December 7, 2006
Organic Listings Forum
Organic Listings Forum
Pose questions to our panel of experts about free “organic” listing issues, plus participate in this session that allows the audience to share tips, tools and techniques. There’s no set agenda, so this is an ideal session to discuss any major recent changes with organic listings.
Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies
Speakers:
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
David Naylor, SEO, Bronco
Todd Friesen, Director of Search Engine Optimization, Range Online Media
Mike Grehan, International Search Marketing Consultant
- They don’t think there are sandbox issues anymore. The engines are constantly “turning the knob” between letting spam in and letting white hat in. The problem with not letting spam in is that white hat gets caught in the mix. If you get links from established sites you are not going to have a problem. Your site has to look natural. If you look unnatural you will get ignored. Look for conduit links… links that connect you to intermediate sites that have links from big sites. Write down 10 reasons why people would link to you. If you can’t do that, then you have a problem.
- ip-delivery.com and fantomaster are the best cloaking tools. It’s all about the ip address collection. You can user agent detect to determine if a browser has Flash capbility or not and then serve up the appropriate content.
- If you are moving to a new domain, do 301’s, notify people to update links and email Google and let them know that you are doing it to make sure you don’t fall through “Google’s ass crack.” Expect a dip when moving. New domain should have a 404 page that has a noindex tag.
- “If you have a 1000 inbound links all from one ip you might be a red neck.” Bruck Clay.
Don’t price your link building by number of links. In that model you can buy a blog spam tool and get thousands. Have a master list of quality sites across multiple industries.
“Would you link to you?” - Do a search in your industry phrases plus ezine and/or newsletter and buy sponsored links in the newsletter. Then that link will be put in the archives and you will get the link value.
- The title tag goes way beyond search and so it will always be very important. Tag clouds (like del.icio.us) might change the way people search in the future. End user data is going to become much more important. Disney, Yahoo and Google all rank highly for the word ‘exit’. That’s because porn sites link to those sites with the word ‘exit’.
- A person with a state-based basketball site was told to make each state a subdomain or a sub folder. Having individual domains for each state is going to be significantly too much work. It’s preferable to have a main domain and put themes within folders instead of subdomains these days.
- Paying for a directory lisitng in Yahoo is not as good as it once was but it’s still worth doing. Good directories are:
bestoftheweb.com, business.com, yahoo.com. Do a query for “submit your site”, ezine, newsletter and use those places to submit. For dmoz.org, do the submission and move on. Think about things to do offline and then those people will write about your site. If you can’t get into dmoz.org, apply in your city and maybe that person will put you in the correct directory. - Use twin feeds if you are syndicating content. You write unique content for your site and let others fight over the other content.
- End user data tied to an account (social bookmarking), query sequences, Google analytics, Google checkout, (it’s all about collecting end user data) could potentially become a major contributor to ranking sites.
- Yahoo looks at the keyword tag. It says that you are a “candidate page” but will not help with ranking. Use commas, keep them original, keep them short.
Comments