Matt Leonard over at Search Engine Journal recently wrote about Twitter SEO: 4 Simple Tips to Help Your Twitter Profile Rank. If you’ve got a Twitter account and want to make sure your profile appears the way you want in search engines, then this is a good article to review. Here is a brief review of Matt’s suggestions:

1. Optimize the title tag by using your actual name instead of your Twitter username.
2. Optimize the meta description  by writing a good “one line bio”.
3. Build followers, links and PageRank. Followers who have pages with higher PageRank can help boost your profile’s PageRank and good quality tweets should help with conventional SEO.
4. Link to your Twitter profile using your name as the link anchor text every now and then.

If you have any questions about these Twitter SEO tips, check out the whole article.

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Last year I created a personal blog and wanted to optimize it for search engine traffic. So, as expected, I googled “wordpress seo” to see if anyone had written tips on optimizing a WordPress blog. Sure enough, I came across a number of articles on the subject.

One of my favorite articles is Joost de Valk’s WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for Your Blog. Joost takes a “holistic view of SEO” and goes through many of the steps necessary to set up a blog for search engine optimization. Some of these include:

1. Basic Technical Optimization reviews permalink structure and optimizing, titles, descriptions, the “more text”, and images.
2. Template Optimization which covers how to use breadcrumbs, headings, code, speed, and sidebars to advantage.
3. Advanced Technical Optimization shows how to avoid duplicate content penalties and manage the flow of “link juice” through a site.
4. Altering a Blog’s Structure for High Search Engine Rankings points out the importance of turning posts into “pages” and linking to related posts.
5. Conversion Optimization shows how to turn readers into subscribers.
6. Comment Optimization and Off-Site Blog SEO give tips about how to involve readers with a blog and connect with other bloggers.

Even though the article covers a number of technical considerations that are specific to WordPress blogs, bloggers using other platforms can benefit by applying these guidelines to Blogger, TypePad, and other platforms.

And of course, just setting up a blog is only part of the work. Unless the posts make effective use of keyword research, they won’t be optimized. However, we’ll save that topic for a later post.

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Following Larry’s post that blogs are hot, Googler Matt Cutts recently presented at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 and posted his slides at Straight from Google: What You Need to Know. Mr. Cutts presented some tips for optimizing a WordPress blog for Google. A few points that caught my attention:

• WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of search engine optimization.
• Google crawls roughly in decreasing order of PageRank.
• Use categories that are also good keywords.

While there is perhaps nothing earth-shaking or new contained in his slides, it’s always good to get another blogger’s perspective on optimizing a blog for Google. Good information if you have a few minutes to scan through 50 slides or so.

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Recently, Danny Sullivan posted a story that SEO Makes Front Page of Los Angeles Times. This particular story caught my eye since Larry previously blogged about The Shrinking World of Newspapers.

As evidence of this trend, the Times story It’s Web 101 for this experienced intern describes how former TV Guide magazine editor Lois Draegin lost her job and is now an unpaid intern at The Women on the Web.

“The Women on the Web,” or WOW, needed Draegin’s magazine-world wisdom, and she needed their guidance through a maze of technology that was as baffling to her as hieroglyphics. In a search for a new job in the media, she had suddenly found herself techno-challenged. She didn’t know a URL from SEO.

It wasn’t until she was teamed up with Randi Bernfeld at WOW that she understood the obsession with terms such as search engine optimization (a method to increase traffic to a website) or used Google Trends to pick story topics and write a uniform resource locater (Web address).

Previously,

. . . she hadn’t bothered to learn such skills as writing tags and URLs because she was paid to think globally about the direction of her magazine. Now she had to think globally not only about each topic but about every word she wrote in the URL, headline, subhead, tag and links in the story.
Everything had to be crafted to draw readers.

“It’s really a challenge to do all of that at once,” Draegin said.

As Mr. Sullivan said:

As part of her new job, she’s discovered that how people search — and maintaining a search friendly web site — is an essential part of the content process.

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Today I noticed that the article 5 Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links for Maximum Benefit got Sphunn. As alluded to in the post Google Quickly Defuses Obama Google Bomb, “links are an important signal in [Google’s] PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful (see More Ways for You to Give Us Input).

Here are five suggestions by Gyutae Park that will help you “optimize existing links to your site and increase their SEO value. This will help you to obtain more direct traffic and creep up in the search engine rankings for your targeted keywords.”

1. Ask for more links – One way to get more links to your site is to simply ask other webmasters for them.
2. Optimize link anchor text – Sometimes bloggers and webmasters link to a a site using poor anchor text such as “click here.” Make sure others link to your site using keywords in the anchor text.
3. Correct errors – Monitor 404 errors on your site to ensure that pages which link to your site use the correct URL.
4. Change link locations – If a site links to a page on your site that is blocked from indexing by a search engine, ask the webmaster to link to another page on your site – and if possible – from a page with high PageRank.
5. Turn your site name references into valuable links – Search for websites that mention your site – but don’t link to it -and ask the webmaster to link to the site with the suggested link anchor text.

This is just a brief review on optimizing links to your site, so check with the original article for additional information.

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Last week Fox News reported Google Quickly Defuses Obama Google Bomb (see Unlike Bush’s ‘Google Bomb,’ Google Quickly Defuses Obama’s). Here’s an excerpt of the story:

In 2003, President Bush’s detractors successfully gamed the Google search engine by arranging to have countless Web sites link the words “miserable failure” to Bush’s official biography on the White House Web site.

The result was that when someone typed the search term “miserable failure” into the Google search box, Bush’s bio rose to the top of the search results.

And that’s how it stayed until 2007, when Google developed an algorithm to detect what became known as “Google bombs” and re-directed the term “miserable failure” to non-political pages.

Unfortunately for Obama, “miserable failure” reverted back to his bio when he moved into the White House. The new president was also Google-bombed with the phrase “cheerful achievement.”

But this time, Google stepped in quickly, rectifying the situation in a few days, instead of four years.

Below is an example of the results you would have gotten in Google a number of years ago for the query “miserable failure”.

Here is an excerpt of Google’s response to this “Googlebombing ‘failure’”:

Regardless of your political persuasion, Google bombs underscore the power of link juice. Recently, Scott Dimmick blogged Are You Helping the Opposition’s Cause? and pointed out how linking affects a site’s PageRank. I recommend a read through if you are concerned where you send your site’s link juice.

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Adding an XML Sitemap to your blog is one way to ensure your blog is getting indexed by all the major search engines. And unless the content in your blog is getting indexed by an engine like Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask, and others, it won’t be found by search engine users.

According to the Sitemaps web site:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Since I have a WordPress blog, I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. After installing and configuring the plugin, my blog’s inclusion ratio – or the ratio of pages in a search engine’s index divided by the total number of web pages – has consistently hovered above 95%. The image on the left indicates that at present, Google has indexed 756 pages of LDS Media Talk.

TypePad, Blogger, and other blog platforms provide similar functionality. For example, see TypePad: Creating a Google Sitemap, WordPress: XML Sitemaps, and Blogger: Sitemaps and Blogs.

Although adding a Sitemap to your blog won’t guarantee that web pages are added to a search engine’s index, it’s simply another way to ensure your blog is search engine friendly.

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We recently ran a list of the most frequently misspelled words or phrases that people have entered into the search box on LDS.org. The following is a portion of the list from June 2008, and shows the number of times someone spelled the term that way during the month. It is interesting to see how people think words are spelled.

• geneology 611
• repentence 280
• pagent 268
• poligamy 124
• patriartical blessing 166
• patriachal blessing 103
• book of morman 65
• sacrafice 65
• sacrement 60
• babtism 56
• melchezidek 56
• confrence talks 55
• preperation 39
• priestood 37
• grattitude 36

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Another post from the Web 2.0 Expo:

Integrating SEO, Usability, and Internet Marketing for High Performance Results

Web sites are not “projects.” They are living, breathing environments. SEO, usability, and Internet marketing are often introduced on completion of the site and retrofitted later to support visibility and promotion to target audiences. This is counter-intuitive and country-productive.

Every aspect of the experience needs to be optimized with intent:

• Web site architecture
• user experience and interface
• content
• metadata
• assets
• media & publicity
• Internet marketing

Proven methodologies

• Competitive research and positioning (not copying other successful sites)
• Keyword research and positioning
• Ongoing content management
• Metadata optimization
• Formatting to maximize efforts, leverage best practices for widespread success (metadata, keyword utilization, etc.)

Since search engine algorithms change, best practices sustain these changes over time, without putting your site at risk of being blacklisted and will perform best for YOUR Web site.

True SEO incorporates (1) company mission, (2) unique value proposition, and (3) pre-qualification of audience. You want to attract people who are perfectly matched to your content.

Usability:

• Give your visitors what they want as quickly as possible.
• Promote engagement before they “bounce” (leave your site).
• Empowers the user to control the experience.
• Empowers viral marketing.
• Provides clear execution of desired outcome at all times.
• Promotes conversion.
• Answer every conceivable question or objection leading to the conversion.

Your mission is to meet the immediate and long-term needs of your audience.

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