Search Engine Marketing Spot

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So why would an up and coming search engine marketing blog stop posting for 30 days? It wasn’t because I was being lazy, it had nothing to do with me not having anything to post, I did not get tired of this blog. I did it on purpose, to see how it would effect my RSS subscription numbers and site traffic. I had expected the subscriber base to plummet to almost nothing, however as I checked it every week the numbers would either stay the same or slightly be higher. I do not have 10,000 subscribers to this blog, not yet at least, however I did see a slight increase in the subscriber base. I also expected to see a drop in daily site traffic, however that number stayed the same as well. So after 30 days of this blog being dormant, how did I manage to not lose anyone? Some may say that it doesn’t matter how many subscribers you have. However I feel that the more you have, the more chances you have of people linking back to your site and of posts that they think are beneficial to there readers. So to me the more subscribers, the better for your website and getting more backlinks for your search engine marketing efforts. I do not have one solid answer, I am not sure that there is just one answer, but this is what I think it takes to keep your readers.

1. Provide Solid Content That Is Educational And Helpful

By now everyone knows that content is king for any blog you write for or any website you are marketing. Posting a bunch of useless text will bore your readers, why should they come back? You talked about a movie you watched, the long walk with your dog, how you had a great time on Friday night, what you eat for dinner week in and week out. People come to the Spot to read about marketing there website, they do not care about other stuff I do in my life. When they see there feed reader or come to the site, they know 9 times out of 10 they will have a good read (or at least I hope so, lol ) and possibly learn something new to implement into there search engine marketing campaign. I try and make the readers think outside of the box and achieve a new level of marketing there websites. This is one reason why I think my subscriber base did not drop.

2. I Do Not Have Thousands Of Subscribers To Lose

This statement could also be a reason why I did not lose any readers, I do not have thousands of subscribers that would leave after 30 days. I know some people will not continue to subscribe to a blog that is not updated every day or that makes a few posts a month at different intervals.

3. People Forgot

I am sure people have a lot of blogs in there reader, some have hundreds and they simply forgot to remove SEMSpot from there list. How often do you go through and clean out your feed reader? I know I do not clean mine out very often, I leave blogs in there that might only post once a month. I am not being lazy, I love to read and learn about this industry. That one post a month might teach me something new, or I can take what I read and apply my own ideas to it to make my marketing efforts that much better.

4. I Got Lucky

This statement can be very true, maybe I did get lucky and that is why none of you subscribers left me.

I believe that a combination of the reason’s listed above are why I did not lose any subscribers. Either way I thank everyone for sticking around the Spot to see what new idea’s will come out next. I do not write this blog just for me, I do not do it for the money (you should notice there are no ads on this site and no paid reviews), I write this blog to inform you the readers. I try to inform you of new techniques or methods, take old methods and revise them, talk about news in the industry, methods you should and should not to do etc. You have stayed this long and I thank you. What reason’s do you think would contribute to not losing any of your readers?
This article was originally written on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog.

Yes I know that domain names are very cheap to buy, but if you are trying to see where you can save any type of money with your marketing efforts then check out register.com. This promotional offer will give you a free TLD for the first year, all that is required is your billing information. Even though you give them your billing information, they do not charge you for the first year. However after your year is up and it is time to renew, they will charge you the $35 to renew your domain name. Just before your domain name is about to expire, you can transfer your domain name to another service. All you need to do is call register.com and request the change and pay the domain fee for whatever company you are switching to. Here is the link to the current new year promotional offer by register.com

http://www.register.com/promo/acquisitions_8772090537.rcmx

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog.

 

 

So here I am thinking as to why Yahoo would come out and say “It is not your fault, but we have to terminate your account” to Shoemoney. There are several email responses listed on his site in regards to Yahoo Search Marketing - ‘We Know We suck’ in which Michelle tells Jeremy that his account has a 65% fraudulent charge rate, it is not your fault, but we will be terminating your account. What in the hell kind of statement is that? Michelle said that Yahoo could not tie discrete clicks to the fraudulent sign ups. You would think that a company the size of Yahoo would have there stuff in order. I guess I am wrong by thinking this. They cannot keep track of referring URL’s from Commission Junction, they cannot detect the use of that many fraudulent credit cards, and they would not assign him another ID to basically make him a new account. I was surprised by this and to top it all off last summer he was in Yahoo’s top 3 for monthly earnings.

Everyone in the industry knows who Shoemoney is, he has made a name for himself weather you think it is good or bad. So with the fame can come the hater’s, or the people who are either jealous or have a grudge against him. Who is to say you could not hire someone in another country to fraudulently sign up using stolen credit card information. There are forums you can go to and actually purchase these types of services I am sure. As bad as that sounds, it is true. Instead of attacking the person publicly and making a name for your self, they could have just out sourced this sabotage attack on his Yahoo Search Marketing account by signing up using the stolen credit cards. Imagine the damage you could do to so many other big account holders.

The truth is that Yahoo needs to get there shit straight, they know they are falling even further behind Google as to being the dominate search engine. With poor support for there top money makers, a tracking system that cannot fully track referring URL’s and shutting down an account even after they admitted it was not his fault. Wow, what kind of system are you people running over there? That many degrees in one building and you pull a stunt like this? Yahoo you need to get a bigger paddle, because you are falling downstream faster then your arms can move with stunts like this.

I could be wrong but who is to stop someone from “carding” on the Yahoo Network to get other accounts shut down like this. My answer is simple, nobody because Yahoo seems to not have full control over there own system and how it is run. What are your thoughts on that, do you think Shoemoney was a victim of his own success and someone sabotaged his account on purpose? I would love to hear what everyone else thinks.

As of today, SEMSpot is no longer nofollowing there comment links.  We are encouraging you to post on our blog and interact with what we have to offer for you on our site.  We will still monitor the comments to not let the spam get through.  This is just another way of saying thank you and giving you a link out from our site.  The debate of nofollow tags will go on for months to come, however I believe there sole purpose was to help combat against blog comment spam.  Now Google is using nofollow to combat against the problem of selling text links, which was an industry they themselves created with there PR on the toolbar.  Anyhow, that is another story among itself and I will not get into that at the moment.  Does your blog still use the nofollow tag on your comments?  If so, why do you still have it setup that way?

You are looking at a screenshot taken of Matt’s start menu. As you will notice there are not very many options really, just some of the important things that he would use on a daily basis. There are icons on his desktop that allow him to do his other daily tasks at Google as well as what it listed here.

Open Email - Pretty self explanatory, this opens his MSN email.
Messenger -This opens his MSN Messenger program.
Spell Checker - This auto spell checks www.semspot.com and checks for every time I screw up “there” and “their”.
Google Updates - This folder contains all of the upcoming Google updates that will be rolled out in the coming months.
Complaints - This folder is 301 redirect to the computers recycle bin.
PR Update Tools - Tools used by Matt to start the process of updating page rank for every website on the internet.
PR Killer! v1.05 - Program used to target individual websites and lower there PR with a click of a button and a captcha code. Version 1.06 should be out soon and will no longer use captcha to validate the user, it will now use a retina scanner to ensure it is in fact Matt Cutts. Some rumors are floating around in regards to someone using this program without permission and lowering the PR of some websites that did not deserve it earlier in the week. Those websites can be found on numerous forum and blog posts, you can check out these blogs for a short list, Andy Beard, Search Engine Land.
Paid Link Detector 2007 - This program searches through a website and with 20% accuracy can determine if a link is paid or not. It then saves the found data to the PR Update Tools folder. This program is still in beta testing so most links it finds on a page are all considered paid. Donna is running a paid link poll, so if you do in fact buy links right now, run over and take her quick poll at SEO-Scoop.
SERP’s Eraser 6.5 - Program used by Matt to penalize your website and at times even erase it completely from there system. Last I saw johnchow.com was bookmarked in this program.
Backlink Deleter 2.0.8 - Program is very touchy and almost has a mind of it’s own from what I have been told. It has the ability to find backlinks to your site, however it not only finds them but also deletes them from the Google database. This of course is still in beta and needs to be tweaked.
Shut Down Yahoo - This folder contained an all in one script that would lower all Yahoo pages PR to a 1, label the Yahoo Directory as a paid link farm, and send out 1 email to every yahoo.com email address advising them to switch to GMail.

I wish I could tell you what is behind the blurred links, but that is top secret Google applications and links to there future plans to take over the internet. Acrobat reader is self explanatory and I checked his Internet Explorer and his homepage was in fact set to SEMSPot.com!

Matt has the option to simply log off, or melt down…I did not test the melt down feature as I did not have the time to leave the building.

One a final note, all of the links shown on Matt’s start menu ALL used the NOFOLLOW tag. This post was meant has a joke, and Matt if you are indeed reading this then I hope you are at least laughing a little bit.

 

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

 

 

So you are launching a new website, or wiping the dust off an old one to re-launch it to the world. Before you get in to deep, you need to think about the link structure you want to put in place for this website. You looking at using sub domains to separate the different sections of your website and keep it organized? How about making sub directories and keeping your pages organized that way? Well lets take a look at the benefits of each first before you make your decision.

Sub-Domains: Using sub domains for your website would look something like this site.yourdomain.com, site2.yourdomain.com. They look short, clean and to the point. Well to the search engines they two different websites all together. It does not matter that the same domain name is being used, what makes the difference is what you are putting before your domain name, that being the sub domain. Using sub domains will not pass the link love around your main domain name as freely as using sub directories. Using sub domains however is a great SEO tactic if you have a large website.

You have your mainsite.com, and you want to add a blog and maybe a chatroom. So you would make blog.mainsite.com and chat.mainsite.com. Now keep in mind that the engines are treating them as different websites here, however when you start linking to other sections of your website, it will look like it is coming from 2 other authority websites. This is a great way to keep your brand recognition and at the same time have the ability to market several websites with each other because they are all under the same domain name. Marketing sub domains can take more time because you are essentially marketing several websites and not just one.

Sub Directories: Sub directories are nothing more then folders you have created to put your pages into, an example would be www.sitename.com/widgets. This is a great for smaller websites and also for people with a limited budget and time frame. I say time frame because no matter how many folders you create, they are all seen as one website by the search engines. So when you start your search engine marketing campaign you are only marketing one website and not multiple websites, like if you were using sub domains.

With sub directories all of your pages will be linked to the same domain and the link love will be passed around through your main domain name. When receiving backlinks, it will not matter what sub directory they link to, your main domain name will still get the “link credit”. Most common way of using sub directories is to have setup like the following.

www.sitename.com/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3.html

Or if you choose to use separate directories for each page then you could do the following

www.sitename.com/keyword1-keyword2

In the end use sub directories if you are running a smaller website and looking for quick link strength throughout your domain. If your site is thousands of pages deep, you have the time to invest in a good search engine marketing campaign and looking for brand awareness then use sub domains. Keep in mind that you will want to use keywords for either your sub domain or sub directory as to help with your optimization. What site structure are you currently running and why did you choose that route?

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

A thread over at digital point got me thinking on how possible this was.  Let’s say SEMSpot blog was to hold a contest in the coming weeks to see who could rank the highest on Google for the term “Google”.  Do any of you out there think you could actually rank number one without using photoshop or other editing softeware?  I bet nobody could even get on the first page of Google for that keyword, I mean wikipedia is currently ranked 8th for he term.  So lets see some results for that term and you will see 9 out of the top 10 are Google owned domains. 

I have seen other SEO contest which the contestants are not told the keyword until the day the contest starts and normally it is for some off the wall phrase.  Well here would be one heck of a contest to showcase people’s search engine marketing skills, weather white, black, gray, blue, purple, green hat it doesn’t matter.  Just show us the highest ranked site and tell us exactly what was done to get it the ranking for the term “Google”.  This contest would take a long time to complete, probably would have to give it a good 12+ months or so for the contestants to try and rank there site or sites.

If you look at the google wikipedia, you will see at the time of this post they have 3.2 million back links in googles index and they are only ranked #8.  That is one crazy number to try and compete with, we know as of right now your back links and anchor text play a big role in your SERP’s so imagine trying to break into the top 10 for the term google.  Is is definitely the extreme SEO challenge and I think impossible to break into the top 10 for.  But one could only wonder what it truly would take to do so…what do you think?

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.

So I will admit this quiz was probably easy for most of you reading this. For any of you who did not know most of these logos, then this was a success in showing you the simple power alone of a logo. When people see your logo, they do not just see colors and a design. They see the symbol for your name, your website, your company even. That goes a long way in any industry. These logos here are a symbol of the search marketing industry and blogging world. On the internet name recognition is great, but I feel logo recognition is greater. When someone sees a full name on a website, they might not know who that person is. If they see a logo or avatar they can relate to the website and the persons first name in most cases. They tell themselves, “oh yea I read that website” or “I have been to that site before, I remember that logo”. They might not remember your name at first, but I bet that logo or avatar stands out to them. Let’s get to the answers now and find out who all these logo’s belong to.

1. Andy Beard – When we see that big A anywhere, this is the man behind it. Andy has a niche marketing blog where he also talks about search engines, social media marketing and affiliate marketing.
   
2. Michael Gray - A.K.A Graywolf. Michael is a vocal figure in the search engine industry, giving great opinions on various marketing information. He runs Graywolf’s SEO Blog.
3. Aaron Chronister - A.K.A. TheMadHat
4. Jaan Kanellis - A.K.A. Incrediblehelp, this green faced avatar can be seen moderating WebPro World and is always there to help out no matter what the question is. He also runs a search marketing blog.
5. Barry Schwartz - Barry runs SEO Roundtable, Rustybrick.com, writes for Search Engine Land, Cartoon Barry, ok so the list goes on and on with barry but he is a vocal figure when it comes to covering search engine news.
6. Ralph Tegtmeier - A.K.A. Fantomaster. Ralph covers the world of blackhat seo and marketing like a blanket. His site not only talks about it, he offers products and services related to it as well. Great information from the “dark side”.
7. Jeremy Schoemaker - A.K.A. Shoemoney. The man who took the world of ring tones and helped put it on the map as far as online marketing goes. It was his adsense check that struck it big with the affiliate marketing world and since then everyone has tried to be like him.
8. Todd malicoat - A.K.A. Stuntdubl. Todd is known throughout the search engine marketing community, and continues to speak regularly at conferences on search marketing and optimization.
9. Sebastian - This one was a dead give away, this logo was what I was referring to in my post. Sorry Sebastian I do not know your last name, so no I didn’t get a perfect score either. Sebastian is a regular over at Sphinn and has made quite a name for himself there with the great stories and feedback in the world of online marketing.
10. Kevin Muldoon - Kevin is the owner of Blogging Tips where you can find great resources from there dozen or so writers on blogging, content writing, search marketing and more.

So there are your answers. How did you score on this quiz? You got them all correct? Well then how long did it take you to answer all 10?

Now you have some insight on who these people are and what they do for the industry.

Your logo is more then a bunch of pixel’s on a computer screen, it is the branding symbol that the internet knows you by. When you see certain logo’s and even avatars, I bet you know the person before reading one word. A few weeks back I was watching The Little Mermaid with my daughter, first thing that came to mind was not the little red crab character with the accent, it was actually sebastian over at Sebastian’s Pamphlets. Yesterday Sebastian wrote an article on getting the perfect logo for your blog. It was a great article that talked about the power a good logo can have. Think if it like a business card, you throw 50 business cards down on a table, you will want your’s to stand out from the rest. The same rings true for your logo, you want your logo to stand out from the rest so people will remember it. I have put together a quick quiz to see if you know these 10 logos from the SEM industry. These logo’s are used in almost everything these people do, branding that logo to there name for eternity. So give this quiz a try and see if you can answer all 10 of these by putting the persons name and blog with there logo. Don’t try and look them up, that takes away from the point of this post. I will have the answers for you tomorrow.

I know you should practice what you preach, so in my defense I do not have a great logo. I have tried myself to create one in the recent weeks and I can not come up with one I like. Biggest problem is I am not the greatest at graphic arts, so I will have to get one done soon because my little blue circle just isn’t doing it for me.

A recent thread over at Digital Point reveals Matt Cutts speaking openly about the Google pagerank bar and how he doesn’t expect to see it updated in the next few days or even the coming weeks. The industry was predicted a PR update in either late July or sometime in August. Here it is now in September and we have yet to see the little green bar update its “magic number”. My belief behind not seeing the update is due to the debate of paid links and what Google is trying to do to fight them. The thing about Pagerank is everyone uses the number as the standard when buying and trading links. If Google does away with the Pagerank bar, then that could put a damper in the link selling market since everyone would have to find another way to convey the quality of there website. As of now, going by the pagerank of a website was an easy way to determine if you wanted to purchase a link on that site. Google dug themselves into this hole and are struggling to get themselves back out of it. In the same article Matt talks about his take on paid directories.

I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:

- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of
the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
_
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”

So from what I read here having paid directories are perfectly fine, you just have to not accept every website that submits and pays you for a “review”. So we can buy these directory “reviews” from directories that are reputable and does not accept every submission. Isn’t that not still buying a link though? Seriously thing about that for one minute, you can submit your site to say BOTW, have it reviewed for $80 and if approved you now have your site listed. Is that not a paid link now? They do not use no follow tags or javascript links, it currently passes the link juice onto your site. Will they be forced to change this now with the paid directories and have all the links no follow, use javascripts links or some other measure to ensure that the juice is not passed onto your website? If that is the case, who in there right mind will bother to buy these directory reviews? We all know that they are not searched as nearly often as the search engines, when was the last time you went to a directory to search for something? Yea that is what I thought….NEVER! Google’s plan back fired and now they are just trying to use duct tape and patch things up until they can find a definitive answer. I believe they will be eliminated the little green bar here in the near future to help combat its use with buying text links from other websites.