SEOmoz.org has a very comprehensive SEO Quiz that contains 75 really tough questions on SEO techniques, rules, myths and more.

I just took the quiz and was really surprised at the results. While I thought I had a pretty good grasp on SEO standards and guidelines, some of the questions were just down right hard, and I did not score as high as I had hoped. The good thing is, I have gained valuable information from my mistakes – your answers are listed at the end with the right answer highlighted with an explanation.

SEOmoz has one of the best collections of free SEO tools – from determining the strongest page on your domain to checking backlinks. Additionally, their premium content is a must for anyone serious about SEO and SEM.  SEOmoz offers professional, step-by-step guides that will teach you all the tricks and tactics necessary to improve your site’s traffic.

• I have been doing some work in the SEO/SEM realm for a client lately. Search Engine Journal’s 32 Important Search Marketing Acronyms has come in handy more than once.
• Samuel at Wake Up Later has put together one of the best lists for freelancers that I have read in a long time! It is 10 Absolute “Nos” for Freelancers – how many of these mistakes have you made at least once in your freelance career? I know I have made some of them.
• Robyn Tippins at Practical Blogging is having a contest – she wants to know what you do to make your area of the world a better place to be and the prize is a three year subscription to Search Marketing Standard and there is also a special deal that will benefit you and a very important charity. I’ll be entering later this week.
• Another gem from Search Engine Journal is Linkbait 101: How to Create Linkable Content and Get Others to Link to It.
• Wendy at eMoms at Home shares a great list of 27 Website Promotion Sources That Have Nothing to do with Google or SEO.
• Looking for some new blogs to read? Phil Gerbyshak has shared a list of more than 125 of his personal favorites - you know if he recommends them they are great!!

Thanks to all the web professionals who continue to share their knowledge, tips and insight so that we can all benefit!!

This is actually a post I did in October of 2006, but it is a useful tool that many of us often forget to use or don’t know exists.

While catching up on some good blogging info at MomGadget, I came across a post by Katelyn. It was about Wayback Machine and checking domains for skeletons in their closets.

The Wayback Machine is actually a very cool tool. You enter a domain name and you can go back through its archives and see what the site looked like in 1996, 1997, and every year thereafter. Archive.org also has tools for finding old music, videos and other media too.

Katelyn was lamenting her difficulty in getting a certain site of hers indexed on Google. She did everything right, from what she could tell, but still no success. She checked her site on Wayback Machine and suddenly it all made sense! The entity that had the domain before her was in a totally different market from her and let’s just say, the content wasn’t rated G, PG, or even R.

In the event that something like this happens to you, you can contact Google directly and plead your case, but I doubt there are any guarantees you’ll be able to convince them.

Tip of the Day – Check Wayback Machine before you buy your domain! You might uncover some skeletons.

“Walla Walla,” I asked? There is no mention of Walla Walla anywhere on your site. Never has been.

So I spent the next 30 minutes explaining to her that the search engines don’t have some special mind reading powers. If you want the search engine to find you based on a certain phrase, that phrase has to be somewhere on your site – preferably in more than one relevant place in the copy.

I try to educate my clients on the SEO basics:

1. Meaningful title tag
2. Keywords that are relevant and show up in the content
3. Solid Description
4. Keyword rich alt tags on images
5. Keyword rich descriptor tags on links
6. Plenty of original, well written, keyword rich (not spammy) content
7. Good site organization with clean, up to date coding
8. Don’t pay $99.99 for submission into “500 search engines”
9. Your typical small business web site will take about 6 months to really get anywhere on Google organically – they just don’t have the back links, page rank and update frequency to get there any faster.
10. If you are going to do a Google Adwords campaign or other paid sponsorship campaign, you really need to educate yourself and enlist the services of a professional.

And while I do my best to hammer home that doing the basics, mixed with good quality content and revisiting this list every few months to tweak, I still seem to get the same question – “Why doesn’t my site show up #1 for widgets in walla walla?”

I would love to know how you educate your clients on SEO. What tips do you give them? What are some of your favorite articles on SEO for the average small business client?

Notice that not only StumbleUpon, but also Digg are being categorized as links from an Internet Search. Interesting.

From looking at the rest of the stats, it appears that the StumbleUpon and Digg traffic indicated in the Internet Search category is different from that coming from another category – Links from an External Page:

It appears that traffic coming from StumbleUpon and Digg in the Internet Search category are the results of people using those sites’ search functions and finding my pages, where as the traffic from the external page links are the result of people stumbling upon my pages or clicking on them directly within the Social Bookmarking sites.

Have social bookmarks “arrived”? Am I beginning to see the another benefit of using social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg? Or both? I’d love your take on it!

Related post:

• Essential Tools for Social Media

Aaron is sharing his favorite SEO Research tools.

Keyword Research Tools

Using a combination of these tools together allows you to compare results and determine the best keywords to target.

Paid Keyword Research Tool:

Wordtracker – This is a paid tool with an annual subscription. The grand-daddy of keyword research tools helps determine what keywords are being searched the most and the keywords that have the greatest opportunity. Cross-referencing theses results with one or more of the free keyword tools below only increases the accuracy of your results.

FREE Keyword Research Tools:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Overture
• SEO Book Keyword Tool

Site Analytics

You ABSOLUTELY have to know where you’ve been, where you’re at and where you’re going. If your current host doesn’t provide you with an analytics tool you can easily understand, you need to install Google Analytics ASAP … this second! Not employing a measuring tool is like plugging your ears whenever your customers talk to you. Did we mention how important this is? Did we mention it is FREE?

Paid Analytics tools worth considering:

• Click Tracks
• WebSideStory / HBX Analytics

Note: In some cases you may want to employ multiple tools. Each have their own strengths and you’re better off with too much info than too little.

Utility Tools

• SEOmoz SEO Tools – SEOmoz itself is a great source of SEO information. For free you get their blog (check out the Whiteboard Friday videos) and limited access to their tool list (which they keep adding to). With a premium membership you have full access to numerous SEO articles and tools to measure a sites rankings, term target analyzer, page strength tool, crawl test and keyword difficulty tool.
• SEO Book Tools – A wealth of tools from Aaron Wall and his SEO book. I like the Link Analysis section most.

Sitemap Tools

• XML-Sitemaps.com – This FREE service generates html sitemaps for you’re your site as well as XML file generation you can plug into other evaluation tools listed below.
• Google Webmaster Central -Tools to help you evaluate Google’s crawlers, site indexing, external links, page analysis and more.
• Yahoo Site Explorer -Tools to evaluate Yahoo’s indexed pages, inbound links, feed submission and more.

What’s in your SEO toolbox? Have you tried any of Aaron’s recommendations? Do you have others to add to the list?

PS - Essential Keystrokes will be a year old this week and I have something really cool planned for next week – don’t miss it!!

Here are a few of the plug-ins I got to know a little better today.

SRG Clean Archive

I have been looking high and low for a way to create a quick and easy listing of all my blog posts in one place. I wanted this not only for my own reference, but more so for my readers. An archive by month without a full listing of the posts is of no use to anyone.

Sean of GeekWithLaptop had my solution! It is called SRG Clean Archive. The result looks like this – my archive page. This one is a very quick install and it’s readme file is easy to follow. If you have installed this in the past, you need to go back and get the latest version. Version 3.0 is hot off the press as it was just released today.

SEO Title Tag

The key to the sucess of many of my sites is the search engine traffic (okay, that’s the key to just about everyone’s success) and I knew I didn’t have everything in my code completely optimized. I emailed Sarah Lewis of Blogging Expertise for a bit of her insight. Namely, I wanted to know which plug-in she uses for modifying the title tag to be more SEO friendly (like what she did for eMoms at Home).

Sarah recommended Net Concept’s SEO Title Tag plug-in. The SEO Title Tag plug-in allows you to overwrite your blog name in your post title tag with the actual post name. This is much more search engine friendly as it produces reinforces relevant keyword matching.

It was a quick install that only required a small amount of customization – all of which was done through the Dashboard (options and pasting a line of code in the header.php file).

If you aren’t in the mood for a plug-in, Daily Blog Tips has instructions on creating an optimal title tag – complete with the code. I found this by way of Randa’s post 5 SEO Enhancements for Your Blog.

WP-Amazon

I started the day helping Ponn at Empower Women Now add the WP-Amazon plug-in to her blog. With this plug-in you can add photos and links to relevant products to your blog posts through a quick search, then an even quicker drag and drop.

Of course, you have to have an Amazon Affiliate account first (so the plug-in knows who to credit), but once you do, this plug-in is so easy to use.

What plug-ins have you discovered recently or would you recommend as a must have for your blog?

Tags: wordpress plugins, plug-ins, wp-amazon, seo title tag, clean archive

How To Get More Text Link Sales by John Chow

16 Must Read Articles to Get the Most out of Your Blog by the Wrong Advices

8 Ways to Turn Negative Feedback into an Opportunity by Wendy at eMoms At Home

Best Ever Explanation of RSS – thanks to Dawud and David for sharing this excellent video

Need a Website or Redesign? Here is our process. by Prime Marketing Blog – while this is their process, it is similar to mine, and anyone who is considering a new site or redesign should really have a sense of what goes into the whole thing!

And another tool for helping you maximize your web site’s performance – Small Buisness Hub’s Website Grader – thanks to Deziner Folio for the tip!

Next week the focus is on Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. She will be featuring interviews and tips on maximizing your search engine marketing efforts and she’ll be giving away some great prizes, too! Personally, I’d love to win the Self SEO prize!

Get on over to Wendy’s site – there is so much to learn and find out how to win, too!

PS – If you are new to blogging or looking to really hone in on your niche, she compiled an amazing list of blog topics and niches – you are guaranteed to find at least one that inspires you.

You pick your player (like Bill, Sergey, Paul, Larry, Jerry, or David) and their opponent. Enter the ring and answer SEO questions from the simple to the obscure. The more you answer correctly, the lower your time and the higher you rank! The first time I played it took me 2:22 to win. The second time around I did a bit better and got 1:11. The questions are random and I did see some repeats the second time through.

I’d have to say this is a fun, afternoon diversion. Go ahead, I give you permission to go play – and to share it with your friends. Afterall, isn’t learning supposed to be fun?

How did you do?