Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

Askville launched recently and it is a beautiful site. It’s fun to ask and answer questions and you get rewards for doing all of it. A killer app is that you can buy superpowers with the coins you get from asking and answering questions. Addictive, easy to use, fun to use - all site content created by the users. This site should be the poster-child for web 2.0. Amazon seems to be hard at work improving it as well. This should be fun to watch.

Other than as a case study, I don’t know yet how this applies to web marketing, but it’s a great example of something being made out of nothing. This is what Google Answers would have been had they not lost their swagger.

This article (The True Value of a Resource Library for Your Website) does a great job advocating for sites to create a resource library of sorts to increase their link authority, percieved trust, indexed pages and stickiness. The risk (not mentioned in the article) is that you’ll spread your trustrank too thin. If you site is sufficiently trusted to rank well for 50 pages, and you add 100, it could hurt your search engine results for all the pages. That would be counterproductive if you recieve fewer sales leads to your store because you created a resource library. That said, the library will likely attract links and increase your trustrank, imporving your ranking (and for many more keywords)

About the Resource Library:

While it’s true that a resource library, on the surface, exists to benefit site visitors, it doesn’t end there — they also provide benefits that can directly impact any business. First of all, they spread goodwill among a business’s prospect base - and its non-prospect base as well. The site is seen by visitors as offering free information about important subject matter - and that makes it a more attractive site to return to in the future when a purchase will be made or a service established.

Second, with a solid resource library, the site puts itself in a great position to organically attract important inbound links. Outside sites will notice the offerings of important and unbiased information and link to individual articles or to the resource library as a whole. This will boost traffic and rankings overall.

Third, if the articles in the section are optimized properly, they will also boost rankings for popular and competitive keyphrases, driving additional targeted traffic to the site. The traffic may enter the site at the articles, but visitors are then likely to click for further information about the site itself.

I love this hittail… it give great suggestions for creating content. Not always great but it’s worht setting up and letting it gather data to make suggestions. I’ve had several instances where it’s given the same advice that I’ve come to after my more detailed research and testing. It’s a good tool. Anyhow, I wanted to point out a nice idea they had on their blog. It’s about scoring well in search engines for people looking for negative things about your company. The great thing about the idea (posting real complaints followed by how you resolved things) is that it’s ethical, effective at getting those hits and it seems like it might truely sway someone who is trying to figure out if you’re the type of company that they’d like to do business with. here’s a quote and the link:

World class customer service is a much more viable alternative to flogging. And if you want some miraculous free advice, take the successfully closed support cases, mark them up with “black-out” stripes to protect the identities involved, and publish them as successfully closed customer service cases. It will fill the search results on the same keywords, but every single one will be a mini-success-story. Yep, it works. Hooray!

more => HitTail: Of Sock Puppets and Public Relations

Job-Hunt.org: An Old-Fashioned Success Story is a great case study of sorts about how to use PR, networking and quality content to build your site and your brand.

Grey wolf blog has a nice post on promoting a local business here. His tips:

1. Yahoo Directory
2. RegisterLocal.com
3. TrueLocal.com
4. Email your Existing Customers
5. Hold a Contest

Google Filters, how to get around them and exploit their loop holes | Joe Whyte - Seo Consulting - Rockyfied

I have been doing SEO for some time now and I have been witness to many a strange occurrence regarding serps. Most of these weird occurrence I would have to say are directly attributed to a Google Filter or Google penalty. So I have been inspired by a post over at webmasterworld and as far as I know there is not a current list out online that list’s all of the potential Google penalties so I have decided to put together an arbitrary list of potential Google Penalties. Please note that there is no proof i.e. press release from Google stating these exist but rather these are ideas, theories and assumptions from SEO’s experiences.

Tropical SEO » Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing talks about linkbaiting. First he stresses the importance of the title with this jewel:

Want an example? Let’s run through the cheat sheet Andy Hagans style:

• Who Else Wants Build Links and Rank High in Google?
• The Secret of Link Baiting (It’s all in the title!)
• Here is a Method That is Helping Webmasters to Link Bait Better
• Little Known Ways to Link Bait Like an SEO Pro
• Get Rid of Your Backlink Problem Once and For All
• Here’s a Quick Way to Rank Highly in Google by Link Baiting
• Now You Can Have that #1 Rank in Google
• Learn to Link Bait like Andy Hagans
• Build a Backlink Structure You Can Be Proud Of
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Link Baiting

He then give great tips about content, including making it scannable, losing the ads and getting friendly bumbs from friends.

This has a great overview of web analytics and talks in depth about on eof the heavy-hitters: IndexTools.

Interview of IndexTools’ Dennis Mortensen on January 8, 2007:

What I try to pitch to our clients is, please don’t focus on any of the canned reports that are there - they are nice, you can use them as templates, but don’t use any of the canned reports. Focus on using the custom reporting capability to get reports based on metrics that you use to drive results for your business.

If you setup a custom report, it’s because you have a business question that you want an answer to. If you look at a canned report, it’s because you don’t really have anything else to do.

The above is why, for clients and sites who want to thrive online, you should use a for fee
analytics tool. If all you want / are looking for are the very basics, free tools are fine.

Shoemoney from webmasterradio.fm has a great interview with Brian Axe of AdSense. I was really amazed and impressed with the interview and with Brian.

(edit: I realize this crosses the line from commentary to rant… you’ve been warned)
My experience with adsense hasn’t been a good one from a customer service standpoint. I’ve worked with sites who have been banned without recourse and are left with dealing with under trained Google customer service types who make the Bush’s military tribunals looks like shining examples of defendant rights by comparison.

So in short, my experience with AdSense is that it is a great way to monetize a site, but they are arrogant, monopolistic and tend to stonewall if they suspect you of crossing them. In their defense, they likely deal with people all day trying to defraud them. The question they need to answer is, How many innocents should be punished to catch an offender? Is it better to err on the side of letting people defraud you, or is it better to err on the side of protecting advertising and never being defrauded? I don’t know for sure, but in my small-time, limited sample, Google appears Hitler-like in their treatment of small sites. I’m certain that one innocent was banned and pretty sure that 2 others are being truthful. Notice that Google would never ban anyone with the clout or Soap Box to fight back. My experience is with smallish, niche sites with no option.

All of that aside, the Podcast with AdSense manager Brian Axe was helpful. He discusses these trade offs and talks about changes to adsense policies here (MP3 Link).

My take aways:
- images beside ads tend to increase clicks but not ROI for advertisers and until Google has a way to protect advertisers from that, they will disallow the process
- Google is working on some process to allow publishers to click on their own ads to better understand their visitors experience (I’m very pleased and impressed that Google is addressing this. Axe’s perspective was perfect. In short: we know this should happen; we’re working on it; Until we get it, don’t click the ads)
- from Google’s perspective, the appeals process works great
- smartpricing is probably a good thing (they’re trying to differentiate between quality and low quality clicks… many advertisers avoid the publishers altogether because smartpricing doesn’t work. it should get better)

Per Optimal Word Count & Web Page Copy Length : SEO Book.com:

Content Suggestions Based on Publishing Formats:
AdSense Site:
A page which has 500 words on it will overlap many more keyphrases than two different pages that have 300 words each. As long as you can put your AdSense ads in a prominent position that gets a decent clickthrough rate without sacrificing your linkability I would recommend going with 500 to 600 word articles.

If you write naturally and your site gains a decent amount of authority you will end up accidentally ranking for many great keyword phrases that never showed up on keyword tools.

Site Selling CPM Ads:
If you are selling CPM ads that may favor breaking longer articles into many shorter pages so each read article gets more page views. This is especially true if you have a strong brand, great mindshare, great link equity, and many direct readers, like Wired.com.

Lead Generation Sites:
Focus your content on conversion, perhaps even using brief pages with little content, but ensure your content is unique. Get what legitimate links you can and add linkbait to your site to build up the authority of your site.

Another thing I really enjoyed in the post was the stat that 50% of online shoppers at top retailers look to customers reviews to influence their decision. That hit home with me because one of the presents I bought was drastically influenced by online reviews at Amazon. I changed features and models and was completely redirected based on user’s feedback about the product I thought I wanted. Web sites need to make use of this to the greatest extent possible.