Is Google raising the LSI element in the algo? I have thought for a while now that Google is using some sort of semantic element in their algorithm, but now I think it has been increased. LSI will totally turn on its head the importance of on topic linking, and a lot of the sites that have ‘bombed’ their way to the top will take a hit. For those of you who do not know what Semantics is, the dictionary says…. (Read on …)
WHY? Why do so many directories only allow the submission of your homepage? How can a site that covers multiple topics have the home page as its most relevant page for all of them? It cant. So we have launched a new deep-link only directory called www.deeplylinked.com submit your deep link most relevant pages to whatever categories you have and get the traffic you deserve.
YES this is blatant self promotion, but it is a resource that i believed was missing online. Currently it is free, but we will be charging in the future.
This is the argument that many have been making for a few years now. But while all this debate has been going on, those who knew who the real king is sat, smiled, and got on with earning money. Those who knew and understood what it is all about just kept doing it, and watching the money roll in.
So if neither copy content nor links are king, then what IS? I will tell you what is king, it is…. (Read on …)
I was over at Small Business Ideas Forum where I moderate, and someone brought up cold calling on the telephone. Now cold calling is something I loved, as I did a LOT of it way back in my sales and advertising early days. I have also helped clients with their cold calling setup, so this was right up my street 
One thing that sales people and sales trainers often fail to get across is exactly what the job of the sales person is. They say it is to sell products, (which is true), but they do not sum it up properly.
You see your job as a sales person, be it teleselling, face to face selling, or selling online is the same, selling is selling no matter what medium you sell in. Your job is to ensure the person you are talking to has the information they need to make a decision. Note I said a decision not a purchase? No matter how good your product or sales methods, some people will either not be able to, or not want to buy your product.
To sell you must listen more than you speak, but you need to get the information to the client, to get that information to the client you need to know what THEY need to know. You do this in the time honoured way that any parent will know. You ask questions! Kids by the way are the best salespeople you will ever meet, they master the skill of open and closed questions with ease. How many of us have gone through this
Please can I have an xxx?
NO!
Why not?
note the use of open and closed questions there!
I will explain the difference between an open and closed question, and explain how as a top salesman I used it shamefully to speak to pretty women without fear of rejection. (when like me you have a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, you need all the help you can get in order to not be rejected). (Read on …)
You toil over a hot keyboard fry your brain to get the words ‘just right’ and announce your writings to the world. Only to find that within a short period of time someone has stolen your hard work! What can you do about it?
Firstly I have to say that the instant you create anything, YOU own copyright to that material. Technically you own intellectual property rights on it. These are legally enforceable rights that YOU as the owner can enforce.
Ok I have been away from blogging for a few weeks, too busy with work and with other stuff 
But here is the thing. Why are people still asking ‘are frames any good for seo’? or ‘how can I optimise my frames site’? WHY BOTHER!
Once upon a time in a land far far away there was WYSIWYG software, and this stuff would build framed sites for you. The search engines couldn’t understand it, users hated it, no one could deep link to it, and users could not book mark anything but the first page. But all that has changed now hasn’t it! Hasn’t it?
Well true spiders can spider frames sites better but still can not handle the URL’s properly, the rest has stayed the same. Technology has moved on now, and you can achieve the same effect with php etc includes or as library items in dream weaver, or as templates within Dream weaver. Front page also has these facilities.
There really is no need to use frames any more, so don’t!
A question over at Small Business Brief made me think how good it would be to share the information I have gleaned on how to cut your advertising spend.
I think it was John Wanamaker that said “Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half”, well the technology of the web allows you to find out which half, or, in other words, it can multiply the ROI no end, as wasted money is wasted!
How many people that run adverts containg a link to their website, simply add www.yourdomain.com without any thought of ad tracking whatsoever, without any thought of page targeting whatsoever? If you do this, then your throwing away a golden opportunity to track the effectiveness of your advertising choice, and your adverts individually.
One of the best things you can do is evaluate your advertising returns properly, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to ask the visitor where they came from.
When the telephone rings, you speak to your customers, and, at the end of the conversation, one of the last things you should do is ask them ‘where did you get our number’? If they say ‘yellow pages, local newspaper etc, ask them why they chose to call you’ you do this because many people will pick up yellow pages to look for your number after having been referred to you by a friend, asking the ‘why’ question will give you the actual source rather than the vehicle for finding your number. If your not doing this THEN DO IT! 
But how can we transfer this online? for sure we get referrer logs, but they will simply show up as direct referrer IE, they typed your URL directly into the browser with no search engine or link page involved .THIS is where the real power of online offline comes to the fore. Simply give each of your adverts a unique URL, and your direct referrers from your logs will tell you how many people have visited as a result of seeing that advert, or having been referred to it by word of mouth (WOM). It really doesn’t matter how they got there, be it first generation or WOM, the initial response will be as a result of THAT ad in THAT publication.
I would definitely recommend sub-domains for this, as people will start typing from the beginning of the URL, and as such will add the sub-domain, and not leave off the sub folder details, as they will sometimes with sub-folders. We use a combination of add tracking and publication tracking sub domains (all excluded with robots.txt to prevent the possibility of their getting confused with doorway pages), and it works a treat!
By doing this we have been able to weed out the poorly performing publications, and increase the spend in those which work best, while finding new publications and refining ads. Sub-domains are perfect for this.
Yellow Pages is a perfect example. Many people have multiple adverts in YP, take for example a wedding car hire and limousine service. (this is a true life example of one of my clients). They advertised in
wedding services
Chauffeur driven car hire
Limousine Services
Specialist travel Services
Airport Transfer
They did not know which of these adverts were working, and at almost £1000 a piece per year it was crucial they found out. by using sub-domains of
weddingS.ourdomain.com
Chaeuffeur.ourdmain
limo.ourdomain.com etc.
we were rapidly able to identify that two of these adverts were bringing in ABSOLUTELY no business whatsoever. enter a saving of £2000 per year to spend on other things. At the same time we identified that one of them was performing very well, so we increased spend on that one, and totally worked on the advert.
I can not tell you how important it is that you grasp the fact the world wide wen, is NOT an advertising tool, it is a marketing tool. Use it as a marketing tool and you will increase your business. Look at entry and exit pages at least weekly, identify where people are leaving your site and find out why1 identify potential problems with that page, correct them, and get them back into your site.
I had a client who made bespoke bridal gowns (posh names for wedding frocks 
) I was able to tell her which of here designs were the most and least popular. She was amazed and asked me how I could possibly know that! I pointed out to here that it was simple, as the click throughs from the images of those gowns told us that. We changed the images, removing the underperforming ones and replacing them with softer styles, and business went up.
Log stats reading is a boring as hell, but it is the key to success on the web.
According to stats released over the last few days, Google has STORMED ahead in its share of the UK market. If searching in the US is known as googling, then in the UK search IS Google.
Google is now BY FAR the biggest, in fact TEN TIMES BIGGER than its closest rivals in terms of search volume in the UK market.
Google 77% (US = 44.7%)
Yahoo 7% (US 28.5% )
MSN 7% (1US 2.8%)
ASK 5% (US 5.1%)
others 4% (work it out for yourself I am too lazy, but Time Warner (AOL etc) got 5%)
Stats provided by Hitwise May 2006 with the US stats from comscore
So for anyone who thinks google is not that important in the UK, THINK AGAIN
At Long last Google have decided to give webmasters the option of not using the ODP titles and description. In a blog post at the official Google site-maps blog Vanessa Fox a Google engineer said:~
“One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and we’re happy to let you all know we’ve added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.”
So if you want to kill the DMOZ title and description, then use the following:-
About a week ago, Google started to roll out an update to their PPC quality score algorithm. That’s right I said ‘update’ not introduced the thing in its entirety. The Google quality Score system has been around for a while now. August 2005 to be precise, when it was announced that the following would affect your bids
Keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR)
Relevance of your ad text
Historical keyword performance on Google
And other relevancy factors (more Google hidden sauce.
It was updated in December 05 when they started to introduce the landing page into the algo.
All of this is absolutely fine, because after all we expect to find relevant content at the end of a click, be it free or paid listings, relevancy is and always will be king in the world of search. But from around July 4 06 Google twisted the knife by altering the minimum bids of advertisers where they think their Google quality Score is too low. There is of course an almighty backlash across forums as advertisers who bid on low traffic low cost keywords/phrases see their minimum bids raise in some cases from $0.20 to $5.00, effectively pricing them out of the marketplace.
The question on everyone’s lips though is WHY. Officially Google say
“From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we’re launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.” taken from here
Most people are saying that this is a direct attack on poor quality landing pages that are using Arbitrage (buying low cost AdWords, delivering them to a page with AdSense ads on and making money by people clicking on the higher priced AdSense ads.) If this is the case, then WHY are Google not simply removing these pages from its AdWords system? WHY are Google not enforcing the quality guidelines that say do not make pages just for AdSense. WHY are Google not altering their terms and conditions to make it unacceptable to deliver AdWords traffic to pages carrying AdSense? OR simply introduce a system where if the visitor is referred from AdWords then the AdSense click is not charged or credited. ALL of these things would result in this tactic being removed, but NOT A SINGLE genuine advertiser would be affected.
Another consideration is the landing page quality? Many PPC professionals use highly optimised landing pages (as you should) and part of this results in constant tweaking of these pages until they get to their optimum for the advert. (YES 2000 adverts might well result in 2000 landing pages, masses of work, but when you see the conversion ratio double, triple, quadruple and more, it is well worth it.) As these pages are tweaked, it is possible to have almost identical pages, and, as a result of this, top pro’s block the spiders from them. They are there SIMPLY for PPC, and NOT as part of the organic SEO, they are an SEM tool. SO how then are Google going to run their algorithm on a page they are not allowed to spider?
I have sent the following request to AdWords support
“Since you rolled out the quality score minimum bid increase that is focused (amongst other things) on the landing page, this has set alarm bells ringing in my head. Although I do not personally run Adwords myself, I do handle accounts for many of my clients, one of which is spending about $30k a month. My main concern is that as many of these landing pages are tweaked and developed to increase conversions, they often become close to duplicate, and anyhow as they are part of the PPC pages we do not want them to be treated as potential doorway pages or as part of the site (as they are not). For this reason we exclude robots from them.
My question is short and simple. How can you evaluate the quality of these landing pages when you are blocked from viewing them by spidering? Will the blocking result in a set score for this element, and will it affect the overall quality score.
I look forward to your reply, and will be posting the reply across the forums to help ease the worries of myself and others.
Regards
James”
Interesting to see what they say about this.
There are also rumblings of unacceptable business practice that might well be illegal in the UK & Europe (companies MUST have a clear and transparent charging structure, charging what you like to different people is not acceptable there) One thing is for certain though, while this might improve the quality slightly there are going to be an awful lot of people large and small who are going to be mighty peeved over the increase in minimum bids.