It's been a taxing week, especially for those of us in the United States, but now you can relax with the SEO Chat newsletter! Speaking of relaxing...if Memorial Day weekend plays any role in your sales, it's not too early to start thinking about it. Remember, you want to optimize far enough ahead so that you'll be hitting the top of the SERPS when potential customers start doing seasonal searches.

Before I dive into the great SEO articles that we have for you this week, let me tell you about the article we're highlighting for you from eWeek. If you're in the market for an ultra portable PC, this model from Lenovo sounds very droolworthy indeed -- and is priced to match. Then again, if you want a PC with a solid state hard drive, you can expect to pay through the nose. Is it worth it? Click through to our review to find out.

On Monday we ran an article about social media optimization and making it work for you. With social sites becoming increasingly popular, you don't want to miss this opportunity to promote your site and increase your traffic. On Tuesday we published the second part of a two-part article on creative ads. In this part we focused on the basic needs that ads claim their products and/or services will fill, with examples to inspire your own efforts. Finally, on Wednesday we encouraged you to think like a searcher when it comes to choosing your keywords so that you'll be found by the people who are looking for exactly what you have to offer. Pull off that little trick and you'll increase your site's traffic AND conversions!

We're all about ways to promote your web site with the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting for you this week in Tutorialized. Learn 65 ways to get traffic to your web site, 11 ways to get free traffic to your brand-new site, and more. Point your browser to Tutorialized and check them out today!

Our Thread of the Week deals with a common problem that comes up after a site redesign. Our original poster has lost some ground in the SERPs for some of his keywords, and wants to get it back. Stop by the thread and share your experiences.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, shares in the good luck and hard work of one of our regular forum members -- after sixteen months, he managed to beat a major competitor in the SERPs. How did he do it? Scroll down to the Spotlight and find out.

Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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Watch the video!

SEOs and site owners fight hard to get a top position on the search engine results pages for their chosen keywords. But that is only half the battle at best. If you have optimized your way to the top but still are not seeing the traffic and conversions you hoped for, keep reading.

When you started optimizing your web site, you probably read a number of articles that urged you to think like a search engine. We've published several of those kinds of articles here at SEO Chat; I've even written one myself recently. There's nothing wrong with these articles, but they don't quite give you the whole picture.

Most of these articles mention at least some of the following points:

• Search engine spiders can't see images and video, so you need include alt tags with a concise description and keywords.
• Keywords must fall naturally; do not stuff them. Include them strategically in titles, headers, and content. Search engines judge relevance based in part on keyword content.
• Search engines love fresh content; if possible, update your site regularly (here at the Shed, we shoot for at least three times a week).
• Search engine spiders choke on dynamic URLs; use static ones whenever possible.
• Get other sites to link back to your site with your keywords to indicate to the search engines that your site is relevant for that topic.

Read Think Like a Searcher to Increase Your Traffic

Creative Advertisements: Psychology of Winning Ads
by Barzan 'Tony' Antal
2008-04-15

This is the second part of the two-part series on creative advertisements. Thanks for tuning in. In this segment, we're going to focus on the psychology of "winning advertisements." The theme of the article is recognizing the ingredients for success, which, when combined, can turn a "so-so" advertisement into a "huge seller." Now, where you apply your newly learned skills is totally up to you, whether it is to create the marketing campaign of a multinational corporation or just to edge up the popularity of your personal site.

The first article of the series covered the psychology of the flow of creativity. We identified the problems that may hinder our potential and provided solutions for overcoming them. In case you missed it, I strongly suggest checking it out. It is published here on SEO Chat.

It is really important to know what is truly important in sales and advertising. This can save you countless hours that you may have lost through trial-and-error. Sure, we cannot afford to be afraid to fail, but we should do our best to learn and grow. And we can do it through the experience of others.

Read Creative Advertisements: Psychology of Winning Ads

Making Social Media Optimization Work for You
by Terri Wells
2008-04-14

Social media optimization is the art of using social web sites to promote your business or organization. If you do it right, you can attract thousands of visitors to your web site, to say nothing of the number of links. This article will explain SMO and offer some tips.

Social media optimization, sometimes called "social media marketing," was first discussed online on August 10, 2006, by Rohit Bhargava, vice president of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations. He posited five rules of social media optimization; his original blog post has expanded to encompass 17 rules, which I have written about previously.

It was in 2007 however, that social media optimization really began to hit its stride. In the past year I have seen at least as many articles about SMO as I have about more traditional SEO. Additionally, many SEO articles that describe the variety of things you can do to promote your web site will include a section that covers social media optimization. They may not use that name, or even any particular name, but what they describe is taking advantage of social media sites to generate buzz, visits, links and hopefully conversions.

Read Making Social Media Optimization Work for You

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

Submit your website the right way!
Easy steps to submitting your website in the right category.
Read the tutorial.

Promoting your website on a low budget
Learn how to promote your site on a low budget!
Read the tutorial.

How to Promote Site to Increase Traffic
SEO is about promoting your site to the world.
Read the tutorial.

65 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website
Learn how to promote your site on a low budget!
Read the tutorial.

6 way to gain traffic to your site-part 1
6 way to gain traffic to your site-part without any spam.
Read the tutorial.

11 Ways to Get Free Traffic to your Brand New Site
Your new site is live. How do you get visitors?
Read the tutorial.

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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.

It's fairly common, when you have to make major changes to your web site, to be concerned about the effects on your ranking in the SERPs. Even if you get completely indexed, you may find you're no longer ranking for the keywords you expect. Our original poster for this week's Thread of the Week is experiencing this problem. Be sure to stop by the thread and offer your advice.

Wrong description in Google Index

Hi, after recent changes to my website (removing old pages and adding new ones) Google has indexed virtually all the pages but the ranking of some of them is so low they cannot be found, and the description accompanying the indexed entry is not the description on the page, it is part of the Shop menu. an example can be seen at kudubikes(dot)co(dot)uk/shop/27. I assume as a by product of this our hits have been cut by 70%.

Help, any ideas what could be causing it?

first off you changed the page names, this removed any links and rankings associated with those pages.

the pages are starting from the beginning. You should have 301 your pages from the beginning.

now you have asked Google to remove them, this is the right thing to do for now.

Make sure your internal linking structure is good. Ie. text links to other pages within your site.

see if you had anyone linking to your old pages, contact them and see if they will link to your new pages.

Wait Wait Wait and keep building links.

P.S. Blow up your meta tags they are useless.

Thanks for that. I think you are right, but we are getting some funny results. Google Webmaster Tools now tells me to boost the meta description and make it bigger. So much for those who say meta tags are dead.

Cheers

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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Beating About .com

The great thing about the SEO Chat forums is that they really are a community; we offer help, celebrate our victories, and share our secrets. So when MaximumTadpole recently beat About(dot)com in the SERPs after sixteen months of effort for his chosen keyword, there was a fair bit of virtual backslapping, as well as some people wanting to know how he did it. Some were especially interested in his link building technique, "Because emailing and asking sure doesn't work well," noted one poster.

After acknowledging the difficulties with getting links for a web site that just sells stuff, MT explained his approach. He does email, but he never asks for the link in his first contact. He doesn't even mention SEO or linking to his site in the first email. Rather, he'll sincerely praise the site from which he would like to get a link, and then ask the owner to take a peek at his site and give some feedback or suggestions. He'll ask for a link an email or two later, and offer to link back to the site as well.

MT noted that he did very little on-page optimization to achieve his victory. "I messed with the title tags throughout the site, but I spent most of the time going after colleges' department of health web sites," he explained. This made sense, since his chosen key word was related to medicine, and it is widely believed that Google gives more weight to links from .edu sites.

Another forum member who recently managed to beat About(dot)com as well hinted that it might be getting easier. "About(dot)com gets its power from it's size, but the changes are often outdated and not really as valuable as others." He said that it still takes hard work in "building valuable linkable content" to beat About(dot)com.

As for MT, his hard work is starting to pay off. He had the top spot for just three days at the time he posted, but he's already seeing a huge spike in traffic. Now he'll have to work to maintain his top position.

Read the thread for this article.