It's nearly the end of the week, so it must be time for the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. Easter may have ended, but Passover is on the way. Of course the usual holidays aren't the only things for which to optimize your site; if you have big regional events coming up, you'll want to catch the attention of potential attendees. That's true even if you're not in that region. For example, Burning Man attracts lots of artists, and there are even regional "PreHeat" events (there's one in Florida this month, in fact). If you sell supplies that would be popular with these kinds of artists, you might want to make that known on your site.

And if that sounds like a good tip, you'll want to check out all of the other great information we have for you this week on SEO Chat. First, though, let me tell you about the article we're highlighting for you this week from eWeek. If you're a VAR, or work with VARs (either as suppliers or clients), you'll definitely find it an interesting read. It covers the trends VARs face today and in the months to come.

As a follow-up to last week's article on keeping track of your online reputation, we published an article on Wednesday that tells you how to respond to negative publicity online. Yes, it's scary when you see something negative about you or your company appearing in Google near the top of the results, but you can do something about it. On Tuesday we started a two-part article on writing creative ads; this part helps you get past the blocks that keep you from being creative. Finally, we started off the week with a review of Blogged.com, a clean little blogging search engine with some good ideas that just might get you more readers.

We cover the basics and more in the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting this week from Tutorialized. Learn how to choose keywords for your web site, how search engines operate, how to choose the right SEO service for your company, and more. Check them out today and reap the benefits of their advice!

Our Thread of the Week takes a look at SEO around the world. Are you living in an area that understands the value of SEO, or do the businesses in your part of the world not "get it" yet? How do the supply and the demand match up? Stop by the thread and sound off!

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, talks about some of the skills you need to be an effective SEO. You don't need to be programmer, but does that mean you don't need to know anything about web site design? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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Watch the video!

In a previous article, I talked about online reputation management. I explained why it is important to monitor your reputation online and how to do it. I also discussed what you should already be doing to manage your reputation. In this article, I will describe what you should do when the worst happens.

There is an old saying that any publicity is good publicity. Even the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie played into that belief; when Captain Jack Sparrow is told that he is the worst pirate someone has ever heard of, he quickly responds "But you HAVE heard of me." Anyone who runs a business, however, knows that this is simply not true; bad publicity is bad publicity, and can cost a large company millions of dollars, to say nothing of goodwill.

The Internet comprises a flood of user-generated content from social sites, blogs, forums, and review sites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Yahoo Local. If you read my previous article, you know what you need to do to monitor your reputation online. You've set up alerts for your company name, your important brand names, top people within your company, and maybe even a rival or two to keep an eye on the competition. You know that you need to monitor news stories, standard search results, significant sites and blogs in your field, and other areas.

Read Responding to Negative Publicity Online

Creative Advertisements: the Psychology of Flow
by Barzan 'Tony' Antal
2008-04-08

Attracting public attention or patronage in order to promote a certain product or service is always a tough task. In this computing era dominated by the Internet, advertising online has started to occupy a larger fraction of the marketing industry. In its very essence, advertising works under the same principles. In this article, we will discuss how to forge creative advertisements that sell. Thanks to the many possibilities of the World Wide Web, we can go digital and even self-promote our own products and/or services. Hundreds of years ago, you could not advertise with animated graphics and videos that could be broadcast and placed in front of millions. Still, as weird as it seems, this kind of freedom has hindered creativity in general. Lots of people are complaining and feeling overwhelmed by creative blocks.

In this two-part series we will approach the topic of building advertisements from different perspectives. First, we are going to identify some of the source problems that are preventing people from unleashing the creative flow of ideas, and then we can research together and find solutions.

Ultimately, we will actually talk about business and sales; our scope is to recognize the patterns behind ads that really sell. You can read about the latter in the upcoming segment, "Psychology of Winning Ads." There you are also going to find real-world examples where we analyze some of the best-known classic ads with our magnifying glass in order to demystify their success and help us recreate them.

Read Creative Advertisements: the Psychology of Flow

Blogged .com Offers Simple Way to Find Blogs
by Terri Wells
2008-04-07

If you are looking for a blog search engine, there is Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Feedster, and many more. So what does Blogged.com bring to the table that these other sites do not? It is easy to use, welcomes user rankings, and just might help you get more traffic. Keep reading to find out more.

Blogged .com first went live in late February with more than 200,000 blogs in its database; that is a very respectable number. It divides these blogs up into more than 100 different categories, which should help any eager blog reader find their favorite subject. To guide readers in choosing the right blog, rather than just listing everything in a particular category with relatively little information, it rates blogs on a scale of one to 10 and provides an overview of each blog.

Blog writers will be interested to hear that this quality rating is not based on the blogs traffic. The company has 10 full-time editors which rate blogs based on frequency, design, writing style, and relevance to the particular topic. In fact, it is the importance of relevance that sets Blogged .com apart from other blog search engines. For example, if you searched for "Clay Aiken" in Google’s blog search engine, you would find blog entries that reference the former American Idol icon. If you performed the same search with Blogged .com, you would find entire blogs whose main focus is on the singer (scary as that might sound).

Read Blogged.com Offers Simple Way to Find Blogs

Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

How to Choose Keywords for Website
Part of the SEO work is to put golden keywords in your website.
Read the tutorial.

Force Search Engines to Read Keywords
Beside choosing keywords, it will need to be read by spiders as well.
Read the tutorial.

How Search Engines Operate
How search engines and its spiders actually work? This article shows you how!
Read the tutorial.

SEO for Flash Optimization
While Flash content is attractive, it is not the case for spiders. Learn how to do it right!
Read the tutorial.

Honesty in Search Engine Optimization
SEO is not about how fast you can go, but what the quality of the SEO.
Read the tutorial.

Choosing Right SEO Service for Your Company
SEO service can be crucial to your business. Choose the right one!
Read the tutorial.

How can this SEO Newsletter be better?

What do you like or dislike about this issue?
Is there a topic you want to learn more about?
What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement,
so please email us. Email us.

Have you ever wondered how popular SEO is around the world? Wouldn't you like to know which areas have lots of businesses that understand the importance of SEO, and which ones can use a few clues? Here's a thread where you can find that out, and speak up for your location.

How popular is Seo in your region?

I request all members to reply. Please share with us your region/country and how popular or well paid is seo as a profession there.

Thanks

Atlantic Canada [Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island] - the need for SEO is very poor.

Most businesses cannot fathom the need to spend money for Internet Advertising & Promotion and this generally causes three issues.

1. Low end (non-preforming) SEOs charging low cost services (less than $5K) just to make a buck 'locally'.

2. Most clientele become disillusioned with SEO very quickly.

3. The longer few local firms invest in SEO the more it costs as time passes by... cause someone gotta pay to do the "catchup on the ROW"... adding to the problems associated with #1 & #2.

SEO is quote popular where I live. If you've ever used Wordtracker you'll see Dallas as a localized search stem for a lot of words rooted with seo and search engine optimization -- mostly because a lot of local companies are searching for their own company in the SERPs.

We're the home of Coppyblogger and SEO by the Sea (Bill Slawski).

There are a lot of fortune 500 companies here that are catching on. Most are using outside firms (Interactive divisions of ad agencies or small boutiques like the one I work for), but some are starting their own in-house division.

Most people I meet still don't "get" what I do in small talk, but it's getting better since the Wall Street Journal and New York Times publish articles about it with ever increasing frequency.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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What Skills Belong in an SEO's Skill Set?

As an SEO, you know that you need to keep up-to-date on all the best ways to promote your web site and get it noticed in the search engines. You need to know how to do on-page optimization, off-page optimization, build links, write content, choose keywords; the list goes on and on. But what other skills should you have that may not seem directly related to SEO?

To start with, you should know HTML. As an SEO you will need to edit HTML pages. It's nowhere near as complicated as knowing how to code in C, but it's still a coding language (of a sort), and a bit harder to write and edit than plain English. If something you do messes up the page you're working on, you'll need to know how to track it down and fix it.

HTML editors that you can use "without knowing any HTML at all," as they claim, are only a stopgap. Say "FrontPage" to any web developer or web site designer and you'll see what I mean. I had very little interest in learning HTML until I used that program; I found I had to go in and fix the HTML it kept messing up nearly every time I used it.

But it doesn't stop there. You need to be able to see the web site as a whole. You also need to see each part clearly, for itself and how it fits together with the other parts. One member of our SEO Chat forums, himself a web programmer, suggested that SEOs should have an understanding of server-side programming (even if they don't actually do it themselves). He also said that it's important to understand technical logistics are important, such as "scalability, code management, render times, manageability" and other factors.

If you didn't have a web site, you wouldn't have anything to optimize. What good is it if visitors see your web site in the SERPs and come to visit, only to find that it is unusable? So you may not need to be a programmer, but you do need to have a decent grasp of web development.

Read the thread for this article.