Introduction to the Link Bait concept
The art of link bait is a combination of creative ideas and great execution; the term linkbait itself refers to the act of creating content for the purpose of acquiring links to a website to increase its search engine rankings. The content itself is considered as ‘ the bait ‘ , which the SEO hopes to catch ‘ links ‘ from websites of value.
One of the most powerful and organic methods to generate contextual backlinks is by the way of link bait.Through this post I hope to share with you the basics of link bait techniques from idea to execution.
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caffeine roll out planned for 2010
The Google Caffeine sandbox has been switched off today, replaced by this message.
We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.
Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.
Thank you – Google
So it looks like Google is finally rolling out the Caffeine updates into its live search, with the holiday season approaching Google has put webmasters and SEO’s mind at ease by deciding not to roll out the changes until January 2010, as confirmed by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team on his blog today.
Some key comments from his post regarding Google Caffeine;
1. I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over.
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Our top tips to optimize your ecommerce for holiday seasons
The holiday shopping season is approaching and you’ve worked hard this year to improve the SEO of your website. Now its getting to the busiest month of the year and you are checking your web stats everyday to see if sales and traffic are increasing.
You’re thinking to yourself, what can I do in the next few weeks to generate more sales? Clearly its too late to make any drastic changes to the SEO campaign? And you would be right, what follows are some simple tips you can implement today to capture more sales during the holiday season.
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Has this been a busy week or what? We’ve barely had time to dissect the new Google Social Search from last Monday and now the big G is hitting us with even more announcements. Why the sudden spurt of new products ? Is Mr Schmidt planning something? Is Google feeling threatened by ‘Bing’ ?
These questions will have to wait, for the time being lets see what has happened;
| Google Dashboard | See what data Google collects from your all your Google products, manage them in one simple place | Official Release | Test it here |
| Google Commerce Search | Hosted ecommerce platform by Google delivered via SaaS using cloud computing. (paid service) | Official Release | See it here (video) |
| Adwords Ad Sitelinks | New Adwords feature that allows advertisers to create sitelinks in the adblock | Official Release | Read our report |
| Google Music Search | New vertical search results for music that lets you listen and purchase directly from SERP | Official Release | Test it here |
| 2 free Google Webinars | – Think2010: Four Winning Moves for 2010 – Holiday Webmaster Webinar |
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| TBA? Adwords new “Automatic Matching” service | Still hot gossip at the moment, Google Adwords testing a set and forget service to run your campaign | First report | Further confirmation |
Adwords Ad Sitelinks
Today, Google has introduced a new Adword’s feature called ‘ Ad Sitelinks ‘ which gives Adwords advertisers the opportunity to deep link into selected landing pages on the one ad block.
Interesting concept, no doubt inspired by organic site links. But unlike organic sitelinks , advertisers are able to specify exactly how many Ad Sitelinks to show, their anchor text and the URL of the landing page.
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Advertising real estate on Google Maps
Are you in the Real Estate industry? Do you run a housing related portal? Than read on, because Google is now giving you more opportunities to advertise your properties on Google Maps and Google Web Search using Google Base.
Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we’ll make searchable on Google (if your content isn’t online yet, we’ll host it for you). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches.
via http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59260
Google’s own explanation is pretty good, essentially Base is a portal where you can provide information and data on your leasing or for sale properties, Google can take this information, which may or may not be available on your website and display it in Google Maps and Google universal search. Note: Google base is not a new search product in itself, it simply acts as a information collection point.
As announced on Google webmaster central blog, Google has confirmed its now crawling RSS feeds to discover fresh content and links.
While it has been known for sometime now within the search industry that Google actively crawls RSS feeds, Google has never officially confirmed this as part of their content discovering practice until now.
Just how much weight RSS feeds impact the indexing factors remains to be seen, but now having confirmation, webmasters and SEOs should be recommending clients to setup valid RSS feeds and making them available to Googlebot.
Here are some tips to make sure your RSS feed is setup for Googlebot crawling;
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PPC Audit Guest Post by Steve Loszewski
Popular pay per click programs include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft adCenter. If you have accounts in these programs, you’re probably interested in improving them to increase (or achieve) profitability. There are a number of ways to improve a pay per click account – what follows is a summary of some of the most common methods in identifying and improving elements of a campaign. Google AdWords is given heavy focus in this article, although many of the concepts can be applied to YSM and MSN as well.
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It was bound to happen, both Google and Bing have been targeting social media and real-time search since the launch of Google caffeine back in August 2009, roughly the same time that Google started to index tweets from Twitter.com.
On October 21st during the Web 2.0 Summit, Yusuf Mehdi of Bing officially confirmed partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to integrate public tweets and Facebook updates into its search results.
A few hours later Marrisa Mayer of Google also announced a partnership with Twitter in her presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Wow, what a day! Two massive partnerships announced in 1 day and only a few hours apart. However, those of you that have been following the two search engines will understand that both Google and Bing have been working on real-time search facilities for quite sometime now and have been trading blow by blow with each other.
Lets take a quick look at the scores
top search queries - Google webmaster tools
Checking the Google webmaster tools today we noticed the keyword sorting feature appearing in the ‘ Top Search Queries’ dashboard.
The three drop down menus will allow webmaster tool users to segment the top search queries by;
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