Intermediate SEO

Posts discussing intermediate SEO techniques and situations. Analysis and suggestions may not help people who are new to search engine optimization. No warranties or guarantees are implied.

Google adds a third index for site search

Posted by Michael Martinez on May 12, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Matt Cutts mentioned on his blog that Google Custom Search Engines now have a special site search index.
This seems like a major step in the right direction as site search has been a real issue for me. Site search is the third navigation tool that every Web site designer (and SEO) MUST take into […]

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 […]

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 […]

Shaping query traffic for new keywords

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 20, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

20-25% of all queries every month have supposedly never been seen by the major search engines before. In a search world that counts in excess of 7,000,000,000 queries per month, where do these 1.4 to 1.75 billion new queries come from? It certainly doesn’t come from bogus link anchor text tests.
Traditional advertisers could […]

Why SEOs need crawl pages

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 3, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Crawl pages have found a lot of uses through the years. Spammers use them to get their spam indexed. A lot of Web sites adapted the crawl page format to HTML sitemap structures (incorporating appropriate page design to make the sitemaps look like the rest of the site). But old-school SEOs used […]

Developing Web friends and allies

Posted by Michael Martinez on February 15, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Every now and then you get a link from an obscure Web site you’ve never heard of. Someone came to your site, found what you have done appeals to them, and went back to their site and provided a link to yours.
We often find these natural links by scouring our referral data to see […]

Why Rand Fishkin’s nofollow post was wrong

Posted by Michael Martinez on February 1, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

The SEO method is pretty clear and simple: Experiment, evaluate, adjust. Unfortunately, some people toss in an unwarranted fourth step: “Reach inappropriate conclusions and proclaim revolutionary breakthroughs in SEO science”.
Let’s look at Rand Fishkin’s recent premature declaration that his implementation of Rel=Nofollow on many internal links magically increased the number of search referrals to […]

Patterns of Use

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 21, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

“You can never go back.” My grandmother said that to me once when I was feeling regret over the way I had handled some situation as a kid. That expression mirrors the philosophy I have tried to shape my career around: keep moving forward.
As a programmer and as a search optimizer I have […]

What other people’s queries teach you about SEO

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 10, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

If you’re in the real estate business one of the best things you can do for yourself is to pick a few queries related to the care and feeding of bears and watch them.
If you spend most of your search results page analysis time looking at your own queries you develop an insular point of […]

Optimizing through community activism

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 8, 2008 in Intermediate SEO

Sharing what you know about search engine optimization resources is dangerous because either the spammers or the stampeding herds of wannabe optimizers inevitably overrun all good resources, abuse them to death, and ruin them for everyone. Responsible SEO sharing requires that you be careful and not endorse any idea or technique that you actually […]

Next Page