Caydel’s SEO Blog

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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Yesterday, my wife and I were out shopping for Christmas presents for our nephews and nieces. We went into Toys-R-Us in order to see what we could find. Looking at all the rows and rows of toys available for kids, a couple thoughts came to me:

Every parent has an innate fear that their kid is going to be anything less than the intellectual elite for their age group. No parent wants that - it reflects poorly on them! (Yes, I know, slightly cynical…)

Toy makers know this, and to that end have done everything in their power to create a marketable ‘educational aspect’ to every toy they make.

• ‘Baby’s First Mobile - teaches shapes, colours, counting, arithmetic and discrete mathematics. Ages 6-24 months’

Ok, the example above is somewhat exaggerated. But I am sure you understand the kind of marketing I am referring to. They are marketing to parents who want to justify to themselves that they are intellectually stimulating their children and providing for their intellectual development when then leave them in a corner somewhere because they are too busy with their own lives to care for their children before they are old enough for daycare.

At any rate, ranting and cynicism aside, many SEOs have children. So what type of toys would be appropriate to develop the skills necessary for SEO work in their children from a young age?

• Link it! - a fun game where players must link together a network of websites. Watch out for those spamlinks! Ages 3-6
• Baby’s First Adsense Heatmap - train your child to instinctively determine the best ad placement. 0-18 months
• Keywords! - Develop long tail keywords. The player with the longest list wins! 6-12 years
• Plush Silky Matt Cutts Doll - Give your child someone to take comfort in and suck on when everything is bad.
• Mechanical Spider & Web - Hang on your wall! Watch the thread color change as the Spider assigns trust! 3-6 years
• Google Dance Party for the Xbox 360 - Teach your child the unpredictable steps of the Google Dance!

Ok, those were poor - what can you come up with?

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EGOL recently made a post on the SEOmoz blog about one of the major shortcomings of Adsense: the lack of a feature to set negative keywords for the contextual ad matching. In short, EGOL is having a problem where many of the contextual ads showing on a few of his sites are not family friendly, leaving him with a poor image when people associate him with these ads.

EGOL’s issue is that while his sites are family friendly, some of his ads are not. Since most visitors do not understand the nature of contextual ads, they would have no choice but to consider him personally responsible for the smut ads Google is giving him. I also see a use for functionality such as this; most SEO types who would be visiting this blog probably aren’t to motivated to purchase ‘Get Rich Quick With Adsense’ ebooks and MFA templates. Knowing this, I could probably largely increase my Click Through Rate by eliminating these ads altogether.

Domain filtering can only go so far; I am sure that I could spend all day placing domains in the contextual ad filter, and I would never be able to remove all the Adwords and Adsense oriented ads showing up in the units to the right of this page. Yet it would be helpful if I could just set those as negative keywords in the Adsense control panel, and not have to worry about them.

What do you think? Would this be a useful feature? I am curious to hear from more people on this. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, we may see the Adsense team implement this type of functionality.

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I may be a day behind the rest of the blogosphere in reporting this, but Search Engine Journal’s 2006 Search Blog Awards are open for vote. The categories up for vote this year are:

• SEO Blog of the Year
• Search News Blog
• Best Search Marketing / Contextual Ad Blog
• Best Link Building Blog
• Best Search Agency Resource Blog
• Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006
• Best Social Media Optimization Blog
• Best Black Hat SEO Blogs
• Best Local Search Blog
• Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
• Best Web 2.0 Blog
• *BONUS* Best Search Engine Marketing Community / Forum
• *BONUS 2* What’s your favorite Search Podcast?

Rather than being a ‘pick the best’ type vote, voters are asked to rate each of the nominations on a scale of 1-5, except for the ‘Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006′ category, in which you are to pick only one. Of course, if you are not familiar with the nomination, you are asked to leave it blank.

There are a large number of good blogs and bloggers on the card for each category. The two most interesting categories to watch will be the ‘Best SEO Blog of 2006′ as well as the ‘Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006′. The Best Search Blogger had about 20 names on it that I read daily; I was hard-pressed to rate them against eachother since each of the nominations does an outstanding job.

Voting will be open until December 24th. Winners will be announced some time after the holiday season is over.

Place Your Vote!

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A lot of webmasters talk about split-testing their ad layouts, trying to determine which layout or block position gives a higher CTR. Well, perhaps you should take it a step further.

I had a page on one of my older sites which targetted a fairly well-paying aspect of the site’s niche. I was making on average about $0.20 per click on this page, which wasn’t bad; most of the pages on the site have consistently been paying in the range of $0.05-$0.10 per click.

This week, I had a writer rewrite the page. The new version was slightly longer, but had a different feel and phrasing than the original. I updated the page with the new content late last night. This evening, roughly 24 hours after posting the new version, the page was delivering me an average $1.35 per click, nearly 7x the average I was previously getting.

It may be to early to completely rule out the possibility of today just being a fluke, but I suspect that the slightly different phrasing used when the page was re-written triggered different ads than the previous version. Perhaps a word was used in the new version that was not in the previous version. Perhaps a certain phrase came together which never appeared previously. I don’t know.

No matter what you pay per article, I would suggest that it is definately worth writing two versions of an article or page, and split test the content to determine which version gives you the best CPC. Even if you pay $25 per article, the difference will eventually be made up.

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Here’s an idea for a Firefox Extension I would like to see.

Often, I will check the top 100 google results for a given keyword, trying to determine how a page is ranking for that keyword. I would like to see a tool that automatically places the result number beside each and every result. This way, I could quickly and easily determine what number it is ranking at with a glance.

That would simplify my life so much!

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One useful way to build some extra traffic to your site is to ensure that your images are optimized for Google Image Search. While ranking for terms in Google Image Search is unlikely to ever bring you massive amounts of traffic, the steps to optimizing your images for Google Image Search are extremely simple.

As an example, we will use the image of Barry Schwartz, Chris Boggs and Daron Babin at SES Chicago doing the Search Pulse on Tuesday evening.

Photo Credits SmallBusinessSEM.com

Note:I borrowed (stole) this image from Barry’s blog. Check it out - it’s always a great read.

The first two steps are simply common SEO sense - these should always be done on a site no matter what. These have the ability to influence your ranking in the main Google SERPS for keywords found in the title and description. The way they influence the image results is just the icing on the cake.

Steps to Optimize Your Images for Google Image Search

1. Use Descriptive Filenames - A filename can present you with your first chance to include keywords in your images. Title the image with a word or short phrase which describes what is in the image. For example, rather than using a camera-assigned filename such as DSC05443.jpg, use a filename like barry-schwartz-chris-boggs-daron-babin-SES-chicago.jpg. Notice the way that I have used a dash (-) between the words in the title - this is commonly interpreted by Google as a space in the filename. This is the most search engine friendly way of labelling images.
2. Use the alt tag! - the alt tag in your image link code will allow you to include some more keywords describing your image. Additionally, the alt tag text will be displayed by Google Image Search in place of the filename in each search result. Therefore, use that as well when linking your code. Here is an example for the image we are using: <img src="/images/barry-schwartz-chris-boggs-daron-babin-SES-chicago.jpg" alt="Barry Schwartz, Chris Boggs and Daron Babin at SES Chicago" />
3. Get Included in Google Image Labeler - The Google Image Labeller is game in which you and a partner collaborate to write tags for images presented. You recieve points when you both submit matching tags. The matching tags are then assigned to the images, and taken into consideration for the Google Image Search search results.

   In order to ensure that your images are included, access your Google Webmaster Central account, and go to the management page for your site. In the left hand bar, you will see an link which says ‘Enhanced Image Search’. Clicking this link will present you with the option to opt-in to the Enhanced Image Search features. This option signifies to Google that you are allowing them to use tools such as the Image Labeler to assist in the indexing of the images on your site.

These tips should provide you a boost in the amount of traffic you recieve from the Google Image Search. The first two steps will are common SEO sense, which should help your regular search rankings for keywords relating to the subjects of your images.

If you have any other ideas how to optimize your images, please comment!

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