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This week I read a great (repeat, great) beginners document on SEO, and felt there were some great kernels of wisdom in there that are worth sharing in short form. The entire document I read can be found at SEOMoz. Those guys rock - thanks for a great document on SEO.

Background: What Is SEO

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing your website so that your potential customers can more easily find you via search engines. Since search engines involve people typing in certain words to find relevant content, and search engines rank popular sites most highly, SEO is about

• The relevance of your content to the keywords that the searcher has entered
• The popularity of your site, often measured in links from other sites.

While the practice of SEO is still a little arcane, it seems there's definitely some core concepts that you can stick to reliably - and it's not all about keywords!

Links Matter. But Not Always.
Some think that SEO is all about volume of links to your site and keyword density on your pages. This isn't false, but it's not true either.

For example, not every link is worth the same. A link from a large, trustworthy site like CNN is worth a great deal. But links from known bad sites, such as link farms (where groups of people link to each other for the sake of building link volume) can actually lower your search ranking.

Apparently, links from sites or groups of sites that are considered "subject matter expert" pages by the search engines are worth a huge amount too.

Think About What Would Your Customers Want
Many things cited as SEO advantages are also advantages to your customers. Valid links, working tools, accessible HTML code, fast loading times, well structured navigation, easily found and focused content - they're all good for SEO.

This also all good stuff for your customers, and it helps with SEO for two reasons:

• The search engines can find their way around, since the site is well structured and easy to navigate
• People are more likely to link to your site if *GASP*... it is ACTUALLY useful and easy to use.

So if you try to make using your website a great experience for your visitors,  you'll find long term SEO benefits too - which is pretty cool, since it makes sense that good sites should be rewarded.

High Quality Is Key
Creating a high quality site that's worth visiting and linking to is a pretty big part of online success, and it's a strength for SEO too. From the quality of your web design to the quality of your content, it all matters. And not always because it matters directly to the search engines, but because it matters to people, and it is people that provide the links that the search engines pay attention to.

So those were three points that really struck me as interesting. Ultimately, it seems that SEO could be summed up in a sentence: "Build a really useful, high quality and easy to use site, and you'll get traffic from search engines." Naturally that's pretty simplistic, and it's a huge field and discipline that most business owners will probably need help in (read that guide, seriously).

There are also a number of technical concerns there, which you'll need to learn or get someone to look at. But technical stuff is easy. Creating high quality content is not - so which do you think you should start with?

Side note: We are an SEO Friendly System & CMS - Hooray!
On a final (geeky) note, I was pretty chuffed that with FluidArc we've got a lot of the SEO friendly features that SEOmoz.org mentions. For example, 301 redirects on the web page level for duplicate content is there. Friendly, human readable links for blog posts, products and catalogs - check! Google sitemap creation, yep! We've even totally covered the website metrics and analytics they recommend.

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The other day there was an interesting little story about the history of blogging - or more accurately, someone making a mistake when recounting the history of blogging. This got me thinking about the history of publishing in general, and where it's heading.

Publishing on the web has truly grown and changed from its humble beginnings, especially in the context of how businesses utilize the tools that are available to them.

Blogging is just one of the tools that in recent years has become a mainstream business tool. Before that it was discussion forums. And currently, we're seeing the rise of RSS for business and marketing. Traditionally it's been that each type of publishing matures and spawns a product that implements that form of publishing. So a business owner that wants to engage in one of these types of publishing would go and find a blog product, or an RSS product, or a forum product, or a website product, or an email marketing product... and so on.

All of these products enable a certain type of publishing to take place. Even online shopping and ecommerce is a form of publishing - it's about publishing your products online. So the majority of what we are doing on the web boils down to publishing!

But it doesn't stop there - after publishing you need to measure the effectiveness of what was published, and then improve what you've published. So, you've got a publishing cyclic like this:

• Publish
• Measure
• Improve
• Go back to 1.

Which means that on top of all the publishing products above, now you need reporting and analytics packages and products to help you quickly and easily improve your content.

Now, we're approaching an era where a business needs 10 - 11 software products in order to publish, measure and improve their online business! So what's this got to do with FluidArc?

Well FluidArc simplifies the publishing cycle, making it less of a hassle and more productive. How? By providing an all-in-one, one-stop-shop to fulfill  the publishing cycle. We're bringing together all the publishing tools you need, combined with smart measurement tools that tell you about the interactions and cause-effect relationships between your different types of publishing.

To illustrate that point a little, let's consider the relationship between a blog, email marketing and ecommerce:

1. Shirley reads your blog and likes what you say
   
2. Shirley subscribes to your email newsletter
   
3. Shirley receives your email newsletter
   
4. Shirley reads your email newsletter
   
5. Shirley comes back to your website
   
6. .... and purchases a product

The blog caused the newsletter subscription. Which caused them to read your newsletter. Which caused them to purchase your product.

So FluidArc's all-in-one product not only powers all that publishing (A blog, email newsletter and products) but it can measure and draw links between those actions. Without adding a line of code to your web pages. Without doing anything at all - it just get's measured.

And here's the really exciting part.

Before I'd need to go through the publishing cycle, 1-2-3-4, with a handful of different products. In four or five different places I'd have to jump in and measure, improve, publish. In many cases I'd need to measure using a different tool than my publishing tool!

FluidArc lets you do all that measuring, publishing and improving in one place. We're tightening and speeding up the online publishing process.

That's a FluidArc difference—we take these steps from 1-2-3-4 times 5, down to just... 1-2-3-4.

It's simple - just the way we like it.

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