Hello again! And welcome back to another great week of SEO. We hope those of you who took off for Labor Day had an excellent vacation, and feel refreshed and ready to tackle SERP climbing.

While we were able to cover only two articles last week because we had to prepare for Ernesto, we promised to bring you that article this week. As it turns out, thanks to the holiday, we ran only two articles this week, so there's still a total of three articles to be covered in this issue of the newsletter.

Two of these articles are two parts of the same series, written by Jennifer Cassidy. The first part, which ran August 30th, introduces buzz marketing, an old-fashioned form of advertising that is gaining new life on the Internet. The second part, which ran September 6th, talks about creating buzz in ways that work for you. In the third article we published since the last newsletter, we discussed the fallout from AOL's release of search information.

Our Thread of the Week shows that, even with a simple answer to a simple question, there is still a little room for disagreement. I guess it just goes to show that SEO is as much an art as a science.

Our SEO Spotlight, just for readers of this newsletter, discusses dealing with bots. Sure, you want the search engine spiders to visit your website, but there are some rogue bots out there that will steal your content -- and even with the legitimate bots, you want them to index only certain parts of your site. Check out the Spotlight for help with this issue.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

SEO Index

Creating the Internet Buzz

Serving as a Bad Example: AOL Privacy Debacle

Understanding the Buzz About Buzz Marketing

 News You Can't Use

 SEO Thread of The Week

 SEO Chat News Spotlight

Introducing Tech News by Developer Shed. News you can't use.

It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's news you can't use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions:

	Where is it worth a lawsuit to teach guitar? Would you spin a roulette wheel at an ATM? What's worse than getting a pink slip? Why should you think twice before selling your old cell phone? How is our Geek of the Week making us feel more secure online? Watch the video!

Creating the Internet Buzz
by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy -- 2006-09-06

In the previous article I gave you an overview of what buzz marketing is and how it has been an important part of marketing since the moment that humans could communicate. In this article, I want to give you specific ways you can promote buzz marketing for your product, service, or website.

Branding

I want to talk about branding first and foremost, because successful buzz marketing goes hand in hand with branding. Branding is not about getting your target market or audience to choose you over the competition, but it is rather about getting your prospects to see you as the only choice that provides a solution to their specific problem. You do this by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact.

Your brand resides within the hearts and minds of customers, clients, and prospects. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot. The objectives that a good brand will achieve include delivering your message clearly, confirming your credibility, connecting your target prospects emotionally, motivating the buyer, concreting user loyalty, and getting the public involved.

Read Creating the Internet Buzz

Serving as a Bad Example: AOL Privacy Debacle
by Terri Wells -- 2006-09-05

AOL’s release in late July of data covering three months’ worth of user searches has sparked a wide range of reactions. In some ways, the reactions have revealed far more than the raw data itself. They have pointed out the ways in which the current handling of search engine data does not serve all those who wish to use it – and the delicate balancing act that must be maintained between equally commendable yet mutually exclusive needs.

As always, let’s start with the facts. In late July, AOL posted data to an AOL research site. This data covered searches conducted in March, April, and May of 2006. It covered 20 million uncensored queries from about 658,000 users, or the equivalent of between one and two percent of the searches conducted through AOL during May. The users were chosen randomly and rendered anonymous by the simple matter of associating an ID number with the searches instead of a name.

If you think that’s not enough to keep a searcher’s identity secret, you’re right, as you’ll see in a minute. For now, the point I want you to understand is that, at the time, AOL did this intentionally, apparently to get recognition from the research community by putting up a data set that can be regularly cited in research papers. It was not an accident.

Read Serving as a Bad Example: AOL Privacy Debacle

Understanding the Buzz About Buzz Marketing
by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy -- 2006-08-30

It may sound like a new buzzword, but it's really one of the oldest forms of marketing. It doesn't matter whether you're online or offline, you should never overlook buzz marketing. This article, the first of two parts, explains what buzz marketing is, helps you understand how and why it's generated, and warns you about the possible hazards.

By now you’ve probably realized there are many forms of marketing available to business owners; both online and off-line. Direct mail, pay-per-click, link trades, SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing), viral marketing and other terms I’m sure you’ve run across in your search to market your product or your online business.

Because this article is online, I’m going to assume that the businesses looking for help in this area which are reading this article are mostly online businesses. So it would make more sense to have online marketing for online businesses, and offline marketing for offline businesses. But it doesn’t always work out to be this way, nor should it have to be limited in this fashion, either.

Read Understanding the Buzz About Buzz Marketing

CSS or not?

Hello,

I'm new to Google optimization. I'm planning to get my site optimized for the keyword "pocket pc" [URL removed] which I started a week ago.

I use joomla and the template uses CSS styles, is this good for Google?

In sitemap, I'm planning to include links to all news content items. In robots, I'm planning to disallow the forums sections. Is it right? I think forums may contain off-topic discussions and I was very disappointed to see my old site where forum was allowed and all my site got optimized for was the user names.

Please help me out. Thanks a million in advance.

CSS based sites definitely have no issue with Google. Many people claim they get a boost in rankings by changing to CSS layouts from table layouts. Personally, I think they are smoking too much dope. Google doesn't really care how you code your site so long as they can read it and tell what is what. I think there are a lot of great reasons for coding using XHTML and CSS, but current day SEO is not really one of them. It may help in the future, but not today - and it certainly won't hurt.

Anything that makes the spiders job easier has got to be beneficial in my book. Therefore, separating content and style has got to be a good thing. It may not have a massive weight in terms of improving SERPS at present but it would not do any harm and, Google are more likely to alter their algorithms in the future in favor of web standard websites.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Carty
Hello,
In robots, I'm planning to disallow the forums sections. Is it right? I think forums may contain off-topic discussions and I was very disappointed to see my old site where forum was allowed and all my site got optimized is for the user names.

Don't do that! Forums=content=clicks=money

Quote:
Originally Posted by JayHands
Anything that makes the spiders job easier has got to be beneficial in my book. Therefore, separating content and style has got to be a good thing.

I don't get this. If your page is cached then the spider didn't have a problem with it. There is no 'easier' only yes or no, 1 or 0, true or false.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

Good Bot, Bad Bot: Making Them Behave

At the Search Engine Strategies conference held last month in San Jose, CA, one of the panels covered issues surrounding the behavior of bots. Some bots we clearly want to encourage, like the ones that visit us from Google and Yahoo to index our sites for those search engines. But even there, we'd like to make them behave in certain ways.

Jon Click of search engine Become.com raised an important point. "Robots are great at finding links and content. But they are dumb. They can't process cookies or JavaScript." How do you help them? Use pure hyperlinks for your navigation, with no JavaScript or Flash involved. You also need to be careful with dynamic URLs. And if you have content that you don't want indexed, use robots.txt files.

That's easy enough, but what do you do when bots you don't want to see are indexing your site? If you have ever wondered how lots of sites have suddenly managed to duplicate your site's original content, that's often how it's done; rogue bots are sent out to steal it. This is a major issue, because search engines often penalize duplicate content, and they have no way of knowing that you're the originator.

You can block these bad bots by allowing only bots that you know are good to visit your site, but how do you tell the difference? Good bots, according to Bill Atchison of Crawlwall.com, share four characteristics: they obey Internet standards (i.e. robots.txt); they don't crawl your server extremely fast; they return regularly to get fresh content; and importantly, your site receives traffic as a result of their visits.

Bad bots, on the other hand, abuse your "hospitality." They ignore robots.txt (and may even use it in reverse to find desirable content to steal). They pretend to be from major search engines, but aren't. They may either crawl very fast (fast enough to crash your servers) to get as much content as possible before getting caught, or very slow to avoid detection. They return more often than search engine spiders, to steal your content and get it indexed before you do. They crawl from lots of different IP addresses to avoid getting caught.

As mentioned, a good way to block bad bots is by using an "opt-in" approach, so that you allow only bots you know are good into your site. You do run the risk of blocking some bots that provide actual quality traffic, but Atchison believes the benefits far outweigh the risk.

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