Thanks for the entries guys, not an overwhelming response by any means but thanks for the guys that took the time out to offer a seo tip for 2008. Some really nice tips that shouldn’t be ignored for the coming year. The Top 3 tips each won $10.00 from Seounique to spend on coffee, beer or your website! Please remember to email me at mridout@epictunes.com with your paypal ID’s so I can send over the huge wad!

Tip 1 (Winner) - Join your local Chamber of Commerce, you can get a link from them, plus you meet real people. Remember person to person networking rather than online networking. You may pick up more links from other members and possibly some consulting work. Don’t ignore what’s in your back yard. – Tip by – Lyndon

Tip 2 (Winner) - My tip for 2008. Do a bit of research, and publish posts showing the results and implications of the research. People love #s and stats. It doesn’t have to be complicated … often something simple. EG. Avatar experiment (http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-avatar-experiment-stunning-vs-cute-vs-guy.html) already performed. Tip by Jeff Quipp

Tip 3 (Winner) - Seriously, my tip would be to get a blog implemented and to take its upkeep seriously. Carve yourself a unique voice within your niche that people will happily return to. This can bring an enormous amount of traffic to your site, and more importantly for the purpose of SEO, if your content is good it will get you loads of naturally formed backlinks. – Tip by – Nick James

Tip 4 – Make all your SEM people build social media profiles for the company while they have down time – When they leave, you get to keep the profiles that can send a lot of traffic/new links to your clients with a couple clicks. Endgame 2008 SEO is going to be about Social Media and link baiting. – Tip by Wignut

Tip 5 – 2008 way of linking besides social and link bait is to find great articles on authority sites. Once you’ve found a great article that is relevant to you/your customer send them a small revision of that article that incorporates your link. Use your savvy persuasion ways and your in. You’ll be surprised how many people don’t mind a little tweaking for a free goodie bag. Good luck SEO’s in 2008! – Tip by Ashley Graham

Tip 6 – My tip for 2008. Make sure your site (or clients site) has plenty of ways for your visitors to promote the site via social media (Digg This! buttons, Add to del.icio.us etc.etc.) and then create “share-able” content. Link-able content and Linkbait is very good, but share-able is going to be better in 2008. – Tip by – John Carcutt

Tip 7 – Don’t waste your time with directory submissions and article submissions. Use link bait and good content to generate natural backlinks. – John Trumbii

Tip 8 – When creating the Title tags for your site make sure your primary targeted keyword is at the beginning of the description for each page, obviously make the page content relevant – By Me!

Firmly a few weeks into the new year I’ve decided to hold a small contest. I would like to make a “2008 SEO tips list”, obviously I could just write the list myself but am feeling generous and creative. I will be holding the contest for 14 days from today and will accept entries up to the 23th January 2008.

Rules:

1. You must post an SEO tip that you think will be valid for 2008

2. It can be any SEO tip you personally think will be true

3. Only one entry per person

4. Entries must be posted as a comment

Winners:

I will use any tip submitted for the final list if I think it’s valid for 2008. The top 3 tips will each receive a $10.00 Paypal payment as a prize. All tips that make it too the list will receive a link to their web page or blog as a point of reference. I thought maybe a small cash offering to buy a few cups of coffee or to help with your sites sever cost might be a nice incentive, you can of course spend it how you see fit!

Why should you bother?

It would be nice to get some feedback from the SEO community as a whole as to what they think will be happening in 2008 and the possible trends we might start to see. It’s also a bit of fun!

Good luck with your entries and please read the rules before entering!

A bit premature at the moment as it is still technically 2007 still. Anyway I would just like to say thanks to everyone for making me personally feel so welcome in the SEO community. As mentioned before this blog has only been around for 6 months and in this competitive industry it’s hard for the “new kid on the block” so to speak.

To keep my faithful readers updated with what to expect in 2008 in regards to this blog I will let you in to a few of my side projects which I hope to keep people up to date with. These include:

1. An SEO awards website, all voting will be user based and include many different SEO categories to look in. This site will be live at the end of January I hope (still bug testing and creating a new design)

2. I recently created my very own Social Bookmarking website called VoteItFly – I will be documenting the joys and struggles of managing such a site and marketing it online, hopefully bringing a bit of useful insight for a few others!

A lso I would just like to thank a few individuals that have encouraged me to continue writing and investigating aspects of SEO:

Wayne Smallman
Jeff Quipp
Nick
Impavid
Technical-Itch

Don’t drink too much tonight everyone!