SEO News Blog

Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

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Posted by rebecca

Since I’m a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it’s redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append “movie” to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).
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Last week Matt Cutts made a post about how to connect your Linux computer to a Wii balance board using Bluetooth. This post happened to make the Digg homepage, however what was really interesting is the way he did it, which has exposed an exploitable hole in Digg.

First off to be clear this post is […]

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Posted by jennita

URL rewrites and 301 redirects… you talk about them, you recommend them, but do you truly understand how they work? Sure, you know that rewriting a URL means that the URL displayed in the browser changes to be more SEO (and user) friendly. And you know that a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. But let’s dig a little deeper, and explain how they work together.
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There was an article on TechCrunch entitled “Jump Into The Stream”

In short, the article is about how the internet appears to be going through its next big shift. It is moving towards becoming a stream of immediate information. The web is being organized by “nowness”

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Do you know what attracts your readers? What headlines they respond to most? Do they respond to pictures? Do they know what your offer is?

No doubt we all agree that testing is a good thing to do. We can see clearly if our ideas are working or not. But a lot of testing is, quite frankly, tedious.

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iProspect recently did a study which showed that the majority of people who respond to graphical ads do so via a latent action other than a click on the ad, like a search for the brand. Any such brand lift or indirect effect of advertising on content sites has generally been ignored by most advertisers because search driven ad networks want search to get credit for that conversion.

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Posted by randfish

Search marketers have a good bit of reading to do today. Personally, my list of top articles to read around the changes (and directional focii) Google brought up yesterday is:

Vanessa Fox’s coverage of Google’s Support for Microformats and Rich Snippets in Search ResultsMatt Cutts on Search Options & Google SquaredBoth SELand’s Live Blogging of Searchology and VentureBeat’s Blow by Blow of Searchology are worthwhile for those seeking to parse exact meanings The Google Webmaster Central Blog’s coverage their Design Refresh of Webmaster Tools

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Posted by randfish

Dear Startup CEOs, CPOs (Chief Product Officers) & Founders,

I know your time is valuable, so I’ll be brief. If you currently have or are in the process of developing a business/marketing plan that includes the phrase “traffic from search engines,” please peruse the following diagram:

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Amazon.com opened up their Kindle publishing program to all bloggers. If you prefer to read blogs on your Kindle you can subscribe to SEO Book for the Kindle at Amazon.com.

Publishers get 60 cents per month per subscriber. It is unlikely that we will get enough Kindle subscribers to notice it as an income stream (as we would need about 50,000 Kindle subscribers for it to be a decent revenue stream), but as such distribution opportunities come about on authoritative domains like Amazon.com, they create a great opportunity for filling up branded organic search results with non-negative authoritative pages. And signing up takes less than 5 minutes.

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