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.

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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.

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I have to admit. Search engine optimization is a bit of gaming when you think about it. Many SEOs want to admit that SEO is either an art or a science. But it’s a little bit of both. Nevertheless, the whole field is built upon the fact that SEO professionals can test and figure out what search engines like and give that to them. There isn’t anything malicious behind what most white hat SEOs do but let’s call a spade a spade. The word optimize is closer to the word gaming than most SEOs want to admit.

Every aspiring SEO wants to know how is it exactly that search engines go about ranking search results. Is it the number of links you have or maybe the type of links you are getting to your site. Could it be your domain name or the location of your server? There are hundreds of factors considered in a modern search algorithm. While none of the algorithms out there today are perfect, they do the best possible to provide folks like you and I with the most relevant results. Google and other search engines may be moving towards personalized and real-time search, but SEOs are not going to give up trying to figure out search engines’ algorithms and dominating them. (more…)

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Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to monetize your online content and make a living without having to work for the man. Of course, you can always use your affiliate income to supplement the one you get from your day job.  There are a lot of affiliates who make money by optimizing their websites for search engines. You can have the best paid search campaigns or get the sweetest display deals, but nothing beats getting free traffic from sites such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. As long as you can get your blog or affiliate portal to show up for short-tail and long-tail keyword searches, you are going to get an additional boost of income and lower your costs per conversion dramatically.

Before getting aggressive with your affiliate campaigns, you want to make sure that your affiliate program gives you enough freedom to implement your tactics. Many affiliates assume that using branded terms in domains or even sub-domains is OK, but many affiliate programs are cracking down on those types of sites, especially after the FTC put more pressure on them to deal with bloggers, affiliate marketers, and social media professionals.

Affiliate programs are not trying to be mean to you when they decide to kick your website out of their program for using branded terms. You just don’t want to confuse people and give them an indication that you are in any way or shape working directly for an advertiser. Let’s take Amazon for instance. If you are trying to build a website on Amazon’s movers and shakers, the last thing you want to do is secure a domain that has the word Amazon or its misspellings in it. Not only that, your sub-domain shouldn’t have those trademarked terms either. What’s the price? You’ll get kicked out if you are caught doing it.

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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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That’s not really a question if you listen to Matt Cutts and other top Google engineers. A Google redesign is in the works, and we are not just talking about the look and feel of the site. After all, who really cares about how Google.com looks as long as you get the most relevant results that help you move forward with your project. The future of search is social, mobile, and much more. Your only source of information will no longer be Google news. There are millions of people who are blogging, discussing issues in forums, creating videos, taking photos, and writing books on all kinds of topics. The next generation search engines bring all of that together.

If you have wanted to try this new Google design but have no clue how to, Gizmodo has you covered. The site has released a mini trick that forces your Google to use the new design to do your search. The trick does work, and the results are very interesting.

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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…)

Google Trends is one of the most underrated services offered by Google. Smart marketers have been using it to optimize their pages, get more traffic on a daily basis, and even come up with products that people want to buy. But it’s still surprising to see executives and top marketers have no clue about what Google Trends is all about. Till now, you could access Google Trends through its official page. But Google has just announced that you can now see the trends on the SERPs, as long as the keyword phrase that you are searching for is on the top 100 fastest rising terms, based on the data from GTrends. Here is what Google had to say about it:

hen you search Google.com and your query matches one of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms, we’ll show you a graph at the bottom of page, with more information — like how popular the query is, how fast it’s rising over time, and other useful data.

I still would have wanted to see the top 100 fastest-rising search terms on GTrends’ page, but that is not a big change. The move should certainly make it easier for people to get more out of their search process. And one would hope that more people will now take advantage of Google Trends, now that the trends will be shown on the search results page.

How it works

To see the feature in action, you will have to check Google Trends and choose one of the top terms on that list. “Joe Scarborough Surgery” is a keyword phrase that is going strong as I am writing this post.

As you can see, Google Trends information shows up at the bottom of the page. While this is very interesting, I would hope for Google to show the same information when I searched for “Joe Scarborough” as well. Google has a lot of services that could provide useful information to the searchers, but not everyone is going to search for “Joe Scarborough Surgery.” I mean what are the chances. Google needs to find a way to tie the information together and provide more value to searchers per each and every search. To cut the story short, it would have been nice if Google would show people who are searching for a specific term the related trends as well. (more…)