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…

Viral Writing: the Beauty of Controversy

Just in case you haven’t read these pieces, here is Brick’s first article and her follow-up piece. It’s worth noting, of course, that Brick’s no beginning writer: her articles for the Daily Mail go back to mid-2009, and in them, she gives the impression of a longer professional history (as you might expect for almost anyone her age). She’s written somewhat controversial articles before, but they never seemed to take off like this one. Indeed, in a piece for the Telegraph on the topic, Bryony Gordon wrote that Samantha Brick’s contributions to British newspapers have gone unnoticed until this…

The 375 Million Active Searchers You`re Probably Ignoring

Right now, iTunes has 375 million active searchers. More to the point, the iTunes search engine gets people spending more time on it than any other search engine (except YouTubes). Between the iTunes for the PC/Mac and the various iOS devices, iTunes is a very important search engine. People looking for information will often look for podcasts and videos there first before looking anywhere else. Add the iTunes App Store into the mix, and if you’re not found on iTunes you’re making a huge mistake. Now, let me be clear about something: every business can benefit from being ranked on iTunes. I’ve…

A Closer Look at Crushing Local SEO Competition

While Arrow already boasts a nice social presence, as I noted in the previous article, they could be doing more. So the question then becomes, what should they be doing? What things can they put into place now to capture more customers and in fact make them the de facto moving authorities in Colorado Springs? 1. This is a somewhat minor point, but the way their page is designed right now, when someone clicks on the blog link, the content is actually below the fold and it isn’t clear that the page did anything. Their page loads so fast that a refresh doesn’t even look like it happened, and …

Crushing Local SEO Competition: A Case Study

Back at the end of February I wrote a couple of articles regarding local SEO where I reviewed a site. The articles were Local SEO: Secrets to Killing the Competition and Dominating Local SEO. I took a website, pepetileinstallation.com in south Jersey, and showed what he was doing right and wrong, and what he could do to crush his competition and gain more business. I’ve decided to turn this into a monthly series. Once a month I’ll look at a site and give exact tips and strategies that could be put in place to gain more business. Understand that these sites are going to be picked somewhat at …

More Ways to Get Attention For Your Blog

This article picks up on where I left off in a previous article. In that piece, I covered the importance of creating a great headline, explained how linking to older posts can help you, and why you should link to other bloggers. I also touched on details such as filling in your page title and description, creating URLs that look good in social media, and attracting and keeping an audience by blogging more than once a month. That may sound like a lot, but there’s always more to learn. Neil Patel introduces these points in the form a negative – don’t do this – but I prefer phrasing them in a p…

Cosmetic Surgery Marketing: Inbound Marketing and SEO

Missing The Golden Opportunity Cosmetic surgeons often spend a large amount of money on their marketing. Most have great looking websites with lots of before and after pictures. I’ve seen several with fairly in-depth link building programs to try and maintain good search rankings. The problem is that the face of SEO is rapidly changing. Link building doesn’t even begin to be good enough anymore. The changes at Google (and Bing) mean that social signals are playing a prominent role in who gets ranked and where. This is so strong at Google that simply putting the right people into your circles…

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