All Entries in the "SEO" Category

How Do You Determine Selling Price?

I sometimes like to read Aaron Wall’s blog. And sometimes I don’t. He’s a guy whose insights range from brilliant to ridiculous. At times he whines (as in when he takes on Google for some supposed injustice) and borders on pedantic immaturity. Then there are times when I actually learn something and enjoy reading every sentence right down to the last line. This post on fake website buyers is one of those posts that I thought was near genius.

Last year I put up a blog for sale and had the privilege of selling it fairly quickly. I was actually hoping that I’d find a local buyer since it was a local geotargeted website. But a buyer is a buyer.

The offer came in from an investor in Europe. He looks for websites with value and turns them into passive income machines. That’s cool with me. Everyone has their own method of making money. A few years ago when I was into real estate investing I knew other investors who were flippers, others who were landlords and some who were into other types of investing. As long as it’s legal, cool.

I know I priced my blog low. I know it for two reasons. First, it sold quickly. And secondly, the buyer didn’t balk at the price. No quibbles, no questions, he just said “I’ll take it; your price is fair.” That, to me, means I priced it low. I probably could have got twice as much for it as I did.

My buyer wasn’t shady. He didn’t ask me for any analytics data and I don’t think I’d have given it to him if he had. My goal was to sell the site and I knew I had it priced fairly (What I didn’t know was that I’d priced it so low). So my question to you is, What criteria do you use to price your websites when you sell them? What do you base your asking price on? Is it traffic value or do you evaluate your web properties on search engine rankings or income it has produced? Maybe it’s a combination of these. Let’s discuss.

Dashes or Underscores? That is the question

I get asked all the time about whether it’s better to use underscores or dashes between keywords in a file name. I’ve always said dashes are better and I still say dashes are better and people still argue the point.

In a domain name, you aren’t allowed to use underscores, but you are allowed to use dashes. That should be your first clue.

But this is from the Google Webmaster Blog, just so you can see why you use dashes instead of underscores.

Underscores vs. Dashes
Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs.

In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you’re providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs.

Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not.

Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time.

Even without punctuation, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a “big leopard” and not a “bigle opard.”

While using separators is a good practice, it’s likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes.

I hope that resolves the issue for anyone wondering whether dashes or underscores are better.

SEO Tracking Tools – Crawler Simulation by Guest Blogger Gushchin Dmitry

First I’d like to thank Gushchin Dmitry of Easy SEO Tracking.com for being a guest blogger at the SEO Discussion Blog. We encourage our readers to send us their blog posts or become a regular contributor. We don’t mind if guest bloggers want to tell about their own product or service as long as it is useful to our readers.

User: I am the owner of the site. I did a good job by exchanging the links with other site owners, by increasing my page rank and creating the best content. Unfortunately, my site doesn’t appear in search engine results. What’s going on?

Don’t panic! One of the possible reasons might be that

Your site is “SEO Unfriendly”

User: What does it mean?

Let’s review the process of indexing the pages by the crawler:

strong>How Crawler Indexes Pages

First of all the crawler doesn’t treat the page the same way the users do.

Let’s consider the following example. What do you see at the screenshot below?

User: Umm… Well…

• Text box
• “Google Search” button
• “I’m feeling Lucky” button
• Logo

Excellent!

Do you want to know how Google “sees” the page above? If yes simply click “view page source” in your browser:

Exciting isn’t it?

The crawler doesn’t treat the pages the same way the users do, because what it “sees” and interprets are the HTML elements only. So one of the reasons your site is SEO unfriendly is the following;

The content of your site is not visible for the crawler as for the improper HTML. This scenario might appear for example in case when the developer or user who created the content incorporated JavaScriptcode or Javaapplets or Flash or things like that.

User: How can I found out whether my site is visible for the crawler or not?

By using Crawler Simulator like the one provided by Easy SEO Tracking.

Crawler Simulator Description
Crawler Simulator performs pretty straightforward operations:

1. It gets the page as if the crawler requests it.
2. And shows what part of the content the crawler actually “sees”

If you want to make sure that your site is visible for the crawler, simply enter the URL of the page in the Site URL field and click the “check” button:

In the example above the content of the page is visible for the crawler.

In cases when the “Content” field is empty or it contains too much JavaScript code it is a signal that the crawler will not see any information at the page (consider the example below):

In the example here there is not too much useful information for the crawler.

User: I entered the URL of my page in Crawler Simulator and it returns nothing. What I need to do?

Find the developer or someone who familiar with the HTML and ask him or her to fine tune the HTML! (If you need help adding content to your page that the search engines can see, click here and fill out the form or call us at 786-317-8774)

User: Thank you! Hey developer. I got some work for you!

Visit Easy SEO Tracking.com for more info.

Who Is Google’s Competition?

One of the things that SEOs and Internet marketers like to talk about quite a bit is the Google dominance over the Web. Some SEOs even go so far as to call Google a monopoly because there are no search engines who truly compete with the search giant for the share of the search market. But I think this is misplaced envy.

I’m not going to defend any Google policies because I think we all know that Google isn’t perfect. That’s not the point. This is simply a discussion about the nature of online competition.

Defining ‘Competition’

The first step to determining who constitutes a competitor for any company is to define, first, what constitutes competition and to do that you have to first define the nature of the business in question. So let’s do that.

What does Google do? And who do they do it for?

Obviously, Google provides information for people searching for it. But are the searchers looking for information from Google’s databases its true customers? No. They don’t pay for those services. They get them for free. Google’s true customers are another subset of its audience.

Some light can be shed on Google’s relationship to its audiences by taking a look at the news business. Newspapers provide news for readers, but they aren’t the true customers for the newspaper. The true customers are the advertisers that pay for space so that the newspaper can stay in business. Without advertisers there is no news. The same can be said of television and radio. The programming sponsors (advertisers) are the true customers.

Likewise, Google’s true customers are its advertisers. Without advertisers Google could not spend money to improve its technology to provide the services that it provides searchers.

Let’s dig a little deeper. What service does Google provide? All of Google’s services can be summed up in one word. Whether we are talking about PPC, organic search, Google Reader, Google Buzz, or one of the several other products that Google offers, it all boils down to one thing – traffic. Google is in the website traffic business.

Google Analytics allows webmasters the tools necessary to analyze their traffic. Webmaster Central gives webmasters more tools for analyzing traffic and building their web business. Google Docs is a tool for webmasters. Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Video, et. al are all traffic building products for Google users. We could go on, but I think you get the picture.

So there are two aspects to Google’s business – traffic and the revenue it needs to generate to provide the traffic benefit that it provides through its free services for its user base.

So Who Else Is In The Traffic Business?

Google is in the traffic business. Everything it does is for the benefit of webmasters who want to receive traffic to their websites. Some of those services – pay per click advertising, for instance – are a “pay as you go” traffic generation service. Others are paid for by the advertisers (Google Knol, organic search, Google Reader, etc.).

When I was in college I was given an assignment to write an essay about whether or not my local newspaper would be considered a monopoly. I was living in Dallas, Texas at the time. Long-time residents of Dallas will know that at one time there were two daily newspapers that served the Metroplex (Dallas Morning News and Dallas Times Herald.) Now, there is only one. The Times Herald went out of business in the early 1990s. This was in the late 1990s. So that would make the Morning News a monopoly then, right?

Wrong. While the daily newspaper served up news on a daily basis its real business was advertising, which means that anyone in the city that sold advertising was a competitor. Businesses have only so much money to spend on advertising. They will either spend it on the local newspaper or somewhere else. Therefore, the local daily newspaper was not a monopoly because it competed with advertisers in other media.

However, in another sense, the newspaper was a monopoly. After all, it was the only daily newspaper in town so if readers wanted an alternative, there was none (although I argued in my essay that even then the lone daily had creeping competitors such as the WSJ and Houston Chronicle, both of which sold heavily in that market).

Just the same, Google can be said to be a near monopoly in a certain sense, but in other senses, it has lots of competitors. Since there are other search engines where searchers can go for information (even if that information is not as high a quality as that which Google provides) it isn’t fair to say that Google has a monopoly on information online. But it does enjoy a position of dominance in the search sector.

However, its true business is traffic. Therefore, any website online that provides traffic to webmasters is a Google competitor. In that regard, Google is far from a monopoly. It does, in fact, have some strict competition. Facebook is the obvious competitor, but there are other websites that compete on a smaller scale, though some of them are growing quite fast.

It’s Time For A Paradigm Shift In Thinking

Internet marketers have got to stop thinking of Google as the evil empire. It isn’t perfect. But it does do a good job of providing webmasters with traffic. For most of us, it is our No. 1 traffic source. But there are a few websites that can say other websites are their primary source of traffic (either Twitter, Facebook or something else).

Some day, Google may not be the No. 1 traffic source online. The cyber world is constantly changing. Focus on the traffic and it all falls into perspective.

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SEO is Dead According to Web Pro News Video

Seriously, just anything titled; is SEO dead? is going to be kind of dumb in the first place. In the 90’s, before Google was a search portal, we knew that getting traffic from every possible source was the way to do Internet marketing.

After Google became a search portal, there were people, and still are people that think all they need is Google for traffic. Any good Internet Marketer or SEO Professional knows that getting traffic from many sources is how you become successful. The fact that there are more sources for that traffic now doesn’t change the method.

That knowledge has been around since the 90’s, even before Danny Sullivan started studying the search engines and how they index pages. Now the guy in this Web Pro News Video, Greg Jarboe, the president and cofounder of SEO-PR is telling people that SEO is dead if you think of SEO as just building websites.

More WebProNews Videos

In the 90s, your Internet Marketing efforts were dead if you thought of it as only building websites. What amazes me about the video ios that they are talking about this as if it is something they just discovered.

You know, I think I’ll start a website using software that allows me to write content to it everyday, kind of like a journal or a log. Web Log or Blog would be a really cool name for that. Wow! look what I just invented!

Seriously, Web Pro News, are you running out of people to interview and topics to cover? SEO hasn’t been about just building websites for more than the ten years this guy in the video refers to.

How Important Is Owning Your Personal Name As A Domain Name?

More and more I’m seeing people buy up their name as an URL (ie. JohnSmith.com, MarthaBartha.net, etc.). Is this just for the sake of vanity or is there a real purpose to it?

By way of full disclosure, I have an URL that represents my name. I went for AllenTaylor.com, but it was already taken. Therefore, I settled for the more specific AllenLeeTaylor.com, using my middle name. I’ve seen some people take their name with a .me extension.

I do think there is a good reason for doing this. For me, it’s a matter of reputation management, but that’s not all. I also believe it’s a good branding tool, particularly for creative people.

In terms of reputation management, you’ll have a better chance at ranking for your name as a keyword if you use your name as a domain name. Google now will only rank a couple of pages per domain for any keyword search term. If the search term is your name then what will searchers find? Your company site should be at the top of the list and you’ll likely have a few social networks on the list as well. A personal domain name should be on that list too.

If you have three social networks, your company website, a blog and your own personal domain name then that’s a potential 12 top spots on Google. Since there are only 10 page 1 listings this increases your chances of being at the top pretty considerably. That’s effective reputation management.

But how about personal branding? I’m a writer. I write SEO content, ghostwrite blogs and write fiction and poetry. I have also worked as a journalist. A personal domain name with a CV and portfolio is a good marketing tool. While I still have to develop my domain name, I am looking forward to the day that it is actually drawing in some new business and fans. That day should not be far off.

On personal domain names, you can count me in favor. I’m sold.

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Can Introverts Interact On Social Networks?

Social networking is getting bigger all the time. Facebook is now the second most visited website on the Internet, right behind Google. Not too long ago Yahoo! was the most visited site on the Internet. Google passed them in 2008.

It’s amazing that another social network, YouTube, is also in the top 5. And if you were to look at the top 100 most visited sites online, a good number of them are social networks. My guess is that a lot of those social network users are introverts and it wouldn’t surprise me to find more introverts on the social networks than extroverts.

I say this because extroverts get their energy from interacting with others whilst introverts get their energy from activities and pursuits done alone. While it may seem that social networking is “interacting” with others and, therefore, a source of energy for extroverts, that really is not the case. What you are interacting with when you engage on a social network is a digital replication of an individual and not the individual him or herself.

Social networks allow people to engage with others through a veil. That is not something that a true extrovert would gain energy from. On the other hand, an introvert can be completely alone and interacting on a social network for an extended period of time. The extrovert is likely to disengage and go out for a cup of coffee just to make eye contact with someone.

I believe both extroverts and introverts can gain from interacting with others on social networks. For me, a bit of both an extrovert and introvert (though leaning toward introversion), I cannot sit for too long staring at a collection of avatars. But I could sit all day and do research for content that I am writing.

Social networking has become a big part of doing business online. That’s both a good thing and a nuisance. It is what it is.

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YouTube Errors Caused by Chinese Hackers?

Today, I was trying to visit YouTube.com and specific videos there. I got an error message Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.

I looked it up to see what that was. One website told me it was spyware and told me to look at my HOSTS file. I did. Nothing in it was malicious code. So that solution wasn’t the answer.

Then I found this at News-About_Knowledge.com

http/1.1 service unavailable” is the error which has been experienced by millions of “you tube” users.

It has been speculated that these are the Chinese hackers who spread this error on the internet. It was reported that Google has announced battle against the government of China. Millions of you tube users have seen a fault in the service followed by a statement http/1.1 service unavailable.

It has been confirmed that the service of you tube remained down for more than 20 minutes. However, Google has not made any announcement regarding this latest error which halted the service of you tube. We have been observing numerous cyber attacks on different web sites. We also reported a cyber attack on Twitter which was made by Iranian cyber army.

Ok, I found this a little far-fetched, but not out of the realm of possibility. Whether this is true or not right now, cyber-warfare is coming.

Do you think Chinese Hackers are the cause of this error message?

Do you think Google would “battle” Chinese Hackers?

Do you think cyber-warfare is here and now or far off in the future?

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Are the Google Search Results you see the real results?

Vanity searches, we all do them. We want to see how we rank for our name, our business name and how we rank for the keywords and phrases we target. But are you looking at the real results?

Have you ever told someone you ranked on the front page of Google for your keyword and have them tell you they don’t see the same thing? I’m not talking about results coming from different servers. That’s a whole other story.

I’m talking about how web history affects what you see. If you go to Google and search for something, look up in the right top corner to see if you are signed in. If you aren’t sign in.

Then, still in the top right corner, go to web history. In the sidebar on the left, choose pause web history.

Now you will see the real results when you search. If web history is enabled, Google gives you results with more priority placed on sites you have visited. So it may look like you have a number one Google listing when you really don’t.

Google Chrome Review

OK, at first I ignored the fact that Google made a browser, just as I tried to ignore Firefox. I really hate change, so I stayed with Internet Explorer. I built websites and only cared how they looked in IE.

Then Firefox users started becoming a significant number of the visitors to my websites. So I was forced to check the websites I build in both browsers. I wish IE and Firefox could get it together when it comes to what an H1 tag  and other elements mean.

Firefox users defend Firefox, but IE was rendering tags the same way for years. Firefox is the one that changed how the elements look in their browser, so it is a Firefox issue, not an IE issue. Firefox is the reason you may need two css files instead of one.

Back to Google Chrome. I was having trouble with pages loading slow in my Google Adwords account. It suggested I try Google Chrome, so I did. Suddenly the pages loaded like lightning! I told everyone they need Google Chrome!

The spell-check feature is really cool. It does real-time spell-check like in a word document, even working in forms you are filling out.

It is a very fast browser for regular surfing of the web. But I have also learned that it is built for light users of the Internet. Google Chrome is a decent consumer browser for people who don’t surf the web much, but for a power-user who is online daily and for hours at a time, it isn’t ready for prime time.

After a lot of use, it suddenly slows to a crawl or won’t load pages at all. I imagine this is a caching issue and you don’t have control over the cache size as you do in other browsers.

It also doesn’t handle some Java applications very well. For instance, those of you who play Mafia Wars can’t accept or share energy packs when using Google Chrome. I don’t know how it works with other games, but I’m sure the problem  isn’t restricted to just Mafia Wars.

In Google Chromes Bookmark Manager, it says you can arrange your bookmarks in alphabetical order. And in the bookmark manager, it works. Then you look at your bookmarks and you realize it did not work after all.

When you want to highlight text you will run into another issue. Let’s say you want to highlight text from right to left. You have to start at least one character to the right of what you want to highlight or you won’t get it all. If you try left to right, you’ll usually be missing the first letter of what you wanted to copy.

So, Google seems to have taken a page out of the Microsoft development handbook. It doesn’t matter if the product doesn’t work very well yet, release it anyway.

I really hope Google will follow through with Google Chrome, but the trust just isn’t there anymore. Google launches a lot of things, then they seem to just abandon them. See Orkut, Google Web Pages, Google Knol and others for examples.

I’ll continue to use Google Chrome when I want to do something in Google Adwords. I think they should rename it the Google Adwords Account Browser. That’s something it can really do.