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SEOQuake is a great extension for Firefox (now compatible with FireFox3!) that will show you almost anything you would want to know about the indexing of any website on the internet. There are a few ways to use it, you can have it show up as a sidebar-like device, a toolbar, or only shown under each website listing on a number of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati and a few others, I am sure.) This little thing will show you the Google Page Rank, Google Index, Google Links, Google Cache Date, Yahoo Index, Yahoo Links, Yahoo Link Domain, Yahoo Directory Links, MSN Index, MSN Links, Alexa Rank, Webarchive age of the domain, the robots.txt file for the website, a link to the WhoIs info, the keyword density of any specific webpage, and a whole lot more if you chose to include SEOQuake’s own little add-ons for this Firefox Add-on. (Would that make the SEOQuake add-ons like sub-add-ons for Firefox? I think we have stumbled onto something here…)

At first it all seems a bit confusing since there is a potential for so much information to be shown at once. If you are a beginner to the whole SEO scene, its best to take it slow and only really concentrate on the Google listings for now. Then you can go and read up on Link Domains, indexing, robots.txt and other META TAG information. If you are already pretty well versed in Search Engine Optimization knowledge, feel free to go ahead and customize the individual options inside of SEOQuake to fit your personal preferences. SEOQuake is not for everyone, and it may confuse and even enrage some users because it tends to slow down your browser a bit if you have it automatically loading on each page-click. The key here is to set all the options to ‘on request’ in the SEOQuake preferences to keep your normal browsing more or less unchanged.

If you do not want the SEOQuake sidebar-device OR the toolbar, you can just choose to turn both off and have SEOQuake only show you Search Engine Optimization information when you are playing around with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati, or your search engine of choice. Under every single hit on the search engines will be that little SEOQuake bar that you can click on to view more in-depth information about a particular website. This way you can do some basic checking up on your close competitors and see exact why they are in front of you in the rankings (for example, on the first page of Google for a certain keyword.)

A simple weblog (shortened to Blog nowadays) is one of the easiest ways to both drive traffic to your website, and generate some dynamic content for your website. Both of these things are great for Search Engine Optimization. Anyone can post on a blog, its a fairly simple task. The key is remembering to blog regularly (at least once a week for the best results.) Most blogging systems out on the internet are both free and easy-to-use. Blogger, WordPress, and Serendipity all use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors that look very similar to Microsoft Word, so many users can easily format blog posts. With functions such as bold, italic, underline, font, size, format, paragraph, strikethrough, and many others, blogging software is not just for power-users or internet geniuses anymore.

With so many free and easy solutions out there, blogging is just a few mouse-clicks away.

When you search on Google or Yahoo, did you ever wonder why some sites show up at the top, and other ones are buried pages deep?  Search sites like Google, Yahoo, msn.com, ask.com are called "Search Engines."  These Search Engines have automatic programs that electronically surf the web and look at web sites to decide the rank based on their secret formula for relevance.  Then they store the information in gigantic databases.  The rankings from this data are called "Natural" listings.  This is in contrast to "sponsored" listings which are paid ads that place your link in special areas on the search results page.  Usually these ads are labeled "Sponsored Links" or are on a blue background.  There are also ad programs such as the "Ads by Google" boxes that you see on many web sites.  Research shows that users are far more likely to click on a natural listing before a paid listing when both are showing.

"Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) service will create or modify a web site to make it naturally relevant to the search engines…thus increasing the natural visibilty for the site on the web, without having to purchases expensive paid listings.

Go to the Atomic Medium Web site for more information on SEO.

When you are working with SEO it is important to not only take note on what is going on in the website’s content and code, but you also need to look at the URLs. People often do special tricks to get things listed (especially with blogs and other dynamic sites) but what about regular old static web pages on information site? Well, word separation of course! You will see tons of optimized sites across the internet using hyphens and underscores to separate the names of their individual pages. Both are used prevalently, but which ones should you be using to help with your site?

To answer that question head over to Google and type in “sleep therapy”. Now open a new window and search “sleep_therapy” with an underscore and in a third one search for “sleep-therapy” hyphenated. Notice the difference? Google sure does! While in the search with the underscore (_) we find results that only contain our search term as it is, the search with the hyphen (-) returned results as if the hyphen wasn’t even there.

So how does this help with SEO, you ask? It has a wide range of possibilities mostly with keyword-rich URLs in your links like “http://mydomain.com/small-business-internet-solutions.html”. Everyone knows more keywords within your website = more relevant content = better overall ranking.

So the next time you are making a new_page.html, consider making it a new-page.html.

In this day and age it is obvious to even the smallest business that the internet is a broad medium of interaction between yourself and prospective customers. Yet with the hundred of millions of people who are online at any given moment you still have to be found by those people before they can be considered a customer (or even a possible one!). Everyone knows that when you want to find something on the internet you need to go to a search engine like Google, Ask, or Yahoo, but understanding how to make your site show up when someone is looking for your services is the hard part. This is where SEO comes in.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the concept of using tried, true methods to improve your standing (often referred to as Rank) on those popular search engines. The higher your rank, the more likely you are to show up for the search terms that you want to.

Of course, it is never that simple. While there are some general standards that go across every search engine (such as keywords and the amount of content you have) that can help your ranking, there are also some that only help you on certain search engines or that could help your ranking one month and the next not help it at all. Google, for example, has their own set of rules that they apply to the websites they list, and if you break the rules there can be consequences (lower rankings, not being listed for searches, and in the worst case scenario ‘black-listing’ of your pages!). While the search engines don’t just have all of their standards publicly released with all the specifics for everyone to follow exactly, SEO specialists take the time to figure out what works best on websites to get you to come on the first page for any given search. These methods are utilized in Search Engine Optimization to help get your website to search engines faster and closer to the first page.

The changing standards and endless competition between your website and your competitors makes the method to getting yourself ranked in search engines far from an exact science. Companies and SEO specialists out there that can help you with getting your website seen often have plenty of experience in experimenting with techniques that get websites ranked quickly and the knowledge to know how to keep them there for long periods of time, regardless of an influx of new competition the difficulty of getting a keyword ranked. However, there are some basic tips and tricks you can follow to get your website on the right track:

1. Use relevant keywords. Even though you want your company to show up when people search for “cell phones” does the term show up anywhere on any of your web pages? Picking keywords that also appear in your website lets a search engine know that your website actually contains something relevant.
   
2. The more (relevant) text the better. If your website has 3 lines of text on each page, your competitor with 4 lines will always look better to the search engines. The more (relevant!) content on a page, the better experience for your visitors and the more the search engines want to refer people to it.
   
3. And finally, always spell check. Bad spelling just looks bad, and the search engines know when you typo (and so will your visitors). Make sure you double check your spelling and grammar before posting something to the internet. A few mistakes here or there won’t hurt, but bad grammar through the whole website is bad for your ranking and your reputation to those possible customers.