Here’s what Matt Cutts (the Google Spokesperson) has to say about that:
So, does your page rank matter? No, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the links on your page are all “no follow,” so it doesn’t help a hoot to be on someone’s page with a PR10. That’s too bad. Twitter could be sending lots of link love, but as that encourages spamming, I guess it’s better than it doesn’t. Dam-ned spammers ruin the Internet for everyone.
Knowing what Google thinks is what SEOs spend most of their time trying to figure out. And it’s an inexact science at best. But sometimes… just sometimes, Google TELLS us what it’s thinking, which is good. Knowing what to expect always makes things better, eh?
So, a little while back, Google started adding Twitter Tweets to the search results. Everyone wondered how those would be indexed and ranked, and there was a lot of speculation about how things would end up, where they’d be placed, and so on. A couple of months ago, Amit Singhal, Google’s real time search guru guy (which Tweets, blog posts, video, Facebook, and other avenues of communication that are immediate in nature) told us how this works, and so… nobody needs to wonder. How cool is that?
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is something I’ve been dabbling in for about five years now, but it’s also something that I’ve taken time to try and understand. I’ve learned from Perry Marshall. I’ve learned from Anik Singal and Amit Mehta. I learned from Simon Leung, and I’ve learned from Glenn Livingstone. All great teachers. Heck, I even learned some tricks from Frank Kern, who loves to “Screw Google.”
But I’m definintely NOT a ninja. I’ve been able to break even, and have made it work for me in terms of building my list. I’ve found some keywords that kill for SEO and I’m using them on Yahoo. I can exponentially raise the number of optins I’m getting with the amount of spending that I do every day. So… that’s cool. Yet, I’d never call myself a PPC expert.
Most people hear the horror stories of people signing up for AdWords, not knowing what they’re doing, and coming away with a bill for thousands of dollars. So, many folks shy away. In fact, they may tell you you’re totally and completely insane for even considering PPC. Well.. perhaps. I’m the jump in and figure it out along the way type, but I learned early on to set my daily spending limit which takes the scare out of doing PPC and getting that huge bill. continue reading »
Ha… I didn’t invent that work, a couple of guys from Google named Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski did. In this video they answer some really good questions from users of Google Analytics. I’ll bet you learn something!
I was over at Google Reader checking out the newest SEO posts, and came across one that tickled me. It’s from Kay Dinsdale and entitled, “So, You want to be an SEO?” Kay, I feel your pain and loved your post. Put me in mind of SEO Myths and Bullsh*t’s post of last week, talking about submitting sites to search engines. (See SEO Myths and Bullsh*t) Sheesh. So much crap floating around out there that it’s no wonder people become confused.
Kay’s post rants about SEO forums where people come in posing as SEOs, and asking questions like, “What’s an H1 tag?” or “What’s a backlink?” Seriously. I mean, if you don’t know those things… you need to study WAY more, my friends.
When I first started studying SEO (and can you ever learn it all, really, eh?), I started with Web CEO’s online “university.” There’s some darned good training in there, and if you go through it all, you’ll come away with a very basic understanding of SEO. That much is really not rocket science. continue reading »
People spend so much time trying to gear their sites up to attract customers that they forget about what’s important to search spiders. They may have cool flash, awesome graphics or code that just tagged along from their free WYSIWYG HTML editor and they don’t even know about it. Did you know that these things can be daunting to search spiders?
Yep. Here are a few things you should know:
Never use an iframe as your entire page.
Spiders ignore iframes because an iframe’s purpose is to pull in content from other websites or other pages on your own. Whatever is in the iframe appears blank to spiders. So, if your whole page is an iframe, it’s like you have no content at all! Not good. It’s OK to use an iframe, if you must, but make it only a part of the page, and use solid SEO on-page tactics for the rest of the page, and certainly content that surrounds it. continue reading »
So, do you ever check your dashboard news when you open the admin area of your blog? I do. There’s interesting stuff there… new plugins, new themes, and if you’re using Analytics, your stats now. I love that!
Today, I noticed a new plugin you might enjoy. It’s one that allows you to show your popular posts, and it adds visitor counts to your single posts page (where you go when you hit the title to a post). Why is it important?
If you’re getting a number of viewers on certain posts, and other folks come to read your blog, they might enjoy the same posts as others are interested in reading. When they find information they like, guess what? They’re more likely to subscribe or come back.
Anyway, an interesting plugin. I just added it so for me today, it’s showing only one post. I’m anxious to see how well it works and whether it’s worth having, but something tells me it’s a keeper. continue reading »
We knew it was coming. Today, Yahoo Search Marketing announced their “search alliance” with Microsoft.
What’s that mean?
Well… I’ve been using Yahoo Search Marketing for several months now, and find that the cost of an identical campaign that I had running at AdWords was half the price. And, for whatever reason, my optins doubled. I didn’t change the page… I changed the advertiser. So, in that respect, it’s been working very well for me.
My switch to Yahoo came on the heels of watching Frank Kern and Trey Smith’s “Screw Google” course, which I think is totally apropos. Why not? They think nothing of screwing us all the time. And almost anything works better for PPC when it comes to Internet marketing these days. continue reading »
I happen to agree with him. Most of the stuff talked about when it comes to SEO is just that — myth, crap and a smidgen of bull. Let’s face it… SEO is a bullshit science. NOBODY knows what Google’s algorithm is (or any other search engine for that matter), so there’s a great deal of testing and tracking going on to see what works and what doesn’t and lots of assumptions are made. Whether they’re right-on accurate or total and complete bull puckey is up for discussion.
Apparently Harry ran a Twitter poll regarding the biggest SEO “myth and crap,” and came up with my very own pet peeve in first place — Submitting sites to the search engines. Here’s what Harry says: continue reading »
I was reading the SEOMoz blog today from my Google Reader, when I see a very cool article on marketing articles to Google News, appropriately entitled “Getting Started Publishing on Google News” by Sam Niccolls. Did you know that Google News gets about a billion clicks each year?
Apparently it can’t keep up with CNN, the NY Times, and Yahoo News, but Google is no slacker. And here’s the thing… pretty much no matter what it is, Google just gets better at it as time goes on. Would this be a good place to pulish content? Of course!
But it’s tricky. You have to fill out an application first, which is understandable. So, you’d better have a competent writer working for your company because well… it’s Google. They want serious articles, not the run-of-the-mill drivel that you often see posing as writing online. To write for Google News, you’ll really have to be someone who’s dead sure about grammar, spelling, and writing articles — and your topic.
First realize that news items are very similar to the articles that live in the article directories online, so if you have news about your business that you can write about — that would be worthy. Or, if you have a great article about something your company is engaged in, then you probably have an article. continue reading »
