The Challenges of Measuring SEO Success Ray "Catfish" Comstock | Over the past five years, I've had to explain the state of an SEO campaign at hundreds of meetings. During that time, both the data that was made available to me to analyze, and the repercussions of what that data means, has changed dramatically. In addition, I've learned a lot about the challenges of explaining to non-SEO folks why we do what we do, and how the data that we see and what it says drives ongoing SEO strategy. SEO Success Measurement Challenges In the old days, one simply looked at total organic traffic from month to month as a primary metric of success. Couple that with a rankings report across "x" number of keywords and you have what served as a "typical" SEO report for most people. As we have become more sophisticated over [+]

So Really, is SEO Dying? Eric Enge writes great seo articles! This one below really is interesting. SEO is the practice of helping publishers bring new traffic and customers to their Web site, by building and promoting high quality Web sites using technology that the search engines can parse. That need isn't going away anytime soon. Not a chance. Defined properly, but still somewhat narrowly, SEO is the practice of helping publishers bring new traffic and customers to their Web site, by building and promoting high quality Web sites using technology that the search engines can parse. That need isn't going away anytime soon. Microsoft certainly agrees, as you can see from their big bet on Bing. Yes, SEO can, and will, evolve as the search engines evolve. The advent of universal search resulted [+]

Microsoft is now powering the search engine on Yahoo's website in the U.S. and Canada. Yahoo Inc.'s shift to Microsoft Corp.'s technology is part of a partnership aimed at undercutting Google Inc.'s dominance of the search market. The two companies completed the transition Tuesday, 13 months after announcing their alliance. The shift in other countries will occur in 2011 and 2012. By leaning on Microsoft's Bing search engine, Yahoo plans to dramatically lower expenses and focus on other products as it tries to snap out of a financial funk that has depressed its stock price. Microsoft tried to take advantage of Yahoo's problems with an unsuccessful takeover bid in 2008. http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/14672-Microsoft-powering-Yahoo.html Now, Microsoft is hoping to get better at understanding people's search requests as it picks up more traffic from Yahoo. [+]

What Google Starred Results Means to Search Engine Optimization? by Wayne Liew on March 3, 2010 Welcome Googler! If you find this page useful, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic. While doing some routine searches on Google today, I noticed a small star appears at the side of each search result item. Popular blogs haven’t got their hands on this and I have no idea whether this is an experimental or a permanent feature. One thing is for sure though. Google has been introducing a lot of additional features to its search engines to introduce personalization into their search results. Google Starred Results will definitely bring the level of personalization in search to another level.

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By Adam Audette, Search Engine Watch, Aug 3, 2010 Great content doesn't automatically earn attention, links, and traffic. There are exceptional resources, images, videos, and articles hidden across the web. They are lost in obscurity, unable to gain attention based on their own merit. If you build it... they won't come. If you build it, they might not even care. How do you create value, and how do you spread it across the web? And how does search engine optimization (SEO) work into that question? And how does it support the strategy as a whole? Just how do you avoid failing at SEO? I recently gave a presentation on how to not fail at SEO, which I'd like to share with you. In the process of putting this together, I distilled a number of thoughts and ideas that have been churning around in my head [+]

Supposedly the Paul who pays the Piper. Surely the owner of the company or the CEO of the corporate (who pays the designers) has the final say? But in reality, the web designer slaving in front of the screen, the SEO specialist fiddling with keywords, the graphic artist doing the jpgs are much closer to the website and its use. Maybe one should rather ask: who owns the "value of the content" on a website? In some larger organisations, this is typically the Marketing Department. However, in many cases the "Technical Department" (whatever they are called in your case) seem to claim ownership of the website. So where does this lead to? Simply this: I believe that the USER is in charge, since he/she effectively pays salaries (through membership fees, through buying products, through clicking on shopping carts), and that [+]

Unfortunately, some people don't know how SEO (search engine optimization) works and what they can expect. Some webmasters still expect that their website will be listed on Google's first result page after submitting the site to Google. That might have worked eight years ago but it does not work today. 1. SEO takes time You cannot optimize your website today and expect results tomorrow or next week. Search engine optimization takes time. Search engines have to find your new optimized pages, they have to find the new links to your website, they have to update the index, etc. 2. You must change your web pages If you want to get high rankings for certain keywords, then these keywords must appear on your web pages. It is possible to get high rankings for a keyword that is not listed on your website if [+]

Wow what a great morning it has been here at SynergizeIT! I was off to see one of our clients Drive Africa- and these guys/ girls rock! Drive Africa is a car rental South Africa company that specializes in 4x4 hire in South Africa. Anyway, what we recently did on their website was make their titles match content perfectly. The key to it was to ensure that the home page was specific to their focus as a company- which is 4x4 hire, car buy backs and car rental. The results was out standing. Drive Africa went from ranking 7th on Google.com 2 weeks ago to 1st for 4x4 hire! For Car buy backs they went from 3rd to 1st and 2nd. The results once a again proved the importance of title tags, and that content must be relevant. SEO [+]

To all the worlds SEO spammers- good bye! Our site has no follow tags; its about real seo discussions and not link building. [+]

OK, so you are supposed to ensure a high (6%? 12%?) keyword density in body text. But where is the edge of the ledge between crawler-smiling, rich text and black hole spamdexing? I am currently working on a research project with a student to do an experiment with Google, testing the waters to find this vague dividing line. In the meantime, just write good, grammatically (:)) correct English text, keeping your keywords in mind, but give it to someone else to read (who is not an expert on anything). If they are not "uneasy" about repetitive text, pushy keywords or unnatural language use, you're probably OK. [+]