Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

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.

How to AMAZE Your Clients With a KILLER Viral Campaign by SEO Bomb Blog
is a great study in how to get fast results for an SEO client. Though partnering with SEO blackhat, they use totally legit methods to create buzz and improve all aspects of the business and their web presence. Wow. Check out the results (I pasted more than I meant to becasue the results didn’t make sense sans context):

Now, as QuadZilla pointed out, my plan had several good points in it, but what was lacking was the one thing that would make this exceptionally remarkable.

The one thing that would make every single designer and Mac fan-boy go Ga-Ga:

Enter The Prizes
Week 1: iPod nano 2GB & iPod 30GB
Week 2: MacBook
Week 3: MacBook Pro
Week 4: Mac Pro with DUAL 30″ Cinema HD LCDs
See where we’re going at? Good.

But there’s one more thing missing: The seeders - and boy did we get seeders.

In addition to the link from Apple.com and the judges from About.com, 456Bereastreet, Mac Addict Magazine and 9Rules.com, you can view the full list of judges right here.

That, dear readers, is some serious link juice.

Crestock.com got 200,000 unique users from the contest, went on Digg, doubled their average daily traffic after the contest, got over 5000 new customers and increased their organic search engine traffic by 1258% - in one month!

SEW’s “Weather.com’s SEO Efforts Rest Heavily on Analytics” does a good job descibing the thought process behind optimising for a keyword. I like the talk about selling the project internally as well. This is a good article for SEW… I want to boycott them for dissing Sullivan but if the content is valuable…????

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.

Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain describes how to use feedburner to track your blog feed. I think it’s way worth it. It’s very hard to tell who is syndicating your content otherwise. That said, a drawback to feedburner is that people subscribe to your RSS using a feedburner owned domain. No big deal, but if feedburner goes under or changes hands or if something better comes along, you’ll need to convince all your subscribes to go through the onerous process of changing their aggregator settings. It’d be way better to just control that url, which feedburner allows you to do for $3 / month.

UPDATE 2/12/07

Alternatively, you could follow these instructions:
http://www.roguewolves.com/drupal-and-feedburner

It shows a very easy way to use your .htaccess file to effectivly mask the feedburner URL as your own. Good stuff.

Authorama: Testing If Google Can Restrict Public Domain Books It Offers For Download
is a great article that, among other things, outlines how to get full-text, copyright free books from Google Book Search.

Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

Google says don’t. They provide a couple of bad examples too. I will say that the examples are pretty obvious. They don’t provide any acceptable examples but they tell you what you can do, as in change the ad colors or put a full border around your ads.

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

Link Equity and Authority Consolidation : SEO Book.com

I agree with this concept but disagree with the example. Digg.com gets so very many backlinks that splitting their brand isn’t really hurting them. Digg is in the link business and does things like incenting people to link their blog to a digg ref rather than the news article. This gives them a good bit of authority and IMHO allows them to ignore “link authority” considerations and focus on what they think will be best from a human user standpoint. That’s the right focus to have I think.

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/10/match-google-adsense-font-type-and-size-to-increase-ctr/

Great blog about matching Adsense fonts. The post doesn’t discuss whether it’s ethical or acceptable under Google’s guideline to do so. I guess it depends… the old, I’ll know it when I see it rule. But it’s a good tip:

In Firefox - Right click the ad, Select “This Frame” then “View Frame Source”. A new window shows you the whole source code with the CSS code too.
In Internet Explorer - Just right click the ad, select View Source.

For the leaderboard
Title
line-height: 12px; font-size: 11px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 12px; font-size: 10px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;

For the large rectangle
Title
line-height: 14px;font-size: 11px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 14px;font-size: 10px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;

SEOmoz Blog | A List of Web Page Quality Signals

SEOmoz gave a list of some web page quality signals today. They are:

Intrinsic Features:

How accurate is the information presented?
How biased or unbiased is the data?
How believable is the content?
How credible is the source?
Contextual Features:

Is the information relevant to the user’s query?
Does the information add value to the subject?
Is the work recent enough to be of value?
Is the source thorough in its presentation?
What amount of information is provided?
Representational Features:

Can the material be interpreted in different way
How easy or difficult is the material for a user to understand?
Does the document state the information concisely?
Is the source consistent?
Accessibility Features:

Is the document accessible?
Does the content present security risks?

When creating a site, these are valuable things to keep in mind. Specifically, you should try to create value-adding, thorough, regularly updating content that is accessible, has a privacy policy and doesn’t use vulnerable code. Search engines probably have a hard time knowing if content is thorough… only that thorough sites tend to be XXX pages with XXX words per page and XX off-site links, but even those sorts of rules have to be a mild signal for Google because there is so much variation. Google clearly values updated content over stale content and I haven’t seen any clear signal showing that Google likes accessible pages or those with privacy policies any better than any others (but it can’t hurt). The only ‘trick’ to be sure of that I see from this is to make sure that pages you create change in some way each time Googlebot visits (I like putting links to recent relevant news storys on the page via RSS). About that quality content, Google can’t tell but people can. Good content attracts backlinks. Backlinks are SEO gold.