Credit: Joakim_kna

Fear of The Dark

Are you afraid to implement the SEO techniques you’ve spent hours learning because you fear you may lose your existing rankings? God forbid your SERPs get knocked to the next page, but you can prevent such an event by taking some simple SEO leaps of faith
Low Risk, Low Return

This adage holds particularly true for any financial investment, and your investment of time and money in SEO should be no different. Playing safe will only work for so long, and inevitably you’ll find the need to innovate on your SEO game plan. I’m not suggesting a major overhaul or drastic change that confuses those smarty spiders from Google, but rather a phased approach of changes that will lead to better results in the long term.

Copyright: Walt Disney Company

Check out those Google numbers today. A fall from grace impacted by their missing the Street estimates. Talk about loosing your street credibility.

Two things stood out for me…”Most shocking is the steep decline in paid clicks, one of the best metrics to measure Google’s underlying advertiser strength. ” From 22% growth last year to only 9% this year. Suggesting, some say, that Google may not be as well insulated from a recession as expected.

Maybe. Maybe not. Advertising tends to be the first line item reduced on the budget in lean times. Will it bode the same for PPC advertising?

…and now here it is for everyone to see!

Leading digital world measuring company, comScore, Inc. released a report today announcing the major trends in U.S. Internet activity last year.  A great article on CNNMoney.com actually goes into some really good detail on who the top-gaining properties were for the year as well as site categories, and core search market growth.

Today is a very rare interview on the SEP blog, but one I felt would be very worthwhile having. Rob Kerry (aka EvilGreenMonkey) is the Editor of Sphinn, and one of Danny Sullivan’s right hand people!

Rob and Lisa

Lately there has been some ruckus on Sphinn, and of course I piped in and gave my two cents worth, saying I thought it was all just a matter of a communication breakdown. I didn’t think the channels were fully open for dialogue.

When I was a kid, I was trained to do category type searches by the Dewey Decimal library system. Later, as I got older, the Yellow Pages reinforced this category type search.

When I needed my Hair Cut I let my fingers do the walking and I looked up Beauty Salons. If I needed to drop a few pounds I looked up weight loss.

And I’m not the only one.

These category searches are so programmed into how we look for information, that they’ve become some of the most competitive keywords on the net: “travel”, “weight loss”, and of course, “sex”.

"The most important word in the vocabulary of SEO is TEST."

"Never stop testing, and your SEO will never stop improving."

"SEO people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals."

David Ogilvy  on Paid Reviews

"There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers."

What do you think about a site marking those links nofollow?

Let The SEO Drooling Begin…

I am a real sucker for SEO tools that make my work as efficient as possible, and I am literally ecstatic about coming across this little gem of a Firefox extension. The Link Diagnosis Firefox extension plugs directly into the Yahoo Site Explorer API that we all know and love, and then manipulates backlink data into a highly versatile and useable format.

Reporting That Your Boss will Be Proud Of

The Link Diagnosis extension transforms regular Yahoo Site Explorer results that look like this

Along the lines of Jeff Foxworthy’s humour, lets start off the week with a fun post …

You may be a search spammer if …

1) you know what a Markov Chain is

2) you use an image editor to write your emails

3) using the same free counter service for all the sites in your network brings down the free counter service

Courtesy: Weblogcartoons.com

4) content is what you are, not what you publish

5) you think of him as “Matt Cutts Me Out”

6) you think of subtitles as alt keyword stuffing

Personally and professionally, this past week has been challenging to say the least. I’ve been virtually AWOL from the web and tried to catch up on a weeks worth of reading this Sunday afternoon.

Here are 10 interesting articles that caught my attention and what I learned:

What you don’t know about Facebook: Don Peat of the Toronto Sun reveals some fascinating information about the social media giant including the country with the highest per-capita number of users, average age, number of friends and daily visits of each user and the fact that the Toronto Facebook ( 1+ million and counting) network is made up mostly of women who keep their political views and relationship status private.

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Last week: Keyword Links.

Left to their own devices, people will assign keywords (tag or link) as they please.

They paint a rich picture of the linked content.

Keyword stuffing is the unnatural repetitive use of a specific word or phrase.

In your content….

..or your links…