This is just WOW! It really points to the fact of where they are going and how important it is to keep things on your site(s) up to date. New, fresh content will ultimately bring more visitors to your site and with some creative methods of linking from your blog or simply your blog design you can see things improve on your site.

BUT

People never like to be wronged or rejected, People still breathe air, the heart is still required to live, humans still walk on their feet and not their hands.

Excerpt: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ECC%201

My point? There are some underlying things in the world of SEO that have not changed and will never change.  So, stick with them and you’ll be safe. Yes, in order to really, really ‘grow’ you have to experiment and take a risk, but dont ever do this while neglecting the basics. This I have found is a critical mistake people, including myself, make. We get so pumped with the lastest link sculpting method we forget to send a few emails out to potential link partners for  a legitimate link or two.  Why? Because its boring.  But many things in life that may seem boring are critical to life. Example: Brushing your teeth, going to pee, breathing.

Take breathing for example:  What if someon told you to do something every day 17,280 times each day, every day for the rest of your life an dit was the same thing over and over? That would suck wouldnt it.

However, if you choose to cut that down just by 10%, you’ll be dead in a day. That would suck too.

So, what are these basics, or ‘tricks’ people might think.

First, stick to a plan. Got an idea for a website? - Do it. Finish it. Make it live with all its features. Grit your teeth and make it happen, no matter what.

This is a genius saying I know but here it goes: “You wont do anything if you dont do anything”

Very simple but how true.  How many ‘great’ ideas do you have but never implement any of them.

A friend of mind pointed out recently that 80% of the fuel on the Space Shuttle is simply used to extend beyond orbit and the remaining mission relies on the 20% remaining.  That is what its like starting a business, blog or putting an idea into reality. It takes 80% of your efforts just to get it off the ground as compared to then running the business, following systems  etc.

So, tip for the day is. Take all the things you have going on in your head. Pick one. Do it until the imagination of it in your head is a reality.

How many times have you been researching something and you think you’ve found what you are looking for only to find out that the article you are reading is from 2 years ago.. Grrrrr and you thought that vacation spot was nice.  The review you were reading was from 2 months prior to the ‘flood’ they experienced and that review after that is lost somewhere in cyberspace.

Herein is the issue. How do you index this kind of data in a way that cant be manipulated.

If you tell people certain elements to inclue peopel will lie.

If you dont, what will be the standard? when goog gets it? the most trusted sites keep pumping out the data that gets read first?

How does this work if some nobody site actually reveals something very important but their site has very few links. These are the challenges.

I think when it all boils down it will continue to evolve but the ‘bones’ will always stay the  same.  Links and link appraisels will rule and they will always be tested.. but as long as humans are involved in the process manipulators will be part of the mix and honestly this keeps it all healthy because letting *goog* have their way exactly would not be a good thing at all now would it. We’ll be paying $50 a click one day to research how to clean up dog pee from our carpet.

“For web sites that do not feature adult content or services, the Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted. Furthermore, for each listing accepted into the Directory, there is a recurring annual fee of US$299 to maintain the listing in the Directory for the subsequent year. For sites that include adult content or services, the nonrefundable initial fee is US$600 and the recurring annual fee is US$600.”

So, you read this and what do you see?
Ok, #1 we selling links. Bottom line, $299 and unless your site is talkiing about blowing up buildings and stuff , your in. Just for the $299. Sounds like a paid link. Oh yeah, they ‘review it’.. of course, they do as they are counting the $$$ in their bank account. This is what qualifies them I guess.  Hey, coming from me I dont have a problem with it one bit. I have a problem with that *gOOg* has a problem with it. Does yahoo nofollow- NOPE. THey are passing link juice.

THe better part is for $600 they’ll publish your *p* site.  So, I’m sure its due to some technical issue in their eyes and how it takes more work since their employees spend so much time on the site approving it I’m sure.

My take? They know what a huge market it is and they can get the $$ so they do. They sell links.. and bunches of them.

Now again, I have no problem with selilng a service. This is how it works in the brick and mortar world right? Pay more money, get a bigger ad, pay more money, get a bigger billboard. Pay more money, get better employees.

The real problem is *goog* entire system is built off ‘who pays the most, wins’ mentality until it comes down to someone else implementing this strategy and it affecting the $400/share service they offer and pay to shareholders. Its just ridiculous.  Do I agree with them policing their index, yes… for crappy sites, spam sites etc. Why do nt they just implement a location verification and a few other methods to weed out the real sites from the bad ones.. What about if youare e-commerce you have to submit a business license to be in the index if you are in the US.. I dont know.. something…
The reason is while they are, of course interested in good results, they dont make a dime fromthese. They make money when you pay them for PPC and thats it.> So anything to prevent you from paying they see as an attack on job-security and thats a bad thing.
So, whats the resolution ? Come up witha method of verification for sites to weeed out the bad ones… be  as pure as they all were when they started or you might see the same thing that happend with Goog overtaking Microsoft happening to them..

Its like marriage. Really.

Having been married now coming up on 10 years with 4 children under 9 let me relate the two as  I would my marriage, or any marriage for that matter.

Lets just say SEO is the Man (of course, always trying to figure out a problem regardless of the outcome) and Conversion is the woman. (You know the one concerned about the bottom line - money)

So, SEO meets conversion. Each is equally convinced that their own agenda is the most important and ‘essential’ to the success of the ‘marriage’.

Mr. SEO says: “If I dont get your traffic you wont have anything to convert”

Mrs Conversion says “If all you do is focus on getting visitors to your crappy website they’ll just leave the site and do NOTHING!”

So, what gives?

Of course.. we know the truth.. any successful marriage only works when both sides ‘give’ and respect the others point of view and actually if you want to take it to the next level, you actually begin to thrive in the others agenda and thats where the magic starts.. you know, after dark normally.

So, again how does this work. I think you see the picture.

I really like SEO. In fact, I like it too much. It blinds me to the bigger purpose and that is to produce something that will last and that has a profit - whether its monetary or simply in reaching the goal for the site other than reaching my XXX,XXX,XXX th  visitor.

It really pains me to start playing around with my site(s) and moving things around, getting my designer to change an image. It really really does even after I’ve done it and proved that it made more money I’ll find myself obsessing again over my stats simply looking a the little bar graphs and wondering why it went down at a 7 degree angle for the DAY. I mean, its ridiculous.

The art of conversion is crucial.  I mean, think about it. Lets say you have a little new site thats getting 200 unique visitors a day and you can’t wait to get to 300 a day. Why wouldn’t I take the time to figure out how to serve those 200 customers before I get to 300?  I’m not sure,  but I know I do it over and over.

Take it from me. STOP and listen to your wife. She’s right - most of the time.

1) What is it

Its the process of writing useful content and submitting that content to other websites called article directories.  These websites have content or ‘articles’ from many many other submitters. Some are crappy and let just about anything go and others are human edited.  Some allow links, others do not. Some get indexed some do not.

2) So, how does it work.  #1 See if the site has PR.  Is it indexed? Do they allow any links to your site? Are they nofollowed?

3) Lets say you have good answers to these. So you write an article and post it to it. If its a good site it will get indexed quickly and you’ll get a link vote. How much value depends on the integrity of the article site.

Should you use them? Yes and No

Yes if its a fairly new site or a weak backlink strucutre. They are links and every link counts from good sites. How much it counts depends on the competitive nature of your industry.

So, the conclusion is dont think your idea has already been perfected. In this case you might not be a programmer but you can explain what you need to someone and have them do it for you. Try Odesk or Rentacoder and get you a good team and have ‘em code it out to your specs. You might find down the road you have a product that Many people might want and will even pay for it. Make it work for yourself and if you are completely satisfied chances are you’ll make others happy.

Here are some steps when taking on this task.

1) First make sure to get a good crawl of the existing site.  This will tell you whats out there. I recently had to do this with a site that had cleverly programmed over 1.5 million pages. Of course google only had around 1,000 of them in their index but they were still ‘accessible’ and this had to be changed as these were doorways into the old site architecture. If these were to be left open this could create issues for duplicate content.

2) Once you have the URL’s you’ll need to determine the unique ID’s that are used to drive the existing architecture. You’ll need to know these so you can either use them for your re-writes or in my most recent case it was a conversion from ASP to PHP which meant I could not use ANY of the existing logic since it was all using recordsets etc etc. So, I had to create an export based on the crawl that kept the product and category ID’s intact and used those to import into the new database that would drive the site.

3) Once you have the tables you can then either desing the new database from this or , as I did,  programmatically create rewrites in the .htaccess that will handle all of these pages. Be sure to check for long URL’s with multiple queries parameters and be sure to forward all of these to either their corresponding pages or the parent ID’s of these pages.

4) When testing on the new site you can use the <base href=”??????”/> so that the rewrites will work while testing.

5) Run a new crawl on the new site and verify all things work

5) Check your redirects in something like Redirect Checker so you can be sure you get 301’s instead of 404 or 302’s. The 301 is the accepted method of redirecting. It also allows the PR from those old pages to pass on to the new pages.

The overall process can be pretty involved but be sure to take it one step at a time and stay organized so you dont end up losing the old pages.

The final tip is that once you do the change dont freak out when the traffic drops for the site as the new pages will take some time to get all figured out. When anything ‘in mass’ takes place on a site the SE’s sometimes take a bit. Once they re-crawl all the new pages and figure out what is going on they will start giving clearer rankings.

Here it is in simple terms:

Short Tail - A short 3 word or less keyword phrase

Example: used auto parts

Long Tail - A keyword phrase over 3 words

Example: where can I find a used alternator for my Pontiac Grand Prix

Ok, so you get the picture. Now what is there to discuss?

I could compare the short tail to the Long tail approach like a 17 year old single guy needing to decide between a brand new car or buying 3 cars for the same price that are 4 years old. That new car has its advantages of course. Its the latest and greatest thing if you want bragging rights. Uh oh but here comes the dude with 4 (FOUR) cars. I mean he has 4 freakin cars thats pretty cool too.  A different one for every night of the 4 day weekend, while Mr cool shows up in the same one night after night.

Well you can see the comparison. Both have their advantages and both their disadvantages.

Down to some facts you need to look at though.

1) Short Tail can be tough to compete with if there is a bunch of competitiion. Normally in these highly competitive markets the long tail can be the way to go.

2) Traffic/Research is absolutely necessary. Use something like semrush to find out what kind of traffic different keywords or sites generate. Dont just foolishly start stuffing title tags and keywords/content into your site without really studying the keywords…simple things like singular and plural make a big difference.

3) Get some good content on the site. If you’ve got 3 sentences on a page and your competitor has 10 sentences with more words describing the service or product and you both have similar page authority.. guess whose getting the long tail? Yep, your friendly competitor.
So, add content and build links and you’ll be shocked to see the kinds of content that come to the site after amonth or two.

First one here: a cunning or deceitful action or device; “he played a trick on me”; “he pulled a fast one and got away with it”

So, a cunning or deceitful action or device. Well that sure does not sound good now does it. But  yet that is what comes to mind many times. It reminds me of the junior highschool days when I probably spent more time thinking about a work around then just studying. Why was the workaround so more appealing? I really did end up burning some time coming up with different schemes. Like the time I wrote the answers down on a small piece of paper and put it in a small curve, taped it to my gut and then un-buttoned the top button of my school uniform shirt. Worked a few times.  I then got brave and just used the same ‘cupping’ method in the top pocket. Got busted . Honor Council.

I was an idiot. I learned nothing.

Well its the same here. In the time you spend reading up on a trick you can just as easily get a tip

So here is a tip: tip off: give insider information or advise to; “He tipped off the police about the terrorist plot”

So, we want a tip regardin SEO, or how can we implement something that will actually WORK and bring more visitors to our site that will in turn, produce the results we are looking for.

So, why the fuss over the use of a word? Big reason. If you stay down the trick path it has a dead end. Stick with searching for tips and you’ll find your path continues to lead to greener pastures. Yep, the trick road has some cool signs on the way that eventually end up in more dead end roads or worse off, accidents with large 18 wheelers (Penalties).

Want a tip for today? Spend most of tomorrow imagining yourself the head of the Web Spam team at Google and what kinds of things you’d try and do to prevent people from manipulating your search index so you could keep your job. Write down the top 5 or 10 things you’d do. Now, after you are done see how shocked you are to find out that you are violating most of the rules you wold implement.

Then, come up with 10 things you’d suggest people to do to improve their rankings naturally and that would still help you keep your job. Now just do those things.

Bottom line is the search engines are trying to get better and better at acting like a human and to detect moral behavior on the internet. To them its all about morals when it comes to their index and they wrote this moral index by the way. They can do that you know, they own the index.