seo
Ask.com – WOW
When last have you been to Ask.com? It looks good and can really help you easily promote your site (more of that last one at the bottom)…
Themes
I haven’t been there in MANY months, but I REALLY like it! I mean, you can theme the home page, which is ALREADY a lot slicker than Google’s home page. Take a look at THIS shocking screen shot of the “Polka Dots” theme:
Then there’s the “Western Sky” theme:
And look how easy it is to do an advanced search! You just click “Advanced” and up pops your “advanced search screen“. Immediate, and simple:
Now, enough about the looks, what about the features?
Blog Search
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the Ask “Blog Search”. And, unlike Google where you first have to actually go to Google Blog Search, here, you just click the “Blog” icon and suddenly you’re searching blogs.
And, while you’re searching, unless you’ve turned it off, down pops the search suggestions, which are actually pretty accurate and helpful:
Not so secret Secret
Here’s a little secret that everybody knows about blog search: use it to find new blog posts about your blog/site topic, and comment on them. It will REALLY help you generate more traffic. I know from experience. I’ve tried it twice for 2 different blog posts, and it tripled the traffic coming into those posts. Of course, there are many other factors that could play a role in this result, but it’s something easy, and something worth it.
Once you’ve done your search and you’re on the search results screen, all the good stuff starts. My main suggestion is to use the “subscribe to this search” feature.
Subscribe to this search
If you have a post on your blog or a page on your site that is dedicated to an upcoming event, for example “Father’s Day”, you’ll want to keep commenting on other people’s blogs, and as often as you can. To make life easier, at the top right of the screen is the option to “subscribe to this search“. This drop down gives you the option of subscribing to the search using Google, BlogLines, and a couple of other options…
Before subscribing, change your search option to use “Most Recent” (at the top of the results) which will allow you to see any new blog posts related to your topic. Then every morning, in the time allocated to “promoting your site”, you can go commenting on other people’s blog posts.
The moral of this post? Go visit Ask.com
Read MoreRocket Science to everyone who doesn’t know
Danny Sullivan said it exactly how it is in the December 21st edition of The Daily SearchCast (roughly quoted):
If I spent a little more time researching…… I could re-roof my house, but I’m not a roofer, and it’s like, magic, “wow, you put a whole new roof on my house”… to me, that’s rocket science, or roof science…
The little things count, as I mentioned in my previous post, SEO Apartheid. If my mother ever wanted to put a website up, she would just write her “great content“, and hope for the best. She wouldn’t know about using Title-tags and meta tags, etc.
Another example of not everyone knowing SEO-Science is this post on the Digital Point forums, where somebody asked for a site review. The site had been TOTALLY coded in Excel. Go on, I dare you, create a web page in Excel and look at the source code. In my mind, apart from the page looking worse than most sites I’ve seen since 1997, it didn’t follow the very basic SEO principles. SEO is exactly what it stands for: Search Engine Optimisation. Not necessarily changing the way it looks, but rather making it easier for a Search Engine to understand it, and know whether to rank it high or not, and giving it a reason to rank it well.
And, if you ever feel the need to explain SEO to your mother, go read this post on the SoloSEO blog: “Your Mom can understand SEO too”
And then, once you know how to explain this in easy terms, go read Oilman’s post, “Shoemoney, A Fish Bowl, and Bullshit“. You’ll get an SEO opinion straight from someone who actually makes a living from this science bullshit. 
SEO Apartheid
It’s always been the whites vs. the blacks. Only now it’s the hats…
And personally I think ShoeMoney is giving WAY too much credit to the White Hats. On-page optimisation IS piss easy.
I mean, I’ve been at this internet game for about a year, and I’m started to read the same stuff over and over and over again (and some of my blogs rank a little higher than others, though nowhere near worth bragging about)…
Ever since the whole Jason Calacanis “SEO is bullshit!” thing started, I’ve been wondering what all the fuss was. Well, here’s my $0.02 worth:
…if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly…:
True. In part. Good content means it contains what people will be searching for. Namely, keywords. If you write good, full-bodied articles, you’re sure to do well jumping off the diving board. But can you swim?
On-page SEO:
In my opinion, you will only really “swim” if your site has a few basic things done right, like titles and headings and alt tags and easily navigable content and…. etc. etc. etc. This is starting to get easier and easier thanks to CMSes such as WordPress which tends to format everything ever so nicely. In my mind, that’s why there are a LOT more blogs ranking higher for terms than normal websites. (Read a HILARIOUS example of that here: “Bizzare Google Request“)
So, personally, I think this section counts for about 50% of your “ranking ability”.
Finishing the race:
This is where you add a few extra finishing touches like good URLs, good page-rank/page-trust, aged domains (if possible), cloaking and as many high-quality links as you can get… I think this might be bordering on the gray edge of your hat, but it’s still not difficult.
Winning the race:
And this is where Jason Calacanis has it all wrong, and ShoeMoney hints at it:
I also explained that I thought that 95% of SEO was super simple but the remaining 5% is where the real secret sauce is that guys like Greg Boser and Todd Friesen know because they have been pushing limits and experimenting in the dark arts for a long time they can apply what they learned to the corporate area.
I think there are a lot of things that can still be done to improve the chances of your site ranking well, and there are not THAT many people who know how to do them. And, Google might not appreciate exactly what else is being done, hence the term “black hat”. It might not be illegal, but it’s taking advantage of maybe 1 or 10 variables in the Google Algorithm, and, as Quadzilla puts it, maxes them out.
Conclusion:
I think the “white hat” SEO weighting should be about 80%, because if you’re up against a page that doesn’t have really good content, on-page SEO and back links, it isn’t that hard to rank higher than them. But go on, I dare you, try rank higher than Dave Naylor for the term “daven“. He’s worked at it, and he knows what he’s doing.
I would give almost anything to sit down with somebody like Quadzilla or DaveN for a few lessons in their art. I find it incredibly interesting, and think that they have their skills honed down to a fine art, even though they are learning all the time. (And apparently DaveN does not dabble in the dark arts any more).
And then there’s ShoeMoney… Any chance you could send me your playbook? Even if it IS outdated (according to your podcast from a couple of months ago). You have a LOT to teach, and I’m willing to learn, though the Elite Retreat is a little out of my price range right now.
