SEO contest: “ambatch dotcom seocontest” September Update
September 30, 2006
Following on from last month’s seo contest update the ambatch dotcom seocontest appears to have had very little action over the last couple of weeks. The top three unchanged in position and unchanged in content too, it would appear - not much to write home about!
Microsoft Adcenter’s Adlab Advertising Tools
September 23, 2006
This summer has seen a new giant in the PPC world, that of Microsoft’s Adcenter. Cooler still, is the abundaSnce of adlab advertising tools available that compliment Google’s research tools and some of the Google’s labs tools and Yahoo’s lab tools.
The adlab can be broken down into the categories of paid search, contextual advertising, behavioural targeting and emerging markets.
The paid search advertising tools help to assist with keyword research that will help identify common misspellings, new keywords, acronyms and abbreviations. I particularly like the search funnel tool tool gives a good indication as to which keywords searchers use before and after a specific keyword search. Another neat tool, the search results clustering tool, groups semantically related keywords.
The contextual tools identifies relevant ads for publisher’s sites. It groups keywords or sites into content categories.
The behavioural tools analyses the behaviour of searches and lists predicted demographic information which can give indication of visitors intention to buy. The demographic prediction tool is great and gives an idea of the type of visitors you can expect to your site.
The emerging markets category is limited to a few states in the US and is used to detect a customer’s location based on their IP and then listing locals ads that are relevant to the location.
Battling Google’s Sandbox & Link Baiting
September 20, 2006
It’s all about trust!
Andy Hagan provides an excellent detailed report on how to beat google’s sandbox , which includes some great ‘link baiting’ techniques. Firstly he defines Google’s sanbox as:
“The sandbox/Trustbox is a set of filters in Google’s search algorithm that together prevent new sites from ranking well until they gain trust.”
Andy insists it is all about building trust between websites and Google. He outlines the Sandbox phases, how to acquire easy trusted links and link baiting.
Link baiting seems to be the real buzz phrase in SEO for 2006 and blogging appears to be taking a key role in building up trust. Andy points out that social media sites like digg.com and Del.icio.us are great in the trust building process.
Links
SeoMoz:How to beat the Google Sandbox
How much Traffic can Digg or Google News can drive to you site?
Google’s Ranking Filters: Trust & Age Factors
Matt Cutts Overview August 2006
September 12, 2006
Matt Cutts provides a lot of useful SEO information, but sieving through it all can be quite time consuming and unnecessary unless you are an SEO or SEM pro. Fortunately seoegghead has created a list of Matt Cutts’ gems.And if you’re not too Google or Matt Cutts pooped, here’s a nice collection of Cutt’s video SEO diaries on Search Engine Wars.
More Matt: John Battelle’s interview.
Google Sitelinks
September 7, 2006
You may have noticed sub sections nested under a domain url. These are Sitelinks!
How to get Sitelinks?
There is no clear answer to this. Firstly, you have to be in the first position for specific a keyword or key phrase. Sitelinks are automatically generated by Google only if it believes the site has enough relevance and authority for the searched keyword. Sitelinks are often generated for brand keywords.
This is discussed in more detail at the seo roundtable and the search engine watch forum.
Google Adwords - Ad Preview & Targeting
September 2, 2006
Google recently released a cool utility for Adwords marketers to preview their ads, without occurring extra impressions or clicks. The preview ad feature extends further to allow marketers the ability to view ads beyond their current local location. Full preview & targeting instructions have been recently released as part of September’s adwords blog.
For example, you could check taxi companies ads targeted in London:
http://www.google.com/search?adtest=on&hl=en&q=taxi+companies&gr=GB-IL&gcs=London
