Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

You gotta love this guy. Trent Reznor is the lead singer for Nine Inch Nails and he really gets the web.

Last year, Reznor released two versions of an album on the Web: One which fans could download for free and a higher-quality version that cost $5. More than five times as many people opted for the free version, leaving Reznor disappointed.

But rather than abandoning online distribution, Reznor rethought his model. This past weekend, he surprised fans by releasing a new album on his Web site. This time fans have five distinct options, including a free downloadable version which only contains nine songs, a $5 downloadable version with 36 songs, and a $300 version that comes with autographed vinyl records.

Cracking Google’s ’secret sauce’ algorithm at ComputerWorld is a great article on SEO and the money involved in it. It seems that online gambling is a pretty big market. (I wonder if there’s any money in Viagra online? I’ll have to look into that. Mortgages? Less savory content?)

Can a poker Web site rank high on a Google search using purely white hat tactics — meaning no spamming, cloaking, link farms or other frowned-upon “black hat” practices. Fishkin answered yes, provided the site also added other marketing techniques and attracted some media attention.

The rest of the panel scoffed. “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,” one chided. After all, this is the cutthroat online gambling sector.

But one poker Web site owner was intrigued, and he later approached Fishkin. “He said, ‘If you can get us a search ranking in the top five for online poker or gambling [using white hat methods], we’ll buy that site from you for $10 million,’” recalls Fishkin, president and CEO of SEOmoz in Seattle. Intrigued but skeptical, Fishkin consulted other gambling site owners at the conference. “They said, ‘If it really does rank there, we might be interested in paying you $10 million more.’”

Turns out, a single online gambling customer brings in at least $1,000 in revenue. With a recent Google search of “Texas Holdem Poker” yielding 1.64 million results, it’s easy to see why site owners would pay millions to crack the code for Google’s PageRank algorithm — the elusive Holy Grail of online marketing.

Here’s the best quote from the article:

People manipulate search engines because they are trying to get around creating what the engines want. The goal of search engines is not to make manipulation impossible, but to make the cost and complexity of manipulation prohibitive to where it is cheaper to rank by winning the hearts and minds of other webmasters.

If you just create good, original content, search engines will be working for you as they refine their algorythms.

It’s Getting Harder to be Fake : SEO Book.com

SEO for WordPress - The Complete Guide very long but it’s exhaustive. Good work Jim.

An Introduction to SEO Best Practices had this to say about link building (they don’t like that term but it’s more accurate that calling it marketing):

Since people won’t generally link to you for the express purpose of making you money, why would they do it? Because they care about their visitors, and they think your site has something of value for them, such as great content. This also happens to be the profile of the sites whose links to your site are likely to have the highest value in the eyes of the search engines.

SEOmoz Blog | Google News – for traffic, links, and rankings

How to get your site in Google News. The link to submit is http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py

SEOBook goes through how to find who a site links to.

He mentions a lot of things I don’t find valuable… the wikipedia part seems ok. But for me the benefit will be seeing how other people build their link networks and whether a site hordes its pagerank.

Keyword Group Detection from MSN

MSN gets a bad rap from the searcdh world because they tend to return terrible results that are easily spammed. Their tools are often nice though. The one above allows you to enter a keyword and it will tell you synonyms. I don’t think yahoo or Google’s related tools are nearly this robust. (both list them above the search results when searching).

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

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.