It’s a pretty common thought that SEO and Flash live on two different planets. If you want to have a great site that ranks organically, you can’t have Flash. If you’re some fancy artist whose SEO potential is limited, you need a flash site to show your flair – because the artistic potential of HTML is limited.

Martin Luther King said “I have a dream..” and I will say the same. We don’t have to segregate these two functions, and in fact, they can both enhance one another in positive ways.

Flash Can Create Great Content for SEO

Although a page shouldn’t exist entirely in flash, having a one-off flash page can actually help your overall SEO efforts. Kayak recently released a beautiful travel map that allows you to immediately find the prices to every major location around the world from your original destination. Although Kayak’s map isn’t utilized through flash, it has a relatable Ajax/Javascript implementation that is substandard for SEO.  Despite this, the huge amount of inbound links the interface created has increased the overall domain strength of Kayak.com. At the time of this posting, the travel map page alone had attracted 1,840 links.

Given the great amount of links it drew, Kayak still has the ability to rank for a moderately strong keyword with an optimized title tag on this page. They currently actually rank on the front page for the single-word term “explore”, although it has no monetary value for their company.

Utilize “Floating” Flash

You also have the option to create “floating” flash. Floating flash moves with the page, but exists as a foreground piece rather than an encompassing background image. Billy.com is a good example of this. If you check out their movers page, you’ll see it in full force as the moving truck moves in. The setbacks of this setup is that the flash can sometimes impede on the background HTML, making it difficult to click links. It’s a give-take situation, however, where the site creator must leverage the benefit of creating a unique site against the temporary setbacks “floating” flash sometimes causes.

Split Interfaces

The most common, and easiest implemented SEO-and-Flash friendly interface is the Flash on top, written content on bottom. This works well for sites that need flash to properly explain what their product does. For example, Empowerkit has a beautiful top-flash that explains their product, with plenty of content on the bottom to support SEO efforts, even though their product isn’t especially SEO friendly.

If your site doesn’t need much explanation, I would recommend against flash in this instance, as often times, it serves more as a distraction than a benefit. Here, the flash serves as a draw to inform the reader of the strong offerings Empowerkit supplies, so it is worth implementing.

The Point? Don’t Rule Flash Out

As a SEO and internet marketer, you should never rule out something that could potentially help your campaign. It may seem counterintuitive that flash could help your SEO, but in many cases, that’s exactly what it does. It just has to be implemented properly to get the full benefits of your efforts, and sometimes, you have to think about it as offering more plusses than minuses, rather than only positives.

Like fancy things like flash? Follow Sujan Patel on Twitter to get more, or become a fan of Singlegrain on Facebook.

Want search engine traffic? Like people visiting you? Then you’re like every webmaster in the world. What’s going to differentiate you, then, is the ability to implement and maintain the following website factors. Get going, be smart, and be dedicated – and you’ll be well on your way to a nice, targeted stream of traffic for a long, long time to come.

1. Title Tags – Your title tags should include keywords, have the most important keywords first, and be shorter than 70 characters. You can find a Title Tag optimizer here.

Bad Example – Mr James Handyman Shop – Tools, House Supplies, Yard Equipment, Wood & Sod

Good Example – Tools, House Supplies, Yard Equpment, Wood & Sod | Mr. James Handyman

2. Image Optimization - Alt tags should continue keywords and be included in your image HTML code. These help optimize your site further for targeted keywords and also make the site more searcher-friendly for those with disabilities, or with images disabled. These will also drive a significant amount of traffic through image search.

Similarly, IMG filenames should reflect your keywords and also the ALT tags you’re using. This will drive even more traffic, increase usability and provide keyword relevance to the search engines. For more depth on this subject, check out Pearsonified’s post on Image Optimization.

Bad example – <img src=”DSC00056.jpg”>

Good example – <img src=”House_Supplies.jpg” alt=”House Supplies”>

3. URL Structures – The search engines enjoy URL structures that are keyword rich, and short. The closer to the front of the URL the keyword is, the better.

Bad example – http://www.tools.com/shop/category/brand/132359?.html

Good example – http://www.tools.com/shovels.html

4. Redirects – Every website should have one URL that the server redirects to when people try and get to the front page. This means that http://www.tools.com, http://tools.com, http://www.tools.com/index.html, should all go to one place. Whether or not you choose http://www.tools.com or http://tools.com is up to you, but either one is preferable over the index.html version.

Doing this will tell the search engines which version of the site is your homepage, rather than having to guess. It will also redirect all the link juice on your site that points to each of the non-emphasized portions and point it towards your own website.

You can find redirect options through most hosting providers’ website control panel.

5. Content – Sometimes webmasters can make the mistake of having a page that’s all images, flash and gimmick. Search engines pick up on solid, written content that is keyword rich, so it’s important to always have at least a paragraph or two talking about the keyword focus of the page. Make sure you maintain usability, though, because sometimes trying too hard to talk to the search engines will mean that you will turn off the end user, the person that’s most important to reach.

6. Site Architecture – It is our strong recommendation that the more competitive and challenging a keyword is to rank for, the higher it should be in a site’s internal architecture. This allows for a higher amount of link juice, the stuff that enables a site to rank higher, to get to the page. This means that these pages you want Google to see (and rank), should be linked to from the front page, or at worst, two clicks away, for a moderately sized site.

How easy are you making it for Google to spider your site, and reach the sites you want ranking?

7. Duplicate Content – Many sites have duplicate content issues, in that they re-use several content pieces over, and over again. The search engines dislike that and can de-index these pages if they recognize them as such. A rough guideline is to have about 30% unique content on each page. Be aware that the search engines are intelligent enough to recognize site structure and things of that nature, and will most likely only be counting the body content portion of our website in these valuations.

Sometimes, duplicate content is unavoidable. In these cases, try and have these pages be linked to on deeper subpages, where link juice distribution isn’t as important. On the higher pages, you can waste linkjuice funneling to these pages that the engines see as unworthy of being indexed.

8. Site Maps – Including a site map is a good way to let the search engines know exactly what pages you want indexed, and with what priority. They won’t always adhere or completely stand by your site map, but it’s a good starting point for saying “look at this, it’s important”.

Google has a good guide to creating a site map here. You should create a site map within your own website, too.

Want more tips? Follow Ross on Twitter or check out his Authentic Marketing blog online.

Links, links, links. We all want them, but we’re not completely sure how to get them. There’s no easy way to do it, but there are a multitude of tips you can implement to improve the likelihood your post, or website, gets linked to.

Linkbait, specifically, describes an action that is specifically taken to attract links. Some posts can generate traffic and conversation, but link bait specifically pulls in the eyes of the bloggers, and more important, the linkerati, to link to your website.

1. Create remarkable, unique, original content. If this isn’t the case, your post won’t get linked to. Few linkbait pieces were created in three minutes or are of two paragraphs in length. Your posts have to be thoughtful, creative, and a good reflection of time-intensive work.
2. Create content that is accessible and useful to a large number of people. If you’re too niche specific, the potential reach of your content will immediately be reduced. However, don’t spread too far, as you want your content to create repeat, loyal visitors to your website. If you stay true to tech, food, or something of that sort, there’s a higher percentage chance you’ll get some repeat readers.
3. Be simple. The more complex and difficult to comprehend your idea is, the less likely your audience is to spread it. Supply something that’s easy to digest, but maintains the remarkability linkbait requires.
4. Provide value. If you solve a problem of the reader, you’ll spur them to action. Desire to solve the problems of others will come from that initial problem being solved, they’ll spread the idea, and your work will take off.
5. Be aware of temporal factors. Jumping on recent news is the best way to create content that’ll be spread throughout the internet. Your linkbait doesn’t have to address breaking news, but offering a unique spin on recent developments can be a great way to kick start link developments. Blogs like Mashable, Gizmodo, and Hacker News offer good insights into what’s new and worth writing about.
6. Understand your audience. Check the social media platforms you hope your content will go viral on, and see what’s “working” there. It’s beyond vital to assess what people like and enjoy promoting.
7. Create controversy. Links are very likely to occur if you pick a fight and call someone out. However, an intelligent audience can tell the difference between good, authentic points and ones that were created to draw in links. Realize an opportunity where calling someone out is worthwhile, then mold the post and content push to make it go viral.
8. Have a reputation. If you work on creating and developing a reputation, linkable content will come a lot easier. This can be both on your website and/or on social profiles, where “pushing” your content will come a lot easier if you have a reputable profile.
9. Reveal as much as possible. Digging into extremely personable details and then referring it back to a public subject can be a superb way to draw in attention. As readers, we love to be let in, and we’ll reward you with links.
10. Post regularly. Your regular viewing audience will be a large part of your “push”. Maintain them by posting with consistency. Five posts one week and one post the next doesn’t fly.
11. Use an attractive title. An extremely important part of the post is the title. To get the content to spread, you have to get the reader to click on the post first. Copyblogger has some Headline Formulas to work from, and also, How to Write Magnetic Headlines.
12. Push at appropriate times. Post in the morning, because there are more readers to retweet and read your content. In other sectors, it may be appropriate to post on the weekend, as there are fewer new posts.  Source: How to Get Traffic to Your Blog.
13. Network. Find and create friends offline or online, and you’ll have additional resources to help you promote and link to your product. This can be extremely powerful, as a real number of friends online can exponentially increase the success of your posts.
14. Reward your network. Your network isn’t there only for you to gain benefit from – be extremely gracious with your links, time and own promotion and your network will return the favor in kind.
15. Analyze other successful linkbait. This, that, this, that, the money, the list, and this one. These are all good examples of linkbait that worked. They all worked for different reasons, but if you look between the lines, it’s not hard to figure out. Twist the lessons from each to apply to your own site and you’ll be well on your way to a Pagerank 10 site.
16. Make content easy to spread. Place retweet buttons and social links in the appropriate places on your post. The more “calls to distribute” you have, the more likely your audience is to do the work for you.
17. Understand linkbait “hooks”. Todd Malicoat has a good post on Hooks on his website Stuntdubl, which is built upon at Smashing Magazine. The five hooks are: the News Hook, the Contrary Hook (having an opposite opinion), the Attack Hook, the Resource Hook, the Humour Hook, the Giveaway Hook, the Research/Statistic Hook, and the Incentive Hook.
18. Create a tool. Creating a tool your audience can use is a superb way to create continuous, long-term linkbait. Every time someone things your tool can add value to their readers, they’ll link to it. As long as it’s current, the links will keep flowing in.

Have any more great linkbait tips? Add them in the comments.

Sujan Patel loves links. He also loves when you become a fan of Singlegrain on Facebook and also follow Singlegrain on Twitter.

Restaurants are generally still pretty oblivious to the opportunities that exist for them on the internet. Local companies often don’t connect the global reach of the internet to their little spot on the planet, but large opportunities still exist to connect their little world to their customers that use the internet. For most restaurants, this is almost their entire customer base.

Not saying “Hello” to your clients, continuing a relationship, and building upon the one you already formed is a large missed opportunity in the restaurant business. Use the following steps to start creating and developing your customer relationships.

1. Make Your Location Known

On your business website (you have one, right?), make sure you have citations of your location on most of the pages. Be certain it’s natural but especially try and get your contact information on the home page, about page, and contact page. These location citations are important to the search engines to prove that you are who you say you are, and your business is located in a set, established location.

2. Start Generating Local Citations

Similarly, the search engines need to find external citations of your business location on the internet to help solidify that you are who you say you are. These citations also generally serve as backlinks for your website, and are a good way to start establishing trust in the SERPs.

The first step is getting your restaurant listed properly in the search engines themselves. Use the following URLs to submit your restaurant to each major search engine:

Google Places

Yahoo! Local

Bing Local

When creating your listing on Google, you’ll have the ability to add relevant local keywords for your restaurant. You can list up to five categories. Immediate recommendations for these keywords are “City restaurants”, and “restaurants city”, as well as restaurant type specific, such as “Chinese restaurants city”, or “City Chinese restaurants”. A picture of the Google interface for adding your restaurant is below.

Google is by far the most important local listing platform, but Bing and Yahoo still have areas where you should register your business. You should use best practices similar to the instructions given above to get your website ranking for the same keywords in the local listings.

Outside the search engines, there is an assortment of general and local business listing areas with a multitude of benefits, from actual traffic, to SEO value, to citation “local listing” value.

Websites with general business value, that generate direct traffic and walk-ins to your restaurant, are listed below. Fill these out carefully to ensure you are maximizing returns from your listings.

Judy’s Book

Citysearch

The rest of these listings won’t generate as much direct traffic to your business, but it will start the ball rolling towards proving your restaurant’s legitimacy in the search engines, both locally and in the general search results.

Superpages

Yellow Pages

Insider Pages

Localeze

Superpages

Cityvoter

Brownbook

White Pages

The USA Explorer

Mojo Pages

Yellow Book

There are several ways to find places to create citations. Besides the given links on this list, you can find more creative, local specific citations with Rand Fishkin’s tip on SEOMoz.

3. Get Started on Facebook and Twitter

If you haven’t gotten your restaurant on Facebook or Twitter, you should. Before starting your page, begin “listening”. Look at other restaurants that use Facebook and Twitter successfully, see what they’re doing well, and see what parts of it you can incorporate into your own pages.

Restaurants should pay special attention to their Facebook page. There is more of your target market on Facebook to be reached, so it makes sense to most efficiently use exposure in the place where you can utilize it best.

To get you started, check out the following awesome Twitter and Facebook restaurant accounts:

Wafels & Dinges in New York, New York: http://twitter.com/waffletruck | http://bit.ly/c6z3HT

Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles, California: http://twitter.com/kogibbq | http://bit.ly/1oBx1s

Devotay in Iowa City, Iowa: http://twitter.com/Devotay | http://bit.ly/arzb75

Nine Mile in Asheville, NC: http://twitter.com/ninemile | http://bit.ly/9vLvgQ

21^st Amendment in San Francisco, California: http://twitter.com/21stAmendment | http://bit.ly/bQS1Ps

Here’s an example from 21^st Amendment’s website, where they link to their social profiles. Your restaurant should do this too. It’s also a strong recommendation to build in the social symbols into your menus, so your customers know they can connect on Facebook and Twitter.

4. Leverage Mobile and the “Restaurant Web”

Outside of Facebook and Twitter, more general-business opportunities on the internet, there are also several restaurant specific platforms you should take advantage of to make the most of your great food.

Yelp.com

Yelp is the ultimate resource for restaurants on the internet, providing the biggest database of restaurant reviews online. Because of the popularity and mass of Yelp, it is impossible to ignore this resource. Check out Yelp’s business owner’s guide to get started and also Mashable’s Yelp for Business guide to maximize the benefit you can receive from Yelp.

Grubhub.com

GrubHub allows you to find restaurants in your area that deliver and gives you the ability to order online without ever having to speak to someone. Get your restaurant listed by going to the website and contacting customer service, and they’ll get you started towards generating new business leads today.

OpenTable.com

OpenTable is a service that sets up instant dinner reservations online. Consumers looking to expidite the process will often come to OpenTable for the convenience it provides, and it’s a must for any busy restaurant. Start the listing process through their Restaurateurs page.

Urbanspoon.com

UrbanSpoon automatically redirects the incoming traffic to their local area, giving in-depth information about all the regional eateries. It offers a review system as well, making it a platform very similar to Yelp. To add your restaurant, use their submission form online.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a location platform that allows users to “check-in” at whatever location they’re at. For restaurants, this creates new customer loyalty opportunities. Your restaurant can offer specific deals through the platform for repeat visits, being the most loyal customer, or “wildcard” specials, so that a special is potentially available every time they check in. Learn more on Foursquare’s business page.

6. Coupon Sites

There are several coupon sites you can utilize to create awareness and increase loyalty for your website. Get your website listed on general restaurant coupon listings, get on Restaurants.com, or take part in Groupon.com to create huge results. Groupon.com is a “group coupon” service that requires large participation for the coupon to work, which means a potentially huge influx of customers for your restaurant.

To get you started, here are a few of the best coupon services on the internet:

Savings.com

Retailmenot.com

Couponcabin.com

Couponmom.com

Get Started!

There are plenty of opportunities in internet marketing to leverage technology to sell food to thousands of potential new customers. This guide is a great way to begin the process of driving thousands of new walk-ins to your restaurant.

Want more awesome internet marketing tips? Follow Single Grain bloggers Sujan Patel and Ross Hudgens on Twitter.

Got Great Title Tags? Odds are, your pages probably have some optimized title tags. Sometimes these are automatically created by Wordpress, or were generated by the website designer without any SEO implications in mind. Other times, someone read a Beginner’s Guide to SEO, threw some stuff on there, and off your website went. Turns out, your title tags probably aren’t up to snuff. There are a few SEO and usability improvements webmasters can make to improve their title tags, today.

Keyword, Brand

Unless you’re Pepsi or Coke or Sony Pictures, you probably don’t deserve to have to your brand name listed first. The only real benefit to this setup is branding – so unless you’re in a major brand war or have a domain that generates only brand clickthroughs (like Pepsi, nobody searches for and purchases soda online, so there is little SEO benefit to having “Soda” or something first), the benefit here is minimal. You can still get your brand name in there, but it will almost always be more beneficial to garner the strong SEO benefit putting the keyword first will provide.

Title Tag Length & You

Many people that work in the SEO industry or  on websites in general don’t really take strong enough account of title tag length. On Google, the most important search engine, title tags will only be displayed up to 70 characters. For usability reasons, and for our next tip, it is advantageous to keep your title tags under or at this 70 character limit. Your result in the SERPs will look sexier and will definitely be easier to understand, which will lend to higher clickthrough rates, more traffic and a ball rolling down the hill that will supply more and more traffic.

SEOMofo has a great SERP Snippet Optimization Tool so you can play around with title tag length and not have to do any of that garn-fangled math in your head.

Blending On-Page Optimization with your Title Tag

The great thing about this 70 character rule is that it tends to blend seamlessly with a strong on-page optimization plan. If you’re naturally using keywords in your title tag and on page, this is a near-optimal ratio for blending a reasonable amount of keywords per page, and also optimizing strongly for them in the content, H1 and Alt Tags.

When you push beyond this 70 character rule, you’re almost always targeting too many keywords, focusing poorly, and not providing strong content on page. Sticking strongly with 70 character title tags is a great first step to superb on-page SEO.

Titles Get You Jobs.. and Traffic

Once you’ve implemented the tips above, you’re well on your way to maximizing your on-page efforts. Never overdo it, keep usability at the forefront, and maintain a focus on SEO, and your website will drive good, targeted leads for the duration of it’s existence.

Ross Hudgens’ title is Senior SEO Analyst. He also blogs on his personal website, Authentic Marketing.

Getting traffic for a new website can be difficult if you go about it the wrong way. Link building for a newly launched website differs strongly from websites in the mid to late stages of growth, as there are certain quality signals and processes to undergo that tell the search engines that your site should be trusted. Using poor link building techniques can lead to a lot of wasted efforts in the initial stages of site development.

Building authority and trust is vital to getting recognized by the search engines. Start with the below tips and you’ll be well on your way to blasting up the SERPs.

1. Get listed in the High Quality Link Directories. Don’t spread too far – we recommend you only stick to Best of the Web, Yahoo! Directory, JoeAnt, and Business.com. These are well regarded and send high trust signals to the search engines.

2. Submit Press Releases to PR sites. A good way to pick up press is to submit press releases to PR sites. PRweb, PRleap, and PRnewswire are all great places to spread news about your launch. If your product isn’t news worthy, it won’t get picked up. Produce something great that’s worth talking about and you should have strong success with press releases.

Make sure you optimize your press release for dissemination. Top Rank Blog has a good guide to use using your press release as a marketing tool. Optify also has a SEO-specific post on optimizing your press releases.

3. Send out closed beta invites. If you have a web application, send blasts out to power bloggers about your closed beta. As long as your application is good, you’ll get positive press and some really strong links pointing to your website. Plus, these thought leaders will probably have some good, usable advice for your web app.

4. Giveaways. Similarly, if you have a product, find the top bloggers in your space and offer a few product giveaways in exchange for a blurb about your post. Make sure you’re contacting the biggest bloggers with the largest audiences to maximize returns, both in traffic and SERP success, with these efforts.

5. Start blogging. With constant, fresh content, you tell the spiders to frequently index your website. You also build an audience for your product and give users additional reasons to link back to your website. The quicker you do this, the quicker you tell the SERPs, and your users, that you’re a website worth ranking

5. Go Social. A great way to get immediate traffic and also get a good link influx to your website is create linkbait from step #5. Spending a day or so to create something worth sharing is beyond worthwhile for a starting website. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam, offers some great tips on his blog for creating good linkbait. SEOMoz.org also has a comprehensive article on Social Media Marketing tactics, where you can find specific tips for submitting to each social media website.

6. Get Local. Submitting your website to all the relevant local directories, and the search engines, is vital for every small business. This is the “go social” alternative for the smaller company, even though it is still (mildly) possible to create linkbait as a small business. Outspoken Media has a great, in-depth guide to launching your Small Business Website, and they offer a lot of great places to get your local website listed.

7. Stick to High Quality links. It can be tempting to hit up all of your personal friends, submit five thousand articles, and spam post the comments at large blogs, but there is strong evidence suggesting that these links are disregarded until Google sees your website as trusted.  There are some strong inferences that low quality links are not a trust signal for new websites until Google (and the other engines) already know that your website isn’t spam.

8. Create a Crunchbase, Squidoo, and Aboutus.org page. Aboutus.org attempts to have website profiles of the internet, while Crunchbase has profiles of tech companies with follow links. Squidoo offers a custom lense for any business or person willing to create one.  Getting on these sites is a good way to start reputation management on your own SERP, and also get a few more links to your site. If you create a good enough website bio on Aboutus.org, you can submit for consideration to get your link do-followed.

9. Guest blog. Find the relevant bloggers in your vertical and reach out. Display appreciation for their blog and also expertise in your field, and most bloggers will be extremely generous with their network. You can generally get targeted anchor text for your blog as well.

10. Be patient. Social media doesn’t always work. Sometimes, you won’t show up in the SERPs immediately. Taking drastic measures, like buying a large quantity of links, can get your website banned before it ever gets off the ground. We’d all like to be #1 in a month, but the reality (and competitive nature) of the SERPs is that this just isn’t a possibility.

Ross Hudgens is a Link Building guru. Check out his personal blog, Authentic Marketing.

Whatever company can do this most effectively will most likely get the rankings, get the traffic and get the money, creating a turnover that means more money that can be spent on SEO and SEO processes, which creates a wider gap between one and two. Every business must do their best to grow their SEO efforts, get links and scale their campaign to win the battles that happen every day in the SERPs.

Here are just a few tips to get your scaling started so you can grow your SEO efforts to the top of the SERP ladder.

1. Hire well – and hire cheap. SEO campaigns have several layers, with each having various levels of experience required. Some of it is strategy intensive, with heavy experience required. Other parts simply require labor hours – parts like low quality content creation, article directories, rank tracking, and etc. These tasks shouldn’t be assigned to high-paid SEO vets, they simply need to be done. However, there’s enough required that you don’t want a McDonalds employee to be working the ship. Instead of craigslist, get on job boards at colleges and post for intern and part-time positions to fill these roles.

You’ll be able to get smart individuals who aren’t looking for career growth right away. You’ll have decent turnover, but getting three or four people doing the low-level tasks will enable you to weed out the less skilled at an inexpensive rate. For those who prove to be linchpins, you can offer full-time roles as SEO Analysts later down the line.

2. Build out in-house processes. Every time a task is performed, you should contemplate ways that you can refine and streamline that process so that you a) don’t have to do it again or b) do it faster. Implementing Standard Operating Procedures creates a company culture and a consistent standard, and also installs a methodology for future use. A few good suggestions for SEO process improvement we use at Single Grain are screen recording (Jing and Camtasia), for employee training videos, and information-architecture based organization formulated on usage frequency.

If you have a process that requires little brain power or any kind of data entry or repetition, you can build out a process to do it automatically. You’ll have initial sunk costs, but after that, your SEO campaigns will be that much more effective.

3. Outsource where necessary. SEO tools are numerous, and each one offers an opportunity to speed up a task. Instead of building out an application to do an SEO task, investigate the multitude of SEO tools available to see if someone has done it for you already. Most are free and offer a speedy alternative to doing the work yourself.

There are also several outsourcing websites you can use to get your more monotonous tasks done, quicker. Odesk, Elance, Textbroker and Mechanical Turk are all good options for your various SEO tasks. Rand Fishkin has a good post on SEOMoz about the strengths and weaknesses of each.

4. Put in the work. There is no instantaneous way to scale your SEO campaign. Many of the ways to do so come from working through a SEO campaign and uncovering the multitude of ways you can automate and outsource pieces of it efficiently. These differ depending on the vertical, but they all exist. Scaling intelligently comes with time putting in the man hours, understanding where you can scale, and immediately taking the steps to do so.

Those who continue to undergo data entry and repetitive tasks without urge to improve their processes will inevitably get left behind in the SERPs by those that chose to do so.

5. Test, rinse, repeat. Every time you implement a process or application to help with scaling, testing is crucial. If you miss even one minor detail, long-term problems can show their face in the future and cause you major stress. Undergoing strong quality assurance (QA) assessment procedures are important to make sure your scaling operations provide large positive ROI, not huge loss.

6. Think about hiring a SEO company. For many internet businesses, hiring on an external SEO company may be your best bet for immediate return on investment. Strong SEO companies already have all of the above standards in place, and since they have already done the work of refining the processes to reduce cost, their mark-up for profit will actually make it preferable for you to outsource to them rather than hire internally. Building out a SEO team is time-intensive and may take years to turn into an efficient, thriving machine, so using an external panel of SEO experts may provide the highest positive return.

While an external SEO company is doing your work, think about hiring an internal SEO intern or a relatively inexperienced SEO to begin the build out internally. Be wary, though, as losing long-term focus can turn this process into a time and money leech. Ask your SEO company for advice on how to do this, if they’re value-focused and are looking out for your best intentions, they will supply good advice on how to turn your external SEO hires into internal operations.

Want more SEO tips? You should follow me on Twitter.  Also, subscribe to our RSS feed.

What the internet did for all of us is help us solve problems at a hyper-speed that we had previously never thought possible. As the internet advances into a mature stage, new applications and shortcuts make these initial improvements seem turtle-slow in comparison. Every day, new and exciting developments emerge that allow us to do what we did yesterday, faster.

I have compiled 24 of these tools and tips, all actionable, to speed up your productivity on the internet, or in life, in a way that actively improves your online productivity. These suggestions are most relevant for the internet marketing professional, allowing you to boost the production of your 8+ hour day to previously unseen limits.

1. Fastest Fox Firefox Extension
For those internet professionals who need the add-on ability of Firefox, the add-on “Fastest Fox” is a necessary download. Fastest Fox will automatically download the next (intuitive) page of whatever page you’re browsing. It has other features but this one, by far, is the most dramatic speed-increaser to your browsing experience.

2. Google Chrome for Browsing, Firefox for Professional
Google Chrome is a great application for casual surfers. It has a minimalistic look and functionality. Because of this, it browses at lightning fast speed. However, for the internet-intensive jobs that many of us employ (specifically, SEO), it doesn’t have the functionality that Firefox has – which means more relevant add-ons to increase the functionality of our working experience.

If you already have two monitors, or one giant one, the solution is right in front of you – dual-browse both. Chrome allows you to drag URLs from Firefox into its browser, so when you find yourself needing to browse new, unvisited websites, jump into Chrome and surf. If you’re doing more SEO-intensive work or something else that already has the extensions Chrome is lacking, use Firefox. Using Firefox exclusively because of this is sucking precious seconds from your day

3. Reduce Clicks
When bookmarking our favorite pages, many of us neglect to bookmark the deep link that our user experience often takes us to. If the website you’re visiting requires a login on the main page before jumping to the homepage, keep the deep link bookmarked. If your session has expired, the worst thing that can happen is another login – the best thing is you’ll be taken directly your desired sub-page.

Some websites require three to four clicks before getting to the level you desire. Even if you have to log in every time before getting to your desire sub-page, this process will save you two to three levels of clicks, which can add up to thousands of seconds saved.

4. Keyboard shortcuts
Pretty much every interface you use has several available keyboard shortcuts for you to utilize. Take five minutes and analyze every program or browser you use. Right click, or surf through the navigation and take note of your most frequently used access paths. Are you using keyboard shortcuts for all of these? Probably not.

Are you saving through the File path every time? Use Ctrl+S instead. Need to open a new file? Use Ctrl+O. Enjoying a page you’re using on the internet? Use Ctrl+D to bookmark it on Firefox. Several of these shortcuts exist for many of our day to day activities.

Chrome doesn’t have an instantly obvious shortcut schematic on their interface. For a list of Google Chrome Keyboard shortcuts, visit Google here.

5. Tweetdeck
If you’re frequently using Twitter and you aren’t using an application since as Tweetdeck, you are burning away hours and using Twitter incorrectly. Instant updates, constant friend feed and the ability to track all of your @ messages and search feeds on one desktop make not using an interface such as this a gross waste of time and efficiency. Some might find the feed distracting or counter-productive, but that all depends on the person.

Recent studies, detailed in last month’s issue of WIRED, have shown that looking at a Tweet stream like Tweetdeck as a “good” distraction can boost creativity and greatly enhance problem solving skills.

If Twitter is a vital part of your business marketing efforts or otherwise, a good source of social interaction to push you through your day, Tweetdeck is a must.

6. Textbroker
For those people with massive e-commerce websites or other needs for immense, moderate-quality web-copy, outsourcing your content needs is something to look heavily into. Textbroker allows you to create content queries from writers within the United States, providing you high quality content for as little as $3 for a 250-word piece.  For those attempting to scale at any realistic level, Textbroker is a necessary evil.

7. Odesk
For more specific tasks that you would like to outsource at a reasonable wage, Odesk is the perfect platform. Pay overseas workers bottom dollar to do things like data entry with efficiency. A good platform and grading system ensures that you can use Odesk in a reliable and efficient fashion.

8. RescueTime
Rescue Time is a time saving application. It tracks the header titles of every application or window you use, accurately tracking time and creating true measures of productivity. It has pre-assigned values for different windows in terms of “very productive” or “not very productive” on a sliding -2 to +2 scale, but you can adjust them for the relative productivity they actually provide for your work. These metrics allow for better assessment of your true productivity and provide some great ideas for improvement.

9. Creating Toolbar Bookmarks with RescueTime
If you don’t have your most used pages slotted on your browser toolbar, you are creating a large time deficiency when you either a) manually input the URL every time, or b) have to move through the toolbar dropdown to access the browser. Depending on your typical browser size, the number of links you can efficiently fit in your browser toolbar can vary.

If you have a well rounded surfing experience, you can use Rescue Time to get an accurate grasp of your most visited pages. From there, make sure that you are using the proper link depth for the domain as noted in tip #3, Reducing Clicks.

Also, think about intuitive mouse use. If you’re right handed, keep the most visited sites on the toolbar on the right hand, to the lowest on the left. If you’re left handed, go left to right, as that’s where you’re most likely to have your mouse come to rest.

10. Windows 7
My portable workspace still doesn’t use Windows 7, and because of that, I get a true appreciation for the power and work benefit Windows 7 provides. The number of shortcuts and usability hacks Windows 7 offers are too numerous (and difficult to describe) for me to detail here, but it is safe to say that you are throwing away dollars and time (similar properties), not upgrading today.

11. Microsoft Excel Shortcuts
Microsoft Excel is a powerful application, and the multitude of formulas you can leverage and utilize with it to speed up your workday is amazing. Adjust it to your specific work tasks. If you can think of it in terms of a math equation, there’s a good chance you can implement it.

When I have a question about the advanced intricacies of Excel, I go to the Excel Forum, which is chock full of helpful Excel experts who will get you the equation you need.

12. Google Voice
If you’re one of those people who never listens to their voicemail like me, Google Voice is a must. Google automatically transcribes your voicemail for you and then sends you a text, making the nag of going through your Voicemail messages unnecessary. These transcripts will never be great, but they should always help you get a gist of the message, enough so to accurately judge the urgency of the message.

It also has other great features like the ability to have one # ping all of your phones, and the ability to create a custom greeting for each caller. For more about Google Voice check out Google’s information page about the product.

13. Xmarks Bookmark Tool
Many of us have multiple computers, one portable, one for work, and one for home. Whatever the number of electronic datacenters you look to, if the number is greater than one, you can benefit from the Xmarks Bookmark Tool. This tool will automatically sync the bookmarks from each of your workstations using a single login, giving you easy access to all your favorite pages without having to re-bookmark the website on a separate CPU.

Xmarks can also be utilized for company wide bookmarking. If there are certain tools your entire company uses, Xmarks can put them on every computer and automatically update them as upgrades and changes occur.

14. Organize RSS Feed
If you were like me, at some stage in your infancy of RSS development you excitedly subscribed to every blog with one decent piece of content. Eventually, your RSS got out of control, you consistently had 1000+ new items in the queue, and you found yourself with no clue or path to content heaven. Thankfully, pretty much all RSS readers have the ability to organize your subscriptions.

As a work productivity junky, I have managed my RSS feeds into several sections based on category. “Humor”, “SEO”, “Website Design”, “Entrepreneurship”, “Small Business”, and “Personal” are just a few of the RSS categories you can use. This way, you can scroll through based on priority, and not have to ker-plunk through 40 new Boing-Boing blogs every time you are trying to find some good learning resources for work. For a more in-depth post on the subject, check out 43 folders blog post.

15. Home Gym
Although a lot of this suggestion list has to do with online hacks, this offline one will provide direct benefit to your ability to produce effectively at work.  If you aren’t already working out actively, you should – doing so would increase your health and happiness, both factors that boost your work production. However, I know that should you not work out, this little paragraph is probably not enough to drag you into the gym. If so, skip this step.

For those that do, you should stop making trips to the gym. Every time you leave your home, depending on the distance of your fitness facility, you are losing 15-30 minutes in there-back travel time. If you had everything in the comfort of your own home, you could work out instantly, and would be more likely to work out as you see working out as less of a hassle.

Since you’re in internet marketing, I’m guessing you don’t look like Arnold Schwarzenneger circa 1980. So you don’t need the heavy weights gyms are there for. Programs and products like medicine balls, 20-30lb weights, kettleballs and pullup bars are all sufficient to get your workout in without every leaving your home. Exercise video programs like p90x also keep your workout fresh and exciting enough to keep your working hard in the comfort of your own home.

16. Dvorak Keyboard
The Dvorak Keyboard is opposed to your current layout, QWERTY. The thing about Dvorak is that the layout organizes keys based on usage and hand strength, improving productivity.  Dvorak hasn’t caught on due to a strong barrier to entry, difficulty with changing back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak, and failure to overcome an investment in competence that many people had made in the QWERTY layout. Despite this, Dvorak is still an attractive option if you are willing to look over the dip in productivity and hassle of using other computers that comes with it.

17. Social Oomph
Social Oomph is a great service to automate your tweets. It has the ability to tweet multiple accounts on one interface, making it attractive to people who have to use multiple accounts. Keeping a constant stream of tweets, rather than bunching at one time, is good for account growth, branding and visibility.  Maintain a human element, though, or risk losing the viability and trust in your account.

18. Mint
Mint.com is a great tool to manage all of your finances in one place. It offers a sleek interface and the ability to pull financials from all of your accounts, cutting down time, preventing errors, and giving you an accurate account of what your finances are, today.

19. Notebooks
Sometimes you won’t be able to work on a plane during certain launch and descent conditions. However, you can always use a notebook. Having one on you at all times means that you can jot down notes, review previous plans, and create plans that aren’t natural to create on a laptop.

This pertains elsewhere, too, as laptop boot up isn’t easy in certain life conditions and jotting down that new idea may be vital to remembering it and the important details that pertain to it.

20. Flight Hacks
Up in the Air is a great movie. For the traveling professional, it offered some good ideas for optimizing your travel experience and cutting minutes off hanging out in the airport. First, if you are using Southwest and just booked your flight, go to your Calendar and immediately set a 24 hour alert so that you can immediately check-in to your flight and get as close to the front of the plane as possible.

To take advantage of this, do your best to manage your bag and fit everything in your carry-ons. This will allow you to show up later to your flight and leave earlier, a potential 20-or-so minute save every time you fly. About.com has a good guide to avoid checking baggage.

21. MiFi
How often does your Wi-Fi cut out at your house? Or you can’t connect wherever you’re at? Wouldn’t it be nice, convenient and cost effective to only have to five minutes to your nearest eat-in to work rather than fifteen to the coffee shop? Would you like to not have to pay for Wi-Fi in many of the places that require you too?

Then you need a MiFi card. Get wireless internet, anywhere. Sometimes the connection is inconsistent and there’s a monthly cost, but if you’re someone who frequently moves around (and not necessarily on a plane), it’s a smart place to spend your cash.

22. Portable Hard Drive
Portable hard drives are a great way to clear out the clutter from your work computer, increasing computer speed and increasing efficiency. The obvious improvements are there too, such as taking your favorite programs and being able to play them on your television, moving large files easily, and backing up your most important documents.

23. Backup Battery Pack for Your Laptop
Similar to the Wi-FI dilemma, something that frequently hits the internet professional is the lack of a plug for their laptop. How many hours has this taken from you in the past? Assuredly, enough to be worth investing in a backup battery pack so that when your first one burns out, you have the option to continue working without interruption.

24. ASAP is poison
In their recent book “Rework”, 37signals’ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson detail how “ASAP” is really never the case.

How often do you really need your instant message answered, right now? Similarly, when your co-worker interrupts you, was their inquiry that pressing? Not often. If we stop knocking on other people’s doors when we work and instead let them take our questions in a flow-of-work cycle (see: e-mail), we can dramatically improve productivity. Every interruption makes it more and more difficult to return to the work we were doing.

For more insights on productivity, you should follow Ross on Twitter. Also, become a fan of Single Grain on Facebook!

Search Engine Optimization, and internet marketing in general, is a strange beast. Due to the hyper-connectivity of its infrastructure, it is evolving quicker than print can catch up. Because of this, accurate paper books on the subject are few and far between, and as such, there are few paperbacks SEO’s can take on their camping trips and beach visits to indulge in some off-hour learning.

While few directly-targeted SEO books exist, there are several other around or near the profession that will broaden and intensify every SEO’s skill set, whether it’s away from the computer or on it.

5. Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Chris Brogan and Julian Smith’s novel on how to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust is a must for every marketing professional. The duo provides many quick, actionable tasks for the reader to immediately improve their business and/or their own internet presence. For the average SEO, expanding beyond simple link building is becoming more and more important. Building out a social network is a great, organic way to get links, and a necessary task moving forward.

As Google evolves, many believe that the search giant will find ways to incorporate the web’s social graphs into its algorithms, making getting a head start into the social world vital for any SEO’s career.

4. The Dip by Seth Godin

Seth offers vital advice for life in what is my favorite book of the renowned marketer.  Pulling the covers over one of the world’s most established clichés, Seth suggests that “winners do quit, and quitters do win.” By supplying strong. stringent details on when you should quit a job and when you should stay put, Godin supplies advice that will put you in position to maximize your career potential.

His theories don’t apply only to your career, either, as his “Dip” philosophy can be applied to several other areas of your life, saving you precious hours and making you cognizant that a “Dip” is soon to come.  Godin will let you know what to expect and what to do about the incoming slouch in the road.

3. Rework by 37Signals’ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson

37Signals speed read is an informative book that serves both as an informative text on productivity and business, as well as a means of motivation. SEOs can benefit from its business essays like “ASAP is poision”, “Embrace constraints”, and “Interruption is the enemy of productivity”, amongst many others.

This quickly read book will undoubtedly give you a push into the next few weeks, generate a creative spark, and offer a clear path to improving your SEO processes and business in general.

2. The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence by Tom Peters

Tom has decades of relevant business experience, and he packs a lot of it into this 507-page book. The book reads smoothly because of its dissection (163 tips), but it isn’t without content. There is a lot for SEOs to learn in terms of leadership, consistency, career development, and of course, excellence.

1. Linchpin by Seth Godin

Two Seth Godin books on one list? There’s a reason why Godin is widely considered the greatest marketer in the world – it’s because he knows what he’s talking about. Linchpin dives into our current need to provide “emotional labor” in order to be irreplaceable. For SEOs, this means providing an irreplaceable “it” to our employers or clients.

Going the extra mile and offering constant process improvements are just two of the things Godin dives into in “Linchpin” that SEOs can utilize. Otherwise, the “Lizard Brain” and “shipping” are two additional tips that will make every SEO better, should they choose to utilize it.

Want more reading material? You should follow Single Grain on Twitter, or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Remember back before Google? Back when we had Infoseek and AltaVista and all those other early search engines? Remember back when keyword stuffing on a page actually worked, to the horror of literate people everywhere? Then Google came along, with its reliance on links and anchor text and other elements, and the game changed.

It’s changing again. In fact, it already has changed in many ways.

Links worked because they were like references; users were telling Google what a page was about. Links, back in the day, were a measure of trust. Social media also relies on this very powerful force.

The biggest indicator of this is the fact that Google and Bing are rushing to make deals with Twitter and Facebook and other darlings of social media. They know that they have to get involved. People value personalization, peer recommendations and instant updates over a static list of top-ten search results. The rush of the search engines to find their place in the world of social media says it better than anything else: the day of social media primacy is coming, if it’s not already here.

8 signs of the coming Searchpocalpyse:

• Integrating Twitter: Google and Bing have both integrated Twitter into their search results, maintaining Twitter as a major source of information for breaking news. Google’s scrolling results are like a CNN ticker, but even more current.

• YouTube marketing: For those who want to take advantage of YouTube in their marketing campaigns, social media is a vital part of the equation.

• Personalization/customized search: By far one of the biggest shifts is Google’s move towards personalized search. Although results have long varied somewhat according to a searcher’s location, this was a change that actually took into account individual search inclinations. Google uses your web search history to figure out what you actually want, and deliver it to you.

• Social media as first stops: Yelp and other specialty social sites like it are often a user’s first stop, because functionally, it’s telling you “Here’s a really good Chinese restaurant in San Francisco” not “This is the Chinese restaurant with the best SEO.” If you’re a home décor junkie on a budget, you might start your search at Apartment Therapy, because you already know it as a source of worthwhile information. Similarly, experienced travelers may gain valuable information from TripAdvisor or one of the myriad of other travel sites.

• Facebook explosion: User visits to Facebook have been known to surpass user visits to the Google homepage.

• Sidewiki: Google’s efforts with Sidewiki, which enables users to comment on websites in a sidebar, are revealing.

• Foursquare: The growth of Foursquare continues: it combines real-time updates with real-place locations.

• ORM firms: The growth of online reputation management services directly addresses the social aspects of search, helping companies manage and address social search results.

What is it about social media that makes it a necessary piece of any marketing plan in 2010? Simply put, it’s about trust, credibility, and community, pieces that are basically absent in an old-school search results page. With the ever-increasing flood of information available online, people want to find sources that have been vetted in some way. They want to read and comment on sites where they feel connected to a larger community.

Furthermore, trust is powerful; it’s the same reason why newspapers and magazines and publishing companies put out reviews and guides that were researched and vetted. People want guidance and reliability. They don’t want to be disappointed when they drop $120 on a nice dinner.

Even if (very hypothetically) artificial intelligence is someday used to implement true semantic search, where a page’s relevance to a query is perfectly judged or where the questions users ask are automatically answered, it’s not necessarily a substitute for the power of the hive mind–for good or for ill. At heart, we are social creatures. Social media is about community, and who doesn’t want to belong?

Social media isn’t perfect. Like any marketing tool, it can be used for good, or for dodgy pharmaceutical advertisement. However, the self-policing nature of social media discourages this, yielding results that visitors are more likely to trust.

SEO will still be important. But without the social media piece of the equation, it’s simply not enough.