Search Engine Placement

It looks like it’s that time again…when newbie websites earn their wings by receiving that coveted bit of notoriety from Google. I’ve yet to see any official postings from Google or even from fellow bloggers, but I have noticed that quite a few of my websites and client websites have received their initial PageRank update from Google. The update appears to be affecting only new websites sites that have not yet received a PageRank status from Google. We’ll post more on this in the days to follow as news regarding the specifics begins to surface.

So if you haven’t heard, there’s a great way to build your link popularity and gain quality click through traffic. Its called blog marketing (or posting). Basically you pay a blogger, within your niche, to write a post about you. You can have them just create some buzz and plug you or even pay for a review.

This new form of web marketing has been working excellent for our clients (and us). It can bring in extremely targeted traffic and significantly boost your keyword placement through quality linking. Of course if you want to know more, give us a shout.

So I’m confused. Today I spent some time looking at top listings for ” internet marketing center ” and SEO is not mentioned in the “top 5″ companies portfolios.  I see everything from email marketing, affiliate marketing, auto responders and so on.  I would think search engine marketing services would be synonymous with internet marketing.  Maybe someone should contact them, maybe that will be me. =)

Deep linking is when you build back links to your site using one of your sub page URL’s instead of your home page. This looks more natural to the search engines then just aquiring link after link to your homepage. Also, your overall link popularity benefits from deep link.
So next time you request a link from somewhere, use one of your sub pages. =)

Another year has passed, and search engine marketing is still trying to evolve out of its current state of primordial soup. Can an industry that requires a heavy tech sense be accepted into mainstream marketing?

Currently most mainstream marketers have only a vague idea of what SEO is. And search engine optimization is as alien to most small business owners as Hip Hop is to President Bush. And no wonder. There really isn’t any “SEO authority” and there is no standard operating procedure for search engine marketing firms to follow. But as online spending continues to generate billions in revenue, there are certainly more and more business willing to take the leap and dive head first into the search industry.

I think this year we will see search engine optimization continue to come closer to becoming an accepted method of marketing, who knows maybe it will sprout legs and become real beast to contend with in our modern day marketing jungle.

Warning: This may only be funny if your in the business… Well it still might not be funny. This was borrowed and improved upon from here.

1. One to buy the bulb; who actually buys 50 of them incase some of his lightbulbs break for his companies unethical black hat light bulb installation techniques…
2. One to outsource his light bulb installation to an offshore company so he can battle the forces of darkness and slay the mighty dragon Onyxia in World of Warcraft.
3. And another to find a boozing freelancer to attempt to fix the broken lightbulb that the offshore company installed

If you don’t already know, duplicate content is bad. Don’t think you have duplicate content? Think again… Say some guy getting into your industry finds your site and decides he likes your content. He copies it onto his website and you’re the one that suffers a loss in your search engine placement.

And so thankfully Google is parlaying with us about what to do, here. Basically, they are saying people use duplicate content to try to garner more traffic, and Google is putting a stop to that.

Here’s how to prevent duplicate content on your site.

• If you have duplicate content on your site you can tell the search engines which pages not to index with a robots.txt file.
• If you have another copy of your site somewhere, use a 301 redirect to re direct users and search engines to the right site. (Ask me if you need help)
• Make sure you use the same link names to link to another page on your site. For example don’t link to indext.html, index.php, index.html/.
• Is your site available in more then one language? Use a top level domain to handle the language pages. For example for French you could get a site.fr or the UK would be site.uk
• You can use Google webmaster tools to pick a preferred domain. For example you could pick a www version or non www version of your URLs.
• Make sure other sites that have your content on their sites link back to you.
• If you use a content management system make sure that it does not publish the same content in multiple formats.

Following the above steps should help make sure your search engine placement does not suffer from issues with duplicate content, and if you do find a site that has duplicate content of yours you can always file a DMCO request.