Well, it's still a massive industry and companies pay SEOs big bucks to try and push their websites onto the first page of Google.

The fact that it's not worth doing unless you're in the #1 – #3 spot is not talked about at client meetings; nor is the fact that there is no point in starting to do SEO until you know what keywords work for your business and the best, quickest, cheapest way to do this is buy traffic…

Here are some great resources from Aaron Walls SEOBook website that, if you can be bothered to take a look, will explain some of the nuances of working with the Google 'smoke and mirrors machine'.

A Look at How Organic Links Have Lost Value

Over the years Google has moved to "fight spam" at the same time Google's business development team has pushed to "make spam." The combination of those 2 (& pulling in additional non-link relevancy signals) has lowered the value of organic links.

Make sure you check out all the graphics at

http://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/

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I would have a expected them to have been honing and refining their search engine optimization strategy and the rankings that go with it for years.

However, from the article I'm about to link you too, it seems that they have very recently decided to 'boost' their search engine results and done it way to quickly and overwhelmingly.

Sadly, they will bring all sorts of attention to themselves; Google see this a mile off; and now they have been publicly slapped by G.

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Not nice is it JCP (the slap); check it out here

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To find the Google external keyword tool just go to Google and search for ‘Google external keyword tool’ and it will be the first organic link at the top of the page. Click on that link and you get to the tool. The first thing to do is select the website content option, which is on the left side of the page.

Then enter the website domain name in the ‘enter a web page URL’ box. Check the box that says ‘include other pages’. Then click on get keyword ideas. The tool will run and it may take a few seconds before you see any results. When it’s finished scroll down a little bit and you’ll see a section that says ‘showing keywords grouped by these terms’.

The highlighted links are what I like to call themes and so what this means is that Google is telling you what are the main themes of your website. This is really cool because it shows you the footprint of your site. This is a great analysis tool, not only for your own site but you can analyze a competitor’s site too and find valuable information about the websites content. It gives you the ability to spy on your competition.

You can see whether or not your site is really on the topics that you want it to be on. You might find that there are some topics that you would like to be in there, some themes that should be included in your content, which are not there. You might also find some themes in there that you don’t really want.

Each theme is sorted by relevance according to Google. So the first theme is likely the most relevant topic that your site is about in Google’s eyes. This is important to know! The keywords below the theme topics are also sorted by relevance and this is what we really want to know. This means that Google is showing you the best, most relevant search terms relating to your websites content.

What you can do is pick the most relevant terms that have a reasonable amount of searches and use those terms as anchor text for back-links. This will work wonders for your natural search engine optimization for those search terms.

If you work smart like this with the data that Google tells you is relevant to your site, as long as the topics are correct of course, you can use this intelligence from Google to get faster search engine optimization results than you ever thought possible.

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I have to agree that the thought of government trying to regulate search seems pretty darn ridiculous to me.

The anonymous author states ‘It’s now conventional wisdom that search engine optimization, representing the organic result sets on any search query, is more voodoo than science’.Well I don’t agree with that at all. If you ask me its always been more voodoo than science. The biggest problem was, is and will always ever be SPAM!

We’ve had link spam for years, content spam for years and now that Google is pulling search results form multiple channels in universal search we’ve got universal spam.

The authrors premise is that the search engines control who shows up in the saerch results and who doesn’t, paid search accounts can be blocked at any time etc.

It sounds like he doesn’t like Google much. Maybe his company just got slapped? Gee, I know how that feels (it hurts, especially for no fault of your own – thanks G)

You can read the original post here;
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/the-time-has-come-to-regulate-search-engine-marketing-and-seo/

And this is an interesting response from Aaron Wall of Seobook;
http://www.seobook.com/it-time-regulate-ignorant-anonymous-guest-posts-techcrunch

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In the real world, clients want to talk about search engines, search engine optimization or search engine marketing (Google Adwords / Pay-Per-Click).

Why? The current economic downturn is having an impact on businesses and with the majority of people now using Google (mainly) to find information on an all subjects across the board, many organizations are re-evaluating their online marketing and website strategy. It’s an area that clients in every market are asking for advice on.

Many are now concerned by their visibility to prospective customers. Businesses that previously saw a website as an online brochure are waking up to the fact that online they’re completely invisible to those searching online for the products and services that they offer. Not a good place to be at the best of times, but a business killer in a recession.

These same clients also recognize another huge challenge. Failing to act now to improve visibility will leave them even farther behind their competition when the economy starts to grow again. This fact is compounded by the changes in the search engine world over the last 18 months of many people are completely unaware. These include Universal Search in Google over the longer term and more recent changes to local search in Google.

Search engine marketing isn’t a one off activity. It requires constant attention, tweaking and monitoring, which is true of both Search Engine Optimization (the free organic listings) and Search Engine Marketing (Google Pay-Per-Click etc).

The best place to start is with an audit of where you are, what are they key words and phrases that are being used by prospects and how well are you currently ranking. Here are some questions to consider;

1. Has your website been built with optimization in mind?
2. What can you do in the short, medium and long term?
3. How are you going to grow links?

It’s also vital to ensure that your paid and natural search is properly co-ordinated. Increasingly, you also need to think about online PR and drive coverage on social media sites, which can both benefit SEO.

Now is the time to act, before your competitors either beat you to it or get so far ahead of you that you’ll never catch up. From what I’ve seen in the local search markets in some industries, there is already a war going on.

Face the challenges of search engine marketing and search engine optimization head on. With the demise of printed media it is increasingly important to stake your claim in the search engine soil. It can be time consuming (especially at the start) but once you begin you can very quickly see improvements in your rankings. Very soon you can also see the benefit on the bottom line with more visitors, more subscribers and more sales!

Start with a $97 FREE Search Engine Ranking Report
and Review of Your Current Web Site
& Get More Traffic Today!

Just click the button to get started!

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A tax cut has been approved in Washington state; I quote “Newspapers across the country have resorted to layoffs and other cost-cutting moves to deal with a wounded business model and a recession-fueled drop in advertising”

Read about tax breaks here

I really don’t get it. They are even blaming Google for their problems? I’ve been recently checking into advertizing rates for display and other types of ads in local papers and magazine here in Sarasota. They have got to be kidding! Sky high prices, with no way of really tracking results. And yet they are still failing?

I think most people see printed news as largely outdated and cumbersome.

This video post from Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand. I’m off to apply for a bail out too!

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I did some modifications to my Content Management System to do just that, specifically control the flow of PageRank exactly where I wanted it in my site and my customers sites and boy, it worked like a charm.

The option I chose back then was to modify the content management system to use javascript to redirect menu links. So I changed all the regular <a href links to javascript window.location. This has worked fine and served me well.

However, at the beginning of 2005 Google, Yahoo, MSN and some of the other major players introduced a new <a tag called rel=nofollow. This tag allows you to explicitly tell the search engine spider to either follow the link or not, which is what I had done with javascript code.

Now it’s all the rage to be ‘going natural’ with SEO and I’m thinking that it might be a better option to change the content management system back to regular <a links rather than javascript. I forgot to mention that the only way the search engine spiders currently crawl any of my sites modified in this way is via a site map, either a regular html site map or now xml site maps too.

So I’m going to try and find out if this is the way to go now before making any changes. Maybe I should stick to the old adage “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”?…

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Do we have to expect a larger ranking algorithm update? Will this change the ranking of your web pages in Google’s search results?

Here’s an overview of what I’ve noticed and what has been reported by webmasters in forums recently:

1. Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google’s index early March.
2. It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
3. Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
4. The Cache data doesn’t seem to be updated.

The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.

Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.

Is this really a ranking algorithm update?

Google engineer Matt Cutts denied that there are any major changes in the search results and that there was a ranking algorithm update on the way.

However, he wanted to investigate if and why the results change so much.

The observations of the webmasters in the forum might be normal changes that happen all the time. But the webmasters who discovered the changes are very web-savvy and they should be able to distinguish an anomaly from usual fluctuations.

I’ve heard on some of the paid search forums that it has to do with Google implementing more of it’s Latent Semantic Indexing algorithm. This makes sense of what I’ve seen recently and I’m in the process of updating some of my pages to see if that’s the case. If it is I’ll make another post.

Another alterantive is that Google is relying more and more on human reviewers to police the content of it’s index and make adjustments. This then brings a human element to the placement of your web page in the index. Here’s a link to a couple of excerpts of the reviewers guide.

This article states (near the bottom) that G has something like 10,000 human reviewers The plot thickens…

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Brainboost is a ‘Question answering engine that accepts natural language queries’ and it is the spawn of Answers.com, the ultimate answer engine, with quick accurate dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, bios, tech terms, news, sports, weather, and much more…

I’ve been using both and have been pretty impressed with the results. Of course, the content is provided by publishers that are affilited with Answers.com, so you ain’t gonna get loads of SPAM! I really like the Answers toolbar and popup. Try it and see what you think…

 maybe this will become the search engine of the future? Look out Google!

Rant over, finished no more…

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