SEO Awareness

Search Engine Smackdown Video Game

slangdon — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:41:09 +0000

I have discussed in several posts that building link popularity is important. One of the better ways to build link popularity is to offer some content or a tool that bloggers find interesting enough to write about (also called Link Bait). As the word spreads so does the number of links pointing to your site. A company called Pronet Advertising has a link buiilding campaign going for their website. They created an online video game called “Search Engine Smackdown”. The game pits the founders of Google, Yahoo, and MSN against each other. It is worth checking out the game even if it is just for the novelty of it.

http://www.pronetadvertising.com/searchenginesmackdown/

Typos/Misspellings Offer Great Potential

slangdon — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:41:58 +0000

When optimizing for keywords most people think of the high traffic generating popular keywords. In the business I am in the “Golden” keyword is “Credit Cards”. The hardest part of getting ranked on that keyword is all the competition from people trying to do the same thing. The greatest market untapped market in search engine optimization are typos and misspellings. If 900,000 people do a search for “Credit Cards”…how many accidentally mistype it? It is more significant than you think and even more when you think of all the possibilities.

I will use an example from Google:

Credit Cards : 90,500,000 Results
Redit Cards : 245,000 Results

It is much easier to compete on “Redit Cards”. It won’t get you as much traffic as the main term, but it is high quality traffic that you didn’t have before.

Recommendation: Continue to optimize for the larger terms, but make it part of your strategy to create pages targeting misspellings and typos.

Two Great Tools:

http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-typo-generator/

More Pages, More Content, More Opportunity

slangdon — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:49:01 +0000

If you are involved in affiliate marketing at all, one of the biggest obstacles over the last few years has been keyword bidding policies. Advertisers have been cutting back on allowing their affiliates to bid on branded terms. That limits options for affiliates because the general search terms have high price tags associated with them. When it comes to SEO the beautiful thing is that there is no cost per visitor aside from your normal overhead with web hosting and the cost of your linking campaigns. The down side is that it isn’t easy. In my line of work I have seen many websites come through our network that have tried a little SEO or no SEO at all. The thing that puzzles me is the fact that everyone is trying to optimize for the same general high-traffic, heavy competition keywords. I am not saying that is a bad thing, but it is bad if that is all that you are doing. Each product that you promote should always have a page built and optimized around it. In the credit card marketing biz there are well over 100 products. That is at least 100 opportunities to optimize for rankings, not to mention 100 more pages of content for your site. If there is still a lot of competition for some of those main product keywords, optimize for a little lesser known keyword. It would be better to be on the first page of that keyword compared to no rankings at all.