I have talked about in the past about the directory submission service that I personally use to get some links to my portals. Directories are not as strong a factor as they used to be when it comes to ranking high on the search engines. But they still do matter. Directory Maximizer is a fairly cheap service that automates the process (not all of it) and keeps you in control of your submissions as well. The service was decent before, but now you can add your own deep links to directories. That should give you some additional bang for your buck. Here is what the company had to say about this upgrade:

In a move that will reinforce your belief that Directory Maximizer is indeed the best directory submission service you can find on the Internet, we are rolling out our Deep Link Submission service. Deep linking, as you probably know, is an oft-overlooked method of SEO whose benefits are manifold and long lasting. You, dear customers, can now build links to your inner pages and not limit your SEO efforts to your home page – and we are going to help you do that.

Deep links do matter. Having the ability to optimize your individual pages for your keywords of choosing makes a big difference. I can’t tell you how time consuming submitting to directories could be, so services such as Directory Maximizer can truly save you a lot of time. (more…)

We have all heard of how real time search is the future. It’s actually not that far out if you think about it. Google’s Real Time search is a good indication to where the industry is heading. By integrating services such as Twitter, you can now do your search on Google more effectively, and in real time. I have talked about in the past how portal developers need to focus on videos, images, forums, blogs, and other avenues to maximize their presence on sites such as Google. But with real time search, you’ll have yet another revenue to get the word out about your product and get traffic back from Google in return.

As long as you are on the latest tab, you are going to see real time results on Google. It may seem a bit strange at first, but if you have been on Twitter for a while, it should come naturally to you. You can obviously click on the tags and search based on those.

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Unless you haven’t paid attention to the world of search engines for months, you have probably heard of Microsoft Bing. Microsoft’s latest attempt to finally challenge Google in the search engine game. And by that, it is destined to complicate the game which we call search engine optimization. When Bing and Yahoo! join in the upcoming months, they are going to become the sole main challenger to Google, and if you are a marketer who makes a living out of search engine optimization, you are going to have to figure out how to show up on the first page of Bing for fairly generic terms. You can still dominate the long-tail market but getting ranked for highly competitive terms can be a challenge.

Danny Sullivan put it best when he talked about the differences between Google’s and Bing’s algorithms:

You’d effectively have two pages, one for Google and one for Bing

You may not see too many differences in results as far as highly competitive terms are concerned, but there are major differences for those keywords in the middle of the spectrum. Google does pay more attention to links whereas Bing pays more attention to content and tags. Both search engines still highly value having the exact keyword in a URL. But that’s never going to change.

Is Bing worth going after? I am not so sure. With the field of social media exploding the way it is, you are better off focusing on a long-term approach than something as fleeting as the Bing’s rankings. The best strategy to have is to figure out the common areas between Bing and Google algorithm and try to optimize in a way that strikes the right balance for both engines. But I have to choose two places to drive traffic to my website, they’d be Twitter and Google. Let’s not forget about Facebook either. (more…)

Google is the big bad guerrilla in the search marketing industry. It has literally dominated most aspects of this market. For years, people have warned about Google’s obsession with world domination. It seems the latest revelation about Google’s behavioral targeting endeavours has just opened a few more eyes. Google’s success has been due to its uncanny ability to deal with raw data. Whether it is the search engine or Google Adsense ads, Google does its best by analyzing data to provide better service to its users.

I happen to agree with Sir Tim Berners-Lee that the future of the web is at stake here. The fact that companies such as Google find it acceptable to monitor their users to find out their online behaviors is very disturbing. Conspiracy theorists have claimed for years that the Internet will become the ultimate tracking tool for the government and the powers-that-be. Think about it. If you are being monitored constantly online, there is nothing these companies don’t know about you. Would you watch that controversial video if you knew you were being monitored?

I’d like to think that our elected officials respect the privacy of their constituents. The problem is there is a lot of money involved in this field, and there are very powerful forces at work here. It’d be encouraging to see some laws passed on this very issue, but powerful companies always find a way to get around the laws and bend them. I don’t want to be too paranoid here. My suggestion here is that you should go anonymous if you are visiting sites that you don’t want others to know you are surfing. If you are checking Yahoo! sports or just reading TechCrunch, you’ll be fine.

Your take: should companies have the right to track your behavior?

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine forwarded me a note from Walmart that pointed out there will be serious repercussions for folks who disclose Walmart Black Friday deals in advance. Walmart has been extremely upset about the leaks that happened in the past couple of years, and this year was supposed to be the year that they would clamp down on these leaks and bring the element of surprise back to Black Friday.

But the leaks have happened again, and Walmart is upset about it. Search Engine Journal reports that someone’s going to pay if Walmart gets its wish. Now here is my problem with this whole issue. If someone puts Walmarts ads online, shouldn’t you be able to link to it? The way Walmart threatens to go after people indicates that you should be careful about who you link to these days. I get that you should not link to link farms and blog spams if you hope to keep your ranking on the SERPs. But I am not sure threatening folks to give up their sources is one way to go.

Walmart is trying to keep deals from leaking out, but who is leaking these deals? It’s either the Walmart folks or someone who has ears on the doors. I personally don’t believe folks should be responsible for talking about leaked Walmart deals. But then again, I thought folks should not be responsible for linking to torrent sites. Boy was I wrong!

Google is finally allowing folks to customize their search results with the introduction of SearchWiki. There had been talks about Google working on custom and personal search, but now you can customize your search results with SearchWiki.

The feature is revolutionary as not only you can now help figure out what pages are actually more useful in regards to your search term, you can also remove results that are useless.

The first button will allow you to vote for listing on the SERPs. The second one allows you to get rid of spam or unrelated results. I think this is great news for us users and bad news for folks who use tricks to get their way to the top. I firmly believe that the introduction of this feature will allow content to be king again. I am sure marketers will again look for ways to abuse this system, but Google is a sophisticated system already and using user input to customize search results can only make things better.

Your take: will the personalized search revolutionize the way we search online?

Google Analytics has finally gotten the makeover we have all been waiting for. Google had announced a while back that Google Analytics was going to get one, but until today, I had not seen the change with my own eyes. Well. It’s here today. While the changes may not sound that significant to you, believe me they are.

The new look is more convenient to business executives. Before, you used to see your site information, and you could go on and click on tabs that you liked. But now, you can also see the % change from previous week, or month, or even year. You can set the change variable to be the # of visits, the time spent on your site or completed goals, even the bounce rate.

That’s not all. You can also star a site and track it separately. This is an absolutely simple but brilliant change to the executive dashboard. Think about it. If you are running a business, you may not have time to go through every single site and figure out how each is doing everyday. Google Analytics’ new interface allows you to see the problem areas faster than before. Now here is the bad news: you don’t have any excuse whatsoever for not using Google Analytics (unless you can afford those more expensive solutions).

It seems things are finally falling into place for Microsoft to buy Yahoo!. First Google was forced to abandon their Yahoo! deal as they came under severe pressure from Microsoft and legal sources. Now, Jerry Yang has encouraged Microsoft to go for it. I am not sure if Microsoft will offer the same price they offered a few months ago, but it seem Jerry has finally come to grips with reality.

Yahoo! has been a mess, and Jerry knows it too. I love Yahoo! and I think they have been great for the search industry. But this business is very tough and unforgiving, and that is why Yahoo! is where it is right now. Yang promised to turn Yahoo! around when he took over, but I am not sure such an end is in sight under his guidance, so why not cash out now while you can?

Is getting distracted an art? I don’t know about you, but after a few years of dealing with all kinds of distractions I am pretty certain that there is such a thing as the art of distraction. It’s simple really. The latest buzz in the SEO world is about the new tool that SEOMoz is going to be releasing soon. It’s called Linkscape, and it’s a very powerful tool. Basically, what it allows you to do is to find out how your competitors go about the business of building links.

The Unparalleled link intelligence advantage that you can get with SEOmoz’s tool is great. There is no question about that. But to most of us, Linkscape is like killing a bee with an elephant gun. Now folks new to the art of SEO want to have the most cutting edge tools in the world. After all, if the tool is branded as “Unparalleled link advantage,” then it must do magic. I call it distraction.

Linkscape is a great tool, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. But at the same time, it can be a big distraction for folks. Everybody in the SEO world is talking about how Linkscape will revolutionize the way SEO’s done. That’s all great. But I rather get the job done with my free tools and let folks talk it out.

Here is the thing. We all love “cool” things. In other words, we all want to be distracted, one way or another. The challenge is to stay on the ball and keep your goals in front of you. You can have the best tools out there on the market. But I rather be a producer than a consumer. If you want to take your business to the next level, just pick a few tools that let you do the job and keep your time investment in new tools to a minimum. Again, Linkscape is going to be great, and the next tool after it will be even greater. But the cold hard facts about SEO still remain: relevant valuable content gets the job done!

P.S. I am the master of this art (getting distracted). Are you?

I love search engine optimization. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s amazing how we find ways to create new business for ourselves. Dynamic URLs are being used on many sites these days. If you are running a Wordpress blog, there is a good chance that you are using the mod_rewrite syntax to optimize your URLs. After all, all respected search engine optimizers claim that static URLs have an advantage over dynamic URLs. I never thought the advantage was much and Barry Shwartz piece now suggests that as well. But now Google is suggesting that webmasters should not use a rewrite method to map dynamic URLs to static ones. Here is what Google has to say:

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

So should you listen to Google? Yes and no really. Google says a lot of things that are simply not facts. Even if Google had trouble crawling dynamic URLs, they are not going to flat out admit it. In this case, I agree that Google is able to crawl dynamic URLs. I have seen it done. I remember when I told the SVP of my previous company that dynamic URLs are not the reason our SEO campaigns were not performing well. Let’s just say he wasn’t impressed by what I had to say and thought I was a complete you-know-what. But here is the thing. Dynamic URLs work almost as well as static URLs.

What Should I do?

Google does claim that dynamic URLs make it hard for them to crawl your pages properly. If you’ve had a Wordpress blog, you are probably familiar with Wordpress’ duplicate content issues. But I would still optimize my URLs to look static and have my keywords in them. Google will not be penalizing folks for going static. Google’s goal is to bring the best information to searchers. Having a static URL is not a dis-qualifier. It should never be a dis-qualifier unless you are doing black hat. But if you just have blog, and you are afraid that Google might ban you for playing with Apache mod_rewrite, think again. What about Google’s recommendation, you may ask. It’s just a guideline, and it doesn’t mean anything. Stop wasting your time worrying about things that really don’t matter and instead focus on creating content that folks will link too (like the above piece by Barry )