Now since google acknowledges that SEO exists and it is ok to have your page optimized for search engine rankings, people asked about google’s SEO certification program.

Here is Matt CGoogle SEO certifcation programsuts reply

Programmers when creating url and page name sometimes create mixed case URL for eg

http://www.skill-guru.com/skill/login/testDetails/12/testName/SCJP-6-Mock-Practice-Test

Now this may be a good programming practice but it is not a good practice from user perspective.  Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-no, as Unix and Linux servers are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the possibility of typos . It is always difficult for users to remember the url (if they can).

So try to keep all your url’s in lower case.

Avinash kaushik is author of best selling book, Web Analytics: An hour a day and blogs on Occam’s razor .

I had been following his blog regulalry and he is a heck of smart guy and one can definitely learn so much about web analytics. Avainahs is co founder of online learning learning startup Market Motive, which will help you to learn and expertise in the field of SEO. Market Motive offers  three month structured course (with exams and quizzes) and costs $3500.

It may not pinch US and Europeans (although with plunging value of pound and Euro , I think it might !!) but is definitely a big investment for Asian community.

Pricing aside , if you look the the faculty, it is impressive and I think it would be worth your money. One cannot learne everything by reading from the book.

Good luck Avinash with this new venture.

Don’t forget to check out our SEO Interview Questions

When a newbie starts on his website or blog , the first thing they want to know is how to bring their site in  first page of google ? What are the steps to achieve this ?

Some developers and webmasters have the notion is that Google is against SEO. It considers SEO to be an illegal activity. Well that is not the case.  Google is against the black hat SEO not white hat SEO.  The proof lies in the pudding so here is the official SEO Guide for starters from Google.

This guide outlines the simple basic steps for developers which will help in better indexing of their site which in turn leads to a better probability of coming up in google search pages.

Well well well !!

Skill-Guru has a pretty good SEO quiz to test your SEO skills and understanding. Now Google has come up with its own quiz.

Take this Google SEO quiz to find out how good you are at SEO.  It has got 40 questions and you do not get to see the correct answers immediately. Correct answers will be published after some time.

Do not forget to check out our SEO Interview questions

The  latest entrant to the test repository of skill-guru is SEO Interview questions. This is a basic level test which will test the skills for newbies who are entering in the field of SEO.

Jobs are scarce in this economy but in technology sector , you fill find a lots of requirements for SEO jobs (Search engine optimization) .

For those who are new to this field , you should understand SEO as an “technique, tricks and methodologies used to rank website higher in search engine” . You can read in details about SEO here .

Jobs :

Go and search for SEO on indeed.com or monster.com. There are lot of freelancing jobs in craigslist also available. This would give you an insight into demand for SEO specialist

Salary :

The salary can range from $45000 – $75000to or $20/per hr to $40/per hr, depending on your capability and talent.

Challenges:

Since this is a online work , any one who has a laptop  and internet connection can take this work.  So people from India, Philippines would be there to challenge you on this front.

How to Start :

There has been much written about SEO , black hat marketing , white hat marketing and you can find tons of materials.  From my perspective,  if you are planning to make a career in SEO you should have following

1. Create a website or a blog , which can be displayed as a proof that you know your work. A good example is Mani Karthik who write dailySeoBlog.  If you have such a good blog then people will know you have got talent and can hire you on high rates.

2.  Start posting articles on the blog on a subject area you are comfortable with.

3. Familiarize with tools like alexa, google page rank, keyword finder .  You can find link of some tools in our forum.

4. Start following sites like http://www.SEOmoz.org, read Matt Cutts blog , Avainash Kaushik . You will learn so much by reading these people’s blogs.

5. Create a google analytics and google webmaster account. Create a bing websmater account also.

Configure your site/blog with these tools and review the results periodically.

These are good starting points.  I will add more later

Either you should be born smart. Else you should stay with people smarter than yourself so that you can learn from them.

I am not born super smart so I try to learn from smart people. And I try to stay in their company by reading their blogs (this is a smart way !!)

One such person in field of search engine optimization is Avinash Kaushik. I had been using google analytics for 6 months but was never aware of some very powerful features . In his recent post , Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages , Avinash explained how could use google analytics to identify the visitors of landing pages.

Go to your analytics account. Clock on Contents on left side. You will see the pages which users had visited.

Select a page and then select Content detail from the browser as below. Here you can see entrance keywords and entrance sources for this page

Once you drill into details , you can find the keywords and sources for your site. With the keywords you can guess if the user has landed on the right page. If not , then you have an idea as to why your bounce rate has been high. The page should have the contents for which the users has been searching and it should be very well written in first paragraph or the heading.

Therefore do not stuff your pages with unnecessary keywords else it is going to piss of your users.

This feature will also help you to drill into details of your campaign , if the campaign has been generating user response , people are staying on your site or not.