Yesterday Yahoo! Site Explorer decided to retire from business. It has left many amateur SEOs, and some professional SEOs too, at a bit of a loss. Many SEOs and agencies have been using the back link service in Yahoo! Site Explorer to monitor, analyse, and generally try to copy the link building actions of their competitors. As someone who has been involved in SEO for over 5 years (not so much by choice but by necessity) I have used Yahoo! extensively, and seen my competitors use it against me, too! I manage several sites across various niches, and some of my sites do interlink with each other, wherever a connection really does benefit a reader. I have seen people leave comments on all my blogs, and doing so in the order of Yahoo! backlinks for my main website. SEO Stalkers are gonna have a harder time I have also seen the same people leave comments on other blogs where I – Read the full article
Quality backlinks play a very important role in the search engine optimization of any site. Backlinks refer to links on other websites pointing to yours. So how do you go about getting them? The Natural Way If your web content is good, people are likely to begin linking to it. The more backlinks your site has, the better. However, it does not always follow that if you have great content, people will always want to link to you. This means that you might not be able to promote your website successfully through the natural way of building backlinks. You will then have to figure out alternative ways of getting quality backlinks. And even if you get many backlinks through the natural way, you could always use additional backlinks. Some of the acceptable methods of building links are through posting in forums, article directories, and blogs. The unacceptable methods (at least to Google’s eyes) include linking to link farms, buying links – Read the full article
For your site to be noticed and to get traffic, it should have a good position in search, so that it will always land on the first page of popular search results at search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Achieving this is no miracle and is not something that can be done overnight: it takes an effective SEO strategy to move your website to the top of search engine results. In order for an SEO strategy to be successful, a website owner should monitor the different metrics of their site on a daily or weekly basis to gauge if the strategy that they are implementing is working. Here are a few metrics that any website owner should watch out for, to know if they are on the right track and if the strategy that they are implementing is improving their website’s ranking: SEO Metrics Traffic Metrics. Web traffic is the number of visitors that your site is getting. This – Read the full article
You’ve spent a great deal of time and effort optimizing your website for the search engines. Why? Because a stellar search ranking is how you’re going to get visitors and ultimately, customers. SEO has been pegged as the most important – and only – way to cultivate traffic. Your SEO tactics have been successful, and you’re among the top results for your keywords. And then comes a curveball. Siri and Her Effect on SEO and Local Search For millions of Apple iPhone 4S users, and there are more of them every day, your SEO won’t matter. Meet Siri. She’s a clever little witch, and you’re going to have to reassess your current SEO tactics if you hope to please her. And please her you must, because iPhone users rely on her. Instead of opening a search engine and manually typing keywords, they’re just going to ask Siri to find them what they’re looking for. And Siri, being the intelligent voice – Read the full article
For the travel industry, at least, social media is seen as more valuable than pay-per-click advertising. The World Travel Market 2011 report says that travel professionals see social media as one of the key revenue-generating channels over the next five years. As proof of this, the study found that eight out of ten travel-related businesses use some form of social media. Not only that: the World Travel Market 2011 also expects that in five years, half of all travel-related companies would be generating income and bookings on social media, rising from the current 22%. Out of those using social media marketing, around 50% do not even invest in PPC advertising, while 1 out of 5 of those who do use PPC aim to stop or reduce their spending in the next few years. It is very apparent that the travel industry loves social media. So if you are in the travel business, it is time to amp up your social media activities. Blogs – Read the full article
Bing may have a chance to gain market share against Google now that the partnership between the search leader and Mozilla has expired. For years, Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser has featured Google as its default search engine as the result of a profit-sharing arrangement. That deal and the popularity of Firefox resulted in a windfall for Mozilla that has fueled its success. More than three-quarters of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google’s payments. No Comment Neither Google nor Mozilla have commented about the lapse of their lucrative deal, and they would not indicate whether the agreement would continue. On one occasion, a Mozilla spokesman observed that the company has agreements with several search engines; on another he suggested that negotiations with Google were in progress. Global Adversaries Google and Mozilla began an amiable relationship long before Google launched a competing product. Now, the search giant has its own browser that has now surpassed Firefox in market share. By many accounts Chrome – Read the full article
The World Wide Web has billion of websites. Some of them are small (for example, most of the personal blogs), some of them are big (for example, eBay), and some of them are too big (for example, Facebook). But some of them are just very important, because they really changed the world over the last years and gave way to a number of Internet-enabled revolutions. What are these websites and how did they influence the world? 1. info.cern.ch: This is where it all began. In 1990, not many years ago if you think about it, a revolution took place in CERN and the first website on the World Wide Web was made by Sir Tim Burns Lee and browsed by Robert Cailliau. 2. Google: Some people confuse it with the Internet itself. Some people even type Google inside Google’s search box! It is considered to be the main entrance of the Internet and changed the way we search for information. It started – Read the full article
If you are hoping to increase the traffic directed to your website as well as your positioning in Google’s rankings, putting an effective and well-structured link building campaign together could work wonders for you. Increased traffic to your website can come from a number of benefits that link building can give you. If your ranking increase in the eyes of search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, your website will undoubtedly receive more traffic from organic searches (simply clicking through to your page via the hyperlink displayed on a search engine results page or SERPS), alternatively you can hope to see extra visitors landing on your website from the links you have established on other sites. Search engines are now users’ main tool for internet navigation and ranking high for some well-targeted search terms should be your ultimate goal when assembling a link building strategy. After being presented with a list of search engine results, a user is far – Read the full article
