Home / WMR Blog

PPC Rockstars Back on Tour While Mobile Presence Reconnects

Mobile is ready to make its Presence known again on WebmasterRadio.FM and the PPC Rockstars are going back on the road.

Mobile Presence returns Wednesday February 8th and PPC Rockstars on Thursday February 9th.

SkyWire Media Sales Executive Nicole Hurley and Senior Account Manager Joe Walczak will take over hosting duties of Mobile Presence every Wednesday at Noon Eastern/9am Pacific.

Location3 Media VP Alex Porter and director of paid search Jared Schroder will host PPC Rockstars on Thursdays at 1pm Eastern/ 10am Pacific.

Stay tuned to the blog as we showcase each series and ask the respective hosts what to expect on each series next week.

News Blurbs: Say WebmasterRadio To Smartphone and Listen; SEO 101 Back; Returning Shows Update

-Mobile Listeners of WebmasterRadio.FM via the Tune In application can now use a new feature called Car Mode that offers a voice search button to easily search and tune in to our live stream in seconds. Just hit the button and say Listen to Webmaster Radio and our live stream loads right up.

-A number of our radio shows will make their way back this month. Here is an overview:
SEO 101-returns January 9th with scheduled guest Stefan Spencer, author of The Art of SEO to look at what to expect in SEO in 2012.
Ecom Experts is tentatively scheduled to return from an extended holiday break on Monday January 9th.
Office Hours- Vanessa Fox is scheduled to return with a live episode on Wedensday January 18th.
Affiliate Marketing Insider returns with new host Cresta Pillsbury on Thursday January 19th.

-Brasco, your lovable gracious and humble radio producer is looking for your votes in the 2012 Shorty Awards, which honor the best of social media, recognizing the people and organizations producing real-time short form content on across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare, and the rest of the social Web. If you would like to nominate Brasco for a shorty award, please nominate him in the #radio category by clicking here. You can also catch his campaign video on YouTube where he begs and pleads for you vote.

Archives of Search Pulse and The Alternative Back Online

Search Pulse (hosted by Barry Schwartz (Search Engine Roundtable and Rustybrick) Ben Pfeiffer (Rank Smart Search Marketing) and current SEO Rockstars host Chris Boggs, and The Alternative (hosted by Webcology hosts Jim Hedger and Dave Davies) have finally been restored on on our website and via iTunes.

These restored audio archives are part of an ongoing process following the migration of the WebmasterRadio.FM website after being hosted on a secure content management system.

With over 5,000 shows produced since 2004, our archivists have worked diligently to bring back some of our most popular programming that we have featured on the radio network. Some of those programs that have returned due to the archive restoration project included Net Income, The Shoemoney Show, The Hook with Katie Kempner and Good Karma.

Search Pulse, which we commonly referred as The Pulse, featured a weekly roundtable discussion on current search topics that received the most buzz from within the search community.

The Alternative was solo-hosted by Jim Hedger that began each week with a look at search engine news segments with Dave Davies, followed by interviews with guests that helped us discover the alternatives in search engines, advertising, revenue and verticals. The Alternative would cease production in the summer of 2007, but Jim and Dave would return in October of that year with Webcology.

PubCon 2011 Coverage Featuring a New WebmasterRadio.FM Show Host

WebmasterRadio.FM roving reporters made their way to the Webmaster World PubCon 2011 Conference last month, and our interviews from the show are now available inside the Specials section or our website.

Superior Affiliate Management CEO Cresta Pillsbury and COO JP Diaz spoke with speakers, attendees and exhibitors to get their take on the annual Internet marketers November pilgrimage to Las Vegas.

In related news, Pillsbury will be taking over hosting duties for the returning Affiliate Marketing Insider radio series beginning Thursday Janjuary 19th at 3pm Eastern Time.

Now, on to the interviews…

Search engine marketing and social media expert Tony Wright discusses Integrated Marketing Communications and how he helps clients create a competitive advantage, boost sales and profits, save money, drive traffic, and promote a brand.

Real World Winning Tactics for Content Creation and Marketing and Linkbuilding discussion with Vertical Measures President Arnie Kuenn.

WeBuildPages is Now Internet Marketing Ninjas as we find out with Jennifer Van Iderstyne, Sales and Marketing Manager with Internet Marketing Ninjas.

Discussing the change of the marketplace in online marketing as Cresta speaks CJ Millar, the Senior Director of Client Management from Teknicks, a Full service interactive enhancement.

PubCon 2011 Giveaways and Takeaways as Cresta Pillsbury and JP Diaz from Superior Affiliate Management take to the tradeshow floor to get a few words with some of the exhibitors and attendees.

Webcology Presents 2011 Internet Marketing Year in Review Roundtable

This Thursday December 22nd at 2pm ET/ 11am PT, the Webcology radio program, hosted by Jim Hedger and Dave Davies, will present a LIVE 2-HOUR Internet Marketing Year in Review 2011 Roundtable.

Scheduled to appear include the following thought leaders:

-Rand Fishkin (CEO and Co-Founder, SEOMoz)
-Jonathan Allen (Director, Search Engine Watch)
-Rhea Drysdale (Chief Executive Officer of Outspoken Media)
-Bill Slawski (SEO consultant and author of SEO by the Sea)
-Thom Craver (Web and Database specialist for the Saunders College at Rochester Institute of Technology)
-Cindy Krum (Chief Executive Officer at MobileMoxie, LLC)
-Kristine Schachinger (Founder/Consultant SitesWithoutWalls.com)
-Terry Van Horne (Partner of Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo)
-Miranda Miller (Search Engine Watch Journalist)
-Mike Grehan (Global VP Content, Search Engine Watch ClickZ, SES Conference and Expo)

If you have any questions or comments you would like to submit in advance of the roundtable, please email them to brasco@webmasterradio.fm, post your comments on our Facebook page or better yet join us for the live broadcast from the WebmasterRadio.FM chatroom.

Google’s New Algorithm Makes the World Less Safe for Spammers

It’s that time of year again when Google, the world’s most prominent and oft-used search engine, revamps its algorithms in an effort to crack down even harder on spam sites. The trouble is, they’re such a megalithic force on the internet that anytime they make even the most minor of shifts, everyone has to adjust accordingly. Here’s a breakdown of the changes that have gone into effect, based on Google’s announcement, and some changes you may have to implement on your own website to ensure you’re not negatively impacted.

A completely revamped spam detection program that looks at individual pages and filters out what it identifies as numerous instances of repeated keywords and phrases. By pushing sites like this down to the bottom of the search results, it limits the likelihood that someone searching for information on European vacations, for example, will be directed to an ad-ridden site. As a consequence, sites with actual content about vacations to Europe will populate the top of the heap, thus giving the user a better overall web browsing experience. In order to make sure that you’re not lumped in with these spammy sites, now’s the most important time to reevaluate your content. If you’re not sure whether your site will be impacted by this new algorithm, review your site’s content and look for instances of repeated keywords. It may be necessary for you to restructure your web copy to be less keyword-driven and more content-driven.

Google is also cracking down on duplicate content and content farms. Not quite driven by the desire to expunge plagiarism from the face of the earth, the ultimate goal here is to prevent the duplicate and triplicate re-posting of legitimate articles that originally appeared elsewhere as a way to attract visitors to an add-riddled website–thus obtaining click throughs and revenue. This type of duplication of existing articles is called “scraping” and has long since been the bane of article authors, as well as users interested in finding unique, original content who wind up running into the same article over and over again. Content farms use programs to aggregate information obtained from various sources, and re-post them in the hopes of attracting visitors. But through the new algorithm, someone conducting a Google search will be more likely to actually come across the website that originally published an article or a blog, instead of being directed to a site that’s scraped or accumulated the information from various other sources. Unless you’re operating a program that scrapes articles from other websites to bring traffic to your own, or unless your website is comprised primarily of re-posts of other people’s work, this change shouldn’t affect you.

Google has also said it’s greatly improved its ability to detect sites that have fallen prey to hackers and have been taken over for purposes of spamming. These words should come as great relief, especially to websites just starting out who are concerned with the abilities of hackers to do major reputational damage with minimal effort. As far as all the other changes go, the best advice remains one that’s been a solid piece of advice for years now: create original content frequently, and you’ll rise in the search engine rankings. Period.

The Big Deal About Geo Targeting

Geo targeting is the method of determining the geographical location of a visitor to your website for the purposes of creating a unique experience for them. If you have an online business that has an international audience, or you want to extend your profile to appeal to visitors from other countries, consider identifying your key markets and create alternate versions of your website. This way, a customer living in Japan will be able to visit your site without necessarily having to read English.

Self-Serve and Full Serve

There are two different types of geo targeting when it comes to websites: self-serve geo targeting, and full serve geo targeting. Self-serve sites leave it up to your website visitor to decide what kind of an experience they want to have. There are many sites that feature a front landing page that asks the user to enter their country of origin, or preferred language. Once they make their selection, they’re taken to a language-specific version of your website. Full serve sites, on the other hand, identify the user’s IP address to give them indication of the visitor’s country of origin.

Local Geo Targeting

Geo targeting can work on a much smaller scale as well, and doesn’t necessarily require you to have five different versions of your website to appeal to your five biggest international markets. Websites can also make use of automatic geo targeting to cater the website experience for visitors depending on what part of the country they’re in. For example, if your website is an online storefront for a nationwide chain of donut shops, geo targeting your visitors based on their IP address can create region-specific layouts that advertise your shop’s nearest locations without entering any information. This works to facilitate repeat visits and increased business, as the website visitor leaves with the perception that they were able to find the information they were looking for quickly and readily on your site.

The Challenges of International Geo Tracking

Geo tracking can be accomplished through software programs that identify the website visitor’s IP address, or simply by asking for a visitor’s country of origin or language preference. But in reality, that’s the easy part. What’s not so easy is pulling off a site with an “international” feel and not coming across either ignorant or insulting–in which case you may as well have just kept things honest, simple, and in your native tongue. One of the biggest challenges of creating a website that will appeal to an international audience is being able to make it appear seamless and natural.

For this reason, it’s critical that if you’re a native English speaker and you’ve decided to redesign or partition your website to cater visits from customers in India, you should work closely with a native Hindi speaker–don’t make the kind of careless mistakes that could serve to drive international business away rather than attract it.

The Difference Between Gray, White, and Black Hat Techniques

There’s an easy way to remember the difference between gray, white, and black hat SEO techniques. In traditional westerns, the bad guys always wore black hats–the good guys, white. Guys with gray hats are not quite good, not quite bad. Here are some of the specifics that outline the differences in less simplistic terms.

Black Hat SEO

A black hat will typically engage in practices that are considered unethical by search engines in order to boost a website’s search results ranking. Some of these tactics include:
Keyword stuffing. This is accomplished on two levels–keyword stuffing in the content of a website, and keyword stuffing of a website’s META tags. This can bring about a desired result in the short term, but can have a devastating impact on your ability to continue to attract an online audience if your website is banned from a search engine.Adding invisible text. As simplistic as this approach sounds, it’s actually a technique that many black hat SEO practitioners utilize in order to stuff an online document with keywords without being seen.

This is accomplished by adding a bunch of keywords to a section of the web page, and hiding them by making the text the same color as the background. For example, black hatters will insert a long string of keywords in white lettering on a white background so that they can’t be seen by the eye, but will be picked up by a search engine.Link farming. This method is also referred to as spam-dexing, and attempts to raise a website’s search engine ranking by creating separate webpages whose sole purpose are to link to the black hatter’s website. Since the number of sites that link to your website help your search engine ranking, this has long been an effective cheat. But search engines, starting with Google, are starting to identify link farms and are taking decisive action to ban them.

White Hat SEO

Essentially, White hat SEO goes out of the way to avoid the kinds of schemes that the black hatters use to deceptively ramp up their showing on search engines. It avoids shortcuts and relies on tried and true methods to actually earn the coveted attention of search engine rankers and, ultimately, website visitors. This is accomplished through the following practices:
Relevant, compelling content. This is important because it serves to win over the two distinctly different–albeit crucial–segments of your audience: actual users and search engines, both of which arrive at accurate assessments of your website’s value and legitimacy through the quality of your content.Effective use of keywords. Web copy and articles aren’t shoddily written excuses to insert repeat instances of keywords and phrases–they’re actually informative, and use only relevant keywords. Non-deceptive META tags. The keywords entered into the page’s META data are representative of the keywords that appear on the page’s text, and aren’t manipulated in any way.

Gray Hat SEO

Toeing the line between black hat and white hat SEO methods, gray hat techniques are those that don’t blatantly cross the line into unethical territory, and in many cases can actually be arguably successful. Still, the fact that many of the methods employed are of a questionable nature separates them far enough from the straightforward and transparent guidelines that envelop white hat SEO. Gray hat SEO techniques include:

Using paid links. This is often done to get around the potential repercussions of participating in link farms. It works when one webmaster pays another to put a link onto their site, driving to the payer’s site.Limited keyword stuffing. This is sort of like the equivalent of driving five or ten miles over the speed limit–you’re technically breaking the law, but you’re doing it in a way so as to fly under the radar. Keyword stuffers should be aware, though, that just because you don’t flagrantly break the law doesn’t mean you won’t eventually get pulled over.

Content Development Tips

How do I develop good content on my website?

It’s no secret that when it comes to websites, content is king. In short order, it’s what differentiates a successful site from a total flop. Think about it this way: what does it even matter if your website comes up in the top three results of any given search engine query if there’s nothing on your site to keep a visitor’s interest, much less ensure they bookmark your page and come back again? The trick to doing that actually isn’t a trick at all–it’s the result of thoughtfully developed content. Here’s how to do that.

Write well-crafted content. This has been discussed before and will likely be discussed again. And do you know why? Because it’s important. What’s even more important is remembering that you don’t have to be a gifted writer in order to captivate someone’s interest. One of the keys to doing that is by offering something of value with every blog or news article you publish to your website. Without that, you’re just writing fluff. And fluff doesn’t earn repeat visits, a loyal following, and those highly valued inbound links that help drive up your position in search engine rankings.Use keywords. Before you haul off and churn out a 500-word blog post crammed with keywords and key phrases, take this into consideration.

There’s a huge difference between keyword driven content, and keyword stuffing–and it’s not just your audience that can tell the difference, so can search engines. First of all, website content that is so packed with keywords that make it impossible to read is a great way to drive people away in droves. There’s an art to the proper use and placing of keywords that relies heavily on subtlety and moderation. Second, content that’s comprised of nothing but keywords separated by a few commas and semicolons with the occasional adjective sends up red flags with search engines, practically guaranteeing that your site will be identified by the likes of Google and Bing as spam.

Web copy with strategically placed keywords, on the other hand, grabs a search engine’s attention and increases your chances of placing high in its search results.Focus on tips and top 10 lists. People love top 10 lists, and they can’t seem to get enough of tip-based articles. The reason? Top 10 lists are far easier to digest than the typical, convoluted narrative structure that has a tendency to make reading difficult. This isn’t to say your audience is stupid–far from it. But reading something from a computer monitor is far different than reading something in print.

People jump on the internet to find information quickly and easily, and they have a tendency to skim through articles as opposed to sitting and reading for extended periods of time. The human eye is attracted to bullet lists and bits of information. Tip-based articles, on the other hand, appeal to the DIY creature that exists in every person that’s ever paid too much to hire a professional for something they could have handled themselves. Develop your content. Expertly crafted content doesn’t come about as an accident. It’s the result of careful thought and planning. If you don’t already have a plan in place that maps out precisely how you intend to build and grow your audience, it’s time to get started.

The Trouble with Linking Schemes

When you really get down to the nitty-gritty about the factors that impact your website’s ranking on search engines, it sounds a lot like the way credit companies come up with your credit rating. In many ways, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of difference. Both your company’s search engine ranking and your company’s credit rating have everything to do with your ability to make money. If you have bad credit, you pay higher interest on loans. If you have a low search engine ranking, you may as well be invisible. To combat a poor credit rating, pay your bills on time. To fight poor search engine rankings, refrain from engaging in certain questionable online activities. One of the most detrimental of these activities is called linking schemes.

What’s a Linking Scheme and How Does it Work?
A linking scheme is a method of using a network of links in order to increase your website’s search engine ranking. The theory behind it is simple. The more links there are on the internet that drive to your website, the more popular your site appears to be–which in turn has a positive impact on your search engine ranking. Often times, website owners will engage in what’s called reciprocal linking in a sort of “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” arrangement for their mutual ranking benefit. The trouble is, search engines are busy looking for ways to make page ranking more honest, and they frown on this type of thing. One of the ways they’re fighting linking schemes (with Google leading the charge) is by penalizing the ranking scores of websites that are found to be taking part in linking schemes.

Follow the Leader
Google isn’t the only search engine out there, that’s for sure. But it is the most frequently used, and since it’s seen as the golden standard among all search engines, you can assume that if Google’s enforcing something, everyone else will fall in line behind them sooner or later. For those webmasters who’ve been busy in their off hours hoping for the demise of Google, this bit of news comes as a chilling omen that the days of page ranking manipulation are set to come to a grinding halt.

So What Now?
You’re probably asking “Okay, then how do I get my website ranking up?” It’s good you asked, because we’ve got a few useful tips on doing exactly that–the clean way.
Create compelling, relevant content on your website. This can be done by publishing a blog and building a wide audience. The more your readership grows, the more people will organically link to your website. This method is far more effective than manufactured links.Update your web site content (including your blog and landing page copy) frequently. People don’t like visiting static websites that never change and don’t offer updated information. If you want repeat visitors who’ll spread the word to others about your website, this is one way to keep them coming back.You can link to other websites, but do so only to sites that would be of interest to your visitors and sites that are relevant to your brand. If you’re an online coffee retailer, link to other coffee sites, tea sites, or companies that manufacture and sell coffee machines.

Subscribe to the WMR Newsletter

Stay up to date on the latest news & "what's happening" with your favorite WebmasterRadio.FM show's, networking events & so much more. Be the first to learn about new programs and special listener-only offers. Don't be left out, 2 mins to opt-in and you're a part of the club.

Name:

Email:

Powered by Subscribers Magnet