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How to Build Links to Major Ecommerce Sites
2007-12-19 19:30:00
Sometimes it is easy to be drawn headlong into the linkbaiting, blogging and social media school of thought with little regard to the read world. In fact, most websites don’t have blogs and have a user base blissfully unaware of social news websites and bookmarking services. Today I will address linkbuilding from the point of view ...
More About: Ecommerce , Links , Sites , Build , Major

The problem with trying to sell Digg
2007-12-18 11:35:00
Digg is apparently for sale at a price tag of $300 million, around $200 per user given that Digg passed the 1 million user mark in March 2007. Some people are trying to figure out the numbers and work out a value based on revenue but that model is totally impossible. Digg is in a unique ...
More About: Digg , Problem , Sell

The most important site you design is your own
2007-12-17 17:19:00
Designing and optimising client’s websites is the main part of my business and sometimes client work has to take over from blogging and updating our own websites. However the old web design adage that the most important site you ever design is your own is especially true for SEO companies. Design is tough work, as ReadWriteWeb ...
More About: Design , Site

Google might be onto something with Google Knol
2007-12-14 16:37:00
Google Knol is getting a mixed reaction today with some people hating the idea and some people playing it down saying it might never launch. Most of the criticisms come from the fact Google would be both the search engine and the content provider whereas in the past users provide the content and Google indexes it. ...
More About: Google , Google Knol , Some

Is Google?s timing of major updates wrong?
2007-12-13 01:04:00
The Guardian newspaper have today written an article titled Is Google a Grinch or a good guy?, which asks many UK SEO’s (myself included) for their views on the recent Google paid link debate. In my opinion the Google AdWords landing page quality score and PageRank paid link updates were definitely necessary and will only help ...
More About: Updates , Wrong , Major , Timing

Ranking in Google Images is getting harder
2007-12-12 15:46:00
Google Images is a great source of traffic, it can even be a great source of links, but recently the algorithm seems to be getting more complicated. Lets take a look at the image search results for the iPhone for example. Normally I would suggest the following steps to get your image ranking on this page: Call ...
More About: Google , Ranking , Ages

Step 1 of a marketing campaign: Google
2007-12-05 17:01:00
A website called Healthy Toys is one of the hottest search terms today thanks to some clever marketing and mainstream press coverage. Writing about how to stop Christmas toys poisoning your children is always a good way to bring in millions of visitors. The problem is that a search for “healthy toys” doesn’t bring up the ...
More About: Marketing , Google , Campaign , Step

Why Google can get it wrong and still win the search engine war
2007-12-05 16:28:00
Google is so far ahead in the UK that a lot of people have never even heard of Yahoo and MSN Live Search . Sometimes Google doesn’t give the right results and people have to start all over again, the funny thing is that nobody minds starting all over again because it only took 0.08 seconds ...
More About: Google , Search Engine , Engine , Wrong

The 6 Most Marketable SEO Skills
2007-12-05 14:48:00
Offering internet marketing and search engine optimisation services is a competitive marketplace with an ever changing set of challenges to be overcome. Thanks to constant algorithm fluctuations and new innovations the SEO industry is one of the fastest moving in the world. To succeed as a service provider you need to be the ultimate 21st century ...
More About: Skills

Google devalues links from banner ads & Matt Cutts wants to remove Toolbar
2007-12-04 09:58:00
An interesting thread sprung up yesterday allowing people to question top Google rs about the paid links issue. One comment that stuck out for me was Googles comments on whether people need to nofollow links from banner ads and 125×125 square ads: we’ve spent most of our time talking about paying money fortext links or paid posts, because ...
More About: Links , Matt , Banner , Toolbar

SEO by numbers: Where is everybody?
2007-12-04 00:14:00
As controversial service PayPerPost hits 100,000 users today I find myself scratching my head a bit. If 100,000 people have blogs and want to make money online why does ProBlogger only have 35,000 subscribers? If 117,000 people want to make their websites more popular by joining Digital Point why does SEOmoz only have 20,000 subscribers? Why aren’t ...
More About: Numbers , Number , Everybody

Google finally ends the hypocrisy and stops text link adverts on Adwords
2007-12-03 10:38:00
Google has been making a lot of noise this year about stopping the trade in text links but today they seem to have finally made a real stand. A search for “text link ads” displays no Adwords adverts today and the same is true for “text links” and all the related phrases I tried. This is the ...
More About: Google , Hypocrisy , Link , Text

How to Measure Social Media Marketing
2007-11-29 12:24:00
Tracking the success of an organic SEO campaign is quite straightforward for ecommerce sites but the rise of social media marketing is leaving a lot of people scratching their heads and wondering how to track social campaigns. The first task in any campaign has to be to work out the goals. Without goals it is impossible ...
More About: Marketing , Social , Media

Has adding Digg buttons increased the BBC?s traffic?
2007-11-28 18:13:00
The BBC added a few social bookmarking buttons to their website during August allowing users to easily submit BBC content to Digg , Facebook, Reddit, Delicious and StumbleUpon. With such a large site adding social bookmarking buttons it would be surprising if it resulted in a major increase in traffic. After all the BBC has much more ...
More About: Traffic , Buttons

Guide to Creating a Google AdWords Campaign Template
2007-11-28 10:38:00
Google AdWords have today released a new feature which allows My Client Centre account managers to create campaign templates and share them with managed accounts. The Google help centre has some information about the campaign templates, I’ve only created a very basic template but this does look like a very useful feature to speed up the ...
More About: Google , Creating , Google Adwords , Campaign , Adwords

67% Discount Code for Search Marketing Standard
2007-11-28 09:28:00
Search Marketing Standard have kindly offered all SEOptimise readers a promotional discount code to new magazine subscribers. The coupon code is HOLIDAY67 which provides a 67% discount, meaning a 1 year U.S. subscription would cost $4.95 (International - $6.60). “This promotion is for new subscribers and will remain active for two weeks until Dec. 10th. At ...
More About: Search , Code , Discount

How to Use Google News & Google Trends to Drive Traffic
2007-11-27 18:39:00
Google Trends is a hugely valuable resource to see what people are searching for right now on Google. Combine Google Trends with the fact Google pulls news results and blog results right into the search results pages and it is possible to leverage a huge amount of traffic with very little effort. If you are listed in ...
More About: News , Google , Traffic , Drive

The State of the SEO Information Industry
2007-11-21 10:34:00
Finding out about a new topic is quite straightforward nowadays, you simply visit Google and carry out a few searches, read a Wikipedia page and usually get the information you require in less than 10 minutes.When the subject you want to find out about is search engine optimisation the task becomes quite a lot harder. All the sites at the top of the search engines for terms such as SEO and search engine optimisation have been there for quite a long time and, while some deserve to be ranked highly, a lot are simply ranking because they are old sites. A newcomer to the industry will no doubt end up using reciprocal links and submitting to search engines because that's exactly what the highest ranking sites are saying to do. The newcomer has no idea the site hasn't been updated in 5 years.Forums such as Digital Point used to be quite valuable sources of information but valuable contributors no longer see any point in posting good advice when it just gets drowned out by a lot of other...
More About: Information , Industry , State , The State

Studying the Topix site move & wondering why they still sell links
2007-11-19 17:44:00
A few months ago Topix, a site with 50% of its traffic coming from Google, announced they were moving from Topix.net to Topix.com.The Wall Street Journal picked up the story and quite a lot of SEO people no doubt read it so lets see how the move is going so far.A search for "topix" brings up the new site no problems and the .com domain has over a million results indexed so is everything going well? The .net version still has 70,000 results indexed and the .net domain doesn't seem to redirect to the .com, even when I set my user agent to be Google.I'm confused as to why the site would buy a new domain to improve branding and not redirect traffic to the new site. Having 2 different sites is confusing for users and for search engines.Also, why are they selling links using Text Link Ads if they value Google traffic so highly? Do the advertisers on this page know they are paying money for a link with nofollow? Would you buy a tiny footer link with nofollow?-----------------------------...
More About: Links , Site , Studying , Move , Sell

Why you should delete your date based archives
2007-11-15 15:27:00
Building a solid blog that Google wants to rank highly is not easy task to start with but it's made much harder by blog content management systems being designed using every SEO faux pas you can think of apart from Flash.Most people have now figured out the obvious tips such as improving your url structure to include keywords, adding a unique title and meta description to each page and preventing indexing of noise pages such as comment feeds.However lots of bloggers are still falling into a major SEO and usability trap - date based archives. When was the last time you visited a blog and browsed their date based archives? I've certainly never done it. The thing to remember about blogging is that maybe 90% of the content is time sensitive. If you want to read about internet marketing or some new product launch that's great but the information is likely to be out of date in a couple of months. I certainly would never want to look back at something you wrote back in 2006 unless I kne...
More About: Archives , Delete , Hive

Plan for life without Google
2007-11-13 01:19:00
Worrying about Google rankings isn't good for your health and it certainly isn't good for your business. This year Google has probably dished out more penalties towards sneaky webmasters than at any other time in it's short history and yet we still rely on them for traffic every day.Letting a third party company which is totally unaccountable to any government body is like putting your savings into a bank run by somebody you met in a bar. It just doesn't make good business sense.Sure Google says that it has users best interests at heart but what would happen if they banned your perfectly legitimate, never broken any rules website tomorrow. Aside from sending Google an email what could you really do to fix things? Nothing. You can't call them, you can't sue them and they don't have to even justify your complaint with an answer.Imagine if Google starts to lose users and they all switch to MSN or just browse sites recommended by their Facebook friends, where would your site be i...
More About: Life , Plan

10 Ways to Make your Website More Popular
2007-11-09 15:07:00
Everybody who owns a website wants it to be more popular. From the web design team at the New York Times right down to the small retailer trying to expand into ecommerce, popularity is the key to success. Reading and working with popular websites every day can sometimes feel like living in a bubble where everybody has good search engine rankings and sites are all beautiful so it's nice sometimes to look at how “normal” websites can improve their popularity.Invest in a good design – while people like Ling might think design isn't everything it is one of the key aspects a site can use to build their visitors trust so you need to get it right.Learn about usabilty – having the best designed website in the world is useless if normal people can't use it. Sit behind some of your non internet savvy relatives and friends and watch them navigate your site and make purchases from your store. If they struggle with things you need to improve your usabilty.Create a useful website – I...
More About: Website , Popular , Make , Pula

5 Web Design Elements to Earn Your Visitors Trust
2007-11-07 18:09:00
Giving your visitors a feeling of trust when they first load up your website is a hugely important and often overlooked aspect of web design. Some sites look trustworthy and some don't but it's not until we examine the designs a bit more deeply that the key elements that help to build a visitors trust become clear.Starting at the top of the page it is important to have a unique logo. Right from large multinational companies down to humble bloggers, if you don't have a trustworthy and striking logo you probably won't get my business or my subscription. The examples below show two high profile bloggers that spent time and money to get the right logo early on and it has paid dividends in terms of trust and subscribers.Next on the list and an element often overlooked by bloggers and large corporations alike is the about page, demonstrated very well by Digg in the screenshot below. An about page needs to have photos, good formatting and most importantly some easy to understand text e...
More About: Web Design , Design , Elements , Earn , Trust

Links that send traffic
2007-11-05 13:03:00
Most websites that rank highly in Google are old and well established sites that haven't gained any new links for months or even years. These websites receive a huge amount of search traffic from Google without producing anything remarkable thanks to the trust Google places on old sites.Compare this to the thousands of new websites with generous budgets for viral marketing & content creation that don't rank anywhere. It's clear that the gap between old and new is too large for Google to ignore for much longer. The search results are stale and out of date with social media becoming the best way to find new content.New sites are being linked from social news sites and blogs every day with thousands of visitors arriving from the most popular links. Older sites only get their traffic from Google and never do anything newsworthy or interesting. Why should they continue to get traffic?Why is an old site automatically better than a new site? How long will this situation keep going?-...
More About: Traffic , Links , Send

Make your top pages work for you
2007-11-01 13:15:00
One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to look at it through the eyes of a searcher.Take a look at the top 10 pages on your site in terms of search traffic from Google and see what keywords people are using to find those pages. Do a search for those keywords yourself, what do you see?Is your site number one? Does your title look right? How about the snippet? There is always room to make your title or snippet more "click able" and attractive to searchers, getting a 20% higher click through rate on your top 10 pages can have a huge effect on traffic.Taking this a step further you can use a keyword tool to see what other phrases related to your top pages people search for and alter your title tags to include those phrases. Targeting two terms is always better than one.Sometimes these small tips can have a huge effect.---------------------------------- ---------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Work , Make , Pages , Ages

New Google AdWords Feature: Number/Date Formatting
2007-10-31 11:38:00
Google AdWords seems to be rolling out some useful features recently, last week it was the snapshot date range comparison and today's is the option to change number, date and time formatting.This is a great addition for UK users to avoid any confusion between US and UK date formats.Here's the Google AdWords account alert (click for full-size/readable image):---------------------------------- ---------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Google , Feature , Google Adwords , Adwords , Number

Google Universal Search Confuses SEO Inc with SEOmoz!
2007-10-31 11:08:00
Or at least it confused me anyway, while searching for SEO on Google today I noticed the following Google News universal search result listed:Having a quick glance at the image and headline I assumed the story was about SEO Inc, but clicking on the headline shows that the story CEO Puts fresh face on SEO article, from the Seattle Times, which is infact about SEOmoz instead!What is happening is that there are actually two news stories, the image links to this article about SEO Inc on Earthtimes.org, with the headline pointing to the Seattle Times story. I'm sure a lot of people have just assumed there is only one story displayed rather than two. Has anyone else found this confusing?------------------------------- ------------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Search , Universal , Univers

Why Web Hosting Affects SEO
2007-10-30 11:44:00
Chris Winfield writes an interesting post about why you need good hosting over at Search Engine Land about how robust hosting helps you in the event of a social media traffic surge. This is of course very valuable but the importance of good hosting extends much further than simply keeping your site running under a traffic surge.When a website suffers hosting issues during a Google crawl it can have drastic effects on traffic for weeks afterwards. The problem is particularly striking for very large sites that attract a lot of long tail traffic as site owners often find it hard to figure out why their traffic has dropped.Imagine Google spiders your 100,000 page site and one day finds 10,000 pages are not working. Those pages will drop from the index until Google crawls them successfully again. If the dropped pages had good rankings each might send 1 visitor per day - suddenly you have lose 10,000 unique visitors per day from your site even though your main keywords are still ranking h...
More About: Hosting , Web Hosting

What would you like to read next week on SEOptimise
2007-10-26 18:33:00
The SEOptimise blog has increased in readership quite a lot recently and we want to make sure it keeps churning out interesting content.Next week we want to post about the subjects that matter most to you so if you have a SEO question that you just can't find the answer to or if you want to know how to knock your competitors off the top spot for a particular query post a comment below and we will do our best to cover it.-------------------------------------- -----Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Read , Week

Don't rely on one type of link for PageRank
2007-10-25 12:14:00
The furore surrounding yesterdays PR downgrades doesn't seem to be dying down yet. I've managed to steer well clear of Digital Point so have happily missed most of the discussion so far.The sites that lost PR include a lot of big names that have not lost rankings in Google so most people won't really care. However a loss of PR does make you a bit worried in case a ranking penalty is around the corner.Most sites that lost PR are probably just the victim of Google bringing their scores back down to where they should be. Having adjusted for paid links and devalued links across site networks there must be a huge impact on PR calculations.This update really brings home to me that websites should have as many links as possible from as many different sources as possible. Relying on one type of link is never a very good idea.------------------------------------ -------Best of the Web Promo Code - 15% discount code for November 2007, plus a chance to win $10,000!
More About: Pagerank , Link , Type , Ager , Gera