This Week In SEO – 4/20/07

by Steven Bradley
on Friday, April 20th, 2007
in This Month In SEO

As I alluded to last night it was a very busy week in the world of search. I could have turned this week’s post into nothing but Google news and still managed to fill the page. Of course if I did I’d be cheating you of so many other good articles this week. Somehow I managed to cull the links into what I hope is a manageable amount. With so much to get to let’s move right into the links.

Social Media

Why not start social media this week with some numbers. Muhammed has some demographics on Digg users and Jordan McCollum has some numbers on social networks in general. She’s also linked to a couple of research papers where she grabbed data.

Even amidst the rumors they were being sold to eBay, StumbleUpon was tweaking things behind the scenes. First they dropped the audience rank feature, which I kind of liked and then today news came out they had added StumbleThru, which allows users to stumble through social media and personalized content. And if for some reason you don’t care for StumbleUpon maybe LeapTag will be more to your liking. Michael Arrington and Muhammed each had reviews.

Being a power user on social media sites can definitely help in getting your content to the front page. Cameron Olthuis talks about the right way to become a power user. Sometimes though, you can do everything right and still not make the home page. Rand took a look at a New York Times Magazine article which showed how unpredictable making your content popular can be. Furthering the unpredictable nature of social media, Muhammed takes a look at a post that made the front page of Digg after republishing content that had been previously buried.

And whether you’re simply a user or actively trying to market your content through social media, Bill has a patent roundup on some of the ways tagging and metadata can be used to organize social information.

Blogging

If it doesn’t make you extremely jealous maybe you’ll learn something from North x East’s post on how they gained 2000 subscribers to a blog in under two weeks. The original post was 500 subscribers in 7 days, but the title has been changing as it grows. Looking for a WordPress theme? Wendy Piersall’s got 7 of them for you that have been optimized for search engines.

It’s true I tend to write long posts. Just scroll up and down this one if you don’t believe me. Maybe I could use a dose of micro-blogging and MG Siegler has a rundown on how to accomplish that with Tumblr. Fortunately for me long posts weren’t one of the 3 blog mistakes Lee Odden described. And finally in blogging this week Alister Cameron discusses a Google Blogsearch patent if only to prove that Bill isn’t the lone person in the community who can digest a patent. If you remember I discussed Bill’s coverage of this patent last month.

Link Building

Matt Cutts set of the debate over paid links as the week started and as you can imagine people are still talking links at week’s end. I’ve added most of the articles that directly refer to Matt’s posts on the other end of the link that started the previous sentence, but kept a few for here.

Todd Malicoat offered his perspective on buying links along with a lot of good advice on how a variety of different types of paid links can benefit your site. Eric Ward has been building links as long as anyone. This week he talks about cleaning up your link profile. Loren Baker too a look at editorial links and acquired links and tells you which ones you want. And Raj Dash hunted and collected links and discussed them in terms of graph theories in what’s becoming an interesting series of posts.

SEO Miscellany

This link gets it’s own paragraph because it’s likely to be one of the best posts you’ll read about seo for a long time. Todd Malicoat hasn’t been posting much lately, but when he has it’s been very, very good. The SEO Playbook is a comprehensive look at what you need to know to succeed in regards to SEO. It will take you a month to read through all the resources Todd’s linked to. Of all the articles linked to here this is the one you’ll absolutely want to click.

The SEO Playbook – Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice

Ok you’ve read Todd’s post and know what to do, but before you start Stoney deGeyter has 50 questions you’ll want to ask yourself before getting started and Entrepreneur.com has a list of free SEO tools that might help you achieve success. One of the first things you’ll want to think about when building a site is how to structure your content. Mark Jackson has some good ideas on linking internally.

A couple of days ago I mentioned my thoughts on why copywriting is perhaps the most important skill for an SEO to have. Whether you agree with me or not it’s still a good idea to improve your writing. Brian Clark tells us how to avoid some common headline mistakes and Neil Patel has some thoughts how you can increase search traffic through your writing.

And now that you’re an SEO guru Shoemoney wants to know why you wanted to be a guru in the first place. He asked the question to some well known gurus and got some interesting answers in return.

Business and Marketing

Brian Clark is back using some Benjamin Franklin quotes to teach us about marketing. Tamar has some links to HeatMap tools to help increase your AdSense earnings. Seth Godin looks at an example of a site taking you to the wrong landing page and adgeek has some excellent tips on increasing conversions on your landing pages, once you figure out which page to send people to of course. And finally Andy Beal talks about a new way to monitor your reputation and what’s being said about you online.

Search Engine News

Google dominated the search engine news this week even more than they usually do. Still Yahoo! managed to make their own share of the news.

Google
It’s beginning to feel like Google owns the entire internet with all the acquisitions lately. Two acquisitions this week include Powerpoint alternative Tonic and video conferencing and collaboration company, Maritech. As you might imagine not everyone is enamored with the growth of Google.

Following up on the deal with EchoStar, this week Google made deals to get audio ads on the Clean Channel network of radio stations

Rumors picked up again about a possible Google phone and Google finally decided to rebrand Froogle as Google Product Search

The SEO in you should know that you don’t necessarily want to have all of your content indexed. My Google traffic increased significantly when I started blocking my WordPress feeds. Google has now made it easier to remove content through Webmaster Central.

This last Google change might scare the privacy advocate in you. Google will be expanding your search history and turning it into your web history as they follow not only your searches, but your travels along the web. Sounds a little big brotherish to me and I’ll be spending even less time logged into a Google property while surfing online.

Yahoo!
Despite first quarter profits being down Yahoo seems to be stepping up competition with Google. First was an expansion of an online advertising partnership with U.S. newspapers.

Next up was Yahoo teaming up with and integrating PayPal into Yahoo Search. The new Yahoo PayPal Checkout program will come complete with a shopping cart icon similar to the one Google checkout displays.

Yahoo also updated Site Explorer and launched a ‘full analytics’ option within Panama.

MSN
Microsoft seemed a bit overshadowed in the news this week, but they did launch what it hopes will be a competitor to Adobe’s Flash and complained about Google’s DoubleClick deal. The also made improvements to the adCenter quality score. Or did they?

I have some friends in town this weekend, very nice weather, and the Yankees and Red Sox 2007 rivalry take one to keep me busy. It should be an enjoyable weekend. I hope it’s the same wherever you are.

Spread some karma These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.