New to the world of SEO? Scratching your head as to where you can begin learning more? Read on!

There are a lot of interesting online tools out there for SEO. SEOMoz has some free site assessment tools, and the Pro toolset is actually very handy for assessing how your site fares against the competition. They’ve also got a bunch of great starter guides and articles. Another good high-level site overview tool I’ll use is Hubspot’s website grader. Although not perfect, it does give a pretty good quick summary of your site’s online marketing effectiveness.

There are kind of 2 camps of SEO factors:

1) on-site: website code, putting keywords into appropriate places, site copy, etc. SEOMoz has some really good starting guides that go through the basics.

2) off-site: number of links pointing to your site from sites with decent “authority” as determined by Google, Bing, etc. and the anchor text used in those links (e.g. if your site had 1000 links pointing to your website that were titled with relevant keywords, that would help your rankings a lot). A good way to generate incoming links to content on your site is through a blog that’s hosted on your domain. The other way is to just reach out to other related sites and ask for a link. Open Site Explorer is a handy tool to assess your number of inbound links. Yahoo Site Explorer is another.

Keyword research is important to both. There is a free keyword tool that Google offers and another one on SEOBook.com that’s pretty decent. To start you’re probably going to want to go after keywords with the lowest competition that still pull decent search volume, as opposed to the reverse strategy of going after the top search volume keywords that have relatively low competition.

This is just the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO, but hopefully it will provide some guidance to those just starting out and feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Have any questions? Comments? Feel free to post them and I’ll be happy to answer.

A very valuable metric in determining the performance of your SEO efforts is the brand / non-brand ratio. This is a measure of brand-related keywords to non-brand related keywords that helps to indicate how well your site is drawing traffic that wasn’t specifically looking for your product or brand. It’s a useful measure, but also one that can at first be a bit tricky to interpret, because while a lower b/nb ratio can mean your SEO efforts are succeeding, it can also be an indicator that your PR efforts are not doing as well as they could (due to lack of brand awareness).

When I was first starting out in the world of SEO, I was working with sites where the number of keywords that organic search traffic used to find a site was low. This made it feasible to simply go into Google Analytics and count the ratio by hand. As the site traffic (and the number of keywords used to find that site) grew, this became an increasingly arduous task.

My solution to this problem was to create an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to automate the calculation of the metric. Simply export your keyword data from Google Analytics as “.csv for Excel” and copy and paste the keywords into the Brand / Non-Brand Ratio Calculator spreadsheet. Enter in your brand-related terms in the box, and the spreadsheet will do the calculations for you.

Download the Brand / Non-Brand Ratio Calculator for FREE.

If you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, I definitely welcome your feedback.

Thanks and enjoy!

Lots of signs point to yes on this one, including this post from TechCrunch and Google’s recent acquisition of Gizmo5, a maker of internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers.

I’d like to know what other people out there think. Vote in my poll below and I’ll be posting a follow-up in a couple weeks with the results!

Many years ago, back when MySpace was the king of social networks and Facebook was just starting to make some noise, many people on MySpace would go around adding anyone and everyone as friends on their accounts so that they could brag about having “1,000 friends”.  Somehow this was supposed to make you cool, despite the absurdity of the notion that anyone actually has 1,000+ friends, or that after adding that many people to your profile it would become nearly impossible to search through your friends list to find the people who actually *were* your friends.

Now fast forward to 2009, and I’m having an eerie sense of deja vu in the form of Twitter.  Suddenly, for many people, it seems that the number of followers they have on Twitter is a measure of their self-esteem.  We have new tools available like SocialToo that enable us to automatically follow anyone who follows us, because god forbid they unfollow us (probably using SocialToo to auto-unfollow) for not following them back fast enough and our precious number of followers should fall.  Many may argue from either a personal or business standpoint that they need 20,000 followers because they want to be able to market/reach out to a broad audience…but really – if I’m @SwimmingProductsSuperstore I don’t think having followers like @IHateWater and @CantSwim is going to help me grow a targeted audience.

As an interesting experiment, for a short period of time I sent out tweets with nothing but nonsense and “buzz words”.  For example, I might have tweeted something like this:

@johnbixby: #SEM #SEO #marketing make money twitter grow followers fast product management tech seo sem online web design

And you know what happened?  I got more followers more rapidly during that time period than any other.  But what good is trying to build a following that way going to do me?  Probably none.  Because instead of picking up thoughtful and active followers through interaction on Twitter, I’ve picked up a bunch of followers set on auto-pilot who are probably just looking to spam people with products or services related to those keywords.

If you really want Twitter to be valuable for either yourself or your business, it’s much more productive to avoid the pitfalls of the “more followers legitimizes my existence” mindset and really work on building a following of thoughtful and active twitterers who share your interests.  If you’re a recovering followeraholic, I’d strongly urge you to spend some time “trimming the fat” from your list so that your timeline is full of more useful and relevant tweets from quality users as opposed to being clogged up with random garbage.  If you use Tweetdeck or Seesmic you may be able to survive this way, but the web is still the dominant Twitter interface out there and following these tips will make your life a much more pleasant one.