2008 August | SEO ShootOut

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Careful with those Backlinks

Backlinks have become very popular in SEO and search engines, especially Google, have started to give them more and more weight when ranking their returns. So I thought I would spend the next few posts talking about backlinks and their advantages and their pitfalls. I’ll be talking about interlinking, reciprocal linking, creating a backlinking campaign, backlink builder tools, and using anchor text.

But let’s get back to backlinking. As I said, backlinking has become so important that organizations have sprung up promising to help you with your backlinks. They claim that they will get more backlinks to your site, and therefore…

Optimizing For New Google Search Suggest

You’ll find this bit of news all over the web; Google is implementing search suggestion over the next week or so. What you may not find all over the web are SEO tips for maximizing traffic from these suggestions. Fear not, friends. SEOBook is ahead of the game on this one, and lays out what other features Google is implementing, the effect they will have on search, and what YOU can do to stay optimized.

Here’s what you need to know from this post:

Google is also implementing automatic matching and updating the quality score.
Industry keywords may consolidate- outlier terms will become more difficult to…

Survey

For those of us in the profession of Web building, this survey from A List Apart is an important survey; it’s like a census that helps people understand who we are and how we work/live/are compensated. Just a few days left! Take the survey!

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Abigail Hamilton is a professional with over a decade of experience in small business, enterprise, and business-to-business design and marketing. She loves writing for the Web, creating and maintaining brand identities, and working with clients to meet their goals.

It’s not Just ‘Writing’

I received a comment on my last post, and it made a lot of sense. And I thought, instead of addressing the comment directly, I would address it in my next post. Here’s the comment in its entirety.

I completely agree that writing is critical for online marketing success; in order to get more traffic of good intent to your site vs your competitors’ sites. And I agree that one of the first things that even a small business should do is dedicate resources to writing on the web. However, I do not agree that this person needs to be a…

Organic results reveal SEO flaws

McCain is not known for his ‘net savvy (he doesn’t use computers) or the quality of his Web site — or his online ad spending, which is less than half that of Obama — so I guess it should come as no surprise that he hasn’t done much to control the results that show on Page 1 of a Google search.

Not only do search results show items 8 & 9 (on page one on my computer, shown at right) to be negatives, but of only four ads on the right column of the Google page, two are pro-Obama: MiddleClass.org links to a report…

Maxing out

Popular gossip Blogger Perez Hilton always like to push things to the limit; it’s true of his page title as well as of his journalism.

It’s common wisdom that anything after the first 10 words of a page title are ignored by search engines.

So, leave it to Perez to use 11. After all, he has been such a diligent self-promoter he doesn’t need a last name anymore!

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Link Building Basics

A guaranteed method to boosting your visibility on the web is by link building. When I say link building, I’m talking about quality link building. Anyone can chuck a handful of links at sites like del.icio.us or Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia, but those are typically sources of constant updating and offer only temporary traffic. To stand against time, you’ll need to invest time, and as the saying goes, “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.”

The Basics

In ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Worthless Link’, Debra Mastaler lists off a short set of guidelines by which she follows to build…

What’s really happening at Google

A lot of human energy is spent trying to figure out what Google is doing at any given time, so as to be in synch with SEO efforts. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to achieve true insight into the operations over there until you acquaint yourself with the cuisine. Sure, the most recent photo is from June 2007, but this year-and-a-half’s record of Google cafe dishes (free to employees) gets you on the vibe.

The blog attracted 339,806 views, and many comments including a few from some very wet blankets:

All I can think is that, with the time associated…

You Can’t do it all By Yourself

One thing I saw when the Dot-Com bubble burst in early 2000, 2001, was a sudden dearth of jobs for content developers and writers and anything that wasn’t strictly coding. Web devs replaced everyone. Companies were downsizing because they could barely afford to stay in business, let alone hire what they considered extraneous employees.

Nowadays, it still runs pretty much the same. Everybody’s a “content developer.” Many companies think that they don’t need anyone who specializes in content. They believe that they can do it all themselves. All they need is someone in the company to write some copy, put a…

Inside Google

The other day a friend who works for Google in Internationalization was in town, and because her schedule was full of meetings we ended up having lunch at the cafeteria in the Google Engineering building in Seattle’s Fremont district. I missed the opportunity to snap a few photos, which is a shame. The salt and pepper grinders on the tables were colorful lucite in Google colors, and the chairs were colored plastic, too. I loved that the decor made you feel like you were on a Google Web page.

I learned a little about what she’s doing, which was interesting, too:…

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