A wise man once told me that if something was easy, everybody would be doing it. That really applies to all aspects of life. Most people are not willing to step out of their comfort zone and endure hardships to achieve their goals. After all, why do that when you can take short-cuts. Unfortunately, short-cuts are going to get you only so far. To pick up a cause (whatever it is) and truly push it, you need to be creative and willing to go places where others have not been or won’t go to. That’s what Nick Newcomen has done. He is the individual behind the World’s Biggest Writing. Nick used a GPS data logger to travel around the U.S. and send a message to the world.

Credit: worldsbiggestwriting.com

(more…)

Sites such as Mashable and TechCrunch are great case studies to go through and learn things from. These folks have made content promotion an art. Each article posted on those sites gets hundreds of retweets and tens of likes. It does come down to their audience and writers, but both sites have done a magnificent job making their websites more social friendly. Of course, these guys don’t do everything.

Targeting Twitter, Facebook, and Digg is a no brainer move. A site such as Mashable gets millions of visitors on a monthly basis, which explains why their articles get so many tweets and retweets. The content posted on these sites shows exactly why content is king. Quality still matters and most of these sites have quality posts each and everyday (multiple times).

(more…)

As someone who has been involved in the Internet industry since 2001, I can tell you that no ranking in safe when it comes to Google. You can be the #1 site for a term one day only to find yourself out of the top 30 the very next day. If you have taken time to diversify your traffic sources, you won’t panic when such thing happens to you. But pure SEO businesses can suffer if they lose their rankings. Making rash decisions is not going to help you if you are experiencing issues with your Google rankings. The best way to deal with it is by approaching it step by step:

1. Don’t Panic + Monitor: do not panic. Google changes things around from time to time. Your ranking may drop for a week and then go right back to where it was. You don’t want to go insane and make lots of changes the very minute your ranking drops.
2. Go through changes you may have made: we all make minor changes to our websites on a consistent basis. If you have changed your .htaccess or  robots.txt, you may want to go through those changes to figure out what you may done wrong. Sometimes, adding a wrong line could lead to major issues for your website.
3. Refer to your stats: it’s often tough to figure out when your ranking has dropped unless you have installed an analytics package on your website. Going through your analytics data could give you ideas what may have happened to your website.
4. Check with your web host: websites get hacked left and right all the time. It could be that your web host has been experiencing downtime on a consistent basis. Whichever the case, you should take time to find out. (more…)

Are you addicted to Facebook? A lot of people are. Many spend hours each day to update their status and interact with other users on Facebook. Facebook is a great tool for businesses as well, giving them the chance to connect with prospects and build solid outposts to increase their sales and conversions. Facebook may be a great community to be a part of, but it’s certainly not one that respects your privacy (the CEO does not believe in privacy, so it’s not a surprise). While Facebook gives people the option to protect their profiles and contacts from leaking information to search engines, not many FB users actually take time to do it. That means your name could show up on Google with friends’ names right underneath, if you are not too careful with your privacy settings.

Facebook may be offering its users options to keep their private information safe. But it is not making their lives easier. I have never been impressed with Facebook’s design. It’s just not intuitive (very un-twitter like). In order to optimize your privacy settings, you could end up going through a dozen of pages and options and even then you may not get it right. (more…)

Let’s face it. It’s awfully difficult to get ranked for a general product on Google these days. Unless you are completely focused on the task and willing to work harder than your competitors, you are not going to have much of a chance of reaching those top 3 places for a general keyword phrase. In some markets, it’s almost impossible to get there without putting a monumental amount of hours in optimizing, grabbing links, and doing all kinds of things. Let’s say you want to show up #1 for the word “laptop” on Google. All I have to say to you is good luck. It’s going to take some work to get that done (not impossible to do though).

Now, it is going to even be harder for businesses to convert as well with the latest changes that Google has implemented on its search engine. In case you haven’t noticed, Google has introduced “brand suggestion” feature when searchers input a general keyword phrase. So if someone is looking for a laptop, they are going to be shown a selection of brands that they can choose from to narrow down their search results. Here is what Google had to say about this new feature:

Sometimes when searching for product information on Google, you may not know some of the brand names relevant to your particular search. For example, if you’re taking on a new river-rafting hobby, it’s quite likely you don’t have a clue about kayak manufacturers just yet. So, we wanted to make it easier for you to find the brands other people consider useful for popular product searches. So this week we launched a search refinement that calls out brand names related to your query in a single line above the rest of the results. Determined algorithmically, these highlighted brand names may help you find what you’re looking for faster.

I agree that this feature could help searchers find what they are looking for faster. But isn’t it a bit presumptuous to assume what brands searchers may be interested in finding out more about? Besides, the results do not seem to be perfect. (more…)

We had heard some crazy rumors about Google taking into account site speed when it comes to ranking websites in their SERPs. Well, that seems to be official now. Google has announced that site speed is officially being considered towards website rankings in the SERPs.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

I have mixed feeling about this. It’s true that Google will not give this factor a whole lot of importance in comparison to factors that determine the relevancy of your website to the searched keywords. Having a speedy website makes life easier on visitors and could improve ROI as well. But a speedy splog is not exactly what I call a user friendly website.

If you are a webmaster, you shouldn’t panic at this point. There are tools you can take advantage of to find out ways to optimize the speed of your website. In fact, Google itself discussed a few tools when announcing this move: (more…)

Those of you who have been around the field of SEO have probably seen the rise and fall of blog spamming. There was a time when people would go to other people’s blogs and get Yes-Follow links back all the time. In fact, a few online marketers were touting this as a must-do technique to get high rankings on Google and other top website. If you managed to get your comments on highly popular blogs, you can almost guarantee yourself a decent stream of traffic for a while. Those days have come and gone, and people are still spamming blogs for traffic and attention. And they are not getting any smarter.

Spammers know that bloggers have become more alert about the challenge of spam comments. That’s why they are changing their comments to make them look as if they are legitimate. Take a look at the following:

I have recently changed browsers from Chrome to Microsoft IE 6. After the change I seem to have a problem with loading JavaScript. Every-time I go on a site that requires Javascript, my computer doesn’t load…

As you can tell, the message is designed to encourage bloggers to allow it to go on. But when you get the same message over multiple blogs, you know you are dealing with a spammer who’s using a dumb strategy. (more…)

As someone who’s been involved in the SEO field for years I can tell you that there are plenty of ways you can mess up your website’s rankings. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can accidentally block crawlers or mess up your title tags or links. But one of the factors that many SEOs don’t pay attention to is their web host’s performance. So you have decided to create lots of content and get it all ranked high on the search engines. If you have gone with a cheap host to get the job done, you better be ready to deal with consequences if your web host happens to be down from time to time.

When you start a business online, you may not have the money to pay $200 to $1000 a month to host your website. You may not even need to. But if you are serious about what you are doing, your website is going to grow. That means, sooner rather than later you are going to be in a position where you will have to increase the amount of money you spend on your web host. Not only that, you are going to need  a web host that provides you with proper support when you are in trouble. (more…)

In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talks in the affiliate community about the possibility of Amazon dropping affiliate sales generated through search engine results pages in the U.S. Amazon has already indicated that it won’t be paying affiliates in the U.K if their affiliate links get ranked on Google. Here is what Amazon had to say about this issue to its UK affiliates:

In addition, as of February 1, 2010 we will no longer pay referral fees on purchases made by customers who are referred to http://www.amazon.co.uk or http://www.javari.co.uk via Free Search Results. Free Search Results are links containing an Associate’s tag displayed in a search engine’s free, natural, or organic search results in response to a search query which send customers directly to an Amazon site without the customer first being sent to an Associate’s site and the customer clicking on a link to arrive at the Amazon site.

These changes do not prohibit you from purchasing paid search advertisements or submitting links to search engines so long as the links that appear on the search engines send customers to your site.

That of course doesn’t mean that you can’t make money by optimizing your website for search engines and get ranked that way. In some ways it’s understandable for Amazon taking such an action. There are plenty of SEO experts who can get their links up high in the rankings and make money that way. Amazon wants to reduce consumer confusion by making you take people to your own site before bringing them to Amazon.

(more…)

Search engine optimization has got quite a reputation among those who don’t know what the business is all about. Some consider SEO as a form of hacking. Others consider search engine professionals as snake oil salesmen. Of course, there are a few people that consider search engine optimization a bad thing for the whole web experience. A lot of bad reputation that search engine optimization has gotten in the past few years is due to SEOs being more obsessed about traffic than improving the experience of web searchers. There are many people that spend more time stuffing keyword, changing their copy to include more keywords that make sense, and even add more text elements to each page to get better rankings in the SERPs. I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t focus on on-page and off-page optimization tactics, but as a SEO, one needs to know why they go about implementing a certain strategy. Your audience may not care about minor changes to your website or a few extra keywords here or there, but it’s tough to know where the boundaries are.

It’s true that search engine optimizers are hired to help websites climb up the rankings and get more free traffic. But if you haven’t spent time to optimize your site to make things more convenient for your readers, you are missing the boat. And I am not talking about adding breadcrumbs or other forms of navigation to your website. It’s about providing value to your readers and giving them what they need. I can’t tell you how many times I have found a page on the first page of Google only to realize it offers no real value other than a page with a bunch of keywords on it. That’s not what the search is about.

(more…)