StomperNet decided to open up again. Las year it was for 72 hours, this time there is no specific time frame. This video features the cases of several sites (one of which a newbie at the time), and a site that did quite well and raked in plenty of organic traffic from Google, and then was dropped from the Google index, causing its traffic to reduce by about 50%. The site pulled through, but not only that, it increased its revenue and client base as well. This was done through a unique approach to PPC advertising - by doing all the wrong things! Check it out, and BTW it’s about 53 minutes, so grab a coffee and concentrate (trust me, when the ball starts rolling you’ll have to make an effort to keep up):

Interesting stuff in there! For example, the OCI (Online Commercial Intention) tool developed by Microsoft was a great reminder. Also, a few nice pointers when doing PPC campaigns for your site, like the AdWords Triangulation Method (quite interesting).

I’m thinking of making a “Video of the Week” category, in which I’d post a video I thought was an interesting to watch for whatever practical reason (fun included). There have been a few in the past months that are worth mentioning. I don’t know, I’ll see how things go…

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I just read a great post on Sugarrae.com, written by Rae Hoffman. The post is actually a Q&A session with eleven link development experts, include the author of the post. There are a lot questions covered, so prepare yourself for a lengthy read. The questions covered are:

1. What are the top 5 or 10 “open” link sources that you still use?
2. Are you afraid of talking about link building in public for fear that Matt might want to make you an example?
3. How much do you stress internal linking on your own or clients’ sites?
4. If you had 7 days to train a link developer, which concepts would you focus on each day as the most important concepts?
5. How will recent trends such as personalization and universal search affect the way SEO’s develop and execute link building strategies?
6. Reciprocal links work. Do you recommend it and how is it different today? If you don’t recommend, why not?
7. Do you think the search engines are currently taking steps to dampen the effects of bursty style link growth that is typical of viral content? Do you think they will in the future?
8. …how long do you think it will be before webmasters stop trusting Google advice in general? What will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? How polluted will the link graph get when webmasters realize Google has no real control over it? What links will still pass weight in that sort of free for all linking environment?
9. In Google’s algothrim updates for 2008, what changes do you expect in terms of how links come into play?
10. What in your opinion are the three top “footprints” you see SEO’s leave when developing links that would flag them as “unnatural” to you?
11. You have a brand new web site devoted to deep sea rescue equipment and education. You have one and only person who can work full time on link building for the next 90 days, then they will leave forever, and nobody will be able to do any link building work beyond that time. The site will continue to have new content added on a monthly basis forever. What advice would you give them?

The last one is a bit long, I couldn’t simply show the question because the introduction bit is quite important. By the way, my favorite part of the whole post. Question number 4 is also quite interesting.

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I just read an article by Danny Sullivan on Seach Engine Land, which goes into detail about Google’s Universal Search and the directions its heading for in 2008. The post is quite long, so make a cup of Joe’s and concentrate. It’s a review of all the changes Google has introduced in the past months since the introduction of Universal Search. Read it here.

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Wiep Knol wrote an interesting post outlining four different types of authority links. He divides authority links into absolute and relative authority links, depending on the site hosting an incoming link. Both absolute and relative authority links are further divided into informational links and navigational links.

The post then goes into link acquisition techniques and gives another seven ways to obtain links. These include link trading, columns/guest posts/interviews, link buying, request proposal links, .edu links, academic research links, links on chamber of commerce websites.

If you’re going to do link building, this post will give you a good starting point to consider before you delve into it. I thought this post was informative enough to link to it using targeted keywords as anchor text.

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Bill Slawski (SEO by the Sea), wrote an interesting post about Google filing a new patent on snippets. Basically, there is a rather complex effort behind the way Google shows snippets in search engine results. Ranging from snippet size and keyword relevancy to more complex things like snippet weight adjustment, the patent mentions many things previously unknown about this. The document makes references to another document still not published, which should contain some more detailed information about the methods and technology behind snippets.

I already wrote a bit about Google snippets before. Recently, the video featuring Matt Cutts discussing the anatomy of a Google search result brought a much needed explanation about so many questions asked about what has/can be done to influence what Google shows as the page description in the search results.

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I’ve just read a great article on Wiep Knol’s site, in which he combined opinions of 17 link building professionals who have expressed their thoughts on factors that determine the value of a link. Every factor has been judged on a 1-5 scale, 1 being “no influence” and 5 being “very strong influence”. Each factor is assigned a final mark that represents the average from marks given by all participants. The article is abundant with explanations and comments, but most importantly it is a mixture of opinions by so many established link building experts, which should be an interesting read for anyone involved with SEO and link building. Oh, and finally, everyone seems to agree that Alexa rank is not important, or very remotely important at best, as a link value factor.

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As continuation of the video series, started with the Anatomy of a Google search result video about two weeks ago, this is the new video featuring Matt Cutts, who explains the usage of the ALT attribute in image tags. It’s a pretty basic explanation of what the attribute does, its purpose, but again, he gives numeric data (and that’s what we all want ) near the very end of the video - the number of words to be used in the ALT attribute that won’t be deemed as spam by Google. If your site features images that are good quality and theme specific, you can do something more with them. Add descriptive ALT attributes, and show up in Google Images queries. You can then try to get links from webmasters who’d like to use an image from your site on their own projects. Here’s one way to do this.

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So many times over the past years, this has happened. An SEO campaign aimed at improving a site’s performance on Google yields unintended (good) results on Live Search (MSN) and Yahoo Search. In fact, on many occasions, the site ranked better for the same keywords on Live and Yahoo than on Google. It’s quite clear that search engines, although different, are quite similar in many ways to other. Google is by far the most popular (about a 60% search share belongs to Google), but both Yahoo and Live Search can bring in significant traffic, some would even say traffic that converts better (due to the demographical structure of their respective user bases).

It occurred to me that companies could do SEO for Google even though ranking well in a particular search niche might be extremely hard to achieve due to the sites that are already occupying top spots, but SEO for these spots and keywords on Google may actually yield top spots on Yahoo and Live Search. Having top spots on these two for identical keywords, for which the competition is simply too strong on Google, can significantly compensate the lack of presence in the top results on it. This is something I noticed through experience, which naturally doesn’t mean it happens as a rule, but it’s definitely something to think about. Aiming at tough search terms on Google, in this case, is a valid effort if it gets you better results on Yahoo and Live. This doesn’t mean it’s easy to get top results on search engines other than Google. Homework still has to be done, and weeks and months of work still have to be invested for long term results.

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Live.com announced on their Live Search Webmaster Center Blog that Webmaster Tools is now officially open to all webmasters and professionals. Webmaster Tools was until recently in “private beta”, and only those who registered earlier could get an account and use the tools. If you haven’t registered for the private beta, now is the chance to open an account and start using Webmaster Tools. There isn’t too much to see there right now, and everything pretty much boils down to being able to check for crawling errors and submit a sitemap for faster/easier crawling. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more on the site in the future.

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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted this interesting video presentation featuring Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team), in which he explains in detail a typical search result. At first I thought this is pretty much a basic explanation for those still not familiar with the way Google shows results, but I discovered this video is actually very useful even for those more experienced, if you know how to listen that is. I like the part about snippets and the additional info within it and how they capture that info from a web page.

Here’s the link to the post. This video is the first of more to come in the future.

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