Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

Interested in doing a Press Release?
http://www.stuntdubl.com/2005/07/11/pr-tools/
Here’s a list of services, many of them free. On the post above, it also gives advice and links for copywriting.

• PR.com promotion
• PRWeb
• 24-7 Press Release
• PR Leap
• Inewswire
• Press World
• PR Newswire Direct
• AddPR
• PRFree

Are your Google Ads Targeting incorrectly?  Try this tip from Google’s Adsense FAQs to tell Google which part of your page to target:

 

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>
 

A good example of a poorly targeting page is here: http://xlife.zuavra.net/curse/ 

The page is about technical problems he’d had.  Rather than showing software ads, all the ads are targeting religious seekers.  The author jokingly wrote that he was cursed in the title and later says that the Linux errors must be “God’s wrath”.  Google decided that the overall topic of the page must be religious and serves ads as such.  I will say though that I was more tempted by those ads than I am by ads on a typical page, but the Adsense targeting may be helpful for some.

At http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-verify-googlebot.html, Google has posted how to verify that a spider named Googlebot is really from Google.  Telling people to check DNS seems like telling us the obvious.  The helpful tip was to also check the fully qualified domain name as spider owners could spoof that.  I’m not tight enough on bandwidth to care if I’m being over spidered, even by rouge spiders spoofing their namres so this isn’t all that valuable to me.  I do like for Google to index as frequently as possible, though.  Welcome Google.  Come on in… take off your shoes and relax.

http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2006/03/10/sitedeals15-released-im-in

The above page is a great post about different strategies employed in SEO contests.  The most obvious is to make a page about the contest, talking about the rules and winners and who’s moving up and down in the ranks.  The side benefit of this page is that it remains relevant for the nonsense term even after the contest ends.  The downside is that everyone else is doing the same time.  That doesn’t really matter to the search engine I don’t think, but it’s harder to stand out from the rest of the pack.  I prefer the humorous entry, like the Chml Srucnoc for President page I once made. It is a lot more fun to read and fun to write IMHO.  As long as the content doesn’t matter, why not have some fun with it?  Start a comic strip with that as a character name or location.  Start an online petition to rename the moon to what ever the key words are.  I enjoy seeing people do those sort of weird things a lot more than simply slapping together junk content (I guess I’m oddly enough implying that online petitions to rename the moon aren’t junk content).SEO contests are interesting to me. Winning definitely certifies an SEO pro as at least marginally capable, and it often signifies great competence. What’s interesting to me is that no quality SEO professional would waste much time trying to win one of these things… their time is far too valuable, so contestants are the self-selected ugly ducklings of the industry.

So should an SEO participate? I did in the one I mentioned above but I can’t yet say if it was / will be a successful strategy (will it get me any clients or notoriety?… not yet). One side benefit of the humorous contest entry strategy is that it’s fun (for me at least) to participate. Chuckling at my own wackiness while typing a page doesn’t feel like work. A waste of time… yeah OK. But not work.

http://www.seocompany.ca/pagerank/page-rank-update-list.html

Nice exhaustive list of Google updates, categorized by algorythm updates, page rank updates, and the like.  It has links to forum discussions or other expert analysis of each event.

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

Nice tool for Keyword density analysis.  It limits the page size, but for most people that should be fine.  I don’t put too much stock in this sort of thing… if you write and continuously update content that would be valuable for people searching for a keyword you’ll be better served.  This type of tool is more useful if you’re trying to game a search engine.  That said, there are times where I’d like an objective opinion of how a seach engine sees a page and this helps me look at the page with fresh eyes.

Nice post at thegooglecache.com/ on the difference between paid and organic listings:

People who rely on PPC for traffic are renters. There is nothing wrong with this and it certainly has its perks. You can start and stop renting at any time - no waiting for a house to be built. On the otherhand, you are always paying someone else’s mortgage.

SEO on the otherhand, is more like ownership. Sure, your house could be blown away by a storm or destroyed by fire. But, if you maintain it well, and don’t take too many risks, you can save a lot of money and get A LOT MORE HOUSE. You can always go back to renting if it doesn’t work out for you. 

One thing worth noting is that to hire an SEO pro, it costs money up-front (liek buying a house) but there is not equivalent to a bank through whom you can finance.

This article: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/sep/18prt.html is inherently biased because it’s written by a guy selling SEO services rather than by a site trying to inform you (does that mean this blog is “inherently biased?) but his stats in particular are interesting:

Study after study indicates people are less likely to clíck on paid search ads rather than on results from organic search engine optimization. For example, one study found that search users are up tö six times more likely to clíck on the first few organic results than they are to choose any of the paid results [1], while an eye tracking study [2] showed that 50 percent of users begin their search by scanning the top organic results. Other studies have shown that only 30 percent of search engine users clíck on paid listings, leaving an overwhelming 70 percent who are clicking the organic listings. [3] And a 2003 study found that 85 percent of searchers report clicking on paid links in less than 40 percent of all of their searches, and 78 percent of all respondents claim that they found the information they were searching for through sponsored links just 40 percent of the time.[4]

Here’s a post I liked from the SEObook blog: Linking for Conversion

If you link to a few authority sites from within the content it helps engines know what community the page belongs to. Although you do not want to link out too heavily on your main core conversion / offer pages. Hopefully you could create other linkbait pages and other content which helps carry the authority of those other page. If you do link out to other authority sites on pages highly focused on conversion perhaps it makes sense to do it below the fold.

The part that stands out to me in the post is where he says “If you assume (rightly) that users ignore your navigation…”.  I’ve never written with that in mind.  I think SEObook overdoes it but if people really do ignore navigation, that should effect how I write.  The part about links in the text working against screen scrapers is a nice point too. (unless they strip the links out which is what I would expect to happen).

Directory submission has long been a part of SEO and web promotion.  It’s really no longer useful for driving traffic directly.  Search engines do at times take the recommendations of directory’s, particularly human edited one, quite seriously.  Other directorys can put you in the dreaded Google Sandbox.  So should you submit to them?  Which ones?  The link below hopes to help guide you.  A good rule of thumb is is to use your head.  Click on some of the links.  If they’re junk, stay away.  If it is good content, and related to your site or topic, submit. I’d be slow to pay for a link though.  There are better, more effective ways[1][2] to spend your money.

http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/