According to a recent survey done by Google approximately 1 billion people will use their mobiles as a primary access point to the internet in 2012. With such a staggering number businesses simply can not afford to be unprepared. A goal for any business in the upcoming year should be to optimize their websites to make them compatible to readers taking in their information on their smartphones, ipads, etcetera. The article below from Search Engine Land has 5 steps to help get your websites up to speed.

by Bryson Meunier

Last week my colleague, Michael Martin presented Mongoose Metrics data that demonstrates that less than 10% of you are mobile ready in 2012.  He also presented some pretty compelling reasons for going mobile in 2012, including the Compuware study that 57% of customers would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site, and 40% would actually even go to a competitor with a better mobile experience.

If you’re a regular reader of this column and you don’t have a mobile experience, you are in the majority of site owners; but you’re also way behind and may not be able to catch up if you wait much longer.

So are you ready? Let’s talk about the ideal set up for your mobile site for SEO purposes.

There are cheaper, easier solutions, but this is the one that I would recommend to webmasters looking not just for a mobile friendly solution, but something that’s truly optimized to bring in traffic from mobile searchers.

If you want to build a mobile site in a way that will increase your organic search engine traffic, this is how to do it.

Read the full article here http://searchengineland.com/how-to-best-optimize-your-mobile-site-for-seo-112940?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed-main

Today is a very informative article about some simple and some major trends to prepare for coming up this year. Some of the information you are no doubt familiar with, for example the idea that Google+ is here to stay and it is going to be important to branch your social media targets to include it as well. Other examples are not so obvious. Publishing articles that include an author image with optional snippet information about the author is going to blow up this year because getting search results into Google images is becoming easier and just one more area for SEO improvement.

By Adam Audette

What SEO trends are important to watch in 2012 for enterprise-level SEO? Many colleagues, clients, and prospects are keenly interested in the answer to this question.

Here are what I think will be four enterprise SEO trends to watch in 2012.

1. Further Corporatization of SEO in the Enterprise

The trend over the last several years has increasingly shown SEO teams “go within” at large companies.

For enterprise companies to realize exceptional results in SEO, they almost always require a dedicated internal SEO team. That’s the case today primarily because incremental gains are harder to achieve, as SEO is becoming more complex, harder (through obfuscation of data, such as Google’s “not defined” segment), and more competitive. Organic results, too, are shrinking and Google’s SERP and paid listings are continually evolving to blend in more tightly with the organic results.

Where does this lead us in 2012? Well, what we continue to see is strong demand for enterprise companies to lean on agencies for SEO work.

As SEO gets investment and resource demands within corporations continually rise, the need for outside support also rises. We see this most strikingly in the need for companies to secure content and off-page support.

Link development, social media, and content strategies will continue to be the primary need of the enterprise in 2012. With this trend comes the solidification of enterprise-level SEO analytics tools for in-house teams (and agencies for that matter). SearchLight, Brightedge, SEO Clarity, Matrix, Searchmetrics, and other toolsets are becoming essential complements to analytics, log files, crawling tools, and Google’s and Bing’s own excellent webmaster consoles.

2. Rich Snippets Proliferate (and So Does Spam)

With one small recent change, Google has made it very easy to get your author photo in search results. 2012 will be the year this absolutely takes off. In fact, it will become a competitive disadvantage to publish without author information accompanying the Google result.

And it’s not going to be confined to authors, either. Rel author is certainly the most interesting recent microformat that Google has introduced, but there are many others. We’ve seen the way rich snippets increase clicks in search results by providing more information and better “pop” on the SERP.

Google’s RV Guha, a rich snippets engineer speaking at SMX East recently, was quoted as saying that “…it seemed that giving the user a better idea of what to expect on the page increases the click-through rate on the search results. So if the webmasters do this, it’s really good for them. They get more traffic. It’s good for users because they have a better idea of what to expect on the page. And, overall, it’s good for the web.”

In our testing, rich snippets can contribute to a staggering 52 percent lift in clicks, with spillover effects in increased impressions. And we’ve seen it even higher, although nowhere near the increases reported elsewhere, (which I have no reason not to believe).

With great power comes great responsibility. Spammers are already jumping all over this one, so I imagine there will be tighter controls coming out soon.

Read the full article as it originally appeared on ClickZ.

Guest posting is a powerful tool which can be utilized to bring exposure to your brand online. Posting quality content to a website or blog that is relevant to your own brand’s area of expertise will increase exposure and bring new visitors to your sites via link inclusion and brand or name recognition. Follow these steps in the article below to develop an optimal strategy for guest posting.

By Eric Enge

Providing great content to authoritative people who are searching for it is a great way to build relationships with important people. Many influencers have busy schedules and rely on finding great sources of content to help them keep content flowing on their blog or website. Offering them a great guest post could be just the thing they are looking for at a time when they are in a big crunch.

Link building has changed. Promotional plans that use only old fashioned link building are flawed in today’s SEO environment. A website may build a great link profile, but an optimal website is frequently mentioned in social media and searched for by its brand name.

Publishing your articles on the blogs/websites of a major influencer is a great way to strengthen your brand, which can lead to those kinds of signals being generated.

Coming up with Guest Posting Targets

The best value comes from picking out the top tier targets. Don’t waste your time writing articles for lots of blogs that few people will ever read. Blogs that have little authority won’t help establish yours, either with the users or search engines.

Here are some ideas on how to brainstorm a list of targets:

• Internal brainstorming: You should always do this first. The key members of your staff probably already know many of the people that it would be interesting to develop relationships with. They may already be reading the blogs of some of these people. Make a list of these blogs operated by influencers to start.
• Use Google: Try some search queries using search terms for your market space. Add some phrases like “news” or “announcement”, or “tips” to try and uncover blogs covering the space. For extra credit, append the phrase “guest post” (including the double quotes) to try and uncover sites that have accepted guest posts.
• Use Bing: Bing will provide different results than Google, so you can often get additional ideas by going here to search.
• Use Google Blog Search: This is the same concept, but it will return blog only results.
• Talk to other people to get ideas: You can talk to connections you already have. You can go to conferences and ask people there, or see who is speaking. Or, if you can’t go to the conference, see who writes about it or who appears on the agenda as a speaker.
• Use other blog search tools such as Technorati: Diversity is a good thing, so checking out other sites like Technorati can be a good way to get more ideas.
• See who is listed in DMOZ in your category: Some of these sites may be good targets as well.
• Follow the trail of other guest posters: Somewhere along the way you will find someone else who guest posts on related topics. See where else they have published guest posts. Try the query string: ["FirstName LastName" "guest post"] (without the []) to have Google or Bing return that list to you in short order.

These are just some starter ideas, and you can probably come up with many more. If your market space is too much of a niche to have a decent number of influencers, look to those market categories which are supersets of yours. Influencers in those superset areas probably want to provide coverage of your topic occasionally, and that is all you really need.

For example, if you sell chainsaws, and that’s all you do, there aren’t a lot of chainsaw specific influencers. However, there are lots of people who cover handyman topics, or outdoorsman topics. Many of these would be interested in articles related to chainsaws.

One last step before you finalize your list is to make sure that you verify that they could be interested in a guest post. In some of the suggestions above (such as “Follow the Trail of other Guest Posters”), you will already know that, but in others you won’t.

To track this down search on ["guest post" site:targetdomain.com] (without the []). If they have never taken a guest post they are not likely to do so for you, so you might want to give that target site a pass for now. Or at the very least, build a real relationship with the influencer by other means first before broaching the subject.

Determining the Content to Create

This step is pretty straightforward. The major steps are:

1. Study the target site. See what they have been posting there. Figure out what will complement recent articles they have written.
2. Pay particular attention to what other people have guest posted on the site. This may provide clues to areas of expertise that the site owner likes to get help with.
3. Review the expertise that you can bring to bear. No point in proposing an article that you wouldn’t be in a position to create!

This last step is important. Given the focus on authoritative sites and influential people, you want to propose something where you can add your own authortitative voice to their site. The whole process only works because you have something of high value to add to the conversation on the influencer’s site.

Approaching the Influencer

If you can get an introduction than that is a great place to start. Nothing better than a warm friendly intro.

If an introduction to an influence isn’t available to you, then manually do the research to try and find their contact info on the web. Never do this with an automated tool because the results are unpredictable.

It’s also a good idea not to write the article in advance. Creating an article and shopping it looks a bit desparate, and actually detracts from your success rate. Decide on one great article that they might be interested in, and pitch that.

Then, put together an email to them. As always, with unsolicited communications, keep it short and respectful. For example, I never waste their time telling them what a great blog they have – be genuine, and if you never looked at their blog before, don’t go telling them you love their site. Your email could be structured something like this:

Dear [Influencer],

I saw that your site accepts guest posts from authoritative people in the industry from time to time. We have a lot of expertise in [your market area]. We [fill in a few major credentials - places you have been published before, awards, years experience, endorsements, or similar things].

We would be interested in writing a guest post for you on the topic of [fill in the proposed title]. The article would discuss [fill in some details] and would be based on [fill in how your background adds value to the article].

Let me know if you would be interested in the article.

[Your name]

You will get a variety of answers to these requests, so be patient with the process.

Some people will come back to you and be non-commital and say write the article so I can look at it first. That’s OK. We always proceed with these articles as our hit rate in getting them accepted is very high.

Others will simple say yes, and that’s great!

Read more here

Others will say no, or not respond at all. Don’t argue with them, or re-email the no responses. Continue to treat them with respect. The day may come when you can turn that no into a yes. Don’t rush it. You can approach them again at some later date. Who knows? They may see your articles appearing on other people’s sites and your credibility may go up with them. Or, you may be able to get a warm introduction at a later date.

The above process works surprisingly well and could get your guest post featured on the website of a major newspaper or authoritative blog. Execute with patience and it can bring you great results.

Read more here 

When undertaking a new initiative, such as fixing problem SEO factors, it can seem very time consuming. At first a task like this can seem daunting, but the good news is that there are some common fixes you can undertake that will take you no more than a few minutes of your day. Over the course of a week you can troubleshoot 8 common SEO pitfalls in the time it would take to come up with a clever facebook post.

By Josh McCoy

While a long standing concerted effort toward SEO can pay off big down the road, don’t forget that sometimes there are quick tasks that can turn the needle.

Over the years, I have heard many times from individuals desiring success in SEO, the request could never gain approval as the resourced time was too great of a budget allocation or that an SEO vendor wasn’t in the budget.

This is true to some extent as a full SEO campaign involves the strategic revision to information architecture, attention to SEO design factors, creation of quality content, a blueprint for a link-building initiative just to name a few items. These tasks can take a lot of time and the thought of this can leave many companies throwing SEO on the back burner.

For those of who you fit into this group, read on for eight simple quick SEO revisions that will allow you to potentially create positive affect with your organic search traffic.

For seasoned SEOs this is rather elementary information but should serve as a reminder of what should be a daily check for a site as they require so little time to assess and can be implemented rather quickly. In fact, you could tackle one of these items every day over your morning coffee and in a little more than a week create the opportunity for additional site traffic.

1. Review Your Robots.txt File; Assess Your Meta Robots Tagging

If you have a robots.txt file on your site, check by visiting /robots.txt. You may be surprised to find out you are withholding pages, folders, images, etc. from search engines that can drive traffic to your site.

Additionally, run a site scan with a tool such as Screaming Frog to assess if there are any pages on your site you are excluding via a meta robots tag. Both of these are a very quick fix if you do find issues.

Unknowingly tagged pages or robots.txt entries are usually the culprit of a developer who forgot to remove the designations when a new page rolled live or a previous site administrator who deemed the quality content unimportant for the masses.

2. Review Your Site Organic CTR by Page; Revise the Worst Page’s Title Element and Meta Description

This is both a conversion optimization and SEO tip. The new world of SEO is heavily focused on the message you send, whether it be search engines or users.

Google provides click-through rate data on landing pages and keywords in your Google Analytics account. You don’t think they are providing this data out of the kindness of their heart do you? They are interested in sites that feature enticing and relative search result displays for web users.

While you may have many landing pages with atrocious bounce rates, identifying the worst one or a few will allow you to revise them in a short span of time to reflect listing users want to click. Simply visit your Google Analytics account and traverse to the Traffic Sources-Search Engine Optimization-Landing Pages section. You can also perform this test through the Keyword dimension of this analytical area as well.

Ultimately, You are improving your site in the eyes of the search engine and you may retain some visitors at the same time.

3. Assess Canonicalization of Your Domain

It only takes a moment to rid yourself of one of the most common forms of duplicate content and link value dilution.

Do your site pages exist at www.example.com and example.com? If so then you need to create a permanent 301 redirect directing all non-www. site pages to the www. version pages of your site.

Search engines don’t want to see two versions of your content. It’s helpful to combine the inbound link equity of these versions into one page as many people don’t always target links to your www version of site pages.

4. Review Your Most Frequently Linked Pages on Your Site

Through the use of a tool such as Open Site Explorer you can gain information in the server status of your most linked content. You may find out a site page that went viral last year and gained a ton of links has since been deleted from the server and displays a 404 code. Additionally, you may also see that a heavily linked page has since been temporarily redirected and is in need of a permanent redirection.

Finding a few of these can result in a few quick redirects to help boost the link value on the domain.

5. Review Your Site for Duplicate Title Elements

Do a quick check of duplicate title elements in Google Webmaster Tools. This can indicate duplicate pages, keyword cannibalization, and bad title element structure.

Checking this Google property feature can quickly show you these issues and give insight into whether you need to spend the next 15 minutes writing unique title elements, creating redirects, or thinking about which of the multiple pages should include a certain keyword term.

6. Find Your Most Authoritative Links; Request an Anchor Text Change

I see it all the time, sites which have links from very authoritative sites anchored on the text Click Here, Buy, Learn More. It drives me nuts!

All your anchor text doesn’t need to be keyword-rich, but it helps to identify your strongest links and reach out to these sites and request a text modification to a non-branded are partially branded variation. You can assess your anchor text by linking site authority with tools such asOpen Site Explorer and Majestic SEO.

7. Review Your Link Targets in Your Site Navigation and Any Other Sitewide Links

By reviewing the links in your main, footer, breadcrumb and any other supporting navigation you can quickly assess if you have duplicate content issues with pesky default pages (e.g., /index.html). These pages should be redirected to the absolute page and the links should also be revised to target the absolute page. These revisions clean up many, many internal linking deficiencies across your site.

8. Verify Your Google and Bing Local Listing

As web users become more localized in their searching behavior it becomes imperative that your off-site listings are owned by you. It doesn’t take long to claim your listing and show search engines that you have control over your external profiles.

Another reason this is a must: this is also believed to be a local algorithm ranking factor. Look to establish verification with other web profiles on sites such as Yelp down the road.

No More Excuses

Creating an SEO friendly site is no longer too expensive or too time consuming. Taking 15 minutes out of your day here and there can do a lot to the search marketing success of your site.

Read more here