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.

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.

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.