Whoever you are and whatever you do; it is not about how good you are and how good your songs, smiles, poems, door handles, decors, paintings, services and buns are.However, speaking about buns, you won’t gain much from the fact that they are known beyond your street and community. There is a chance that your buns will become a local attraction, so that every tourist will by all means drop in to taste them on the way to the art gallery. Still that tourist won’t be able to enjoy your buns for breakfast while at home.

If your activity is not very much dependant on time and location and you are not the sole service provider in the area, you certainly need advertising. If not advertising in its pure sense, then at least some efforts to make your business known beyond the circle of your actual clients, their friends and relatives.

There was a time when ads in the local newspaper would spread the word about you to everyone. Then came a time when you needed to bother about radio-coverage, publish a couple of leaflets, and, who knows, may be your city was big enough to have a TV channel.

Today, however, the issue of spreading information is not that simple. The thing is that the pool of information is bottomless. If you want to get your message through to me, for instance, it’s no use trying to do it with conventional advertising techniques. It was 1.5 years ago that I last saw a newspaper; I only occasionally come across a radio broadcast once in a couple of weeks; as for the television, I don’t watch it at all. And it’s not that I’m a snob who doesn’t care about the world around. The thing is that I don’t have time to follow all the information sources. And even if I did watch TV, how could one guess which of the dozens of channels I would pick that day. When there used to be only 3 TV channels, the term “information space” made some sense. But since their number saw an incredible increase, there have appeared numerous, practically isolated information spaces.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: adwords, facebook, general thoughts, google, MySpace, orkut, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, SMO, web 2.0
Posted in SEO, general thoughts, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

I doubt that there is any professional copywriter who has never heard yet about such a service as Copyscape.com The matter is here about plagiarizm and defending your rights online. In two words this service helps to identify the duplicate content in the Internet – pages, that already have the “same content”.

How does it work?
You insert the definite web-address (it can be the root URL or a concrete page) and push the “Go!” button. The system start global scanning and can provide you with the number of urls that have the same content or that have quoted you. Great, isn’t it?!

In reality everything is much more commonplace as you might think: the system just uses the command that is called “exact match” when you type something in Google, like, for example, “web development company in Europe” – you will get results exactly for this very phrase. No wonder, this is invaluable for copywriters.

By and large, what we’ve got?
The tool that queries Google (and Google only!) to find the pages that have the same or practically the same content. Is it perfect? Absolutely not! I will write down a list of disadvantages of Copyscape (sorry, if I criticize it sharp – I would like to see the more powerful tool in the nearest future):

1) Limited free queries per IP address (20 at the moment);

2) Google indexed pages scanning only (this means that Yahoo! Live.com and other search engines are ignored and this is really in vain as it has been long ago noticed that other Search Engines index pages more often and faster);

3) The system is often mistaken (for duplicate content it can take absolutely different information though some connectors, parenthesis or other cohesive elements that can be used absolutely everywhere on different web-sites);

4) It scans only those pages that are in the main index in Google (the pages that are in Supplemental Index – a very common practice nowadays – are excluded from scanning. Why? No idea!).

Once again, I’m not paying tribute to this Tool just for the disadvantages mentioned above. They are enough to ruin (100% the right word) a copywriter’s job! Even the following picture won’t save you 100% from stealing your content.

P.S. Ready for a big discussion! Please, leave comments.

Tags: copyscape, copywriter, copywriting, google, plagiarizm, SEO
Posted in SEO, copywriting | 4 Comments »

In January 2005 there was a post in Official Google Blog that I would linke to qote here:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

In a few weeks other search engines, like Yahoo and MSN, agreed to take into consideration the nofollow attribute of the links their spiders find while crawling. Originally this attribute was introduced to prevent people spam other people’s blogs with comments that contain nothing but links to some sites. If you have a blog yourself, you of course saw such comments linking to sites promoting viagra and texas holdem poker. Later other techniques of link spam appeared, including mass-submission of links to social bookmarking sites. Thus, most social bookmarking sites also introduced nofollow attribute for all the links that are bookmarked by the people. Some sites, like blogmarks.net and netvouz.com have not yet done so, but one can expect them to join the rest pretty soon.

However, the top social bookmarking sites I listed in my previous post can influence search engine results and traffic to the sites you promote even while using the nofollow attribute on all of their pages.

1. The first site most of you have already heard about is del.icio.us. It is the most popular of all the social bookmarking sites and it’s popularity became it’s power. Some people would use del.icio.us instead of a common search engine if the amount of irrelevant data in SERPs for their query seems overwhelming. Lots of other sites all over the web like tagvy.com, travelicio.us, tagcentral.net and many, many others would syndicate data from del.icio.us for some of the tags people use to describe their links at del.icio.us. The sites I’ve listed publish links for many tags, but it’s not a rare practice that some blog writing, for example, about SEO, would contain somewhere in the blog sidebar several latest links that people tagged as relevant to SEO. And the features I like most about del.icio.us is their export and import. Because all the links you have added to del.icio.us can be exported together with all tags and descriptions in several various formats and del.icio.us seems to be the only place where you can collect bookmarks and then import them from there to loads of other sites and applications that work with bookmarks. Even browsers offer less functionality than del.icio.us.
2. Once you have added several sites to del.icio.us, you can export the links and add them to Yahoo MyWeb. The peculiarity of this service is that it’s integrated in Yahoo and once the page you submitted to this service appears on any SERP in Yahoo, it will stand out on the page and look different from all the other results in the SERP. Yahoo will indicate how many people have saved this very page into Yahoo MyWeb, and as so far very few pages are saved there, this really makes a difference.
3. The last service from this top 3 I want to talk about, is not just a site, the most important feature with Stumbleupon is their toolbar. Once the toolbar installed you can vote for or against any page on the web. Or, if you feel bored, click on Stumble! button on the toolbar and the service will forward you to a random site according to your interests and the chances you land on some particular site are as high as the number of positive votes from the toolbar users. Of course, this would not help you if you are promoting something dull and something that only a small audience would understand, but once your site sells or offers something interesting, you should try Stumbleupon. So far we had very nice results with it for several sites.

And I would not recommend you the following websites for your SEO efforts: lilisto.com, linkagogo.com, unalog.com, igooi.com, hyperlinkomatic.com, zurpy.com and looklater.com. I’m not saying that these sites a bad or useless, but for me they were not worth the time I spent trying to figure out how they work and testing them for the sites I’m promoting. However, you might have a different experience.

Tags: del.icio.us, google, MSN, nofollow, SEO, SERP, stumbleupon, yahoo, Yahoo MyWeb
Posted in SEO | 4 Comments »

3 weeks ago the SEO world held it’s breath when the fluctuations in the SERPs began. Everyone expected their sites booming in the searches, getting much more traffic, selling more widgets, recruiting more clients. Disillusionment!

Jagger1 was followed by Jagger2 and then the last stage of Google Update, but the results appeared to be disastrous for almost 90% of webmasters across the whole world. Practically evebody blamed google guys for letting scraper sites come up in TOP10. Yea, you’ll never know what S.Brin and his colleagues are doing with the search algorithm. Just guess, nothing more.

Stop! I forgot – there is a great blog owned by Matt Cutts – one of the leading Google engineer who showed himself to the public. I’ll quote his words: “Starting yesterday, Jagger3 was visible at the 66.102.9.104 data center. There’s still some minor flux on that data center, but it includes Jagger1, Jagger2, and Jagger3.”

Again, nothing about the peculiarities of ANY Jagger. Ok, the difference in SERPs? Well, we see them, but still. Jagger3 is still in process and does not show any sign of winding down.

Tags: google, SEO, SERPs
Posted in SEO | No Comments »