Wordpress 2.3 = Seo Goodness Mmmm…

1. Native tagging support - Gone are the days of using 3rd party plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins. Tagging is now integrated into Wordpress 2.3! If you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind

In what to me amounts to the high impact SEO story of the year, Ammon Johns has announced that he is stepping down as an administrator and moderator of Cre8asite Forums.

Ammon Johns (1966) is a household name in the SEO community. Active in SEO and SEM since 1997, Ammon was one of the first proponents of the holistic approach which has ROI instead of “just” high rankings as its goal. Instead of sending more visitors to a site (the classic SEO model), Ammon worked to send qualified traffic where “every single one of them is a genuine, prequalified sales prospect”.

My friend Peter Papadimitriou at Globecraft sent me the following email he received from Google:

Dear Peter Papadimitriou,

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to
easily reach additional qualified customers who are searching
Google from their mobile phones.

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on
Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com).
We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for
free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly
growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

Today was a big day!  Well for me anyhow.  Just to give you a little background a big part of my job is to not only to strategize off page SEO campaigns that support all of the onpage SEO efforts for SEP’s clients, but to report on all of these efforts. 
Traffic, engagement, conversion, authority all easy…links oh those blessed one way natural links this is what we are all really after, this is hard! 
In the past the only way I knew to track the inbound links that were created by an off page campaign was using some special syntax in queries that our SEP Wis walks me through every time (I do not pretend to fully understand). 
Along with this I would also try and use AltaVista.  But AltaVista seems to report the highest number of inbound links but as I have found out not all links are visible. (go figure).   Another tool was Technorati; Technorati is good for finding fresh links to a given site very quickly.
But in general, the overall numbers of results are estimated at the very start, and this can become misleading. Not all results are reachable from the search engines, so a false illusion can be given.  Until today!!
SEP’s Wis has found out a simple traceable and free method that will stream line all of this.  Google Alerts.  Yes Google Alerts are not new but here is what is new setup your alert to report on “link: www.acme.com” this will let you know what new one way links are being created! It also works for the crawlers with using “site: www.acme.com”.

When the Toronto Star published an article several weeks back announcing that roughly 700,000 Facebook users belong to the Toronto city network, my phone rang off the hook from clients asking what their Facebook strategy will be.

SEP has been working with Social Media, at a variety of levels, for some time, so the announcement that General Motors Europe is launching a “social media newsroom” caught my attention.

Essentially, GM Europe’s new website will allow downloads of its photography from Flikr, a link to their video collection in YouTube and news to be “republished, commented on, shared and tagged by a large community where the boundaries between news provider and news consumer continue to blur,” it said in a statement.

Last month I blogged about the death of the Yellow Pages being premature. The next day, R.H. Donnelley continued its aggressive online push by acquiring Business.com for $345 million.

Today, R.H. Donnelley, the No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US, announced it has begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, according to a News Observer report.

According to The Wiz of SearchEnginePeople.com Internet stalwart and SEO guru paid directory of yore, Uncoverthenet.com appears to have been blacklisted and removed by Google.

A simple site search on Google http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=.. shows no reslts. A simple search for uncoverthenet also reveals no results for the site itself. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GFRC..

Google of course has the right to do as it please with regard it’s own business however, is it possible that the paid links exceptions are going too far?

Only time will tell. After all, paid inclusion extends to every store that extends a portion of its sales to Amazon. Or to Yahoo. Or to Ebay. Or to, well, I’m sure you get the point.

I just read that the European Union gave Germany the go ahead to give $165 million for research on Internet search-engine technologies that could someday challenge Google.

Called Theseus, the project is aiming “to develop the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet”. It would translate, identify and index images, audio and text.

European companies in general spend far less on research than US companies do, and so the EU said the project should help change that.

The Theseus project was born out of Quaero, a joint French-German Internet search initiative. Quaero was put to rest in December 2006 when the German and French researchers “took different directions”.

Tony Wright at SearchEngineWatch had an interesting post regarding Google’s Local Search Land Grab.

As anyone who has ever done directory work before (Hey Tom!) knows, the infrastructure costs are prohibitive in as much as the legwork and the adminstrative work involved more often than not prove prohibitive barriers to entry.

Interesting that Google has solved both, turning once again to its infrastructure base at the academic and collegiate level to accomplish both, the required feet on the ground, and the data entry.

Google never fails to recognize the value of every dollar and it perhaps for that reason they see so much of a return on every dollar.

I miss my blog and I can’t believe it’s been two weeks since I lasted posted.

The times, they are achanging, and not necessarily in a bad way. Anyhoo…

So, the icrossing funding, purchasing Proxicom thingy. Interesting.

Even more interesting, the perspective offered by Janet Driscoll Miller of Marketing Pilgrim: What the iCrossing Acquisition of Proxicom Says About the State of the SEM Industry.

In short: