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"Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clark, 1972
The Rank Magic Blog
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Avoid SEO Smoke & Mirrors|
Beware #1 guarantees When someone guarantees a #1 ranking, ask them what keywords they will be targeting. They may be able to get you a #1 ranking for an obscure search term, but since no one is typing that into a search engine it won’t bring you any traffic and therefore has little to no value.
Keep your expectations realistic Understand there is no magic formula to SEO Be involved in all steps of the process |
SEO Tip: Keywords In Your Domain Name
January 24, 2009 ::: The question often arises about whether to choose a domain name that has one of your keywords in it. Back several years ago, that seemed to be an important rankings consideration. If you were searching for a waffle maker, www.waffle-makers.com always seemed to show up at the top of the list, whether it really deserved it or not.
Well, it's not that easy anymore, but it IS fair to say that since the keywords searched for are bolded in the search engine results, having a keyword in your URL provides one more opportunity to catch the eye of a potential customer. Is it likely to raise your rankings significantly? Probably not, as Bill Harttzer explains.
SEO
Link Building Fundamentals
January 20, 2009 ::: Link building is a long-term process but the rewards are great. Building your Link Popularity is a a fundamental requirement for marketing any Web site, regardless of how established it is.
Eric Enge has an article at Search Engine Watch that can help you get started with effective research that can focus your efforts on high ROI links.
Conversions - Write Copy That Sells
January
14, 2009 ::: First impressions count. And your web site need to
make two good first impressions, as we pointed out last month. First, you need to impress the
search engines and convince them to rank you near the top for your chosen
keyword phrases. But getting people to your site does you no good unless
your copy can convert them into paying customers. So the second good first
impression you need to make is on the human visitor to your web page. You
only have a few seconds to convince your visitor that he or she is on the
right page for what they're looking for. Then you need to convince them that
you're a company they want to do business with.
These aren't really conflicting goals, but you won't achieve them both by accident. You need to carefully write copy that addresses both. Rebecca Appleton, Operating Director at UK SEO agency Top Position has written a nice piece for a recent issue of Search Marketing Standard. <I recommend it to you.>
Realistic SEO Expectations
January 9, 2009 ::: Jill Whalen recently wrote an article on setting realistic SEO expectations. Here are a few excerpts.
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Those who've been in the SEO biz for a number of years know how much
more competitive it is these days compared to a few years ago. The
number of web pages indexed by search engines has doubled, tripled,
and quadrupled in past years. On top of that, a good portion of site
owners and webmasters know just enough SEO to be dangerous. Those were the days when anyone who knew even the slightest bit about SEO could easily rank highly in all the major search engines, with very little effort. These days, it's almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody's searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you're doing. Beware of SEO Companies Who Will Tell You What You Want to HearAnd remember, there are plenty of SEO companies that will say they
can do whatever you want them to do. You want to be #1 for "spring"?
Sure, no problem. They will happily take your money, do some work, and
promptly get no results. Don't blame them though – they were just
telling you what you wanted to hear. |
This is a terrific article. I recommend you read the whole thing ... <here>
Cost Per Link Is a Lousy Metric
January 5, 2009 ::: Typically what happens is that an SEO is performing work on behalf of a client, or the company they work for. They are diligently adding incoming links. Then the person managing the SEO does a calculation, looking at the money spent on the SEO, and the number of links acquired.
For example, if you have an in-house SEO getting paid $8,000 per month, and they obtained 40 links for you last month, your cost per link is $200. So why not try to drive this cost per link metric down?
The reason is that it will drive you to acquire crappier and crappier links. What the metric ignores is that all links are not created equal. In fact, a high quality link can easily be 10,000, or even 100,000, times more valuable to your web site then one of those crappy links.
<Read more of Eric Enge's pithy and insightful analysis>
January 2009
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