Posted on Apr 15, 2010
Search engine rankings aren’t the most important factor when it comes to harvesting organic traffic; click through rate in the SERPs can play a much larger role than you’ve been led to believe. The leaked AOL search data is the only resource we really have to estimate click through rates on the search engine results page. The majority of people will agree that those values are pretty accurate when it comes to estimating the traffic at a certain rank. What most people don’t realize is by how large of a factor you can skew the respective CTRs at different ranks by simply improving what searchers see.
read more
Posted on Mar 15, 2010
It’s a simple question: Are you writing for people or for search engines?
Writing for search engines is easy. You take your knowledge about a topic and simply regurgitate it as text as quickly as possible while including those all important keywords. If you are a bit lazier you might not even write original and just plain bad content, you’ll take an article already written on the issue and simply rewrite it, so that you trick search engines to think its unique content. And if you are even lazier, you’ll just take that article, run it through a spinner, and repost it to save yourself valuable time.
read more
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.
read more
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.
read more
Posted on Jan 20, 2010
Yahoo Answers is a surprisingly useful resource to give a new or existing website a shot of adrenaline. The community is full of legitimate people, who actually answer questions, and spammers, who are abusing it for traffic and backlinks. Yahoo does a decent job suspending (aka banning) the accounts of these spammers, but it really is a futile effort as the spammers can just make new accounts. Another method of deterring spamming is that links on Yahoo Answers appear clickable only if the user posting is level 2 or above. On the plus side, this banning keeps Yahoo Answers from becoming a complete cesspool. You can choose to be a full out spammer, borderline spammer, or a more genuine user. All will have their respective pros and cons.
read more
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.
read more
