Author Archives: Admin
Likes Mean Relevance in Facebook Search
Nick O’Neill at All Facebook reports that Facebook has confirmed that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them.” He also calls this Facebook’s “war on Google.”
While utilizing likes and the open graph as a ranking factor in search should help Facebook improve its internal search, it doesn’t represent much of a threat to Google search. Google indexes the web. Facebook indexes activity from Facebook users. There’s a pretty big difference, regardless of how big Facebook is.
There is certainly something to be said for Facebook search, however. There’s no question that a lot lof people are using Facebook and spending a lot of time there, so having some kind of search strategy for Facebook is not a bad idea. Naturally, the Open Graph will play a huge role in this, and that means taking advantage of Facebook’s social plugins. As I’ve … Read the rest
The Death and Rebirth of Editorial Citation on the Web
Posted by randfish
I’ve been having a similar conversation with a number of folks from the world of search that’s interesting enough as to deserve some transparency and discussion. It centers around the idea of the web’s link graph and how it operates to power the rankings of relevant results in the major search engines. If we follow this brief timeline, you’ll see what I’m getting at:
- 1993 – 2000: The beginning of the web is marked by an influx of researchers, academics, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Nearly every link created has an editorial, reference purpose behind it. A link is one page telling its viewers that another page has useful, interesting or worthwhile information about a specific topic.
- 2001 – 2005: As the web commercializes at an accelerated pace and PageRank becomes a familiar concept, links drift further away from editorial votes and more towards self-interested endorsements, often with financial
The Best Links In Life Are (Not) Free
Chris Crum wrote a post for WebProNews called Google Shares Its Viewpoint on Earning Quality Links.
We thought it was an excellent post and wanted to summarize the high points for our readers. If you want the full post, click on the link above.
I think the most important thing to focus on in his post, and link building in general, is the word “earn”. Despite what Luther and Janet might tell you the best things in life aren’t free. You have to put in some blood, sweat and tears. Getting great links to your site is no different. Working to add value in a community, writing great blog posts, and providing valuable tools to your visitors are all ways a little a sweat can turn into some face melting links.
Going after the “low hanging fruit”, aka mass directory submissions, still works to an extent. The problem is … Read the rest
SEO Heroes, SEO Villans, and… SEO Mediocres?
Last summer, Mike Moran over at Search Engine Guide wrote a post about the line between black hat and white hat SEO. You can read his post here.
Mike makes a great point in his post. If you’re asking where the line is drawn you don’t get it. There may be many shades of grey between the purists and the spammers, but, if you want to be successful, you need to stop playing in the grey areas and go all in one way or the other.
Black hat SEOs are amazing at what they do. Staying on top of trends to find new loop holes and quickly exploit them is hard work. Playing near the edge of the cliff doesn’t cut it for these people. They strap on a base jumping pack and dive right off. The cool thing is it’s dangerous and they’re successful at it.
On the flip … Read the rest
Choosing the Right Keyphrases – Especially for the Smaller Sites!
Posted by Sam Crocker
Hey there folks! Today’s post is a hands-on walkthrough of some of the decision making used when choosing the keyphrases to target. Producing a list of the most important terms in an industry is nice, but actually choosing the right keyphrases is essential. The post was largely created in response to a question submitted by Kien in the comments of my last post.
What to Expect
This post should provide you with real-life examples of the keyword decision making process and help you make sense of the output from the revamped Keyword Difficulty Tool. If you’re already a hardcore keyword research (and keyword difficulty) guru, this is more of a refresher, but should provide valuable insights to journeymen and perhaps a bit more transparency into how to choose the right keyphrases for your site (plus a bit of a tour for those of you who haven’t used … Read the rest
Liquid Query: Multi-domain Exploratory Search on the Web
User search activities on the Web are getting more and more specialized: users expect more precise domain-specific results from search engines and typically perform complex tasks that involve exploratory, multi-step search processes. In this paper we propose the Liquid Query paradigm, that allows users finding responses to multi-domain queries through an exploratory information seeking approach, upon structured information collected from Web documents, deep Web data sources, and personal data repositories, wrapped by means of a uniform notion of search service. Liquid queries aim at filling the gap between generalized search systems, which are unable to find information spanning multiple topics, and domain-specific search systems, which cannot go beyond their domain limits. Liquid query provides a set of interaction primitives that let users make questions and explore results spanning over multiple sources, thus getting closer and closer to the sought information. We demonstrate our approach with a prototype built upon the … Read the rest
8 Reasons In-House SEOs Hire SEO Consultants
Posted by Lindsay
When I was an in-house SEO I hired outside SEO consultants. Now as the outside SEO consultant I often work with in-house SEOs. In the comments of my most recent post, an interesting question came up, “…why would a company who has an in-house SEO expert hire an external company?”
Here are 8 excellent reasons why talented in-house SEOs often bring in outside help.
1. Specialized Expertise
Not too long ago, SEO was a niche marketing specialization. I remember when even Internet Marketing was considered a highly niche specialization. In fact, my college marketing instructor tried to talk me out of Internet Marketing because it was too niche and I ran the risk of limiting my prospects down the line.
Times have sure changed. As the search engines have matured and the SEO industry has evolved along with them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to be on … Read the rest
How to upload SLICK WP AUTOPOSTER to cpanel hosting
How to upload SLICK WP AUTOPOSTER using cpanel hosting.
Video Rating: 0 / 5… Read the rest
Whiteboard Friday – What’s Working for You? with Richard Baxter
Posted by great scott!
The avalanche-like flow of special guest Whiteboard Fridays continues this week with another installment featuring our beloved London SEO expert, Richard Baxter (anchor text, y’all). Last week Richard helped us all learn how to get our fresh content indexed licketty-split, and this week he’s back to help us learn how to identify which areas of our sites are working hardest for us.
Whether you have multiple types of content on your site (maybe a blog, tools, articles, etc.), or you have limited content types across different topics (blog posts about cats, kittens, evil cats, ninja kittens, evil ninja kitten cats, etc.), wouldn’t it be nice to know which content types or topics bring you the most and best traffic? Never fear, Richard’s here to explain his handy-dandy system to do just that! By the end of this video you’ll know exactly which stats to pull from … Read the rest
Bing vs. Google: Prominence of Ranking Elements
on June 17, 2010
in Advanced SEO, Learning SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine News, SEO Analytics, Seo Marketing
Posted by randfish
This past week during the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, I presented some correlation data alongside Janet Driscoll-Miller, Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing & Matt Cutts of Google. Matt in particular was quite vocal in expressing a desire to see additional data points from our research, primarily around the prominence/visibility of particular elements in the results. This post is intended to help make that available.
I must say that I don’t agree with Matt on the importance of the raw visibility/counts over the ranking correlations. My feeling is that SEOs in these spaces are more interested in answering the question – “what features predict a result will rank higher vs. lower on page 1?” – rather than the more straightforward – “does this feature appear more frequently on page 1 at Google or Bing?” However, I certainly agree that both are relevant and interesting.
If you’re trying to wrap your head around … Read the rest
