It looks like the CircuitCity.com name has been sold for $14M. I just read about it on the SEOBook website.
Here’s the thing, if I were to sell recommendations on my blog posts here and provide links to my sponsors products (and not use nofollow) Google wouldn’t like it very much and would probably penalize my site. In fact, that was the whole reason given for the nofollow link attribute in the first place.
I don’t think that I would sell undisclosed advertising or recommendations here on this site, but I’m trying to understand why a giant company can buy and sell their page rank and I can’t. Seems like a double standard on Google’s part to me.
On second thought,…
I probably would sell out for $14 Million.
(sorry, I went away for a second, but I’m back now)
A little while ago I noticed on Twitter a post by a local SEO company that was trying to get Pittsburgh to #1 on Google for the term “best city in the world”. I realized that this was more about them than Pittsburgh, but I was a hometown boy who likes his city and thought I might add a link and help them out. Some also said that they should have picked a more appropriate search term, but I thought it was fine.
I checked back occasionally and this past Saturday the City of Pittsburgh website was on the 12th page. That’s pretty good considering they were not anywhere a week or so ago. Visit Pittsburgh was on the foruth page and the thing that really caught my eye was my blog post was on the first page!
Today the City site is on the first page of Google (#2, congrats Eyeflow) a respectable fourth page on Yahoo and still not anywhere on Bing. My post is still right up there, too and it got me thinking. I just wrote a quick blurb to try to help my city out, not even thinking about what it would do for my site. I’ve had quite a few visitors come through for that term.
I know that the search term “best city in the world” is probably not going to bring me any new business, I would much rather be found for “best web designer” or even “best web designer Pittsburgh”, but who knows?. The point here is that the best way to promote yourself in the search engines is to constantly add new content to your site. Some will say (rightfully so) that you need good outside links pointing to your site, but the best way to get those is to give them something that they want to link to.
Write about your business, tell anecdotes about your customers, give advice and make sure that if you are sending a newsletter that they all are available as a page on your site. This is called the long tail of search, having your site found for things other than your primary keywords. Especially with a new site you will be much more likely to find yourself at the top of a less popular search term, but perhaps one of these terms can land you a great customer!
Eyeflow Internet Marketing is attempting to rank Pittsburgh #1 for “best city in the world.” Pittsburgh is my hometown and I really like living here so I thought I would help out.
The way to do this is by getting high ranking sites to link to your site, in this case the City of Pittsburgh’s site, preferably using the term Best City In The World. While my site isn’t that high ranking, every little link helps so I’m adding mine below. There are also some things that I can do to help boost my link.
- I want the link to be a text link to the Pittsburgh site
- I want to have the actual words (that I want to help the rank of) in the link
- For a little extra emphasis I want to have the link in a headline, in this case <h3> tags
There is an interesting debate going on at highrankings.com about whether it’s better to host your own video’s or use Youtube and embed the video into your page.
I have always recommended to my customers that they use YouTube or Google Video to host their videos and embed them into their pages. There are a couple of reasons for this. My customers tend to be smaller businesses and their hosting plans don’t include a huge amount of bandwidth or the ability to stream their content.
Most every business who post a video hopes that it get very popular and is a great promotion for their site, but if you get a good Digg, Stumble or some other sharing service recommending your video, you can quickly use up all of your bandwidth. Before you even know that it’s all gone your site may be down for quite a while and then you’ll probably have to buy more.
I don’t believe Google will ever run out of bandwidth.
The next issue is streaming. If you just post a video on your site the entire thing must be downloaded by your visitor before it will start to play. Many of them will leave your site before that if it’s a large video. To start playing the video as soon as the visitor arrives at your page requires a streaming server. Many web hosts don’t even offer that and true video streaming in any form can be expensive.
This is not an issue with most video hosting services.
There are also some some advantages to self-hosting. You can view the debate on
Earlier this week Google started “profiles” as a way for people to provide their personal information to Google that will be displayed on search results pages for their names. Google had this to say about the new feature “a way to give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that I’m more comfortable with people finding and reading what I write about me rather than what others do, even though it may be good. So I’m trying this out. At the very least I’m getting some links to my site and profiles on Twitter and LinkedIn which may help business.
Google may be trying to do something else here, like starting it’s own social network instead of buying Twitter, but at least I feel like I’m more in control even if I’m probably not. Try it out yourself, then Google yourself and see how it works.
Looks link the new update for my Android G1 phone is almost ready. There are going to be lots of improvements that I’ll use, plus it promises to make almost everything on the phone run faster.
The best things for me so far are copy and paste from the web and stereo bluetooth for charging and listening at the same time. It will also support widgets so that means many more cool new apps are coming.
I read the other day that a small company in Taiwan is suing Apple over the multi-touch technology. I’m hoping that will lead to having multi-touch and auto rotate on unrooted Android phones, like mine.
A funny thing happened when Google temporarily removed the tethering apps from the market a couple of weeks ago, Twitter was ablaze with ways around it, which helped me locate this solution http://androidguys.com/?p=4542.
T-Mobile tried to keep people from tethering their phones and the result was that now many more people know about this and are now able to do it.
The issue that matters to me the most is battery life and I guess that’s just a problem that I’m going to have to live with until I get a new phone, but at this point I’m pretty sure it will be another Android phone.
Not too long ago I wrote about how it would be nice if we could get rid of IE6 on the web. Recently the more I’m reading about browsers the more I think that IE in general is losing the war. Several years ago when Microsoft pushed Netscape off of everyone’s computer it was declared that the browser war was over and IE won. For a while website designers only had to worry about that one browser.
Then came Safari, Firefox and others when web surfers saw just how limiting IE could be. They (myself included) began to switch despite MS’s best efforts to hold on to them. Many businesses are still holding on to their Explorer only ways, but I see that changing as well. There is news that Firefox is now ahead of Internet Explorer in Europe and Matts Cutts of Google posted his blog’s browser breakdown over the weekend showing that Chrome could become a player as well. I don’t see those Chrome visitors here yet and his numbers will be slanted by what he uses, but I like it on my phone.
My opinion is that it’s all for the best, more choices are almost always better. Having viable alternatives will make those who want to force you use “what’s best for you” reconsider their thinking. Anyone who looks at how IE8 works can see that. It’s good for me because I can think of web standards and worry less and less about IE “hacks” to my pages. The question to ask…
Back in the good old days (mid 90′s) you didn’t even have to consider what a visitor were using to view your site. You viewed everything in Internet Explorer and made it look good in that. My friends used to think I was nuts for wasting my time looking at my site with Netscape.
Today you have so many more choices that it’s hard to keep up. There’s IE (many versions), Firefox, Safari, Chrome and many more. What most site owners that I’ve spoken to don’t even consider is how their site looks on a smart phone. Using a good web standards approach to designing your site will help you with that, but do you know how your site looks on a phone?
Smart phone sales are going through the roof and PC sales are actually falling so even if it’s not a big deal now it will be more so as time marches on. I have two different phones with Internet capability and the web looks very different on my Blackberry than it does on my G1 Google phone, but this site looks pretty good in both.
I’m not saying that you have to hire some developer to make you your own iPhone or Android application, but you should keep up with this trend, a while back I wrote a post about a free tester How Does Your Site Look On A Phone? You can also use your phone or grab a friends phone and have a look at your site (then give it back).
Here’s what got me thinking about this, a post by Vic Gundotra a guest poster on the TechCrunchIT blog called…
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
One of the things that I like most about Google is that they will let almost anyone play with their toys and they have some great toys. Tom Scott has created Real World Racer: A Google Maps Racing Game.
Tom uses the satellite photography from Google to let you plot out race courses almost anywhere in the world. You can chose from several default cities and tracks or you can create your own.
You get a red car to control using the arrow keys on your keyboard and the computer races white cars against you. If you know where you’re going you can take illegal short cuts.
I raced here in Pittsburgh and I especially liked driving across the river. It’s all very cool.
One of the best ways to move your site up the search engine results page for your keywords is to have incoming links from outside websites. The higher ranking and more authoritative these sites are the better it is for you.
The problem that people and companies with new sites run into is how to get these popular sites to link to them. Unless you are already a household name there are few authoritative sites that will easily share their “link juice” with an unknown, right?
That’s not necessarily true. I was reading a post today by Dana Larson on the Online Marketing Blog called 5 Link Building Tips for New Websites. It offers some great ideas on where a new site owner can get links from authoritative sites that will help you get started.
The post and commenters had some good ideas that you should check out, but it also made me think of some more. For example
- If you have an account on a social networking site like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. you can easily get a link to your site from there. While it’s true that most of their content is locked up behind your password and Google can’t read it, if you have a link to your site on your profile page and select “make it available to everyone”, you have a link to your website from some of the highest ranking sites there are today.
- If you belong to a group like a networking group, or a professional group many of them will give you a link as well.
