Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

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.

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001866.shtml

A brand can still push their main brand name (say Paypal, for example) while promoting their name as being Paypal Payment Solutions. Place more emphasis on your core brand name, but also make relevant keywords look like they are part of the legitimate official name to get a bit more friendly anchor text.

I used this in the Chml Srucnoc competition with my Chml Srucnoc in 2008 slogan and push. This should be considered and adopted anytime you’re doing a link building campaign. The only reason not to do this, is if it would make your brand or site sound awkward to the human readers.

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

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.