Everyone and their dog is SEO

Being an SEO myself, I come across wide varieties of SEOs everyday. I interact with them through their blogs, IM, social media and forums. I learn a lot from them and will continue to do so.

There are a lot of intelligent SEOs out there but I have a feeling that too many people declare themselves as SEOs prematurely. Being called SEO is something which makes people feel good and hence they always tend to attain the title as early as possible. Most of them Only a Few of them are on the right track but very far from the stage where they can be called genuine white-hat successful SEOs.

I read an excellent article by Jill Whalen - "The Evolution of a Search Marketer". All you SEOs and wanna-be(s) read it, and if you think the article tells your own story then don’t get surprised. It’s the story of most of us. However, I feel that the article needs to be updated now and further stages of evolution should be added as it was written some 2 years ago.

Ok, coming back to newbies. Let me show you a chat conversation that I had a few months ago with a so called SEO. It is a real chat, I have edited some grammars and some not-so-pleasant words.

Conversation:

Him: Dude, what are you doing these days?

Me: I have a SEO project and my own sites to maintain, it’s too much hectic these days

Him: that’s cool

Me: ya kinda

Him: by the way, can I help you in the SEO project

Me: that’ll be great for me

Him: so give me the details

Me: tell me about your experience first, the keywords you ranked for

Him: I am doing a lot of reading, ask me anything

Me: dude, SEO is not about to read, it’s a "to-do" thing

Him: you can ask me any question about SEO, and then see

Me: but what’s the point asking you questions, will the customer ask you questions? no, he will want your previous results. You’ll have to show him your current SERPs.

Him: SERPs what?

Me: Search it on Google

Him: ok, wait

I have more such conversations in my chat archive. If you want some of them ask me :P. I’d also like to clear that I have no intentions to des-respect anybody. Being a newbie is not something which one should be ashamed of. We were all noobs once. Were’nt we?

I wanted to throw some more light on this topic. But not feeling like writing now. Ok some other time then (in part-2 *hint*).

You have no choice but to Follow me on Twitter!

I admit that I have declared this tons of times in last few months, but yes I am back to twitter. I have been On n’ Off on Twitter but this time I am here to stay, I promise :P

Follow me here http://twitter.com/TechnoDiary

This post is now in race for two awards "Shortest post of the month award" and "Most arrogant post title of the month award". Cheers!!

Some Results Manually Manipulated By Google?

Few days ago, I saw a Google result which seems to have ranked non-algorithmically. The result came up when I searched AIR on Google.co.in. Let me also clear that the results are filtered by GeoLocation, so you might not see the same results from your location. And that’s why I have put a screenshot displaying the Google Results.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the first result is of All India Radio. Nothing wrong because All India Radio is usually abbreviated as AIR. But, how do Google Algorithm know this?

- The term AIR is not in the Title of the page

- Not present in the body of the Home Page

Also, the term AIR is used extensively in following contexts

- Adobe AIR

- Atmospheric Air

- Airways/Airlines

A lot of competition for the term, which makes it even more interesting.

The only thing which may have caused it to rank #1 could be the inbound links. The homepage has some ~3000 inbound links as seen from Yahoo! Site Explorer and there’s no way I could analyse the anchor texts of those links. I randomly checked some 10 links, and none was linking with the term "AIR", but that was just random, the full results could be totally different from my test cases and test results.

Conclusion:

1. Google sometimes give rank to some sites manually.

OR

2. The search term need not necessarily present on the page for getting ranked for that term. Perhaps Google is doing good in Latent Semantic Indexing.

P.S. You may wonder why I was searching for AIR. Actually I am learning Adobe AIR and trying to develop some simple but cool applications. Will update you more on this later.

What’s Keeping Me So Busy

It’s almost a week since I last posted here. I think it’s a good idea to blog about why I am not blogging. First of all, it’s not that I am not blogging, I have been writing well researched posts in the last few days but it’s just that they haven’t been published. Reason? they need some finishing touch.

I have few more blogs and sites which require some caring and love every other day. I am also struggling with one of my hosting account, it gets down every once in a while. Thinking of moving sites shivers me. I have been in constant touch with the hosting support and the last thing I heard from them was “Seem like we have been fighting a losing battle”. That scared me. It’s actually a DDOS attack and I hope it gets sorted soon enough.

What else? SEO Search, I have been on a research project from last 10 days. The research is going good and will surely result in some great posts on SEO here. Now I need to complete the half written posts and publish them as soon as possible.

Common Myths About Google SiteLinks Part-3

This is the third and last (or may be not) part of the series - Common Myths About Google SiteLinks. You can check out the first part and second part before reading this one. You may also like to read about Google SiteLinks in general if you don’t have any idea about them.

Ok, enough links to previous posts. Let’s start with this brand new shiny cutting edge revolutionary post (please bear with me). Here’s the first one -

Myth9: Keywords in Domain Name are not considered while allocating SiteLinks

I used to think like that until I came across demon hunt. This site doesn’t contain the term demon hunt in the title, neither it is present extensively in the body of the home page. But, we can see that the domain name is made up of the term demon hunt. This proves that Domain Names do have something to with the SiteLinks. It can also be noted that keywords in domain name are indication of one’s brand name. This does make sense.

Myth10: Subdomains can’t get SiteLinks

Ever heard of Hacker News? Or Site Explorer? You need more examples? Ask me. It is a well known fact that Google (Search Engines) consider a subdomain as separate site, so not giving SiteLinks would have been an inherent inconsistency.

Myth11: Submitting SiteMap to Google Webmaster Central is necessary for SiteLinks

Most of the static sites still don’t incorporate XML sitemap because of the complexity in updating them, whereas we the wordpress bloggers enjoy great plug and play functionalities in the form of plugins. Search around, you’ll see a hell lot of static sites that do have sitelinks with them. I also own a site with no XML sitemap,  but it still enjoys SiteLinks.

This brings us to the end of third part of common myths about Google SiteLinks. I might or might not publish its next part. But, I am working on another series of posts - Wordpress SEO. Wordpress is said to be good for SEO out of the box, yes indeed. We just need to know the difference between Good, Better and Best though.

Ok so that’s all for today. :)

What 20 days of blogging has taught me

It’s been 20 wonderful days of blogging. Was pretty confident of learning new things through blogging but never expected the learning process to start that soon. I am now regretting for not starting blogging much before. Better late than never, as they say (ok some self-consolation).

In this post I’d like to tell you about what all things I have learned in the last 20 days, not many but still above my expectations.

What all I have learned:

- Making myself organised : First of all, let me volunteerly admit that I am a highly unorganised person when it comes to work. But, blogging has somehow taught me to work in an organised way to some extent. I have now learned how to keep myself productive and what all things affect productivity. Instant Messaging is by far the most distracting thing I have experienced.

Not only did I learn about productivity, I have also learned to keep handful of pre-written posts/drafts in the buffer. This is what we call risk management in blogging.

I have also downloaded a To Do List Manager, it’s showing some positive results too.

- Writing for humans : Gone are those days when the likes of Keyword, Title Tags, Number of words etc used to play on my mind (well, not really but still). I know they are important, but, writing for humans is much more important if one looks at a long term prospective. People say "Content is king", and I say "At present content is not the only king, but surely will be" as the SEO goes more semantic. I am here to stay for long, so that makes sense.

- Social Media is Important : Social bookmarking sites like Mixx, Digg and few others have helped me in getting TechnoDiary indexed, not only the home page but also each and every post that I have written so far.

- Incorporating images into the posts: Finally, I have realised that images are important, they make the post beautiful and give another reason to visitors to read the post.

- Commenting on other blogs: That has helped me a lot. Not only does it help one in getting some quality traffic to one own’s blog, it also helps one building contacts with fellow bloggers.

Nice! I have learned quite a lot of things. I’ll update you soon when I learn about more things. That’s all for the time being. Sayonara.

Google and Scalability Problems?

Never seen the two together until just few hours back when I stumbled upon a sphinn story which took me to this article, the article is written by the guy behind Gbrain addon for Mozilla Firefox. Let me first tell you about this addon,

gBrain is a Firefox extension to automagically bookmark all pages you visit at the Google bookmark service. This effectively moves your browser history from your browser instance to a central place on the net (Google) where it is easily searchable from every computer.

Google contacted this guy requesting him to take down his not-so-popular-but-useful Firefox Extension. I wonder why they requested, they could have used cease-and-desist or something like that, but it’s good to see this anyway.

The guy asked Google out of his curiosity the reason behind this request. At first Google message bearer wasn’t able to answer, but after a day or two the developer of Google Bookmarks and Google Web History contacted him directly.

The Google engineer told him about potential scalability problems this extension could breed. The extension creates 1000s of bookmarks per person per month. Google search algorithm is taught to go through the person’s bookmarks every time there is a query. Ok, now it makes some sense. Google Bookmarks was never made to handle thousands of bookmarks.

Whatever be the reason for this take down request, it’s not very Google of them. One sweet thing Google did to the developer at the end was sending him a T-Shirt and a USB card reader. The guy has now taken down this extension completely. And another sweet thing was these things were of no use to the guy and he decided to give away to his readers. The world is getting nicer, or is it just me?

When We Start Bribing Readers

Seeing a lot of contests on blogs these days. While at one blog someone is offering 5,000$ worth of sponsored prizes, other is offering in 5 figures. Every other blog seems to be hosting a contest, that’s exaggerated but still. All they want from participants is to subscribe to their feeds, comment on the posts or make a blog post about the contest itself on their respective blogs, of course with a do-follow link.

You call it marketing? Me too, but:

Whilst I understand that these are all Marketing fundas and all, I personally feel that in this way we are going to dilute the value of readers and readership. I am not saying that it is wrong, it doesn’t hurt anybody; readers happy, contest owner happy - then what’s wrong with me? Why I am making such a fuss about it. Honestly, I am a tad miffed about this buying and selling of readers, links and comments. All these are part of blog marketing these days, as they say.

An interesting thing is that I have been seeing these contests from long, never cared. But, now they are bothering me because TechnoDiary has filled me with a great positive energy and I have started respecting blogging and its ethics more than ever.

What do I mean? Are all these contests unethical?

No no.. not unethical at all. It’s bloggers’ personal choice to like it or not. Even biggies like John Chow and Shoemoney like it, I don’t. It’s that simple. Everybody has a freedom of speech on expression (on net at least), that’s what I am making use of at the moment by making my point.

Also, it’s not bribe in a real sense, if we provide real good content to the users then those users are going to be our subscribers sooner or later, contests can be considered as catalysts in this case. My post title is for those who just want to gain more and more subscribers by giving out more and more $$$$, while ignoring the content.

Let me also tell you that I have recently sponsored a prize for a contest which is still going on somewhere. I had to do it, again for what? yes, for marketing this blog. You’d say - sponsoring a prize for something I am not a big fan of, it doesn’t make much sense. But, I know where to draw the line. Again, I’d like to emphasize on the fact that every blogger has different mind set, different strategies and different likes/dislikes. I am just one of them. Time for the big question:

Would I ever host such contest here on TechnoDiary?

May be not. However, I believe in "never say never". If ever I start feeling comfortable with such contests, I might do it. It is a fact that contests do help in spreading the word. They are the easiest way to gain subscribers these days, but for the time being, I’d prefer to go without them. Again, personal choice.

At the end, I’d like to admit that I have failed miserably to make any strong point. I’d also admit that I have been diplomatic and defensive in my approach (as I don’t want to disrespect anyone at all). Above few paragraphs depict my state of mind at the very moment. I might cover this topic one more time but only after some research. This time I just blogged it without thinking or researching. But hey! this is my blog after all. :P

This is where I Make Money Online

HP Pavilion dv9000, that’s my workplace. Any comments?

Sorry guys, Content is not the only King

"Content is King" - As they say. No, I am not yet fed up of hearing this, because I know being fed up won’t help either, people will keep singing the same song each day.

I have no problem in calling the content a King, but, I believe that there are more kings who we need to take care of. There are people who say: "It’s not even a queen, SEO is the key to Making Money Blogging" while the rest would say "Of course, Content is the King".

It’s time that the left and the right side of my brain should start a debate again, as you know the infamous Mr. John and Mr. David are always ready to debate on anything (even when they are on a same side; now that’s too much). Ok, not wasting much of our time we let these two handle the topic.

John Vs. David:

Situation: John is happy seeing his first 100$ a day in adsense, he’s again, in front of his pc. David this time is shaving, he still has a bandage on his nose.

David: What’s up with you chap.. looking happy..

John: Yeah, I made 100$ in adsense today

David: congrats!!

John: ya, thanks.

David: any tips on how you did it?

John: See, it’s all about links and title tags and keywords and..

David: What? where’s the content?

John: content is nothing

David: c’mon John, at the end of the day, content is what users are looking for

John: somewhat right, but, who brings users to our site? han?

David: but I heard people saying "content is king"

John: Believe them or believe me.. you know who has just gotten 100$

David: I see, seems like content is not the only king here

John: hmm, you still think content is king?

David: yes.. 

John: Ok! then keep writing good quality shiny content, and let me do some keywording now, you better shave off your ugly beard.

David: yes, I’d do.

Interesting, I’d say. While John is happy on getting good $$$ through his SEO techniques which give him even more reasons to ignore the content, David has agreed on the fact that SEO techniques work, but he still knows the importance of content.

Which side am I, at the end?

Well, I do believe that writing for humans is very important, but, one just can’t rely on content. One has to be SEO aware to sustain in this competitive arena.

Content "OR" SEO?

People tend to choose only one of the two. Doing so will do nothing but harm your blog. In the above conversation, John seems to be a believer of SEO, not the content. John is good in SEO, that’s great, but, he has to learn writing for humans if he wants to keep getting awesome money in the years to come.

It’s about Content "AND" SEO

This is the way to go. We should write excellent content while taking care of some other important things (read SEO) at the same time. David seems more likely to succeed in the long term because he knows Search Engines will only improve in their understanding about good & bad. SEO is going to be less effective in coming years.

Conclusions:

- At present, money can be made through SEOing the crap sites.

- Content is king, but there are more kings.

- Powers of content will increase in the coming years as web goes more semantic.

- SEO will become less effective gradually.

- John is arrogant.