SEO.com - It’s Time to Join
Posted by reviews on Mar 22, 2008
You may be familiar with the owners of SEO.com reportedly paying $5 Million for the domain. Yes, that’s a lot of money. As it turns out, Mike Mann, the owner of SEO.com did not pay quite that much. However, he is still a really wealthy individual from his days in the domain industry.
News report from the time of the announcement:
Mike Mann is a prominent internet entrepreneur who sold BuyDomains company a few years ago for more than $65 million. His latest tech venture is just that, a venture capital firm based in Washington D.C. which goes by the name of WashingtonVC.
Yesterday Mann announced the purchase of SEO.com by WashingtonVC for $5 million as well as the formation of an SEO firm led by Dave Bascom. The company is formerly known as Web Targeted, search engine optimization company located in Utah. Jay mentions this new domain will give them a huge advantage over the fierce competition of Search Engine Optimizers.
Just the same, as far as SEO is concerned, it has the perfect domain name, is owned by one of the wealthiest people in the domain and SEO industries, and has a quickly growing forum.
So, if you are thinking about joining, this is the time to do it while it’s still young!
Please click the logo to join
The Power of Google
Posted by reviews on Oct 12, 2007
Google seems to be growing exponentially. During the month of August alone they were reported to have had 31 billion queries throughout the world. In total more than 37 billion searches were carried out across all Google sites. Second on the list was Yahoo!, which had a paltry 8.5 billion searches recorded during the month. Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN Search do not come anywhere near being as used or have the level of usage. Although there was a poll conducted recently showing that Yahoo! had a slight lead for users in terms of being a favored search engine. These users still seem to be using Google anyway.
The Asia-Pacific region, including China, Japan and India, contained the greatest number of unique searchers, with 258 million conducting over 20 billion searches during the month.
Since Google has such dominance, as far as search engines are go, they also can greatly influence the way websites are designed, how people market their sites, and to that end, which websites people visit. They can also pretty much dictate the cost of advertising as well. This level of control over something so pervasive, being the internet itself, makes one think that they have more influence now than Microsoft ever had during its hayday.
I believe they are bordering on monopoly control of the internet. I wonder if they will be eventually targeted for regulation or some sort of government instituted penalties, such as being broken up.
Matt Cutts New Startup Idea
Posted by reviews on Sep 20, 2007
Interested in a new internet business startup idea? Here’s an idea straight from a Google employee!
Matt Cutts, the well known Google employee that blogs about all things internet, has come up with his own internet money making venture. Realizing that most people have a ton of their favorite songs in an mp3 format, only not necessarily legally downloaded. His idea is that people may like to have a higher quality, legal format and would go for the opportunity to upload a list of all their favorite titles and have them converted. The mp3 conversion internet business would charge the customer to cover the cost of making the songs legal, etc
Here’s how he thinks it could work for you:
- offer people ringtones of songs on their hard drive
- charge a penny or two for each song that is converted to “legitimate.”
- run some banner ads or AdSense
- anonymize the data and license the anonymized data to various businesses
- get people to sign up with Pandora, Last.fm, or Rhapsody.
- don’t make any money on it. Use it as a way to build brand recognition or positive karma.
I actually could see how this could work! However, the biggest incentive for people would be a huge assault by the RIAA with lawsuits and other penalties. Also, if they offered higher quality sound and a full catalog of data, since many mp3 downloads don’t include much information and have incorrect spellings.
So, all you audiophile, internet entrepreneurs better get a jump on the competition and do it now!
As a sidenote, Matt Cutts has hinted before that Google would not be a lifelong pursuit when he said “I love working at Google, but at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say ‘Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. It’s been like eight years now! When do we move on to our next adventure?’” Maybe he’s considering finally doing one of his ideas.
Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Terms and Acronyms
Posted by reviews on Aug 31, 2007
302
Adsense
Algorithm
Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example:
< a href=”http://www.reviewerofsites.com/” >This is the anchor text< /a >
ATW
- AlltheWeb (search engine)
Authority
A website that is considered by Google or other search engines to be trusted and usually given a high PageRank.
BackLink
A web page that has a hyperlink to one of your pages, usually the home page.
B2B
Business to Business
Blog
BOT
Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.
BOTW
Best Of The Web (Directory)
- Cache
- CAPTCHA
- Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart
Cloaking
Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Canonicalization
Click Fraud
Conversion
Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.
- Content
- Context
- Relevance of one element of a web page’s content to other elements of web page’s content.
CPL
- Cost Per Lead
- CPM
- Cost Per Thousand
- CPS
- Cost Per Sale
- CPC
- Cost Per Click (Google’s PPC Program)
- CTA
- Content Targeted Adverstising - It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.
- CTR
- Click Through Rate
- CVC | CVC2
- Card Verification Code
Data Center
Dedicated Server
Deep Link
A hyperlink from another website that is pointing to one of your website pages, other than the home page.
Directory
A web directory lists web sites by category and subcategory.
- DMOZ
- Directory MOZilla (a directory)
- DNS
- Domain Name System
Domain Name Doorway Page
A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Duplicate Content
Dynamic IP
EPC
- Earnings Per Click
FFA
Free For All - FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimize their importance in ranking formulas.
- GAP
- Google Advertising Professionals
- Google (a search engine)
- HTTP
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol
- HTTPS
- HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure
- IBL
- Inbound Link (see Back Link)
- KDA
- Keyword Density Analyzer
- KEI
- Keyword Effectiveness Index
- Keyword/Keyphrase
- Keywords are words or terms which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are phrases consisting of multiple words that are used in search engine queries.
- Keyword Stuffing
- Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding (many) keywords to a web page for the benefit of influencing how a search engine ‘perceives’ the page. This is not for the benefit of human visitors.
Link Building
The process of finding or acquiring backlinks to your website or sites.
Link Farm
A link farm is a group of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity.
Link Juice
Link Popularity
Long Tail
LS
- LookSmart (a PPC Directory)
- LSA
- Latent Semantic Analysis
- LSI
- Latent Semantic Indexing
Matt Cutts
Google Employee in charge of preventing or limiting SPAM in the Google search engine results pages. His blog.
- Monetize
- Nofollow
- Noindex
- OBL
- Outbound Link
Organic Results
Page Rank (or PageRank)
PageRank is a numerical weighting (0 to 10, 10 being the highest) based upon the Google link analysis algorithm.
PFI
Pay For Inclusion
- PPC
- Pay Per Click
- PPR
- Pay Per Rank
- PPV
- Pay Per Visitor
- PR
- Google PageRank™ is a numerical weighting (0 to 10, 10 being the highest) based upon the Google link analysis algorithm.
- PR0
- PageRank Zero - the lowest actual PageRank given by Google.
Proxy
- PSA
- Public Service Ad
- PubCon
- Reciprocal Link
A two way hyperlink between websites.
Robots.txt
- Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.
- SEM
- Search Engine Marketeer
Search Engine Marketer
Search Engine Marketing - SEMPO
- Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization
- SEO
- Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimizer - SEP
- Search Engine Placement
Search Engine Positioning
Search Engine Promotion - SERPs
- Search Engine Results Pages
- SEs
- Search Engines
- SES
- Search Engine Strategies (a conference)
- SEU
- Search Engine Usability
- Sitemap
- Shared Server
- SMM
- Social Media Marketing
- SMO
- Social Media Optimization
Snap shot
SPAM
- Sites Positioned Above Me
Spamdexing
Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine’s index.
- Spider
- Also called a bot (or robot). Spiders are software programs that can scan the web, normally following hyperlinks (links) throughout a website (via internal links) and to other websites (via external links). They have many different purposes, including indexing web pages for search engines to finding e-mail addresses for email spammers.
- SSL
- Secure Socket Layer
Static IP
An IP address that does not change.
Subdomain
- Text Link
- TLD
- Top Level Domain
- TOS
- Terms of Service
URI
Uniform Resource Identifier
URL
Uniform Resource Locater
W3C
- World Wide Web Consortium
- Webmaster Tools
- Wikipedia
- A is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization. It is the largest, most extensive and fastest growing encyclopedia currently available on the Internet.
Y!
- Yahoo! (a directory)
Web Surfers Resist Search Engine Sponsored Links
Posted by reviews on Aug 25, 2007
According to a recent poll by Penn State, web surfers do not trust search engine sponsored links. Print Goes Wireless published an article recently, stating that “consumers are distrustful of search engine sponsored listings and click on such links fewer than twice in every 10 searches, new research has revealed.” Those are some horrible statistics! This only shows that Adsense website owners need to be always changing with the consumer mindset. If it means tweaking their website layout to flow better with the ads or improving their content so the visitor will more likely trust, or even appreciate, the link, then the webmaster must keep working on imaginative ways of developing their sites.
Further, the article states, “in that study, participants clicked on the results identified as ‘organic’ on more than 80 per cent of their searches rather than sponsored links even though many of the organic results were actually rewritten sponsored links. So his goal was to determine whether integrating sponsored links into organic results would increase the click-through rate, but this did not happen.” This is very interesting and goes against much of the thinking of Adsense webmasters. Instead of using block ads, perhaps the better method is to integrate the ads into the content itself, such as having keywords link to an ad. We’ve seen this on some websites and forums, but they don’t seem well integrated and usually have a double line under the word. This seems to be very annoying for the reader if they happen to roll their cursor over the word, which would then display an ad image or more ad text.
The other unavoidable problem is with the advertisers themselves. If their advertisement leads the visitor to a page loaded with eye-popping, bold print that seems like a poorly designed web page, at best, or a horribly conceived ad, at worst, then the the visitor will be more annoyed than happy with the result of their click. Advertisers must take the time to make visiting their site worth it.
As web surfers become more savvy and discerning in what constitutes a worthwhile site, including those of advertisers, then the pressure falls back on the Adsense site and the advertisers to offer up something better.
Google Proxy Issue - Any Third Party Can De-Index you!
Posted by reviews on Aug 21, 2007
As Dan Thies points out in his blog entry on his SEOFastStart.com site, it is possible for the Google spiders to crawl “your” site’s pages through a proxy. The problem is that Google will then no longer see the real url as the correct url, but instead view the proxy’s url as valid. Your url will then be de-indexed by Google (and possibly other search engines). Imagine how many visitors could be lost because your site is no longer coming up in the SERPs (search engine results page)! Imagine also, how this could effect other areas of income if your PageRank drops to zero because of this!
They did notify Google about this over a year ago, but to date Google has done nothing. As time has passed, more advanced proxies have come into existence. These advanced proxies no longer pass the user-agent and other valuable information, making it even more difficult to prevent this from occurring.
How Can I Tell if I’ve been Proxified?
A simple test is to do a search for a keyword or phrase (or combination of phrases) that are unique to the page on your site that you are testing. If you find a duplicate page via the search engine then you may have been proxy hacked. A typical proxy url may look something like: www.example.com/nph-proxy.pl/655486/http/www.yoursite.com/
An Implementation Guide is available on Jaime Sirovich’s blog to walk you through some possible preventative measures.
Hopefully Google and the like take this seriously and fix it soon!