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Tag: search engine watch

  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 There are a number of big names in the SEO and online marketing industry. A lot of times I throw them around as answers to “people I would like to meet” or “what source do you have for this information?” More often than not, though, there are a handful of names that continue to come into play. After about 2 years of all of your funny looks, I thought it was time I let you just a little further into my world. So, here are a few introduction. Oh, and a lot of “SEO Experts” claim to know these people on a personal level so as to boost their credibility in hopes of making a sale. This is certainly not the case most often, and especially in mine.

    Danny Sullivan

    • Creator of Search Engine Watch, Journalist, and Internet Consultant.

    Danny Sullivan became involved in SEO, unbeknownst to him, in 1995, when he had a client that was complaining that his website was nowhere to be found in the search engines. At this time, SEO was little more than a thought. There were no handy-dandy tools, no SEO forums, and no guides to help in the matter of exposure online. So what did Danny do? He decided to research what it takes for a search engine to decide to rank sites higher. He modified, tracked, and re modified his sites so as to determine what changes had what effects. After a long period of time, and a large amount of answers, Danny posted his information online, and it soon became the very first “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines.” There had been nothing of this information beforehand, and this may have indeed jump started this whole industry. While checking out the pictures from this year’s Google Dance, his appeared and my daughter asked “Daddy, who is that guy.” To which I answered, “he is the guy that made Daddy’s job possible.” With so much acclaim and even more e-mail incentive from grateful website designers, Danny maintained the information online for the world to partake. As time passed, he dug deeper to find what it takes to index sites, increase ranking, increase traffic, and how the search engines work overall.

    In 1997, Danny launched what is now arguably the most important SEO information site online, Search Engine Watch. It contained his “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” and so much more. SEW has changed ownership (as many great things in business do) but is still maintained and edited by Danny Sullivan himself. Years later, this site is one of the very first that I visit every single, and throughout my day. There are very few times that I can stumble onto a question that is not answered here.

    Matt Cutts

    • Google Software Engineer, Superior Blogger, Nice Guy, CIA Operative.

    Matt Cutts began his employment with Google in 2000, where he worked as a software engineer, and ended up creating Google’s SafeSearch (Google’s family filter). He deals primarily with issues of quality (as in spammers) and webmaster concerns (like the algorithm concerning ranking and penalization). Matt names wasn’t nearly as famous (or infamous depending on your perspective) until he started his blog. Using his blog, Matt talks SEO, Google’s products, life at Google, and a lot of overall nerdy stuff. When his pic came up on my computer, and my daughter asked of him, I replied, “that’s the son of B**** that makes Daddy’s job really hard.” With respect of course.

    *Little more is known of Matt because he works for the NSA under the guise of a Google employee, so he can read and distribute all of your emails to the government.* *I am totally kidding. Being in the spotlight carries a lot of responsibilities and burdens, one of which is dealing with petty rumors and crass people. There is a site (that I am not going to justify with naming here) that claims my joke, sorta, in a very sorry attempt to degrade Google’s integrity. Matt did indeed work for the Department of Defense while going to school for his M. S. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That plus the B. S. degrees from the University of Kentucky in both mathematics and computer science, means he’s a really smart guy. He worked for the DoD as an elective, providing a few months of study, and then a few in the work environment. Think about it though, even if the rumors are true, and the government used Matt to get your Gmails and read through them, do you really think that’s the worst thing our government has done? Probably not. Matt is widely noted as an extremely nice and approachable guy. Many Google employees will openly admit that they hate waling the floors of seminars and conventions with a Google badge on, as they soon become the target for angry webmasters. Matt easily gets the most of this activity, and returns it with a smile.

    I will likely be doing an on-going posting on some other big names in marketing and the Internet industry. I believe that it is a very good idea to know the people you work with, even if not directly.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 9, 2006 There are a bunch of them. I would like to share some of my favorites. First, though, I would like to say a thing. All tools are not 100%. Nothing is. Tools for SEO are online and rely on information given by different sources. For example, there are tools that check link popularity. Google will not ever let you know how many links they consider. This would give a little info on how they determine ranking and they don’t want that. Some tools check for ranking. Ranking is a relative term. Google has many different data centers, and a site that ranks 23 for a keyword on one center, may show a different rank on a different center. So let’s look at some neat tools to use.

    Site Report Card

    This one is a pretty cool overall tool that shows a few different aspects of a site that can and likely do affect rankings. It shows different aspects on a scale of 0-10. It’s a good idea to get everything as close to a 10 as possible, but not always easily done as some Flash conventions are not seen as acceptable for this one. It also shows link popularity and inclusion which is a good way to judge how many of your pages are indexed. Also, the spell check shows less than satisfactory results sometimes, as there are words that we say and type that aren’t in the tool’s dictionary.

    Overture Keyword Selection

    This is a tool that was setup to show how many times a certain word or term was searched for in a month’s time. This can help decide on what terms you want to optimize and market your site for. If you were thinking about a term that got 10 searched last month, might want to look at other terms. If there were 17,234,879,240 searches, might want to look at variation of a term with the next tool.

    Google Keyword Tool

    This is one of my favorites. This tool will show you a vast number of variations of a word or term, so that you aren’t trying to get your site to be number 1 on Google with the term “cell phone.” So you can check into other terms, use the previous search tool from overture, and decide on your best plan of action for optimization and marketing.

    Search Engine Watch, SEO Book, WebProWorld Sometimes, the best tool in the world is the help of others. These are two of my most favoritest forums and my favorite blog (next to mine, of course). I have yet to even ask a question that was not answered, and the amount of information provided here is immense. Make sure to get more than one opinion though. In the real world, people have a tendency to speak on things that they don’t completely understand or even remotely have experience in. Also, learn to know the mods on these. You will start to notice that the majority of the posts are answered by a few individuals, and they are incredibly smart.

    There are also a number of other tools out there that “check meta tags.” Please be wary of these. I’m not saying not to use, but I am saying that everybody has their idea of what is acceptable. WideXL, for example will tell you there are too many keywords or shine out your “poison” words. First, if I have 21 keywords, don’t tell me I have too many of something Google doesn’t look at. Obviously you probably don’t want to have 5000 keywords as there are some search engines that use them, and a hit is a hit (if it’s relevant). And “lingerie” is not a poison word. Look up “lingerie” in Google. See number 1. Look at their keywords. Yeah.

    So, check out these tools, research your SEO, be mindful of the information and/ or advice you get. Even from here. I try my hardest to keep the information here as correct as I can, but everyone makes mistakes. Unless you have tested it and counted the consequence, it hasn’t really happened in your world.

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  • SEO Factor Blog

    October 7, 2006 In the creation of a site, many people make use of frames. Frames are a way of making one page that will stay static, but a chunk of which will be used to call information from other pages. The use of frames is often because it is a person’s first site, or their relative made it after graduating a website design program or just picked up a book. This isn’t really a bad thing because most website design/HTML books don’t even go into SEO, and the use of frames is one of the very first subjects covered. It can be a neat little method of keeping a common look throughout the site before learning CSS. More on creating frames can be found here at my favorite online tutorial, Tizag.

    The problem with frames is that some browsers don’t play well with them, and the information on the page is often within a frame that can not be seen. Here is a way to get around this problem, posted on Search Engine Watch, while still making use of the frames method. Keep in mind that most methods of using frames and making them SEO friendly, will only help so much. And it’s not really that much.

    But maybe you have talking to someone that doesn’t want to give up the frames no matter what you say. One good method is the creation of landing pages. (note: not doorway pages or anything that is a “trick.”) You can create a few pages that have the same look and feel as the framed pages, and place the bulk of relevant text on those pages. They will be the first set of pages on the site, (that means replacing the homepage) and will link to the framed pages. Then these pages can be submitted to the search engines. I also think that this is a cheap and ‘shortcutty’ method. It leaves a void when a surfer is moving from framed to unframed pages, and decreases the amount of acceptable information that the search engines can see.

    In my opinion it’s probably best to make good use of CSS if you want a common feel on the pages of your site. This will give the desired effects, and work very well with a surfer and search engine alike. Keep in mind my opinion on design should be taken lightly. I’m very analytical, so “pretty” is not a word I implement often. I am very lucky to be involved with people that have an incredible eye for design and a comparable understanding of SEO. The make the site, I make the site work. Now that’s a partnership.

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