Just year ago I used to wake up and check performances of my websites, sometimes it was an hour long process to check trackbacks, buzz on Technorati, RSS submissions, Google Analytics, and website backend for comments, submissions, and recent activity. Now it just… who Tweeted me?  

 It is sad but people don’t link your site from their blogs, websites, and social profiles. Almost entire web community moved to Twitter and people prefer to Tweet favorite links, good articles, viral stuff etc. Amount of incoming links dropped dramatically especially in blogoshphere, Darren Rowse mentioned that amount of inbound links dropped dramatically. Even annoying individuals who used to comment and link everyone to make friends moved to Twitter and now they Tweet every website and user they can find.
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Importance of image optimization was explained a lot of times by many web marketing experts (Example: Search Engine Watch, Web Analytics World, or SEOBook) but most webmasters still ignore basic rules to optimize images and attract get traffic from image searches like Google Images, Yahoo! Image Search, or Bing Images. Honestly, I wasn’t a big fan of image optimization for search engines because I was just lazy to tag (add “alt” tag) and write descriptions for each image. In August I decided to test how image optimization can improve my traffic. I spend all day applying image optimization and SEO strategies to images in my library. This week I took all data and it kind of impressed me.

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 Today another person asked me how to get YouTube video on Google Search, make optimization, and improve rankings. It actually suprised me because I had the same question in the past. YouTube is another website and Google treat YouTube like any other site. Some people are saying that Google prefers to rank YouTube better because YouTube is part of Google network… it is not true. In fact, Google does not give any preferences to it’s own sites, for example, search for a keyword ”translator” and you’ll see that Yahoo Text Translator appears higher than Google Translator. YouTube rank high on Google (and other search engines) becasuse it is the best video sharing network and one of the most popular site in the world with billions content pages.

Snippets to different 2 chicks 1 cup reactions in Google search results.
 As you see, it is not only YouTube videos but also other networks as well.

 Google treat YouTube videos the same way like any other popular video sharing sites (Veoh, MetaCafe, Revver etc). It creates snippet with video preview for popular videos or regular result preview for less popular videos. It is automatic process and if your video is popular enough it will appear in search results for related keywords. I would say even more, authors of popular and viral videos almost never use any search engine optimization to gain success.
Read more to find how to optimize YouTube Video

 Duplicate content issues is the biggest problem for most shopping websites. The problem comes with manufacturer description, most owners of shopping sites simply copy and paste product descriptions which was provided by supplier, manufactures, or host of affiliate network. Word to word description appears on multiple sites across the web and cause collective punishment from search engines.

 Here how Google, Yahoo, and Bing work with content… their algorithms is created to find original source of unique content and avoid appearance of a websites which steal content and violate copyright laws. When 1000’s shopping networks and sites use the same manufacturer description it moves all of them into omitted results. Often only one site remain in Google, Yahoo, or Bing index as content source.

 Example:

 Description from Amazon and Target websites for wooden hangers appears in 172 other websites and networks. As result, Google index only 13 of them and moved other 159 networks into omitted results with 0 chance to appear in search index when people search for wooden hangers, cheap wooden hangers, affordable wooden hangers, large wooden hangers ets…
Read more to find how to avoid duplicate content

 Every experienced search engine optimization expert will tell you that the best link is one-way link from related websites. For new site it is hard to receive good backlinks and regular submissions in free directories or link exchanges doesn’t work as it used to. Sometimes webmasters needs to go on other websites and ask for a links.

Picture source: SEOmoz

 In most cases email which ask to give backlink look spammy and most webmasters delete it and even report it as spam. Let’s look what Google recommends on webmaster guidance page: “Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online”. Yes, Google suggest to go and tell other webmasters that your site online… hm, but how to do it in legal way without spamming?
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Last week Jeremy Shoemaker made a post SEO’s Need To Adapt Or Die explaining that SEO’s need to blame themselves and not recession. Jeremy also pointed that SEO is not important as it used to be because everyone knows how to make site appear on top of Google and many technology companies create SEO friendly products which can help.

I’ll agree with Jeremy that SEO’s need to change to stay in business but I am defiantly not agree about technology companies. Of course many content management platforms are trying to create software which is SEO friendly but there are still a lot of work needs to be done by human being who can review product and make adjustments. Wordpress, for example, there are still a lot of fixes needs to be allied by professional SEO. Most content management providers create custom product for everyone, but every website and idea is unique and it is work of SEO specialist to improve new shopping blog, photo blog, blog social site, or business news for search engines.
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Article by Lisa D. Myers Get Special Price” to Appear in Google Maps, Now! captured my attention. Lisa wrote about company from Norway which offered her friend to submit business in Google Maps. As we know, Google doesn’t offer any featured, paid, express, sponsored submissions but some companies still use shady tactics trying to sell free service to business owners who are not too savvy in technology and web marketing. Working in advertising industry for many years I saw a lot of examples when companies with big names try to cheat and add “extra” services to their bill. It raise my eyebrows and make me laugh when some sales agent call or come to my office trying to sell me something with hopes that I still live in 1986.

The most unique and sometimes funny tactics I met:

We’ll keep meta tags on your website for $1000 / month!

Yacht dealer from New England hired me to help with SEO and I noticed right away that website doesn’t have meta tags. I called their CMS (content management) provider, apparently multinational company, and asked why meta tags is missing and there is no way to access FTP or add them through their content management. Representative on the phone told me that it will cost $1000 / month to activate meta tags option on a website. Holly crap! How come I never came up first with this “genius” idea”!
Read about more shady techniques

 Digg reported that nofollow tag will be added to some links, “We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community… We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity” stated on Digg blog. Clear decision made to reduce spam and unwanted links from some SEO’s. It is not a secret that some people don’t really care about news distribution and appearance on frontpage, many webmasters see Digg as a place to get powerfullink and improve search engine rankings.

 For many years Digg was trying to avoid rel=”nofollow” tags hoping that community will bury spam submissions naturally, as we can see it didn’t work really well. Some “smart” SEO’s used to create multiple profiles from different ip and vote for their own submission, some of them even created communities to exchange Diggs.
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 Search engine submission lost it’s importance in web marketing since search engines became faster and can index new website or page incredibly fast. It is useless to use Google submission form because it still takes days and even weeks to index a website. Many webmasters found that link building and participation in social networks guarantee indexation in several hours. In many cases it is enough to submit new website or page in several sites like Digg or Stumbleupon and site will be indexed.

 Many people are getting confused between two terms: search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine submisison. Search engine optimization is a process to improve a website in search engine results and get better traffic from search engines. Search engine submission is a process to list your site on peoplular search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Read more to find how to get listed fast…

Google “sandbox” is a term webmaster use to describe Google punishment. Many web marketers are skeptical about “sandbox” and Google itself denies form of punishment called “sandbox”. It still creates a lot of discussions in SEO forums and webmaster communities to explain website partial removal from Google index or sudden drop in rankings for specific keywords especially when site was over-optimized or “black hat” SEO applied.

Signs which tell that website was placed in Google”sandbox”:

If you open a new website and become build links very aggressive especially for popular keywords you site can appear on Google for a little while but suddenly loose all positions for all keywords except when you type full domain name. It happens when webmaster submit site in thousands directories overnight, use submission software, build links with the same anchor over and over again, spam in forums or blogs.

Google can also move site to “sandbox” if you use link farms or build links from fake blogs / sites hosted by free hosting providers. Example: many blogs on Blogger which was created to link your new website.

Unlimited link exchange or link buying process could lead to “sandbox” punishments as well especially if link building software or networks were involved.
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