While most SEO’s already know the ins and outs of off-site search engine optimization, but what often gets overlooked is the actual on-site SEO which may be a key reason as to why you are not at the top of the SERP’s. I’ve compiled a list of things the beginner SEO can do to make sure his or her site is fully optimized for the search engines.

1. The Title Tag – Single handedly the most crucial element of on-site optimization. Make sure you have your main keywords in here. A useful plug-in for this if your using Wordpress is optimal title.
2. The H1/H2 Text – Are also extremely important because they show the search engine the main subjects and “table of contents” for your sites content. These should be targeted towards the keywords you want to rank for, and should be indicative of your title tag.
3. First sentence of body text – In terms of advanced SEO tactics, the first sentence for the body for every page on your site will be picked up by the SE’s and more importantly are picked up by Google’s LSI algorithm.
4. Meta Keywords, Description and Robots Tag — The site’s meta tags are always used to place your site in the rankings. As well your sitemap.xml will be looked at by Google on a regular basis so keep it updated.
5. The Body Text – Try to keep your focused body text in bold as this will be more emphatic to the search engines.
6. The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be optimized. A useful way to do this with wordpress is through permalinks. (Settings -> Permalinks -> Custom Structure, and then use “/%category%/%postname%/”) So for http://site.com/SEO-optimization-in-toronto.html would rank higher for a page devoted to “SEO optimization in Toronto” simply due to this structure.
7. Same Site Link Texts — Make sure all your pages of your site are inter-linked or have some type of navigation whereas your main pages you are trying to rank for are linked. Make sense? Having your targeted keywords linked to other relevant pages can go a long way for a little higher rankings.
8. Same-Site Link URLs — Don’t just use keywords to describe pages inside your site, those URLs you link to should include SEO URLs as well. (eg: http://site.com/your-keyword.html)
9. Keyword Density — While this topic is generally up for debate, the general consensus is to have anywhere between 5-8% of your total text. So for a 500 word article you should have anywhere between 25-40 of those words as some sort of derivative of the keyword you are trying to rank for. While this isn’t THAT important for rankings, it should still be considered.
10. Image ALT Tags — Lastly you should always make sure to have your images optimized for keywords you wish to rank for. It wouldn’t hurt to go as far as to change the names of the images to be keyword-rich as well.

By using these simple methods, you can get a jump start on your off-site SEO so that you can focus more on getting inbound, authority backlinks from relevant sites. Then all you can do from there is write viral content and link build like a madman. I will be doing a follow up post on off-site SEO methods so stay tuned.

So I signed up way back when they launched, status updates seemed like a cool thing at the time.  But then I totally forgot about that fleeting twitter account, and just earlier today came across a hilarious video entited “twitter whore“.

Now if watching that isn’t enough to turn you off twitter for the rest of your life, well… Either way, I decided I would log into my twitter account to brush off the cobwebs, and what do I come across?

Twitter was down:

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I think I am pretty much done with Twitter, that is unless something useful for it comes along and I can manipulate it in a way to make a profit.

Well the RIAA isnt going to be happy about this one. A brand new service by young entrepreneur Justin Ouellette has just hit the net. The service or Muxtape as its coined, allows you to upload your favorite songs and have them saved for playback on the web whenever you want.

The site has only been live 24 hours and its numbers are soaring. (wonder if the servers will hold up) 8600+ users, around 20,000 songs and over 35,000 visits. Pretty impressive to say the least.

This site has a lot of great things going for it, and I have to say it looks promising if he can keep up with the server costs. The sign up page is 3 fields, so right off the bat your in love. Your alloted 12 songs, so they better be your favorites, and there is a cap set at 10mb per file, which is sufficient. From here you can pretty much play your songs directly from your browser or media device. Pretty cool.

I played around with it, uploaded a few tracks and it seems to work smoothly. Another great concept turned social media. What will be next? Video feeds?

Well its a new year, and that means that I should probably get off my ass and get down to business as usual. So for 2008 I figured I would give some insight as to the best ways in which to garner traffic to your website for the new year.

Social Networks

With the booming explosion of facebook and myspace, marketers should once again look to utilize these resources in order to drive substantial traffic to their websites. Numerous web developers have seen great success using facebook ads to publicize their sites or push conversions on their affiliate offers, and either way you will see improvements.

Blogs

Blogs are going to continue to be utilized in 2008, with networks like blogrush and mybloglog you can expect to drive traffic to your sites using the traffic and social systems of these sites. The best thing about blogrush is that it is totally free and the traffic you drive can be targetted for your specific niche. The best thing about blogs is the fact that if your writing unique content you can get other webmasters to help build your traffic flow simply by linking to your articles. Content will always be king.

Social Networking & Bookmarks

We will continue to use social networks such as Digg, Sphinn, Delicious, Stumbleupon, reddit and the long list of up and comers to drive traffic and build backlinks to our sites. While getting your stories dugg or stumbled isnt the easiest thing to do, as long as you keep submitting viral stories sooner or later you will start to see traffic flowing. While the majority of the users are going to be ad blind, it will still be one of the best ways to drive traffic and backlinks for your sites.

Google

Still the powerhouse of the internet, valued at $66.5 Billion US Dollars, and not something that looks to change anytime soon. Getting your websites and articles ranked high in the SERPS will ALWAYS drive you targetted traffic and tons of it depending on the relevance and search popularity of your terms. While backlinks and SEO are the most important things to consider when trying to rank for google, once you struggle with rankings for awhile and work on building high quality niche relevant links to your pages, you will start to see significant traffic from the search engine leader.

Article Writing

Well content is still king in 2008… Not much has changed there. The only thing that has changed is who is writing your content. With guest blog writers and some very inexpensive article writing services available on the various webmaster forums around the net, you can keep a steady stream of articles flowing for less than $50 a month if you know where to look. However if you have garnered a reputable name for yourself in the industry you can even find yourself writing articles for others and making a pretty penny.

Overall in 2008 you should look to continue to utilize the booming social media networks and social platforms to drive traffic that is targeted for your niches, these are the top performers right now in terms of my traffic generation and I suspect that these methods shall remain prevalent for the rest of the year.

We knew it was going to happen. Digg users try to game the site by copying articles and then passing those said articles off as their own work. Also users engineer written works in the Digg user base to increase popularity and thus forth increasing traffic to their site.

While other Digg users have gone off to forums such as DP and sitepoint in “Digg-trades” whereas they can gain a vast amount of diggs for relatively cheap or for returning other users’ diggs. (.30 each for 50 diggs in the current example)

However unethical it may be, it is being done and these “Digg Gamers” are taking advantage of the tremendous amounts of traffic sent from digg. Even with the traffic not being the best in terms of monetization (Digg users tend to know not to click ads, and will only do so by accident most times), it is still traffic, and that means return visitors and maybe future sell’s for you and your affiliates.

An article I read over at SEOmoz, titled “The anatomy of a Super Digg” explains exactly how he gamed Digg users with viral articles written simply for the basis of gaining quick readability and interest.

Over the coming weeks I am going to attempt to “game” Digg with some viral marketing and some catchphrase titles, I may use the Digg systems used on the forums however I am afraid I may be penalized by Digg for using these unethical methodologies… only time will tell.  If anyone has any experience with using Digg-trades please let me know how it went for you.