SEO Dance

It seems like an all too common problem these days. Webmasters trying to better their site’s ranking by hiring someone good at SEO only to be out hundreds of dollars with no results to show for their money. Hiring someone to help you with SEO for your website can provide great and satisfying results. It’s just important to make sure to check out the person first.

There are budding SEO organizations like SEOBy.org, which stands for Search Engine Optimization By.., that have been started for those in the business of SEO. Through SEOBy.org you can find members who are in the business of search engine optimization. Also by finding someone through an organization gives a some protection or at least an outlet to complain is no services are delivered.

Asking other webmasters for whom they use will help to narrow down your choices and also give you a list of SEO professionals who have netted results. When hiring an SEO person or firm, do your homework about them. You wouldn’t hire a contractor to work on your home without doing a little background check. Take the same type of care and concern when dealing with your website. It might be a lot of work but it’s better than be taking advantage of, which there are plenty of so-called experts who are just waiting to do so.

If your New Year’s Resolution is to add more SEO/SEM blog feeds to your RSS reader, thank Lee Odden for his compilation of must-read search marketing blogs.

Some are industry leaders’ like Danny Sullivan’s old blog Daggle and some are the search engines’ own blogs like Inside AdSense, the official AdSense blog.

Tags: seo blogs, search blogs, Lee Odden

SEO Philippines co-member Benj Arriola, an SEO expert, sent this info to the mailing list regarding the Vorgermilten SEO contest.

It is a request for bloggers to post something about this SEO contest with a contest page that has suddenly disappeared from the web just a few days before the contest ended. Benj is supposed to win the contest but with the contest page’s disappearing act, how does he claim his prize? Here is Benj’s post:

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If you are a serious about your search engine optimization efforts, you don’t just optimize your text content, you don’t just learn how to optimize images. Videos need to be SEO’ed, too.

The popularity of the $1.65 billion YouTube and other video submission sites has proven that videos are the next big thing.

So, here’s a bunch of SEO tips for videos from Search Engine Strategies speakers Jon Leicht, Intuit’s web marketing manager, Eric Papczun of Performics and Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative:

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Although SEO is not an exact science, experts can, of course, easily tell the truth from the lies in terms of the efficiency of an SEO campaign or whether your business or whatever endeavor you have will benefit from any strategies or not.

Lee Odden of TopRank clarified five wrong notions about SEO:

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There’s the linkbait, drinkbait, sharkbait, all kinds of baits.

And one has just become more creative with a hatbait. Search Marketing Gurus’ Liana Evans is the brainchild behind this fun linkbait in the form of voting for your favorite hatbait pictures. Pictures of many of the most prominent search engine marketing experts holding the linkbait posters have joined. So who do you vote?

Aside from the main winner, here are some possible additional awards:

If there’s enough comments on the picture, perhaps will bestow an “honorary” HatBait.com award …. like “Most Tortured HatBait Participant”, or most “OxyMoronic HatBait Picture”.

Who will I vote? Who else?!

hatbait, search marketing gurus, linkbait

Internet marketing experts Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, Dave Taylor, and Jeremy Schoemaker will be holding an online business event namely Elite Retreat Conference. The conference, which will cover a wide array of search engine optimization, social networking, and monetization topics, will take place on December 18-19 in Marriott RiverCenter San Antonio, Texas. Attendees have to pay a whopping $4,850 each but will acquire business wisdom from the top four internet marketing gurus AND get the following stuff, too:

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From leaving Search Engine Watch to coming up with a new search engine blog, now Danny Sullivan ventures into holding a search marketing conference called Search Marketing Expo, SMX for short. Its first event will be held in Seattle on June 4-5, 2007 at the Bell Harbor Conference Center.

Together with the announcement of this new search marketing event is Danny’s new company - Third Door Media

Read full press release here.

SEM event, SMX, Search Marketing Expo, Danny Sullivan, Third Door Media

The end of the year calls for lots of resolutions, and I don’t know if Search Engine Journal included impressing its readers with its new layout. But it sure did impress me.

I find it now more online-news-site’y than blog-ey-looking. SEJ’s new layout’s been designed by none other than one of the most discerning designers today, Chris Pearson, who was also behind TLA’s Link Building Blog and SEOBook. Chris Pearson’s seo-friendly web designs didn’t rely mostly on the Web 2.0 trend this time but gave in more to SEJ staff’s request for a more journalistic feel.

Now if only Loren Baker post a fresher mugshot. Hehe..

search engine journal, blog layout, new layout, Chris Pearson, web design, SEO-friendly web design, SEO-friendly blog layout

It’s been months I guess since I’ve read about how like a terminally-ill patient who has been told too late about his case, pageviews’ value will soon be forgotten. Bad simile, I know. But Steve Rubell’s just made me think a tad more about it.

Warning: Preachy post ahead

Wouldn’t this only mean that search engine marketers and optimizers could have more of the last laugh? Good SEO’s, that is.

Should an SEO service provider just care about how many page impressions site his client’s site gets? Unless that’s the client’s only goal, of course. SEO’s who deliver quality service don’t just rely on traffic stats. Not everything should be about mindless clicks. Actions do speak louder AND pay better, remember?

And speaking of actions, it’s about time that the worth of pageviews gets trashed and subscribers (e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds) and sales, of course, talk more about the quality of a site.

Of course, this would mean damage to those sites relying on CPM for ad revenues. But if those sites do have that much CPM, it would not be that hard to get subscribers, right? So the death of pageviews, who really would suffer from it again?

pageview, Steve Rubel, conversion, SEO pageview, CPM, subscribers

Search Engine Strategies is a grand search engine marketing and optimization event organized by Danny Sullivan. It will be held in Hilton Chicago on December 4-7.

SES Chicago 2006 will be tackling the following topics:

- How search engines list Web sites for free and through paid placements;
- How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors;

- How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results;

- How to calculate the ROI of your SEM and SEO efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy, and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t;

- How to build links that generate traffic to your Web site, and how to avoid the penalties of “spamming” the search engines;

- What’s coming next in the constantly evolving world of Web search, and how you can profit from these changes.

Here the profiles of the SES 2006 Exhibitors.

SES Chicago 2006, search engine strategies, Danny Sullivan

Aaron Wall, an SEO expert and author of SEOBook has just announced his additions to his ebook. Among the updates he has included are mostly about link baiting.

The part of the link baiting post that caught my interest most is the method of formatting a link bait, which Wall has discussed in utter detail.

It’s not rocket science how a list becomes so viral in no time, but here’s how Aaron Wall puts it:

By creating ordered lists of factoids an incomplete story can look well researched, even if it is not. For example, if you make a list of 101 ways to do x people may give a few ideas and some feedback, but nobody is going to sit and list 383 ways to do x.

The power of a magnetic headline can’t also be discounted if a successful linkbait is one’s goal. According to Wall, it’s the behavior of the social news users like of Digg, that makes effective or interesting headlines trample those with great content but lame headlines or titles.

More link baiting wisdom from Aaron Wall.

linkbaiting, SEO book, Aaron Wall, headline writing, SEO copywriting

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