Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

Keyword stuffing is a practice that used to work for all Search engines, but Google and others seems to have gotten smarter over the years. According to Wikipedia:

Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.

Seems pretty straight forward, yet some SEO’s still try to get away with it, heck, it’s easy to fall into that trap. And it used to make sense, but the cream always rises to the top and now links are king of the internets.

Why? Well, links come in all shapes and sizes and the logic is that Company A cannot own every website in the world, so it becomes a huge web popularity contest. But it just doesn’t come down to just getting a ton of links, you have to get the right links. Think of it in terms of a big high school and you are right in the middle. If you are best friends (have a link) with Jimmy, the high school quarterback that’s worth a whole heck of a lot more than being friends with everyone in the chess club, debate team, and band combined I know I’m going to get hit for that last one, but you get my drift.

So always be on the hunt for the right links (from .edu’s, .org’s, large companies, old domains, newspapers, and anywhere else where posting content is highly controlled and regulated). Site’s that allow any Joe Blow to post content, I’m looking at you MySpace and Craigslist, are going to have slim to no “trust” rank in the eyes of Google, Yahoo, etc.

For all you aspiring entrepreneurs out there who thought you might be able to save a few bucks doing web hosting from your home computer via Comcast, think again. From the Prohibited Uses and Activities section of their terms of service:

(Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:) run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;

From what I have seen, the only way to host anything is via their Comcast Business account. Just wanted to save you the headache of setting up a home web/file server and then finding out you can’t do anything with it.

Doh!

According to recent comScore data, Google owns 45% of the search market and Yahoo has 28%. The bloodletting is still happening at MSN, who are still continuing to have their gargantuan slide into oblivion in terms of search traffic and user base. Until they learn that reliable and relevant search results are the key to internet traffic this will continue, or they lay down some real money ala New York Yankees style to buy up the best talent. It makes sense to me to spend a few dollars on employees and take back search instead of arguing over nickels and dimes and having Google snatch up the best talent. Although, I’m not in the board room at Google or Microsoft, so these are just assumptions.
One interesting tidbit:

Americans conducted 6.8 billion searches online in October, up 3 percent versus September. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 33-percent increase versus year ago.

So search volume increased over 33% from last year. Very impressive! I can only wonder what will happen when Vista is launched in January and a bunch of new PC’s are online 24 hours a day and every time a user searches, it’s dumped through live.com or msn.com. Should be interesting to watch and might be the extra kick in the butt MSN needs to win back some market share from the big boys.

One final note, I can only imagine what is going on at Ask.com and their marketing department.

Marketing Guy: “Why haven’t our multi-billion dollar campaigns worked to bring traffic to us? We tell everyone our search engine returns better results and is easier to use.”

Tech Guy: “Have you looked at Google’s interface? One form and a button? Tough to beat that one.”

Text links to your site can be a very powerful tool in order to improve your search engine ranking. As taken from Google’s technology page:

In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.

What they do not tell you is how this whole voting works within the link itself. Since no one outside of Google has the algorithm on hand. Let’s make some educated guesses as to how this might work.

Scenario 1:
A link from page A to page B in the form of:

From Page A - Go to this link: http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html

Results of Scenario 1:
The pagerank for Page B increases by 1 Google Unit or “Goonit” since they received one vote via the anchor link. It does not benefit Page B in terms of keyword association via the Google Search algorithm since most people will probably not search for “http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html” in Google’s search bar.

Scenario 2:
A link from page A to page B in the form of:

From Page A - Go to this link and learn about chickens (where chickens links to http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html)

Results of Scenario 2:
Again, Page B increases by a Goonit, but now we have the anchor text “chickens” associated with the page: http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html. So when someone searches for “chickens” in Google’s search bar, they are more likely to see http://www.pageb.com/somepage.html than a non-chicken referenced page.

Scenario 3:
A link from page A to page B in the form of:

From Page A - Go to this link and learn about chickens (where chickens links to http://www.pageb.com/chickens.html)

Results of Scenario 3:
Again, Page B increases by a Goonit, we have the anchor text “chickens” associated with the page and the landing page has “chickens” directly in the url. Everything is coming together. The only thing left to do is make sure that the title and body text of http://www.pageb.com/chickens.html mentions chickens and the world will be at peace.

So how do I become #1 in Google rankings? Rinse and repeat my friends, rinse and repeat. By having good content, people will link to it. And by having a savvy marketing team, SEO, or web designer, you can tailor pages, titles, keywords, etc. to match your industry search terms. If you have further relationships with other sites, you can get them to link to your site and vice versa, however, avoid reciprocal linking schemes as those are a quick route to the Google graveyard. It makes sense if you refer back to Google’s technology page. If Page A votes for Page B and Page B votes for Page A, those votes nullify each other and you are essentially treading water.

Let me know if I forgot anything.

It appears that someone fell asleep at the control room over at Chase. Good thing I do all my banking with paper…electronic paper! In the context of a “404 Page Not Found”, the people in that picture look scary and mocking.
Well done chase, well done.

Any good webmaster has heard of Search Engine Friendly URL’s, but really what are they?

Early in search engine design, Google, Yahoo and the like preferred:

http://www.mysite.com/mysite.html

instead of

http://www.mysite.com/mysite.cfm?id=123&product=12312&state=MI.

While the site was being indexed, the “spiders” would get lost and not all the pages would be indexed. As search engines improved, so did spidering technology and this became less of a problem.

However, as usability became more prevalent on the web, the extremely long and clumsy url’s became harder for users to remember, easier methods had to be created to change “?id=12312345123&product=12312325415&state=MI” into “michigan-products”. As any good SEO and Webmaster knows, Cool URI’s never change. This is where URL rewriters comes in.

If you are running Apache on your webserver, this is standard and can be accomplished using the mod_rewrite rule within .htaccess. If you are running IIS, you can purchase a nice little application known as ISAPI_rewrite and this works within httpd.ini.

Both of these products let you create rules that run on top of your web server to transform extremely complicated URI’s into delicious bite size morsels that your users can understand and more easily remember.

Enjoy!

So not only do I have to deal with spam at my job, but I now have to deal with job spam? You have probably seen these Monetti emails arrive with “Canada and USA employment perspectives” and “International Loan Concern have new vacancies in USA” subject lines. How bad does Monetti need employees that they are spamming people around the world?

The bit about “International Loan Concern” touched off my Simpsons alarm. Perhaps you recall the Mr. Sparkle commercial. Classic!
Well done Monetti, well done.

More info: here

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WTF? Gmail image spammers have reverted to spamming Stock tips using WWII Japanese references? Is that what it’s come to?

Also, what’s up with the “hi, It’s Jeff”, “hi, It’s Joey”, “hi, It’s Francois” spams?

I have no idea what Gmail is doing to try and filter those, besides IP address. Can’t really filter based on anything else, as most of the message is just random text.

And what is the point of those? I assume just probes to test if the message got through or not, because they have no action item “Visit www.hi-its-francis.com” or “call 555-555-5555″, so what else can it be for?

In case you have been living under a rock, you know what spam is. A question recently came up of how do some companies (see Overstock.com, Buy.com, Angie’s List etc. etc.) get through spam filters and restrictions and others do not. The answer dear Watson is that they pay. Dolla, Dolla bills y’all.

Two solutions are Goodmail Systems (which works for AOL and Yahoo) and the ever popular Sender Score Certified (which works for Hotmail, MSN, Roadrunner “and 34,000 other ISP’s”). So if you are looking for the reason why you are getting messages from these companies and not others, it’s because they have a high speed route right to your inbox. A good analogy is the Illinois Tollway… You’re driving along minding your business, and all of a sudden a huge roadblock ahead. What’s with all this traffic? Well, you can either be a sucker and wait in the toll line with all the other “mail” or you can pay $399 a year and be “certified” by these mail services and zip on through the iPass lane.

Get the drift? So if you have $399 a year to spend, as well as $1000 annually for Sender Score Certified, you too can break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side, hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY!