Welcome to the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. Have you ever felt as if there's a conspiracy afoot to keep you out of your rightful place at the top of Google's results pages? If so, then you may enjoy the item we're highlighting this week from eWeek. Nine, count'em, nine conspiracy theories that just won't go away, and the down-to-earth responses that will keep your reality check from bouncing. Before you use Google Earth to hunt down the location of the lost city of Atlantis, you'll want to check out this slide show.

After you're done checking that out, come on back to SEO Chat for the trio of articles we published for you this week. If you want to get a better handle on your traffic, a site analytics tool can help you see how it's performing based on a large number of metrics. Wednesday's article went into the specifics, giving you a list of tools and what they usually measure, and explaining how this information can benefit you and your bottom line. If you're trying to increase your traffic, Tuesday's article showed you how to harness the power of PR public relations, not Page Rank to do just that. And if you're looking at ways to get traffic from search engines other than Google, Monday's article gave great advice on optimizing your web site for Microsoft's search engine (whatever the company is calling it this week).

You know the rules of SEO change constantly, every time the search engines tweak their algorithms. And you've probably heard about trust and authority as relatively new, important factors in Google's algorithm for deciding how sites rank, and how they pass link juice. But how can you measure a site for these nebulous terms? That's the question the original poster of this week's thread ponders, and as you might expect, he garnered a good many thoughtful answers. Be sure to check it out and add yours!

If you're looking for more SEO-related information, why not check out Tutorialized? You'll find nearly 100 tutorials covering various SEO topics, including link building, on-page optimization, and more. You'll also find plenty of items on web development and other technology topics, if that's your cup of tea. And if you want to share your knowledge, it's free and easy to submit your own tutorial.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, tackles the issue of fresh content. If you're approaching the question of adding content to your site by wondering what Google counts as fresh content, you need to adjust your focus. That's not what fresh content is really about. So what IS it about? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

• News of the Weird wants your delicious ratings. And we will do anything to get them.
• Is your cereal dull and bland? SEO Hulk can help you with that.
• America invades Russia. You heard it here first.

Watch the video!

Navteq Maps itself to the Moblin Project Platform

By Tina Gasperson
Navteq, a Silicon Valley company launched in 1985 with a goal to provide digital map services for a range of markets around the world, announced it will become part of the flourishing Moblin project ecosystem.
Read the full article >

Interop
May 19th-21st, 2009 | Las Vegas Convention Center | WEBSITE >
Attend the Interop Conference for a comprehensive, integrated view of technologies that will give your business a competitive edge. Learn how the recent surge of IT innovation can help you cut costs, get closer to your customers and increase revenue.

Computex, Taipei
June 2nd-6th, 2009 | Taipei World Trade Center | WEBSITE >
Computex is the second largest computer exhibition in the world, next to CeBIT in Germany. Each year, key global businesses launch their new products here.

O'Reilly OSCON
July 20-24, 2009 | San Jose Convention Center | WEBSITE >
Sustaining, Applying, and Expanding Open Source to Change the World O'Reilly Open Source Convention - OSCON - Open for Business for over a decade with a consistent vision towards the next generation of Open Source.

Intel Atom, MIDs, and Moblin

Steve “Chippy” Paine shows off the Clarion Mind MID

If you are investing time or money in SEO/PPC, you need to know what you are getting in return. The best measure is your bank account and ROI, but with careful analysis of your visitors and their behaviors, you can increase your bottom line, help redirect efforts to the most profitable website segments, and get more out of each landing page. In this article we discuss web analytics and its usage for your website.

Analytics Products

There are many tools on the web for free and others for reasonable prices. Take your pick.

Google Analytics - Google has a lot of built-in advanced features comparable to expensive analytics tools. The down side is, when you use Google Analytics, you're sharing all your data with Google, and they can do anything with it. For instance, if a certain keyword converts well for you, logically it should convert just as well for other companies, so Google may raise minimum bids for that keyword to make more money.

Read Using Analytics on Your Site

Public Relations and SEO
by Ivan Strouchliak
2009-05-19

Before PR meant Page Rank, it was short for public relations. This century-old science not only has a place in the new field of SEO, but it plays a vital role if you want to get good buzz for your web site. Keep reading to learn how to get good PR for your company, and how to combine its effects with SEO.

"'Suits make a corporate comeback,' says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002. Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to." - The Submarine

Public relations, PR for short, is the science of getting a message out to the public through offline and online media. Public relations are used to maintain a good image of the company, to build brand awareness or to cover up the wrong doings of a company. All of the brands you know do public relations, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and even the US government.

Read Public Relations and SEO

SEO for Microsoft Live Search (MSN)
by Terri Wells
2009-05-18

Microsoft is the latest major player in the search engine game. It came to the scene in 2004, and has since lost half of its market share to Google. Microsoft continues to treat search as a top priority, and as you've heard, attempted to buy Yahoo for $40+ billion. With an eight percent market share, Microsoft doesn't send many visitors, but you can benefit from relatively easy SEO techniques.

In this article we cover Live Search's history, strategy and optimization.

Live Search, MSN, Windows Live

MSN (Microsoft Network) launched in August 24, 1995 as a consumer website and fought a portal battle with Yahoo, AOL, Lycos and other portals. Until 2004, Microsoft outsourced search to third party search engines; in July 2004 they launched their own search technology. They tweaked it until 2006 and then rebranded MSN Search to Live Search, confusing a lot of users.

I think this rebranding was one of their first mistakes, as MSN had a strong brand (portal, MSN messenger), while "Live" came out of the blue. Microsoft marketers (or whoever was in charge of branding) did not learn from Ford's and Coke's failed rebranding attempts, and are now stuck with a weaker brand than MSN.

Read SEO for Microsoft Live Search (MSN)

Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

Google Adword Campaign
How to build your own Google Adword Campaign. Easy to follow set of instructions.
Read the tutorial.

How to Promote Site to Increase Traffic
SEO is about promoting your site.
Read the tutorial.

Easy Search Engine Friendly URLs with mod_rewrite
Create search engine friendly URLs easily with mod_rewrite.
Read the tutorial.

How Search Engines Operate
How search engines and its spiders actually work?
Read the tutorial.

SEO and Link Building for Quality Traffic
Build quality traffic using your keywords! Here is how!
Read the tutorial.

Make Engines Read Keywords
Force search engines to read your keywords.
Read the tutorial.

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What do you like or dislike about this issue?
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What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement,
so please email us. Email us.

Webmasters frequently try to figure out what factors Google weighs in its algorithm. Two new values, namely trust and authority, have cropped up. How do you measure these? And are they really more than just buzzwords? These are the topics for discussion on this week's thread. Be sure to stop by and join the conversation.

How to measure trust and authority from Google

I have been thinking about this a great deal lately and am afraid that my lack of brain power is really getting in the way.

We all talk about trust and authority when considering Google rankings but how on earth do we:

1. quantify this
2. identify this
3. obtain this

I know the obvious answer is links, but how exactly do we target links from trusted authority sites when it's impossible (in my eyes) to determine exactly which sites Google trusts and which sites are considered an authority?

My thoughts are that a great deal is to do with a site's ranking.

If a site ranks highly for its target terms then Google must trust that site to some extent? Do more top 3 rankings mean more trust?

Similarly with authority. Does Google judge authority by the number of terms a site ranks for, and how many other sites that also rank link to that site?

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this!

RE: "...it's impossible (in my eyes) to determine exactly which sites Google trusts and which sites are considered an authority..." lewis....here's my thought on that specific thought....

IMHO, Google must believe that say a .edu site -- a higher education/learning institution, would be by definition, a "trusted authority" site. This stands to reason to me, and is logically sound to me as well.

That's not to say that Google DOES this....but I've no other means to run my SEO practice, than to make some "reasonable" conclusions....and this one one of them.

That said, I also believe that Google must somehow (algo functionality variations suspected here) also "vary" the links coming from a .edu to a degree, in that if a site is NOT penalized SERPwise by incoming links, as they can not be controlled by the site owner, somehow Google MUST do exactly that for an incoming link from a .edu. This is contrary I do realize to what's the normal conclusion....yet I think that it just MUST be true...

This is reasonable to my way of thinking. This also, may not be truthful, yet for my client lists when I can get a .edu link to a site I SEO, I'm always smiling that day as I subsequently do see a rise in SERPs...ie empirical evidence appears to support that thought....

So....others here, can you offer up any further thoughts on this?

This is such a great question it's got me thinking "Why hasn't anybody asked it before?" and if everybody pitches in, we could all save a lot of time going after the right links.

My view is:

If a site has sitelinks for certain terms, it is usually a sign of trust. Obviously the more competitive the term, the more trustworthy the site. Starting with exact match domain going up to one word keywords.

If a site is picked up by Google News. I was searching today for currency information and the difference in the quality of results between Google Search and Google News was outstanding. Google knows if it is to be the #1 news search it had better keep a watchful eye on who it aggregates from.

Backlinks from obviously trusted sites. Harvard, Yale, BBC, NYT, WSJ. But going further than this, the closer the link to the index page, the more trustworthy IMO.

Academics and newspapers are like a corporate hierarchy and the same must go for the website. A link from harvard(dot)edu/xxx/xxx/xxx/xxx may mean one professor agrees with your site. A link from harvard(dot)edu/xxx may mean a whole faculty agrees with your site. At every / closer to the index, more people have the chance to question why the link is there and makes for a more editorial vote that passes authority of the institution rather than one small part of it.

Which is why I believe backlinks from a student blog located at subdomain.harvard.edu/studentid/blogname/blogpost are of little worth when it comes to passing authority; no matter that there is a .edu in the URL.

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

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Consider the bar raised

Fresh Content: What's the Point?

Are you posting fresh content regularly because you think you will rank higher in Google because of it? Are you wondering what exactly Google considers to be fresh content? Are you wondering whether you need to add new pages of content or can get away with changing the content on current pages for Google to take notice? If so, you may be approaching the whole idea of content, and the importance of fresh content, all wrong.

New content, as a number of our members on the SEO Chat forums have pointed out, is simply that: new content. It's not a magic bullet that will get you higher rankings in Google. If you want it to do that, it must be high quality content that is relevant to your web site. That means being on topic and including the right keywords.

That also means considering your visitors first. What are they searching for? In the words of respected forum member gazzahk, what you need to add to your site is content other people are interested in. This can generate links and traffic. Don't add content just for the sake of adding content; adding content that no one is interested in is not going to help your site.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't add new content regularly. There are a lot of good reasons to do so, as gazzahk points out. New content on your site can help you turn up well for new and long tail keywords. Adding new content regularly can let you discuss newsworthy topics and spin them appropriately for your web site; this can give you a high ranking in the SERPs fairly quickly, as any blogger can tell you. You can use new content to expand the range of topics your site addresses, and the products and/or services you offer.

New content attracts traffic in a number of ways. It can encourage visitors to link to your site, in part by giving them more interesting pages to link to. Regularly adding new content encourages visitors to return, and can even give you a following. We can even include search engine spiders among those visitors; if you add new content often, your site will start getting indexed more often. But getting indexed more often doesn't necessarily mean that your rank in the SERPs will improve for that, as respected forum member EGOL notes, The answer is new kickass content...If it ain't kickass then don't expect much.

New content can have disadvantages, which you should keep in mind before you start adding it wholesale to your site. For example, it can spread the power your site receives from links more thinly. If the content is of average to low quality, visitors will know, and may judge your site accordingly. This can make it hard for you to gain conversions. And ultimately, if you focus on adding new content without paying close attention to its quality, it is worse than useless; it takes your time away from doing more useful things. Invest that time, instead, in creating highly useful content, even if it takes longer. The return on your investment, both in the SERPs and your bottom line, will be well worth it.