Search Feature

For those of you who do not have the budget to hire an SEO, my recommendation is this:

1) Get a powerful and rememberable domain name.

2) Buy a powerful logo for it.

3) Build a fully functional and easy to use website.

4) Create hubs, lenses and knols.

Now: Do yourself and everyone else a favor. When you create any of those outlets, don’t spam. You WILL be iced and see low results. Network with others when using those platforms. Give advice about your niche.

You will see some serious and more than anything very targeted traffic!

From there I recommend that you check out SEO Book or the sites I have featured here. Read thru some of the interviews and see which SEO expert’s style fits you the best. I have never claimed that this would be THE site for SEO, but it is more or less a doorway into the world of SEO, a “start here first” sort of place. You would not believe how wrong so much advice on so many forums is. You can so easily be misled. The above works based on how much time, effort and enthusiasm you put into it.
Stay away from quick fixes and don’t get into blackhat.
Be competitive!

Please continue here …

As suspected, my knol ranked immediately and outranked a lot of other pages regarding the event it is about. Never seen anything like it. So now I am publishing a new one, which will be an ongoing work in progress about Costa Rica. Will show it to you once I am done.

Right now I am taking my time turning it into something useful for anyone who is interested in Costa Rica, which is where I have been living for 2 years and know a lot about.

The urls are long and horrible. But still, they rank. I highly encourage creating one, but make it quality. But all your effort and knowledge into it. The key is not to get it up, but keep it up!

Mike

You fine folks are in store for the information of the century; - WOW - is all I have to say.

I have great news for those of you searching for information about how to rank better in Google. I received a packet from American Express earlier this week,  and to be honest, I was not aware of  the “true gem” I would find when I first decided to explore the contents, and all I can say, is that opening the package was likely the best decision I have ever made… I think.

 It seems American Express entered the search business and is offering its spam, err, mailing list of small businesses a few tid bits of useful information. Yep, American Express sent (probably millions) small business owners information about how to rank better “naturally” on search engines.

Read the rest of this entry »

interesting to realize that search engines do cash in on keywords related to manipulating them. 

TLA seems to get away with quite a bit, and I wonder if their ad campaig and link strategy really works. My guess would be yes. If you have such a strong presence and give business back to the search engines, I would really be surprised if they were not somehow “blessed” in their actions

Or maybe their service is so ineffective, that search engine employees prefer to send them there. This seems to be the only one on Google blackhatblueprints.com/?gclid=CKf0ooij9JQCFQKcFQodyUjSqw

I honestly would not trust a blackhat product or service using Google ppc though. At least not for their blackhat related sites.

This is probably the worst misinformation out there. A potential client contacted me and has been advised to create 5 or 6 sites about the same thing, interlink them and build links and then rank for a very competitive keyword.

Let me tell you right now, that if you build links for too many sites, you are spinning your wheels. Unless of course you want to do it the blackhat way and know what you’re doing.

If you want to use the power of multiple sources, stick to dofollow AND nofollow social networks for additional traffic. Your myspace page may not give you power in Google, but it itself can rank high immediately and with a banner and link to your main site, you WILL get targeted traffic.

I strongly advise that if you don’t have the budget for SEO, get into social networking and focus on making your site useful and helpful.

You can also not have too much content on your site and focus on social networking.

The Google Know is a new platform where you can publish bits and pieces of information to the web. The main reason that the platform will catch on is of course the fact that Google can make you join.
When I Google Jack Resneck, what pops up on page 1? 2 Knols of his, so those who understand search engines are almost forced to use the Knols to stay ahead of their competition. 526,000 results for that name and 2 Knols outrank anybody else in the world with that name?
This of course is time consuming. But I am going to start a Knol about a friend’s event and will keep you posted on the results.

Mike dammann

Added: The downside to the social media phenomenon is that overall content gets weak. You rewrite the same thing over and over again for several outlets to dominate the SERPs with every social network that you are a part of and it clutters up the SERPs and eliminates variety. If would be a lot better if all of Dr. Resnick’s writings were in one place for people easy to find and then make sure that when people type in Herpes related keyterms, they have more sources to choose from on the same SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Instead he is writing all over the place to push the competition out of the way. Reverse SEO, don’t just rank, make sure that the others are not even seen.
It would be way better to have him pay to be on top and then see something different below.
Variety has always been Google’s strong side, but right now the variety of results decreases as many of the web savvy business people have learned how to dominate their industries.
Should a Doctor spend his time writing all over the place instead of making one informative post on his own site?
If Google Knol catches on to be THE one social network, then it may not be a problem, but if this turns into yet another blogspot type of disaster, then I predict a ton of clutter unless the Google team takes this one seriously and comes up with some good ideas on how to keep Google Knol quality.

And here is my Knol.
Out of all of the social networks I am on, Twitter is the one I use the most followed by Facebook. Myspace is pretty worthless unless you spam it with Friendblaster. Friendfeed makes a lot of sense, but lack “something” and Mixx does not impress me one bit. If it wasn’t for the search engine benefit, would you be drawn to it?
Of course not. Same thing I have to say about most of the networks using dofollow.

My hope for the future is to see most of them disappear and have maybe 5 or 6 major ones everyone uses.

In hope that some of these may catch on some day, here are a few abbreviations that I myself have been using lately. Some of the people I network with get some of them, but of course most people are like “What was that?”.

So if you have on to add that you have been using and that you want people to recognize, post it here.

tyt - Take your time

wdym - What do you mean?

om - Oh my without using his name in vain

ays - Are you serious?

em - email me

dygi - did you get it?

ymbk, ygbk, ymbj, fr etc. refers to you must be kidding, gotta be kidding, joking, for real and such.

wtn - watch the news

gi - Google it

cm - call me

col - crying out loud

su - shut up

aslsp - Age sex location sexual preference.

OK, I’m done for now, more to come

With all that is being said and done regarding social networking and how a search engine benefit plays a huge role in the participation on many, I have to say that when it comes to getting cut and dry and real information, Twitter is by far the best.
The fact that you can just blur out a link to a story and read what other people in your niche are participating in is VERY helpful when it comes to avoiding having to read thru so much material that you are not interested in. I personally have no time to check whether a blog I read has made a new post or not, and am not that interested in reading thru a lot of comments to see whether one of them is in reply to one of mine or not.
Twitter works almost like Yahoo! messenger on a more global scale. At least for me. Following all of the best SEO people out there, it reminds me of the old threadwatch. Twitter is so simple, but exactly what people have been waiting for. I’m sure that soon we have something much better and more effective in place, but right now, Twitter beats everything when it comes to being a place to help you stay on top of news that YOU are interested in.

Mike

Tamar Weinberg loves Social Networking.

MD: Tamar, first of all you are called the ultimate social networker and I do see you everywhere I am. How much time do you spend networking and do you think that it is something everyone should be doing or rather just an outlet for people who can’t stop chatting.

TW: Well, I really don’t have time to really chat with all the social networking I’m involved in (which I consider to be a 24/7 type of behavior — except that as an Orthodox Jew, I’m a Sabbath observer, so I’m not really online then!). Granted, I love to embrace the individuals within the social media sphere, and I am mostly doing it to build relationships, but I also like to discover information that the collective would find interesting. I find social media informative, lucrative, and also a really great way to market to individuals (provided that you do it right, and it varies per network and per product offering). The latter is why I’m mostly involved in it, but it’s something you really need to know very well; it’s about knowing the psychology of individuals too.

MD: I personally believe that the percentage of internet searches is going to be more and more happening on social networks and people will rely less on search engines in the future. Do you agree and where do YOU believe people will get the best overall results for their searches in let’s say 5 years? Will the amount of social networking results dominate to the point that more and more people will enter them directly rather than rely on organic search engine search?

TW: I think that factoring in what other people want is likely to happen. Hopefully, this will do two things: it will make the earlier adopters a lot more influential. It will also turn everyday internet users into influencers too. This is only possible, though, if social networking becomes more mainstream with the help of search engines (and not only for personalized results).

MD: What is it that you’re passionate about?

TW: I’m passionate about doing what I do now. I love writing and helping others. I also love social media but I can’t just build a social network that will take off from inception. Think about Cuil.com, the new search engine that supposedly is aimed at taking down Google. Within its first day of launch, Cuil had more negative press than one would have imagined. Other social networks have tried to create the next “Digg clone.” The problem is that there are a lot of passionate users that exist on these sites already. It’s hard to drive away users from the sites that they use religiously unless those sites cease to function effectively. Think about Twitter — when it died, Plurk, FriendFeed, and Identi.ca filled the void (for awhile). Friendster was replaced with MySpace (and later Facebook when it opened its doors to everyone). Friendster’s failure was also in the fact that it wasn’t able to deliver what it promised and the network issues were too frequent.

MD: A part of social network is IMO addiction. I find myself reading thru stuff that will not really benefit me, but can’t really stop going thru it. I know that I am not the only one and was wondering, what is it that a social network has to do in order to keep its users hooked?

TW: Usually, it depends on having early adopters that are influential — at least having the people you listen to vouching for the service. Twitter was initially approached with a lot of skepticism, and I think I joined a year before the rest of the SEO community did (December ‘06). Still, though, others came as their friends started talking about it and word of mouth spread.

Also, a very important part of fostering addiction is reliability. That’s how many people flocked to Twitter (at first) in addition to FriendFeed and other social networks. Identi.ca is still one of those new networks that is being doubted because it’s a Twitter clone with little to offer (except that it was up when Twitter was down). It had a lot of its own issues with stability at first and most people doubted it would survive. Sure, I see people occasionally add me as a friend on the social network, but I don’t think anyone is using it as religiously to consider Identi.ca an addiction. I know there are some Twitter and FriendFeed fanatics, on the other hand.

A big part of an addicition is being regularly engaged. If you see someone talking about the site but then losing interest, it’s not going to succeed at keeping the users hooked. You need to help build the community as well.

To sum up, it depends on influence, stability, engagement, and community.

MD: Let’s talk about SEO for a minute. And spam of course. It seems that Facebook has things under control and MySpace is getting better. A lot of the social networks use do follow and they are the ones most vulnerable to spam. Should a social network use the no follow attribute? And how do you feel about the fact that so many social media pages rank high in especially Google and people use those platforms rather than their own sites to promote their products? I am mainly talking about Squidoo and Hubpages which do a pretty good job editing for quality, but then again, isn’t this something that is going to almost force people to use social networks unless they have a nice size budget to market their sites?

TW: Well, I don’t like how my Twitter and Digg profiles outrank me for my own blog that I put more of my heart and soul into, so I do feel the concern there. Sure, I don’t mind if they rank, though. Putting it that way, it’s great for reputation management. On the various sites, though, I’d say nofollow is helpful; I speak from experience from managing a social media network which recently was attacked by this kind of spam. Having Viagra and Tramadol pages generated by money-hungry spammers and not a large staff to combat this kind of spam becomes a problem and I understand the logic behind such a decision.

MD: When you read blogs by search engine employees giving SEO Tips, how do you feel about that. Does it seem strange to you and do you believe their “advice” to be honest?

TW: I think it varies. I trust a lot of educated individuals and I’m glad that they are opening up about their tips since it all makes us more knowledgeable (though it depends on the blogger; some posts obviously are weighed with a grain of salt whereas others are more important). However, with regards to SEO, I don’t consider myself to be one. I’m a blogger who is hugely immersed in social media and I report occasionally on SEO topics. If someone asked me for SEO services, I’d defer them to someone more capable.

MD: If you haven’t read this yet, you should. Not only is it informative, it also entertained me to read the conversation between Aaron and Matt. How do you believe Knols will fit into the whole picture of social media and where do you stand on the fact that Google requires you to first file a DMCA request before removing copyright violations? Shouldn’t it be a lot easier considering the fact that copyright violations go hand in hand with duplicate content and affiliate spam? Do you think Google should rethink their attitude?

TW: I’ve never been too enthusiastic about having to file a DMCA either via fax or snail mail. We’re in the age of the internet, people! I don’t own a fax machine and I hate how long snail mail takes. If Google encourages these practices, they should have a DMCA team dedicated to handling requests via email forms and trust the digital signature as authentic.

With regards to Aaron’s piece on Google Knol, it was very insightful. It’s troubling at the same time that the pages rank so high so fast — but it makes sense that Google wants to promote their product by “abusing” their search engine to do so. Actually, I hope that Google rethinks their attitude with regards to ranking those pages.

MD: Are Knols going to be useless or do you think that they are the new way to connect writers?

TW: I think the Google Knol project happened a bit too late. Wikipedia has been around for years, is clearly in the forefront, and there’s no real comparison. Google does have a competitive advantage here, though, because they are ranking those Knol pages higher for the very reason so as to bring the Google Knol project to the attention to the general public, but I also think that’s an unfair advantage that they’re exploiting.

I honestly don’t really know if I’m ready to say that the Google Knol project is a flop; it’s too new. But at this point, I also don’t see it going to turn into a community-building tool. At this point, it seems that people will use Knol to get a #1 ranking and nothing else.

MD: Last but not least, what are your long term plans, what do you want to get accomplished and what sort of impact do you want to leave behind? What motivates you the most in your mission and what do you believe others should get out of the networking example that you set?

TW: I don’t really have long term plans. I live every day trying to do as much as I possibly can and try to squeeze out every possible opportunity I can. If you ask me a question, it’s really hard for me to say no!

I don’t consider myself a trendsetter, but if I can offer one bit of advice with my “networking example” as you put it, I’d say that outreach is critical, and there’s not only one channel on which to do that. Vary your sources and interests. Don’t only use Plurk or Twitter. Don’t only focus on IM. Social networking — for the act of networking purely (not for marketing and content promotion) — is best when you spread yourself thin so that you can be ubiquitous. You likely won’t hear that adivce in any other type of discipline, but in this particular case, it works.

Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings and one of the most respected voices of SEO. She is also a very cool chick and me liking you is mandatory for qualifying you as an interviewee. Enjoy!

MD: Jill, you have been in the SEO industry for so many years now, what are some of the highlights and also some of the lowlights which you can recall?

JW: Hmm…good question! I’d have to say that every day is actually a highlight as I still learn something new each and every one of them. Every week there’s something new happening, or some new controversy to discuss. It’s pretty fun!

For lowlights, I’d have to say those were back when Google used to do those major updates and screw tons and tons of businesses in the process. I remember one update that happened right before an SES Conference in Chicago many years ago, and there were so many webmasters there who were devastated by what had happened to their websites prominence (or lack thereof) in Google. Google did go back and loosen the screws a bit after that one, but I’ve never seen so many shell-shocked faces before.

MD: One of our themes on Search Feature is the future of SEO. We basically want our readers to get an idea on what they can start doing today to be competitive in tomorrow’s search engine marketing world. What would you recommend a new or intermediate SEO should start doing which the regular SEO books do not tell you about?

JW: The interesting thing about that is that to succeed in tomorrow’s search marketing world, it’s the same as how to succeed in today’s “real” world. You have to have something great and unique. So those who are creative will always be the ones on top. Those who just copy what everyone else is doing will find it much too difficult to survive for the long haul. It also takes lots of hard work, passion and dedication. People with those traits have always been successful, and will continue to be long into the future.

MD: Let’s walk the fine line of linkbuilding for a while. I recall you being one of the first using the term linkbait years ago, but how do you recommend getting started with a brandnew site to let’s say achieve getting ranked for some competitive keywords within 6 months - 1 year?

JW: Nah, that wasn’t me using the term linkbait. I can’t stand the word, especially with the connotations it has developed today, i.e., basically tricking people into linking to you.

In terms of helping a brand new site in a competitive market to get ranked quickly, I don’t have any advice for that. There are no quick fixes and never have been, so that’s not really my area of expertise. My focus is and has always been on helping existing, established companies to fix their websites to be the best they can be.

MD: Is there really a way to compete with with business sites investing a large amount of money into SEO by simply creating something that people will want to link to and tell their friends about?

JW: Sure. Look at some of the new sites that came on the market and then were sold for millions in a year or two. Places like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. They had unique ideas and built a better mousetrap. Again, it all comes down to creativity and passion, not necessarily money.

MD: Links vs. content. There are different strategies. Either targeting a mass amount of easier keyterms thru a large amount of content, or go for the harder terms and put more of an emphasis on linkbuilding. If you were to start out today, which strategy would you be most likely following and why?

JW: Why are those the only 2 strategies? At High Rankings we don’t do either of those things. Building a massive amount of content for the sake of SEO is usually going to be crap content, and I would never recommend that to anyone. And attempting link building without something worth linking to is another useless folly. Your question presupposes that one has to target either the easy terms or the hardest terms. But the trick, if you will, is to target the middle ground. In other words, those keyword phrases that get a lot of decent searches, but for which are still obtainable if you know what you’re doing. It always amazes me how often the truly best keyword phrases get ignored!

MD: Let’s say there is a blogger who has no desire to get into the technical aspect of SEO. He just writes for the people and has no desire to change anything, but he hires you to help him promote his blog. What would you encourage him to pay attention to when writing articles and which social networks do you believe help the most to help someone promote their blog or site?

JW: High Rankings has done some consulting with corporations who are putting together blog strategies for various purposes. However, every blog is different, so there’s no one-size fits all solution. One company we consulted with had an awesome blog on social responsiblity that was perfect for promoting on Twitter, Facebook, and other similar venues. On the other hand, many of our B2B client’s would probably not get much out of participating in those types of communities.

It all comes down to finding out where your target audience hangs out and then becoming part of that conversation. As to what to write about in your blog, once again, that’s where the whole passion things comes in. Write about what you love and your passion will come through. Passion is infectious and is a great viral marketing tool. Just remember that you can’t fake passion, so don’t even try. The community will smell that a mile away!

MD: Talk to your clients now, past present and future. I’m sure that you have to overcome the same old barriers over and over again when trying to explain the strategies to rank their sites.

Imagine 50 future clients reading this and tell them what to keep in mind when they are going to get started in one of your classes.

JW: Our clients generally have some specific SEO problems that need solving, so we go ahead and do that for them. By the time they become clients, they already know our process which makes there a lot less barriers to overcome. Our advice is different for every client as it depends on their unique needs. This is something that often sets us apart from our competitors — we don’t have any one-size-fits-all strategy. No two companies can use the same exact SEO strategy, so there’s no reason in trying to sell that to them!

For those taking one of our High Rankings SEO classes, they often have a misunderstanding of what SEO is and isn’t, so we start out teaching them that, and then move on to providing them with the specific info they each need to take their own websites to the next level. If they need or want additional SEO consulting later, we can provide that, but most learn enough in the class to fix what’s broken in order to start gaining more targeted search traffic.

MD: Recently we are seeing 14 years olds rank for some tough terms companies are spending $1,000.00s a month on and the web gets cluttered up with some weird stuff. Library of Congress is talking about serializing blogs http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=42

and Steve Forbes has mentioned that blogging can hurt the economy. Where do you stand in this discussion and what are some of the effects a decision to place labels on blog could have?

JW: I’m really not familiar with those discussions, and therefore don’t feel qualified to comment.

MD: You probably know where I stand when it comes to how Google has changed in the past 3 years. Give some advice to the Google employees to save themselves headaches and improve their algorithm without having to beg webmasters to help them.

JW: Actually, I’m not familiar with where you stand on that, sorry! I really don’t understand this question. I’m pretty sure Google employees don’t want nor need my advice for anything. They’re pretty smart dudes and dudettes!

MD: Last but not least. Tell us what you believe has made you so successful and what you are planning to do in the future to remain a leading voice in the Search Engine Marketing industry.

JW: I think one of my talents is in explaining the complicated in a way that the average person can understand. I live and breathe SEO and understand every facet of it. People seem to like reading my stuff and taking my advice because it cuts to the chase and is very common sense advice. While others often make SEO seem more complicated, I boil it down to the essentials. I believe as long as I continue to do that through the High Rankings Advisor newsletter, the High Rankings SEO Forum, and the other communities in which I participate, my voice will continue to be heard in the search marketing industry for quite awhile.