We get asked quite often... If we only got to choose 2 elements to optimize on-page, what those would be?
Well, wishing the answer was more technical than this, the fact remains that we would pick the Title tag and the meta Description.

Title tag - The most important one. This is what the searcher will click on to arrive at your site. And it is were all starts in terms of converting that visitor into a customer, member, affiliate, supporter, or whatever you want your site to accomplish. It should satisfy both your visitor and search engines in terms of relevancy. Therefore it needs to be "clickable". Target terms should be considered in terms of co-occurrence, prominence, and proximity. We recommend to include your target terms once in it, at the beginning (prominence) following with a call to action (click through). The last issues are length and separators. If your title exceeds 67 characters, it could be trimmed out in the SERPs, which not only does look bad, but also wouldn't allow the searcher to see your entire message. Separators help increase visual relevancy of your terms.

Description meta - You need to optimize this. It should "describe" the Title tag further, detailing any additional information that would further increase the chances of being chosen as the most relevant and appealing search result. It should also include the target terms at the beginning, but branding terms are not necessary, instead focus more on why this would be a better listing to click on that your competitor's. Then you have achieved its goal.

What about your own titles and descriptions? What have you found to be effective?

Nothing big happened, but there were a lot of small updates
across the index, in what I could call a "cleanup" type of update.

Just as it was 6-8 month ago, PR is back for a lot of web directories.
This is important for the ones that do pass link value from their listing.

The most remarkable thing is that after losing thousands of links,
many sites still have their PageRank intact. Link Quality, anyone?

If you have been seen a flux in Google Toolbar PR, it is an update, they are doing an "incremental" PageRank toolbar update. It started some days ago, and it is not fully completed yet. This is a minor update compared to the big one back in November.

Because of this, it has low impact for most sites. Have you seen any changes on the Google toolbar? Would you mind to share?

New update from Yahoo for crawling, indexing and rankings. Lots of sites experiencing the update as of this morning.

The last update was about a month ago. Yahoo Search Blog has confirmed the new update saying:

"Over the last few days, we've been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."

As announced, some major re-indexing is reported on many sites. So far, this update is giving more weight to older or established sites and larger sites. Even more so than Google currently does.

Have you noticed any Yahoo crawling changes on your site's activity or in your rankings?

After months without a "visible" update, with data collected about 30 days ago, all Google datacenters show a new PageRank update.

This update has no direct impact on rankings, since the information on the PR Toolbar is outdated, about 3 months, and supposed to be updated every quarter. The PageRank of the sites linking to your site may have changed, therefore affecting your own. One not well understood aspect of PageRank is it scoring. For example, a PR 6 is a numeric score rounded from a value anywhere between 5.6 and 6.9 in the PageRank scale.

Coming back to the fact that this PR update did not affect rankings, an example site was downgraded from a PR7 to a PR4. Both rankings and traffic remain constant. So besides a PR downgrade, that may impact future link building efforts, nothing has changed.

A lot of new sites went from PR0 to PR1 as usual between updates. Also, there was an increase in the numbers of PR2 sites. Most PR3 sites stayed at that level. Some PR4 sites lost 1 or 2 points, and PR5, 6 and 7 sites lost points as well.

But the way to approach link building the natural, proper way remains despite all these adjustments. And still can be done legally without triggering PageRank downgrades like the ones we are seen.

Did you experienced similar results? Do you have examples? We would like to know, so just leave your feedback via comments.

In the previous article on this topic, I covered the main types of links you want to get for your site. On the last part, I will clearly state which types of links to stay away from pursuing, and I will further explain some misconceptions about the good types of links.

Do not do this to your links:

(1) Placing a form on your site and then allowing anyone to add a link to your site using an automated process. If you do not manually approve these links, well, you are asking for “link problems”.

(2) Denying a link based solely on a low or non existing PageRank. What a mistake! PageRank is not only outdated, it is also less relevant that it was in the past.

(3) Sites that exchange links with you, but at a later time they do a “nofollow” on your link, or they just simply take it down.

(4) Sites with faked PageRank. Yes, they are all over. The problem is that you are doing an exchange link or buying a link from a site that doesn’t have the PageRank they claim to (offending domains use a 301 or 302 redirects that point their sites to others with high PR)

Read the complete second part on All About Links For SEO

This article covers a much discussed topic in the SEO community. Also, clients and often site owners come up with questions about what links to get, and how to get them. Note that I will not consider reciprocal links here, because of better alternatives, because of better alternatives, and because their effectiveness only applies to a small number of sites, who use them under 10% of their overall link ratio. I will review the main types you want to get for your site.

The natural one-way links.
This one is solely based in good content and resources. This is the safest method of link building available as far as search engines, which look at the “intent” of links. But it is also the slowest. If your site is new, then as part of its launch, submit it to niche web directories. Start with a few highly trusted directories, but do not have more than 10-15% of your overall links coming from them. Don't overlook industry-specific directories that may be paid or unpaid. These usually send highly qualified traffic and can be a real bargain. Directories will get you site many natural one-way links, at a natural speed of growth. This combination of type and speed is very beneficial. Look for sites that would benefit from offering users your content.

Read the complete first part on All About Links for SEO

With all the advances and artificial intelligence applications Google has done in the last years, it is agreed they have set the standard to follow by other companies, in the challenge of developing the smartest search engine. So... What is next? Were do we go from here? The application of new techniques of Artificial Intelligence such as query expansions, object recognitions, and new natural language selections, will definitely impact how searches are performed and the capacity of the retrieval engines of learning even more based on stats info, therefore improving even further the machine learning process.

Keyword reliance on text based content ranking is not the only indexable content new comers are targeting. Images and video are areas were recognition, classification and scoring are maturing, opening many new optimization opportunities levels we didn't think possible in the past. So there is going to be more in the future of search results than just clusters of words connected by links to other clusters.

Read the full article on New Intelligent Search Engines

Yahoo has the second biggest Search Engine Market share. This is why it is important to know the basics of Yahoo SEO. I will review the key areas you should be focusing on if you are targeting their rankings:

Titles: Keep your title tag short (around 5 words) mentioning your target key phrase no more than once. No different than Google here, except by the amount of words.

Descriptions: 15 – 18 words total including your target key phrase at the beginning, keeping the overall text very descriptive. You should include an alternative version of your key phrase as well if possible.

Keywords: Unlike Google, Yahoo still uses this tag as part of their ranking evaluation process. Including the most relevant words to the content of the page at front, make sure additional words are still found within your content for maximum benefit. Keep your tag up to 200 characters in length – without commas. No, they would not look like one word altogether, and this is part of the indexing process anyways, were commas get removed. You can keep a comma delimited version for own SEO tracking.

Headings: H1 and H2 should be used containing the key phrases and to keep the on-topic relevancy of your content.

Topical and Navigational Links: When applicable, use links to other sites that further re-enforce the topical nature of your content. That is the basis of what all search engines perceive as relevant, quality links. These are basically one way links from sites that specialize in content directly relevant to the content on your own website. In terms of navigation, you should link internal pages from a broad topic, to a narrower topic, to a specific topic.

Keywords in URL: Even they don't carry a lot of weight with Yahoo, topical keyword-based filenames can give you additional boost over your competitors, so they should be implemented.

If interested about Google or Msn , please read SEO for Google, Yahoo and Msn

In the past 2 years, a very important factor in web content writing was keyword density, with the recommended 2 to 7% agreed by most seo experts. Well, that has changed for 2007, at least as far as Google goes. Their new patent clearly indicates the massive role that Latent Semantic Indexing is going to play in how they evaluate the relevancy of any given page and therefore its rank by closely considering co-occurrence rates and semantically related phrases, especially focusing the attention on the first one.

Read the full article on Latent Semantic Themes