Category: Search Engine Optimization

It’s official! The third edition of The Art of SEO book by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, and company founder Jessie Stricchiola is on the shelves and available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and OReilly.com.

I’d like to send a personal shout-out to Lee Odden for running the best SEO book survey on his Online Marketing Blog. We certainly don’t mind coming home first as the Best SEO Book in 2009 in the minds of his awesome readers, especially when compared against the rockstar list of books under consideration.

And while we’re here, I would also like to thank Chris Sherman for his great review of the book on SearchEngineLand’s Best SEO Books of 2009 list.

In both lists The Art of SEO is compared alongside a solid lineup of SEO books by very accomplished experts in the field, many of whom are friends. It’s an honor to have our The Art of SEO included alongside these other great SEO books.

The Art of SEO is written by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, and Jessie Stricchiola of San Francisco SEO company Alchemist Media.

At long last our The Art of SEO book is available on Amazon. It has been quite a fun, illuminating, and rewarding experience to create this elaborate work. It truly has been an honor to have been given the opportunity, by O’Reilly, to produce such an extensive volume.

I speak for my co-authors when I say that we all, truly, hope you find the book as information and resource-filled as we do.

Once you have your copy in your hands, we would love to hear your feedback – please visit the Art of SEO Book website to submit your comments.

Enjoy!

While having a conversation today with a dear first gen SEO friend, the discussion made its way to the topic of SEO today vs. the SEO of years ago. Specifically – we discussed how it seems much of the focus has drifted away from some truly fundamental aspects of optimization, particularly with regard to on-page characteristics.

For example, while links are, without a doubt, essential to the success of any SEO efforts at this point, the on-page content has become way too devalued in some circles. As a very specific example, the concept of “proximity” – the closeness, or “lack of distance” on a given web page between the words that comprise a keyword phrase of two words or more – has all but vanished from the discussion of SEO. It’s not too tough to see what’s getting a page ranked for “cheap tickets” when it appears in the top 10 in Google, but the words “cheap” and “tickets” can’t be found anywhere near each other on the page. Call the bomb squad!

While keyword-rich anchor text in external links is obviously an effective standalone short-term SEO tactic (and a lot of fun for “miserable failure” and “greatest living american”), it certainly does not build the foundation for solid, long-lasting results when the on-page content doesn’t take proximity – and a myriad of other factors – into account.

We rock Connies.

Google, please stop giving Valentine’s Day love to parasitic marketers!

Here are some examples of people who are ranking their SPAM by posting it on crowd sourcing sites like NowPublic.com or free classifieds in Topix. Try a search for Valentine Lingerie and you will find the #4 position taken by A Splog Post on NowPublic.com and the #8 and #9 spots taken by two free classified listings from 2 different domains with essentially identical content on Topix.

It is really hard to make a coherent argument why these pages deserve to rank for Valentine Lingerie more than another costume & lingerie site. Topix and NowPublic have no incentive to fight this garbage unless the engines make them suffer for all of their content, because they get paid on the impressions.

For the “marketer” whose Splog post is on NowPublic, the 699 visits on the page to date might be worth the effort, but it definitely doesn’t mean they deserve the eye balls. NowPublic also doesn’t NoFollow links, even ones that seem to clearly be less than editorially controlled, so there may be (NOT) some PR flowing to the Spammer as well.

I am not sure if MSNBC and Foxnews deserve the love their getting from Valentine’s Lingerie more than NowPublic, but at least these articles aren’t spam, they are “news stories about fashion”.

Google, please stop ranking the SPAM. It encourages blackhats and causes blight in the index!

I used to spend more time than I care to think about getting through people whose job it was to make influential people people hard to reach. An amazing tool was introduced a few years ago that makes it easy to get around these roadblocks and get invited in the back door.

That amazing tool is Google Alerts, which allows each of us to get our own private alert whenever Google discovers a new page that contains a keyword or phrase we find of interest. It turns out that there is nothing I find more interesting than reading about me. It happens that many busy and accomplished people share this weakness.

Instead of beating your head against the corporate firewall, do a little social engineering. Post a blog (or even a blog comment) with someone’s name and people will read what you say about them. Does it work? Let me show you with a shout out to some of our friends. I won’t email/text/poke any of them, just to make this a valid demonstration.

Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Ryan, Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, Gord Hotchkiss, Jeremy ShoeMoney, Doug Klein, Bill Gates and Stephen Colbert, let me start by saying hello.

I really appreciate you stopping by and I hope you are doing well. I know you are all really busy and I am really sorry that I called you under what you might consider false pretenses. Since you are here and you have responded to my honey trap…please take a minute and say hello to some of our other friends.

Thanks… and I guess I owe you a beer or something.

The recent New York Times article about Google search contained a note that Google is always on the lookout for bad search results. They acknowledged that constant minor tweaks occasionally produce results that are low quality.

We are all aware of the occasional site that ranks and appears to defy logic, but I am curious about queries where a majority of the results, or at least the top few, are particularly irrelevant. What “normal” queries do you run that gives really bad results?

DazzlinDonna from SEO-Scoop.com has an interesting post about a new variation of the chain letter. This time, you are asked to SEOs for Charity Link Meme and give links for Charity.

This is a annoying but powerful very creative viral link building idea. I am not sure who gets the credit for starting this, but they are claiming inspiration from the Colbert Google Bomb. I wasn’t tagged and I would probably refuse to play along if I had been, so I am not going to tag other bloggers, but here is Donna’s list.

• Service International – Disaster Relief
• Pujols Family Foundation – Children with Down Syndrome
• National Alliance to End Homelessness – Homelessness
• The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research – Parkinson’s Research
• Ronald McDonald Care Mobile Program – Child Healthcare
• Aids Research Alliance – Aids Research
• Wildlife Conservation Society – Wildlife Protection
• Cancer Research Institute – Cancer Research
• Second Harvest – End Hunger
• AARP Foundation – Helping Senior Citizens

On the other hand, I like how this could give candidates plausible deniability for Guerrilla SEO in politics, so here is an alternative list:

• Rudolph Giuliani in drag, kissing Donald Trump
• Giuliani, a Roman Catholic, divorced twice
• John McCain supports Bush’s War in Iraq
• McCain embraces the Christian Right in Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
• John Edwards on the environment.
• Bill Clinton being Strategist in Chief for Hillary.
• Barack Obama, opposition to the war in Iraq