Paid Links: Google’s New Competitive Spy Policy Could Kill You
Gone are the days when you built your website and waited for the search engines to crawl them and index them. In those early days of the Internet you could expect the content on your website and the meta tags to be the most important criteria the search engines used to judge where you should fall in the rankings. Not so any more. Google introduced the idea of off page factors. Now, those factors are the most important part of the picture. Unfortunately, there's a lot of counterfeiting going on. All SEO boils down to two things: Keywords Links Ideally, these would be equally weighted. But they're not. If you don't have inbound links, you're dead in the water. For that reason, everybody who wants to be somebody is scrounging, scamming, scheming, and doing everything they think is necessary to get those links. Some of it is good; a lot of it is not. And the search engines have noticed. That's why Google is encouraging your competition to spy on you (as if they weren't doing that already). Only now, your competition has some incentive for sending you the equivalent of a virtual Molotov cocktail. It's called a paidlink report - or, at least, that's CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Paid Links: Matt Cutts’ Ridiculous Solution To A Problem Created By Google
Matt Cutts sometimes has some really kookie ideas: - Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight. - Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. Word to Matt: OK, this is a really bad idea for several reasons. First, Google got the ball rolling on making links valuable in the first place. Remember? It was the first search engine to place significant importance on back links. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Affiliate Marketing: Does Structure Matter?
Affiliate marketing has been around almost as long as the Web itself. Well, since the World Wide Web, anyway. Essentially, your affiliates are your sales people. They bring you business. You should treat them well. From what I've seen, the best affiliate programs do three things: Compensate performance generously Reward recruiters Provide marketing collateral for the affiliates You have to make affiliate efforts worth your affiliates' time. What that means is compensation must be commensurate with the amount of time and energy your affiliates put into promoting you. That will be different from product to product, service to service, and between products and services. Generally, though, you want to compensate your affiliates with generous commissions. Some affiliate programs pay as much as 75%, but I think 50% for most products CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Meta Tags: Do They Count?
I witnessed an argument in a forum the other day between two SEOs. They were discussing meta tags. One of them said he had a "special trick" for ensuring that he got high ranks in the search engines and it involved the use of meta tags. The other guy argued that meta tags don't matter. It was an interesting discussion. First, let me say that any time someone says they have a "special trick," I get skeptical. SEO is not about special tricks. It isn't rocket science. Anyone can do it. The problem with most website owners is they don't have the time to do it. But if they did, they'd have no problem doing it because it really isn't that hard. That's not to say that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
PPC Campaigns: How To Choose Where To Place Your Ads
While I'm on the pay-per-click kick, here's a quick tip to help you determine whether you should use Google, Yahoo, or another source for your PPC campaign. First, consider your target market. Are you aiming your advertising toward techies? Keep in that Google may have the lion's share of searches, but they don't have the lion's share of searchers. Allow me to spell out the difference. Google has captured more than 50% of the search market in the U.S. In the UK, 75% of searches are conducted on Google. But keep in mind that those are individual searches. Yahoo, by contrast, second in number of searches in the U.S., has more than 50% of search traffic. I hope you see the difference. Yahoo is the most visited website CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How You Can Profit From Typosquatting
For those of you who don't know, typosquatting is the act of using typos or misspellings in domain names to draw visitors to a bogus site in hopes of garnering a profit from click-through ads or other revenue generating practices, legitimate or illegitimate. I'm not going to get into that argument, but I do want to bring out a sneaky method of ensuring traffic for your website. Interestingly, this practice can also prove useful in punching a dent in typosquatting. If you own a domain name that could easily be misspelled or you have reason to believe will rise in popularity enough that typosquatters will seek to profit from it, then you could purchase the domain names of misspellings of that domain name and redirect those CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Content Development Isn’t Easy
When it comes to content development, before you can get into any specifics you have to define content. It has almost become cliche, Content is King. The curious thing about cliches is that they are generally known to be true. The question is, what exactly is content? Content can be any number of things. Your body text is, of course, content. Pictures, graphics, logos, vidoes, podcasts, and other media are all considered content. Essentially, anything you put on your website, including advertising, is content. You should have a well thought out plan for your content before you start building web pages. One of the first things you'll need to consider before you start developing your website is, what specific types of content you will need. Most text-only CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Techniques For The Blogging Handicapped
Here's a quick SEO technique for your blog: SEO Your Blog Post Title Choose a keyword for your post. Make that keyword, or keyword phrase, the first part of your post title. For instance, for this post assume my keyword is "SEO." I can write a thousand different titles for that keyword but I want to ensure the search engines realize its value as a keyword. That's why I put it up front. There are several ways you can do this. The first way is as I did above: Craft a phrase that grabs the reader's attention and utilizes the keyword in the pole position Another method is to drop the keyword followed by a colon and a catchy phrase, like so: SEO: Break Your Crutches And You'll Be Crawling Another CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Digg This Story Or Bury It, I Don’t Care
Two days ago, Search Engine Land blogged on the plight of SEO websites at Digg. The thesis was that Diggers don't like us and one of the dead give aways, it seems, is the website domain name. Another is the title and description of the post itself. Well, I guess I'm as good as dead. I don't know why, but I've got an eerie feeling on this one. New kid on the block, SEO written all over my face, and basically shooting the finger at Diggers like they are the problem and not the solution. Well, I hate to play hard ball, but call me Sandy Kofax. There's been a lot of talk lately about social marketing, bookmarking sites like Digg and the whole viral framework CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
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