Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimization’
Recently, Google webspam and SEO guru Matt Cutts reiterated Google’s position on paid blog entries. Google doesn’t like them. What he was light on explaining was how exactly Google can tell an entry’s been paid for, though his example – Kmart’s recent paid reviews promotion, where the company gave bloggers $500.00 gift cards – was easy enough to find, since some of the bloggers involved stated the nature of the relationship up front. So: good or bad? Cutts’ (and Google’s) position is that paid endorsements fill the Web with unreliable, spammy junk content, and he’s probably right. Unfortunately, the situation is really more complicated than that, because the economics of web marketing are about attention, then cash. Read the rest of this entry »
People often look at keyword research as a simple numbers game, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is not to say that you should ignore raw search traffic – far from it – but that’s not going to give you the whole picture unless you take a close look at the search engine result pages (SERPs) that actually come up for those terms. Even then, it isn’t enough to just inspect the stats of the pages you see in the top ten. What kind of sites are they? Here are some examples of sites that affect SERPs with more than their sheer popularity:
Keyword selection is one of the fundamental elements of any strategic internet marketing program. You need to know what people are looking for and how your business will fit in. The principle is simple. How do you do that? Well, that’s where this core SEO task gets a little more complicated.
Like many people, I look up things on Wikipedia every day. Oh, I don’t always trust what I read, but then again, I’d never make it my sole source for serious research either. The fact that it’s one of my top casual destinations underlines its importance in strategic search engine optimization. Of course Google and Wikipedia are both well aware that Wikipedia is some of the most valuable SEO real estate due to both raw popularity, and Google’s tendency to up-rank Wikipedia pages . . . well, just because. Every SEO analyst has a story of a client who had trouble cracking the top because Google saw fit to chuck an obscure Wikipedia stub up to #1.
One of the things we take very seriously at GILL Media is our duty to represent a client’s business according to their wishes. This is one of the hard rules of our strategic search engine optimization method. It’s a challenge, too, because page content and blog posts are elements of a stream, not static artifacts. They need to be regularly expanded, updated and adapted to traffic fluctuations, ranking changes and other new conditions.
Look ahead if you will – to the future! We’ll all wear silver jumpsuits and drive teardrop-shaped flying cars. These will be polished to a reflective sheen by our robot butlers. That’s cool, but as an SEO guy I have to ask: “SEO is changing every day, so what will I be doing to pay for my flying car and faithful robot butler in say, ten years’ time?”
Read the title. What does it mean? “Vertical marketing†is a response to an increasing trend toward niche searches and finely divided communities. Vertical markets have always existed, of course. Not a lot of people need pelagic hydraulic fluids, for example. (In fact, even though I toured the linked site, I’m still not 100% sure what they are!) Increasingly, natural vertical markets are being joined by niches that have been “verticalized†by the evolving nature of searches and communities. Read the rest of this entry »
Graywolf’s article on the how Google gives bad Wikipedia pages privilege got me thinking. So did Demerzel’s “Future of Google Search Results.” When I’m analyzing the SERPs for a specific keyword I increasingly note that Wikipedia’s hogging the first position, even its doesn’t really have much to say. Youtube’s up there as well. That’s cool for casual searches, but when someone’s looking for serious information, 90% of the time Youtube’s going to be a bit too wacky for the job.
