Seo for your living

seo

Open Source Media Strategies

Nice Idea, Google!

About a month ago I launched an SEO tool named the Website Health Check tool. The launch was quite successful, so Google decided to block my tool, then added its features to Google Webmaster Central. You shouldn’t artificially manipulate the link graph or screw with other people’s sites, unless you are Google.

I can plumb around Google blocking it, but there are a limited number of types of webmaster tools that interface with search engines that can be provided to the general public without either being cloned by the search engine or having the search engine serve you some type of retribution for creating them.

Editorial judgements are rarely equitable, and nobody wants to have sitelinks, but have them appear at the top of the 5th page of the search results for their own brand.
what Kevin Rose did to a Digg member who created an unofficial Digg group on Facebook.

The Transition From Open to Close

Sure that Google maps API is open today, and so are many other data sources, but after they buy enough marketshare look for that to change. The big networks are only open in markets they are losing. What did they do to their SOAP search API after they had enough market leverage? They killed it.

Relying on APIs or scraping data from someone else’s platform only has value if you can aggregate it from many sources, do it in a way that is hard to block, add substantial value, have alternative data sources, and you are creating something that you know the data sources you are relying on will not clone for a strategic reason.

Wanted: Writer, Editor, & Marketer…Pay: $0

All these networks pretend that they care about you, but they are vultures. Their data is their data. Their ideas are their ideas….and so are your ideas, unfortunately. If you find yourself becoming someone else’s user generated content, or your business can be described as a feature on someone else’s product, you are wasting your time.

11 Steps to Successful SEO for Your Business (Search Engine Journal)
I wrote in November a long article for my website about the necessary steps for a business to successfully engage in organic search engine optimization. The article provides an overview with additional references to go into more detail for each of the steps. Here is a shorter and more compressed version of this article that is […]

International Keyword Research Tool

I took down my old Overture powered keyword tool and replaced it using Wordtracker data because:

• I like Wordtracker’s data more
• Wordtracker’s API is much more reliable than scraping data from Overture
• the Overture tool seems like it has been down more often than it has been up recently

I primarily focus on the US market and did not realize how popular the international aspects of the old keyword research tool were until I started getting a rash of email complaints after taking the tool down.

So I put the old keyword tool back up, renamed it the international keyword suggestion tool, and defaulted it to using UK values (while still allowing users to grab data from other regional markets). I also zipped it up here, so anyone can install it on their site, and set it to a different default language if they like.

[Video] How Aggressive Ad Placement Kills Websites

When I did a recent Q&A thread one of the recurring themes with sites that were struggling was AdSense ads positioned above their content. Many websites are never given the chance to grow because they monetize too aggressively and look to spammy to enjoy the benefits of organic growth and community building.

Mentioned in this video:

• 96% of email is spam
• Corbis gives bloggers ad sponsored images - don’t use them…just use Istockphoto
• Compete.com graph comparing a leading Mustang community to one that has limited exposure
• How Google enforces relevancy and grows profits: focus attention, evolving quality score, advertiser enabled filtering
• how to market viral videos
• Bootstrapping Blog - even good sites can diminish credibility a bit if the ad is not well blended into the content
• get charities to help you market your business, video about marketing techniques you should be using, and video about creating a self reinforcing authority

An Unjust Fear of Link Buying

So Worried that You Forgot to Compete

While on the link buying panel at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon a few people were pushing that you might need to consider how Google will view your current link buys 5 years down the road, and that they may hurt you then for what you do now. Upon hearing that I said something like “less than 5 years ago I bought spammy links and if I did not I probably wouldn’t be speaking here right now”. That got a cheer from the crowd. Who wants to be worried about what Google thinks or does 5 years from now? That is no way to innovate or take marketshare from current market leaders.

Reviewing Result Quality

When engineers view your site they don’t just look at “if you have a few spammy links” but they try to consider the quality of user experience and the ratio of clean links to dirty links. If your site is good and ranks for years then you are going to get many natural links that dwarf any spammy links that were part of your site launch.

Building a Real Business

If your business model is entirely reliant on Google 5 years from now, your user experience is sub-par, and you haven’t built up any brand equity after ranking for 5 years then there was not much effort put into building a legitimate business, and it deserves to fail. But the sites that rank get self reinforcing exposure. If SEO is part of your brand building and site building strategy you simply can not sit around waiting for the rankings to come in.

Inferior Sites Ranking #1

It is easy to lack objectivity when talking of the quality of your site, but in some fields I compete in, many of the top ranked competing sites are ran by people buying a slew of spammy links and pointing them at their (quite obviously) English second language sites. Because they rank, those sites get some number of self reinforcing links. If I did nothing but create great content they would still outrank my site. You have to buy marketshare in one way or another (public relations, AdWords, link buying) if you are trying to gain marketshare and your market is competitive.

Who Buys Links & Uses Push Marketing to Buy Marketshare?

That does not mean that I am an advocate of bad user experience or poor quality content, but if you care about SEO and have a new site in an old market, user experience and content quality are not enough unless you do some push marketing at launch.

• AOL sent out millions of spammy CDs to market their service.
• Google pushes their logo onto ads they distribute all over the web, has the largest push ad network on the web, has some of the dirtiest domain traffic partners (many cybersquatters), recommend infidelity, and bundle Google Checkout usage with lower ad prices and free links.
• Yahoo! has an in house SEO team and a few years ago Yahoo! was one of the leading link buyers.
• IAC buys a ton of links and aggressively cross links their sites.
• Microsoft has got in trouble for launching new products by bundling them with their old products and steals traffic by sending seobook.om traffic to their live search product.
• Monster.com owns a ton of thin lead generation sites.
• eBay pays affiliates to spam Google.
• One of Google’s large ad distribution partners tried setting up a deal with me to rank their ads in Google’s search results using aggressive black hat spammy techniques, in which I declined to participate in.

We Don’t Write the Algorithms (or Hand Edit Search Results)

As an SEO you simply give the engines what they want. Looking at what they rank and how they market their sites gives you better insights for how to rank than blindly trusting the tips they give you to prevent you from ranking and suggesting you buy their ads. All of the web portals you know and love use push marketing to build their businesses. Why shouldn’t you?

Get Fuzzy
When I think of fuzz I think of one of the most annoying things in the world. It gets on your clothes it clings to your body and there s nothing you can do about it. But there s a form of fuzz that affects your web site as well and that s one kind of fuzz you CAN and SHOULD do something about….
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ANOTHER BUMPER YEAR IN THE OFFING FOR S. KOREAN SHIPBUILDERS (Asia Pulse via Yahoo!7 Finance)
Shipping/Ports   Soaring prices of raw materials such as oil and coal have been a huge pain for many companies in South Korea, the world’s fourth-largest oil importer that relies entirely on imports for its oil needs.

Another Bumper Year In The Offing For S. Korean Shipbuilders (Asia Pulse via Yahoo!7 News)
Soaring prices of raw materials such as oil and coal have been a huge pain for many companies in South Korea, the world’s fourth-largest oil importer that relies entirely on imports for its oil needs.