search marketing blog: ambergreen

The first annual SEO Championship starts today and is aimed at highlighting the advantages of SEO, alongside providing a huge dollop of publicity for Eastpoint Media, the Swedish company behind the contest.

Challengers have to get a website to rank as highly as possible in the natural search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN, with the winner determined by the average ranking between the selected search engines.

There are loads of cool prizes on offer and as Anyone can join at anytime during the contest, its worth taking a look to see if you can get top rankings for the keyword phrase “globalwarming awareness2007”

In a move designed to increase ad sales in Europe AOL has bid $900m for Tradedoubler, the Swedish based online ad sales group.

AOL has increasingly moved to focusing on ad revenue rather than its initial subscription based model, a move which was highlighted when Carphone Warehouse bought the company’s internet access in October last year.

Following months of technical issues the Open Directory Project is again accepting site submissions, as well as allowing users to complete the Update Listings Forms.

Old submissions to DMOZ were lost following the technical nightmare that began back in October, so if you submitted a site prior to that, it will be worth checking the index to see if your site made it.  If not, get posting before every man and his dog realises that submissions are being accepted again – you could be in for a long wait otherwise.

Digital Inspiration has posted on Googlebot ignoring the robots META tag or robots.txt instructions, the two methods used to prevent Google crawling webpages. Taking two case studies – one from del.icio.us and another from Google Finance, it seems that Googlebot has even cached pages form one of it’s own sites which were disallowed.

The responses generated by the posting are interesting, have you noticed this happening?

At Pandia Search Engine News a posting by Lars Iselid of Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching, takes a look at search engines for searching for finding images, as well as the sound and content of video files.

Looking around Iselid found several engines such as Podzinger, FindSounds and other search engines, including Riya, the company behind image likeness search. 

There’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things when it comes to building your inbound link count. It’s no such a vital part of your search marketing strategy that you really need to do everything you can to get it right. Essentially the link building process isn’t complicated or difficult, it simply requires common sense.

At Search Engine Guide Jennifer Laycock has posted a great article in which she says; “good link building goes beyond simply putting together great content or a great product. It focuses on securing a relationship between two individuals so that the link follows naturally.”

Using an example of someone who approached her for a link and did it the right way, Laycock demonstrates what it takes to build links the right way, by building a relationship first and links second.

At SEOMoz.org Rand Fishkin has posted a great list of SEO resources for everyone from beginners to professionals, covering a range of topics from multimedia to linking and copywriting. Well worth a read.

Matt Cutts has announced that Google’s quarterly PageRank export is underway, where scores shown in the Google Toolbar and elsewhere are being updated.  According to Matt this won’t make a difference to your site’s ranking or traffic to visibly change as these PR scores are already in use in Google’s scoring. 

ambergreen are always telling people not to focus too much on PageRank, something which Danny Sullivan comments on in his review of Matt’s post.  This is summed up by the discovery that while Google sends plenty of traffic to Search engine Land, the site has a PR of zero.

Matt also discuss supplemental results, and while ha has already admitted that pages in the supplemental index are those deemed to be less important from a PageRank perspective than ‘normal’ results, he does say that supplemental results will continue to become fresher results, enabling more traffic to be gained from supplemental pages.

Also on the agenda are the ‘filetype:’ operator (which allows you to see the results of certain filetypes - i.e. filetype:doc – for a certain keyword)

Be sure to check out Danny Sullivan’s analysis of Matt’s post, as it looks into other recent areas of concern such as CSS indexing and duplicate content. 

Hitwise have reported on just how successful the Christmas period was for many online retailers, following the release of Christmas trading figures from the IMRG indicating that online sales in the four weeks leading up to Christmas reached £3.7bn, an increase of almost 50% on 2005’s figures, while high street sales are estimated to have risen just 2.5% over last year.

Heather Hopkins, Hitwise’s Director of Research in the UK, showed that December’s visits to the Hitwise Retail Index (an index of 100 leading retail websites) were up 5% year-on-year, slightly down from the 8% predicted back in September. 

Having predicted that high street brands would continue to lose out to internet retailers, the reality proved this to be correct, with e-commerce investments paying off in market share increases. 

Among the top 100 retailers to benefit from this increase in market share were

M&S – 25% increase in market share

Woolworths - 26% increase

HMV.co.uk – 58%

John Lewis – 23%

Waitrose – 103%

Microsoft is offering a webcast on adCenter and the tools that it provides to help target the right audiences by demographics.  The adCenter webcast will discuss the system and related tools and offer case studies and demonstrations designed to focus on improving ROI. 

To be broadcast on Wednesday 17^th Jan 8:30 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) – sign up here.