Archive for September, 2007
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 9/12 – 9/28
A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including DMOZ’s home page has gone missing from the Google search results, a new product called Fuser allows you to manage email and social networking accounts in one place, Google adds Video to the sources one can receive Google Alerts from, Microsoft rolls out a major update to their Live Search product, and finally Web security firm ScanSafe reports that one third of employers are blocking access to social network sites due to security and productivity issues.
Awesome Plug-In To Fight Comment Spam on Movable Type Blogs
I wish Movable Type had something better than Akismet which does a pretty good job filtering spam but still very quickly populates Movable Type’s junk folder. While this keeps junk comments from ever appearing on your blog, it still takes time to sift through them in order to locate any good comments which end up in there (which has happened). I have heard they have CAPTCHA support in version 4.0, however we are still running 3.2 and have not gotten around to upgrading yet. My thinking is that someone somewhere must have developed a plug-in that would allow me to install CAPTCHA or a comment challenge of some sort in the version I have right now. I can’t imagine everyone who uses Movable Type spending their valuable time sifting through junk comments to make sure that good comments are not accidentally deleted.
So late last night, with a little searching, I found an awesome plug-in developed by Jay Allen simply called Comment Challenge plugin.
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 9/17 – 9/21
A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Yahoo! agrees to acquire open source office suite Zimbra, Google launches PowerPoint alternative called Presently, Netscape makes the switch regarding their social news service to new site – Propeller, Digg adds new social features and Diggers are not happy, and finally, nine search engine executives make Forbes 400 richest Americans list.
SEO So Easy a Monkey Could Do It, Or Can They?
Automating the SEO process has been a hot topic of late. Loren Baker stirred up the conversation with his post “Can SEO Be Automated?” where he talks about the fact that search marketing agency, Commerce360 is developing proprietary software to automate SEO. As of today, his post has received 41 comments, mostly from people defending the fact that SEO cannot be completely automated. I agree! Then Lisa Barone published an excellent post defending the fact that SEO still needs the human element. This leads one to wonder if search engine optimization can actually be accomplished with software or in other words, can monkeys do the jobs of humans?
So Long SMA-NA – Grassroots Association Officially Dissolves
Ian McAnerin, current president of the two plus year old Search Marketing Association of North America (SMA-NA) has announced that he will be dissolving the organization as of today mostly due to lack of resources. The association was originally founded out of concern that SEMPO, one of the major associations related to the search marketing industry, was not properly serving the needs of everyone. Since then, according to Ian, SEMPO has solved those issues.
When Your On Page SEO Goes Too Far
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing your web site with the goal of increasing your visibility in the top search engines when specific keywords or phrases are searched for. Every web site that wants to be found in the organic search results of engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask and the like need to incorporate some type of SEO strategy. Some take it to far though as in an example I recently found with a national computer services chain.
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 9/10 – 9/14
A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including CapGemini becomes big ally in helping Google distribute its Apps product, Yahoo! owned Right Media responsible for serving Trojan-laced ads on MySpace, PhotoBucket and other popular web destinations, Netscape announces new location of social news site – Propeller.com, 97th Floor releases social media extension for Firefox, and finally, Yahoo! is rumored to be interested in acquiring news aggregator BuzzTracker for 5 million.
Optimizing Press Releases for Search Engines and People
Li Evans has a great post over at Search Engine Gurus where she explains how to not only optimize press releases for search engines, but people as well. Press release submitted online are a good way draw attention to your products and services. They also provide opportunities to increase the amount of inbound links that are pointing to your site. However, as Li explains, “understanding who will find this information intriguing enough to call you to investigate a little more and create a story out of your information is the key to creating successful press releases.”
Put Your SEO Knowledge To The Test
Test your SEO knowledge with a new 75 question quiz put together by SEOmoz. It will probably take you anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to complete the test but is a worthwhile endeavor. By scoring wrong on some of the questions, I was able to add to my knowledge. One of the questions, “what is an acceptable way to show HTML text to search engines while creating a graphical image to display to users” has two answers that are correct, at least in my opinion, however I chose the wrong one according to the quiz.
Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 9/3 – 9/7
A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Wikipedia to challenge the search giants with the launch of Wikia Search in December, eMarketer reports that for the first time in history, online advertising has surpassed radio advertising in dollars spent, Facebook will open user profiles to search engine spiders, Netscape is pulling the plug on its social news service and returning to its former self, iPhone owners are upset over Apple’s decision to cut price of phone by $200 only two months after it was released, and finally, the 2007 edition of SEOmoz’s comic strip recap of Search Engine Strategies in San Jose is available to humor you into the weekend.
Federal Government Opposes Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality – the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user, is under attack once again. The Washington Post reports that the Justice Department has come out in opposition to the idea of Net Neutrality and endorses the idea that Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic. This in light of several telecom and cable companies stating that they want to have the ability to charge select users for the right to access certain content on the Internet or to do so at higher speeds than others.
Can You Increase The Visibility of Your Site on a Shoestring Budget?
After putting together an SEO proposal for a small business web site they came back and informed me that they only had $300 to spend. That’s not monthly folks, but period! After looking over my proposal which was more to the tune of a few thousand dollars, they wondered what they could do (if anything) with such a small budget.
