Hundred Dollar SEO

photo credit: SuperFantastic
Search Marketing is more than just search engines. One of the most amusing things to me is when people boast that they get the vast majority of their traffic from Google — sometimes as high as 80%. It is difficult not to laugh at that. Having a business that is entirely contingent […]

photo credit: zen
Does a combined Yahoo! Microsoft make sense? No probably not. Both have structural issues that make integration likely to compromise both of them. Neither company is particularly search motivated these days. They make money from advertising through their portal aspects, news, mail, etc. and search is just one of the channels. If […]

According to a young woman I met this weekend you are, or will be. Everyone eventually gives up the long hard road to their dreams for the comfort of immediate reward. The real question is how much have you sold?
Search has 3 major players makers, rankers, and searchers

Makers build content: Bloggers, web designers, game makers, […]

An excerpt from comments at Cornwall SEO March 7 - 11, 2008:
Carlos Del Rio:
The major weight of links and references are to things that are accessible, not exceptional. Pages that amass large amounts of links are often remarkable (comment worthy) content that is not on the high end of the value spectrum.
Lyndoman:
Carlos if something is […]

How do search queries come into existence?
For anyone following Eliot Spitzer a new phrase appeared this morning Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Ms. Dupre is the second most searched term for March 13th on Google. She is the intended result of 6 out of the top twenty searches. Think about that for a minute, a significant portion […]

Michael Martinez paints an admittedly arrogant picture of Advanced SEO tactics. Certainly he has gotten his hands dirty in the search optimization business, but his advice is more like Zen gardening than in the trenches warfare.
Mr. Martinez’s guide to Advanced SEO:

Advanced SEO plans for a minimum of 12 months (or 4 seasons)
No problem there […]

I know this is a major accusation but Google is spiraling further and further into a “keep them in the dark” business model.
On March 6th they announced that load time is going to be factored into Quality Score.
This means that if you are running dynamic content, third party tracking, any javascript, or off-page calls […]

One session that I wish I had attended at SMX West is Avoiding PPC Pitfalls. One of the speakers, Amy Konefal of Closed Loop Marketing, put her Powerpoint online so I read through it. I’m not sure how I feel about the things that she points out.
The basic premise is solid — broad match can […]

On Friday I made the claim that SEO is by definition antagonistic to search engines. That the work that search marketers, including me, do takes advantage of any current state in search technologies to improve the search traffic of our clients.
“We as an industry are 100% counter productive to the goal of the search engines. […]

To thank Randy Ray for his many comments I am going to tackle video and news search today.
Optimizing for video searches.
Videos search should be approached in a very similar manner to searches for images.

Use standard coding — for videos that is <object>. Include size parameters for the object and <title> attribute, <name> attribute, and <standby>.
Surround […]