Latest SEO News

Keeping competitive analysis healthy - 3 hours ago
Sunday, September 2, 2012, 15:24:51 GMT by Jennifer Van Iderstyne

Whether you're launching a new vertical or trying to dominate a small niche, analyzing your competitors is crucial. Healthy competitive analysis provides ideas for ways to improve keyword targeting, content quality, link building tactics, and more.

author: Jennifer Van Iderstyne
publisher: Search Engine Watch Blog

Test post - 1 day and 18 hours ago
Saturday, September 1, 2012, 00:26:17 GMT by David Kline - MSFT

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident,

author: David Kline - MSFT
publisher: Microsoft Advertising Community

Coming soon: enhancements to the adcenter ad preview tool | #ppc #sem - 1 day and 21 hours ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 21:00:15 GMT by Ping Jen - MSFT

Where is my ad? is one of the most popular questions we get. With that in mind, soon we will offer an updated Ad Preview Tool, to help our advertisers verify whether or not their ads are showing to the general audience or a targeted audience. The tool will also offer targeting and a diagnostics feedback function. This enhancement will be complete within the next few releases,

author: Ping Jen - MSFT
publisher: Microsoft Advertising Community

Potus iama stats - 1 day and 22 hours ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 19:49:49 GMT by the reddit admins

Without any fanfare ahead of time, The President of the United States spent 30 minutes answering questions from anonymous users with no mediation on a website run by 20 people, and in a forum that was organically created by volunteers. Tens of thousands of people actively participated by voting and/or commenting and millions watched,

author: the reddit admins
publisher: reddit

New ad land cartoon: big shop versus little shop - 1 day and 22 hours ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 19:44:45 GMT by Yahoo! Advertising

When it comes to ad agencies, size matters-at least with office supplies Is the grass always greener at the other agency? If you work in a mega-firm, do you daydream of toiling at a humble but pure little shop, making it solely on your own grit and genius? If you work in a shrimpy shop, .

author: Yahoo! Advertising
publisher: Yahoo! Advertising

Almost half of all smartphone users have purchased digital entertainment products - 1 day and 23 hours ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 19:19:39 GMT by Cynthia Boris

American's have a bad case of Johnny-Five syndrome. So named for the robot in the movie "Short Circuit," the disorder's one and only symptom is the intense craving for more digital input. Movies, TV shows, podcasts, webseries, music, ebooks " they can't get enough. According to the new Mobile Intel Series report from Millennial Media,

author: Cynthia Boris
publisher: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Online marketing news: google+ integration, price of not tweeting, bing facebook photo search, take advantage of linkedin - 1 day and 23 hours ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 19:09:34 GMT by Ashley Zeckman

Restaurant Social Media Top 10 Have yu ever wondered how the largest restaurants in American stack up on social networks? This recent infographic from QSRweb.com shares a glimpse into how your favorite fast food spots are fairing. While the infographic provides insight into likes, fans, and followers, it would be great to see what sort of engagement strategy these companies have,

author: Ashley Zeckman
publisher: Online Marketing Blog

File under: not sure about this, bing adds facebook photo search - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 18:19:14 GMT by Cynthia Boris

"Looking for that epic shot from last winter's ski trip? Or the I-could-die-laughing photo of your roommate's cat dancing?" No? Too bad, Bing is going to help you do it anyway with their brand, spanking, new Facebook Friends' Photo Feature . (Say that three times fast!) The widget, which resides on Bing's website,

author: Cynthia Boris
publisher: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Most popular sej articles for july 2012 - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 18:19:14 GMT by Melissa Fach

1). How to Deal with Creativity Block by David Wallace | @DavidWallace David provided an infographic that can help you with that blank page staring back at you. For those of us that are constantly blogging and creating different forms of content, this IG can be super helpful. 2). Facebook Ads: What Are You Really Paying .

author: Melissa Fach
publisher: Search Engine Journal

How to verify that bingbot is bingbot - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 17:33:59 GMT by Vincent Wehren

Since we posted about this topic a long, long time ago (especially if were counting in Internet years), its time for a refresher on how to verify that a bot visiting your site claiming to be a Bing crawler is really coming from Bing. If you see what appears to be Bingbot traffic in your server logs based on a user agent string, for example Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.

author: Vincent Wehren
publisher: Live Search Webmaster Center

Ad of the week: warner home entertainment's double brand wrap on yahoo! tv - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 17:33:57 GMT by Yahoo! Advertising

A brand new rich media display format makes a star-studded debut on Yahoo! TV. And that's a wrap! The third week of August saw the world premiere of the double brand wrap on the Y! TV homepage. As the country gets primetimed for the start of a new TV season next month, Warner Home Entertainment .

author: Yahoo! Advertising
publisher: Yahoo! Advertising

The 2012 london summer paralympics live on youtube - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 17:08:48 GMT by Jacques Hebert

Missing the thrill of fierce global competitions and awesome displays of athletic prowess? Well, lucky for you, these things live on through the 2012 Summer Paralympics Games in London. The Paralympics just kicked off this Wednesday (check out the Opening Ceremony !) and will run through September 9th. This year, the Paralympics are more accessible and global than ever through YouTube.

author: Jacques Hebert
publisher: YouTube

Social fridays: create a google+ page to connect with users - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 16:38:36 GMT by Inside AdSense Team

Welcome back to our Social Fridays series, where we're providing tips for getting set up optimally on Google+ each week. Last week, we shared best practices around placing +1 buttons on your site and tracking their performance. Today, we'll move on to creating a Google+ page for your site. A Google+ page is the hub of your site's identity on Google,

author: Inside AdSense Team
publisher: Inside AdSense

Friday humor: fun is coming at king's landing - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 16:13:26 GMT by Melissa Fach

Today's Friday Humor is for all the Game of Thrones fans who are anxiously waiting for Season 3 and the sixth book, which is still being written. This is a part 2 of the GoT Friday Humor we did months ago. We hope you enjoy them. Have a happy Friday and Game of Throne fans, .

author: Melissa Fach
publisher: Search Engine Journal

Bing adds facebook photo search - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 15:48:19 GMT by Thom Craver

Remember that cool photo your friend shared on Facebook last week? Can't find all his pictures from last week's party? It's no longer a problem. Bing has now added the ability to search for photos shared by all your Facebook friends.

author: Thom Craver
publisher: Search Engine Watch Blog

Amazing back-to-school gadgets, websites and apps - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 15:08:01 GMT by Melissa Fach

I saw Punky Brewster / Soleil Moon Frye breaking down some very cool techy gadgets, websites and apps that our kids can use and love. So I thought I would share them with you. If you have any questions about the gadgets you can contact Soleil on Twitter @moonfry. Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world .

author: Melissa Fach
publisher: Search Engine Journal

Emarketer reduces 2012 facebook revenue estimate by 15% - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 14:17:44 GMT by Frank Reed

Facebook has gone from social media monster to social media punching bag (at least on the business side) all in the matter of a few short months. This whole public thing isn't as easy as it looks is it, Mark? Well, to possibly add insult to injury, eMarketer has released that it is revising its estimates for Facebook's revenue in 2012 by 15%. In an article they state In February,

author: Frank Reed
publisher: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

How buzzman rewrote the rules of fiction to create relevant video content - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 14:12:42 GMT by Jonathan Allen

Buzzman, an interactive agency from Paris, talked candidly with Search Engine Watch about the secrets of their success in promoting Tipp-Ex, a brand of correction fluid on YouTube. Apply these principles to your video content development!

author: Jonathan Allen
publisher: Search Engine Watch Blog

How old should your social media manager be? - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 14:02:35 GMT by Dan Wilkerson

There's been an onslaught of articles lately proclaiming why you should or should not specifically hire a 23-year old to manage your social media presence. I've tried to avoid commenting, but after a recent Inc.com article about why you should never dream of hiring a younger person to manage your social media accounts, my hand is forced. There is a perfect age for your social media manager.

author: Dan Wilkerson
publisher: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Maria montessori google doodle: how montessori education 'programmed' google's founders - 2 days ago
Friday, August 31, 2012, 13:27:20 GMT by Danny Goodwin

Maria Montessori, the Italian educator best known for creating an educational model that essentially allows children freedom to learn and create independently, is the subject of today's Google Doodle. She was born on this date 142 years ago.

author: Danny Goodwin
publisher: Search Engine Watch Blog

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Google PageRank Update August 2012 surffday

Well there comes just a new update on Google's Page popularity algo on 2nd August 2012. The PageRank toolbar has started showing new ranks for all websites worldwide. The update this time seems a major one and there could be no further expectation of any new changes within the next 24 hours. The last update was on May 3rd and third last was on February 6th. The duration gap has now become constant. Google rolls out these updates quarterly, after every three months. The next update and last update of this year is expected anytime between  November 1-10 2012. PageRank as you all know is a numerical weighting scale between 0-10. Websites that are recommended by related niches via backlinks rank higher on PR scale and get the benefit of faster crawl and index rate.  Blogs with higher PR are crawled faster compared to those with lower PageRank. For example a PR 7 webpage is crawled several times per minute compared to a PR 5 page that is crawled once every minute. The faster the robot crawls your pages the greater the chances for you to drive organic traffic from Google and build readership.

The PR for MBT remains at 4.0 and same is true for SEM which remains at 2.0. My main focus these last months have been Alexa Rank and I must congratulate all our readers for taking MBT to attain an Alexa Rank of 7K. MBT now counts amongst the very few Google blogs that has AlhamdulillAh crossed the 10K boundary. SEM has amazingly reached 29K within just 6 months and is improving daily. 

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Happy Birth Day To AdSense! 18 June 2011 succses full

Google AdSense Team will celebrate its eighth birthday just after 1 hour i.e. 18th June, 2011. AdSense was launched in 2003 and since then this great marketing and advertising company has served more than Two Million publishers all around the world. AdSense is the biggest income source for GOOGLE Inc. Just this year in 2011 Google earned $2.34 Billion dollars which is 28% of their total Annual revenue i.e. 9.36 Billion Dollars! Its eight years non stop success does surely mean a lot to them.

Goggle AdSense enable web owners to display text, image and video advertisements on their websites and blogs. All blogger blogs are equipped with AdSense ad integration by default. The revenue generated depends on page impressions and clicks.

Adsense team said:          

Growing to over two million publishers worldwide since our launch in 2003, we want to thank all of you for helping us expand and thrive.
As we celebrate AdSense, we want to share our appreciation for all the AdSense publishers whose innovation has made the last eight years so successful. The Google Display Network is comprised of many AdSense publishers like you: those who offer useful and engaging content for your community and serve as an effective channel for advertisers to connect with audiences.
For the last eight years, we’ve relied on your product feedback to help us improve, your success stories to inspire us, and your content to enhance the ecosystem of the world wide web. We look forward to growing older and wiser with all of you for many more years to come!

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You Need Traffic For Your Blog, Here's How To See It.

For those who blog, or write in online journals, keeping track of visitors can be a great way to see who visits a particular blog. There are many ways to keep track of blog readers when you blog. Blog hit counters; visitor tracking, referrers and keywords all can help you know if someone has visited your blog.

When you set up your blog, you will probably have already decided on the type of blog you will keep. Some web blog hosting sites will offer there service for free, but have a minimum of features. Other blog sites might cost, but will offer bloggers services to keep track of visitors. There are many reasons to track the visitors that read your blog. Understanding who visits you blog will help you know what your readers are looking for. Successful blogging starts with interested writing and will appeal to your readers. Another reason you might want to keep track of the visitors that come to your site is to increase traffic. This is especially important for blogs that are for companies. Companies can use their blog for inexpensive advertising. Knowing who visits the blog site will help a company understand if they are reaching their target audience for their services or products.

A blog hit counter is one way to keep track of the amount of visitors that read your blog. Blog hit counters are usually small boxes at the very end of a web page that updates a number every time your site is hit. Some blog hit counters can give site owners site statistics, reports and graphs to illustrate blog activity. These counters can also show you where your readers are finding your site. If your blog hosting site does not offer a blog hit counter feature, one can easily be downloaded or added to your page from another site. There are many free sites that offer counters for blog pages. Blog writers can register on the hit counter site, download and install directly into the blog template. This will give an accurate count of how many visitors you have to your blog. If you are not worried about keywords or details information about your readers, then a blog hit counter is the easiest way to track your readership.

If you want more advanced blog features, then you can add tracking options to your blog. There are several ways you can track your readers. One is by keywords and the other is a visitor tracker. Keyword trackers are ideal for those who need to know what keywords people are using to locate a blog. This could be important for businesses that need to reach potential consumers. A good keyword tracker can also help you organize your blog site to determine which keywords are most popular with readers. It can also help get your site listed on search engines. Keyword trackers can be downloaded for free in many cases. If your site relies heavily on readers, then a keyword tracker could be a good choice.

A visitor tracker works much the same way as a keyword tracker. The difference, however, is that a visitor tracker will provide you with information statistics about your blog visitors. Usually, this information is given in easy to understand graphs and tables. If you need to see where your visitors are coming from, then a visitor tracker can be quite beneficial. It is a little more sophisticated than a hit counter, but works about the same way. When a visitor enters your blog site, their information is saved onto the visitor tracker. When you are ready, you can log in and see exactly who your visitors are. Many times not only are you able to see the statistics on your readers, but you can also see reports for current visitors and those that have visited the site in the past.

One other way that a blog writer can keep track of their readers is to include a comment section at the end of your blog page. Not all visitors will want to leave a comment, but this is a good way to gain feedback about your site. You will better understand the type of readers that frequent your site, but also understand the kind of content that they want to read.

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About Internal Links vs Outbound Linking

Only to be attacked over and over again by a so called SEO web expert who thinks linking out is bad and shouldn’t even be discussed!
Last time I checked Wikipedia has loads on internal links and quite a lot of outbound links, though for quite sometime now they have rel=nofollow the external ones to help prevent link SPAM. Wasn’t like this all the time though, recall them adding nofollow then removing nofollow only to re add it later! During all this time Wikipedia has done well in Google SERPs so it’s doing something right with it’s SEO.
Many of my web sites have lots of internal links like Free Recipes site which currently only uses internal linking mainly because I have only one site like this, if I had more I’d link them together freely.
Finally got around to updating this site, upgraded to using WordPress as the backend and in the process of adding over 100,000 recipes (up from 11K). Currently at 35,000 recipes and I think WordPress is struggling with the database size so might not get to 100K!
Now that it uses WordPress I was able to very easily automatically internally link around 300 relevant keywords: whenever a keyword is found for the first time on a page within the main content it’s turned into an internal text link using the keyword replaced (use the same concept on this site so most internal links in this post are automated).
Will probably add a couple of hundred more internal linked keywords like this long term because linking (internal and outbound) increases Google rankings a lot due to Google giving the anchor text of links on a page more weight than standard body text (also the links help the page they link to as well).
What this means is if you have a page about Internal Linking you should link from it with the anchor text:

Internal Linking
Internal
Linking
Internal Link
Internal Links
Link
Links

Note related words like Link and Links help with Linking SERPs.
But not only that you also want related phrases for that page to do well, so you might want SERPs like-
Google Internal Linking
Outbound Links
And so having the words Google and Outbound as anchor text will help with these related SERPs.

Outbound Links

I don’t like linking out freely to related sites I don’t own since it gives that site a boost as well and I’m not one for helping the competition for free
So I try to link to my own pages with relevant keywords first and link conservatively to other related web sites. For example I have 4 sites that cover SEO to some degree and so makes sense to link those together.
Google AdSense Templates (sells AdSense/SEO themes) which links internally and with several of my other SEO related sites like SEO and Affiliate Marketing which has some free WordPress AdSense/SEO themes(yes it’s reciprocal links and lots of them) and if a link has relevant text (internal/outbound) it will help that pages rankings (and the one it points to).
You can see they both do quite well for searches like “AdSense Themes”
http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&rlz=1T4HPEA_en-GBGB242GB242&q=AdSense+Themes
3rd and 4th domain listed are mine and freely link together.

Nofollow and Outbound Links

Note: Google changed how it treats nofollow since I wrote this article (everything else in the article is still true) nofollow now (2010) damages a sites SEO quite badly. When nofollow was first introduced by the major search engines a nofollow links would pass no link benefit/PR and the links benefit that would have passed through the nofollow links was shared between the do-follow links (internal and external). Currently Google DELETES the link benefit of nofollow links, making nofollow one of the worst possible things you can have on a website SEO wise!!

Like I said I don’t like linking to sites I don’t own (selfish that way), but you can still benefit from the anchor text of outbound links without having to use PR on them. If you view source of this page you’ll see all the Google search links are rel=nofollow (not wasting PR/link benefit on a Google search!).
The Google search result below helps show that nofollow links can still help the page they are on due to the anchor text (it’s not ignored by Google).
http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=30&hl=en&rlz=1T4HPEA_en-GBGB242GB242&q=%22Dictionary+of+the+History+of+Ideas%3A+Classicism+in+Literature%22+&btnG=Search
You’ll note the word ideas is used once on the Wikipedia page that’s number 1 for the above SERP and is part of a nofollow outgoing text link (under the External Links section). Classicism is used once on the page and is used as normal text. Basically there is only one place on the page where you’ll find this exact text.
Google has used the anchor text from a nofollow text link and associated text to rank that page for this highly specific search.
This means IF you added dozens of outbound links to relevant sites, but nofollow them you would at least gain the benefit from the anchor text of the nofollow outbound links with out the PR cost of an outbound link.
This does not prove the text gains the same weight as anchor text of a link without rel=nofollow (haven’t been able to determine a test that shows conclusively either way). For now we can be sure the anchor text of nofollow links is not ignored by Google for ranking purposes and MAY be given the same weight as a normal text link.
Personally I find using nofollow this way steps into the greyhat SEO arena and so something I’d not do excessively (I occasionally nofollow a related link to a competitor for example). The risk of using links this way has got to be very low since sites like Wikipedia do well that way, so would be a bit hypocritical of Google to ban sites for this type of SEO.
You’ve also got 90% of blogs using this technique on comments, most blogging platforms now automatically nofollow all links added to comments. So pretty obvious Google can’t automatically penalise sites for excessive nofollow use.
That said use rel=nofollow on outbound links with care, a Google manual review of a site with hundreds of nofollow links that are clearly added by the site owner may not get by their quality guidelines. It’s one thing having links added by anonymous posters to Wikipedia and blog comments being nofollow by default and a webmaster adding them to their own content for ranking purposes.

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