You see it every week.  A search engine makes an announcement, and everyone blogs something along the lines of:

“hey, there was an announcement – I have no idea what it means but here’s a bunch of SEO ramblings so I can sound like I’m writing a blog posting – I hope I got this out quick enough – what does everyone else think about this”?

The following is a make-your-own SEO blog post formula.  The approach is outlined in my earlier posting on formula-based content;  just spin the following into thousands of versions, and then you can skip reading about 50% of the blog postings that go up every week on SEO – a massive timesaver.  It starts out a little dry, but quickly devolves into inside SEO jokes  – enjoy! Read on »

Google Gnomes Measuring Click-Through-Rate in Teslas?

In the Paid Search end of its business, Google uses Click-Through-Rate (CTR) as a major determining factor in its “Quality Score” calculation, which is a key factor in its Adwords ad auctions.  This is because CTR is a proxy for relevance; if enough users click on an ad after performing a keyword search, then it’s reasonable to assume that the ad must be pretty relevant to the keyword.  When it finds so, Google’s auction system rewards relevant creative-keyword combinations and penalizes less relevant ones.  This ensures a satisfying user experience and Read on »

While keyword density is important (regardless of what you’ve heard to the contrary), it’s not enough to simply say the keyword you want to rank for many times, or even better, the the proper number of times.
Keyword Density tools like Bruce Clay’s can help you figure out how to do that, but it’s important to be engaging to your end-users, and to look natural to search engine algorithms.   Peppering related keywords into your writing can help with both of these goals Read on »

Alien Bodies In Cold Storage at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway?

It can be hard to keep up with everything going on in the world of Search Engine Optimiization, there are so many great sources to keep track of…Matt Cutts, Bruce Clay, the SEOMoz guys, and so on…fortunately there is a single great source that pulls all of these sources together.  And, no, it’s not the Roswell Daily Record…although some of the material in the SEO community certainly qualifies as “consipracy-theory” fodder.

The ultimate source of SEO News, better than any I have seen anywhere else on the planet, is Read on »

They forgot "Be"

There is a company that has been doing content scraping on a level that’s really unimaginable, to the point that it can be regarded as a completely different business model than most others that do this.  Like many of the sites you’ve seen out there, its approach is to spider the web and copy other people’s content, then subsections of content are “mashed” together and presented to end-users – essentially auto-generated web pages.

The difference between this company and the myriad of other scrapers our there is in the “mashing up” process Read on »