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Link Building 101: How to Evaluate the Power of Directories
by Paul Teitelman.As previously mentioned in part 1 of this series, it’s extremely important to be able to evaluate the power of a directory for link building. Especially when you consider that the power of a directory listing is much more complicated than just looking at the PR of the directory homepage.
Using Search To Mitigate/Reduce Business Risks
by Jeff Quipp.Talk to most people and ask why they engage in search and they’ll answer … “because it gets results”. There’s no question; search is a very important part of the marketing mix.
That said, many people and businesses do not necessarily understand all the inherent benefits of search. Consider for example, the ability of search to mitigate or reduce certain types of business risks. Accordingly, the remainder of this post will assess the numerous ways that search can help mitigate or reduce business risks. In particular:
Sitemaps Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
by Shannon Hutcheson.What is a Sitemap?
A Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs of your website with additional metadata about each URL. It is useful for every site (or blog) to have a sitemap because it is an easy way to keep the search engines informed on when a page was last updated, how often it is updated, and how important it is in relation to the other URLs of your site.
Google first introduced Sitemaps in June 2005 so web publishers could publish lists of links from their sites. Shortly afterward, MSN and Yahoo announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol along with Google. Sitemaps are now everywhere on the net, not just on the corporate business site.
Delicious Count WordPress Plugin … for Tracking and Improving Blog Post Quality!
by Jeff Quipp.How can you really tell if the quality of your blog posts are improving over time? This is after all, a key objective of blogging.
In reality, it depends on what you’re hoping to accomplish.
If you’re blogging to:
- generate affiliate and content network revenues, the answer is obvious.
- to drive the bottom line ultimately by positioning yourself as an authority in your industry, you’ll need to routinely publish Resource type posts (see Types of Social Media Content). Unfortunately, its not as easy to track the quality of a Resource post as it is to track the quality of an Entertainment/Sensationalized post.
Match and Game! Google Automatic Keyword Match
by The Doug.So there I was, minding my own business, when all of a sudden I had a conversion on one of my campaigns (ALWAYS exciting) but I couldn’t attribute it to any of the keywords in the adgroup it was showing up for. “Well! How can THAT be?!”, says I.
After running a search query to investigate further, I found the little miracle keyword that so silently and wonderfully threw a conversion my way. I found it, and it was not a broad, exact, or even phrase match. It was Automatic. That’s right! It’s not an option that you just choose like the others, but in fact a beta that Google inserted on various accounts with the “you need to do nothing in order for this feature to be turned on” type of message.
Link Building 101: The Power of Directories
by Paul Teitelman.Directory submissions are still one of the most powerful and safest link building strategies in existence. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find quality directories to submit too as many directories continue to get penalized by Google as I outlined in my last post, the History of Paid Directories.
As a result, the goal of this three-part series is to focus on the power of directories for SEO, and more importantly, to teach any SEO enthusiast how to find quality directories (both paid and free) going forward. Here’s what you can expect from this three part series:
Nofollow 101 – Understanding the Nofollow Tag, for Beginners
by Shannon Hutcheson.What is Nofollow?
Nofollow is an html attribute first introduced in 2005 by Google. Originally, the rel=”nofollow” attribute was added to discourage comment spam in blogs. Links with nofollow should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine.
From the Google Blog:
From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
9 Ways Search Engines Can Personalize Your Search Results
by Jeff Quipp.Personalization of search results is very important to the future success of any search engine, and its an effort well underway with many of the big 3 search engines as we speak.
If its true that the key success factors of search are:
-
a. reliability
b. ease/speed of use
Then it stands to reason that the more often a search engine provides searchers with the exact information they are looking for, the more often they are to use that search engine in the future, and the less likely they are to switch to another search engine.
The History of Paid Directories
by Paul Teitelman.Paid directories have historically been one of the best link building strategies for Search Engine Optimization. Back in the golden days of SEO, where it was much easier to manipulate Google for SERP’s, paid directories were thought of as being the ‘holy grail’ of link development.
Over time, the fine staff over at Google have constantly and consistently taken efforts to both manually and automatically penalize these directories. In some extreme cases, the ever-feared Google ban has even been applied! The goal of this post is to attempt to explain why Google penalizes directories, and also to provide a few examples of powerful directories that:
5 Question Website Performance Quiz – Is Your Business Website Performing?
by Judy.After having spent seven years in the web industry, it never ceases to amaze me that many of today’s corporate decision makers are still failing to grasp and/or maximize the power of their corporate website.
There are enough studies out there today to tell us that the majority of research preceding purchase decisions, both for the B2B and B2C channels, is done online. In some cases, the only piece of the process executed offline is the actual sale or engagement itself. From small business engagements (plumbers, florists, etc.) to enterprise level purchases (vehicles, technology, etc.) the first and most critical stage of the process happens right here online…the initial research.
