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Oct 12, 2007 |
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There's more than the usual reasons to be excited about getting this week's SEO Chat newsletter in your inbox. Tech News is back! That's right, our irreverent take on some of the strangest technology-related news stories is appearing on our web sites once again, as sassy and in-your-face as ever. Be sure to check it out today! While you're at it, you might want to read the latest article we're highlighting from eWeek. If you purchase managed services, you might find it interesting; if you're in the managed services sector, or you know someone who is, you won't want to miss it. It considers the partnership between Level Platforms and Do IT Smarter in light of Dell's recent acquisition of SilverBack. The times are changing, and so are websites, as you'll learn when you read this week's SEO Chat articles. On Wednesday we reviewed Yahoo's Search Assist to see what all the fuss was about. While it isn't the kind of drastic change Ask made not too long ago, it does show that Yahoo is trying to think about what will help its users most. On Monday and Tuesday, we ran a two-part article that looked at eBay's overhaul. While eBay isn't technically a search engine, its site revolves around its search technology -- and the online auction giant is hoping the improvements will plug the steady trickle of buyers and sellers finding other sites on which to do business. We're back to basics with the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting this week from Tutorialized. We have the best 19 tips for search engine friendly web design, an SEO dictionary, a great explanation of how to do mod_rewrite to make your URLs friendly to the search engines, and more! We know you'll want to check out these and many other tutorials on Tutorialized. Our Thread of the Week deals with the question of paid links. Can you really buy your way to a high ranking in Google? No...but that doesn't stop people from trying. And some have even claimed a certain amount of success. The key, it seems, is to keep Google from finding out that they're paid links...and with Google's algorithm getting better all the time, that's easier said than done. Feel free to stop by the thread and share your experiences. Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, approaches the issue of SEO and relevance. Have you ever done all the SEO you can for your website and noticed that your competitors were still beating you in the SERPs? And worse, you couldn't quite figure out why? The answer just might be staring you in the face. Scroll down to find out. Thanks again for reading.Until next time,
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How To Appeal To Both Humans And Spiders: Best Practices For Writing
Website Copy
How Savvy Technology Marketers Can Improve Results with an Intelligent
Content Strategy
Business Technology Marketing Benchmarks 2007-2008 PDF Slides SEO Index |
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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:
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eBay
Opens Social Networks When you’re the biggest online auction house around and you’re starting to feel the competition breathing down your neck, what do you do? If you’re eBay, you borrow a bunch of ideas from your competition and try to make them your own. In this second article of a two-part series looking at eBay’s changes, we’ll see what else the site has done for its customers, both buyers and sellers. Last time we talked about what eBay did to make searching for something to bid on more like window shopping. We mentioned the “wall of images” approach, and how hovering over a single image brought up more detailed information about the item. We talked about eBay’s new Bid Assistant, designed to help buyers win the items they want more often without having to closely monitor the site. We even mentioned the new one-click bidding approach, to help cut down on nail biting when an auction is in its final 15 minutes. Greg Sandoval of CNet found some other searches and search results
that showed eBay is still in the process of experimenting. Sandoval
tried putting in the search term “Nikon D40” and saw
a page different from the “wall of images” I’d
seen for my searches. Instead, he saw a page with two photos of
different models of the camera. “The pictures were much larger
than the thumbnails typically found in eBay’s results,”
Sandoval noted. “Below the photos were ratings of the cameras,
links to customer reviews, and the range of prices.” |
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eBay Overhauls Site, Search eBay is still the top site online when it comes to auctions, but it is starting to feel the heat. In an effort to recapture some of its old magic and make the site more useful to its visitors, eBay is performing its biggest overhaul in years. In this article and the next, we’ll take a look at the changes. Is eBay an auction house or a tremendous shopping search engine? A few years ago I was somewhat active on the site as a buyer and a seller. Back then people were just starting to discover that they could make a full-time living selling stuff on eBay. It was the world’s biggest yard sale, and one of the first, most glorious examples of something that could only be done on the web. eBay was born 12 years ago – before Amazon, before Google,
and before many retailers had web sites. Now visitors can go to
Amazon and order just about anything without having to wait for
an auction to finish. Many items can be purchased new or used, with
substantial savings on used items. Users of search engines such
as Google and Yahoo – and that includes just about everybody
who gets online – expect an engine that “knows”
what they’re looking for and quickly delivers relevant results.
Sadly, in these areas, the online auction giant is showing its age. |
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Tutorialized has a dedicated SEO section for Search Optimization, Website Marketing, and many other SEO/SEM related tutorials. |
Submit Your Tutorial Today! |
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Macronimous- Practical web design SEO Techniques :: Download
Free Complete SEO E-Book Best 10 Tips for Search Engine Friendly Web Design - OWES SEO Dictionary Apache's Mod_Rewrite URLs for Search Engines Introduction to (Search Engine Crawlers) |
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Google frowns on paid links; they mess up the search engine's ability to judge what is truly relevant. So it will
not count such links in its algorithm...when it can spot them. This is the issue at the heart of this week's
Thread of the Week. Be sure to stop by and join the conversation.
Are Paid Blog Links Ok...? Do they help? justinx34 I was very interested in whether paid blog postings with back links help PR and can you buy too many? jwatsonl First, if you are doing the paid blogging in an attempt to get PR, you are going about SEO the wrong way. There are hundreds of posts in the forums about how worthless PR is. Some paid blogging links could be helpful in your rankings BUT, with the latest paid link issues with Google, I would be careful and very selective. There are better and more efficient ways to spend your money than on paid reviews. Some paid reviews though, johnchow .com might well be worth the money as far as a traffic point of view goes. Can you buy too many? I don't think so. The links might not count a lot and if you are doing it for the purpose of ranking (read above). If you are doing it for traffic, the more the better right? Noj Yes paid blog posts help, and there are the hardest paid links for the search engines to spot. Due to nature of blogs you see them give an initial boost, then fade as archived and then increase in usefulness as the archive ages. As far as too many yes, sudden peaks in linking can harm rankings if deemed artificial. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed.
Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. |
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Are You Trying to Fake Relevance? It's not unusual for those new to SEO to come to our forums for advice. One of the questions these newcomers tend to ask goes something like this: "My competitors are beating me in the SERPs now when they weren't before. Their PR isn't even as high as mine. They don't seem to have as many backlinks as I do. And I've been knocking myself out to SEO my site. What's going on? How can they be beating me?" If ever there was a time to trot out the old cliché about the forest and the trees, this is it. Longtime SEOs can fall prey to it too: you optimize every page for your keywords, get all the backlinks you can, get yourself listed in blogrolls if that's appropriate, and you're still not moving. What these SEOs are forgetting is that Google measures all this stuff merely as indicators of what it is really looking for - and sometimes the search engine knows when it strikes gold even without all the indicators. Search engines, and those who use them, are looking for sites that are relevant to their search. All the PR and all the links in the world won't mean a thing if you aren't as relevant to your chosen topic as your competitors. Or, to use a metaphor: would you rather visit a museum with someone who is sincerely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about its contents, or someone who is merely feigning interest? This kind of thing can't be faked. It can only be built up slowly over time. And over time, as others discover the site, it gets the links it deserves for being a good resource. Since these links come naturally, there's no reason for them to trigger any "filters" from Google. As jraymond, one of our forum members explained it when answering a new member's questions on this topic, "I know you have been focusing on SEO, but I think you need to spend more time thinking about content and your users than SEO. It will help you more in the long run." Indeed - and if you're building a web site for the long run, this is how you should be thinking. Relevance is more rewarding - and more durable -- when it's natural. Read the SEO Chat forum thread on this topic. |
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