What are Rich Snippets?

Rich Snippets offer a way for Web sites with certain types of content to enhance their site’s search result listings in Google. All the Web site has to do is add some HTML code (in the form of microformats or RDFa) to structure that data in their pages so the search engines can recognize it. And even before Google started offering this six months ago, Yahoo! enabled microformats in SearchMonkey back in 2008.

Read more here!

Are you making enough money from your website?

There are a number of ways to monetize a site. Aaron covers the options in extensive detail in the “Monetization” members area , however today we’ll take a close look at just one aspect of monetization, Affiliate Marketing.

Read More…

Over the weekend URL shortening service tr.im decided to call it a day. They posted the following statement:

“tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further development since Twitter has all but anointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.”

Read More…

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html“/>

That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .

Here’s the link where you can Learn More about the Canonical Link Element.

Two thirds of company marketers believe that investment in natural search (SEO) is “very good value for money”, making it the most cost-effective channel for generating B2C leads.

Source: Online Lead Generation (B2C) Report 2008

Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords:

Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don’t know which flavors to serve, or suppose you’re responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products. To conduct your own, more detailed analyses, you can now easily export Trends data to a .csv file.

How can you use this data to build your business? Read more here

Search Engine Optimizer Aaron Wall put up an extensive, multi-angled analysis of the worth of a top Google ranking.

Google Ranking and Pagerank are probably the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. With billions of existing pages and millions of pages generated every day, the search issue in the Web is more complex than you probably think it is. PageRank, only one of hundreds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient.

When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. What’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search engine ranking. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords other than the crucial part which is misspellings, there are more areas to look at;

·         Acronyms - are words that are creating by using letters from a multiword phrase. For example, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. Abbreviations and slang would also fall into this category as well.

·         Hyphens - is it pay per click or pay-per-click? Again, this is a term where both variations seem to be accepted. Make sure that you are taking advantage of any hyphen versus no-hyphen in your own market.

·         Also those fun keywords that fall into multiple variations, such as BBQ, barbeque, barbecue, Bar-B-Q, Bar-b-que. Let’s hope you are using them in a PPC campaign rather than optimizing for all those variations for organic search results.

·         Synonyms - refer to two completely different keywords that either mean the same thing or are very closely related, such as soda versus pop versus soda pop. If you were a drink company, you would need to ensure you optimize for all three, since what people call it varies by region in the US not to mention worldwide.

·         Plurals - even though some might consider this the most obvious keyword variation to target. For example, you would want to use both mortgage and mortgages as well as both restaurant and restaurants. You would be missing out on a lot of traffic if you only target the singular or the plural and not the other.

Finding and researching keyword variations is something that many marketers still miss out on when selecting keywords for both organic and paid results. By utilizing the above tips for finding variations, you might discover an entire keyword set with high volume yet still low competition by your competitors for both organic search results and within the pay per click market as well.

You can read more about this topic here.

Aaron Wall on preemptive spam penalties and Google’s relationship with SEO companies.

“Google is determined to make any scalable link building process black hat. It won’t be long before all off topic link bait, including articles, is considered link spam.” Read more –>

Theres a lot of question comes on my mind; Are widgets spam? Why does Google comes down so much harder on individual SEO than Corporations? How far could Google go?

Trading freebies for links seems very fair to me. I don’t think we are violating Google on this kind of practice. I know now why some people prefers:

• outsource SEO kept confidential
• use companies to market widgets and applications

Google moves is really unpredictable nor unstoppable, they always refine algorithm to give so called “relevant search result” to the users. Are we really getting relevant results nowadays? Trying to banned websites as many as they can.

I want to share this one comment on Aaron’s post:

“Personally I think that Google is the organization that needs to be more transparent. If the rules as they defined them are not being applied universally than there are ethics issues at hand. Favoritism and discrimination are strong words but this smells bad to me. Are SEOs being descriminated against? Aaron described it as “arbitrary judgement” but I think there is more to it. If you put lipstick on a pig it is still a pig… right?

Unfortunately we all get a taste of that harsh reality at some point in our lives (not all people are treated equally….shocker). The reality is the corporations with the deepest pockets will play by different rules as they always have and always will. It is simple economics Google answers to the stockholders and the almighty dollar.  by ourmonmouth“

I totally agree with that comment. It is clear that Google is abusing power.

Search engine optimization is a compartment or division of Search Engine Marketing.

The difference between SEO and SEM has the diminutive to do with the overall mindset of the status quo. Mostly SEO embarks upon meta tags, titles, keyword density, natural listings, directories, and good html coding when SEM was into paid inclusion, paid placement, and a piece of SEO.

Search engine optimization dictates the majority rules of being the mainly prominent marketing technique right now, and company like Keyphrasesearchmarketing.com are developing similar approaches to guarantee that their sites are the ones conjecture the top results on the major search engine rankings like Google, Yahoo and etc.

SEM rapidly flattering the most popular and helpful to protect the mainly valuable contacts with clients from all over the world, after an excellent record from the SEO this is the most effective way to market your business online. On the other hand, since it is becoming such a large industry, there are numerous providers of search engine marketing services and various are superior and more trustworthy than others. Therefore, it is important to conduct an appropriate survey for the corporation that you come to your decision to use intended for online marketing campaign.

So, to increase your business specializing in social networks and search engine ranking and marketing, think first the other SEM options if you want to see if they might work for you. Nevertheless, if you work on SEO, the entire complex was into absolute worthy and wisely for your time.