SEO, More SEO, and a Word of Encouragement

The Balance Between Good Content and SEO

Lee Odden of TopRankBlog welcomes us to Monday morning with a great article on balancing quality content and search optimization. He argues that the language SEO folk use tends to scare away creative content types. Really, they are trying to accomplish the same thing. Great SEO uses keywords. But, as Lee puts it, “Great SEO copywriting doesn’t read as a list of keywords, but instead balances keyword usage with creative writing that appeals to the reader; educating, influencing and inspiring action.” Walking the line between search optimized keyword-drivel and consumer-converting quality content may not be so difficult–it may just be a matter of thinking about what information will be useful to the consumer. The real trick will be performing flips while balancing on this line.

Read the full article at toprankblog.com.

And Now, on from Optimizing Content to Optimizing Photos

Can people find your site if they perform an image search instead of a general web search? According to Kasy Allen, they should be able to. She dips her spoon into the SEO soup by looking for images of tortilla soup. Some of these images take advantage of correctly labeled alt tags and titles, with the keyword included. However, it seemed that Google also catapulted images to the top if the rest of the page was optimized for search. The takeaway here is that all of your content should be optimized, as consumers begin to expand their search horizons to include non-traditional search.

View tortilla soup pictures and SEO explanation at seomoz.org.

Will Small E-Commerce be Run Over By S&P Downgrade?

We’ll wrap up today with a little bit of heavy news. In the face of a downgraded government economy and abundant financial fears, Marcia Kaplan of Practical Ecommerce tells small e-commerce businesses not to worry. Small businesses, she says, have already learned to adapt to a recession-oriented environment and will continue to thrive in an arena where consumers increasingly turn to the internet for their shopping.

Read the full article at practicalecommerce.com.

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