Several months ago I signed up for Dan Thies’ SEO Research Labs web site and I downloaded his SEO Fast Start…only to be disappointed by the 2004 date. Over the past couple of months I have received numerous e-mails from Dan’s site promising a new SEO Fast Start 2007 book (download the book below). Well, he delivered on his promise. I downloaded his e-book the other day and made my way through it, pretty quickly I may add. His latest book is a great resource for anyone considering entering the SEO game. I felt there were many valuable points in the book, but the most value I felt that a beginner could derive from his book is the methodology behind selecting the right keywords.

Back when I started in this game I nearly pulled my hair out trying to narrow down the list of keywords that I wanted to optimize a site/page for. I would have paid good money for Dan’s methodology back then. If you’re a beginner, I highly recommend that you check out Dan’s latest release and walk through it step-by-step.

Download his latest book here: SEO Fast Start 2007

There’s also a great review/post on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook website about Dan’s book. It seems there is a slight disagreement between the two heavyweights on the proper use of the nofollow tag. But, Dan cleared up his argument in the comments section.

All-in-all, I think Dan has provided the entire community with a great resource that serves as a good reference for all SEO’ers. I’m looking forward to Dan’s other Fast Start e-books (e.g. PPC Fast Start). You can sign up for Dan’s Fast Start 2007 mailing list here. Although the content is a little slim at this point, you can check out his Fast Start Portal (blog) for more info.

Thanks, Dan!!!

Hello everyone, today we’d like to introduce our United Kingdom Best Rank address, BestRank.co.uk. There isn’t much here but will serve as our UK internet address. More to come soon on this domain.

Rumor has it that Google is set to purchase feedburner, the leading blog feeder on the internet. This seems to be a great way for Google to tell who subscribes to which blog in order to produce more relevant search results. I.e. they can filter out fake blogs and list the ones people actually read in their search results.

Google did the same thing with YouTube last year. Their hefty purchase of the video startup, turned giant, means they are able to now interlace YouTube videos in their web results. Interesting - something MSN and Yahoo! can’t do, they can’t compete with. Those sly dogs over at Google know what they’re doing when it comes to company aquisitions… now if only I can get them to buy me out (good luck).

Big news today….Microsoft is buying an online advertising firm called aQuantive Inc. for the tidy sum of $6 billion….in cash. This really comes as no shock since both of Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the search industry have recently acquired major advertising firms. The first was Google and its purchase of DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, then came Yahoo! with its purchase of Right Media Inc. for $680 million. Then yesterday, WPP Group PLC (world’s 2nd largest advertising and marketing megahouse) announced the purchase of an online ad company called 24/7 Real Media Inc. Microsoft was in the running to purchase 24/7, but apparently 24/7 had other suitors.

Here’s what Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer had to say about the aQuantive acquisition:

“Microsoft is intensely committed to creating a thriving advertising business and to partnering closely with all key constituencies in this industry to help maximize the digital advertising opportunity for all,”

So, what’s going on here? Do all of the big dogs know something that we don’t? This looks very similar to the Star Wars race between Russia and the US some years back. Whoever can amass the biggest and most lethal arsenal wins….ready, set, go! Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are in a race to see who can dominate the online ad world. And who can blame them? There’s lots of money to be made in this industry.

These are very interesting times. It’s clear that all three of these major players are trying to capture a bigger piece of the $40 billion dollar online advertising market…which happens to be growing at 20% per year. But what does this mean for us little guys?

Well, for starters, it looks like we’re in for some challenging work in the online ad space. With this online industry consolidation, big companies like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be able to offer advertising much more efficiently and, due to economies of scale, much cheaper. They are clearly plotting against us SEO’ers and trying to drive us out of business. I mean, in 5 years who will be able to justify paying a PPC firm to manage their online campaign when a company can have its secretary, I mean administrative assistant, manage the campaign directly through the respective search engines?

I think there will always be a need for SEO’s and online marketers, but it seems that the online fragmentation is becoming, well, less fragmented. Big companies are getting hip to the idea that their deep pockets can keep attracting more and more traffic, which means less and less traffic for the little guys. The same holds true for online advertising. It’s an age-old adage…cut out the middle man = more profits for me!! Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft will continue their march toward total industry consolidation so that we (the stupid majority) can access one-stop shopping. It’s virtual castration…an online lobotomy, if you will.

I guess I can always go back to waiting tables!

Today I noticed a funny change in the background picture on Google’s search page, then I ran into a few blogs that were reporting Google had changed it’s interface!

When a search term is queried, such as: “seo” or “marketing”, Google gives suggestions from it’s own service offerings that contain your search query, right on the new navigation bar. Also of note: Google’s service offerings are now atop the search box, so things like mail and images are now a little closer to reach.

It seems Google is now using what is referred to as a “Universal Search” that combines vertical search channels, as noted by SEO by the SEA:

Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a “Universal Search” system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.

This makes a little more sense now that we’ve seen Google service offerings pop up in the navigation bar when we do a search for something like “Bush”, it gives us “News Music Blogs Video Images Groups” that contain results from that search. Again, now we don’t have to search the different offerings that Google gives us - they search it for us right away the first time we execute a search query and the results are stored in the little links in the navigation bar!

So what’s the big deal? Obviously Google is making a change, but they are also giving the consumer more freedom to “find what they want” or a broader semantic search. So we all can now find those targeted ads just a little bit faster and over a large number of people using Google’s search, that adds up to a lot of $$$ flowing around the web.

You want to create a blog, but you’re not sure if you should setup your blog on your current website (say, as a sub directory of your main site) or as a completely separate domain. There isn’t a “one-line” answer for this question so I will help explain the business implications behind both strategies.

“If you want to use the blog for something which complements the rest of your website, such as an FAQ section or an online media centre, then integrating it in the website is ideal, as it will re-inforce and support all your company’s activities. If, on the other hand, the blog needs to present you as an independent source of information and advice, then you would be better to distance it from your website, so that you can be seen as objective in this role rather than as part of the company which has interests in the area.”

Better Business Blogging has a great article on the subject and I encourage you to read up.

Today on Buzzle I found a great little article that talks about why landing pages on your website are critical to online-marketing success. Essentially, you have your website and you somehow generate traffic to your website. You could be getting traffic from an SEO campaign or via paid text ads such as Google Adwords. But getting traffic to your site is not enough - if you’re not funneling you’re website traffic to the correct portions of your website, you could be losing potential sales:

Let’s say you’re an online hardware store that sells a range of different products, including hammers, saws, power tools and axes… and you have a website where people can buy them from. You pay for targeted keywords, such as ‘buy hammer’ and ‘buy power tools’ and send all the traffic to the home page of your website.

If the person that typed in ‘buy hammer’ doesn’t see a hammer on the first page they are redirected to after they click on the ad, there is a much lower chance that they will convert to a sale. If, on the other hand, they click on the ad and are then taken to a page where they buy a hammer, there will be a much higher chance of them buying the hammer… leading to higher conversions and lower cost per customer acquisition.

A landing page is a single page dedicated to a single product or service, providing the visitor everything they need to know to make a decision to buy the product immediately.

Landing pages are very important for your businesses if you attract customers looking to find something specific for sale among a list of service or product offerings. As we have seen here, using Adwords in conjunction with your web site’s landing pages (not necessarily your home page) of your website can really pay off. Making higher sales via your site is not always about how much traffic you get but how you use that traffic, how you streamline a browsing customer’s time when they are looking for specific offerings on your site.

Page Rank or “PageRank“, is a term that describes a link analysis algorithm, created by the founders of Google (back in 1995 as part of a research project at Stanford, with a finished prototype in 1998), which helps to determine a web page’s search engine rankings for a particular keyword search. PageRank is just one of many factors that Google relies on to rank results in their index, but is worth noting as important because Google uses this as the basis for all their online search tools/offerings.

Essentially, PageRank (PR) is a number, anywhere from 0 to 10, assigned to and spread out among a set of web documents. For example, if you have a website with 5 pages, your index (home) web page might have a PageRank of 6, while your sub pages may have a lesser PR of 3 or 4 (being a little less popular / less in-bound links). Some documents on your site may not even have page rank at all. Again, PR is spread out amongst the pages on your web site to help Google’s search spiders and index know which pages are the most important pages (on your site) to show in their search results for key word searches. PR helps to show which pages are the most relevant and which ones are not.

How do I check my site’s PageRank? You can download the “Google Toolbar” and install it into either your Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser. The Google Toolbar has a PageRank meter that you can check whenever you browse to a particular URL, very handy.

How is PageRank assigned on your website? PageRank relies on the democratic nature of the world wide web in that links to a given web page count as “votes” for that webpage, the more votes you get, the higher the PageRank and the better your chances of ranking high. So if web pages “B” and “C” both link to page “A” then page”A” has 2 votes. Likewise if page “A” points to page “B” then page “B” now has a vote from page “A”. It is thought that links from other web sites pointing at your web page are generally weighted more than links from your own internal web pages pointing back at your web site. Again, the more links you have pointing to your web page, generally a higher PageRank number is assigned to that web page. Google also takes into account the quality of the incoming links to your pages (links that are coming from web sites /web pages that have similar content and or theme as your web page) and not just the quantity.

PageRank is also thought to be based on a logarithmic scale of somewhere between a base 5 or 6, so your PageRank goes up when you reach a certain link level/threshold. If you are not familiar with logs don’t worry, here is a tutorial, and I will try to spoon-feed this to you For example: if PR was using a logarithmic base of 5, your web page will reach a PageRank of 3 when you have X number of links at or greater than 125 and less than 625 (125 <= X < 625). In this case the lower limit of 125 comes from 5^3 = 125 links, while the upper limit 625 comes from 5^4 = 625 links. Do you see how having your X number of links between 125 and 625 will always result in a logarithmic value of no less than 3 but no greater than 3? Another example, if you had 300 back-links to your web page, then obviously 125 <= 300 < 625, so the log base 5 of 300 will give you a number of something like 3.5439 (rounded off), which is no less than 3 but no greater than 3. But what if your link count gets bumped up at equal to or greater than 625, say at 626? Then it is thought your PageRank will increase from 3 to 4, since the number 626 gives a logarithmic result of exactly 4.0009933414339, which is no less than 4 and no greater than 4 while using a base of 5

The NoFollow hyperlink tag attribute is a new industry standard recently adopted by all major search engines to help people redistribute PageRank within their websites, i.e. stoping PageRank leaks from important pages to less important pages. It was also created to combat spam within blogs to help stop PageRank from being injected into third party sites that aren’t relevant, such as spam blog commentators who leave their web site URLs on blog entries in hopes of creating instant back-links, and ultimatley higher PageRank, to their web sites.

Also of note: there are web pages that rank higher in search results than other web pages that have a much higher PageRank - so PR is not an end all solution to where your web page ranks on a particular key word query. Besides, it wouldn’t make sense to base search results on one factor or one majority factor alone, people could game the system with ease by creating many spam back-links, resulting in spam search results = no good. PR just happens to be a single factor in the grand ranking scheme that Google has laid out.

If you remember only one thing about this article, remember this: PR can be used to tell the search engines which pages on your site are more important than others, depending on the keyword search context given. Read up more about how to tweak your web site’s PageRank to your benefit.

What is the “NoFollow” concept that we’ve heard so much about and what does it mean for your website/business? Nofollow is a special HTML tag attribute that you can place inside of your hyper-links which will tell search engines spiders, once they come across your link, to not follow the link in question and subsequently to not give linking credit (PageRank) from the current page to the hyper-linked page.

So what? What does this mean? It means that if you have a website that contains what you would consider “non-landing” pages then those pages may be sucking PageRank from your “main-landing” pages. In this case, non-landing pages are pages that you wouldn’t normally want to show up in search engine listings, maybe something along the lings of a “terms and conditions page” or a “payment” page on your checkout process (that you link to via your main landing pages). Main landing pages are pages that you want to have show up in search engine listings, such as your home page or an FAQ page maybe. If you haven’t been using the Nofollow tag in the linking structure of your website (from your main landing pages to your non-landing pages), then those non-landing pages may have PageRank built up on them. Check your FireFox Google Toolbar and see your PageRank for your non-important or non-landing pages. If you were using Nofollow, you could prevent your main landing pages, i.e. your index page, from injecting PageRank to your less important pages (while still linking to them at the same time) - because when you inject PageRank from page A to page B, page A loses a bit of PageRank in the process - and so it would be beneficial to keep as much PageRank as possible on the pages that matter the most.

In an interview, as posted by Stone Temple Consulting, Google’s Adam Lasnik said:

“We realize we cannot turn the web back to when it was completely noncommercial and we don’t want to do that. Because, obviously as Google, we firmly believe that commerce has an important role on the Internet. But, we want to bring a bit of authenticity back to the linking structure of the web. And, Nofollow is one way in which that can be properly accomplished.”

Straight from the horses mouth, Nofollow is endorsed by Google.

To sum up, using Nofollow can be a great way to redistribute PageRank on your web site’s pages to help your main landing pages become stronger landing points (high PageRank) by blocking the PageRank “leak” to your less important pages on your website. Again, higher PageRank is thought to be one variable that increases a web page’s ability to show up in search results for a given set of keywords, and higher search rankings can mean more traffic = more business

Quality website content is still second to none. This is not a new theory, nor is it the panacea for all your website ills. It is, however, the backbone of any good website. The current state of the internet has empowered consumers more than ever. People have the power to switch to whatever site they want with a simple flick of the wrist. People don’t want to see a website stuffed with ads, they don’t want to see a bunch of pop-ups, and they sure as hell don’t want to give their e-mail address in exchange for accessing website information. Consumers don’t seek out webpages chock full of advertisements or useless content, they seek out webpages with the information that they are looking for. If they don’t find it on one page, then you can rest assured that they will find it on a competitors site.

What is it that people want? They want good, well written, quality information! As a website owner, you must think like a consumer and you must be a marketer. You have to ask yourself, what would the consumer want to see/read before they make the decision to purchase? Then, you give it to them! Give it all to them! For free! That’s right…give them the information they are craving and don’t ask for a thing in return. If this is done correctly, then the probability that they will purchase from you goes up exponentially.

John Reese wrote a great paper on this topic, click here for full article. He poses a new theory that if your website is not making the lives of those people visiting it better, then the site is not doing an adequate job. So, ask yourself, does my website make anyone’s life better? If not, then you need to adjust your website strategy. John goes on further to hypothesize that content in no longer King, but now it is Kong. What that means, I’m not quite sure, but it’s a powerful message because I think Kong could kick the crap out of King.

In an article, written by Mark Jackson, ‘The Golden Rule of SEO: Content is King’, he gives three reasons why well written content is important.

* It engages the reader
* It increases search engine rankings and traffic
* It promotes the likelihood of quality links from other sites

These reasons should really come as no surprise. But it never hurts to remember the reasons why we need to spend so much time and effort on quality content.

So, which is it…King or Kong? I think content is King Kong and the internet is the Empire State Building. Content is the 8000 lb. gorilla hanging from the rafters and swatting down bi-planes like mosquitoes. All hail the great King Kong….he won’t be dethroned anytime soon.