For those of you not in the loop, spyfu.com is a web service that provides information on who is bidding on what keywords as well as further information on competitors’ daily ad spend as well as their average CPC. The startup squad have a great article on what spyfu does and how it does it.

No […]
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Do you do any sort of pay-per-click management for the online travel vertical? I recently attended a Google AdWords Webinar about online travel trends which they based on a ComScore study of 50,000 UK web users. Our Google rep, Marie, sent me a copy of the ComScore study which I have used to bring you […]
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Tags: free blogs digg seomoz rand fishkin pagerank

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Yesterday Danny posted a typically thoughtful piece on Google’s success, on the occasion of its ten year anniversary. Titled The Google Hive Mind, the piece addresses an age-old question about Google: does it have a master plan? Danny argues that, in essence, the company does not, and runs through…



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Tags: blogs blogging web 2.0 sphinn seomoz

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Techcrunch is publishing a rumour that Yahoo might be looking to sell off Yahoo Answers.

“Yahoo Answers, which was launched in late 2005, is a staggeringly huge site. Recent Comscore stats say the service attracts nearly 150 million monthly visitors worldwide and generates 1.3 billion monthly page views. That’s 67% unique visitor growth in the last year. Yahoo as a whole, though, has nearly 100 billion monthly page views, so it isn’t a material percentage of total Yahoo traffic”

Nice traffic, however Yahoo Answers is full of junk content. There are now numerous competitors in the Q&A space.

If you’re first mover, as Yahoo was, you can get away with low quality content, but as competition increases, the quality must also increase in order to keep people hooked. Whilst hugely successful in terms of traffic numbers, Yahoo Answers now must to respond to increasing competition. With rumours of a sale, it looks like Yahoo may instead be refocusing their efforts on their core business.

This is an example of the “curve to quality” pattern. First movers can get away with junk content for a while, but eventually competitors will up the quality and gain audience share as a result. This reinforces the need to adapt business models in light of competition, and the need to avoid commodity status.

We can see the same curve to quality pattern in the blog world.

Jackob Neilsen was advising a world leader in his field on what to do about his website. The guy wanted to know if he should start a blog.

Neilsens answer was no, and here’s why:

“Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you’re searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.”

Also check out the graph “variability of posting quality” in Nielsen’s post.

I suspect Nielsen is on the right track. Blog traffic is reportedly at an all time high, but they still only accounts for 0.73% of US traffic. Perhaps as the quality of the average blog increases, so to will the audience share.

Due to the pressure of competition, low quality content eventually becomes commodity.

Do you read mee-too search blogs? Not many people do. Most people gravitate towards the blogs that offer the highest perceived level of quality, as opposed to those that repeat the same news found elsewhere. Mee-too content is no longer an effective strategy in the blog world, or the newspaper world, as syndicated news services are finding out. There is simply too much competition.

There are other reasons why you might want to focus on quality as a strategy.

Google will always try to filter out low quality, commodity content in order to heighten user experience. Google approaches this problem in a number of ways.

In the remote quality rater document, Google lists a range of categories raters can attribute to web content. One category is “Not Relevant”. This category applies to “news items that appear outdated” and “lower quality pages about the topic”. Obviously, “lower quality” is a relative term and the comparison would be made between competing SERP results. Pages categorised as “Not Relevant” will receive lower SERP placement.

Also consider the notion of poison words. Posion words are words the search engines equate with content of low quality. If, just for example, forum content is found to frequently be of low quality, then it is reasonable to assume Google will look for markers that the site is a forum and mark this content down as a result. Markers might include a link back to a popular forum software script, for example.

This metric would not be taken in isolation as there are various other quality markers Google use. However, if the content is low quality and appears in a low quality format, you stand less chance of ranking for competitive queries.

The same might apply to commercial content, especially such content that appears in non-commercial query results.

Google’s business model involves advertisers paying for clicks in the form of Adwords. The main SERPs are essentially a loss leader that facilitate people clicking on text advertisements. The main SERPs are the reason people use Google.

Such a business model would be supported by an algorithm that rewarded quality, informative content in the main SERPs. It could operate by downgrading any content deemed as purely commercial, and this would involve looking for commercially-oriented poison words. Posion words in this context might include “Buy Now”, “Business Address”, and other variants unique to commercial content. This would “encourage” those with commercial messages to list with Adwords because they would have trouble appearing in the main SERPs. It is unlikely such an algorithmn would apply to commercial queries, however.

Google filters in this way because there is much competition for keyword queries. Google looks to find the best answer. The answer of highest quality, both in terms of relevance and searcher satisfaction. As competition increases, the answers will get better, which is why you must aim to stay high on the quality curve.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

A while back you might have read Brian’s Effective Copywriting Tactics for Affiliate Marketing, which offered some great advice. But something tells me you might have wondered how to apply that advice to real-life affiliate marketing.
I’m going to show you exactly how I implemented those 5 tips with the Thesis theme affiliate program. And […]
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Tags: blogger myspace wordpress themes digg rand fishkin

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Who needs to learn how to read?
After all, we all learned how to read fairly early in life, usually in elementary school, right?
But do you know how to really read?
More importantly, are you really reading?
Reading can make you a better writer, as long as you’re paying attention and leaving time to actually write. But […]
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Like I previously pointed out SEO and web accessibility should come hand in hand. So here is the collection of web accessibility tools that can be also effectively used for SEO purposes.

22 Vote(s)

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Tags: blogging free blogs free hosting seomoz rand fishkin

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

A while back you might have read Brian’s Effective Copywriting Tactics for Affiliate Marketing, which offered some great advice. But something tells me you might have wondered how to apply that advice to real-life affiliate marketing.
I’m going to show you exactly how I implemented those 5 tips with the Thesis theme affiliate program. And […]
More Search Optimization News….
Tags: blogs myspace free blogs wordpress themes seomoz

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Some of you might have noticed I’ve had a link to a site called Lateral Action in my signature line all summer. It’s taken us a bit longer than we expected to get launched, but I think it’ll be worth the wait.
So what is it?
Lateral Action is a new blog that explores the intersection of […]
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Apple recently opened up Applications to third party, and I’ve been waiting to see someone create something for the SEO/Domain market. This free app, Domainer, is really simple, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Domainer tracks the PageRank of your site, and seems most useful to me as just a quick way to check […]
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Tags: blogging web 2.0 seomoz page rank reddit

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

So far in this series, we’ve discussed why testimonials are so powerful, how to collect testimonials with my “SPURF” system, and 10 ways to make your testimonials work harder.
But what if you don’t have testimonials? What if you need other ways to give your credibility a boost?
No problem.
Yes, testimonials are a great way […]
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Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

I recently saw Ed Dale teaching thousands of Internet marketing newbies how to use Market Samurai, a paid tool promoted through their free course. Which, it turns out, is another good example of why many free information sources are worth less than they cost.

As their B case video (showing the free alternative that justifies the month-long sales pitch for various products pitched as free help) they used a poorly configured version of SEO for Firefox to make it look worse than what they were trying to sell. The video reviewing SEO for Firefox was given the title of SEO Competition The Old Way, and concluded that for SEO for Firefox

I am sorta hoping that you never have to use this, but if you do, it is there, and it is available.

Thanks for the faux recommendation. Pretty sleazy stuff there Ed Dale. Thumbs down for you.

For anyone who wants to see how SEO for Firefox actually works with all its features enabled, please check out the following video…and compare what you see to what you saw in that other video (while noting that I took half the time to show a much more comprehensive picture of the actual features).

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Tags: wordpress free blogs free hosting blogosphere

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Have you ever stood in a store with something in your hand and then looked up to see if there was a clerk nearby you could ask for help?
Sure you have. We all have. Good help is hard to find.
Companies have been cutting costs by moving towards self-serve more than ever. Depending on where you […]
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Tags: blogging free blogs free hosting seomoz rand fishkin

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

At WebmasterWorld, a forum member is baffled by the fact that his homepage isn’t ranking for a relevant search term; instead, one of the internally-linked pages rank. According to the forum member, the homepage has the right keywords within the title tag and should be targeted appropriately, but the internal page outranks it.

It seems that this forum member is not alone. Another member encountered a similar issue recently. Other forum members suggest that it could possibly be a temporary thing, but if (after 3 weeks or so) nothing has changed, it may be helpful to optimize those pages again.

Another possibility could be over-optimization of the front page, which could result in a penalty as we’ve seen before. One forum member makes this case clear:

If it has taken a tumble on just a handfull of specific searches, and there is no legit reason for the inner pages to rank higher than the home page (ie they’re less targeted and have a weaker link profile), then it sounds like your home page may be seen as a bit over optimized for the phrase(s).

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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Tags: blogs wordpress wordpress themes reddit delishio

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

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Tags: blogger web 2.0 sphinn cylon pagerank

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

How does one who may sell SEO services in the future give away information without giving away too much information (and fearing that the client will run away with the proposed strategies and implement them himself/herself?)

That’s a difficult situation and one I think a lot of people find themselves in. They are compelled to sell themselves by proposing a strategy but are afraid it can backfire. However, many clients who solicit the advice of SEO services are doing it because they cannot execute that detailed plan.

noel_x99 makes a great analogy that should make you feel a little bit better about providing that information:

Here’s an example: We were recently at an arts festival watching an artist scultping a log with a chainsaw. Suppose that artist were to spend time with me explaining his technique and showing me how to do it - even what he was thinking when he applied his technique. Then suppose he handed me the chainsaw and told me to do it myself. I couldn’t do it. Because I would lack the basic understanding of the skills of using a chainsaw. And even though he explained the technique…I couldn’t do it. It’s a combination art, technical ability, and experience that I don’t have with a chainsaw.

That should alleviate those fears you have about giving away ideas (unless the client is well versed in this area of marketing). Most people can hear your suggestions but have no idea about how to execute. In the end, giving out more information does seem to show that you have the expertise and indicates that you’re willing to help.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

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Tags: blogger myspace wordpress themes digg rand fishkin

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.