John writes:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

Aaron Wall ’s rebuttal:

Unlike John Dvorak, professional SEOs do not need to lie and pull sleazy tricks to get “hits”… we rank for high value keywords and turn that traffic stream into real business. His publishing strategy is so inauthentic and cheesy that he writes by number.

And now the video!

This guy Dvorak doesn’t have a clue – friggin foolio, I would love to debate his view on SEO – jimminy crickets.

John Dvorak – a Good Example of Why Many Media Companies Deserve to go Bankrupt : SEO Book.com

Social networks, blogs, Twitter etc indicate a move away from the webmaster as signaler of importance i.e. who you choose to link out to. The search engines will need to mine the social signals form those networks. The user will signal where their attention is focused by their interaction and paths.



Universal search, in may cases, has pushed results listings down below the fold. For example, to get a client seen high up on the results page may involve making sure making sure they are featured on Google Maps. Similarly, if they have video content, it should be placed on YouTube. Google have shown they are increasingly looking to the aggregators for results and featuring their content in prominent positions.

Check out the entire post from Aaron – The 100+ Ranking Variables Google Uses, And Why You Shouldn’t Care : SEO Book.com

It increases the utility of your site. People will see you as being helpful. People will see you as non-partisan i.e. not always favoring your own stuff. Webmasters may see your inbound link in their logs and follow them back to you. Links are, at the most fundamental level, a connection between people.

If you’ve read something about the HITS algorithm (.pdf), you may have noticed that HITS looks for, and evaluates, both authority and hub pages. i.e. pages that contain multiple links out to authority pages. HITS stands for “hypertext induced topic selection”, and, like PageRank, is concerned with link graph analysis.

Outbound Linking For Fun And Profit : SEO Book.com

1. Establishing a Baseline Keyword Value – Given a fairly constant ranking position and traffic stream you should be able to estimate visitor value AND how much additional value would be created by improving your rankings.
2. Review Typical Click Distribution Profiles – A friend recently said “whether we’re 15 or 150 doesn’t make much a difference.” Indeed, search clicks are heavily concentrated on the top portion of the first page of search results. And this trend toward traffic consolidation has accelerated as time has passed.
3. Considering factors that modify click distribution – A variety of factors must be taken in account for when estimating overall search volume distribution. While this list is not exhaustive, it contains many of the common factors worth considering. Whenever possible we also offer tips for how to overcome these data biases.
4. Tapping the Long Tail – People search for everything under the sun. When the leaked AOL search data was manually classified into 20 different categories the category with the leading volume was other!
5. Improve monetization Via Scale – With more scale you can test and improve monetization faster, be more selective with what customers you are willing to work with, have leverage over suppliers, and/or negotiate direct ad deals that allow you to drastically increase the profits from your website. To put this in perspective.
6. Take action Today!

Aaron has some amazing tips and also completely outlines the extreme importance and value of having the #1 result in Google. I personally recommend every user of SEOi and SEO Guru prints this out and puts it on their office wall or uses it as part of any whitepaper to sell clients on the value of Search Engine Optimization.

Check out Aarons original article ‘How Much Money is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?’ here…

See Marks quote below:

Over the next few months, I’ll be redesigning MediaShift in conjunction with adding new video and audio features. One of my goals for the redesign is, not surprisingly, to increase traffic; and with nearly 50% of MediaShift traffic coming from Google, getting more traffic means doing more SEO.

The Top 9 SEO Suggestions are listed below:
1. Get inbound links and link out as well.
2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front.
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.
4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated.
5. Highlight your best content on every page.
6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.
7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.
8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.
9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.

I think this is a really awesome article and it also marks a pivotal point for the SEO industry as well – it’s not often when BIG media is covering topics like this on their site, about their site.

Kudos go out to Mark for such a great piece, I encourage all SEOi users and readers to check it out here.