wanem guide

Over time popular bloggers build up hundreds or thousands of subscribers. These subscribers are people interested in the field or topics that blogger writes about. Each time those bloggers write a new post those readers get notified of the new content in their RSS readers. Imagine that… • everytime you had an idea to share, that 5,000 people who trust your opinions see it. • most of those 5,000 also write blogs in your field or related fields. • some of those bloggers frequently mention your site • some of those bloggers also have thousands of subscribers. Blogs are all about spreading ideas (via in content links) and accumulating attention. Where people go search engines follow. If many people link to your blog posts that also boosts your search engine rankings for the other parts of your site. If you write a frequently updated blog the media is more likely to believe you are a topical expert than if you are just a merchant selling goods in your industry. Attention IBM gave awa...

Quantity versus quality Most Internet Businesses Fail Many people are in a rush to build thinking they are ready to cash in on the next gold mine. A ton of money changes hands on the Internet, yet most Internet businesses fail. Why? People think they can make something rather large that is pretty good. Logic such as “If I can make a dollar a day off each page and have 200 pages, I would not need to work.”  The low cost of content creation can lead to poor document quality. If you say one incorrect thing, you may lose the trust of a prospective customer—sometimes for life. Making information that just turns out to be clutter rarely makes for a long-term, successful website. If you don’t have passion for what you do, it is much harder to be successful in a completely open environment, especially if workers who have a lower living cost in third world countries can easily duplicate your work. Long-Term Investment Strategy Editor and MarketWatch correspondent Bambi Francisco asked Mi...

With how many pages there are on the web, quality will usually win over quantity. With that being said, sometimes it will make sense to have multiple, similar websites covering slightly different topics. Doing this can help you create topically authoritative inbound links to different sites in your network  and give you a multibranded approach to marketing. However, you want to make sure your sites are all different and unique. If your sites are extremely similar, then your sites may receive a spam penalty or have the nepotistic link popularity discounted. Even worse is that if you interlink them all, then all of your sites could get penalized at the same time. Those using strong brands and good ideas can usually do well without creating a topical network. If you create a topical network expressly to deceive search engines, then you are taking a risk and your sites may get removed from the search indexes. In addition, some search engine relevancy algorithms, such as Google’s curr...

Search Engine Relevancy Many people think search engines have a hidden agenda. This simply is not true. The goal of the search engine is to provide high-quality content to people searching the Internet. Search engines with the broadest distribution network sell the most advertising space. As I write this, Google is considered the search engine with the best relevancy. Their technologies power the bulk of web searches. The Problem Listing a New Site T he biggest problem new websites have is that search engines have no idea they exist. Even when a search engine finds a new document, it has a hard time determining its quality. Search engines rely on links to help determine the quality of a document. Some engines, such as Google, also trust websites more as they age. The following bits may contain a few advanced search topics. It is fine if you do not necessarily understand them right away; the average webmaster does not need to know search technology in depth.  Some might be intere...

Relevancy is never static. Due to commercial market forces, search is CONSTANTLY broken. Thus, if you think of this e-book as a literal guide, it too will always be broken. Instead of thinking of the web  and search in terms of algorithms it helps to think of the web as a large social network. Ask yourself questions like • What are people talking about? • What stories are spreading? • Why are they spreading? • Who is spreading them? • How are they spreading them? The reason search relies so heavily on the social elements is that page content and site structure are so easy to manipulate. It takes a mind well-tuned into marketing to be able to influence or manipulate people directly. There are ways to fake authority, and when you are new it may make sense to push the envelope on some fronts. But invariably, anything that is widely manipulated is not a strong signal of authority. Google wants to count real editorial votes. Consider the following: • It is not common for news sites ...

Search algorithms are still in their infancy. Many people will still be able to run successful businesses doing nothing but SEO for at least a few years to come. When I was new to SEO, and only knew a bit about it, I did not have a strong brand or understand marketing well. I did things like rank people for terms worth hundreds of thousands of dollars while charging them a one-time $300 fee.  Did my efforts pay off? Sure, but due to my ignorance of the business end of the process, I still almost wound up bankrupt because I undercharged for services. As you learn more about the value of SEO and how it integrates into the web, you should be able to increase your income or social reach significantly. Only by pairing SEO with other marketing methods or viewing the web through a larger lens will you be able to fully appreciate the value of SEO. If you do not know what PPC, CSS, SSI, CMS, or many of the acronyms mean, it does not make sense to try to learn all of them in one day.  I...

Your rankings will improve. They will also get worse. Many people rush off to change things right away when the algorithms change. Sometimes the search engines roll in new algorithms aggressively, and then later roll them back. They cannot fight off new forms of spam and determine how aggressive to be with new algorithms unless they sometimes go too far with them. If you are unsure of what just happened, then you may not want to start changing things until you figure it out.  Sometimes when algorithms are rolled back or made less aggressive, many sites still do not rank well because their webmasters changed things that were helping them. Nobody is owed a good rank, and just because a ranking temporarily changes does not mean that a site has been penalized. It is far more likely that the ranking criteria shifted and the site may not match the new ranking criteria as well as it matched the old ranking criteria.  One of the greatest SEO techniques is knowing when to do nothing at...