John Chow is following Enviroman @ Peter Chen 0 comments

I received an email announcing John Chow is following enviroman at Twitter. Should I be happy? I don't know. Years back I remembered John Chow's blog was given a very high valuation and he is very well know. When I got that email, I did some checking and found these - John Chow vs. Google - Guess Who's Winning and 4 Lessons From John Chow Google Bombing Experience. What did they say? Essentially, John chow did some SEO and link building for the phrase "Make Money Online" which Google didn't like. Seems Google called it Google Bombing. Looks like John Chow's has dropped from his high flying position from Google's perspective. It seems that Google is 'manually' punishing John and has dropped him to the 51st result for the term "John Chow," and his "make money online" campaign has been dropped to 57th. And now googling John Chow doesn't turn up in page 1 of Google's SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

However, I wonder if John Chow really minds because it seems his earnings in 6/1/07 jumped to $12,569.61 from $2790.05 from in 12/1/06, I assumed because of his "Google Bombing".That is, his monthly income increased by $9779.56 which is a hefty 350% increase. John Chow also claimed that his income is not highly dependent on traffic from Google.

Now I checked John Chow's Twitter profile page. Wow, he is following 22,948 and has 21,759 followers on Twitter. That is, he is following more than he has followers. I suspect he is using the tactic to increase Twitter followers by following others in the hope of others following him when they get the email announcing John Chow is following them. Should you copy John Chow's strategy? I don't know. But I myself will probably not for the time being.

How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes 0 comments

By Matt McGee

I’ve been a bad blogger. I’m swamped at work and have been distracted outside of work, and I’ve been trying to get by here on SBS with list links and even some of my best Flickr photos. I can’t remember the last time I posted something helpful / educational. My bad….

Let me take a stab at making things better.

I often get asked to review a web site and give quick feedback on the site’s SEO. The issue: Is the site doing well, or in desperate need of SEO help? To answer those questions, I’ve developed a speedy system to go through a site and take a quick SEO snapshot. I’m going to give that system away here. On a smaller site, this should take about 20 minutes. Even on the biggest sites, it’s never taken me more than an hour.
SEO Your Site in Less Than an Hour

A. Visit the home page, www.domain.com.

1. Does it redirect to some other URL? If so, that’s bad.
2. Review the Page Title. Does it use relevant, primary keywords? Is it formatted correctly?
3. Review site navigation:
* Format — text or image? image map? javascript? drop-downs? Text is best.
* Page URLs — look at URL structure, path names, file names. How long are URLs? How far away from the root are they? Are they separated by dashes or underscores?
* Are keywords used appropriately in text links or image alt tags?
4. Review home page content:
* Adequate and appropriate amount of text?
* Appropriate keyword usage?
* Is there a sitemap?
* Do a “command-A” to find any hidden text.
* Check PageRank via SearchStatus plugin for Firefox
5. View source code:
* Check meta description (length, keyword usage, relevance).
* Check meta keywords (relevance, stuffing).
* Look for anything unusual/spammy (keywords in noscript, H1s in javascript, etc.).
* If javascript or drop-down navigation, make sure it’s crawlable.
* Sometimes cut-and-paste code into Dreamweaver to get better look at code-to-page relationship.

B. Analyze robots.txt file. See what’s being blocked and what’s not. Make sure it’s written correctly.

C. Check for www and non-www domains — i.e., canonicalization issues. Only one should resolve; the other should redirect.

D. Look at the sitemap (if one exists).

1. Check keyword usage in anchor text.
2. How many links?
3. Are all important (category, sub-category, etc.) pages listed?

E. Visit two category/1st-level pages.

Repeat A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5 - this will be quicker since many objects (header, footer, menus) will be the same. In particular, look for unique page text, unique meta tags, correct use of H1s, H2s to structure content.

Check for appropriate PageRank flow. Also look at how they link back to home page. Is index.html or default.php appended on link? Shouldn’t be.

F. Visit two product/2nd-level pages.

Same steps as E.

Also, if the site sells common products, find 2-3 other sites selling same exact items and compare product pages. Are all sites using the same product descriptions? Unique content is best.

G. Do a site:domain.com search in all 3 main engines.

Compare pages indexed between the three. Is pages indexed unusually high or low based on what you saw in the site map and site navigation? This may help identify crawlability issues. Is one engine showing substantially more or less pages than the others? Double-check robots.txt file if needed.

H. Do site:domain.com *** -jdkhfdj search in Google to see supplemental pages.

All sites will have some pages in the supplemental index. Compare this number with overall number of pages indexed. A very high percentage of pages in the supplemental index = not good.

(Note: The above is no longer a way to view supplemental results in Google, and Google has said it no longer distinguishes between a main set of results and a supplemental set.)

I. Use Aaron’s SEO for Firefox extension to look at link counts in Yahoo and MSN. If not in a rush, do the actual link count searches manually on Yahoo Site Explorer and MSN to confirm.

…..END…..

That’s what I do when making a quick SEO site analysis. Important: This is for identifying problems, not fixing them. And it doesn’t replace a real and complete SEO analysis. (There are several shortcomings, for example. Here’s one: Steps E and F assume that all category pages across the site will be the same, and that all product pages will be the same. This is not always the case, so you may miss problems/issues that a real, deeper analysis would reveal.)

Blog SEO Tips from SES San Jose 0 comments

Moderator Dana Todd & Lee Odden

Blogs have been abuzz for at least 4 years in the tech space and in the past 2-3 years in the business marketing world. Like many new marketing/communication channels, there continues to be a need to demystify shiny new objects and what they mean for businesses. Blogs and search engine optimization are no different.

One point I would make is that companies are wasting their long term time when setting up blogs purely for SEO purposes. It’s short term thinking and over time, results in difficulties with keeping momentum, new ideas and content. How do I know? Been there and done that, many times.

It’s far more realistic to implement blogs for specific purposes such as product communications, online newsroom, thought leader/strategy, customer support/communications, news, branding, advice/tips, aggregation of content in specific topics and many more. Regardless of the purpose, each blog implementation and ongoing management should have an intentional SEO effort.

Our session at SES San Jose on Blogs and Feeds included Amanda Watlington who gave a litany of advice and insights on strategic considerations for blogging ranging from goals to content sourcing to URL. She also offered an impressive list of specific tactics for optimizing both blogs and feeds. Amanda has been presenting on this topic at SES since the session was first implemented 3-4 years ago.

Chris Boggs gave advice on linking from blogs with examples of why not to link to press releases since they can get removed and not linking to other types of content because of archiving and lack of proper redirection.

Daron Babin made an argument based on his personal experience with the new WebmasterRadio.FM site on why it might be better in some cases not to use a blog platform, but to use a custom CMS (content management system) that publishes feeds. He offered numerous ranking examples and technical details of how the publishing platform automates many SEO friendly features of the web site.

My presentation on blog SEO focused on the value and opportunity with links specific to blogs and also offered 3 case studies.

In 2007 there were approximately 70 million blogs tracked by Technorati and this year they post 112 million, although there are likely far more than that. Out of all those blogs, 100 million have less than 20 inbound links. 400,000 blogs have more than 20 links and the top 2,600 blogs have over 1,000 inbound links.

Think about that. To be one of the top 1% of all blogs according to Technorati, it takes (among other things) 1,000 inbound links. That’s a number any competent search marketer could achieve in a reasonable amount of time provided there’s good content to work with. It represents a good illustration of the opportunity for SEOs to leverage blogs as a compliment to search engine optimization programs.



The first case study I presented concerned a Senior Housing Development Company, that wanted to provide an informal communications channel to address topics of interest to their target market and also to motivate a shift in thinking of their industry from “old folks homes” to “senior communities, senior living”.

Tactics included updating their blog and optimizing with keywords as well as leveraging categories to offer an online newsroom to archive optimized press releases both chronologically and by keyword-rich category.

Results included the blog becoming a top 5 source of referring traffic to corporate site, a huge increase in keyword rankings and a 500% increase in unique visitors.



The second blog SEO case study involved an online book and games retailer that wanted to tap into the passionate communities of games and puzzle enthusiasts online.

The tactical approach involved creating robust online game content include taking old style carnival games and having them made into Flash games to be played on the blog itself. A presence was created on Facebook as well as social media promotion efforts on StumbleUpon, Digg and bookmarking sites. Also, Twitter data was mined for users talking about games, puzzles, learning etc and followed to create a channel for promoting the latest games posted to the blog.

Results for the online puzzles site included a doubling of unique visitors from organic search, a quintupling of monthly traffic and more than qunitupling of page views to well over 400,000 per month. Now the site not only sells books and games but monetizes content/traffic with contextual advertising.

The third blog SEO case study involved our own blog, Online Marketing Blog. Our strategy was to transition a news blog into a unique content destination that would demonstrate TopRank’s thought leadership on topics ranging from Push and Pull Public Relations to Digital Asset Optimization. Increasing awareness in the search, PR and direct marketing industries as well as with prospective clients were specific, long term objectives.

Tactics for Online Marketing Blog include a regular schedule of unique content: industry and SEM agency insights, interviews, conference coverage, surveys, blog reviews and blog tools, photos & video.

Results include being ranked in the Technorati 100 (#31 favorite out of 100 million + blogs) and in top 15 on the AdAge Power150 list of top marketing blogs. However, the more meaningful results according to objectives include media coverage in influential publications: