Here are some of the top must do Twitter SEO tips to consider:

URL: Probably the most important thing. Don’t forget to have your URL visible in your profile. It only takes a few seconds to type in.

User Name: Your user name is also going to be listed in your domain so chose one wisely. If you pick something to cutesy you will have no chance of ranking in search results for your targeted keywords.

Description: Your description is used as the meta tag information for your profile so you can see where this would come in very handy to have optimized for your targeted keywords. Are you starting to see the overall goal of optimizing your profile?

Background: Take advantage of using your background to get more of your messaging across. You are allowed to upload your own background image so use it to either further your business brand or you can use the right hand side of the background to list some information about your services or your business.

Personality: Don’t let your profile seem like just a business even though you might be there to generate new leads. Try adding some personality to your profile. Ask your followers questions, have a contest show your audience that there is a human being behind that Twitter profile.

Hash Tags: This one is often overlooked by many people. If you drop a “#” before a word like SEO or any other keyword you might be targeting this will allow your tweet to show up in search results for when others search for that keyword.

Whenever dealing with any online social network or even a business profile optimization and SEO elements are very important. It doesn’t mean that it will rank all the time but if you are spending the time to create a profile you might as well make it 100% efficient in order to increase the possibilities of that profile ranking in search results.

On the flip side, it is important to understand who you business competitors actually are. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen companies not properly identify their competition. Just because you are in the same industry does not mean you are a competitor. If you have an established company that has a great reputation and brand and if you starting out then, I would think twice about considering them your direct competitor.

Now lets switch back for your competitors in the search engines. If they rank above you, why? Do they have more links, or better quality links than you? Are their pages well written using known SEO techniques? By analyzing what they are doing successfully, you can determine which areas need more work on your own pages. By analyzing those behind you, you can determine where they are improving and what strategies you need to undertake to maintain your position.

Here is a good list of SEO competitive research tools that I recommend:

1. Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics – Yes, these are 2 of the best free tools on the market. Before you can look at your competitors, I would look at and analyze your own website. Organic search visitor data and the amount of inbound links.
2. Compete – Compete has become a great and industry standard for competitive research that goes beyond SEO. They offer tool and several anayltics products that are truly excellent. I would recommend Compete to any marketer or business owner at every level of experience.
3. SEOmoz – If you are not going to hire an SEO expert or search engine optimization firm to help you with your SEO, I highly recommend SEOmoz. I consider SEOmoz to be advanced and is excellent for the marketer or business owner that “gets” search engine optimization. If you are a beginner then, I would look elsewhere. SEOmoz offers a full suite of tools including the competitive research aspect.
4. Link Diagnosis – Here is a good tool that combines some other link data, I think it pulls in data from Yahoo and Bing as well.
5. SEO Book Firefox Tool – Very good plugin to install on Firefox that gives some top level data about your competitors as you search. This one is a must use…I switched from the IE web browser to Firefox when I found and started using this tool.

Another important point here is to always remember to check your own analytics to determine which keywords are delivering visitors and conversions. Make sure you undertake a competitive analysis for those keywords as well. You may not be targeting them, but if they are delivering traffic, don’t let your competitors overtake you and steal that traffic away. Those phrases possibly rank well – can you improve their rankings and maintain that advantage? Competitive analysis is all about measuring your competition – just make sure you are assessing your competitors correctly.

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

They say it themselves – I am doing this for reference in meetings more thatn anything but it’s good to know/share

Everyone keeps telling us links are very important for our ongoing search engine optimization efforts. Some of these types of inbound links are obvious but some are not so obvious and could still generate both power and visitors to your website. It is important to understand all the variety of different types of relevant links that you are capable of achieving over time.

Here are some of the most important types of links to build to your website:

1. Press Releases: Press releases are a very important ingredient to any online marketing campaign. Links embedded into the press release can generate very useful links for your website from other industry related sites. If it is a really newsworthy topic and other websites pick up the information it will be even more beneficial in generating new pathways to your website.

2. Articles: Articles used to have a bit more weight to them but they are still very important. The right types of articles could very easily get picked up on other industry leading websites leading to very good links and a steady stream of highly targeted website traffic.

3. Profiles: Website profiles usually only give you one link but that one link is a very important link. Whether it is from Facebook or LinkedIn the links let the search engines know that you are serious about growing your business in many different areas online.

4. Forums: Most forums are very old so the links you could get from them will help your business in a great way. Not to mention the traffic you could generate from being active in a forum is sometimes very surprising. Many of the older forums have a great deal of activity and if it’s a forum dedicated towards your industry than you should be there regardless.

5. Local Profiles: Don’t think because you want to take your business international that listing yourself in the local places and directories isn’t important. The links will let the search engines know that you have a physical address connected with your business helping grow your trust factor.

6. Blog Comments: Leaving intelligent related comments behind on your targeted industry blogs is very helpful. Many of the links appear in Google webmaster tools all while driving highly relevant traffic to your website.

7. Industry Associations: Local online and offline industry associations are a great way to build trust with your website visitors. Often many times association memberships include the opportunity to have profiles and links to your website. This not only helps with link building but builds highly relevant visitors to your website.

These are some of the most important link sources you should have as part of your long term link building efforts. Remember it is important to diversify your approach so you never want to be top heavy on any of these efforts. Keeping your links balanced and growing is the name of the game.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, January 8, 2010

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, November 14, 2009

Over the last few years the search engine optimization industry has really taken the business community by storm. Some understand the process, some don’t have a clue and many are still left scratching their heads wondering what it really is and how it can help their business. The industry has become tougher and tougher over the years because there doesn’t seem to be any industry standards in place on how to get from point A to point B making the education process challenging. There are however some things that all search engine optimization people (yes, this includes all SEO experts, consultants, firms, agencies and wanna be SEOs) should never do. This list below may seem like common sense or business 101, but I felt it was time for me to write a post to the SEO industry folks who read this blog on a regular basis!

1. Beat an Effort into the Ground: Over the years we have found things that work and things that don’t work. The worst thing someone can do is to find that one little technique and beat it into the ground over and over. This is not marketing, just manipulation of search results. In today’s market place it takes a variety of efforts at the same time to bring an online marketing campaign together.
2. Focus on Just Rankings: Yes rankings are important but rankings alone don’t grow a business successfully. It is important to focus on marketing a business or website for the sake of growing the business and brand naturally. The goal of every website is to grow as a business should. There are many different ways to build a business online and rankings are just one ingredient. Potential customers and clients need to see you in multiple areas before they actually make that purchase.
3. Blowing Off Clients: You never want to blow off clients for any reason. If you anticipate a not so nice phone call it doesn’t matter. Communication in this industry is very important. Things change very quickly and easily in the internet marketing industry so if you are leaving your clients in the dark you could find yourself without clients very quickly.
4. Be Sneaky: SEO is not a secret sauce anymore. Many industry people have had a hard time revealing their efforts to clients leaving a certain mysterious undertone throughout the entire industry making things worse for everyone. It is not rocket science. Simply put it is quality proactive marketing that ultimately leads to your website being an authority figure in the search engines and as a result achieving high rankings in search results.
5. Give Guarantees: Any established search engine optimization expert will tell you that you cannot give guarantees of rankings in this industry. Things change sometimes over night and at the end of the day nobody has control over the search engines and how they behave except for the search engines themselves. Giving guarantees to people and not following through, which happens very often, only creates jaded businesses and business owners leaving a tainted image of the entire industry in the eyes of those clients.

It is important to realize that optimization is something that businesses never stop doing. I think when SEO was created it should have just been called “proactive marketing” because essentially that is what SEO really is. Do you think large brands just marketed their business for 30 or 45 days and then took a step back and grew into the giants they are today? No. SEO is an ongoing effort that is always changing and evolving. There are no magical pills or universal steps to getting it done because every business is different and requires different steps to achieve their goals. Marketing is an effort that you never stop doing for your business which is why it is important to realize the connection between SEO and marketing. Yes rankings are important but rankings alone don’t grow a business into a large brand.

Treating your website like a business is what will cause it to grow. Rankings don’t build a brand and keep customers long term. Being proactive and getting involved in social media and positioning your company as a leader in the industry is what will get your business to grow as a brand. SEO should always be approached with a quality versus a quantity approach. Spamming the search engines only to achieve high rankings is not going to help you or your business in the long run. Every website SEO campaign should be treated like a full grown marketing campaign. A well written press release topic announcing something very news worthy could go much further than one written just to help with rankings. The well written PR topic will also help with rankings because more websites will choose to link to it rather than just a keyword heavy press release designed to achieve rankings with little to no substance for the readers.

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, October 8, 2009

It happens every couple of years or so. Google will undergo a huge algorithm change that seriously affects some rankings. Sometimes those algorithm changes affect the search engine optimization strategies at a large number of websites – sometimes they affect a wide variety of different types of websites – and sometimes they only affect a few websites of a certain type. But you can bet that Google will drastically change its algorithms again at some point in the future. When it does, will that change affect your site in a negative way?

Search engines are unpredictable. In one sense. You don’t know what they’ll do next. But they are very predictable in that you know they’ll do something.

Google will likely make a large and serious algorithm change some time within the next two or three years. When it does there will be a lot of sites that fall in the rankings. Will yours be one of them? How can you prevent it?

The best way to prevent a huge fall or decline in rankings due to a search engine algorithm change is to not rely on any one method of SEO or online marketing too much. In other words, don’t put all your hopes on one link building strategy. Diversity is really the best defense you have against out-of-the-blue search engine algorithm changes.

And most of all I always recommend following Google’s Webmaster and optimization guidelines at the following links:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

The important things to understand is that the Google algorithm might change over time but the basics won’t!

From Nick Stamoulis at http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com

I don’t want to knock developers because we need them. There are some things that search engine optimization experts just aren’t qualified to handle. A good developer is a huge asset to any company, large or small. But I have noticed that many developers do not give a moment’s thought to SEO. And for the most part it is due to the way they are trained.

That’s why I was intrigued by reading about a web developer who discovered the world of SEO.

I found the story to be quite riveting, actually. And it’s the perfect testimony for the importance of optimization in your website development. If you have a developer who doesn’t understand SEO or care to understand SEO then you might want to provide that developer with some training in the topic or introduce him or her to a search engine professional who can work with him. It’s important to include a well-trained SEO on your website development team. That person can be a developer with knowledge of SEO or it can be an SEO without a development background. In either case, your development team needs to have a web developer and an SEO on it. It’s essential.