One of the newest books in print about search engine optimization is “The Art of SEO,” published by O’Reilly and written by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C Stricchiola. So what do you get when you pull in four of the most respected people in the SEO business to write a definitive book on the subject? Pretty much exactly what you’d expect: lots of juicy SEO goodness.

While the authors cover some of the basics of search engine optimization, and definitely lay out a good case for the value of SEO for non-believers, this book is not for SEO newbies. This book is more suited to those who already get SEO and have at least a decent grasp on the technical elements that go into good search engine optimization.

While it’s not a beginner’s guide, this book does cover the entire spectrum of the SEO process from keyword research to implementing on-page optimization, to link building, to measuring the success of your SEO efforts.

“The Art of SEO” also gets into some of the nitty-gritty details that most other normal sized books don’t get into. Examples of what I’m talking about include the following:

• Canonical link element
• Search spider control
• CMS issues
• Optimizing Flash
• 301 redirects
• URL rewrites
• Hidden content
• Changing servers
• KPIs for long-tail SEO

I also really like how they cover various topics on how to evaluate and select an SEO firm and how to best utilize your in-house team for maximum search engine success.

It’s a big ol’ book (600 pages!) and it didn’t flow smoothly from one chapter to the next at times, maybe because it was written by four different authors, so it’s not really the kind of book you’re going to cozy up with to go to sleep. In fact, if you’re a search geek like me, it will get your brain juices flowing and you won’t be able to think at all because of all the new ideas and things you remembered that you should be doing to optimize your site.

Overall, I was very impressed with The Art of SEO and I think it’s the best book on the topic of search engine optimization. You won’t be disappointed with the quality and quantity of content in this book. To be fair, I haven’t yet read most of the other books listed on SEL’s Best SEO Books of 2009 list. It did edge out Kris Jones’ book on Lee Odden’s poll of the best books of 2009.

Book Review: 'The Art of SEO' is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

In Matt Cutts’ keynote at PubCon in Austin, he announced the Friend Connect API. This means is that we will now able to integrate Friend Connect within blogs, forums, content management systems, essentially any site. This change will allow you to add a plugin to WordPress or whatever platform you are using and visitors can post comments under their Friend Connect ID. This will allow people to login with their accounts from Google, Yahoo, OpenID, and serveral other widely-used accounts.

A few Googlers have already created proof-of-concept plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB. They will be available on code.google.com later today. I’m sure many more will be developed very soon. Matt mentioned that these were these guys’ first plugins, so pros will likely put out ones that are better, and I’m sure we’ll see them for all kinds of different blog/cms/forum/etc platforms very soon.

The primary benefits of this new API is that you will be likely to get more comments and more contributions from visitors because people can use an existing account. Hopefully we’ll get fewer spam comments. At the very least, it will be easier to sift through the comments from real people and spammers. Also, if people know their real name and picture will show up next to their comment, they should be more polite in what they say.

More info will be posted on official Google blogs within the next hour or two.

Keep an eye on these:

Google.com/friendconnect
Googlesocialweb.blogspot.com
Blog.opensocial.org
mattcutts.com/blog

Update: here’s the official announcement

of course, Joost already has a wordpress plugin for it

Google's Matt Cutts Announces Friend Connect API is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Just like the lamb lying down with lion, but the big three search engines came together for a rare joint effort to announce the launch of a new feature that will help ease the world’s duplicate content problems. The new feature, called the <link> tag tells the search engines what version of the URL is the correct one to want index.

The link tag goes in the <head> section of the page of  looks like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.somerandomsite.com/hot-dogs” />

The search engines have been doing a pretty good job figuring out the right URL when people use redirects properly, but it’s not always easy to get it right–especially when we build these nutty sites with 50 different URLs pulling up the same content. This change should help a lot of webmasters sleep easier knowing that their proper, canonical URL will be indexed and given all the link juice it deserves. I look at it like a page by page sitemap to tell the search engines what URL to index.

Official blog posts about the new link / canonical tag:

Yahoo

Google

Microsoft

Coverage on other blogs:

Search Engine Land

Joost already created a WordPress plugin for this feature

3 Reasons to Use rel=canonical, 4 Reasons not to use it

New Canonical Link Tag Will Help with Duplicate Content is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

From Speaking on Business

Listen here (mp3): SEO.com KSL Speaking on Business

Transcript:

February 2, 2009

This is Fred Ball for Zions Bank, speaking on business.

The Internet has become the marketplace of choice for many business owners. According to statistics from eMarketer.com, a company that provides research and analysis on digital marketing and media, in 2008, $10.7 billion was spent on U.S. Search Advertising, which is advertising done via search engines. That number is expected to grow to $12.3 billion in 2009.

This is why, as a business owner, it pays to invest your online advertising dollars well so potential clients can find your company’s Web site more easily. This is what Dave Bascom does through his company, seo.com, which stands for search engine optimization.

Seo.com is a search marketing consultant. The company helps clients make the necessary changes to their Web sites so they appear closer to the top of a Google or Yahoo search, which makes clients more visible to their intended audiences. Seo.com also has software to track traffic that comes from links on search engines and other Web sites.

Dave was first introduced to Internet search marketing in 1998 while finishing his marketing communications degree at BYU, and he has been doing it ever since. In the year and a half since he launched seo.com, Dave has worked with hundreds of companies. His clientele has included everything from real estate to software and retail companies to a scrapbooking supplier.

Dave says seo.com has grown more quickly than he anticipated and some of the biggest changes have come about because of its rapid growth. He has been striving to create business systems and processes to increase consistency. Employee training and development is a top priority at seo.com so the company can provide the highest level of service.

For Zions Bank, I’m Fred Ball. I’m speaking on business.

SEO.com Featured on KSL Radio's "Speaking on Business" is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Yes, I live in Utah. Yes, I love SEO, and yes, I’m a geek. All three things are evident if you see my new custom Utah license plate featuring my favorite three-letter acronym: SEO.

So what kind of car would you expect to be sporting these sweet tags? A Hummer? A BMW? How ’bout an Audi R8? Naw, those would all be too cool for a search geek like me. This Utah search geek drives a 1998 Toyota Camry.

I know what you’re thinking, but stay with me on this…if you think about it, this is a perfect car to represent SEO. First of all, it’s a 1998, which is the year I first started doing SEO. Of course, we didn’t call it SEO back then, and it was all about meta tags and submitting your site to the search engines. Speaking of search engines, there were about a dozen that we cared about back then and none of them were named Google. It’s also a great car to represent SEO because is is very fuel-efficient–just like SEO is a very efficient way to spend your marketing dollars. And even though it’s not flashy, it’s reliable and it just keeps going after all these years, just like SEO. Oh, and last, but not least it’s paid for. Has been for a while. Just like search engine optimization is a marketing method that pays for itself early and often.

So if you see me driving my SEO-mobile around the streets of Utah, give me a honk. Two honks if you’re a fellow SEO geek.

Utah SEO Geek is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Google announced the release of their own open source XML sitemap generator tool. There are several third-party sitemap tools around that do a great job, but Google decided that they could add some value with their own tool.

As they describe it:
Unlike many other third party Sitemap generation tools, Google Sitemap Generator takes a different approach: it will monitor your web server traffic, and detect updates to your website automatically.

Sounds like an interesting, different approach to sitemap creation. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I will try it and report back on the results.

If anyone else has tried it out, post in the comments and let me know what you think about it.

Get the code for Google’s XML Sitemap Generator

New Sitemap Generator Tool from Google is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

It’s been a little over a month since I got my G1 phone from T-Mobile. So far, I’m really enjoying it. My old phone was a Blackberry Pearl, which was a great phone, but this G1 lets me do so much more. Even though T-Mobile doesn’t have the 3G network here in Utah yet, most web pages load pretty quickly, and if I’m somewhere I can get on a wifi network, it’s super quick.

What I like:

Multiple ways to navigate. You’ve got the touch screen, roller ball, full qwerty keyboard and the four buttons below the screen. I like to have options, and this phone has multiple options for moving around and getting to what I need.

Easy set up and syncronization with my stuff. Since I was already using Google apps for email, calendar, and contacts, it was as easy as entering my username and password to get everything up and running. I wish everything in life were this easy. For anyone using Outlook for email and contacts, you might have a few more hoops to jump through to get it to sync up.

Cool apps. Every time I check the Android app market, there are more apps in there. One of my favorites is ShopSavvy – this one lets you scan the barcode for any product and it will search for it and find the closest stores that sell it (based on your GPS location), along with prices and phone numbers. It also searches and compares prices from online stores selling the same product. another very cool app is Shazam, which will listen to any music and tell you the name of the artist and song. It also provides a link to buy the song from Amazon MP3 and a link to the band’s MySpace page if they have one. The strangest app I installed is one called Krystle II. It turns your whole screen into a picture of fur, and then it purrs and vibrates when you pet it. My kids love it. I think it’s stupid, but people I show it to get a kick out of it, so I haven’t uninstalled it yet.

Micro SD Card for more storage. The phone came with a 1GB micro-SD card, and can easily be upgraded for one with more storage capacity. As far as I can tell, however, there’s not currently any way to store apps on the SD card, just images, music, video, etc.

What I don’t like:

Battery life is pretty weak. It won’t last a full day if it’s fully charged in the morning. I guess it’s because there is a lot of stuff going on all the time, plus with the big display, it wears down the battery life pretty quick. I’m near a computer and/or electrical outlet most of the day anyway, so it’s not a huge deal to plug in when needed. Plus, I bought a recharger that works in the car, so I should be able to power up almost anywhere.

No flash player. I don’t need flash for most of the sites I care about using on my phone, but it would be nice to have when I need it. Plus, my kids are pretty bummed that webkinz doesn’t work on my phone.

Touchscreen Dialer. It takes some getting used to coming from my blackberry pearl. After a month, I’m still getting used to the touchscreen, and I find myself sliding out the keyboard to surf the web or send a text message more often than I call, anyway.

Overall, I’m very happy with the G1. It fits nicely into my lifestyle and lets me get what I need online wherever I may find myself. As long as the battery holds up, I’ve got the tools to get some work done on the go.

TMobile G1 Google Android Phone Review is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Do you search Google for your trophy keyword every morning to see if you’re still on the first page? Do you check more than once a day? If so, you are a rankings junkie and it’s time to shake the habit. Things have changed with the search engines to the point where rankings are no longer the best indicator of SEO success. Honestly, rankings have never been the best indicator of success, but this is becoming more and more important for marketers to understand. You should be focusing on how much traffic is coming from search, which keywords are driving that traffic, and most importantly, which keywords are driving sales.

The most recent twist in the search universe was Google’s announcement this week of the launch of SearchWiki. SearchWiki gives registered Google users the opportunity to mess with the position of sites in the SERPs. Basically, it gives me as a searcher the opportunity to pick which site shows up in the top spot and get rid of all the crap that isn’t relevant for any given search. Sound incredible? Don’t get too excited, any changes I make will only be visible to me when I’m logged into my Google account. However, position adjustments and comments people make in SearchWiki can be viewed by other searchers if they click on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of the page. If this catches on, and isn’t ruined by spammers, I expect SearchWiki to gradually gain more importance in what people see when they search. The first step will be to allow the option to let people’s search results be influenced by friends’ wiki changes, and then Google could start including aggregate wiki data as part of their search algorithm for the general public.

At the recent PubCon conference, representatives from all three major search engines spoke about how each is trying to offer more than “ten blue text links.” What they mean by this is that rather than the traditional 10 text links to web pages when you search, they are starting to serve up other types of content that is relevant to your search query. We’ve been hearing about this trend for the past couple years, and it has gradually become more prominent in the search results–known as a Universal or Blended search. Any given search could yield results for images, video, shopping, blogs, local maps or news. Rather than just links to these other types of media, they are often embedded right in the search page. With this shift away from the standard “10 blue text links,” it changes the paradigm of search engine optimization. While optimizing web pages is still important, if you aren’t creating and optimizing a wide array of digital assets, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to get your brand in front of searchers.

Another major shift in the search engines that will continue to have a huge impact on search marketers is personalization of the search results. The search engines are starting to customize the search results for each individual searcher based on their search history, geographic location, or other demographic factors. This change makes it futile to focus on search engine rankings, because the ranking will vary depending on who’s searching.

Mobile search is another important area to consider. The newest smart phones like the G1 and iPhone make mobile search look a lot like regular web search, but it is still a different experience searching the web from a mobile device. It’s a much smaller screen, and people aren’t usually searching for the same reasons they would search at the office or at home. Mobile search centers more around local search–it’s about finding restaurant reviews, phone numbers, directions, stuff they need to know when they’re on the go. Often, the default Google search from a mobile phone serves up search results that are localized to the searchers location. Search tools like Google’s recently launched voice search application for the iPhone, and ChaCha, which has been around for a while, give people the option to speak their search queries, or even send them via SMS text messages.

What does all this mean? It means we need to rethink how we look at search engine optimization. We need to do all the little things to make our sites relevant for our keywords. We also need to think beyond our own websites and provide unique, valuable content in as many different formats as possible. Focus on being relevant to whatever and however people might search, and your traffic and sales numbers will tell you if you are hitting your target.

Stop Worrying About Rankings is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Getting ready for the second day of PubCon in Las Vegas. So far it’s been great. We’ve got a crew of six people from SEO.com here at the conference. I’ve met some great people and look forward to meeting many more over the next couple days. The sessions yesterday were very good, and the topics look even more exciting today and tomorrow. We’re splitting up and hitting as many sessions as we can and we will post some of our insights here on the blog.

There’s a lot of Twitter activity among PubCon attendees

A couple good sites to get great coverage of PubCon include Search Engine Roundtable, and WebProNews, plus lots more if you look around a little.

PubCon 2008 Las Vegas is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I keep hearing about how tough the economy is and I know people who have been hit hard by the housing market, credit crisis, and all that junk. However, for our company, business is booming. We have been growing like crazy and it shows no signs of slowing down (we are hiring). Just yesterday, I got the latest edition of Inc Magazine, with this year’s Inc. 500. The Inc. 500 list is made of the top 500 fastest growing companies in the United States. No, we didn’t make the list this year, but I was very pleased to see a large number of companies from Utah on that list. In fact, Utah had the highest number of companies per capita, and Provo and Salt Lake both made the list of cities with the most companies per million residents. Many of the companies on the list are tech companies, which shows this really is becoming the Silicon Slopes!

Congrats to the Utah companies on this year’s list including:

31 Skullcandy
46 Interbank FX
60 Salt Lake Mailing & Printing
94 Simplicity Group
168 Cymphonix
180 Seastone
252 BuilderFusion
324 Doba
335 Fusion Holdings
356 Fishbowl Inventory
392 Heritage Web Solutions
420 AtTask
425 Clearlink
429 Mindshare Technologies
481 Engenuity Financial

Of course, there are many great companies in Utah that aren’t on that list. The secret is getting out. Utah is a great place to live and it’s a great place to do business. We have a smart, talented, entrepreneurial workforce and we’re doing some great things here. Personally I think the best is yet to come.

Utah Rocks the Inc 500 is a post by SEO expert Dave Bascom. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.