Posts Tagged ‘search-engine-optimization’
SEO best practises, especially linkbuilding (off-site SEO) has come to the forefront since social networks have built critical mass in the last couple of years. Some ambiguous/enigmatic practices with regards to giving backlinks to users has left SEO specialists like Aaron Wall, Rae Hoffman, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Dave Naylor amused, puzzled, frustrated and at times outright indignant.
[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Google’s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]
So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.
Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?
Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.
So some human intervention is needed to review content.
And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are (more…)
I first got to know Kris when he took over the mantles of the Cash Tactics blog from it’s fonder Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman earlier this year. (Ruck went on to focus on his Convert2Media affiliate network).
From the Cash Tactics site, Kris describes himself as a “PPC and CPA Marketer but I also deal in retail affiliate marketing and I’m a product owner with my own affiliate program. I own a PPC search engine, several smaller search engines, a couple drop shipping stores, and a few other random sites.”
During our Friday Podcast discussion, we talked about:
- How Kris got started in internet marketing
- Changes and development in search engine optimization for your website
- How to optimize your website structure
- How to get started with a directory or search engine-based business
- The difference between a “thick” directory and “thin” directory
Listen to the Friday Podcast:
Check out:
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…)
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…)
