First of all if you do not know what comment spamming is then let me give you an example.  Have you ever been reading someones blog, and you see a random comment like, “nice blog, check out my casino site”  or something like that and there is a link or a URL left …  If you are reading a blog about how you don’t agree with the Iraq war and you see a comment like this, well what you have just witnessed is a comment spammer.  If you run a credible blog that you want your readers to take serious then you know what a problem this is.  So what can you do about it? 

• You can include charachter strings (where you have to enter a number or something like that to continue or post) 
• You can also threaten to report as spam
• You can blacklist them.
• Turn off the ability to link on your website
• If you allow links then implement a “no follow tag” so they get no credit on the search engines.
• block thier IP address. 
• The most important thing you should do is have an area on your blog where you talk about your comment posting policy.

Anyone who is familiar with blogging (and how useful they are) should be a good member of any community they are in.  If you provide useful information, and articles related to the blogs the reader will look into who you are and you will gain credibility and exposure that way.  So bottom line, just be a good contibutor and you will get the exposure you are looking for, comment spam free!

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This post will be pretty simple, but its an area that most would be (SEM) Search Engine Marketers get wrong. Without going into huge detail about the different tags, or meta on your pages I want to make a simple point when going after keywords in your content. Here are a few points to make sure you are doing correctly on any given page of your website in regards to the keywords you are going after:

1. Do not use any keywords in the meta (ie title tag, meta description or meta keywords) that you are not using in the content.
2. Do not anchor up any words in the content that you do not have in the meta.
3. Do not use keywords in the images that you are not using in the meta.
4. Do not use keywords in the title tag that you are not using in the content.
5. Do not use keywords in any header (tags) that you are not using in the meta.

A good rule of thumb, (if you see where I am going with this) is to make sure you don’t give the search engines the idea your website is “spammy” by abusing keywords. The main way people abuse keywords they want to be found for is by including them on content page, or in the meta when not using them on the other side. In short only use keywords that relate to the specific page you are working on or trying to optimize.

Do not try to write your content pages for a search engine, write them for a human. Write the pages like you would if a search engine did not exist. When you start to understand this practice your website will start moving up in the rankings and you will be rewarded in time.. A good example of a page written for a reader and not a search engine is an article found on Rocky Mountain Mattress about the history of memory foam

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Many SEO’s will not flat out tell you that they hate PPC (Pay Per Click) and anything related to it, but they will not tell you its great either. Several factors lead me to belive (being an SEO) that natural is still and will always remain the way to go for a truly successful business. A mistake small internet business owners often make when setting up a PPC Campaign is not really understanding how they work and picking the proper keywords. You still need to have an analysis done of your site and the keywords you are targeting. Often times the major engines have services that will set these campaigns up for you, but if you don’t pay attention to the words they use and take out ones that are not related and un-targeted you are just wasting money on traffic that will not convert.

With so many adsense spammers out there thriving on places like MSN and Yahoo its hard to have a good feeling that you are actually getting good quality traffic with the money you are paying. If you use Adwords you worry about this and PPC fraud. I read a report that said Google had set aside $90 million for PPC fraud suits.

These guys are doing thier best to control thier programs, and you got to give places like Google credit for having such strict policies in cancelling spammers, and abusers of these programs. It does make you wonder if you have ever lost money with your campaigns because of bad practices.

The solution. Get yourself an SEO firm that practices white hat techniques, and that will get you quality traffic which will lead to better conversion then any PPC campaign. Natural search engine optimization is the long term solution for your website, PPC is often a quick fix in getting started and you should also use an SEO expert in helping you set up your PPC Campaigns.

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I was shown this by a friend today and got enough of a kick out of it that I wanted to share it with everyone.

Oh how its sad, but isn’t this what its coming to? ENJOY!

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Question:  Is it bad to have a splash page on my website?

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I am asked this question and everytime I am amazed at the way people think.  I think they were bad in the 90s and they are still bad now.  There is no place for a Splash Page on your website.  If you are a webmaster or in charge of marketing for your business and you have one TAKE IT OFF NOW.  In the line of monopoly do not pass go, do not collect $100 … just get it off.

Why are true SEO’s and SEM’s passionate about this?  These pages do nothing for you except lose customers.  As a consumer when I am looking to buy something online I want to skip the BS and get right to the meat of the matter–in this case the product.  I do not need to waste time with a flashy intro that usually has no content (bad for search engines) and the Meta is usually done wrong.  Its hard to optimize for flash and most splash pages are built this way, but I have even seen some really horrible HTML splash pages.  They are all bad! 

Think about yourself when you are surfing the web and looking to purchase something.  You do not need one more click to waste your time.   Give me the info and let me be on my way!!!

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A very simple post with a reminder to avoid certain things when building your website.  Often you have hundreds (maybe thousands) of keywords that relate to what you are doing on your website.  It may be very tempting to use those keywords in the meta (all of them) on everypage.  Doing this is a bad thing.  It is a good idea to only use the keywords in the meta that you are using in the content of the page.  Some search engines could think of you site as “keyword spamming”  if you put so many keywords in the html.  Alot of search engines have given less respect to the “meta”.  Yet so many people keep trying to get away with it…  It will  hurt your standings in Google and may even get you banned. 

Hidden text is something that people are still tricking the search engines with, but once you get caught it will also get you banned and you have to get it off, re-apply to get reindexed and comply with all of googles guidelines.  Hidden text is when you match the color of the text the same as the background.  (this is where alot of people just through a mass amounts of keywords or the same keywords cause they are not creative enough to come up with good content.)  All this will still get you banned.  Stay away from this practice.

Something else that is tempting to do is stuffing your images alt text with massive amounts of keywords.  Again, a bad practice…. this can also get you banned on Google. 

Bottom line, stop trying to trick the search engines…just be creative and come up with good content and start playing well.  Turn a new leaf and start practicing “white hat seo” techniques.  You will be rewarded in the end by all the search engines (atleast the ones that really count).

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The live page rank, future page rank (RK) or whatever you want to call it speculation over the last couple of days just got some light shed on the subject-sort of…..let me explain: Matt Cutts answered in his Q&A over the last couple of days that the RK Parameter will no longer be showing any other number then 0. This tells you that infact the live pr tools have been shut off. No one answered why? This is where the sort of comes in. Also the speculation remains as to what exactly the live pr was. Was it the future pr of your site after big daddy? Matt does not go into much detail with this either, other then offering this:

Q: “What’s an RK parameter?�
A: It’s a parameter that you could see in a Google toolbar query. Some people outside of Google had speculated that it was live PageRank, that PageRank differed between Bigdaddy and the older infrastructure, etc.

So I guess we did learn two things:

1. We know that live-pr will not be showing any other numbers besides 0.
2. We know that we still dont fully understand what the tool really was measuring (although we have a good idea now).

It will be interesting to see what new tools will be developed or if this is something Google will keep shut from now on.

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Today in reading MC answers to all the questions he gave the community the opportunity to ask, I found the question and answers that I had wondered most about.  Really what live pr or (RK) is and why are the tools that some developed to show this so called future page rank no longer working and would they be working again?  Well here goes the goods:

Q: “Is the RK parameter turned off, or should we expect to see it again?�
A: I wouldn’t expect to see the RK parameter have a non-zero value again.

This tells us that the current hacks people have used to figure this so called live pr will not be working any time soon.  In answer to what exactly the (RK) is (as there is still debate) MC answers this as well:

Q: “What’s an RK parameter?�
A: It’s a parameter that you could see in a Google toolbar query. Some people outside of Google had speculated that it was live PageRank, that PageRank differed between Bigdaddy and the older infrastructure, etc.

MC does not go into much more detail then this, but it leaves you to speculate that if you were lucky enough to see what your furture or live pr will be, it could possible be rolled out in the next couple of weeks.  BUT you will not be able to see anything like this again for the time being.  Very interesting why this was such a big deal?

The tool that showed this live pr can be found here http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ and is still very useful for showing you what your PR is on all of Googles Data Centers (these guys that invented this tool don’t even know why it was shut down).  With the fluxuation of toolbar page ranks lately during big daddy (hopefully now that big daddy is done it stabalizes) this tool is good to show you the current toolbar pr without guessing if you have jumped from a 4 to a 0 overnight.

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What is a Robots.txt file and is it important? The Robots.txt file is a file that is included in the root directory of your website and it tells crawlers (search engine spiders) what they can visit and what they can’t visit. You may be saying to yourself, “why wouldn’t I want a search engine to visit my site?” Several reasons:

1. Your site is brand new and its going to take a few months to get finished. You really don’t want a search engine to index your site, or crawl across it for consideration if its incomplete. This could actually hurt you on some search engines if they crawl a site that is “under construction” or incomplete with a ton of broken links.

2. Lets say you have a page with information that you don’t want the search engines to index. It could be a page you only want your company to have access to, but don’t want to password protect it.

So much can be added to this, but understand the robots.txt file is a tool we can use to help the search engines crawl across our site better. Google has implemented a really good tool to help you check your robots.txt file, as well as some other useful tools related — if you dont have an account sign up for one here Google Site Maps.

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Question:  Can RSS feeds help me get better ranking on my website because the content is always changing and staying fresh?

Rss feeds will do nothing to help improve your rankings as far as what I gathered from the SES New York 2006 when talking to the Google SES Feedback Team.  Many people that I talk to think that the fresh news story of the day is all that thier site needs to stay in compliance with Googles content issues..  Not true at all.  You have to look at it this way:  Google has a pretty good idea (and they said they are working on ways to make it better) of whose content that story is originally from.  With that said, its not helping your site on Google.  What RSS feeds can help you with is keeping people coming back to your site.  If you have a feed they are interested in more then likely they will keep coming back to you.  If they keep coming back to you there is a good chance that someday they may “click on an ad” or purchase something from you.   This may seem like a simple question enough, but I get asked this question so many times I think it was worthy of a blog…

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