• Let’s All Get Inline (In a Block, In a Block)
• Thinking Outside The SEO Box
• Fix Your CSS
• 10 Things Any Web Developer Worth Their Spit Should Know
• Easy Vertical Centering with CSS
• WordPress Plugin: Comment Info Tip
• Greasing Gmail
• CSS – An Absolute Mess
• Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling
• How to Promote Your Blog – So What?
• Disjointed CSS
• Random Bits Podcast with Jonathan Snook, Part 1
• Random Bits Podcast with Yaro Starak
• Web Developer Crossword Puzzle

After seven years of being a software developer I have finally done it – I’ve joined a web agency! On November 3rd I will be joining Malenke | Barnhart here in Denver. I’m pretty excited about it. It looks like a real fun place to work, Xbox 360 on down time, dress however you want and drink beer on Fridays. All while producing incredible top quality work. Here is some of their work:

• Denver.org
• Ford
• Denver Zoo
• Quiznos
• Girl Scouts

So for those of you that have worked for an agency before, do you have any advice for me?

Are we moving ever closer to that promised paperless utopia?

In this article I’ll share with you what I shared with them. It may surprise you to hear some of my suggestions.

The beginning of our conversation was your typical SEO talk. It started with an explanation of how Google (and others) ranks web pages. The typical reader of this blog will be familiar with this, so I’ll skip it. But if you need a refresher, read the article Google’s PageRank Explained.

After explaining to them the significance of inbound links to their site it didn’t take long before they asked the question that always gets asked at this point, “How do we get people to link to our website?”

I deflated their spirits be telling them that it’s not easy. You see, e-commerce sites, like theirs, don’t typically attract people wanting to link to them. Nobody, naturally, wants to link to a website that sells jewelry or Hungarian food condiments and trying to get people to link to a site they don’t want to can be an exercise in futility. I know, because I’ve done it many times.

But hope is not lost. There is a way…

The short answer is you have to give people a reason to want to link to you. But how does an e-commerce site do that?

That’s what we’ll look at in this article. No, it’s not your typical, “How to acquire links” article so read on.

Doing Old School E-commerce in a Web 2.0 World

Your typical e-commerce site is the web equivalent of a retail shopping aisle. It basically just puts product in front of the consumer. That’s a necessary step – you need to put the product in front of the consumer in order for them to purchase it, but it shouldn’t be the first step and it most certainly shouldn’t be the only step. If you don’t take steps to encourage their buying decision along the way then placing product in front of them won’t even matter. It’s kinda like the guy that swings his jacket open revealing a bunch of watches and asking you if you want to buy a watch. He’s probably not too successful unless he’s fortunate enough to be in a room of people needing watches.

The Amazon Effect

Just because Amazon does it doesn’t mean you can too! Amazon has become the model for which many people base their e-commerce paradigm on and I believe this is hurting a lot of web businesses.

Amazon was launched in 1995 and was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet. While many companies did not survive the late 1990s dot-com bust, Amazon did, and now has become a household name for web shoppers.

If you are running an e-commerce shop you need to get one thing straight. You’re not Amazon!

There’s three attributes that Amazon possesses that you don’t:

1. Everybody knows Amazon; we don’t know you. In fact, we’ve never heard of you and we don’t trust you. Over the years I have made hundreds of purchases from Amazon. They have earned my trust. I can purchase from them without fear that my personal information is in jeopardy or that the product will never find it’s way to me. I can’t say the same for you.

2. I already have an Amazon account. Ultimately this may be your biggest problem. I’ve already given all my user information to Amazon: name, address, city, state, zip, credit card info and all the rest. I really don’t want to go through that process again. In addition, I really don’t want to have to create an account and remember yet another username and password. Sure, I could use my same username and password as I do for Amazon, but is it worth it? Especially if I’m only going to buy from you once?

3. Amazon doesn’t have to do a damn thing. Because Amazon has earned my trust they really don’t have to do anything but show me the product and the purchase button. In fact, many times I will find a product on another site that I like then turn around and see if Amazon has it so I can buy it from them; even if it costs me a few more dollars. What can I say, I’m lazy and don’t want to fill out the forms again. And like I said, I trust them.

So you can see you really need to question whether the Amazon e-commerce paradigm will work for you or not. Keep in mind, it wasn’t easy for Amazon to get where they are either. It took them eight years to make their first annual profit with this model.

At this point you may be asking, “But what other model is there?”

Let’s look at two companies I mentioned earlier: the jewelry store and the Hungarian food condiments store. They both have some things going for them, things that separate them from Amazon. The jewelry store has prices that Amazon can’t compete with and Hungarian food condiments is something Amazon doesn’t sell; maybe the only thing these days. So both are good businesses to make a go of it.

Here’s what I would do if I ran either of those websites: I would blog. If I owned the jewelry store then I would blog about jewelry. I would become an authority on jewelry. Here’s some of the blog post you might find on such a blog: Don’t Buy a Diamond Without Reading This First! The Difference Between a Cultured Pearl and a Natural Pearl. Or Do You Know What The Hardest Metal on Earth Is? It’s tungsten carbide. I would explain what tungsten carbide is and nonchalantly explain why it makes for a great ring and — are you ready for it — I would link to the tungsten carbide ring section of my store. I’m using the blog to act like a impartial party that informs and teaches it’s audience about jewelry all the while linking to my store that sells the product. It’s important to not make your blog post sound like a sales pitch, but casually plug your products.

Need more ideas? You could blog about what popular celebrities are wearing. Perhaps a blog post showing the necklace that Angelina Jolie is wearing on the red carpet or the ring that Paris Hilton is sporting. You could show pictures, tell who designed it, list what it costs and then link to a necklace or ring that you sell that is similar, but for a fraction of the price. Sound silly? Take a moment and think about how many people do searches for “Angelina Jolie”. On Google in 2007 Paris Hilton was the eighth most popular search so perhaps not so silly.

The Hungarian food condiments blog could feature a new recipe each week. Each recipe would be sure to use one of the condiments that your e-commerce store sells and of course it too would link to its product. Imagine how many people perform searches on recipes. Certainly much more than those that perform searches for Hungarian mustard! Instead of just having an audience of Hungarian food lovers you have an audience that loves food… much bigger.

Becoming an Influential Source

Creating a blog / e-commerce tandem allows you to become an authority on your subject. It allows you to demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about your product and even passionate about it. This allows you to move away from the cold, impersonal store front of placing as much product on the screen as possible and replaces it with a human; complete with personality and passion.

In the end the idea is to connect with your audience and form relationships with them. This builds trust and trust is a big factor in making purchasing decisions.

Let’s Spell it Out

Let’s review and see where we’re at. We have an e-commerce site that isn’t doing well in the search engines because no one links to it. Why would they?

As a result we are creating something else, something that if done correctly people will feel compelled to link to: a blog. Whether you put the blog on the same domain as the e-commerce site or its own domain I’m not sure. I welcome your thoughts on that.

The blog not only acts as a conductor of links, but more importantly, it allows you to influence people’s buying decisions. In addition, it allows you to do something most e-commerce sites don’t. It allows you to have a relationship with your customers and hopefully convert your blog’s audience into your e-commerce stores customers.

I will conclude by saying that this strategy is not a quick fix. Nor is it easy. It takes work, but all successful businesses take work!

This is a very large photo I took of a mountain near Choquequirao, Peru. Figure 1 shows it set as a normal background image without playing with CSS's background-position or anything else and only a rather boring corner of it (not that the whole image is that exciting either) is visible:

Figure 1

Figure 2 shows the same thing, except that the image has been centred using background-position:center:

Figure 2

It's even more boring! Now, with CSS we can still improve this a bit, by using the img element instead of a background image. Yes, this is not as beautifully semantic, but for the purposes of this example will do:

By setting the width and height of #bg and the image to 100%, we can fill the viewport up with the image, but of course the aspect ratio of the image will not be maintained and the stretchiness can look horrible, particularly if the browser window is resized.

Time for some JavaScript, then. The first thing to do is to make sure the image has actually loaded before we try to resize it. I've decided on the following approach:

The key thing here is that we first set an onload event listener on bgimg (the image we're resizing) which will fire when the image has finished loading. However, it will only fire if the src attribute is set, so we do that in the following line (it doesn't matter that it's the same src, fortunately).

The last three lines fire resizeBg when the browser window is resized and cater for decent browsers and IE. Here is resizeBg:

The first two lines obtain the width and height of the viewport. There is a small caveat here: For document.documentElement.clientWidth to work (since IE does not support self.innerX), IE must not be in quirks mode, i.e. the page must have a valid doctype. Not much of a caveat, really, since your pages should have valid doctypes anyway.

Following that, we just employ some simple mathematics. The first if block will set any image to the same width as the viewport. It also works out the new height for the image so that the aspect ratio is preserved.

The next if-else block is important. If the first block's calculations means that the new image's height is smaller than the viewport, we need to make it a bit bigger. This means setting the width to bigger than the viewport, so to preserve the aspect ratio, we centre it by shifting it left by half the difference.

If the height of the new image is bigger, then we need to centre it vertically, which is what the else if bit does.

Now, as shown in Figure 3, we can get a nicely-fitting centred image as the background!

Figure 3

See the finished example page (which Figure 3 links to too) and the accompanying JavaScript file. The JavaScript file includes code to run the resizing function when the DOM has loaded, using Dean Edwards' script, so the init function will look a little different to the one on this page.

Before anyone says anything, yes, the script could be made truly nice and unobtrusive by creating the HTML elements for the background image with JavaScript as well, but that is not the focus of this post, so it can be left as an exercise for the reader!

Update (29/01/09): I've updated the code to make the script work in IE6. Please note there are also changes to the CSS (in the finished example HTML file).

Danny founded Search Engine Watch in 1996 and spent a decade there educating the world on search engine marketing. In 2006 he left SEW to start up a new website Search Engine Land where he serves as Editor-In-Chief. Danny also continues to speak at Search Marketing Expo (SMX West) on all things search related. Perhaps no one has done more to evangelize SEO than Danny Sullivan.

Podcast Highlights

• 00:29 - What in the world is a technologist?
• 01:13 - What's new with Danny?
• 04:34 - Does Google deserve it's high public approving rating?
• 12:11 - How has social media change Internet Marketing?
• 16:20 - What are some social media strategies?
• 17:19 - We learn about Sphinn.com
• 21:21 - Random question time

Play the podcast now! Notice the Random Bits podcast player on the right?
Or Download the podcast for later!
Or Subscribe to the Random Bits podcast feed!

There are two ways to link to a file/page/location in HTML, either by using absolute or relative paths:

An absolute path defines a location by including the protocol, the server/domain, the directory (if needed) and the name of the document itself. Below is an example of an absolute path:

<a href="http://www.search-this.com/page.html">

With a relative path, you skip the protocol and server/domain name and go directly to the page name, like so:

<a href="/page.html">

So which is better?

Well you'll get different responses depending on who you ask. Many people will tell you that relative paths are better but I'm not one of them! I always recommend absolute paths and here's why:

At one point GoogleGuy, an employee of Google, who helps fight crime -- or at least helps webmasters -- said, and I quote, "absolute links have less potential for getting messed up [when Google indexes your page]. Even though it shouldn't make a difference, I recommend absolute links."

OK, sure, maybe just because GoogleGuy said so is not a good enough reason. I agree. So here is -- we live in a time where people scrape your content and place it on their own site. If you're going to get scraped you may as well get a link back to your site, right? That's only going to happen with an absolute path!

And it's not just scrapers. There are other legitimate ways to have your content show up on other sites; like RSS and web-services. I think in todays web, it's no longer just personal preference; absolute paths are the way to go.

The Problem

The problem is that it creates two different links to the same page. For example, here would be the two links to Paul's last article:

http://www.search-this.com/2007/11/26/css-a-recipe-for-success/

http://www.search-this.com/2007/11/26/css-a-recipe-for-success/#more-464

So what can sometimes happen is that if the article becomes popular, half the people will link to it one way while half the people link to it the other way. Thereby dividing the total link juice in half.

The Fix

The only way I have found to fix this is to modify a file in the wp-includes directory.

For WordPress 2.2 and up modify the post-template.php page.
For WordPress 2.1 and below modify the templates-functions-post.php page.

Somewhere around line 124 comment out the $output line with the "#more-$id\" in it and change it to the below:

Just remember that each time you upgrade WordPress you will need to remod this line. But if it helps out with SEO it's a small price to pay.

• Stop Worrying - About SEO
• Do It Yourself SEO?
• Do It Yourself SEO? Part 2
• Title Tags - A Search Engine Optimization Cornerstone
• Random Bits Podcast with Rand Fishkin

Once again, I want to be clear, a sound understanding of SEO/SEM can benefit your website.

Now that I've said that, some people are spending way too much time worrying about SEO.

Take Action!

"You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it." -- Carlos Castaneda

Acquiring knowledge in an attempt to make your website better is fine, it's even responsible, but it's not a substitute for action. Some people are spending too much time on SEO and not enough time on their actual product. I've been a member of the SitePoint forums since 2001. I've seen many people enter into the SEO forums, never to return -- it's like the Hotel California. They get so wrapped up in every aspect of SEO that they forget about the real leg-work that needs to be done.

These people want to know every minute detail of SEO, right down to what's the perfect number of words on a page. As if having more or less words on a page will suddenly open the flood gates and traffic will come pouring through. Shouldn't they be worrying more about the words on the page instead of how many words there should be? Is it not more important to have relevant copy for your human audience than to have the exact number of words for the search engines?

The Wrapping Paper Is Not The Gift

I find myself wanting to say to these people, "Stop worrying so much about SEO and just concentrate on creating a website that's relevant to an audience." Look, no amount of SEO is going to make something that's crap good. It's just not. Instead, focus your efforts into making something that's good, that reaches an audience and that people will want to naturally share with others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. The point is that if you build something remarkable, the people will find you. I'm not saying, "Build it and they will come" -- we all know that's not the case. What I am saying is that when we DO eventually come, have something worth our time. Have something that will make us glad that we did come and make us want to return. Have something that's worth us subscribing to. Perhaps we may even find ourselves wanting to link to you.

I talked with the owners of some of the most popular websites on the web (according to Technorati's Top 100) and asked them flat-out how much they concern themselves with SEO. Here's their responses:

How much do you concern yourself with SEO for your site?

• How to Change the World By Guy Kawasaki (ranked 15th by Technorati)

  In the way you’re asking, zero. I don’t know a thing about it. In the way you should be asking, I spend 3-4 hours per day concerned with this: ie, trying to come up with good content. My assumption is this: Write good stuff, people will find you as opposed to obsessing about SEO.

• Seth's Blog By Seth Godin (ranked 24th by Technorati)

  none

• 456 Berea Street By Roger Johansson (ranked 31th by Technorati)

  First of all I make sure there are no barriers that prevent search engine robots from spidering the site. When I write I make an effort to write titles, headings and link text that are clear and helpful to my readers, which also means they contain words and phrases that my target audience uses for searches.

  Other than that, not much. I focus on accessibility, which means I get most of my on-site SEO for free.

Those answers are so on track that you may think I wrote them myself or in someway coerced them; I assure you that I didn't. I didn't need to, I knew what their answers would be -- if you spend any time at their websites it's quite apparent that they are concerned with their product and firmly understand that if they focus on the product, the rest will take care of itself.

I do realize that not every website is able to write as compelling of content as those mentioned above; that e-commerce sites and traditional business sites will likely find it difficult to generate the same amount of traffic or acquire incoming links. Nobody naturally wants to link to a website about POS software. That said, that doesn't mean they can't benefit by writing compelling content for their industry. In fact, in a recent podcast with problogger Chris Garrett he talks about how even the local plumber could benefit from blogging.

Once again, for the record, you absolutely should take steps to ensure that your websites pages are indexable, that your content is sufficiently marked-up and that you know the key search terms for your audience. In short, you should understand the basics of SEO. But the point is to focus your efforts on making the best product possible. Understand SEO, but don't get lost in SEO. Likewise, marketing has its place -- it gets people to listen to you, but after that you better have something to say.

This is part 2 in the "Do It Yourself SEO" series. In part 1 we tackled the issue of whether you should do your own SEO or hire it out. In doing so we looked at four questions and now in this article we will revisit those questions and take a closer look at what it will take to make your website successful.

Before we begin it's probably fair to give my background as it pertains to search engine optimization. For starters, I am not the smartest guy in the room. I hold no certifications or formal training in SEO/SEM; everything I know has been learned in the trenches over the last eight years. So what follows are some observations that I have learned during my call of duty.

You won't find advice in this article like: "use heading tags in your copy" or to "make sure you have keyword-rich title tags on each page" or the "significance of landing pages" -- while all are good advice, this would turn into a book if I went that route. Instead we are going to look at the skill sets involved in making a website successful. My hope is that by the end of the article you will have a greater appreciation for SEO/SEM.

Let's first start by revisiting those four questions we addressed in the first article:

1. Do I really have time to take on the development and promotion of a website?
The amount of time it takes to make a website successful is hard to gauge. First, you have to define success. What does it mean to be a successful website? Is it measured by the number of visitors to your site? Or your search engine rankings? Or how many widgets you've sold? Or how many people have subscribed to your feed? Or how much AdSense revenue you've made? It may be all of these -- or none of these. Depending on how you define success it will play a roll in how many hours you can expect to work.

Also, keep in mind how you define success today may not be how you define success tomorrow. Today you may be happy with 2,000 visitors a day, tomorrow you may want that number to be doubled. Today you may be happy that you rank in the top 5 in Google for one of your keywords, tomorrow you may want it to be for five keywords. Typically, people are never satisfied once they have reached a defined level and only then look to redefine success.

I can't accurately tell you how many hours you're going to need to work to make a successful website. But, you can safely assume that the more time you put in the more likely your website will be successful.

2. How much is my time worth?
Once again, only you can answer this question - there's no formula to plug in. For me, I always keep in mind that the time I spend doing one job is time away from another job. That's why I almost always turn down side jobs. If I were to do SEO work on the side that would mean time away from my wife, daughter and golf clubs. That time is too precious to me. So you have to ask yourself what your time is worth.

3. How strong are my web development skills?
Anyone in the SEO business knows that there are two sides to the SEO coin: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. Put another way -- the development and the marketing. Let's first look at the development side:

Web Development
I'm going to also break web development down into two sides: client-side code and server-side code. Client-side code is code that's interpreted by a web browser; HTML and JavaScript are examples of this. Server-side code is handled by a web server which executes the code and spits it out to a browser. So in the end, server-side code ends up being client-side code; ASP.NET and PHP are examples of this.

Since SEO is only concerned with client-side code that's what we'll focus on here.

Client-Side code is then further broken down into three more categories often called the separation of concerns:

• Content: the words on the page are so much more.

  It's often been said that content is king and no one should know this better than a search engine optimizer. Content is the life-blood of any website. It's the reason why people come to your website in the first place.

  So being a good copywriter is an essential tool in the SEO belt. The ability to write fresh, relevant content that people will find useful and want to share with others is key. In addition, a good copywriter should be able to write in a language that’s easily understandable for a global audience and allows for easy scanning of important concepts.

  Lastly, the copywriter should be able to research and define keywords relevant to the websites market and incorporate those words into the content to appease the search engines without detracting from the human readers experience.

  I would add that I believe copywriting is one of the most under-appreciated skills on the web -- it can make or break a website -- and so I believe this may be reason enough to hire a professional.

  Now that you have your content you still need to get it on the page and that is the job of HTML/XHTML. Thankfully, learning HTML is pretty easy and should not take too much time. But like most things in life that are easy, people can have a tendency to get lazy. Don't write lazy HTML. Your HTML should strive to convey the meaning, or semantics of the content on the page; but that's another article...

  Once you have your well written content properly marked-up it's time to make it look good, bring on the bling-bling, I mean the presentation layer.

• Presentation: making the plain look good.

  How a website looks should be entirely attributed to CSS. Your HTML code should only serve to define the content and in no way change how it looks as that is the sole job of CSS.

  While CSS adds many benefits to a website, for this article I only want to talk about the benefits of CSS as it pertains to SEO.

  Search engines like Google and Yahoo send out their spiders or bots to crawl web pages and then index the content retrieved on those pages. These spiders care only about content, not code, so all that is indexed is the text. People often times get this confused, if you want to see what a spider sees, try this spider simulator.

  So at this point you may be thinking, how is CSS going to help our website with SEO if all that the bots see is content and CSS is used for presentation? That's a good question and there's only one answer: CSS allows our content to visually (in the browser) have a different order than what is actually coded in the HTML. This helps because search engines tend to give greater importance to content the higher up it is in your code. Put another way, the content closest to the HTML body tag is deemed most important.

  There's really nothing else as far as presentation goes that can help your SEO efforts, because as we've just said, search engine bots are all about content, not looks. It's we humans that can appreciate beauty, not the bots.

  With presentation done we can now talk about the behavior layer.

• Behavior: controls the behavior of your content.

  Thus far we have used copywriting skills to create interesting and unique content which we then semantically mark-up with HTML to create our web pages. We then visually breath life into our pages by using CSS. Lastly, we have the option of giving our pages a layer of interactivity and dynamic behavior by introducing our pages to elements like JavaScript, Ajax, or Flash.

  Many of these interactive technologies can greatly enhance the user experience, but if not properly implemented can pose a real challenge to the search engines. So an SEO should know how to properly work with these technologies to increase the user experience without diminishing the search engines ability to index the content.

At this point we are now done with the on-page optimization. I know some of you may be thinking, but you didn't talk about <h1> tags or <title> tags, what gives? Remember, we aren't talking about specifics here, those tags are HTML tags and we can assume when you learn proper HTML you learn the significance of such tags.

So let's move on and look at the other side of the SEO coin -- off-page optimization.

4. How good are your marketing skills?
Believe it or not, that was the easy side of SEO! Web development can take days, weeks, or months, but once you're done you start the marketing side and that should last the lifetime of your site.

Once again, we are not going into specifics today; we can do that some other time. What we are after now are the skill sets you need to learn in order to promote your website. What follows is a list of marketing skills you will want to learn:

• Cost Per Click (CPC) / Price Per Click (PPC) Advertising: This is where you research keywords and set up advertising networks like Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter.
• Link Building: Obtaining incoming links from other websites to yours is an important element of SEO and there are many ways to go about it; but that's another article...
• Directory Submission: Submitting your website to directories is always a good idea. The major directories include: DMOZ, Yahoo! and Best of the Web Directory.
• Buying Links: Paying for advertising can be a good ROI if you know where to do it. Locating quality websites within your websites industry to buy advertising can be time consuming.
• Viral Marketing and Social Media Optimization: There's nothing better than creating content so compelling that others want to spread the word for you. This is called viral marketing, much like a virus moves from host to host, a well written article can spread from blog to blog. Social Media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are like hotzones -- they alone can spread the word to thousands.

So now that the website is up and running and the links are coming in, it's time to sit back and relax, right? Wrong! Just like playing video games, standing still will get you killed! You now need to get yourself a web stats resource like Google Analytics or W3Counter so you can track and analyze your website's behavior. Making heads or tails out of your website's stats is again another article for another time, but it's most certainly something you will want to be learn.

This may not be an all encompassing list, but it's a good start of some things you will need to learn if you wish to do your own search engine optimization. I'm sure that you guys will let me know if I missed some stuff!

Review
Hopefully this article has given you a greater appreciation for SEO and you won't be so quick to offer up the advice of just do the SEO yourself, because as we've just seen, there's a lot that goes with it.

So let's review the skills a good search engine optimizer should posses:

• Copywriting: the ability to write original compelling content that your websites visitors will find useful and hopefully share with others.
• HTML / XHTML: the markup that defines your content and puts it in the language used by browsers.
• CSS: is used for presentation and allows our web pages to look beautiful.
• Marketing and Promotion: build it and they will come is not an option on the web. You need a marketing plan.
• Analytics: allows you to know more about your website's visitors and what parts of your site are working and what parts are not.

This will be a two part series. This first article will look at whether or not you should do your own SEO. In a follow-up article we will then look at what you will have to learn should you decide to do it yourself.

DIY SEO?

If someone at work were to ask you where the closest Grease Monkey shop was so that they could get their car tuned-up would you tell them to read up on how to change their own oil and to do it themself? If someone were to ask you if you know of a good plumber would you tell them to talk to someone at Home Depot and then do it themself? How about if someone needed a good physical therapist to aid them in recovery, would your response be, "just do it yourself?" Or if someone were to ask you if you knew of a good place to get barbecue ribs would you hand them a recipe and tell them to just make it themself? Probably not. So then why tell someone to take on all the design and marketing responsibilities of their website themselves?

I know what you're thinking; you're thinking but they CAN do their own SEO. I don't disagree. People can do just about anything they set their mind to; so I have no doubt they could do it themselves. But, the reality is that we pay for things all the time that we could do ourselves. In fact just recently I paid a good bit on money to have someone build a flagstone patio in my backyard. I could have done the job myself, the skills required to do the job aren't great, but for me to do the job would actually cost me more money because my time is more valuable than that. In addition, the guys I hired are professionals; there's no doubt they did a better job than I could have done. I also pay people to change the oil in my car and I even pay people to make and deliver pizzas to me. I pay for all sorts of things I could do myself, and so do you.

So just because they CAN do it themselves doesn't mean they should. Before you tell someone to do their own SEO have them answer the four questions below.

Answer these four questions before you decide to do your own SEO:

1. Do I really have time to take on the development and promotion of a website?
Most CEO's or entrepreneurs don't have time to do optimization and marketing; they're too busy running a business. They're forecasting trends, cornering markets, and managing relationships -- to suggest they should stop that to spend time on their website could actually cost them more money than if they hired someone.

2. How much is my time worth?
This is a question you should always ask yourself before starting any project. Remember, time spent doing one job is time away from doing another. Again, this could mean you are actually losing money by doing the job yourself.

3. How strong are my web development skills?
Really be honest, most CEOs I know are business people, not techies.

4. How good are your marketing skills?
Maybe you do have the development skills - what about the marketing skills? Marketing and promoting actually takes much more time than developing does. MUCH MORE! And it should never end!

After answering these questions you should be better equipped to decide if you are the right person for the job or if someone else is. There's little doubt that some people could and probably even should do their own SEO - after all some of you like to change your own oil and some of you even like to make your own pizzas. But, often times you will be better off hiring a professional.

[ NOW READ PART 2 ]

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in blogging (or on any website for that matter) is to not fully utilize your title tags. The title tag has been and will continue to be one of the most important elements in search engine rankings. Title tags are the over-arching descriptor for the page; they communicate with the search engines telling them what each page is about.

So then why is it that so many websites fail to optimize their title tags?

Without question the biggest mistake made by websites is to simply use their blog or company's name as the title. Take Zales as an example. They are one of the biggest diamond stores around and yet what do we find in the title of their homepage? Nothing that mentions diamonds! Compare this to Luxurien's website and notice the title of their page.

Luxurien's title tag is fully optimized with their most important keywords: "Fine Jewelry", "Titanium Rings", "Bracelets", "Tungsten Rings", and "Gemstone birthstones". These are keywords for which they would like to place highly in the search engines. So it comes as no surprise that they rank second in Google for the keyword titanium rings.

You might be thinking, "Yes, but what if someone types the name of the company in the search engine? Don't we want to rank first for that too?" Of course you do, but that is pretty easy to achieve. The competition for the keyword "Luxurien" or "Zales" is pretty low, right? The competition for "diamond jewelry" or "titanium rings" is fierce.

Besides, if someone is searching for Luxurien in the search engines it's reasonable to believe that they already know who you are as they are already seeking you out. In other words, that fish is already on the hook.

Often times people think they are being smart by putting their keywords first in the title tag and then at the end including the company or blog name. I still don't recommend this! The reason is because by including the name along with your keywords you have lowered your keyword density.

The website that uses "Internet Marketing" as its title has a higher keyword density than the one that uses "Internet Marketing by Search-This". If you're in a competitive market then you need all the edge you can get so I would recommend you drop the name and just stick with the keywords.

It's believed that the keywords in the beginning of the title tag are weighted more than those in the middle or end. So be sure to place your most important words in the beginning of your title tag.

Finally, it's also believed that a character limitation exists and is set to around 60 characters. So again, keep your title tags short and focused.

For review, your title tags:

• should contain the keywords for that particular page
• should not include your blog or company name
• should be short and concise
• should have the most important keywords first
• should not include words like "the", "by", "that"
• should be unique for every page

Episode 1 - 4/30/2007

Guest: Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz.org

Background: Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing

Total Time: 21 minutes

In this, our inaugural podcast, we talk with Rand Fishkin - Search Engine Optimization specialist for SEOmoz.org. Rand gives some optimization advice to help you optimize your website. He also explains the new Premium Membership that SEOmoz.org now offers and finishes with a few personal questions! Who knew that Rand Fishkin would be iPod-less!

This being our first podcast we did have some technical glitches. The volume on my phone is a bit low at times, so click the webPod wheel on the right and turn it up!

Podcast Highlights

• 00:30 - Hear Rand’s thoughts on reporting paid links to Google
• 04:18 – Rand tells us his opinion on .gov and .edu links
• 07:20 – When optimizing, is what’s good for one good for all?
• 10:21 – Rand gives us some pointers on how to optimize
• 12:14 – Rand tells us some of his favorite keyword tools
• 18:32 – Get to know Rand a little bit better

Play the podcast right now! Notice the Random Bits podcast on the right? Just click the Rand Fishkin link and it will start playing. It might take a few seconds to stream-in...