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With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization SEO, which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPress plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

via 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress.

Kawasaki to discuss his latest book, Reality Check, and his upcoming keynote, “Twitter as a Tool for Social Media,” during free Webcast this Friday, March 6, from 1 to 2 p.m. EST

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 4, 2009 — Search Engine Strategies (SES), the leading and most established search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) conference and expo series, today announced that Guy Kawasaki and John Gerzema will give keynote speeches at SES New York (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/newyork/), which will be held March 23-27, 2009. Leading up to the event, Kawasaki will discuss his latest book, “Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition,” and his upcoming keynote, “Twitter as a Tool for Social Media,” during a free Webcast this Friday, March 6, from 1 to 2 p.m. (EST).

Matt McGowan, Vice President and Publisher for Incisive Media’s Interactive Marketing Group, which includes Search Engine Strategies, Search Engine Watch and ClickZ, will host the SES Webcast with Kawasaki. To register for this event, go to SES Webcasts (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/webcasts/).

McGowan said, “We’ll discuss Guy’s most recent book, Reality Check, and get his insight into why Twitter is rapidly becoming the social media tool of the 21st Century. Our exclusive 60 minute closed-circuit webcast, which takes place in advance of Guy’s keynote presentation at SES New York, is also your chance to engage Guy with specific strategic and business questions of your own.”

Kawasaki is giving the opening keynote at SES New York on Tuesday, March 24, 2009. He is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed and early stage venture capital fund. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web — the success of which is attributed to social networking tools such as Twitter. He is considered one of the top 50 most popular bloggers worldwide, and was recently selected by Invesp.com as the #2 top marketer of 2008.

Kawasaki’s newest book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition (Portfolio, Penguin Group), was released on October 30, 2008. Reality Check is his all-in-one guide for starting and operating great organizations — ones that stand the test of time and ignore any passing fads in business theory. He is also the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

Gerzema, the Chief Insights Officer at Young & Rubicam Group, is giving the morning keynote at SES New York on Thursday, March 26, 2009. The best-selling author and pioneer of account planning in American advertising agencies has designed brand strategies for clients for almost 25 years, guiding campaigns to international strategic and creative acclaim. He previously oversaw the international network for Fallon and founded offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sao Paolo.

Gerzema’s new book, The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How To Avoid It, was voted #3 Best Business Book for 2008 from Amazon’s editors and “Best Advertising and Marketing Book for 2008″ from CEO Read. The book is currently on Business Week’s Best Seller List.

Those who register for SES New York (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/newyork/registration-details.html) by Friday, March 6, 2009, will save up to $200.

About SES

Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/) is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Other Incisive resources for interactive marketers include Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/), which provides news and information about search, analysis of the search engine industry and tools for improving search marketing effectiveness, and ClickZ (http://www.clickz.com/), which provides digital marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion and research.

Incisive Media (http://www.incisivemedia.com/) is a leading global provider of specialized business news and information, in print, in person and online. The company’s principal markets include financial services, legal services, commercial real estate, marketing services and risk management. Incisive Media’s market-leading brands include Accountancy Age, Computing, Investment Week, Legal Week, LegalTech, Post, Real Estate Forum, Risk, Search Engine Strategies and The American Lawyer.

The thumbprint of social media on search engine optimization is evolving. It used to be that the big rage was figuring out how to develop link bait that had a strong chance of making the front page of Digg, Reddit, or other similar social news sites. The results were good, mostly in terms of getting a volume of links to a page on your site.

This is still a great tactic, but social media can do so much more today. For example, with Twitter or Facebook it is possible to use networking and information sharing techniques to build high quality links. I have seen sites from a number of different spaces use Twitter effectively as a PR outreach mechanism.

This new type of PR has become a new technique for link building and promotion. However, fast forwarding from today, there is the widely held belief in the SEO community that social media will be a major source of ranking signals for the search engines in the future

via The Evolving State Of Social Media & SEO.

In the realm of e-commerce, one of the top marketing tools a company has is a Google ranking. The difference between a page 1 or page 2 search engine ranking can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for a company.

Because of this, companies are allocating more budget space than ever toward search engine optimization SEO, the strategy and process of improving the volume of traffic to a website by improving the search rankings of various search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask and MSN.

via SEO: Essential to Survival – Entrepreneur.com- msnbc.com.

I decided to take the Clickbank offers off of the sidebar and just put them here. Now there is only one sidebar with advertising, just to the right there.

Clickbank is an affiliate marketing site, where you can become an affiliate for just about anything.

On the “Making Money Online” and “Search Engine Optimization” topics, there are all sorts of training courses and tools.

For must of this stuff, you can probably learn it on your own. But if you buy a package and actually follow the basic ideas, they probably all work.

The key to making money is to find a niche where your acquisition cost of a new customer is less than the amount of money that new customer is worth to you.

Here are the Clickbank offers.

Making Money Online

• WordPress Goldmine
• Expert WordPress Blog System
• WordPress Affiliate Pro
• Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress
• Blogging In Action: From Start To Six Figures With A Professional Blog

SEO Tools & Services

• SEO Elite
• Web Tools Now
• Web Traffic Machines
• WordPress SEO Sniper
• The SEO Mindset
• XTreme Rankings SEO Course
• Project Black Hat

Sending out press releases is a great way to get picked up by news sites and blogs. If you choose sites that link back to you, you can also increase your rankings in Google. But which press release sites should you use? My goal was to separate the contenders from the pretenders.

I combined the Mashable press release distribution list, plus a bunch of other lists, and then did my own Google searches to put together a definitive list of press release distribution sites. Then I checked every site to see that it was actually a press release distribution site. I cut out the sites that were closed down or taken over by spam sites. Here is the mega list.

The sites are ranked by Google Page Rank (higher is better), Compete.com unique monthly users (more is better), and Alexa rank (lower number is better). Please leave a comment if this list was useful, or if you find something that I missed.

Writing and syndicating original articles is one of the best ways to increase your search standings on Google. Not all article submission sites are equal, however. Here are the top 40 article submission sites. I did the work so you don’t have to.

The article submission sites are listed and ranked by Google PageRank, Alexa rank, monthly unique users on Compete.com, and search volume for phrases containing the domain name as determined by the Google keyword tool in Adwords.

I looked through every decent book on Search Engine Optimization, including Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, and a number of the leading sites including SEOmoz.com and SEOBook.com, and a number of articles listing the top article submission sites.

All the lists I could find were terribly out of date. Many of the sites listed on the top SEO sites went to spammy sites that wanted to sell you an ebook or training course. Most of the sites listed in Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, published just a year ago, were simply out of business.

Many blogs and ezines pick up content from the top article sites and republish it. One common question about syndicating your content through article submission sites is the following: Doesn’t this duplicate the article all over the web and thereby reduce search standing?

Syndicating articles does create lots of duplicate content, but if you craft your articles with carefully keyworded links back to your page, then the net effect is that your page should rank higher, and you should gain lots of new backlinks and exposure on the web.

Maybe I will try it with this article and see what happens. First, I will make sure Google indexes the article here on http://blogsimplified.com.

Hopefully this list is useful. Please leave a comment if you find any good sites that I missed.

Here is Scott Gledhill’s excellent presentation, “Is SEO Evil?” from Web Directions South 2007, in Sydney, Australia. With this thought provoking title, Scott Gledhill takes us through the basic ideas of SEO and why it is not an evil black hat method of getting traffic, but rather a basic discipline that every blogger should consciously incorporate into daily practice.

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