The news is out, Google is not a fan of Microsoft Windows. The main reason is security concerns, the vulnerability that is present with the hackability of the operating system. Read more »

Trying to show the results of SEO is not just doing a search on your targeted keywords and viewing the latest position.  It’s more than just that. Read more »

As many blogs that get decent traffic know, you often get a lot of spammy comments on your posts, even when you have a decent anti-spam plugin or two.  Well, there are other routes to go when you STILL get spam comments.  And I’ve found a nice one. Read more »

Google’s making some changes to their standard search results, to include a left hand nav bar.  This has made some people (including Business Insider) wonder if it’s to imitate what Bing already has in place – a side panel to have different links for images, videos, etc.

This change will affect how people view results in general, although Google’s advertising approach will likely not change heavily.  We’ll have to see what the response is when they go fully live with these changes.

You can see Google’s words on the new SERPs here:

When doing SEO, it’s not as easy as just picking out your main market keyword and thinking you can jump to the top with that keyword.  A lot of people seem to think that generic keywords equal good sales.  But this is not the case, more often than not.  Good SEO requires work and research. Read more »

Not really much more to say than that. I found a post on his blog from not too long ago, and it cracked me up.  Even people outside of internet marketing might find it worth checking out.

SEO tips being lies? Okay, not always intentionally, but it happens.  Mainly because with the ways SEO works changing so much, a lot of old techniques no longer work.  Keeping on top of these makes a big difference.

There are several, but I’d recommend checking out this great list put together by Stephan Spencer, Chris Smith, Rand Fishkin, and Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.

Apple has recently revealed news on the iPhone OS 4 update.  The more interesting part of this news for marketers is the new development of iAd – an advertisement opportunity to allow ads to be created and used within apps on the iPhone. Read more »

Google is continuously finding new ways to measure the quality of web sites, to choose which pages should be ranked higher.  Relevance is still king for SEO, but one new element for search engine optimization (listed by Google directly) is web site speed. Read more »

So it’s April Fool’s Day.  And Google always has something good.  Apparently today they have announced that Google is no longer Google.  Is is now Topeka.  You can find out the details here, on their blog.

But all over the world, new things have arisen with Google.  In the UK, a video was put up on YouTube about their latest translation advances.  You can see the details of this amazing tool on the Google page here.  A similar tool is available in Japan.  Google Maps got an upgrade in Australia.

And I highly recommend going to Google Maps, use street view (drag the icon of the person onto a street), and you’ll see the latest advance in Google Maps technology.  Quite nice.

SEO is an evolving animal.  There are many techniques that worked very well in the past that no longer are as effective, if effective at all.

Read more »

Matt Cutts put out his latest update with Google in his blog.  It appears that Google is now allowing bookmarking within the search engine itself.  The way it’s done is to use stars next to each page you want to bookmark (much like Gmail operates with stars and emails).  Then for any related searches, the bookmarks will show up above all the organic listings in a separate starred list.

And for editing on any of your bookmarks, there’s now a Google Bookmarks page that you can use to go and adjust your bookmarks as you see fit.  Any text you add here will be used to match searches you put in, and will display that bookmark if you search for text within these fields.

How many people use this tool we’ll have to see, but it does have some advantages for organizational use within Google.

Google released a report card last week for product pages on search engines.  This report card analyzed the levels of quality for SEO on the pages.

The short of it – Google gave themselves only one “excellent” rating, got three “satisfactory” ratings and eight “needs improvement”.

Google has stated they have taken action on these results or plan to.  It’s somewhat funny to hear that the big search engine doesn’t always tweak their own pages properly for SEO purposes.

If you want more details on this, you can check out this article from the Los Angeles Times.

Today a court order goes into effect to force Microsoft to allow Windows users a choice in internet browsers.  Previously, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the default browser installation on Windows.  As of today, that decision is no longer enforced, and users will have a choice to make that many were previously unaware they even had.

One possibility of this outcome is that Google Chrome may now see some increase in use.  Google is doing a heavier push in the mainstream media, so everyday internet users will see the option to install Chrome.  If a lot of them choose this, this will increase Google’s hold over the search engine market, and this will also effect many SEOs in their approach to optimization.

It appears the battle between Google and Microsoft (who’s joined forces with Yahoo) may have only now just begun.  To check out more details on this story, see this article by HighPosition.net.

As everyone knows, typing in a domain doesn’t always give you the site you intended to hit.  And typos like this happen all the time.  There are people who have realized this and are making money from it.

There are two ways to make money from domain typos – either by using PPC and bidding on these typos (and then making money from the traffic you get on these usually cheap keywords), or by registering these domains and putting ads on the site for them.

The people that do the latter are called “typosquatters”.  And there’s potentially a lot of money in the ads for higher traffic domain typos.  Keep in mind that if the owners of the real domain notice you doing this, they can ask you to take the site down.

Whether or not typosquatting is ethical is a subjective question, but the fact is that some people make a ton of money from it, and so does Google.  You can find out more about this and the figures involved in this article from Sideways News.

I got an email from Microsoft adCenter promoting the new alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft.  They’re calling it “Search Alliance“.  The aim is to have their online paid advertising fully unified before the 2010 holiday season, although they did say that they’ll wait until 2011 if they “determine this will be more effective”.

Microsoft bought out Yahoo, so now the primary tool behind both search engines will be Bing, and behind the pay per click (and other paid online advertisements) will be adCenter.  The Search Alliance has stated that each company will “continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences”.  Not sure exactly how they’ll pull that off with the same search engine for both, but they may just mean the search interface.

The support will be broken apart, Yahoo supporting the bigger advertisers, and Microsoft will provide support to “self-service” advertisers.  They are combining their platforms for the advertising audience, so ads put together under this new alliance will reach consumers using either search engine.  The Search Alliance brags that advertisers of all sizes will now be able to have access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million worldwide searchers.

At any rate, this is pretty big news – Yahoo and MS pulling together to battle the mighty Google.  I expect this may be an epic battle.

The stance Google’s taken on search engine optimization has always been a little hazy.  However, they do acknowledge many elements of SEO as being important for a good web design (as implied by all the information given within the Google Webmaster Tools pages).  But it appears they’re taking it a step further.

Google has begun a small project by showing how to improve SEO for some select pages within countries in northern Europe.  They will then put up a post about each page describing their findings and what they recommend to improve listing positions.

This isn’t exactly offering SEO services for clients (like our own Tulsa SEO services), but it is showing that they acknowledge how important SEO is for improving results, and are even willing to help by giving some tips.

Mark Jackson has a good article detailing more on this in ClickZ.

It appears that Fortune 500 companies on the whole have not caught up to the internet marketing needed to rank well for their primary keywords.  And many of them still don’t use pay per click marketing, even though the combination of the ones that do spend about 3 and a half million dollars daily for their keywords.

The interesting thing here is with those millions being spent, you’d think they would put the money into SEO to push their primary keywords to the top of the listings, but it appears that they are not doing this.  The companies are still improving on their listings, but it’s still a minority that are even breaking the top 50 in the SERP list for their primary keywords.

MediaPost has an article with details on the exact figures involved in the Fortune 500 SEO results, as well as their PPC figures.

Google Buzz is the latest update from Google.  Went live yesterday, looks to be Google’s effort to break into the social media market.  I personally tried it out a bit, it ties directly to Gmail.

It does do updates regularly, and appears to share the information with anyone who follows you.  A lot of people have commented that it looks to be an imitation of Twitter.  The nice thing is that you can connect to other sites, to reduce all the different social machines that need maintenance.

The default for me was to activate sharing with Picasa and Google Reader (I didn’t select either of these).  The other options available are visible in the image above.  The blurred domain is a site I set up on BlogSpot/Blogger through the same account.  With Twitter, it will read your Tweets, but from what I can tell it only reads to Buzz, not vice versa.

Looks like Google’s still ironing out the kinks on this, I’m sure plenty of people will be giving feedback for it.  For now I find it nice since I don’t have the mass of content that is dealt out on Twitter, and so far it appears to still stay within actual social connections (and hasn’t spread into the marketing machine yet).  So every “buzz” I’ve gotten so far has been from a friend, making an actual comment on life instead of a business telling me how good their merchandise is.

I don’t know if it’s automatic for all Gmail users, but from the amount of people I’ve seen pop on with it, I’m guessing it is.  It’s just another option underneath the Inbox, and it will show updates for some “buzz”es (but not all) within the Inbox.  It appears it will post the updates for anything you have contributed to to your Inbox, with the little Buzz logo next to it.

We’ll see if it’s something that gets used a lot or not, should be able to tell within a few weeks how well it’ll work.

There are a lot of standard black hat SEO methods that have been around for a while, but those that stray a little on the darker side of SEO keep busy.  There are several new tactics that these people are using.

As SEO becomes a more prominent form of marketing, black hat methods are also becoming more well-known.  The latest term for these techniques is “poisoning”, which I find appropriate.  These SEOs will put their poisoned links (which contain malware and installations of other nefarious elements) into various places where people will find them through either particular keywords or through social media.

As a lot of people are not aware that these attacks happen, they can often give away account information, trusting that the sites they are visiting are reliable.  These attacks come through Twitter and Facebook as well as through standard search engine results.

For more info on this, check out this article by Last Click News.

Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex.  In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products.  How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?

This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.

• Google likes unique posts, good content
• Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
• You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages

By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site.  Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue.  Focus on only these elements.  Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.

By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it.  In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages.  For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”.  There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue.  By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.

Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help.  Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions.  For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.

The search engines evolve, as does most modern technology.  The latest revision in search engine result pages is the “universal search”.  This is the displaying of results for searches in not just web site links, but images, maps, videos, blogs, and more.

The universal search allows a large breadth of information to be given that is relevant to any search done.  For SEOs, this means adjusting approach on how to get relevant information out onto the web.

When trying to publicize information about something you want people to discover, to make sure you can be found by different areas within this universal search you’ll want to make sure you go across multiple areas with your information publication.  This can be done through audio, video, blogging, social media – or getting creative and doing it in unique ways.

It all comes down to doing good marketing, just online.  As the web evolves, so must our online marketing.  For more good information on the universal search, check out this article by Ron Jones at Search Engine Watch.

It’s surprising what being snowed in can do for your productivity over a weekend.  I’ve finished up with some changes to the site, finally added a Portfolio page and an About Us page (so you can see what my ugly mug looks like).

Read more »

The iPad is the latest Apple news and it’s been getting a lot of attention.  Considering this, some not-so-nice SEOs are using the fresh keywords to do black hat SEO to infect computers across the globe with malware.  They’re targeting laterally related keywords such as “Apple Tablet” and “Apple iPad Rumor”.

Be cautious if you see some weird results when you do searches on these types of terms.  The eWeek Security Watch has more info on this.

This isn’t directly internet marketing related, but it’s something I know a lot of people have been waiting for.  The iPad (AKA the iTablet and other names).  It looks to be a cross between the iPod/iPhone, a laptop, and a television.  It’s thin, sits in your lap, and is full touch-sensitive.  Plus compatible with your old systems, so you can copy apps from the iPhone to the iPad to have them full-screen.

It looks like it might have good potential for a portable movie player with a substantially larger screen, has better use for eBooks, and the higher resolution makes everything a little easier to see, such as maps, your calendar, YouTube, not to mention web browsing.

The full announcement came today from Apple, so if you’re curious to learn more about it (as I still am), you can check out the official iPad page.