Online Marketing Glossary: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
- The practice of altering a website so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. The process usually involves choosing targeted and relevant keywords and phrases that will drive traffic to the site.
SEO is really a no-brainer; you must do it. I’ve been working on my SEO and I’ve noticed a remarkable jump in the amount of traffic that’s coming to me via search engines as opposed to referring websites. Some people say that SEO has no future, the theory being that as long as you’re developing good content the search engines will recognize the relevance.
I say it can’t hurt!
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
CJ Jumping into SEO?
I logged into Commission Junction today to see this:
The timing of this is pretty curious, if you ask me. Right on the heels of Google Affiliate Network and their declaring that they’re 86’ing the referrals. So what’s up now Calacanis – SEO still bullshit?
Read MoreExplain the value to me
Okay, so there are some websites that I just don’t get. So this is a participation welcome post. Well, okay all of my posts are, of course, welcome to comments, discussion, and participation. But today we’re going to jump into web 2.0 and the world of user generated content!
There are a couple of biggun websites out there that I just don’t understand what the value of these pages are. On one hand I do understand the getting your name out there and a wide & varied web presence will generate traffic (however little). But on the other hand, there’s only one of me so where do I allocate my personal resources?
Here are the websites I just don’t get – someone explain it to me! Remember, this blog is dofollow so feel free to throw in a link for your trouble!
- Squidoo.com – Isn’t this just a big affiliate link venue?
- FriendFeed.com – This seems like a lot of redundancy since the people I’m inclined to follow on friendfeed I already follow through their channels that are linked. Make sense?
- Technorati.com – Is this just scrapped content heaven? Is there any value to your Technorati authority?
- Mahalo.com – What is SO much better about this cultivated human powered search engine?
NoFollow vs. DoFollow
First, the definition, courtesy of Dot Traffic Glossary:
Nofollow
A website can direct a search engine spider not to follow a link that appears on it. The idea being that the target website’s ranking will not influence the website indexed. Nofollow attribute values are most often used on sites with user generated content, like user comments and blogs.
Dofollow is basically the opposite of this. Many bloggers refer to this as link love. By allowing the search engine spiders to follow those links, you’re increasing their page rank status and allowing their ranks to influence your rank. Which is not what you want if you’re looking to increase your page rank, necessarily.
There’s a debate raging amongst bloggers and it seems like most smaller blogs are going the Dofollow route. By spreading the link love you’re helping out your fellow bloggers, who are more inclined to reciprocate. Blogroll’s are a prime opportunity for this. The larger bloggers don’t seem to be weighing in on the issue (at least not from what I’ve seen) so perhaps for a blogger with a larger audience they couldn’t care one way or the other.
Since this is a bit outside my expertise, I’ll admit, I posed the question to my 59 Twitterati followers for their opinions:
Shawn Collins of Affiliate Tip: “Event with nofollow in my blog comments, the comment monkeys constantly attack with their spam.”
Scott Jangro of MechMedia: “I’ve been fighting so hard with the spammers recently, I’m starting to question my own long-time use of dofollow.” He also added “I agree with Sam on the size of the blog though. Mine was until the past few days a PR6 which has me on every must-spam list.”
Sam Harrelson of ReveNews & Affiliate Fortune Cookies: “I’m all in favor of spreading the love, but there are SO many gamers out there that it makes DoFollow really unsustainable.” He followed up to say “Would just add that if it’s a small blog, you might make dofollow work. As it grows, it’s just too hard.”
Of course, these opinions totally fall in line with that I’ve observed in looking around. The little guys are all for dofollow to get the word out, but once you cross that line you become a “comment monkey” target. Scott Jangro wrote a really reflective post about it back in February called Attack of the Comment Monkeys (don’t know how I missed it from the RSS feed…).
I think one thing all bloggers and internet marketers in general can agree
on is that Spam is a problem. Not only is it definitely annoying, but it also pollutes the well (as Jason Calacanis pointed out in his keynote at Affiliate Summit West last month). It makes a lot of legitimate internet marketing look bad, and it’s a fine line before someone misunderstands persistent follow up and due diligence for the dreaded SPAM label.
Where do I stand? Long time readers of this blog will note that I use links a lot in my posts. Basically I do this for two reasons: 1. I like to give readers an easy reference of what or who I’m talking about. 2. It’s just nice karma. This blog is hosted by Blogger, and according to their Help Center they automatically add the nofollow tag to the templates. Which is probably why I have a page rank of 0.
So I’m going to edit my template as an experiment. For anyone else curious on how to do this for blogger, there’s a great tutorial online here. Let’s see what happens, shall we?
Read MoreDay 2 of Affiliate Summit – Suck All!
Almost a month ago I was granted a press pass for the Affiliate Summit. I was excited to get into the bloghaus and blog about the day as it happened. I was thrilled to walk around and network with people. I really wanted to get some great coverage of the Keynote (coverage hell, I wanted to just listen too), but… none of that happened.
Why? Because Las Vegas hates me. And there are far too many germs here. And somehow during the day on Sunday…I developed a cold. A bad one. Damn this dry air & germs!
So I didn’t get up in time to make it downstairs to have breakfast AND make it to Jason Calacanis’ keynote like I wanted to. I managed to grab some breakfast and share some stats about our affiliate program with my colleague here with me from PsPrint to help out and then to man the booth. I sent her out to get the table top sign made that wasn’t made in time for the show. I station the booth for awhile and talk to some good people before it’s time for me to head off to the morning session I planned on going to.
Oh, incidentally, for anyone who wants some GREAT coverage of the keynote, check out J. Botter’s Blog.
I digress.
I attended this morning’s “Video Innovation in Affiliate Marketing” panel. Good stuff, although I was a bit disappointed in moderator Melissa Salas reading off a prepared script pretty much verbatim. But I really enjoyed the insight from video professionals, and it’s comforting to know that content really is king, and that production value isn’t as important. Woo Hoo! I was wondering how you’d go about monetizing a video, but Revver.com seems to answer that. I’ll definitely be checking that out when I get back to the joy that is desktop computer (this older laptop isn’t that great). I really enjoyed Gary Vaynerchuk’s sense of humor & ballsy honesty. I’m excited with my new Aiptek A-HD 720P 5MP CMOS High Definition Camcorder
Some great points from the panel session:
- Most people come on the internet for two P’s – pleasure or problems. If you solve someone’s problem, it’s a good video.
- KNOW what you’re talking about. As long as you know your subject, you can produce great content.
- In the next 12 months, you should test video on your site. By 18 months from now, if you don’t have video on your website you may be in trouble.
- Video really works to sell as it gives your brand more credibility & builds brand equity.
- Depth of information is quality will translate to a successful video.
- Work on integrating video into your current web experience for the most effective video experience.
- The average video watched online is about 2 minutes long.
- An enormous amount of video watching is done at work, so keep that in mind. Melissa added that a Click to Listen button is much appreciated by these people.
- In terms of size & format, go for the best quality you can when shooting, even if it has to be compressed when uploading online. If you can afford it, shoot in HD. It’s where everything is headed. (Side note – this makes me really glad that I bought my new HD mini cam! It’s the one in the picture.)
Day 3 should be good – hoping for some informative sessions and to feel better.
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