Every once in a while, CTRL-U is my best friend. If you’re a search optimizer like me, then you know exactly what I mean.

Sometimes, the code surprises you. For example, sometimes that valid link passing juice, isn’t really a juice-passing link after all. Look below the surface, and you’ll find that it’s a tricky cloaking mechanism (largely via JavaScript) that hides your link from the hungry-hungry-bot.

Out of habit, I did it today. Yes, you know what I mean, I toggled CTRL-U. I didn’t mean to look at the code of Google’s SERPS, but it just so happened. What did I find? You would be appalled, fellow SEOptimizer Nazi: Google uses a gaggle (yes, a gaggle) of inline CSS (*waves index finger prodigiously while hissing*). Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

So, does this mean that inline CSS is bad, or that Google is just bad (at SEO, that is)?

The Las Vegas air was waiting for thousands of search marketers to fill its void. And we did. This was my first PubCon attendance, and although much of the information presented would be valuable to most noveau-seo, I would have to say that much of what I heard here could be learned with a little trial and error and elbow grease (which I’ve always said is the best way to learn).

But what was good about this conference? In my opinion, we now have some definitive statements from the guys at the search engines themselves - things that don’t trick the engines, but will dramatically increase our rankings.  And most of the time, a few minutes of a code tweak can mean a world of difference in ranking.

Good

• I think Matt Cutts lost some weight. Thoughts?
• In the duplicate content session, Google, Yahoo, and MSN all weighed in on some easy and quick ways to eliminate duplicate content confusion. Central point here was mainly comprised of two things: 1. Avoid parameters and session ID’s. Engineers may love ‘em, but this is where you - as an SEO - need to step forward and say, “NO! I will not take this kind of abuse.” Instead, says the search gurus, you should try to track your visits through cookies, and 2.)Take the extra two minutes it takes to do your www. to non-www. redirect (or vice-versa). I mean, really? Why do people not do this from Day 1 of launch?

• Paid links. Do they work? Are they legit? This was, by far, the most heavily attended session of the conference. I’d like to think it’s because most people want to know what NOT to do, but somehow, I don’t think it was the case. SeoBook’s Aaron Wall gave some pointers on how to campaign for links without directly “paying” someone for the link, as did SEOMoz’s Rand and John Lessnau from LinkAdage. I especially found Aaron and Rand’s advice to be helpful. Among the things mentioned were charity donations, article syndication, widgets, contests, and site acquisition (I got the sense that this was mostly for the links, rather than the site itself).

Bad

• Don’t submit a site with paid links to the site review session whose panel contains Matt Cutts. I think a few sites (I won’t mention any names) made that fatal mistake, despite the fact that Matt’s computer was mysteriously inoperable. (by the way, does anyone know what tools he uses. I would pay a fortune to know and/or receive the .exe files for them).
• I got the sense that a few PubCon attendees saw the conference as a springboard to promote themselves. Besides the fact that this is a conference for SEOs ( who generally don’t purchase Widget A from Site Alpha), I didn’t see any reason why some site reviews had people expounding on the infinite virtues of their products. Let’s hear how you got all those links for a change. 

The Ugly

• How do you get 5 million+ unique visitors a month with such an ugly site.
• Why does it cost $14.95 to get to the top of the Stratosphere?

So I’m going to make a historical analogy. Recall what the early days of newspaper journalism were like? Gutenberg’s printing press was a relatively new contraption. Newspapers were sprouting up like sugarcane in Hawaii. The country was in a media boom… a print media boom, that is.

Why is today like the Gilded Age once again? We’re beginning to see the maturation of online media. In the late 1880s, the heated battle between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal was at its apogee. The battle is best depicted in Citizen Kane. How does this compare with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace and Google’s buy of YouTube? Quite well. And it could forebode the future of these young, immature media.

Print media, back then, was more “yellow” than “yellow” will ever be again in history - and thank God for that. The haphazard speed at which things happened in the Gilded Age encouraged bombast, inaccuracy, and sheer irresponsible journalism. It was the PT Barnum of reportage - always out for the sucker.

Online media, today? Much like print journalism in its yellow, gonzo era. But we’re coming out - and I’m not the only one to think this. Forbes had a report today posing the somewhat-rhetorical question: Is Content King Once More?

So is content really king now? Haven’t we been saying that for years of web media - and yet, each day is another video of a drunk David Hasselhoff, or a college girl taking a bath in macaroni and cheese. Each day provides yet more evidence that our culture doesn’t care about carefully constructed content any longer, and all they look for is a quick and dirty diversion?

Of course, these questions, too, may remain rhetorical for some time. And Forbes is merely posing the question as one of the few old media conglomerates that has managed to succeed online.

One of the most popular plugins for Wordpress is the All in One SEO pack by Semper Fi Web Design. Appropriate to its name, this plugin handles all of the nitty gritty details of SEO for those of you who don’t have the time - or the money - to improve the crawlability and ranking of your site.

Remember, despite its moniker, the All in One SEO pack still requires a bit of strategic thinking on your own part. You’ll still need to input a custom title and meta description for the home page (which is essential), and you should also exert control over the plugin options, when necessary (for example, some posts will require you to input a custom permalink that’s separate from the default permalink; this is vital for proper indexing in some cases).

The All in One SEO pack works flawlessly, and you’ll find that it’s quite intuitive.

In addition to its full range of options for title formats (for tags, archives, search titles, and more - even), you’ll find that the plugin gives you the ability to auto-generate meta descriptions, use NOINDEX for sections that pose a duplicate content issue, and provide custom titles, descriptions, and meta information for individual posts - if you so desire.

This is, by far, the best plugin for SEO I’ve seen out there, and I highly recommend adding it to your Wordpress install.

Each Week, we’ll review a popular open source plugin - whether it’s the latest add-on for Mozilla, or some sweet little bell (or whistle) for Wordpress.

Thanks to a post seen on Matt Cutt’s blog, we’ve been taking a look at Mitcho’s “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.” The thing is: It’s not “yet another” plugin. This little powerhouse has a plethora of interesting features.

My favorite option was the ability for admins to view the ‘relatedness’ score of the posts. I’ve always wondered how these little gizmos score the posts. Much like the mysterious Google algorithm, I’m sure they take a variety of factors into consideration, but as far as I can tell YARRP looks more closely at the title and body text using a SQL query keyword analysis.

Of course, another reason I love this plugin is the fact that you can alter the algorithm yourself! You have the power of Google at your fingertips! Don’t like the way posts are scored? Simply disallow tags or categories in the YARRP scoring algorithm!

Not fond of the total number of posts being displayed (heck, if you like to produce a lot of content, your related posts could start to get multitudinous!) No problem! YARRP allows you to select the total number of posts to be displayed.

You can also place the related posts box anywhere in your Wordpress template. This is invaluable if you prefer to have your related posts displayed as a floating div in your post, or even in the sidebar.

Overall, upon testing the plugin on my own experimental blog, I’m having great results. There is a heated debate in SEO circles whether or not interlinking will help you SEO-wise, but I’m sure it couldn’t hurt, and I’ve personally seen well-placed related links bring me up in the rankings.

I’ve been a Search Engine Optimizer maestro for a while. What I’ve realized is that no amount of underhanded techniques, link building trickery, or paid strategy will ultimately get you where you want.

Content is king, of course. But links are queen. And in order to reconcile the two, one must realize that good, relevant, and interesting content always wins when it comes to building links.  I have pushed, and pushed… and pushed for a few pieces that I thought were interesting. Sadly, they fizzled out in the bones of social bookmarking gravestones.

But every once in a while, I put out a piece that — while technically a little inept, and in my opintion: unininteresting. What surprised me about those pieces was the fact that they gained a rabid following in the social bookmarking sphere. Why? Sometimes you will never know. But the sure strategy to getting ranked will continue to require one simple task-at-hand: What will MY users find INTERESTING.

If you have that pinned down, then it’s a sure win.

Before you think a link is golden, think again!

For those of you who are frequent link prospectors, you’ll often run into what you consider the mother lode. This is a seemingly untapped link that - with the right coaxing and ’strategery’ (thank you, GWB) - you can turn your new homestake into a golden bonanza for your target site.

For the right prospect - let’s say a ballpark PageRank 6-8 with strong backlinks - you’re willing to invest considerable time and resources. For some of you, getting a link on a PageRank 8 is a must, by hook or by crook (I do not condone “by crook”).

The easiest way, which is generating all the buzz lately, has been blog comments. Google clearly indicates that blog comments are a relatively white hat practice (with one or two caveats). Remember: Your comments should be relevant and on-topic!

For example, let’s just say you find a blog or news page with dofollow comments. You spend a good 20-30 minutes reading the entry and typing in an insightful comment (of course, with a link back to your target page). Shazam! You’re well on your way to a valid PR8 backlink — or so you think.

So where does the Guardian come into this?

The U.K. Guardian’’s cleverly (deceptively?) entitled community blog, “CommentIsFree,” may or may not have been on your radar. I know it was on mine. My plugins were all indicating dofollow comments. The page was being cached every day by Google. And spammers had not yet discovered this beautiful opportunity.

My ma’ always said: “Nothing in life is ‘Free.’”

That was all before I looked under the hood. The title “CommentIsFree” was a blatant bait-and-switch phrase intended to send SEOs on a wild goose chase. Comments were not — in fact — free. The links were hidden behind a snippet of JavaScript. I looked at the text version of the Google cache and the comment links were nowhere to be seen. It seems as if the Guardian is capitalizing on the dofollow blog movement to hurt the SEO industry (whether or not its intentionally malicious is up to the U.K. Guardian to elucidate).

So, moral of the story: be familiar with good ol’ fashioned “View Source.” Plugins that show whether or not a link is dofollow are convenient for first inspections, but it could also lead to fruitless and time-consuming endeavors. The U.K. Guardian is just one of many cases in point.

I’m on to your ways, U.K. Guardian! You underestimated the intelligence of the average SEO.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

You may have heard that Yahoo just partnered up with Google. I definitely think this is a good thing - not only to improve Yahoo’s dismal performance vis a vis paid advertising, but also to improve our credibility as SEOs!

You may well know that the cost per click has been steadily rising as more and more marketers pay for their traffic. This won’t change any time soon. In fact, the Yahoo/Google partnership will only exacerbate already skyrocketing click costs.

The average CPC is expected to rise, and the rise isn’t expected to stop, according to Jupiter Research.

So what’s an SEO to do? Pounce on it. This is an opportunity to show your client (if you’re a freewheelin’ consultant) or your boss (if you’re an in-house guru) that search optimization is free traffic.

It’s not only free, but it’s also more qualified and gets the lion’s share of traffic. Search engine users are 6X more likely to click on the first few organic results than the paid results. The heatmap knows all!

Granted, paid search is still the easiest and most effective way to bring in revenue, but for some revenue streams, it just doesn’t work. Where a company can really shine is in the bread and butter listings. SEO may not be rocket science, but it will soon become the star hitter on the field.

So, as we reflect on the recent revelations just know, deep down in your heart that it feels good to be a gangsta… dayam, it feels good.

Looking at the graph and the inbounds can tell you what succeeds. It will never tell you what fails.

People often focus too much on the negative. You can’t focus on negatives, especially in the realm of search optimization because — chances are — those negatives will happen much more often than the positives.

This is no truer than it is with link building. In order to succeed in linkbuilding, you need to know your successes. These are your places that you can turn to later, whether with future projects, or with the same project.

Failures, on the other hand, are not going to help you. You’ll find that, whether you’d like to or not, the failures will quickly fade from your memory while your successes are where your learn the most.

Case in point: I had a recent project that involved building the traffic for a kid’s website. The content was fun, interesting, and one of those types of tasks that SEOs envision as another cake walk. Building the links, however, was tough and I can’t tell you how many manual link requests I sent out to schools and educators. All that mattered, though — in the end — was that one single .edu link (like it or not, EDU domains are by and large still GOLD).

And the result? Traffic spiked. I still don’t know the source of that fortuitous link. All I do know is that the failures faded into memory the moment I saw the inbounds climb. All that mattered in the end were the triple sevens.

This is the official blog of Chronicas Media, a full-service search engine optimization adviser. If you’re a business owner looking to go online — and get ranked well — you can find some valuable information here. As always, we’re happy to help with any consultation you may need. Simply fill out the form to the left and we’ll get back to you as soon as humanly possible.

We hope you enjoy the content. SEO may not be rocket science, but you’ll definitely need to keep up-to-date. We’ve been successful at increasing our clients’ natural search traffic by up to %500. See our testimonial page for our accolades.

To get started, just submit the form to the left, and we hope you continue following the entries at Sing Ping!

Sincerely,

Jonathan Haeber
Proprietor
Chronicas Media