Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Current news and events in the world of search engines and search marketing. Includes links and commentary on current search engine events.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Yahoo Quick Links

Search Engine Land's got the official scoop on Yahoo Quick Links - those cool little extra links that have started showing up on some search listings.

posted by Dave @ 6:44 PM   0 comments links to this post

Search Engine Smackdown Game

You've got to play Neil Patel's Search Engine Smackdown game. You choose your fighter and opponent and then answer search engine trivia to beat your opponent. Danny Sullivan is the referee and each fighter has his own special move to attack their opponent. I only had time to try Larry--who rides a segway over his opponent, and Bill, who uses a magical MSN butterfly to slap his foe. It's freakin' funny.

Check it out

posted by Dave @ 10:15 AM   0 comments links to this post

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Google Analytics Hack: Full Referrer Tracking

I use Google Analytics on a lot of my sites, as do most of our clients. Google's solution is very robust and offers a lot of great analytics data and reports--especially for the price (free). One thing I find annoying is that they don't allow you to see the full referring URLs by default. Reuben Yau offers up a solution to this problem using urchinTracker, and a follow up solution for people who may not be able to edit the head section of their pages.

This hack is useful if you get clicks from multiple pages on a website, and you want to track how much comes from each URL. Or if you see traffic showing up from a news site or some other site but can't find the link, this will show you the exact URL the traffic is coming from.

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posted by Dave @ 9:40 AM   0 comments links to this post

Saturday, March 17, 2007

SEO Jobs and Search Marketing Jobs in Utah

If you've got the skills and are looking for a new gig, we're looking for SEO/PPC people to join our team at Web Targeted. We've got some super-exciting stuff going on--huge stuff--so if you know your stuff when it comes to SEO or PPC, you won't want to miss this opportunity. We're taking this company to a whole new level and we need some more search marketing experts to help us along the process. Pay is competitive and the team you'll be working with is unbeatable.

Check out the Web Targeted job page for more details on what we're looking for.

posted by Dave @ 3:42 PM   0 comments links to this post

Friday, March 16, 2007

SEO/Link Development Experts Answer the Tough Questions About Links

I just skimmed this article on SugarRae with 5 link building gurus answering their own toughest questions about link development. Looks like some very good stuff. I'll have to go back and read in more depth when I get some time.

Check it out if you care about links (hint: if you don't care about links, you should)

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posted by Dave @ 9:34 AM   0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

WSJ Article about SEO effects of moving site to a new domain

Whenever I read an article about SEO or search marketing iin a "mainstream" publication, I like to mention it. This article in the WSJ addresses the issue of changing to a new domain and the problems it can cause with search engine rankings. If you do a 301 redirect, you should be fine, or if there is a drop, it should resolve itself fairly quickly. The article goes on to talk about how some sites drop out of the search results even when you're not moving to a new domain. There's a humorous anecdote about some company who was supposedly threatened to be blacklisted if they didn't quit calling Google to ask about how they could get indexed. Of course, they weren't blacklisted and their site got listed within a couple weeks. They just needed to be a little patient.

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posted by Dave @ 10:28 AM   0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Social Media Marketing Tactics from SEOmoz

Jane at SEOmoz has written a sweet article about Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing Tactics. It's lengthy and offers up a great intro into the world of Web 2.0 and all things social media. The mozzers have a lot of experience with social media, so they know their stuff. Jane gives some great advice on how to (and how not to) use social media for marketing a business. Definitely worth a read.

Oh, and one other fun site she mentioned at the end of the article--the web 2.0 validator--which allows you to check the 2.0-ness of any URL.

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posted by Dave @ 8:59 AM   0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Analyzing the Webmaster Skew of Alexa Data

Just saw this anlaysis of the webmaster skew of Alexa's data. Not exactly a comprehensive study, but apparently Peter is a very smart guy and I think he makes a very valid point--you can't put too much stock in Alexa numbers because of the way they gather their data.

Unfortunately, until something better comes along, I think people will continue to look at Alexa data as some kind of measure, even though it kind of sucks. At least take the Alexa numbers with a grain (or two) of salt.

via Matt Cutts

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posted by Dave @ 8:58 AM   0 comments links to this post

Can Robots.txt Increase Your Rankings?




Neil Patel says his traffic increased 11% after he added some duplicate content pages to his robots.txt on his blog. The idea is to get rid of junk pages that aren't helping your search rankings, which helps the other pages that you do want indexed to improve in the search results. It makes sense, although it's hard to know if this is the only reason his traffic increased. I'd be more convinced if he had a before and after ranking report that improved in addition to the traffic...although even then, there are so many other factors in play, it's hard to know if the robots.txt file was solely responsible. Still, it doesn't hurt to utilize the robots.txt file for what it was intended. I'll have to experiment with this a bit with this blog to see if it makes a difference.

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posted by Dave @ 8:38 AM   0 comments links to this post

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Yahoo Finally Offers A Way to Opt Out of Lame Directory Titles

It's about time Yahoo joined the party and adopted a meta tag that allows site owners to tell Yahoo to use the HTML title instead of the Yahoo directory title. The search engines that use the ODP directory implemented a similar tag a while back. Yahoo has been promising a similar option for several months, so it's good to see it actually happen.

The code for the new tag is

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

or

<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">

Read about it on the Yahoo blog

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posted by Dave @ 11:38 PM   1 comments links to this post