Here is the latest Whiteboard Friday Video from Rand at Seomoz.org. It talks about blogging for higher rankings on your website, and better yet some specific tactics to do when blogging. Not just throwing up a wordpress blog or something. Enjoy the video!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Blogging for Higher Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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You better believe the advice I am talking about is from Rand of SeoMoz. Would you expect anyone else? You can read the full article about Keyword Usage and Targeting. He explains it really well and helps us to understand the basic fundamentals behind keyword usage and what is too much and too little. This is the process he recommends:

1. Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. More detail on title tags follows later in this section.
2. Once in the H1 header tag of the page.
3. At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if
   there’s a lot of text content). You may find additional value in adding
   the keyword more than 3X, but in our experience, adding more instances
   of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings.
4. At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or
   <b> tag, as search engines consider them equivalent (note: at
   this time we’ve only actually tested Google for the <b> vs.
   <strong> equivalency).
5. At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not
   only helps with web search, but also image search, which can sometimes
   bring valuable traffic.
6. Once in the URL. Additional rules for URLs and keywords are discussed later on in this section.
7. At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta
   description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used
   by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by
   searchers from the results page (as it is the “snippet” of text used by
   the search engines).
8. Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to other pages on your site or different domains

If you are looking for better advice and steps than that for Keyword Usage good luck. That is as basic and fundamental as it gets. And though it sounds simple, truly instituting this process can be difficult. But you want to spend the time and research necessary to do this. Don’t forget however that your content still needs to be engaging to the reader at the same time. It needs to interest people, not just the search engines!

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Andy MacDonald from swiftmediauk.co.uk wrote a good article recently about the top 10 SEO myths and he explained each one of them in detail. Since this is a Web Standards blog for Utah I thought it might be helpful for you to be aware of some the SEO myths that are out their so that you are better educated on what to look out for. Here they are in order.

Myth # 1: All Meta Tags Are Of Equal Importance

Some Meta tags are useful while others are not. I have stated this many times. Search engines are relying more and more about what is on the website than what the tags are telling them. The description tag is used by some (but not all) search engines. The same goes for the keyword tag. Keyword tags are used more by spammers and people using software to find you as a link partner than the search engines. In my opinion, the only tags you should concentrate your efforts on are the robot tag and the description tags.

Myth # 2: You Should Submit Your Site to Search Engines Weekly or Monthly

Honestly, I never submit any site more than 1 time and sometimes I don’t even do that. If you submit your site once, you’re good. The engines will come back on their own. You can sometimes speed up the process of getting your site indexed by linking it to a high traffic or high PR site. The search engines will find the URL to your site and index it automatically.

Myth # 3: SEO is Too Expensive

Actually, SEO is probably the most cost effective form of online marketing. Organic SEO is cheaper to set up and maintain than a PPC campaign or banner advertising. With PPC and banner advertising, you pay for clicks or impressions. With SEO, all clicks are Free. You simply pay for the set up and monitoring of your site’s pages.

Myth # 4: PPC Is More Effective Than Natural SEO

In the short term…true. In the long term…false. Why, you ask? Organic SEO is preferred by searchers over 5 to 1 to PPC. People trust organic searches to return relevant results. People also know that the ads to the right of the page are sponsored ads. They have long ago figured out that anyone can bid on any term they want, as many often do, without even a hint of relevance. So, long term SEO structuring can indeed be

more effective than PPC, especially when considering the preferences of search traffïc. A top search rankings may take some time to get, but once you are there (and provided you can maintain it), you will get better results than from a PPC ad.

Myth # 5: Hiring an SEO Specialist “In House” is Cheaper

The problem with hiring someone in house is that they are paid hourly or by salary. Most SEO firms charge per item or project. It doesn’t matter how long it takes us, you pay a one tíme charge. When you hire a firm, it’s like having a team of SEO experts on your payroll. Paying a flat rate saves you monëy and speeds up the time it takes to complete a job. Additionally, most SEO firms have specialists who write, submit, redesign sites, post pages, etc… Hiring one person who can do all these things competently is highly unlikely.

Myth # 6: I Can Only Optimize My Homepage for Key Terms

You can and should optimize every page on your site. Each page should have its own key terms, with no more than three phrases per page (preferably one).

Myth # 7: All I Need to do is Write Content with the correct Keyword Density and My Site Will Rank Well

Wrong…especially if you want to rank on Google. You will need off-site SEO as well as on-site SEO. Keyword density may work on MSN (for now), but it will take more than that to rank well for all search engines.

Myth # 8: I Shouldn’t Aim for the Most Competitive Keywords and Phrases

If the keywords you are competing for are very competitive, should you optimize your site for them? Of Course! I would optimize for some high, medium and low competitive key terms. Cover all your bases. The worst case is that you won’t rank well for the high competitive key terms and that’s ok. You can always work to improve them. Don’t shy away from top key terms just because they are competitive. You may nevër know how close you could rank for them unless you try.

Myth # 9: Only Work With Companies That Give You A Guarantee

Guarantees would be nice if they were worth the paper they are printed on. In fact, most guarantees from SEO firms have the same stipulation in them. This stipulation usually states that as long as they get one of your key phrases to the top of any major search engines, they have fulfilled their end of the agreement. This is irrelevant to the competition of the term. In other words…it’s easy to be number one for terms no one is competing for. Don’t be deceived by high rankings listed on SEO sites as they can be misleading.

Myth # 10: SEO Requires a 1 Year Commitment on My Part

It certainly shouldn’t. Don’t lock yourself into a year contract with any company unless you already have an established, favourable business relationship. SEO, in most cases, should be performed on a month to month basis with a mutual understanding of the objectives and relative
timetable. Often, both the long and short term maintenance contracts that many firms insist on including with each job are unnecessary. As
an example…If you have a new site optimized, especially right after an update, you may not see results for three months. Why pay for
maintenance in the interim time?

Additionally, you may not be happy with the results of an SEO firm or even the level of service. A long term contract may only ensure that you receive a full year of bad service. So, don’t lock yourself in with a year contract, at least until you are comfortable with whom you are dealing with.

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Your company is located in Utah and you provide services of some kind here locally in the Utah area. How do you go about your search engine optimization campaign? Where do you start? Better asked, what do you need to do different when optimizing your site locally compared to an emphasis nationally. The answer is that there is not a big difference. You still do all the same things you would normally do with your SEO campaign. But I did want to highlight a few quick tips to help you gain an advantage over your competition.

10 Quick Utah Specific SEO Tips

1. Address and contact information on homepage - Make your address and contact information for your business available on the homepage of your website. Many times, after crawling this information Google will include you in it’s Google Local directory. This helps Google understand where you are and to what region you are specifically marketing too.
2. Submit to local directories - there are many Utah specific local directories such as connect-utah.com or utahfirms.com etc. These directories are specific to Utah and are very relevant to your company. Submit to the free and paid directories to get the optimal results.
3. Trade Show & Conventions - trade shows and conventions here in Utah are a terrific way to spread the word of your company. Handing out business cards with your URL located on them as you walk around these events and “mingling” with different people can create a huge effect on your company. You will see increased traffic by doing this.
4. Blogging - believe it or not, there is a small but effective community of bloggers here in our state of Utah. Many of them are “nobodies” like me! Many of them are “somebodies” like Paul Allen the founder of Myfamily.com. Using blogging techniques to attract these bloggers attention and making them aware of your superior services can increase traffic and website conversion tremendously.
5. B2B Networking - Corporate Alliance and BNI are two B2B networking groups that have helped my business grow very fast. These networking groups have given me the opportunity to meet many new people and to share information with them about my services. Many times in these B2B groups you are asked to give short presentations about who you are and what you provide.
6. Offer a Free Report -  Free reports are awesome!  I always download them when I get the chance.  More people need to offer this. I am convinced that webmasters get lazy and don’t want to spend the time and energy to put these type of resources together. If you can put together a free report pertaining to what you do, and it’s well written and helpful to the reader then you will gain trusted readers that turn into hot leads for your business.
7. Be Specific in What You Offer - be specific in what you offer to your consumers here in Utah. There are far too many real estate agents who are competing for ‘Utah Real Estate’. What specifcally do you provide? What separates you from your competition? Find a niche and work with it!
8. Be Specific in “Where” You Offer - What I mean by this is similar to what I stated above. There are far too many people that are competing for the term ‘Utah Real Estate’ or ‘Utah Dentist’. Be more specific. How about ‘Dentist in Sandy, Utah’ or ‘Real Estate agent in Spanish Fork’ etc. Doing so will make searching for services much easier for the consumer. And will give you a much more qualified lead.
9. Dmoz.org - get your website listed in the region specific section of the Dmoz web directory. Make sure to get yourself listed under the Utah region.
10. Yahoo Local Directory! - This is a paid directory that is worth the money. Get listed here to really help your Yahoo SERP’s. This is the least important of all the other 9 tips but it is of course still important.
11. Post ads in Craigslist - Post an ad every week or two under your category of services in your local craigslist section. This will help increase traffic of people who interested buyers. Do not spam craiglist with worthless ads. Be relevant and don’t cheat.

These are just a few tips. But these alone can really benefit your business website and increase your Search Engine Ranking Placements (SERP’s). Don’t forget to setup a free analytics program such as Google Analytics to see the results of all your work. You will notice an increase in traffic and conversion.

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If you do not already have a StumbleUpon account then I suggest you get one after reading this article. Stumbleupon is a cool application that combines social bookmarking with a cool “Stumble” tool where you can set your category preferences and hit a “Stumble” button on your browser to randomly visit a website from your selection of categories.

Stumbleupon is great for users because you can bookmark thousands of links and tag them with keywords for future organization and searching. After bookmarking hundreds of valuable and relevant links, your StumbleUpon page can get highly popular and get a decent Page Rank. You can see my page at chasesagum.stumbleupon.com

Users of Stumbleupon typically only bookmark websites and articles that they like! Content or tools that they find valuable to them. Imagine having a website or blog article that gets “Stumbled” often. All of the new inbound links that start generating to your site without you having to do anything. Better yet, Google is constantly making improvements in algorithms to better track real, more natural inbound links. Stumbleupon gives you those types of links.

So again it all comes back down to having solid, well written, and beneficial content. This content will naturally entice people to bookmark your website which spreads the PR of your website so much faster and stronger. To fully understand this concept however, I recommend getting a stumbleupon free account, and start bookmarking sites whenever you come across them. The ones you like of course.

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It’s been nearly a month since I requested to have my content listed on UtahSEOPlanet.com and still have heard back nothing! I must say that I am disappointed. While monitoring their blog, you would think that they would have a need for more SEO related content. One visit to their blog and you will notice how much garbage there is that has nothing to do with search engine optimization at all. Every few articles you get a quality, well written and helpful SEO article.

I will keep you readers informed on the progress with this. Our biggest interest is in finding out if Utah SEO Planet is really a blog dedicated to SEO and Utah, or if it’s just simply a marketing tactic by some SEO company here in Utah. I will keep you up to date!

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Too many categories with not enough content for each category can hurt the search ability of your weblog. Categories on your blog help you to break up your content into smaller pieces to help assist readers, and search engines to understand the makeup of your content. Those categories have the ability to build up momentum if you allow them to.

Paul Allen, “the lesser” as he calls himself is an Internet Entrepreneur here in Utah and has a long track record of business success.  He has a blog http://paulallen.net where he talks about various subjects from Search Engine Optimization to BYU Basketball here in Utah. His writing is good. But you will notice by visiting his blog that he has way too many categories. The content is too broken up. He’s treating Categories like they are a Tag Cloud. This made it very difficult for me to search specific topics of content that I was looking for on his website. For example he has categories ‘BYU Basketball’, ‘BYU Football’, and ‘BYU Marriott School’. This would be better served as just one category for ‘BYU’ and using the others either as sub-categories or nothing at all.

Having way too many categories however does not take away at all from the quality and benefit one gains from reading Paul Allen’s weblog. It simply just makes it hard to search through it. Which only becomes more and more of a problem over time.

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On the SEO Scoop Blog the author DazzlinDonna gave us some good ideas to get a few relevant links via social networks. The article titled ‘7 Social Networks Where You Can Get Relevant Links’ lists these 7 resources:

1. Flickr (might be nofollow now)
2. Linkedin
3. Stage6
4. Del.icio.us
5. Squidoo
6. Mixx
7. Reddit

A good healthy list if you ask me. Social Networks provide a good avenue to create relevant links to your website. Many industries have their own social networks. These niche specific social networks are perfect if they provide you with a profile page of some kind where you can put your links to your website. The most desired link is the one that allows you to control your anchor text for your link. I do have two recommendations of my own that I would like to add to this list.

• Stumbleupon
• Digg
• Myspace

There are a few others that you can link from but do have a ‘nofollow’ on them. Social Networks such as Youtube and Facebook do this. And even though you are not getting page rank passed onto you from this links, you are still creating avenues for people to find your websites. So having your links in these social networks can be important as well.

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I read recently at the Marketing Pilgrim weblog an article titled ‘Surprise, Surprise: SEO Works’. It talked about a case study that MarketingSherpa did and gave results on the 4 tactics that increased traffic by 58%! Let’s just cut to the chase. Here were the 4 tactics:

1. Develop new language versions of the website
2. Create new white paper to qualify leads
3. Boost incoming links from relevant sites
4. Test design and placement options for links to Web forms

Marketing Pilgrim translated that into some normal English for us.

1. Add more (multilingual) content
2. Add more content
3. Build links
4. Test website effectiveness

It would be interesting to give just these 4 tactics a try to one of your more stale websites and see what happens. You do the case study yourself and see if it works for you. All the tactics are simple and have been mentioned many times on this blog and many others. But sometimes SEO works for webmasters in small doses. What I mean is that sometimes too much information can burden an SEO campaign. At times it helps webmasters to have a few simple steps to adhere to help them on their way to SEO progression. These 4 tactics are a good place to start.

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The orem.org official city website needs some help. Somebody with some expertise to do the job right. They have under their business content, a full directory of all businesses large and small registered in Orem, Utah. They have a cool little tool where you can search for different categories, keyword, etc. Basically just an advanced search tool to narrow your search. The results return some basics including the name of the company, URL if one exists, phone number and a few other details.

What is the problem you ask? It’s the fact that the entire database has been placed in the page using an “Iframe” which is disabling all listings from being crawled by the search engines. It’s apparent that the website for orem.org has been built using the Joomla Content Management System. I can tell simply by looking at a URL on the site:

http://orem.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=248

Can you see the dynamic parameter that says “com_wrapper&Itemid=248″? Joomla uses Mambots, Modules, and Components. “com” is a component.  This is a local governmental website. If any type of directories exist on the Internet that list Orem businesses, this is the one that carries the most importance on the search engines. It has the most trust. The most validity. If we can’t even get an official city website crawled properly by the SE’s than it shows us how far behind we are in our local Search Engine efforts.

Orem.org needs to get someone to fix this immediately so that Google can crawl these results. If someone is “googling” for a business in Orem, Utah, they should able to see what the City of Orem is reporting.

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