Archive of ‘search engine optmization (SEO)’ category
The thing about internet marketing is given the constantly changes, you can expect a lot of excitement (or stress) in the field.
If you’re relying on organic traffic generation methods, especially from the search engines, there have been recent developments which may cause a change in your strategy.
Some of these include:
- The Rise of Blackhole Seo
- Changes in ranking alogorithmn like Google PageRank (a number of websites and blogs saw their PR score drop by 1 or more in recent weeks) and Alexa rankings have fluctuated greatly since the system was change a number of months ago
- Looming changes Google plans to or has implemented since as lower weightage given to directory links (thanks Wil Reynolds for the heads-up), including paid Yahoo directory submissions.
Which can be like an earthquake sending ripples through your business and earnings if you’re not prepared.
I was speaking with Geordie Carswell, former RevenueWire CEO who’s now involved with (more…)
Following up on my “Blackhole SEO and Your Internet Business” post last week about high authority sites sucking up SEO linkjuice and pointing out using nofollow links, or worse yet, internal site pages or resource pages, I was conducting some research for a project when I came across an eBay partner (affiliate) network blog post.
Obviously, an auction site (or “digital marketplace” if you prefer that term, publishing blog posts about content publishers generating affiliate income is going to draw some interest.
eBay, from my experience, has taken a fairly non-supporting position towards affiliate marketers on it’s network, so seeing them point to (more…)
Michael Gray AKA Graywolf has been twittering about Blackhole SEO posts from the likes of Aaron Wall and Quadzilla recently. Although he hasn’t published his own post yet, it’ll be something to look forward to.
What is Blackhole SEO anyway?
As described by BlueHat SEO Eli, it’s where link authority AKA ‘link juice’ is trapped (more…)
At the recent Affiliate Summit, Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds and SEO veteran presented some of his latest techniques in optimizing your website rankings in the search engines.
Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins recently uploaded Wil’s slides from his presentation together with other presentations and they can be access here: Affiliate Summit East 2008 presentation slides.
From his “My Favourite 5 SEO Strategies Exposed” session, one of the items Wil talked about was Google’s recent Knol, or knowledge aggregation site.
Located at Knol.google.com, the site seems like a combination of Squidoo in that users can create topic-focused resource pages, with the authority of a Wikipedia.
Knol pages have ranked prominently (more…)
Longtime blog readers will recognize Austin, TX-based Laura Alter as the co-owner of laptop forum NotebookForums and might recall the launch of her blog last year.
Recently, Laura has been more proactive moving from the forum management/marketing side of things to becoming a SEO evangelist of sorts.
She recently organized an Austin SEM meetup, with a presentation on local search (aka geotargeted search engine optimization).
Optimizing your website for local traffic, especially if you’re mainly a geographically-fixed business like a hair salon or ice cream parlor can pay off with big dividends regardless of whether you go down the free search engine optimization route or the paid search route.
A number of factors work in your favor:
- Highly relevant and targeted traffic since the campaigns specially target consumers with specific needs
- Generally lower bids, as the pool of advertisers is smaller (even in a metropolitan area like New York City or Los Angeles – it’s a more viable prospect compared to facing bidders all over the world)
- Higher conversion ratios
- Ease-of-followup and greater opportunities to build a continuing relationship (especially if you employ email marketing and/or direct mail in your customer relationship management efforts)
Obviously SEM/SEO is not going to be your end point, it’s merely going to be your start point to generate leads. Building the relationship and establishing trust, credibility, asking for the sale and asking for the repeat sale are going to be the bedrock of your business building efforts.
For the local SEO side, here’re some slides from Laura’s presentation:
3 formats for localized SERP (search engine results page) display:
10 Pack
Authoritative OneBox
Integrated Map
I remember getting (more…)
Google search engine ranking team Google Fellow Amit Singhal published a blog post “Introduction to Google Ranking” at the official Google blog.
While not going into the specific nuts-and-bolts factors influencing SERPs (or search engine results pages), Amit outlined a number of broad principles to keep in mind when optimizing your web pages.
Principle 1: “Best locally relevant results served globally”
As I’ve earlier noted, your geographic location, specifically your IP number can determine the search results returned.
Amit’s assurance that they operate on the “no query left behind” principle, meaning every user query gets the most relevant results, is yet another assertion that the “user experience” more so than the affiliate marketer, SEO or even adwords advertiser’s interest is given priority.
If you’ve been following developments (and educated guesses) in the SEO field, you’ll know that meta criteria like “time on site” and other deeper level criteria from Google Analytics (and no doubt, Google own deeper level analytics, and possibly algorithms derived from basic analytics) are being incorporated into these ranking factors.
I applaud the SEOs who’re on the leading edge in following and sometimes trying to step ahead of Google to rank higher in the SERPs. For the average internet marketer, developing a long term sustainable business model and providing original, quality, link worthy content is probably the best route for now.
Principle 2: Keep It Simple
What’s simple to a UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon comp sci major might (more…)
