I have posted about creating title tags before but here is a nice refresher. The Latest and Greatest Search Engine Friendly Page Titles is a post from last week at Search Engine Roundtable. It contains links to threads from last week in the Search Engine Watch Forum and the High Rankings forum where people have asked for advice in creating title tags. If you follow the link to those forums, you can see what Danny Sullivan and Jill Whalen had to say about it respectively. I always enjoy getting input from other SEO’s on how to optimize web pages.

The optimization for the title tag shouldn’t change much, however. I have used basically the same formula for optimizing the title tag since 2000. Your title tag should be descriptive of the content of the page, and it should contain the keywords for that page. Don’t try to stuff keywords in your title tag though. It could hurt your rankings. Be sure to also include your site name, either at the beginning or end of the tag. It’s that simple!

In doing research lately, I have come across a paid directory I am recommending for some business owners that have relatively new web sites. I don’t normally recommend paid links unless it’s really neccessary. However, I think a listing in Business.com can help many businesses with web sites that have had trouble building links and traffic. It costs $199 to be listed for a year and then can be renewed for $149 a year after that.

I suggest paying the initial fee and trying it for a year. After that if you are not satisfied, you don’t have to renew. I think in most cases, it would be worth the money. You should see an increase in targeted traffic not only from this directory but from the search engines as well. I believe that also you could receive more links on other sites just for being listed there. This will then bring in more traffic from those sites as well as increase link popularity in the search engines. Here is the link to the sign up page if you are interested.

http://www.business.com/info/ad_products/annual_inclusion.asp

The Librarians’ Internet Index, or LII, is one of the best directories you can find on the web today. Here is an excerpt from their about us page.

Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) is a publicly-funded website and weekly newsletter serving California, Washington state, the nation, and the world.

Every Thursday morning we send out our free newsletter, New This Week, which features dozens of high-quality websites carefully selected, described, and organized by our team of librarians. Topics include current events and issues, holidays and seasons, helpful tools for information users, human interest, and more.

I think the most important thing to look at here is that they only list “high-quality websites carefully selected, described, and organized by our team of librarians.” This is what makes the site so valuable as a resource for searchers. I highly recommend the newsletter, and have added a link over on the sidebar.

From an SEO standpoint, a link from the LII is priceless in terms of the link popularity and traffic that your site will receive. Getting them to link to your site however is very challenging. LII will not link to just anybody. Their criteria for submission is very strict. This can be found at http://lii.org/pub/htdocs/selectioncriteria.htm.

They also receive so much spam that they have a unique way of requesting submissions. You can submit a listing request to LII in two parts. First, fill out the submission form on their site. Once you do this you get a separate e-mail that lists an e-mail address to resubmit your request to. The e-mail overall is very cryptic and is hard to make sense out of.

If anyone has submitted a successful listing request to LII, I would love to hear about it. I would like to know how it was accomplished, along with how long it took to list your site and how your site benifitted from it.

When do you throw the book at Content Stealers? is a post on Jim Boykin’s web site about dealing with people taking your site’s content and using as if it were their own. Someone asked him the question of how to deal with these people. He pointed them to some interesting and helpful links about what rights you have and how to go about handling the situation.

The most interesting thing I thought was what graywolf said in the comments. He pointed to the U.S. Copyright Office web site where you need to go to if you want to register your content. This link is for literary works. According to the site:

Literary works may be published or unpublished and include nondramatic textual works with or without illustrations. Computer programs and databases also are considered literary works.

I’m assuming that web site content would also be considered a literary work. Send them a copy of your content along with a payment of $30. The registration becomes effective the day that the Copyright Office receives your materials. You should receive a certificate of registration in 4 to 5 months.

Some questions I have in regard to this are, is it an annual fee, and do they require you to pay it for copyright to be in effect? I was under the impression that if you create it, you own it. I guess the issue is proving you wrote it, and that is why you need the certificate. If it is annual, it seems like a lot of trouble to go through. I think the fee is very reasonable for what you are getting however.

For those of you out there who don’t know what tagging is, you are not alone. I myself have seen it, but still do not quite understand what it is.

Technorati is a blogging site that supports blog tagging. Using Technorati Tags explains what tagging is and how to create tags.

According to their page, “a tag is basically a category name that is used to help organize items found on the web, such as blog posts, photos, etc.” Some blogging software supports tags already. If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom feeds, publish your feeds and categories will be read as tags.

If your blog software doesn’t support categories, all you have to do is tag your post by including a link in the body of your post. Here is an example:

<a rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]“>[tagname]</a>

The [tagname] can be anything. You do not need to include the brackets, just the descriptive keyword for your post. Just make sure to include rel=”tag” inside the anchor tag.

You can link to any web page that ends in a tag. This means that the last word in the url is the tag or category name. For example, these tag links would also be included:

<a rel="tag" href="http://apple.com/ipod">iPod</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity">Gravity</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua">Chihuahua</a>

To include your tag in Technorati, make sure to ping them. You can ping them manually here or set up your blog software for automatic pinging.

To see some examples of site that use tagging, follow these links: Flickr, Buzznet, del.icio.us and Furl.

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has posted an SEO cheatsheet online that he passed out to conference goers at the Search Engine Strategies conference going on in New York right now.

The cheatsheet lists a rundown of pretty much everything I would advise a client who wanted search engine optimization.

1. On-Page Optimization
2. Search-Friendly Architecture
3. Web Design & Usability
4. Promoting & Marketing Your Site
5. Creating Linkbait
6. Link Building Tips

I should say I agree with everything except the linkbaiting part. While I do think it is a great tactic for SEO, not everyone can do this especially most businesses seeking SEO. This type of marketing usually requires a large budget as typical businesses do not have the resources to do it in house. In addition, most businesses are not right for social bookmarking sites unless they create something really new and noteworthy.

SEOmoz is a great SEO resource. Watch this site for more great coverage of Search Engine Strategies going on right now.

How Some Credit Card Processing Companies Seem to Be Strangling Ecommerce (Why We Love Amex & Discover) at MarketingSherpa.com brings to light interesting facts about credit card processing companies. Marketing Sherpa cannot take Mastercard or Visa through the end of February on their web site because they reached a pre-defined revenue limit with the card companies. Marketing Sherpa can still take American Express and Discover because apparently these cards either don’t have these limits or they are substantially higher.

According to the article, Visa and Mastercard give each merchant a revenue ceiling to limit their risk. The risk occurs because customers in the US have 90 days to complain about fraudulent charges and get them removed. If if a merchant suddenly goes bankrupt or flees the country with 90 days of revenues, the credit card company is responsible for the debt.

Apparently, situations like can and do occur. Once you have processed a certain amount of monthly revenue through Mastercard and Visa, they can shut off without warning. Site owners can try and avoid this by accepting American Express and Discover or allowing customers to be billed. One good thing is that it is a monthly limit. At the end of the month, they will reset the limit and turn processing back on.

I was surprised to learn this, and I suspect most site owners did not know this either. At least now, you can educate yourself and learn what the limits are so you can try and figure out when you are close and provide alternative processes if you anticipate being shut down.