have come right out of 1998, although the author seems a bit embarrassed by the subject:

Sadly, the majority of web rings consist of gaudy, amateurish Web disasters. Pair up with these nightmares and your site will be deemed guilty by association. However, with a little research, you may find a higher-quality ring. Maybe.

On the whole, though, “Attract Visitors to Your Site” doesn’t do a bad job of providing an accessible introduction to a subject that is often covered in mumbo-jumbo. And at $5, it’s an investment that you can recommend to family, friends and customers with even the smallest of budgets.

How do you introduce friends and clients to SEO and search engine placement?

Here are a few of the tips that were shared during the panel to help you write blog content that will help your search engine rankings with no knowledge of SEO techniques or web development required.

Write Great Titles

Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.

• Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
• Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
• Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
• Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon

Write New and Interesting Content

Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.

Include Personal Anecdotes

Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.

These are just a few of my tips for writing content that people will enjoy reading and then link to, which generates better search engine rankings.

What are your tips for using content to improve your SEO?

Photo by Nathan Bergey, used under Creative Commons.

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In this post, I’ll discuss some basic SEO techniques and how to apply them.

Understanding the Jargon

The first thing we need to define is SEO itself. We already know what  the acronym stands for, but what does it mean? According to the SEOmoz dictionary, SEO is “the process of increasing the number of visitors to a web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine.” So when you perform SEO on a site, you are making sure that when someone types in relevant keywords into Google (or other search engines), the site will appear in the results. Ideally it should appear within the first page or results, or even as the first result. Here are some other common SEO terms, together with definitions:

• Keyword: The word or phrase that users enter into search engines.
• Crawlers, bots and spiders: These are the names given to the programs that search engines use to browse, analyze, and index your site.
• Search volume: This is the number of people who search for a given keyword. Some tools measure this per day, per month, or per 100 days.
• Competition: These are the other sites that aim to rank well in the same keyword as you do.
• Search engine result pages (SERPS): The term itself is descriptive — these are the pages of results that appear when you type a keyword into a search engine.
• Back link: A link to your site from another site.
• On-page optimization. These are the SEO techniques you apply on your blog or site itself, and therefore have most control over. It doesn’t involve outside factors such as getting backlinks from other sites.

How Important is SEO?

Applying even the most basic on-page optimization can bring in better, more qualified traffic from search engines. Still, SEO is not the only way to draw new visitors to your site. Nothing beats creating quality content that people will want to share. SEO is just the polish that will make your site appear more accessible to search engine crawlers. Without solid content behind it, SEO by itself will not make a difference in the long run.

At the same time, there’s such a thing as overdoing it. Don’t apply short-sighted techniques, such as stuffing your site with unnecessary keywords, or getting hundreds of back links from irrelevant sites. Doing this will make your site seem like spam to visitors, ad could even be banned by the search engines from showing up in SERPS altogether (Google has some guidelines on techniques to avoid here).

Choosing Keywords

The first step is to come up with a “seed list.” Think about all the possible keywords (or phrases) your target audience will use when looking for a site like yours. If you’re providing a specific service, make sure to include keywords related to that service.

After that, check out the search metrics of the words in your seed list, to find out which to optimize your site’s copy for. You need to find out the search volume and level of competition for each keyword. You can do this with some free tools:

• WordTracker’s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Keyword Discovery‘s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Nichebot Classic. It’s powered by WordTracker, but links to competition data (although you have to click to get the numbers).

Here’s a good rule of thumb to remember: apart from relevance, good keywords have high search volume but low competition. The mistake many beginners make is that they aim for the most popularly-searched keywords (those with high search volume). While there’s nothing wrong with that, competition for those terms is so strong that it’s hard to rank well for them in the SERPS. By adding a few modifiers (additional words to make a more specific phrase) to popular keywords, you have a better chance of ranking well.

Getting to Work

Performing on-page optimization throughout your web site is easy, especially if you are familiar with HTML. Even if you aren’t, there are dozens of online tutorials out there which can help you find and tweak the code on your web site with little difficulty.

URLs. The first thing you should look at is your URLs. Does your domain name contain an important keyword? If it does, that’s a bonus. If not, then channel your efforts into crafting SEO-friendly URLs for the pages of your site or the posts of your blog. For example, a page about hiring logo designers is better if given the following url: http://www.example.com/hiring-logo-designers. Avoid using only dates, numbers, and irrelevant words as the URLs of your pages. Note that descriptive “search engine friendly” URLs may not affect ranking themselves, but people will be more likely to click through a page with a descriptive URL from a SERP.

Page title. This line of text (in the <title> tag) appears on the title bar of your browser when you’re looking at a web site. It should contain your primary target keywords, but don’t overdo it. This title will appear in SERPs, and you don’t want it to look like keyword-stuffed spam.

Headings. The heading tags of your pages (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) serve a dual purpose. They show your readers the hierarchy of information on a page, and they are also useful for SEO. Use relevant keywords within these tags.

Content. Your content should contain a few of your choice keywords, but you should be careful that the added keywords aren’t detrimental to a visitor’s reading experience. Make sure the keywords are there when necessary, but don’t insert them in every other sentence just because you think the search engine bots will like it.

Additional Resources

If you want to learn more, here are some guides you can start with:

• I already linked to the SEOmoz dictionary above, but the entire site has a collection of good resources, particularly The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO and Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
• WebsitePublisher.net has a clear and simple SEO guide.
• As for what you shouldn’t do, Lyndsay Walker wrote a two-part series on SEO tricks to avoid.

Have you ever tried optimizing your site? What were the results?

Image by svilen001 from sxc.hu

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As companies strive to get discovered by customers on the increasingly crowded Internet, demand for the skills of search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) experts has grown.

Could a search engine-related career be right for you?

Types of Search Engine-Related Careers

Search engine marketing and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) responsibilities involve creating, launching, managing and optimizing paid search campaigns. Critical thinking, problem solving and analysis play an important role as this job requires reviewing data and creating reports. The reports provide needed information for tweaking campaigns in order to boost their effectiveness. These jobs often require knowing how search marketing applications work.

SEM specialists research and select the right keywords to optimize sites with, write ads that compel people to take action and conduct tests to determine campaign effectiveness. People in this job optimize landing pages and use email, blogs, social networks and online PR to create marketing campaigns with high conversion and click-through rates (CTR). These jobs usually have a greater analytical focus than SEO jobs.

Search engine optimization experts focus on designing or modifying web sites to play nice with search engines and help the site appear higher on the search engine results pages. They make sure the site doesn’t have any aspects that negatively affect its standing with search engines. This career has overlaps with web design because improving a site’s ranking may call for making changes to the site’s content and structure.

It’s important to know the difference between “black hat” and “white hat” tactics as well as the pros and cons of each. Using black hat strategies can hurt a company’s standing in the SERPs. Once a company loses its standing, it’s very hard to climb back up. Rob Oskins of Capital Solutions Bancorp explains that SEO experts have two key roles: ensuring the search engines can crawl your site’s web pages easily by optimizing the site’s content and structure, and getting links from other sites. “SEO involves these two major areas. It’s not rocket science, but it’s not easy,” Oskins says.

How to Qualify

SEMs and PPC managers need to know how to use Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and similar services to create profitable campaigns. It helps to become Google Adwords certified and join the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO).

Knowing web design, HTML and other web site markup and technologies benefits those who want to work in SEO. “Having HTML experience when going into SEO is as important as learning the alphabet,” says Stephanie M. Cockerl of nextSTEPH. Some jobs require knowledge of languages like JavaScript, PHP and ASP.NET.

It’s possible to fall into the job through a happy accident like Christopher Noonan, president of Noon-an-Night Marketing. His brother needed to build a web site and market it. Noonan helped and discovered a new talent, and learned his skills the hard way through trials, testing and guessing, which he did for no pay. “The knowledge I gained in the first year by having a site to play with from the very beginning really helped my confidence and ability,” he says.

Some discover the career after a lay off. Cockerl learned PPC on the job with help from a mentor who was her former employee’s vendor.

Online Marketing Tools

Those in this career rely on Google AdWords, Google Analytics,  Wordtracker, WebTrends, bid management software, web tracking software, Microsoft Excel, instant messenger, texting, conference calls and email.

Find Clients

Consultants in this career find their clients mainly through referrals from current clients and online networks such as LinkedIn.

Would you consider a search engine-related career?

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Sitemasher

I wasn’t sure what to make of Sitemasher when I first heard of it. With Sitemasher, you can build a web site, manage the content, get analytics, implement basic SEO, and you get managed hosting to boot.

But at $99/month, I felt the kerpow of sticker shock. I knew that I had to think about Sitemasher differently to fully appreciate its value.

So after a demo with the company, here is what I’ve learned.

Web Developers Rule at Sitemasher

Sitemasher is really meant to be a tool for Web developers to help them provide integrated Web services to clients and either hand over the finished site to the client or continue to easily manage the site for the client. There are two views to Sitemasher:

Dashboard View: This is more for the marketer or business owner who wants to have some admin controls such as viewing site analytics, adding some basic SEO code into the site like easy-to-construct meta tags, and set user levels. Depending on a person’s role on the Web site development and maintenance process, their user access can be set up with limitations. The user roles tool allows admin to specify exactly what each person is allowed to do on the site – from edit to approve to publish. Tasks can be created and assigned.

Basically, Sitemasher lets the site admin turn features on and off based on the client’s needs and the workflow everyone wants.

Studio View: This is the heart of the Web developer’s domain. In Studio view, the developer can build the site from the ground up and tweak their development environment to their preferences. There is also a Style Sheet manager and a Database creator. So when a developer creates a form, for example, Sitemasher’s system automatically ties it to a contact database to manage the contact information.

Not being a Web designer myself, I didn’t grasp all the designer speak, however, I got the impression that even someone with my 1990s HTML and Web design skills would be right at home with the easy-to-use site building tools.

Back to the Price

After seeing how robust and feature rich Sitemasher was, I began to think again about the price. Would I, as a site developer, have to pay $99/month to build a site for my client?

The answer is NO. Web developers can use Sitemasher for free as their development tool for multiple clients. Each client gets private access into their site during all stages of development. Then, when the site is ready for debut, the developer triggers the site to publish it live.

Sitemasher analytics

At that point, the $99/month kicks in and this is a cost that the developer can pass on to the client. They could then choose to be done with the project as the CMS, analytics and SEO tools are easy enough for a non-programmer to use so a client could handle the site from then on. Or they can remain on hand – if the client has a capacity issue – and use Sitemasher to manage the site for the client. The client still pays $99/month for their site and all the features while the developer can charge for their time as webmaster.

Breaking down $99/month, I needed to remember that we’re talking about:

• a really powerful site builder (ex: Dreamweaver $399US);
• a detailed analytics tool (ex: Google Analytics which is FREE but something like WebTrends isn’t free);
• basic SEO (this could entail hiring an SEO expert for hundreds of dollars);
• simple CMS (this could be pricey – $1200/year); and
• managed hosting (this could range from $25/month to hundreds of dollars per month).

Frankly, just the CMS alone could make Sitemasher worthwhile to the business owner who doesn’t want to mess with code and also wants a good degree of autonomy from their Web developer.

$99/month is the Basic level where only 2 people can be users (Web developer and customer and then later could be switched to two customer staff members). The next levels, $249/month allows 5 users (with the ability to add), approvals, different user roles, and versioning while the $699/month gives you unlimited users on top of all the features.

NOTE: On October 8, Sitemasher announced the Sitemasher Website Design Contest which runs through March 1, 2009. Find out more about how you can enter. First Prize: $1,000; Second Prize: $500; Third Prize: $250 as well as a one-year subscription to Sitemasher Basic and a few other bennies.

Have you tried Sitemasher yet? What do you think of it? What other multi-featured Web development tool are you using and do you pay for it?

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