Remember the movie Old School with Vince Vaughn and Will Farrell? Yeah, me neither. That’s because, while I’m sure the movie has some funny scenes, it just didn’t have the staying power of, say… Tommy Boy. Of course Tommy Boy had a very distinct advantage out of the gate… it didn’t star Will Farrell. You [...]

Seattle SEO expert and website marketing firm, Musson Media Consulting, is helping small businesses win top placements in the search engines using SEO (search engine optimization) to deliver free website traffic.

Seattle SEO expert and website marketing firm, Musson Media Consulting, is helping small businesses win top placements in the search engines using SEO (search engine optimization) to deliver free website traffic.

Impact Media (blog) Which SEO Rule Is Most Important SEO Consult (blog) If used appropriately, search engine optimisation can make a big difference to your online business and the results it is able to achieve.

[ In addition to blogging, I?m also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Over the last few weeks I?ve been polling developers to see how many are using the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) toolkit to increase traffic to their web-sites.  I?ve been surprised by how many people either have never heard of the tool, or have not yet had a chance to run it against their websites.  This blog post provides a quick summary about why anyone doing web-development should check it out.

Why use the free SEO Toolkit?

In a nutshell ? the free SEO Toolkit Analyzer helps you increase traffic and visitors to your site, and as a result can increase the revenue you directly or indirectly make through your web-site. The SEO Toolkit Analyzer increases traffic to your site by helping you assess and improve the search relevancy ranking of your site with search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  As your search relevancy ranking improves, and your site becomes more search engine optimized, you?ll find that your site receives more and more user traffic from search engine queries. 

Takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Analyzer

It takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Toolkit Analyzer against your web-site.  You simply point the tool at the top-level URL of your web-site, and then it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would ? following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a human friendly report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site - along with suggestions on how to fix each of them:  

It works with any web-server

The SEO Toolkit works with any web-server. It works with IIS5, IIS6, IIS7 and IIS7.5 ? it will even work with Apache web-servers running on Linux.  Basically you can point the SEO Analyzer at any remote HTTP server and it will crawl the site and generate a SEO report.  You do not need to setup any software on the remote server ? instead the tool crawls and analyzes the site remotely just like a search engine would.  This means you can even run the site on your friends (or potential customers) sites and generate reports for them. The SEO Toolkit does require that you have the IIS7 Admin tool installed on your local dev/client machine in order to host the SEO Analysis admin UI tool.  The IIS7 admin tool is a built-in feature of Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.  The IIS7 admin UI only needs to be installed on your local dev machine though ? you do not need to have IIS7 installed on the server.  The SEO utility running inside it will work fine against your IIS5, IIS6 and other web servers.

How to download and install the SEO Toolkit

You can easily install the SEO Toolkit using the Microsoft Web Pl ...

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the important considerations that any Internet web-site needs to design with in mind.  A non-trivial percentage of Internet traffic to sites is driven by search engines, and good SEO techniques can help increase site traffic even further. Likewise, small mistakes can significantly impact the search relevance of your site?s content and cause you to miss out on the traffic that you should be receiving.  Some of these mistakes include: multiple URLs on a site leading to the same content, broken links from a page, poorly chosen titles, descriptions, and keywords, large amounts of viewstate, invalid markup, etc.  These mistakes are often easy to fix - the challenge is how to discover and pinpoint them within a site.

Introducing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Today we are shipping the first beta of a new free tool - the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it. You can install the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer I blogged about earlier this week.  You can install it through WebPI using the ?install now? link on the IIS SEO Toolkit home .  Once installed, you?ll find a new ?Search Engine Optimization? section within the IIS 7 admin tool, and several SEO tools available within it: The Robots and SiteMap tools enable you to easily create and manage robots.txt and sitemap.xml files for your site that help guide search engines on what URLs they should and shouldn?t crawl and follow. The Site Analysis tool enables you to crawl a site like a search engine would, and then analyze the content using a variety of rules that help identify SEO, Accessibility, and Performance problems within it.

Using the IIS SEO Toolkit?s Site Analysis Tool

Let?s take a look at how we can use the Site Analysis tool to quickly review SEO issues with a site.  To avoid embarrassing anyone else by turning the tool loose on their site, I?ve decided to instead use the analysis tool on one of my own sites: www.scottgu.com .  This is a site I wrote many years ago (last update in 2005 I think).  If you install the IIS SEO Toolkit you can point it at my site and duplicate the steps below to drill into the SEO analysis of it. Open the Site Analysis Tool We?ll begin by launching the IIS Admin Tool (inetmgr) and clicking on the root node in the left-pane tree-view of the IIS7 admin tool (the machine name ? in this case ?Scottgu-PC?).  We?ll then select the ?Site Analysis? icon within the Search Engine Optimization section on the right.  Opening the Site Analysis tool at the machine level like this will allow us to run the analysis tool against any remote server (if we had instead opened it with a site selected then we would only be able to run ...

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not only the job of the marketing department. It must be considered from a web site’s inception and throughout its lifetime by you, the web site developer. Making changes to the architecture of a web site and modifying presentation techniques can dramatically increase search engine rankings and traffic levels. [...] Post from: Busby SEO Test Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the thirteenth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today?s post covers some of the improvements being made around Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with ASP.NET 4.

Why SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large percentage of traffic to sites now comes from search engines, and improving the search relevancy of your site will lead to more user traffic to your site from search engine queries (which can directly or indirectly increase the revenue you make through your site).

Measuring the SEO of your website with the SEO Toolkit

Last month I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit we?ve shipped that you can use to analyze your site for SEO correctness, and which provides detailed suggestions on any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in the site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further.

ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of new runtime features that can help you to further optimize your site for SEO.  Some of these new features include: New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties New URL Routing support for ASP.NET Web Forms New Response.RedirectPermanent() method Below are details about how you can take advantage of them to further improve your search engine relevancy.

Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties

One simple recommendation to improve the search relevancy of pages is to make sure you always output relevant ?keywords? and ?description? <meta> tags within the <head> section of your HTML.  For example: One of the nice improvements with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms is the addition of two new properties to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription that make programmatically setting these values within your code-behind classes much easier and cleaner.  ASP.NET 4?s <head> server control now looks at these values and will use them when outputting the <head> section of pages.  This behavior is particularly useful for scenarios where you are using master-pages within your site ? and the <head> section ends up being in a .master file that is separate from the .aspx file that contains the page specific content.  You can now set the new MetaKeywords and MetaDescription properties in the .aspx page and have their values automatically rendered by the <head> control within the master page. Below is a simple code snippet that demonstrates setting these properties programmatically within a Page_Load() ...

A couple of additional properties on the Page Class to help set HTML meta tags.

Ladies and gentlemen we have outdone ourselves today. How many articles are there relating to hacking your way through search engine optimizing asp.net MasterPages? A thousand a hundred thousand? Who knows but I can tell you this none of them not a single one comes anywhere near what SpiderLoop SEO control panel can do for master pages as of today. It took me one hour to search engine optimize our entire SpiderLoop site and boy oh boy is it optimized. Different meta tags on every page, perfectly coordinated with the pages content, every alt text tag filled with relevant forward and reverse keywords, and relevant internal backlinks from the entire site. If you are using master pages on even one of your asp.net web sites then you absolutely positively must be using SpiderLoop. I have actually surprised myself with how easy this was to do and I built the thing. It takes one line of code in your master page ONE LINE and this is it <SpiderLoop:header ID= "tHeader" UseKeysNum=1 UseSupKeysNum=5 pageTitle= "none" StartKey=-1 TagsOption=2 useDataFile= True runat= "server" / > and your entire website is optimized if you skip the useDataFile=True tag it will randomly choose keywords for the pages which is fine but nothing like the control you have now check this out. <pages> <page pname= "about_spiderloop.aspx" startkey= "55" /> <page pname= "back_links.aspx" startkey= "45" /> <page pname= "resellers.aspx" startkey= "76" /> <page pname= "a_bright_future.aspx" startkey= "85" /> <page pname= "sell_spiderloop_1.aspx" startkey= "86" /> <page pname= "sell_spiderloop_2.aspx" startkey= "96" /> <page pname= "prices.aspx" startkey= "119" /> <page pname= "affiliate_banners.aspx" startkey= "111" /> <page pname= "download.aspx" startkey= "117" /> <page pname= "system_requirements.aspx" startkey= "118" /> <page pname= "technology.aspx" startkey= "69" /> <page pname= "what_people_are_saying.aspx" startkey= "29" /> <page pname= "success_stories.aspx" startkey= "17" /> <page pname= "screens.aspx" startkey= "38" /> <page pname= "rss_data_feeds.aspx" startkey= "121" /> <page pname= "contact.aspx" startkey= "19" /> <page pname= "support.aspx" startkey= "122" /> <page pname= "hosting.aspx" startkey= "123" /> <page pname= "quick_install.aspx" startkey= "65" /> </pages> This little XML file allows me to choose the keyword from my SpiderLoop control panel to optimize each individual page. (that's what took an hour) and wow it sure is pretty. Go look at the source code on SpiderLoop here's a snippet from the RSS feed page <title>How SpiderLoop internet marketing uses RSS data feeds</title> <META NAME= "keywords" content= "Best RSS feeds seo marketing, Affordable RSS feeds seo marketing, Professional RSS feeds seo marketing, ecommerce RSS feeds seo marketing, ...

Having a website is not enough for reaching the global users without a SEO Company Delhi. And if you are not able to reach the global audience you cannot generate revenue because sell of your product will not go beyond a certain level. Obviously there are companies as well to compete with you and so you have to take and edge over them.SEO technique is a good way to increase traffic on the web page. Increased traffic means greater number of users which results in greater sell and greater business. SEO services refer to search engine optimization writing exposing the website to the world more dominantly. Thus website owners look for affordable SEO services to promote their websites.SEO services company India with various branches situated in all the major towns provide website promotion services through SEO writing. SEO is really a very effective tool to gain the desired results in online marketing. India is considered a haven for affordable SEO services. SEO experts in India are in large numbers. They are recruited by SEO services Company India and SEO Company Delhi. seo services company seo company delhi affordable seo ...

As a free open source option for beginners, advanced webmasters and SEO’s alike, Wordpress has become one of the most popular platforms in which to build a web property. Although Wordpress is rounding the corner towards version 3.0 there is still a lot of useful SEO tools that are not and will not be built-in to the blogging software. Once having installed the software to your web server one must hunt around the internet tirelessly for Plugins in order to satisfy their requirements for SEO. Metamend has decided to make this task easier for our valued web visitors by putting together a little wordpress seo bundle. This Wordpress SEO theme bundle could save the average person hours of time researching and obtaining the best tools for Wordpress. Wordpress in itself is naturally good for SEO in the way that it allows so much control over the website including on-page optimization and file naming. With a few additional plugins you can turn a wordpress site into an SEO dream. To learn more about Wordpress and to download our comprehensive Wordpress SEO Bundle click here . ...

I had the pleasure of meeting Topher Kohan in Las Vegas at Pubcon 2009. We didn’t get a chance to talk shop but I instinctively knew that Topher was the kinda guy whose brain I wanted to pick. He is the SEO Coordinator at CNN.com , a news site with astronomical amounts of both text and video content. If that doesn’t give someone serious SEO street cred then I don’t know what does. I finally got a chance to catch up with Topher and ask him a few questions about his profession and craft. How did you get started in SEO? When I was in school at the Art Institute of Atlanta, I took a class with a teacher named Aarron Walter (author of “Building Findable Websites”), and he really turned me on to the power of SEO and the skills that I could take from being a Web developer and apply to being a SEO. Are there certain aspects of SEO that interest you more than others? Organic SEO is what I love to do. I cut my teeth on and kind of made a regional name for myself by specializing in SEO for midlevel nonprofits. They have no budget to spend on search marketing, so I had to really do a kick-ass job at the organic side of it all so they could get the biggest return for the work I was doing for them. CNN.com recently did a major site redesign. What were some of the challenges you encountered with such a massive project. Also, did you work close with the designers and developers to make sure SEO best practices were considered and implemented? Let me start by saying that, yes, I was involved with this from the wireframe stages all the way through the launch of the final code. Our developers and designers really have a grasp on how important SEO can be because of the great work we did on the 2008 elections. So getting them to take the extra steps and do the extra work to add in the SEO things I needed was not that hard. Without that groundwork, though, it would have been really tough to convince them that it was worth the effort. That said, there were challenges to be overcome, like knowing that it is OK to lose a battle or two and not get 1,005 things I need as long as I got the really important stuff included. I could have dug my heels in and been a big a-hole about it, but the best plan was to really push for the must-haves and make sure the second-tier stuff was added to the post-launch sprint list. Things like the canonical tag or adding no index/no follow to the search results pages are important SEO items to include on the new site but it was not imperative to have for launch day. Once they understand that the things you are fighting for are really the things you need, from an SEO point of view, on launch day then there is a much better chance to get them included on the day the site goes live. Post-launch, it was all about showing the ROI on the work to make sure that the next time I need the developers or designers to help me out, there is management buy-in. That is there a ...

As search marketers, most SEO professionals are focused on the optimization aspects (both on page and off page) that will help a site achieve top rankings in the SERPs of the major search engines. The complexity of achieving top rankings increases by the day with the algorithms focusing more and more on factors that cannot [...] Related posts: Increasing The Scope Of Existing PPC Campaigns Effectively LinkedIn, But NoFollow Link Love Relationship Between Link Growth And Indexation Inbound Deep Links Benefit Page Rank Distribution Sitewide New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel - Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2 Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1 SEO Followed By Website Optimization - Beat Your Competition

PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are a sure fire way of attracting traffic to your website almost instantaneously without the rigors of an SEO campaign that is required to bring your site on top of the SERPs. The most important thing to be aware of when it comes to a PPC campaign is understanding [...] Related posts: Increasing The Scope Of Existing PPC Campaigns Effectively LinkedIn, But NoFollow Link Love Relationship Between Link Growth And Indexation Inbound Deep Links Benefit Page Rank Distribution Sitewide New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel - Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2 Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1 SEO Followed By Website Optimization - Beat Your Competition

SEO consultants spend a lot of time looking at websites. Moreover, like web designers, SEOs definitely “see” websites very differently than the average web user. Some days, it feels a little like the Matrix, where instead of seeing the streaming code, you see the people, cars and buildings that the code signifies. After doing web [...] Related posts: Increasing The Scope Of Existing PPC Campaigns Effectively LinkedIn, But NoFollow Link Love Relationship Between Link Growth And Indexation Inbound Deep Links Benefit Page Rank Distribution Sitewide New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel - Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2 Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1 SEO Followed By Website Optimization - Beat Your Competition

Many website owners don’t have a good understanding of exactly what their SEO does, how he does it or how he charges for it. This should help answer many of those questions. Research is always the first step! You and your SEO will collaborate to decide what market niche you should focus upon. Then your SEO will guide you to the least populated niche, by identifying the keywords and keyword phrases that present the highest probability of search queries, and the least competition. In this case, it’s better to be the large fish in a small pond, than the small fish in a large pond! Analyzing the competition on the search engines will help him to identify those queries that are most sought out, and present the least competition, which are those that will give your site the quickest boost in the search engine results pages (SERPs). As you can see, effective research is the key to success in this phase, as well as others. Your SEO will present his plan, identifying the ultimate and intermediate goals, and the tasks to be undertaken to get you to the top of the SERPs. He’ll also establish milestones by which you can gauge his progress. Examining any areas in which the desired results weren’t achieved will afford a great deal of insight as to the causes. Don’t hesitate to ask your SEO to explain clearly what the intended tasks, goals and milestones are to be, and by what metric they’ll be measured. Begin the actual project with a written agreement, signed by both parties, that fully describes the responsibilities of each of you, so as to avoid conflicts later. The results of SEO services can never be guaranteed 100%, but they can be measured. There are, however, many variables that are beyond the SEO’s control. While some SEOs will bill their work on an hourly basis, it is typically only the most established and successful firms that will do so. It’s usually considered better, by both SEO and client alike, to bill per task, with achieved milestones being the metric. A typical, and very effective approach to price structure, would be the following: The SEO will divide your selected keywords and keyword phrases into two groups. The first, comprised of those with relatively low competition, can offer the quickest results. The second, highly competitive words and phrases, will take longer, but once achieved, may offer the greatest overall benefit. Once you have seen that your SEO can achieve massive improvements with the low competition terms, you should feel more comfortable about continuing the process, to achieve even greater results. Pricing for on-page and site structure optimization will typically be based upon the site size and intricacy. The SEO will consider the amount of time and expertise level he’ll be putting forth, as well as competitive pricing, and bid the project accordingly. The off-page SEO costs depend much more upon keyword competition, which means that you may be incurring additional expenses when chasing th ...

PRLog Mar 3 2010 5:06AM GMT

I had the pleasure of meeting Topher Kohan in Las Vegas at Pubcon 2009. We didn’t get a chance to talk shop but I instinctively knew that Topher was the kinda guy whose brain I wanted to pick. He is the SEO Coordinator at CNN.com , a news site with astronomical amounts of both text and video content. If that doesn’t give someone serious SEO street cred then I don’t know what does. I finally got a chance to catch up with Topher and ask him a few questions about his profession and craft. How did you get started in SEO? When I was in school at the Art Institute of Atlanta, I took a class with a teacher named Aarron Walter (author of “Building Findable Websites”), and he really turned me on to the power of SEO and the skills that I could take from being a Web developer and apply to being a SEO. Are there certain aspects of SEO that interest you more than others? Organic SEO is what I love to do. I cut my teeth on and kind of made a regional name for myself by specializing in SEO for midlevel nonprofits. They have no budget to spend on search marketing, so I had to really do a kick-ass job at the organic side of it all so they could get the biggest return for the work I was doing for them. CNN.com recently did a major site redesign. What were some of the challenges you encountered with such a massive project. Also, did you work close with the designers and developers to make sure SEO best practices were considered and implemented? Let me start by saying that, yes, I was involved with this from the wireframe stages all the way through the launch of the final code. Our developers and designers really have a grasp on how important SEO can be because of the great work we did on the 2008 elections. So getting them to take the extra steps and do the extra work to add in the SEO things I needed was not that hard. Without that groundwork, though, it would have been really tough to convince them that it was worth the effort. That said, there were challenges to be overcome, like knowing that it is OK to lose a battle or two and not get 1,005 things I need as long as I got the really important stuff included. I could have dug my heels in and been a big a-hole about it, but the best plan was to really push for the must-haves and make sure the second-tier stuff was added to the post-launch sprint list. Things like the canonical tag or adding no index/no follow to the search results pages are important SEO items to include on the new site but it was not imperative to have for launch day. Once they understand that the things you are fighting for are really the things you need, from an SEO point of view, on launch day then there is a much better chance to get them included on the day the site goes live. Post-launch, it was all about showing the ROI on the work to make sure that the next time I need the developers or designers to help me out, there is management buy-in. That is there a good ...

The subject we’re tackling today is one of the hot topics in the world of SEO currently – the importance (or otherwise) of ‘.edu’ links and whether or not they’re necessary or desirable part of the optimisation process. If you’re an SEO or webmaster, you may have already been approached by someone attempting to sell [...] Related posts: SEO School: Lesser known Techniques #1 The other day in a brief moment of downtime, myself... Give yourself a Rankings bump: shape your PageRank with ‘Nofollow’ One of the most keenly discussed tools at the disposal... SEO School: International SEO Let’s say you run a business. Your SEO’s great, you’re...

During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs. Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites [...] Related posts: Increasing The Scope Of Existing PPC Campaigns Effectively LinkedIn, But NoFollow Link Love Relationship Between Link Growth And Indexation Inbound Deep Links Benefit Page Rank Distribution Sitewide New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel - Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2 Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1 SEO Followed By Website Optimization - Beat Your Competition