Don’t know what search engine optimization is? Know someone who needs easy to understand overview of SEO? That’s what this video provides, in three minutes. It’s part of the many resources provided by Search Engine Land’s “What Is SEO” page http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo.
SEO Advice from a Pro
Understanding the SEO business.
Build a solid understanding of the SEO business with this interview of Jon Payne of Ephricon Web Marketing.
This post is a work in progress; more thoughts soon.
What not to do in SEM
The takeaway is simple: do not pay for inbound links to your site.
Why? These so-called “backlinks” are prohibited by Google’s guidelines.
The only time you can legitimately “pay” for links is via their own paid ad networks (AdWords and AdSense).
Read what the NYTimes discovered about the country’s 4 major flower sellers google-gaming efforts for Mother’s Day.
Google cleans up low-quality “content farms”
Google acts to clean up low-quality “content farms” — sites which scrape other people’s content and manage to rank higher in search engine results. Two known biggies affected: Demand Media and the Big Board.
Being bad to your customers is bad for SEO
Being bad to your customers is bad for SEO
Were you following the saga of the latest SEO-hacking creep? Google has announced it changed its algorithms to detect bad actors.
However, Search Engine Land explains how this man did not really benefit from link equity from bad reviews… it was through several SEO tricks. Two different stories going on.
You can study how a site obtained its google ranking via Yahoo! Site Explorer.
By the way, the seller did get arrested. Justice to be served, finally, thanks to media exposure.
How to permanently opt-out from Double-Click and Adsense
To keep the google theme going: Google has a page describing its advertising cookies. You can permanently opt-out from Double-Click and AdSense tracking by cookies.
You do clear your browser’s history and cache every week, right?
Intrusive consumer-tracking technologies
Are you aware of how large the site tracking industry is growing? WSJ reports about intrusive consumer-tracking technologies:
The 50 [sample] sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used to conduct the study. Only one site, the encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, installed none. Twelve sites, including IAC/InterActive Corp.’s Dictionary.com, Comcast Corp.’s Comcast.net and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN.com, installed more than 100 tracking tools apiece in the course of the Journal’s test.
The companies that placed the most tracking tools were Google Inc., Microsoft. and Quantcast Corp.
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Some of our web clients need analytical visitor tracking tools, which are not used to build consumer profiles but rather to determine content popularity and effectiveness of Adword Campaigns and referral sources. They have not joined networks like Quantcast to track all of your activities across other websites.
Regarding Flash, Apple is disingenuous
The war of wits and accusations heats up:
If Flash is to be consigned to the recycle bin, then what technology will replace its amazing animation capabilities? Apple is disingenuous in only focusing on the video-playing aspects of HTML 5.
In other news: SEO — Forget PAGE RANK: Google tells us to forget about it.
TWEO – What’s your Twitter Klout?
Twitter has just become more high stakes… there are firms out there measuring your influence on Twitter… like this one: http://klout.com/twitter/influence/.
So, marketers are soon going to focus on high-influencers in their efforts. Move over SEO, here comes TWEO (Tweet Optimization). You heard the word from PDG first ;-)
Your Blog – Add NoFollow to your Comments
Why should you add “nofollow” to your CMS or comment system?
Google describes it well… decide to whom you give Page Rank; dissuade spammers.