has 13+ years experience in web development, ecommerce, and internet marketing. He has been actively involved in the internet marketing efforts of more then 100 websites in some of the most competitive industries online. John comes up with truly off the wall ideas, and has pioneered some completely unique marketing methods and campaigns. John is active in every single aspect of the work we do: link sourcing, website analytics, conversion optimization, PPC management, CMS, CRM, database management, hosting solutions, site optimization, social media, local search, content marketing. He is our conductor and idea man, and has a reputation of being a brutally honest straight shooter. He has been in the trenches directly and understands what motivates a site owner. His driven personality works to the client's benefit as his passion fuels his desire for your success. His aggressive approach is motivating, his intuition for internet marketing is fine tuned, and his knack for link building is unparalleled. He has been published in books, numerous international trade magazines, featured in the Wall Street Journal, sat on boards of trade associations, and has been a spokesperson for Fortune 100 corporations including MSN, Microsoft, EBay and Amazon at several internet marketing industry events. John is addicted to Peets coffee, loves travel and golf, and is a workaholic except on Sunday during Steelers games.
via flickr
I was asked by a friend today if posting comments on blogs with no follows is a good way to build links for SEO. When I asked him what other strategies he had for acquiring links he mentioned this was going to be primary source of link building!
Just like the good old days where keyword stuffing and meta tag stuff used to work quiet well, search engines and especially Google are now catching on to comment spamming.
Links in comments are now devalued regardless whether or not if they have no follows. This is a direct response to the huge amount of spam comments now appearing on blogs, if you have ever ran a blog of your own, you will know what I mean, even the most obscure, hard to find blogs on the strangest topics can attract spam comments.
Its actually not hard for search engines to determine if a link is from the comments section of a blog, a quick look at the code in wordpress.
<ol class=”commentlist”>
<li id=”comment-1372″>
<a id=”comments”>
Not hard for search engines to look for these tags and devalue the link-juice within them is it?
While comments are no longer useful for link-juice / reputation passing, they are still useful for the following reasons;
Driving qualified traffic
Lets say you own a fishing / lure store and you come across a blog post from someone complaining he isn’t catching any fish. This would be a perfect opportunity for you to leave a comment with fishing tips and suggest some lures he could use; at the end of the comment, be honest and say you own a fishing store where they purchase these products, with one link to your website, not ten!
You already have the target audience thanks to the blog post, now its simply putting together a well constructed comment.
Be mindful how you structure the reply, comments that look like a cut and paste job or advertising fluff will be deleted. Trust me, these type of comments are not hard to spot.
Ask yourself, are you providing any added value to the post, if a friend came to you with a complaint that he isn’t catching any fish. Are you going to give him a bunch of random lure names without telling him why he should use them? Of course not, be conversational. don’t write your comments like robots, because they will be treated like one.
Quicker Indexing
Comment links can also be used to get your website indexed quicker by search engines, if your website is new and not showing up in Google index; it is most likely in Google’s Sandbox.
A method I have found to be useful is using blog comments on popular blogs to naturally drive Googlebot to your sand boxed website.
Follow the advise above with comment structure and don’t spam. You will find once you have a few decent comments approved on blogs, it will move out of the sandbox faster, in most cases I have found this process to be faster than manually submitting your website to Google.
( Don’t forget to setup a Google webmasters account, if your sites not been found it could be other issues causing it, don’t assume its just been sandboxed, I will be posting about Google Webmaster Tool soon, stay tuned )
Making Connections
Blog commenting is one of the simplest form of Social Media Marketing! Good comments generate discussion, and this is what every blog owner wants. Subscribe to comment updates via email so you know when someone else has responded to your comment, this is where you can really engage with your target audience and offer your services / products.
Good comments can still land you juicy backlinks, most blog owners appreciate good comments and will reward you with a link from an actual post perhaps mentioning how your fishing lure has helped him catch more fish!
Not only do you get a backlink from an actual post which would pass on the link juice, you have just gained yourself a loyal customer that will potentially refer others to your website.
So hopefully you will take my advice and stop comment spam once and for all on the internet!
But seriously, blog commenting is a great internet marketing tool, but for link building purposes they are clearly not as useful as they used to be. If you are solely focused on an SEO campaign, cross off blog comments please!
A compilation of the most newsworthy, ground breaking, interesting and useful stories that matters to the search and marketing industry, sourced from websites, blogs and tweets. Can’t wait for the weekly round-up? Follow us on Twitter @little_engine for the latest on search and marketing.
Google announces public testing for the new search infrastructure on Google webmaster blog.
Search quality engineer Matt Cutts updates and answers questions on Caffeine
Will Google Caffeine effect Google Local Listings – some thoughts and comparisons
Lil Engine evaluates and tests Google Caffeine – Exclusive overview and comparison
GooBingHoo.com – Compare side by side search results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and now also with Caffeine.
20 free keyword research tools – Excellent list of free to use keyword suggestion / volume comparison research tools.
FireFox Addon: Monitor the Page Size with View Dependencies – via SEJ
Optimize your crawling & indexing – Good tips provided by Google Webmasters blog , slideshow and text wrap up
Matt Cutts: Straight from Google – What You Need to Know about Word Press Optimisation, very good video for WordPress users that want to learn some simple optimisation tips [Video] 45 min
Small Google PageRank update – Mostly changes in internal pages, SEO’s reporting mostly drops in Pagerank for internal pages, especially those sites with a large index.
Matt Cutts on nofollow – The debate continues with this video with Jen Lopez ( SEOMoz ) and Matt Cutts ( Google ) @ SES San Jose 2009
Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs? – Matt Cutts on Google Webmaster YouTube
Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm – via SEOMoz.org
Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm
Google Adwords Conversion Rates Don’t Vary Much with Ad Position from Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian.
Google Adwords – Sponsored search ads now displaying closer to organic results. Keep track of CTR’s in the next day or so. Advertisers reporting a 5 – 10 % increase in clicks.
Google Adwords – Googler’s have reported different text size / type and location changing on Sponsored Results Ads. Appears Google is doing quite a lot of A / B testing on Adwords.
Google Adwords – New Search Ads Quality Guide , Google adds some pretty useful resources to their Adwords help section, such as: how quality score affects your ranking and how quality score affects how much you pay.
Is Your Business Ready for Online Marketing? – Great 60min video of Warren Lanier, CEO of Bridge Point Marketing and David Kamatoy. Some really useful tips for business owners and entrepreneurs, covering the differences between traditional advertising, SEO and social media marketing.
10 Really Tangible Ways To Measure Social Media Success – nice tips on measuring the success of social media marketing campaigns with sites such as Twitter and facebook.
United Breaks Guitars Song 2: Yes, Dave is back with another YouTube music video on his broken guitar. Will he get as much exposure as his first hit? I doubt it, this song is pretty weak and really doesn’t bring anything new or fresh to his first song . Maybe my conspiracy theory is true, maybe Dave is working on a Viral campaign for United!
A new visualized web search engine, sleagle.com, was born today – 08/18/2009 : Join the Discussion
Thanks for checking out the first ever Li’l Engine weekly search roundup! I’d love to get some feedback on my writing style and also the topics covered, perhaps you may have more to add to this roundup? or want to see a particular topic covered more, let me have it 🙂 You can contact me directly via my personal twitter account or just leave a response in the comments.
The buzz within the search marketing industry is torn between 2 of this quarters biggest announcements:
1. First been the search partnership of Bing ( Microsoft ) and Yahoo! ( more )
2. Secondly Google has announced a major update to its search infrastructure code named #caffeine
[ don’t forget add our RSS or Twitter to get notified when part 2 is released ]
On August 10th, the Google Webmasterblog announced public testing of their new #caffeine search quoting :
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
The caffeine update is been reported as a complete rewrite of Google’s search infrastructure – lets check out what this means;
The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results
Yes most definitely, although Google is stating otherwise ( for now ). When we first heard about #Google #Caffeine I posted this question to Matt Cutts from Google.
john chen August 10, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Hi Matt,
Been sussing this out all morning, from the Google blog and your post its seems there are algo changes / updates on the current sandbox. I’ve noticed some definate changes in the how the SERP is different in the sandbox in my play this morning.
Could you confirm this?
Matts response was:
john chen and Daniel Sterling, most of the changes are in things like our core indexing, so there’s less changes for things like rankings. Lots of users won’t notice a big difference
From our own research and you can verify this yourself in the #caffeine sandbox, this is simply not the case! There are major differences in Caffeine SERP that will ultimately effect users, SEO and most of all companies that depend on their search positions.
These changes come from our initial research in comparing a sample data of searches, and by no means represent a concrete conclusion. Google caffeine is still under development, as such the algorithm and infrastructure will change and alter in the near future. These are just preliminary conclusions for your consideration ( food for thought ) and therefor I recommend that you make no immediate changes to your SEO strategies, but simply keep the above in mind.
Google has released #caffeine for general public testing here
If you are after a direct comparison tool between #caffeine and current #google search Try http://www.goobinghoo.com/
Goobinghoo - side by side SERP comparison
You can easily compare the search results side by side, but don’t forget to sign out of your Google account. ( otherwise you may see your own preferred results )
Part 2 of this Google Caffeine update post will expand further into our findings above and with real data + example comparisons, as well as some SEO tips that you can perform today.
Did you find this post informative? Have anything further to add? Please leave a response in the comments section.
I am honored to introduce myself as your new content editor and go-to guy for the revamp Li’l engine website and community.
During the next 6 months I will be working with top designers, programmers and writers together to bring you a better browsing experience, more SEM / SEO and internet marketing related news and online tools to help boost your productivity and sales.
Our little website is now into its 7th year, during this period we have evolved and grown alongside the SEM and internet marketing industry, which has now grown into a 23 billion dollar monster.
“They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person’s life. In other words, it’s evolving fast and faster.”
– Vint Cerf
As we start the 3 quarter of 2009 and well into the global financial crisis, the SEM industry continues to grow steadily as more corporations and business see SEM as a cheaper and more effective way of advertising.
While a major new player in the internet advertising market is breaking out and making businesses and marketers take notice. I am speaking of course about Social Media Marketing.
Lets take a look at some quick stats;
What is interesting from this graph when comparing SEO and Social Media Marketing is that only 8% of marketers counted SEO as not relevant / don’t know, where as 27% answered the same for Social Media Marketing.
This is great news for SEO’s as the market is now almost completely aware of the benefit of SEO, but the stat also introduces an uneducated / uncertain market for Social Media Marketing, perhaps where SEO was 7 years ago, what does this mean?
It means there is potential to convert the 27% of marketers who either don’t know about social media marketing or don’t care into the same 8% for SEO!
I see Social Media Marketing as a great potential for internet marketers in the next 2 – 3 quarters, but to achieve great results we must educate ourselves, the public and in particular the business owners / corporations to the benefits Social Media Marketing and most importantly how it alongside SEO and other internet marketing strategies will combine to generate more business and ultimately increase the bottom-line, more sales and revenue.
The goal of the new Lil Engine website is to continue to bring our readers the most up to date information on SEO and SEM but also to focus on new emerging strategies that are going to shape the future of internet marketing.
Whether you are a seasoned SEO looking for the latest search engine trends or a novice SEO, Li’l Engine will give you the in-depth insight along with clear explanations.
O’dear, I’ve gone and said the D word… Truth be told there are many capable web designers out there that are interested in SEO and internet marketing. Why? Because it is an added value to their clients and employers, designers that can provide a stylish, search engine friendly and conversion driven websites are hard to find, but are desperately needed within the industry.
Are you still wondering what all the fuss is about with internet marketing? Consider my post above, internet advertising is worth $23 billion dollars and growing, can you afford not to educate yourself?
A little knowledge goes a very long way, next time you are approached by an SEO company, you will be armed with a certain amount of knowledge that will help you judge the competency of the SEO and you might just save yourself some $$$ at the same time! Those that are a little adventurous and curious can also try out some of our strategies themselves, the discussion forum will be a great place to network with other business owners and to get advice from seasoned SEO’s.
My name is John Chen, a creative director and accounts manager for a large E-business firm in Brisbane, Australia. My day to day duties include web design, following up on SEO campaigns, traffic and conversion ROI analysis and speaking with my clients whom are generally small to medium business owners.
My background in internet marketing begun by way of fire, a start-up eshop for consumer electronics, I had knowledge in web and graphic design but little knowledge in internet marketing.
It was a steep learning curve to find out why my website wasn’t making any sales, but luckily for me, I had 2 great mentors that were prepared to answer my dumb questions and always pointed me in the right direction. They were Napoleon Pham from evrsoft and Dejan Petrovic from DejanSEO.
But I realize not everybody is as privileged to have access to mentors, this is one of the major motivations that I decided to take on the role as the new editor of Li’l Engine, to help build a community where experts and novices may share and learn.
I am very much looking forward to bringing about the changes in Li’l Engine outlined above as well as chatting and participating in discussions with you on our blog and forum.
In the mean time, please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions for me or just want to say hi, I would love to hear from some of our regular readers. Alternatively if you want to contact me directly, I can be reached on info [at] johnchen.com.au .
To start following the progress of our development on twitter @little_engine head to
http://twitter.com/little_engine
– John
Charles Darwin has taught us that competition is part of nature. In fact, it’s an integral part of evolution, and drives all of us to come up with creative ways to survive, or even dominate. The same is, of course, true in the context of business. You have to always be aware of what your rivals are doing in order to plot your next move and measure your own success. There are many competitor-analysis tools out there, but there’s one that’s tailor-fit for blogs and other online business, and it’s called Competitous. (more…)
While the world’s economies reel and Wall Street struggles to keep afloat, how will the online world be affected? Whether you’re a pro-blogger, an Internet marketer, or an online retailer, the state of e-commerce is an important barometer (more purchases means more ad spending, and more profit for everyone). Knowing this, E-consultancy came out with its Online Shopping and Credit Crunch Survey Report a while back. Surprisingly, the results show that online spending will suffer less than traditional retail. (more…)
Great news for local sites in Thailand. You can now benefit from better targeted ads with Google’s announcement of its support for Thai in Adsense for Content. Last year, it was already included in the Adsense for Search program, so this just comes as the next logical move. Hopefully, other languages will soon follow. I’m all for localized content. (more…)
For an average blogger’s needs, I’m inclined to think that Google Analytics is more than enough. The number of features and the zero tag price are definitely welcome. However, I’m sure out there somewhere are folks who have a nagging feeling that things can and should be better. If you’re one of them, you might want to stop and take a look at Clicky. (more…)
Being a compulsize AdSense checker, I look at my stats almost every hour, and just now I found that I couldn’t log in. Adsense gives me an error “UsernamePasswdNotMatch” in Opera. In fact, they do match, and yes, I’ve checked if caps lock was on and it’s not. On IE8, it gives me an Error 403. I did a quick Twitter search to see if other people were experiencing the same thing, and lo and behold, I wasn’t alone: (more…)
I’ve been doing business on the Internet for six years. Many things have changed on the World Wide Web since I launched my very first website, but there’s one (negative) thing that apparently will never be gone: this tendency to waste great opportunities that is evident in so many webmasters.
If there’s one huge problem that a smart webmaster should fight as hard as s/he can, this is it. This can never be stressed enough: grab any and all good opportunities that you find on the web as soon as you can. And once you start, do not give up so easily.
I’m going to tell you a real-life story to illustrate my point:
K. started surfing the web because she wanted to have some fun and research her favourite subjects. As time went by, she naturally made friends with other Internet users, joined forums, mailing lists and became a loyal visitor to various sites in a specific niche.
One day she realised that there was a certain type of website missing in that niche. So, she decided to fill this gap with her own web project. It was totally amateurish… yet it soon became pretty successful, because of three major factors:
1. She was a sort of pioneer, because she detected a need in her niche and was the first one to do something about it.
2. She really knew what she was dealing with and even devoted part of her time to expanding her knowledge on the subject, so she could improve her website on an ongoing basis.
3. She had good networking skills, so it wasn’t hard to spread the word about her site.
However, she wasn’t able to make a single cent from that site and eventually took it down. Why did this happen?
* She stopped investing in networking and promotion.
* She believed that the niche was about to collapse, so she lost the motivation needed to keep her site up.
* She thought a site like that couldn’t be effectively monetised.
This is what happened afterwards:
Talk about missed opportunities!
Had she persevered, now she wouldn’t have to use her own story as an example and alert for other webmasters.
