• Don't Forget To Give Thanks, SEOers
    In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday this weekend in the United States, Erik Daffron give thanks to a collection of tools concepts, and collaborations that made his job easier this year. Here's a sample: "I'm thankful that in early 2008, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google joined up to expand their robots exclusion protocol to honor a series of new characters and directives that the traditional robots.txt protocol doesn't address." And, "I'm thankful that LinkedIn corporate profiles exist, of course, but more specifically, I'm excited that LinkedIn has opened them up to be crawled."
  • A Few Must-Have Live Search Features
    Shopping for a few Live Search features on Black Friday? Arnold Zafra tells us about new tools for Microsoft's Webmaster Center and describes their use. He is most impressed with the malware detection procedure, calling it the most important feature in the bunch because it detects whether your Web pages, or those the site links with, are malware infected. While the malware tool flags infected links and sends alerts in the next search result, the other two new features are "simplified authentication and outbound links filtering tool." The tools work together to give SEO experts and Web site …
  • What It Takes To Rock SEM/SEO Campaigns
    Never make permanent decisions based on temporary positions. Don't let emotions blind you to reason. Surround yourself with sharp people and draw on their gifts without being intimidated. Take time to consider all options. And, yes, choose your battles wisely. These are the first five of 10 "decision-making guidelines" that Stoney deGeyter believes will "rock" your SEM/SEO campaigns. DeGeyter takes a set of guidelines about making the best choices in daily experiences and applies them to SEO and business decisions. "Any one of these decisions can breathe life into a dying SEO campaign, push a successful campaign to …
  • SEO Opportunities In Social Media
    Know your audience. Keep this in mind when deciding on the social network or the media site to post content. These sites can help boost link popularity or drive traffic, but with so many social networks you could muddle the message. If your target audience is primarily female, Jenny Popov suggests sites like TeamSugar.com work well. While most social media sites let you create a custom profile or blog, Team Sugar also serves up a variety of info about celebrities, fashion, beauty, home decorating, food, fitness, pets, and technology. The extra content offers benefits to increase SEO optimization. …
  • Secrets To Picking Perfect SEO Keywords
    Mark Jackson offers insight into the keyword selection process, provides ways to find helpful tools, and information on differentiating between keywords with high search count vs. those you might see increased traffic. Jackson suggests you run a paid search campaign for the keywords you are interesting in targeting. To help you get started, he provides information on determining the popularity of those keywords, as well as insights on paid search campaigns.
  • SEO Hand Wringing
    It appears Google's SearchWiki has caught the attention of SEO experts and media. Rand Fishkin has been fielding a round of questions, read a bunch of blog posts, and seen a whole lot of hand-wringing. Not to worry. It's called "change," he writes. Just as it happened with personalization, local results and geo-targeting, Google Knol, and Universal Search, it will happen again. Attempting to calm a few frazzled nerves, Fishkin writes: "The biggest true changes I've seen to SEO have come from directional shifts at Google that typically received far less publicity and media attention." For example, when …
  • Practices Makes Perfect Display Ads
    Customize your display ads to make them stand out, consider separating each into its own ad group, and double-check your ads to ensure they meet Google's suggested criteria. Emel Mutlu recommends using "unique keywords for your display ads, without impacting the performance of your text-only ad groups, especially those running on search as well as the Google content network." These guidelines from Mutlu provide some "best practices" for using display ad builder that should help get campaigns off to a running start.
  • Advancing SEO Segmentation
    Richard Fergie tells us how to use Google's advanced segmentation feature to get useful data for setting advanced ad scheduling options. Google Analytics can tell you how conversion rates vary by hour of the day or by day of the week, but it doesn't give you both pieces of information at the same time. Advanced segmentation features in Google AdWords lets you increase or decrease bids based on the time and day of the week. Fergie believes this tool is useful because traffic on certain days at specific times is more likely to convert to sales.
  • Sticky Wicky Biddings
    Marketers are divided on the issue of trademark bidding as a search strategy in which one company bids on its competitor's name or trademarked term in PPC campaigns, according to Brian Combs. Search engines Google, MSN and Yahoo don't look favorably on the practice, either, but it's being done more often these days. If you own a trademark and competitors are bidding on it, Combs reminds us, the increased competition for the trademarked keywords means pricier bids. So, if you are concerned about competitors using your branded terms, defend your trademark by conducting search audits at least once every …
  • 9 SEO Bookmarklets To Grab
    Ann Smarty suggests nine SEO bookmarklets that are a "good alternative to FireFox extension," are easy to install, backup and organize, and don't require constant updates. For example, Google Cache bookmarklet allows for quick access to the cached version of the current page. Or, X-Brower SEO bookmarket gives you quick access to the page and domain to collect important SEO statistics directly from Google search results. Smarty tells us these bookmarklets offer many benefits besides enhancing Google search.
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