A visitor dropped by my site asking whether Google cared about a link’s styling. I got in touch with Matt Cutts, and he was nice enough to take a few minutes to share an answer. Here’s what Matt said: (more…)

A reader from Singapour asked this to Google and then came to my blog: “Why is search tied to ROI?” ROI means return on investment, an essential business “metric,” or “measurement standard.” The answer to why search marketing is tied to ROI is in the full post (click read more for access). (more…)

You often hear best practices saying that Google won’t index your pages if they force Googlebot to take a sessionId. Is that really true?

How does Googlebot treat session IDs?

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“What does Google want” is a common question that many pretentious SEOs claim to know the answer to. I’m about to join their number. Google has moved beyond measuring SERP quality based on relevance and are now aiming to provide the best user experience possible.

Other titles I was considering for this post were:

Why Matt Cutts’ “Make Content For Users” Was Very Insightful

How Googlers Measure SERP Quality - Relevance Is No Longer King

Sorry Rand, But The Googlers Were Very Expressive, IMHO.

They are aiming not just for relevance, but overall positive user experience.

That’s what’s behind labelling of cracked sites in SERPs. That’s the reason for Universal search. That’s why AdWords integrates with GA, and GA with Feedburner. That’s why Quality Score counts loading times.
That’s probably what’s behind Knols (remember, Wiki + AdSense is good user experience ;).) For the inspiration to this post, lookie : what google wants/researching the territory.

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency - most people place it around 7 times - for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have! (more…)

I was asked what the ROI on SEO is a few times at a recent business event, and decided that it was about time someone spoke up for us organic search marketing experts. The sad truth is that we SEO Experts are grossly underpaid! Let’s look at some stats (or damned lies, if you prefer). (more…)

I’ve been asked the question recently in connection to business blogs: Should I blog on the company’s official site/domain name, or should I blog on on a fresh domain name? Each approach has its advantages, but with current search engine algorithms, my advice is to have the blog on (more…)

Social media is one of the most difficult things to justify in terms of ROI because current analytics aren’t well suited to measure its data. Here’s my proposal for social media analytics and tracking. This is an approach to use as a foundation for creating social media analytics tools, not a tool.

If you want tools, then check out the tools listed at the end of this article. Unfortunately, the best they can currently do is just measure brand mentions and track them; that only solves part of the problem as we’ll see. (more…)

I was emailing a prospect recently who mentioned that a competing firm had proposed doing A/B multivariate testing. If you’re familiar with the jargon of testing different ads/landing pages, you would know that A/B testing is different from multivariate testing. I can’t blame the prospect or my competition however, because ours is an industry enamoured with jargon and it sometimes gets me confused too! In any case, let’s see what A/B testing (more…)

First of all, submit to directories that review submissions before accepting them. The whole premise upon which modern search engines are built is that a link from one website to another is an editorial vote as to the quality of that website. (more…)

It is worth submitting your site to some directories, including paid ones. There are two reasons to submit to directories. First, you stand to gain text links that help with your SEO. Second, some directories will also send you traffic. (more…)

A question I’ve been asked a lot recently is “Can SEO be automated? Can I just get some software or hardware that’ll do the job automatically and get my site ranked at the top of the SERPs for my keywords?”

No, you can’t automate it.

First of all, search engine optimization’s foundation and core is about building links. Take the example of Google-bombing, where many people link to a certain webpage with the same anchor text, in a concerted attempt to have that page rank for the words in the anchor text, even though that page is not trying to rank for those keywords. This technique was succesfully used on several occasions and serves to demonstrate the power of link-building.

Now consider how you go about building those links. (more…)

Q: I’ve heard that I should have robots.txt on my website. What is robots.txt and why should I use it on my site? And if I really do need it, how do I go about writing and implementing robots.txt?

A: Robots.txt is a text file that tells search engine spiders (what are search engine spiders?), also known as search engine robots, which parts of your website they can enter and which parts they can’t. You can think of it as a nightclub’s bouncer or doorman, whose job it is to keep certain people (in our case the search engine robots) out of a certain VIP section of the club.

Now you may be thinking, I thought SEO was supposed to get my website fully crawled and indexed by the search engines! Why in the world would I want to keep their robots away from some of my pages? It’s a good question, and the simple answer is that most websites don’t want any of their pages being hidden from the search engine spiders.

The main reason why robots.txt would be used is to keep sensitive information private. (more…)

Google’s blog search patent application came out in March 2007 (though it was filed two years earlier) and it, like Google’s near-legendary Anatomy of a Large-Scale Search Engine paper, explains how the search engine will rank documents. In other words, it gives an idea of what makes the first blog show up first, and what makes the second show up second. So understanding the patent is essential to ranking a blog in Google’s blog search.

Luckily for you, you don’t need to go through the drudgery of reading through the whole, long technical paper. Various SEOs (Bill Slawski) and other good folk (Alister Cameron) have analyzed the patent and published this analysis for the public benefit. What follows is my comprehensive summary that aggregates and simplifies the patent and its analysis. (more…)