Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2010-09-24

Trouble reading this message? Read it online. September 24th, 2010 Welcome back yet again to another installment of the SEO Chat Weekly Newsletter. It has been a rainy week here in the Florida offices, so we skipped out on the beach tanning and hunkered down to bring you the latest and greatest in SEO news and how-to's. Keep reading to find out what we were busy working on! First up: two must-read pieces that covers the technical aspects of Google Instant and explains the implications for search engine optimization. How will this affect you and your pagerank? Read these two great articles to find out. Last up: I am a huge fan of the Joomla content management system, and this week we featured an article that every SEO that uses Joomla should read. It details how to properly optimize your Joomla site and gives you some great tips that will help you rise to the top of the engines. 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, SEO Chat Staff ARTICLES Google Instant Technical Observations for SEO Joomla Search Engine Optimization Tips for Webmasters Google Instant Puts SEOs on Their Toes SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail         ADVERTISEMENT As an entrepreneur, your primary goals include closing more sales, getting repeat business, and building lasting, profitable relationships with your contacts. And email marketing can certainly help you do that. The problem is that so few people actually know how to use email marketing effectively. In a powerful new free report, you'll discover 3 techniques for increasing your sales through email marketing. This free report reveals the secrets of Email Marketing 2.0 and shows you: Why most emails get ignored, and how to make yours stand out How Email Marketing 2.0 can increase your profits while you spend less time at the office Why most entrepreneurs are sabotaging their own efforts How experts send the perfect message at the perfect time to close more deals And much more! If you want to get more out of your email marketing, then this 5-page free report is for you. Download your free copy today!       top It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Keith showcases the best of Tech News. No - it is not just five minutes of credits. Watch the video!     ADVERTISEMENT   top Google Instant Technical Observations for SEO by Codex-M 2010-09-22 Google Instant is the latest Google innovation to have an effect on both users and SEO. But what kind of effect, exactly? This article will make some technical observations of Google Instant in action, and examine the short- and long-term implications for SEO (with a focus on keywords). You can learn more about how Google Instant works directly from Google; we've also touched some on how it changes the SEO game here on SEO Chat before. Okay, let's go to the most important question to be answered: How does Google Instant affect SEO and its users? The answer to this question is fundamental to the evolution of SEO, and it's important that practitioners adapt to this change in order to survive and do well at the SEO game. Read Google Instant Technical Observations for SEO ADVERTISEMENT Code is just about everywhere you look. So are the challenges of bringing your ideas to life. Fortunately, Visual Studio 2010 simplifies the entire development life cycle, from design to deployment. Learn more today.   top Joomla Search Engine Optimization Tips for Webmasters by Codex-M 2010-09-21 Joomla is one of the most commonly used CMS (content management systems) for websites. This is a short SEO guide for Joomla webmasters and users that explains how to deal with Joomla SEO problems and implement easy solutions. Bear in mind that this tutorial focuses on the onsite optimization aspects of Joomla. It is important that you have an administrator login privilege. This means you need to be able to log in as administrator to your Joomla website before you can implement the changes recommended in this tutorial. The suggestions in this article can be implemented whether your website is in development (still using local host) or in the production stage (at your hosting server ). Fixing the Joomla Front Title tag problem The default Joomla home page uses Welcome to Front page. Ideally, you need your home page title tag to be as accurate and descriptive as possible. Read Joomla Search Engine Optimization Tips for Webmasters ADVERTISEMENT Links From PR5-PR9 Sites Permanent, one-way text links 12 Months Permanent Link Guarantee Unique link building service Increase your site rankings , traffic , and sales ! Check Our Low Prices   top Google Instant Puts SEOs on Their Toes by Terri Wells 2010-09-20 In the first part of this two-part article introducing Google Instant, I explained the new feature and how it affects search - from Google's and the searcher's points of view. In this article, we'll take a look at how Google Instant is likely to change the way you do SEO for your website. The first question we might ask is, will Google Instant actually change SEO at all? The SEO Chat forums have been buzzing about this development for a while. While some members think this might mean the end of SEO, others insist that it makes SEO even more important. One respected member bluntly stated that, with Google Instant, if you aren't on the front page now, forget about it. And it just might get more difficult to get those high spots, too - at least, not without investing some real cash . Another respected SEO Chat member noted that On an average size monitor nearly every result visible on popular topics is now an advert. That's a big negative for anyone relying on natural traffic. Read Google Instant Puts SEOs on Their Toes top Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! 10 Essential Bing SEO Tips 10 tips which you can follow to get your links indexed at the top of Bing. Read the tutorial. How Can I Boost My Google Rankings? A definitive guide that teaches you how to boost Google rankings. Read the tutorial. Using and Getting on Digg The title says it all. Learn how to use Digg for search optimization. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. 10 Essential SEO Strategies Learn 10 essential SEO tips and tricks for getting a higher ranking. Read the tutorial. Learn Techniques Required for Creating Content WordPress Business Blog from average to extraordinary. Read the tutorial.   How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.   top Sometimes, what Google says it does and what SEOs see it do are two different things...which leads to some frustration. This week's thread talks about Jill Whalen's recent venting on that topic, and provides a little insight. manray Jill Whalen slams Google Someone just got fed up of "false promises" made by Google and decided to let the world know. http:// www .highrankings(dot)com/dear-google-290 jsteele823 She's just jealous ;) WhiteHatSEOMktg Interesting. Over eight years ago now, I used to contibute to Doug Heil's ihelpyouservices(dot)com forum and Doug and Jill slated me for my strategy which was to build a theme relevant, categorized directory of outbound links and then to ask for reciprocal links. What I was doing was spamming and unforgiveable according to Doug and Jill. "Plus ça change" as they say here in Belgium. I pointed out that I: * Reviewed the linked to sites manually. * Only ever solicited a link where there was a clear indication from the site owner that this was wanted. * Only linked to sites that I thought were of genuine use to my own site visitors. * Included a real world address in my link email. * Took great care to ensure my directory was valuable and balanced. The strategy proved highly successful and my main client became a top 100 Internet retailer in five years. Spam is what you want it to be at the end of the day. It is very subjective. Google decides what is and isn't an unacceptable manipulation and the truth is that a site promoted in the above way ends up having many one way links by virtue of the fact that most of the community of web masters building links in this way end up posting links that they don't get reciprocated and vice versa. Everybody has their way of getting links and it all boils down to networking with site owners in some way or another. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read More top Google Instant: Hold the Drama When Google Instant first came out, a number of our SEO Chat forum members looked on with concern. Several tried it out and declared they didn't like it. Others said that it would spell the end of the long tail. Still others even went so far as to say that it spelled the end of SEO, period. Granted, seeing results pop up in real time as you type in your key phrase represents a significant change to the user interface, and intuition tells us that user behavior will surely change in reaction to this. Or will it? Google Instant came out on September 8. I'm writing these words on September 23. That's more than two weeks to absorb the changes and observe their effects. It may not be very long, but with the speed of online information collection and analysis, many of our members are starting to see some preliminary results. Nobody would argue that two weeks of results can deliver anything conclusive, of course, but what's happening out there? You may be surprised and pleased to hear that there's remarkably little drama. Nobody is screaming about sudden drops in the number of visitors to their websites ever since Google Instant came out. Forum member Dice79 got the ball rolling when he observed that So far I've seen only increases, with a 3-5% normal increase in traffic over the past two weeks. Other members seem to agree that there's nothing to fret about. Of the other SEO Chat forum members who have weighed in so far, two have seen absolutely no changes to their traffic, one has seen a modest increase, and one has seen a slightly more than modest increase. This is hardly a scientific sample, but it does seem to hint that many of the fears pertaining to the way Google Instant will change search behavior may have been unfounded. So how could a change this big lead to such an apparently small effect? There are a number of possibilities. As I noted above, perhaps our sample is too small, and the sites being examined are not of a type to be adversely affected by Google Instant. Matt Cutts hinted at one point that he expected Google Instant to change search behavior over time; perhaps not enough time has passed for users to adapt to what it can do for them. It's also possible that not enough time has passed for SEOs to get the complete picture from their data. What I think is most likely, however, is that Google Instant is not, and never was intended to be, the kind of feature that would make or break any website. Google focuses on getting searchers to the information they're looking for as quickly as possible. As with Universal Search and other features Google has rolled out with that goal in mind, many screamed that they would lose visitors, rankings, money...and yet, the ones who give visitors what they want continue to do well. That's the real intention behind Google Instant: put the searcher in the center of the search, and websites that do the same will be rewarded with rankings, visits, and maybe even conversions. Good luck! Advertising Advertise in our SEO newsletter and reach informed SEO and search engine marketing professionals! For advertising information, contact us. Unsubscribe If you don't want to receive our emails, please unsubscribe. An email will be sent with additional instructions to confirm your unsubscription. Ziff Davis Enterprise, 28 East 28th Street, New York, NY 10016

Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2010-09-17

Trouble reading this message? Read it online. September 17th, 2010 Hello once more and welcome back to the SEO Chat Newsletter. It has been a busy week here as usual, and we have worked tirelessly to bring you the best in SEO news and how-to's. In the next few weeks, we are looking to ramp up the number of times we publish every week, so be sure to keep an eye out for a boatload of new content. Until then though, here are three new pieces that are sure to keep you satisfied. First this week: FaceBook is testing out a new feature that will allow you to follow your friends actions. Creepy or cool? See what our writer has to say about this stalkerlicious new feature. Next, the Goog unleashed Google Instant onto the web this week. How does it affect the SEO game? What does it mean to Google's bottom-line? Only one way to know for sure... Last up: An inciteful tutorial that teaches you where and how to get quality links. It is an often misunderstood aspect of SEO and I think every optimizer worth their salt should take a peek at this piece. 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, SEO Chat Staff ARTICLES Facebook Testing New Method for Following Others Google Instant Changes the SEO Game SEO Tutorial: Quality Links - Where They Come From and How To Get Them SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail         ADVERTISEMENT As an entrepreneur, your primary goals include closing more sales, getting repeat business, and building lasting, profitable relationships with your contacts. And email marketing can certainly help you do that. The problem is that so few people actually know how to use email marketing effectively. In a powerful new free report, you'll discover 3 techniques for increasing your sales through email marketing. This free report reveals the secrets of Email Marketing 2.0 and shows you: Why most emails get ignored, and how to make yours stand out How Email Marketing 2.0 can increase your profits while you spend less time at the office Why most entrepreneurs are sabotaging their own efforts How experts send the perfect message at the perfect time to close more deals And much more! If you want to get more out of your email marketing, then this 5-page free report is for you. Download your free copy today!       top It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Keith showcases the best of Tech News. No - it is not just five minutes of credits. Watch the video!     ADVERTISEMENT   top Facebook Testing New Method for Following Others by wubayou 2010-09-15 Depending on how many friends you have on Facebook, your profile can get inundated with a sea of news and updates. Perhaps you do not care too much about updates from certain friends. On the other hand, you do have that special someone that you would like to keep tabs on without having to visit their profile constantly. To appease those with this similar frame of mind, Facebook has begun testing a new feature that will allow members to subscribe to certain users. The proposed subscribe feature is in its infancy stage. Facebook has stated that the feature is currently being tested with a very small percentage of its members to see just how practical it is. One might believe that this subscribe feature was designed by Facebook to mimic Twitter's follow feature that allows users to keep up with updates from members of their choosing. If taken out of the beta stage and put into action, the Facebook version would let members receive updates of new happenings from friends they subscribed to. For instance, if you subscribed to John Smith's Facebook, you would receive updates either in your Notifications tab or on your mobile device Read Facebook Testing New Method for Following Others ADVERTISEMENT Code is just about everywhere you look. So are the challenges of bringing your ideas to life. Fortunately, Visual Studio 2010 simplifies the entire development life cycle, from design to deployment. Learn more today.   top Google Instant Changes the SEO Game by Terri Wells 2010-09-14 Late last week, Google unveiled Google Instant, the kind of interactive search on steroids that Jonathan Allen of Search Engine Watch called arguably the biggest change in the user interface (UI) of search engine results pages since search engines were invented and one of the most sophisticated engineering projects for Google since Caffeine. Keep reading to find out what it is, what it does, and just how much you might have to rethink your current approach to SEO. Google actually foreshadowed Google Instant a day or two before its release with an odd Google Doodle - a Google logo composed entirely of balls that moved when your cursor hovered over them, but settled down when you stopped moving your mouse. The company's only explanation for the mysterious logo was that it symbolized how they thought search should be: fast, fun, and interactive. That's what Google Instant is supposed to be. As Search Engine World pointed out, however, Google has been building toward this service for a long time. Google Instant combines improved spelling corrections, universal search results, Google Suggest and more (even the Google MentalPlex April Fool's joke) into a search that appears to all but read your mind as you type in your query. Read Google Instant Changes the SEO Game ADVERTISEMENT Links From PR5-PR9 Sites Permanent, one-way text links 12 Months Permanent Link Guarantee Unique link building service Increase your site rankings , traffic , and sales ! Check Our Low Prices   top SEO Tutorial: Quality Links - Where They Come From and How To Get Them by Codex-M 2010-09-13 Getting quality links to a website is often the hardest thing to do in the field of search engine optimization. It is one of those things over which a webmaster has the least control. If you're struggling with this yourself, keep reading for some strategies that will help you win those all-important links. The webmaster can easily control the quality of the content shown in the website, as well as the web design layouts and the onsite search engine optimization aspect, but not the inbound links pointing to it. Unfortunately, leading search engines like Google rely on the evaluation and analysis of backlinks more than the onsite aspects when assigning a ranking in the search engine results. So as a webmaster, you may often ask yourself: Where do these quality inbound links come from, and how do I get them? This article will examine the link profile of numerous successful websites to find some usable clues as to how to make your website look attractive in terms of winning inbound links. It also examines easy-to-implement strategies which ordinary webmasters can put into place. So if you are ready, let's get started. Read SEO Tutorial: Quality Links - Where They Come From and How To Get Them top Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! 10 Essential Bing SEO Tips 10 tips which you can follow to get your links indexed at the top of Bing. Read the tutorial. How Can I Boost My Google Rankings? A definitive guide that teaches you how to boost Google rankings. Read the tutorial. Using and Getting on Digg The title says it all. Learn how to use Digg for search optimization. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. 10 Essential SEO Strategies Learn 10 essential SEO tips and tricks for getting a higher ranking. Read the tutorial. Learn Techniques Required for Creating Content WordPress Business Blog from average to extraordinary. Read the tutorial.   How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.   top Should you build one big website, or lots of small ones? That depends on your purpose, as our original poster of this week's thread found out. Stop by and join the conversation! fiorina   Which is better, one big website or a lot of small websites? I have been building various websites for several years now. It is kind of my hobby, not for making money. I am considering what to do with them now. These websites are small in size: They have about 30 pages each. Should I put them together in one big website? Or should I keep them separate? The reason I have been building multiple mini websites is that I thought that one could be overwhelmed just by looking at the size of a huge website. I want each person to read as many of my web pages as possible, hopefullly all of them. So from that perspective, I think 30 pages is just long enough to read through, but 300 or 600 pages is simply too much for most people to read through. As a result, I think, people might read fewer pages at a huge site than they would at a small site. What do you think? I have never built a huge site, so I do not know the effect of size in search engine ranking and the number of visitors. Besides that, it is rather difficult to put a large number of websites into one because topics dealt with in them often overlap. The easiest thing to do would be to just put them into subdirectories, but isn't it meaningless? It would not be much different from a lot of mini websites from the visitors' point of view. So, the question is: 1) Do you read more at a small website? 2) Is it really worth the time and energy to put small websites into one big website? Most of these websites of mine are ranked quite high at Google. They do not have many links from outside: normally just a few or none for each page. There are very few or no links among my websites. I do not know what Google is doing, but that is the way it is. Jesus Nofollow Quote: Originally Posted by fiorina 1) Do you read more at a small website? Depends on the product and topic. I might read more initially on a topic I'm interested in and it is doable (30 pages being doable), yet I will be a returning visitor and read a lot more over the years on the bigger websites like Wired and SEOmoz, when the 30-page website is probably long forgotten. Quote: 2) Is it really worth the time and energy to put small websites into one big website? I'd reverse this question. Is it really worth the time and energy to put one big website into a lot of small websites? One thing is for sure, time and energy investment is a lot more on smaller websites, than it is on one main website. ROI on the time and energy investment of main websites is also multiple times greater than any small website could ever accomplish, even with twice the effort. paratroll If building websites is your hobby I see no reason to stop what you're doing the way you're doing it unless your focus has changed. The guys here are all right in what they say, one website is easier to manage, cheaper to maintain and promote, but to us it's a business ultimately and that is what we will be basing most of our decisions on. To answer your earlier questions I'm unlikely to read 30 pages of a website, I tend to use a search engine to find what I want read it and get out. I approach the net the way most men approach high street shopping. With that said I am probably not your demographic, and that is what counts here, what would your readership say? If they have already settled in to read 30 pages I would imagine they would be open for more from the same site. As to amalgamating all your sites, I would suggest choosing your best performing and most easily expandable site and just working on that in future. If you want to let some domains lapse, add their content to the 'main' site and 301 redirect the pages from the original domain several months before you let it go so it gives things time to settle. I wouldn't recommend a directory simply because it's yet more work and I don't think it would really help get people to your content. In addition you'd be adding yet another site you would have to promote and maintain! It's a bad habit! Ultimately you should probably sit down and work out what is most important to you. Do you enjoy making discrete sites more than you care about getting your message out to people. If you enjoy making the sites then go for it, keep doing what you're doing, but if you want lots of people to see and read your content then start concentrating on a single site, it's a lot less work. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read More top What to Know Before Hiring an SEO Your doctor works for you, but you know your own body better than he does; you live with it all the time, after all. You may not have his general expertise, but you know if your temperature normally tends to run a little high or if one of your moles suddenly doesn't look the same anymore. Your doctor fixes problems, helps to keep you healthy (and make you healthier), but it's a partnership. The same thing is true about any SEO you hire. Like a doctor, an SEO has specialized knowledge that they can apply to your situation, but YOU'RE the expert on your own website and business. This means that they can't do their job well without some very meaningful input from you. So you need to be prepared to explain your situation very clearly. A good SEO, like a good doctor, will ask you a number of questions, but there are some questions you need to ask yourself first. First, are you prepared to wait a few months before you get a return on your investment? If you really need to start seeing results soon, you may want to look at jump-starting things with a pay-per-click campaign. Pure organic SEO takes time before you start seeing its effect, however. Second, what words or phrases would you expect visitors to search for to find your site? You'll want to get just a little creative here. People who are ready to do business with a dentist may search for (name of town) dentists, but they're also likely to search for the name of whatever procedure they need - for example, invisible braces. Incidentally, brainstorming a lot of keywords can give you some great ideas for content for your site, especially if you write a blog. Third, who is your competition? If you don't know, you need to find out. This is where doing good keyword research can help you. Search Google for some of the terms you think are good bets that a visitor would use to try to find you, and see what comes up. Remember, if you don't know who your rivals are, you don't know what you'll have to beat to get to the top spot. Fourth, what is unique about what you have to offer? In marketing, this is sometimes referred to as your unique sales proposition or USP. What makes you and your company different from everyone else in the same field? Say you run a craft shop. Do you specialize in a particular craft? Offer classes? What do you do that other craft shops don't - or don't do as well? You should know the answers to these questions before you even begin your research to hire an SEO. Indeed, once you do know the answers to these questions, you might just decide to do a little more research into SEO and see what you can accomplish for yourself. In any case, an SEO needs something to work with before he or she can help you reach your goals - just as a doctor needs to take a full medical history before taking you on as a patient. This is what you have to bring to the table to help the partnership work. Good luck! Advertising Advertise in our SEO newsletter and reach informed SEO and search engine marketing professionals! For advertising information, contact us. Unsubscribe If you don't want to receive our emails, please unsubscribe. An email will be sent with additional instructions to confirm your unsubscription. Ziff Davis Enterprise, 28 East 28th Street, New York, NY 10016