The Month After
Forgive me blog for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last post. So much has happened that is blog worthy and SEO related.
October 1st I found myself in Seattle, sitting in rapt awe as Rand Fishkin explained SEO gospel.
SEOMoz’s SEO training was awesome. Now, I’m a newbie, so please remember that I see things from that perspective, but I was amazed. I think my head was going to explode. The “training” could better be termed “The State of Search 2007”. Rand pretty much started at the beginning and explained the what, how and why of SEO.
It was great!
More “expert” people might say that it was to basic, but it was exactly what I needed.
I came away with two key things:
1) A Filter. There is so much crap information online about SEO. It VERY difficult to decide what is and what isn’t: useful, accurate and unbiased SEO information.
Rand gave a exact view of where the industry came from and where it is now. Based on that information it is easy to see and filter out bad / outdated information.
2) I learned that I think to small. I had a bunch of little questions that I wanted to learn the answers to. What I learned instead what that I wasn’t even thinking in the right scale. The minutia that I was worried about was so irrelevant that it didn’t even matter. Real SEO’s are playing a much bigger game.
I think more than anything the training was a mindset changing experience. It took a couple days to let everything sink in and recalibrate my thinking.
The most exciting part… I found out that I am at least headed in the right direction with my own projects. That was encouraging.
Now on to bigger and better things!
PS: Thanks Rand! You rock!
Posted: November 6, 2007 | Under: Personal | Leave a Comment
Some Good Reading - Top 25 SEO Blogs
DailyBlogTips.com recently posted a list of the Top 25 SEO Blogs.
“There are many ‘Top SEO Blogs’ lists around the web, but most of them are based on the preferences of the author.
The Top 25 SEO Blogs list, instead, ranks the blogs according to their Google Pagerank, Alexa rank, number of Bloglines subscribers and Technorati authority. Each factor has a score from 0 to 10, and the maximum score for each blog is 40.”
Aside from various ranking factors, these blogs are from some of the top SEO experts in the sector. In an industry where getting honest, accurate and up to date information is difficult; these sites are cutting edge. Good stuff for your news reader.
And if that is not enough, TopRankBlog.com has a “BigList” of SEO Blogs.
Posted: September 3, 2007 | Under: SEO | Leave a Comment
Effects of Bad Outbound Links
One of Rand Fishkin’s posts at SEOMoz.org, discussing some issues about Google with Matt Cutts, got me thinking.
A week ago, one of the sites I was working on promoting suddenly dropped in rank. It was rather… annoying, since things were just starting to get rolling. I couldn’t really figure out why. I had been out getting inbound links for the site. Why would it suddenly DROP, if inbound links were supposed to be GOOD for a site.
In Rand’s post, one of the issues discussed was the effects of bad outbound links. The question revolved around the usefulness of generic web directories. Including the ones designed just to help webmasters increase their rank and relevance.
Matt’s statement was that: Google still feels that directories are valuable. Even ones that are generally built for SEO purposes. Google treats all directories the same. If their authority/PageRank is high and content relevant, they can still pass a lot of link value.
But here is the kicker. Rand: “Directories (and all websites) that link out need to be very, very careful of who they link to, as this is a big way that Google’s algorithmically identifying and discounting paid and other types of links they don’t want to count.”.
Basiclly, if a site or directory is linking to lots of low quality or spammy sites, Google will consider that directory or site less authoritative. IE: Sites listed there get dinged. So, with my drop in rankings, I must have listed my site in a directory that Google considers “spammy”.
Bummer.
Directories that have an editorial process and keep those spammy sites out, can better maintain their level of authority with Google. So I guess you really have to watch WHERE your site gets listed.
Posted: August 30, 2007 | Under: SEO | Leave a Comment
Hitwise Demonstration
Unbeknown to me, our company was recently contacted by Hitwise. They arranged with one of our division managers to do a presentation. I got invited as an afterthought, but it gave me opportunity to sit though a one of their presentations. I guess it’s always good to bring “the guy who works on the website” and who “does that optimization thing” to something internet related.
If you don’t know, Hitwise is a “online competitive intelligence service”. Which when translated into English means, they know a lot about who is visiting what on the internet. This gives them the ability to profile market sectors, consumer behavior and demographics. From a corporate point of view it lets you get a look at what your competitors are doing, how you match up and what you are missing.
The entire presentation is tailored to your company and as you go along they show you live market data. Looking at it from a sales point of view, our presenter, Eric, adapted the presentation very well to what we were interested in. Our company doesn’t describe itself very well, so he wasn’t completely sure what we did at the beginning.
It was interesting to see where our company “ranked” in our sector. I think it was somewhat of a wake up call to the managers. I was surprised to see how much Hitwise knew about our consumers and competitors. If there was “big brother” on the internet, it would be Hitwise, they know way too much.
Included with their information, they had a lot of SEO related data. They had relevant keyword data for our sector, they knew which keywords our competitors were using, and which ones were driving traffic to them. In addition they have the ability to show you which keywords you are targeting well, which ones you are weak on (IE: do more SEO work with these) and which ones we were missing (long tail data).
All in all, they have an amazing amount of useful information. But it also comes with a corporate price tag that most people consider a yearly salary.
Posted: August 29, 2007 | Under: Keyword Research | Leave a Comment
Remove Wikipedia from the Organic Listings
Recently Squidoo got hit with the Google authority whacking stick. They were “over ranking” for various terms and Google decided that they should be given less relevance in the search results. And of course as a result they were beaten down in the Google serps. So from Google’s point of view, when a website starts unduly influencing the search engine results, you adjust them so they fall back in line.
What I want to know is what about Wikipedia?!
Wikipedia is literally dominating search rankings across the board, and in more categories than any other single organization. Please understand, I am a Wikipedia fan. I think what they have built is absolutely amazing. They are the role model for what mass collaboration can do. And it’s a great resource. But it’s really grown out of control in the search engine results. They literally show up for everything now (rank position #7 in Google, 4 in Yahoo, 11 & 12 in MSN for “everything”).
The have so much authority that they can rank for whatever they want. And that’s fine and great. But given their size, isn’t it time to start treating them as a special case? Why doesn’t Google just make a special entry at the top of the search results for Wikipedia (like local search results)? They almost always show up anyway. Just add a line at the top of the page: Wikipedia has this to say about everything and they know it all.
Then…
Take them out of the organic listings completely!!!
By giving them their own special listing, if people are looking for more information they can visit Wikipedia. Everyone knows that Wikipedia is a good informational resource. But when they want to buy something why should Wikipedia show up in the search results? By taking Wikipedia out of the normal search engine results, the other people who are actually relevant to what the searcher is looking for are there where they belong.
And incase you were wondering, the Answer to the Ultimate Question about Life, the Universe, and Everything, is 42.
Posted: August 18, 2007 | Under: Articles | 12 Comments