How To Get Good Links: SEO - SEM Beginner’s Guide (MasterNewMedia.org) Every single SEO expert will tell you that the next important thing to rank high inside major search engines is to get good incoming links from other sites. But how do you go about getting good links from other sites in ways that are effective and immediate? While lots of people are tricked into wasting money on software systems that find sites similar to yours in topic and send automatic …
Toronto SEO Expert to Address Two Las Vegas Web Conferences (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Alan K’necht, founder and president of K’nechtology Inc., a Toronto search engine optimization and search engine marketing company, to speak at Web Builder 2.0 Dec. 3, 2007 and at PubCon (WebmasterWorld’s Search & Internet Marketing Conference) Dec. 5, 2007 in Las Vegas.
Toronto SEO Expert to Address Two Las Vegas Web Conferences (PRWeb) Alan K’necht, founder and president of K’nechtology Inc., a Toronto search engine optimization and search engine marketing company, to speak at Web Builder 2.0 Dec. 3, 2007 and at PubCon (WebmasterWorld’s Search & Internet Marketing Conference) Dec. 5, 2007 in Las Vegas. (PRWeb Nov 20, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/SW5zZS1JbnNlLUNyYXMtWmV0YS1UaGlyLVplcm8=
The program is targeted at owners of small amounts of domains in their portfolio. GoDaddy serves ads that are based on the domain name, and the analysis of what people click on and search for in the site.
This new service, CashParking, not only helps webmasters make a few extra dollars, but provides another means by which websites and companies can get search related traffic through links on unique domain names that are not as yet built out.
Flash Intro Pages: Big SEO “No No” (Search Engine Roundtable) Ad: Convert visitors with Google Analytics - free āØ Do you want to make the most of your site’s search engine visibility? Do you want to rank for your bread and butter keywords? Do you also love your Flash introduction page? Well, you would be kidding yourself if you want to have the best of both worlds. A SitePoint Forums thread asks if a Flash intro page can hurt your rankings. 99% of …
I am by no means a standard for success (I have many flaws that need fixed), but this 5 minute and 25 second video highlights some of the things I did right that helped me do well on the web.
I am off to the blogging conference tomorrow, so no videos for a few days, but please let me know what you think of this one. If you will be at the Blog World Expo I am speaking there Tuesday about SEO. Feel free to stop by and say hi.
Register Domains Early & Often: As soon as you have a good idea go register the related domain. The registration and re-registration fee is negligible compared to the potential rewards of executing on a good idea.
Built At Least a Few Links:Search engines and web users have a limited number of ways to gauge trust and credibility. Setting up at least a basic site and building a few links for it costs next to nothing compared to the potential rewards of owning a good idea. Throw out a shingle, get it a few links, sit on it for a year and come back to it.
Ride Successful Trends: You don’t have to be first, but it doesn’t hurt to be. Also look to duplicate some of the best ideas from the past, while looking for ways to modernize them.
Reinvest in Your Best Channels: If something is a success reinvest in improving the design, the layout, and the offering. If you are beyond self sustaining you are not far from making relatively large profits. A few months of learning, testing, and tracking can lead to a ten fold increase in income.
Don’t Wait Until Tomorrow: Google is mapping out your psychological flaws. Tomorrow the web is going to be dirtier and more competitive. Skipping one hour of work today might mean 3 hours of work next year or 12 hours of work the following year.
This video is a bit longer than some of the earlier videos, clocking in at 9 minutes and 39 seconds.
The Dual Roles of Navigation: Navigation needs to be user friendly and search engine friendly. If you want a user to pay attention to an offer you have to link to it with a call to action in the content area of the page. If you want search engines to pay attention to a page you have to link to it on important pages and/or from many pages. In general it is also better usability and better for your rankings to use descriptive (or keyword rich) text links over image links for your primary navigation, and in most in content links on your site.
Navigation Should Parallel Keyword Strategy: Your primary site navigation should be aligned with keyword categories, structured in related groups that capture keywords along the entire purchase cycle. If you have navigation that is not aligned with your keywords (like date based archives or an about page) you can use nofollow on it to prevent passing link equity through that portion of your site. You may also want to demote sections of your site that convert exceptionally poor relative to the better performing options.
Examples of Channeling Link Equity: Some websites, such as Target.com, show Google more navigation than they show end users to promote seasonally hot items. Other sites, like Chocolate.com, chose to use nofollow on unimportant internal links to de-emphasize unimportant options. You can view the nofollowed links on Chocolate.com by viewing their site with SEO for Firefox turned on. In some cases it also makes sense to use nofollow on user generated content to lessen the incentive for driveby spamming.
Clean & Clear Structure: If you author many pages about the same topic it is important to link to the most important articles in order to emphasize them, and use breadcrumb navigation to help structure the site and show what pages are most important.
Duplicate content: Google likes webmasters to believe that Google has duplicate content figured out, but if they have multiple similar pages indexed you are splitting your PageRank and they may rank the wrong version. Make sure you do not place the same (or exceptionally similar) content on multiple pages. Stuntdubl has a good list of resources for dealing with duplicate content.
Subdomains: If you have logical breaks in your content you may want to use subdomains to create smaller focused mini sites. If you have a strong brand you can get a bit more aggressive with subdomains, like eBay is.
Welcome to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (Pensions Net) Meta Tags Optimisation Tutorial Tutorial on optimising your sites meta tags to improved search engine results. Free Meta Tags Generator Generate meta tags for your site quickly a simply using this meta tag generator.
Michael Jenson from Solo SEO recently emailed me about a cool new free SEO tool he created called Index Rank. After seeing my post about Google date based filters, Michael created the Index Rank tool, which allows you to see the growth of a site’s profile in Google based on the number of pages indexed over different periods of time. The tool also allows you to compare multiple sites against each other.
Why is this data useful?
Since Google removed the supplemental results label, the next best thing we have to test site trust for lower end longtail pages is how quickly new pages are getting indexed.
If you see a rapid increase in indexing you know that is caused by an increase in domain trust due to better inlinks, an increase in content creation that leveraged unused authority the site was sitting on, solving a crawling issue, improving internal site architecture, or some technical issue that might be associated with creating duplicate content pages.
If everything you create is getting indexed you may consider creating content at a faster rate, perhaps using sub-brands off subdomains.
If you keep pumping out content but are not seeing your indexing stats go up, that is a cue to build links.
Good and Bad Clients: an SEO’s Point of View (ISEDB) This article is addressed mostly to people who consider hiring an SEO. If you understand from the start what an SEO expects from a client, you’ll probably find it easier to achieve understanding. In our profession, the client’s understanding is often a key to success.
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
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.
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.
Good and Bad Clients: an SEO’s Point of View (ISEDB) This article is addressed mostly to people who consider hiring an SEO. If you understand from the start what an SEO expects from a client, you’ll probably find it easier to achieve understanding. In our profession, the client’s understanding is often a key to success.
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?
The not for profit site that is down, requiring you to buy through the payment link inside of Google’s cache
The site with Google Checkout and Google AdSense on their home page
The site with a sleazy Clickbank affiliate ad for how to steal stuff
The site with no money back guarantee
The site with a design that looks like I created it in January 2003 (my first month on the web)
The eBay member with 0 reputation
The eBay member that takes a month and a half to ship
The eBay member selling authentic lithographs
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.
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
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.
This 3 minutes and 29 second video was one of my first. It is not as clear and fluid as some of the more recent videos. It talks about how many websites ranking for years got killed by a Google engineer within days of being mentioned on a popular SEO blog.
The Role of Editorial Decisions at Google in Determining Relevancy
Almost every commercial site ranking for a wide array of commercial terms is doing something outside Google’s ever-changing webmaster guidelines. SEO guidelines are set up such that you are not allowed to rank for anything worth ranking for.
Dictating search relevancy is as much about mind control as it is about determining what is considered relevant.
Some really spammy stuff gets a free pass because it is owned by a major corporation, or an expert that is actually misleading people and giving advice that sets up obvious footprints that are easy to detect and discount. Relevancy and hand edits are not applied justly or evenly.
When sites are new they tend to have less natural link profiles because push marketing is not as clean as pull marketing. After sites get significant exposure they can rely more on pull marketing and pretend that they were always clean. If a search engineer wants to they can start your site at 0 because years ago you did something they did not like, or simply because the site is associated with you. Relevancy and hand edits are not applied justly or evenly.
If an SEO blog provides information that is too good with specific examples of how to apply the techniques someone at a search engine might hand edit the site on principal.
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.
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.
Philipp Lessen recently asked me to guest post on Blogoscoped about the state of the world of SEO in 2007. I talked about recent events, editorial considerations, industry consolidation, and all sorts of other goodies.
I also did a mini interview with Web Pro News at the Blog World Expo. I pulled my wonderful wife into the interview, and she was kinda shy. Today is her birthday so we are about to go out soon.
Michael Jenson from Solo SEO recently emailed me about a cool new free SEO tool he created called Index Rank. After seeing my post about Google date based filters, Michael created the Index Rank tool, which allows you to see the growth of a site’s profile in Google based on the number of pages indexed over different periods of time. The tool also allows you to compare multiple sites against each other.
Why is this data useful?
Since Google removed the supplemental results label, the next best thing we have to test site trust for lower end longtail pages is how quickly new pages are getting indexed.
If you see a rapid increase in indexing you know that is caused by an increase in domain trust due to better inlinks, an increase in content creation that leveraged unused authority the site was sitting on, solving a crawling issue, improving internal site architecture, or some technical issue that might be associated with creating duplicate content pages.
If everything you create is getting indexed you may consider creating content at a faster rate, perhaps using sub-brands off subdomains.
If you keep pumping out content but are not seeing your indexing stats go up, that is a cue to build links.
This 7 minute and 50 second video is one of the first SEO videos I made. After reviewing it I realize I could have moved the screen around to show a few more examples of the stuff I was talking about. Rather than discussing one topic this video moves around to offer a wide array of marketing optimization ideas.
Domain name & site design: using a strong domain name helps you look more credible and helps you rank better. An original high quality site design also makes content appear more trustworthy.
Logo & homepage page title: place your keywords in your logo. Instead of using Paypal as your logo, use something like Paypal payment solutions or Paypal online payments. You can still emphasize the Paypal name while benefiting from enhanced inbound anchor text due to keyword proximity, and some people perceiving your official name as containing the associated keywords.
Title of articles & filenames: use at least one keyword phrase in your page title and make your filenames descriptive. Doing so will help you build descriptive inbound links. Some people link using your page title as the anchor text, this is especially true if your page title is short and memorable. Many authoritative websites cite sources using the full URL with filename in the anchor text.
Minimize duplication: mixing up your on page seo, page titles, and meta descriptions helps you rank for a wider net of keywords and makes your rankings more stable
Leverage your authority: add useful descriptive background text below the fold on high authority pages. Also consider adding more internal links on high authority pages.
Buying links: when buying them, consider buying links indirectly through payment schemes involving community participation and discussion, such as contests and affiliate programs.
Syndication: if your content is published on other sites, make sure to reference older posts on your site to drive that traffic stream and link equity back to your site.
Drunken spelling: if you have a community aspect to your site, don’t correct misspellings. In fact, some publishers might even place fake reviews and comments on their sites to help capture misspelled keywords without raising their risk profiles.
Spammy examples: find reasons to discuss spammy high margin topics on high authority websites by relating them to your core business. If your relation is a bit of a stretch, consider backdating it or finding another way to place the story on a part of your site that does not have thousands of people reading every word.
Pay Per Click Edge Adds SEO Component to their PPC Management Service (PRWeb) Raleigh, NC based Pay Per Click Management firm announced today that they are giving their Backyard SEO service to new clients Free of Charge! (PRWeb Nov 15, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/Q3Jhcy1JbnNlLVByb2YtWmV0YS1UaGlyLVplcm8=
Content Strategy: Have A Strong Focus - SEO-SEM Beginner’s Guide (MasterNewMedia.org) The new small piece of online marketing advice that I am adding today to the large SEO-SEM puzzle, focuses on the importance of selecting and maintaining a very clear site and content focus - theme. Photo credit: Julian Addington-Barker As the web moves forward , the ability to stand out and be matched to very specific, identifiable themes or topics becomes an increasingly …
Searching Google for Girls Search engines are popping up left and right. With people fiddling and tinkering with open source directories, and API’s. But i have never came across something like this….
Are you a girl? A girl that loves searching? Better yet, a girl that loves searching on Google? Why not try Girgle?
There is really nothing new as far as search technology goes here. Girgle is really just a pretty landing page for the AdSense search tool. Pretty might not even be the word. Its landing page is a little malformed with its heart shape thingy. The developer might have something, but they might want to spend a bit more time making it at least appear a little prettier.
Community Powered Search Eurekster is a different kind of search engine. It is based on community decisions on what the top results should be.
What you would have to do to get inclusion into Eurekster is to create your own swicki. It would be tailored to your particular interests. The swicki will then scan all of the updated pages from your particular site. As people use your particular swicki, the system will learn behaviors of people, and rank your site accordingly.
In a basic approach, a Swicki is a search engine that learns from your users. Results are produced for relevancy, and a buzzcloud of searches are created based on only what users care about.
Kayak is a travel search engine, not a travel agency, design to give customers the best deal possible, and help finding travel related products and supplies.
Kayak gets paid through clickage on ads that are displayed on their system, for anything from hotels, airlines, and rental cars. Kayak’s whole deal is that they are not trying to sell their visitors anything, they are just providing the best information for them to make their own decisions.
In this first new ad campaign of Kayak’s, they take a satirical campaign that supposedly isnt at a location where others would go. The campaign uses a provocative approach to humor.
An In Depth Look at Google`s Potential Buyout of GoDaddy The speculation surrounding Google s potential purchase of GoDaddy reached its pinnacle back in September and has since waned somewhat. Because there hasn t been any news recently to either confirm or dispel what so many people have been anticipating I figured that I would take an in depth look into exactly what is being considered and how its possible transpiration will affect the SEO and web hosting fields…. Reach Your Online Customers Through Optimization Learn how search engine friendly design can tap into free traffic from search engines: SES Chicago
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.
5 Quick Tips for Building SEO Content (Search Engine Journal) While itās great to have a web site optimized and performing well in the engines, you need to build out content on a consistent basis. Managing growth without upsetting your existing SEO efforts can often be a challenge. With these challenges in mind, here are my top ten tips for building site content […]
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.
Effective Tagging For Both Usability & SEO (Search Engine Land) In this era of Web 2.0, it seems that blogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, and wikis have been the buzzwords occupying most of the limelight. But personally, tagging is the Web 2.0 technology that excites me the most, because of its versatility and wide applicability. A tag, according to Wikipedia, is “a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a …
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.
Philipp Lessen recently asked me to guest post on Blogoscoped about the state of the world of SEO in 2007. I talked about recent events, editorial considerations, industry consolidation, and all sorts of other goodies.
I also did a mini interview with Web Pro News at the Blog World Expo. I pulled my wonderful wife into the interview, and she was kinda shy. Today is her birthday so we are about to go out soon.
This 3 minutes and 29 second video was one of my first. It is not as clear and fluid as some of the more recent videos. It talks about how many websites ranking for years got killed by a Google engineer within days of being mentioned on a popular SEO blog.
The Role of Editorial Decisions at Google in Determining Relevancy
Almost every commercial site ranking for a wide array of commercial terms is doing something outside Google’s ever-changing webmaster guidelines. SEO guidelines are set up such that you are not allowed to rank for anything worth ranking for.
Dictating search relevancy is as much about mind control as it is about determining what is considered relevant.
Some really spammy stuff gets a free pass because it is owned by a major corporation, or an expert that is actually misleading people and giving advice that sets up obvious footprints that are easy to detect and discount. Relevancy and hand edits are not applied justly or evenly.
When sites are new they tend to have less natural link profiles because push marketing is not as clean as pull marketing. After sites get significant exposure they can rely more on pull marketing and pretend that they were always clean. If a search engineer wants to they can start your site at 0 because years ago you did something they did not like, or simply because the site is associated with you. Relevancy and hand edits are not applied justly or evenly.
If an SEO blog provides information that is too good with specific examples of how to apply the techniques someone at a search engine might hand edit the site on principal.
Email, SEO, Usability are Top Holiday Priorities for Online Marketers, According to Brulant Study (PRWeb) Email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and usability/customer experience are the top priorities for online marketers this holiday season according to a recent survey. The survey was conducted by online solutions provider Brulant at the Shop.org 2007 Annual Summit held in Las Vegas in September. (PRWeb Nov 14, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: …
Tuning Up Your Web Site Sometimes web sites are like cars. You can have a site that looks gorgeous from the outside but if it s under-performing and not getting you where you want to go it might be time for a tune up - or even a complete overhaul. Read on for your own care and maintenance guide…. Get your FREE 30 day VMware Workstation trial Now! Virtualize your desktop today with VMware Workstation.
 things to complain about that they likely won’t even have time to rant about you working with them.
<li>The incremental cost of manufacturing many products (especially software or information) is dropping to ~ $0.
<li>The cost of marketing such products and services is rising exponentially as markets saturate.</ul>
<h3>Recent Examples of Donations</h3>
<p>Today I got an email about an <b>SEO</b> firm providing free <b>SEO</b> services to charities, <b>Search Engine</b> Land posted about <a target=)
Google giving charities free Google Checkout buttons on their Google ads, 
seobook.com/images/carnival-copy.jpg” height=”141″ width=”213″ alt=”Carnival Copy.” align=”right” />
