The main aspect of SEO is increasing the rankings that a website has. In lamence terms, this means manipulating your content so that your website appears at the top of the results.

That said, let me share a short anecdote. Many years ago, when I was just learning how to code websites, I didn't really understand the concept of validating your XHTML. See, I was one of those people who learned how to code a website using tutorials on the internet, and so I wasn't instilled with the concept to using valid code. Tiny mistakes in my coding would render my code not valid. All I had to do was fix little mistakes, and everything would be okay.

The same can be said of search engine rankings. Visualize valid XHTML as synonymous to your website appearing at the top of a query's results. One little error in SEO techniques will render your code invalid. Like fixing invalid code, changing something to increase your search engine ranking is usually small, so let me offer to techniques:

First, include a descriptive title bar. When you open a webpage, whether you know it or not, a title bar displays on your screen. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, then on the upper-left hand corner of your screen, you will see a small image of a fox, followed by the title of your website, followed by "- Mozilla Firefox." This is the title bar, and it is one of the most overlooked ways to increase your ranking. I can't tell you how many times I've been to a website whose title bar reads "Homepage." First, the word homepage includes no information for a search engine. A more descriptive title would be "Corporate Search Optimization Blog: Howto increase search engine rankings." Now, when a spider is crawling your website, it will see something much more descriptive.

Second, determine your link popularity. Link popularity is the number of quality sites that link your your site. Nowadays a supermajority of search engines use some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. There are many free, online tools that you can use to determine your link popularity. Submit Express offers one (link to: http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/).

While most people would overlook these two simple things, they're a lot like adding alternate text to an image when W3C renders your XHTML invalid. It's the little things that count, and these will definitely set you in the right direction.

I have owned an iPhone for almost a year now, and I, like the rest of the community have been subject to the "there's an app for that" joke. The joke follows as such: whatever jam you're in, there's an app that will get you out of it. If you need to defuse a bomb and rescue the mayor’s niece with mere seconds to spare, there’s an app for that. If you wanted to finally figure out if Shcrodinger’s cat is dead, there’s an app for that. We all know that there's an app for just about everything. Just the other day, I read the following article about a real-world instance where the iPhone has come in handy: Alone in the darkness beneath layers of rubble, Dan Woolley felt blood streaming from his head and leg. Then he remembered -- he had an app for that. Woolley, an aid worker, husband, and father of two boys, followed instructions on his cell phone to survive the January 12 earthquake in Haiti. "I had an app that had pre-downloaded all this information about treating wounds. So I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound fracture," Woolley told CNN. Read the rest of the article. http://alturl.com/ym5e The aforementioned man had been trapped in the ruins of a hotel in Port-au-Prince as a result of the earthquake the struck Haiti, and remembered he had an app that would help him survive. He looked up what to do on his app, including how to treat for shock, and was pulled from the rubble more than 60 hours later. While some perceive the "there's an app for that" saying as merely a joke, there really is a wide-variety of apps for everything, and chances are that one of them can save your life.

Two of the most popular blogging platforms online are Blogger and WordPress.  With both platforms, users can sign up for a free blog and are given the additional option of purchasing a custom domain for their blog. There are many key differences between accounts at Blogger.com and WordPress.com, and your decision to use the former or the latter to host your blog is based solely upon what features you think a content management system should include.

Let’s begin with themes, because every blogger is obsessed with how their website looks. With Blogger, you are free to edit any of the themes, style sheets and colors, and you can also install a third party theme (a popular website that offers free downloadable Blogger themes is BlogSkins). There’s a catch, however, and that is that Blogger has a unique markup language, so in order to create your own theme, some learning is involved. WordPress seems to fall on the entirely opposite end of the spectrum, where there is no template editing available to users, and style sheet editing is available as a paid upgrade. Select WordPress themes allow you to upload a header image, and even then, many of the available WordPress themes are quite disappointing.

The next issue that arises is how images are stored and how much storage space you get. Unless you have an image heavy blog (like a photo blog or a showcase of your work), bloggers don’t tend to use that much image space. Blogger gives users 1GB of image storage and all images are uploaded to a Picasa Web Album gallery that is linked to your Google Account. WordPress on the other hand, gives users 3GBs (paid upgrades are available) of images, .ppt, .doc, and .pdf file storage and you can add an image gallery to any post. If you’re concerned about uploading other types of files on Blogger, you can always upload .ppt, .doc, and .pdf files to Google Docs.

Another thing that will tear bloggers’ opinions is the static page feature. WordPress has consistently allowed the publishing, editing, and deleting of static pages. Blogger, on the other hand, does not offer the same time of availability. At a first glance, the unavailability of this feature on Blogger seems a little disappointing, however, with some patience and time, static pages can be artificially created.

Those are the main ones, but of course, there are many more feature differences that I didn’t discuss.  Or of course you could always create your own from scratch like Corporate Search Optimization and NetScope did.

Check out these great postings from the week. I highly recommend Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques

Have a great weekend!

Bad SEO Techniques That Will Hurt Your Google Rankings

Blow Your Mind Link Building from SMX Advanced Seattle

Google Releases AdWords Editor Version 6.0

Google Site Search Now Includes Custom Indexing; Will it Improve Your Google Rankings?

25 Blog Optimization Tips Even Dear Old Dad Could Ace (Plus 10 More Tips for Mom!)

Why Sculpting PageRank Is Not For Everyone

Winning From The Start: Getting Ad Copy Right

Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques

Wow… it’s been 3 weeks since I’ve updated this blog. Sorry for the MIA, it’s been a busy couple weeks! Hope you’ve been following up on your SEO news, if not, here is our top picks of the week to get you back on track. Have a great weekend!

More People are Looking at Google Ads, Says comScore

How to manage your pay per click campaigns to help you avoid common PPC mistakes and Google Ad Words Gaffs! (AKA Top of the PPC flops!)

8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics

Google, Yahoo & Microsoft : SEO Influence of Keywords in Domain Names

How Many Google Penalties Are There?

Nielsen: Google Hits New Search Share High

More partner site examplers from the Google content network

“Yes M’am, Yes You In The Back Row” [13 Web Analytics Questions]

Sorry about missing last week’s SM BLinks. I was really swamped and was not able to make the post in time. Anyway, the BLinkings continues. Here are top posts of the weeks. Enjoy!

What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

Place ads on television with Google TV Ads

The Main Factor Necessary to Convert Visitors to Customers

“Dear Avinash”: Stressed Agency Analyst & Robots Are Out To Get Me!

Site Re-Design? Call Your SEO Expert First

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