More On Google And Yahoo
Yesterday, I talked about marketing your website on Google versus Yahoo. There is yet another reason - and this could be the most important reason - not to focus too heavily on one search engine or another. Conventional marketing wisdom says market your website toward Google because they have the strictest rules and if you meet Google's favor then you'll receive the praise of the other search engines as well. Too bad it doesn't work that way in reality. The search engines all have different criteria. There algorithms weigh more than 100 factors in determining your rank. Each search engine chooses its own factors and the weight of those factors in their search ranking schemes. What works for one search engine doesn't work for another. Here's an example: If you run a blog that exists on your website's primary domain and link to your website from that blog, Yahoo will count those links as a part of your link popularity but Google won't. Of course, everyone knows how important inbound links are to your link popularity rating, especially with Google. If your blog is one of your primary marketing vehicles for your website and your target audience is web-savvy techno geeks then CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Get Fixated On Google, Know Your Market
Let me start by asking you a question: What's the number-one business killer on the internet? The answer is obvious, but many people miss it. The answer is: not being found on the first page of Google. This is fairly common advice, but it's a bit misleading. Later in the article this author cites a comScore study that showed Google held 47.5 percent of the search market in February 2007 while Yahoo had just 28.1 percent. Then he justifies spending all of your time trying to please Google on these statistics. If you think about it, that's not really good advice. Suppose that there were three major automobile makers in the world. We'll call them Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler. Now assume that Ford sells 47.5 CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Duplicate Content A Really Big Issue?
A lot of people are worried about duplicate content. Sometimes it can seem like mass hysteria. OMG, will that paragraph I copied and pasted from my favorite website last week count against me? If I have articles floating around at 50 article directories online can I still use one for my blog? Will my websites suffer if I put the same article on two of them? You get the idea. Well, Adam Lasnik has a great post on duplicate content and I highly recommend you reading it. For those of you who don't have the time, here's a summary: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Dashes Or No Dashes? The Dilemma Of The URL
Websites that still use underscores for their URLs are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Some say that people who still use underscores are "old school" while dashes seem be used far more often these days. A usability related reason for using dashes rather than underscores is the elimination of the confusion created between a space and an underscore when the URL is viewed as a link, or when printing such a URL. More to the point, the chances that a combination of keywords contained in your Web site is included in the SERPs increase exponentially when using dashes. For exemple: a URL that contains "seo_techniques" will be shown by the search engine only if the user searches for seo_techniques (this kind of search is rarely performed); whereas searches CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
When Link Building, Don’t Worry About Percentages
Reading this article on SiteProNews reminds me of the Geico commercials you see on TV. Call me a caveman, but here's my response, "Uh, what?" Let's break this down. The writer starts off by saying there is some sort of link building "constellation" that is ideal for a link building campaign. Far out, man. Like, you mean, Pluto is still a planet? I'm not quite sure what he's getting at, but the logic is murky at best and appears in the night sky as a streaming array of lights much like the Milky Way. In essence, that SEO is spaced out, dude. 1. Internal satellites - 10% of total links These are internal links, particularly links on sub domains. The suggested examples are subdommains of the main domain CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Deep Linking To Another Website Legal?
I'm not going to discuss the entire article, but there was a great article this morning on SiteProNews. The article discussed 12 laws bloggers should be aware of. It was a well-researched article and I highly recommend anyone involved in blogging read it even though I agree with every word of it. I would like to talk about one of those laws that has some stark importance to all of us. It's called deep linking. The author of the article recommends: 1. NEVER claim that a page or site is your work unless it actually is. 2. ALWAYS clearly distinguish between your work and someone else’s. 3. CONSIDER that deep linking is a pretty well-established blogging practice, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Search Engine History And The Future Of Search
In seven years, Internet search has gone from relying on information from more than 26 search engines to information provided mostly by two. What happened? Search Engine Acquisitions Well, or one thing, acquisitions. Some of the most famous acquisitions happened suddenly and rather unexpectedly. The most important one of all may have been Yahoo acquiring Inktomi. That acquisition resulted in the Web's most popular directory actually becoming a search engine. It allowed Yahoo to enter the competitive race for top search engine status. Unfortunately for them, they lost. Search Engine Algorithms Other acquisitions were almost as important, but another factor that influenced the way the playing field has winnowed down is the relevance of each search engine's algorithms. Some of them just couldn't keep up with Google. Once inbound CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Website Analytics Is As Necessary As Air or Water
If you're not paying attention to what visitors on your website are doing, you should. How else are you going to improve your website to capitalize on your strengths and tweak your weaknesses? Without a proper analysis of visitor activity, you are like a man trying to paddle a boat without an oar. You should receive some basic information from your web hosting company that will help you analyze visitor activity. If not, then you should change web hosting companies. That web hosting company should include statistics about the number of visitors who visit your website, how long they stay there, which pages they visit while they are there, how long they spend on each page, entry and exit points for each visitor, and the less CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Who Should Hire An SEO or PPC Consultant?
If you've been thinking about outsourcing some or all of your Internet marketing you'll want to think long and hard about hiring someone to do your SEO or PPC work. First, ask yourself if it's necessary. It may not be. It's not that I don't believe these are valuable services. They are. After all, I provide both services to a growing list of clients. But I realize that the services aren't for everyone. First, SEO. What is it? Well, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the science of optimizing web pages to rank well in the search engines for specific search terms. Everyone can benefit and everyone should engage in SEO. You can't really survive without it. But should you hire someone to do your CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What SEO Factors Are Important To Your Website?
SEOmoz has an excellent poll on search engine ranking factors. The poll includes a host of well-known, and some not-so-well-known, SEO experts. And, no, I'm not one of them. The contributors were asked to determine whether certain criteria are important for ranking purposes at the search engines. It's worth studying. I highly recommend that you take some time to look the list over. The macro-topics include: Keyword Use Factors Page Attributes Site/Domain Attributes Inbound Link Attributes Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes Within each of these general topics, experts were asked to judge the weight of more specific questions such as whether keyword usage within the title tag is a heavily weighted factor. In all, there are 53 out of the hundreds of criteria that could be judged on the list of topics discussed CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Viral Marketing Through Microsites
WebProNews ran a great article a couple of days ago on microsites. One paragraph struck me particularly and points to the success of such sites: Viral marketers know that having a separate presence for campaigns can return good results. The most preferred tactic used by marketers is "Creating cool microsites" with 37 percent saying they produced excellent results. One-third said that online games brought good results. What Is A Microsite? A microsite is a one-page website used as a sales letter for a product or service. They're quite popular and always have been. As early as 1995 there were people online building these small websites offering some kind of product for sale. Some have done well, some have not. But the ones that have done well - CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Rescuing Your Site From Supplemental Status
Search engine ranking is one of those things that website owners are constantly fighting to improve. The worst of search engine ranking is being termed "supplemental." With Google, once you are in the supplemental directory, getting your site back out is like battling upstream with a spoon though the rapids. Recently, an article was published that gave some very worthy tips on doing just that, rescuing your site from the black hole of "supplemental" listing. The first point the writer made is to make sure that the URLs involved are search engine friendly, and short. Making them search engine friendly is fairly easy, take out those special characters. They are not necessarily special so much as a hindrance to the search engines. Quite simply, putting that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
When It Comes To Meta Tags, You Only Need Three
When it comes to HTML, you can always count on accuracy and detail delivering your website's content in proper order to the search engines. If you are new to website building, or are struggling to understand why your website is not performing this article may be of tremendous value to you. First, let's look at meta tags, these are the main points of interest to the search engines, they do not look at a webpage as humans do, so meta tags are the brail, if you will, to what they see. Meta tags should always be between the *head* and */head* tags, like so: *head* *title*(Your Website Title)*/title* *meta name="description" content="(Your website's description) "* *meta name="keywords" content="keyword,keyword,keyword,etc "* *meta name="Author" content="www.your-website.com"* *meta name="owner" content="www.your-website.com"* *meta name="classification" content="(The main subject matter of your CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Bombs Are Proof That Link Building Works
For example, Rand Fishkin, one of the most respected people in the industry, urged his readers a few days ago to manipulate search engine rankings for the phrase "Greatest Living American" to make Stephen Colbert the number one result. What's worse is that he offered a shot at an $80 dollar reward (a 2-month subscription) to the participants. It's called a Google Bomb, and SEOmoz didn't invent it. Last year Google changed its algorithms to kill Google Bombs - well, the negative ones any way. After thousands or millions of websites linked to the White House website with the anchor text keywords "miserable failure," Google took decisive action and disengaged the Google Bomb, offering a statement that future Google Bombs wouldn't be possible. In actuality, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Evaluate An SEO Firm
The SEO firms that I think are the best are smaller. If I couldn't do SEO anymore and I had to ask someone to do it for me, I could name three or four smaller shops, each with under 10 people on staff (I think). I would at least ask these firms for a reference. I wouldn't go to iProspect, iCrossing, 360i, or any of the other big I's. It's nothing against them, but I think I would get better service and more passion from the smaller shops. This says it all. I agree. You'll get better service from smaller firm. SEO is pretty static. If a firm is worth its weight in salt it doesn't matter how big it is. This question is not CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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Nick Stamoulis:
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