 | October 8th, 2010 | | Welcome to another installment of the SEO Chat Weekly Newsletter. As we wound the week down, we worked hard to bring you some hot new SEO articles to get you through the extended weekend. We know you can't wait to get started, so read on and see what's new at SEO Chat this week.
First up: the Drupal content management system is growing rapidly in popularity. As such, you will want to be sure to keep abreast of the latest SEO modules this great program has to offer. This weeks last article can help you do just that! Next up: Who doesn't love a great video game? They are fun, exciting, and can sometimes help you see the world in a different light. This week, Dev Shed's own Terri Wells created a piece that asked the question - what can video games teach us about SEO? She then answered that question with an article. So go read it.
Not enough? Check out our third offering: a hot piece on Google Street View. Where has the Goog extended its reach to now? Only one way to find out. Read the article below!
Finally, we top it all off with our Spotlight and Thread of the week you won't want to miss.
As always, thanks for reading. Until next time,
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| | | | | | Drupal Search Engine Optimization using SEO Modules
by Codex-M
2010-10-06
Drupal is one of the best content management systems for building and developing websites. The Drupal developers make it very convenient and easy for webmasters to implement search engine optimization practices on an existing and completed website. This article will show you how. The technique involves using modules which operate similarly to a WordPress plug-in (for those very familiar with WordPress). A module makes its possible to implement added features (such as SEO practices) on your existing Drupal installation without the need to customize or modify the core Drupal source code. Before proceeding further, it is important that you meet the following requirements that are used to implement this tutorial: Read Drupal Search Engine Optimization using SEO Modules
| | | | | ADVERTISEMENT |  | | | | | Video Game Tricks for SEO
by Terri Wells
2010-10-05 Wouldn't it be wonderful to get your visitors to put in as much time on your website as gamers put into playing Halo and other video games? You may not be able to turn your site into a dazzling, graphical free-for-all, but you can adapt some of the things that make video games so addicting. Customize some of the following ideas for your website, and you may soon see a swarm of visitors. I saw the ideas I'll be discussing here on Neil Patel's Quick Sprout site. The techniques fall loosely under the heading of game mechanics. Game mechanics, according to Wikipedia, are a construct of rules intended to produce an enjoyable game - one that people want to keep playing. So what are some of the elements that make a game fun? Well, one of the most obvious is competition. There are several ways to encourage that on a website. You might want to start with a test of skill or knowledge. It doesn't have to be fancy, either. Think about all those online quizzes you've seen. Sites like Facebook and OKCupid are full of these. Sometimes, the sillier they are, the better. Patel mentions that Bunkbeds(dot)net created a quiz that asks the question How long could you survive chained to a bunk bed with a Velociraptor? Read Video Game Tricks for SEO | | | | | Google Street View Reaches Brazil and Antarctica
by Terri Wells
2010-10-04
When Google introduced Street View nearly three and a half years ago, hardly anyone imagined that it would attain the reach it has today. On October 1, Street View earned the distinction of reaching all seven continents when the search giant added Brazil and Antarctica. Long-time Street View watchers won't be surprised to hear that there were a few glitches, however. Let's look at Antarctica first. It's kind of difficult to get one of Google's Street View vehicles to and through an area with such a harsh climate. Let's not even talk about the ecological implications! No, what Google did instead, according to its blog , was focus on Half Moon Island; indeed, if you read the blog entry to the end, you'll note that its author mentions vacationing to Antarctica with plans to take some Street View photos. For the rest of the continent, Google seems to have relied on user-contributed photos as much as they could. So if you use Street View to examine Antarctica, you'll see a lot of blue dots that represent these photos. You'll be able to drop Google's famous pegman over these dots to view the images. Read Google Street View Reaches Brazil and Antarctica
| | | | Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
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The title says it all. Learn how to use Digg for search optimization.
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| | | | | | When you're just starting a site that will be driven by user content, it can be hard to make it look worth checking out - and the ways to fix this might lead to their own problems, as the original poster of this week's thread notes. Be sure to stop by and offer some advice.
Glenn Kilpatric
Will I be penalized, banned or something Else ?
I recently set up a new site. Part of the site is for user reviews of local services and businesses. I sneakily asked some friends to add a review or 2 to get the site running and create that active feel. Unbeknown to me (at the time), one of them copied some reviews from another site. So what will be the outcome of this ? Will the site be banned from google, will the page be banned and the rest of the site left to perform as normal ? Will I recieve a penalty of some form, or does duplicate content really not matter. Oh, and should I remove the copied reviews. Probably a good idea as its not a friendly thing to do to a competitor.
Dice79
You'll be fine as far as Google is concerned as long as you're not duplicating content en mass.
S-E-Ogre
Don't get me wrong. It's clever and it probably would work to an extent, but just as you know with lying you have to remember what you said and with getting a fake review written you have to worry about a lazy friend COPYING and PASTING to your site. At least tell them to be smart about it. All in all, its like me coming out with a new product that hasn't hit the market yet and giving it rave reviews from customers when no one has bought yet. Give the product away in exchange for that testimonial or review. Good testimonials take hard work or a great product and a satisfied customer. Those are the most effective reviews. And you CAN tell when a review is fake. Go on amazon and look at some of the reviews that you can tell are fake or the new author asked a friend to get on there and write a review like their life depended on it. This kind of thing is what is going to make Google not give any credit to other people's reviews that may have worked hard for their reviews and were given honest ones.
Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read More | | | | | Don't Bother With On Page SEO You've heard this before, but the SEO newcomers always need to hear it: onpage SEO makes little to no difference in your standing on the search engine results page. A recent post in the SEO Chat forum illustrates this point. The poster optimized his home page by changing its title tag so it featured keywords for which he wanted the site to be found. He also changed the meta description, added a keyword-rich H1 tag on the home page, and wrote a keyword-rich paragraph. He targeted the same keywords in all of this. What was the result? A day later, Google had indexed and cached the new home page, but the page still remains in the same position in the search rankings, the poster noted. That's no surprise to veteran SEOs. It's been known for a long time that meta descriptions don't affect your standing in the SERPs; they may have at one time, but Google corrected that years ago in response to egregious keyword stuffing. The other changes listed have also had their heyday at one time, but nowadays they add little, if anything, to your rank. Respected forum member and moderator Josh Steele gently set our newbie straight. On-page work...[is] like posting more and more awards on the wall behind your desk - they don't mean a thing until someone or something recommends you to someone else. You need third party referrals. In other words, he needs links, preferably from highly trusted sources. So where should our newbie look? There could be other sites that are [about] industries related to yours, sites that feature articles about what it is you do (not sites that feature articles about every thing in the world...like ezine), suppliers websites, customer websites, local news outlets, etc. If you're a landscaper, you might check to see if your local hardware or lawn and garden store has a list of trusted contractors; if they do, you might find out if you can get on it, and see if they'll link to your website. Maybe they'll give you a link if you do a presentation there. Which brings up the next point Steele made; it's that the hard part is actually getting the links...think back to the networking classes you had in high school/college (if you had some), and think of it in much the same way - you scratch my back I'll scratch yours. You won't get these links for absolutely free unless you're just THAT amazing (and also assuming no one else is near as amazing as you are). Yes, by all means, you should make your site the best it can be. But that means doing the real hard work. Focus more on putting up real content and becoming the kind of trusted resource that others actually want to link to, and less on things like meta descriptions and H1 headings full of keywords. Often, what you do OFF your site pages is at least as important as what you do ON them - especially when it attracts links because your expertise is showing. That's the way you grow your garden online. Good luck! | | | | Advertising
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