Google has just Released a PDF Guide of Best SEO Practices for Starters

The free SEO Guide by Google covers the basics of most common SEO Best Practices that webmasters might consider optimizing, like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, heading tags, images, robots txt and promoting your site.

The guide contents are:
Good practices for page title tags
Good practices for description meta tags
Good practices for URL structure
Good practices for site navigation
Good practices for content
Good practices for anchor text
Good practices for heading tags
Good practices for images
Good practices for robots.txt
Good practices for promoting your website

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(If you find the information at SEO Practices Blog useful, please help us support it by giving this Blog some “Link Love”: Linking to us or bookmarking our site. Thank you.)
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This SEO Guide by Google also provides a complete list of sources that can be useful in a site’s Optimization and Promotion process: Free webmaster tools, Web analytics services, as well as other Google resources to find all information you need.

So go on and Download the free Search Engine Optimization Guide by Google. Please make your comments on the release of this SEO Guide by Google.

A Beginner’s Guide to HTML E-mail for Marketing: Free PDF Guide.

Email marketing refers to the use of email in marketing communications. It’s a very important marketing tool, that if used the proper way, can get you great results on your online business.

Email Marketing has been used as a way of promoting businesses for quite a while, it has evolved throughout time though, and there are new techniques involved in the process.

In its broadest sense, e-mail marketing covers every email you ever send to a customer, potential customer or public venue. In general, though, it’s used to refer to:

-Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again.

-Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship.

-Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people

I have been really busy with my work, studying, taking online courses, reading, etc…, trying to keep up with the latest changes and techniques used for SEO/SEM.

I found a great PDF guide about e-mail marketing, it’s a beginner’s guide to designing, coding and delivering HTML Email. It covers the following topics:

(If you find the information at the SEO Practices Blog useful, please help us support it by giving this Blog some “Link Love”: Linking to us or bookmarking our site.)

- How HTML Email Works
- Designing and Coding
- Anatomy of a Good, Healthy HTML Email Newsletter
- Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Designing around spam filters
- Testing & Troubleshooting Your Email Designs
- Email Marketing Basics & Best Practices
- Measuring Performance
- Check List for Beginners
- Useful Resources
- Email Applications & Known Issues

So download the free PDF guide to HTML E-mail: Designing, Coding and Delivering, it’s a great guide to check if you’re interested to learn about the subject.

One of the best SEO Books to learn about Search Engine Optimization got reviewed at reviewlicios.com by Anita Chaperon. She made an honest and thorough review of this E-Book and showed us why this is one of the best options we have to learn SEO today.

Anita points out that anyone from beginner to intermediate level and who owns a Website will benefit from this SEO Book.

She answers questions like who wrote it, what’s covered in it, who is this E-book useful for, how recent is the information in it, etc.

Check out Anita’s review of the SEO Book, this will tell you why it is one of the best acquisitions you can make if you’re really serious about getting into Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine optimization is one of the largest growing fields, and best paid on the Internet, that’s honestly one of the reasons I got into it. When I started on SEO 2 years ago, I wanted to find a book to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization; I wished some one would have suggested me this book; it would have saved me a lot of time. I highly recommed it.

Ladan Lashkari: Success in the Online World.

Found a great, inspirational story about a successful Internet Marketer. Her name is Ladan Lashkari, a young Iranian woman of 21 years who started on the Internet when she was 17. With a lot of dedication and effort she has become a very successful Internet Marketer.

This is an amazing story because she is a young Iranian woman, who happens to live in a country where woman’s possibilities and rights are very limited.

Not only that, but being in a country with a strict U.S. embargo, not having the possibilities of having credit cards or bank accounts to do business online, and with English as a second language, those are huge barriers that she has managed to overcome…

And how has she done it… Her formula as she mentioned is perseverance, don’t give up, no matter what:

“When you are just getting started, you should know it might take some time to make the amount of money you expect, and you should keep on and don’t give up – no matter how people around you try to disappoint you. I think this is the most important and difficult part… it’s where most people give up.”

You can read the full story at Eric’s Blog, it really is a very inspirational story, as he says:

“If this girl can do it, so can YOU. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are…it doesn’t matter where you live in the world… it doesn’t matter what other internal and external factors are trying to hold you down. You CAN succeed!”

I invite you to read, study, and be persistent. Try to find the best resources on the Internet to learn SEO. I’ve found a great seo book that has helped me to understand the basics. It has the best and most updated information and resources to get you through your SEO learning process. So if you are new to SEO and Internet Marketing, check it out; it might be your next step to your online success.

Free Internet Marketing Video.

Every time I write a post, I think of what type of information we SEO beginners would want to find on the Internet that will help us build our knowledge and experience. I found an interesting resource that shows us the basic steps of online marketing if you are an SEO beginner or you are planning to start your own business online…

Even though this is a promotional video for Epiar.com, it has good information on it; check the video: introduction to Internet Marketing, you will find important aspects like:

1- Why to have a Website
2- What makes a Website succeed
3- What is the Internet
4- How Search Engines work
5- Optimizing Web pages
6- How people navigate online
7- How to build link popularity
8- Identifying Websites within your Industry
9- Getting targeted traffic to your site

Remember our idea at SEO Practices is to guide you to quality resources we find about the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Marketing, so you can start building your own experience and set of best practices that will actually work for you.

This is a list of essential search engine optimization strategies, you will probably learn some other in the long run, but right now I want to give you a list of the initial SEO techniques you have to have in mind when thinking on building your own website.

These practices will increase your chances of getting indexed by Search Engines, better rankings in the search engine’s result pages (serps) and possibly increase the amount of traffic to your site.

SEO is about a series of techniques you do to your website in order to improve the quantity and quality of visitors.

Here are some of the most important practices:

1- Get your own domain name (preferred if it is .com, is the most used on the Internet and people are already used to it). You can check Godaddy.com, to buy your domain name, they’re a Company with good reputation online.

2- Get your own, reliable hosting (a place where your web page is stored to be permanently available to visitors) for your site. A couple of hosting sites you can check are: Dreamhost.com or Pair.com.

3- Do a thoroughly keyword research to find out which are the most important words you should be using in your site, related to your main topic.

4- Add Titles, keywords and descriptions on the head of your page code. Each should be unique and related to the page.

5- Add a robots.txt file at the root of your server: e.g.: http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

6- Add a Sitemap page to your site: It should contain each page of your site, is like and index for your site, it will help guide visitors and search engine robots for better indexing.

7- Use CSS (cascading style sheets) to arrange the presentation of your Web site. It’s used to define colors, font and layout. This will help you improve the ratio of text/code of your Website, you want to have more text than code.

8- Use your keywords to describe the images in your site: alt tags.

9- Make sure you use H1 and H2 tags for the headings and subheadings of your site, using your keywords.

10- Write articles including your main keywords. Don’t worry about keyword density or frequency, what’s most important is that your article is compelling and useful to your visitors.

11- Link to relevant, quality sites using contextual links (using the keyword of your site).

12- Make sure you don’t have broken links in your site.

13- Try to use bread crumbs on the top of your pages, to make sure your visitors know where they are in your site, e.g.: Home > Marketing > Link Building. This will tell them they are reading an article of the link building section of the category marketing.

14- Get rid of java scripts in the code of your page and put it in an external file.

15- Build 404 pages (when someone reaches to a page that is not found in your site it will show the visitor a custom message instead of getting an error page and loose that visitor). For instance the message could say: Sorry the page you have reached does not exist, please go to our home page: http://www.yoursite.com .

16- Once this is all done submit your site to major Search Engine and Directories and start building links to your site, of course that’s a subject for another post.

You will find a lot more techniques to add to your SEO list of basic practices, but for now these ones will help you get started. Good luck.

I have found a good article about the basics of Social media Optimization for seo newbies. Social Media has become a very important source for marketing if it is done the proper way; sites like Digg, Netscape, Del.icio.us can drive good traffic to your site so content can be easily found, distributed and shared by the participants of the community.

Continue reading the guide to social media optimization | digg story

Having a Blog today has become very important if you are interested in starting your own Business Online. Blogs are a simple way to publish to the Web, they are easy to maintain, you can easily start contact and communicate with others on the same field you are at and are a great tool for Online Marketing.

At SEO Practices we want to share with you a nice list of some of the best resources for you SEO newbies, it will guide you through blogging step by step:

Get your Own Blog:

Choosing the right blog platform is very important if you want to stand from the crowd, you can either host it on Blogger, Word Press, Type Pad or on your own domain (most recommended). Of course if you are just starting to find your way around the Internet any hosted solution on any of the CMS mentioned bellow will do to begin with:

Word Press
Blogger from Google
TypePad 
Movable Type

Starting your Blog:

I’m very aware of my own limitations as a blogger and strongly believe that it is only by researching, reading and practicing that we get to know anything. So I encourage you to start going through the resources on this guide and working on your own blog.

Blogging for Beginners
Guide to Building, Customizing, Promoting, and Monetizing your Blog
21 Tips to a Successful Blog Launch
Blog Usability: Top Ten Design Mistakes
21 Tactics to Start your Blog

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs:

SEO for Blogs is about preparing your blog so Search Engines are able to index it easily and therefore to improve the chances to be found by Internet Users. In Wikipedia is defined as: “marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding”. So lets not get too complicated and read the following resources:

SEO Best Practices for Blogs – Problogger
Blog Optimization
Search Engine Optimization Tips and Resources for Blogs
Optimize your Blog

Finding and Writing Content:

There are four basic characteristics that a piece of content must have:
-Uniqueness
-Related to your topic
-Usefulness
-Quality

Here are some of the best resources related to best practices for writing content and how to find it:

10 Web Tools to Help Generate Blog Content Ideas
How to Write Magnetic Headlines
29 Topics and Sentence Starters for Your Next Blog
5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang

Promoting your Blog:

How to make your blog noticeable, it’s about bringing readers to your blog, weather you are generating leads, selling a product, or offering a subscription to a newsletter or a download, you want visitors to come to your blog and take an action. Promoting is about letting others know your blog exists. Check some of the best resources with tips, ideas and tools of how to promote your blog:

25 Tips for Marketing your Blog
How to get traffic for your blog
23 Ideas for Finding New Readers for your Blog
Blog Promotion Tools

Blog Useful Tools:

Here is a list of resources of useful tools that will help you enhance the look, functionality and security of your blog:

Add a Styled Flickr Photo Stream to Your Blog
Backup Your Blog
Make your Own Feed Button
Share the Blaughter: Put a Comic on your Blog
What bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox
Social Bookmarks for your Blog

Social Networks for Blogs:

You can get you blog noticed on the Social Networks, those are sites where thousands of Web Navigators participate, looking for information, news, entertainment, games, etc, and most important deciding which ones they have found are the best resources. Check some of the following:

Social News Network
Social Bookmarking Site
Search, Surface, and Organize Blogs
Find Out who is Reading your Blog
Subscribe to and Manage to lots of Web Information

I have seen quite a few posts lately related to Pay Per Click, so I thought it was important to write about a few basic seo practices for beginners to have in mind when thinking of starting a Pay Per Click Campaign.

The first time I got into PPC was last year when my boss told me we needed to start running a PPC Campaign for a couple new websites, he asked me if I new about it, I of course told him… yes; sure, I know how to do it.

So right after I started to look for information about PPC and found out that it was a way of doing advertising for a Website, through PPC Search Engines, whom will do the marketing for you, some of them are: Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft Ad Center, Miva, Goclick, 7Search, etc.

In order to get clicks from a PPC search engine, you are supposed to register a PPC account with the chosen SE, set keywords to bid for, and manage your PPC account on a regular basis.

Here are some of my recommendations:

1. Check carefully some of the most common PPC Search Engines and choose the one you think is more convenient for you.
2. Make sure you know how much money you can spent daily (campaign budget).
3. Find out how much money is going to cost you to run that specific campaign.
4. Do a meticulous keyword research to find out which words are most convenient for your PPC campaign.
5. Start initially a campaign test with a very low budget while you get the hang of it.
6. And most important of all, document yourself thoroughly before you start a Pay Per Click Campaign.

A few great resources to find information about Pay Per Click:

PDF Guide: Google Adwords and Yahoo PPC Tips – Aaron Wall, SEOBook
Pay Per Click Guide for Beginners
Basic guide to PPC
198 PPC Search Engines Reviews

Aaron Walls of Seo Book, wrote a nice guide about the optimal word count and web page copy length.  He outlines the following basic on page optimization practices:

- We should Optimize for user experience, meaning that a page should be optimized for both Search Engines and for user experience, we should write as natural as possible using the keywords we want to rank for and variations of them.

- Our ideas should be structured, which mean we should write dividing the content in several paragraphs with logical sub headers to make the content easy to read.

- There aren’t an exact number of words to be written in a web page copy, we should use as many words as we need to make a clear idea of what we want to say.

- We must considered to develop a personal style.

- Omit needless words.

To read the full article go to: Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length