Archive for the ‘SEO Tools’ Category
Jul
03
Posted under
SEO Tools,
SEO Web Design,
Search Engine Marketing,
Search Engine Optimization,
Search Marketing,
Search News,
search engine news 
Today I became aware of a very unfortunate branding issue with a new social media platform called Posterous (pronounced Post-Er-Us). First of all, you should know that Posterous is a killer application that I have little doubt will soon be a leading social media property; I will have a follow-up post outlining the reasons. Now onto a sad yet humorous (IMO) lesson in branding; Posterous appears to be commonly misspelled (and even mispronounced) as Posterious (Post-Ear-E-Us).
Why is this mispronunciation/misspelling a problem? Well first of all the creators of Posterous seem not to have considered the misspelling from the beginning because they do not own Posterious.com. Second of all, doesn’t Posterious sound a whole lot like, well, a variation of posterior? I don’t know about you but I don’t think I would ever want my startup even remotely associated with, er, the posterior of anything.
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Jul
03
Posted under
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search engine news Posted by great scott!
Crawling and Indexing. Without them you can't rank. If you can't rank, you can't get search traffic. If you can't get search traffic, your online marketing efforts are going to suffer; and in our industry that is a colossal FAIL.
This seems like simple stuff we all take for granted, but it's critically important to understand what you must do--and avoid--to make sure your site is regularly crawled and then maintained in the primary index of each of the major engines. Even if you think you know it all, take a few minutes to watch this week's Whiteboard Friday...you may just realize you've been ignoring some critical ranking factors.
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Jul
02
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search engine news According to Yahoo,
The story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.
Yahoo! News set an all-time record in unique visitors with 16.4 million people, surpassing our previous record of 15.1 million visitors on election day. Four million people visited the site between 3-4pm Pacific time, setting an hourly record. We also recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our fourth highest after Inauguration Day, the day after the Inauguration, and Hurricane Ike. Read the rest of this entry »
Jul
02
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search engine news Happy Independence Day to all our American friends, clients, and readers!
We will be open, business as usual, on Friday July 3 & Monday July 6 for those of you not taking a long weekend.
From all of us at StepForth we wish all of you a safe and enjoyable holiday!
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Posted by Scott Van Achte
Jul
02
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search engine news It is far more profitable to appear transparent than it is to actually be transparent.
Jul
02
Posted under
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search engine news I just finished reading Justin Brigg’s post “9 SEO Tips”. The post may have a boring title but his tips are pretty sound. I especially liked tip number 5, which tells about the power of the hash #, something frequently overlooked, if known at all, by SEO newbies. On my next post I will be expounding on the uses of the hash but for now what I’ll really be writing about was inspired by the accompanying illustration on the need to compromise to come up with a good web design. The illustration, which I’ve shown below, may seem funny but is perfectly true.
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Jul
02
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search engine news 
The following post is a counterpoint to the Outspoken Media post titled “Would I Recognize Your Blog In A Dark Alley“, and exists to offer an alternative path to land of unicorns and rainbows.
First off there’s nothing wrong with running a community driven website or blog, in fact in many cases it can be an excellent and very successful path to choose. That said it’s not the only choice, not the right choice for everyone and maybe not the right choice for you, and it’s important you know your options. The direct opposite of a blog which fosters a sense of community is a thought leadership blog.
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Jul
01
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search engine news Posted by randfish
I'm not always a fan of Guy Kawasaki's work, but really enjoyed his post on the OPEN Forum - A Dozen Don'ts for Entrepreneurs. I thought I'd take a stab at replicating it with some of my biggest warnings for those in our field.
For the list below, the word "clients" is interchangeable with "marketing manager" or "executive team" for in-house SEOs.
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Jul
01
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search engine news The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there.
Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or now, so why not tackle something new?
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Jul
01
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search engine news Posted by RobOusbey
We all like links from big sites right?
Whether it's in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it's great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it's on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it's strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it's unlikely to have a great crawl rate.
The front pages of sites, on the other hand, tend to have a much greater diversity of domains pointing to them and a good crawl rate. Furthermore, Google is likely to look with suspicion at an old article that suddenly gains a new link, compared to site front pages which have new links added to them more often, and legitimately.
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Jun
30
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search engine news The Internet is a-buzz with the latest offering from Firefox – the best browser available in my opinion – and the upgrades look absolutely tantalizing:
It is twice as fast as Firefox 3: an impressive feat!- You can save movies as easily as saving an image,
- It will download fonts from websites if your computer does not have the necessary font – this is very new and very very cool. Why? Because now sites can include their very own custom fonts that can add a lot of pizazz to a site and create a very unique look. Now you will be able to see the site as the designer intended.
- It offers location-aware browsing: an option that will enable the browser to tell websites where you are located so that they can tailor their content for your area. Again this is an OPTION do not fret over your privacy.
- You can surf the net anonymously using private browsing options just like Google Chrome offered when it released.
BUT! I do not suggest upgrading yet IF YOU USE PLUGINS because there is a good chance they will not yet work with the new version. I am personally going to hold off on my business machine because I have some valuable plugins on Firefox that I use for website analysis and I can’t afford to lose them right now. But I am not worried because it is only a matter of time until I can upgrade without losing any functionality. That is because in just a few weeks most will be upgraded to work the the new version so I will wait until then. I suggest you do as well if you are in the same boat I am.
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Jun
30
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search engine news 
This weekend I was doing a little housekeeping on some of my domains and hosting accounts and decided to test and see if it was possible to get a website indexed using XML Sitemaps and no external links.
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Jun
29
Posted under
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search engine news The State Motto of Rhode Island is “Live Free or Die”.
Their state assembly passed a law to try to impose sales tax on Amazon.com. The Law essentially states that because some of amazon’s associates have a physical presence in the state, that amazon must pay sales tax.
Amazon’s response? “Alright, then we’ll shut down the affiliate program in your state.
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Why is this mispronunciation/misspelling a problem? Well first of all the creators of Posterous seem not to have considered the misspelling from the beginning because they do not own Posterious.com. Second of all, doesn’t Posterious sound a whole lot like, well, a variation of posterior? I don’t know about you but I don’t think I would ever want my startup even remotely associated with, er, the posterior of anything.
