The Naked SEO Guide from Netpaths

What do Microsoft and Seinfeld have in common? They both peaked in the late 1990’s.

Below is a video of the partnership of Microsoft, and Jerry Seinfeld, who was reportedly paid $10 million to do these ad spots.

There is something strange about Microsoft’s advertising agency, they really try hard to copy apple, but fail miserably. The ad agency is trying to portray Microsoft Vista as cool, edgy, interesting and innovative however the result is an unconnected ad that inspires no interest or desire to take action to purchase the product.

Shoe circus? This conjured visions of the Vista programmers being a team of clowns working at Microsoft. Not what they had in mind.

The ad will definitely go viral, and will get millions of online views, however the buzz will not increase Vista sales. It could possibly inspire people to check their local mall for cool technology, where they may potentially end up at an Apple Store.

Could these Vista video ads actually help sell Macs? One thing is certain, it will not increase Vista operating system sales.

Microsoft is good at making functional products and forcing corporations into endless upgrade cycles, but they have never made a really cool product.

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It appears Google is going to be transitioning to the Google Suggest format as their new search default. This means that when a user performs a search in Google, Google will use a formula to decide what search phrases the user intends to search.

Obviously any major change to Google’s core search functionality will have a big impact on search engine marketers. Whether it will be a change for the good or bad is still widely up for debate. On the plus side for example, regional sites may see a boon from this as Google will be predicting results tailored to the user’s own region. On the flip side, while 3-4 word keyword phrases will likely see a huge increase in search volume, long tail keywords will not receive nearly as many searches, which negatively effect many sites that receive a great deal of long tail traffic.

New Search Functionality

Another interesting feature of the new Google suggest format will be the drop down mini SERP. This will essentially offer website the best possible search engine position as the mini SERP page will be free of any PPC ads, and top ranked sites on mini SERPs will surely garner a great deal of organic traffic.

Based on Google’s status in comparison to all other search engines, this is going to be a huge move. There’s no doubt this has the potential to completely change the future of search – for better or worse.

One pitfall is a reputation management nightmare.

For example, searching for “Obama” brings up suggest results including “Obama Antichrist” and “Obama Muslim”. These searches may have nothing to do with the person, and a searcher may have never known about potential references to “Muslim” but now they may click to find out. If you have positive results for potentially negative search queries this could be a big benefit.

Another potential problem is negative reviews, complaints or customer service issues. Terminix pest control has had complaints in the past, and they show in the search suggestions:

Users looking for Terminix.com find direct suggestions to complaints, which could potentially be an issue for the corporation.

Google suggest presents unique challenges to search engine optimization companies and I am very curious to see what new SEO tactics arise out of auto generated search suggestions.

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Wordpress is a great platform for websites mostly due to the amazing flexibility and simplicity. Optimizing your Wordpress blog for SEO can be easy as well. There are a variety of Wordpress SEO plugins available for free that can give your site a huge boost in the SERPS. In most cases, all you need to do is upload the plugin and activate it! Here’s a list of some of the top Wordpress plugins to help you with your SEO effort.

All In One SEO Pack

The All In One SEO Pack is a vital Wordpress SEO tool. Most importantly, it allows you to write custom Meta Title, Description and Keywords tags for each individual post you write. It also allows you to noindex your categories and archives pages, which will prevent any duplicate content penalties. This plugin takes seconds to install, is frequently updated by the author, and an absolute must have!

Google XML Sitemaps

Another great plugin - Google XML Sitemaps is pretty self-explanitory. Once installed and set up, it will automatically generate an XML sitemap and submit it to Google and several other search engines every time you add content for your site.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Wordpress Plugin

This plugin automatically adds a small social bookmarking bar at the bottom of your blog posts. This will help you, and your visitors easily bookmark your new posts with all the popular sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Propeller - just to name a few.

Popularity Contest

This is a great plugin that will automatically calculate your most popular blog posts based on a variety of different factors that you can modify. You can display the most popular posts in your sidebar, and the plugin will update them automatically. This is a great way to drive traffic to your most popular pages, and also to get more of your blog posts well indexed, and pass page rank on to those pages.

FeedBurner Feedsmith

With the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, you can submit your feed to FeedBurner, then download the plugin. Once you activate the plugin, it will redirect your regular RSS feed through FeedBurner.

Sphere Related Content Plugin

Here’s a great plugin that very few people are taking full advantage. Sphere matches news articles from around the web with related stories on blogs. Joining the Sphere network and adding the plugin will give you a chance to get featured on websites like CNN, Time, AOL, Reuters and more, potentially driving hundreds of visitors to your site for free!

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Google Webmaster Tools can now display on your igoogle.com homepage. This is a huge competitive advantage for google, as having your website stats on your start page is convenient and helpful. One more reason to use google.com/ig for your homepage - I do. GWT is the only location that shows accurate link count data and any website spidering issues.

Steps add your website stats to your Google homepage

1. Login to GWT
2. Navigate to Tools -> Gadgets
3. Choose the datapoints of interest

Now you can see all your important website data and get immediate alerts to any potential problems with the Googlebot. Gbot now has one more hook into webmasters screen real estate, and it is slowly taking over our lives.

I’m a sucker for good data, and the GWT doesn’t disappoint. Hat tip to Shoemoney for this Google gadget.

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Google just released Ad Manager, their custom ad serving tool. This slick program allows you to serve different ads on your site through one interface.

So for example if you have sold targeted ads for 1/3 of your pages you can display your own ads, and the rest can be adsense/doubleclick backfill. This gives you the most targeted ads, and highest monetization opportunity.

Some benefits of using Google to serve your ads

• Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in French or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can - Ad Manager also supports international currencies .
• Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue - upload your own advertising graphics.
• Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
• Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start a live advertising campaign.
• Day and Time Targeting: Don’t want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. Set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, in 15 minute increments. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, , operating system, language, domain and custom targeting.

Ad Manager requires an adsense login so apply for an AdSense account if you do not have one.

Unfortunately the adsense referral program appears to be discontinued so you cannot receive commissions for sending new signups. The new Google Affiliate Network site is here and currently is not integrated with your existing adsense login account.

This is a threat to OpenX, an onpen source software solution known previously as OpenAds and phpAdsNew, for managing the advertising campaigns on websites. I first used phpadsnew in 2000 just after they forked the code from phpads. My only criticism of Openx is the cumbersome interface which is not intuitive and is very difficult for clients to learn.

Read about the Ad Manager feeatures on the Adsense blog and at TC.

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Use Google Base, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com and Shopzilla can help your site achieve better traffic. It is better to be a part of online shopping networks if you sell products. Joining shopping aggregators broadens exposure and gives you access to third party review sites, but can also produce low ROI.

Essential Feed Checklist

1. Do everything you can to get reviews. Reviews will increase secondary sales, and store reviews can have independent search engine results, possibly giving you more than one position on page 1.
2. Watch your ROI. Shopping aggregators do not allow you to set CPC prices, so you are at their mercy. If you don’t make sales from shopping network clicks, lower your spend or choose a different ecommerce aggregator.

An anonymous retailer says that using Google Base has helped him/her get an increase in traffic and the person encourages others to try it out.

“every[site] we’ve submitted a product feed for is doing surprisingly well with it.”

Reviews are hard to get with only 3% of the people who buy actually leave a review. One way to encourage users to leave a review is by offering a coupon or discount for reviews.

Here is an example of what one ecommerce vendor did to encourage reviews:

Break out the adwords budget a bit, get that nice shopping cart logo on adwords and start driving traffic to your top 10 selling items. If you use two or three check out methods, a discount for using Google checkout. We used a 5% off your order type of coupon we made in our Google Checkout panel, leading to a review page.

The more shopping engines you advertise on the more reviews Google will pick up, assuming you get reviews on those other shopping sites.

Leverage online sites to maximize product reviews. Social shopping is the promise of web 2.0 retail.

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Pepperjam Network is a new affiliate network that has won over the affiliate marketing world. They have taken the best features of Commission Junction, Linkshare, Connect Commerce and created a great affiliate platform with personalized service and true customer support.

To inspire new users and existing publishers, Pepperjam is offering bloggers $10 for every post about Pepperjam Network news or tools. Bloggers also receive an additional $7 for every new affiliate you refer to the program. Your new affiliates receive $10 as a sign-on bonus.

So start writing about pepperjam to increase your blog income and give new Pepperjam affiliates a $10 signup credit. This is equivalent to a $10 copuon just for signing up to this affiliate network.

I have used Pepperjam for nearly 6 months and have found many exclusive affiliate offers including SEOmoz & ebay. They provide the only 3rd party Ebay affiliate program, so if you dispute the tracking system on the Ebay partner network ebaypartnernetwork.com, try Pepper Jam instead.

If that’s not enough incentive to post about Pepperjam consider the 2008 Inc. 500 list was officially released today announcing that Pepperjam ranks as one of the top 100 fastest growing privately-held companies in the United States of America.

Pepperjam’s 2008 Inc. 500 ranking is #70 with three-year revenue growth of 2,447.5%. Pepperjam must have an extremely satisfied clientele that is driving it’s growth.

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I have used Twitter.com for several months and love it. I have found real value in public microblogging and consider it an important part of social media marketing.

Follow me at Twitter.com/Cvos

Checking my account today I saw this unique color collage from my random followers. These people created unique color shifted avatars to increase their exposure, and it has worked. Publishing your unique thoughts, insights, and comments to relevant stories will incease your twitter authority. Make your tweets count and you will be rewarded - quality rules over quantity.

This graphic illustrates the value of using unique social media avatar images and changing them often.

Some of the SEO’s that Google loves to hate have been on a green trip recently. Can you identify these savvy SEO’s that have gone green?

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A day in the life of webmaster support from Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead. Maile filmed her day at the Mountain View Googleplex. I didn’t think video camers were allowed inside Google - when I was there last year they had security searches to make sure no cameras of any kind were brought in.

Nice to see Matt Cutts make a cameo appearance on this video. What is a Google webmaster video without the anti spam king?

The work environment sounds nice, start at around 10 AM and finish around midnight. This schedule is a very compatible with the computer geek/internet addict work environment. Obviously it has served Google well.

Useful tidbits include:

Recent and upcoming releases
* Webmaster Tools API on schedule (this will be cool)
* “Skip intro” in search results (this sounds interesting, like a skip flash intro?)

Two recent spam techniques mentioned in the blogosphere. Brian White, who leads one of the Webspam-fighting groups at Google, explained that one technique is new twist on old idea, both are already handled.

Good to know multiple Googlers are probably reading Shoemoney, Dave Naylor, Quadzilla and probably subscribe to all the SEO black hat forums and training sites.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission now officially recognizes public information sharing on corporate websites and online information sharing sites. In a landmark announcement, the SEC now allow disclosure of financial information through corporate blogs.

how companies can use their web sites to provide information to investors in compliance with the federal securities laws, particularly with respect to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

the release addresses antifraud issues that may arise when issuers, their officers, and employees speak on company-sponsored blogs or electronic shareholder forums. In particular, it provides guidance for companies hosting or participating in blogs or electronic shareholder forums about the applicability of the antifraud provisions to statements made by the company or by a person acting on behalf of the company. It also highlights the restrictions on a company’s ability to require investors to waive protections under the federal securities laws as a condition to entering or participating in a blog or forum.

Corporations are no longer bound to traditional media and distribution channels in order to satisfy full disclosure requirements. In the past, disclosure filings were sent through wire services which may charge over $1000 per filing, causing undue financial strain on smaller businesses and reducing the amount of company information available to the general public.

SEO’s are licking their chops in anticipation of being able to sell search engine optimization to corporations as a value added service to replace the bland, expensive, obfuscated wire releases. A good SEO will be able to create a press release that is interesting, useful and most importantly linked to.

Imagine a crafty SEO promoting disclosure requirements on a major social networking site such as Digg.com. In a huge win-win, the SEC regulations are met, the company gets huge immediate exposure, and the benefit of lots of long term backlinks.

Brian Solis wrote a book on the new SEC disclosure regulations in his Tech Crunch blog post. Hopefully most corporations will blog with streamlined information and add a bit of humor and personality to their new personal PR websites.

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