SEO Dance

Straight from the Wordtracker’s Keyword Expert newsletter, here’s an SEO workshop contest that the competitive SEO folks out there can join:

If you are a Wordtracker fan and can make use of some skills sharpening, you might be interested to win the following prizes:

- A 5-day intensive SEO Mastery Workshop plus hotel and travel
- One of four annual subscriptions to Wordtracker.
- One of ten monthly subscriptions to Wordtracker.

All you have to do is to write an essay of 200 words or less on why you’d like to improve your keyword research and SEO skills.

Here are the contest rules.

SEO contest, Wordtracker, keyword tool

I’m growing considerable affinity to visual search engines and meta search engines. Aside from getting tired of the spam sites and other rubbish search engine results, meta search engines esteem (everyday my diction is getting more and more influenced by comment spammers) me more than the other major search engines. Why? I’m seeing better results from their SERPs for this blog than from the other SE’s. Hehe. Or maybe because I still have the coveted-trifecta-to-win-SEO-contest syndrome.

What is a metasearch engine?
Metasearch engines are mashup search engines that usually show the top 10 results from the major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live and Ask.com. The most fun metasearch engines I’ve encountered are Dogpile, Kartoo, Quintura, and Zippy.

Here are some of my observations for each of the mentioned metasearch engines:

Dogpile fetches results from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. But it looks like it’s more of Google since after checking out results for SEO Dance, this blog is not on the top of the results, which also holds true with Google.

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I’m a trivia nut. Are you? Here’s a fun trivia for SEO rockstar fans. Do you recognize whose signature shoes are these:

More hint from PubCon pics.

See if you can guess who these SEO gurus are.

SEO trivia, SEO expert, SEO pro, SEO consultant

It’s been a month since I posted the details of the Philippine SEO Contest 2.0. So what have all the Pinoy SEOs brewed to earn a good search engine position for this contest?

No screenshots this time. One of the Ituloy AngSulong participants was geekly cool enough to provide a quick count of this SEO contest topnotchers.

3 months to go! Good luck, everyone!

Will be posting some of the participants’ unusual SEO techniques soon, if any.

ituloy angsulong, seo contest, seo philippines, ituloy angsulong results

One of the most popular link brokerage services Text-Link-Ads has released shiny new features mainly for link buyers in the form of:

RSS/Email Inventory Alert System

Link buyers can sign up to be alerted of new TLA inventory additions directly throug their RSS readers or e-mail inbox. An inventory watchlist is made available, which could be helpful to SEO people aiming to acquire more inbound link juice options.

Previously Purchased Inventory Marking

Link buyers previously purchased links are now marked red to avoid duplicate purchases.

More from TLA’s Link Building Blog

TLA, rss, link building blog, link buying

These past few days are full of exploration for the two biggies of the search world - Google and Yahoo. Aside from joining forces for the use of Sitemaps, both are found to be tweaking on their search engine results.

Google is working on adding blog search results from Blogger Search maybe? Here’s a screenshot of the caught blog result add-on.

While Yahoo has been caught redhanded adding some Yahoo!Answers on its SERPs.

Finally, Google and Yahoo are realizing that real answers and fresh information should be given some attention. This will definitely boost the morale of bloggers and hopefully make the blogosphere gain more traction as the bloggers’ effort becomes more recognized by Google. Now, don’t start brewing abuse of these new features, please.

Google, Yahoo, SERPs experiment, Yahoo answers, blogs, bloggers, search engine results

If you want to know if your site or blog’s content is on-theme or relevant to whatever umbrella topic you want your site to be about, if the content keywords are doing their role, here is one free tool that measures a website’s theme distance - Theme Distance.

Theme Distance is a mashup tool from Virante, a web marketing company, using the content categorization of MSN AdLab and University of Alberta’s word collocation tools.

Virante, theme distance tool, keyword relevance tool, keyword tool

Social news sites have become great allies to traffic-loving bloggers. And Digg is just one of the most preferred social news site because of its ability to make traffic cause a stampede when a post gets dugg the right way.

In pursuit of digg-a-licious traffic, will you pay to get dugg? If yes, here’s one that just offers such service - UserSubmitter.

Users or the ones who wants to get paid for Digg-ing get paid $0.50 for every stories they Digg. Submitters have to pay $20 for every story plus $1 Digg desired.

Let’s wait and see whether this service will get Dugg or buried.

Digg, diggers, pay to get dugg, get paid to dig, social news

SEO contest participants use various SEO techniques including giving away Superman tickets to those who would help them with their link development efforts.

Others would easily give away a PR6 link to get that Google shirt:

I was coaxing him to give me the shirt in exchange for a PR6 link but I was turned down! -Alleba

And so, the following link exchange effort would not hurt, right?

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If you would like people to see blogs or sites that send your blog some link loving, Technorati Link Count Widget can be your ally. With this Technorati product, the number of links to your posts can be seen updated in real-time. Technorati labeled each link as reactions to make readers follow the conversation.

There’s just one flaw though:

In a small number of cases, you may notice some fluctuation between the count on your page and what you see when you click through to see all the reactions.

For bloggers to easily integrate this widget, link count codes for the most popular blog services, Blogger, Movable Type, Typepad, and Wordpress, can be just easily copy and pasted.

link count, widget, Technorati link count, link count widget, Wordpress plugin

Instead of posting a recap of the PubCon discussions…

because I wasn’t there.

Which is your favorite Pubcon figure, er, picture?

pubcon vegas, pubcon 2006 pictures, webmasterworld pubcon 2006, randfish

Idea Catchers, a web design and online marketing support company is sponsoring the “Ugly E-commerce Site Makeover Contest” for online store owners, independent retailers, and catalog or mail-order companies with an e-commerce site.

The prize is a custom e-commerce site worth $25,000 and 90 days of online marketing support (probably search engine optimization and positioning, link placements, press releases, blogs, pay-per-click campaigns, email newsletters).

The deadline in submitting entries is on December 31, 2006.

Here are the contest guidelines and where you can enter your site to the Ugly E-commerce Contest.

e-commerce site makeover, website makeover, makeover contest, online marketing, Idea Catchers, ugly e-commerce contest

Searching is fastly getting revolutionized with the mushrooming of various search engines offering a wide array of features. And just recently, a new visual search engine with a catchy moniker, Snap, has been launched to join the SE war.

Here is what Snap boasts about:

1. Provides a fast visual display of its SERPs previews.

2. Anticipates user’s content through suggesting widely-searched terms. (think Google Suggest.)

3. Allows interaction with the preview site without having to leave the SERPs page.

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After announcing to the whole blogosphere that Google still snobs this blog, I have found one more reason why SEO Dance won’t rank well:

AdSense ads make it hard for sites to get a decent search engine placement. This is according to a survey conducted by RankingMeasures. Its press release includes:

“To the search engines, one warning sign of a spammy (read: uncool for the search engines) website is the presence of contextual advertising.

But no, this news, actually it’s an old news, won’t deter me from getting in better terms with the big G and with just all the search engines ever made. I’m not spamming… right?

RankingMeasures full press release.

via Revenews

google ban, adsense, seo blog, google sandbox

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is one of the widely-used method of keeping up-to-date with industrial news from blogs or sites and a method for bloggers or webmasters to keep its readers stapled or to generate repeat traffic. If you don’t have an RSS feed to offer to your readers yet, you’re losing the chance of making your accidental on non-accidental readers go back to your site or blog when you update it.

However, since not a lot of people are as giddy on adding new RSS feeds from blogs they visit everyday, no matter how good the content those blogs offer, one has to come up with some way to perpetually increase his blog’s RSS subscribers.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim is one of those bloggers that know how to up his readership. He has just announced today that he is giving away a free iPod to one of his blog’s RSS subscribers just by subscribing and here are the mechanics of this contest.

I’m wondering, when can I afford to host a traffic-generation contest like that?

ipod shuffle, ipod contest, free ipod, RSS, RSS contest, marketing pilgrim, traffic tip