Authoritative, but Often Wrong Trusting a powerful authority is easy. It allows us to have a quick shorthand for how things work without having to go through the pain, effort, & expense to figure things out. But it often leads to bogus solutions. This video does a great job of explaining how nothing replaces experience in the SEO industry. A combination of numerous parallel projects,

Want a good example of Google's brand-bias stuff being a bunch of bs? Niche expert value-add affiliate websites may now lack the brand signal to rank as the branded sites rise up above them, so what comes next? Off-topic brands flex their brand & bolt on thin affiliate sections. Overstock.com was penalized for having a spammy link profile )in spite of being a brand they were so spammy that they were actually penalized,

I am not sure how many people were holding off on updating to Firefox 5 because of our SEO extensions , however we made versions for Firefox 5 quite a while ago for Seo for Firefox , Rank Checker & the SEO Toolbar . When you first go to update it there might be a message that the extensions are not compliant. If that is the case, upgrade to Firefox 5 & then after you get Firefox 5 installed it has a check for updated versions of extensions.

Search is political. Google has maintained that there were no exceptions to Panda & they couldn't provide personalized advice on it, but it turns out that if you can publicly position their "algorithm" as an abuse of power by a monopoly you will soon find 1:1 support coming to you. The WSJ's Amir Efrati recently wrote : In June, a top Google search engineer, Matt Cutts, wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among other things.

Am I the only one who gets a warm, fuzzy feeling from a well-crafted, super-targeted landing page? Right, I didn't think so :( Landing pages tend to suck more often than they inspire.

The SEO tool space is a pretty crowded one )and growing one!(. Tools are helpful, there is no doubt about that. However, tools are generally only as good as the person using them. We'd love to know what tools you use and why, so please let us know in the comments after the post :( I am not "house" handy by any means, I can barely hang a picture frame straight. So if you gave me the best construction tools in the world I'd still make extra holes and screw something up.

If you're the type of SEO who builds and markets a variety of sites, there's something very satisfying about spotting an area that few people occupy, and making it your own! There are various software programs available that help you find niches, often based on finding keyword terms with high traffic and low, or no, PPC bids. These tools can be very useful for keyword list building, however finding great niches requires a little more analysis to establish viability.

If the social sites were isolated I would comfortably ignore them as a waste of time . Unfortunately, search engines are convinced there is signal to be had on social networks )in spite of how easy they are to game with promotions(. If I wasn't super busy I would run one such promotion to prove my point, but I am already drowning in email. Bing + Facebook Bing is pushing Facebook integration everywhere. TV ads , on the search results, etc.

Why do we try to rank sites high in the search results? Obviously, SEO is a traffic acquisition strategy. We seek to direct audiences who are interested in our products, services or ideas to our sites, rather than those of our competitors. We expend time and energy getting a site to rank a few places higher, or for a wider range of keywords, but it also pays to focus our attention on what happens after visitors arrive. If visitors arrive,

In any market where the leader has a monopolistic marketshare it is a great idea to encourage innovation elsewhere and promote further competition . In the past Blekko was a great SEO data source but I couldn't use it as a default search service because the auto-firing of their slashtags were in many cases too restrictive. They did a recent update which still fires slashtag results,

You Must Disclose, or Else... Matt Cutts has long stated that machine-readable disclosure of paid links is required to be within Google's guidelines. The idea behind such Cassandra calls is that the web should be graded based on merit, rather than who has the largest ad budget. The Google founders harped on this in their early research : we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers .

Do you know anyone who got their rankings back after Update Panda trashed their site? There may be some, and there may be some people who get their rankings back eventually, but the problem is a fundamental one: If the Google dragon flicks her tail in your direction, and all you rely on is rankings, you're screwed That's life in SEO. Google flicks her tail, and some webmasters may never be heard from again.

In his book, Origin of Species , Charles Darwin says that: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." This is typically used by proponents of Intelligent Design to state their case against evolution by invoking the principle of Irreducible Complexity,

As Google continues to push organic search results further down the page in favour of greater ad exposure and universal search, it is important to maximise the amount of space your website receives from the search giant. The more real estate your listings have, the more likely you are to receive visitors to your website. Below are 6 ways to increase your SERP )Search Engine Result Page( real estate. 1.

"I am just like a robot - following only what I have been told." - Katutu, Google toolbar testimonial As long as end users get their Angry Birds they really don't care how it comes to them. But they should! Right now, an aggregated link to this entry places higher in a search of the title than my own site, which is a Page Rank 5 site )i.e. it has a lot of "strong" links in and a lot of content(.

Recently, we did a post on the benefits of using PPC for Local SEO . In this post, we are going to go through how to structure a local PPC campaign for a small business. This post is designed to show you how really easy it is to get a local PPC campaign up and running. If you want to streamline the campaign building process, choosing the right tools upfront can be a big help. Landing page creation can be a time-consuming and expensive task, but it doesn't have to be.

We love free stuff, especially when it comes to SEO tools and SEO data. Recently, we published a post on how to do a good bit of competitive research with free tools and now we are going to do that for competitive research on domains. There are a number of tools we can use here.

A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy There are many approaches to online navigation & discovery. On the surface many of them look exceptionally different, but when you look a bit deeper many of them are playing the same game with the same game plan . The main differences are brand perception & marketing angle, but they all copy off of each other . New Ideas, or The Same Ideas?

Dr. Pete shared examples of the marketing funnel, highlighting how we must overcome hurdles )or break through barriers to conversion( in order to make a sale. Why People Buy Premium Domain Names The idea of an exact match domain )EMD( is that you are buying a piece of land right next to the highway. You sink in a lot of money upfront, but hope that it backs out over time by lowering your traffic acquisition costs. For many years this model was both logical and profitable.

This Shouldn't Hurt Too Bad One of the more perverse things about online markets is that since things are not done in person a lot of people are willing to work in the gray area. That allows people like Vitaly Borker to torture his customers as a marketing strategy . ;( When Stanley Milgram did his famous study on if people were willing to torture others )so long as they thought it was part of a scientific experiment(,