It’s hard to find good quality information now a days. And it seems like it’s even harder to find good solid information about SEO. So here’s a SEO Blogs that I think you’ll enjoy reading. It’s a site that I feel does a great job delivering the goods and helping people towards learning more about search engine optimization. I found the site on Sphinn.com, after having a successful front page story submission. And while we’re on the topic of Sphinn, if you haven’t joined the community, I recommend doing so. Once you do, you’ll instantly sync yourself with a lot of experienced people who do nothing but eat, sleep, drink SEO 24/7.

Hobo SEO Company

Hobo SEO is a company based near Glasgow, Scotland. They focus on providing customers with the highest quality SEO services and also help with online branding. They are a content focused SEO company who show their clients firsthand how to do what they even do themselves.

At the time of writing this article, Hobo SEO has over 6700 RSS subscribers, and over 2200 Twitter followers. Those are quite impressive numbers, so they must be doing something right. They claim that their site is viewed by over 50,000 people every month, many of them come direct from Google searching for DIY SEO tips.

Hobo SEO goes the extra mile and even offers people a free SEO eBook titled, “hobo guilde to GOOGLE SEO.” You can get your free copy simply by joining their free newsletter.

Additional freebies include:

1. DIY SEO GUIDE – Where you can get some help understanding why your website is performing poorly in Google.
2. Linkbuilding Guide – They say that the key to high rankings in Google is to have other real websites link to yours. Their linkbuilding course will help you learn more about successful linkbuilding.
3. Beginners Guide to SEO - For beginners, this is an excellent start. Hobo SEO’s Beginners Guide to SEO offers you everything you need to get started with becoming a savvy SEO yourself.
4. SEO Blog – Visit their SEO Blog where tips and ideas about Google and search engine optimization are shared among 50,000 montly visitors.

With all the freebies, the guides, the newsletter, and the blog, Hobo SEO is one of the better SEO blogs I have seen. All in all if you’re looking for high quality SEO information from people who know what they’re talking about, I recommend making HoBo SEO one of your daily reads.

What are some of your favorite SEO sites that you’d like to share with others? Drop a comment and let us know. Also, if you have your own SEO site, you’re welcome to tell everyone about it too.

If you’re looking to get some excellent search engine marketing tips, there’s obviously quite a few sites online that provide them. One site in particular has captured my attention. Recently, I discovered a search engine marketing company in Houston called, Search Engine Marketing Group.

The company was formed in 2006 by Gerald Weber, who happens to be an avid reader of SeoHosting.com Blog. The company started out as a web design business; However, when the needs for professional search engine marketing and optimization services increased over time, Gerald and his team adapted to the demands of business.

Quickly the group grew to be one of the leading search engine marketing companies in the city of Houston. Consequently – and in addition to providing some of the most top notch and professional search engine marketing services in their city - their group also sports one of the hottest blogs covering the topic of search engine marketing and SEO tips.

I discovered the blog recently after getting a trackback notification on a previous article I published on SeoHosting.com. It seems that Gerald had some opinions that differed from mine and he felt compelled to share them on their company blog. It’s a good thing that he did though, otherwise who knows how long it would have been before I would have discovered the site.

That said, if you’re looking for some excellent and practical tips on search engine marketing, I would definitely recommend checking out Gerald’s SEM/SEO blog. A lot of hard work goes into the articles being published and as always, the information and education is totally free.

Some of the more recent tips include information on how to reduce StumbleUpon message spam, how to become a Digg power user, and how to make WordPress more secure. Be sure to check the blog out and connect with them by subscribing their RSS feed.

Blogging seems to be the ideal solution for many things, one of which being SEO. Many people know this, and even more learn this, but I wonder if people often understand why having a blog is important for SEO. Basic and very practical SEO Tips tell us that we should avoid bad coding, use relevant keywords, be conscious of where we place them in text, and get inbound links. Considering these tips, then a blog is an ideal solution for SEO.

Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge.

What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.

Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.

Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.

To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.

Have you seen the People of Walmart website? Perhaps, you’ve already contributed and uploaded a picture or two? I find it interesting how certain things go viral on the Internet. Typically, I see low grade YouTube videos or cheesy webpages hit it off on the web. And so is the case with a newly launched blog called People of Walmart. It went viral, people love it, and the way I see it, for site owners, there is a lot that can be learned.

People of Walmart is very simple self-hosted WordPress blog that allows users to contribute content. In this case, it can be a picture of an unusual person found at Walmart. Users who want to contribute must submit the photo by email and manually include a title, description, and include tags. After editors review the picture, it will be published on a blog post. These are called Wal-Creatures.

With over 15,000 fans on FaceBook, People of Walmart has grown very quickly and has captured the interest of thousands of people almost overnight. The site has been of huge interest to FaceBook users, and with over 700 people following on Twitter, awareness of the site seems to be spreading into other networks as well. But, what about SEO? Once the viral buzz wears off and the sudden spike in traffic dwindles down to a trickle, where will the site stand in the SERPS?

My prediction doesn’t look very promising. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether the owners of People of Walmart make changes or not, one thing remains possible: You can make changes to your own site. Granted, your site might not go viral like theirs, but if it does, you’ll at least be ready. And as I had mentioned above, a lot can be learned from People of Walmart. And no, I don’t think People of Walmart will last very long after the buzz wears thin. The reason why is because of their lack of SEO.

Let’s look at the element of user generated content and how to optimize it for search engines. In the case of People of Walmart, photos that are being sent in manually via email. With that, perhaps WordPress isn’t the best option to use. There are many other open source programs available that are more suitable towards handling pictures such as Coppermine. With proper configuration of the software and some minor SEO tweaks, submitting content into People of Walmart could easily become a fully automated and instant process, and most importantly, a search engine friendly one. Titles, descriptions, and tags could be done without the assistance of an editor. A moderator would only be needed to review the submitted content and to the “Publish” button.

Regardless though, WordPress was chosen and with that, many improvements could be made to help the site in the long term for the years to come, long after the viral buzz. But let’s look at how post titles appear in Google. There are other things that could be optimized, but post titles, along with the process of how user content is being generated are the most important.

As you can see in the screen shot above, all titles appear the same. Let’s take a closer look at this entry:

You wouldn’t know it from the entry, but the entry links to a blog post titled, MISS NEW BOOTY which potentially has the ability to pull rank on the miss new booty SERP. The problem is that the blog post doesn’t and it could if it was displaying the post title before or preferably instead of the blog name. Using the All In One SEO Pack can easily correct this. If the post title is visible then the words used in the post title have the potential of becoming keywords that can be used to find the post in search. Right now, unfortunately those valuable keywords are truncated, thus totally wasting the potential of having INTITLE keyword strength. One last element that should be updated is the permalink structure. The site is using the default (p?=123) style and it should be modified to use the /post_title/ style so that INURL keywords can be used. (Read Google Basic Searches)

All in all, it is great to see sites like People of Walmart find success, but also seeing sites like this show me that there continues to be a need for professional SEOs. In order for People of Walmart to have long term success, their site may soon need to undergo some SEO as well as platform changes.

So you just started a business website or a blog and now you’ve heard all the hype about ranking #1 in Google and how much traffic you can get for free. You’ve read a few articles, wasted a few hundred dollars on some eBooks and video tutorials, but still you can’t seem get your site to rank for the keywords you want. This leads to seeking advice and help with SEO.

Search engine optimization is the process of making your website or blog friendly and optimized for search engines. But, today, there is so much involved with SEO, at times it can even be mind blowing for those have experience. How do you get help with SEO if you need it? Well, there is a site called SEO Consultants.

SEO Consultants serves as a nationwide directory listing of search engine consultants. The site is very simple to use. Simply choose your country, state, and specify a few optional filters, and then you will be returned with a listing of SEO Consultants near you.

If you happen to be an SEO Consultant, I recommend getting listed in this directory. They rank #1 for the term SEO Consultant. And, I am sure they get a lot of traffic that can convert into profitable leads for your SEO business.

Getting listed in their directory isn’t cheap. The cost is $200 dollars to get your business reviewed by their staff. They have very strict standards and getting listed isn’t easy. But, if you are successful with getting listed in their directory, I am sure they pay offs will be huge. On their Submit URL page they mention this:

“As of 2009-07-10 we have 107 active members and 897 prospective members who have been declined since our initial launch on 2002-06-01.”

I think the $200 submission / review fee and hardcore standards make their directory listing a valuable resource to consumers. Only the best of the best are listed in this directory, and it only took me a few minutes to realize that. Consumers can place trust in the companies listed within. Getting your SEO business listed is something you might want to aim for and consider in the future.

By the way, I did send them an email prior to writing this and asked the staff if they would honor a special discount to readers on SEOHosting.com blog. I’ll update this post and do a follow up if they reply back honoring a discount to their submission fee.

During the week I spend some time reading up on the latest news and gossip within the search engine market and week to week I end up having quite a few articles that I end up bookmarking or adding into my favorites. While I will continue to save these articles in my various bookmarks for my own personal use, I figured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to share with you some of the articles that I enjoyed reading through the week.

With that being said, here is an overview of some of the articles that I read this week that I think that you’ll enjoy reading too. Every Friday, you can mark your calendars and be sure to visit the SEOHosting.com blog for some really excellent references to what I would consider, “The Best in SEO” for the week. I call this weekly series, SEO Friendly Friday. Hope you enjoy, I know I sure enjoy helping your learn.

On July 29th, 2008,  Ann Smarty from Search Engine Journal wrote an article titled, 3 Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence. In this article she explains that using keyword prominence can indeed help you get better rankings, get your site indexed faster and improve how your listings appear in the search engines. On a prior published article Ann Smarty explained that using targeted keywords in the the title of a page, meta description, H1 and H2 tags, alt tags, anchor text links, bold and italic text and in the body text are examples of great keyword prominence. These really are some valuable SEO Tips.

On that same day,  Brian Carter, from Fuel Interactive, wrote an article titled, 5 Powerful Local Search Marketing Tactics. Brian explained that the material used in this article was part of his SMX Local 2008 Presentation. In this article, Carter provides an online video as well as an online slide presentation that is packed full of tips that will give you an edge on creating a powerful Local and Mobile Marketing Campaign. Carter provides his thoughts behind five tactics which include his suggestion to “Put All Your Money in Google AdWords!”, “Learn & Use the 4 Methods of AdWords GeoTargeting”, “Spend the Budget & Spend it Well”, “Avoid Local Tunnel Vision”, and lastly “Apply PPC Best Practices to Local Marketing.” This for sure is a piece that you too will want to add into your bookmarks for in depth study.

I’ll admit that July 29th, 2008 spawned quite a bit of excellent content for the search engine market community. David Harry, a marketing consultant who publishes on SEO Site Reference, wrote a piece titled, How to learn SEO in 2008. I enjoyed reading this article very much because in this article David Harry compiled a very excellent list and overview of resources that can indeed help you improve your SEO. David Harry provides a wealth of links and references that provide education and learning for anyone who is interested in SEO. In this article you can discover some of the greatest “SEO books”, “Online guides”, “Online training courses”, “Classes, Seminars and Conferences”, and a very complete list of “Blogs.” In addition to the mentioned references you too can get connected with some of the greatest “Media Outlets” and “SEO Forums.”

If you have a story that you’d like to share with me, feel free to send me an email with the material and it just might get included in a future publication on the SEOHosting.com blog.