Search Engine News

I received a call recently with a most perculiar point. The caller wanted to take me up on an offer we had for web designers to do one of their client’s sites free in hopes of securing additional work down the road. While I’m always happy to work with designers the message was still odd, I never approved such a promotion and as we’re basically running at full capacity and having to turn down clients to insure our guarantees and current client obligations are met - I was certain that in some 16 hours-of-work daze I wouldn’t put out or OK such an email.

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Flickr Embraces Nofollow Tags as part of Search Engine Optimization - Should You (Or Any Of Us) Be Concerned?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 22 of February , 2008 at 3:59 pm

Photo sharing site Flickr has recently started using nofollow tags in its individual photo descriptions, reports CNET and WebProNews. Should we care?

There are two ways to look at this. The first way is that nofollow links in the descriptions of individual photos might discourage certain search engine optimizers or webmasters from posting photos to Flickr. That may not be bad as those most discouraged are probably spammers and webmasters looking for cheap link juice. On the other hand, legitimate search engine optimizers and webmasters will suffer along with the spammers and may end up finding other ways to get free links.

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Is Your SEO Giving You The Run-Around?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 16 of October , 2007 at 3:16 pm

Read a great article this morning on Gooruze. It was written by Andy Beal so you know it’s got to be good, right?

The essence of the article, and I agree, is that there is no excuse for an SEO not to share with you what he is doing to improve your site. If he is vague and unresponsive to your requests for information then you should think about going elsewhere.

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Today was an exciting day at SES NY 2007. I haven’t had the time to attend a session yet (that’s right, 3 days in and still no sessions). On the plus side, I’ve had the opportunity to interview many of the people who’s sessions I’d have most wanted to attend and ask them my own questions.

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Posted by randfish

The Public Media Conference in Boston proved to be one of the most unique audiences I’ve ever spoken to. Rather than webmasters and business owners, the crowd consisted primarily of reporters, station executives and public media contributors. These folks share the interests and goals of traffic, branding, influence and connection, despite the difference in focus (profit vs. relevance & funding opportunities). In addition to sharing some words on SEO, traffic building and blogging, I also learned quite a bit from sitting in some sessions.

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Posted by randfish

Back to basics time this Friday, and this time, it’s all about the only meta tag that still has relevance; the meta description tag. Meta descriptions have three primary uses:

To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

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Well here we are, 3 interviews later. Haven’t had a chance to go to a session yet but I did have the opportunity to interview Mike Moran from IBM, Michael and Mikhail from ClickFacts.com and Stephanie Krebs from DominionEnterprises.com. Here’s what we talked about.

With Mike From IBM:

Mike and I discussed the launch of a free search engine Omnifind Yahoo! Edition. While I haven’t had a chance to put it through it’s paces yet he describes it as easy to install, light on technology and resources provided you have a dedicated server at your disposal. Some of the features that tey provide such as symantic search functionality are impressive and I will definitely be giving it a peek when I get back from the convention.

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Posted by Fluxx

Last Friday, I released a piece of linkbait for Drivl that I had been working on for the past few weeks.  It was Every Single Mythbusters Myth EVER on One Page, and I was pretty proud of it.  I’m a bit of a fan, so this was totally a labor of love.

As with any linkbait, I was watching the referal logs like a hawk.  I submitted the page to Digg, and it did manage to get popular — but then was promptly buried before getting more than a hundred diggs or so.  I also seeded Stumbleupon with the page.  It was the best thing I could have ever done.

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Why Error Pages Should be CustomizedWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 14 of December , 2007 at 1:32 pm

Customizing your error pages is a great way to ensure that your customers know that your website is still around and is merely offline for one reason or another. The fact is that the Internet is a here today gone tomorrow world and when a site is offline, people more often than not, expect the worse.

Customize your error pages…they should be short and informative. You don’t need much in your error page other than your company name and a vague reason why your site is offline. The best error pages are a little ambiguous as to the reason for the site being offline, thus allowing them to be used in as many situations as possible.

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Google has long hated publicly on people buying or selling links. Some of the better SEOs have moved beyond just getting a link here or there and have moved into acquiring trusted properties, improved them, scaling them, and marketing them. Google hates the practice though because they would prefer to have crusty dated content or incomplete blog posts ranking, such that anyone searching with a commercial interest is more drawn toward their Google AdWords program.

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