Coconut Headphones

Google Crawling Behavior Exposed: 16 Different Googlebots?

Must.....Document.....Google's.....Crawlers!

Of the major disciplines in SEO, architecture is perhaps the most important of all. This is because if you don’t take into account Google crawling behavior and Google can’t properly spider your website and discover your content, then it won’t matter if it’s the right content, whether it’s optimized, or whether you have obtained any links to it. It may as well not exist if Google can’t discover it.

You’re probably familiar with Google’s spider program, Googlebot, but there are many other ways that Google visits your website. This posting will attempt to pull them all together, and raises some open questions about Google crawling behavior for the community because some aspects of Google’s numerous spiders are still relatively mysterious. Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Architecture | 3 Comments

Jan 12

RI SEO Company Case Study for Rhode Island Search Engine Optimization

We Burned a British Ship *Before* the Tea Party, and refused to Sign the Constitution until the Bill of Rights Was Added

We Burned a British Ship *Before* the Boston Tea Party, and Refused to Sign the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was Added

For an SEO consultant in Rhode Island (just as for any business), it’s important to leverage all possible marketing channels to reach potential clients. Word of mouth and references from website design firms and various website and internet solution providers can be key. With this in mind, I recently met with a local RI marketer who may be able to help me with some SEO consulting references, and in the process, I might be able to help him with his clients in RI search optimize their websites. He mentioned he has been doing a lot of on-page optimization for his firm’s marketing services, and even with little to no link building, they are ranking well and getting some good leads.

This prompted me to take a look at whether I rank for any terms people local to me care about, and I don’t. In fact, I have to confess that, while one might think I must be doing all kinds of crazy things to optimize this blog Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms | 5 Comments

Jan 12

How to Use Driving Directions in Local Search SEO for Google Places

: This Guy Will Probably Get Some Pretty Unique Search Results

Back in late August of last year, some Googlers presented a paper at a conference entitled “HyperLocal, Directions Based Ranking of Places”, where they investigated the possibility of using driving directions logs from Google Maps as a ranking factor in Local Search. In my experience, Google does not publish papers on major ideas unless they have one or more patent applications already filed Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms | 8 Comments

Dec 11

An Un-hole-y Search Marketing Lesson from World War II

Dropping a Truly Unhole-y SEO Concept On You

Dropping a Truly Un-hole-y Search Marketing Concept on You

Today we have a cautionary tale for you about the Statistical Research Group, a group of scientists based out of Columbia University during World War II. This group did research for the Military, including work on the fuse for the atomic bomb, optimal amounts of explosives in shells, and aircraft survivability. Members included top researchers such as Milton Friedman, who later founded the “Chicago” or “Monetarist” school of economic thought and gained a Nobel Prize for his efforts (in retrospect, Monetarism was a failed attempt at moderating the Keynesian economic policies which are currently driving our economy into the ground). Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy | No Comments

Nov 11

How to Estimate How Many Links You Need

In ancient times, tens of years after the dawn of Google, lived a strange race of people...the SEOs. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing...but their legacy remains. Get out your stone calculators!

Doing some work for a client with a fairly new site recently, I noticed their home page has a toolbar PageRank of 7, and they achieved that almost entirely by having a site-wide link on a PageRank 9 website. Finally, now that have I seen enough cases like this, I think it’s possible to estimate the answer to the question “How many links do I need?” for many situations. This posting will detail the anecdotal data I’ve seen, and then give tables that can be used to estimate what a page’s toolbar PageRank will become if you obtain a link from a high-PageRank site, and also how many links of which type you need to move up one level of PageRank. Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms, SEO Linking, Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Nov 11

A Key Paid Search Finding Every SEO Should Study

Paid Search Pollen for SEO Flowers

The very natures of Paid Search and Organic Search may seem different, but they are actually substantially similar. Most folks specialize in one or the other, but comparatively few excel in both. This has resulted in a severe lack of cross-pollination between the two fields, other than in the area of keyword research.

Where overlap exists, we can leverage learnings in one field to understand the other, provided we’re mindful of their differences. One of the landmark papers on Paid Search was a Google paper called Predicting Bounce Rates in Sponsored Search Advertisements; here we’ll ruminate on the similarities and differences between the two fields and see how we can apply the key finding of that paper to the field of Organic Search. Full article»

Posted in Featured Article, Online Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Algorithms | 3 Comments