Getting your site high up in search engine results is an art without a simple one size fits all solution. However, it is informed by hard data obtained from various software tools, the core set of which you will use over and over again in similar ways. How you actually react to the information you get from these tools is where the art comes in.

If you start with an existing page that you would like to optimize, the first step is to determine what keywords to optimize for. Search engines will reward a page if it uses a particular word or sequence of words multiple times. However, there is a much-debated sweet spot of 3-6 repetitions or a 7% density of a keyword or keyword phrase that you will need to shoot for to optimize it for top search results. Any less and your page will not be considered authoritative. Any more and your search ranking may be viewed as spammy.

A good place to start in finding a particular keyword or keyword phrase to optimize for is a word density tool. SEO Quake is a free Firefox plugin, which has a keyword density feature that lets you search for single words, and keyword sequences of specific length. Look for the most used sequence on your page which best describes its content. Or make a note of several if there is more than one which stands out.

Now you need to see how those phrases look in historical search engine results. The leading tool out there for this analysis is Wordtracker, which is a website where you can look for words or phrases and see how many people have searched for them, as well as how many other sites out there use the exact keyword phrase in their website. It is a pay site, but is extremely valuable. Start with a free trial account and play around with it to see how it works. The magic of Wordtracker is that it helps you find the right combination of maximized number of searches crossed with minimal competing pages.

The phrase you are looking to optimize for may not have many searches, or too many competing pages. So this is where you might react to alter your content slightly in order to find a better niche for your page in search engine results. Google has a free site where you can search for a phrase and it will suggest similar ones.  You can see right there what the search volume was for them in the previous month. If you find one with more search volume, plug it into Wordtracker to see if it has a reasonable number of competing pages. And if the phrase is a reasonable substitution for your existing one, then bingo, you have improved your potential for search engine rankings and associated traffic.

There are many other tools, techniques and variations of search engine optimization out there. But this summary gives you a taste for an essential part of it.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Andrew Crowe Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Technology, Web

Getting your just-starting-out blog linked to from a big name blogger in your industry is a great way to catch new eyes and new followers for your blog. Depending on the size of the blog that finds you and how highly you are recommended in that post, as single story could sky-rocket your site in a matter of days.

There is no magic button for getting “The Big Guys” to find, like and link to your site – it’s mostly dedication, hard work and good content. However there are some “no no’s” you can commit that will guarantee your work will never be featured.

One of the “Big Guys” in our field is SmartBlog on Social Media. Jesse Stanchak recently shared 5 tips on things to avoid when trying to get your blog content featured on other, more established blogs. These tips, straight from the horse’s mouth, are great common sense rules to follow:

1. Use your full name.
2. Date your post.
3. Disclose & credit your sources.
4. Avoid R-rated words and images.
5. Don’t getting viciously political.

The full story is a great read and for those of you interested in great ongoing Social Media news coverage, I highly recommend their daily email news brief.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web

Today America lost a great leader with the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy. In the press coverage today remembering his many great achievements, it was mentioned that Senator Kennedy was the first member of Congress to have his own website! A friend shared this screenshot of his actual website from 1993.

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Full article.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, General, Technology, Web

I recognize all of these distinctly.  And of course, am not one of them.  At all.  Ever.  *wink*

I think my least favorite is a combination of the sympathy baiter slash maddening obscurist.  Which is often the same thing.

Here’s the list, from this CNN article:

The Let-Me-Tell-You-Every-Detail-of-My-Day Bore. “I’m waking up.” “I had Wheaties for breakfast.” “I’m bored at work.” “I’m stuck in traffic.” You’re kidding! How fascinating! No moment is too mundane for some people to broadcast unsolicited to the world. Just because you have 432 Facebook friends doesn’t mean we all want to know when you’re waiting for the bus.

The Self-Promoter. OK, so we’ve probably all posted at least once about some achievement. And sure, maybe your friends really do want to read the fascinating article you wrote about beet farming. But when almost EVERY update is a link to your blog, your poetry reading, your 10k results or your art show, you sound like a bragger or a self-centered careerist.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Social Media

It’s called Star Walk, and it takes advantage of the possibilities of the iPhone interface in an extremely slick and compelling way.  Now, given you have to have the most recent iPhone 3GS in order to experience the really whiz-bang feature.  But if you do, and you’re at all into astronomy, this will kind of blow your mind.  Hold your phone up as if you were looking through it at the sky, and when you tilt it beyond 90 degrees the thing orients itself to display exactly the portion of the sky perpendicular to it.  Move it around and the display changes accordingly, highlighting the celestial features toward the center of the screen.

Another awesome feature of this app is something I had already seen and appreciated in the desktop application Stellarium.  In the image above for instance, I have popped out the time menu, which allows you to move forward or backward in time.  So if you flick your finger from bottom to top along that strip on the right, you would see the sun set below the red horizon line.  And see that there may be a chance of seeing Saturn just above the horizon a couple hours after sunset.  Or, another cool demonstration is to find Polaris, “the north star”, and advance time so that you see all the other stars rotate around it, while it remains almost perfectly fixed in the north.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Gadget

This Twitter project undertaken by the Massachusetts Historical Society made my day! It seems that many of our 6th president’s journal entries were so brief they often came in under Twitter’s 140 character limit! (E.g. “Weather fine_ wind scanty. Lat: 44-13. Long: 53-40. This afternoon I found the Caboose on fire.”)

Mass Historical Society is Tweeting (retweeting?) his sea journey to Russia in a daily update exactly 200 years to the day after the original trip. Join the 9,300 and growing followers of @JQAdams_MHS.

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Social Media, Web

The blogosphere and news outlets are abuzz this morning with the Drudge verses White House video showdown. For those of you not familiar, a brief recap…

The Drudge Report recently posted this video from Breitbart.tv with the title “SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS saying His Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance.” The video quickly went viral.

Early Tuesday morning, the White House released their own video on the WhiteHouse.gov blog in a post titled “Facts are Stubborn Things” featuring Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office addressing the video directly.

Though Douglass never says “Drudge Report” the camera does focus on a screenshot showing the original Drudge headline “Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will ‘Eliminate’ Private Insurance…” with the URL bar clearly visible with the address “http://www.drudgereport.com.” The White House video is without a doubt, a direct counter strike against the video above.

Though reform of American Healthcare is a large, complex issue, a Social Media campaign dealing with negative feedback is actually fairly straight forward. Love him or hate him, you’ve got to admit that the Obama Administration employs some of the best executers of social media campaigns in politics today. So let’s see what we can learn from this defensive strike…

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web