We Do Search Engine Optimization.

About 5 years ago search engines realized that blogs, comments and user generated content were going to pollute the web with an endless stream of low quality, off topic, unmanaged links. As the search engine ranking algorithm is primarily link based, this had the potential of making search engine results unusable.

How to Stop Links Gone Wild

The answer to a new influx of links was the nofollow tag, which literally would tell a search spider not to crawl this link. the tag looks like

<a href=”http://questionable site.com” rel=”nofollow”>questionable anchortext<a>

The question we are asking is if the nofollow link tag is dying. The answer is no, but it is changing. Increasing use of nofollow for a range of purposes.

Google lists the three main intended uses of nofollow as:

• Linking to untrusted content
• Paid links
• Crawl prioritization (typically linking to yourself with nofollow)

See more opinions on the nofollow tag and the rise of microblogging from a Will Chritchlow.

Mark Twain’s worst nightmare has come true – anyone can read any of his books online for free, and his estate has lost all control over his works.

Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens was a huge proponent of copyright, and fought to keep strict copyright laws. He worried about the fact that it would eventually expire, leaving his heirs without a way to make an easy buck. Twain didn’t want perpetual copyright, only protection that would cover his children’s lives. He thought his grand kids should fend for themselves, but for Twain and his daughters, he sought to combat “the pirates.”

His idea was to augment his existing copyrighted works on the eve of their entry into the public domain in order to create new, copyrighted books. The original book would pass into the public domain, but Twain hoped that the newer, augmented works would outsell public domain materials if they offered additional material. He tried to create value from his older works that would be copyrightable and fully owned by him.

Mark Twain had a clever solution to competing with free, an in true form this didn’t involve publishers, attorneys, or government. He simply provided added value.

Many publishers today, especially newspapers, have to compete with free or risk going out of business. Information and entertainment will continue to be reinvented, and the best way to maintain business is to add value. If you can add value to a product or service, people will always buy it.

New York Times article from 1906 describing Twain’s plan to beat copyright law.

Google books blog describing

Read A Tramp Abroad in Google mobile book. See the Book Search blog announcing 1.5 million books in your pocket. Thats a lot of reading material, and Google is adding value to their own search engine by providing this for free.

Using good keyword research and educating editors on proper search engine optimization techniques helped the Hearst publishing empire increase traffic to their web properties by 150%.

Hearst publishes 15 of the world’s most popular magazines including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Oprah’s O Magazine, and Good Housekeeping as well as 5 web only magazines. Their Senior SEO Analyst for the Digital Media team overcame the challenges of introducing SEO to management, staff writers and editors.

Choosing the right keywords is essential. An online writer must adapt to the online world, which means using different words than for a print publication. Below is an example of using keyword research to write title tags that will reach the largest audience:

When writing for women’s fashion: titles are big part of what they do, so early on we made the decision that we’d instruct them to run some comparatives on the keywords ‘fashion’ and ’style’. In the print context they like to use the word style, but I stressed to them that style is somewhat nebulous in that it can mean a number of things. People’s behavior online is different because when they are looking for content they tend to be much more literal, because they have to be. The Wordtracker keyword research data showed us that 7:1 people were more likely to use ‘fashion’ than ’style’ when looking for the kind of content we were promoting.

Here is a great tip on assisting editors with search engine optimization, and coding the keyword research tools into the web based publishing platform.

We have incorporated a link to the Wordtracker keyword tool directly into our CMS (content management system) so that when someone is entering a critical field, like the meta-title, right next to it there’s a link to Wordtracker, which acts as a ‘call to action.’ They can at least check to see if the keywords they have chosen are a solid choice, or if there’s something better out there.

Hearst probably uses a custom CMS, but this could easily be added to the ‘write’ page in wordpress.

Read the full article on how Dan Roberts helped increase Hearst Publication’s online traffic. This is a good thing, because the Hearst.com design looks like it was last updated in 1996.

http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/hearst-magazines-seo