Using Semantics for Keyword Research

Sujan Patel wrote a fascinating article on this topic for Search Engine Journal. After explaining how Google figures out what searchers mean when they enter keywords, he discussed five steps you can take in your keyword research that will help you get found more often by your target audience. I’m unspeakably grateful that we’re passed the days when optimizing your keywords meant pick a single target keyword and cram it into your web content as many times as you can, as Patel characterizes the obsolete style. He correctly notes that That ship has sailed. Thanks in part to Google’s Penguin u…

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson Resigns

Activist Yahoo shareholder and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb brought the truth about Thompson to light, discovering that the CEO did hold the financial degree he claimed on his resume, but not the computer science one. Normally, one would think that Thompson’s experience would make this a non-issue. As Greg Stirling pointed out, he had many years of experience as a successful tech executive in Silicon Valley…the paper was a technicality of sorts – not to minimize the ethics issue. Apparently it’s the ethics issue that Loeb couldn’t abide. He pushed hard, not letting the issue die; it bec…

Bing Launches Social Sidebar

In its blog post on the subject, the Bing team describes this as the most significant update to Bing since we launched three years ago. They’ll be phasing it in over the next few weeks. So what can we expect? Danny Sullivan got a preview of the new features to try out. He noted that the new design featured three columns with Core Search, Snapshot and Sidebar panes. It comes across as a very functional design, and a surprisingly useful way to incorporate the social graph into search. For example, let’s take a look at the Social Sidebar. It presents as a vertical gray sidebar to the right of y…

Write Content For the Four Buying Personalities

Once again, I owe a hat tip to Stoney deGeyter for discussing this point. In his article, though, he draws indirectly on a philosophy dating back to Hippocrates. Back in those days, and for a long time afterwards, doctors believed that both illness and one’s personality stemmed from four humors, and treatment aimed to balance these humors. While science discredited the medical part of this theory, it turns out the idea of four different basic personalities has some merit. To be honest, we’re all a little too complicated to be easily broken down into one of four categories. But in trying to b…

Write SEO Content for Your Visitor`s Goals

Stoney deGeyter covered this topic recently. He approached it from the perspective of building a mental image of visitor personas. You form a persona based on a visitor’s motivation. What do they need? Why are they on your website? Once you can answer those questions, you can think about what kind of content will help your visitors, and create it accordingly. I don’t disagree with deGeyter, but I like to think more in terms of goals. If you really want to try to think like one of your customers, don’t just ask yourself what they need; ask yourself what they’re trying to accomplish. If your w…

Guest Posting: How to Find and Seduce Your Editor

I’d like to tip my hat to two people here. The first one is Matt Goffrey. He’s written articles for SEO Chat for the last quarter, and he’s done just about everything a guest poster should do. The second one is Matt Beswick. He wrote a piece for Search Engine Journal on how to cheat at guest posting and get away with it. Some of the tips I’ll be including here I got from his article – but I’ll be talking about them from the other side of the desk. So let’s assume, for the moment, that you’re an expert in your field, and you want to find someone – or many someones – who will appreciate that ex…

Title Tags: Not Just for Keywords Anymore

First, let me give credit where it’s due. I just finished reading a post by Michael Martinez in which he digs more deeply into this so-called basic topic than anyone I’ve seen. Martinez’s contrarian views, eloquently expressed and supported, can make any reader rethink a cherished position. If he’s right, then the way most of us do our page titles or title tags is – well, not wrong, exactly, but a little misguided. We all know how you’re supposed to write title tags, right? Start by doing some keyword research for your topic, build a title using those keywords, then lather, rinse, repeat. Make…

Penguin Joins Panda in Google Web Spam War

Google webspam guru Matt Cutts explained the rationale behind Penguin in a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog. He noted that We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings. Penguin represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. It’s supposed to decrease the rankings of sites that violate Google’s terms of service. Cutts gave two examples of websites whose ranks he expected to see drop after Penguin. One displayed egregious keyword stuffing. The …

Facebook Releases Negative Report Before IPO

According to a quick item from David Angotti for Search Engine Land, Facebook reported that its net income fell 12 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Looking at the previous quarter’s total revenues, the latest quarter saw total revenues fall six percent, to $1.06 billion. That may not be cause for serious concern, however – especially when you consider that the previous quarter included the holiday shopping season, and Facebook makes its money from ads. Indeed, the company itself noted that the downturn was due to seasonal trends. Compare Facebook’s revenues to the year-ago quarter, and …

Increase Traffic With the Triangle of Trust

The phrase triangle of trust was first coined by the famous (and to some, infamous) Frank Kern. For those that don’t know, Frank got in fairly early to the whole Internet thing, but thanks to the boneheaded actions of someone he had zero control over, got noticed by the FTC. When I say got noticed, what I really mean is that they showed up at his door and basically demanded that he give them literally every single penny and valuable possession he had, or else they were going to arrest him for running a pyramid scheme. Now most people would have given up. Instead, ol’ Frank went on to crea…

Google CEOs to Search Asteroids for Resources

The press release from Planetary Resources includes an impressive list of investors and advisors. In addition to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, film maker James Cameron (of Avatar fame) is involved; so is Ross Perot, Jr., son of the former presidential candidate and chairman of The Perot Group. Peter H. Diamandis, one of the leading lights behind the Ansari X-Prize competition encouraging non-governmental space flight, is also part of this venture. So is Eric Anderson, an aerospace engineer and philanthropist long involved in a variety of efforts encouraging commercial spaceflight, including th…

Will Scamming Slaughter Social Search Signals?

Trond Lyngbo wrote a long and thought-provoking piece for Search Engine Land on this very topic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about their clients and their online reputation. If you worked as an SEO back in the early days of the field, of course, you can almost predict what’s coming – which only makes his points ring all the truer. If you didn’t, come with me on a short trip back in time. Before Google came on the scene, getting to the top of a search engine ranking often involved keyword stuffing and other practices considered shady or frowned upon today. Google introduced th…

What`s Behind Blekko`s Spike in Popularity?

By Blekko’s own analytics, the number of unique IPs it saw went from 1.58 million in December to 5.33 million as of the beginning of this week. Looking at their chart, the biggest spikes seem to have happened between December and January, when the search engine nearly doubled its traffic, and between March and April, when it went from 3.71 million unique visitors to 5.33 million unique visitors so far this month. Matt McGee notes that this represents a 337 percent rise in visitors just in this year – and April isn’t over yet. The year-over-year numbers are similarly impressive. McGee compared…

The Challenge of SEO for Large Enterprises

Eric Enge discussed these issues with Warren Lee, who manages SEO for Adobe’s web properties. The web software company gets 48 million visits a month to its own websites thanks to Lee’s efforts. In Lee’s opinion, knowing what the most common hurdles to SEO are before starting a project can help prevent problems before they occur. They can also help you plan a winning strategy. The first of these four big challenges, as Lee sees it, is something he calls cross functional alignment. It stems from the fact that large organizations tend to separate their functional parts into silos: marketing, H…

Matt Cutts: Let Googlebot Crawl JavaScript, CSS

Cutts normally uses these short videos to answer questions he’s received. In this one, he acknowledged that many webmasters block Googlebot from crawling JavaScript or CSS by using robots.txt. He tried to allay concerns about Googlebot causing problems when crawling a site. A of people block it because the think, ‘oh, this is going to be resources that I don’t want to have, you, the bandwidth [used up] or something,’ he admitted, then went on to say but Googlebot is pretty smart about not crawling stuff too fast. Cutts also pointed out that some webmasters will unintentionally block Googl…

Is Google Tracking Your iPhone?

Todd Wasserman covered the story for Mashable. It was also covered by none other than the Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal, advertising companies have been using special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default. Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer broke the story on his blog earlier this month. He stated that Google and Vibrant Media intentionally circumvent Safari’s privacy feature. Media Innovation Group and PointRoll…

What the Wikipedia Study Really Means for SEO

If you would like to peruse the study yourself, you can read Intelligent Positioning’s blog post. To really understand what we can learn from the study, we must first consider its methodology. The researchers conducted the entire study in English, using a random noun generator to compile a list of 1,000 words. They then searched for those words on Google’s UK site, through the Google Chrome Incognito browser to get around any personalization or customization. On the surface, the results seem to speak for themselves. For fully 99 percent of the searches, a Wikipedia entry appeared on the first …

Google Playing Doctor With Health Searches

According to a Google blog post by Dr. Roni Zeiger, Google’s Chief Health Strategist,many users searching for symptoms often follow this up with a search for a condition related to those symptoms. For example, those searching for abdominal pain may follow it with a search for irritable bowel syndrome. So Google decided to speed this process up a little. According to Dr. Zeiger, now when you search for a symptom or set of symptoms, you’ll often see a list of possibly related health conditions that you can use to refine your search. The list is generated by our algorithms that analyze data …

Romney Feels Santorum`s Google Pain

Danny Sullivan offers a run-down of the most recent events on Search Engine Land. In case you’ve been too busy to watch campaign developments, I’ll start by saying don’t Google santorum or romney unless you really want to be grossed out. It’s worth studying what happened here, however, as an example of the power of links over time – and how that may be changing. We’ll start with Santorum’s well-known story. Back when he was simply a senator, in 2003, Rick Santorum publicly compared gay sex to man-on-dog sex. This angered Dan Savage, a popular and controversial columnist in the GLBTQ comm…

Overlooked Google Ranking Factors

I saw these ideas in an article by Neil Patel that appeared on Search Engine Journal. He goes into great detail explaining why you should use these techniques and what you can gain from them. If anything I tell you here piques your curiosity, I suggest you check out that piece. We’ll start with a ranking factor that’s near and dear to every writer’s heart: authorship markup. Google has been supporting authorship markup since the middle of last year. Even today, not everyone uses it, though you’ll find it on most of the major publishing websites. If you run a site with authored content, you’ll…

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