Archive for July 2011

Google Places Entry for the Business "123kjkjad9 -"

Location of a Business Called "123kjkjad9 -" * click to enlarge*

“Local search” is a term used for searching on websites that let you find different types of businesses in a geographic area.  These can be map sites, search engines, yellow pages sites, or local directories.  Unlike traditional organic search optimization, there are numerous places you must go to create, correct, and optimize your business’ listing, and this can be a daunting task.  Also, this portion of the SEO industry uses intimidating terms like “7-pack” “NAP”, and “Citations” that can be a little off-putting.

This posting will de-mystify all of this and simplify the process by breaking it down into eleven steps Read on »

Rankings Explained

Rankings Explained.   Any Questions? *click to enlarge*

Last year, some people from the academic community who hadn’t been snatched up yet by Google or Bing did a really interesting study.   Rather than simply researching factor correlations to rankings, as SEOMoz does a great job of doing every so often, they used machine learning techniques to create their own search engine, and trained it to reproduce results similar to Google.  After the training process, they extracted the ranking factors from their trained engine and published them and presented on them at an industry conference.  They were able, for the queries they trained on, to correctly predict Read on »

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Website *click to enlarge*

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Website *click to enlarge*

Google and Bing are in an arms race.  The two weapons they are deploying are datacenters and Ph.D.’s, which are substitutable for each other.  If a Ph.D. comes out with a way to store or index data that is 5% more efficient,  this can result in hundreds of *millions* of dollars of savings in datacenter costs.

Often these companies will file patents if they have some really good ideas, or they will file them just to have some patents in a particular area they are worried they may eventually face a lawsuit in.  For instance Read on »

y SEOToolset

Bruce Clay's SEOToolset *click to enlarge*

In our recent post, High-End SEO on a Low-End Budget, we briefly mentioned Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet®.  This is a great subscription service that has been around for a long time and has recently gone through a major upgrade – here we’ll take some more time to run through the service in detail.

Bruce is one of the original SEOs from back in the day, and his company provides a wide variety of training classes, SEO services, and even access to its proprietary optimization toolset.  In a nutshell, this subscription service contains Read on »