YouTube SEO is Heavy, Man!

Optimizing for more YouTube views, and building a subscriber base, is something I must admit I have little experience with, but a friend of mine recently asked me for some advice on this, so I’ve done a pretty exhaustive survey of various material and postings. The following ideas look like sensible basic optimization tips.  There were so many ideas I had to break it into three postings – this one, an upcoming “Advanced Tips” posting, and an upcoming Read on »

Internet World Stats

Truly Penetrating Analysis

You’ve probably had to research internet usage at some point – whether to figure out browser usage percentages so you can decide which browsers to bother supporting, looking at internet usage by country for a business looking to expand geographically, or any other myriad of reasons.  Like me, you probably did this by doing a ton of Google searches.  Well, I ran across a site that aggregates much of that information, and also the sources for the rest of it, all in one convenient spot Read on »

Mining for PageRank

Google’s Toolbar PageRank, the value that you can obtain by surfing websites while the Google Toolbar is installed, has been available via a number of websites for years, ever since someone figured out how to reverse engineer the protocol that the Toolbar uses to talk to Google’s datacenters to obtain the value. Google appears to have been fairly tolerant of tools that obtain this data over the years (otherwise many of them would have been banned, or they would have changed the protocol frequently, etc.). This tolerance sometimes makes me suspect that Toolbar PageRank is a bit of a purposeful red herring, and ranking is perhaps all about anchor text instead, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The most popular tool for checking individual PageRank values is probably Read on »

McDonalds: Behind the ArchesLet’s say you were stranded on a desert island, per our previous scenario, have your positioning book in hand so you can properly straighten out the product you’re trying to sell with your burgeoning lead-gen business, you’ve SEO’d (is that a verb?) your lead-gen site with the help of your SEO reference book, and you’re having trouble getting to sleep at night due to wild monkeys screeching as they bang coconuts together.  What business biography would be really beneficial?

Well, if you want to get some sleep, don’t get Read on »

Positioning - The Battle for Your MindLet’s say you were stranded on a desert island, as in our previous scenario, but luckily managed to land a number of marketing consulting gigs with your remote internet connection, so you could earn some money helping companies straighten out their marketing (and receive Dr. Pepper etc. via parachute drop by transferring money to some shipping company via PayPal).  And let’s say you could start out with only ONE book on marketing.

My choice would be Read on »

The Art of SEOLet’s say you were stranded on a desert island with no landing strip and surrounded by terrible rocks and breakers such that no boat would be willing to rescue you – without even coconuts to sustain you.  But in the midst of this you somehow had an internet connection, so you could throw together a quick lead-gen business, and then through PayPal you could transfer money to some shipping company who would then drop food, Dr. Pepper, and other essentials down onto you via parachute in exchange for your earnings. Read on »

There are a ton of great free tools out there, but there comes a point where you need to actually shell out a little money for tools if you’d like to accomplish some substantial results from an SEO standpoint.  If you’re an in-house SEO doing it all, you’ll  need tools for the six major pieces of SEO – Keyword Research, Architecture Analysis, Performance Tracking, Content Optimization, Linking Analysis, and (optionally) Monetization.  For Monetization, Google AdSense is pretty hard to beat, at least if you have under 500,000 page views, and the AdWords Keyword tool does a great job on the Keyword Research front, so in this posting we’ll focus on the other four areas.

The following tools are great values and add up to well under $100.00 a month Read on »

"Thank you very much" for the SEO Badge, Mr. President!*

Today, in the spirit of Wired Magazine’s “wired/tired/expired” series,  we’re going to run through some online marketing terms that have become downright “square”, and either are being, or should be replaced by, a more “hip” counterpart. This one goes to eleven!

Read on »

You see it every week.  A search engine makes an announcement, and everyone blogs something along the lines of:

“hey, there was an announcement – I have no idea what it means but here’s a bunch of SEO ramblings so I can sound like I’m writing a blog posting – I hope I got this out quick enough – what does everyone else think about this”?

The following is a make-your-own SEO blog post formula.  The approach is outlined in my earlier posting on formula-based content;  just spin the following into thousands of versions, and then you can skip reading about 50% of the blog postings that go up every week on SEO – a massive timesaver.  It starts out a little dry, but quickly devolves into inside SEO jokes  – enjoy! Read on »

teslacoils

Google Gnomes Measuring Click-Through-Rate in Teslas?

In the Paid Search end of its business, Google uses Click-Through-Rate (CTR) as a major determining factor in its “Quality Score” calculation, which is a key factor in its Adwords ad auctions.  This is because CTR is a proxy for relevance; if enough users click on an ad after performing a keyword search, then it’s reasonable to assume that the ad must be pretty relevant to the keyword.  When it finds so, Google’s auction system rewards relevant creative-keyword combinations and penalizes less relevant ones.  This ensures a satisfying user experience and Read on »