Recently in Search Engine Optimization Category
Recently, I’ve heard about startups that want to automate enterprise SEO for large websites. I suppose they theorize that if Google, Bing and the other search engines can gather Internet content, categorize it and rank it, then it’s possible to write software that will recast your content as a perfect website. I do not believe enterprise SEO software can optimize a complex website without large amounts of critical thinking or decision making from real people who are familiar with your business and have a deep knowledge of SEO. The research, evaluation, recommendations necessary for good SEO are fraught with endless
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Continue reading Enterprise SEO Automation
On Sunday, Rand Fishkin posted a great heads-up piece about how personalized search, branding, and leveraging your current rankings can make for an interesting marketing strategy. His mention of the 2007 Pontiac commercial brought up a particularly interesting idea. In the commercial, the viewer is instructed to “Google” Pontiac as opposed to going to a website or calling a toll-free number. This commercial was one of the first to demonstrate the power and universal influence of search. By having your consumer access your site through a keyword search you increase your sites traffic strength, branding, and likelihood of getting personalized
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Continue reading Personalized Search Strategies & Video Games
It appears that Google’s new infrastructure, code named Google Caffeine, is rolling-out live to data centers. Why is this important? Expect to see ranking changes. Don’t freak-out. We’re not talking 2012 or Alderaan upheaval here. That said, expect disturbances in the force. While most well and legitimately optimized websites should remain unscathed, it’s likely that others could experience some organic ranking unpleasantness. What is Caffeine? Caffeine is an infrastructure change. Think of it like upgrading from XP to Vista or from Vista to Windows 7 or from Snow Leopard to Windows 7. Google seems to make infrastructure changes every three
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Continue reading Google Caffeine - Don't Let It Keep You Awake at Night
Check out Portent Interactive’s own Evan Fishkin at PubCon 2009 in Las Vegas, NV. Evan’s head was shaved by Google’s Matt Cutts due to a lost bet. Evan bet Matt that no one would submit a spam site to Google’s interactive site review. Clearly, someone did. “You can take my hair, but you can never take my link juice!”
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Continue reading Evan Fishkin's PubCon 2009 Head Shaving by Matt Cutts
Our good friends over at Hanapin Marketing - you know, the folks who run the PPC Hero blog - are running a pretty amazing SEM Sweepstakes right now. They have some great prizes available, including: (3) Paid Subscriptions to SEOMoz (1) 3-Month Subscription to ClickEquations (a neat bid management tool that we use at Portent) (100) Various Internet Marketing Tomes (1) Full PPC or SEO Audit by the Hanapin Marketing Team (worth $4,000) What are you waiting for? Go sign up! They’ll start randomly selecting winners on October 12th, 2009.
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Continue reading Shout-Out: Hanapin Marketing's $16,000 SEM Sweepstakes
Early this year Google made a change to their organic rankings algorithm. Named Vince’s Change, after the engineer who worked on it, the search marketing industry describes it as favoring brands. Here is what Google’s Matt Cutts had to say about Vince’s Change in March. A few things that Matt says about Vince’s change caught my ears. It affects a small number of queries People made 9.1 billion searches on Google during June of 2009. That’s 9,100,000,000 searches. Let’s say Vince’s Change impacts 5% of searches. Five percent is 455,000,000 or 455 million searches. That does not seem like
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Continue reading Is This How Vince's Change Works?
On June 2, 2009 Google reversed itself when it announced that the nofollow attribute (rel="nofollow") can no longer be used to redirect PageRank. Google’s Matt Cutts stated that nofollow tags would now evaporate PageRank. This is a major policy change by Google’s, one that impact advanced search engine optimization. I want to discuss What is PageRank? What is a nofollow link? The old Google behavior The new Google behavior SEO Options and recommendations What is PageRank? PageRank,called link juice by some, is a signal created by and measured by search engine results ranking algorithms. This is the foundation of Google’s
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I hate when good people suffer from bad SEO: Us Seattleites love the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Tomorrow will be the last print edition. Here, in the Emerald City, we already knew the venerable newspaper was to become an online only publication. And as much as we hate to say goodbye to the broadsheets, we want the online edition to succeed. That’s why this story hurts. I hope they fix it quickly. Today The Seattle PI made the URL switch from seattlepi.nwsource.com/ to seattlepi.com. Unfortunately they made a critical mistake. Instead of redirecting from the old domain to the new domain by
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Continue reading Seattle SEO Dysfunction at the PI
I just wrote a skeptical piece about the search engines’ new rel=canonical standard. I am, after all, a skeptic. But, if you’re a large publication with a massive site, you’ve got canonicalization problems, and this could be the solution you’ve been looking for. In a nutshell: You can use rel=canonical in the HEAD element of pages you don’t want indexed, and search engines will list the URL you indicate, instead. No guarantees on whether this will actually help with search engine optimization, but given how difficult it is to clean up these kinds of problems on larger sites, it’s worth
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Continue reading Calling All Publications: Rel=canonical Is Worth A Look
Are long tail keywords dying? I’m just asking? I started using long tail keyword strategies well before Chris Anderson’s book arrived on the scene. Back then I called them embedded keywords. And yes, for the sarcastic readers, this was long before the Iraq war too. I coined this phrase because a more popular keyword was embedded into the longer search query. Fast forward to the present. Each year it seems a little more difficult to crack into the top rankings for long tail keywords. The traffic doesn’t appear as strong either. I have a few ideas about this: The Internet
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Continue reading Are Long Tail Keywords Dead?
