That is Tendenci allows you to easily edit SEO tags like Meta, Alt tags, and Title tags directly from the interface (no coding required).

If you have a Tendenci site and would like know how to easily optimize your site for search engines be sure to review her slide presentation.

Learn more about the SEO features of Tendenci including:

1. The automatic SEO features of Tendenci, and how you can best take advantage of them
2. What custom SEO features are available in Tendenci
3. Tips for optimizing content like pages, articles, photos, news releases, etc.

Picture yourself here this October 6th and 7th, the Norris Conference Centers at CityCentre in Houston.

For the SEM & SEO Enthusiasts…

Schipul’s fearless SEO leader, Caitlin Kaluza will be speaking at two different sessions:

• Metrics for the Real World: A look at the ins and outs of the metrics world and customizing your analytics program and expectations for your business and demographics.

• Beyond the page: Optimizing your website ‘stuff’: The best ways for adding and sharing content strategically and how to learn from your site’s traffic patterns

Other speakers include Carter Cole from BrandExtract, the creator of the popular Chrome extension SEO Site Tools. Carter will be speaking about just that – creating Google Chrome extensions! Brian Wheelis from Facebook may also touch on SEO and Facebook.

The Must See SchipulCon Speakers

• Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal…need I say more?
• Nicholas Skytland & Steven González with NASA, yes seriously, NASA!!
• Brock Wagner, the founder of Saint Arnold’s Brewery, the most delicious beer ever to come out of Texas.
• Brian Wheelis, Manager of Agency Management Operations  for Facebook

The list doesn’t end there. Check out all of the SchipulCon speakers and register today. There are even one day tickets for those who can’t make it to both days. If that’s not cool enough, tickets will also be sold at the door!

Just for reading this entire blog entry The SEM Blog would like to offer you a sweet discount off of SchipulCon tickets with this promo code: schipulpal

We look forward to seeing you!

For more information about these Search Stars visit their websites:

• Bruce Clay – BruceClay.com
• Matt Cutts – MattCutts.com/blog
• Danny Sullivan – SearchEngineLand.com
• Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz.org

Which is better for SEO? Schipul.com/web-marketing vs. Schipul.com/web_marketing

According to Search Engine Land, Google and Bing handle dashes and underscores in URLs differently.

Google’s Matt Cutts, recently released this YouTube video update on the Underscores vs. Dashes question.

“Join on the Underscore, Separate on the Dash.”

Google says it’s better to stick with the dash to separate keywords in a URL. If you’re starting a new website and its brand new, Google encourages you to use dashes. This will allow you to add more easily searchable keywords into your URL and may help improve rankings.

However, if you have a website that’s successful in page rankings and has been around for a while, don’t worry about it. Underscores are fine to use for established websites. Cutts says the amount of impact it has in Google rankings is “relatively low” and he does not recommend going back and rewriting every single URL to use dashes because it’s just not worth it and may cause problems.

Do Dashes vs. Underscores Make a Huge Difference in Google?

Cutts states, “It doesn’t make that much of a difference. It’s what we call a second-order effect. It’s not a primary thing that makes a huge difference.”

What About in Bing?

A Bing spokesperson responded to Search Engine Land by saying they do not differentiate at all between dash and underscore in their URL ranking features.

What Should Webmasters Do?

If you are launching a new site, then go ahead and use dashes in your URLs, in order to keep your keywords separate. According to Cutts, “when Google sees an underscore in a URL, it joins what’s before and after into one term.” However, if you have an existing site and using underscores in your URLs, don’t change them to dashes because it can cause technical problems and can impact your search rankings.

YouTube Video Optimization Tips from the Schipul SEM Team

It’s important to optimize your videos for the best ranking. Fortunately, YouTube is very SEO friendly. In today’s blog post, we’ll cover some informative tips on how to optimize your YouTube videos and channels.

Optimize your video title

Your video’s title tag can be up to 100 characters long including spaces, which means your title tag can potentially include up to 15 words. Use these extra characters to optimize by including your companies’ name and adding relevant keywords to your title. For example, instead of “Slot Trenching Video” use “Slot Trenching | Hydro Excavation | T-Rex Services.” This client example includes not only the title of the video, but an informative keyword as to what services they provide, and the name of the company making the video at least three times as searchable.

Add keyword rich descriptions and tags

Video descriptions can include up to 5,000 characters. That is a lot of text but use it wisely. Include informative information with relevant keywords but not to overwhelm the viewer.  Remember they are visiting your YouTube video page to watch your movies, not read your content so keep it clean and concise. It’s not uncommon to find a few links to a web page for more information in video descriptions.

Also remember to use your video tags. For some reason, people tend to post videos without any including tags. These are an essential place to input keywords for improved searchability and top ranking in YouTube and Google searches. Tags have a 120 character limit, including spaces. Use them wisely! But most of all, use them.

Can’t think of any more good keywords to fill up those 120 characters? A secret tool to use within YouTube itself for key phrase ideas is the autocomplete suggestions feature found in YouTube search boxes. Start typing in a relevant keyword and YouTube will show you what is commonly searched for along with that first term.

Add transcripts to your videos

Make sure your videos are spider crawlable by creating transcripts and making closed captioning available to your viewers. Not only is this great for any potential viewers who experience hearing problems, but search engines are able to crawl your text transcripts.

• How do I transcribe my videos?

YouTube allows for users to request a machine transcription of your videos. It does it’s best to try and transcribe the video for you, but in reality, this is a buggy option. Instead, take the time to manually upload your own transcript.

Open a new file in Notepad and prepare your transcript. A transcript file must be saved as a plan text file with no special characters. To seperate captions, be sure to use double line breaks.

For example, your transcript may look like this:

Once you have your transcript, log into your YouTube account to upload it to your video.

1. Mouse over your username located in the upper right corner of every page.
2. Click My Videos. You will then be directed to a page showing your uploaded videos.
3. Find the video to which you’d like to add captions/subtitles and click the down arrow located to the right of the Edit and Insight buttons. Select the Captions and Subtitles button from the drop down menu.
4. Click the Add New Captions or Transcript button on the right hand side of the page. You will be prompted to Browse for a file to upload.
5. Select a caption/subtitle or transcript file to upload. If you are uploading a transcript (no timecodes), select Transcript file, otherwise, select Caption file.
6. Select the appropriate language. If you wish, you can also enter a track name.
7. Click the Upload File button.

After you’ve uploaded your transcriptions, YouTube uses speech recognition technology and does it’s best to sync the text of your transcript to the audio of the video.

Click here for additional info on how to transcribe YouTube videos.

For the finished product of a well optimized YouTube video check out our Google+ Button Overview video screen shot:

Notice the well optimized title tag, description (links to further information included), and plenty of tags (bonus points for the geo-targeting). Video also includes a keyword rich transcription.

We hope you’ll find these tips useful in optimizing your YouTube presence. Have any others to add? Share them with us in the comments section.

What can SchipulCon fill your brain with?

We’re very excited about the upcoming  SchipulCon 2011 event on October 6th – 7th in Houston, TX.  SchipulCon is a 2-day learning whirlwind for business owners, marketers, nonprofit professionals, Web geeks and all-around curious people.  It’s still a few months away but registration is already open.

This year’s conference is dedicated to 3 very special areas of awesomeness (go in-depth on these topics on this blog post here):

1. Create – design, develop, program, master, conquer
2. Profit – grow, culture, sales, HR, employee relations
3. Reach – market, optimize, fund raise, community build, generate buzz

Our speakers (new speakers being added all the time – check out the speakers page for detailed info) are a diverse, funny, brainy and successful bunch.

Early Bird tickets are going quickly – buy your SchipulCon tickets by 7/31!

Join us!  Our July-only ticket special is quickly coming to a close, so buy your tickets by July 31st to take advantage of a $100 early bird discount.

We can’t wait to see you there!

Places pages will still link to these third party sites for a more well rounded search experience but only after showing Google user reviews. Google will no longer integrate the actual reviews from any other consumer rating websites into the page or the Place rating system. Take a look at the photo below to see what this looks like.

Another important change to note is that Google is now emphasizing a call to action at the top of companies’ Places pages with two new buttons encouraging users to “Write a review” and more easily upload photos from places they’ve been.

Having stellar, yet genuine, user reviews are a great way to bring in business and encourage new customers to try your services and check out your business. Places photos also do a lot to help your search engine optimization efforts. Not only do they give your customers visual insight to your company, they also get indexed in Google images. In order to optimize your Places presence, encourage your happy customers to write reviews directly on your Google Places listing.

Expect more Places pages upgrades to roll out soon. Google also notes forthcoming advancements for increased user personalization of local searches, as well as platform and device flexibility.

For more information, view Google’s official statement on “The Ongoing Evolution of Place Pages.” For more do-it-yourself SEO tips from the Schipul SEM team, visit our DIY SEO page.

If you are new to SEO, these videos are a great introduction to the essential Drupal modules that will enhance your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign. You will learn the basics of analytic metrics and webmaster tools in order to conduct effective keyword research for the best keywords for your SEO campaign.

Watch and learn how to optimize your title tags, meta tags, sitemaps and more using various Drupal modules. Also, according to the course description, you will learn how to “configure built-in Drupal settings to properly set up your header tags, content silos, menu system, robots.txt and Apache rewrite rules. You’ll learn to measure your site’s compliance and performance before laying out the next steps for your SEO campaign to maximize your site’s conversion rates.”

For more information about these Drupal SEO videos, check out the introductory video below.

1.) Introduction
2.) SEO Checklist Module
3.) Setting up Google Analytics
4.) Using Google Webmaster tools
5.) Researching keywords
6.) On-page optimization
7.) Customizing page titles
8.) Customizing menu paths
9.) Redirecting menu paths
10.) Implementing relevant meta tags
11.) Optimizing for local businesses
12.) HTML header tags
13.) Creating content silos
14.) Leveraging the menu system
15.) Creating & submitting sitemaps
16.) Controlling access with robots.txt
17.) Setting up .htaccess rewrite rules
18.) Testing standards compliance
19.) Importance of site performance
20.) Testing with SEO graders
21.) Conversion rate optimization
22.) Next steps for an SEO campaign
23.) Conclusion

Download the Drupal SEO videos here.

Let us know how you are using Drupal or if you need help optimizing your website for search engines.

Contact the Schipul SEM Team in Houston for more information.

Once you have your Google Places page setup and verified, make sure and complete your profile. Then, take the next step and add a Posts feature as a quick status update in the now familiar 160 characters. The message will automatically run for 30 days in your Places page.  Think about using your targeted keyphrases or a special message to your visitors.  Only one post will show at a time, but you can choose between Specials, Events, or new features. The end of the year is a great time to provide information about specials and events.

Let us know how you are using your Google Posts or if you need help creating a complete listing for your business.

Contact the Schipul SEM Team in Houston for more information.

We happen to think Holiday and Seasonal trends are pretty insightful and shared how you can optimize your web campaigns for both traditional holidays or even make your own holidays to support your business. Flip through the slidedeck to learn how we research phrases and trends to forecast opportunities. We then help clients set editorial and planning calendars for specific dates and know what they should be looking forward to for the next campaign.

If you would like more information and resources about Holiday Search Engine Optimization for all season of the year, contact our Houston Search Engine Marketing Team.