SEO exposure

I've been trying to learn a little more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) nuisances in 2010 (and earlier). My findings include:

1. The contents of a title tag should not exceed 65 characters while the contents of the description tag should be limited to 25 to 150 characters.



2. http://www.ispionage.com/ and http://www.compete.com/ and http://www.spyfu.com/ and http://www.keywordspy.com/ are tools for gauging what competitors and doing in the name of Adwords.



3. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal is good tool for measuring if a potential search term is worth optimizing for and also how competitive it is. We have been using this tool to determine overall traffic for a keyword (within a month's time) and then http://www.google.com/analytics/ to determine how big of a pie slice (within a month's time) we are garnering. The second number divided by the first provides a percentage to track.



4. http://www.quantcast.com/ is a tool for gauging the audience of an existing web site while http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html is a tool for gauging how to reach a demographic by way of social media marketing (use the third slide of http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/ladder.html to interpret the results the tool gives).



5. http://mashable.com/ gives Web 2.0 and social media news.



6. http://www.wordtracker.com/ and http://www.wordze.com/ are keyword tools. Wordze offers a 30 day free trial and also supposedly provides cost-per-click projections with recommended keywords.



7. Canonical tags may be used to make the most of duplicate content instead of having duplicate content become a negative. Something like this <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/> in the header of a page suggests that the page's content should weigh in favor of the other page referenced instead of a scenario in which the two pages compete with each other.



8. http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php allows one to determine a "page rank" for a page and Google has leaked that the better a page ranks the more Google is inclined to allow more pages on a given site to be indexed. Page rank and the number of pages indexed are tied together as metrics.



9. It may be wise to build a search engine at one's site, to record what the public searchs for, and to pay attention to those searches which yield zero results. What are others NOT finding at your site?



10. http://www.cogi.com/ is a good transcription service. Headspring has been transcribing audio recordings form our senior players speaking on their expertise and cleaning the transcripts of the recordings up to feed (eventually blog postings and also) whitepaper content such as that found here: http://www.headspringsystems.com/services/custom-application-development/



11. I now have experience with WordPress, dasBlog, and subtext. If you are going to host your own blog, WordPress is very likely the way to go. dasBlog and subtext are ASP.NET open source alternatives to the one solution which PHP truly excels at. Use dasBlog and subtext when under hosting restraints. dasBlog does write content to files in lieu of using a database which may save one on hosting fees.



12. One may track Twitter traffic using service such as http://bit.ly/ consistently to wrap URLs offered at Twitter (putting a tracking code at the end of URLs).



13. verticalresponse.com is good for email campaigns.



14. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp is good for recording live presentations which in turn may then draw interest at YouTube and Viddler.



15. http://www.attentionwizard.com/ may be used to tell where eyes will go on a landing page. http://www.crazyegg.com/ seems to be a comparable tool as are http://www.clicktale.com/, http://www.usertesting.com/, and http://userfly.com/.