SEO Discussion Blog

Fun Meta Tags for the Clueless

I was reading up on SEO and reviewing what people say about meta tags and found a page I really liked and wanted to share with you.

Check out Official META Tags for Top Search Engine Positions 

Have fun!

Is it possible to have a Set of Standards for SEO?

I’ve seen a lot of talk about SEO Certification and Standards. There are a lot of SEO pros who like the idea and several who don’t.

The problems I see are;

1. Who gets to set the standards? There area lot of well-known SEO Gurus, some self-proclaimed and others who have been recognized as such by others. But, it’s like name brand products. Just because they are well-known does that automatically mean they are the authority in the SEO community?

We all do SEO differently. There are some basics that everyone does, but then we use our own experience, both successes and failures, to help our clients.

There are times when there is more than one right way to promote a website. Two SEO pros might do it differently and achieve the same results.

So, one might not be using the “standard” method someone else decided on, but still achieve the desired result or possibly even better results because they did something totally different than everyone else. Does that mean they are still wrong because it did not meet those standards?

2. SEO Competition. It also seems to me it would be difficult to get everyone to use a set of standards because we all have to compete with each other in our own business and we have to compete with each other for results for our clients.

If we all did the same exact thing, how does anyone gain the advantage? The best method of SEO hasn’t been invented yet. A new SEO person might come along tomorrow and have a better way to do things than any of us.

However, they would be outside of the standards set by whoever set them. But their results might be beating us all. I think standards make everyone mediocre. It undermines the ability of new rising SEO stars to show their stuff. It inhibits creativity because we are just following some “standard”.

3. Selecting Standards. So, who sets these standards? Do we hold an election? Will it be a popularity contest? Maybe the prettiest SEO Guru gets to set them.

If you set a bunch of SEO pros at a table and discuss SEO, there will be different opinions on how something should be done. Which of them gets to be the one that overrides everyone else’s opinion for the standard?

There are some very popular SEO websites built by some very smart SEO pros. Does that mean they should set the standards? Is their opinion something you follow religiously? Or do you like to march to the beat of a different drummer?

And if you do things differently from what you read at those websites and achieve good results for your client, are you wriong anyway because you didn’t do it the way they told you to?

I’d love to hear your opinion about SEO Standards and how you think it’s possible or impossible to have them.

Domain Name Parking Services

If you have a lot of domains that are not developed yet, you should be parking them somewhere that might make you some money with adsense or affiliate ads.

You can install a wordpress blog on them and write a few posts with your adsense or affiliate ads in place.

You can park them with GoDaddy and get some of the adsense revenue.

You can put up just one page with some original content on it.

Anything is better than just paying for the domain name every year until you finally get around to developing it.

My question for the day is, do you park your domain names anywhere and what domain name parking services do you recommend?

How Important Is Blogging For SEO?

Since I’ve started blogging I’ve seen blogs go from very important for search engine ranking factors to somewhat important. Let me explain how I’m using these two phrases:

• Very important means influential in multiple ways with no negatives.
• Somewhat important means influential in multiple ways with some negatives.

I still believe blogging is important for SEO. Add a blog to your website and blog to it every day and you will improve your site’s search engine rankings. It’s almost a guarantee. But, there are some practices that used to not count against you that will now count against you if you engage in them. And there are other practices that do not benefit you as well as they used to.

Examples: When I first started blogging it was common to see three sites enter into a three-way reciprocal link circle and all of them benefited. You can’t do that any more. Also, blogs within a network could all link to each other and all of them benefited. That, too, has ceased to be a benefit.

Granted, the above examples apply to static websites too, but bloggers were using those methods very extensively and suddenly the rewards were not there any more. Blogging then lost some of its luster because many SEOs started multiple blogs for the purpose of link building. Google killed it.

So, to what extent does blogging still help you with your SEO? Does an off site blog proffer any benefits? How about some discussion …

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Google DNS, Google Caffiene & Google Local Search?

Google didn’t get where they are by being stupid. Those guys at Google really know what they are doing and they are usually able to do things before anyone saw it coming too. They are full of surprises.

Hopefully, you already know about Google Caffeine and Google Local Search. You may have already heard about Google DNS as well. But read this about Google DNS from the Google Code Blog.

A proposal to extend the DNS protocol Wednesday, January 27, 2010Today a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS and Google are publishing a proposal to extend the DNS protocol. DNS is the system that translates an easy-to-remember name like www.google.com to a numeric address like 74.125.45.104. These are the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.

ICANN has to approve it before it happens, but ICANN usually signs off on whatever these companies wants to do, so don’t expect a long debate. Vint Cerf, (the inventor of email), used to run ICANN and now works for Google.

By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City. If you look up www.google.com from the Netherlands, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in the Netherlands. Sending you to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization.

Sounds really good doesn’t it? We all want more speed. But there’s more. Right now when that load is balanced, none of your IP Address is passed along from your ISP to the other resolver.

Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.

That part, as the post states, will not reveal to your whole IP Address to Google, so they won’t know exactly who you are. As long as the agreement ICANN approves does not include some obscure legal clause that states this can change later. As long as Google maintains the “Do no evil” policy.

But this post isn’t about privacy issues. With the launch of Google Caffeine and with Google Local Search becoming more popular, I suspect that Google DNS is part of an overall strategy to make local search even more powerful.

I’m not a DNS expert, but it seems very logical that with Google having the ability to know your general location combined with the ability to send you to the server they want to send you to will have a major impact on Google Search results.

What do you think?

Does W3C Validation Have Anything to do with SEO?

I read a blog post today that offers the top 5 SEO tips for 2010.  In the very first tip it says;

Optimise all your code before sending the new website live

• This is likely to become a concluding ranking factor in the near future for the Google SERPs
• Many tools are available to help you optimise your code such as Google Page Speed and Yahoo’s YSlow

I believe they were talking about clean code that loads fast. I’m not sure what they mean by “concluding ranking factor”, because load time has been a factor for a long time now.

But it brought up a question. A lot of people pay a lot of attention to W3C Validation. It’s a selling point for some web design companies.

But is it or will it be a factor in search engine rankings in the future?

Google.com 45 Errors, 2 warning(s) when I checked.

Yahoo.com had 141 Errors, 28 warning(s)

Bing.com had 12 Errors.

Searching for the term auto parts in Google and the top result is Advanced Auto Parts, 358 Errors, 162 warning(s).

Searching for the term real estate in Yahoo and the top result is Realtor.com, 137 Errors, 4 warning(s)

Searching Bing for the term airplanes and the top result is Wikipedia and that page validated. The number 2 ranked site for airplanes is Airplanes.com, 35 Errors, 17 warning(s)

So besides the Wikipedia result, none of the top ranked sites validated. This is by far not a complete study obviously, but I used 3 different random terms and top results for those terms did not validate and nether did the search engines’ own pages.

So, do you believe that W3C validation has anything to do with SEO?

Can you show examples?

What Will Be The Dominant Online Marketing Tool In 2010?

If you look back over the years, you’ll see that there have been different methods of marketing online that have dominated from year to year. In 1995, if you had a website then you made sure you were listed in Yahoo!s directory. In 1997, you tweaked your meta tags and tried to get listed in Alta Vista. In 1999 you were trying to get backlinks to impress Google. In 2003 you tried to make sure that your website content had all the right keywords in the right amounts.

Then there was e-mail marketing, social bookmarking, MySpace, blogging, Facebook and Twitter, viral marketing, video marketing, mobile marketing, and the list goes on.

What do you think will dominate in 2010? What Internet marketing methods will capture everyone’s attention and take off like a bat out of hell?

Why is SEO.pn different from other SEO Blogs?

I’ve written to my own SEO blogs and I’ve been a guest blogger on others. I participate in LinkedIn.com SEO groups. I’ve managed SEO forums since the 90s.

There are a lot of great SEO blogs out there that share what they’ve learned with others. Many SEO and Websmater forums are helpful as well.

The blogs, forums and groups I have found the most useful were those that encouraged discussion about SEO, Internet Marketing and more.

Those of us in the SEO business don’t always agree about methods, but when each of us expresses our ideas or points of view it leads to each of us learning more and to those that read the posts and comments, but don’t comment themselves, it is invaluable to them to have read different points of view on those topics.

That is why we built SEO.pn. This blog is not about our SEO servies. This blog is not to show you how much we know about SEO. This blog was established to invite others to participate in discussions.

We may even do some group projects to test out theories. Whatever we do, we want to have fun, network with other SEO pros and learn more.

We hope you’ll join us as a member or become a guest blogger!

How Important Are Domain Names?

Take an informal survey of domain names online and you’ll find that some domain names use keywords and some do not. There are arguments that support both positions. Some people believe that a domain name that you can market into a recognizable name brand is more important. Other people say that keywords within the domain name are more important. Which is right?

To be sure, both are correct. But keywords within a domain name can help you rank better for that keyword. That said, there are quite a few successful companies online that have opted for the branding route rather than the keyword route.

Which do you think is more important?

• Are you a ‘keywords within the domain name’ type of SEO?
• Or do you think it’s more important to have a branded domain name?

Google Caffeine and Twitter

This is from a press release from OnlinePRNews.com

Online PR News – 02-February-2010 – SEO Internet Marketing firm monitors live ‘Real Time’ search results for a select group of keyword phrases and finds leading Social Media Marketing companies are incorporating targeted Twitter strategies. Irbtrax SEO Internet Marketing forecasts a tremendous surge in the use of Social Media Marketing services as an effective Internet Marketing strategy once the value of Google Caffeine’s ‘Real Time’ search is fully realized.

“There’s no doubt it will contribute to a variety of new marketing possibilities. However, based on what I saw it appears many companies are still taking a wait and see approach instead of being more pro-active.”

My questions are;

Have you used Google Caffeine?

If yes, what is your experience with it?

Do you agree with what is said in that press release?

What are some other ways we can benefit from Google Caffeine?