By David Temple

Back in the 20th century Danny Sullivan, a guy who seems to get ‘it’ long before most of us know what ‘it’ is, wrote an article about sem seo certification entitled “Promoters Call For Certification“. In that article he describes an open letter from Beyond Interactive, Mercury Seven, US Web and Web Ignite to the major search engines. These four firms were calling for the establishment of a certification program for optimization professionals from the search engines. After Danny gave his reasons why he believed certification wouldn’t be viable, he added, “Given this, it may make sense for the major search engines to consider experimenting with the GoTo model and accept paid links, especially for competitive terms”.

Tip # 1 – Whenever Danny Sullivan speaks, listen. Whatever he writes, read.

By Matt O’Brien

Oh those famous words heard a thousand times by countless kids everyday. So what did you say when you were asked? A Doctor? A Lawyer? What about a search engine marketer? The first two maybe but search engine marketer no way. I wanted to be an archeologist myself (thanks to Indiana Jones of course), but I never even heard of a search engine marketer before.

By Harmit S. Kamboe

If you are some one like me who has not written a line of code, but understand how critical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, then fret not. Help, is at hand.

I have had the good fortune of stumbling across and being a part of the SEO industry and have found that SEO is more to do with good, logical thinking than any secret coding tricks.

Maximizing SEO return has two basic components:

1. Know the problem
2. Solve the problem

Know the Problem

By and large, the problems with SEO are two fold:

1. Search Engine Penetration

By Laura Lane

Three weeks ago, the most popular article in the running for the SEM Scholarship was Nick Urbani’s “The SEO Article You Shouldn’t Read.� While I agree with many of the points he makes, we differ in several areas. I agree that a “coherent, forward looking strategy� is important in SEO. Furthermore, I like to win as much as everyone else – but what does it mean to “win�? Is it just about getting a number one ranking?

What I love about SEO is not just the thrill of getting a number one ranking, but the accountability that we have to our clients. This is the biggest thing that Urbani’s Theory Focused Planning is lacking – accountability. He mentions holding yourself accountable for learning in his last point, but is that all accountability is or should be?

By Will Critchlow

You know you’re an entrepreneur when you’re sitting in the cinema wondering how much money you could have made by buying popcorn wholesale and selling it at the door…

You know you’re into SEO when you look at SERPs like “leeds hairdresser” and you wonder how quickly you can skill yourself up as a hairdresser, how much you could afford to charge per cut (CPC) and what your ROI would be…

Now most startup businesses fail in the their first year (Related stats) and that figure might seem daunting if you’re thinking of starting a business, but the truth is that these businesses were doomed to failure anyway “robot horses??)

By Saravanan S

Pay per click is what that got me started in search marketing back in Aug 2004.
Being so new to the field I started reading up whatever article I could find about
PPC, downloaded e-books, played a bit the keyword suggestion tools and the newfound
knowledge about keyword demand, supply, competition, KEI, Ads, Landing pages,
Conversion was fascinating.

It took me a couple of weeks to learn these, prepare a keyword list, write
some ads and launch a google adwords campaign. And the first time I saw the
ad show up for the targeted keyword in the top position among 15 other competitors
that was a great feeling.

By Martin Muehl

The most important On Page optimization techniques include content optimization, the title-tag, several META-Tags, headlines & text decoration, alt- and title-attributes and continuous actualization.

(1) Content Optimization

This is a tough one, because you should of course concentrate on your user and easy readability, but you always have to have an eye on the search engines as well. For your users it’s clear what a certain page is about if it’s written in the headline, but for search engines it’s better to repeat the important keywords several times. So you have to strike the right balance: