What is advanced SEO, and who is expert in it?

An essential question: What does advanced search engine optimization (SEO) consist of, and who has the expertise to achieve it?

I think that a new SEO method is necessary, which we at Gnosis Arts are working on, one that takes into account algorithmic changes and adapts SEO strategy accordingly.

To begin with, SEO is art and science: A broad range of strategies and techniques; not easily pinned down, but often derivative of the intuition of experience and analysis.

The true SEO expert knows that page rankings and positions alone are not enough.

An expert understands execution and the knowledge that if not properly done, things such as IP delivery and page rank sculpting can go very far afield from one's business goals.

There are things to keep in mind such as SERPS: Webopedia clarifies perfectly:

Short for search engine results page, the Web page that a search enginereturns with the results of its search. The major search engines typically display three kinds of listings on their SERPs. Listings that have been indexed by the search engine’s spider, listings that have been indexed into the searchengine’s directory by a human, and listings that are paid to be listed by the search engine.
Also see How Web Search Engines Work in the Did You Know . . . ? section of Webopedia.

The target audience must be persuaded to click on the link, and the graphics of the site must accommodate the SEO. Tag words and meta-tags must not be too cluttered; the exact information of the seeker must be clear.

(Developing a web friendly site is important, and will be covered next month. )

SEO Optimize Website , one of the gems of Search Engine techniques and social marketing internet analysis, whom I treat as a sort of holy grail, have this marvelous post which I show below. Oddly, one of the reasons I absolutely love their posting is that they make reference to so many of the tested methods which Eric Bryant, Director, Gnosis Arts Multimedia , and I, were intuitively using already!

Here is a synopsis from their lengthy post :

Web Design/Development

• Landing page optimization for organic search results
• ROI oriented usability testing (Split A/B Testing etc.)
• Streamlining information architecture towards a predefined sales funnel
• Enforcing security considerations to prevent crackers from compromising your system and hijacking your site’s authority
• Implementing dynamic scalability for large sites by self replicating processes
• Siloing content on important keyword optimized pages (instead of PageRank sculpting)

Web Analytics

• Identifying the target audience by age, income, education, computer skills, region and understanding it
• Conversion attribution to find out how many stages were involved in making a person finally appear on site or buy
• Twitter analytics to follow your true fans and connectors who spread the word and realistic Twitter traffic numbers
• Monitoring long tail keyword combinations and frequency for early acknowledgment of trends
• Time based and historic keyword research to identify potentials for recurring traffic spikes

Content Creation

• Creating videos, ebooks, infographics and other rich media for SEO purposes
• Semantic SEO trying to understand user intent and serving the appropriate content
• Business blogging beyond solely SEO copywriting keyword rich content for search engines
• Writing of “magnetic Web content“, with “killer headlines” and irresistible hooks
• Defining an SEO code of ethics for your company and anticipating upcoming industry standards
• Allowing and managing and user generated conent with crowdsourcing, tagging/folksonomy
• Predictive SEO in order to be the first to offer supplies for demands that don’t exist yet

Link Acquisition

• On topic widget bait for long term recurring results (not just link bait)
• Creating both funny and engaging quizzes. Example: SEO expert quiz
• Preparing and implementing contests to actively empower audiences as brand evangelists
• Establishing reputable awards or annual best of collections. Examples: Web 2.0 awards, Semmys
• “Pulling a Calacanis” that is stirring controversy to gain attention and make adversaries and supporters to link to you

Social Media Outreach

• Proactive online reputation building, instead of just reactive firemen like management
• Social CRM for all relevant groups (beyond “customers”). Example: Influencers
• Creating and spreading viral memes through various media independently of your own presence there
• Creating communities both inside and outside your own websites. Example: Dell Idea storm
• Disseminating social media press releases and cultivating blogger relations

Expanding into New Markets

• Embracing Twitter plus other Microblogging for business purposes
• International multilingual SEO on one site or creating parallel sites
• Geo-location based local SEO and IP delivery for international businesses
• Mobile search optimization with appropriate CSS formats for different use cases
• Introducing “real life” SEO with links you can scan with your mobile (See SEO Optimize at: http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/06/30-advanced-seo-tactics-techniques-and-resources-55-links.html)

The Associative Property of SEO: Semantic Web

As many of us in search know, the Internet Marketing and Web Development communities are all abuzz on this new semantic web ... thing. Though most of us still don't know exactly what it is or how to describe it, we're all pretty sure it's going to completely revolutionize the field of search - for all of us.

Thankfully, web start-ups like Dapper.Net are leading the way in educating the search marketing and SEO communities about how the semantic web works.

So, rather than try to explain, in words, what the Semantic Web is and why it is important to search, allow me to demonstrate by way of a Dapper API that we constructed. Dapper's API developer platform is a very helpful CMS that makes the process of marking up your web pages semantically much easier than utilizing raw XML/RDF markup.

Our Dapper.Net Semantic Web API

Add to your site   powered by Dapper

What This API Tells Us About Semantic Web

As you can see, our API (called a Dapp) classifies some key content of our homepage under pre-defined categories. What stands out most, at least in my mind, is the inter-relationships among various web content. In this way, the dapp enables search engines to draw connections between semantically-related content on your web pages:

1. The concept "social media optimization" is associated with that of "Internet marketing" and "seo service"


2. The image of our Gnosis Arts Logo is associated with the concept of "image optimization"


3. The term "web content development" is linked to the idea of "professional writing services"

So you see, now we've effectively amplified, augmented, elaborated upon each concept by associating it with other related concepts which aren't necessarily synonyms. The result: Richer, fuller meanings (semantics) are generated by my website, fed to the search engines; and, now my webpages "say" much more, without my ever having had to add any new content to them.

Another way to look at it: Dapper is kind of like an LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) application on steriods. It automatically allows you to create synonyms and synonymous phrasing (by way of assigning Resource Deacription Framework [RDF] ontologies) for virtually all of your web content. (Unfortunately, Dapper doesn't yet allow you to semantically mark up certain object elements, such as Flash and Windows Media video - but I'm sure it's coming!)

The "Associative Property" of Search Engine Optimization

Such functionality underscores a key principle of SEO and website promotion. Search engines rely as much on association as anything when assigning quality, authority, relevance and rank to a website. We learned this through our own experimentation, the results of which are published in our new e-book titled Guide to Social Media Optimization.

In effect, effective link building, intra-site linking, content development, TITLE/META tag construction and geo-targeting depend upon the auspicious associations the search engines can make:

• among your website and other websites (in the case of link building);
  
• among the pages on your own website (intra-site linking);


• among the concepts, words, ideas, and object-elements on your site (content development);


• among your webpage headings and the content that flows out from those headings (TITLE/META tag construction);


• among your website and its geographic/demographic context (geo-targeting).

In other words, a huge part of your website's online success is based on its relationships with our segments or factors of the Internet community as a whole. In fact, it was the knowledge of this idea which spawned Web 2.0, if you really think about it.

So, as I see it, one main task of the Semantic Web will be to clarify and create a kind of synergy within and among these inter-relationships. In this way, the Semantic Web is the attempt to create a Metaweb - a web of relationships among websites and categories of websites, as opposed to simply a web of just websites.

Yahoo Go! & Flickr

Yahoo Go! is a mobile PDA software application that allows users to customize the mobile phone Internet display.

Yahoo Go! has an API which allows you to send your PDA pictures directly to your online Flickr profile. So, of course, I'm thinking about how such an API could be used for Internet marketing.

First, let's talk about Flickr.



Another SEO benefit of Flickr is that you can submit your Flickr profile to del.icio.us. As I've explained in our Guide to Social Media Optimization, Del.icio.us is one of the top 10 social bookmarking sites. It is also one of the sites that leading SEO companies like SEOmoz use to determine overall Page Strength. For these reasons, the Flickr-to-Del.icio.us API has value for SEO.