This time of year is when most people reflect on their lives, where they’re at and where they want to be in the future. It’s also a time to reflect on the good things in their lives. I thought of a list of SEO things to be thankful for.

1. You know what SEO is! You’re already ahead of the curve if you run a website and know what SEO is. Even better if you know what the key elements of SEO are.
2. There are plenty of resources for SEO information. When I first started doing SEO almost 10 years ago, there was hardly any information available about what to do other than title, meta description, meta keywords and copy. Now we have other criteria to consider and plenty of resources, like the blogs at SEO.com, to get more information.
3. Great conferences to attend:
   SES (Search Engine Strategies), PubCon, SMX (Search Marketing Expo), and Search eXChange. There are even international conferences now, which didn’t exist a few years ago.
4. It’s not boring. Things within the industry change quite often, so you constantly get to learn new techniques and tricks to help sites rank well in the search engines.
5. You can be creative. Being good in the SEO industry requires that you pay attention, think through what you’re doing, and try out new things. Testing to see what happens when you do a particular action is a great way to learn more about what works and what doesn’t. And testing in our industry doesn’t involve blood, animals, or human pain!
6. Sharing. It’s amazing to me how well we share with one another. When one person learns something new, they blog about it and teach others how to do it and what the impact of it will be. We even share our toys (also known as plug-ins and tools).
7. Learning a new language. Yeah, OK, we might be geeks, but we can be pretty dang interesting! At our Christmas party a group of us starting talking about SEO. The spouses started laughing because it didn’t make any sense to those outside of the industry.
8. Our industry is growing at a time when almost everything else is declining. What a great space to be in! We are so different from other industries; we are definitely in a good spot.
9. We can work from home when we need to. With only a computer and Internet access, we can work from the office, from home or even on vacation if we want to (one of my co-workers took a two-week vacation and is working part of the time to save on PTO). It’s so flexible!
10. We work with great people! Most SEO people either know or want to know other SEO people. We talk about more than just our industry and take an active interest in other people’s views and ideas.

So there you have it. Ten things to be thankful for in regards to SEO. Hopefully you can think of a ton more things to be thankful for all year long.

Be Thankful is a post by SEO expert Tamra Hamblin. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

I guess I really am getting old. I mean, I know I am because I work in an office where most of the people are about 15-20 years younger than me and I still use Alt-E-U to undo something in a document.

Yeah, I’m old, and I’m OK with that because with age comes experience, knowledge and history. But it also comes with a longing for more simple times, like when the Internet was an infant. Times gone by when, while there may have been more players on the Internet playing field, and they may have spoken a different language, you scrambled a bit more to talk to them all. It was good fun (meaning it was interesting and kept you on your toes). There was no one that totally dominated everything because everyone was pretty new.

I miss the old days, when the players in the Internet field were: Google, Overture, Yahoo, Ask, Alta Vista, Excite, Hot Bot, and Lycos were all top engines (MSN didn’t exist yet and Overture and Yahoo were separate). Google was not yet a giant, and no one search engine dominated the field.

Most people didn’t realize, though, that these search engines were using some of the other engines’ results. They were playing on the same team but they had different names on their jerseys.

So what’s my point? Simply this: Looking back, we sometimes forget how things have progressed. It’s nice to know a little bit more about the history of Internet marketing and how one area supports another.

For example, I remember searching the Web in the early ’90s and not being able to find a single thing because the search engines sucked so badly, and there was so much garbage and banner advertising on the Web. I hated it. I never wanted to use the Internet again and thought it was doomed to fail. Yeah right. See how well I predict the future? But I really appreciate how efficient search engines are now, and feel I have a better understanding of it because of having experienced search engines in the early ’90s I know how to structure my search queries together and get better results. I also lived through the dot-bomb era, and can often tell which type of company has a chance of surviving and which doesn’t by watching the management and marketing of the company. Having been around for so long has also given me access to a wide variety of marketing avenues, such as affiliate marketing, SEO, PPC, banner advertising (which at one time actually worked), email marketing and social media.

Metrics and analytics are also effective tools that marketers have today. It’s much easier to review metrics and actually use those metrics to make decisions. With such a wide experience base, the old timers like me have a few areas to pull from when we make recommendations to a client on what they should do and how they should optimize. Although I think SEO is “da bomb” I don’t think it can stand on its own. We need to remember the rest of the players companies need to use.

Some of the current players for Internet marketing are social media groups like Twitter, Facebook, blogging, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Sphinn, and Tumblr. Each has their own specialties, methods and followers that you can reach out to. So be sure to target your message appropriately for each properly. Of course there’s search engine optimization, pay per click , and email marketing that needs to be included in the team mix.

For any company to stay in business, they need to use all the marketing players on the field. All the players need to work as a team to help the company be successful on the Internet. After all, isn’t that our goal, to be successful?

Marketing Team Players is a post by SEO expert Tamra Hamblin. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

When you have a large company, I mean large enough to be international, you need to have your website listed in different languages so that people across the globe can access it and then understand what your site is about. After all, you need to remove all the roadblocks you can for all your potential customers. But when you translate the site, keep in mind that you shouldn’t just do a direct translation word for word because things just do NOT translate well like that. Have you ever spoken to someone who looks up every word in a language to language dictionary? The sentences they compose are very poor, grammatically speaking, even though they may have all the correct words in the sentence. You do not want your website to read that way or your potential customers will think poorly of you.

At the same time, as you have your website translated professionally, it would be wise to remember that the keywords that are popular in the United States are not necessarily popular in other countries. So while we use the term laptops in the United States, the term equivalent to notebooks is more popular in China on Baidu, and it’s a totally different word in Russia on Yandex.  This makes a big difference when you have the copy translated and it’s definitely something that needs to be researched beforehand and then shared with the translating company.  It’s also important to remember that just as we use slang words here, there are slang words used in each country and they need to be researched as well. They will not be revealed in the synonym search given on Google.com, you will need to speak to a local to find out what the current term is for your keyword.

This is how I do the localized research once I have found the correct localized terms.

• Go to Google Adwords
• Change “results are tailored to English, United States” to whatever the right language and country are for my search
• Put in the directly translated word in “enter one keyword or phrase per line” section
• Leave the rest of the options as they are already selected and click on “Get keyword ideas”
• Change “Match Type” from “Broad” to “Exact”
• Review the local search volume by month, reviewing the keywords and the search volume for them

Sometimes you will find a great keyword or two that you should use to optimize in your copy.  Always remember to check out what each of those keywords mean though, don’t automatically assume that they are synonyms just because that’s the way Google has them listed. That could be a big mistake!

So can you just use Google translator or one of the other online translating tools to translate your keywords for you? Absolutely not! I once did that for a very large client and my Malaysian counterpart had a heyday laughing at me. Not a pleasant experience on my part. Be sure to use a live translator who is current and fluent in both languages. The reason I say current is, as mentioned above, you need to use the recent slang keywords, not only the proper words necessarily.

Besides using these keywords in your content, you should also use them in your title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, and image names when possible. In fact, if you can use the keywords in your file names, that will help you too. Remember, not all countries have Google as the top search engine and in most cases the search engines for other countries are using the “old” search engine rules, so you can play by them.

Photo credit

How to Take Your Keywords Global is a post by SEO expert Tamra Hamblin. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Getting good rankings in the Baidu search engine is not an easy task if you are accustomed to working with Western search engines such as Google US. The Chinese search engine spiders sites much the same as other spiders. It follows links from one site to another and also follows links that are submitted to it manually. However, there are a few differences in the way the websites are ranked. For instance, Baidu places more emphasis on the number of incoming links and meta descriptions, while Google is concerned with quality of incoming links.

Information on Baidu

Baidu is the leading search engine for websites, audio files, and images in China. The company offers a Chinese language search platform, which consists of websites and certain online application software, as well as Baidu Union, which is the company’s network of third-party websites and software applications. The company primarily provides Chinese language Internet search services to enable users to find relevant information online, including web pages, news, images and multimedia files, through links provided on its websites. You can read more about the full services available on the the Baidu search engine on China Analyst.com.

Baidu introduced “phonetic” or “pin-yin” search, which allows users to type in Chinese keywords using English alphabets. This feature is designed to skip the switching from English input to Chinese input, and for when the user is not sure of the written form of a keyword. Since there are many different ways to pronounce and state common words, and many different dialects, this was a huge addition for the search engine which greatly set it apart from all other search engines. Read more about Pin-Yin.

Baiduspider, the proprietary spider for the Baidu search engine, is load capacity friendly and is designed so it will not overload your site by visiting it too quickly. Unlike some other search spiders of the West, Baiduspider also obeys the Internet robot agreement. You can forbid baiduspider from indexing all or part of your site, by correctly setting up your robots.txt file to block portions or your entire site. Read more about how to optimize your Robots.txt file on our blog.

In addition to natural search results, Baidu also displays paid search results within the body of its search results. Baidu mixed its paid advertisements with its natural search results until recently when the search engine began to separate the results. Soon, all paid results will be segregated from natural listings (very similar to Google) making it easier to find organic rankings quickly, and more important to implement your SEO correctly.

Key Takeaways

What should be implemented in order to rank well in the Baidu search engine?

• Get back to the basics of SEO. Pay attention to title tags, meta tags, descriptions and keywords. Correct usage of H1 and H2 tags, alt tags, and anchor text.
• The anchor text for internal linking matters, so be sure to optimize it.
• Write the site in Chinese, not English. This includes alt tags, description, title tags, keywords, content, etc.
• If the site isn’t already indexed, submit it to baidu trends.
• Increase the number of incoming links. Keep in mind that Google looks at the quality of links. In order to maintain strong rankings in Google and acquire good rankings in Baidu, one must balance the two. Acquire good quality links in high quantity numbers.
• Having servers located in China helps the equation, since this gives credibility to the idea that the site is Chinese, and should be ranked well as a Chinese site.

Want more information on Baidu? Visit Filination.com
Read more about Google or Yahoo on our blog.

Ranking Well In the Baidu Search Engine is a post by SEO expert Tamra Hamblin. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Now that Adobe has made the modifications to Flash so that it will be indexable, and the search engines have begun to index Flash, does that mean you can just put any Flash piece up and it will be indexed without any problems? Not really, you still need to do a little extra work on your part to ensure that the Flash work will be indexed and read correctly by the search engines. Otherwise you may be in the same boat as you were before they were able to read Flash.

So here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Currently Google is the only search engine who is noticeably reading Flash files. They have worked closely with Adobe to develop the right toolset for the Googlebot in order to read the files for indexing. Yahoo! is “working on it.” MSN is developing their own format, Silverlight, which will compete with Flash, so they probably won’t be developing the toolset necessary to read Flash files.
• Search engines still can’t follow JavaScript, so be sure that your links to Flash files are not done in JavaScript or the Flash still won’t be indexable and it won’t be because of the Flash file.
• Include keywords in your content—of course! Use relevant, researched keywords that you want to rank well for.
• As with your website, use text instead of images so the spiders have something to eat and index. If everything is in an image, there will be nothing left for them to index.
• Be sure to use an HTML layer for your Flash file and include all your links in it that are in your Flash file. Remember to not use JavaScript to execute any of your links.
• Use SWFObject 2.0 for the best programming that detects whether or not a browser supports Flash and then serveseither the Flash or HTML text version of the website based on what it detected. Read more about what’s required here on Google’s website.
• Google has noted on its website that they are having issues indexing bidirectional languages (Hebrew and Arabic).

According to the Google website their algorithm follows Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. The algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, undoubtedly better than a person does; that content is then available to be indexed by the algorithm. Google utilized Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library in order to improve the algorithm’s effectiveness.

We’re still waiting to see what Yahoo! has to say about how they will index Flash, but it’s a safe bet that if you follow what Googlebot needs, Yahoo! will eventually be able to read it too.

Helping Flash Become SEO Friendly is a post by SEO expert Tamra Hamblin. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.