It's that time of the week again. Time for the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. We'll start you off with the article we're highlighting from eWeek. If you're struggling with the challenges of growing your company, we think you'll find some helpful insight here. It’s an excerpt from a book titled “The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World.”

We only have two new articles for you this week due to Monday's holiday in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On Wednesday we took a look at a new entrant into the SEO and SEM business: Wal-Mart. Well, more specifically, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart's bulk shopping outlet, now offers SEO and SEM services. But don't panic; this might actually HELP your business. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, we discussed some of the more common SEO mistakes; this knowledge should serve you well in your climb to the top of the SERPs.

You'll find both the theoretical and the practical in the SEO-related tutorials we've highlighted for you this week from Tutorialized. You can learn what practices are considered "white hat" vs. "black hat" SEO, check through a complete list of keyword suggestion tools, or if you're still pretty new to all this you might want to read a general introduction to SEO. It's all here, waiting for you, so why not check them out today?

Our Thread of the Week just might spook anyone doing serious SEO work on their site who hasn't considered the SEO effects of a hacker attack. If no visitors can get through to your site, how will the Googlebot get through to index it? And if the Googlebot can't get through, you just might be removed from Google's index. What should you do? Scroll down to find out.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, highlights a post from Google's Webmaster Central blog. We don't do this very often, but this post was particularly informative; it covers frequently asked questions about Sitemaps. If there's something you wanted to know about them, but didn't know where to find the information, scroll down to the Spotlight and you just might find it.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

Kick-start your Java apps
To create, test, and deploy a Web-based application or Web service rapidly, you need a proven relational database, a standards-compliant Web application server, and a flexible IDE. Ideally, all these software packages are production-tested, simple to obtain, easy to use, and well integrated with one another. This tutorial shows you how to use IBM-backed open source and free software to kick-start your Java Web-based application development. You'll learn exactly where to download such components, install them, and get them working for you today.
Learn more.

Kick-start your Java apps, Part 2
The combination of Eclipse, DB2 Express-C 9.5, and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition 2.0 -- all free to download, use, and deploy -- is an excellent from-prototype-to-production suite for all of your Java and Java enterprise development needs. What might not be obvious is the relative ease with which you can use these proven tools to create, test, and deploy cutting-edge, lightweight applications as well. This tutorial guides you through the development of a small human-resources application, first using conventional JavaServer Pages (JSP) based technology, and then migrating it to a highly interactive solution using Ajax.
Learn more.

The IBM DB2 Detective Game
Here's a fun way to learn about DB2! Learn or teach the basics of DB2 and relational database with an interactive game called The DB2 Detective Game. The game teaches relational database concepts and shows how technology can be applied to solving real-life problems (the game's theme is a crime investigation). This tutorial has been updated for DB2 9.
Learn more.

All White Papers.

SEO Index

Wal-Mart Offers SEO and SEM Services

Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes!

Building Linkbait? Do Your Homework

    SEO on Tutorialized

 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:

What do Kathy Lee Gifford and this Chinese theme park have in common? Which do you think is more frightening: The Al Jazeera Children's Network or the Robotic Museum they helped build? How bad does it hurt to get shot? In the testicle...This guy can tell you. Bill Gates + $750,000,000 + Gigantic life-size Gundam + Will he do it? Will Voltron get served by the Robeast? Only one way to find out Watch the video!

Wal-Mart Offers SEO and SEM Services
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-23

It sounds like an April Fools’ Day joke, but SEO-focused journalists first got wind of it around Christmas. Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart’s brand for bulk sales to small businesses, now offers search marketing services. What does this mean for SEO and SEM consultants?

SEO journalists are writing about this all over the web, from Search Engine Journal to Search Engine Land. Aaron Wall links to it and threatens to fight back by selling Chinese-made US flags for three cents each. Tameka Kee of Media Post Publications thinks it might be a sign that SEM has moved one step closer to becoming a commodity. And at least one commenter with a name that is somewhat familiar to members of our SEO Chat forum wondered about their return policy.

On the face of it, the idea of Wal-Mart even entering this kind of business seems ridiculous. SEO and SEM are highly specialized fields; to do it right, an SEO consultant needs to spend a serious amount of time with each client to understand the needs of their business. Once they get a feel for the company and its field, the next step is keyword research; then there’s planning the ad campaign, especially if pay-per-click marketing is a factor, going over the web site with a fine tooth comb to hit all the on-page optimization, building links for off-page optimization…the list goes on and on.

Read Wal-Mart Offers SEO and SEM Services

Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes!
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-22

Everyone learning a new skill makes mistakes. In some fields, the necessary skills are tricky enough to keep up with that even old hands will make mistakes. Search engine optimization is no exception to this rule. Avoiding the most obvious mistakes can help put you ahead of the game.

You probably know that Google turns up more than 23 million hits if you search for SEO. It also turns up 174,000 for the phrase “SEO mistakes” (without quotation marks). So if, while you’re reading my article, you discover that you’re doing something you shouldn’t be, take heart – you’re in good company. And it isn’t too late to make amends.

If you really are just starting to do SEO, by reading this article you can learn from the mistakes of others. And if you’ve been doing SEO for a while but never made these mistakes, don’t feel excluded; there’s no way I could cover every possible mistake in a single article. Indeed, judging from the links I turned up, I could fill a whole book with SEO mistakes to avoid. At least a couple of chapters could be devoted to blogging mistakes, which I don’t plan to cover in any great detail here.

Read Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes!

Building Linkbait? Do Your Homework
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-16

So you haven’t been happy with the results of your conventional link building or link trading campaign. Or maybe your web site is very new and you want to be discovered quickly. You think linkbait will get you there the easy way. Think again.

There is nothing “easy” about linkbait. For readers new to search engine optimization who haven’t heard the word before, linkbait is content that is interesting enough to inspire many people to link to it and even send links to their friends. Indeed, it is designed with the idea of increasing traffic to a particular web site.

There are several parts to a good campaign that uses linkbait. Every one of them requires a certain amount of work, whether it’s research or writing or programming or what have you. If you’re really clever and creative, you can speed up the process a little. If you’re not afraid to be controversial, and can rant creatively without alienating too many people, you might even be able to speed it up a lot.

Read Building Linkbait? Do Your Homework

Tutorialized has a dedicated SEO section for Search Optimization, Website Marketing, and many other SEO/SEM related tutorials.

IPB SEO
Three important, almost mandate tips on invisionfree power board search engine optimization.
Read the tutorial.

Save your keywords - Stop using open stat counters
Learn how using open stat counters can affect your website's search engine rankings.
Read the tutorial.

White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO
Which is which? Are you a bad, or good search engine optimizer?
Read the tutorial.

General SEO Introduction for Beginners
A light and easy read on the topic of search engine optimization.
Read the tutorial.

A complete list of keyword suggestion tools
Preparing your web pages with meta tags for effective search engine submission and ranking.
Read the tutorial.

Hacker attack

Hello everybody,

On Monday my website was apparently hacked, somebody requested 15,000 time in the space of a few minutes a file that never existed on my site, the hosting company got suspicious and suspended the site for about 20 hours.

Now this morning I realized I lost a N.2 position I had on google for a few months now (was in the top 5 for over 2 years) and nowhere to be seen in the top 100.

Since googlebot visits the site every day my guess is that it came while the site was down, and since it could not find anything now it took this page out of the index.

Now the site is back up and working, should I expect to get back to my position n.2 soon, or will it take a long time? Has anybody else had a similar experience?

Should I do something or just hope for the best? Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.

Assuming this was the cause, it should come back as soon as Google re-crawls the page in question. There's never any guarantees that it'll return to the #2 slot, but it should be more or less there.

Google has been playing around with the SERPs quite a bit this month, so your drop may also be related to this.

I'd also start looking around for a better hosting company.

Totally agree, any hosting company worth its salt should be able to deal with a Denial Of Service attack without your site being affected.

Certainly you don't want a hosting company that takes you offline for 20 hours if someone hits you with only 15,000 requests!

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

Google Publishes Sitemap FAQ

If you've ever wondered how Sitemaps can help you with Google - or why they're not helping you as much as you think they should - you'll want to check out the January 15th post of Google's Webmaster Central blog. It is entirely devoted to frequently asked questions about Sitemaps. I'll touch on a few of the important ones here, but you should really check it out for yourself.

You may already know some of the answers, but didn't particularly want to hear them. For example, submitting a Sitemap to Google helps you make sure that the search engine knows about your site's URLs, but it doesn't guarantee that they will be crawled or indexed. "We use information from Sitemaps to augment our usual crawl and discovery processes," the blog entry explains. Submitting a Sitemap does help you in other ways though; for example, if your Sitemap is submitted via Webmaster Tools, Google will show you certain stats, including how many of your Sitemap's URLs are indexed.

Sitemaps won't help you rank better, alas. If it does help you to get more of your site crawled, though, it can help you by leading to "increased presence and visibility of your site in our index," the blog entry explains. The FAQ also dispels some myths: a Sitemap can hurt you "Only if it falls on you from a great height." Google never penalizes for submitting a Sitemap. When you think about it, it really wouldn't make sense; Google is trying to encourage site owners to submit Sitemaps, so why would they penalize for it?

There is also some interesting news in the FAQ. It used to be true that you had to put your Sitemap at the root of your site. But Google has made some changes that will let you put your Sitemap "just about anywhere" as long as you verify two things in your Webmaster Tools account: the site on which your Sitemap is located, and the site(s) whose URLs are referenced in the Sitemap. It's nice to have that extra flexibility.

The entry is educational not just for the post itself, but for the comments. For example, there are plenty of tools for automatically generating Sitemaps -- but did you know that Google itself has one? This point is mentioned in the comments, and a link to the tool is included. The FAQ may not answer all of your questions about Sitemaps, but it is an excellent start.

Read the thread on this topic

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