One Half Amazing!

Waiting on the NFL playoff games to start and need to kill a little time?  Here are the articles I’m reading this weekend.

• 35 Beautiful and Effective E-commerce Sites. One of my predictions for 2010 is that “experience” will be the big web buzzword.  Smashing Magazine has put together a set of attractive online stores that try to do just that by creating an eye-catching look and also focusing on usability.
• Google SEO Resource for Beginners.  Straight from the mouth of the 800lb gorilla, Google hands out SEO bananas for you to make your site leaner and meaner in 2010.
• Posterous taps Post.ly to help share your media via Twitter. Attach photos, music, videos and docs to your tweets.  Post.ly takes care of the rest.
• Chris Guillebeau over at The Art of Non-Conformity kicks off his $100 business forum.  The premise being to teach individuals to start small businesses on a budget of less than $100.  I was lucky enough to get into the first class beginning in February.  I’ll keep you updated on how it works out.
• Microsoft makes learning Office fun (yes, you read that right).  Microsoft turns learning Office into a game where participants score points for unlocking challenges and achievements. Badges can then be shown off via Facebook.
• How to create custom YouTube, Twitter and MySpace backgrounds

If you’re interested in seeing more, check out my Google Reader Shared Items.

What are you reading this weekend? Let me know in the comments below.

Mark Robertson of ReelSEO caught up with YouTube’s Matthew Liu to get some insight on best practices for optimizing your videos. Here’s what he had to say.

Content

• Creative should be engaging and compelling enough for users to comment, rate and ultimately share.
• Shorter videos (2-3 min) perform better than longer (~10 min) videos.
• Learn from your video Insights.  If your viewers are engaged better than other videos, you’re going to be rewarded in search rankings.

Community

• Clear and concise tags, description and title.  Use complete sentences when you can.  Tags should be relevant, don’t try to play off of popular terms if your video isn’t related to that particular subject.
• Keep embeds on, the more links or times your video is embedded on outside pages, the better ranking you’ll get.
• Videos with more ratings, comments and views typically get better rankings.
• Use annotations to link multiple videos together.  Don’t forget to add date and location to your video’s description.

Found a YouTube tip that’s helped you achieve better rankings? Share it in the comments below.

SEOMoz did a great Whiteboard Friday video on using SEO to grow and expand your e-mail marketing list.  Here’s the synopsis and corresponding video.

Step 1 – Attract the Right Audience
Target keyword searches in which users are looking to find out more or discover information related to your product or industry.

Step 2 – Deliver Compelling Landing Pages
Build your credibility right off the bat by providing guides, data points, reports and interesting blog posts directly related to the search terms the user found your site with.

Step 3 – Offer Something Awesome (and even Free)
Increase your signup rate by offering an extended report or content relevant to your user’s needs.

Step 4 – Deliver Non-commercial Messages First
Don’t try to sell the user something in their first e-mail message.  Fulfill expectations, grow trust and build great relationships before anything.

Step 5 – Iterate
Repeat your actions.  Keep getting better and improving on your results.  Tweak and test.

Tad tries to define this new shift in search engine optimization or what some are calling SEO 2.0 (which in my opinion is a lazy name).  While many of the pros are still hatching out and evolving the definition, he gives it a go and says that SEO 2.0 is “not Google SEO, a Buzzword, a PPC scheme or part of an MLM formula, it’s the people’s SEO, about relevancy & ORM“(object relational mapping – allowing different systems to basically speak a similar language).

Putting it all together, SEO 2.0 is about changing the factors that currently impact what influences a site and relies more on community and trust.  SEO 2.0 also takes into account other mediums much more, such as video, maps, books and looks to makes results more personal to the user. Here is the full SEO 2.0 article.

Here are the interesting posts at the top of my reading list this week.

The fine folks at the Red Cross are working diligently on crafting a Social Media Policy Handbook.  They’ve got a great start and are light years ahead of even most for-profit businesses. As it should, its available online for your viewing pleasure.

Staying with the non-profit side of things, NPR has a great feature of The Extraordinaries.  Its a micro volunteering iPhone app that allows people to give small blocks of time (< 5 min) and knowledge to a non-profit. Some of the first tasks available are tagging images for the Brooklyn Museum building a map of childhood playgrounds.  It’s a beautiful concept.

SEOMoz updated their SEO Best Practices to account for new industry data.  They clear the air and a lot of confusion in regards to new search engine optimization standards.  The synopsis is H1 tags are not all that necessary anymore, stop trying to sculpt PageRank with nofollow, use footer links, java and flash sparingly, traffic to a site doesn’t determine its ranking and quite a bit more.

Smashing Magazine compiled a great list of web design checklists and resources that will help improve your writing skills.

Rumor has it that Google is experimenting with product ads that would would work very similar to AdWords, but display an image ad along the right hand side of the SERP when the user searches on a particular term.  These ads would run on a pay-per-action basis rather than a pay-per-click (PPC) basis.

Having an overall search engine optimization strategy is important, but sometimes you’re so far over your head that you just want a few quick wins to build a base and get you rolling.  Here are 6 quick SEO tweaks you can make today to improve your site and rankings.

1. Focus on a small set of related keywords – Find the best words that you want your site to be known for and add in the terms your customers (or potential customers) use to describe your service. Write content relating to and focusing on that small set of keywords.  5-10 words is probably the best recipe and Google’s keyword tool is a great place to get started.
2. Clean up your URL’s – Search engines like URL’s that are clear and concise.  If your page URL’s look like www.mywebsite.com/?p=123, tweak your content management system so that they display more like www.mywebsite.com/category/my-amazing-post-with-keywords-in-the-title. If you’re using WordPress, here’s a guide for permalink structure.
3. Use the H1 tag – H1 tags are used to define headlines.  In the eyes of a search engine, text with an H1 tag looks more important than regular plain text.
4. Link to other pages within your site – Use keywords in your links.  A link that looks like “Creative Online Marketing Campaigns” looks much better to a search engine than “click here for my favorite post.”
5. Make sure all pages have descriptive page titles – If you’re selling laptop memory, a page title that says “Laptop Memory | Computer Memory, DDR RAM, Memory Sticks and Computer Upgrades,”  is much better than “Memory.”  I would keep titles to about 60-80 characters
6. Build a site map and make sure it gets submitted to search engines.  Ensure that engines can index and find all your content. A good place to start is Google WebMaster Tools.

Bonus Tip: Write great content so other sites will link to you – inbound links are one of the most important aspects of optimizing for the web. Link bait is one thing, but truly unique and valuable content goes much further.  Shoot for the latter, it has more staying power.

Share your successes in the comments below.  What are those quick SEO wins that you would suggest?