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SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog
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Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.
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Do You Need Meta Descriptions Now?
That’s an interesting question: “Do you need meta descriptions now?” Last year “The Entire Page Is The Meta Description” (and I am repeating that sooner than I thought I would). My anti-meta description rant was not actually directed a the poor misused meta description HTML element. Rather, it was directed at the poor downtrodden masses of Web developers, managers, producers, copy writers, developers, and other people who have been directed to “SEO the Website with keywords and meta tags and titles”. In other words, mechanical meta tag production is about as useful for SEO as hanging from a tree one-handed and yodeling on Sundays to bring back Elvis. That is, churning out keyword-rich meta tags that are intended for SEO is a waste of time. Do you need meta descriptions now? Well, technically you NEVER needed them. It’s just that, given a choice between a search engine slapping in some...
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Good Link, Bad Link: How to Stop Breaking Your Website
Here is a quick rundown of intrasite linking practices you should review with your developers or clients when analyzing your Websites. Top Menu Bars: Only Include What the User Can See Bad Menu Using CSS to cleverly hide links from your visitors until they mouse over the menu bar is: User-UNfriendly (it’s damned annoying) Keyword-stuffing (try looking at all those links with the CSS turned off) Flattening your site architecture (which is BAD for your search engine optimization) As Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) said to Peggy Carter in “Captain America”: If you have anything to say, now would be a perfect time to keep it to yourself. All your reasons for cramming dozens of links into top-of-page menu bars are excuses for bad Web design coupled with bad search engine optimization coupled with bad user experience. Good Menu Assign a unique menu bar to each navigable section of...
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What Kind of Links Have More Authority in Penguin?
Okay, you’re a spammer or someone who believed all the nonsense that came out of the link spam community and you got your Websites burned. I’ll humor you. “What Kind of Links Are Working Now After Penguin?” It should be obvious: All the links that were not filtered either this time around or previously by Google. There are no “kinds” of links that were targeted by Penguin, except that they were only placed for the sake of promoting Websites in search engine results. So any random blog that wasn’t affected by Penguin is still free to editorially link out to whatever sites it pleases. Sure, Google has attached some caveats to that privilege — like, you don’t want to link to Websites that have been penalized. You can fire up your link spam software and hit the forums, blog comments, and social media sites all you wish but that won’t...
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Can I Make Money Only From Long Tail Traffic?
The short answer to this question is, yes, you can make money from long tail traffic. I think a more important question, however, is “how much money can I make from long tail traffic?” Or, an even better question might be, “Do I have what it takes to make money from long tail traffic?” Mostly it takes patience, especially if you don’t have any money to begin. If you DO have some money, then you don’t need quite as much patience. The other key ingredient to making money from the long tail is moderation or a sense of when “enough is enough”. I think whomever is asking about making money from the long tail has probably recently felt the sting of too many search algorithm updates. A lot of short-cut I(nternet) M(arketer)s (and I use the expression only figuratively) have been complaining about major setbacks to their passive income schemes....
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Now Accepting PayPal Payments for SEO Theory Premium Newsletter
Due to the numerous inquiries and comments about using PayPal to pay for the SEO Theory Premium Newsletter we have now added a PayPal subscription button to the SEO Theory page. All Letter.ly + Amazon Payments subscriptions remain in place. If you want to change your subscription payment from Amazon Payments PLEASE WAIT until you have received the 4th May newsletter. Information will be included in the next two newsletters. This is intended as a TEMPORARY alternative option to Letter.ly. We have been advised that Letter.ly is working on accepting PayPal payments. For the present time our preferred method of billing and delivery is through Letter.ly. PayPal subscribers will receive a SEPARATE copy of the newsletter (same content, just not sent on through Letter.ly). It is our understanding that PayPal subscriptions are the customer’s responsibility. YOU cancel recurring monthly billing through YOUR PayPal account. We will only be able to...
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Mapping Dark Websearch
Twitter maintains the world’s busiest search index. I am pretty sure of that; I just cannot prove it. Facebook may be a close second. Or perhaps I have it backwards and Facebook is the world’s busiest search index and Twitter is a close second. There are so many fake and unused accounts on both services that it’s impossible for an outsider to understand how much activity either service supports. When an SEO speaks of “search” people generally think of things like products, services, and finding Websites or businesses or checking the weather, and so forth. You can actually do these things on Facebook and Twitter but they are very clumsy tools for that. On the other hand, if you want to find out where someone lives, who they know, what they like, what they do for a living, you’re more likely to do that successfully on either Facebook or Twitter....
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Shaping User Focus Through Search
If you are not logged in you want to enter your email address in the subscription box to the right of this article. Go ahead, the article can wait while you subscribe to the once daily digests that tell you about the articles we have published here. Do it. SUBSCRIBE NOW. And when you’re done with that, you next want to click on the Letter.ly SEO Theory Premium Newsletter link to the LEFT of this article so that you can subscribe to the PREMIUM newsletter. Go ahead. Do it. It’s only $25 a month. And when you’ve finished with that, you want to visit my SEO Theory Premium Services page so that you can purchase some of my valuable consulting time. I’ll tell you how you can build more links to your site, or how I think you should recover from a Penguin penalty, or a Panda penalty, or whatever...
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Dear @Bing – Please Get a New Marketing Plan
I ran Windows Update on two computers yesterday and Lo! and Behold! at the end of the process (both machines are running Windows 7) I saw much to my surprise a big fat ugly Bing Toolbar sitting in the middle of my desktop. The update process gave me the option of unchecking several default settings, which led me to believe that if I simply closed the toolbar it would not come back. But NOOOOooo! Bing wouldn’t have any of that! When I clicked on the settings icon (the little gear wheel) I found much to my surprise that Bing STILL wanted its toolbar to start up and run automagically when I boot the computer, so I had to disable the thing AGAIN just to make sure it was really, really disabled. What kills me is that I got up and walked away from one of the computers for about 30...
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