The most scary thing about openning up a private Web 2.0 service such as Yahoo! Buzz? Simple! Aggressive marketers. We have seen it with MySpace, LinkedIn, and FaceBook. Now you can add Yahoo! Buzz to the list of online venues that will be targeted to generate millions of free visitors (or that’s what marketers will try to do). I personally like the fact that I get to try this good looking service as I don’t really have a site that can go against SI or ESPN, so having the chance to really test it out would be great. Don’t forget to get your codes here. Remember, this is not a marathon but a sprint. Whoever figures out how to effectively utilize Yahoo! Buzz will get the traffic advantage.

Any organization that you go to, you’ll find about 99% of its employees don’t know anything about SEO. I have talked to marketing managers, directors, and senior vice presidents who have no clue about how search engine optimization is done. But the funny thing that I have notices is that after 10 minutes of discussion about on-page SEO tactics that they could use to improve their sites, I almost always get this brilliant feedback.

“I have a great idea! Why don’t we just change the color of the text that you are suggesting to white. That way we don’t hurt the customer experience and make search engines happy.” So why is hidden text such a popular idea among marketers:

• Low Risk: hiding the text looks low risk to most people. Your copy doesn’t have to be perfect if you hide it. Besides, you can probably put things in there that you normally wouldn’t (if the text was visible).
• Damage Control: you don’t know what adding a paragraph of text would do to your customers. They may leave and don’t come back (it depends on the content you put on your site). So why not mitigate the potential damage by not showing them anything at all?
• Greed: everybody gets greedy sometime. You want to have everything and pay nothing. We all want to have our cool flash sites and put pretty images on our pages and avoid anything that search engine might like.
• Ego: everybody wants to be a genius. We all have egos and if we find some solution that no one has tried before, it will make us feel good. But here is the thing. There got to be a reason why people don’t use these so obvious tactics, right? Not everyone’s stupid!

Some of these obvious mistakes are just due to lack of proper knowledge. I really don’t blame people who suggest these ideas, but sometimes the top guys go ahead with these ideas without talking to a professional SEO. Now that’s when you can get into trouble.

It’s amazing how on-page optimization techniques get no love from SEO experts and marketing gurus. Of course, it all comes down to who you call and expert and guru really. It’s true that on-page tactics have been abused and abused more by search engine gamers in the past but there are still a few techniques that you should implement on your site regardless of what “SEO gods” tell you:

1. Title Tags Matter: title tags matter big time. Put your most important keyword first and go from there. Put you brand last if you can. Don’t try to make the title more than it should be. As long as your title is not a collection of random words, then you are fine but don’t forget your keywords.

2. Header Tags Matter: It absolutely does. I have tested a few sites and have seen significant results by using <h1> and <h2> tags on my site. I was actually moved from position 5 on page 2 for a highly competitive keyword to position 9 page 1. It may sound like a very small improvement but can’t beat being on page 1.

3. Bold, Italic Tags Matter: They do. You can give search engines cues about what is important on your page and what’s not. Use <strong> and <i> tags when you can (actually using <strong> is more effective than <b> for some reason).

4. Keyword and Description Tags matter: The so called “big picture” marketing gurus might disagree with me, but keywords and description tags absolutely do matter. I have personally seen results by implementing them (not just moving up the rankings but also higher conversion rates). Don’t ignore them.

5. Sitemaps Matter: creating a sitemap is not really that hard so it baffles me when SEO professionals claim that it shouldn’t be done as it’s not worth it. Why not?! Folks, it literally takes a minute to create a sitemap and you will have something that search engines love. Why not do it? Yes. You can use the time to focus on FaceBook, but if you spend 1 minute a day on your FaceBook strategy, then you are in deep trouble.

Remember that search engine optimization is not an exact science. Nobody really knows what works. We know what doesn’t work thanks to Google (Black Hat techniques definitely won’t work for long). But other than that, there is no book or article from Google that claims you shouldn’t do META tags. It’s tough and boring but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Yahoo! Directory is one of the most expensive directories that are out there. Directories or fossilized search engines used to be a great way to give credibility to a site and get ranked higher on Google and other engines. But over the years most directories have either lost their glamor or become less of a factor as Google has updated its factors. So, can one justify paying Yahoo! $299 a year per listing in Yahoo! directory?

I have tested Yahoo! directory a few times, and I believe it is still worth it to try Yahoo! directory for your site. With my tests, Yahoo directory has worked like a charm getting me higher on Google on terms that are not super competitive (but competitive enough to matter). I’d like to think of Yahoo! directory as a tie-breaker as this point really. If you and your competitors are doing everything right, then Yahoo! can break the tie. However, if your site is completely unoptimized, then you may not get value from Yahoo! directory. Also, don’t forget that Yahoo! does not guarantee you a spot in the directory so you can be out of $299 if your site is terrible.

What to do?

I would try Yahoo! directory for a year (especially if your competitors are using it as well). I wouldn’t expect a huge increase in traffic for being listed there, but if it helps you get a bit higher in search engine rankings, then it’s probably worth it. If it does nothing for your business, toss it after a year. It’s not as if it significantly matters.

A lot of people come to believe that you can compete with any site on the Internet for that top stop on Google no matter when you have started your website as long as you pay a good SEO professional to get the job done. The truth of the matter is even the best SEOs may not be able to get your site to the top of search engines if you have just started today and you are in a superhyper competitive market.

These days more than anything SEO is all about picking your battles. You may choose to choose a very broad term and use that as your main target keyword for your SEO campaign, but I promise you there is more disappointment in the horizon with that strategy than going after the long tail of search. Now if you are a huge company who have had a site for 10 or 12 years and have over a million customers, then you should probably be competing for those high positions.

The strategy is simply different when you are working with a very small business. For small businesses, it’s often better to go after niche searches and avoid getting into a war with the top guys unless you are an ambitious startup and are the hottest thing in the market. So here is my approach to helping small business get ranked high on search engines:

• Pick the right keywords: Pick keywords that are not too broad or too general. The phrase “small business credit card” or “cash back rewards credit card” gives you a better chance of getting ranked on Google than the word “credit card.” Even the two mentioned phrases are extremely competitive, but that’s due to the landscape of the financial industry where there are millions of affilites with valuable and sometimes useless sites who are trying to get ranked for every combination of keywords possible.
• Get the basics right: I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to SEO professionals who want to take shortcuts and do Web 2.0 marketing. Social media should absolutely be in your plans. You should have a content strategy for Digg, YouTube, Reddit, and Delicious. But you can’t not optimize your title tag and expect things to work out because you are doing Web 2.0 marketing. Web 2.0 is cute and can be very powerful but sometimes it’s just too cute.
• Don’t forget linking: Having the right linking strategy can be the difference between being on the first page and first on the second page. The difference may not look huge to you, but believe me it is. Once you are on the first page, you are going to be seen by a lot of people even if you are on position #9 or #10. But the 2nd page requires an extra click and people are very frugal when it comes to spending clicks. Get the right anchor texts from the right relevant sites, and you are on your way.
• Don’t forget automation: I love the old school method of doing everything by hands. Finding out how many backlinks you have by hands, and finding the number of indexed pages manually. It’s great. It reminds you how hard things used to be done before we got SEO tools such as Web Position, WordTracker, and … I am sure a few of you think of people who lived years ago and didn’t have cars. But I doubt you actually go to work with a horse to see how things used to be (actually you might want to do it with the gas prices skyrocketing). Use the tools. Time is indeed money.
• Don’t forget analytics: a few years ago, you could have argued that analytics is expensive, useless, or both to your business. Not anymore. If you want to have any chance of converting better and competing with the big boys, you can’t afford to do marketing the blind way. You can’t guess things or go with things that feel good. You need to track and test, and I am not just talking about pay per click marketing. You should test your SEO pages all the time. Change the way the copy is written. Move things around. Pick the keywords that actually do convert. What’s the benefit of ranking for the term “credit cards” if its conversion rate is 0.00001%. Basically out of each 100,000 people, you get one person who applies for your card. That’s terrible. Now, it could be that your site is so scary it drives people away. But you wouldn’t know it unless you have a good SEO analytics package in place. Google Analytics is for free. Go get it. No excuses!

In the search engine optimization market, being productive is the best thing that can happen to you. Sometimes it’s really about who can get things done faster. Now you can’t take a big company’s site from zero to 10 in 5 days, but you can certainly do more for them by using tools that are available online. Here are a few tools that everyone can use to automate SEO tasks:

Keyword Research Tools:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool (Free)
• Google Traffic Estimator (Free)
• WordTracker (paid)
• Keyword Discovery (paid)
• Wordze (paid)
• SEO Digger
• SpyFu

W3C Validation Tools:

• W3C Code Validator
• RSS Validator
• CSS Validator

Robots.txt Generator:

• Robots.txt file generator
• Robots.txt Validator

Htaccess Writers:

• Htaccess generator
• Htaccess writer

Site Analyzer:

• SE-Inspecter
• Website Optimizer

Linking Tools:

• Backlink Check Tool
• Broken Link Checker
• Link Verifier
• Reciprocal Link Checker
• Site Link Analyzer
• Back Link Text Analyzer
• Link Popularity Checker
• Link Quality Assessment Tool

I will have a more comprehensive post on each category later on, but the above tools should be plenty to get anyone started.

Who are the real heroes in our hyper competitive industry? Are they those who you see at Search Engine Strategies giving lectures about the latest development in our industry? There are a lot of these people who I have the most respect for. Most of these lecturers have paid their dues and have been good at one time. But today, most of these guys barely do any SEO work. Their focus is more on “big picture” ideas. The dirty work is done by SEO professionals who have been in the industry for 2-5 years.

I don’t have any problem with people getting paid or promoting themselves in these events. What I do have a problem is when these people ask $400-$1000 an hour and deliver the same work that a SEO professional with 2 - 5 years experience can deliver. Sometimes their work is even worse than that. I have personally read a few proposals for the companies that I have worked for from some of these so called “big guys.” To share a story here, one day the SVP of the company that I used to work for asked me to review a proposal from one of the top guys in the industry. The proposal was probably the worst I had seen at the time. But the guy was asking for $500 an hour to do consulting (not doing any work). That’s not what being a SEO professional is all about. Being a SEO professional is all about providing value to clients/customers. So my hates off to the true heroes of our industry.

You have probably heard already that Cuil by ex-Google engineers is finally out and open to public. They claim that they have indexed over 100 billion pages and are the largest search engine on the planet. That is al fine and dandy. But let’s see how Cuil stacks up in design and algorithm:

Design: Simple all black design for Cuil make it look like Black beauty (not the horse). But my experience with black pages shows that they all fail. Does that mean Cuil will fail? Not for this reason but I would’ve preferred a better background color. I guess that’s one way to differentiate yourself.

When you search for a term, the results pages are shown in three columns. The first two columns are basically are your normal results pages while the third column allows you to search by category, which is very neat. Overall, I like the design though it could be too distracting. Reading items one by one is easier for most folks than looking at 3 columns at once.

Algorithm: I picked the term “Federer” to see what I can find on the Swiss genius. To my surprise, Cuil not only shows results for Federer, but also shows a few tabs at the top predicting what I may be looking for (e.g. Federer vs. Sampras, Federer Nike, Nadal vs. Federer). But the same search for UFC showed “ultimated fighting championship and United Fruit Company). Does anyone actually use UFC for united fruit company?

Over all, I don’t see anything that makes me want to drop Google and start using Cuil. It’s nice and cool. It’s different, but no thanks. I’ll stick with Google.

It’s true. Matt Cutts mentioned it a few days back, and now I understand why one of my blogs went from PR of 3 to PR of 0! PageRank is not really as important as it used to be but going from 3 to 0 in a couple of days is depressing. Having said that, some sites have seen improvements. Check yours today!

Well, if you haven’t heard the news yet, then you should know that Google is pretty much close to buying Digg for about $200m (Kevin, can you spare a bother a mil?). So what does it all mean for people who have used Digg to drive traffic to their sites?

It’s tough to say. I don’t think Google with follow no follow links on Digg. Having said that, I still expect sites to get indexed quickly using Diggoogle. But Digg will be in good hands. Google will take care of Digg for now, and I am sure the algorithms will get better and the whole gaming thing that is going on with Digg will diminish. The interesting thing to watch is whether Google finally get the YouTube - Digg integration right.

I am truly glad that the Digg guys are getting paid for all the effort they put in. Not quite Facebooish money but $200 mil isn’t that bad either.