Rockyfied Roundup | Whats going on in the search industry | 4/27/07

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Among my many blog post browsing I do daily I have found a few things in the industry that I feel are worth republishing. Some interesting things are happening this week in search and they are things you MUST KNOW ABOUT.
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Gluttony Decathlon Continues | Challenge 2 | 16 chicken soft tacos

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The second part of the Gluttony Decathlon continued a week ago at a lonely Del Taco close to the 55 freeway in irvine California. The challenge was between 3 of the irvines most notorius stomachs. To win the challange you must eat as many soft tacos within an hour as you possibly can. Here is the run down and play by play. (more…)

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Building Your RSS Subscribers | Cultivating a blog community part 2

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Today Andrey from SMS has released my part 2 post on cultivating a blog community. This post deals directly with the power of an rss subscriber and how to start gaining more rss subscribers to your feed. I give many tips and tricks to try out and some might be more effective then others but are worth a try non the less.

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What Magazines do I Read?

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I was pinged by Kris over at Pepperjam Search on what magazines do I like to read. I thought I would answer this meme for funnsies

Maxim
Stuff
Playboy — Just for the articles
Wired
EQ
Search Marketing Standard
Revenue
Kiplinger
Details

Thanks kris for the ping and I would like to ping the following people.

Cam
Rebecca Kelley
Chris Hooley
Snoop Bloggy Blawg
Todd Austin
Rob Watts
Jaan

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Myspace News released | is it a digg killer?

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Today I read on the daily times that myspace has released a news portion called myspace news that is a lot like digg.com. Members of the social networking site myspace will be able to vote on stories to help make them popular so more members can find them. (more…)

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Stumble Upon Releases StumbleThru | Social Media News

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On april 19th SU announces the new release of a very interesting feature called stumble thru. The new service is designed to allow you to stumble randomly through a site. For instance if you want to stumble wikipedia you can now do so.

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Rockyfied Roundup | Whats going on in the search industry | 4/21/07

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I have been late to post recent activity in the search engine industry. I have been really busy plus my trip to SES NY has put me back a little bit but I wanted to keep my readers up to date if they have not seen some of this information already. Some very interesting stuff is going on in the search industry.

Google’s Eric Schmidt announces that YouTubes “claim your content” is almost ready, reports Search Engine Land.

Googles Matt Cutts says there is a new way to report sites that offer paid links. Although we know google has been after paid links for a while this opens up a big can of worms for us SEOs. I have heard rumor that link brokers are currently working on ways to get around this. Aaron walls talks about the real reason google doesnt like paid links, see todd mailoats link communist post here.

Kris Jones from Pepper Jam Search reports Google to buy Double Click for 3.1 billion dollars. Double Click is an SEO firm which makes this news very shocking. Read coverage on pepperjamsearch blog and loren baker talks about what google might do with double clicks marketing company called Performics.
Search Engine Journal talks about MSNs tellme new services that are competing with Goog 411.

Ebay is reportedly acquiring stumble upon which makes me very nervous on the future usage of stumble upon, tech crunch reports.

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Joe Balestrino of MR. SEO talks about Meta tags | Guest Bloggers

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Joe Balestrino is an SEO consultant, founding partner of www.mr-seo.com and hosts the weekly Mr-SEO podcast on iTunes, a free resource for teaching the basics of SEO to beginners.

Advice on Meta Tags

Sometimes meta tags can make the difference between a good ranking and a great ranking. One thing to keep in mind is that when tweaking tags for improvement, it’s wise to change only the title, keyword or description tag, not all three. This will help you figure out what has a positive or negative effect. In regard to keyword tags, adding more doesn’t equate with better rankings. Too many instances can make the tag look spammy to the engines. Below are instructions for setting up the three primary meta tags.

Keyword Tags: the keyword tag needs to reflect keywords for the page only, not the entire site. As a general rule, don’t repeat any keyword or phrase more than 3 times. Example <meta name="keywords" content=" Nike, Nike Shoes, Nike sneakers"> For keywords and phrases with singular and plural options, one of each is enough. Tags that read Blue Nikes, Red Nikes, Black Nikes, Green Nikes and so on should be avoided. Instead label the tag as so…Blue, Red, Black, Green, Nike, Nikes. Remember that if you don’t have a particular product or service offered on the page, the associated keywords shouldn’t be there. Tip: Place any common misspellings of keywords in this tag as well.

Title Tags: Probably the most important tag there is, the title tag can move a ranking up several spots in some cases with minor adjustment. Each page should be optimized for a particular phrase or phrases. If you optimized a page for Discount Nike Sneakers, your title tag should read

Discount Nike Sneakers – Company Name. The keyphrase must come first and the company name last. The sooner the keyphrase is found, the better. You can always experiment with the title tag for maximum effectiveness. You could try Discount Nike Sneakers on Sale, Discount Nike Sneakers | Nike Sneaker, etc… The possibilities are endless.

Description Tags: The description tag helps supports the title tag and the content on the page, however, this tag has a little more importance than most people are aware of. Let’s go back to our example about the Blue Nike sneakers and assume your page content talks about Blue Nike Sneakers and your title tags and H1 tag also support the content. If that’s the case, the term “Blue Nike Sneaker” needs to be in the description tag. But here is the kicker: If possible, start the description tag off with your phrase or at least have it in the first sentence. This is very important, as is making sure your description tag is informative and sells the page. People will be reading these descriptions. If you don’t use a description tag the engines will pull content off the page, likely taking your phrase out of context or worse, off of your menu. The description tag is your opportunity to control what your traffic will see while supporting your other meta data. You can steal traffic from higher ranking sites with a well written tag.

A word about supplemental results: Avoid at all costs using the same title and description tags, even in the early stages of the site. Having all the tags the same could place pages into the supplemental, where they might remain for months, slowing SEO efforts to a crawl.

Thanks Joe B. for the insightful post! Make sure you check out MR. SEOs website and his informative podcasts.

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Stumble Upon Removes Audience Rank

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I have been missing my audience rank for about 3 days now. I started to get very suspicious of this so I started asking around. It looks like Stumble Upon has taken a page out of the book of digg and started removing factors that allow you to gauge your rank and profile power within stumble upon.

See profile picture update:

We currently still have the top stumblers page at least but I feel that may be sure to follow the audience rank and be removed. The power behind each profile seems to have stayed which is no big suprise.

I hope they bring it back because I got it up to around 6500 and I was really happy to see this number keep growing with all of the quality stumbling I have been doing. Its a nice way to be inspired to keep stumbling as petty as that sounds.

See my interview over at Web Pro News regarding the audience rank removal.

Pronet Advertising picked up the story as well. Thanks CAM!

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The largest single act of gun violence today!! Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead!

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May God bless and be with you all!!

Where is this world leading to? It just gets worse and worse and never better.

Check out the post at the nytimes.

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