Caydel’s SEO Blog

Ok, time for me to share a little hidden annoyance I have.

Occasionally, some of the people who subscribe to my blog via RSS decide to link to me in blog posts of their own. Thanks for that, all of you - I really appreciate that something I’ve written has given you something to ponder, and you thought it was worth the time to link to me, or write about the subject I brought up.

However, instead of using the Feedburner URL of the post you are linking to, why not just link back to the post itself? Ie, instead of linking to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/CaydelsSeoBlog/%7E3/120829609/

why not link to:

http://www.caydel.com/a-simple-algorithm-for-googles-webrankings/

Yes, I know that the Feedburner URL redirects to the second one. Also, this is more or less using a ‘link condom’ when linking to the site; the Feedburner URL is not just a simple 30X redirect to the new site; it performs a decent amount of processing for their Feed Statistics before sending you on to this site. Why not just link directly, and spread the link love?

Of course, if there is a certain benefit, or thought behind it, let me know in the comments - I am curious about positive uses for such linking!

Share This

In the last few days, I have been tagged into two seperate memes, so here I am killing two birds with one stone:

My Nerd Score

CShel has just tagged me into the Nerd Score meme. Feeling somewhat apprehensive, I took the test, and it turns out that I am slighly less nerdy than Cshel. At the same time, had some of the questions been asked differently, I am sure I would have come up higher. Questions like ‘How many programming languages do you know?’ (6-10), ‘What was your first computer, and at what age did you get it?’ (Tandy 2000, at age 10)

Google Search Trends

Jason Bartholme, the king nerd, has tagged me into the Google Search Trends Meme.

If you have a Google account and are signed in, you can view your search history by clicking on Web History, then Trends. There you will see three lists of ten for your Top Queries, Top Sites, and Top Clicks. Below that, is the fun stuff. Here are my numbers:

My numbers are obviously lower than most others; I suspect that is due to me using the Google search bar in Firefox rather than actually using the Google.com homepage. The results that are returned by this box are actually an Adsense Search results page, in which the advertisement revenues go to the Firefox Foundation.

Tagging others:

In return, I would like to tagthe following for both memes:

• Dave Zuls
• Scott Horne
• Shandy King
• Abhishek Tripathi
• David Ogletree - yes, I know JB also tagged him, but I’m just turning up the pressure!
• Richard Ball

I could keep going, but I will spare the rest the pain of yet another meme :p

Share This

A recent post at SEOmoz once again brought up consider the plight of the Search Engine Optimization industry; as effective and needed as SEO consultants are, blackhats and webspammers have given the industry a black eye.

People see the search community in two camps: Search Engines (good) and Spammers/SEOs (bad). The way they see it, the search engines work diligently to reduce spam, and show the most relevant results for their queries. On the other side of town you have the SEOs and spammers, who try to make sites rank for their own ends, therefore throwing off the good, pristine search engine results.

What the public needs to realize is that real SEO isn’t about making pillspam or other useless garbage rank - SEO is about ensuring that relevant content ranks in the SERPS for related queries. For most site owners, there is little or no value in ranking for non-relevant queries. Often, the pursuit of rankings by SEOs forces them to review the content, make it more relevant and of better quality to induce links, and all around creates better websites and an overall better user experience on the Internet.

I think the SEO community needs to reach out to the public in some way to raise our profile in the public eye, differentiating ourselves from the communities of webspammers and other devious characters. We need to present ourselves as a legitimate, valuable industry. I think that we are on the right track as far as it goes, but more has to be done.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to better clean up the SEO image? I would appreciate your thoughts.

Share This

I spoke with one of my clients this morning, and he told me about some recent successes they have been having through email marketing to a mailing list targetted at a tightly defined mailing list.

You can read more about it at my (other) blog: Tried, Tested and True: the Mailing List

Share This

A while back, I first commented on the fact that the entire .cm (Cameroon) TLD appears to be redirected to the Agoga.com parking page in my post ‘Typo Squatter loses Thousands of Dollars Due to Missed Details‘. This post generated tons of interest and comments, and a large amount of search traffic.

The move by the government of Cameroon has become an ongoing mystery for many domainers - few could fail to see the benefitsof owning the .cm registry. Think of the profits - any time you mistyped ‘.com’ as ‘.cm’, you went to an ad-driven parking page. It is estimated that millions of people make this sort of error every day, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars of ad revenue daily. In essence, whoever redirected the .cm registry pulled off the perfect coup of the domaining world.

Well, the mystery is finally solved. According to a recent article on CNN, the mastermind behind the .cm switch is Kevin Ham, domainer extrordinaire with an estimated net worth of $300 million dollars. According to the CNN article, Ham sent a group of his employees flying to the nation of Cameroon to convince the government-run registry the value of landing-page redirection. Ham splits his profits off this scheme with the government of Cameroon.

According to sources, he is also eyeing Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) for the same type of agreement he has with Cameroon.

Share This

As some of you may already know, I’ve started my own web design / development / SEO / SEM business handling everything from internet marketing, to site design, to web applications development. Early on, I am throwing a fairly wide net until I have a chance to find where the demand and the money is - at that time I will narrow down my focus upon that particular industry.

Currently, I am trying to land my first few clients. I’ve had a few already who have been happy with my work, but it looks like I will have to cold call to get the ball rolling. Does anyone have any strategies with respect to cold calling? Is there anything you do which seems to garner a great response?

I appreciate any tips!

Share This

Back in January, I wrote a piece on whether the newly-popular Blogkits blog ad network lived up to their claims of outearning Adsense on blogs. My feeling at the time was that they did not even come close, but I was willing to give them more time to prove themselves.

Nearly five months have passed since I wrote the original piece on Blogkits; by now, Blogkits has been on my blog for nearly six months. Before someone points this out in my comments, I must admit that I did cheat on the blogkits challenge a bit; rather than removing Adsense and completely replacing it with Blogkits, I ran both ad networks side-by-side.

So, what are the results?

Blogkits
Impressions: 50,716
Clicks: 286
Leads: 0
Payout: $0.00

Adsense
Impressions: 22,340
Earnings: $39.64

Within the six-month time period, Blogkits has not earned me a dime, despite nearly 300 clicks. This indicates horrible conversions on their part. Meanwhile Adsense was been quietly accumulating the whole time.

Of course, we should not forget that a single sale on Blogkits has the potential to generate more earnings than Adsense; it could just be a string of poor luck that I have no conversions yet. On the other hand, I think enough time has passed to show that Blogkits is not a particularily effective blog monetization solution.

One interesting point is the fact that Blogkits reports twice as many impressions as adsense for the same time period; neither ad network correlates well with the pageview statistics shown by my analytics / stat programs.

Share This