April 2008

How competitive is a query space?

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 30, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

How competitive is a query? When SEOs want to piss on each others’ parades, the first words out of their mouths are often along the lines of: “That’s not a competitive query”. That usually means, “I don’t compete in that query so it doesn’t mean anything to me so I’m going to be […]

SEO Glossary updated

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 29, 2008 in General

I have updated the SEO Theory SEO Glossary with new definitions (culled from more recent SEO Theory posts). I’ve also standardized the entry formats although I’ve left the commentary in place. I’ll probably come back and clean up the commentary in the next update. You’ll see I added a section on search […]

The high human cost of specialized SEO skills

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 28, 2008 in SEO Theory

As the demand for experienced SEO technicians increases over the next few years, the industry may feel pressure to increase specialization. Skillset specialization offers advantages and disadvantages that don’t necessarily cancel each other out. For example, working only with specialists improves an organization’s ability to focus resources where they are most needed; thus, […]

The mechanics of linking

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 25, 2008 in Link Theory

There are still people today who insist that search engine optimization is all about links and IP addresses. Although they are full of crap they can usually sway a few gullible people, which is a shame because that means the endless debates about links-versus-content will continue ad nauseum.
Despite what some people would have us […]

SEO Experiments Anyone Can Do

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 24, 2008 in SEO Theory

SEO experiments are an important part of the learning process in SEO theory but as we have no industry standards people don’t agree on how to structure SEO experiments. An SEO experiment should test a hypothesis OR it should generate data for analysis. Sometimes you can accomplish both tasks but I think that […]

How to get the most SEO bang from query operators

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 23, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Google’s poor link: query operator has taken a huge beating from the SEO community for the past few years. The query operator’s reputation has been dragged through the mud so much that most people now use Yahoo! for link research (which is equivalent to asking Monaco to handle your national intelligence initiatives).
Here are the […]

Exploiting the holes in search market share data

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 22, 2008 in Competitive Analysis

I have been monitoring and measuring search market share since public data has been released by the various services. Danny Sullivan has been doing it for many years more than me. However, as I have noted in past discussions, today’s metrics don’t accurately report real search market share. Search market share metrics […]

Four advanced SEO practices

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 21, 2008 in Advanced SEO

As I have pointed out myself, many people are disappointed in the SEO conferences because you cannot learn the “real” hardcore stuff from the presentations. SEO conferences nonetheless serve useful purposes because those presentations help people who are just learning about search optimization understand the basic principles and see just how much is actually […]

A day in the life…

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 18, 2008 in General

Wake up.
Check the rankings. Spam doing good. Have breakfast.
Hit the train. Walk to office and ignore co-workers trying to socialize.
Check the rankings. Spam doing good. Have a snack.
Go to meeting. Production off schedule because of last-minute changes I said I would not make the day before. Make more […]

When link faking fails, there is always search engine optimization

Posted by Michael Martinez on April 17, 2008 in Link Theory

Greed, laziness, and ignorance are an SEO’s worst enemies. Sometimes I throw “panic” into the list as well. In this business, there are a lot of people who think they have the ideal trick for topping out the search results. How do I know that? I read their claims every day […]

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