BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» SES

Catfish is Back! What’s new in SEO for 2010

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:40:24 +0000

Hello everyone. Really sorry I have been gone from the blog for so long. The last four months have been absolutely crazy around here and to be honest I have been a little overwhelmed keeping up with everything that has been going on. The good news is that the chaos is a direct result of all the increased business that BusinessOnLine has gotten this year and the incredible growth that is happening around the company. We have doubled our SEO team this year and we are getting ready to start hiring SEO analysts again here in San Diego! Look for those job listings to be available soon in the careers section of the site. Additionally, we have been hard at work growing our process based on all the new advancements in search that have happened this year. Whether it’s the advent of the rel=canonical tag, the inclusion of view through data to our analytics offering which completely changes how we look at search attribution, or our new tool FirstLinkChecker.com which revolutionizes the way we look at internal link structure, there have been a ton of new developments. So that coupled with my SES presentation for San Jose in August as well as my upcoming presentation at SES Chicago in December and my Pubcon presentation in November, it has been impossible to find blogging time. The good news is that I finally have a better handle on all changes and I am once again in a position from a time standpoint to be more consistent. So thanks for everyone’s patience and hopefully I can share some things with you today which can give you a head start for your 2010 SEO initiatives.

Avoid duplicate content with the link rel canonical tag.

The REL=canonical tag is definitely something that should be included on every page of your site. This tag solves a lot of potential duplicate content problems and there is no reason it shouldn’t be a standard part of your code. Another recent advancement in duplicate content prevention is Google’s new dynamic parameter tool. Actually we should give the credit to Yahoo Site Explorer for coming up with the dynamic parameter handling idea first. These new tools significantly alter the approach to addressing duplicate content issues although a healthy 301 redirect strategy is also still part of a good duplicate content prevention plan.

If you didn’t see my webinar about View Through Data and how it dramatically changes the way we look at search and social media, you should really check it out. This data allows you to ask the question, of all the people that I am seeing as bookmark traffic, or alternatively, of all the people who typed my company name into Google, how many were exposed to a specific social media site, video, press release, Website mention, web page with a static advertisement, or any other digital asset. And the amazing part is, no link needs to exist between the asset in question and your site. It’s not voodoo and we didn’t make a pact with the devil, but it is amazing. If you want more information about how you and your company can leverage view through data to give you insight into your analytics that was previously impossible, contact me at catfish@businessol.com and I will set you up with someone who can answer questions specific to your application and analytics platform. But seriously, this stuff is incredible, its brand new and it can really help you understand what is causing your brand related searches as well as paint a much clearer picture of your social media ROI.

First Link Check - FirstLinkChecker.com

One of the most exciting things we are doing right now is the official public launch of our new tool “First Link Checker” at www.firstlinkchecker.com. We did some testing and found out that what SEOmoz reported a while back was true. Only the anchor text found in first link between two pages is counted in Google’s scoring. So this tool highlights the first links found in source so that you can see which links are being counted and which ones are not. Benj will be releasing a blog post on the subject this Friday to coincide with our initial public launch of the tool this weekend at DMA (the tool is in Beta right now). We hope this is the first of many tools we hope to develop that will be useful to the SEO community.

WebmasterWorld's Pubcon

And with all this going on, I am really excited to be headed to Pubcon next month to talk about SEO for Mega sites, meaning very, very large sites. This topic is very dear to me as many of my clients have absolutely huge sites. It’s one of the reasons we built our in house SEO tool called SEO Explorer. It’s been going on for a couple years now. Hopefully in 2010 we will be able to extend it to people outside of BusinessOnLine. We will see! But in the meantime, I have a lot of cool things to share about SEO for really large companies. So join me in Vegas next month for Pubcon!

Search Engine Strategies

I will also be speaking at SES Chicago in December. Ill be back on the Beyond the Numbers session where I will look at some ways to augment your analytics data and how that should be driving your ongoing SEO Strategy.

Also look for a new blog post from me next week where I will give everyone a cool excel trick that allows you to measure your long tail keyword performance. Thanks again for everyone’s patience with my blogging schedule! Have a great week in search and hopefully I will see you next month in Las Vegas!

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First Link Checker in Alpha Stage Tested by Initial SEOs from SES

Benj Arriola — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:24:02 +0000

First Link Checker by BusinessOnLine

At the previous Search Engine Strategies Conference, BusinessOnLine’s Ray “Catfish” Comstock has shared to a number of SEO professionals our new tool called the First Link Checker which is under it’s alpha stage. So far the feedback has been favorable and has also guided us to make minor improvements just before our beta release. We thank everyone that has been helping out and if you wish to be an alpha tester of this tool also, send us a tweet and mention anything about our first link checker. Expect more information to come in the following weeks!

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My SES New York 2009 Experience: SEO Adventures 3000 Miles from Home

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:53:00 +0000

I just got back from SES New York on Friday where I was very honored to have an opportunity to speak and to contribute to an outstanding session called “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers”. Between myself and the other exceptional speakers including Cindy Krum, Founder and CEO of Rank-Mobile; Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board and Managing Partner and Founder of Beyond Ink; and Seth Besmertnik, CEO & Co-Founder of Conductor, Inc. I felt like we put on a very informative session and the feedback I got from audience members after the presentation was very encouraging. I will be presenting a separate blog post later in the week covering some of what I spoke about at the conference.

I was happy to have an opportunity to speak right after Guy Kawasaki’s keynote speech which I thought was fairly well done and educational despite what some other people have suggested. I thought most people coming away from the keynote were energized and ready to learn more about SEO, SMO and everything in between. So I wasn’t surprised that we had an almost capacity room of about 150 people.

After I was done speaking, I attended some of the sessions in the afternoon although I admit I skipped the session after I spoke to unwind and get some pizza. I have been to SES before so I wasn’t particularly confident that the stock lunch menu would be to my liking (I was happily surprised that SES has definitely improved their food selection since last time I was there two years ago). Props to the SES New York organizers for taking care of the problem. However, I was more than happy to have some authentic slices of pie from Ray’s Pizza around the corner from the Hilton where the conference was taking place.

While we are talking about the Hilton, let me say that the hotel is fantastic. The only complaint that I have (and it’s a big one), is if your going to charge a $250 discounted nightly rate, don’t try to weasel me for $15 extra a day for Wireless Internet. If nothing else, be smart enough to realize that at this conference its pretty much a given that almost everyone needs it. So bundle it in with the total package cost and let me be happily surprised that my laptop works as soon as I enter my room. That was a REALLY annoying part of the whole experience.

Overall though I had a great time. I thought that the sessions were really good for the most part. I thought Michael Gray had one of the better presentations that I saw, and was impressed with the amount of tactical advice that he gave people that could be implemented immediately. I am a big fan of sessions that teach people how to do things, rather than those whose speakers pontificate about high level subjects that make for interesting coffee conversations, but don’t really help you make money.

For example, in the session titled “Universal and Blended Search: An Update”, the people that were from agencies did an ok job discussing some tactical elements of Universal Search. But the search engine representatives seemed like they were giving a commercial about all their Universal Search properties. There was no real tactical advice and it felt like that they were all trying to convince people that their search engine was cooler than the other guys (and it wasn’t hard to figure out how to spend advertising money with them… *lol*). Ironically, Google, who invented the phrase Universal Search, was not part of the panel. Thankfully for them. So that was a little disappointing.

But the session on video search was outstanding. It was probably the best session I went to (or at least tied with the “feed” session that Michael Gray was part of). It’s amazing how the popularity of video has turned YouTube into the second biggest search engine in America. And goes to show you how important video content is to SEO.

I also learned a lot more about social media, especially with regard to how cool targeting ads can be with FaceBook. Actually there is a lot of cool stuff happening at FaceBook. If you haven’t set up a page for your business on FaceBook, now would be a good time. Between the social media capabilities, the viral possibles, and the potential SEO benefits, a FaceBook page for your business should be a priority for your online marketing efforts.

It wasn’t all business in New York (although mostly it was). The first night, Monday, I went to sleep early so that I could be well rested for speaking. Plus the 6 hour flight is always draining. The second night we went around the corner to a little New York bar filled with other SES attendees and talked a little SEO over a couple Heinekens. The last night I went to Dave and Busters in Time Square which was definitely the highlight of the trip. I got to hang out with my friend Heather and we were thoroughly entertained by the wisdom of Bruce Clay. Bruce is a fun guy to talk SEO with. His experience and his passion about the subject of SEO are almost unmatched in the industry. We both laughed when I reminded him that I met him six years ago. Time Flys.

So I had a great time, but after three days of intense SEO and meeting all kinds of amazing people (like Jefferey Eisenberg for example), I was VERY happy to get home (although not so happy with the extra hour of waiting for our plane to take off… *lol*). One fantastic thing about living in San Diego is your never really sad to come home. It’s not paradise, but its pretty darn close.

And it sure is a lot warmer here than New York

Stay tuned later this week for my blog post about my session and some of the SEO tips that I spoke about. Have a great week!

Catfish

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BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» SES

Catfish is Back! What’s new in SEO for 2010

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First Link Checker in Alpha Stage Tested by Initial SEOs from SES

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My SES New York 2009 Experience: SEO Adventures 3000 Miles from Home

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