Welcome to the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. If you started an SEO campaign with plans for it to peak just in time for Valentine's Day, you're probably biting your nails already as you watch the SERPs. Why not take a quick time out from all that worrying and read the article we're highlighting for you this week from eWeek. If you'd like to turn one physical server for your business into multiple virtual servers, you may want to read this first; it's not as easy as you may think.

We have a full slate of articles for you this week. On Wednesday we considered the effects of black hat SEO and negative SEO on a business and how you can fight back. It can be quite a challenge; fortunately, most black hat SEOs are too busy with their own sites to attack others, but every so often you may encounter this problem. On Tuesday we looked at the ways you can score your SEO efforts so you know whether they're helping you to achieve your goals. Finally, on Monday, we took a look at everyone's favorite embattled search engine ahead of its quarterly report and pondered how deep Yahoo's layoffs would have to be for the company to stay afloat and get its act together.

Those of you strapped for funds and just starting out will really appreciate the selection of tutorials we've highlighted for you this week on Tutorialized. Need to promote your web site on a shoestring budget? Want to get traffic to your brand new web site for free? Looking for a new way to get a reader's attention? We have it all here; why not check it out today?

Our Thread of the Week covers the domain name question -- well, one of them anyway. Is it best to put your keywords in your domain name? Does this trump other forms of SEO? This has inspired some pretty lively discussion and debate. By all means, check out the thread and share your experiences!

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, takes a look at what social bookmarking can and can't do. If you're hoping that it will help you increase your PageRank, you're in for a disappointment. Then again, should you be trying to do that anyway? Scroll down to the Spotlight for some strategy to ponder.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 1: Create a continuous build and integration environment
Learn how to implement a build management system that uses and extends your existing automation technologies. This tutorial shows, step-by-step, how to install and configure IBM Rational Build Forge to manage builds for Jakarta Tomcat from source code.
Learn more.

Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 2: Automate builds for a real-world Tomcat project
Learn how Rational Build Forge can extend a simple compile and package build process by adding customization and deployment capability. Go from a manual method to automating: checking for code changes; getting the latest source; compiling and packaging; customizing; copying to and restarting a deployment server; and sending e-mail notification that a new version is available.
Learn more.

Write REST services
This tutorial discusses the concepts of REST and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and shows how they apply to services. It also shows how to use Java technology to implement REST/APP-based services.
Learn more.

All White Papers.

SEO Index

Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics

Scoring SEO Efforts Realistically

Yahoo Layoffs: This Could Get Ugly

    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's scarier than a holographic Prince Charles? Wait...who's Prince Charles? Suicide bomber + staircase + long beard... What could possibly go wrong? Need to find nudity and beer, stat? Then Nudar, my friend, is God's gift to you... How come these cockroaches are so big, and fast, and green... Cockroach SMASH!!! Why are so many men getting breast implants? Here's a hint: Women don't like to share. Watch the video!

Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-30

Even if you don’t engage in black hat SEO tactics, you may be affected by them. Black hat SEO can be used to maintain a position at the top of the search engine results pages that isn’t really deserved based on the site’s content. Or it can be used to attack competitors, dragging down a rival’s site. It’s enough to make many white hat SEOs and site owners furious.

The good news is that most black hat SEOs are too busy with all of their own sites to directly attack their competitors’ sites. When asked about blackhat SEO tactics, dzine, a regular poster to the SEO Chat forums for the past two years, said that proper black hat SEOs “can’t be [asked] to (willingly) lower competitors’ ranks. They just churn out website after website.”

Don’t assume, though, that it’s never done simply because it’s difficult. There’s even a term for it: negative SEO. The topic was covered by Forbes a few months ago. The article quotes Matt Cutts' reaction to a specific form of negative SEO. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible,” he said. “But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”

Read Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics

Scoring SEO Efforts Realistically
by Akinola Akintomide -- 2008-01-29

What do you put in a progress report to an SEO customer? This article will look at what "not" to worry about too much and what to consider as indices of a good SEO program. It also gives an estimated time frame and a sketch of how to outline it to a customer (or to yourself if you are a DIY person).

Scoring your SEO efforts can help for a number of reasons. If you can "grade" yourself adequately when it comes to SEO efforts, you can charge on a performance basis. You can also know when to drop a project you are not succeeding in and honestly tell the customer to get someone else to work on the project.

Working as a solo SEO practitioner, or even as an SEO analyst in a large company, can be a confusing experience. Being so dependent on the SERPs makes search engine marketing seem vague and nebulous, and sometimes you feel like you are boxing with shadows. With web development or programming there are few external variables (except management and acts of God) and with SEO the search engines themselves are pretty much the external variable. Many things can throw off your scoring, so we will have a list of things to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to. First we will have what not to pay attention to.

Read Scoring SEO Efforts Realistically

Yahoo Layoffs: This Could Get Ugly
by Terri Wells -- 2008-01-28

Blogs and more respected publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal talk about rumors that battered search engine Yahoo is about to make massive layoffs. Some sources tout numbers as large as 2,500. Is there any truth behind these rumors? And what are the implications?

Let’s address the first question first. I don’t know anyone willing to give me inside information at Yahoo, regardless of whether I use names. But I do read a lot, and I do have a certain sense of history. I distinctly remember when Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, took the CEO slot away from Terry Semel in June of 2007. At that time he said he’d spend “the next 100 days or so focused on mapping out a strategic plan for the long-term success, working with our teams to put the right organization and the right people in place, and making any necessary changes.”

Those 100 days would have been up right around the time of Yahoo’s Q3 2007 earnings announcement. While Yahoo did deliver a solid quarter, it apparently wasn’t good enough for Wall Street. Net income for the quarter was $0.11 per share – exactly the same as the net income for the same period in 2006, when Terry Semel was still in power as CEO. It was as if Yahoo was simply delivering more of the same, even after the management changes (more than 17 executives at the vice president level or higher have left Yahoo since December 2006).

Read Yahoo Layoffs: This Could Get Ugly

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

SEO the magic of Meta Tags Generators
Meta tags generator is a tool -usually free- used to optimize your web page for search engine.
Read the tutorial.

Promoting your website on a low budget
Learn how to promote your site on a low budget!
Read the tutorial.

11 Ways to Get Free Traffic to your Brand New Site
Your new site is live. How do you get visitors?
Read the tutorial.

My Favorite Online Keyword Tools List
Here I have collected some of my favorite online webmaster tools.
Read the tutorial.

Bad Publicity is better than No Publicity
Getting a readers attention can be a tough task try this approach.
Read the tutorial.

How important is a domain name in SEO?

I'm wondering how powerful a domain name is in SEO -- I'm guessing very.

For example, I search "Boston Real Estate," and get the following results:

1) (domain withheld) (extremely Popular site)

2) (domain withheld) (ERA's website... kinda nice)

3) (domain withheld) (Decent website)

4) (domain withheld) (ok website, has a million links on it)

5) (domain withheld) (this guy just came out of nowhere --- I just noticed now..... I've been monitoring "Boston Real Estate" results... and this came out of nowhere today...................... it's stuffed with keywords

Could a domain name like "AnthJames" rise to #1? ... or will domain names with Boston Real Estate in it, always be superior?

Thanks!

Keywords in the domain name and URL is just one element of SEO. Its effect on rankings is debatable. IMO it won't make or break your campaign, there are far more important factors when it comes to rankings - especially for competitive keywords.

I suppose if you had a URL like www. eatingdisordersforpeoplewithhorribleearinfections. com, I suppose you would rank well for the term "Eating disorders for people with horrible ear infections", only because the competition is extremely low.

Focus on more important factors such as content, links and quality.

In our experience if all else is equal in a race between two competitive sites then the site with the keyworded domain will be difficult to beat for #1.

It definitely is an advantage, as shown in your search and probably most property + location searches you try, being as property is quite a competitive area, good SEO awareness will be needed to make an impression. We are currently working with a property company who are named partner + partner and in the property + location searches, the top 5 sites are all some variant of www.property+location.various

Obviously these are not the only searches people make in this marketplace that you should target, but our stats show it's approx 30-40% of the searches, so if you can get the keyworded domain, I definitely would.

Also as mentioned good keyworded directory and page structure is another big factor, the whole site should be designed from the ground upwards with SEO in mind, because it is such a competitive marketplace, you will be up against other sites built like this, and always struggle if you don't think about it at the start.

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

Social Bookmarking and PR

There are a number of things you can do with social bookmarking and other social web sites to help promote your site. You can increase awareness of your site among the communities in which you post your bookmarks. By extension, you can increase the traffic to your site when web surfers get intrigued enough to follow your links. You can even, just possibly, encourage the major search engines to index your web site a little more quickly, since they seem to like visiting and spidering social web sites on a regular basis.

What you probably won't do through social bookmarking, however, is increase your site's PageRank. As Gary Beal (also known as GaryTheScubaGuy) explained in the forums recently, "PR is historical data based on many factors (back links, trust, etc.)." It's also worth noting that a number of social bookmarking sites use the nofollow tag - and since one factor involved in PR is backlinks, those sites won't help your PR at all.

By all means, though, if you want to give your position in the SERPs at least a temporary boost, you might be able to achieve it with social bookmarking. Beal recommends that you rotate the pages you bookmark every 45 days. He notes that MSN and Yahoo will reflect those bookmarks in about 30-40 days, while Google takes closer to two months.

Some web site owners are concerned about their PageRank, but really shouldn't be. PageRank does not affect your position in the SERPs and does not increase your organic traffic. Focus on optimizing for the keywords for which you wish to rank well. And if you do choose to engage in social bookmarking, don't do it with the idea that it will increase your PR. It will give you other benefits, however, and is worth doing for those reasons.

Read the thread on this topic

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