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.

Many of the people reading the SEOHosting.com blog might not necessarily be bloggers or have a blog. Having a blog attached to your web site is very important for allowing your to quickly and easily score targeted traffic to your business, products or services. I’ll go into more detail on that topic in the near future. However, in this article, I want to talk to you about how you can get material to write about on your blog.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Garry Conn. I am a full time online publisher who owns and maintains many various sites covering a very broad range of topics. Every single site I own is actually powered using an open source program called WordPress. In my business, it is vital that I have material to write about. If I can’t produce content on my sites, then I can’t continue to rank well for targeted keywords in the search engines. Secondly, I can’t simply write about anything. I have to write about things that are loosely based on the businesses, products and services that I represent. If I don’t then the traffic I target have zero interest in the items that make me money.

Getting material to write about on your blog can be tricky. Blogging has very similar characteristics to a typical journalist, book author and news reporter. Bloggers can experience writers block and at times lose a source of material to write about. If you don’t have material to write about, it can be very frustrating. It too can be frustrating finding material to write about that relates to your niche.

One of the best ways that I score material to write about is by subscribing to email newsletters. While I never copy and paste the actual newsletter I receive in email, what I do however, is provide a review based on the information that was sent to me. My content is always unique and never a duplicate found somewhere else on the Internet. For me, receiving email newsletters that relate to my niche topic are perfect writing prompts and allow me to quickly storm out writing ideas. There are times too when I will receive a newsletter and just by reading that email it will trigger another writing idea for me.

If you are having trouble finding things to write about on your blog, I would strongly suggest that you subscribe to email newsletters that will deliver material to you that you can turn right around and write about yourself. If the newsletter contains a link to the source, I would too also provide that link. Also, in content that I write on my blogs that were based from a newsletter, I openly explain this in my article and encourage my readers to also subscribe to the same email newsletter that I have subscribed to.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this post and speaking of subscriptions, if you would like to continue receiving excellent content from SeoHosting.com, take a moment to subscribe to our free RSS Feed. In fact, if you enjoy our content a lot, you can even syndicate our content for free using our very simple and easy to use widgets. These little widgets fit perfectly into the sidebars of most blogs.

When I set out to publish a page on the Internet, I already know well in advanced the primary keyword phrase I am looking to target in the search engines. In this article, my aim is to teach you how to target primary keyword phrases in the search engines by publishing uniquely written content. For me, I am a blogger and one who chooses to use WordPress as my choice blog publishing software.

WordPress is widely supported and increasingly growing in popularity. With that being said though, it really doesn’t matter too much as far as what program you use towards publishing content on the Internet. What really matters though, is how you go about it. For me, WordPress happens to cover pretty much all the bases I need with only a few minor tweaks to the program and the current template being used.

Here is what I do to assure that I am able to successfully target the primary keyword phrases that I am aiming for in a web page, or in my case, a blog post. Firstly, I have to identify choice keyword phrases to target. This requires research as I don’t want to waste time attempting to target keyword phrases that have too strong of a competition, nor do I want to invest time into targeting keyword phrases that no one searches for.

The ideal keyword phrase to target is one that has a very low amount of competition while also having a high number of monthly searches. The ability to spot out keyword phrases like this come with experience or just natural ability. Many people simply use software to aid them in keyword research. For me, I use both my natural ability and experience coupled with software to assure the most accurate level of keyword predictability. If using software appeals to you, I would recommend checking out WordTracker as well as Micro Niche Finder. SEOHosting.com provides some really nice free SEO Tools as well as a 7 day trial offer on WordTracker.

Once you have figured out the primary keyword phrase that you want to target, the rest is a snap. It is really just a matter of using the exact keyword phrase as your web page title, making sure that the same phrase is used again wrapped in <h1> or <h2> tags and then used again twice in your web page or blog post content. Don’t purposely make your content feel spammy and for sure, don’t over saturate your content with the keyword phrases that you are targeting. The best thing to do is just write naturally and allow your writing talents to kick in.

After that, then the final step is getting that page indexed in the search engines. The time it takes to index depends on the age of the site, how easily the content is accessible to the web crawler and how often the web crawler visits your site for updates. If it takes a longer period of time to index, you may consider setting up a sitemap.xml file. A sitemap.xml file is basically a road map for search engines to quickly find your newly published content. A sitemap.xml file works both on blogs as well as regular static web sites.

In the above example, you can see that the keyword phrase that I chose to target. You will notice that that exact phrase is also used in the <title></title> tag as well as the post <h2></h2> title and is used two times in the body content of the page.

The end result is a success. After my page was indexed in the search engine, I was able to search for the exact phrase and my page pulled up number on in the search result page. My advice to you is to target keyword phrases that have a very low amount of competition but also happen to be phrases that are commonly searched for on a regular basis.

Earlier I mentioned that over time you can gain more of a natural ability to do this. In the very near future, I’ll expand on how to do this more. In the mean time, I hope that you found this article helpful. For a complete list of other articles I have published here on SEOHosting.com you can visit my personal archives.