Caydel’s SEO Blog

In the last few days, I have been using HitTail to make capture my search referrals. HitTail supposedly analyzes your queries with the intent of isolating which searches lead to your blog which you could easily rank for with well-written articles.

The reason HitTail works is this: picture your blogs index page. There are five or 6 or more entries on each page of the index. This mishmash of content is indexed by the search engines, leading to queries coming in which may use words taken from multiple seperate posts.

If searches are coming in based on multiple posts’ content, chances are the keywords used are related to the theme of your blog, and so would make easy targets to rank for. HitTail isolates which incoming searches would be easy to rank for.

So, when the posts which were together on the index page eventually drift off, you can maintain your ranking for that term by creating an article using that keyphrase.

So far, HitTail has only made one suggestion for me - ‘rails ajax radio’. With luck, and a couple days more traffic, HitTail will hopefully provide a few more suggestions I can work with. If you are a blogger, give it a try!

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Kevin from Adbrite just let me into Adbrite’s new video ad program. The ads are currently running on a CPC basis. This will be a very nice feature. Users who view the video will be able to embed it in their own site, or send to friends, and you collect the revenue for all embedded copies as well.

If a video were to go viral and make it’s way around the internet, you could potentially be collecting revenue on thousands or even millions of views.

Above *should* be my first attempt at using the system. This is a video of Jesse Cook playing ‘Rattle and Burn’ in Montral at Jazzfest 2006 from his latest DVD. He is one of my favourite artists - I had the pleasure to see him play in Dec. 2004 and he was simple amazing!

Note: To get this code working, I had to modify the Adbrite code a bit - remove the noscript tags and anclose it in a div. But - it’s working now!

Update: It appears that clicking on an ad in the video causes a popup. This popup is blocked by default for Firefox, so I doubt we see the revenue for it…. Hope they find a way around this.

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This afternoon, Aaron from the City of Angels Children’s Home in Tijuana, Mexico contacted me for some SEO advice. It seems that since yesterday, the homepage of the site (just the homepage, not the entire site! http://www.tjkids.org) has been dropped from the Google index.

I’ve taken a look at it, and identified a few possible factors:

1. Very low link strength - The site has only 17 backlinks according to Yahoo, with only 14 distinct domains between them.
2. No internal links to the root domain - The menu bar linked to http://www.tjkids.org/index.html rather than to the root page.

If you have a spare minute, here’s some things you can do to help Aaron and the orphanage.

• Are you an SEO? Do you see anything else on the page that could be causing Google issues? I’d appreciate it if you could post anything else in the comments, so I can relay it back to Aaron!
• Are you a blogger or webmaster? It would help a lot if you could write a post or story linking back to the City of Angels Children’s Home. This will help them to get indexed again.

Thank you for taking a second to read this, and please consider helping out!

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Roughly one month ago, on December 11, I signed up for Jim Kukral’s BlogKits service. Blogkits was designed and is marketed as a way to monetize blogs, aiming at taking over the advertising positions on blogs most often filled with Google Adsense or a similar PPC service.

The truth is that the vast majority of blogs don’t make more than pennies per day using Google Adsense. And here’s a little secret that even the “big” bloggers (the ones with tons of traffic) don’t want to tell you… Even they only use Google Adsense to supplement their blogs. They make a lot more money selling other ads because they have traffic.

It’s true, if you don’t have a ton of traffic like the vast majority of blogs, running Google Adsense is a waste of time. Take our challenge. Sign up and run BlogKits partner ads on your blog for 30-days in place of your Adsense ads. Then compare the earnings, and you decide which one is more worthwhile.

I was definately interested in giving it a shot, so I signed up and placed a BlogKits block on my blog, which is visible to the right, above my existing Adsense ads, as well as in a text link following the title of each post. Now, nearly a month has passed, and I have made my decision.

Before I comment on my earnings, I should mention that I cheated on the BlogKits challenge a bit - I did not remove my existing Adsense ads. I figured that the influence each ad service had on the other would be minimal; if people are interested in an ad, they will click it, regardless of what else is on the page.

For the time period from 11/12/2006 to 08/01/2007, BlogKits has taken 61 clicks, with a 0% conversion rate, and $0.00 earnings. For the same time period, Adsense has had 22 clicks, with $8.33 in revenue.

Now, I realize that the click volume to each is somewhat small; it may take more clicks before I see any conversions with BlogKits, and even a single conversion has the possibility to pass my Adsense revenue. Nevertheless, after just under 30 days, BlogKits has not performed for me!

I will leave BlogKits up for another month or two to collect more data, but so far I am not holding my breath! How has your experience with BlogKits been - has it worked well for you?

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After reading Guy Kawasaki’s post on ‘Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn‘, I realize that LinkedIn is catching on at a quick rate.

I think it has a lot of potential both for job hunting and just for having a professional contact network. Additionally, with the new LinkedIn Answers section, it will only become greater as a resource for professionals to rely on.

I’ve had my LinkedIn profile up for about a month and a half now, and have built a small contact list. However, there is nothing about it that even really shouts out my interest in SEO or Web Design. I know I am a capable programmer and decently knowledgeable about the SEO industry, but due to a lack of professional experience (I’m only in University, remember), I don’t have a wealth of previous positions to include which might indicate my knowledge and interest in these fields. Additionally, none of my previous employers use LinkedIn, and so I can’t draw on their recommendations either.

I want to clean up my act a bit on LinkedIn. So how would you suggest I optimize my LinkedIn profile and make it more professional looking? I want to be able to apply for jobs via LinkedIn and not immediately dismiss me based on the sparseness of my profile.

Any suggestions are very much appreciated. Additionally, if you want to add me to your contact network, go right ahead. My email address is brian@caydel.com. Thanks for any help!

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Wow - the last couple days have been full of surprises.

A few days ago, I wrote an article called, ‘Google is Beta-Testing Keyword-based Ad Filtering‘. I didn’t think it was anything special; I was just rewriting something that was written in the comments of a previous post.

Well, much to my surprise, Search Engine Land picked it up (thanks Barry) as well as Web Pro News. WebProNews is of course scraped to high heaven, so I immediately got tons of backlinks as a result of that.

The post on SEL was seen by a number of prestigious bloggers, and soon the story was getting linked from ProBlogger.net and The Inside Google Blog among a large number of other sites.

Here’s where the big surprises came in - the article started getting linked from sites in different languages such as Korean, and a few German sites.

At it’s peak, the post made the Techmeme frontpage, which sent about 150 readers.

As a result of this post, my Technorati rank dropped greatly, sitting me at 98,277. From tracking my referrals, I suspect that I got between 200-300 new backlinks, and the number of RSS subscribers reported by FeedBurner has doubled. My Blog Juice jumped from 2.1 to 2.6.

Welcome to the new readers - I hope you are somewhat entertained and informed by my posts. Thanks for the link love everyone who linked to the article - I will be giving you tons more like it

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Today, a set of Wikipedia articles about Barry Schwartz, Matt Cutts, and Ben Pfeiffer were moved into the Articles for Deletion list by Wikipedia editors.

The editors are removing them on the basis of a lack of notability. Of course, these editors are obviously not involved in the search industry; otherwise, they would immediately recognize that these three are household names to the industry.

In order for the editors to acknowledge the notability of these three, they need a set of news sources about each of these men and their contributions to the search industry. If you know of or can find articles mentioning or about Barry, Matt, or Ben, please post them into the discussion pages at the following Articles for Deletion pages:

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barry Schwartz (technologist)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Matt Cutts
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ben Pfeiffer

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