•A Message to Technology sites :: Digg Yourself to get Slashdotted
One of the best ways to promote your site is to generate buzz that gets carried offline.
One way to do that is to ensure others know what you are doing but sometimes this can be difficult especially in today’s fiercely competitive online market.
There are areas of the web which are geared towards helping some of those sites and if your site is a technology or tech related site then this article is for you.
The web is all about Buzz. Those who can generate the most buzz about themselves...
•Choosing a CMS (Content Management System)
Content Management Systems (or CMS) have been in use on the web for some time now, however up until recently very few systems were considered search engine friendly.
The foundation of most CMS systems is simple: First one creates a template which will be used to display your pages. In general, one template is all that is needed for an entire site. From there one uses the provided software to add content to the site. This usually means entering the content in some form of dashboard. When...
•Could the New Google Spider be causing issues with websites?
Around the time Google announced “Big Daddy,” there was a new Googlebot roaming the web. Since then I’ve heard stories from clients of websites and servers going down and previously unindexed content getting indexed.
I started digging into this and you’d be surprised at what I found out.
First, lets look at the timeline of events:
In Late September some astute spider watchers over at Webmasterworld spotted unique Googlebot activity. In fact, it was in this thread that the bot...
•Craigslist Censoring begs the Question :: Is the Internet the last great Bastion of Free Speech?
There is yet another debate raging over whether the Internet should truly allow unfettered free speech.
This debate is over Craigslist and whether it should be more proactive in censoring those who post on it.
The debate began when listings for apartments were posted that were obviously racially slanted. In this article I look at the issue and ask the question: Should the Internet be censored?
Free speech is one of the building blocks of any democratic society. Without free speech...
•Customer Segmentation :: Big for 2006
As web users become more savvy e-tailers are going to have to learn how to adapt their sites to suite many different users.
In this article I look at why segmentation is going to be so important in the new year.
As our industry grows up we begin to apply more and more traditional marketing tactics to SEM. In 2006 I think this trend will continue and the biggest tactic that will need to be applied will be profiling and segmentation of the market.
I am already steering some of my own...
•How to beat the Google Sandbox AND make money at the same time
I stumbled across this quite by accident. I knew it was there because I’d seen it before but I forgot about it until today.
So I did some checking to see if it still does work and based on my limited test it appears that it does.
What I’m about to explain to you may not only help get sandboxed sites indexed and ranking quicker, it can even make the site owner a little money.
I’ve been blogging for a few years now. I started it as a hobby and the blog I had was actually a blog...
•Marketing online? Time to think Christmas!
For many retailers now is the time to think Christmas. This is because at least in terms of search engines now is the time to make changes so that they have registered in the organic index. But what does one have to do in order to prepare for their Christmas time online marketing campaign? In this article, I give some pointers on how to prepare your organic optimization strategy.
It seems that every year I have to remind my e-tail clients to prepare for the upcoming season because while...
•More Link Building Resources :: Prase
There’s a cool new tool available to help you build links. It is called PRASE and in this article I will explain why it’s good at helping find sites.
Further I’ll look at some of the other features to see if there are other uses for this tool, such as competitive intelligence gathering and deep linking opportunities.
Really, this new tool offers so much more when you begin to look at what it can do. And that’s what I’m writing about today.
So as I was scanning through my ever...
•Much ado about PageRank
There are those in our industry who will tell you that PageRank is dead. I’ve been reading a lot lately about how we are supposed to ignore the green bar in our browser but you know what? I disagree and I’m going to tell you why.
For those who don’t know, PageRank is Google’s way of determining a website’s worth based on the number of incoming links it has. In other words, Google counts the number of links pointing to a site as votes, generally speaking the more votes a site has the...
•Online Marketing 201 :: Marketing to Early Adopters
Online Marketing 201 :: Marketing to Early Adopters
recently attended a search engine marketing seminar and there was lots of discussion about how to mass market your site online.
Because that is essentially what search engine marketing is: Marketing to the masses. But a question came up as I was listening and that is: How does a website market to early adopters?
In this article, I hope to address some of the points you need to cover to market to this distinct group of people.
I...
•Planning a site redesign? Read this first!
I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve consulted on where, without a word to the SEM team, the site owner re-launches with a brand new site. Sometimes it’s a simple cosmetic change but more often than not its a completely new site with new page naming conventions and new folder hierarchy. In this article I am going to try and explain how you can minimize the impact to your search engine rankings when performing a redesign.
A typical scenario
One I’m sure most SEM’s are familiar with:
You...
•Reputation Management :: A prerequisite of Effective Link Building
Over the past few articles I’ve brought you different tactics you can use to help build quality links to your site.
And while I am going to continue to bring you even more of these tactics I thought it would be good to step back and take a big picture look at why link building is important.
Further, I wanted to look at other things you should be considering when you are doing your link building: Namely managing your online reputation.
As the web evolves, reputation management becomes...
•Reverse Engineering Googles Business Strategies
What’s in a name? That’s a good question. Some feel that the name that you are given at birth provides and accurate description of who you will turn out to be.
So I began to wonder, does a domain name say as much about a future site as your name says about you? I decided to take a look at some of the domain names registered by Google to see if I could get an idea of what the company may be up to in the future and came up with some interesting ideas which I will share with you here....
•SEO and Search Engine Forums & Conferences :: are they really helpful?
Working in the SEO/SEM industry can be very rewarding. Many times a problem can be solved simply with a little online research, and posts on a few forums.
All to often, however, some people put too much stock in the posts they see, ultimately negatively impacting their SEO efforts.
In this article I look at some of the positives and negatives of online SEM forums and attending SEM and SEO conferences.
As part of my daily routine I visit a few of the search engine forums out there to...
•SEO Questions - Why do I see different Google results than my clients?
Having been in this industry for as long as I have, I often forget some of the basics. Well, it’s not that I
forget, it’s just that I assume that everyone else in the industry has the same knowledge level as I do.
So when I get a “newbie” asking a question like “Why are my Google results different than my clients” I have to
take a step back and realize that we aren’t all equal.
Therefore in this article I’m going to answer this one seemingly simple question. While it may be simple to...
•Social Networking - The Next Great Marketing Medium?
There has been a virtual explosion of social networking sites in the past couple of years. Even the big players like Google, Yahoo and MSN are getting into it.
With so much interest in how social networks work, one begins to wonder if there is marketing potential within these social networks?
I’ve been watching social networking for some time now. In fact I’m a member of various social networking sites including MySpace and LinkedIn just to name two.
I joined partly because I...
•The Importance of Web Analytics :: Using Your Analytics Properly
Analytics are very important to your web marketing campaign. If you do not use analytics properly you may not understand how effective your search engine marketing is.
In this article I look at some practical examples of when to use analytics and some things you need to identify in order to get the most out of your analytics.
I came across a situation today that I thought I’d share. It has to do with a client’s analytics.
Many times, as a search engine marketer, it is up to us to tell...
•The Long Tail and Analytics
The Long Tail and Analytics :: Why Analytics Need to Get Better
There is a theory called “The Long Tail” that noted that a relative handful of blogs have many links going into them but “the long tail” of millions of blogs have only a handful of links going into them. It is very similar to the bowtie theory.
This same Long Tail theory has been applied to search in that a handful of queries drive a lot of clicks to a site but in reality there are sometimes tens of thousands of other terms...
•The MSN Search Interface
Now, instead of wide blue bars there are sleek silver-grey bars.
Also, the top bar where the search box is became narrower. To me this makes the page seem less “closed in” and more visually appealing. I now feel as if I can trust the results more because they have more room.
I’ve also noticed that MSN has been playing with the display of the titles. Before this change, they seemed to bold the entire title, as well as bolding terms which matched the search query in the snippet....
•Using New Content to Build Links
Sometimes, link building is more than just searching out sites to request links from. Sometimes you have to get creative in how you build links.
In this article, we look at another way of building links that doesn’t really require you to go out and search for relevant sites to request links from.
The web is growing at a phenomenal rate.
Technorati, a popular blog search and syndication site estimates that the blogosphere alone doubles in size every 5 months. As of the end of July 2005,...
•Using Spider Traps to Discourage Site Scraping
Sometimes your competitors will do almost anything to compete with you including stealing your content.
To do this they sometimes employ automated software much like a search engine crawler to make the process quicker and easier than manually copying your site. This can cause many problems for you.
In this article we look at ways to stop this from happening.
Stealing on the web is rampant. I don’t mean stealing people’s user id’s and passwords. I mean the stealing that goes on to a...
•Using subdomains to bypass Googles sandbox
There was apparently some talk at SES Chicago on getting a site indexed in regular results a lot quicker. This involved the use of an existing established similar domain (either one you own or one you bought) and use it to help you get a site out of the “sandbox.” The full forum post can be found here.
The technique is in the gray-to-black range. I wanted to mention that first, however if your site has been boxed for a while, this may be an alternative for you. It also requires some coding,...
•Vertical Creep in Search Results :: Should Organic Optimizers be Concerned?
I thought for this week I’d give a summary of some of the more interesting Search Engine Strategies sessions which are currently going on in New York City.
I was at SES as a speaker last year in New York and I have to say, there is a wealth of information there even if some of it is contradictory. Not only that ,but you get to meet some amazing people and can even have one on one access with some of the search engine reps. Overall, I found it to be a worthwhile experience.
This year,...
•What is TCP/IP?
Many people may not know what TCP/IP is nor what its effect is on the Internet. The fact is, without TCP/IP there would be no Internet. And it is because of the American military that the Internet exists.
During the days of the cold war, the defense department was interested in developing a means of electronic communication which could survive an attack by being able to re-route itself around any failed section of the network.
They began a research project designed to connect many...
•Why Content is Still King - Effective SEO Tactics
It was a year ago that I attended my first search engine strategies conference. It was also at this conference that I became a speaker.
Search Engine Strategies and PubCon are undoubtedly the two largest SEO/SEM conferences out there today so of course there’s huge attendance and lots of big industry names attending.
There’s also a guy there who you may have heard of. His name is Barry Schwartz and he’s from Search Engine Round Table. I bring his name up because he’s found one of the...
•Wiki - What SEOs can learn from it
I’ve been actively researching ways to quickly and effectively build content to websites. And while blogs tend to be near the top of the list, there are other opportunities out there.
One such opportunity is a Wiki. And while a Wiki won’t suit all sites, there are those that can use a Wiki effectively. If you think you are one of those sites, take a look at this article.
What is a Wiki?
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit web page content using...
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