Basic SEO Rules
Published November 24, 2009 | 
This is a sweet little table to have handy when tidying up the onsite SEO stuff. Getting these basics right will go towards supporting that 15 or 20% that Google takes into account when ranking you for relevant keyword phrases.
Of course there’s more to a title or description than the number of characters!
My first rule is to keep the keyword as close to the front of the sentence as possible (proximity) and to keep the number of words down (density)
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Second, you want the title to make sense and press the right buttons. Too many SEO’s focus on stuffing keywords in titles even if they don’t make sense and neglect the fact that the title is what the searcher sees in the results page. You can boost your conversions massively just by treating this tag with the same respect you would give a pay per click advert.
Something similar goes for the description and I often include a telephone number just to show that the site is totally transparent and means business. Telephone numbers create a sense of trust even if the searcher has no intention of using it.
The URL is again important as it shows up in the search engines helping towards your relevancy score in the eyes of the customer. The keyword in the URL has less of an impact on rankings than it once had due to SEO’s abusing it but from a marketing and information organisation sense it is a smart move.
Posterous Initial Thoughts
Published November 24, 2009 | This service seemed so simple so I had try it out. http://posterous.com/
In short you can post to your all of your content distribution points via your email or via a posterous bookmarklet in your browser. I signed up and first port as usual is the profile page where I edited my user data by adding the same old greyscale photo I’ve been using sometime now and then changed the theme to match my main sites. I also made sure at sign up that the posterous URL contains my company name which unsurprisingly includes my keywords. To get the system set up for content sharing you have to go through the usual steps of handing over your passwords which I do with one eye on the future when the service goes down and my passwords get scattered across cyberspace – or maybe I’m paranoid. But once you’ve got over that you can start your messing about. Getting down to business I decided to use the bookmarklet first and posted directly to my posterous site. Here are the results http://brooksdigitalmarketing.posterous.com/ . Personally I think it looks ok but I’m not particularly bothered since it is more a stepping stone to my main site. When you post via email which I used for this post you can specify whether or not you want to post to all usingthe post@ syntax or you can use a selection of other; for this I used blog@. I would recommend reading the FAQ sections as there is a lot you can do with this but in truth I’m a novice so can’t offer any more wisdom. What I do know is that the posterous pages get cached and the links are not nofollowed so there seems to be some link love available. Give it a spin and see what you think.