SEO digest
Whoa! It's Jane! Yes, SEOmozzers, your regular Roundup Thursday schedule will resume next week when Rebecca gets back from a half-ironman competition in Mexico.
Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:
- If you have a problem with seeing people dressed as Lyrca-bodysuited butterflies, I suggest not viewing the Search Engine Rap Battle videos. They're awful. It's wonderful. I personally think that Yahoo! pwnd MSN but Google handed it to Yahoo! in the final round.
- I am almost too young to remember when Napster was relevant, and it seems even more irrelevant that Best Buy is set to buy the company for $121 million, but this article from PaidContent highlights some of the other lackluster purchases in the online-download industry as well as this recent acquisition.
- In "holy crap, the Internet is a good place to run a political campaign!" news, Valleyway and Did-It have both dived into the U.S. Presidential nominees' usage of paid advertising. Did-It looks at the breakdown of how people receive their political information, and Search Engine Land sums it up here.
- Technorati steps up from "nearly useless" to "slightly more useful" with this report on the State of the Blogosphere. Do you dislike the word "blogosphere?" I don't like it at all. Technorati makes some interesting claims in this post, such as hypothesising that I should be wealthier than I actually am, but one claim I related to is the idea that the lines between "weblog" and "other website" continue to blur. I put together the comparison data (which I need to fix, as it is out of date) for our Trifecta tool and the most difficult part of compiling the blog data was deciding whether or not a site was a blog. It's harder than you'd think.
- Who likes analytics? I like analytics! I like installing analytics packages and looking at the same data in different ways. Thus, I enjoyed this post by Dennis Mortensen, comparing the analytics dashboards provided by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!
- To quote Rand, "I'm not sure if it's weird and useless or awesome and valuable." The Media Bloggers Association plans to provide resources, both monetary and legal, to bloggers who have fallen victim to a range of online violations.
- Ever had the feeling you're part of something bigger than yourself but you can't figure out what it is? Maybe you were one of the 10,000 people who contributed to the digital drawing of this US one-hundred dollar bill, receiving one penny for your troubles.
- Did Rebecca ever tell you that these roundups take a long time to put together? Perhaps Berocca, which Kiwis, Aussies and Brits know as a hangover curer and all-around legal form of crack, should send us a blogger relief pack. Does this put Berocca in a paid post situation? Ciarбn doesn't think so.
- How did Seth Godin become so successful? BusinessWeek investigates the marketing mainstay.
- Have you ever closed a dialogue box on your monitor and then thought, "I wonder if that warning about a critical error was important?" Nearly fifty smarty-pants college kids did the same thing over and over again in a study conducted by North Carolina State University's Psycology Department. One assumes that NCSU's campus is rife with viruses, and I do not mean the sort you can catch at a Friday night frat party.
- We're big-time now, kids! The upcoming SMX East conference in New York City will include a panel featuring real-live online campaign workers from the U.S. Presidential race. Organisers have secured a representative from the Republican campaign and are "still working" on a Democratic representative to talk about their strategies. Even given his campaign's decline, it would have been interesting to see what a Ron Paul representative would have said as well. Panel details are listed here.
- Peter Da Vanzo writes a really smart article at SEO Book about using keyword research, amongst other methods, as a market research tool. The post is great for highlighting some alternative keyword research options, such as Twitscoop and DiggLabs DigSpy, as tools which pull from meta search engines often return crazy results. Nope, I refuse to believe that 1,836 people searched for "chlorine all purpose denist dog cleaning minnesota" yesterday, Wordtracker.
- Black text on a white background looks awesome, unless you begin to read it. My eyes still hurt. Discoverd via Bryan Eisenberg at Grokdotcom, please read the entire page in order to get the point. Now think about this in a commercial sense: that white-on-black landing page starts to look a bit nasty now, yes?
- Fantastic picture of zebras fighting. Followed by an article addressing some search engine and corporate-friendly title tag ideas. An SEO who has never had a debate with a client about the structure of a title tag is missing out BIG time. It's seriously one of the best conversations you'll ever have.
YOUmoz entries:
- What I Learned from a Fishmonger in Seattle. Marty Martin details what he learned during the SEOmoz PRO seminar in August... although one of the things that really stuck with him came from his trip to Pike Place Market.
- YOUmoz Newb Pwns Spammer. I laughed to the point of giggle-tears whilst reading Darren Slatten's chronicle of his dealings with a now-infamous private message spammer.
- How to use Robots.txt and Redirects the Wrong Way. Michael Sparer draws from Rebecca's "Newbie Mistakes" series to detail some common errors with the robots.txt protocol and permanent and temporary redirects.
- 21 Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation. Reputation management is best begun at home, and Vaidhyanathan's list is a great resource when you're looking for ideas as to how to start.
- Selling SEO: Tips on How to Act, What to Say, and How to Sell to Clients. sly-grrr provides a detailed list of how best to sell SEO services to clients.
- What Food Taught Me About Internet Marketing. A formerly silent reader of SEOmoz, Franz compares his learning experience in SEO with his experience working in a kitchen.
- How Flash Affects Your Website's Rankings with SEO. What is says on the tin: Indy Media Group looks at some SEO issues you'll come across when working with Flash.
- Help a Reporter (And Yourself) Out. tom6a profiles HARO, where journalists post questions and subscribers can step up as sources.
- Adwords hackers - what a nightmare. Web Design Adelaide had a nasty experience with is business' Adwords account being compromised.
- Joomla Users: Stop Wasting Your Link Juice. The owners of Joomla-powered sites used to have a hell of a time nofollowing their links, until Alledia released a menu module to help out.
- Define: - A Solid Natural Traffic Generation Strategy. petrosianii noticed that some rather random pages on his site were receiving a growing amount of traffic. It turned out that Google had picked his pages up for some "define:" queries.
- SEO for Video. The Lost Agency talks about Google's plan to index the content of videos, rather than just videos' meta information.
- How to Run Your SEO Business from the Thought Leaders of SEO. Marty Martin provides a roundup (roundup within a roundup, Russian doll like, yeah?) of some recent valuable SEO posts.
- Dinosaurs and bunk beds and widgets, oh my! saffyre9 stumbled across a widget from BunkBedsPedia this week and shares his findings.
- Who's Afraid of RSS Feeds? Me... Jdeb has some concerns about the information he sees surrounding RSS feeds and asks the community for advice and contributions about RSS best practices.
- Is A Link Buyer An SEO Expert? Gunjan Pandya writes a controversial post about what should define an SEO expert and whether those who predominantly buy links can call themselves true SEOs.
- Selling Services and Shoes: Some Copywriting Tips. Webwordslinger compares selling services with selling products, highlighting the different marketing tactics required for each.
- IIS Case Folding, Robots and Results. After working almost exclusively with Apache servers, Jeremy Chatfield sees some potential SEO problems with the way IIS servers handles different cases in URLs.
Best of YOUmoz:
New events added to the Events Calendar:
- Melbourne SEO Meetup on October 11 at 12:30pm. The monthly Melbourne SEO Meetup takes place at 213-215 Blackburn Road, Mt. Waverly / Sydnal, Victoria, Australia.
- International Search Summit, London takes place at the Conference Centre, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, St. Pancras, London on November 20. The event focuses on international and multilingual search and will be hosted by WebCertain.
Upcoming events:
- UK SEO Seminar / Workshop, October 3 at 10:00am at the Clarendon Centre, Brighton, East Sussex.
- SMX East October 6-8 in New York, New York.
- Scary SEO, October 24 - 25, Hilton Deerfield Beach, Boca Raton, Florida.
New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:
Featured job postings:
- Internet Marketing Manager at Speakeasy in Seattle, Washington, US.
- Search Engine Marketing Specialist at Stone Interactive Group, Ann Arbor, Michigan, US.
- PPC/SLC/CPC Account Manager at Marcel Media Inc., Chicago, Illinois, US.
- Online Marketing Manager / Specialist at Rental Markets Inc., Houston, Texas, US.
- PR / Online Reputation Specialist for contract work at Basis, Ontario, Canada.
- SEO Specialist at Human Bridges, Boulder, Colorado, US.
- SEO Consultant for contract work at LincolnLoop, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, US.
- Internet Marketing Manager in Yeovil, UK.
- Paid Search Marketing Manager at Onward Search, Seattle, Washington, US.
- Entry Level Organic Marketing Analyst in Dallas, Texas, US.
- Head of SEO at Gaming Media Group Ltd., in London, UK.
- Independent Sales Manager (Text Link Ads for Link Building at Ask2link, Redwood, California, US.
- SEO/PPC Analyst/Specialist at HZDG, Rockville, Maryland, US.
Featured companies:
United States/North America:
- Speakeasy in Seattle, WA
- Empowered SEO in New York, NY
- Rental Markets Inc. in Houston, TX
- Verecom Technologies Inc. in San Francisco, CA
- Morrill Technology Group in Greenville, SC
- Working The Magic, LLC in Bellingham, WA
- Prestige Design in Bergen County, NJ
- Closed Loop Marketing in Roseville, CA
- RedAlkemi in San Francisco, CA (also with offices in the UK and India)
- PilotOutlook.com in Bellevue, WA
- Digital Cataplult in Port St. Lucie, Florida
- SEOGroup in Chicago, Illinois
- Ocean Online Group in Chicago, Illinois
UK / Europe
Asia
Featured resumes:
Currently looking:
- Bruce Gibbs has over ten years of experience working with online projects, including large eCommerce web development, marketing and publishing. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
- Levi Wardell has a decade of experience in information architecture, content creation, analytics and all facets of search marketing including paid and organic search. He is based out of Maryland.
- Mike Harmanos has worked as that National Distribution Sales Manager for a large manufacturer and is now branching into online marketing.
* It so does happen.
www.seomoz.org
published @ September 30, 2008
