January 2004 Archives

I wanted to let everyone know that I know you are checking back on a daily basis for new posts from our authors.

Please stick with us. We are going through a restructuring period and it might take some time to get this blog going again. I am dedicated to getting things rolling again real soon.

We just need to make sure all the forums are happy and fully represented in a accurate and positive manner.

Thank you for your loyalty!

There is an interesting post at SEOChat.com's forum in regards to the use of the correct English term "Web site" versus the accepted but not correct term "Website". The larger question in play is when to use incorrect spelling of a term when you know a large percentage of people searching for the term misspell that term.

I would love to hear from the copywriter people and the usability people here on this.

The thread can be found at SEO Chat's forum and is named "Website" vs "Web Site".

I wanted to let everyone know that there will be a lot of changes taking place here. That is the current reason for the lack of posts over the past few days.

The Search Engine Roundtable Weblog will be more about representing the popular forums by the forum's respective leaders then about discussing the extreme views of the SEO spectrum.

That does not mean to say there won't be exciting posts. This blog will actually have very interesting posts that will refer to popular topics at the best SEO/SEM forums out there on the net. In addition, each blog author will be adding their professional and unique view of the thread(s) referred to in the blog post. We will be having guest authors to discuss some of the latest and hottest topics in the search engine industry that arise, such as Phoenix who has been exclusively covering Inktomi topics.

I and many other forums are excited about the potential of this blog so please make sure to check back daily.

This is the second time that evil people have tried to spam this board with automated comment programs. I have upgraded this blog to not allow multiple comment posts in X seconds. It won't allow it. I have also banned a few IP addresses from even visiting the site. This type of spamming is just wrong. All of us here are trying to volunteer a portion of our time each day to posting information of value to our reader. For someone to take advantage of this courtesy to increase PageRank and site position, I feel, it wrong.

I think I have steamed enough. If any of the spammers want to contact me, please do. I think this blog has some of the best SEOs out there and if you want to mess with us, do it to our face.

That is all. :)

The newest backlink and PageRank data has filtered down to all the servers now. Hopefully everyone did well...

Nothing too exciting, but some might find them useful...

• Google AdSense Sandbox - Lets you view what AdWords would be served up by Google for any webpage.
  
• Search Engine Script - Takes the complexity of adding a "search this site" function to any website (it uses the Google API on the backend).
  

When does a 'potential' customer become an 'actual' pain in the neck? Some people are genuine, some are dreamers, and others, are out and out scoundrels and timewasters.

Anthony parsons wrote " Just recently I had a person enquire to employ my services which they had picked the package suited to them, contacted me for some extra advice and then decided to push the point and see what they could get out of me all before purchasing"

Would you have replied like everyone else did? take a look here

Death is the inevitable result of life. We are born. Somewhere along the way we become useful. Then we become useless again and die.

On this day, a life is gone. The life of the Content SEO.

There are two types of SEO's. Not WhiteHats and BlackHats, in case that's what you were thinking. I've never worn a hat and I'm not going to start now. Rumor has it they lead to premature balding.

The Content SEO
The first group I call the copywriters. This group likes to place the chosen keywords in the page titles, in H* tags and in optimized density within the body copy. This group usually also believes in creating redundant "content pages" targeting less than competitive keywords.

The targeting of less than competitive keywords is more often referred to as targeting "more relevant" keywords. For instance, instead of targeting a search term like "web hosting" which you could retire on, they choose to target "Florida web hosting", "expert economical Florida web hosting", and "cheap affordable PHP website hosting in Tampa".

One common trait of the content-focused SEO is the inability to compete for highly competitive keywords.

This is common amongst the SEO copywriters, or the "content SEO" people. They target lots of keywords that are typically less productive than the other group.

Another identifying trait is the common utterance of "PageRank doesn't matter." Or, "PR is dead". Or, "links should occur naturally".

The Link Mongers
The other type of SEO is the SEO that focuses on link acquisition. Sure, throw some keywords on the page, but the bulk of the energy is spent on acquiring links. The Link Monger knows the value of PageRank and the power of anchor text.

"Link Mongering" - it sure doesn't sound pretty. In fact, it isn't pretty. "I want my son to be a doctor, lawyer or link monger when he grows up." ... You're not hearing that on a daily basis. But the fact remains, link mongers own the competitive keywords. It comes down to this:

You cannot keyword density your client into a #1 spot for highly competitive keywords. You cannot page title your client into a #1 spot for highly competitive keywords. The only way you're going to get there is by way of PageRank and anchor text of inbound links.

The bulk of SEO discussions should not be about SEO copywriting. They should be about link generation.

Rest in Peace
Persons practicing SEO would be well advised to note that the day of impotent SEO copywriters dictating the rules is over. The bell tolls for those SEO's of years past. Search engine optimization must focus on link acquisition to be useful.

This is common knowledge these days. No longer can an SEO pass themselves off as useful if they do not go after and get a respectable amount of links for their clients.

In what has become mainstream SEO, the content SEO is scoffed. The old "don't worry about PageRank - worry about creating good content" argument has become a laughable mockery of SEO. Even the beginning webmaster knows the value of PageRank, and that PageRank wins.

The discussions of content SEO vs real SEO may continue, but it's simply a formality. Content SEO is as dead. It's been murdered by the Link Mongers.

SEO Chat has just gone through a major upgrade to a new version of vBulletin.

It has some really nice new features that makes the posting, reading and moderating of threads much more manageable.

They are currently adding more features and fine tuning some of the design and functionality right now.

Check them out at SEO Chat Forums.

One of the most underated appache applications, mod rewrite has been a friend to SEO for quite some time. I have decided to build a tutorial/forum dedicated to the Mod_rewrite and its applications at www.mod-rewrite.com (To be released soon)

I am looking for questions, suggestion etc as to what info people would like to see on the site. Of course any tips tricks, neet quirks or sucess stories that you have discovered would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers

Anyone using the keyword ranking tracking tools out there (or anything that uses the Google API) may have noticed that the API servers were broken for an extended period of time (19 1/2 hours to be exact).

The servers are finally back up (on a different IP address), and the nice thing about it is they seem significantly faster. Hopefully it was simply an upgrade and they will retain their newly acquired speed.

Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineWatch posted a very interesting article on Personalized Social Search.

Eurekster launched its beta search engine gives you personalized results based on your past search patterns at Eurkster.

Visit http://home.eurekster.com/howitworks.htm to learn how eurekster works. Also make sure to check out Danny Sullivan's article here.

Two exciting news related items occurred this week and have drummed up a lot of discussion in some forums. Since I have been leaving out Webmaster World (not on purpose) I decided to take some time to plug them.

First news worthy fact is that Yahoo! opened up Yahoo! Labs. Concept taken from Google Labs? I'll leave those questions to the forums. WebmasterWorld is discussing this topic here and SEOChat is discussing it here.

Next news worthy rumor is that Google will now take its AdSense program and allow you to put them in email. This can be huge for so many people and companies. Check out the threads at Webmaster World and SEO Chat.

Exciting stuff, don't you think?

I posted a sticky at the SEOChat forums to find out the number of people who are interested in attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC this March.

SEO Chat might be in the position of getting a discount from JupiterMedia, the company that runs the Search Engine Strategies Conference, for SEO Chat members. Danny Sullivan asked me to find out how much interest there was in our forum for people to attend the conference.

If you can post your thoughts about attending, I will then be able to relay this information to Danny Sullivan and hopefully get a discount for our members. I personally recommend this conference, some of the search engine elite attend the conference and there is always so much to learn. In addition, if there is enough interest, I will work on organizing an SEO Chat only meeting on one of the days of the conference.

For more information on this conference please visit: http://www.jupiterevents.com/sew/winter04/index.html.

Please vote and post your thoughts by click here.

A very heavy going discussion is taking place over at the highrankings forum with regard semantics and what exactly is going on.

"When I first saw it, I was a bit puzzled. Wouldn't Google with such a complex algo already have placed heavy importance on it for rankings? Or, are they now just able to do it?"

Wrote Paulj.

(I suspect that at the first stages of Florida, they allowed it to work poorly - hence the weird results, and later tweaked the levels of semantical requirements to trigger the "use it or not use it" levels - and those adjustments continue today).

Was posted some time later with regard it's application

There are some links here to some superb resources, but be warned they are deep, and hard work, BUT that said, if you are serious about SEO, then you should read it Semantics, whats it all about? good luck, and pour yourself a cup of coffee before you start.

In 1996, Bill Gates published an article entitled Content is King. His premise was that on the Internet, content sites - not ecommerce sites - would be generating the bulk of the income.

Although my response to Bill's assertion is laid out in an rant suitable titled Content isn't King, I'd like to make a few points here on SE Roundtable.

Bill's Theory
Mr Gates states, "Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting".

TV and Radio broadcasting generates revenue because it's expensive to operate a TV or radio station. The shows aired on TV is uniquely expensive as well. They can charge a premium because of it. Publishing on the web, however, is free.

And when it's easy to do, everybody does it. This brings the price down. Supply and demand. Doctors only get paid what they do because there are fewer of them. If every other person had the skills to be a doctor, they'd be making minimum wage like content publishers.

Bill goes on, "within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won't be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You'll just click on what you want, knowing you'll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis."

Can you imagine? Paying for content?

Bill's last line gives him away -

"Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products-a marketplace of content. "

"Ideas"? No. Ideas are still a dime a dozen. Ditto for experiences.

You can't charge for content. The consumer will go elsewhere. CPM for banner advertising is at an all time low. Most advertisers simply are not interested in banner ads. Advertisers want to pay for performance. And even pay per performance isn't paying much. Five cents per click through. Ten cents. Twenty five cents or even a dollar. It really doesn't matter because the consumers aren't clicking through.

Case in Point
Suzuki-Bikes.com is a little content site. Some 4,460 pages currently in Google's index. The site averages 2,000+ uniques per day. The Adsense earnings of the site aren't enough to fund my daily Starbucks run. Sure, there have been offers from dealers to buy advertising on the site. At five cents per click, I didn't figure it was worth my time to respond.

An identical site belonging to a Kawasaki dealer generates less traffic. Less traffic, but over $2 million in sales per year.

Content is King? Naw.

Here's a link to the forum thread:Bill Was Wrong

I got this idea a couple of days ago, when presented with an awesome example of how important relevant content related links are to Inktomi. This goes into what I have noticed as the Low-Value / High Value Content factor that can easily be created from linking certain types of sites together. Without divulging the sites themselves, I will try to explain.

One idea, is that in order to create what Inktomi would consider High Value Content (thus higher rankings) one would have to obtain links from sources that are themselves considered High Value in terms of content. I have believed this for some time, and it does hold true in Google and in Inktomi. However, based on some recent findings, it appears that you can create High Value content based solely on who links to your in the first place (their on page factors) and how closely related it is to your site. The link popularity of the site seems to have little to do with it as well, just the quality matters (their on page factors). One link can be better than 500 links having no related value to the page.

For example, if you are promoting gift baskets in California, and you create another site of similar nature promoting gift baskets in San Diego. Take into account that these sites have similar titles and metas. You can link these two sites together, and in doing so Inktomi takes into account the link from site 1 to site 2. While site 1 doesn't have to do well in Inktomi, it however can do well in Google (top 10 rankings). That is how Google fits into the picture. While the Google and Inktomi Algo are not the same they do have many similarities, and if a link comes from a page that is well optimized and relates very specifically to the page it is linking to. Its bonus points in Inktomi, and through the examples I have seen will rank in the top 10 for what phrase that is being targeted by site 2 or even by site 1. Kinda interesting, so I will be testing and checking into this a lot more. I will let you know what I find. While I know some of this may or not make sense, I am throwing out ideas to help myself formulate a theory that might work to explain it better. Link experts, let me know if I am on the right path or not. :-)

As most of you already know, Yahoo! announced two days ago that it will be dropping the Google organic results from its search and switching to its own search acquired back over a year ago from Inktomi. The CEO of Yahoo!, Terry Semel made this statement on January 14th 2004.

SEOs have been preparing for this transition for a while but as you can imagine this announcement had a major impact at the SEO forums. SEO Chat member hotwheel announced the news related in the Google News forum a day ago, Yahoo on Wednesday said it will drop Google during the first quarter of 2004. This announcement and the speculation that grew up to this point generated many topics in the Inktomi Forum at SEO Chat.

Check these threads out, its worthwhile reading. Our own Phoenix, Ben, has been a leading contributor here and at SEO Chat in providing the answers to those in need of a Inktomi specialist.

Having done my fair share of banner advertising, I've long been familiar with the extremely poor performance of banner advertising. A thread in the IMR forums, Banner CTR, brought this topic up, and soon the conversation turned to Adsense CTR vs Banner CTR.

Although it's too early in the morning to put serious thought into it, I'm guessing that the Google CTR's are significantly higher due to the fact that Google's ads are specifically relevant to the topic of the page, whereas banner advertising tends to be more generally relevant to the website topic.

Whatever the reason be, Google has done a magnificent job of restoring the old 468 by 60 dimension to its previous glory.

It seems like the world and his brother are chasing page rank, but exactly how good is it? what real difference does it make to your SERPs position?

Is there any REAL benefit to gaining a higher PR, or is it all just another Google viral marketing tool.

"So energies spent striving for PageRank would be better spent on content perhaps?

Mc Fox"

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3057&hl=

The Google Florida Update, unarguably the most talked about update in search engine history, generated several dozen theories as to Google's motives behind the update. 'Experts' from around the world quickly began analyzing Google results and historical facts to determine what Google's logic behind ranking one site over the next.

There are many famous theories but the two theories that have support from the majority of the well known SEO experts are:
Dan Thies' Topic Sensitive PageRank (TSPR) theory
and
Phil Craven's Expert System Theory

The forums are buzzing with supporting facts and questions on these two theories. At Phil's SEO Forum, Phil and Dan discuss both their theories and how they relate and differ from each other. In addition, the thread discusses additional supporting evidence and clarification of the theories.

SEO Chat is also discussing Phil's Theory and Dan's Theory. Cre8asite Forum and HighRankings Forum are also discussing the theories.

Very exciting and interesting information. I recommend you all read the theories and the threads.

The colorful, outspoken Bryan Eisenberg, co-founder and Chief Persuasion Officer of Future Now and writer on usability oriented subjects for Clickz.com has written yet another thought provoking article.

I read Are You Designing for Usability or Sales?, Part 1 because I love his passion for incorporating persuasiveness into website user interface and how it relates to usability.

If I understand Bryan's perspective properly, persuasion is a motivator, whereas usability is a satisfier. I agree. We make decisions based on these two things everyday.

Bryan's article contains statements I don't accept as true for myself, such as "The general problem I have with usability as a discipline is its focus on use, not the user." I've done the use cases and requirements testing. This is okay and good discipline when done methodically.

But nowadays I'm even more focused on the human experience and REACTION to user interface. That reaction, or response, isn't a simple matter of making a pretty button with descriptive label that goes somewhere logical or fulfills a requirement. That button must also inspire that click. Still, lately, I've been searching for even more than this and how it relates to user interface design, user tasks and intent and the bottom line - sales or traffic.

Continue reading "Behind Every Click Is A Person"

Ok, this originally was a comment (lol...it was pretty long heh), but I realized that it's length and content would be better suited for a regular blog. I guess this is a follow up to the last entry regarding getting back your listing in Inktomi. So how does one get back their rankings in Inktomi if blacklisted? Well I talked with a Positiontech rep. today, and he and I went over some of the details to stuff that can be tried to get back your rankings.

Basically there are two approaches that people can take in order to get back their ranking in Inktomi if by chance you have been blacklisted. Honestly from what I can tell there is some grey area as to what blacklisted or banned means (despite a lot of research into this). But it comes down to you were penalized for bad techniques or code, which means you are still in Inktomi index but not ranking anywhere, meaning this can also be blacklisted. Or for some reason you get completely blacklisted from the Ink database for doing something really bad, meaning your site does not appear in the results at all. Hence, permanantly banned for eternity. Alright, back to what you should do to get your rankings back.

1. If you use Positiontech or similar company to submit your urls to Inktomi and you find yourself blacklisted, RE-OPTIMIZE the page with clean new html, get rid of anything that could be hindering you. Go to the Positiontech interface and "de-activate" your url. Wait about 1 week, and then go back and "re-activate" your urls. This way your site gets out of the original submission process and once re-activated it can be feed back into the results.

2. Get a new domain and put your content elsewhere. I have to say this is probably the easiest of the bunch. Sometimes its more of a pain to try to get relisted then to use a new domain and hosting account for under 10 bucks you could pick up at enom.

3. Pray that your site will get a periodic review by the Inktomi people and get resubmited back into the database.

Its not secret that Inktomi keep a large record of all the sites that it deems "blacklisted" or spam. They do go back and check these, but there is no time frame as to when this might happen.

I hope this answers most of the questions. :-)

OldWelshGuy, James Edwards, was born, raised, lives and works in Wales in the United Kingdom. James has a background in advertising/publishing and marketing. H currently runs a small Internet Design Marketing/SEO company with his wife, they specialize in bringing offline businesses online for the first time, often working with start-up businesses. They have made a niche for themselves in the owner operator businesses.
James and his wife go by the phrase "Happiness over profit" and have lived their lives in that manner.

James devotes a substantial amount of time to the Highrankings.com forum where he is a moderator, he also is an editor Skaffe (Wales) Joe ant, zeal and a couple of others, as well as just starting to create a hand picked free directory resource for Wales ( walesnet.co.uk).

James will be representing his the forum he moderates, HighRankings and will provide his thoughts on the current industry trends.

I thought it would be interesting to post some thoughts on what is means to be a moderator at a forum.

Today for example, there was a little scuffle at SEOChat.com in regards to a post by a member that started a heated topic on an individual. It happens that the whole thing was a miscommunication between two people over a private message. Anyway, this thread was reported to the mods for reviewal. As many of you know SEOChat rarely locks of deletes threads. I have decided to lock this thread until I had more information. Webby decided to simply delete it after I locked it (after the mods ok'ed it) because the whole thread was based on a miscommunication.

That sprung a handful of PMs to me and the other mods about deleting threads and how we shouldn't do it. Well I agree, we should not have to delete threads but sometimes for the better of the public we have to. Public threads need to be moderated and SEOChat does just fine by itself. We very rarely have to do any work as a moderator there.

The role of a moderator:
- Be patient, understanding and neutral
- Must be respected by the members
- Helps to excel at the forums topic but not a requirement (many good SEOs would be bad Mods)

I think the moderators from all the forums deserve a pat on the back, don't you?

While its relatively not too difficult to optimize for Inktomi in general, getting blacklisted by Inktomi is actually a little easier than most realize. I believe a lot of it stems with people over or out doing the optimization of another website that ranks well in Inktomi. Keyword density is not always a magic bullet for Ink. The problem with getting penalized in Inktomi is that most are not even aware of what they got blacklisted for in the first place, they assume the worst and that the "sky is falling". Well despite titanic fears of the worst and short of getting abducted by aliens there shouldn't be anything to fear, its relatively easy to get back your rankings in Inktomi. The first thing people should do is look at their website to begin with. Do this before emailing Positiontech or Inktomi with vague questions as the to the nature of your site. If you identify possible problem areas and be specific you are more likely to get a better answer. Here are some problem areas that have popped up in the past for people who got blacklisted.

1. Hidden text contained within or off the viewable area of the website or page
2. Formatting meta-tags that are incorrect in syntax or appropriate length. This applies to meta data and titles as well.
3. Meta data that has nothing to do with the page itself.
4. Cascading Style Sheets can create problems when used incorrectly.
5. Cloaking pages that either direct or feed the Slurp robot something other than what is originally there.
6. Affiliate URL's, inserting affiliate id's within a URL.
7. Redirecting visitors for no apparant reason
8. Heavy inbound linking for artifically raising link popularity, could possibly apply to networks of sites that cross link only with a single network.

An interesting topic at the IMR forums that definitely needs more discussing: Is Branding Important?

It's interesting because it is indeed a question that should never be asked. Brand is (in my estimation) the single most important aspect of marketing. Brand is the state of being where consumers feel familiar with you and trust you. That equals sales. It equals more than sales - it equals a higher profit margin because you can charge three times more than your un-branded competition.

When I walk into the local mall, there are several clothing stores right as I enter the mall. These stores are located in perfectly for large amounts of traffic. In SEO terms, they are at the top of the SERPs.

Thing is, I walk right by those stores. I can't even recall the name of those stores as I sit here trying to recall. I keep walking until I find a name I know - The Gap, Eddie Bauer, ETC.

The same principle applies to Internet marketing. If I do a search for dedicated servers, I may visit a few sites I've never heard of, but the conversion ratios just won't be there. I feel more at ease buying from a company I've heard of - ServerBeach, RackSpace, RackForce, ETC.

Search engine placement helps. But SEO by itself is often not enough. Brand plays a crucial role, whether you're at the mall or online.

Many people already know that using subdomains for geo specific locations in the URL have a benefit from the SE's most notably Google, however I have been tracking several very competitive city+hotels such as "london hotels" "new york hotels" etc and it seems this subdomain technique is not only helping, it seems that there is a site of the cityname.domain.com variety on the first page of every kw I have checked.

Continue reading "Subdomains dominating"

I did a little poking around (hey, I'm a techie, that's what I like to do), and decided to look at why googlerankings.com is "under construction" all of a sudden (for about 3 weeks now) with their rank checking service.

Well, it appears they aren't so much "under construction", as they are simply blocked by Google. The interesting thing about that, is they claim to have been given permission to do it from Google as stated here. Personally, I always thought it was strange that Google gave them permission, while pretty much denying everyone else in the world.

Anyway, if you still want to use Google Rankings, you can do so by clicking here, but you will notice it kicks back the error it gets from Google (HTTP 403 Forbidden Access). Or at least it does until they look at their referrers and decide to not let people follow this link. :)

The lesson? If you want to check your rankings in Google, don't go around Google's terms of service. There are ways to legitimately check your rankings in Google, since Google gave developers access to the Google API. Two such services are the one we built, and SEO Count.

I've been giving some thought to the theory and it seems to rely on Topic Sensitive PageRank being calculated on-the-fly, but I don't see how this can happen. Here are my thoughts on it:-

http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?t=173

Backlinks and PageRanks are being updated. I wouldn't normally mention it, but I'm making some good gains :) I'm surprised that it's come round so quickly because they were updated over the Christmas and New Year period.

Good thing that this isn't a forum, or it would inspire a much too lengthy thread ;)

While doing some testing (and playing around I might add) this week with some of the "backdoor" and free submission url's for Inktomi. I managed to succeed in getting a brand new site spidered by Inktomi within 5 days of my initial submission. Now while I used to use these free submission forms before, back in the days when $39 was way to much money to spend to SEO for Inktomi, 5 days for getting Slurp to find a site was unheard of! Whether it was a fluke or not, I figured that it was would be benefical to post some of these urls, and let other SEO's and webmasters test them out.

Submit to Inktomi for Free - The problem: Its unreliable, no guarantees, and does not update within 48 hours. While this method is surely not as effective as pay for inclusion, who can beat the price? If you are strapped for cash then this might be a temporary option to get your pages into Inktomi until you can pay for more reliable methods.

http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Submit to Inktomi through one of its Web Search Partners - This is one of the Inktomi backdoors many are not aware of and all it takes is a little searching to find them. I have used these on multiple occasions in order to test how effective they are and as well get pages into the Inktomi index for free. One of things I discovered was that taking a look at a list of Inktomi partners (http://www.inktomi.com/customers/index.html) was not only good to get a feel of where their search engine results would appear, but also where I could find submit fields for inclusion into the Inktomi database. Note: These pages do not stay up for long, so do not be surprised if you find they no longer exist.

http://goo502.goo.ne.jp/cgi-bin/feedback/addurl.cgi
http://search2.msn.fr/suggestions/ch/

This post is going to be a short one; it has been a crazy week - been very busy. I would like to apologize. We will be having some exciting posts shortly by new blog authors and some new guests and you can also expect the current authors to post more often.

There is a post at SEO Chat entitled What's up: -gv and -va OFFLINE, Update coming?, where members are discussing there thoughts on an upcoming dance based on Google datacenter activity or lack there of.

An other thread discusses the use of hyphens and keywords in the URL and can be found at http://forums.seochat.com/t7508/s.html. Another forum, Cre8asiteforums is also discussing this topic actively over this week and can be found at: http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=5145.

That is all for today from me. Have a great weekend!

Benjamin Pfeiffer, a.k.a. Phoenix, works as a search engine optimization and internet business consultant, and well as optimizer and researcher. He is owner of Rank Smart Search Marketing, and has been in the search engine optimization and marketing field since 1998. He has been responsible for overseeing teams of professional SEO’s in start to finish campaigns of hundreds of clients. Benjamin participates as veteran moderator on SEOchat.com, a popular search engine optimization forum and Associate Editor at Search Engine Roundtable, a group of senior members from the major SEO/SEM forums on the Internet reporting on news worthy events relating to the industry. Benjamin specializes in code optimization, keyword research, linking strategies, ebusiness consulting, search engine robots, search engine penalizations, and usability. Benjamin was a co-founder of Turbopromoter.com one of the first complete SEO knowledge base and project management applications available to SEO’s today. He has authored a number of articles on SEO that have been published on major news sites, and continues to write and contribute to these sources regularly. He is also the owner and founder of a network of educational publishing websites whose main means of promotion are SEO and SEM.

On a number of occasions I've written that Google's days were numbered from the day they first launched, because it's always been the case that search engines rise up and then fade away. Engines like AltaVista, InfoSeek, and Excite used to be the big boys only to become also-rans when people found something better. But now I'm beginning to think that Google might not suffer the same fate, because they are doing things differently to the way that any of their predecessors did things - they have a completely different mentality.

AV and the others lost out because, instead of improving search, they turned themselves into portals and tried to make money from other things than search. They were more-or-less satisfied with their search algorithms and their overall concepts of what a web search should be. They took relatively minor measures against spam, and tweaked their algorithms here and there, but their overall concepts didn't change.

Continue reading "Google May Survive"

Man, with Kim down to part-time, I'm going to have to pull my weight! Darn it.
I just wrote a long essay on writing, but I'm going to have to carefully proofread it again before I can post it. (All because of a corollary of Murphy's Law-- whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the most embarrassing time. The one time I make a really blatant typo will be in an essay on the importance of proper spellchecking.) I know you're all drooling with anticipation. And firing up your spellcheckers, you jackals. ;)

So, in the meantime, I shall step in as the Cre8asite beat reporter and point out a thread there I've been enjoying immensely, started by the moderator Grumpus, who doesn't usually do usability stuff. Neither do I, generally, but this really struck a chord, and ended up being a colorful, interesting thread on not only usability, but also more about the purpose of a website as a whole, and various methods for making a website suit its purpose more fully. Kim gives loads of excellent insight into what usability testing is all about, so maybe this will tide us over for a while. It's a thread that's still active, as well, so who knows where we'll go next?

Usability--Of Blinders and Peanut Jars.

Continue reading "Usability, Peanut Jars, and the role of Marketing"

Call it an "early retirement", or the fact that I'm a Gemini and we're impossible to understand, but as quickly as I nosedived into this new blog as a regular contributor, I'm going to now take a backseat and let Bridget (aka "Dragonlady7") continue to feed you breathtaking threads from Cre8asiteForums. She's one of our busy Moderators there and the present SEO Copywriter contributor here.

I, meanwhile, will be buried up to my eyeballs with usability research and submitting posts here as a Guest Contributor when I find things I just know will fascinate you about the field. I always keep an eye out for nifty usability improvements that also enhance search engine optimization.

Things like instead of placing a drop-down menu of 10 or less items with vague one word labels, create a box with text links instead, using the same label, but with an added text description that describes for your visitor what they'll find, or what they can do, when they click on that link. The description and text link are great for SEO (especially if you hyperlink the entire description) and your website visitor will be more inclined to not only click on the link, but stay on your website because they feel confident in where you're taking them or what you want to present.

I'll be back with more ideas, and usability oriented website links, to keep you interested in what I do and how I can make you get rich quick. Just kidding, of course. We all know you can't put up a website and earn millions of dollars in 15 minutes, right? (It takes a bit longer for Google to find the site and THEN you'll rake in the big bucks.) Heh heh.

Well, Jill's forum gets an other plug here at the Search Engine Roundtable for the post titled Self-appointed Seo Expert Has An Opinion.

Dan Thies wrote a 17 page paper he names "Special Report: How To Prosper With The New Google", this document can be downloaded as a PDF (100k).

He reviews what the Florida update was all about. He then goes into shooting down most of the crazy theories about this Google update. And then presents his own theory on Google using a new PageRank algorithm that is based on not only the number of high ranking incoming links to a site and also not just about the anchor text of those links BUT now it also includes the type of site that links to you. If that site is part of your site's theme, then its worth more then a link from a site that has nothing to do with your site.

I find this theory interesting since this is what Teoma has developed a few years ago with its "Subject Specific Popularity". I wrote an article on this that can be read at Teoma - The Superior Search Engine?.

The forums and threads that are currently discussing this theory are at:
Self-appointed Seo Expert Has An Opinion - HighRankings
How To Propser in the New Google - Cre8asite Forums
Dan Thies's Google Theory - SEO Chat Forums

Brief overview: Yahoo! has been using Google's search results to power its organic search service. Yahoo!, over the past year, has purchased several search engine technologies - including Inktomi and Overture (which at that time owned AltaVista and AllTheWeb).

The main speculation was that Yahoo!, since it purchased Inktomi right out, would be using Inktomi results after it leaves Google. We have also seen cases where Inktomi results have been experimented with Yahoo in the main stream search and largely overseas.

Grumpus a moderator over at cre8asiteforums posted at HighRankings Forum his opinion that Yahoo will not being using Inktomi but rather AllTheWeb and/or AltaVista.

Very interested information, read more about it at http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2826.

Interesting thread over at IMR...

To sum it up, it seems (I could be wrong) like Google is not allowing phpbb.com (which is a PR10 site) to pass along Page Rank. I have not found a single link that any page within phpbb.com links to that is reported as a back link for that site (with the link: function). In case anyone is wondering, there is no blocking via robots.txt (I even went so far as to spoof my user agent to look like googlebot to see if they are cloaking anything... which they aren't).

I started out as a simple webmaster in the days when websites were simple to build. Then I provided basic search engine optimization services back when basic SEO was enough to pull rank in the top 25 spots. I say twenty-five because although number one rank for a client made me look great, searchers back then were willing to click on sites found in the first 25 results and still considered them "worthy". Nowadays, if a site isn't ranked number one, the SEO is blamed (or a change in Google's indexing), but not the website design.

Nowadays, if a site isn't found in a paid for spot somewhere at or near the top of search results pages, it may never be clicked on. Today, keyword density and linkage are not enough, especially if you have a competitive product like lingerie, automobiles, games or trivia and travel, to name a few. Companies sink a lot of money on SEO or PPC just to get the attention of someone who will at least click on their URL with a mouse. They pay for that click, regardless of whether or not the visitor remains on the site and does anything productive such as make a purchase.

That's about as nuts as me putting on a ton of makeup and pushup bra and standing on the street corner hoping to get noticed and having to pay each person who just looks at me. (Great for the ego, but who in the heck can afford that?)

What is the surfer looking for? What do they want to do once they get to your website? Are they even looking for your type of website? Ads, title tags, meta descriptions and keywords don't accurately portray site purpose, design architecture, ease of use or quality of information.

Continue reading "Rank High and You Will Be Browsed"

One staple of search engine optimization forums is the perennial discussion of SEO guarantees. It is a discussion that is often more divisive than needs be.

The Opposing View
Often, those opposed to search engine optimization ranking guarantees state the obvious:

Everyone knows that there is no sure way for top rankings and still they give all types of alluring guarantees.

And sometimes go so far as to say:

This is fraud.

Granted, SEO professionals do not control organic rankings. But many times we do guarantee rankings, and deliver on those guarantees. I personally am of the opinion that I could get top ten ranking on any keyword I chose to, given enough time, money and resources.

My View
My opinion is that anybody paying for any service ought to be guaranteed results. When I pay for my car to be fixed, I don't want the mechanic to make a good faith effort. I want it fixed. Period.

In the web services industries, credibility is at an all time low. I personally look to guarantees to differentiate the credible from the incredible.

I think Phil Craven stated it beautifully when he said:

Nobody can guarantee to achieve a top 10 ranking for a specific searchterm except in PPC engines, and then the client has to pay for clicks. What *can* be guaranteed is a top 10 ranking or your money back.

In the end, a guarantee does not imply the absolute ability to control rankings. It simply means that in case of failure, the SEO will refund the monies paid.