Blogging is one of the hottest trends on the net. A blog (short for “web log”) is a web-based diary where the author can ruminate on whatever strikes his or her fancy. The blogger may share photos, poetry, political views, gossip, industry trends, business advice, or the latest on their personal life. By definition, blogs are organized in reverse chronological order. Many are updated daily. They can have one or multiple authors, such as a community blog.
Continue reading »Spread the word: 
Ann Meyer, author for Multichannel Merchant, discusses the power of natural search over paid search listings. This article goes on to mention the importance of proper keyword usage and the need for scaleable optimization techniques.
Included in this article are quotes from Netconcepts’ VP of Client Services, Jody Hartwig. Jody shares her views on natural search and the best practices needed to succeed in today’s market.
Continue reading »Spread the word:
Usability Professionals Association Auckland Chapter Meeting — Auckland
The marriage of search engine optimisation and usability can be a happy one. Granted, just creating a successful user experience can be a challenge. But to also cater to the search engine’s algorithms concomitantly - this can seem downright daunting. Many companies, often inadvertently, choose one approach over the other. The goal, elusive as it may seem, is improved search engine rankings ALONG WITH greater accessibility and better overall usability. Get ready for a dose of insight, strategy, process, and well-considered opinion to cure what ails your site.
Join Stephan for an information-packed session covering:
Spread the word:
Leveraging Technology in Marketing — Auckland, NZ
In this interactive panel session, understand the ways in which your organisation can achieve success in the area of search engine marketing, and hear from two companies who have implemented search engine marketing techniques, with great results.
Stephan Spencer, Managing Director, NETCONCEPTS
Caroline Booth, Marketing Communications Manager, MEDIA DESIGN SCHOOL
Hayley Roberts, Director, WORKING IN LTD
Spread the word:
Our client Steve Spangler is quite the renaissance man. In addition to being the CEO of a catalog company, he is also a toy inventor, an Emmy award winning television personality, a magician, an educator and a certified professional speaker. Just the sort of person you’d want blogging and podcasting.
The audio podcasts featured on Steve’s blog are targeted towards science teachers and include interviews with leading educators and monologues from Steve with helpful teaching tips. The video podcasts, targeted towards both teachers and parents, are some of the most amazing experiments you have ever seen. From exploding pumpkins to flying potatoes and erupting soda bottles, each episode is a hoot!
Functionality on the blog includes email subscriptions to posts and comments, buttons for readers to submit the post to Digg or del.icio.us, tag clouds and tag pages, RSS feeds, a audio podcast player built right into the blog, and more. Read the case study to learn more about this project and some of the results, including the fact that over 13% of their online sales can be attributed to Steve’s blog. The company’s products, which include science toys and experiment kits, are worked into the blog in a very soft sell way, so the blog doesn’t seem like a shill for the ecommerce shop.
[ database | client admin cms | SEO ]
Visit The Site: Steve Spangler Science
For Further Reading: Testimonial, Case Study and Steve Spangler Portfolio
Successful Online Advertising — Auckland, NZ
PANEL DEBATE-
Moderated by Stephan M. Spencer - President, Netconcepts
Kate Vale - Head of Advertising & Sales, Google
Jon Ostler - Technical Director, First Rate
Spread the word:
Successful Online Advertising — Auckland, NZ
Spread the word:
Here we are, the last session of Search Engine Strategies. It’s been a great, but exhausting conference. The session I attended was on SEO Tools. Three of the five panelists provided their Powerpoints on their websites (just so happens they were the three best presentations), which you should definitely check out because they show screenshots of these tools in action. Download the first two Powerpoints from www.webuildpages.com/ses and the third from www.epiar.com/ses.
Jim Boykin:
Wayback Machine
Find Age of Website Tool
Poodle Predictor (spider simulator)
Copyscape (website plagiarism search)
URLinfo
Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
KwMap (a keyword map for the whole Internet)
Hubfinder (looks for co-occurring backlinks, which may be authoritative links that help satisfy topic dependant link authority algorithms. To use Hubfinder enter a subject, and / or competing URLs to analyze linkage data of top ranked competing sites via the Yahoo! API.)
Keyword Tracker
Todd Malicoat:
Domain/server level information: Whois Source, DNS Stuff, and Check Class C IP Address (this last one is to make sure the links that you plan on buying are on different class C blocks)
Competitive information tools: GoogSpy, SwitchProxy extension for Firefox
Backlinks & offpage information tools: Pages Indexed, Backlinks Domain, PageRank, Allinanchor, Keyword Density tool, Yahoo! Link Harvester
Keyword information: Google Sets, Keyword Density tools, Google Suggest, Snap.com Keyword Stats
Header & page level information: Server Header Checker
Spidering & indexability: Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Sandbox Detection Tool
Ken Jurina:
Firefox extensions: SEOpen, Web Developer, Search Status, PDF Download, Roboform toolbar, Search Keys, IE View (all downloadable from http://extensionroom.mozdev.org)
Web CEO
Click Tracks
LiveSTATS
Roboform
Marketleap Link popularity check, Search engine saturation, Keyword verification
Bill Hartzer:
OptiLink
OptiSpider
Keyword Combinations
Keyword Helper
URL Trends domain analyzer (it also supports notifying you via email or RSS when changes happen)
Sources of other tools: www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html, www.digitalpoint.com/tools/, www.seotoolset.com, www.seochat.com/seo-tools
Paul Bruemmer:
Alexa
RankingManager
Linxviewer
Yahoo! Finance
Hoovers Pro Plus
Print Screen Plus
Well I wanted to blog many more sessions than I did, but it ended up being a lot harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully for you, dear readers, there were many other capable bloggers blogging the SES sessions. In particular check out the coverage on Search Engine Roundtable blog.
By the way, a big hello to all the bloggers I met for the first time at SES, including Scott Miller, Aaron Wall, and Barry Schwartz, to name a few.
Spread the word:
I’m a bit behind on my conference session blogging. Waaay too many parties going on; doesn’t leave much time for blogging. The Google Dance last night. Yahoo! party at Great America the night before. And tonight I’ve got another party to go to. Yesterday I spoke on RSS. I’ll post a recap on that session later.
I just attended “Search Engine Q&A On Links”, which was great. Lots of useful advice from Google and Yahoo! about linking (nobody seemed to want to ask poor Ask Jeeves any questions). It was funny how obviously diametrically opposed the engines were to the immediately prior session on “Buying and Selling Links”. It’s hard to reconcile the two different sets of advice. Matt in the hallway before this session was adamant: “Don’t buy links!”
Anyways, without any further ado, here’s the session recap:
Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves:
Be cautious of: reciprocal links and purchasing links
Avoid: link farms, cloaking pages, invisible or hidden links that trick the crawler
Become an authority on a subject
Focus on your busines and content. Rest will follow. [I say: “yeah, right…”]
Teoma uses subject specific popularity: garner respect in your industry, subject-specific text based links can be understood. (hubs and authorities model)
Tim Mayer from Yahoo!:
Here’s some important news!! Yahoo! has just launched a brand new service: Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search. Stop scraping the Yahoo site for backlink results and use Site Explorer instead. Access via an API is offered too. And you can export as a CSV file.
Yahoo has 19.2 billion web objects in its index. Over 20 billion objects, when you include the audio and video.
Plans to use community to improve search quality. Social search = within a trusted network, where someone within your network vouches for a site.
Create natural linking strategies. when things start to look unnatural, is when you’ll start getting into trouble. We look at intent (linking to plasma TVs, diamonds, and Viagra all on the same page) and extent (i.e. what looks normal. Having everything on the page as links or 200 links on the page is too much!)
Yahoo! offers a much more comprehensive sample of backlinks than Google, but not a complete set of backlinks. New system (Site Explorer) will be reasonably comprehensive, in his opinion the most comprehensive out there.
It’s unnatural to link to sitemap-1 sitemap-2 sitemap-3 sitemap-4 sitemap-5. If you are doing this, you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Matt Cutts from Google:
Good links are earned links, links that are based on editorial discretion.
Create services that really useful. e.g newsletters, an article a day, syndicate through RSS (attribute my article and give me a link). start a blog.
Matt launched his blog today: mattcutts.com
Think outside the box.
Only SEOs and librarians do backlink searches. Historically we decided to dedicate a subset of our servers to backlinks. Only a sampling of backlinks would be displayed but only for a threshold of PageRank 4 or higher pages. A suggestion was made to show backlinks for lower PageRank pages too. We liked that idea so we now show a random sampling of backlinks, including low PageRank scoring pages too. We show twice as many backlinks as shown before, but still it’s only a sampling of the backlinks.
In graph theory, a clique in every node in the graph is very unnatural. So don’t link to every single node in your network of sites; it’ll get flagged.
For dynamic sites, you’re very safe if you have fewer than 2 parameters; keep the values of those parameters to fewer than 5 digits, and don’t name a parameter “id”. Googlebot sometimes tries variations of URLs by dropping parameters, but we only do that deep level analysis on big, quality sites.
Another good approach that alltheweb came up with: spider would always go 1 dynamic page deep from a static page.
Search engines only grab 100k or 200k or 500k so be careful loading up a huge page with a lot of links.
PageRank isn’t as important as SOME people make it out to be. BUT it’s NOT like “PageRank? Oh yeah let’s shuffle that one under the rug! That was sooo 4 years ago!”
“BO” = backlink obsession
We export PageRank only once every 3 months or so.
Technorati tag: Search Engine Strategies
Spread the word:
Search Engine Strategies — San Jose, CA
This session explores how search engines are dealing with blog and webfeed (RSS/Atom) content and why providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic.
Spread the word:
Pages (55): « First ... « 40 41 42 [43] 44 45 46 » ... Last »
Ecommerce
Link Building
Copywriting
Web Development
Website Audits
Business Blogging
Search engine optimization
online marketing
RSS Marketing
HEADQUARTERS
2820 Walton Commons West, Suite 123
Madison, WI 53718 USA
Phone: (608) 285-6600
Toll-free: 888 207-1109
REGIONAL OFFICE
36 Anzac Rd., Browns Bay
Auckland, New Zealand
Phone: (+64) 9 476-4601
infodesk@netconcepts.com
