Google to be featured on 60 Minutes Sunday

According to CBS News, Google will be a feature story on 60 Minutes this Sunday, January 2, 2005. “The company that began as a school project six years ago is now worth about as much as Ford and General Motors combined. Lesley Stahl and 60 MINUTES cameras take viewers inside the campus of this Silicon Valley gem to reveal a laid-back environment that belies the super-competitive drive that has made it so successful.” I doubt that we will glean any SEO secrets from the broadcast, but it may still be worth tuning into.

Birthdays and Betas

According to InsideGoogle, Froogle turned two this month, but is still in beta. Today is my birthday, and I am a bit older than 2, but I still consider myself in beta as well. Especially, my SEO self. SEO in many ways is like a product that is in perpetual beta. The tasks are never finished, the learning never stops, and even if your site makes it to that oh so coveted number one spot, you can never assume that it will stay there. Even if all your competition goes away, you could still lose your ranking due to any bizarre change in an algorithm. Once that happens, it is like starting all over again trying to decide what can be done to regain the favor of the search engines. So the wisdom of the day is that SEO is a lot like life – a never ending, always changing cycle of ups and downs, frustations and joys, learning and experiences. May you all be lucky in life and in your SEO quest.

SEO Scoop gets a facelift

If you have been here before, then the first thing you will notice today is that SEO Scoop has changed its look. I have been wanting to do this for a while, but could never decide what I wanted to do with it. I finally made a decision, and this is the result. Hope you like it. The great thing, of course, is that the site is driven by an external CSS file, so making changes across the site is as easy as making changes to one file.

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How obvious is your topic?

Try this little on-page SEO experiment. Go to a page on your website that you are actively promoting but are having trouble ranking. Have your mother or grandmother or some non-techy friend look at the page. Give them only about 5 seconds to glance at it. Now close the browser and ask the person what the main topic of the page was. If they can give you the correct answer, give yourself a pat on the back. If they give the wrong answer, or just have no idea, you need to go back and do some more work on that page.

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Warning – new PHP worm even worse than last

A php Internet worm released on 12/25/2004 that doesn’t use php bulletin boards – it attacks ALL php scripts/pages which are vulnerable to a File Inclusion Flaw – is being called PHPInclude.Worm. Please go to http://isc.sans.org for more info on how this might affect you.

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Comprehensive keyword research tool

An excellent new free tool has hit the SEO scene that gives a comprehensive view of keyword search terms, using both Wordtracker and Overture data. This tool goes beyond what I have seen in any other similar tool. As you can see from the screen shots below, using the keyword phrase “coffee beans”, a wealth of data, including future projections is given. Many more terms were listed, but I only captured a few in the screenshot. In addition, if you click on the hyperlinked number in the Per Month (Prev.) column, you are presented with the Keyword Difficulty calculations to help you determine the viability of ranking well for that keyword phrase (similar to the concept of KEI). Below is a screenshot of the Keyword Difficulty Results for the phrase “coffee bean”. Check out the Keyword Tool for yourself.

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Happy Holidays!

Forget SEO for a couple of days. Enjoy the time with your family and friends. May you all have a joyous holiday, filled with love, laughter, and good cheer.

Defining your product can bring search traffic

Users often hear a term that is new to them. Something about what they heard makes them curious, so they head off to their favorite search engine and type in “What is [search term here]?” If you have a product or topic whose definition may be not be common knowledge, consider creating a page (or a forum post if you own a forum) that is titled What is [your term here]? Use that phrase in a header tag, and then write two or three paragraphs of information that defines the term. It is often easy to rank well for the phrase, and it can bring in quite a bit of traffic. Give it a go.

Search engines, bugs, and ethics

You will often see the argument that [insert search engine here] owes webmasters nothing, and that they can do whatever they want with their results. Therefore, webmasters should not complain about bugs that prevent their websites from ranking. I suppose that, legally, this is true. I imagine that any attempted lawsuit would likely be defeated. After all, search engines do not have a contract with webmasters, so even if the search engine is *at fault* because a bug in their algo prevents a site from ranking, the lack of a contract would make the search engine not liable for any loss of revenue to the site owner. Ok, I’m no expert on law, but that would seem to make sense to me anyway.

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Gigablast lets you create your own topical search engine

Want a great service to offer your site users? I love this idea from Gigablast. According to them, “you can create your own topic specific search engine in minutes. Gigablast’s revolutionary, new technology allows you to create a list of up to 200 web sites (or subsites) and a search box that searches just those sites. Give your visitors a unique search experience, completely free of charge. For instance, if you have a site about horses, why not create a horse-specific search engine?” To create your own topic specific search engine, follow the directions given at www.gigablast.com/byose.html

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Backlink analyzer AKA Tool Number 9

We Build Pages has created a very nice free tool that analyzes backlinks, showing unique domains linking to the site, the IP addresses of those domains (great for analyzine Class C IP structure), and the age of the domains linking to your site. This can also be a good way to analyze the backlinks of your competitors. I do hope they decide to give the tool a better name – Tool Number 9 just doesn’t work. In any case, have fun playing with backlinks at www.555webtemplates.com/backlinks-tool.asp

Sneak Peek at new MSN home page

Wondering what the new MSN home page will look like when the MSN beta search goes live? Seems as though this might be in the works. http://www.msn.com/defaultpf.armx.

Google SERPs jumble, tumble, rattle, and shake

Reminiscent of the Florida shakeup last year, the Google SERPs are again going through a major update. The shakeup started yesterday, and has not yet settled across all datacenters. Like last year’s Florida algo change, webmasters are reporting massive changes to search results. At least this year, Google played this little trick near the end of the Christmas season, so hopefully it will not affect businesses as badly as it did last year. Of course, things may change over the next few days or weeks, as this algo change does not yet appear to have stabilized, so if you have lost your rankings, do not make drastic changes just yet. Give the update some time to settle, then analyze the results. If anything obvious seems to have changed, I will report what I find.

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