1. Claim your listing on major search engines.
   This is a simple step, but it is also very important. Claiming your business listing at Google, Yahoo, and Bing will give your company exposure and imrpove your rankings. You can do this by searching your business and once located you can claim the business, well actually anyone can also.
2. Make sure you are listed in the correct categories.
   Having your business correctly listed is important in targeted searches.  As an example DMOZ will require you to “drill into” by clicking your way through a specific category (e.g., Computing > Internet Services > Search Engine > SEO ). Making sure the mapping is correct and updating your listing can help with your higher placement on SERPs.
3. Keep your business information consistent.
   Having your information match up throughout the web helps Google know that the information is correct and relevant. More specifically, your description and your opening paragraph on the landing page. This also means not keyword stuffing your titles because that makes the information look incorrect to Google.
4. Have Analytics on your website.
   It is important to have Analytics for your site so you can see exactly what keywords bring in traffic, and what pages of your site are helping or hurting your turnover. By watching these statistics, you can figure out exactly how to imrpove your website. Google Analytics offers something called Overlay, which will place statics on your links and will show you where your traffic is being drawn.
5. Check out the competition.
   Look at both natural and local search results for your targeted keywords and see who shows up. See how your competition lists their businesses and see if you can apply any of that to your company. Remember, success breads success!

These are basic steps every company should take in order to make sure your business ranks better in search engines, brings more eyes to your company, and eventually brings in more business.

1. Your key words need to be found in the body of your document. If they are truly key words they will appear at least 3% of the time on your page.

2. Try and focus on getting traffic for relevant key words on your web site that do not have as much competition as others. For example, if you want to get a person to your web page when they type in the single search term “health”, you are going to have a tough time getting page 1 results. However, if you are offering manicures, you might want to attract people looking for information about “fingernail health”, which would be far easier. (A good test is to go to your favorite search engine and type in your key words and then look at the number of results displayed. The fewer there is, the easier it will be for you to get good results for your relevant key word searches.

3. You need to have a minimum of 100 words of text on your pages. Content is king.

For the best Gmail performance, we suggest disabling Firebug for www.google.com.

Windows or Linux Users

To disable Firebug:

1. Open the Firebug pane in your Gmail tab by clicking the Firebug icon.
2. Click the down arrow next to the Net tab, and select Disable monitor for mail.google.com
3. Repeat Step 2 on the Console and Script tabs.

If you’d like to keep Firebug running, you may improve Gmail performance by following these steps:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the Console tab.
3. Select Options.
4. Uncheck Show XMLHttpRequests.
5. Click the Net tab.
6. Select Options.
7. Check Disable Network Monitoring.

Mac Users

To disable Firebug:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the bug icon in the top left corner of Firebug and select ‘Disable Firebug for mail.google.com.’

If disabling Firebug for Gmail doesn’t improve performance results, you may have to entirely disable Firebug.

Here’s the link to the original article. Google support document.

According to the plugin site, “Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.”

I’ve found it to be a quick install and the developers are pretty proactive with keeping it up-to-date and backwards compatible.

Here’s the email I recieved:

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

and heres a link to an article for it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/01/google-docs-dropping-ie6-support

Place Important Keywords Close to the Front – The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they’ll be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results.

Leverage Branding – Start every title tag with a brand name mention, as these help to increase brand awareness, and create a higher click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a brand. Many SEO firms recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach – think about what matters to your site (or your client’s site).

Consider Readability and Emotional Impact – Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visits from the search results and can help to invest visitors in your site. Thus, it’s important to not only think about optimization and keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitor’s first interaction with your brand and should convey the most positive impression possible.

Inbound links to your web page

• Are the web pages linking to your web page relevant to the primary search term?
• How fast does your web page get new links pointing to it?
• Do the web sites which link to your page belong to the same content category?
• Since when do the links to your page exist?
• Is the text surrounding the link to your page relevant to the primary search term?

Your web page

• How many important links from your other pages point to your web page?
• Do the links on your web page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
• How often and how many changes do you make to your web page over time? Is your content up-to-date?
• How often and how many web pages do you add to your web site?
• How long do your visitors spend time on your web page?

Search engine result page

• Do your competitors on the search engine result page get a manual ranking boost by The search engine you are focusing on, for example Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or Wikipedia?
• How many visitors of the search engine result pages click through to your page?

2. Try and focus on getting traffic for relevant key words on your web site that do not have as much competition as others. For example, if you want to get a person to your web page when they type in the single search term “health”, you are going to have a tough time getting page 1 results. However, if you are offering manicures, you might want to attract people looking for information about “fingernail health”, which would be far easier. (A good test is to go to your favorite search engine and type in your key words and then look at the number of results displayed. The fewer there is, the easier it will be for you to get good results for your relevant key word searches.

3. You need to have a minimum of 100 words of text on your pages. Content is king.

While managing one of the many feeds I setup or maintain I had to claim the post in Technorati and in doing so I needed to create a post so Technorati can confirm I’m an authorized person. That post requires that I place a code into the blog, which ends up in the feed, because Feedburner works PDQ. This is not a problem on a new feed but can result in spam for an existing subscriber base.

Feedburner Troublshootize:
“As a last resort with a regular feed or a podcast, you can resync your feed. You should only resync if your feed is more than 1 hour out-of-date and pinging FeedBurner does not update it or your podcast files are not being turned into enclosures by our SmartCast service.”

Although it’s really not that drastic, the key point you should take away is that your feed MUST BE 1 hour out-of-date! I tested the ping Feedburner a number of times and it errored with a “full throttle” message.

Deleting an Item From Your Feed. It’s more like refreshing your existing feed.

Follow these steps to delete an item from your feed:

1. Remove the item from your blog’s feed. When dealing with Wordpress, there’s two ways of doing this. You can either set the item to be a draft again, or delete it. If you aren’t dealing with WordPress, this is a fairly simple task so you can probably figure it out for yourself. In general, if the post does not appear on your blog’s index, it probably isn’t in your feed.

2. “Nuke” your feed in Feedburner. You can do this by heading over to Feedburner and then clicking on the ‘Troubleshootize’ tab. Scroll down until you see the header ‘The Nuclear Option: “Resyncing” your feed’ and click the button to ‘Resync Now’. It’s kind of odd to find this option here, so that’s why I’m making a blog post about it. It was the last place that I decided to look. The option is also hidden under the page fold so it’s harder to find.

It’s as simple as that. The resync option is played up to be a catastrophic event (”nuking” your feed), but it’s painless. Your feed will be rebuilt from your updated blog feed that does not include the extra post instantly.

With real-time flow of information it’s challenging to ascertain what’s deemed good quality. Sure you’ve got retweets, tags, bookmarks and social news sites that can infer a degree of popularity (which is not the same as quality, to be sure). There’s also authority of domain to go by. Regardless, the concept of relevance is harder to pin down when messages are pumping out at a furious pace.

Google Search Experiment

Look ma’ no hands!! While looking into an issue (beyond the fact that I misspelled Atlanta in my search)  as a web developer and seo practitioner I ran into a Google search results page that displayed far more than I was expecting. I came across an article on Mashable that said Google randomly selects people for beta testing. Although, a cursory search did not locate the article (I’ll update with a link once located).

There are pro’s and con’s to that, which I’ll outline later but an FYI would have been appreciated. I’ll see if Google equally surprises me with a phat fat check!

I’ve since learned that I accidently enabled an SEO toolbar and Firefox plugin that modified my Google SERPs.

Firefox Addons

As a web developer I often need a “fix”. No, not caffeine. Ok, well maybe I don’t need “the fix” but some of the web sites I inherit do or a new feature being implemented may have some conflicts so I need to do some debugging in order for the site to work correctly and in many browser types and versions.  Alas, I have a little army of grunt software that gets me from point a to point z much more quickly than sys.outs or alert messages. I’ve saved numerous hours using the following set of Firefox Plugins. I’ll briefly outline them and provide a link. My favorite is Firebug and YSlow is pretty damn cool also!

Firebug: You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Website http://getfirebug.com/

FireFTP: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. Website: http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

FoxyProxy: FoxyProxy is a set of proxy management tools for Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, and Songbird: Website: http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/

GreaseMonkey: Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

IE Tab: This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. Website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

Screengrab: It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

Web Developer Toolbar: The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

YSlow: YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. Website: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Below is a view of the FireBug console.

Firebug Plugin

Google Gmail Settings

Although an awesome feature I have to go to this page a number of times throughout the day because there is no way to configure the fetch to occur more or less frequently. When I forget to do check I may get an important email 45 prior to an auto-fetch when the email required a quick response. That’s where the solution comes in.

The solution does not configure an increase in auto-fetch of pop3 accounts in gmail but rather provides functionality to the Gmail Inbox interface so I can push one button to fetch (refresh) my Inbox page. Thanks to the script called GMAIL POP3 Quick Checker written by Tim Smart http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/51516 I can now effeciently keep up with all my emails. This script will add a “Refresh Pop3 Accounts” link just above the first email in Gmail’s Inbox of your account.

Gmail POP3 Quick Checker Link

You first need to add the Firefox plugin from GreaseMonkey https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 and then go to the script and click the install button.