mpilatow's Blog: All Categories

Are you finding all of the keywords that are valuable to your site? If you are only using the keyword tools you may be missing out on some valuable data. All of the major search engines provide excellent data to help you with your keyword research. The best part about this data is that it shows you exactly what the users of those search engines are actually looking for.

The keyword tools like Wordtracker and Overture's tool are great resources to start your research but to really tap into the keywords that are being searched on most you need to use the information provided by the engines. At piloSEO there is recent post that discusses some information that the engines provide that can help you take your keyword development to the next level. You can… Read Full Post

As Matt Cutts has been hinting at for a while, Google has now dumped the supplemental results tag from the SERPS. Now it does not mean that the SI no longer exists, it just means that the results will look no different when you do a site:domain or regular search. Matt has been hinting at this for a while and it has finally happened. Google reps, including Matt, have been telling is that the SI is not a penalty and is crawled and refreshed more often. The fact remains that it is still crawled less than the regular index and the pages within the SI are less likely to show up in searches. It is my hope that they are able to bring the SI into the regular index but I don't see that happening for a while.

From what I have read from Matt, one of the biggest… Read Full Post

A recent Search Engine Land post discusses a study from Penn State that found that searchers seem to associate relevance with certain search engines. In the study they found that searchers found results more or less relevant depending on what search engine they believed they were using. The study provided the same results but showed them in MSN, Google , and Yahoo branded pages. The searchers then decided which engine they thought provided the most relevant results. The funny thing is, Yahoo scored the highest at 36%.
Apparently, searchers believe Yahoo is more relevant but for some reason they use Google. Read Full Post

Rand has written a new post about the Black Hat SEO masters that I found very interesting, Matt Cutts even stopped in. In it he discusses some of the top Black Hat SEO masters and some of the techniques that they have used to move to the top of the BH world. Black Hat is not for everyone and contrary to what some people believe it is very difficult to succeed in. I am not advocating BH techniques and my hat is as white as the driven snow  but his post is a fun look at the black hatter from a professional and a social standpoint. I also think there is a lot that can be learned from some of the black hat techniques for white hat SEO work. Not necessarily the actual techniques but the effort and technical expertise the best black hats utilize.
When I started… Read Full Post

This one came as a bit of surprise this morning when I checked some of the regular blogs I read. I think Vanessa did a fantastic job developing and improving the Webmaster Central product at Google. Matt Cutts and Search Engine Land were talking about this morning along with Vanessa herself. She will be tough to replace at Google but I am sure they have great people there to keep things moving in the right direction. I am very interested to see what new ideas and innovations she brings to Zillow. Read Full Post

Are you taking advantage of the local sections of the major search engines to advertise your business? If not you are missing a big opportunity. Google, MSN, and Yahoo  all provide an opportunity to advertise in their Local sections and it is FREE. Signing up is very simple but you do have to verify that you actually have a physical location in the local area that you want to advertise. These local listings allow you market to a very specific area to reach the most qualified customers, those searching for your service in that specific geographical area. They show up at the top of the SERP and they also allow you to add additional information (like phone #, address, office hours, etc) as well as providing a map to your office. This allows potential clients… Read Full Post

Not my site but I spend quite a bit of time at the Google Webmaster Groups and I see this topic come up all the time. The typical premise is someone has a site that was doing fairly well in Google for a while and suddenly it is nowhere to be found.

Many webmasters are under the misconception that once they achieve quality SERP rankings they will stay there. Of course, this is not the case. There can be many reasons why this happens including a penalization and outright ban, increased competition, or loss of link love from their backlinks.

This discussion focuses on the loss of link love because it is something many webmasters overlook. A lot of Webmaster make the false assumption that Google's backlinks analysis is fairly static and that every link… Read Full Post