We now offer an SEO package for clients interested in improving their ranking on search engines. The package includes but is not limited to:

• Site submission to the top 3 search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN
• Google Account and Webmaster tools
• Sitemap development and submission to Google and Yahoo
• Access to monthly reporting tools
• Google Analytics Account for monitoring site stats
• HTML code optimization and meta tag design for optimum visibility

Mike Sansone had some good pointers about blogging:

• Find-ability: Use social tools such Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Digg to make your site findable.
• Adapt-ability: Track your traffic – both your site and your feed – and adapt to what your audience reads and clicks. Don’t box yourself in to tight. Change is growth.
• Response-ability: Comment on other sites, send ‘thank you’ emails to other bloggers for their work, always respond to comments left on your blog.
• Market-ability: Get great at writing headlines. The best way to do that is by writing headlines (and posts). Submit your work to Carnivals, or start your own.
• Sustain-ability: Don’t start something you aren’t willing to see through to completion. Patience, young blogger. The reaping comes after the sowing.

One more reason why I started a blog – I can’t suggest it to customers if I don’t know how to do it myself.

I found a very nice tool today (it’s free by the way) that gives you a GUI interface so you can make subnavs.

So for example, a lot of sites have a main nav element called Products. This tool will help you create a subnav so that when you put your mouse over Products, another menu opens up giving you more options.

http://www.opencube.com/imenus.asp

The tool is free and does not use Flash or Javascript so everything is SEO friendly.

As I peruse the online plethora of “how-to’s” on the web about how to rank your website higher on search engines, I keep running into the ‘keyword density’ enigma.

No one seems to know what the magic percentage or number is as far as how many times to use a certain keyword/keyphrase on a webpage.

You don’t want to repeat them too much or you might be considered spamming the search engines; but then you want to make sure you use them enough or you don’t get your point across. It’s a mystery. Google certainly won’t give any hints about it, so how do we know what’s acceptable and what’s not? Should I repeat the same keyword 5 times? 10 times?

I set up a blog for my company the other day (http://www.avalive.com/blog/blog.html) and was showing it to a friend. He asked me if I was pinging Technorati when I made updates. I was like, ‘Techno -who?’.

He said you can set it up so that whenever you made changes to your blog, you notify other popular blogs of your changes. Fortunately, Google’s Blogger does that automatically for you.

Technorati is very popular right now so you want to make sure you ping them.

I did some research and found this site the other day:

http://www.pingoat.com/

This service lets you ping multiple blogs at once. It’s free, easy and they also have some other great tools like a webpage keyword analysis tool, a spider simulator tool and email anti-spam generators.

Impulse Web Solutions of Wilmington NC is starting it’s own blog courtesy of Google’s Blogger.

The purpose of this blog is to discuss up-and-coming technologies in the world of web development and to inform site users about what’s new with Impulse Web Solutions.

Enjoy the blog!

http://www.impulsewebdesigns.com