Posted on Mar 9, 2010
I used to work as a clerk at a gourmet prepared food shop, and they sold sandwiches for something like $9 each. People didn’t even hesitate to pay that price probably because they were tourists or they valued the exquisite food that we made. Anyways, when I was first working there I used to glob dijon mustard on sandwiches like it was mayo. My boss saw this one day and asked, “Did he ask for excessive amounts of dijon?” I replied with a hesitant, “Uh no, why?” She had me taste some dijon, and from then on out I put on easily one tenth of what I used to spread on. I can laugh about it now, but I still feel bad for all of those unfortunate souls that paid $9 for a sandwich only to have a horribly unpleasant facial expression of shock with eyes wide open. I learned that more is not always better.
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Posted on Mar 3, 2010
Interacting with the community of your niche is an essential step for success. If you want people to know your website exists, then you’ll need to start engaging in these activities.
Writing superb content just doesn’t cut it anymore. You can create a website or blog with cutting edge and novel content, but unless you promote it no one will find it. Well, a few people might accidentally type in the url for your site and discover it, but the market you are targeting will be oblivious to your existence. In order for people to find your website, you need to market it.
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Posted on Feb 11, 2010
If you have an infinite budget or endless amounts of time, then reading this post will be a complete waste of your time. Before you go though, please fill me in on how one can acquire either of those.
For the rest of you, utilizing your time and budget effectively while link building can improve your return on investment in projects substantially. There are a lot of factors to consider:
- How much time do you have available?
- What sort of budget do you have available?
- What do you value your time at?
- What is your link building plan?
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Posted on Feb 6, 2010
If you can attain the #1 ranking for a (relatively) competitive search term, you can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your website. Winning the battle for the #1 ranking can exponentially increase your traffic. Too many people are targeting a range of search terms that is simply too wide. If you were trying to become a professional athlete, you would not spend time training for every possible sport. You would pick the sport that has the most potential and run with it. I’m not saying that you should focus all of your link building efforts on a single term, but shifting the focus of your link building campaigns and resources to your money keyword is an intelligent choice.
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Posted on Jan 19, 2010
I’m going to give you a bit of background prior to diving into the Google over optimization penalty that a website of mine received. I recently bought a website for 6 months revenue ($1,000) after haggling down the seller from 9 months revenue; this website’s niche can be quite variable and the seller needed money, hence its relatively low price. This site had stable serps for the past 8 months for a nice variety of search terms; it did not require any upkeep. Additionally, it had decent backlinks – a few hundred blog comments and blogroll links on the rest of the previous owners related websites.
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Posted on Jan 6, 2010
Website trust and authority are completely different things; they are commonly clumped together and confused. Website trust is essentially a measure showing search engines that a website provides real value and does not engage in unethical techniques (aka blackhat seo). Where your backlinks are from is an important factor in domain / website trust. If you have backlinks from highly trusted editorial websites (Newspapers, universities, goverment sites, professional associations, etc.), then you will more likely be trusted than a website which only has backlinks from spammy or bad neighborhoods.
The other side to this determining trust is who you link out to. If you link to non-reputable and spammy resources, then your website will lose trust. One last factor may play into the trust that is designated to a certain domain or websites; this is registration details. Google is a registrar of domains; thus they can see who owns what domains, and they already know what these websites link to. If the majority of your portfolio contains spammy or link farm like websites, one could make the assumption that on a whole, domains with your contact details could be flagged as having a greater chance of not being trustworthy. These are the factors that play into determining the trust a domain or website has.
Website authority is a bit simpler to understand; authority is a measure of how many website link to your domain and how these websites link to you. Different links hold various authorities; the sum of these links and the authority associated with them determines your authority. Google PageRank was once a good measure of authority, but it has recently been tainted by manipulative webmasters. Google likely accounts for this tainting by adjusting the trust of these websites. The diversity of a websites link profile is another factor. If your website has 100 links from 1 different website, this will not be as affective at raising authority as having 100 links from 25 different websites.
Authority can also be considered on a webpage to webpage basis compared to trust which is generally viewed as a global website factor. A singular webpage of a website may have authority, while the rest of the website might be filled with non-authoritative content. This touches upon the concept of deep linking and the importance of building deep links. Domain / website authority and trust can be broken down into these concepts, but their value to a website in seo is clearly significant.
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