• Great Places to Find Information About SEO
  If you’ve been less than successful in searching for good, up to date, quality information and suggestions on search engine optimization (SEO) you will surely love this list of key sites, put together by Jeremy Morgan. Matt Cutts, SEOMoz etc – there are others but using this list will cut down on frog-kissing time.
  (tags: SEO search SearchEngineOptimisation)

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is something I keep reminding myself I need to learn more about. I’ve got some of it worked out and have found invaluable the free, downloadable guide Google released some time ago – Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. But to improve my knowledge and hopefully the findability of my blogs, I’m embarking on some self-education. So my plan is to focus on something about SEO once a week, at the beginning of the weekend, and report here in a series which I am grandly titling SEO Saturday.

Today I’m looking at the question of whether hyphens or dashes in URLs are better than underscores. As the title of this post declares, it seems that the verdict is no contest in favor of hyphens.

Why would this question concern me?

Well, having spent about half an hour today trying to find a good domain name for a new project and discovering the top level, dot com version of each name I picked was not available, I got to thinking about using a hyphenated (i.e. with a dash or dashes) domain name, just as an SEO expert colleague of mine does regularly. In the particular instance this would make quite good sense, because each of the dot com names I looked at was parked, that is it was not being used for a “real live” website or blog. So I would not, on the face of it, be competing with someone active in the same market space with a live site and the same site name.

And indeed the dot com domain version of the ideal name I wanted for the new site proved to be available in the hyphenated version.

Maybe it was time to get over my prejudice in favor of “continuous” domain names and get into the hyphenated variety?

Then, no doubt because I was thinking about all this, I noticed in my FriendFeed stream a video by Google searchmeister Matt Cutts about hyphenated versus underscored URLs. Not that I’d been thinking about using underscores, but the video was brief and I found it very interesting for the implicit insight it gave into how the people behind the scenes at Google think and work.

Verdict on the particular question? Google’s machines read hyphens in URLs as separators, i.e. indicating separate words and thus, Matt indicates, hyphens are better than underscores. At least, better for now. He acknowledges that they might change the algorithm one day.

The next question is: given the choice between a hyphenated  dot com name and a non-hyphenated, “wholeword” dot net, or dot org or other alternative to dot com, which is better?

I’ve done a bit of searching online but don’t know what the “right” answer is to that, although there does appear to be a consensus of “one hyphen good, two or more hyphens bad”.

Advice and comments welcome.

Exciting New Toolbar from SEO Wizard Aaron Wall

The Seo Toolbar is a toolbar that I can see is going to help me get a much better understanding of how SEO works. The toolbar only works with Firefox, so if you don’t use firefox, the features this toolbar offers might persuade you to switch.

Want to know why Google or Yahoo! ranks pages? If so this is the Firefox extension is for you. The SEO Toolbar pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.

Aaron says that the  SEO game is becoming more complex and he has designed the toolbar to help evaluate your competition.

Watch the video here to see how this can help you and your sites.

I know for me this will help me understand more about SEO, something I tended to neglect, until now.

I know about backlinks – also known as incoming links, inlinks and inbound links or inward links – and why they are important in terms of your blog’s ranking. Positively and negatively.

I understand that knowing more about my backlinks and their quality is an important part of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

But I know also that I don’t know nearly as much as I should. And what is more problematic is that I don’t know what I don’t know.

Which says to me that my sites might be missing out on an improved ranking, just because I’m not paying attention and taking appropriate action.

One reason I know that understanding the whole backlink thing is that my China-based friend and colleague, Lonnie B. Hodge, who is a search specialist, refers often to backlinks and their importance.

And as I’m scheduled to record a conversation with Lonnie this afternoon, I thought it would be timely to do some checking in my own backyard, starting with my Des Walsh dot Com site on WordPress.

I discovered some interesting information and had a couple of surprises.

My checking used three types of tools:

• the list of backlinks you see when you log in to the admin section of your WordPress site
• the list provided by Technorati on your page there
• various automatic backlink checkers you can find with a Google search.

In this post I’m focusing on what I learned from the WordPress site.

When you go log in to the admin section of your WordPress site, it should open at the Dashboard. You see a column of recent comments on the left and a column of Incoming Links on the right as in the screenshot below.

What I found today, as the screenshot shows, were:

• a link from the Disaboom site where my friend Glenda Watson Hyatt, a.k.a. The Left Thumb Blogger mentions me – and links to Des Walsh dot Com – in the context of talking about going to Las Vegas for BlogWorld & New Media Expo
• a link from my partner Suzie’s Abundance Highway site, where she is recounting a conversation she and I had and linking to the Des Walsh dot Com site
• a link from a site which has evidently copied, without attribution, a post which Suzie had sent to our colleague Liz Strauss for her Successful Blog site and which had a link in it to Des Walsh dot Com
• a link from the typepad Hacks site of John T. Unger who posted about speaking at BlogWorld & New Media Expo and specifically about the panel he and I are on
• a link from the mybloglog page of “Tangos”, who had left a comment on Des Walsh dot Com

How have I used this information today?

• I left a comment on Glenda’s post: this was a good thing to do, first because I wanted to publicly acknowledge my friend’s mention of me and secondly because it is about conversation and I coach people to spend time commenting on other’s posts so as to be part of the conversation
• I mentioned the apparently unauthorized copying discovery to Suzie, who sent a message to Liz Strauss: interestingly, the person who owned the site had left an easy trail back to his Facebook page!
• I decided to check out my backlinks on Technorati - with somewhat more startling and disturbing links. To be revealed in the next post in this series!
• also I used a few of the freely available online backlink checkers – that will be a third post.

What’s your strategy or practice with managing your backlinks?

What am I missing that would make me more effective in this department, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?

On a scale of 1 to 10, mine would rate at about 2.

When I saw Lynne Terry’s tweet today about a SEO resource, I clicked the link and found Dan Thies’s SEO Fast Start. Lyn has a glowing review at Click Newz and has met Dan recently. Dan has 10 years SEO experience and you can learn from either videos or PDF format all

There is a 100 page ebook which looks great. I can see at a glance, that I have some work to do. A picture in this case does speak a thousand words.

SEO is an area I have known a little about, but basically avoided and realize that in becoming a six figure blogger, I had better fast get an understanding of how this works.

I see the first box, in my favorite color purple, says map out a keyword strategy. Look like I will be busy both here and over at The Highway.

I asked a friend what they thought their SEO IQ was and I received the reply “Don’t Ask!”

Please feel free to share your SEO IQ and any tips that will help fast track mine!