SEO Dance

GSINC, a team of SEO and Internet marketing consultants working for e-commerce businesses, web design agencies, business associations, and trusts presents a number of free video tutorials about a number of important info regarding the basics of SEO.

Among the SEO topics they’ve covered include:

- What is a title tag and its importance. One specific info about optimizing title tags is that they need to be 63 characters or less to appear in full on Google.
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Link development is not an easy task, esp. if you have too few friends with quality sites to ask inbound links from. But what do you think will make it easier for you to gain those coveted links that will make your site get a good search engine placement for better visibility?

This how Mike Grehan, author of the Search Engine Marketing book:

When you’re looking for links, take a brutally honest look at your own site. Make a list, check it twice. If you can’t list 10 good reasons someone would want to link to you, then ask who you built the site for and why.

More link building discussion from SES Chicago 2006.

link building strategy, SEO link building, SES Chicago 2006, Mike Grehan, search engine marketing

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

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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For the uninitiated, linkbaiting is that SEO strategy that makes use of various, often sneaky methods to gain IBLs or inbound links and consequentially, gain more traffic. It is a form of viral marketing, Internet-literati style.

For a link bait to be successful, a hook is required. A hook is that thing that drives publicity, good or bad, it still is publicity. Black hat or white hat, it still is SEO.

Examples of linkbaits include delivery of the freshest news, nowhere-else-to-be-found how-to’s, lists (top 10 people with the most polluted mind, why Google will never outdo MSN, top 10 Firefox plugins you’ll never use), controversial or humorous videos, etc. You get the idea?

For the initiated, it’s not new that more and more are making linkbaiting a full-time job. Here are some of ‘em gifted ones:

- Stuntdubl Linkbait Service($5,000)
- Text-Link-Ads Link Service ($5,000 - $10,000)
- SEOMoz LinkBait Development ($5,000 - $50,000)
- Andy Hagans Link Baiting Service ($4,995)
and the most recent player of the link bait game:
- Eric Ward Link Bait Strategy ($2,000)

$2,000 to $50,000?! Lucrative, eh? But how do you measure the success of a link bait service, really? Anyone has ever availed of such SEO service? Feel free to throw in your 2 cents.

link bait service, linkbaiting, Eric Ward

I don’t know with static websites but I’ve experienced firsthand from my blogs, especially my photoblog, how images can make traffic pouring in. Aside from the fact that images can make sites more aesthetically likeable, there are other ways that you can do to optimize your images for more search engine traffic.

Here are some effective image optimization techniques:

1. Avoid using images that are too large since they can turn off readers when it takes too much time downloading them. If you find an image that you want but it’s too large, resize it.

2. Use title tags in maximizing the potential of your images in making your site have higher search engine placement. Wordpress powered blogs can easily make use of this image title tag optimization through writing a descriptive title for your images when uploading them for use in your blog posts.

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If you are faced with the dilemma of what to give more attention to in optimizing your website or blog for better search engine visibility, on-page or off-page SEO, one SEO study showed results that search engines favor more the off-page SEO efforts of webmasters.

SEO experts of Fortune Interactive used its SEMLogic technology to acquire information on what SEO factors search engines find important. The study used the highly-competitive keyword “laptop” and checked out the top 100 search results from the Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The data was analyzed last June 30, 2006.

Here are the results of the study:

- *IBL Quality is the most important factor across the board.
- IBL Quantity is of least importance relatively among the off-page factors across the board.
- Achieving the **coveted trifecta of ranking well across the search engines requires strong values in the two most important influential factors for each search engine.

*IBL stands for inbound link
**coveted trifecta - ranking high for the three major search engines

Here are more details on the results of this study about SEO factors.

IBL quality, coveted trifecta, on-page SEO versus off-page SEO, SEMLogic, Fortune Interactive, SEO study

If you’re one of the few who still value traffic from MSN Live, this would interest you - one from Boogybonbon.com claims to know a hack to attack your competitors and get them deindexed from MSN Live.

But before you read this SEO tip, I’m hypnotizing you and you won’t remember a thing when you wake up.

Here’s how you can hack your way towards MSN’s top SERPs:

a. Check the competitors site to see if a non-valid URL returns a 200 status code with any header checker tool.

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Using link farms for link building is widely-known as a big no-no. Why? Google included it on its webmaster guidelines that link exchange farms are a big no-no if you would not like to be labeled as a black hatter.

White Hat Link Building?
But there is one manual method of link building that used to be most favored by search engines. However, the SEO world quickly evolves and search engines are getting smarter each day, or are they? But whatever the case may be with how all the major search engines rank websites, one old school SEO technique that is currently getting less and less popularity is reciprocal linking or asking for link exchanges.

Value of Reciprocal Links in Link Building NADA?
Now if you are still a big believer of reciprocal links as a link building scheme, some SEO gurus would assert that reciprocal linking is now more of a way to gain more traffic and not to increase pagerank. That information is subject to debate but whatever floats your SEO boat, right?

Webmasters’ Apathy with Link Exchange Requests
Getting into the vein of this blog posts title, yes you don’t have to send an e-mail to webmasters of sites having high pageranks saying “please exchange links with me. You and I will both benefit from this link exchange.” (But more for me, really.)

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As an SEO copywriter myself, keyword-stuffing is something that I find hard to avoid. However, I perpetually look for ways to improve my SEO articles to avoid making readers hitting that dreaded X icon while reading my stuff.

Making Content More Readable
Making content more readable by writing engaging content can help. Jokes can’t be so bad in keeping writing light but there are just some topics that can’t be infused with humor.

Search Engines Love-Hate Relationship with Keyword-Rich Content
It’s a good thing that search engines are now learning to despise sites with too keyword-stuffed content. Although that’s the case, SEO content clients still can’t grasp the fact that mentioning keywords to the point of annoying redundancy will soon be a thing of the past and would still request for heavily keyword-rich articles.

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Chris Pearson of Pearsonified shared his on-page optimization triumph by employing two methods that have caused his site’s search engine traffic to increase by 455% in one month:

As for this SEO blog, I’m still waiting for the new blog theme to be rolled out next week before I can request tweaking for on-page SEO purposes.

How about you? Care to share some tips on how to fix your site or blog for on-page optimization?

Details of Pearsonified’s On-page SEO success…

Pearsonified, on-page optimization, SEO technique, SEO tool, Cutline Wordpress theme, Wordpress

Monetizing blogs has become one of the most popular source of extra online income this year. And just recently, I was asked how does blogging generate money. I’m currently doing it now with the help of 451press. Other ways to earn from blogging would require another blog post. So, to keep the long story short, I enumerated dozens of ways one can earn from blogging.

The curious girl wants to explore blogging for money and shot a few more questions. One of her SEO-related queries is how to choose a domain name that can be easily optimized.

Since she is thinking of a blog domain name and not a business site domain name, a little creativity grazed her thoughts. By the way, she is planning to work on a blog on politics, which is just so timely because of the elections.

So what did I tell her about the proper way of selecting a domain name for her politics blog? I remembered emailing her the importance of thinking about the readers and how they will relate the content of the blog with the domain name.

I forgot to include though the following important points in choosing a domain name for the purpose of easier optimization for the search engines and readers, of course:

Have I forgotten anything?

domain name, choosing a domain name, SEO tool, domain name suggestion

Why would you want to delve into more search engine information? If you are serious in marketing your business or would like an online presence for whatever reason, studying SEM, the mother of SEO, will definitely be a great idea.

Here’s one new product for SEM enthusiasts that might awaken better your SEO/SEM interest:

Ad Age Search Marketing Fact Pack 2006 - a 52-page PDF data guide on engines, keywords, sites and studies.

One teaser: Top SEO techniques for 2007 were mentioned.

Ad Age, SEM, Ad Age search marketing fact pack, SEO techniques, SEO tool, SEO tip

Google’s pagerank update yesterday, was a bluff. I think it’s better called a pagerank dance. The two sites with pageranks that went down yesterday regained their previous PRs during the evening. Whew!

Found a heads up post about an MSN algorithm update yesterday, November 3. The SEO report stated observations about the recent alteration of MSN algorithm priorities:

- More love for title tags.
- More love for optimized domains

Here is just a statement from Ross Dunn which I’m starting to not believe:

MSN is still following the basic principles of good SEO

If that is the case, why so little SERPs and why the love for Blogger?

via StepForth

MSN algorithm update, MSN, optimizing for MSN, title tag, domain SEO