SEO

NOFOLLOW CSS Class - fake or new way to rip of link buyers?

Marketing Fan — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:28:09 +0200

Years after the NOFOLLOW tag was introduced as a publicly visible tag for links to be ignored

there’s a post about an internal NOFOLLOW class that only Google is able to interpret – per site.

According to this blog post Google allows you to add a NOFOLLOW Cass class to your webmaster console and tell google (in secret) that a block that might be labelled “white-navigation-links” are in fact sold links and that Google should ignore them.

Well, as of today I haven’t seen that “No Follow Class” option in any of the webmaster console accounts I manage for my own stuff and clients.

What about you?

Primer on Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing

Marketing Fan — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:58:10 +0100

Introduction.

Search Engine Optimisation - SEO - is the term applied to the most common method to ensure the effective internet marketing of your website. Having produced a website you’ll obviously want people to visit it. Whether it’s because you want to inform people about something for entirely altruistic reasons or sell them something; if no one knows your website’s out there - how can they visit it? Whilst there are various ways you could set about publicising your website, Search Engine Optimisation is by far the most cost effective and probably the easiest way to market a website on the internet.

What does Search Engine Optimisation do?

Quite simply SEO optimises the possibility of your website being on the first few, if not the first one or two, pages of websites returned by a query entered into a search engine. In essence this means ensuring that when anyone enters a query into a search engine and that query relates to something in your website - the search engine considers your website to be an ‘important’ one on that queries subject matter. In so doing the search engine will rank, or position, your websites URL (Universal Resource Locator or website address) high up in the list of websites it returns. Some SEO techniques can be employed by website owners themselves or you can hire someone to do a truly professional search engine optimisation for you. The following provides an outline of some of the things involved in producing a website that is ‘search engine optimised’.

Linking with other websites.

One of the many different techniques that can be employed in Search Engine Optimisation is premised on the following point. Search engines think that a website that has lots of links to it from other websites ‘must’ be an important/popular one. So, if you enter into reciprocal arrangements with other websites - they will have links meaning that your website is in effect being marketed over the internet by another. The more important/bigger/cooler the other websites with your link on it are - the better the linking will work for you as an internet marketing tool.

Listing your websites URL with search engines.

The idea of giving search engines some information about your website, in order to help it find your website in response to a search engine query, might seem totally obvious. However, the process can be time consuming and subsequently many website owners haven’t done so. Part of the problem is different search engines carry out their searches according to varying criteria, which further complicates the process. For a relatively small amount of money it can be a good idea to pay a ‘submission agent’ to do this task for you. They will often register your website with up to 100 search engines, some of which you’ll probably be unaware that they even exist.

Intelligent URLs.

Improving your websites Search Engine Optimisation by using intelligent URLs is another obvious and relatively easy task to carry out. For example; if someone has a website - fruit.com - that is to do with - yes that’s correct fruit! Which would be the more ‘intelligent’ URL for a page that is all about oranges: www.fruit.com/page4.html - OR - www.fruit.com/oranges.html
ie. Make webpage URLs relevant to the topic of the page.

Meta tags.

The intelligent use of meta tags in a webpage can be a very powerful method of ensuring your website is optimised in terms of search engine rankings. Along with ‘meta tags’ - is the appropriate use of the ‘title’ element of a webpage. The ‘title’ element works similarly to the idea of ‘intelligent URLs’. ie. Rather than giving a webpage a title of, say, Page 4 - make it appropriate to the content of the page, eg. Use the page title 'Oranges' - for a website about different fruits. Meta tags are analogous to ‘taglines’ in an advertising campaign. Along with the ‘title’ of a webpage search engines use meta tag descriptions and, to a lesser extent, keywords as a quick reference point for what’s inside a webpage. Using terms that you anticipate people will be searching the internet for in meta tag description and keywords will greatly improve the search engine ranking of your website. An important point here, in terms of internet marketing, is to make sure your meta tag description reflects the ‘title’ element that you have given the webpage. Don’t forget as well that something as simple as thoughtfully using the ‘alt’ attribute in an ‘img’ element will also help search engines to find website.

And finally …..

To increase the chances of people bookmarking and returning to your website; having optimised it you’ll need to keep people interested in the content of your web pages. Poorly written material in your website will inevitably mean readers will doubt the validity and veracity of it, or worse quickly become bored by it. Hiring a professional writer to either edit or write text and articles for you is to be highly recommended.

The SEO consultant - a job / process description - a bit of a rant

Marketing Fan — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:23:47 +0200

Now when I was in New York City last month for the SES I met, among a ton of other friends, partners and clients – Avi, a New Yorkian SEO ...

And you know what’s best about meeting good ole’ friends at those events? Yeah, meeting them, having booze and getting introduced to THEIR friends… it’s about networking and actually the non-plus-ultra is if your friends actually do the “elevator pitch” for you, so all you have to do is stand there are smile, hand out some cards and then get back to those folks actually :-)

Shimon Sandler was introduced to me, and while I didn’t recall the name I found that this is actually a really respected SEO consultant in the scene … well- in fact I read on his blog and a ton of this comments eg on Jim Boykin’s link building blog.

One of Shimon’s interesting posts on his blog is that Job-Definition of what an SEO actually does… I love those posts (just like Todd/Stuntdubl also ALWAYS releases those posts where I just think RESOURCE... it’s a RESOURCE... man, it’s great and I’ll be back)

You know when I look at Shimons definition of what an SEO consultant does I actually have to remind myself to finally revamp, rewrite and (hell) get rid of the typos in the copy of my own SEO company site – and yes sure – I want to sync the content in AT LEAST two languages english and german, after all that’s one of my USPs here… and I even got some spain and italian domains for Cemper.Com as well last week …

Shimons’ definition will serve me well as a blueprint, an information architecture for my new copy… 16 points that describe the basis SEO process… very nice..

and best of all, Shimon even gives away a “standard proposal” he sends out to his clients, including specifications for deliverables and EVEN the charging model … he starts with a retainer fee of $2000 for his services, that’s 20 hours work … but still charges what is above that.. I think that’s pretty cool to buy… after all that’s just 4-5 hours a week … half a day… I bet he spends HALF of that already for communication and reporting on some clients…

(hint hint hint to all clients and managers – let your people work :-)

What I’m missing there is some detailled spec on WHAT/WHEN Shimon reports on his link building, link buys, etc… my impression in general is that link building is a bit under-sized in the whole post – after all links are 95% of the game, once you made sure in the first month that the site-structure and content does not suck as it usually does in the beginning when an “agency” created that nice ALL-FLASH loaded site…

But where do these clients come from? ... hehe.. Shimon is a nice guy… giving away a “sales blueprint” with some sort of checklists to ask prospective clients is definately worth a read…

The “questions for SEO clients” are even a bit sophisticated… assuming you KNOW you have an SEO client… you know which question saved me HUNDREDS OF WASTED hours over the last 3 years?

christoph to a prospective SEO client that calls him up wrote:

Nice site you got, promoting all your products, services, etc. blabla

So – what would it do in the bottom line for your business when you get from NOWHERE to number1 in Google? do you know much you actually make per sale? and how much can you spend to increase the number of sales?

Oh – you don’t know?

Frankly, I met/got called up by so many folks that do “internet marketing” just for some sort of “branding value” or their ego to be up in ranks that they have NO CLUE if they can spend 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 EUR per time interval… well – that’s where I usually end the call… sorry – but people that got no idea on their spends usually have no idea on their goals, or just don’t care… neither of these is a reason to do business…

But anyway, you know it’s REALLY funny – bumping into friends on conferences is one thing, but getting to know the next “indirection” of the network just by chance is in fact the MAJOR reason for me to go to these conferences and to to spend $350+ a night for that sneazy little room in the hilton… Staying as close as possible to the even gives you those extra 15 minutes AT LEAST twice a day where you can meet up with a lot more people that if you would stay ANYWHERE...

Too bad I’ll miss out on the SMX in June and the SES In August – but I’ll then have my studies and master’s finished (be sure to checkout the online survey !)

After this bit longer break I’ll do these

- DrupalCon in Barcelona (September) – NICE weather :-)

- SMX social media special (October) in New York City again, YEAH – rocks

- WMW in Las Vegas (the classic in November)

and then maybe even some SES in chicago… or I might just hang out with my friends there… not sure

Then I’ll sing – “I just can’t get enough…” :-D

SEO Stars need no RSS

Marketing Fan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:26:04 +0100

Today Rand posted about his experience in reorganizing his Firefox bookmarks…

well, while I don’t believe that’s worth a post or even worth a digg it’s worth reading in some detail to find some cool new sites or tools … and a couple of SeoMoz-Members found the post pretty cool… so it’s worth it I guess.

But hey, I just found some links to his favorite (top) blogs, not the really cool secret SEO tools or articles he uses for daily work… drawing his line at the “competitive advantage” not listing public tools he uses… hmmm – too bad …

but wait – some bookmarklets where there, actually pretty similar to those few bookmarklets that Michael posted a few hours earlier …

This small list of bookmarklets makes me think that either

a) those guys don’t want to give away the REAL cool secret bookmarklets (hey – indexing checked only on Google? NO check for supplemental counts across data centers, no comparision of cached pages per data center…) ...

or b) both Michael and Rand are really looking at SEO and search engines (especially Google) in a very different way…

And hey, no single bookmarklet for Jim’s great Top10 tool? do you guys lookup whois dates for ranking sites up by hand?

and then it hit me like a hammer:

Links to Blogs…

Yep – Rand confirmed he didn’t get into RSS so far … which is pretty straightforward yet coolish statement … (did I hear foolish?)

It’s interesting to read that even top-techie guys and industry leaders like Rand did not yet adopt RSS ... I would have never expected THAT. you learn a bit every day.

Among some other funny responses I found this

EGOL wrote:

lol… even old farts like me use RSS

Nothing further to add :-)

Brad's video on organic search vs. PPC, long tail and conversion testing

Marketing Fan — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:17:54 +0200

Brad Fallon has put up a new video that deals with the advantages of organic search optimization vs. pay per click traffic.

Obviously this is a teaser campaing for one of his new (info?) products as it’s hosted on convertlinks.com (which domain just went 2+ years old – links will start to work).

Some topics or findings he touches:

get 2 SERP entries for 70% probability of click-thru
demographics show: highschool kids only click 33% on organic search, so PPC is good for that target group… higher educated and therefore those with buying power people click 55-65% on organic results… so if you are selling to those you know what do improve :-)
then he goes a bit into detail on the long tail keyword phrases, low hanging fruits or just 3+ word keyword search phrases that convert much better and how to target them

conversion testing after around 16 min is another topic- some nice samples about security logos in the wrong place impacting conversion negative were quite interesting… that part is really worth watching

that first video is here

Then there’s a 2nd video I didn’t watch in full as it again had a pretty slow start, but it later on at minute 13 or so talks about LSI or latent semantic indexing which is a technology search engines use today…

if you every wanted to understand what LSI is, they have some nice, simple samples in there… GO SEE IT!

so the second video is here

After the videos they send you to a signup page for their autoresponder – and well I signed up again… I get so many unqualified spam these days that one or two single targetted sales mails really don’t make a difference … I thank them for putting me on a list that targets my needs :-) and of course I use a qualified email that I can anytime – like “brad-fallons-new-video@mydomain.com” ... hehe

Google outranked me for my name

Marketing Fan — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 01:59:06 +0200

I just noticed that Google outranked me for my name “Christoph C. Cemper” with 2 pages on the Google COOP directory

so my prev #1 in my oldest tech weblog at http://weblog.cemper.com is only #3 :-)

gee – and all that with 2 sitewides from this marketingfan blog as well as weblog.cemper.com – both NOT using the anchor text…

Just another proof that a max trusted domain allows ANY thing to rank…

[via Christoph C. Cemper – Google-Suche]:

Also notice that my googlepages page is neither indexed nor ranks for anything – altough it has the same minimum linkage.

The Top 16 SEO research papers

Marketing Fan — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 03:56:39 +0200

Top SEO research papers

There’s way too much speculation on the web about how search engines work. Years ago the scientific community already created and documented the concepts that people are assuming things about today. All you have to do is READ

So here’s a list of my favorite papers – including those newer ones “TO.READ (in full detail)” :-)

The classics

the original PageRank paper

Combating Web Spam with TrustRank

Topic-Sensitive PageRank

Topic-Sensitive PageRank: A Context-Sensitive Ranking Algorithm

Block Level Link Analysis [PDF by MSN

Hilltop – search based on expert documents

Convergence of PageRank and HITS Algorithms

Using Rank Propagation and Probabilistic Counting for Link-Based Spam Detection

Generalizing PageRank: Damping Functions for Link-Based Ranking Algorithms

Undue Influence: Eliminating the Impact of Link Plagiarism on Web Search Rankings

Site Level Noise removal

SpamRank

I am still missing those on LSI ( latent semantic indexing ) as well as a couple of papers I read about 2 yrs ago about the link dampening… hmmm

TO.READ

Propagating Trust and Distrust to Demote Web Spam

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment

Lexical and Semantic Clustering by Web Links

MSN Antispam detection – affiliate link patterns

Pagerank Revisited

Well, not bad – one could spend a few days reading all these papers…

Paris hilton is back

Marketing Fan — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 10:35:01 +0200

when I rambled about the private porno released by Paris Hilton back in 2003 I found it really funny to see how a previously rather uninteresting, unattractive girl was making herself famous by quite objectable manners…

However the last days I found a ton of traffic for Paris hilton sex tapes loaded on my weblog, even taking it down for 2 days (because I had the outage on the weekend and no reasonable alert mechanism in Drupal mysql connect – until yesterday)

This morning Google Sitemaps showed me that keywords that I’d never track or would optimize for, show up with pretty high rankings

paris sex tape 43 paris hilton sex tapes 35 paris hilton sex 47 paris hilton sex video 47 paris hilton video 76 paris hilton sex tape 36

I think I need to signup for a Paris hilton sex tape download affiliate program and sell this traffic to those people that ship her tape, shouldn’t I?

Or I could create a paris hilton fan site and power it with those hits…

however – traffic for these words is enormous, so I’m better off using it today :-)

Another funny result:

matt cutts 17

my blog ranking #17 for Matt Cutts – well, cannot confirm that from my location here, but US people might see it there :-)

Not sure how I could monetize THAT ranking – your suggestions are welcome :-)

How to get the top 5 Google Positions for 200$ once

Marketing Fan — Fri, 19 May 2006 13:28:46 +0200

Just today I came across a funny post on a freelancer portal where one wants to hire SEO services to get into the top 5 positions on Google.

- he lists 14 terms to rank in the Top5
- some terms are single keywords terms
- some terms are so generic they have a competition of 34 million !!

Quote:

require urgent help in TOP 5 POSITIONS for Google, your techniques must be ethical and within all of Google's guidelines, once you have achieved the results we will then pay you for your work.

We are happy to deposit the funds using escrow, we will also pay a $20 per month maintenance fee to maintain the positions as an ongoing contract.

Hehe... this is funny... and he already has 10 people bidding from $100 to $300 for that work... this is amazing... maybe I missed something, but I guess I will put up some RFPs similar to that one and see what people will do for $200 ...

Of course with the term "once you have achieved the results we will then pay you for your work." this should be a nobrainer...

Can YOU achieve top5 in Google for $200 for 34mio competition, and keep those ranks for $20 per month...

Your thoughts?