One of the biggest issues for the publishers in the SEO industry is the difficulty there is to capture a snapshot of the industry that can stand the test of time. The industry is very dynamic and is changing on a consistent basis. So books that are more than a few months old are often outdated and not worth your while, especially if you have some experience in SEO. But the past couple of months have been great for SEO students. There are plenty of new books that let you catch up with the latest developments, so you can implement the latest strategies before they become old. You still want to keep up with the blogs and forums, but these books should give you a head start:

The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice): any book that has Rand Fishkin as an author is worth reading. I have been a big fan of SEOmoz for quite a long time. This book is not something you can read over a few hours. It’s a lot of theory and material that can make anyone dangerous in this field.

Web Analytics 2.0: it’s really surprising how many SEO professionals don’t pay enough attention to traffic analysis. This book will open your eyes and show you what you have been missing all along by ignoring your analytics software.

Joomla! 1.5 SEO: Joomla! is one of the best content management systems around, especially if you are into developing portals. This book shows you how you can go about optimizing your Joomla portals to get more free traffic from search engines.

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Until now, Google has focused more on providing users with search results that are relevant to their search, helping them find information that applies to their situation. But it seems Google plans to put more emphasis on site speed in the near future. In a recent interview, Matt Cutts explained that a lot of people at Google believe that web needs to be fast and faster websites could get a bump in the results.

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It’s nice to see that Google has identified site speed as one of the factors that could affect searchers’ experience. Nothing can be more frustrating when you search for something only to find websites that just don’t load up. But the move to count site speed towards search engine rankings could open a can of worms for Google and publishers. It’s a known fact that spammers are very good at hacking, breaking, and doing everything but providing value. Does that mean these guys will get away with making their sites fast and climb the rankings once again? (more…)

The blogging world has literally exploded in the past few years. Everybody that I know and don’t know has a blog these days. If you own a new blog, you probably don’t get a whole lot of comments each day. You can always try the test methods (e.g. talk about controversial issues, break news, and ….) to change all that. You can also build your blog up gradually and before you know it your comments start to add up. But did you know that you’ll be leaking PR and link weight through your comments if you leave them Yes-Follow?

I personally prefer rewarding my readers with Yes Follow comments. In most cases anyway. Getting people involved on a brand new blog can prove to be difficult at first, but giving people an incentive to participate could help. But every time you do that, you get these messages:

If you are planning to allow Yes Follow comments on your blog, you need to make sure you don’t allow anyone to add comments to your blog without moderation. That would save you time and protects you against malicious comments such as the ones you see in the above image.

Blog spamming has always been encouraged by aggressive marketers. If you happen to go to one of their conferences, they talk about how they use scripts to automate the process, rotate comment title and link to avoid getting caught. The fact is, it’s not that hard to identify these bogus comments. Here is how I would approach the process:

1. Allow everyone to comment on your blog.
2. Everyone’s comments will stay in a queue before they are moderated.
3. Comments that link to a spammy (low quality) website will be no-followed.
4. Comments that link to an authority website (related to the topic of the post) will be left alone.
5. Remove comments that link to Google, Yahoo, and Bing homepage. They are usually spam.
6. Limit the number of outgoing links from each page (counting comments).
7. Ban the IP and account of spammers.
8. Watch out for trackbacks and advanced spam strategies.
9. Close comments after a specific number of weeks or months.
10. Use a moderation service such as Disqus to allow more comment formats such as Video, Audio, …

You can always no-follow all your comments. There are a lot of SEO professionals who recommend doing that. I personally prefer rewarding my readers as long as they don’t link to a banner farm or unrelated website. It certainly makes things more complicated, and you will have to do your due diligence to make sure you are not linking to a suspect territory. But that’s one of the challenges of blogging.

When it comes to developing content on the web, I like to keep things simple. It’s really not that different from the basic laws of economics. It’s all about supply and demand. You can have the best product/content around, but if there is no demand/search for it, you are going to be the king of a very very small niche. If that’s your hobby, and you don’t intend to go anywhere with it, then you may be fine with your domination of your little niche. As a business owner, however, you can’t afford to go after niches in which there is not enough demand for what you are selling.

One of the best way to figure out where the demand is by using trend tools that are all over the Internet. Google Trends, WordTracker trends, and Google Insights all can show you what people are searching for and where your niche may be going. These are some of the classic tools available. But Twitter trend tools are perhaps the most exciting way to figure out what people are talking about right now and what you can do about it. Take Twendz for example. It’s a cool little tool that gives you a live overview of what going on Twitter. It shows you what the hot tags are, and whether people are talking positively or negatively about your specific topic.

Yahoo! Sidebar is yet another top twitter tool that lets you keep track of things on Twitter and find out where the demand is. It’s simple economics. If you can identify the demand, the need and desires of your prospects, you can certainly create content around those. (more…)