Google recently integrated personalized and real time search into their Search Engine Results Pages.  Since roughly 70% of searches occur on Google, it is imperative that Internet Marketers know and understand Google’s recent update to their Search Algorithm.  After reading through many articles on the subject dating back to early 2007, I wanted to share the articles that I thought were most relevant to the topic.  They are listed below in chronological order.

13 Google Personalized and Real Time Search Resources for SEO and PPC

1. SearchEngineLand.com:  Google Ramps Up Personalized Search by Danny Sullivan on February 2, 2007
2. SearchEngineLand.com: Google Personalized Search, Google Bookmarks & Link Building by Eric Ward on March 5, 2007
3. SEOBook.com:  Search Personalization Will NOT Kill SEO by Aaron Wall on January 29, 2007
4. SEOBook.com: How to Turn Google Personalized Search Results Off Without Logging Out by Aaron Wall on June 9, 2007
5. AimClearblog.com: How To Exploit Personalized Search for SEO by Marty Weintraub on November 29, 2009
6. SearchEngineLand.com: Google Launches Real Time Search by Danny Sullivan on December 7, 2009
7. Huomah.com: SEO Guide to Google Personalized Search by David Harry on December 7, 2009
8. AriOzick.com: Why I’m Not Worried About Personalized Search or Caffeine (and Why You Shouldn’t be Either) by Ari Ozick on December 8, 2009
9. OutSpokenMedia.com: Google Enables Real Time Spam and More by Rae Hoffman on December 9, 2009
10. MediaPost.com: How Real-Time Search and Personalization Influence PPC and SEO Campaigns by Laurie Sullivan on December 9, 2009
11. SearchEngineLand.com: Search and Real Time Madness by Danny Sullivan on December 10, 2009
12. SearchEngineWatch.com: The Demise of SEO Wont Be Caused By Personalization by Chris Boggs on December 11, 2009
13. MediaPost.com:  How Will The Real-Time Web Influence PPC Keyword Pricing? by Laurie Sullivan on December 11, 2009

How will Google Real Time and Personalized Search effect SEO and PPC?  I’m sure there are many questions surrounding this topic and how to leverage Google’s real time and personalized search for success.  Many tests are undoubtedly under way as I type and I bet certain SEOs are already benefiting from the new Google Algorithm Update.

Were these links helpful?  Please let me know of any article that you would like to add to this list of Personalized and Real Time Search Resources for SEO and PPC.

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LinkedIn has evolved into the largest online business networking platform – totaling 32 million users worldwide.  Prior to the social networking craze, LinkedIn was largely used to connect with past co-workers and trusted colleagues.  Now, however, LinkedIn has extended its capabilities to serve as a brand building platform for professionals looking to network, engage, and communicate with like-minded peers. The surge was accelerated during the recessionary period when laid off workers were looking to locate jobs and hopefully connect with others who could assist in the process.

Today, LinkedIn continues to grow by adding key features that are essential to not just networking but building a community to share information, discuss and debate, and promote personal and business brand as well as network. However, harnessing the true power of LinkedIn not just to network with your “trusted” and “known” community of friends and colleagues but promoting your brand and thought leadership through LinkedIn.

To gain insight into the use of LinkedIn, build SEO for your profile and blog, as well as launching engaging and meaningful conversations, I spoke with my good friend and colleague Chris Hewitt. He’s not only my trusted friend but someone who truly understands the power of the platform.

In this blog Q&A, I looked at several components – how do you use LinkedIn to build personal brand and network, what are some innovative ways to use LinkedIn to build awareness and some tips and tricks to maximize using LinkedIn. Please read below.

Why is LinkedIn so important for professionals today in building network and personal brand?

Our professional success is largely determined by the recognition of that effort by our colleagues and peers.  Similarly, the growth of our career is supported by the generosity and investment of other professionals.  As a result, we need to nurture those relationships and reciprocate in the growth and development of others.

I believe that it is critical for professionals to be present, be heard, be engaged, and be connected in order to build and sustain success.  The Internet, and advent of Web-based tools, has provided us with a powerful tool in being all those things…often in real-time.

Currently, LinkedIn is the most popular professional, Web-based social networking tool and, as a result, important.  I think it is important, though, that we are not complacent…another tool might be a better solution; either now (e.g. chi.mp or posterous.com) or in the future.

One important note about companies.  I think LinkedIn has done an excellent job in providing professionals with ability to build an individual brand while also personalizing an organization through the organic enrichment of ‘company’ profiles.  While many marketing/communications people actively monitor/manage their company profiles, any validated user (based on email domain) can contribute to that profile…a great tool for showcasing a supportive, engaged corporate culture.

What are some innovative ways to use LinkedIn to build personal brand, promote events, and create awareness?

First and foremost, I believe we need to ground our expectations in a type of altruistic philosophy.  We should look at LinkedIn as a tool we can leverage to return real value by sharing our unique value proposition with other professionals (and aspiring professionals).  With this concept driving our actions, we are better positioned to reach our career/business/networking objectives while positively contributing to the larger community.

LinkedIn, itself, has a variety of tools that can be leveraged to create individual and organizational awareness.

Certainly the ‘answers’ feature is a great way to share your knowledge with the community.  Additionally, where relevant, you can highlight the strengthen and solutions your company provides.

However, in the last year or so, I have seen a troubling (and dramatic) increase in self-serving dialogue through LinkedIn Answers.  Users are clearly posting questions to draw attention to their message, company, etc and other users are answering to feed their ’social competitiveness’ (my idea that a lot of our social networking is driven by our innate desire for higher social status).

So, to me, the innovative is not in the tools but leveraging those tools into concepts.  For example, use LinkedIn as a platform for showcasing your evolving professional concepts and keep your content fresh.  For example, let’s say you had a new marketing concept that you are excited about; one that really showcases your experience/creativity/innovation.  You could use LinkedIn as a platform to create a personal marketing campaign and share your thoughts:

• Write a blog post and attach it to your profile.
• Create a mini-series of LinkedIn status message that change on a scheduled basis.
• Relevantly update your experience to showcase how you used (or could have used) this concept.
• Create a presentation in Google (upload to Slideshare) and post on your profile.
• Develop some type of ‘take away’ material that viewers of your profile can download (Box.net).

You could also create polls and questions (where relevant and valued-added) to drive your message.  The key to this concept is that you regularly (I know…easier typed than done) change out your LinkedIn ‘conceptual campaigns’.  Changing out these concepts once a month would be a powerful statement of your personal brand (not to mention your ability to execute).

SEO is very important today. What are some tips and tricks to make your LinkedIn profile more SEO friendly?

Your LinkedIn profile is likely not going to carry enough search engine equity to compete against other websites for general keyword concepts (e.g. ‘real estate professional’, ‘Experienced MSCE’, etc.).  So, you should rather focus your energy on personal characteristics combined with key concepts, skills, or experience.  For example, if you regularly speak on a particular topic and any special phrases (e.g. ‘Your Ness’ as seen in ‘You, Me, and Dupree’).  Also, if you have a branded product, service, or concept you should include the relevant text in your tagline, summary, specialties, and experience.

In order to generate greater search engine visibility for your LinkedIn profile, focus on ‘inbound links’ (links to your profile from other websites).  If you want to use your LinkedIn profile as your main online presence (versus a website, blog, etc.), take every opportunity to link to your ‘public profile URL’.  Some examples of linking opportunities are:

• Part of your posted biography (events, speaking engagements, etc.)
• Press releases
• Social networking websites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• Attached to your comments on blogs, articles, etc.

Lastly, and in my opinion most importantly, is what actions you want visitors to take after finding your profile.  Focus on engaging visitors (especially search-generated visitors) to your profile and driving them to a particular action.

Examples:

Job Seeker (visibility/candidacy)

• Change your status to reflect a concept relevant to the organization you are seeking an interview or position (e.g. industry article, thought, etc.).
• Create a relevant blog post that details a unique, differentiating strength/idea that would be too long for an interview or resume.
• Post a copy of your resume or other supporting document (via LinkedIn Applications) that could be downloaded (note: make sure that document prominently displays your contact information)

Product/Solution Provider (awareness)

• Customize your website link, use action-oriented hyperlink text and drive them to your website.
• Post relevant documents using LinkedIn Applications.
• Tie in relevant blog posts and links to your website.

Why should marketers today care about LinkedIn?

The LinkedIn community organically generates high quality and well-qualified audiences that we, as marketers, would love to reach with our messages.  Additionally, there are enough explicit and implicit profiling attributes to segment various audiences (e.g. industry, company size, region, skills, etc.).  As a result, LinkedIn presents the opportunity to engage highly targeted audiences.

While we wipe the dollar signs from our eyes, we have to be thoughtful in our approach to these LinkedIn audiences.  Our tendency is to ‘blast’ the rich LinkedIn community with our concept/message/offer.  However, we need to focus on content and actions that authentically create dialogue.  Share our knowledge and resources and allow opportunities to grow naturally from that dialog.

With the sophisticated SPAM filtering built into today’s email systems and software, I believe social media SPAM is going to be the next digit intrusion; just look at the number of multi-level marketers on Twitter generating empty content (and all following one another).

Key steps to getting started:

My advice is to build and grow your presence under the guidance of a personal brand strategy:

• Who are you?
• What have you accomplished?
• Where are you going?
• What’s your unique brand position?

Don’t start by building another resume…create a dynamic, engaging presence.  Your experience should be coupled to concepts not tasks, duties, and responsibilities.  In developing your personal brand strategy, ask others to help define your unique characteristics and provide guidance for your message.

While it may be tempting, don’t count connections…build meaningful connections within your network.  You will want to be able to make connections to people within your network.

My personal connection philosophy:
If you can’t happily and meaningfully introduce a person at a cocktail party or networking event, they should not be a connection.

Also be authentic with your connections.  Did you work with someone previously but had issues with their work/performance/approach?  Do not connect with them…your personal brand equity is also tied to the people you trust to be within your network.

One special consideration for job seekers…always preserve your brand, even when the search isn’t going well.  It is far too easy to type, post, and hurt what you have been building.  Your profile is a statement of your personal brand and needs to be carefully protected.

Should you promote your personal blog versus company website?

Your profile allows for the use of multiple links; use them to identify what it is your linking to and why:

• Use your profile to promote yourself, your skills, and accomplishments.
• User the descriptive sections of experience to highlight relevant experience as well as company objectives (e.g. 100 word company description).
• Use a company profile to promote your brand, messaging, and positioning.
  • Encourage the members of the company to enrich the profile.

How should you integrate other social networking sites to LinkedIn and why?

Yes…however, where it is relevant (okay, you may now move the needle from my broken record of ‘relevance’) and where it is targeted.  The inclusive of Blogs and applications like Slideshare/Box.net/Google Docs is a great way to tie together various concepts to form a better picture of your professional profile.  Similarly, you can post your LinkedIn profile/badge across your other social networking properties to engage visitors.  For example, use your LinkedIn profile as your biography and focus your energy on maintaining that content (versus managing multiple biographies).

Lastly, don’t feel that you have to create a hyper socially networked profile that will be the envy of all your Twitter followers.  Be authentic.  If you are an active member and/or passionate about a group, display it on your profile.  If you like to socialize your reading list through LinkedIn, awesome.  The main point is not to make your LinkedIn profile a dizzying blur of social media NASCAR badging.

To leave with a quote from Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby ’This sticker is dangerous and inconvenient, but I do love Fig Newtons.’

Reposted from The Marketing Journalist by Cindy Kim

It goes without saying that search engine optimization is just as important for blogs as it is for websites. However, fortunately, blogs integrate software that pings search engines to inform them of new content, and consequently, blogs are usually crawled a lot more often than a static site.

When you are considering SEO for blogs, you’ll need to think of employing numerous on-site techniques so that search engines can discover your content. The critical piece is keyword-rich content. Beyond that, make some considerations for:

1. Usability and ease of navigation: Make it easy for your readers to access the various parts of your page without

difficulty. Be sure to add important information in visible areas. One mistake often seen with blogs and blog designs is the lack of a “Previous Posts” or “Next Posts” link on the bottom of the page. It makes sense to flesh out all these details as soon as possible.

2. Regular content updates: Search engines crawl websites more often if they are frequently updated. Content updates are user-friendly as well – readers have a reason to keep returning to the site.

3. Creation of XML sitemaps for search engines (and HTML sitemaps for user navigation): An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of URLs that informs search engines when new content becomes available. You can also put numeric values to indicate weight/priority on specific content. When content gets updated, your XML file is updated. As long as you register your sitemap with the various search engines, the search engine spiders will discover new content by looking at your sitemap file. Adding an XML sitemap is usually easy with numerous plugins available for blog platforms.

4. Duplicate content: Your category pages may have the same exact content as your monthly archives. If this is the case, be sure to employ rules (such as in robots.txt) to filter out the duplicate content. For example, in the case of WordPress, you may want to add rules to disallow crawling of category page. This ensures that search engines find the proper page (typically the main page) and crawls that (and indexes it) instead.

5. Linking (both internally and externally): Link to your important pages internally, and use appropriate anchor text to direct your readers (and search engines) to content that you feel is important. Link externally to diversify your content and link to other recommended sources for information. For example, if you are talking about search engine optimization and have a page dedicated to SEO on your site, you may want to link to your SEO page (internal linking). But if you want to talk about social media marketing and don’t have a relevant page on your site, you might want to point your readers to a better authority source on another website (external linking). Also, when employing linking techniques, use appropriate and descriptive anchor text, not “click here” to pass the best link value to these pages.

6. Choosing a name that is easy to remember: Like any website or brand name, your blog should not be difficult to remember (see #3). Keep it simple.

Four Elements blog is your daily source of news, tips and trends for web 2.0, search engine optimization and our future web. We help entrepreneurs and business owners correctly integrate emerging technology. Four Elements helps clients succeed, in all economic climates, through personalized integration of social networks, social media, blogs, widgets, wikis, cloud computing, search engine optimization, social bookmarks, web tools and mobile technology.

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Most Internet traffic is driven by search engines, and search optimization means developing web content that maximizes the number of visitors to that content. Let me qualify that. You want the right traffic from the right people interested in what you’re delivering.

So how is this done?

Linking Strategies

• Inbound linking, that is links pointing to your site are seen as a vote for your content’s relevancy. That’s especially true if the the other site has similar content and is ranked higher than yours.
• Outbound linking shows that you’re linking to relevant content and outbound links can help your readers find more information than you can possible write in your content. Check out what Google says about outbound linking.

You can create all the outbound links you want, but there seems to be more weight given to inbound links from an SEO perspective. In order to get them, you must do a couple of things:

Join the conversation and visit other blogs. Read that content and leave an INTELLIGENT comment. That get’s the conversation started, because that blogger may come to your site and do the same. Or, if your site has content that’s particularly apropos to his (or her’s), voila inbound link.

Link to Your Own Posts

Your blog or website should be a compendium of information for your visitors. They are visiting your blog/website because they want answers. So give them answers and make those answers easily accessible. For example, if you want to know more about sponsored conversations, try one of these posts:

• How to Make Sponsored Conversations Work for You
• To Sponsor, or Not Sponsor Sponsored Conversations Online

Or, if you want to learn more about these.

• Building Your Blog Traffic With StumbleUpon
• Writers Who get SEO Strategy Are Valuable

Choosing Good Keywords

Choosing good keywords is important, especially in areas that are less saturated. And, there are several good keyword tools you van use. Google AdWords is good, as is Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool.

There’s an art to using keywords. Use to many and you lose readability. (Remember, your key audience is people, not Google’s bots.) Nonetheless, you should use keywords in your page titles, and in subtitles. I’ve also been told that increasing the font size to H3 makes a difference too.

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Do you have a web site? Do you wonder how you can make more money with it? If so, consider these tips for making your web site more usable and friendly to your customers.

1. Anticipate the needs of your users

Get started on the right foot by anticipating the needs of your customers. It sounds simple, but when was the last time you took a moment to put yourself in your customers shoes? If you were them, would you find your site friendly? Does it do a good job of helping you solve a problem? How many clicks does it take you to get to the information you were looking for? These are all questions to ask when considering web site usability.

Too often, web sites get designed for personalities within a company or organization and not for your actual customers. A perfect example is in the creation of FAQ’s (or frequently asked questions). Did you build a FAQ based on what customers are actually asking you or what you’d like them to know? There is a big difference. If you have a sales team at your company (call center for example) consider having a sit down with them to find out what they are hearing from customers on the phone. Incorporate this expertise from your front line troops into the content of your web site.

2. Develop multiple, strong calls to action

Ten years of direct internet marketing experience has taught me that in order to create action online (sales, leads, information requests, etc) it is absolutely critical to develop a strong call to action. Provide an incentive for people to give you their contact information. It doesn’t need to be a monetary one, although discounts and free shipping on orders are proven winners. Newsletter sign ups, email lists or even sweepstakes are strong enough enticements to get people to leave their email address.

And because you never know someone’s communication preference, make sure to offer them multiple ways to get in touch with you. It could be as simple as a phone number, an email sign up, a live chat box or even a small lead form. This is especially important with paid search marketing like pay per click. Each visit to your site through a paid search campaign costs you, so make the most of the traffic!

3. Optimize your web site for search engine optimization

Of course, the best web site visits are the ones which don’t cost you. Search engine optimization can help your web site rank for keywords and phrases in natural search results. If you have a small web site (small business owner) then you can probably do most of the work to add search optimization to your site. There are plenty of sites which talk best practices. In general, remember that search engines like Google or Yahoo are looking for relevant content. If you have followed step one (anticipating the needs of your users) then it is likely your site will be written for your target user.

Make sure your web site title tags use the keywords you would expect them to search for if they went to Google and keyed in a search. Stay away from Flash or image heavy sites that lack good textual content. A pretty design is great, but make sure your web developer or advertising agency isn’t sacraficing usability or search engine optimization best practices. What you will end up with is the prettiest site that no one ever sees, otherwise.

4. Let data be your guide – web site analytics

In the old days, you’d create a web site and then wonder if people liked it. Was the site drawing in visitors? Where did they come from and what were they looking at, if anything? Web site analytics has gotten sophisticated and in most cases, free! Now you don’t need to guess, just install analytics and make insightful decisions based on data.

Google Analytics has become the gold standard for web site analytics. It is free and easy to set up. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to install Google Analytics (GA for short) but if you’re scared by editing web page code, you might want to find a web developer or talk to your hositng provider. After just a day, you’ll start to be able to see visits to your web site, which pages they looked at, for how long, and which sites link to yours. GA has options for ecommerce sites too, so you can actually see which keywords create the most sales, for example.

For larger companies and sites, consider Core Metrics, another great analytical tool.

5. Test, test and test again

Internet marketing is an iterative process so you should always be changing things around on your web site, incorporating what you have learned. If you have installed analytics you’ll start to see what is working on your site and what is not. Don’t be afraid to experiment! If you have a page on your site that many visitors see but leave right away, you might try to change the content of the page, perhaps the imagery or even the call to action. You’ll be amazed with how the smallest changes to the layout of a page, or even its color scheme, can improve a web site’s conversion.

These are basic tips for improving web site usability for small or even large web sites. I’d love to hear your comments as to ways to increase conversion on your web site to help it reach its full potential.

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OK, there are probably a few exceptions.  But for the most part, small businesses—say, 98%—that have either static websites or websites that are separate from their blogs are missing out on two huge advantages:

1. search engine traffic
2. an inexpensive, easy-to-use content management system

Search Engine Traffic and SEO

Attracting search engine traffic is the difference between a website that’s an asset and one that’s nothing more than an expense. If your website is not a search destination for your prospective customers, it’s not helping you very much. Oh sure, if you have a website people can go to when they see the URL on your business card or your Yellow Pages ad, that has some value. But the old idea of a website being a sign alongside the information superhighway pointing to your business is outdated and not very effective.

The key to a website that helps you build your business is search engine traffic, even if your business is exclusively local. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a local business person say they don’t need to be found in online searches, because their business is all local. Yet, they spend (lots and lots of) money on local newspaper ads and local radio ads. I guess they think local people don’t have an internet connection and don’t use it to look for local businesses? Think again!

The number one way people look for places to buy goods and services is by internet search, overtaking the Yellow Pages more than a year ago and widening the gap on a daily basis. And that includes checking out local businesses that people intend to drive to and do business with after they’ve determined online that the business offers what they’re looking for and appears to know what it’s doing (the quality of your site and blog posts have some influence on that one).

Blogs are search engine magnets, IF they contain focused, frequently updated content that your potential customers search for. Google’s algorithms favor focused, frequently updated content, the kind of knowledge and information you already have your head. Put it into some blog posts (frequently, and focused) and watch your business benefit from additional traffic from online searches.

Having your blog integrated with your website (what we often refer to as a blogsite) gives the non-blog portion of your website a higher pagerank than if the blog is completely separate from the website, moving it higher in search results.

Inexpensive, Easy-to-use Content Management

Secondly, a blogsite makes it easy for small businesses to update any part of their website using the same backend used to publish blog posts. The days of calling the “webguy” for simple content updates will be over. You may still need the webguy to add certain kinds of functionality or to make fundamental changes in the structure of your blogsite if and when that becomes necessary, but you will have full day-to-day control over the information it displays. And that’s important, because if people are finding your site, the last thing you want them to see is outdated information.

But beyond that, the information on your site can reflect what’s happening currently and can make your website an integral part of your sales and promotion strategy. Suppose you offered a daily special to the first person each day to say the word of the day that they could only get on your website? Suppose you gathered email addresses on your website from people who wanted to be made aware when there was a sale? You could email these opt-in, prequalified customers and save yourself the expense of a radio ad or newspaper ad announcing the sale.

These are just a couple of examples of how having greater control over the content on your website can lead to more business. There are other strategies, likely some that would fit your business perfectly.

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There are hundreds of search engine optimization blogs and companies out there that will promise you an instant ROI if you use their tools, services or guides. Some of these tips and services can be valuable, but only if your blog or website has incredible content. Hopefully you created your blog or website with the intent to provide valuable content, services and/or products to your target market. If this is not your intent, you should stop reading right here. Your page needs to be filled with engaging and informative content on a specific topic. Make sure your content is focused on one or two similar topics because the more general you get, the harder the optimization becomes. Your goal should be to become an authority in a specific field. Let all your visitors do the SEO work for you. If your content is as good as it should be, readers will begin to link to posts and even site certain posts on their own site.

A crucial aspect of SEO is link-building and many people look into buying links and/or trying to find link partners. Stop wasting time and money on these potential rank-decreasing actions. Instead, spend that time writing great articles and thinking of engaging ways to include different forms of media into yours posts.

Finally, make sure to focus your content around the keywords you want to dominate. If you are looking to come up high for the search “web 2.0 real estate consulting” it is not smart to right a post about derivatives. SEO takes time and no amount of money or tricks can change that fact. So, stop worrying about buying 500 links from a website and instead worry about the quality and optimization of each and every article you write.

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Your blog platform should give you the ability to make the following choices and customize your site with some basic SEO elements. As indicated in the list below, some blog platforms fall short and others give optimal control. Again, consider the pros and cons of every blog platform you are weighing on before actually choosing a platform.

1. Title Tag Customization and Rules: Unfortunately, being able to customize your title tag isn’t always built in for some blogs. In fact, the self-hosted version of WordPress requires an external plugin (to be discussed) to customize the title tag. MovableType’s title tag will have to match the post title (though a capable developer may be able to circumvent that). In all likelihood, it will not be possible to make these changes on a free blogging platform.
2. Static, Keyword-Rich URLs: Without a doubt, WordPress is the best choice for keyword-rich URLs if configured properly. In fact, the keyword-rich URL (otherwise known as a slug) can be customized to your needs. MovableType and TypePad, on the other hand, do not have keyword-rich URLs. The standard URLs have numerous digits in the filename. ExpressionEngine, like WordPress, gives you the option to add keyword-rich URLs with a small change: the delimiter between words is an underscore instead of a dash. While this doesn’t typically make a big difference on SEO, many people do suggest that dashes are better between keywords. Even Google’s Matt Cutts suggests dashes. (While the dashes-versus -underscores debate is evolving, the recommendation is to stick with dashes.)
3. Meta Tag Customization: While not critical to search (and consequently of small importance to choosing your search-friendly blog platform), meta tags have always been a problem for blog owners. You can specify tags (descriptive labels to websites) which work well with blog search engines like Technorati and help for bookmarking purposes with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, but on the other hand, meta tags are not easily defined. As in the case of title tag customization, WordPress has this feature only as an external add-on.
4. Enabling Custom HTML Tags: Fortunately, all blog platforms give you the freedom to add “nofollow” to URLs that you don’t want to give outright endorsements to, and depending on the features defined in your CSS stylesheet, you can use header tags such as H1, H2, etc. Be advised that adding optional tags to your standard HTML tags is not something you can do in Visual or WYSIWYG mode – instead, you will have to edit the source of the blog post to make such changes, as nofollow is only added if you hand-code it into the post yourself.
5. Internal Anchor Text Flexibility: As this blog post states, “In order to be ‘optimized’ rather than simply search-friendly, customizing the anchor text on internal links is critical. Rather than simply making all links ina site’s architecture the page’s title, a great CMS should be flexible enough to handle custom input from the admins as to the anchor text of category-level or global navigation links.” Internal anchor inflexibility is typically not a problem with many blog platforms as you can change the anchor text as needed. However, as an aside, you may want to work with your developer to employ page sculpting for less-important pages or add nofollow to links to which you do not want to pass much link juice.

6. Intelligent Categorization Structure: Thankfully, most blog platforms give you full control over categories and subcategories, and the number of categories available is limitless. Furthermore, depending on the software used (WordPress is great at this), you can specify a different URL slug for your categories and even write a description which will appear on the category pages.
7. Pagination Controls/Duplicate Content: Depending on whether you’re hosting your blog software on your server or if you’re hosting with a free option, the amount of control over pagination varies. If you host the software yourself and have a development team editing and updating the source code, you’ll have full control over the source code and stylesheets and can add nofollows or noindex tags to any pages that you do not want search engines to crawl. The recommended suggestion is to use robots.txt, which is something that is only available if you host the blog yourself. As such, there is a lot less flexibility on these features when it comes to free hosted solutions. Refer to this blog post for more information on how to deal with blog pagination and duplicate content issues.
8. 301 Redirect Functionality: Of course, this functionality is best employed within your own hosting environment. WordPress has its own 301 redirection plugin as well in case you are changing your file structure and have hundreds or thousands of blog posts that will need to be altered.
9. XML/RSS Pinging: All of the platforms discussed in this article have XML and RSS pinging; without them, it would be debatable if it really meets the criteria and is considered a “blog.”
10. Image Handling and ALT Tags: All blog applications mentioned in this article also give you control over image handling. Keep in mind that the hosted TypePad application has storage limitations depending on the solution you have purchased, and the same applies for your own hosted solution (check your quota with your hosting provider if you have any questions). WordPress gives you incredible control over ALT tags as you upload the image to the server through the software, but all other platforms make it possible through editing the code by hand.
11. CSS Exceptions: If you are hosting the blog yourself, you’ll have complete control over your stylesheet and can add any CSS rules as appropriate. Blogger.com also features CSS control, though WordPress.com does not (and TypePad has this feature available only for higher-priced subscriptions).
12. Static Caching Options: This is one feature that free bloggers (using Blogger, WordPress.com, or TypePad) don’t have to worry about. Since free hosted solutions are typically incredibly scalable, simultaneous database connections during a traffic surge should not impact performance on other blogs and won’t bring down your website either (especially as it’s hosted elsewhere). On the other hand, if you host MovableType, a static page is created when you publish your post. WordPress does not offer static caching options out of the box and can be troublesome because of the constant PHP/MySQL queries (though there are a variety of third-party plugins to augment caching). Still, when it comes to WordPress, your hosting configuration and server resources ultimately determine how stable your WordPress blog will be under hundreds of concurrent connections.
Four Elements blog is your daily source of news, tips and trends for web 2.0, search engine optimization and our future web. We help entrepreneurs and business owners correctly integrate emerging technology. Four Elements helps clients succeed, in all economic climates, through personalized integration of social networks, social media, blogs, widgets, wikis, cloud computing, search engine optimization, social bookmarks, web tools and mobile technology.Link to original post

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Search engines provide tools to help you with the most essential SEO tasks:

• Competitive analysis
• Keyword research
• SEO site auditing
• Link building

Competitive analysis is the first thing to do when planning a website and is also a continuous process you will need to often return to when building and promoting your site. In order to get on top of SEO efforts for your industry, you should know who is ahead of you in SERPs. Competitive research can basically include (though it is not limited to) the following steps (all of which are handled with the help of search operators and tools described in the guide):

1. Identifying how many pages in SERPs you are going to compete with for the given (core) term (i.e., the overall number of competitors)
2. Determining who your direct competitors are (i.e., who to watch for, whose example to follow and mistakes to avoid)
3. Evaluating the strengths of those competitors’ websites: their site age, on-site SEO, and incoming links (i.e., your keyword difficulty), etc.

Keyword research is a complex but a very important process of choosing and implementing niche-related terms that comply with the following criteria: they have the highest relevance, low or reasonably high competition level (”difficulty”), and high conversion rates. While webmasters have a variety of valuable web-based keyword research tools, search engines and search-based applications can also be very helpful for:

1. Finding relevant popular keyword phrases
2. Expanding your keyword list with keyword phrases, synonyms, and related terms
3. Evaluating your keyword competition

SEO site auditing is the process of evaluating how search-engine-friendly your website is and also of finding and correcting on-page SEO mistakes to improve the site visibility, reach, and accessibility. SEO site diagnostics include:

1. Site architecture analysis
2. On-page keyword prominence evaluation (title tags, internal anchor text, header tags, page content, etc)
3. Robots.txt file review
4. Header response analysis
5. Website crawl and indexation rates
6. Website canonical problems check
7. Website possible internal duplicate content issues analysis
8. Website internal power evaluation (finding most powerful/weakest pages)

Link building is the process of gaining inbound links to your website. Since links are the integral part of the Internet as they connect sites into a web, it is quite natural that they play the most important role in search engine algorithms and hence in building a successful, highly ranked website. The tasks wherein advanced search can be of major help include:

1. Exploring your competitors’ link building strategies and tactics
2. Finding relevant websites and pages to get a backlink from
3. Finding any site’s most powerful/relevant page to get the most link juice from
4. Finding relevant places for possible link baiting (e.g., relevant social media sites, discussion boards, and blogs)

Four Elements blog is your daily source of news, tips and trends for web 2.0, search engine optimization and our future web. We help entrepreneurs and business owners correctly integrate emerging technology. Four Elements helps clients succeed, in all economic climates, through personalized integration of social networks, social media, blogs, widgets, wikis, cloud computing, search engine optimization, social bookmarks, web tools and mobile technology

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