Have you ever thought to yourself (or had a client say to you), if I triple my budget, I should see at least triple the results … right?

Unfortunately NOT … at least in most cases that have anything to do with search!

Why:
Plain and simple; any reputable search company will target the easiest and least expensive wins first where limited budgets are involved (or as I like to refer to it, the preverbial low hanging fruit). Let me explain using a very simple example.

Imagine you’re a caveman or cavewomen, and you’re obviously always hungry. You find an apple tree brimming with tasty ripe red apples.

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Previous Instalment: The Keyword Density Myth.

If a search engine would search "live" through the documents it knows about for the occurrence of the word we’re looking for it could take its time and then simply report where it found our word.

In this example our search engine has only one index: the documents itself.

However, time is something a search engine doesn’t have; the query needs to be answered now.

What we need is a real index!

back in the day…..

source: GeekAndPoke

My post on 5 Unique Ways to Make the Google Bot Your Best Friend attracted quite a bit of attention and a fair number of comments, which I’m really happy about. One of the strategies that I discussed in particular was using Wordpress’s built-in pinging features to ping a large number of pinging services every time a blogpost is posted.

Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Look or sound familiar?

For example, having the same dialogue with the same client and expecting different results. Or having the same conversations with a peer or associate and expecting different results.

Words get tossed around in such dialogues and conversations; words like stubborn, non-responsiveness or negativity more often than not with fingers as pointed as the barbed dialogue behind them. At first blush, bad words all but in reality, not so much bad as emotionally charged, which may in fact be good because they intimate an emotional investment in projects, clients or responsibilities. Whether good or bad, they tend to be taken to heart, and taken personally.

Image courtesy: a-albionic.com

So my colleague passed me a short little article from thestar.com this morning entitled “Microsoft to make ’significant’ announcement” and of course I had to read it post haste.

Apparently they are holding a press conference today to spill some new beans, but NOT about it’s multi-billion dollar offer to purchase Yahoo Inc.  I really am quite anxious to find out what this news is, and in fact will add the press release link to this post as it comes in.

Is an authority in a given industry necessarily a celebrity, and visa versa?

Lee Odden recently made an interesting post The Fallacy of SEO Celebrity earlier this week, echoed shortly after by Rand Fishkin with his Desire for Fame in the SEO World post. I wonder if this post has been misinterpreted … think I did at first too.

These posts resulted in a blog volley from a different perspective … the Fame Game and Take Your Fame and Shove It. All posts caused me to think even harder about the subject of authority (though Dave’s made me laugh too), as did Lyndon’s (Cornwall SEO) response in the SEOmoz post, and will cause me to rethink what I postulated earlier.

A few months ago I wrote a post comparing various online press release services. While nobody disputed their effectiveness at building links, there were questions as to how to measure the full value of Online PR.

For fun, I’m going to take a real release that we recently did and answer each of the questions that was raised.

(Full disclosure, this is a client of ours and he agreed to share these numbers)

Here’s what we did

Have you ever tried to talk shop with a family member? At a birthday party?

"So", he says with a glass of wine in hand, cheeks getting a bit redder already, "what do you do? Wasn’t it something with computers, all that Google stuff and so on?"

"I do SEO", and you realize you made your first mistake. Mentally you slap your forehead as your conversation partner goes into deep pensive mode.

"Ass IO?"

Something does not compute.

"Search engine optimization. I optimize web sites for search engines."

Credit: Walter Wycliffe

With crawl rate being an uber factor in deciding how fast webpages are indexed in the SERPs, SEO’s are always striving for ways to invite the Googlebot over to client websites more frequently. Of course, generating new and quality content is probably the best way to inject some fresh visits from the googlebot, but then again, generating new content is quite the task in itself. But are there other legitimate ways to having a website crawled more frequently than simply generating new content? I’m going to show you atleast 5 ways to easily get the Googlebot coming for more!