Welcome to February -- and the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. By now you're probably looking forward to spring, so here's something that might help encourage a little more green in the future: the item we're highlighting this week from eWeek. It's a 21-minute podcast in which Drew Clark, co-founder of IBM's Venture Capital Group, explains how the carbon trading market works and the IBM-developed SOA technology behind it. If you've ever wondered how carbon trading credits work, you're in for an education.

We have a good assortment of articles for you this week. We know you were all buzzing about Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo, so we kicked off the week with a discussion of its implications and wondered whether Yahoo would take the deal. Tuesday found us looking at landing pages and the key element your landing pages need to be the most effective. On Wednesday we discussed SEO mistakes so you can avoid making them and costing yourself time, traffic, and sales.

We're highlighting an eclectic mix of tutorials for you this week on Tutorialized. You'll learn the basics of building a Google Sitemap, how to significantly improve your Alexa site ranking, and more! Why not stop by Tutorialized and check out these and other great SEO-related tutorials today?

Our Thread of the Week takes another look at the domain name question. If domain names don't have an effect on your position in the SERPs, wonders our original poster, why was he able to get such a high ranking with a pair of one-sentence web sites? Scroll down to see the enlightening answer to that question, and be sure to check out the thread itself to share your experiences!

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, considers the meta description tag. Believe it or not, this tag still matters, though probably not in the way you think (or hope) it does. What are you missing out on if you neglect this tag or use it poorly? Scroll down and read the Spotlight to find out.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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LPI exam 301 prep, Topic 302: Installation and development
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All White Papers.

SEO Index

Costly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

Focus is Key for Landing Pages

Microsoft Makes $44.6 Billion Bid for Yahoo!

    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:

Why did Mr. T run over Mexican Superman? No...not to get to the other side. What's eight foot tall, considered a weapon, and is full of meat? And no, it's not Chuck Norris. Is Evel Knievel flipping in his grave over this monster bike? Probably not, but I bet he is doing some nifty coffin wheelies.... How do you find the love of your life if that love just so happened to rob a bank? The website Conjugalvisit, that's how. Is Papa Smurf taking Viagra? Judging by this picture of 400 Smurfs, I'd say yes. Yes he is. Watch the video!

Costly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-06

I recently wrote an article about the various SEO-related mistakes that can cost your site its position in the search engine results pages (SERPs), to say nothing of traffic and conversions. Frankly, there are enough of these to fill a book, so I’m writing a second article on the subject.

I’m going to start by talking about one version of site accessibility. Kalena Jordan, writing for Site Pro News, mentioned two scenarios that I sincerely hope we don’t see too often today. The first one involves taking a site offline for maintenance. It’s true that eBay does regular maintenance on its site every week, on Friday, but that fact is very well-known to the regulars and easy to find out if you’re new. Typically, during a regular maintenance period, eBay’s features are intermittently unavailable or slow. eBay always announces scheduled maintenance well in advance and states how long it will last.

eBay does not put up a “back in an hour sign” on its site while it performs its maintenance, and neither should you. Not only will users get annoyed, but what happens if a search engine spiders your site during this time? It won’t recognize the sign; it will simply assume your other pages have expired and remove them from the index. If that makes you shiver, it should. All of your hard SEO work to get to the top of the rankings will go down the drain until the search engine spiders come back. Consider setting up a mirror site for maintenance periods.

Read Costly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

Focus is Key for Landing Pages
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-05

If you set yourself up properly, when users click through an ad for your product or company on another site, they end up on a landing page. This is your sales pitch to convince them to convert. You’ll find plenty of tips for building, testing, and improving your landing pages, but it all boils down to one word: focus.

Time and again I encountered this point in my research. Lisa Barone made the point in a blog for Bruce Clay. She was covering a MarketingSherpa seminar about its updated book on landing pages. The sentence that leaped out at me was “What makes a landing page effective is its focus around a single topic.” She wrote that in the context of fine-tuning the eye flow for a landing page, but it’s really what brings a landing page together: everything on the page focuses on one topic, with one goal: convincing your visitors to convert.

Hard selling belongs on your landing page, but it’s a special kind of hard sell. You must take your visitors by the hand and guide them to what you want them to do. Matthew Roche shared some insight as to the necessity for this in a February 2007 post in his blog. In the days before the web, consumers simply read and/or watched ads, which marketers could at least imagine led smoothly and directly to a sale. But it’s quite rare for a person to “go online, type a URL into a browser, visit that single site, accomplish a task, and leave the web completely,” Roche notes. “More often, we search, we dither, we explore, we lose track, we gain focus, we complete an action, we get bored, we get called for dinner, we log off.”

Read Focus is Key for Landing Pages

Microsoft Makes $44.6 Billion Bid for Yahoo!
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-04

The bid made jaws drop everywhere. Still, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given Microsoft’s 18-month-long on-again, off-again attempts to partner with or acquire Yahoo. It leaves the rest of us asking two questions: what are the deal’s implications? And will it actually go through?

My first reaction when I heard the buzz about the deal was that there hasn’t been this much fuss about a potential merger since AOL acquired Time Warner for $182 billion back in 2001. Certainly, there hasn’t been another Internet deal that big since then. It would be the biggest deal in Microsoft’s history, dwarfing the previous record-holding $6 billion purchase of aQuantive.

That’s all the more reason we should take a close look at this deal. You know every Yahooligan is doing so. Some of them are shuddering. Others, according to a comment on a Valley Wag story, are vowing to stay and work to make any cultural changes to the organization “as painful as possible for the new Microsoft directors and division Veeps, short of insurrection.” I’ll have more on that point of view in a bit.

Read Microsoft Makes $44.6 Billion Bid for Yahoo!

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

Google Sitemaps basics
This tutorial will show You how to read and make simple, static Google Sitemaps.
Read the tutorial.

Become An SEO Warrior In The SEO game
SEO game by GSINC. Anti Spam flash game- fight the SEO battle against 6 opponents to try and win!
Read the tutorial.

How to significantly improve your Alexa ranking fast
Easy way to improve Alexa rank without boosting traffic
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How to increase RSS feed burn subscriptions
Basic technique to increase RSS readers.
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Submit your website the right way!
Easy steps to submitting your website in the right category.
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My 1 Sentence websites ranked #2 in Google

This is why I think domain names have enormous weight.

About a year ago, before I got into SEO... (I got heavily into SEO about a week ago, my website should be completed in about 1-2 months from now) ................ I bought 2 domain names that were almost identical to 2 new condo developments in Boston.

For an example, 2 new-construction condo buildings called "The Bristol" & "The Solarium" were being built....

Their websites were:

The Bristol .com & The Solarium .com

I thought, let me buy The Bristol Condos .com & The Solarium Condos .com ---- and they were on GoDaddy, and I bought them both for $10 a piece.

I then made a free "Godaddy Website Tonight" webpage..... that basically said "Thanks for visiting the Solarium Condos .com -- this website is coming soon!" .... and then did the same for The Bristol.

My 2 websites were #2 after the actual condo developers websites............. above about 30 pages such as Boston .com /TheSolarium , etc.

I'm thinking... geez I cant wait to develop these sites and sell a bunch of these condos...... then I realized, afterdoing more research --- that developing these sites could possibly be cybersquatting......... so once more educated on the subject, I deleted them --- deleted the domain, everything.

The point im trying to make here.... is I ranked #2... with no links, and only 2 sentences.... but the domain name was basically a direct hit.

What do you guys think of this??? I know there's controversy about domain names ----- but this appears to be strong proof of the weight of domain names.

Interesting info, thank you.

The most interesting thing for me is that the prominence of KW domain names in serps seems to be a reasonably recent phenomenon.

I know that KW domains did reasonably well in Google in the past but several exhaustive tests had proven the fact that Google wasn't parsing domain names... KW's in the urls were bolded in search results but it was easily proven that any nonsense string which matched a query was also bolded). So it seemed reasonable to assume that the success was attributable to the fact that unsolicited backlinks most often used the domain name as anchor text.

But - since last April/May KW domains seem to have become very dominant... (and as the OP has proved/testified this doesn't seem to have anything to do with BL's) which seems like a strange direction for Google to move in given the obvious "unfairness" of such a system and the fact that it will only encourage cyber-squatting!

I can't help thinking (and hoping) that the phenomenon is most likely an unintended consequence of algo changes which G have instigated / are instigating and that it will be short-lived.

Meanwhile - If I were you - I'd put the pages back, develop the sites and sell the condos.

While I applaud your observations you have made some critically bad assumptions.

The ability to "RANK" is inherently tied to the amount of websites targeting webpages to the phrase you are ranking for.

Can you show 10 domains actually targeting where you beat them all????

You observed top ranks for your domain names but how many other websites are actually attempting to beat you, compete with you on those phrases?

I have a domain frequent asked (dot) info and it ranks #1 or #2 for frequently asked [back & forth with the IRS domain] with 228,000,000 other reported pages that contain those words...

That said: no one targets frequently asked so it's understandable that my domain that has the phrase in it ranks well for that term.

Now look for the domain under frequently asked questions - no where to be found... but why?

The domain name is so powerful so where are my ranks?

Against all the major government sites that all have very robust frequently asked questions sections - my domain name even with all their targeted and 'on-topic' "Frequently Asked" link anchors... can't compete.

The main point I make here... in the scheme of things "THE DOMAIN" while being one of the more useful on-site optimization values - isn't a major factor if others "are also targeting that phrase"...

Obviously, if you're the only target the phrase and it's in your domain -- you're going to rank well... but it doesn't mean that you will sit #1 or even in the top 1000 if a thousand other non-keyword-domains want to rank for that phrase.

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

Meta Descriptions Matter

Let's get one thing straight: tweaking your meta description will NOT improve your PageRank. The search engines look at on-page and off-page elements to determine that, and hardly look at the meta description at all. So how can it possibly matter?

Imagine that you're using a search engine. Aside from the actual position in the results, what do you look at to determine whether a site is worth visiting? You read the site's description, given just below the hyperlink. Search engines get that blurb from your meta description tag.

This is a good reason to make sure your meta description tag is properly worded, not sloppy or spammy. The major search engines look at your meta description first when deciding what to display; if you have no meta description, Google will either grab a sentence on the web page with the searched-for keyword in it, or grab the DMOZ description if there is one.

MSN and Yahoo take slightly different approaches. Yahoo will take both a part of your meta description and a part of a sentence on the page containing the keyword; otherwise, like Google, it defaults to the DMOZ description. MSN's approach is similar.

So if you want to be more attractive to potential visitors, don't neglect your meta description tag. Make it informative, compelling, and keyword-appropriate. Include your keywords in your web page's content in a natural way, and give more information than you provide in the meta description. Finally, if you're in DMOZ, make sure the directory has a good description of your web site.

If you don't ever want the major search engines to resort to DMOZ or Yahoo Directory for a description of your site, you can stop them by using the following tags on your pages:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP" to stop the three major search engines from using the ODP directory, aka DMOZ.

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR" to stop the three major search engines from using the Yahoo Directory.

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