Search Engine Optimization News, Tips and Information

Information on search engine optimization strategies for business.

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Microsoft Yodles Goodbye to Yahoo...For Now

On Saturday, Microsoft retracted its offer to buy Yahoo after last minute talks between Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo and Microsoft executives Steve Ballmer and Kevin Johnson. Microsoft was willing to pay $33 per share for Yahoo for a total acquisition cost of $47.5 billion, up from the last offer of $29 per share. "Clearly a deal is not to be" wrote Ballmer in a letter to Yang transmitted late in the day on Saturday.

Yahoo's board had wanted $53 billion, which amounts to $37 per share. At that price, almost double the value of Yahoo's stock when the takeover discussions started a few months ago, Microsoft evidently did not see the transaction as lucrative.

Additionally, it appears that Microsoft will not make good on its threat to take over Yahoo through a hostile purchase of stock on the open market, known as a proxy battle. With sufficient ownership of Yahoo stock acquired through a proxy battle, Microsoft could have replaced Yahoo's board with a more acquisition friendly board. However, Microsoft has determined a proxy battle to be "not sensible" as Yahoo would have likely taken steps during the proxy battle which would make them "undesirable as an acquisition".

But don't think the discussions are over. If Yahoo is unable to successfully manage a turnaround and its stock prices drop into the low teens, Microsoft would likely make another offer later this year, which may be more difficult for Yahoo to turn away from.

Facts from this article taken from various third party online sources, including the Associated Press and the Austin American-Statesman.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

More Join Fight to Defeat "Der SEO Führer"

At least one other person has joined the fight against aspiring SEO Führer Jason Gambert by filing a Notice of Opposition with the USPTO today. And I can tell already that I am going to like this girl. Her name is Rhea Drysdale. In her honor, I have created this SEO Trademark Propaganda Poster, what do you think?



I received an instant message today from Rhea Drysdale letting me know that she has joined the fight. After our IM session I had what I can only describe as the wondrous pleasure of reading her blog entry on the subject. This girl has a sense of humor. Much like mine. She even went so far as to fudge around with a screenshot of Gambert's website. Check it out, it's hilarious:



Isn't it great? It's funny, how nobody in the industry wants for the industry to be "saved" by Gambert. Of course, that is because we are all mere minions, and do not know what is best for us. That is why Gambert Longshanks has come to save us all. And Ms. Drysdale's use of imagery continues - likening us worthless minions to Mel Gibson's rebellion in Braveheart. Wonderful!

Anyway, Ms. Drysdale seems pretty ruffled up about the whole situation, as she well should be. And her style is awesome, as she goes through some of Gambert's blog posts and addresses them in her own way, saying his statements "make her ill", among other things.

Kudos to you, Rhea!

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Roundtable: SEM Industry Steps on Slippery Ground

A roundtable discussion featuring ArteWorks SEO CEO Matt Foster, along with Scott Buresh (Medium Blue), Roger Janik (ServerSideDesign), and Frank Siano (eBridge Marketing Solutions) on the topic of the current and future state of the SEM industry was conducted by PromotionWorld. The full roundtable discussion is available here: http://promotionworld.com/interviews/interview/080424Roundtable_page1.html.
Full article here
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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

SEO Trademark Dispute Gets Ugly

The ongoing saga of the attempt to trademark the term "SEO" has taken an interesting turn, as the applicant Jason Gambert sent two emails today to ArteWorks SEO CEO Matt Foster. In the first email, Gambert implies that he will be filing suit against ArteWorks SEO. In the subsequent email, which is more of a rambling manifesto than a coherent communication, Gambert implies that he has the support of a number of industry leaders, including Danny Sullivan and Doug Heil (both of whom he mentioned by name), and that ArteWorks SEO and others opposing the application for trademark such as SEOMoz are only adding "another scar to the face of the entire industry." I believe Mr. Heil has already made his position on the SEO trademark issue quite clear when he stated on Gambert's blog "I do not approve of the way you have went about this. Trademarking a term in this way and for that term is totally and utterly ridiculous and has not given you any high marks within the community you want standards in." I would love to hear Mr. Sullivan's position on the matter as well.

Ever since ArteWorks SEO made public its intent to fight the ludicrous attempt to trademark the term "SEO" by applicant Jason Gambert the threats have been rolling in. To date, four communications have been received, two anonymous ones, and two from Jason Gambert himself. Before we go into a discussion of the specificity of the communications, some of which are clearly threats, let it be known loud and clear so that everyone understands, including applicant Jason Gambert, that threats and intimidation will not deter ArteWorks SEO from proceeding forward. In fact, such behavior will actually lead to the exact opposite result than is desired by those making such threats, in that it only solidifies and strengthens our resolve in this matter, only making it more clear that we are doing the right thing by opposing this trademark application.

The threats began last Friday in the form of two anonymous comment posts to this blog. One such post threatened that I would be "punched in the face", another, subsequent post, threatened that ArteWorks SEO would be slapped with a $25 million dollar lawsuit. Of course, we have no way of knowing who made these comments (which were not approved for publication on our blog), but we have our suspicions.

Then, today, I received an email from Gambert himself. In it he issues what I consider and what was clearly intended to be a threat. The subject line of the email read "FYI/Defamation", implying some sort of a threat of litigation. It says, in part, "Please advise your attorneys that I have...notated your use of the term Nobody [sic] in regards to me. I also notated your website changes..."

What website changes? Do you mean our blog posts? Thank you for noting them. While you are at it, do you mind noting them on Digg and StumbleUpon, among others? We would be appreciative. Every Digg counts.

And Mr. Gambert, obviously the use of the word "nobody" is nothing more than hyperbole opinion. It is self evident that is not a statement of fact. Unless a phantom filed the trademark application, that is, in which case you don't exist and therefore wouldn't care what was said about anything. Either way, you are fine. So calm down.

It's very interesting. Stunning, actually, that there would be a reaction such as this. Almost as stunning as the fact that "SEO" is alleged to stand for "systems efficient optimization", yet pleas are being made to the SEO community (by which I mean search engine optimization community) to support the application. If it doesn't stand for search engine optimization, why address the search engine optimization community? Why make statements that the purpose is to create a set of search engine optimization standards?

I digress.

In this country we have free speech. I am free, you are free, Jason Gambert is free, to make statements of opinion and hyperbole regarding any topic whatsoever, but especially regarding topics or persons in the public eye. By attempting to trademark the term SEO, Gambert has definitely gotten himself in the public eye. Also in this country we have courts and legal systems in place for the handling of disputes such as trademark applications and the like. And this is exactly where this dispute will take place - in the courts - and not through threats, coercion, or intimidation.

Mr. Gambert, I do not know you personally. Although I feel as if I know much about your character, based on a number of your public actions. Examples include what, in my opinion (and since you are threatening defamation action, let me make it real clear that this is my opinion only, as are the entire contents of the ArteWorks SEO weblog), is best characterized as an extreme bad faith effort to trademark the term SEO and leverage it for your benefit, as well as through your attempts to threaten or manipulate me or anyone else out of using the legal system to protect our rights. Additionally, it is my opinion that you have committed perjury by submitting a trademark application claiming that you have proprietary ownership in the term "SEO", and further it is my opinion that you have committed perjury by claiming that "SEO" stands for "systems efficient optimization" when I believe you know good and well what SEO stands for and that your intentions involve the use of that term in its commonly accepted meaning. This is further validated in my mind by the fact that you have addressed the SEO community regarding this and your intentions to create a set of industry standards, which to the best of my knowledge was conveniently omitted in your trademark application.

Just my opinion.

Later in the evening, I received a second email from Gambert, in which he appears (again, in my opinion) to make clear that indeed his intentions are to utilize the term "SEO" to refer to search engine optimization. This is the manifesto to which I made earlier reference, and in my opinion appears quite narcissistic. The SEO Trademarker Manifesto email in relevant part is as follows (grammar and spelling errors in original).

The "SEO Trademarker Manifesto":

Matt,

Just showing you that I am “Sharp” “Intelligent” “Courageous” and “Fearless!”

Unlike the rest of the “Haters,” “Cons,” “Used Car Salesman” and “Snake Oil Dealers, I have honor.”

It’s just a perfect example of people automatically hating what they fear most…(FEAR ITS SELF)

It would be nice if people would talk to me before automatically assuming things out of their own fears.

I have no problem with you, I don’t know why you have such a big problem with me…

I have not done anything to you, I have not personally attacked you or your business!

You are attacking me, my business, my reputation, my credibility etc. for what?

If you think I am going to send you a Cease and Desist letter, you error tremendously…

Please drop the hatchet already, if all of us are constantly fighting we will never get anywhere.

Believe me it won’t be “FUN” to war with one another, it will be ugly, and just add another scar to the face of the entire industry.

Who needs all that stress, not you, not me, not the industry, and not are pockets especially.

Let’s all come together and do something awesome to clean up all of our reputations as executives!

We are only going to have one shot at this, and so far the PRO’s do outweigh the cons….

Everyone has said, “CANT,” “CANT,” “CANT,” and all I have done is show everyone how seriously I can. I now wish to show

Everyone “WE” can! Every lawyer said it was impossible, it is not believe me when I say this…

When you can’t get one lawyer, NOT EVEN ONE to believe in you, you end up representing yourself.

I think I have done a pretty darn good job, figuring I did what every lawyer said was impossible…

So far “DOUG HEIL,” is the only one with enough courage to step up to the plate.

I have been in contact with “Danny Sullivan” as well!

Oh yes, I almost forgot, and a few well known companies too… ; )

Sincerely,

Jason

Still looking for the rest of the SEO Rock Stars!


At this point, I am tired of writing about this, it is late, and I will let Gambert's words speak for themselves. Draw your own conclusion about whether or not he intends the "SEO" trademark to apply to search engine optimization.

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Friday, April 18, 2008

Press Release Regarding Trademark of Term "SEO"

ArteWorks SEO Files Notice With USPTO Of Intent To Join Fight Against Approval Of “SEO” Trademark
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



Contact:

Matt Foster, CEO

ArteWorks SEO

P.O. Box 1967

Austin, TX 78767

Phone: 512-535-2821

www.arteworks.biz

matt@arteworks.biz



ArteWorks SEO Files Notice With USPTO Of Intent To Join Fight Against Approval Of “SEO” Trademark



Austin, Texas – April 18, 2008 – ArteWorks.net Inc., d.b.a. ArteWorks SEO, today filed its notice of intent to join the fight against an application for trademark which attempts to reserve the phrase “SEO” for use by a single individual “in all computer related areas” including “search engine optimization”. ArteWorks SEO has put the trademark applicant, Jason Gambert, on notice of ArteWorks’ intent to oppose the application through its submission to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) of a Request for 30 Day Extension of Time to File Notice of Opposition. ArteWorks SEO’s request was automatically granted today by the USPTO.



The application which is before the USPTO and has been assigned serial number 77171330 attempts to reserve use of the term SEO to the applicant to the exclusion of all other parties. It appears the application contains deceptive information in addition to being a frivolous attempt to leverage an accepted industry term for the financial advantage of the Applicant Jason Gambert.



Among other things, Gambert alleges in his application that his “first use” of the term “SEO” was on or about February of 2007. ArteWorks SEO has been using the term SEO to describe its search marketing and search engine optimization services since at least March of 2004. Additionally, numerous web references to the term “SEO” have been found in the Internet archive and other sources dating back at least as far as 2001. These web references include but are not limited to archived Wikipedia pages and archived pages of numerous firms offering SEO services prior to Applicant’s alleged “first use” of February, 2007.



“ArteWorks SEO, as well as numerous other entities and individuals, have been using the term ‘SEO’ to describe search engine optimization services for years prior to the alleged first use of February, 2007,” stated Matt Foster, CEO of ArteWorks SEO. “The term ‘SEO’ has been around since the 1990’s, and it is preposterous that any single individual would purport to claim ownership of the term. As leaders in the SEO industry, we are proud to stand up and fight against this bad faith trademark application.”



At least one other organization, SEOMoz, Inc., has already filed a Notice of Opposition in the same case.



ArteWorks SEO has until May 25th to file its completed Notice of Opposition, or in the alternative request an additional extension of time.



About ArteWorks SEO



ArteWorks SEO is an internationally recognized search engine optimization firm and a leader in the field of search engine optimization. For more information, please visit www.arteworks.biz.

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

ArteWorks SEO to Join in Fight Against Trademarking Term "SEO"

It seems there is a character who thinks he can trademark the term "SEO". ArteWorks SEO is joining the trademark litigation, and it going to be fun laying the smack down on this nobody.

This character, who nobody has ever heard of before, has a name. His name is Jason Gambert. One look at his pathetic website, which I absolutely refuse to link to here, is clearly demonstrative of the absolute pitiful amount of knowledge of SEO this guy has. Take a look at his title tag, which by the way is the only indexable piece of content on the site. It's horrible. Why is there no indexable content on his site? Because it is a Flash site. And this guy claims to be an "SEO".

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has already denied his application at least three times. In his current application, he makes the claim that "SEO" is his rightful trademark and stands for "systems efficient optimization", which is a "process" (as opposed to a service) for the manipulation of keywords and keyphrases, and is not an Internet marketing service. Of course, Gambert contradicts his own application in statements he has made on his personal blog and elsewhere, appealing to the SEO community for support of his application, so that a standardized set of "SEO best practices" can be developed for the benefit of all mankind.

Now wait a minute, Gambert. I thought you said SEO had nothing to do with search engine optimization? Why, then, are you in your personal blog saying that your goal is to create a set of SEO standards? And, by the way, who are you? If anyone is going to be setting SEO standards, it will certainly not be you, a person of whom nobody has ever heard, with no professional reputation, not a single verifiable client (have you ever actually done any SEO for a paying client), and obviously zero SEO knowledge.

Utter hogwash.

The good folks at SEOMoz have already filed their Notice of Opposition with the USPTO, and ArteWorks SEO is in the process of filing its response. The SEOMoz response aptly notes that Gambert's application proposes to trademark the term "SEO" for any and all "computer related services". He claims the first use of the term "SEO" was by him and occured on or about February 14, 2007.

SEOMoz's pleading sheds further light on the arguments against the granting of this preposterous application. It notes that the term "SEO" has been used since the 1990's, and in fact that SEOMoz has been using it since 2003, a good 4 years prior to Gambert's alleged "first use". SEOMoz further elucidates the fact that it appears Gambert has falsified information and engaged in deception regarding his use of the term, including a cooked up logo or icon in which he claims he coined the term "SEO", but which is obviously nothing more than a "phony specimen" which has never been used in commerce and was concocted for the sole purpose of supporting his trademark application.

The SEOMoz Notice of Opposition continues, citing additional problems with the application, providing additional evidence that the term "SEO" has been widely and generically used in the field of SEO (oh wait, am I allowed to say that?), and goes on to describe SEO as a service (not a process as Gambert claims) which is an "essential marketing strategy". SEOMoz lends additional credence to their argument that it is a marketing and not a technological service by elucidating the otherwise-obvious-to-everyone-on-the-planet-but-Gambert fact that SEO is typically paid for out of an organization's marketing budget rather than its technology budget.

What it all boils down to is this - Gambert is trying to make a quick buck by leveraging the right to use the term SEO to only himself and those who he, in his sole discretion, believes meet the standards for SEO "best practices".

As leaders in the SEO industry, ArteWorks SEO is thrilled to join in the fight against this guy. See you in court, my friend.

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Thursday, April 03, 2008

Remove Ripoff Report Items With Reputation Management Strategy

There has been increasing press in the SEO industry lately regarding Ripoff Report. It seems these guys are pretty unscrupulous in the way they conduct business, and if you have become a victim of Ripoff Report there are steps you can take to ameliorate the damage.

The Ripoff Report problem has gotten so bad, in fact, that some SEO industry experts are calling on Google to remove it from their listings. It appears Yahoo and others have already pretty much discounted the Ripoff Report (no, I'm not going to give them any link love, you'll just have to look it up yourself) in their indexes, however Google still seems to have a love affair with this site. What this means, if you have become a victim of Ripoff Report, is that unfounded, and sometimes libelous, publicity about your company can appear at the top of the search engines in a search for your organizations name, or the name of its principles. This can be very costly in terms of lost sales and corporate opportunities. However, you are not without a defense against this type of negative publicity.

Any online reputation management strategy involves the creation of content to replace the offending content in the search engine results. Typically, this content can take one of several forms.

Perhaps the best way to deal with negative publicity is to confront it directly through the issuance of a rebuttal. Creating content which states what the problem was, and how your organization resolved the problem to the satisfaction of the complaining party is an excellent source of information to potential customers who will be very interested in seeing how your company deals with customer grievances.

Another way to directly confront negative publicity is to dispute it publicly. As you can imagine, offending blog posts and negative publicity are usually not written from an unbiased perspective, and will likely omit certain important facts. Providing your version of events can help level the playing field and get both sides of the story out there.

Press releases are another good way to get your company name out there and to supplant negative listings in the search results. Releasing positive press about your company can influence public opinion and perception, and can also attract positive commentary across the web.

Creation of blog content is another way to supplant negative listings in the search results. Create useful and informative blog articles, and be sure your company name is included in the article so that you have the opportunity for those posts to rank well for company name searches.

Sometimes bad press can be tough to get rid of, in which case you should consider hiring an expert search engine optimization firm to handle it for you. Select a firm which has experience in online reputation management and is willing to explain to you in plain English the methods they will use and why such methods are effective.

About the Author: Matt Foster is the CEO of ArteWorks SEO ( www.arteworks.biz ), an internationally recognized search engine optimization firm which also handles online reputation management and services to remove Ripoff Report items from top search results pages.

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Thursday, March 13, 2008

Matt Foster's Interview at SMX

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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Debunking SEO Mythology

In Greek mythology, the Hydra was a creature who could not be defeated, as each time one of its heads was cut off, two more would sprout back in its place. It seems that SEO mythology is no different; every time one SEO myth is debunked, two more SEO myths crop back up in its place, only adding to the confusion about search engine optimization.
Hercules was able to defeat the Hydra by cutting off its heads and then burning the stumps before new heads could grow back. What SEO needs is a hero, an SEO Hercules, to come and save us from the Hydra of SEO Mythology. Let’s go through some of the more pervasive SEO myths and see if we can put a torch to them.

Myth: All I need to do is figure out the magic bullet, and I will be at the top of the search engines.

Fact: Search engines use over 200 factors to rank sites. No one factor will get you to the top. To get to the top, you must have a balanced search engine strategy encompassing many factors, both on page and off page. There is no magic bullet.

Myth: Search rankings are about link popularity. Get as many links as you can. Join web rings, “free for all” (FFA) link exchanges, and get as many sites as you can to link to you through reciprocal linking back to them.

Fact: While link popularity is important if done correctly, Google is placing links under increasing scrutiny, and sheer volumes of inbound linking without regard to the source of the link and other factors hasn’t worked in years. It is not the raw number of links that matter, but the type of links. Links from trusted sites, relevant to your industry, with proper anchor text and relevant surrounding text and page content, to original content on your site are the ones that will help you. FFA linking will most likely get you in trouble with the engines as they could interpret that as an attempt to spam the results. In addition to bleeding away all of your page rank to other sites, FFA linking will increase your chances of linking to a “bad neighborhood”, another thing which can get you into trouble. Never link to sites you do not know or with which you are not familiar. Remember, Google is smarter than you, you can’t fool them with unnatural linking schemes.

Myth: It’s all about “keyword density”. Be sure to repeat your keyword numerous times on your web site. Keyword repetition increases keyword density and inflates your search engine ranking.

Fact: Structuring your page around some magic formula for keyphrase density does nothing for you. Yes, your target keyphrases should be included at least once on the page, as well as in your title and meta description elements, and in an H1 or H2 tag if possible. Other than that, forget about keyphrase density. Create your web content for human readers and write it so it makes sense to them. Whatever you do, avoid keyphrase repetition, a known spamming technique sure to get you into trouble.

Myth: Repeated submissions to the search engines increase your rankings. It is a good idea to sign up for an automated submission service, which will regularly resubmit your site to 1,000 or more search engines each week.

Fact: Automated submissions are a violation of major search engines Terms of Inclusion and can get you into trouble. Search engines don’t need you to submit to them, set up a blog and get a few links to your site, and they will find you very quickly. Using blogger.com, which is owned by Google, usually can get a new site indexed within a week. Just be sure to put a link on the blog to your site.

Myth: The meta keywords tag must include your target keywords. Search engines place heavy weight on this tag and use it to determine which keywords for which to rank your site.

Fact: Search engines that matter, such as Google, place zero weight on the keywords meta element due to historical spam. Yahoo appears to give it some small weight. In any event, use of the keyword meta element is of so little use, many SEO’s ignore it altogether.

Myth: Because links are so important to search rankings, I should go out and purchase a large number of paid links and submit to hundreds or thousands of directories in order to get more links to my site.

Fact: Google especially has cracked down hard on paid links in the last few months. To put it succinctly, they don’t pass page rank. If you want to buy a link from a site, only do it if you believe the link itself will be a good source of traffic (in other words, only do it for legitimate advertising purposes). Do not do it if your purpose is for that link to transfer page rank or increase your ranking, as it likely will not. Additionally, hundreds of useless directories have been harshly penalized as well, so that links from within them are either not counted at all or given very little weight. Get links from a few well respected directories such as dmoz.org, Yahoo directory, Business.com, JoeAnt, and others which have a manual review process. Automated submission services which submit to hundreds of directories are a waste of money.

Myth: I should write articles and submit them to article directories, because links from article directories have high page rank and are given great weight by the engines.

Fact: Article directory links in and of themselves carry little to no weight. The engines are smart and know that people spam these directories with useless content just to get a link. If you want to get relevant, trusted links to your site that actually mean something, create useful, informative, or educational content that people will want to link to. Articles are one form of such content, but only if they are good enough to get picked up by other sites. Other content which can serve as link bait is video content, tools and widgets, product reviews, top 10 lists, and interesting or entertaining blogs.

About the Author:
Matt Foster is the CEO of ArteWorks SEO, a leading search engine optimization company. For more information on search engine optimization including a series of educational videos, please visit www.arteworks.biz.

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Monday, January 14, 2008

Video SEO 101

Discusses the increasing importance of video in search engine optimization, as well as techniques for video optimization.
The Growing Video Universe

Predicted to be a $3 billion dollar business by 2010 (source: eMarketer), the use of video for search marketing, while still in its infancy, is growing at a tremendous rate. According to market trends expert Brian Haven, over fifty percent of world wide web users are viewing at least one video per month, and this potential number of viewers and visitors has many companies sprinting toward full scale internet video campaigns. With the launch of Universal Search in many of the most relevant search engines, including Google, more videos will begin appearing in actual organic search engine rankings, thus increasing their value to SEO firms and their clients, not to mention the advantages of pure viral marketing.

YouTube, the most successful video sharing website, estimates they receive almost 30 million unique users in a single month’s time. As only a three year old company, now owned by Google, it is considered to be the fourth busiest website in the world, and is only one of the hundreds of video sharing avenues. Metacafe is not far behind, generating almost 20 million unique viewers every month. The importance of video for Internet marketing as well as search rankings will continue to increase as broadband becomes more common and search engines react accordingly, and as such, video optimization has already become an important part of online marketing campaigns and search engine optimization strategies.

Video Marketing

There are millions of short video clips produced by professionals and amateurs alike available on the web. Some post videos in the name of fame and fun, while others are focused on using videos to create a viral marketing campaign and drive traffic to their respective websites. With millions of consumers of video content the question must be asked as to how successful are videos in driving actual web traffic. According to a recent study by Market Experiments Journal, the use of video in viral marketing can produce incredible click results. Market Experiments produced several amateur style videos for posting on the web that would serve as experimental viral marketing. These 28 videos pulled over 80,000 views in one month, and by sixty days they had received over 300,000 views with no additional work or investment. At 324,190 views, 4,162 people continued on to click through their website, and the best part is that the views will continue to increase, bringing in more website traffic at a minimal cost. When the cost of the acquisition of these users via video was compared to PPC, it was discovered that a PPC campaign would have cost over $20.00 per visitor acquisition, whereas the video campaign cost a fraction of that.

How does this transfer to SEO?

It has long been known amongst search engine optimization experts that one of the most valuable ways to create inbound links to a website is by creating quality content. This content in turn serves as “link bait,” with the goal of receiving one-way links from other websites that fuel both traffic and search rankings. The concept is simple, and applies to the utilization of video for SEO. Entertaining, informative, or humorous content has proven to be excellent link bait, as are product reviews and “top 10” lists. With the proper techniques of production, formatting, optimization, posting, and publishing, video can be an excellent way to create such content and boost search engine ranking results.

Creating Video Content

To take full advantage of video optimization, the first and most important step is to produce a high quality original. Most successful videos are created using professional equipment, digital tape, plenty of light, and quality microphones. Some of the most successful amateur videos on the web were shot with 3 CCD cameras and nice tripods. ArteWorks SEO, for example, utilizes a Canon GL2 3CCD recording on MiniDV with both standard letterbox and 16:9 widescreen capabilities. This will produce an obvious difference in the clarity of picture as well as accuracy of color. Videos that are too dark or whose sound is difficult to decipher will most likely be passed over by increasingly savvy viewers or leave an impression that the video producer is an amateur. Next, it is important to shoot videos that have some relevance to your industry. Even if it is just a funny skit, an ounce of relevance will go a long way in creating relevant links and search traffic. Once the footage is created, videos should be edited to a length that is conducive to viewer attention spans. Informational videos should be less than five minutes, and funny skits should usually be under one minute or even thirty seconds. Videos that are too long may lose viewers or experience loading delays. The object is to load the video as quickly as possible and then leave viewers wanting more.

Video File Optimization

Once you have created short, concise, entertaining, quality videos, you will need to optimize the video files for search engine crawlers. Titling is the most important part of this process. The actual title of the file name works similarly to Title Tags for web pages. Search engine crawlers can recognize these file names and index them accordingly, so it is important to include target keyphrases within the video title. The process continues by injecting the appropriate metadata into the actual video file encoding. This should include information like the title, length, keywords, and authorship associated with a particular video clip. Another increasingly popular video optimization strategy is to include a transcript of each video. This transcript will not only provide valuable text threading, but it can also include anchor text links specific to keyphrases.

Publishing Your Video Content

There are two common ways to post videos for others to view. The first, for SEO purposes, is to post videos directly on your website. Link bait that is directly connected to your website can then attract links directly to your website. Each video should have an individual page with content that is associated to that video’s specific keyphrases, and the URL for that page should include the title of the video. Videos can also appear in blog or forums so that others can comment and form a small social network. When a video is posted on a webpage, you can include a link to the video transcript and the code for embedding the video on other websites or blogs.

Beyond posting on your own website, publishing your video on various video sharing websites is almost more important in terms of actual exposure. Video sharing sites like Youtube, Metacafe, AOLvideo, Yahoo Video, Myspace, and more can solicit thousands of views in a short period of time because each of their viewer bases range from 10 to 50 million per month. With proper submission, these types of sites can serve as a mass syndication effort for your videos, which is vital for viral and organic ranking purposes. There are hundreds of Internet success stories that come from the thousands, or millions, of hits a particular video clip received on a video sharing site.

Video Bookmarking

Though video sharing websites are an excellent resource for achieving high exposure, social media sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon, Del.icio.us and others can also create a powerful buzz as well as provide excellent inbound links. Again, this process is similar to that of bookmarking any other type of content on a social media site. By bookmarking the video on the business website and on other sharing sites, using relevant and authority bookmarking accounts, the videos have been released to another world of sharing and voting that can bring in countless views, especially if they are well liked by the community. However, there is another key reason for submitting bookmarks to social networks. Search engines have become increasingly likely to index bookmarked postings on social media networks. Thus, your video content can appear in universal search rankings, which will increase their visibility for relevant keyphrases. If that bookmark leads back to your actual website, the impact on your organic search rankings will be noticeable.
Making it easy for others to bookmark videos on your website is another means to fully take advantage of social media networks. Most social media sites with bookmarking capability offer “buttons” that can be posted on a website that will automatically bookmark the selection for the viewer to the appropriate network. For example, you might place a “Digg” button next to a video player, and when clicked, it would prompt the viewer to quickly bookmark this item to their Digg profile.

Looking to Tomorrow

The use of video as link bait content is a relatively new concept, and the increasing sophistication of search engines will continue to change and improve the ways videos are indexed. There are already some search engines like Blinkx that use speech recognition and visual analysis rather than just metadata in order to determine the nature of specific video content. Capabilities like these and further advances will continue to change the way video can be used to create online exposure, but the value of video for the future is clear. Regardless of the technological advances and shifts in industry standards, video content will continue to grow in popularity as the rest of the world shifts to standard broadband Internet connections. For this reason, it is important to consider the inclusion of some form of video content for any online business that seeks to improve their credibility, visibility and ranking results. By starting now, your business can ride the wave from the beginning, growing alongside the development of the role of video in search engines. It is truly a golden opportunity for smart businesses to rise to the top.

About the Author

Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. He has a Bachelor’s degree in radio, television and film and extensive experience in social media optimization. Mr. Hamilton also heads up the ArteWorks SEO educational video series on topics related to Internet marketing and search engine optimization. If you would like to view the free educational SEO video series, please visit www.arteworks.biz.

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Search Engine Optimization and Paid Links

Matt Foster, president of Arteworks SEO discusses with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org Google's crack down on paid links. This is a huge topic with the search engine optimization community

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Friday, October 26, 2007

Paid Link Pain of Google's Iron Fist

Google has come down hard on paid links. Don't believe me? Just ask sites like washingtonpost.com, forbes.com, and many other high profile sites that have just had their page rank reduced by two to four points. Are you still considering hiring that SEO firm that offers "paid text links" or "paid ad buys" as part of their strategy? I hope not.

Google staff began talking about an upcoming shakedown on paid links several months ago. One of the reasons for the shakedown is that paid links are not true, natural links, and therefore shouldn't qualify as "voting" links for the purpose of transferring PageRank. Google prefers to have sites naturally linking to each other, as natural linking is the more reliable way to ascertain the relative importance of a site. In the past, Google has come down on FFA or "free for all" linking schemes, link exchange schemes, link farms, and appears to discount reciprocal linking (link trades or link swaps). Now their target is paid links.

Google is not against paid links per se. Conspiracy theorists aside (who believe Google is trying to end all advertising on the Internet except through their own AdWords service), Google is not stupid and they know that there are legitimate advertising reasons for purchasing links from quality sites that would be good sources of qualified traffic to your site. However, the problem is that people were (and still are) purchasing paid links not for advertising or traffic purposes, but rather to artificially inflate their link popularity.

Google came out this summer and said that all paid links should be identified as such or risk a penalty. Specifically, it has been suggested that paid links should utilize the nofollow attribute, which is an attribute in the linking code of a site which tells Google the link is not intended to transfer PageRank. Use of this attribute clearly identifies the link as "non-voting", and solves the problem.
However, many sites ignored Google's warning. Then, in the fourth week of October of 2007, Google slammed down its iron fist. Some very high profile sites, including many in the search engine optimization industry, were hit hard through reductions in PageRank of several points. These were sites such as washingtonpost.com, forbes.com, searchengineguide.com, suntimes.com, and seoroundtable.com. Additionally, many high profile blog sites were hit. The one thing that all of these sites have in common is that they sold text link ads, and did not employ the nofollow attribute.

This served a dual purpose - it served as disincentive for the site owners to continue selling paid links absent a nofollow attribute, as well as a disincentive for link buyers to buy links from these now low PageRank sites.

Rumors in the SEO industry are that the buyers of these paid links could be the next to be hit. So buyer beware. If you are shopping for SEO, avoid any firm or strategy which offers a "paid link buy", "text ad purchase", or anything similar. You do this for a few reasons: first, the links will likely be worth nothing (for SEO purposes), either through use of a nofollow attribute or low PageRank.

Additionally, you could be putting yourself at risk as the link buyer. Finally, any SEO firm offering this service obviously does not know anything about SEO, and as such any of their purported search engine optimization services are suspect.

How can you protect yourself? If you are a seller of links, use the nofollow attribute. If you are a buyer of links, don't do it for SEO purposes, or you will be sorely disappointed. If buying a link makes sense for your business (i.e. the link will be a good source of qualified traffic), then do it. If you expect it to improve your positioning in the engines, however, you are misguided in your efforts.

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks SEO, a top 3 search engine optimization company in the world. For more information, please visit www.arteworks.com.

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Saturday, July 07, 2007

SEO 101: Should I Use My Business Name in the Title Tag?

The html title tag of a web page's html header is the single most important "on page" element when it comes to search engine optimization. That being said, is the best use of this valuable real estate served by including your business name in the title? Chances are the answer is a resounding "no!"

The title tag is an html tag which occurs in the header of a web page's code. The first thing I look at when I get a call from a prospective client is their title tag. More often than not, this tag is being used improperly, to the extreme detriment of the client.

Recently SEOMOZ.org released its rankings of the ten most important factors in search engine rankings. The title tag came in at number 1, and this is no surprise to any SEO that has been around for awhile. Google especially pays a lot of attention to title tag content, and uses title tag information heavily to ascertain the relevant keyphrases for which to rank a site. The opinion of search engine experts is unanimous on this one - keyphrase use in the title tag is the number one "on page" factor affecting search engine rankings. This is not disputed, theorized or subject to professional debate. It is a fact.

Given this fact, we must look at how to best use the title tag to optimize our site for search engines. Many sites place the business name in the title tag (or even worse yet leave it blank or with default content such as "untitled document" or "home page"). Any of these variations can be disastrous!

Let's use an example of a company that manufactures widgets. The primary keyphrase for that company would be "widgets", this being the phrase for which the company would like to rank highly for in the search engines. Now let's assume the company name is "ACME Manufacturing Company, Ltd.". Notice that the word "widgets", which is the desired keyphrase, is not extant in the company name.

So the company goes out and builds a wonderful web site to promote their widgets. However, throughout the site the title tag contains the following content: "ACME Manufacturing Company, Ltd." What is the effect of this?

First off, the effect of this is that the site will likely rank highly for the search query "ACME Manufacturing Company, Ltd.". The problem is that nobody is searching for the company name, they are searching for widgets. So all of ACME's competition shows up in the search engines for a widget query, but poor ACME is nowhere to be found. How do we help ACME rank highly for the search query "widgets"? We must optimize the title tag for the search engines by replacing the current title tag content with the desired search query: "widgets".

Generally speaking, the company name should never appear in the title tag unless you actually expect to derive most of your traffic from searches involving your company name. As this is a rare situation, avoid the temptation to put your company name in the title tag - save it for elsewhere on your page. Put your desired search keyphrases in the title tag, and leave it at that.

Following this methodology throughout your site by optimizing title tag content for each page according to the desired search query for that page will be a major step in the right direction for high search engine rankings.

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks SEO, a top 5 search engine optimization company in the world. For more information on search engine optimization, please visit http://www.arteworks.biz.


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Friday, April 20, 2007

Your Competition Works for Google

Still think you can fool Google with your unnatural links? I'm talking about link exchanges, link farms, hidden links, and now even paid links.
Google's Matt Cutts recently wrote about Google's plan to catch you. You and I know it as vigilantism.
Prior to the Google era search engines were mediocre at best, looking at on page factors only which could easily be manipulated and spammed. These factors included metadata (especially the keyphrase tag) and the number of times a search term appeared on a page.

Those days are long gone. With the advent of Google, the concept of link popularity became tantamount to the determination of the relevance of a page to a specific search query. But what is Google looking for when it comes to links?

The answer is natural, one way, inbound links from trusted sites to unique, original, useful, informative, or educational content, with the anchor text of the link containing keyphrases relevant to your site.. The answer may also be found in what they do not want: link farms, link exchanges, hidden links and paid links. And guess who they have watching you? Your enemy.

Cutts wrote in his blog this week the following:

"I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you'll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

As far as the details, it can be pretty short. Something like "Example.com is selling links; here’s a page on example.com that demonstrates that" or "www.shadyseo.com is buying links. You can see the paid links on www.example.com/path/page.html" is all you need to mention. That will be enough for Google to start testing out some new techniques we’ve got — thanks!"

Whoa! Google is now asking your competition to report you if you buy or sell links. Interesting, isn't it, when Google's massively popular AdWords program is all about paid links. Conspiracy theorists will tell you that Google is trying to take over and control all paid advertising on the Internet, worldwide. But I digress. The point is that Google is asking your competition to report you if you buy or sell links. Period.

So what to do? Create the kind of links that Google wants. There is only one way to do this, and that is through the regular creation of unique content. Here is what you do:

1) Set up a blog (blogger.com is owned by Google and a great one to use as they crawl all of their blogs regularly)
2) Post content in the form of articles
3) Syndicate those articles through article distribution sites (do a search for "article distribution" to find these sites), use your keyphrases within anchor text links back to your site (these links are usually included in an about the author section, but can be in the article body as well)
4) Get active in social bookmarking and social media optimization, sites such as digg, furl, and del.icio.us to name a few.

Those four simple steps are all it takes to conduct an effective link building campaign that won't get you into trouble.

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks SEO, one of the top 15 search engine optimization firms in the world. For more information, please visit www.arteworks.biz.

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Thursday, April 05, 2007

Top Factors Affecting Positive Search Engine Rankings

The jury of search engine experts over at SEOMoz has weighed in, and here are the top factors affecting search engine placement, according to them, with my comments.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag - I have said for many years that if I had a gun to my head, and could do only one thing to a web page to optimize it, my choice would be the title tag. Put your keyphrases in your title tag, and remember to optimize each page individually (i.e. don't overstuff your title tag, and have different title tags for each page that reflect the content of that particular page - otherwise, you may suffer from a duplicative content exclusion and find yourself in the supplemental results).

2. Keyword Use in Body Text - Duh. If your keyword or keyphrase isn't mentioned at least once in the body text of the web page, then it does not seem your page is very relevant to that keyphrase, now does it? But don't get all caught up in the keyphrase density myth - there is no magic number of times it should appear. Make sense to readers, and it will make sense to the search engines.

3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis) - Google is smarter than you give them credit for, and just stuffing a keyphrase into a completely unrelated page won't do you much, if any good. Your page should be on a topic which is semantically related to the keyphrase which you are targeting in your title tag.

4. Keyword Use in H1 Tag - Oh, for years the naysayers have been telling me that H1 tag keyphrase use meant nothing and that I was an idiot for thinking otherwise. Well the verdict is in and this is the fourth most important factor according to the SEOMoz article. At this point, therefore, we have learned to put your keyphrase in your title tag, include it in your body text, which body text is topically or semantically related to the keyphrase, and head up the body text with an H1 containing the keyphrase.

5. Keyword Use in Domain Name - This is one that I disagree with. I have seen absolutely no evidence of this at all. Do a simple search on the internet for most any search term, and chances are the top results do not have the search query in the domain name. I believe this may have minor importance, but don't go and change your domain because of it. Seriously, you have much more to lose (such as age of domain, inbound linkage, site reputation, etc.) I regularly see clients at the top of Google with domain names containing nothing near the relevant search terms.

6. Keyword Use in Page URL - This is what I have called "descriptive file naming" for a number of years. I believe it is of some importance, again, however, is more of a factor when setting up a new domain than would be for an existing domain with high pagerank and inbound linkage. Changing your internal url's for the sole purpose of meeting this criterion again is very risky, for the same reasons mentioned above.

7. Keyword Use in H2, H3, H... Tags - Well if it works for H1, why not for H2 et al.?

8. Keyword Use in ALT Attributes and Image Titles - SEOMoz incorrectly calls them an ALT tag, but it is not a tag, the ALT is an attribute of the IMG tag. Semantics aside, I believe this to be highly important, I would have ranked this above the URL and domain name items. Experience has shown me that image optimization (image file name, alt attribute, and title) is a wonderful way to make a page more relevant to a desired search query.

9. Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags - I always use this method, as well as keyword use within the EM (italics) tag. I believe this to be a moderately important factor as it helps emphasize to Google what your page is about, and what you consider important. Definitely on my short list of things to do for "on page" search engine optimization.

10. Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag - Again, one of my "big 4" for on page optimization. The "big 4" being: title tag, meta description, h1, and image ALT attributes. (I don't include body text in my big 4 as I believe that is self evident). Definitely important, and again, each page should have custom title and meta description tags.







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Monday, March 05, 2007

The Rising Power of Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is perhaps the best kept secret these days in the field of search engine optimization. But what is it, and how can you harness its power?
Loosely defined, social media optimization is a form of search engine optimization which targets the increasingly popular user-driven content bookmarking sites such as digg.com as sources of both traffic and inbound linkage. This type of SEO strategy can best be described in more traditional terms as an aggressive viral marketing campaign, in which user driven content forms the "word of mouth" necessary to create a buzz in the online community regarding a particular web site.
Huh? Let us address some key terms one at a time.
Social media can be defined, for our online purposes, as any web site in which the content of that site is primarily user driven. In other words, the site owners don't create the content, the users do. Some familiar examples might be blogger.com, myspace.com, facebook.com, and similar sites. It would also include social bookmarking sites, which are becoming evermore popular these days, especially by users in their 20's and 30's.
A social bookmarking site is a site such as digg.com. There are many of them. These sites generally operate as a way to store Internet bookmarks online. Think of the familiar "Favorites" folder in your browser. Well, social bookmarking sites do the same thing, but take it a step further. First of all, social bookmarking allows a user to post his or her favorite articles, news stories, or web sites online as opposed to on their local machine. Secondly, these bookmarks are public, so that anyone can browse them and find sites that other people have bookmarked. Finally, many such sites offer additional functionality, such as user-driven ranking or voting and the addition of public comments to each bookmark.
So how can this be used for search engine optimization purposes? Well, it is important to rember that the proper goal of search engine optimization is not just rankings, but traffic, and not just any traffic but qualified traffic. It serves no business purpose to be #1 for a term not relevant to your site, or to recieve loads of unqualified traffic to your site that will not result in a conversion to sale. When SEO is considered in this context, which is the proper one, things begin to make more sense.
Social media optimization involves a number of things, which will be detailed in later posts. However, generally speaking, the bookmarking of your site's content to social bookmarking sites creates both inbound linkage, traffic, and a "buzz". It is a wonderful way to "get the word" out about your site in short order.
The other advantage of social media is that it does create its own sort of internal quality control. Those who choose to spam a site with low quality posts will generally get voted down by the social community. Of course, bad publicity is better than no publicity, but we would all rather have a positive buzz about us given the choice. The creation of quality, useful, informative content is crucial to generating a positive buzz about your site.
Social media optimization involves more than just the act of bookmarking your site, however. It also involves making your site easy for others to bookmark as well. This is usually accomplished via a series of bookmarking icons placed somewhere within each page of the site, which allow users to post your content to a social media site with a simple click of their mouse.
Ethical social media optimization also requires the creation of quality content, as previously mentioned. The online community simply will not tolerate useless, banal posts and the user driven model of social media fosters a spirit of creativity and originality, all of which contributes to the "mashup" of Internet content. The mashup theory in a nutshell centers around the concept of an aggregated web, in which content is pulled from a variety of sources to generate a quality, relevant, and informational experience for the netizen.
Of course there is much more to social media optimization than this, however this thumbnail sketch should serve to acclimate you with key terms and processes. Happy bookmarking!

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks Business Class, one of the top 15 search engine optimization firms in the world. For more information, please visit www.arteworks.biz.

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Monday, October 02, 2006

Groundbreaking Ecommerce Software Released By Top 15 Search Optimization Firm

Internationally recognized search engine optimization firm releases the latest version of its search engine friendly ecommerce software

Austin, Texas – October 2, 2006 – ArteWorks Business Class, ranked #14 in the world for organic search engine optimization by independent ranking organization TopSEOs.com, has released version 3.0 of its search engine friendly ecommerce software solution known as PrimeCart.

"PrimeCart is the only ecommerce software of which we are aware that was created specifically for search engines by a top ranked search engine optimization firm," commented Matt Foster, President of ArteWorks Business Class. "PrimeCart solves the problem of search engine invisibility that most ecommerce platforms face. We are confident that this is the most search engine friendly shopping cart software available on the market today."

"ArteWorks Business Class has demonstrated that it is a leader in its field, showing superior service levels and performance for their clients," commented Bill Peden of TopSEOs. "ArteWorks Business Class is a standout amongst the many Internet marketing vendors in the $5 billion plus search marketing industry."

PrimeCart is affordable to small business, with pricing beginning at only $59.00 per month, yet powerful enough for enterprise. It is loaded with search engine features such as static url’s, dynamically generated Google sitemaps and Froogle feeds, individual product page customization, and eliminates problematic session id’s and dynamically-generated product pages which are largely invisible to search engines.

"It is important to remember that search engines rank pages, not sites. It is therefore crucial that each product page not only be visible to the search engines, but be individually optimized for the contents of that page. The vast majority of ecommerce software available today simply ignore basic search engine optimization techniques, such as custom head tags, H1 tags, image alt attributes, and allow for no or limited unique product page optimization. Additionally, advanced techniques such as RSS feeds and content syndication are noticeably absent in most off the shelf systems," continued Foster.

PrimeCart comes with a free trial and a “no hassle, money back guarantee”. More information on PrimeCart can be found at www.primecart.com.

About ArteWorks Business Class
ArteWorks Business Class, the developer of PrimeCart, is located in Austin, Texas and specializes in search engine optimization, search engine friendly ecommerce and search engine friendly web site design. ArteWorks Business Class maintains a global client base and is the recipient of numerous design awards for its work. ArteWorks Business Class is ranked in the Top 15 organic search engine optimization firms in the world by independent ranking organization TopSEOs.com.

Company Contact
ArteWorks Business Class
Matthew Foster
matt@arteworks.biz
www.arteworks.biz

About TopSEOs.com
TopSEOs.com was founded in 2002 by e-ventures and serves to provide the search engine marketing industry and companies with a single source for researching internet marketing vendors as well as a place for internet marketing and service providers to showcase their services. http://www.topseos.com

Company Contact:
topseos.com
Bill Peden
service@topseos.com
www.topseos.com
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Google's Big Daddy Update

Items of major importance to Google, straight from the horse's mouth...
Anybody ever heard of Matt Cutts? He's a lead software engineer at Google, he's all over the web. He has a personal blog which can be very insightful. In fact, he is telling us what Google wants! Check out these excerpts - this is extremely valuable information:

On sites that are penalized or banned:

The sites that fit "no pages in Bigdaddy" criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.

On the importance of not linking to "bad neighborhoods":

Linking to a free ringtones site, an SEO contest, and an Omega 3 fish oil site? I think I've found your problem. I'd think about the quality of your links if you'd prefer to have more pages crawled. As these indexing changes have rolled out, we've improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling. I'm seeing links to mortgages sites, credit card sites, and exercise equipment (be penalized).

On what types of links are good for you:

You've got some people who were relying on reciprocal linking or link buying complaining specifically that they're not crawled as much.


On the importance of blogs:

You ask "I'm wondering how you gain relevant links, in some sectors, without reciprocating, or paying? Do you believe that rivals would give you a free one way link, lol?" My answer is that trying to force your way up to the top of search engines is in many ways not working in the most efficient way. To the degree that search engines reflect reputation on the web, the best way to gather links is to offer services or information that attract visitors and links on your own. Things like blogs are a great way to attract links because you're offering a look behind the curtain of whatever your subject is, for example.

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Monday, June 05, 2006

Why You Can't Get Good SEO for $29.99 per Month

That cheap out-of-the-box SEO software readily available on the Internet that promises you top rankings for only $29.99 per month is sure to get you in the top 10 Google results! If you are optimizing for "beach resorts in Nome, Alaska", that is.

Unfortunately, you probably have a business that is somewhat more competitive. Wasting money on an out of the box seo solution is going to do nothing but get you frustrated - and make the vendor of the out of the box solution rich.

Out of the box solutions such as Submit Express, Web Position Gold, IBP and the like are cheap - but don't do much. Effective search engine optimization involves human intervention and simply cannot be accomplished via use of these cheap services. Optimizing your meta tags and dropping a few keywords into your web site won't pay the rent.

The fact of the matter is this - quality search engine optimization requires individualized attention. Search engine optimization is not a one size fits all proposition. Skimping on your seo budget is cheating yourself and is offensive to search engine professionals.

As an seo professional, I get this all the time - people trying to either skimp on their search engine optimization budget, get me to work for an "interest" in their start up idea, or just "do them a favor" and tell them what is wrong, and they will "fix it themselves". Please. If a business owner is not willing to invest into their business, then why in the world would I want to?

Take this recent inquiry - a real life statement: "Please tell me, what can i do using only my own time and $100 to get in the top 10 for 'business forum'?" Now think about this - wouldn't any professional be extremely offended if someone approached them and asked them to make them rich for only $100? A keyphrase like "business forum" is extremely competitive - you are competing against Forbes, CNBC, and the like. You are asking a professional to invest many, many hours of time over the course of several months or years to get anywhere close.

My plumber charges more than $100.00 per hour. Do you think my plumber would be offended if I asked him to work for me for months or years at that rate? Wouldn't any professional?

So here's the scoop, folks. SEO professionals don't want a stake in your business. They don't want a share in your profits, stock options, or a promise to pay "once things start to happen". Just like everyone else, SEO's need to feed themselves and their families. If you are not willing to invest in your business, don't ask another professional to do so. Go and spend the $29.99 per month on an out of the box solution. Then, when you decide you would like to see some results from your expenditure, come back and talk to us.
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About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks Business Class, http://www.arteworks.biz, and is an expert in search engine optimization, regularly achieving top rankings for his clients. Mr. Foster has been active in the industry since 1995. For further information, or to begin the process of optimizing your site for search engines, please contact Mr. Foster toll free at 877-812-2217, or by email to matt@arteworks.biz.
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Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Embrace Your Images for Search Engine Optimization

Perhaps the most untapped search engine optimization tool is the optimization of your images. But how do you go about using your images to boost your search engine rankings? Here's how.

You know all about keywords, metadata, link popularity, H1 tags, strong text and the like. Armed with this knowledge, you go about optimizing your web site, only to discover that you still aren't getting the organic search engine visibility that you desire. Perplexed, you wonder why.

You know just enough to be dangerous. To yourself, that is. The term sophomoric comes to mind. From the Greek, sophos (meaning "wise"), and moros (meaning "fool", as in "moron"), perhaps you are a "wise fool".

But wait. Before you get in a snit about being given the appellation wise fool, let's figure out how to get rid of the moros while keeping the sophos.

Likely, one of your biggest problems is the failure to properly optimize your images for search engines. To understand how performing search engine optimization on your images is done, let us first take a look at how search engines ascertain the contents of an image.

It is important to remember that search engines don't see images the way humans do. Images are nothing more than bits of code which tell a computer what color and brightness at which to display any given pixel. While preliminary research has been done in the field of image recognition by search engines, the algorithms are rudimentary at best, doing nothing more than an analysis of colors and brightness, without any real progress being made at identifying the depiction contained within the image.

Therefore, search engines rely on two main algorithms for the identification of the contents of an image. The first is dependent on a contextual analysis, the second is dependent upon what we tell the search engines.

Contextual analysis of images

The contextual analysis of images is primarily based upon (1) the subject matter of the page and (2) the text immediately before, after, or surrounding the image (also known as a caption). Absent any additional information, a search engine will assume that an image on a web page is an image related to the general content of that page, with greater emphasis placed on the text in the immediate vicinity of the image. From an seo perspective, we will assume that your content is already optimized for your desired keyphrases, so (1) above doesn't do much for us. However, a bit of a rankings boost may be obtained by ensuring that your images (regardless of what they are really of) contain keyphrase rich content around them.

However, the real power of images in search engine optimization is found in what we tell the search engines. There are two important techniques for the optimization of images in this manner, which will without a doubt give your site a rankings boost.

Telling the search engines about your images

The first important technique is known as descriptive file naming. A search engine gives much weight to the name of the image file. So, for example, if you are RCA and you have a logo image of a dog with its ear in a gramophone, you might name the image gramophone.jpg or dog.jpg. This is telling the search engines that your image contains content related to dogs or gramophones.

But wait again.

This is also telling the search engines that your web page is about dogs or gramophones. If you are RCA, wouldn't you rather be ranked for a term such as "consumer electronics"? Probably. So, utilizing descriptive file naming, you would want to give your image files names which reflect the general topic of your web site. So, instead of naming the image logo.jpg, banner.gif, dog.jpg, gramophone.jpg, or the like, you would want to name your image something like consumer-electronics-logo.jpg or consumer_electronics_dog.jpg. Now you are using keyphrase rich file names, and giving your site a rankings boost.

The other major way you tell a search engine about your images is via the utilization of image ALT attributes. An ALT atrribute is simple ALTernate text which is used to describe the image. Instead of putting words like "Dog listening to gramophone" in your ALT attribute, you should look at ALT attributes as another opportunity to include your keyphrases on your page. So, we would want the ALT attribute in the case of RCA to say something like "Consumer Electronics".

The failure to properly optimize images in this manner is a major flaw in many attempts at search engine optimization. Following these techniques will, undoubtedly, help your online business to achieve the organic search engine visibility you desire.

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About the author:

About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks Business Class, http://www.arteworks.biz, and is an expert in search engine optimization, regularly achieving top rankings for his clients. Mr. Foster has been active in the industry since 1995. For further information, or to begin the process of optimizing your site for search engines, please contact Mr. Foster toll free at 877-812-2217, or by email to matt@arteworks.biz.
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Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Ethics of Link Popularity

What is an ethical link popularity scheme?
Right now, the search engine optimization world sits at a point where 95% of practitioners and site owners operate like this...

1.) Word starts to spread that links help your site.

2.) Site owners and marketers rush out to get any and every link that they can.

3.) Word spreads that reciprocal links are pretty easy to get.

4.) Site owners and marketers start spamming the world with link exchange requests.

5.) Word spreads that one-way links "count more."

6.) Site owners and marketers start buying links in a rush to gain those one-ways.

7.) Word spreads that you can "earn" links with great content.

8.) Site owners and marketers start to grumble about how much work this SEO thing is.

Anyone else noticing a pattern?

What tends to happen in this industry is the development of the leaders and the lemmings. The leaders are the those that are out there in the trenches, testing and working and researching to figure out what has an impact. They then share their findings with the lemmings who rush out to implement those findings with no thought as to "why" they are making those changes. The simple fact that the change may help their site is enough of a reason for them.

But that's not good enough.

To see this industry progress, we need to focus on teaching people why the search engines place more value on earned one way links or why content needs to be relevant and engaging rather than mathematically formulated to have the proper number of keywords.

Site owners and marketers need to learn more about how people judge the value of a web site so that they can understand and even anticipate where algorithms may go in the future.

A little common sense applied two or three years ago would have easily made it clear that earned, unsolicited links showed a more honest representation of value than links that were traded or paid for. With that in mind, site owners could have had a hefty head start by spending their time building great content rather than chasing down the next link.

As we move into the future, issues like latent semantic indexing and personalized search will play a powerful role in how search engines put together and deliver results. By taking the time to teach site owners about these concepts and how they might be applied, the SEO industry will be able to teach people how to anticipate what search engines will be looking for, rather than letting those same people play a non-stop game of "catch-up."

Courtesy: http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/007454.html
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Monday, May 15, 2006

Custom 404 Error Pages and Search Optimization

Utilizing descriptive file naming is essential to any quality search engine optimization project. But what about the old file names, which no longer exist? The use of a 404 error page is recommended to avoid search engines finding broken links and non-existent pages.


But what is a 404 error page? To answer this, we must first understand what a 404 error is. A 404 DNS error is commonly known as a File Not Found error. This is what you see when you type in a URL that does not exist into your browser's address bar. Usually, the server returns something akin to 404 - File Not Found. If a search engine comes across such an error, it can have a negative impact on your search engine visibility. The solution to this is the creation of a custom error page, usually named 404.htm. When this page is extant on the server, instead of a File Not Found error being returned, the 404.htm file is returned. It can be thought of as a "catch-all" page, that is displayed when no file corresponding to the file called upon in the address bar exists.


Most good seo's will implement what is known as descriptive file naming as part of a search engine optimization project. In a nutshell, descriptive file naming is simply the naming of HTML files according to the content of that file. Fore example, let's say you own a carwash in Austin, Texas. You have a page which itemizes your various services and their corresponding prices. Currently, the page is named services.htm. After search engine optimization, this page is renamed to something like austin-carwash-services.htm, utilizing a descriptive file naming methodology. The problem is that search engines may have already indexed the services.htm page, or third party (external) web sites may link to the services.htm page. Obviously, you don't want people using these links to reach a non-existent page, and likewise you don't want search engines linking to it or finding non-existent pages. The 404.htm page is also useful in the event external links or user inputs contain typographical errors.


Installing a 404.htm file on the server, and enabling custom error pages in your control panel (if necessary), solves the problem. Any user who clicks on a link to the old services.htm page reaches the 404.htm page instead of receiving a 404 DNS error. Search engines do the same thing. This ensures that no user is left stranded in "no man's land", and increases web site "stickiness".


Critical Elements of a 404 Error Page

Remembering that the 404.htm file will be encountered any time a 404 error would otherwise be returned, it is intuitive that the page must contain generic content, related to the overall theme of the site, as opposed to page-specific content. What this means is that creating a 404.htm file, in the example above, solely for the missing page services.htm, would be a mistake. For example, if you created your 404.htm file to be a mirror of the old services.htm file, if someone linked to another non-existent page of your site, for example an about us page named about.htm which has been renamed, they would land on the 404.htm page containing service information. This would likely lead to confusion on the part of the user. As such, building a 404.htm page with generic information is best practice.


A 404.htm page should hold the same "look and feel" as the rest of the site. Usually, this would mean a banner image with navigation bar, with an area for page-specific body content. Using the CSS or web site page template, create the 404.htm page to contain body text which informs the user of the non-existence of the desired page, and clearly directs the user to important areas of the web site.


So, at a minimum, the 404.htm page would contain the following:


1) Same look and feel as the rest of the site

2) Error message, such as "The page entered was not found on our server. Please try one of the links b