Seo for your living

Newer Search Engines Add Twists to Search
Not many people outside the search industry notice it but new search engines are cropping up all the time. After they ve been around for a while they start adding new features to compete against the ever-increasing tide of even newer search engines. In this article I take a quick look at three new kids on the block Hakia Enetez and True Knowledge….
Outsourcing Software Development? Regain lost visibility into your projects. Spot problems before they affect delivery and budget.

Using Search Tools for SEO
You re not supposed to use a screwdriver like a hammer or a chisel. I ve done both. It may not work as well as using the right tool but it got the job done. In a similar way you can use certain tools to help you with some SEO tasks despite the fact that they weren t designed for these tasks in the first place….
Automate Software Builds with Visual Build Pro Easily create an automated, repeatable process for building and deploying software.

Helping Charities is a Form of Spam? Or Just Great Marketing?

Donating to a charity or sponsoring an event is one of the safest ways to buy a link, but getting them to use and recommend your product is a far more effective approach to marketing. Why? Passion is more important than PageRank.

Charities Can Help You Market Your Stuff Cheaply

Google giving charities free Google Checkout buttons on their Google ads, Google is giving away $10,000,000 to push Android, and Google recently pushed Gmail through a Threadless contest. Google uses contests and charities to market their services, are you?

Personal Relevancy

seobook.com/images/carnival-copy.jpg” height=”141″ width=”213″ alt=”Carnival Copy.” align=”right” />

Google is starting to push for higher content quality, and they are willing to lose revenue to do so. Some people fight decreasing relevancy by throwing more ads in the content - only to become more irrelevant. Carnival copy is no way to win.

The solution is better information quality, better formatting, and better partnerships. And this giving does not have to be to a large charity or rock star. You can do it everyday with the people you interact with and get the same effect. A few links, comments, mentions, and emails add up over time. Give and thou shalt receive.

Stealing Passion to Create a Unique Sales Proposition

So far this year I have probably come up with at least 4 multi-million dollar ideas. But I am uncertain if the market timing is right and I have the business acumen and finances to make them soar, but I will try. And, to be honest, some of the ideas were not even mine. They were simply extensions of other’s ideas and/or flaws to current market leading models…just like what Google was founded upon (though my ideas are far less ambitious than their idea is).

If you are entering a saturated marketplace and do not have a strong USP read rants or research from long time industry purists that are angry with the current marketplace. You don’t have to buy everything they say, just take one of their best ideas, give it a touch of framing, make it relevant to your business, and base your marketing and public relations campaign on it.

If they are viewed as a nutcase and written off by the market then competitors will not realize the brilliance of your brand and the strength of the purist angle until you start cutting into the market in a big way. By then it will be too late for them to react, and if they do copy you, then you can use that to further affirm your market leading position. Google said “don’t be evil” and everyone thought they were cute and cuddly until they were too reliant on Google to say otherwise. See the goog. Be the goog.

Free Guide to Optimizing Your Blog for Google

Giovanna recently said that it would be a good idea for us to create a guide to doing SEO for blogs, so we did just that. Please give us feedback on what you think of The Blogger’s Guide to SEO.

If you like it please Stumble it, Sphinn it, and Del.icio.us it.

Update: #2 on the Del.icio.us popular list! Thank you.

Re: Hello i am Earl Grey

By Far, The Worst Gmail Ad I’ve Ever Seen

Post by Giovanna Wall

I really like Google’s Gmail program. It’s truly my favorite email service. They also do a great job scanning through my emails for relevant keywords and phrases that they match with their advertisers. However, recently they have fouled and have gone out of bounds. In my recent emails to friends and family, I’ve used the terms “wife”, “husband” and “happily married” a lot referring to my recent marriage.

This was Google’s response:

Re: Hello i am Earl Grey
[quote author=fantomaster link=t…

Publicize Your Publicity to Create Successful Viral Marketing Campaigns

Older Marketing Techniques

When the Google Florida update happened in 2003 I read about 5,000 forum posts, tested a few of my sites, and wrote an article based on what I saw. That article got to be quite popular, but that popularity faded over a month or so, but I wanted my 15 seconds of fame to last.

When that article started spreading I went around asking high authority sites which linked to competing sites if they would be willing to link to my site. Some of the most effective techniques used were

• using hub finder to find sites linking at multiple competing websites, and suggesting listing a few more sites (in a list including my site)

• contacting people who were still linking at a competing site that was moved, letting them know that the site had moved

Site’s like the HTML Writer’s Guild would generally say no to a link request from a guy like me back then, but because of that surge in popularity they were like “oh you are that Aaron…we will get you link up today”. As soon as that happened once I decided to go on a link request binge. The great links rolled in and I was like SWEET.

Image from southpark-world.net

While some SEO sites never recovered, mine grew in authority due to the flood of high quality links, and within a few months my rankings were better than ever, and I had high authority recommendations from trusted organizations.

Ageless Marketing Techniques

If you are featured on Oprah or have the chance to interview Oprah make sure that is featured on your site. The same is true if you are featured in the mainstream media.

Newer Marketing Techniques

When I recently published the Blogger’s Guide to SEO I launched a multi-pronged marketing campaign.

• The idea was tailored to a specific audience.

• I created a custom logo for it so it was easier for people to have something to share and to make dedicated posts about it.
• I blogged about it on SEO Book and asked about a half dozen friends if they could mention it on their blogs.
• I linked out to Lee Odden’s list of blogs. Without even asking him for a link, he decided to reference it on his blog and spread it to his network of over 400 Facebook users.
• I had a ready made AdWords campaign set to target blog related stuff. The same day the article was released someone searched Google for blog, clicked on my ad, read the article, then bought SEO Book. And that ad campaign is also seen on many blogs.
• I guest blogged on Compete.com about making money from blogs.
• A great friend of mine submitted the story to StumbleUpon. Social media is no longer an every man for himself game.

What you really want to do when launching a good idea is to saturate the market with your idea as fast and hard as you possibly can such that it looks organic, yet gains the benefits of push marketing from years past. The story got to #1 on the Del.icio.us popular list, made the Sphinn homepage, and had Digg not deleted it the story would have made the Digg homepage. Hundreds of links are still rolling in.

Marketing Deficiencies

What could I have done better?

• I did not make the idea community oriented enough by asking x bloggers to give their top tip for doing SEO for blogs. Asking for data from a bunch of people to help them feel affinity toward and ownership of the idea to make them more likely to help market it.

• I could have done a few more guest posts on other sites.
• I could have built up the launch by writing relevant related entries on SEO Book asking for what people wanted.
• I could have embedded a bit of controversy in it.
• I forgot to email people subscribed to my old newsletter. Sending those thousands of people that update could have helped get it a bit more of a bump in traffic.
• I could have participated on some well known forums to have them help market the site.

Anti Vote Baiting (Beta)

Matt Cutts recently offered a public voting for my lynching, but we just talked things over, and there will be no lynching - at least not yet. I think Matt is a great guy, but his job is tough as a public face of THE company dominating the web.

It is easy to take a series of events as being personal, but sometimes they are just a series of events and no personal damage is meant, and/or the person doing the damage is an anonymous third party. Also, priorities and goals and reasoning inside a large company can seem vastly different than how they appear outside of the same company, especially when the company has 13,000 employees and keeps doubling in size about every other year.

I still believe that many of my Google criticisms and concerns are valid, but there is only so much Matt can do, and he is doing the best he feels he can, and probably far better than I could do if I had his job. The keyboard is mightier than the pen.

By Far, The Worst Gmail Ad I’ve Ever Seen

Post by Giovanna Wall

I really like Google’s Gmail program. It’s truly my favorite email service. They also do a great job scanning through my emails for relevant keywords and phrases that they match with their advertisers. However, recently they have fouled and have gone out of bounds. In my recent emails to friends and family, I’ve used the terms “wife”, “husband” and “happily married” a lot referring to my recent marriage.

This was Google’s response:

Publicize Your Publicity to Create Successful Viral Marketing Campaigns

Older Marketing Techniques

When the Google Florida update happened in 2003 I read about 5,000 forum posts, tested a few of my sites, and wrote an article based on what I saw. That article got to be quite popular, but that popularity faded over a month or so, but I wanted my 15 seconds of fame to last.

When that article started spreading I went around asking high authority sites which linked to competing sites if they would be willing to link to my site. Some of the most effective techniques used were

• using hub finder to find sites linking at multiple competing websites, and suggesting listing a few more sites (in a list including my site)

• contacting people who were still linking at a competing site that was moved, letting them know that the site had moved

Site’s like the HTML Writer’s Guild would generally say no to a link request from a guy like me back then, but because of that surge in popularity they were like “oh you are that Aaron…we will get you link up today”. As soon as that happened once I decided to go on a link request binge. The great links rolled in and I was like SWEET.

Image from soutpark-world.net

While some SEO sites never recovered, mine grew in authority due to the flood of high quality links, and within a few months my rankings were better than ever, and I had high authority recommendations from trusted organizations.

Ageless Marketing Techniques

If you are featured on Oprah or have the chance to interview Oprah make sure that is featured on your site. The same is true if you are featured in the mainstream media.

Newer Marketing Techniques

When I recently published the Blogger’s Guide to SEO I launched a multi-pronged marketing campaign.

• The idea was tailored to a specific audience.

• I created a custom logo for it so it was easier for people to have something to share and to make dedicated posts about it.
• I blogged about it on SEO Book and asked about a half dozen friends if they could mention it on their blogs.
• I linked out to Lee Odden’s list of blogs. Without even asking him for a link, he decided to reference it on his blog and spread it to his network of over 400 Facebook users.
• I had a ready made AdWords campaign set to target blog related stuff. The same day the article was released someone searched Google for blog, clicked on my ad, read the article, then bought SEO Book. And that ad campaign is also seen on many blogs.
• I guest blogged on Compete.com about making money from blogs.
• A great friend of mine submitted the story to StumbleUpon. Social media is no longer an every man for himself game.

What you really want to do when launching a good idea is to saturate the market with your idea as fast and hard as you possibly can such that it looks organic, yet gains the benefits of push marketing from years past. The story got to #1 on the Del.icio.us popular list, made the Sphinn homepage, and had Digg not deleted it the story would have made the Digg homepage. Hundreds of links are still rolling in.

Marketing Deficiencies

What could I have done better?

• I did not make the idea community oriented enough by asking x bloggers to give their top tip for doing SEO for blogs. Asking for data from a bunch of people to help them feel affinity toward and ownership of the idea to make them more likely to help market it.

• I could have done a few more guest posts on other sites.
• I could have built up the launch by writing relevant related entries on SEO Book asking for what people wanted.
• I could have embedded a bit of controversy in it.
• I forgot to email people subscribed to my old newsletter. Sending those thousands of people that update could have helped get it a bit more of a bump in traffic.
• I could have participated on some well known forums to have them help market the site.

Buy Compete.com Credits For Half Price - Today Only

I have been giving Compete.com a lot of coverage, but that is because they offer a great service. Today they are offering credits for half price.

Do You Design Banner Ads?

A couple years ago a friend of mine who sold ad inventory for premium publishers told me the key to making his banner ads work was to not make them look like banners, unlike the below tongue in cheek effort:

For how many years was the banner the standard format for online advertising? As the web evolves and each of us learn better business practices many standards become irrelevant relics of the past. Every business person is a creature of laziness. Sometimes laziness prevents us from changing, and sometimes it helps us make ourselves more efficient. If a macros can do the job then why not let it?

What ideas have you held on to for far too long? What information and productivity tools convinced you to break those habits?

GotWebHost.com — The First Global SEO Web Host (PRWeb)
Got Web Host goes global. The first SEO web hosting company to offer dedicated ip’s in datacenters in the United States, Canada and Europe. GotWebHost.com the leader in SEO hosting is now the first global seo web host. (PRWeb Nov 29, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/U3F1YS1UaGlyLUhvcnItSG9yci1UaGlyLVplcm8=

5 Free Or Cheap SEO Tracking Tools (WebProNews)
There are a number of free or inexpensive search analytics tools available out there, and this article will outline a few of them that have gotten rave reviews. SEObook author Aaron Wall talks about these in our interview with him, as well as some strategy and online marketing philosophy, which you can check out in the video below. Google Analytics Google shook up the search …

Write Great Titles For Your Blog Posts - SEO - SEM Beginner’s Guide (MasterNewMedia.org)
Writing great titles for your own articles and blog posts is the second most important thing you need to do to get greater visibility and exposure on major search engines. Notwithstanding tons of articles on the topic and the supposed ease with which great titles could be written, I still see most online publishers, SEO specialists and highly popular sites completely miss the boat on this …

Understanding Google’s Mindset on Classifying Spam

If…

• people would not notice it when Google removes your site from the search results

• Google can clone your business model without paying writers to produce content or carrying physical inventory

… then your site is spam. Maybe not by today’s standards, but eventually.

As the web evolves, a once whitelisted site can become a site that is easy to penalize. Evolve with the web, or grow irrelevant by the day.

This could sound like a scaremongering post, or it could be taken as a sign of the importance of connecting with people on an emotional level, and offering an experience worth sharing.

Search Engine bid management
There is a new tool on the market for automated search engine bid management. It has been developed by Efficient Frontier and Enlighten.

The tool will help in making the bid managements process more scientific and more efficient when dealing with the most complex paid search campaigns.

Efficient Frontier is focused on delivering advanced technology for search engine marketing performance. With that ability teamed up with Enlightens ebusiness knowledge, it might be something to add to your arsenal.

The search engine bid management tool is currently only available to customers of Enlighten. If anyone has any experience with it, or more info on it, please feel free to post your insight in the comments.

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Perceived Authenticity is Key to Profitable Niche Publishing Business Models

Via TC, I discovered IBM released a report on how the they think the $550 billion global ad market might change in the coming years. The predictions look bleak for most ad agencies and traditional media gatekeepers, but good for niche publishers who have a solid stream of attention:

The “voice” delivering a message, along with its perceived authenticity, will become as powerful perhaps as the message or offer.

As media gets more saturated, we get better at filtering out garbage. Jakob Nielson’s article about writing articles instead of blog posts does a great job of explaining why writing fewer and more in depth articles is effective for gaining and keeping attention in a competitive marketplace.

On a related note, Frank just noticed a TV show skipping the TV and starting out on the web. There is no easier way to increased perceived authenticity than having a direct and open relationship with the audience.

IBM also offered research on the attention economy in a paper titled Vying for attention: the future of competing in media and entertainment. Rich Shefren recently created a mindmap of what he calls the Attention Age Doctrine, which shows why people are willing to pay larger premiums for great advice and nothing for decent advice.

YouTube leads the video search marketplace
Like many people, I enjoy a good video. Especially with YouTube. Anything and everything is on there, well pretty much anything.

YouTube hosts any video it seems. From full length feature pirated movies, to news stories, video blog entries, a ton of just plain personal videos of the dog running around, to just plain hilarious videos of senior citizens dancing helping add to the 20 million visitors per month.

Hitwise just released some stats on YouTube, and their amazing 60% share of all videos watched online in the US. Compare that with Yahoo, MSN, and Google’s share of only 3-5%, and you can see why YouTube is a video traffic genius. The company gets around 100 million video’s viewed per day, and YouTube has said that they had 2.5 billion videos watched per day last month.

If you think there is nothing to see in the video search marketplace, look again, it’s hotter then ever, and YouTube is steaming up the web.

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The Facebook Phenomenon
It all started when Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook on February 4 2 4 with two of his roommates and another computer science comrade from Harvard College. Their vision was to create a networking site where they could remain in touch with friends. For this reason at first this socialization network was restricted to Harvard College students but since September 2 6 the network is open to users worldwide. This article takes a look at where Facebook has been and where it is going….
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Understanding Google’s Mindset on Classifying Spam

If…

• people would not notice it when Google removes your site from the search results

• Google can clone your business model without paying writers to produce content or carrying physical inventory

… then your site is spam. Maybe not by today’s standards, but eventually.

As the web evolves, a once whitelisted site can become a site that is easy to penalize. Evolve with the web, or grow irrelevant by the day.

This could sound like a scaremongering post, or it could be taken as a sign of the importance of connecting with people on an emotional level, and offering an experience worth sharing.

Why SEOs Should Use the Meta Keywords Tag On Their Homepage

Should the MarketingSherpa’s guide to landing pages use an effective landing page? Should a company touting the value of statistics use statistically relevant datasets?

Every day someone is getting called out for being a liar, a thief, or a charlatan douchebag. You can’t track it all, but simply following your own guidelines and ideals lessens the odds that people will wrongfully call you out.

A few years back a friend of mine bolded one of the keywords in the content on the homepage of his SEO services site, and I told him I thought it made his homepage look slightly worse. He then replied “perhaps, but it looks optimized”. That line of thinking made sense to me.

Linkbait is the New Reciprocal Links Page

[Update: it appears a friend wrote a spot on article using the same title about 6 months ago. Here is some link love for him.]

I have been a big fan of linkbait, but for all its upsides it does have many potential risks that are rarely discussed by most marketers. Outside of those risks, most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever. If you are selling branded CPM ads good news for you, but otherwise there is no value.

The potential upside of a linkbait driven marketing campaign is growing smaller by the day. In the third video here, DaveN hinted that he believed that Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate. Which ultimately means linkbait only creates significant value if you can keep launching one right after another.

Given that Google hand edits some hyper-successful linkbaits, is it any surprise that they aim to minimize the upside potential of random one off linkbaits? A couple of my better friends who are a bit cynical went so far as stating that linkbait is only promoted by search engineers because it is so easy to detect and devalue. Linkbait is the new reciprocal links page.

Compare linkbait to developing a real brand. Developing a real brand is slower and more expensive, but search is intrinsically tied to branding. If your brand is the keyword, it is hard for search engineers to take it away from you. They are irrelevant if they do not show you at the top of the results. They can show at most a few ads before they list your site, or they degrade their user experience. And, as you build brand awareness, it causes a smooth natural link growth profile, which helps you rank better for the generic phrases. Brand building is nothing they could ever really penalize, as they have no reason to want to penalize companies for creating real brands.

You don’t have to be a brand guru to learn how to build a brand. Simply discover a couple legitimate channels, track why people talk about them with Google alerts, and replicate the best ideas while ditching the bad ones.

The Value of Consumer Generated Media & Editorializing Commercial Offers

Looking for Christmas oriented keyword research? You would be hard press to find a better list of hot toys this year than to look at Amazon.com’s holiday toy list. Google also offers their Google Trends product, which will likely confirm the validity of Amazon’s list as the holiday season draws near. Both of these lists work to reinforce the market leading position of the associated companies, and editorialize their content based on user feedback.

Amazon.com not only offers stuff like the holiday toy list, but they

• offer video samples of products in use

• allow you to find out what is new, what recently got hot, and their best sellers by category
• list the highest rated consumer reviews near each product
• allow users to comment on the reviews
• tell you what other consumers who viewed the item you are looking at eventually bought

All of that editorialized information makes people more likely to talk about their site (free marketing), makes people more comfortable buying (higher conversion rates), and thus increases how much Amazon can afford to pay for traffic (through search or affiliate channels).

But you don’t have to have that sort of scale to editorialize your content. Many niche sites would do well to integrate user feedback. How hard is it for your content management system to create a most popular list which links to your highest traffic pages or most frequently sold items? After setting it up, it requires almost no effort to maintain, but provides social validation for what is already popular.

If you sell something expensive and want to avoid being replaced by improved technology and consumer feedback aggregation you should look to sell an experience instead of an object. One of the easiest ways to do that is by editorializing the offer and following up with the customer throughout the purchase process.

Manufacturers are going to foot the bill for some new types of product information packaging, but by the time they do everyone will have the same information and it will no longer be an advantage. Those who are quickest to adopt the new information formats and new types of interactivity will have fatter profit margins.

32 Important Search Marketing Acronyms (Search Engine Journal)
Being that we work in an industry defined by acronyms (SEO) and have trouble sometimes determiniming the difference between SEO and SEM, SEM and PPC, or PPC and CPC; over at DP, KP started a thread listing SEO acronyms which I feel are quite useful (espcially for newbies or prepping before a meeting) and worth […]

BizRate.com & Google Break Up

Google Checkout Makes Shopping Sites Undesirable

As Google Checkout ramps up, many thin arbitrage / shopping aggregator sites are going to see a significant love loss from Google. In September Andrew Goodman wrote a piece on how paid search and organic search quality criteria may play off each other, after coming across a post on Inside AdWords where Google stated that some types of sites are likely to merit a low quality score:

The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it’s important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

• eBook sites that show frequent ads
• ‘Get rich quick’ sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines

Market Saturation

It does not help any of the shopping aggregators that there are about a dozen competitors (BizRate, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping, NextTag, Epinions, DealTime, Pricegrabber, Pricerunner, Yahoo! Shopping, etc.). From a marketing standpoint almost all of them offer near identical user experience, so few of them are remarkable or linkworthy. The whole field (including Yahoo!) compete based on renting large swaths of links.

Everyone MUST Rent Links to Compete

Given Google’s recent war cries against buying and selling links, and that there are so many shopping comparison sites, it is easy for Google to whack a few of them with it going unnoticed by anyone outside the companies. But if you are in the comparison shopping field and do not rent links, how can you compete with Yahoo! when they do? You can’t.

The Fall of BizRate.com

I am uncertain if the drop in Google was algorithmic or editorial, but BizRate’s Alexa ranking is off sharply over the past couple weeks, and if you look at top keywords they ranked for on Google (via Compete.com, SEO Digger, or SpyFu), their site is no longer ranking for many of them. In fact, I didn’t even see the US site ranking for “biz rate”. For that term bizrate.co.uk ranks #1. When I visit the UK site from a Google search result for “biz rate” the site asks if I want to view the US site or the UK site.

Google’s Algorithmic Whitelists Are Not Carved in Stone

BizRate, which sold to the E.W. Scripps company for $525 million, used to be on Google’s editorial white list.

How Efficient is the Web at Selling High Priced Items?

I wanted to get my wife something cool for her birthday, but the gift I wanted to buy proved nearly impossible to find from a trustworthy source. I was going to get her a high end autographed item, but who should I buy it from?

1. The not for profit site that is down, requiring you to buy through the payment link inside of Google’s cache

2. The site with Google Checkout and Google AdSense on their home page
3. The site with a sleazy Clickbank affiliate ad for how to steal stuff
4. The site with no money back guarantee
5. The site with a design that looks like I created it in January 2003 (my first month on the web)
6. The eBay member with 0 reputation
7. The eBay member that takes a month and a half to ship
8. The eBay member selling authentic lithographs
9. The eBay member selling the item used

While I listed the above faults as though each was a different site, many of the sites actually suffered from multiple trust eating offenses. I consider myself a savvy searcher and yet these were the best sites I could find for what I wanted to buy. Because of the price-point I was unwilling to trust any of them enough to buy.

At lower price points we are more likely to let little things slide, but almost every site undermines conversion rates. A year from now I will probably look back on this post and laugh at some of the things I was screwing up today.

E-mail as Social Network: the Pitfalls
E-mail is one of the oldest functions of the Internet. Originally used by scientists and scholars to collaborate on projects its popularity grew and with the advent of the World Wide Web practically everybody online now has an email address and many users have several. Now Google and Yahoo want to change e-mail to make it more like a social network….
Reach Your Online Customers Through Optimization Learn how search engine friendly design can tap into free traffic from search engines: SES Chicago

Q & A Open Thread

Feel free to ask any SEO or internet marketing related questions and I will try to answer them below.

I prefer to answer broader industry questions than site specific questions. It can take a day to do a strong site review, and I could miss a lot of things that are wrong if I give your site a 5 minute once over.

Questions like “I have a new site and want to know where to start with link building” are better than comments “please review everything about my site”. Also I can’t guarantee that I can do anything to get your site unpenalized by Google if you were recently penalized.

[Update: I just closed this thread after a few hundred comments, so I have time to write more new posts.]

BizRate.com & Google Break Up

Google Checkout Makes Shopping Sites Undesirable

As Google Checkout ramps up, many thin arbitrage / shopping aggregator sites are going to see a significant love loss from Google. In September Andrew Goodman wrote a piece on how paid search and organic search quality criteria may play off each other, after coming across a post on Inside AdWords where Google stated that some types of sites are likely to merit a low quality score:

The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it’s important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

• eBook sites that show frequent ads
• ‘Get rich quick’ sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines

Market Saturation

It does not help any of the shopping aggregators that there are about a dozen competitors (BizRate, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping, NextTag, Epinions, DealTime, Pricegrabber, Pricerunner, Yahoo! Shopping, etc.). From a marketing standpoint almost all of them offer near identical user experience, so few of them are remarkable or linkworthy. The whole field (including Yahoo!) compete based on renting large swaths of links.

Everyone MUST Rent Links to Compete

Given Google’s recent war cries against buying and selling links, and that there are so many shopping comparison sites, it is easy for Google to whack a few of them with it going unnoticed by anyone outside the companies. But if you are in the comparison shopping field and do not rent links, how can you compete with Yahoo! when they do? You can’t.

The Fall of BizRate.com

I am uncertain if the drop in Google was algorithmic or editorial, but BizRate’s Alexa ranking is off sharply over the past couple weeks, and if you look at top keywords they ranked for on Google (via Compete.com, SEO Digger, or SpyFu), their site is no longer ranking for many of them. In fact, I didn’t even see the US site ranking for “biz rate”. For that term bizrate.co.uk ranks #1. When I visit the UK site from a Google search result for “biz rate” the site asks if I want to view the US site or the UK site.

Google’s Algorithmic Whitelists Are Not Carved in Stone

BizRate, which sold to the E.W. Scripps company for $525 million, used to be on Google’s editorial white list.

Why SEOs Should Use the Meta Keywords Tag On Their Homepage

Should the MarketingSherpa’s guide to landing pages use an effective landing page? Should a company touting the value of statistics use statistically relevant datasets?

Every day someone is getting called out for being a liar, a thief, or a charlatan douchebag. You can’t track it all, but simply following your own guidelines and ideals lessens the odds that people will wrongfully call you out.

A few years back a friend of mine bolded one of the keywords in the content on the homepage of his SEO services site, and I told him I thought it made his homepage look slightly worse. He then replied “perhaps, but it looks optimized”. That line of thinking made sense to me.

Do You Design Banner Ads?

A couple years ago a friend of mine who sold ad inventory for premium publishers told me the key to making his banner ads work was to not make them look like banners, unlike the below tongue in cheek effort:

For how many years was the banner the standard format for online advertising? As the web evolves and each of us learn better business practices many standards become irrelevant relics of the past. Every business person is a creature of laziness. Sometimes laziness prevents us from changing, and sometimes it helps us make ourselves more efficient. If a macros can do the job then why not let it?

What ideas have you held on to for far too long? What information and productivity tools convinced you to break those habits?

Giovanna Wall, the New Writer for SEO Book
BizRate.com & Google Break Up

Google Checkout Makes Shopping Sites Undesirable

As Google Checkout ramps up, many thin arbitrage / shopping aggregator sites are going to see a significant love loss from Google. In September Andrew Goodman wrote a piece on how paid search and organic search quality criteria may play off each other, after coming across a post on Inside AdWords where Google stated that some types of sites are likely to merit a low quality score:

The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it’s important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

• eBook sites that show frequent ads
• ‘Get rich quick’ sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don’t comply with our affiliate guidelines

Market Saturation

It does not help any of the shopping aggregators that there are about a dozen competitors (BizRate, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping, NextTag, Epinions, DealTime, Pricegrabber, Pricerunner, Yahoo! Shopping, etc.). From a marketing standpoint almost all of them offer near identical user experience, so few of them are remarkable or linkworthy. The whole field (including Yahoo!) compete based on renting large swaths of links.

Everyone MUST Rent Links to Compete

Given Google’s recent war cries against buying and selling links, and that there are so many shopping comparison sites, it is easy for Google to whack a few of them with it going unnoticed by anyone outside the companies. But if you are in the comparison shopping field and do not rent links, how can you compete with Yahoo! when they do? You can’t.

The Fall of BizRate.com

I am uncertain if the drop in Google was algorithmic or editorial, but BizRate’s Alexa ranking is off sharply over the past couple weeks, and if you look at top keywords they ranked for on Google (via Compete.com, SEO Digger, or SpyFu), their site is no longer ranking for many of them. In fact, I didn’t even see the US site ranking for “biz rate”. For that term bizrate.co.uk ranks #1. When I visit the UK site from a Google search result for “biz rate” the site asks if I want to view the US site or the UK site.

Google’s Algorithmic Whitelists Are Not Carved in Stone

BizRate, which sold to the E.W. Scripps company for $525 million, used to be on Google’s editorial white list.

Q & A Open Thread

Feel free to ask any SEO or internet marketing related questions and I will try to answer them below.

I prefer to answer broader industry questions than site specific questions. It can take a day to do a strong site review, and I could miss a lot of things that are wrong if I give your site a 5 minute once over.

Questions like “I have a new site and want to know where to start with link building” are better than comments “please review everything about my site”. Also I can’t guarantee that I can do anything to get your site unpenalized by Google if you were recently penalized.

[Update: I just closed this thread after a few hundred comments, so I have time to write more new posts.]

Re: hype or not hype?
ok thanks a lot,i really appreci…

Helping Charities is a Form of Spam? Or Just Great Marketing?

Donating to a charity or sponsoring an event is one of the safest ways to buy a link, but getting them to use and recommend your product is a far more effective approach to marketing. Why? Passion is more important than PageRank.

Charities Can Help You Market Your Stuff Cheaply

Google giving charities free Google Checkout buttons on their Google ads, Google is giving away $10,000,000 to push Android, and Google recently pushed Gmail through a Threadless contest. Google uses contests and charities to market their services, are you?

Personal Relevancy

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Google is starting to push for higher content quality, and they are willing to lose revenue to do so. Some people fight decreasing relevancy by throwing more ads in the content - only to become more irrelevant. Carnival copy is no way to win.

The solution is better information quality, better formatting, and better partnerships. And this giving does not have to be to a large charity or rock star. You can do it everyday with the people you interact with and get the same effect. A few links, comments, mentions, and emails add up over time. Give and thou shalt receive.

Download Camtasia For Free

Via Dan Thies, I noticed you can download and register Camtasia 3 for free. Camtasia is the screen capture software I use when I make SEO videos.

Online Ad Company Yodle Raises Funds (CRN)
Firm buys ads online, designs Websites, provides email applications and implements SEO best practices.

Perceived Authenticity is Key to Profitable Niche Publishing Business Models

Via TC, I discovered IBM released a report on how the they think the $550 billion global ad market might change in the coming years. The predictions look bleak for most ad agencies and traditional media gatekeepers, but good for niche publishers who have a solid stream of attention:

The “voice” delivering a message, along with its perceived authenticity, will become as powerful perhaps as the message or offer.

As media gets more saturated, we get better at filtering out garbage. Jakob Nielson’s article about writing articles instead of blog posts does a great job of explaining why writing fewer and more in depth articles is effective for gaining and keeping attention in a competitive marketplace.

On a related note, Frank just noticed a TV show skipping the TV and starting out on the web. There is no easier way to increased perceived authenticity than having a direct and open relationship with the audience.

IBM also offered research on the attention economy in a paper titled Vying for attention: the future of competing in media and entertainment. Rich Shefren recently created a mindmap of what he calls the Attention Age Doctrine, which shows why people are willing to pay larger premiums for great advice and nothing for decent advice.

Learn what SEO is and how to do it (About.com)
SEO or search engine optimization is a technique where you write Web pages that are attractive to your readers and to the search engine spiders that catalog Web sites. You…

Using Search Tools for SEO
You re not supposed to use a screwdriver like a hammer or a chisel. I ve done both. It may not work as well as using the right tool but it got the job done. In a similar way you can use certain tools to help you with some SEO tasks despite the fact that they weren t designed for these tasks in the first place….
Reach Your Online Customers Through Optimization Learn how search engine friendly design can tap into free traffic from search engines: SES Chicago

Online Social Network Spam: Growing Trend?
Online social networks are one of the blessings of Web 2. . Plenty of people use them to stay in touch with their friends meet new people make work-related connections and more. Unfortunately it seems like you can t have something good on the Internet without someone coming along to abuse it and that s as true of online social networks as anything….
Try VMWare Workstation for Free! Register here. VMware Workstation: The gold standard in desktop virtualization. Click here for your free trial.

Communication Breakdown: 5 Avoidable Failures That Derail Search Marketing Campaigns (Search Engine Land)
Last week I had occasion to visit with a B2B prospect. Halfway through our meeting they voiced concern about their ability to uphold their end of the SEO partnership. Naturally, soon thereafter we were engaged in a spirited discussion on the main reasons B2B campaigns fail. As it turns out, they were already familiar with how both lack of implementation and lack of measurement can …

‘Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: a Developer’s Guide to SEO‘ Now Available (Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance)
DUBLIN, Ireland—-Research and Markets has announced the addition of Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer’s Guide to SEO to their offering.

Rage Software – Track your SEO Status (Web Host Directory)
RAGE Software announced today the immediate availability of RAGE SERank 1.0, an all new application for web site owners to track and monitor their search engine rankings.

SEO Suite 8.0 (Jumbo.com)
This is all in one package web promotion software.

Laser Guidance Takes a Quantum Leap (PR.com)
A-Metrics, LLC and SEO Precision, Inc. have announced a partnership to advance fast steering mirror (FSM) technology with “order of magnitude” accuracy increases for laser guidance products with many government and commercial applications. Executives in the partnering organizations said their electro-optical solutions will dramatically improve the current technology and vastly enhance product …

Re: Boards to add or remove for usability and organisation
I did not find things confusing….

[Video] Intro. to PPC Marketing Using Google AdWords, Yahoo & Microsoft

This 9 minute and 37 second video offers basic tips for starting with pay per click marketing.

General Tips for Starting With PPC Advertising

• Start advertising on the major search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN give you faster feedback and better traffic quality than smaller search engines typically do. The size and scope of the large ad networks means that the #5 market is going to have almost no clean syndication partners because 60% of Google is more than 90% of smaller networks. Yahoo and MSN often have cheaper clicks than Google due to fewer competitors and less sophisticated price gouging ad quality algorithms.

• Use different match types. Understand the differences between broad, phrase, and exact match. If you use broad or phrase match, make sure to use search query performance reports to find more keywords you should be advertising on and keywords you should be blocking via negative keywords tools.
• Should you use ad syndication? Off the start, opt out of contextual ad syndication and test your campaigns via Google search ads, such that you can get a clean signal of click value, ad position, and ad CTR. After you know what it takes to compete in search you may want to re-enable ad syndication. If you enable ad syndication, set it up with its own ad groups or bid differently for contextual ads than you do for search.
• Track conversion. This will teach you what keywords actually lead to commercial events. Sometimes if you are priced out of common market related keywords you can still find some high value lower search volume keywords that other competitors have not yet found. If you are managing large and complex campaigns you may want to use a third party conversion tracking tool, but if you only sell one product and/or run smaller accounts then you can use the free conversion tracking tools built into the search ad networks.
• Use PPC to guide SEO. It is cheaper to use keyword research tools and use PPC to find out what terms convert right when you start an SEO campaign than it is to spend months targeting the wrong keywords.
• A/B split test. Use the built in Google AdWords a/b split test tool to test different ad copy, and use their Website Optimizer tool to test different landing pages.
• Be relevant. Use tight ad groups and send traffic to a landing page catered toward that basket of keywords. These tips increase ad clickthrough rate, ad quality scores, and conversion rates while lowering cost per click. Set brand related keywords in their own ad group. Dynamic keyword insertion can help improve your perceived ad relevancy by matching the ads up against keywords from the search query. Google’s offline AdWords editor can help you create tight ad groups.
• Set advertising goals. Some advertisers are looking for direct ROI, while others are looking to build their brand while making meager profits. If your brand related keywords are highly profitable, you might want to use those profits to help subsidize the cost of keywords earlier in the sales cycle or keywords that help increase brand awareness. If you have no search advertising experience and no brand awareness you can’t be afraid of losing money off the start.
• Use PPC to build links. If you create linkworthy content and buy the related keywords you can get mainstream media exposure for next to nothing.
• Learn from the search engines. Google AdWords offers free online training videos which teach you how to use their ad network. One note of caution is that when they talk about Google tools that optimize something, many of those tools optimize eating your ad budget and increasing Google’s revenues at your expense.

SEO Suite 8.0 (Jumbo.com)
This is all in one package web promotion software.