To those of you who were off on President's Day, welcome back! You'll understand, then, why this week's issue of SEO Chat is a little short. But we still have plenty of great stuff for you. So if you're looking for help getting to the top of the SERPs or the latest SEO news, we have it here!

If you've been looking for new ways to learn about SEO, you won't want to miss the article we ran Wednesday on getting an SEO education. There are a lot more options now than there were even two years ago, including online courses, conferences, and of course ebooks. On Tuesday we looked at site target marketing -- the importance of knowing who your audience is and setting up your site appropriately to reach them.

We're all about money and traffic with the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting for you this week from Tutorialized. You'll learn how to earn money from your educational website, 65 ways to get traffic to your site, and more. Check out these and other tutorials on Tutorialized; you'll be glad you did.

Our Thread of the Week deals with a not-uncommon situation. What do you do when you've bought a domain that's been around for years, make changes, and see its rank in the SERPs fall? That depends very much on what you did with the site, and what it was before, plus many other factors too numerous to mention here. But our forum members offer some hints. Why not stop by and join the conversation?

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, offers a special treat. Gary Beal, aka GarytheScubaGuy, was at an SEO-related convention recently and ran into Adam Lasnik, Google's Search Evangelist. Of course he couldn't let the man escape without asking him a few pointed questions. Wondering what Lasnik's answers were? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

Web development with Eclipse Europa, Part 1: The Java EE for Eclipse
It's a good time to be a Web developer. You've never had more choices in terms of technologies. There are so many great open source Web servers, databases, programming languages, and development frameworks. No matter what combination of technologies you prefer to work with, there is an integrated development environment (IDE) that can increase your productivity: Eclipse. In this tutorial, Part 1 of a three-part "Web development with Eclipse Europa" series on how to use Eclipse for Web development with Java technology, PHP, and Ruby, we'll see how the latest release of Eclipse -- Europa -- can be used to rapidly develop Java Web applications. We'll use Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE) for Eclipse to build a Web application for tracking and calculating baseball statistics.
Learn more.

Web development with Eclipse Europa, Part 2: The Java EE for Eclipse
No matter what combination of technologies you prefer to work with as a Web developer, Eclipse is a single integrated development environment (IDE) that can increase your productivity. In Part 2, we'll see how easy it is to develop PHP applications using a different set of Eclipse plug-ins, collectively known as the PHP Development Toolkit (PDT.)
Learn more.

Web development with Eclipse Europa, Part 3: Ruby Development Toolkit and RadRails
It's a good time to be a Web developer. You've never had more choices in terms of technologies. There are so many great open source Web servers, databases, programming languages, and development frameworks. No matter what combination of technologies you prefer to work with, there is a single integrated development environment (IDE) that can increase your productivity: Eclipse. Here in Part 3, we introduce the RDT and RadRails Eclipse plug-ins and show you how to get these plug-ins and start using them. You will learn how to use RadRails to do many common Ruby on Rails development tasks.
Learn more.

All White Papers.

SEO Index

Getting an SEO Education

Site Target Marketing

Optimizing Your Press Releases

    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:

If these gloves don't fit, should you acquit? Plus new OJ freshly squeezes you! Can looks really kill? Now that our soldiers have been equipped with laser eyes, yes -- yes they can. What do you do in Tokyo if a giant moth attacks? Hop into these levitating buses, that's what. Could Windows Vista prerequisite updates cause your computer to enter into an infinite loop loop loop loop loop Why would Aquaman open up his own gas station? The sQuba submarine car might be a clue... Watch the video!

Getting an SEO Education
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-20

Unlike western medicine, SEO is mostly “self-taught.” Students read books and articles, visit SEO forums and attend conferences, and then apply what they learn to their sites. They observe the results, tweak, and repeat the cycle. Is there a better way to learn the subject?

Before I give an answer, I’m going to give you two caveats. The first one is that search engine optimization as a practice is little more than a decade old; as a profession apart from being a webmaster, it is even younger. While there are currently a few certifications in the field, they are not universally recognized in the same way as a diploma from an accredited medical school.

The second one is that I’m hardly an SEO practitioner myself, aside from researching the field and writing appropriate content. I don’t actually do any significant work with HTML, I don’t study keywords, I’ve never tried to conduct a pay-per-click campaign, and most of what I’m going to talk about here is stuff I learned second hand.

Read Getting an SEO Education

Site Target Marketing
by Akinola Akintomide -- 2008-02-19

In this article, we will look at some things site target marketing will help us focus on, the importance of knowing who to target when optimizing a site, the probable pay offs of knowing your target demographics, and then the factors to ignore.

Do You Want To Sell To Just One Type Of Buyer? No, you want to sell your product to anybody that can buy it. The idea is to create a perceived value. --Anonymous

Before we start an SEO campaign, we set targets. These targets include the amount of traffic you expect to get, your conversion rates, the amount of leads you expect to generate for a certain number of hits, how much work you intend to get done internally (inside your marketing team) within a specified time, etc. Target marketing, apart from helping you focus on what is important to you, helps in discerning between "noise" and "signal." Not to get technical, but this has as many applications in search engine optimization as in "signals analysis."

Read Site Target Marketing

Optimizing Your Press Releases
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-13

If you look at a press release through the lens of an SEO, what you see is not a piece a paper; it’s potentially a mini web site. From this perspective, the humble press release takes on a whole new life. In this article, I’ll discuss a number of ideas that will give your press releases much more impact.

Before I get to these tips, however, maybe you’re not convinced that you need to optimize your press releases in the first place. If you aren’t, here are some points to consider, with a nod to Rob Garner, writing for Media Post’s Search Insider:

If you use an online news wire such as PRWeb, PRNewswire or BusinessWire to help you distribute your press releases, you may already know that many reporters go directly to them (or receive feeds from them) for content. They’ve turned into “press release search engines," and as with any search engine, content indexed by them may need to be optimized if you want it to be found by your target audience.

Read Optimizing Your Press Releases

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

10 Social Media Linkbaiting Methods For SEO Optimization
You should never submit your homepage to the social bookmarking sites.
Read the tutorial.

How to earn money from educational/tutorial websites
Learn how to make money by sharing your knowledge.
Read the tutorial.

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
Web site promotion is the most important step in making your business succeed online.
Read the tutorial.

65 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website
There are a lot of ways to get traffic. Here are 65 of them.
Read the tutorial.

Expert Advice/Opinion Needed?

About 4 – 5 weeks ago I suddenly lost quite a few good UK Google rankings that I had. Although we still appear for some, we have dropped a couple of spots for some, but as far as 20 for others. I assumed this was because of Google geographic location factors. Although we are a UK firm we have a .com and our servers are hosted in the US.

However some of the firms that are now above us can not surely be classed by Google as a better resource. If you type in David Brown we don’t even rank for that at the moment, but then I might look a little later on and we will be second, then tomorrow we will be at the top, and then we disappear again. Our website is david brown (dot)com.

Secondly we are trying to target the phrase radicon. It's not a competitive phrase but has good search volume. Now we currently rank 25th on (dot)co(dot)uk for this term, but I personally believe that we are far better for this search term than the sites that are above us. We originally started this page in July last year and started off at about 30th and gradually moved up to 3rd. We were there for about a month before we bombed. Am I wrong about this? Are we not a relevant search result for this term?

The website was redesigned in April. The domain is about 8 years old but all the pages are new.

Has anyone any advice as to what I should do to improve my position? Or an explanation as to why I am struggling for this keyword?

Cheers for any advice

If all the pages are new, then the backlinks pointing to them are mostly new also. Age of links is important to Google. New pages can rank, but it takes some time to develop authority and trust in Google.

In my experience as I observed, developing authority and trust in Google for new pages can be acquired in many ways. These are:
a. Relevant quality inbound links pointing to that page using the targeted keywords.
b. Contains unique and high quality content.
c. Bookmarking factor, (how many users like your article).
d. User statistics- this is a new factor although it is related to the quality of your content. Like, how many times people revisit the new page, time spent on the page reading the content.

Those are important points to take note of if you want to rank high in Google.

Next thing to note, is to review your site in accordance with Google quality guidelines. Since you have experienced a sudden drop of ranking, I suspect maybe a spam is within your site. Check for accidental hiding of content, hidden links to banned domains, or linking out to a highly penalized site, keyword spamming, etc.

Redesigning the website may involve changing the internal links, and it is important to ranking. since pages are new, internal links associated to it are new also and will take some time to stabilize to get it's full effect (like getting those pages indexed).

Now what is the position of your site?

Have you changed all the old file names of your site in April or only the content?

If pages names or extensions are changed then this Google response is quite obvious.

Also SERP gets bad effects if your pages have been decreased from previously.

If there nothing such case then not to worry, be patient and keep on working in the normal way; the pages will get their previous position soon.

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

Gary Beal Chats With Adam Lasnik

Gary Beal, one of our SEO Chat forum moderators, is currently attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in London. One of the best parts of these conferences is picking the brains of the presenters and other attendees. Beal - aka GarytheScubaGuy on our forums - touched base with Adam Lasnik and Google's Search Quality Team. He asked Lasnik a few questions; here are some of the answers.

Lasnik noted that Google identifies companies buying backlinks via a reporting tool in your Webmaster Central account. Specifically, there's a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools that lets users provide information on sites buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation. It makes no difference whether you report the links once or 500 times; Google will only receive it once.

Another way Google identifies backlinks that have been purchased, according to Lasnik, is by looking at historical trends and major fluctuations. A hot topic that draws a traffic surge won't automatically mean that your site is "flagged;" Beal's guess is that it "passes through a system that…'marks' it for review."

Beal then asked about sites that have duplicated pages on separate extensions like .co.uk and .es. Lasnik said it wouldn't cause a duplicate content penalty. And he gave Beal a heads-up: "He asked if I had seen the new article on Webmaster Central regarding the thread about duplicate content caused by URL parameters and [said] that I should keep my eye on the blog because they were coming out with something new for members. So now is a good time to sign up and add it to your RSS feed."

Beal also passed along a warning from Lasnik: redirecting too many domains with 301s may cause a penalty. "I couldn't really get him pinned down on a number," Beal noted, "but I'll be doing a little homework..to try and nail and educated guess together." Here's hoping Beal turns up with more information - both about the redirect and the conference - very soon!

Read the thread for this article.

Advertising - If you wish to advertise in our newsletter, please contact us.

Unsubscribe - If you don't want to receive our emails, please unsubscribe.
An email will be sent with additional instructions to confirm your unsubscription.