I often have a need for a character count script to tell me how many characters something contains. I also often find a need for a word count script. Since I never seem to find such a dual-purpose script handy for calculating characters and words all at once, my quickest response is often to open up my Microsoft Word. I wait for the cumbersome software to load, then copy and paste it and wait for Word to think for a while. It stinks, and I finally got really tired of it. There is no need to hog system resources and more screen space by opening Word or a similar software. I nearly always already have a browser window open, so it would be a lot easier to just open a new tab and then copy and paste the content into a quick and easy javascript character counter and word counter.

I have been a web guy for a very long time. I have often found that when I need a script or an application, it is best to just sit down and create it myself. Over the years, I have written a squillion web applications of all kinds. Strangely enough, I often find that the simplest tools to create are also the ones I have a hard time finding the moment to just do it. Once I get around to it, I have often found that there were a lot of others who felt the same way. For example, there are thousands of people every month who use my very basic and aged screen resolution test. I wrote it because at the time I saw a need for it in my daily routine. The same thing happened here.

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.

I was on the phone with a new prospective client just yesterday and he brought up the use of meta tags. I immediately felt like a time machine had just sucked me back to the 1990s when search engines gave attention to the meta keywords tag. The topic of the meta keywords tag comes up once in a while, and each time I think to myself “somebody really suckered you bigtime, buddy.” I find it really hard to comprehend how some people imagine that something simple like meta tags will make a real difference in their website ranking in search engines. It is as if they think they have really out-smarted all the technicians over at Google, Yahoo, Bing, and etcetera, with this cool trick called a meta keyword.

Why can’t the meta keywords myth just die? I mean, there was a day when a good SEO could outsmart a search engine with tricky little tactics like this, but how can somebody in 2010 really think that there is such a simple way to outrank billions of other pages vying for search engine rankings? Do these people really think they were the first on the scene and they have uncovered the golden key to the Internet? Come on … anybody smart enough to tie their shoe should be able to reason this out with just one little “duh, I guess this kind of makes sense” moment of reality-checking.

Have you ever taken a moment to consider what people are really looking for when they come to your website? Of course you have, right? Maybe you have tried some keyword research tools and done your best to discover as many lateral keywords as you can possibly optimize. What may be surprising is how many customers you are missing, and the relatively simple reasons why. I want to give you some Google website marketing ideas for how to improve your website traffic, and optimize the traffic you already have.

Let’s take a look at two types of website traffic that come from a Google search. I will call them “first-search” and “second-search” website traffic. Both are important, but most companies are too focused on one to even recognize the other. Their loss may be your gain!

Blogging and SEO (being found in search engines) go hand in hand. If you have read more than a couple of my articles, you know that I am a strong proponent of blogging. Blogging is a huge asset to anybody wanting to be more visible to the public, and so it should not be taken lightly. If you do not have a blog, be sure to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog”.

Blogging comes with a lot of choices, and those choices include whether to truncate your blog posts and show excerpts on the home page, or to include full articles. Let us consider these options.