Three patents granted today to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all describe how each of the search engines might take a close look at page addresses, or URLs on dynamic web sites.
I wrote about the patent from Microsoft back when it had just been published as a pending patent application, in Microsoft Creating Rules for Canonical [...]
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Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo Patents on Interpreting Dynamic Page URLs
It’s bad enough when vendors offer real estate SEO services and/or advice that isn’t worth a dime … but what about when the national organization that’s supposed to support real estate agents starts spreading around misinformation to its members?
The National Association of REALTORS® offered up some SEO tips in its official magazine last month via an article titled “6 Weeks to Better Search Engine Results.”
I like the idea behind the article — simplifying some of the low-hanging SEO fruit into tasks that can be worked on one week at a time. Good idea. But some of the specific advice is … well … not so hot. Frankly, some of it just exacerbates the same problems that have plagued real estate agents for years — namely, that so much of what they call “real estate SEO” is over-the-top and spammy.
Here are the six one-week tasks listed in the article:
On the surface, that list looks … okay. Not great, not what I’d list, but not terrible. It’s when you get into the specific suggestions that things get ugly and real estate agents get misled. Let’s look at a few tips:
Under Week 2: Broadcast Your Links is this advice:
Develop a campaign to get other Web sites linking to yours. Focus on social networks and trusted real estate Web sites, advises Cheryl Waller, a real estate technology expert in Port Saint Lucie, Fla. One way to do this is by making thoughtful comments on real estate blogs and leaving your link as part of your blog post. “You don’t need 14,000 links to your site. What you do need are relevant links to your business from reputable Web sites that are trusted by search engines,” Waller says. This helps search engines deem your site as trustworthy, too.
Reality: Commenting on blogs can help with exposure, but it’s not a “campaign” and isn’t likely to make a search engine think your site is trustworthy, either. Worse, it’s something that too many people overdo and get wrong. A lot of real estate agents dropping links on each other’s blogs only adds to the perception that the entire industry is one big spam-fest. Consider these two comments that came in overnight on the Richland Real Estate Blog:
Not very “thoughtful,” is it?
Under Week 3: Use Keywords Generously is this advice:
While it might seem like overkill to repeat certain keywords heavily throughout your site, the strategy really does work, says real estate and technology blogger Matt Rains, a practitioner with Keller Williams Atlanta Partners in Loganville, Ga. He suggests incorporating the top phrases that you want associated with your site—”St. Louis Historic Homes,” for example. For strategic ideas, try the Keyword Tool on Google AdWords. Using the tool, you can type a phrase that’s relevant to your business and immediately find out how many people search for that term each month. Your main keywords should appear at least 10 to 13 times per 700 words on a page, says Mark Menzella, who runs RE/Advantage, a real estate Web design company in Fairfield, N.J.
Reality: Keyword density is a myth. There’s no perfect amount of times a keyword should appear on a page to rank, because there are countless other factors that determine a page’s relevance and importance. Hearing “real estate Web design” people pitch this advice only reinforces the idea that real estate SEO is a joke. Better advice is what I said here: There’s no magic formula or perfect “keyword density” — write for your users so the pages are readable, but be sure to include the right search terms as you write.
Under Week 6: Tweet About It is this advice:
“Now that tweets are indexed in Google, Twitter has become an important part of SEO strategy,” says Misty Lackie of Go Smart Solutions, a technology consulting firm in Grover Beach, Calif. So get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and create useful tweets that happen to include your business keywords and links to your site.
Reality: I love Twitter, but the SEO benefits of using it are neglible … especially if your tweets are going to “include your business keywords and links to your site.” Look below; does anyone think this is how to use Twitter?
No human will click on the link in a tweet like that, and since the link is no-followed, there’s no SEO benefit from using Twitter this way, either. Twitter can be an amazing tool for local visibility, but it has nothing to do with Google indexing tweets (users are blind to real-time results). It has to do with being real and creative on Twitter, not spamming your keywords and links there.
If you’d like to see the whole article for yourself, it’s on Realtor.org. Sadly, it seems that nothing has changed in the two-plus years since I first wrote about real estate SEO being a disaster and a joke. Even more sad is that the bad advice is coming from the national organization that’s supposed to make life easier for real estate agents.
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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
Bad SEO Advice for Real Estate Agents … from the NAR
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Bad SEO Advice for Real Estate Agents … from the NAR
I’m not so tech savvy as to know how to carry out any hacking or utilise backdoors (the Pentagon can sleep easy tonight) but when I was looking around for a particular filename when Google suggested these interesting options:Like I say, I’m no hacker, but that looks like a list of backdoors to me! Out [...]
Using 4Ðw0rÐ$ to sell hackz? LOLZ is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.
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Using 4Ðw0rÐ$ to sell hackz? LOLZ
A Guest Post by Johnny B. Truant from The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions.
I got an email the other day from a man who was at his wit’s end.
The email explained that in this man’s business, he was doing many of the same basic things that I was doing, but with much less success. He had been building websites for years. He had refined his craft. He felt that the sites he built were better, more complete, and had more features and better support than mine. He had more experience than I had. He even said that he was probably smarter than I was.
Yet I was doing really well and he was not. So what was the problem?
I replied that he was looking at the situation incorrectly. Generating the business I have — over 70 current active leads at last count — has nothing to do with making better websites, or being faster, or being cheaper. And it certainly has nothing to do with being smarter. (Besides, I graduated first in my class, ahem.)
There are a million people out there who do what I do. A million people putting up Wordpress sites and making them sing. Plenty of these people are better, faster, and cheaper than I am.
So I told him: People don’t come to me because I create the best Wordpress websites in the world, because I don’t. The people who come to me do so because we’re friends.
I’m not going to argue that relationship-based marketing is better than bulk-traffic based marketing, because I know that many incomes have been built on attracting a ton of people who you don’t know and who don’t know you. However, I will say that if you’ve never truly tried to get to know your readers, followers, commenters, and casual online acquaintances, you may really be cutting off your profits at the knees.
In case you missed the memo, Darren is one of the principals of the Third Tribe — a group and a philosophy with its roots in building businesses and audiences based on interpersonal connections. If you’re operating with a Third Tribe mentality, the sheer number of people who visit your site or read your blog matters far less than the number of people you exchange a few words with, or who you help without asking for pay, or who like you enough that they’ll retweet everything you post or buy everything you put out.
A Third Tribe business is about getting as many people to like you as possible. I tell my consulting clients that my job is to teach people to make friends.
And yes, I know how naïve that sounds. But hear me out.
Most people in my shoes, looking to sell Wordpress website setups by leveraging social media, would get on Twitter and announce their service’s features and low prices. They’d blast their specials and sales out to Twitter and Facebook. Maybe they’d create a fan page so that people could be “fans” of their business — because, you know, it’s really natural to be a fan of a business. They’d optimize sales pages and plan careful upsells, and they’d massage prospects through their product funnel.
By contrast, here’s how I use social media:
That all looks really backward, until you realize that my goal isn’t to create customers, but instead to make friends.
If you’re funny, people tend to like you. (I’m not saying you should be funny if you’re not, but if you’ve got it, flaunt it.)
If you write and talk about yourself as a whole person, rather than a one-dimensional business drone, people tend to be interested in you.
If you answer tweets and emails in a somewhat chatty, personal way instead of going for the sale when it’s not obviously warranted, people tend to enjoy talking to you.
And when all of those friends — and friends of those friends — one day have a need that you are able to fill, they won’t go to Google and look for the first search result or for the guy with the cheapest price. It’s human nature that they’ll come to you — their friend — first.
This really can be as simple as I’m making it sound. If you have an easily consumable product or service that a lot of people need and can afford, then all you really need to do is to get out there and make online friends. And they don’t even have to be friends-friends, if you know what I’m saying. They can be people who have read what you wrote somewhere and liked it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard something like, “I read something you wrote on IttyBiz about kung fu, and would like you to build me a website.”
I’m so not kidding.
The beauty of this approach is that it’s easy and natural if you can just unlearn some of the ingrained habits you’ve gotten used to, like a feeling that a businessperson should be “professional,” or that a fashion blogger should, you know, always talk about fashion and nothing else.
The web has magnified our interpersonal connections and the ability to meet new folks in new ways, but it hasn’t changed the fundamental nature of relationships. If we like people, then we want to hang out with them more, and do more with them. It’s that simple.
Now get out there and make some new friends.
Johnny B. Truant writes about Fight Club, tweets about zombies, and is one of the two extremely personable guys behind The Charlie and Johnny Jam Sessions. If you want to build a cool business while being a real person instead of a boring business drone, you should definitely get in on those.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
Why Your Business Needs Friends
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Why Your Business Needs Friends
No stupid gimmicks like “follow us on Twitter” or “buy us a beer” or anything – we just happen to have a spare copy of the brand new 2nd edition of Brian Clifton’s superb Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics lying around the office and we’ve decided to give it away.
If you fancy getting a [...]
Google Analytics Book Giveaway! is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.
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Ok it’s most probably too early to tell but all the signals to me, is that it’s going be a long haul for Google. Today while hopping around sites I fell onto mashable, this thing that hit me was :ok the message is plain and simple to me Mashable really want you to BUZZ their [...]
Google Buzz success or failure? is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.
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Google Buzz success or failure?
In the Internet marketing industry, we’re all constantly pushing ourselves to learn more and grow what we know. It’s not unlike what you want for your own children — education and opportunities that build a foundation for future success.
Turns out the search community is interested in sharing just such opportunities with students, a.k.a. the future of the world. Right now Google, Bing and the White House are all running contests and programs for children and young adults that promote learning and education in fun and creative ways. If you think your child might be interested in taking pictures, developing software or code, or hearing the President deliver the high school commencement address, check out the following opportunities.
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Contest: Youth ages 5 and older are invited to submit their original photos which celebrate Earth Day. Entries will be divided among four age groups: 5-10, 11-13, 14-17, 18+.
Prizes: The grand-prize winning photo will be displayed on the Bing home page on Earth Day, April 22. The winner of each age group will get to go to the Microsoft Campus and attend a Bing editorial team meeting. Also, first, second and third place winners will all receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a digital photo software package for their school.
And there’s more! Each day during the voting period, Bing will donate $5.00 for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote. And voters get to designate what classroom projects will benefit from the donation. Everyone truly wins!
Entry Period: March 29-April 11
Voting Period: April 13-19
Web Site: http://earthdayphotocontest.com/
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Contest: Eligible college students are invited to answer the question “How can you use data to help your community?” by developing a software application. This contest is open to college and university students within a 50 km radius of Google offices and datacenters. Teams must consist of three to five students.
Prize: The grand-prize winners will receive an Android-powered phone and an all-expenses-paid trip to Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
Entry Period: March 29-April 11
Web Site: http://juicyideascompetition.appspot.com/
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Program: Every year Google funds a three-month student mentoring program, pairing students with organizations to work on a coding project together. Student developers partner with a group running an active open-source software project.
Who Wins: Everyone involved! Students gain exposure to real-world software development situations and a resume-worthy experience in their field of pursued interest. The mentor organization gets to bring in and identify new developers. And more open source code is released for anyone to use.
Application Period: Mentor organizations may apply by March 12. The student application period opens March 29.
Web Site: http://code.google.com/soc/
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Contest: Okay, so this one’s got nothing to do with search, but it’s definitely a student contest. And the White House’s marketing efforts are worth learning from. Public high schools are invited to submit an application of four essay questions focused on personal responsibility, academic excellence and college readiness. To supplement the application, a school can also submit a two-minute or shorter video as well as data on attendance, graduation rates, and other key indicators.
Prize: President Obama will deliver the commencement address to the winning school’s graduating class.
Entry Period: February 19-March 15
Voting Period: TBA – The White House and Department of Education will select the six finalists. The public will then be invited to vote for their top three choices on the White House Web site.
Web Site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/Commencement
Attention Students & Parents! Search Contests & Programs that Pay Off was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.
Originally posted here:
Attention Students & Parents! Search Contests & Programs that Pay Off
A while ago there was a severe lack of SEO based tools for any Android based mobile phones. Since I use a HTC Hero it was a manual job for checking keywords if I only had my mobile to hand.
I’ve had a quick look on the Android market today and there are about four tools [...]
SEO Rank Pro is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.
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SEO Rank Pro
Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…
Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff. Like everyone, they want to build things that gain the respect of their peers. This aspiration is where the problems get started. Unless you happen to develop for an extremely technical audience, users don’t want cool stuff. They just want stuff that works and makes their life easier. For example, let’s say a developer wants to build a weather dashboard with real time satellite video feeds, an AJAX module that show the latest temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed/direction, the sunrise/sunset times, and tidal data. A regular user, on the other hand, just wants to know “is it going to be sunny or cloudy and do I need a jacket or umbrella today?”
We’ve seen several examples of this played out in public in our little tech-bubble-blogosphere in the past year:
So how do you recognize when you are in this situation? If you, your developer, or anyone on your team makes these kind of statements, chances are strong that you are on the wrong path:
What can you do to prevent this kind of mistake from ruining your project? Here are some ideas:
At the end of the day, you and everyone involved needs to understand that, for your project to succeed, it needs to solve a problem users have first and foremost. Stroking the ego of the CEO, making the marketing department look clever, or making a developer feel stimulated are not real goals.
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.
Developers VS Users
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Developers VS Users
While I get many questions from bloggers asking for advice on ‘how to blog‘ perhaps one of the biggest questions a new blogger needs to ask themselves before they move on to the HOW to blog question is ‘WHAT will I blog about?’
There is no real right or wrong answer to this question as blogs come in all shapes and sizes and focus upon all manner of topics. However thinking through the question before you start a blog will help you make some of the other decisions that you’ll want to make later on in this guide (for example the domain name and the name of your blog will probably come out of this decision).
Choosing a niche to blog about is important for a number of reasons. These include:
My first blog was a personal blog with no real niche focus. It did start with a main focus upon Spirituality, but over time began to cover a large range of topics including blogging, photography, culture, politics, personal stuff that I was doing etc. The more topics I covered the less I appealed to everyone.
Sure a certain group of people were interested in Spirituality and Blogging, but less of them were into photography, even less also liked my stuff about Australian Pop Culture….. each topic narrowed the chances of me writing something that would appeal to all of my readers. I started to get complaints from them – ’stop writing about XXXX’.
When I began to break topics out onto their own blogs my audience responded well – those who were into photography gathered around that topic, those that were into blogging gathered on that blog.
In the end this is about relevance – people seem to be drawn to niche focused blogs because they know that they’ll see content on them that focuses upon the things they are specifically interested in.
I tried to make money from my personal blog for a while but found the going really tough. At the time I mainly tried to make money from advertising and found that sponsors were simply not interested in promoting their product (which had a specific focus) to an audience who were there to read about a whole range of things.
What camera manufacturer wants to promote their latest camera on a blog about photography that also touches on spirituality, politics and what movie I saw on the weekend?
Niche blogs also tend to work better with contextual ad networks like AdSense. AdSense is getting better are providing ads that related strongly to what is on a specific page of content but I have seen instances where blogs covering lots of different topics attract ads that don’t always relate to content on a particular page.
The other thing about AdSense is that it is a system that gives advertisers the ability to target specific sites. These types of targeted campaigns can be quite profitable but they are less likely to happen if a blog covers a large range of topics, many of which don’t relate to that advertiser.
When I went niche I found monetizing with advertising a lot easier. In fact monetizing with a variety of methods seems to be easier on niche blogs. Affiliate promotions and selling your own products work better because your audience is there to get information on certain topics – so when you promote products on those topics…. they’re much more likely to buy.
It is possible to rank well for all kinds of topics on a generic/multi topic blog. It’s possible – but I find it is easier when you have a blog with a focus upon a niche topic. If your whole site is about the one topic Google treats it as more of an authority on that topic the more content you add, the more you interlink the posts, the more other sites in your niche link to it etc.
There are certainly exceptions (mega sites like Wikipedia are obvious ones) but unless you have the pulling power of a massive site like that a niche focused site could be the way to go.
One of the consequences of moving to more of a niche focus with my blogging was that I noticed I was starting to become known for that topic.
The first time this happened was after I started my first photography blog and 2 months later had a phone call from a city-wide newspaper asking for a quote on a photography related story. This had not happened to me before as a result of my personal/multi topic blog but having a site purely focused upon a single topic gave a perception that that topic was ‘my thing’.
For me having niche focuses has helped me to become known on different topics – which has led to all kinds of opportunities in those niches – including writing books, speaking opportunities around the world, main stream media appearances and all manner of partnership opportunities with wonderful people in my industries.
Not everyone wants to build their profile and become known in an industry – but if that’s part of your goal then a niche blog on those topics can be powerful.
Before I conclude this post on niches I thought it might also be worth noting that a blogs niche need not only ever be focused upon a topic. I explored this more fully in a post titled – Does Your Blog Focus Upon a Niche Topic or a Niche Demographic? As the title of that post suggests – there are some successful blogs around that cover a variety of topics – that appeal to a similar type of person or demographic.
So instead of just writing about video games – a blog might choose to blog about topics that appeal to teenage boys – video games being one of the topics that they might have an interest in.
Worth noting though is that if you do decide to target a niche demographic rather than a niche topic – you could be opening yourself up for a lot of work. Covering a diverse range of topics can certainly work – but to cover them all comprehensively can take a lot of time and energy.
Now that we’ve looked at some of the reasons WHY a niche can be a powerful thing to think about before you start looking at HOW to blog – later this week I’m going to continue this post with a followup post exploring a number of factors that those looking to start a blog might consider when choosing a niche.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
How to Blog: Choose a Niche for Your Blog [Why Niches are Important]
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How to Blog: Choose a Niche for Your Blog [Why Niches are Important]
En esta parte podrás poder cualquier cosa sobre ti ó sobre tu sitio, una pequeña introducción ó algo que desees hacerle saber a tus lectores. elsonar.es
Three patents granted today to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all describe how each of the search engines might take a close look at page addresses, or URLs on dynamic web sites. I wrote about the patent from Microsoft back when it had just been published as a pending patent application, in Microsoft Creating Rules for Canonical
SEM Synergy this week will be live, and Bruce Clay will be talking to callers and answering questions on the show! People that hang out in the WebmasterRadio.FM chat room during SEM Synergy each week (and really, why aren’t you there?) know that I’m asked “Is this live?” about once per episode. How excited am I to be able to say “YES!” this time around?! SEM Synergy , our weekly radio show and podcast here at BCI, is actually going live for a very special reason: our 100th episode! (Pay no attention to the episode count on iTunes. It’s a little thrown off because the episode from SES San Jose 2008 was eaten alive by technical issues…) In the 99 episodes that have happened since the first show came together in April 2008, we’ve been privileged to interview some of the SEM industry’s most respected authorities — privileged not only because our industry’s experts are fun, witty and beyond bright, but they’re also exceedingly generous with their time and knowledge! (And if you needed more proof of the SEO community’sgenerosity …) I mean, I’m always amazed when I consider the SEM Synergy library is chock full of brain nuggets from the likes of Avinash Kaushik, Matt Cutts, Vanessa Fox, Danny Sullivan, Bryan Eisenberg, Tamar Weinberg, Michael Gray, Marshall Simmonds, Dr.
Look out, Big Apple. Search Engine Strategies is coming to town
Moderator: Matt Van Wagner , President, Find Me Faster Speakers: Meagan Rochelle , Search Solutions Specialist, Microsoft Nicholas Ward , Product Manager, Range Online Media How many people are using Bing Cashback, Matt asks? About a quarter of the audience raises their hand. The rest are interested to find out how it might work for them.
The first big search conference of the new year, Search Marketing Expo West , is just around the bend. SMX West takes place March 2-5 in Santa Clara, California. Bruce Clay, Inc.