Optimizing a site so it is delicious for the user to browse around and at the same time inviting to search engines isn’t the hardest thing to do as long as you stay away from these “don’ts”.

1. Don’t use images for text

Even though software like EverNote can recognize and index text in images, search engines can’t. Or don’t. Anything you write in or on an image is 100% lost on the search engines. Using the alt or title attributes helps a tiny bit. But the loss remains huge. Text: 100% score. Alt/title attribute: 0.01% score.

First of all, credit where credit is due. Elixir Sytems, a search engine marketing company out of Phoenix has an excellent white paper on online reputation management posted on the SEMPO site here.

They’re definition of online reputation managment as a cross between marketing, public relations and search engine optimization is pretty much on the money. Once the domain of public relations, reputation management has witnessed a migration from the hands of primarily, the media into the hands of the consumer.

As should be apparent from a few of my previous blog postings (Should I use a .ca top level domain (TLD) for my Canadian site?, and Benefits of Being Recognized As a Canadian Site by Search Engines), we believe that most Canadian companies should be more diligent in ensuring that their sites are hosted on Canadian IPs … otherwise without a .ca they lose out on certain advantages. In fact, do yourself a quick favour, and perform a search on Google.ca for your domain name less the www and the suffix (eg. .com), remembering to check the “Pages from Canada” radio button. Does your site appear? If not, using one of the hosting companies listed below will solve the problem very quickly.

(of course substitute .com.au in Australia, co.uk in England, etc.)

Ahhh … a question we get often, and one without a standard answer. Rather, the answer is based on your particular situation. So, take a minute to consider the questions below, and voila, you’ll have an answer.

1)      Is your site on a well established domain?

While often overlooked by the masses, Google, MSN, and Yahoo all give Canadians different search options than Americans when searching the web. Each gives some sort of preference or boost to sites deemed to be Canadian within their Canadian search results, although offer no benefits obviously for ranking in the generic .com results. This means that Canadian companies need to be diligent about ensuring that they appear in the search results of the most used engines in their home country, especially since the advantages realized do not yet appear to be offset by poorer rankings in the generic .com engines.

It’s “how to” day.

This is a tremendously easy way to see your Google Adwords Results in cities or countries where you’re not located.

To see Google Adwords Results In Another Country:

Move there

Append the following code to the end of your query: url &gl=country iso code (ISO stands for International Orgzanization for Standarization — why it wouldn’t be an IOS code is quite beyond me, but I digress…). For the very curious, here’s a listing of the various and sundry ISO country codes.

So, a search for dentists on Google http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GFRC_enCA213CA213&q=dentists becomes http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GFRC_enCA213CA213&q=dentists&gl=UK to show dentists in the UK.