This one's so basic yet so critical to SEO success: make sure that within your blog template you link to the blog post's permalink URL from the title of the post. That will provide you with much better (contextual) anchor text than the word "Permalink" will. What's wrong with the word "permalink"? Nothing, if that's the word you want to rank #1 for in the search engines! ;-)

The only thing worse than the anchor text of "Permalink" is "Click here"! (Unless of course you wish to rank #1 in the search engines for "click here"!)

Your anchor text (a.k.a. link text), should contain keywords relevant to your business. The search engines associate those underlined words with the page that you're linking to.

I'm not suggesting you remove all mentions of the word "permalink" from your blog; rather I'm suggesting that you augment those keyword-anemic links with keyword-rich text links. Just like I have on my blog. I have 2 links to the permalink URL: one from the post's title, the other at the end of the post where it says "Permalink". (I'm presuming here that you're already putting good keywords in the titles of your blog posts since that was the topic of my Blog SEO Tip #1.)

Also, when writing your blog posts, look for opportunities to refer to and link to previous posts or related content you've got up on the Web (like I just did in the previous sentence!). It goes without saying that those links should have good anchor text too. While you're at it, might as well go the extra mile and think up good anchor text when referencing customers, friends, colleagues, and business partners in your blog as well. They'll appreciate it, and it's good karma!

So, in summary, say yes to contextually relevant anchor text!

If you think SEO is hard now, just wait until search engines start varying the results for each individual, depending on their profile, search history, geographic location, and now... mindset. Yahoo Mindset is Yahoo Labs' foray into intent-driven search, where sorting of the results are partially dependent upon the searcher's intentions (whether they are in a shopping frame-of-mind or a research frame-of-mind). Yahoo is using machine learning to score web results as commercial or informational. Scores range from -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational).

It's a pretty cool idea but I don't think they've quite nailed it yet. (They do refer to it as a "demo" on the home page so I can't be too hard on them!) The big question is: does Yahoo decide what each page is, or does it decide on the whole site? Imagine being a commercial site and Yahoo decides you are researching only.

A trawl through some common search queries reveals that results on the research end are no less commercial than the commercial end, but the slider bar on the left of each result is different, so maybe the machine learning algo is scoring the pages differently.

Fold in personalized search (where search results vary depending on the searcher's profile and previous search behavior) and local search (where results vary by the searchers' geographic location) and then it starts getting really interesting for us SEOs. It'll make life a lot tougher for optimizers because we'll need three times the content if we want to be found at the commercial and research ends of the search, as well as in the middle.

Just as with personalized search, local search, and other innovations coming out of the search engines' labs, intent-driven search is yet another nail in the coffin of old-school SEO.

Writing articles is a great way to improve your search engine positioning – in fact some of the top referring keywords come from articles.

But do they produce leads? Possibly not, but articles are great for promoting your brand. You will be quoted in everything from college papers, class projects, theses, and blogs. Many of these will link back to you. Spiders will visit your site looking for new content. Combine it with RSS and you have a powerful way of syndicating those articles globally.

SearchEnginePosition's Rob Sullivan has written an interesting article about his own experience, which you can read here.

January 23 was a momentous day in history. What was said and by whom will have significant, long-term beneficial impact on online advertising. It happened in Atlanta, although not all participants could make it on time due to bad weather at the airport.

Representatives from search engines (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Become, Shop.com), retailers (Sierra Trading Post, Red Envelope, Bare Necessities, CompUSA, Cutter & Buck, Coldwater, REI), agencies (Rimm-Kaufman Group, Performics, Mercent, Mars) and the NRF (NRF’s ARTS, the Association for Retail Technology Standards) all met to discuss establishing an industry standard for describing products for online SKU-based advertising and the comparison engines.

During the two-hour meeting, retailers and engines alike shared their frustration at the lack of a common platform for describing products and receiving back advertising reports.

The most important outcome of the meeting was the decision to move forward towards an industry standard for describing products online using the expertise and process of the NRF’s ARTS.

The group next plans to meet in Menlo Park on February 27 to begin work on a specification.

This standardization effort is newsworthy for several reasons. Such a standard would:

• allow retailers, both large and small, to advertise online more easily
• help the engines by increasing their advertising base
• help consumers by allowing retailers to communicate a richer set of product information to the engines which would then
• facilitate improved product searching and comparing

The meeting was also interesting in that a diverse set of organizations with widely different interests all agreed that the current situation was far from good and that an industry standard would help greatly.

The online retail community needs to know that this is happening. And they need to get involved in the standard building process.

A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger's secret weapon. I can't believe how few bloggers do this. I'm not talking about Technorati tags, although those are useful too. I'm talking about using a plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is exactly the plug-in I installed to create tag pages like this one.

So now, if I want to target a new search term in the search engines, I just start tagging some posts with that search term and, presto!, I've got text links everywhere pointing to this new tag page (notice I've put a tag cloud globally at the bottom of every page so such links are ubiquitous throughout my blog). And of course I made sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy! I'm going to further optimize the tag pages by adding some keyword-rich intro copy to each tag page, but I haven't gotten to that yet.

Title tags are one of the easiest and biggest impact things you can do for SEO. Not only that, title tags are also very effective in enticing the searcher to click on your listing rather than someone else's.

To maximize that clickthrough here are three quick and easy tips:

• Include a call-to-action like "Buy now" or "Free shipping"
• Form a question
• Don't repeat keyword phrases. Not only does that look redundant from the searcher's perspective but it also looks like keyword stuffing from the search engine's perspective.

The webinar I co-presented earlier this year along with our client REI and our partner SLI Systems is now available as a downloadable MPEG-4 video file. Watch it at your leisure on your PC, or if you're lucky enough to own the new video iPod, you can watch this webinar on it!

Download it now (70 Megabytes)

eMarketer has just released a new research report, Search Engine Marketing: Search Users and Usage. The report gets inside the heads of searchers to better understand why people click on paid ads.

David Hallerman, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the report, states:

"The good news is that the growth of paid search ad spending is flattening out. Yes, you heard me right. That's good news. In an industry once-burned by bubble-and-burst expansion, Internet advertising is best served when its most effective vehicles show steady, and less hyped growth."

"As the paid search market matures, involved companies will look for additional ways to build their bottom line through search. This will include greater spending on tools such as search engine optimization, which boosts organic search rankings, and broadening the paid search base with superior implementation of local search, contextual advertising, and vertical search."

Our research report "The State of Natural Search Engine Marketing for Catalogers" was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the IT Services category in the Bitpipe's Third Annual White Paper Awards IT Services. Drinks all around! Woohoo! ;-)