Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

We recently launched the SEO Forums on SEO.com. Come over and check it out if you have any questions about SEO, or if you already know it all and have something to share. We hope to build this into a thriving community that will add value and maybe a slightly different perspective than the existing forums and communities out there.

Labels: seo

Pauline Kerbici from High Rankings recently posted an interview with Seth Godin about Squidoo. She asks some interesting questions about Squidoo and SEO. Several interesting points arise. She pointed out some over-hyped content on Squidoo where they previously touted the Google PR-raising value of having a Squidoo lens. Pauline notes that the offending text was removed shortly after the interview. He says they aren't building their business to pleas Google, but he admits that the "spam overhaul" came after they got dinged by Google. He also closes by emphasizing that they've done a lot of good through the charities that they support, which I agree is a very cool part of the whole Squidoo concept. In fact, I think it would be cool to set up a similar network that gives all the money back to charities, rather than just 5% or whatever these guys do.

Labels: seo, seth godin

I just noticed a post on Sphinn a list of the top 25 SEO blogs. All the usual suspects are there, most of which are in my reader for daily consumption. Good stuff. Danny's Search Engine Land came out on top. I have to agree that they are the #1 source right now for SEO news, tips, etc. They've expanded into social media and other aspects as well, and continue to crank out the goods.

Labels: seo, seo blog

I've been impressed with the quality of the content being pumped out by Danny Sullivan and friends over at Search Engine Land, they do a good job covering the news and offering insight about all aspects of search marketing. I feel like Search Engine Land has emerged as the leader in the industry for timely, relevant, and quality news. Everybody loves Danny and he's got a great team of writers and contributors in the Land. On the Daily Searchcast last week I heard Danny announce his new social network for search marketing types: Sphinn. Although I haven't taken the time to go check it out myself yet, but it looks very cool and I read a glowing review by Rand at dmoz, so I better go sign up and try it out. I think it's a great idea that was overdue. There are so many search blogs and stuff going on in the industry, it's hard for any of us to keep up--especially when our jobs as search marketers take so much of our time. Like most SEOs I know, I subscribe to dozens of search blogs, but it's getting hard to sift through and find the best stuff. Digg and other social networks have the bad habit of burying good content just because it comes from SEOs. So it's great to have a place where all of us search geeks can stretch out and share our opinions about all the happening stuff in search. There are some detractors who are really just trying to get some of the attention themselves. It's funny how even the guys who rip on Sphinn are over there trying to Sphinn their blog posts. That's the search industry for you, everyone's got an opinion, but we're never too proud to pass up a good link ;)

Labels: danny sullivan, seo, social media

We made the Official announcement today about the acquisition of Web Targeted and the launch of SEO.com. We also decided on a logo for the new company and we've got a new website design in the works. Stay tuned for more new stuff from SEO.com in the coming days and weeks.

Labels: news, seo, seo.com

This NY Post article extolls the virtues of organic search listings, by referencing an upcoming report by Internet Search Metrics along with eBay's recent Adwords spending diet. They point to these things as evidence that there is a lot of valuable traffic that is being left on the table by companies that ignore organic search while spending thousands or millions of dollars on paid search. I've personally seen this many times with marketers I've talked to about SEO. I think a large part of the reason for this isn't so much that companies are unaware of the value of organic search, it's more like they've tried doing organic SEO themselves or even outsourced it to an SEO firm, but didn't see measurable improvement, so they gave up in favor of PPC, which gives them complete control as long as they keep paying.

Labels: seo

I noticed another reference the other day in Sean Ammirati's blog post quoting a Google engineer (Udi Manber) as saying that 20-25% of all searches on Google are unique--meaning that almost 1 out of 4 searches are for something that has never been searched for on Google. He also mentioned that searcher expectations and needs will continue to evolve. This makes for some interesting issues for the search engines as well as us search marketers. How can we optimize for keywords and phrases that people haven't even searched on yet?

We need to look at search in terms of relevancy and overall theme rather than exact keyword phrases. We need to provide quality content and products that will meet specific needs of the consumer, rather than just be "optimized" for a certain keyword.

Don't get me wrong, keywords are still important and will continue to be for a while, but we need to recognize the importance of being relevant outside of simple keyword phrases to build a long-term, sustainable business.

Labels: keywords, seo

Big news! Web Targeted was recently acquired by WashingtonVC. In collaboration with BP Holidings we were able to secure the best SEO domain in the world: SEO.com. I'm SUPER excited about this change and look forward to the challenge of taking this SEO company to a much higher level. We've still got the same great team of SEO experts, plus a few new faces. SEO.com will continue to be a search engine optimization firm, but our website will also offer lots of good stuff like SEO resources, tools, articles, tips, and insight into the SEO/SEM industry.

Stay tuned for a new logo, website, and a lot more.

Labels: seo

John Andrews wrote a great post about some of the difficulty of selling SEO services with so much misinformation and snake oil salesmen in the marketplace.

He references Market for Lemons an essay by Nobel prize winner George Akerlof. That essay established what is now known as asymmetrical information theory. Sounds like a very interesting read.

Labels: seo

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.

Labels: domains, news, seo, wsj

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.

Labels: robots.txt, seo, tips

One of my employees, Nelson, just started a new SEO blog called Search Banter. It's literally a week old, but he's already got some good stuff on there, so go check it out if you're interested in search marketing news and tips. Nelson's a smart guy and I look forward to his insight into the world of SEO.

SearchBanter.com

p.s. I guess this means I'm officially back from my blogging vacation

Labels: blogs, nelson james, sem, seo, seo blog

Lee Odden posted a list of the blogs he reads...or at least the ones he knows about and has looked at once. From the looks of the size of this list, I think I was the only search-related blog left off, but it's still a pretty good list. You'll never have time to read all these blogs (there's like 250 of them), but scan the list and see if you notice any that sound interesting and check them out. I've heard of the majority of them and read a lot of 'em from time to time. I don't think every single one of these is must read, but there's definitely some good stuff in there, so check it out.

Labels: blogs, search marketing, seo