SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.
Start With A Movie!
New to SEO? Why not take three minutes and watch our video introduction to search engine optimization? It’ll quickly cover the basics:
Search Engine Land worked with Common Craft to produce the video, and they have many more great explainer videos like this in the Common Craft video library, so check that out!
More Advice For Newbies
For more basic but also in-depth advice, our Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors, shown below, introduces you to all the key concepts you need to know:
You can click on the table to view a larger version of it. You can download a copy to print for easy reference!
As a companion to the table, the Search Engine Land Guide To SEO explains the ranking factors in more depth, in a tutorial providing tips and advice on implementing them. Links to the entire guide are shown below (start at the beginning, and each page will take you to the next):
- Overview: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
- Content & Search Engine Ranking Factors
- HTML Code & Search Engine Ranking Factors
- Site Architecture & Search Engine Ranking Factors
- Link Building & Ranking In Search Engines
- Social Media & Ranking In Search Results
- Trust, Authority & Search Rankings
- Personalization & Search Engine Rankings
- Violations & Search Engine Spam Penalties
- Blocking & Search Engine Results
- Download The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
TIP: If you’re a Search Engine Land member, the Search Engine Land Guide To SEO is available as a downloadable eBook. It’s just one of many benefits you get. Not a member? Consider signing-up!
Another excellent guide is Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.” This is a free PDF download that covers basic tips that Google provides to its own employees on how to get listed. You’ll find it here.
Also well worth checking out is SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO,” which you’ll find here, and the SEO Success Pyramid from Small Business Search Marketing.
There are also a variety of print books you might consider. Here’s our review of some newer books: A Roundup Of Best SEO Books.
Advice At Search Engine Land
Here at Search Engine Land, we provide SEO advice and news in a variety of ways:
How To: SEO is our section that is devoted to practical tips and tactics about search engine optimization.
100% Organic Column is Search Engine Land’s column that covers different search engine optimization topics every week.
More Search Engine Land Columns – Beyond our 100% Organic column, Search Engine Land also has these columns that cover SEO topics:
- In House
- In The Trenches
- Industrial Strength
- Let’s Get Social
- Link Week
- Locals Only
- Small Is Beautiful
- Strictly Business
- Video Search
SEO Library Archives is an area of Search Engine Land that provides a collection of all stories we’ve written on the topic of SEO. We also have subcategories, including:
- SEO: Blocking Spiders
- SEO: Blogs & Feeds
- SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages
- SEO: Domain Names & URLs
- SEO: Duplicate Content
- SEO: Flash
- SEO: General
- SEO: Image Search
- SEO: Local
- SEO: Mobile Search
- SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites
- SEO: Spamming
- SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps
- SEO: Tagging
- SEO: Titles & Descriptions
- SEO: Video Search
- SEO: Writing & Body Copy
Also see our related Link Building category and these subareas:
Here are a few of our popular articles about SEO from the Search Engine Land library:
- Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates
- 29 Worst Practices & Most Common Failures: SEO Checklist, Part 1
- SEO Checklist Part 2: Best Practices
- 36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To
- 36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To
- 21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques
In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for each of the major search engines:
Remember, those with Search Engine Land memberships also have access to a wide-range of video content about SEO recorded at our SMX: Search Marketing Expo conferences. Our Search Marketing Now webinar site also has SEO presentations available on demand, to anyone, for free.
More SEO Resources
There are a number of blogs and forums that focus heavily on SEO topics, including: aimClear, Blogstorm, Bruce Clay Blog, David Naylor, Eric Ward, Fire Horse Trail, High Rankings Forum, John Andrews, Matt Cutts, Michael Gray, Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Nine By Blue, Outspoken Media, Search Cowboys, Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Sebastian’s Pamphlets, SEOmoz, SEOoptimize, SEO By The Sea, SEO Book, SEO Copywriting, SEO Gadget, Stone Temple, The Link Spiel, WebProNews and WebmasterWorld.
Looking for an easy-to-scan compilation of SEO news? Check out Alltop. For compilations of the best articles on search engine optimization in a given year, visit The Semmys. At Search Engine Roundtable, you’ll discover a regular compilation of important discussions happening on a variety of search marketing forums. For definitions about terms like SEO and other technological issues, check out Webopedia.
Don’t forget to take our free SearchCap newsletter! SearchCap provides a recap of all the day’s SEO-related news from sources all over the web, as well as the day’s news from Search Engine Land and from Search Engine Land’s related social news site, Sphinn.
Friday, September 30, 2011
What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
Thursday, September 29, 2011
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011
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Friday, September 23, 2011
Five Free Website Builders - Website Magazine - Website Magazine
There are two generally opposed schools of thought when it comes to free website building tools and services.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Untitled
| How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 5 Easy Steps Monitoring your social media presence is incredibly important - but many business owners and marketers are concerned it will take too much time. You don't need a whole team devoted to social media monitoring - with some tools and these free tips, even one single person can keep an eye on your social media presence. Cover these 5 steps over a cup of coffee and you'll build social media into a healthy daily inbound marketing routine! 1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company ( 2 minutes ): Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time. 2) Scan Google Alerts ( 1.5 minutes ): Check Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms in a Google Alert and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away! 3) Check Facebook stats ( 1 minute ): Visit your Company Page's Faacebook Insights. This can be found under the page's main photo if you are an admin for your page. Scan your active users and interaction stats. Check out your wall posts or new discussions if you have them enabled for your page. 4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions ( 3 minutes ): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website or a relevant blog post that might be helpful to your audience. 5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Digg and others ( 2.5 minutes ): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too! Want to monitor, engage, and measure your social media presence all with one tool? HubSpot's inbound marketing software makes this easy. Our Inbound Marketing Specialists can show you a demonstration of the tools with some of your very own brand and industry keywords.
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011
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Saturday, September 17, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Microsoft warns computer owners of phone scam - YouTube
Tell your friends neighbors and relatives NOT to fall for these scams!
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Tooya Pro Graphics Tablet (Windows/Mac) $29.88 AR - Slickdeals.net
Tooya Pro Graphics Tablet (Windows/Mac) $29.88 AR-->
Critics call foul as Google takes aim at JavaScript with Dart
#Dart-Even in something as ever changing as web development change is hard. What do you think?
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Win 8 is here! if your brave enough. 8:00 pm et tonite
The new Windows Dev Center is launching soon
From here you’ll be able to download the Windows Developer Preview and get the Windows Developer Preview guide, tools, samples, forums, docs and other resources to build on Windows.
Find out when the Windows Developer Preview is ready to download:
Network sites
Other links
United States (English)
© 2011 Microsoft. All rights reserved.
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Monday, September 12, 2011
SRS Labs Announces Audio Essentials – Software Designed to Allow Any PC to Deliver HD-Quality, Home Theater Sound | Business Wire
August 30, 2011 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight TimeSRS Labs Announces Audio Essentials – Software Designed to Allow Any PC to Deliver HD-Quality, Home Theater Sound
All New SRS Audio Essentials Delivers the Ultimate Entertainment Experience for Music, Movies, Videos, and Games on the PC
SANTA ANA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SRS Labs (NASDAQ:SRSL), the industry leader in surround sound, audio enhancement, and voice post-processing technologies, announced today the availability of its all new audio software suite designed to enable any PC to pump out home theater-like sound. Loaded with a complete suite of fully customizable SRS audio enhancement solutions, the all new SRS Audio Essentials works with all PC-based media players and gives users full control of their audio experience.
“Today’s consumers are always on-the-go, demand their content on their schedule, and expect HD-quality audio and video playback on their mobile devices. Given the exponential growth of audio and video streaming services as well as the popularity of digital downloads, notebooks and laptops play a critical role in the entertainment experience of consumers,” said Allen H. Gharapetian, Senior Vice President of Marketing for SRS Labs. “Utilizing feedback and insight provided by our fans and friends through social media communities like Facebook and Twitter, we took on the challenge of designing the perfect audio enhancement software suite to address every problem faced by consumers dealing with poor quality compressed audio files as well as issues generated by the minimal frequency response range of small laptop speakers and headphones. All those efforts and research have culminated in an all new software solution that drastically improves the audio playback capabilities of any PC, allowing it to sound bigger, louder and more impressive.”
In practice, SRS Audio Essentials breathes new life into music, movies, games and all types of other content including YouTube style videos by processing the audio with patented psychoacoustic technologies to not only deliver an incredibly lifelike, immersive audio experience, but compensate for physical limitations of speaker configurations and headphones. Audio Essentials takes into account multiple variables when processing audio, including the type of content being played, size and number of speakers, style of headphones being used and the content source. It then mixes in the optimal amount of psychoacoustic processing, bass enhancement, sound field expansion and vocal intelligibility solutions for that specific mix. The end result is audio quality at its absolute best, allowing music to sound like it is being played live at a club, and movies and games to feel immersive and life-like.
Available in both a free and complete package, features of SRS Audio Essentials include:
Audio Essentials (free) features:
- Sleek, intuitive UI – Advanced AV receiver look and feel
- Enhanced audio playback for 2-channel speaker systems
- Music Configuration - Tunings specialized for music
- External Speaker Configuration - Output specialized for external speakers
- Internal Speaker Configuration - Expert tunings for internal laptop speakers
- Bass Enhancement - Maximizes bass response capabilities according to speaker size
- Full-function stereo peak meter – graphically displays audio activity for 2-channels
Audio Essentials Complete ($29.99) includes all of the (free) features plus:
- Advanced matrix surround sound decoding for surround sound speaker systems
- Virtualized 360 degree surround sound over headphones
- Intelligent volume leveling and volume maximization
- Movie Configuration – Optimizes the playback of movie content
- Game Configuration – Optimizes the playback of video games
- Presets for several popular speaker configurations
- Customizable Graphic EQ with bass, mid-range and treble settings
- Full-function 5.1 peak meter - graphically displays audio activity for 5 channels
Supporting every major PC media player and streaming content service, both versions of Audio Essentials are available now at www.srslabs.com/audioessentials for download. The MSRP for the complete version of Audio Essentials is $29.99.
To commemorate this announcement, SRS is running a sweepstakes where first and second place winners will receive a notebook PC pre-loaded with SRS Audio Essentials, and 15 other lucky entrants will win free copies of the software. The sweepstakes is running now through September 27, 2011. To enter the sweepstakes for a chance to win, visit www.srslabs.com/aesweeps. For more information about this announcement, SRS or our technologies, please contact us at pr@srslabs.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
About SRS Labs, Inc.
SRS Labs’ company description and important cautions regarding forward-looking statements made in this release are available at http://www.srslabs.com/boilerplate.
Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=6844049&lang=en
If you havn't tried the Free SRS audio essentials you don't know what you'r missing
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Great collection!
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/whatanicepost/status/112938829941440512
Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Google+: The Complete Guide
Teaching a social media class tonight. Still not sure I get Google+. Seems like work to me
Your Google+ Guide: 15 Tips For Newbies
20 million people are using google + since launch July 7. I have invites if you need one
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
5 Certs That Put Developers on the Fast Track | Education.Internet.com
Technology evolves at such as rapid rate that software developers must continually update their skills to keep pace. Certifications can be just what the job doctor ordered–offering targeted training in a specific technology, allowing developers to master a specific programming language or developer platform, and demonstrating proficiency to employers.
Choosing the Right Developer Certification
Developer certifications can lead to increases in pay and career advancement. Evan Lesser, Director of Learning for the IT job center Dice, emphasizes the need for strategic planning to get the most out of developer certification programs: “When you combine in-demand skill-sets and proven salary impact, specific certifications become valuable to individual technology professionals,” he explains. New software development platforms and programming languages are continually redefining the developer’s job qualifications.
Top Five Developer Certifications
The following developer certs offer the most bang for your buck, both in terms of professional relevance and career advancement potential. Salary figures are from an industry survey conducted by Certification Blog.
1. Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD)
Microsoft products remain ubiquitous throughout business information technology, ensuring the lasting value of any Microsoft IT certification. Even Microsoft certifications introduced a decade ago such as Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) continue to hold value today.
Microsoft Certified Solution Developer certification demonstrates the ability to design and implement solutions using the Microsoft .NET frameworks. A mastery of .NET technology is crucial to the design and analysis of leading-edge enterprise solutions. The MCSD developer certification requires at least two years experience in a lead developer role. MCSD certification can lead to job titles such as software engineer and software development architect. With a MCSD developer certification, IT professionals earned an average salary of $84,522.
2. Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJD)
Versatility is the hallmark of Sun Java certification. Certification magazine summed up the value of Java developer certification training: “learn once, apply everywhere.” The classic object-oriented programming language launched in 1995, Java still dominates software and Web development. The entry-level Sun Certified Java Programmer certification saw an estimated annual market value growth of 37 percent in 2009, according to Foote Partners’ 2010 IT Skills and Certification Pay Index.
Sun Certified Java Developer certification indicates that one has arrived as a Java programmer. The advanced program combines theory and practical programming expertise, turning out Java specialists qualified to develop commercial software applications for enterprise, mobile, and Web environments.
3. Certified Internet Web Professional (CIW) Web Developer
CIW Web Developer certification has the distinction of being the industry standard for Webmasters. The Web developer series includes three specialist exams–JavaScript Specialist, Perl Specialist, and Database Design Specialist–and a fourth professional-level certification synthesizing all key Web development skills. Together, the CIW Web developer certification program offers a comprehensive foundation in Web programming tools, preparing recipients for all aspects of Internet application and database development.
4. Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project managers offer added value to an organization by combining technical development expertise and business administration skills. According to a study by IT staffing firm Veritude, project managers are among the IT professionals most in demand, along with software developers and database administrators.
The Project Management Professional certification can help software developers solidify their management experience and gain recognition as a professional project manager. The certification develops and validates recipients’ ability to plan, coordinate, budget, and execute a software or IT project. Applicants must have three to five years of management experience to qualify for the PMP certificate program. The average salary of certification graduates is $101,695.
5. IBM Certified Solution Developer: WebSphere
IBM’s product-specific certification qualifies Web application developers to design, build, and test Web services using the WebSphere Software V7 and WebSphere Applications Server V6.1. Baseline magazine rated this certification among the “Top 20 IT Certifications Worth Having,” with an estimated annual market value growth of nearly 30 percent.
Developer certification training programs and exams offer developers an important means of career advancement and a way to stay up-to-date in the constantly changing world of technology and development. Stay on top of these changes with the developer certifications that hold their value.
Let's go for CIW
