SEO News Blog

Posted by randfish

This week we’re diving into the hiring game - trying to find the people who will help us make both the free and premium content on the site even more valuable over the weeks and months to come. Jane’s in charge of hiring our new customer service / office manager and Jeff’s doing double-duty, seeking out both a web developer and a GUI designer. We’ve already received one resume that’s so incredibly cool, I’ve just got to share:

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Posted by randfish

I think that sometimes, we in the field of search marketing try to make the concept of ranking more difficult than it really is. True - there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank well for a particular keyword in standard organic results at the engines, you’re really only talking about a few big key components.

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Posted by CredoPaul

NOTE from Rand: This post was contributed by the winner of our landing page competition, Paul Robb. Here’s Paul’s winning page, which drew both surprise and controversy. Paul offered to write two posts on the results of his page and his strategy for persuasive copywriting - this is the first of those posts. Enjoy!

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Posted by randfish

Last week, the New York Times opened up their 13 million document archive and dropped their Times Select program (which allowed access in exchange for a fee). This move was covered extensively in the blogosphere and even influenced other giants in the online publishing world (like Murdoch on the WSJ) to question their own content strategies.

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Many financial and social markets are destroyed by short term opportunism. Because the web is virtually limitless, it is easy to make sales pitches that sound like everyone gains. But that is rarely, if ever, true. Every clean traffic source gets gamed. So do the dirty ones.

A recently launched blog Ponzi Scheme has more holes in it than swiss cheese. What kind of desperate people get in on the 5th tier of a Ponzi Scheme? Does it benefit your credibility to recommend low quality sites or have ads for your site seen on their sites? What type of readers do the low quality sites have, beyond the robotic community? No reason to link out to those sorts of sites, and you can probably use AdSense to buy ad space on their site for about 3 cents a click, if it even has that much value.

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Posted by randfish

Let me just preface this post by saying that I hate management books, business theory books, success coaching and nearly everything that starts with the phrase “The XYZ Habits of Highly Effective…” That said, I got so many recommendations to read Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, that I couldn’t resist. In particular, two people that I trust intensely - Gillian and Avinash Kaushik - said that they too, had a distaste for management theory diatribes, but loved this one. And now that I’ve finished it, I find myself thinking about it almost daily.

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Posted by shor

I’ll admit I sometimes forget certain website addresses.

And sometimes I’ll Google eBay rather than type ‘ebay.com’ into the address bar (apparently I’m not alone, it’s the 3rd most popular search query in the US)

Besides confirming that I’m lazy and have the memory of a goldfish, my point is, wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to type in URLs, especially when we’re outside of the house and have to use our cellphones to connect to the Internet?
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With an ever increasing number of ways for people to share content and an ever increasing number of competing channels the easiest way to estimate the value of a blog post is to look at the people citing it. Citations lead to new readers and subscribers…and more citations. If your posts are well cited it does not take many posts to get thousands of subscribers.

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If you are looking to build links one of the easiest ways to do so is to place yourself inside a conversation that is already wildly spreading. Sites like Techmeme and Del.icio.us show what stories were recently hot, and you can find some bloggers who cited those stories using Technorati and Google Blogsearch. Google has a date based filter on news and recently launched a date based search filter for their regular search results which allows you to find fresh content on any topic. If you follow up on a popular story and contact these people you might find a few easy to acquire high authority links.

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The web has long been rich in social and viral marketing elements. Email this to a friend, social bookmarking, blogging, etc. So many services have popped up that now there is a Social Media Firefox Extension and Andy Hagans is planning his fake review optimization service.

Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die. Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.

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