Do you check your statistics to see if your web traffic has moved up since you checked it an hour ago? Do you ever feel just a tinge of obsession over your Google Analytics or Clicky statistics? Do you wait impatiently for the next update of your score on Alexa, Compete, or Quantcast? Do you get frustrated when your PostRank score is a day behind and you just have to know if they actually picked up on all of your hard work?

Stop it! Just stop it!

I know how easy it is to feel better when you go and see how (or if) people are interacting with your website or your social media profiles. It is actually very important information to know. Knowing your statistics, and understanding what they mean is extremely valuable for effective online marketing. The problem arises when it is taken to a level where productivity is lost.

I am not going to tell you to ignore search engines totally, but it is important that you strike a balance in favor of people over search engines. It is really easy to get caught in a trap of writing and optimizing everything just to be listed the most prominently in search engines.

I have written about a lot of SEO topics, provided a lot of useful blogging tools, and shared some really good reasons to blog. One thing that I am not so sure I have really said enough about is the notion of writing as if the search engines never existed.

I try to have this thought in my mind with every article I write, but even I am often caught in a trap. It is really easy to get a little too keyword choosy and worry yourself with keyword density and all the other SEO magic, to the point where it is no longer useful or interesting to the people who are ultimately your audience. Without them, you are kind of like a dog chasing a railroad train. What would you do with those search engine results without the people? I mean interested people who receive benefit from what you have to share with them.

Is Squidoo good for search engine optimization (SEO)? The short answer is “Yes!” The longer answer involves how Squidoo can help to improve your search engine ranking.

First, for the uninitiated, I will explain that Squidoo is a service which allows for creation of topical pages. Squidoo calls each of these pages a “lens”, and the lenses you can find on Squidoo cover a great deal of useful information. Your lens (or lenses) can include any topic you like, and in fact, I have a Squidoo lens just for that. It is titled “SEO, Social Media, and Other Stuff Murnahan Likes“, and it includes RSS feeds from some of my blogs. That means more syndication of my content. This is a good thing, although the RSS links are not very useful from a search engine optimization standpoint. It also includes RSS feeds for commenting services I use, such as my Disqus profile and Intense Debate profile so people can see things I am commenting about on other blogs. It makes a nice aggregation of things I like and things I am up to. The possibilities are vast, and Squidoo has a lot of nice modules that are easy to customize.

My SEO tip today is about paying attention and taking action. There are about a squillion things that influence good SEO, and even more things are required to achieve great SEO. Paying attention to details can sometimes make the difference between good SEO and great SEO. Do I have your attention yet?

You are not, I repeat NOT going to get the best results that you seek from this article if you do not pay attention to detail. Good SEO has a lot to do with very fine details, and it often means paying attention to the details that the rest of your industry neglects. Today I am going to give you some thought-candy about the links which point to your website, but first, I am going to be sure that I have your full attention and that you are ready for this brain-exploding tip.

I think a lot of people try to make SEO seem a lot harder than it actually is. Really good SEO is actually quite tricky and time consuming, but there are many things that are pretty simple and tedious, but just need to be implemented properly. Knowing all of those simple and tedious tasks, and how they fit into the big picture of your search engine optimization strategy, and using them properly to receive optimal benefit is why people hire a search engine optimizer.

SEO: It is the art and science of getting your website listed in search engine results for more search terms and listed higher than all the others. This is a pretty important factor to website success … and business success. So, it would seem tragic if you had done almost all the right things, but then you just forgot some of the basics.

Nobody is perfect. We all forget things. I want to give you a reminder of something that I frequently find overlooked by WordPress blog owners when they set up a new blog, and as the blog grows. The basic principle can apply to any website, really. The little things really do add up, and this is a quick SEO tip that you can use to improve your SEO so fast that you may wonder why you ever neglected it.

There are good SEO (search engine optimizers) and there are bad SEO, and if you cannot tell the difference, your money and time will be wasted. I am going to give you some third party objective tools to tell the difference between good and bad SEO. These can help you to determine whether yours is working, whether you have hired it out, you are seeking to hire it out, or you are venturing into the ever-popular DIY SEO. The information I will provide in this article also includes some great SEO tools just to satisfy your curiosity. This can help, in case you wondered why there are not more people coming to your website, or to estimate how well your competition is doing. First, I want to be sure that you understand what SEO is and why good SEO is important, so I will start with that.

Did you know that Google will help you to have better results in their search engine? Google provides useful advice on how to improve a website’s search engine ranking, and they did it with Brandon’s Baseball Cards. If you have never heard about Brandon or the example Google made with his baseball cards, I would not be surprised. There is a lot of information on the Internet, and it can be hard to take it all in. The information Google provides to explain search engine optimization is worth the time it will take to read and take notes. This is especially true if you are going to try do-it-yourself search engine optimization (DIY SEO) for the first time.

Google Wants to Index Your Site

Google wants to include your website in their index, and for good reason. When you can find anything and everything you ever want to know at Google.com, it is good for their company. This is how Google maintains its ranking as the number one search engine. Being the perfect go-to source for information is what drives Google’s AdWords advertising sales up, and keeps their market share strong. The biggest challenges website owners face mirror the challenges Google faces, and are as follows:

Tynt content tracking has some great uses and is extremely simple to implement. I just cannot figure out why more people are not using it. My guess is that they will!
I am a fan of knowledge. I love to know things, and this is especially true when it comes to Websites. I use a lot of tools to track what people are doing on my sites. I use Google Analytics (of course), and I love Clicky Web Analytics because I like to watch what people are doing on my site in real time (yes, I see you there, reading and copying [...]

Do-it-yourself search engine optimization (DIY SEO) is possible, and may even bring you to the top of Google search listings for a few of your chosen keyword phrases. If you choose this route, be prepared to lose astonishing amounts of money due to lost opportunities. The opportunity cost of bad Internet marketing efforts will always be much higher than the cost of hiring a professional search engine optimizer.
Of course I have a stake in your choice, so this is admittedly not without bias. Just for a moment, try to give me the benefit of doubt. I am telling you this [...]