We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization thoughts of the day.

monitor your own pages and see when people make changes. Evaluate your competition in real time with this simple tool codeMonitor.

Passion + knowledge = credibility

Business + Blog = personality

Video + Creative = Viral Love

Comments + Blogs = Exposure

Compassion + Freedom = PR Heaven

it’s not about the budget. It’s about your attitude.

The problem with SEO and PPC is making it a hope endeavor. You create your campaign and you hope that the person types the right keywords, hope that the searcher likes your product, hope that he/she is finding what he/she is looking for and hope they make a purchase.

HOPE is not a marketing strategy.

Create something unconventional & unexpected – marketing without making it look like it’s a sales pitch. Don’t spam, avoid a hard sell, participate (connect, don’t alienate), and contribute (put the community first) and be genuine.

Read more from the search engine marketing conference at the roundtable.

SEO agency watch with Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Manager for Hewlett-Packard.

She is mainly a coordinator with many levels of management. Breaking sites into sections is very helpful.
PPC search advertising campaigns can overlap, causing competition for paid clicks from the same company. This is bad as it can raise costs and weaken user experience.

Build relationships in house to get things done. Befriend programmers, designers and content writers to make sure all individuals are implementing search engine optimization best practices.

Rand Fishkin interviews Ms. Vaughan in the Seomoz office.

I have to write a post about the Macbook Air. Everyone seems to have one, including celebrities, executives, high level business people, and a list bloggers Guy Kawasaki, 37 Signals, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Martha Stewart, Charlie Rose, Telegraph, and more.
Just be careful when taking the macbook through airport security.

Feeling any Apple envy yet?
The specs are a bit weak, but it is an awesome laptop computer. I would buy one if I was a serious business traveler and needed a better computing platform than an iPhone.

The macbook air is so small and light people throw it out with the trash. Many contests and promotions have surfaced promising a mac book air as a prize including this plea for links. and a contest to win a macbook air.

The lack of jacks, ethernet ports and peripherial support are also big problems. Sharing a CD Rom drive is cool, but can be impractical.

. . . some Macbook Air.

MacBook Air 13″ 1.6Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB RAM 80GB iSight
Apple Computer Thinnovation.
You can get a discounted Mac book Air for $1564.

These online celebrities, high profile businesspeople, advertising executives and agency employees are all lusting after the Mac Book Air for a reason. How long can you resist the magnetic pull of the Apple design and marketing machine?

If you feel you are important and use the new macbook let me know below and i’ll add you to the MBA list.

Sometimes big companies just never learn. Dell.co.uk has been generating doorway pages in an attempt to SEO their way back to 1999. They must have received one heck of a powerpoint presentation from WebPosition Gold.

Some of the offending webpages that provide little unique content with extra helpings of keywords

http://laptops.dell.co.uk/laptop-computers/66/

http://laptops.dell.co.uk/notebook/63/

http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptop/69/

http://laptops.dell.co.uk/laptop/70/

http://laptops.dell.co.uk/cheap-laptops/62/

There are 2 reasons why this unscrupulous Search Engine Optimization is terribly bad

1. This is a Fortune 500 company and they should have better marketing teams. Really, if Dell sent any of their marketers to a search engine marketing conference this SEoops could be avoided.
2. Dell will get away with it, while small webmasters never will. There have been countless cases of quality websites getting burned while large sites never face a penalty.

This paragraph isn’t spam, but it sure is awkward and has a lot of forced keywords

Laptop computers can be kept safe and secure with ease. As alarming as the threat of hackers and viruses and the like may sound, securing your laptop is simple with Dell. And keeping your information safe needn’t break the bank either. There are various affordable options for protecting your new laptop through Dell’s security partners. Laptop computers feature a range of security options, so whether you’re buying a new Dell laptop and want to add security software to your purchase, or you want to update your current home system, check out your options with Dell. We’ll take the hassle out of your laptop security – giving you one more great reason to buy at the Dell laptop sale!

From the page footer – related articles? Seriously Dell is trying to follow the article directory trail? Did they outsource SEO to India?

Code screenshot from Dell Computer pages shows SQL calls picking out keywords from database fields. This brings new meaning to the phrase “commenting your code”!

Dell doesn’t have to worry about HP as their main competitor, they are rapidly loosing marketshare to other laptop manufacturers. Dude, drop your Dell and get a Macbook Air! Dave Naylor was the first person to spot this.

Best of the web is one of the few paid directories that I find worthwhile submitting to.

This is a list of worthwhile general web directories listed in order of importance

• Yahoo
• Dmoz
• Business.com
• BOTW
• GoGuides
• JoeAnt
• Jayde
• Skaffe

One current benefit of using BOTW.com is frequent discounts and promotions

BOTW current 25% discount promo code: SAVEBIG

Also for best of the web affiliates, this promotion code is commissionable (most are not).
So you can save 25% and earn your regular 30% affiliate commission as well. This works out to a big discount on the directory submission and review fee.

$239.95 * .25 = $179.96 cost for your customer
$179.96 * .30= $53.99 for you
$125.97 for the BOTW review team

Dapper has created a service called Semantify that lets you automate custom markup for your websites. The semantic web was promised long ago as a way to provide content to everyone and make it universally accessible.

An example of the semantic web: if you have an automobile site and use the number 17 the search indexer will understand that ‘17′ refers to wheel size, and will allow data usage and search based on this value.

Yahoo is the only search engine that presently supports semantic markup, so this is the only search indexing service that receives the custom code.

This works by showing custom code to this search engine, effectively doubling the kb size of your pages. When the Yahoo! spider crawls your webpage, it will be shown a semantically marked up version of your live content.

The process of adding the Dapp code to your website

1. A search engine robot requests a page from your site.
2. The code above identifies the request as a semantic search engine robot and sends a requset to Dapper.
3. Dapper runs the relevant Dapp on your page, and sends you back the semantically enriched page.
4. Your server gives the search engine robot the semantically enriched page.

The Semantify service only works with PHP, and all processing is done on semantify’s servers. This will create a bit of a lag, so luckily this process only needs to be executed when serving pages to search engines. Improvements and extensibility are in the works including the ability to use multiple languages and extended features.

How do you stand out from a crowd? Be unique and have something your competitors don’t. Websites that have a local presence must be in Google local, and they just keep letting you add more business information.
Instructions for adding a video to your Google local profile

1. Go and edit your current verified Google Local Business Center listing.
2. Go to the “photos” navigation tab
3. Enter a video in the bottom part of the page – note only youtube videos are accepted at the moment

Google is really sticking it to online yellow page sites and specialized directories – dmoz, business.com, and Yahoo directory watch out, your days may be numbered.

See more detailed instructions on how to upload videos to your Google local listing at SE land.

An internal document from Google’s search engine spam team has been leaked and now the web has a copy of the Google Quality Raters Handbook. This link was previously here http://www.beussery.com/GoogleSpamDoc.html but has since been removed courtesy of the legal team from Mountain View. Thankfully this link still works and you can download the google spam guidelines as a PDF here.

Some of the search engine optimization guide contents:

Quality Rating Scale

• Vital
• Useful
• Relevant
• Not Relevant
• Off-topic

Categories For Results That Can’t Be Rated

• Didn’t Load
• Foreign Language
• Unratable

Spam Labels

• Spam
• Not Spam
• Maybe Spam

Flags

• Pornographic content
• Malicious code on pages

Joining social networks and participating in web 2.0 online communities is vital so human reviewers from search engines can verify your identity:

It is not uncommon today for individuals to maintain various types of personal pages on the Web. Homepages, social networking pages, and blogs have become increasingly popular. Some individuals have more than one blog and/or more than one homepage on a social networking site (e.g. myspace, facebook, friendster, mixi). When these pages are maintained by the individual (or an authorized representative of the individual), they are all considered to be Vital.

This is a long winded description of why content is king

Relevant – A rating of Relevant is assigned to pages that have fewer valuable attributes than were listed for Useful pages. Relevant pages might be less comprehensive, come from a less authoritative source, or cover only one important aspect of the query.

Examples of Relevant pages include a page with a brief article on the topic of the query or a less important subpage on the correct site. If a query asks for a list, then a single item is Relevant. For example, if the query is[ fudge recipes ], a single fudge recipe is Relevant.

A rating of Relevant is also used for a homepage that would have been Vital if there had not been a more dominant interpretation for the query.

Differentiating full e-commerce owners from affiliate marketers

Recognizing true merchants: Features that will help you determine if a website is a true merchant include:

* a “view your shopping cart” link that stays on the same site and updates when you add items to it,
* a return policy with a physical address,
* a shipping charge calculator,
* a “wish list” link, or a link to postpone purchase of an item until later,
* a way to track FedEx orders,
* a user forum, the ability to register or login,
* a gift registry, or
* an invitation to become an affiliate of that site

Please note the following:
Not all of the above need to be present for a merchant to be considered a true merchant. Yahoo! Stores are true merchants – they are not thin affiliates. Some true merchants will take you to another site to complete the transaction due to the fact that they utilize third party cart systems. Such merchants are not thin affiliates.

This Google webspam guide book was released in April 2007, but is still very relevant to search engine optimizers.

I’m going to sidestep a morality judgment against Eliot Spitzer and his patronage of an elite prostitution agency. This post offers no opinions on the former New York governor in particular or the escort business in general.
Instead I’m interested in the site structure and content of what is now the most famous escort website in the world.

Some interesting facts about the EmperorsClubVip.com website:

• They were hosted at homestead.com
• Employed Google Analytics
• Used Stats from http://www.realtracker.com
• Used javascript to prevent image downloads
• Hid text with javascript

The hosting company is owned by Intuit, an excessively corporate environment with a strict structure who surely was not happy to be connected to this high class escort site.

The most interesting code employed on the Emperors’ website is javascript to hide all text from search engines. If you view the source code the text is all hidden in external javascript files, making the text invisible to most search engine indexers. The text is visible in a search engine cache because the javascript files are kept intact.

Emperors club was not search engine optimized and while the title tags were stuffed with keywords, the main content was intentionally hidden.

This is a paradox: why would the web developers attempt to optimize this site by creating keyword laden titles, but keep content invisible? There is also a very usable sitemap cleanly linking to all the main sub pages. Emperor’s Club VIP was clearly designed to be indexed, but not ranked well.

The site has 147 backlinks as of 3/11 according to yahoo but most of these were generated after the scandal hit. This provides really good data about yahoo indexing and displaying backlinks as it has updated incoming links to EmperorsClubVip.com in less than 2 days. Please Yahoo, if you are acquired my Microsoft, don’t take this link analysis tool away from SEO’s!

They also appear to have had an exclusive link exchange program:

To Advertise your business on our website email: ads@emperorsclubvip.com Prices may vary according to the page on which you choose to advertise: Portfolio Page: $15,000 / month Individual model and Concierge pages: $2000 – $8000 / month. Once approved, link exchange is complimentary.

Looking at some of the site content, we find these “models” aren’t cheap
Hourly Rates:

• three diamonds -$1,000
• four diamonds – $1,200
• five diamonds – $1,500
• six diamonds – $2,100
• seven diamonds – $3,100

24- hour Day Rates:

• three diamonds -$10,000
• four diamonds – $12,000
• five diamonds – $15,000
• six diamonds – $21,000
• seven diamonds – $31,000
  multiple -day travel package rates available

This sounds like a salesman at Beverly Hills Rolls Royce:

fees vary according to individual education, sophistication, and ambiance created by each of our models. Choosing from only the most impressive model companion candidates, Emperors Club vip is, by far, the most selective social introduction service available.

Like any conscientious business, they comply with workplace regulations and offer flexible schedules and higher education credits:

With time, promotion, if any, to higher category (ies) is considered and based upon our expanded knowledge of the model’s character and the grace with which she handles public relations / interactions. It is advised to schedule your dates with our models in advance, as each model has place in her schedule for a select number of meetings per month due to her university / career commitments.

See the emperorsclubvip.com prostitution website courtesy of the web archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070824162509/www.emperorsclubvip.com/EmperorsClubVipRates.html

Google Cache (while available)
http://209.85.173.104/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3A
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.emperorsclubvip.com%2FEmperorsClubVipWelcome
X_models_elite_companion_travel_luxury.html

screenshot of the Emperor’s Club website

This search shows 29,000 results, can you guess what the total will be in 1 week? How about 1 month? I predict it will at least quadruple.
Governor Spitzer (client 9) stayed at Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC the night of February 13, 2008, before testifying about the bond industry the next day before Congress where he allegedly met a prostitute from Emperor’s Club escort service.

Final thoughts
Creating an escort website to provide prostitution services is not illegal, but once money changes hands it is illegal. Perhaps unknowingly the escort webmasters and site owners exposed all their clients online identities by using Google Analytics. Google can identify site users through their massive data collection activities, and if the site uses Google Conversion Code they will know if you contacted the site. The escort service has given their personally identifiable information of their clients to Google.

This is one reason not to use free services such as Google Analytics.

At the end of the day this will not diminish prostitution or the sex economy at all. If anything it will likely increase the awareness of online escort services and spur growth in the online paid sex industry.

This is the first political post on this blog and I have no intention of making a habit of writing about politics. I do wish to share the presidential candidate calculator from vajoe.

I have no idea what Joe’s policital leanings are, but he has created an excellent non partisan site for comparing presidential candidates. How often will a politician answer your direct questions with a direct answer? This site has a database of information that seems to correctly show the opinions of our presidential hopefuls.

I now have a solid reference point to come back to if my chosen candidate makes decisions I disagree with.
I scored 88.5% for Barack Obama.