SEO – Design – Flash – Development for the Web

Awesome T-shirt for those of you that have struggled with trying to figure out how to get your websites into the Google Search index!

SEO is Certifiable…but it’s also a lot of fun! Enjoy!
www.CafePress.com/stinkycooper

I was just reading that simple URL’s as opposed to Lengthy Keyword filled URL’s are better for search engine placement within Google. I’m not sure how much I agree with that. I have done some testing on both counts and must say that in my opinion it is not the case. By having some keywords in your URL string pages seem to rank higher, providing there is relavent content on the page.

So, I would be careful before making that assumption.
But then again…who the hell am I!

Check out my new SEO shirt….

Well, I just read an article an it brought up a 2 new Patents that Google filed, which you can read about here: Document Scoring Based on Traffic Associated with a Document and Document Scoring Based on Query Analysis.

Web page creation date
Changes and updates of a web page
Analysis of search queries
Links, link texts and the changes of the links
Website traffic
User behavior
Web page topics
Domain related information

Pretty wild and logical if you ask me. All search engines should use some of those as ranking criteria but they will hopefully use it with a grain of salt. You wouldn’t want to get dinged because your site doesn’t update for a long period of time, if it was ranked highly originally.

Things have been moving up regularly. This is fantastic, albeit, exhausting. Finally, some people I work with understand and realize what I was trying to do in my early stages with Downtown Hotels and have let me put this back into the works. We have steadily grown in rankings with Yahoo and MSN…as well as google. I’m am very please and will post more soon.

Well, we got the google smackdown again. We’ve been playing around with just our title tags lately and have watched google just push us around. It’s really insightful, frustrating and dissappointing to watch what you think is a great Keyphrase, or keyword and not get the results that your looking for.

So, Google says it doesn’t play favorites, yet, some of their “clients” get treated as if they have all the keywords and popularity no matter what terms you search for. – How is this? I understand some of what they are doing, but it is seemingly extremely difficult to break into the general keyword results.

I think I have some understanding of search engine placement, but then sometimes I feel like a novice. I don’t like tricks, gimicks or spam to get proper placement but I’m starting to think maybe I should start looking into it. It’s just unreal!

Well, it seems as though we are finally back on track with the SEO project of death. We have updated all of the templates to contain fresh text content and less back and forth linkage with Roomrate.com. By eliminating linking within the attractions area and the content area we have given Airportandhotels.com the contextual relevance that will allow it to stand on its’ own.

Back in Google for some of our latest updates…we feel we have finally done the right thing. Let’s hope it keeps going.

I saw thesse in a forum…thought they would be useful elsewhere. Thanks – Hiccup

To increase your clicks on adwords follow these rules:

• Never buy and ebook that tells you how, it’s a rip off
• Increase your Max CPC, and check it using the ad diagnostic tool. If your ad is not appearing, increase the max cpc until it does. (On the tool, there is link that says, “view ad in google” or something to that effect. Use it.)
• Make your daily budget at least double what they recommend. They really like $1,000 daily budgets for some reason…($30k per month maybe). BUT never increase it to more then you can blow in a day.
• Take crappy keywords and either delete them or put them in their own campaign so they don’t affect the CTR of your good keywords.
• Always write multiple ads, (two to start), and dispose of the lower perfomer after awhile. If you use two ads, adwords will rotate them automatically. Always try to beat the ctr with the new ad copy. Changes can be as simple as changing the word “easy” to “fast”.
• Look for related industry keywords, misspellings, competition keywords and urls of competition or anything that the surfer would type in to locate your subject. Overtures keyword tool is great for this. googles keyword tool is ok for this.
• You can have the number one spot at ANY TIME. But you’ll pay dearly for it. (just increase your max cpc substantially and you’ll see)
• google’s “Traffic guesstimator” is wrong 99% of the time, don’t use it.
• Always use broad match, phrase match AND exact match, you’ll be surprised at which ones work best.
• Always display the keyword in the title using {keyword:default phrase}
• Don’t put thousands of keywords auto generated by services like word tracker into the account all at once, your ads will never be shown because your daily budget cannot handle large amounts of keywords.
• Once you find your best producing keywords, increase the bid on them slightly to get more profits and protect their positions.
• Make your copy stand out and be relevant.
• Once your CTR is above 10% you will pay less per click for the same or better position. ( they reward you for relevant, high click through ads.)
• The best way to learn all this is by tinkering with the system, finding what works and what doesn’t.

Well, another few weeks have gone by. I have found our site moving up in the results again…thank GOD.
Google mostly…
when doing a search using our key phrase we have jumped everywhere. I’m pretty psyched.

Something that is helpful for all SEO’s-
It seems as though Google and Yahoo differ on one important ranking feature. SubDomains.
If you have them … Yahoo likes…really Likes.

Google on the other hand….doesn’t give you any credit for it. Oh well.

Good luck

Well, for starters I have multiple website that I’m working on for SEO. Roomrate.com is what I have been writing about and have mentioned AirportsandHotels.com. Well, I know we reached greatness in Yahoo with AirportsandHotels.com ….but, it doesn’t seem to mean crap to Google.

I just don’t get it. I’ve been cleaning up some of the site in case it is duplicate content…but still no results
I thought, maybe sandboxed….so we’ve asked for reinclusion….

and then – Bam! we have a PageRank of 3 – from no PageRank.
Go figure….we can’t get ranked but we still get a PageRank number. Any thoughts on that one…..NO…really…any thoughts?

This is my summary of this this article:

1. Improving website content – Content needs to be updated regularly
2. Navigation for visitors and search spiders -navigation simplified
3. New metrics measuring the success of a search marketing campaign -shared analysis of on-site traffic

a. Integrate their PPC campaigns with their SEO campaigns

Direct quotes of note…
“search, as a tool, is no longer confined to the search engines”

“Keywords are important, make no mistake about that but search engines have moved far beyond simple keyword/context measurements.”