Today many people believe that search engine optimization is a waste of time. I think it is based on misunderstanding of what SEO really is. This misunderstanding is often a result of negative users experience as far as relevancy of the search results are concerned. If you practice SEO in an attempt to manipulate search result to get to the top at any cost, you are very short sighted.
I belong to a group of people who believe that SEO can be very useful. I am mindful of SEO every time I write a new post, trying to provide useful and relevant content to the user. I don’t think I am cheating my way to the top of the search engine results. Every time I write an article, I want it to come up in top 10 results for a keyword or set of keywords.
Why 10 top results? Most of the internet users using search engines do not change the default settings and, after submitting a query, each page produces 10 search results. The top 10 search results across the search engines receive anywhere from 70% to 95% or more of all clicks.
I have recently discovered 103bees (HT: ProBlogger). 103bees is a very good analytics tool, which every blogger should use. It helped me to visualize the distribution of click over the keywords used to find this blog. One need thing about 103bees, that it also reports what position of the search results your website was found at. Take a look at the results for this blog of last few days:
As you can see, the likelihood of user ending up visiting your website if it found among top 10 results is 7+ times more than if your website was found on the second page (results 11-20).
When creating new content for your blog or website, you should be mindful of good SEO practices. It can produce impressive results.
Many of you know that I have been involved in a project 100 Top Real Estate Blogs. Again, 100- figuratively speaking. If you visited the listed lately you probably know that there are more than100 blogs on the list.
If you blog about real estate and related issues, feel free to submit your blog. I know that this list was criticized quiet a bit for using unreliable statistics. While we attempt to rank your blog, it is not the ranking that matters. It is an extra exposure your blog will get. By submitting your blog, you get a link and we ask nothing in return.
To “make in” for the next update, all blogs must be submitted by 6:00 PM (Eastern Time) tomorrow (April 13).
Thousands of people today are blogging, twittering, making friends on Facebook…
We may not fully appreciate this new emerging force on the internet, but we indeed have already embraced it and even gave it a name- “Social Media”.
This new force is changing the Internet and is writing new rules of engagement, if you wish, for a successful business. And the new rules are rather simple- transparency and honesty.
In my opinion today businesses and inviduals have three basic choices they can make:
Embrace thins new movement and follow the new rules. This some times will require to face and engage your worst critics. Most of the criticism out there can be reduced to “this item sucks” or “this is the worst wireless provider”? But if face your critics in an honorable and honest way, trying to improve your products, chances are you will disarm your critics and maybe even turn some of the them into your best allies. Just think about it, most of the times companies are criticized over the type of services or products they offer.
Do nothing about it. It looks like many companies out there are so afraid to step out of their shell. The fear is so great that it keeps them “frozen”. These are the companies that we will not remember two years from now.
And the of course you can chose to ignore the emerging social media or/and continue to be a complete asshole as far as transparency and honesty are concerned.
You are probably looking in between the lines trying to figure out if the next few paragraphs will follow with the examples. The answer is no. I had different goal in mind…
We have a golden opportunity today. With today technology and the Internet, we have an unprecedented opportunity for promoting our brand. On opportunity that was not available to many just short ten years ago. Unless you and I take on this opportunity and just do two things, be transparent and honest, we are wasting our time and other peoples patience.
I can’t blame Realtors for being overprotective about their listings. You don’t want your inventory to be misrepresented. However, at the same time many real estate websites have their local Multiple Listing System integrated into their websites so when visitor searches for the property, he can browse through hundreds of listings without leaving the website. Of course this can result in a lead where you can work as a seller’s agent on a property that you did not list.
But what about offering an opportunity just to any webmaster to “advertise” for you for free? Going back to Wayne and Pat, below is an example of a listing served via Realird.com Listing Widget I was able to grab right from their blog:
Why would you consider RealBrid.com? Simple. Viral marketing. There are many bloggers like myself that are on the constant lookout for good content for their blog. This can create an exponential exposure for you listing.
I have decided to play around with Google Custom Search. Now you can find pages and documents on this domain using the big “G”. Since this website is powered by WordPress, many who read this post will wonder why? Do I trust Google more? The answer to this question is yeas and no. Mos of the WordPress themes today include a “search box”. This default search in WordPress will serve your visitors the most up to date results, since there maybe some latest posts on our website that Google has not yet discovered. So why on earth would some one consider using Google?
There few reasons to consider.
It may help you to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately some of the WordPress themes are written poorly. Some times it can happen that what suppose to a “search” results can be indexed in the search engines. In fact, there is no way for a search engine to tell a regular page apart from a page produced by your on site “search function”. I am not sure if this is a common problem but it does happen.
If you have several similar websites, you can tell Google Custom Search to serve results from the all of your websites. You can even include websites that do not belong to you, but you think that your visitors would benefit from the results.
You can refine the results so your visitors after performing a search will be served with the most relevant search results.
I also think that the “native” search option of WordPress is underutilized. When you place the Google Custom Search code on your website, the text box has Google’s logo in it. Don’t forget that word google had become a verb, it is associated with search. Don’t tell me you have never said: “Let me Google this or that out”!
Many of the visitors to your website will recognize Google’s loge before recognizing anything else on your website.
I personally have chosen to serve the search results via an AJAX Search API interface, I just thought it looked really sharp. So go ahead try my new search box and let me know what do you think.
When I received cease and desist notice from ePerks lawyer, I had a gut feeling that my problems associated with this company were far from over. I was not that far off. What I though would be a problem turned into a nightmare which I am still enduring.
When the commenting activity was at it’s peak on one of my posts, I had kept very close watch on those who commented on my blog. I warned few individuals that their behavior was unacceptable and if they did not stop, I would ban them from my website. I do find suspicious if a person leave more than one comment on my blog during one visit, leaving different name for each comment. When my warnings were ignored, I in fact banned some one who identified himself as “John”. I emailed this individual to notify him that he was banned, here is the answer I have received:
From: Jaffar Sadighi sadighij@yahoo.com
To: Vlad Zablotskyy vladzablotskyy@gmail.com
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 2:48:08 PM
Hehe. Vlad, I want you to know I eat people like you for breakfast. You are simply pouring fuel. I will enjoy this one.
—– Original Message —-
From: Vlad Zablotskyy vladzablotskyy@gmail.com
To: Jaffar Sadighi sadighij@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 2:48:08 PM
Subject: One word for you: BANNED
You are banned from leaving further comments on my blogs. Enjoy your life.
It turns out that Mr. Jaffar did not stop there. Evidently he decided to use Yahoo! Answers as his weapon of choice:
Strangely enough, the cease and desist notice from ePerks lawyer included the following:
Our research also shows that negative remarks are not only invited, but are posted without a challenge. Conversely, favorable remarks are met with hostility and belittlement, including demands that the posting party either prove they are participating agents, or do not work for ePERKS.
I am very curious to know the methods employed to the above mentioned “research”. If Mr. Cook were to read the comment thread on the post in question, he would quickly realize that I did not challenge every “positive” remark. I challenged only those left by the suspicious individual like Mr. Sadighi.
The Yahoo! Answers had since deleted the despicable posts, and from what I can tell they have also deleted profile of “Jaffar S”. It will take a few days or maybe weeks for the search engines to delete these pages from their index. But I will never rest to protect myself and my family. I hope now you can understand how much I appreciate bloggers like Matt Brown who just few days ago have started a campaign he called Save Vlad Zablotskyy.
I hope I am the last blogger ever who had gone through this sort of vicious attacks. But the nature of the internet is such that no one really has any guarantee against finding themselves in a similar situation.
My hope is that my case, and maybe other cases out there would would result in some sort “bloggers coalition” that would allow us to defend ourselves against such disgusting tactics.
It is my opinion that no blogger who have ever made a remotely negative remarks about this company is safe. My advise to you is to immediately set up Google Alerts for your own name so you will be notified a soon as your name is mentioned on the Internet. In the past I thought it was too vain to have such an alert. You can see how mistaken my thinking was. I am in particular worried about Greg Swann of BloodhoundBlog, Marlow Harris of 360digest, Lydia Player of North Dallas Homes, Jay Thompson of Agentgenius, Matt Brown of The Fantastic Site Of Lord Matt, Pat and Wayne of Willingford Wired. These bloggers have either publicly supported me or were critical of ePerks, and I am afraid may have invited upon themselves the fury of individuals like “Mr. Jaffar Sadighi”. Please, I am begging you, set up Google alerts for your own name.
Am I inviting unnecessary attention to an issue that could go away on it’s own? I stopped believing it such a notion due to the above described attacks. As long as my case will prevent other bloggers from going through such and ordeal, it is all worthed. Silence on my part may do more damage not only to me, but to a larger community of bloggers.
Comments are the reason why blogging is fun! Moderation of comments, what makes blogging a burden. Especially if you are faced with sporadic or even systematic spam monkey attacks.
I love comments and try to answer to majority of comments across my blogs. This along can be come very time consuming. I host my three most active blogs on three different web hosting providers, on good days I spend up to an hour answering comments. But it has been becoming somewhat difficult task. Until of course you would use Disqus. With this new system an ordinary hour of answering to comments on my blog effectively turns into mere 10 minutes.
I was a little hesitant at first to even try Disqus. In fact the first few times I saw Disqus installed on other blogs, I refused to leave comments. However, after Scott Jangro, a software engineer, had taken Disqus for whirl, I new I had to give it a try as well.
Now I am absolutely in love with this new way of managing comments on my blogs. There are two things that absolutely love about Disqus: 1) You can manage the comments for all your blogs in one place; 2) It allows you to answer to the comments via e-mail- huge time saver!
If you have not try Disqus yet, give it w whirl. Good products like this tend to become huge. I predict Disqus to be bigger that MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog.
April 17, 2008
Posted in Analytics, Blogging, SEO, Web Master Tips 
I have decided to play around with 
content rss
