The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.

This TechFlash article about the Colorado law is a little bit less vague:

The law requires Amazon and other online retailers to inform Colorado residents how much they owe in sales tax on web purchases. [...] While the law doesn’t try to force Amazon to actually collect sales tax — a strategy pursued by some other states — it does draw Amazon into Colorado’s sales tax collection efforts.

I personally do not rely on an Amazon Associates account, and I have never drawn a large amount of revenue from Amazon.com. I am concerned about what this will mean for other affiliate programs that I am involved with. Since I began exploring SEO, and beginning to employ SEO strategies in the sites I have been building, I have seen a marked increase in the amount of affiliate revenue I have been fortunate enough to collect. I have been making plans to grow my affiliate marketing revenue, however I don’t know if other retailers will be following through with the same measure as Amazon.com.

I have a lot of questions about the possible precedent that this will set. Is it only retailers that this is effecting? What about Clubs and subscriptions?

If anyone has more information about the possible reach of this new law, please let me know. I would be very grateful.

The full text of the notice from the Amazon Associates Program is listed below:

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado’s new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

In a post at the end of September, I briefly complimented the Raven Tools help system on another blog of mine. Less than a week later I got an email from @RavenJon thanking me for the mention, and offering me use of Raven Tools for the following three months at no charge. It just so happened that that following Friday Everett sent me an email telling me my SEO internship had been extended for three additional months. I’m not mentioning the gesture for full disclosure, however I wanted to mention the awesomeness of it and the irony of when it came.

When my internship was extended I was given two different portals to paid membership communities. The sites had little to no optimization, and they had in-depth SEO audits that were two or more years old. I was given the logins and a cubicle. The first thing I did was plug the sites into Raven to see how it all worked. Their setup wizard was super easy to set up. It was able to auto-detect keywords and competitors and I was able to add them to the monitoring system – or not – with a single click.

Once the site was plugged into the Raven Tools system I was allowed to automatically research keyword competitors. Raven Tools will examine the keywords that it extracts from the site as well as ones that I submitted manually. It will track your web site’s SERP ranking for each word, determine your competitors and display your positions side by side.

I used this as a barometer to show me how well the work I was doing was benefiting the site. Naturally I was already on page 1 for nearly all of the brand related terms, however there many select terms that could have been performing better. I was able to see the page 1 and 2 performers at a glance so I could work strategically to improve their individual SERP rankings.

With Raven’s competitor manager I could add and subtract competitors manually. Once inside I could look at each competitor’s quality score, page rank, inbound link count and number of indexed pages. This tool was not only useful to gauge the competition, but it also helped me to determine the value of different link building opportunities.

The link manager was probably the most valuable and unique tool on Raven’s SEO arsenal. Link building is arguably the most difficult and hard to manage part of SEO that I had to learn. Raven’s link manager for link building laid everything out quickly and logically. It allowed me to categorize the type of link I was after and even auto-filled things like title, anchor text and link URL. You could easily change the status from a link that was requested, scheduled, active and inactive. One of the most helpful aspects of this link management tool is that it checked the links and automatically notified me if changes had occoured in the anchor text, PageRank, if the nofollow attribute was added, or the link was removed all together. Brilliant!

Raven Tools does a bunch of other stuff like social media profile monitoring, Google Analytics integration and even allows you to post directly to WordPress blogs. Raven’s system helped me organize the information I was gathering, and laid it out in a way that was very easy to understand. This set of tools ended up being essential in organizing and reporting the data I generated as I was learning SEO.

Because of the help I got by using Raven Tools for SEO and Social Media, I was able to produce a drastic increase of organic search engine traffic to the projects I was working on. In the fourth quarter 2009, my primary project saw a 871% increase in organic search engine traffic over fourth quarter 2008, and a 116% increase in organic search engine traffic over third quarter 2009, for its top 25 targeted keywords.

As Facebook gained popularity, and companies began to really see the value of social media, my perspective of it began to change. In addition to creating good sites that are well prepared for search engine visibility, it is also necessary to consider whether a social campaign is right for a business. There are a few things to help you decide if launching a social media campaign is right for your business, and rule #1 is why I have not created a Facebook fan page for Beginning SEO.

Do you have time, and commitment to give your social media strategy?

Beginning SEO does not get the attention from me that it probably deserves. Time is money after all, and if you don’t have the resources to make an appropriate commitment your blog, Twitter account and Facebook fan pages, the hinges will begin to squeak and it will be obvious how much care you have been putting into them. This offers a bad ascetic to folks who do happen to stumble upon them.

Rather than offer my suggestions on why you should, or shouldn’t create social media profiles for your business, I would like to offer my perspective on the usefulness of social applications and how I see them best implemented.

Google Buzz

Nothing to report, unfortunately. Google Buzz is threatening to become a serious contender in the social software arena, but most of the information you are going to find at this point are a lot of articles and posts talking about privacy issues. Despite the deluge of Buzz privacy issues that users appear to be up in arms about, usage statistics for the two week old Social Media infant are overwhelming. Just five days before this post was written, Mashable’s Ben Parr called Google Buzz…

…a nuclear bomb whose fallout will permanently alter the social media landscape.

The true impact of Google Buzz is still yet to be determined. As a method of sharing, searching and reading content, as well as interacting with other users, it seems to be on its way. I have heard rumors about Buzz’s speculated effect on SERPs.  Rumor has it Goolgle Buzz will begin to give consumers more influence and may allow everyday people to compete for SERP placement with corporations who have significant digital marketing budgets. So far it doesn’t appear that Google Buzz can benefit large corporations, but rather a tool for the people.

At this point in Buzz’s youth I see it as another hose on Google’s data vacuum, consuming your information like The Blob.

Facebook and Twitter

I put these together because they work so well in tandem, it’s ridiculous for some organizations to use them separately. There are many ways that your business can use Twitter and Facebook to develop your brand and gain public recognition. It’s a great way for smaller businesses as well as non-mainstream companies get the word out. As a business your Facebook fan pages and Twitter time line can allow you to:

• Distribute original and third party content relevant to your brand identity
• Leverage your content to create conversations between you and your fans, and your fans with each other
• Add another level to customer service, as your fans will turn to your Facebook fan page to publicly express their issues and questions with your service
• Act quickly and authoritatively in the face of different kinds of online publicity

Another thing that Facebook and Twitter have in common is the amount of access you have to the general public (and most importantly your customer base) at any given time. This access is something to be respected however. The people who fan and follow your business do so because they like something about what it represents. Going too off-topic can turn people off just as badly as having too many daily updates. Most Social Media users were drawn to it because of a desire to connect with folks they know. People have a desire to keep up with people that they have things in common with. They added your organization to their friends list, and your organization should take that as a humble compliment.

Twitter Tip: Create many accounts for as many topics as you would like to represent. For example a news organization can have Twitter channels for

• Local news
• National News
• International news
• Sports
• Entertainment
• Lifestyle
• Classifieds
  

If you are wondering if developing a Social Media Strategy is right for your business, the answer is undoubtedly YES. It’s a great idea to start planning your strategy in tandem with SEO from the beginning. You must be prepared to give it the proper amount of time and attention. Social Media can be your gateway to a responsive and proactive audience. It is important to respect your followers and realize that every time you say something, someone will be listening. Choose your words carefully and approach your strategy with your brand identity at the front of your mind.

My internship had been extended for an additional three months, and I was given two sites to work on. Each of the sites had an in-depth SEO audit from early 2008. I was let loose on the situation, and worked with the sites’ manager and developers to optimize them. I couldn’t have asked for a better circumstance to work under. I was able to work autonomously with tons of support from the people around the office, whether they were directly involved with the project or not.

My internship ends again at the end of the year, and I’m pretty sure they’re serious this time. I learned a lot in that beginning SEO incubator, and I’d like to share some of it now.

Relevant, optimized content

When developing quality SEO content, you begin by discovering relevant keywords. Tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool or the Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool are great. They can be even better when used together, as they offer different results. There are plenty of other free and paid keyword research tools as well. Using these tools together you can compile a excellent spreadsheet full of great terms to optimize your site for. You may want to take this list and separate it into groups. This will help you as you begin to plan the content structure of your site.

Break your content into many pages. Use the keywords you have gathered to nail down your primary web site structure including descriptive page titles, descriptions header tags and text anchors. As you do this, bear in mind that this will not be the final draft. You will continuously analyze and and modify these elements throughout the life of your site. Pay close attention to how you are doing this step, as it will begin to position your site to attract visitors from search engines, and encourage them to return.

You should now have an idea of what content you should be developing.  You’ve already set your primary SEO keywords, so now you can choose what secondary keywords you will be using on each page. One important thing to consider at this point is this:

• Spreading out your content is good for SEO
  If you have a multitude of relevant terms or information on one topic, don’t be afraid to create more pages. This will allow you to use fewer target words per page, thus concentrating your keyword density. This will  make it easier for your readers to find the information they are looking for while allowing you to gain more specific keyword ranking within search engines.

When you are ready to draft the actual copy, there are a lot of factors to keep in mind. Think about your objective and which terms you wish to rank for. For instance, a personal injury lawyer may decide to focus a campaign based on helping on the job accident victims. Your content could include the keywords construction accident, workers compensation or workplace injuries. Include these phrases throughout your new page’s content and H1 /  H2 tags such as “Construction Accident Lawyers,” “Worker’s Compensation Law,” and “Common Workplace Injuries.”

It is also very important to to continue to add fresh content. Keep up with news and events surrounding your industry and you will never run out of possible topics. Always look for sources of new content topics and new keyword targets to increase traffic to your web site.

Quality web site markup

The way your site is built has a significant impact on bringing in search engine traffic, and helps you to keep your visitors around longer. Using web standards when you write your markup and site architecture, and content integration can help bring in boatloads of traffic and help your users find exactly what they’re looking for when they arrive.

The appropriate use of web standards can significantly reduce development and maintenance time. One external CSS file can control the look of your entire site, eliminate the need for redundant HTML like <font> tags and allow you to make global style updates by changing just a few lines of code. Following web standards can also help to avoid the SEO mistake of duplicate content. For example, one XHTML file can employ separate style sheets for screen, print or mobile devices, removing the need for more than one document.

Separating formatting, structure and behavior will speed up the loading time of your web site. all of the CSS or JavaScript used in your site is downloaded only once when your user downloads the page that includes them. Search engines will have an easier time crawling your site when they can avoid things like missing close tags, complex nested tables and invalid code.

There are a few essential tags that should be used on every optimized page.

• <title> could be the most important place to place your primary keywords. Create titles using natural language, and avoid making them any longer than 60 characters.
• <strong> and <em> help search engines determine the hierarchical importance of a keyword, as in this example:
  The more credible sites that <em>link</em> to your site, the better your <strong>search engine results</strong> will be.
• <alt> Alternative or “alt” text is placed within an image’s XHTML to replace an image if it can not be rendered. Use keywords to describe what is shown in the image.
• Anchor text is the word or phrase a user clicks on in a link. Give your links’ anchor text some good, descriptive keywords.

Smart links for good SEO

Building quality links to your web site is just as important as anything mentioned so far. Some would argue that it is the most effective single method of SEO that you can do. There are many ways to build inbound links for SEO. I will not go through specific methods of link building, however there are some guidelines that you want to be cognitive of as you execute your link building campaign.

Link directories, press releases and interlinking are all great, tried and true ways to get links to your site. These methods are not always the most effective however. If you really want to get the most out of your linking efforts, networking is where you want to work. Rather than sending “let’s trade links” emails, it is important to use the relationships that you have built and initiate dialogue that will keep links pouring in. Your role in your professional community can be an unlimited source of inbound links.

When discovering good link building opportunities, the only limitation is your own creativity. Your brand is your company’s image, and if you value your brand you should already be sold on the value of things like press releases for new products or services. We are in an environment of webmasters, bloggers and online business people who all would love nothing less than getting inbound links from our neighbors. Since being a member of a community is about giving back, why not create a links page on your own site to offer reciprocal links?

Analytics

Now you have an optimized web site with content fit for a king, and all the inbound links you can dig up. What do we do with all this traffic? Analytics gives you a all the information you need in order to determine how well (or poorly) your SEO effort is doing.

Google Analytics has nearly everything you need to break down your success however there are tons of tools, both free and premium, that can supplement Google’s powerful analytics tool. Analytics will tell you things like what keywords searchers are currently using to find your site. A page can be optimized for one group of keywords, and still be bringing you traffic from others. By looking at these additional related long-tail keywords you can get a picture of how people are finding you. You could use these additional keywords to create new content pages and potentially increase your total traffic overall.

You want to develop regular, monthly reports based on the three major search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo. Track your progress over time using services like WebPosition or my favorite premium internet marketing toolkits from seomoz and Raven Tools.

In conclusion

One of the biggest SEO mistakes that you can make is overestimating your efforts. SEO is a journey, and never a destination. As you explore beginning SEO methods and strategies you will notice that these methods often compliment one another. You will find that your web site is ranking for terms that you never intended. You may discover that you are being linked to from somewhere that you never expected.

All of these things I learned within the 5 short months I spent as an SEO intern. I’ve learned that by content development, link love, adhering to web standards, understanding analytics and keeping a firm finger on search technology and SEO industry buzz you can create success for your web site, and the sites of your clients.

I also got a big book of past patent applications for search related technology.  One of them is Google’s patent on Address Geocoding, that was filed on September 22, 2003 (at that time I was just getting my feet wet in PHP).  It goes through and describes a method of turning your address into geo-coordinates.

A geocoding component generates geographic coordinate information, such as latitude and longitude values, for postal addresses.

It describes a method of determining if a Web document has geographic significance, and plots a geographical location based on that information.  It gets pretty specific about what the tool will do, how it filters results and finds the most relevant results based on user input, and things like that.

Not the most wild party I’ve ever been to, but based on the success of Google Maps and google Earth, it really feels like I’m holding a little bit of history.

But I digress…

Another tool in the SEO box, that I’m learning how to create, is a Competitive Analysis.  It’s basically looking at sites that are competing with your client’s, and trying to determine what it is that is causing them to rank higher.

I have done some research, and I’ve found a bunch of information on the subject.  I found a lot of information, including this article on Web Pro News that despite being a year and a half old, seemed to have a lot of really great stuff in it.  If you pick articles out of a Google search, you’ll see that many articles give a lot of the same information.  That’s awesome, because it lets me know just what to look for, thereby making my job a lot easier.

Some of the things that a SEO will look for are:

• The age of a domain.
  Older domains have more search engine credibility.  I learned this one in the four years I spent in the domain industry.  If you are purchasing a domain for a new project, it’s good to take one that has been around for a few years.  In some cases a resale domain may already have inbound links, which is quite valuable right out of the gate.
• Number of indexed pages.
  If a competing company’s Web site has 1000+ relevant, content heavy pages, they will typically rank higher then a smaller site.  If your client’s site is 20 pages, and their competitor’s is 1000 pages, keyword competition might be a lost cause.
• Content.
  The phrase I keep running into ad nauseam is “Content is King.”  I’m beginning to think there is something to that.  One of the things I have seen a lot of are ethical arguments relating to SEO.  The importance of quality content is paramount among reputable SEO articles I have read.  The better, and more unique your content is, the nicer you look.
• Site architecture.
  Good navigation helps spiders crawl your competitor’s site more easily.  Easy to follow paths, and links to other content within their site, and making the best content the easiest to access are methods that causes your client’s competitors to rank higher.
• Inbound Links.
  Link building is something that has been buzzed into my ear more then one time.  Through my surfings, it appears that link building can be a touchy subject among the SEO community.  Through what I have read, I have learned that link building can be tedious, busy work, and in some cases a necessary evil that must be trudged through.  There is a little about outsourcing link building to India, and paying per link.  If SEO is PR, then outsourcing link building can’t be a good idea.  Appropriate link building seems to be about networking and cooperation among businesses.

The things I have learned here so far have been primarily based on inbound links.  I am guessing that link building is going to be learning specifically during my time here.  It does seem quite time consuming, but seems to be one of the more important tools in quality, ethical SEO.

This is in no way an exhaustive list.  These are just a few key points that I have seen, and felt were important.  If you have more information on the subject, please feel free to add to this list.

Later I plan to address Competitive Analysis and Link Building processes in more of a how-to format.  I think there’s more information about all that before all that though.