Sportsbook SEO Specialist

Social or SEO – Which is better?

2008-01-09T17:24:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of talk about social media and social book marking as taking over the tradition SEO industry. While it is true that some of the major social media sites are taking over the top listings in Google.

These days it isn’t unheard of to see multiple listings for the same content that has been linked to from the various sites like Digg and Boxxet. Sure these sites will help you get your content spread all over the search engines but is it the same as getting your page to rank high in the search engines? The short answer is no.

You see the reality is this; your content will rise to the top of the engines quite quickly but not for your site, it will be for the social sites that are hosting the snippets of content from your site. Good for the social site and if anybody actually visits those links, it could be good for your site as well.

Another way that this is different is in the amount of time that your content stays at the top of the search engines. At the time of this writing these social sites usually were ranking for about 2 weeks before they disappeared from any meaningful rankings. This is not too bad for content that has a short shelf life but what about content that has a longer shelf life… not so good.

Also, how long do you really think it will be before Google steps in to the fray to deal with what in essence is nothing more than duplicate content diluting their so called “quality results”? Does anybody truly need 20 or 30 listings to the same story spread over just as many social domains? I think not. Do I take advantage of it? I sure do!

Now what about SEO – is that going to disappear as a marketing tool? The quick answer is hell no. If you were given a choice on getting your site/pages to rank at the top of Google for years or weeks I am pretty sure which of way you would go.

Back in 2004 I obtained top 3 rankings for some fairly competitive gambling related terms in Google and those sites have had almost no updating or link building since then and yet they remain at the top of Google. You are not going to get that kind of sustained ranking with social book marking.

At this time the best thing one can do is to use the social book marking while it still works, to help your sites gain some ground in the search engines by combining it with solid SEO tactics.

Yesterday I wrote a quick little tongue in cheek article about the alleged Jessica Simpson Curse. Fairly topical these days given the NFL playoffs are quickly well underway. I added this to my sports betting blog and then I added the article to some social book marking sites. Within an hour not only was my blog ranking in Google but so was the social book marking listings.

When my blog got listed in Google there were a few sites that ranked higher for the search term “Jessica Simpson Curse” but not for long. Within 24 hours my blog page took over top spot in Google* for that term and the social book marking pages started to slide in the rankings. While it was good to have multiple page 1 rankings for my blog, I think I still prefer to have my actual page ranking in number 1 rather than somebody else’s social media site.

Social Media is the buzz right now but it can’t last as it is way too easy to exploit just like some of the other techniques of old – can you say keyword stuffing? Use it while it lasts but trust me – it ain’t going to replace solid SEO tactics. That will come later when there is a breakthrough in artificial intelligence brought on by semantic search but that is for another rant.

* results may vary depending upon datacenters

Google Dance – But Who Pays the Fiddler?

2007-11-19T15:53:00.000-08:00

November comes around and once again we all get our annual unwanted invitation to the Major Google Dance. It doesn’t matter if you had intended to join in the festivities or not as for all indexed websites; attendance is mandatory

The term Google Dance refers to a period of time when the algorithms are fine tuned in an effort to allegedly give a better result to searchers. As of late I am not so certain that this is the reason behind the updating. Prior to this last major GD the previous one brought us something Google likes to term “Universal Search”.

Universal Search, this was supposed to be something that was going to improve the quality of the results as it brought more options to the results such as Maps, Books, Video and the like. Interesting thing though is that all of these so called enhancements were nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to force feed us more of Google’s products instead of actually giving us results that we were looking for. Sure these things are all good and fine if you are actually looking for News, Books, Videos or Maps when you started your search but if you weren’t then these things are just in the way of you finding what you want.

Anyway, this latest Google Dance seems to be concerned with visible Page Rank. There are a lot of theories as to what the point is behind the down grading of the PR. Some folks think that it has to do with devaluing paid links in an attempt to quash the link economy while others think that this move was geared towards transferring Page Rank into something called Trust Rank.

Seeing as sites can easily influence search rankings through links the whole PR model is kind of useless so the theory is they changed it over to Trust Rank. Sell or buy links and guess what, you loose your trust rank. If you loose your trust rank well then you can’t affect other sites with your links. Problem is, how do you filter out the links on a website as paid links; who makes that decision and what if that person is wrong? The whole theory smacks of censorship to me

Regardless of the theory that you are following these days it seems that Google is up to something once again and as usual, we are supposed to accept it and for the most part it seems most of us do.

Over the years I have watched many a Google Dance unfold and as the dance continued to drone on, I would often go into the posting forums to read the threads concerning lost rank and SERPs. As I read the posts I always sat and marvelled at the fact that while Google was pounding out the tempo for their dances; it never was Google’s algorithms that were dancing, it has always been the webmasters who were the ones actually doing the dancing as they tried to stay in rhythm to Google’s cacophonic beat.

The only real question is how long are webmasters going to let this massive corporate entity rule their businesses? Google doesn’t care about your business short of wringing out as much money as they can prior to bleeding them dry. If Google was concerned about what actual people were searching for they wouldn’t force their products upon us with their Universal Search, they would let us look for what we want on our own instead of telling us what we want.

There is another rumour floating around out there regarding this latest dance, it has to do with how Google actually has to resort to hand editing the PR of sites that they suspect of engaging in the link economy. If this rumour is true then it should go a long way to discredit their so called “better search engine”. Strange how this better search engine can easily be manipulated through linking and the only way to fix it is by hand editing the results to weed out the paid linking dance crashers.

I don’t know about you guys but to me it seems that the Emperor is having a garage sale and we are all buying his “Used” New Clothes.

Social Book Marking – The newest form of MLM harassment.

2007-11-14T14:31:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t all that long ago that people started to question why old friends and acquaintances were looking them up.

You’d be sitting at home doing something solitary like reading the paper or doing the crossword when you’d get a phone call. Answering you are surprised to hear that it is that old buddy from the 9th or 10th grade calling to “Catch Up”. A few minutes go by and after you have run the gamut of pleasantries and platitudes you politely ask “So what do you do for work now?”

“So glad you asked” is the response. “I recently got involved with (insert whichever fits, Melaleuca, Amway, Avon, Mary Kay, PrePaid Legal, Reliv and far too many others to list), and man do you ever need to take a look at this.” Some seductive numbers are offered in an effort to win an invitation to your house so they can show you how much money you can make. “Great, how does Tuesday sound?”

Tuesday arrives and everything looks wonderful until they tell you that all you have to do to make some serious cash is to sign up hundreds of people under you and before you know it, you too are making some serious greenbacks. This always brings the question… “Where am I going to find all of these people to sign up under me?” “No problem, just ask all of your friends and the people at the office and before you know it, the people you sign up are signing up people too and they are all under you making you money”.

Sounds easy right? Wrong. People are resistant to old friends showing up out of the blue with get rich quick schemes. In fact if you want to be removed from your social network of friends join an MLM scheme and see if the invitations don’t stop coming soon after your first few attempts to con your buddies into signing up under you.

How the hell is this like Social book marking you are probably asking? Well it isn’t in terms of buying anything but it is similar in how these vast networks of old friends and acquaintances looking you up and then constantly asking you to Digg this and add that to Delicious or write on my Super Wall. The good ones will actually provide their own page profile to Digg before asking but others expect you to do this for them as well.

I don’t know about you but it is getting so bad that I don’t even like to look at email and instant messages from people from my past any more. Hell, I am even starting to question messages from current contacts.

Another thing, what if I don’t like the content you asked me to social bookmark, what is the etiquette on that, if I say no will it somehow ruin the friendship if there was one to begin with? Or how about this, are the people within your social book marking circle book marking equally or are they building up a vast social book marking deficit that they will never make good on?

I don’t know about you but I for one can’t wait until Google completely removes the value of social bookmark links. Really what value can these social bookmarks have as I don’t even know anyone who uses them to find content on the web. If people aren’t actually using these social bookmark sites why do we have them? Is it because some socially inept programmer types think social bookmark sites are cool because they afford them a social circle even if it is only a virtual one?

Bottom line for me is this… If you are contacting me after all these years because you found my profile on Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn and you thought you would ask me to social bookmark your content, stay in the woodwork, I am really not all that interested in making a positive public declaration regarding your spam content.

Just like the MLM pressure salespeople of old, I am not interested in your schemes to make you rich, more popular or socially acceptable. Similarly to multi level marketing, it doesn’t take much exposure to the social bookmark scheme to grow weary of the one sided nature of the old friend contacting you with the request to Digg my story.

Nevada gets its own Domain

2007-09-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I blogged so I thought I would write about the new domain .nv.com. That’s right you read right .nv.com. Does this mean that all of the states are going to be getting their own domains now or is Nevada getting their own in hope that they might funnel all gambling sites to that top level domain?

Lets for the moment suppose that the funneling of gambling sites is the reason behind the new TLD. What other state funneling processes would be put in place would wi.com (Wisconsin) be used to funnel all American cheese sites into that TLD? Would all American automobile sites get funneled in to mi.com (Michigan)? I highly doubt it but there must be a reason behind the new domain.

A quick visit to the nv.com registry site tells us that they have been allowing organizations and companies from Nevada and Netherland Limited Liability Companies (Naamloze Vennootschap - "NV") since late August 2007. They also go on to say that as of September 19th, 2007 they will allow everybody else to purchase domains.

I did a quick check to see what domains were available still and managed to secure a few good ones for myself seeing as I represent several Nevada based gaming concerns. I managed to secure 10 myself; sports-betting.nv.com, pokerroom.nv.com, horseracing.nv.com, marketing.nv.com, texasholdempoker.nv.com, searchengineoptimization.nv.com, onlinepoker.nv.com, onlinebetting.nv.com, mma.nv.com and handicapping.nv.com. Not too shabby if you ask me.

Naturally I tried to get the biggies like sportsbook, casino, poker and the like but naturally these were already taken. I did a little check with their Whois tool to see who the lucky registrants were but it appears that they are cloaking ownership or they have taken those names in reserve for future sale, perhaps through auction.

Regardless of what happened to these great gambling domain names there are still plenty of great domains available. I would fully expect that as of September 19th, 200712:00PM CST (-5GMT) there will be rush to secure domains that hasn’t been seen for a while. I could be wrong but I doubt it. If you should go and try to secure some domains keep this in mind; these domains cost $50 US per year and you must order for 2 years minimum. Good luck everybody and let me know which domains you secured and perhaps do a little link trading.

Social Media Marketing – What is it & who needs it

2007-06-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

By now there are a few sites that you should have heard of, Craigslist, Digg, YouTube and MySpace – these are just a few of the social media sites and there are quite a few more. Social media sites are sites that people can go to congregate to share pictures, ideas, videos and more. I know it sounds like just about every other site out there but there is a difference and that difference is in the level of interaction. You see social marketing sites encourage involvement and promote a sense of community

Social media can be used for more things than sharing your holiday pictures or goofy videos. Social media sites can be used to find new employees or perhaps a new love interest or even find an old one. Social media can be used to bring in a whole new level of collaboration when joining in with a similarly minded community.

Perhaps one of the best things that social media sites can be used for is reputation management. Let’s say that some person has printed some negative comments about your company and those pages rank highly in the search engines, this is clearly not a good thing for your business. Creating social media accounts can certainly help in some cases.

You see due to the high level of traffic and linking to these social media sites, some of these sites can rank quite highly within the search engines. Given the power of these networks you should be able to create your company pages that will soon out rank those negative comment pages, forcing them to fall in the SERPS and hopefully, right off of page 1. Of course you would need to set up several profiles to push those negative comments off of page 1.

Here are a few of the more popular ones.

Amazon
Craigslist
Facebook
Flickr
Judy's Book
LinkedIn
MySpace
Newsvine
Technorati
Yahoo Answers
Yelp
YouTube

Google Web Alerts – Is anybody maintaining this product?

2007-06-11T11:48:00.001-07:00

I don’t know how many of you out there use Google Alerts or how many of you actually try to get your stuff published using this system. If you are like me you may use this system to stay up to date on the topics that matter most to you.

As a content producer I have tried several times to get my reporters stories included within the Google Alert system only to be rejected time and again. I know that for their system it is all about how the information is delivered and the number of writers can also make a difference. Knowing this hasn’t made it any easier to get included.

With that said I can’t help but wonder if it is so hard to get included into the Google Alert system, why do I keep getting alerts that redirect to pages that have nothing to do with the original alerted story? How about a little quality control on the sites that are currently in the system and kick the offenders out to make room for new, quality feeds?

Link Requests – A waste of time or just a waste of my time?

2007-06-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

Own a website? Expect link trading email offers – it is a given. A lot of time and energy is devoted to this simple task; I just wish that the efforts put forward for these types of email requests demonstrated some rationale thought and offered a value added solution. Unfortunately this is rarely the case as more often than not; the requests come in as a selfish deal skewed towards the requester.

I am the project manager for one of our sites http://www.wisehandpoker.com/. This is a content rich site that deals with poker and is rapidly gaining an authoritative nature due to all the content we provide to major sites, publications and organizations.

Take this request I received this morning as it is pretty common. (Example edited to remove references to where the email came from and to what site they were trying to promote.)

Currently we are carrying out a 3 – Way link exchange program.
This gives us
both a better footage in Google ranking. I’ll link to you from one of my site,
and then you link from your site to my another site.

If you are
interested in exchanging links with us, please upload the following information
on your website

It goes on to say…

Please notify me when you upload our link and mail me all your link
details.

Hoping for a successful deal

Now as far as requests go it isn’t too bad with the following exceptions.

They expect me to place a link to their site and notify them on the location prior to informing me of the URL of where they will place my link.

I took a look at the site they want me to link to and it is just another one of those poker portal sites that offers nothing to the viewers except for a way for the viewers to help make the site owner some money through affiliate links. What would be the value to our readers?

Good only knows what kind of lame ass link directory they would be placing my link on?

If you are going to spend time looking for quality sites to link with don’t you think it would be a wise idea to offer the other site a high quality link in exchange? Barring that, don’t you think you should at least disclose where you were planning to place the reciprocating link?

What we have to keep in mind here is that when linking to another site that link is considered to be a recommendation to your readers to visit that other site. As such don’t you think that you should make sure that the site you are linking to is of a value?

I know that the strategy here is to get me to put a link to their site and then hope that I forget about it so that you get a nice 1 way link. This may work for some sites because the site owners don’t know any better but I mean come on… if the site you are trying to secure a link from is miles better than yours and it offers something of real value, should you be trying these bullshit tactics?

Come on people; practice a little linking responsibility in an effort to make the Internet a more useful place for everybody. Don’t pollute the web with your pitiful attempts to make money by promoting your garbage sites with third rate linking schemes. If you want to use a 3 way link system, offer the other site in your triumvirate something of value and fully disclose everything up front.

I can’t really say that the request I got this morning was totally useless as it did offer me the opportunity to blog about something today.

Sports Handicapping Challenges

2007-05-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

I have been working in sports information for a long time now and if I were really interested in sports beyond watching the cheerleaders, I would become a regular at the sports handicapping challenges. There are a few of them out there and having the position I do within this industry I have certainly seen my fair share of them.

Lately I have been noticing a site called Shark Handicapping rising up in the search engines for various sports picks terms such as football picks and the like so I naturally thought I would check them out.

While I was looking around the site, looking at their winning percentages, which I might add is favorable for the sports bettors among you readers, I noticed that they have a decent handicapping challenge. Now as I said earlier, I am not one to get too involved with sports but I do have some friends who fancy themselves to be pretty good with their football picks and sports picks in general.

The people over at Shark Handicapping offered a challenge to those wanting to try to beat their record which I said was pretty good. Seeing as it might be a hard record to beat, they have offered up other prizes in the past for those who don’t beat them but have the highest overall score. Like I said, I will be telling my handicapping buddies about this site and encouraging them to sign up to see which one of them gets the Sharks Handicapping Challenge bragging rights.

We are not Spammers! You sure about that???

2007-05-15T09:25:00.000-07:00

Well well well - what did I get in my inbox this morning? You guessed it, more emails from the same people I wrote about a few days ago. If you recall their email said that...

NOTE: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind.We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit.If you are not intersted in Link Exchange then you can reply simply "NO", We will never contact you again.

It seems that they do not live up to their claims regarding contact as I clearly sent them email say "NO". Hell I even went a little further and included some other information in my request, might have been about "sex and travel" or it could have been something about "autonomous sexual relations". Any way it really doesn't matter as I clearly spelled out the word "NO" and clearly they do not understand the concept of NO.

These latest emails came with another invitation to be excluded from further contact.

NOTE: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind.We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit.If you are not intersted in Link Exchange then you can reply simply "NO", We will never contact you again and also if you have already added our link on your sites then please change our following link info(Title,Description) given as bellow.For this we give you a new link back from my other relevant and quality site.

Now it seems that I will have to go one step further and contact the company that hired this outsourced SEM service and let them know that while they may be saving some money by employing some India based SEM sweat shop, they are in fact hurting their reputation by using them. Does the money you save by outsourcing equal the potential loss of reputation? I highly doubt it.

We are not Spammers?

2007-05-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

How often do you receive unsolicited email that starts off with the line “We are not spammers”? These types of email usually have something to do with a request for a link trade. The sad part is that they usually offer to do a 3 way link exchange where they offer to put your link on some useless domain that doesn’t offer a hope in being taken seriously as a directory, and request that you give them a link to their main site.

Here is an exact copy of the first part of the email;

NOTE: We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind.We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit.If you are not intersted in Link Exchange then you can reply simply "NO", We will never contact you again.

I have once again requested that these dip shits stop sending me emails, I wonder what part of the word “NO” they don’t understand, perhaps the quotation marks are throwing them off?

Every once in a while I will have a little fun with these “outsourced” so called experts and respond with something like this;

“I would love to exchange links with you on this condition – you link to my site from your main site and I will link to your shitty site (site’s name left in on purpose) with some spammy, phoney, link directory site that I will develop specifically for you.”

Of course just to avoid any confusion I don’t use quotation marks. Perhaps what I will attempt next time is to translate the above mentioned response into a whole bunch of languages so that I can have a hope that these sweat shop “experts” might finally understand.

These websites that use outsourced SEO services, perhaps you need to take a look at what these companies are doing for your properties. Myself, when I get these spam emails from the same services over and over again I make note of the main website they are trying to build the link popularity for and I go out of my way to inform my counterparts for this industry to avoid that site like the plague.

Yahoo Directories Can Hurt Your Site!

2007-05-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

About 1 year ago I contacted the fine people at Yahoo to find out why I could never get a client’s site indexed beyond the main index page. After checking to make sure that the site wasn’t in violation of any of their rules I sent an email to Yahoo to discuss my findings.

The only thing that I could discern was that the earliest information regarding this domain was still being listed in several of their directories. Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing but seeing as the site changed ownership and focus back in 1996, the old directory listings are completely wrong.

Provided with this information it was fairly easy for someone at Yahoo to ascertain that this was the issue and I was told that they would address this issue soon. They even went so far as to extend to me an invitation to send in follow up questions to which I only received a standard form email, totally unacceptable! Well it has been a long time now and Yahoo doesn’t seem to want to address this issue.

After a few months of waiting I asked if it would be helpful if I were to resubmit my client’s site to the directories and paid for re-inclusion. Typically – I got the standard form response once again. With this kind of customer service is it any wonder that Yahoo.com is losing market and search share?

My only hope now is that someone over a Yahoo might read this and become concerned enough about their product to try to improve it. While I can’t reveal the site here, as that would not be appropriate to this forum, I can assure those of you who might read this; the site is obviously an old site and probably one that predates Yahoo itself.

If the Yahoo directories are so flawed that it takes more than 11 years to update the information contained within, what good are they? If these old directories are having a negative effect on my client’s site and have been doing so for more than a decade, I can only suggest that if Yahoo refuses to fix this issue then I would strongly suggest caution to those webmasters who were thinking of including their sites within the Yahoo directories.

It would be cool if someone from Yahoo were to contact me through a private email in this forum and follow up on this issue.

Google VS. Hakia

2007-04-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years we have been hearing more and more regarding Semantic search. As more and more companies try to break this barrier we will undoubtedly see a lot of new beta testing site pop up. For example one of the most recent ones I have heard of, and tried out, is http://www.hakia.com/.

Hakia has released their beta version of “Meaning Based” search engine that is based upon proprietary semantic software. “Meaning based” search, an interesting concept and one that needed checking out so I went over to their site and performed some gambling industry related searches like sportsbook, sports betting and casino. What I received didn’t exactly thrill me.

The things I noticed right off of the bat were the results tended to be based upon having the search queries within the domain name and within the page titles. Also, I noticed a lot of low quality affiliate sites pop up which in my opinion is a step backwards in search.

Using single search phrases or queries was giving fairly standard results so I thought I would type my query in the form of a question so I asked, minus the quotation marks of course, “Which is the best sportsbook?” and again, the results were less than stellar. I received a whole host of sportsbook directory listings and gambling portal sportsbook pages. Seems to me that offering me a bunch of portal site’s opinions on what they think are the best sportsbooks falls a little short of offering me any kind of meaning. Granted, the same search on Google gives me similar results but at least I could find the occasional actual sportsbook within their results.

Bottom line here is that semantic search has a long way to go before it will threaten Google’s share of the search market. I am a firm believer in that the next evolution of search will be in the form of Semantic Search and that when this type of search is perfected it will be closely followed by a break through in true artificial intelligence.

Google + DoubleClick X Performics = Evil

2007-04-18T15:57:00.000-07:00

When Google’s purchase of DoubleClick is finalized will Google do the right thing and close down or sell off the DoubleClick division of Performics? Myself I highly doubt it.

Will Google pass on insider information to their newly acquired SEO firm and give their client base an unfair advantage? Perhaps but I doubt it simply because it would be too easy for the new employees to distribute those secrets.

Does becoming a part of the Google family of services mean that Performics will be getting more opportunities with the larger SEO contracts? Probably… from a salesman’s perspective I would think this would be a great selling feature.

So does the purchase of an SEO company by a search engine constitute evil? Does anybody else smell brimstone?

Online News VS. Search Engines

2007-04-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

Billionaire investor Sam Zell recently bought Tribune Corp. for 8.2 billion. Sorry – let’s give that number the respect it deserves – 8.2 Billion dollars. Seems like a lot of money to be spending on a medium that seems to allegedly lose money with every edition. Mr. Zell claims that the newspaper business is hemorrhaging money, in part, due to the bad deals newspapers negotiated with search engines.

At a speech at Stanford Law School Mr. Zell suggested that if Google wasn’t allowed to “steal” the newspaper’s content for nothing, Google wouldn’t be nearly as profitable. Now I can’t say anything about how much money Google makes off of freely distributed news content but from my perspective, I don’t go to Google to find my news and I suspect that might be the case for others too.

Google does offer a News Alert service that emails snippets of stories to people and those snippets contain links to the full stories. Most webmasters I know go out of their way to get included in the Google Alert system as it can be profitable in terms of traffic. Does this mean that Mr. Sam Zell wants to remove their websites from the Google Alert system? If he does then I can’t see how that would be helpful to the newspaper’s website’s bottom line. Further to that point I guess it is true… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks Mr. Zell and I hope that the 8.2 Billion you dropped on this venture wasn’t your last 8.2 Billion!

Article Syndication - Duplicate Content or Valuable Marketing

2007-04-09T11:05:00.001-07:00

Do the links contained within article syndication carry the same weight as they once did? That is a tough one to answer due to the changing value of article syndication and who you are asking. For site owners who are looking for content to post on their sites so that their readers might get a chance to read some new content, then article syndication remains valuable. For search engines, article syndication is little more than duplicated content that quickly gets regulated to the Supplemental Results indexes.

From the perspective of the writer who syndicated their content the value is two fold.

They get to brand their product or site by putting information on similarly themed sites and in front of readers who are keenly interested in the topic.

The links are still crawled by the search engines regardless of which index they are listed and besides, with duplicated content, it is generally the site with the higher PR that gets credit for the content which means you are getting credited for those links from the higher value site.

The only real question on value here is how much link popularity is derived from links within the Supplemental Results index pages in Google, versus links from their regular indexes. The short answer is “Who Cares!” Seeing as your message is getting posted on other sites and regardless of whether or not Google wants to remain relevant, readers can still click through to your site if they like your message. Syndicate away!

What is SEO?

2007-04-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

SEO stands for search engine optimization (or optimisation depending upon which side of the pond you are on) and when done properly, is nothing more than accurately communicating to the search engines what any given page is about. Granted there are ways to artificially increase the “illusion” of what a page is about but that would go against the notion of “accuracy”.

Think about what each page is about and try to find the best keyword to describe the topic of each page and use those keywords in the TITLE tag.

Again, keeping in mind what the topic of the pages are about, write an accurate description for each page, keeping all hype slogans out, save that for the “on page” copy as search engines don’t care if you think your page is the “best”, “fastest”, “newest” or “cheapest”.

While most of the search engines no longer give a rat’s ass about KEYWORDS, some still do use them so for the ones that still do make sure that you only use words that are actually on your page within the KEYWORD tag.

There are some other things you can do to help convey to the search engines what your site and pages are about such as FORMATTING and LINKING but, if you start with the above mentioned you will be well on your way to accurately communicating with the search engines.

Yahoo to support 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags

2007-04-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

For those of you who do not know that the ODP or the Open Directory Project, can sometimes override the descriptions on your site in the organic search listings.

The reason that this could be bad for your site is that the editors at the ODP don’t take your SEO efforts in to account when they write their descriptions. While a link from the ODP can be good in terms of helping your ranking in the search engines this benefit can also hamper your conversion due to some less than flattering description of your site.

Myself, I have always tried to write decent descriptions that accurately describe what any given page is about so as to help searchers make an informed decision on whether or not to visit my site. To have those efforts thrown out because some search engine decided take a short cut and allow someone who doesn’t represent my site or products write about them has always been a bit of a sore spot within the SEO community.

It only took a few years for some of the search engines to catch on to this complaint and address it, Google being the first with Yahoo was soon following suit. With that little problem addressed it seemed that a similar situation might be happening with old Yahoo Directory listings as well.

Back in late February 2007 the Yahoo search blog posted this information regarding the their own directory Titles and abstracts…

We’re adding support for the Meta tag called ‘NOYDIR’ that will complement the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag, which we already support. If you’re unfamiliar, the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages. While we continue to pull from various sources to provide the best title and abstract for a given page in search results, we realize that webmasters may still want the ability to exclude titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory. So, as promised, we’re
providing support for ‘NOYDIR’ which will recognize the following Meta tags on
your pages:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR"

or (don't forget to add the "<" and ">" to the meta tags)

META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR"

For pages with this tag, we will not use Yahoo! Directory titles or
abstracts for your URL in web search results. This will grant webmasters the ability to participate in the Yahoo! Directory Submit program and benefit from inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory, while maintaining control over URL titles and abstracts in search. This will not have any effect on the Yahoo! Directory Search experience, which will continue to use the Yahoo! Directory and title abstract information.

We are re-indexing content on the web to launch this change, and you should immediately begin to see the changes on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Korea. (Other regions will roll-out in the future.) This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling that is typical of weather updates.

If you have any questions, please refer to our webmaster resources page or visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Thanks!
Priyank GargProduct Manager, Yahoo! Search

Thanks Privank and here is to hoping that this little tag may help fix some issues that I have heard complaints about over the years!

Google Link Tracking

2007-02-06T13:58:00.000-08:00

You know how Google always displayed fewer links to your site than say Yahoo or MSN? Well they are now giving us better information but not on the regular search pages for queries like link:mydomain.com. Now if you want to take a look at how many links Google sees (I don't think they still show us 100% of inbound links) all you need to do is set up a Google Webmaster account, verify the website, and then wait a few days and viola, you get a list of links that Google sees. Very cool.

Move over Google – Quintura is here!

2006-12-08T12:46:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of talk about latent semantic indexing but that is all there has been – talk. Then along comes Quintura.com. Not only does Quintura.com deal with latent semantic indexing but it also shows us how it works.

Go to the site Quintura.com and enter a single search word for any topic you like and watch how it offers many other topics on that search term. Place your mouse over one of the optional keywords that appear that interests you and then watch how it will further offer more options based upon the relationship between the other words. Once you have your cursor placed over any particular keyword, look at the result listings below to see if it offered the most appropriate website to your topic.

Now this system isn’t perfect but it is an exciting beginning for where search technology is going. The search engines we use today are generally based upon mechanical search whereas Quintura.com is based upon contextual search.

What is Contextual search? In effect, with contextual search, all relevant text and other data is automatically categorized and set in context. With mechanical search names of people, names of places, dates, prices and other related topics to the original keyword query are potentially lost to the searcher unless specifically identified within the original search query; now, they are related facts waiting to be exploited from within contextual search results.

The future of search is changing and I say that change is for the better and it is about time.

SEO – SEM Cold Callers

2006-11-16T12:30:00.000-08:00

You know it never ceases to amaze me how these new SEO companies can send out emails offering to raise websites in the search engines without even doing the most basic research first. When I say simple I mean basic research like finding out the domain of the site they are emailing?

Here is a typical example of an email they send out:

“I’ve helped many well-known companies get the highest search engine placement for their website at the lowest cost, and want to do the same for you. If your interested, reply with the website address you want reviewed and how you would like me to contact you with the details.”

How can these people honestly think that they should be trusted to improve anything when they can’t even be trusted to look at the website prior to emailing somebody about their services?

If that were the worst of it that would be bad enough but when you go and review the site that sent you the email, to see if they have the ability to back up that claim, you usually come across some cookie cutter website that lacks any useful information. The most recent offer that came to me came from some site that was made up entirely in Flash.

I am not going to tell you what you need to do in order to successfully sign up new clients but I will suggest this… do some research first!

DOJ + GOP = Morality Police

2006-11-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

As you can see by the dates of my most recent blog, I haven’t been blogging since the DOJ went after BOS (bet on sports). The reason for this has nothing to do with any kind of fear of prosecution for marketing gambling sites. The reason for the lack of the blogging has more to do with being too busy because of the bullshit prohibitionist stance of the GOP. Ever since these latest rounds of attacks by the DOJ of the good ole US of A I have been really busy consulting with worried American businessmen.

Now I do not have a problem with our American cousins enforcing their rules and laws as they are theirs to enforce. However, when their laws interfere with the lives and livelihoods of people who did nothing wrong according to the laws of their own lands, well I do have a problem with that.

Rather than interfere with American citizen rights for which the GOP knows they wouldn’t get away with due to ACLU clout, the GOP chooses to wipe out billions of dollars of global investor income instead. Nice. If what they are really trying to do is protect the US citizens then why make everybody else suffer? The answer is quite simple… because they can.

Damned ODP Interference

2006-07-18T10:50:00.000-07:00

Tired of having the description from the ODP interfering with the on page description in your Google search results for your site? No problem as the good people at Google has put together a new Meta tag for us to use. Simply add the Meta tag of <meta name="robots" content="noodp"> to your <HEAD> content and wait for the GoogleBot to crawl your site once again. You can read more about this over on the Matt Cutts Blog, in case you don´t know who this guy is he is an engineer over at Google.

An eyeful a day keeps the doctor away!

2006-04-13T14:39:00.000-07:00

By Jonathan Hayter

Someone sent me this article and I simply had to post it as I am a firm believer in the words it contains.**Editor**

Staring at women’s breasts is good for men’s health and makes them live longer, a new survey reveals.

Researchers have discovered that a 10-minute ogle at women’s breasts is as healthy as half-an-hour in the gym.

A five-year study of 200 men found that those who enjoyed a longing look at busty beauties had lower blood pressure, less heart disease and slower pulse rates compared to those who did not get their daily eyeful.

Dr Karen Weatherby, who carried out the German study, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well endowed female is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics workout.

Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation.

“There is no question that gazing at breasts makes men healthier.

“Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of a stroke and heart attack in half.

“We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years.”

**Editor**
Something gets extended anyway! But seriously guys “Get tit to stay fit!”

The Link is the Thing!

2006-04-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

Natural linking, what is it and how do I get it? More importantly, do I need it? If you run an Internet web presence that you want others to find in the search engines then the answer to the latter is YES!

What is natural linking? That is an easy question to answer. Natural linking occurs when someone places a link to your site from another site. The reason that someone might link to your site is not really important, the fact that they placed the link is the only thing that matters.

Some of the reasons that someone might place a link to your site or to a page within your website are:

• Your site offers some information that supports a fact or reinforces    a position contained within another site.
• Your site offers some tools or resources that would be helpful to    others.
• Your site contradicts a common misconception that others want use    to validate their own views on that topic.
• Your site represents a controversial viewpoint that others might    want to showcase for their own purposes.
• Your site is just so very cool that others need to be made aware of    it and seeing as my website links to your site, my site must be cool    too!

Regardless of the reasons why someone might be linking to your site, these natural links are very important. Even if someone is linking to your site because they think it is a sad joke and they want others to see how bad your site is, it really doesn’t matter.

Knowing that these types of links are important the next question is, “How do you get people to link to your site?” There are several ways you can get people to link to your site with the easiest being, make a useful site. Easier said then done you are thinking eh?

When you think about it, creating a useful site isn’t that difficult, it just requires time. Time to find helpful tools to share with others, time to find sound advice regarding your site’s topic of interest and time to make your site ooze the “It” factor. The amount of time it will take is solely dependent upon how much effort you want to put in to it.

OK, so you finished your site, now what? How do you let people know that your site is ready to amaze others? There are several ways to let people know about your site. If you have a budget set aside you could set up a PPC campaign that may bring in some traffic. You could join groups or forums that share your interest or even better, that are totally opposite to your site’s message or theme. Perhaps one of the best ways is to write articles that others can use on their sites that are seeded with a few well placed links pointing back to your site.

One of the next big trends that is about to take off is, the “Bartered Link”. Bartered links are where you offer space on your site to host an article written by other webmasters, which contain text links to their sites in exchange for a one way link back to your site. Are bartered links considered to be natural links? If they aren’t then they sure do a fine job of mimicking them.

Regardless of the motivation behind someone linking to your site, even if it is because they think your site is bad or your opinion is wrong, just remember this… the fact that they did is all that truly matters as the link is the thing.

Ahhhhh - Go Google yourself!

2006-03-27T15:54:00.000-08:00

Have you ever put your own name into Google to see what comes up? When most people put their name in Google they are lucky to not have anything pop up unless they are in an online business of some kind. The types of things that most people get might be governmental reports if they have ever gone through any bureaucratic red tape. These types of returns are only as bad as the red tape they were involved in.

For some people the results of Googling their own name could be a picture of some drunken indiscretion at a party. Every once in a while I like to type in the names of people from out of my past to see if what kind of results their names turn up. Rarely do I find any pictures but when I do, they are usually pretty good and potentially profitable but I won’t go into that here.

When I Google my own name I am pretty lucky for the most part as most of the results returned are for articles I have written, sites I am credited for and various other things that I have developed over the year son the Internet. Sometimes, however, my name gets used a keyword that leads to a site that is of a questionable nature. Nothing I can do about that so I don’t even worry about those unless I have to.

The only time I would be concerned about what my name turns up in a Google search is when a prospective contract or employer finds something he/she doesn’t like. Naturally, I can explain everything I have done online over the years and can back it up with copies of the work I have done so for me, I don’t really worry to much. For others though this could present a more significant problem, especially when looking for that new job.

So go ahead – Google yourself to see what comes up before someone else Googles you that could bring you down. Forewarned is forearmed.