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April 2008 PageRank Update and VisualRank
Google datacenters have been busy the past couple of days as they were updating toolbar PageRanks (TBPR) across the board. The last complete PageRank update was in late February. SearchEnginePanel.com maintained its PR2 since getting ranked, and is now up to PR3 from this latest update. I’m attributing the small step to writing fresh unique content coupled with promotion through social media, and some of you may have noticed our posts in StumbleUpon or Digg.
More Google News
Coming soon (or perhaps not so soon) to a Google near you - VisualRank. As the name implies, VisualRank will be the image-equivalent of PageRank for web pages. Images will begin to be weighed and ranked just as pages have, but I doubt it will have much of an effect on image search traffic. After all, PageRank is only a mediocre measurement of a page’s link building initiatives, and is far from being a strong indicator of SERP ranking.
More SEP News
During the announcement of our latest theme in late March, we hinted that we had a little project underway. Well, here it is. We’ve recently added a lexicon to our blog to help decipher some of the more cryptic search marketing acronyms and some general search marketing terms. The list will never be exhaustive, but it will be kept updated to contain the more relevant terms in the industry. So for you loyal SEP subscribers that get our feed through email or a feed reader, stop on by to our Lexicon page and brush up on your vocabulary! 
And Speaking of Subscribers…
Some of you may have noticed that our subscriber count dropped from the 60-70 range to the low 40s a couple of weeks ago. I was curious as to how many actual subscribed readers there are of SEP, and decided to purge the email list of non-readers. Basically, I emailed everyone and told them to reply if they wanted to keep their subscription. So even though the subscriber count is hovering around 40 right now (with only 20-30% being from email), it’s a much more accurate depiction of true human readership.
Tags: Google, link building, PageRank, search traffic, SEP, social media marketingTop Five Advantages to In-House Link Building
There are many benefits for having an in-house (internal) search engine optimization team, and link building is one method of capitalizing on them. You will notice that some of the following factors spill over to other SEO endeavours as well. A caveat I should mention is that the following advantages alone will not enable an in-house SEO to outperform an outsourced SEO, unless the in-house SEO has a solid foundation and understanding of search.
Now without further ado, I give to you the top five advantages to in-house link building.
1. Understanding of the Business
An internal employee is more likely to have a deeper understanding of your business and the industry. This knowledge and insight definitely comes in handy in choosing the right keywords to optimize for. An in-house SEO is already familiar with the language, brands and product lines involved.
As a result, the keyword research phase could be cut in half, and your staff might even discover keyphrases that an outsourced SEO firm might not have.
Tags: keyword research, link building, SEO, web developmentUser-Generated Content and the Power of Blogs
User-Generated Content
Whether it be the decreasing cost of the Internet, its ease of use, an affinity for expression, sheer vanity, or a combination of them all, the amount of user-generated content (UGC) is rising exponentially. Everyone from your best friend’s mother to your neighbour’s kitten has a MySpace/Facebook/Orkut/Bebo account or user profile somewhere with very vital information like their favourite music and colour.
But beyond the social networking profiles exists one particular flavour of user generated content - blogs. This special category of user generated content has been gaining a lot of momentum and popularity over the web, and search marketers need to pay close attention to its impact over search engines.
Tags: link building, SEM, SEO, social media marketing, web developmentAcquiring .EDU Links Through Yahoo Search
Backlinks from the coveted educational .EDU top-level domain has long been sought after by SEOs for their theorized link-weight. It’s believed that links from .EDU pages carry more importance and are valued higher by search engines, since the websites of education institutions are supposed to be more authoritative. Whether this postulate is true or not, here’s a way to potentially obtain these backlinks.
Link Commands and Yahoo Search
Link commands are normally used to find more specific information that contains certain keywords but excludes others, but they can also be used to find backlinks to a site. For example, to find all the .EDU links pointing to your domain, use linkdomain:yoursite.com site:edu . Alternatively, you can also use linkdomain:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com inurl:.edu , which may display even more results.
This may seem obvious at first, but see where your competitors are acquiring their .EDU links. Unless you have a spy or secret access to your competitors’ Webmaster Tools and/or Site Explorer accounts, the list of links obtained from using link commands will not be exhaustive. Nonetheless, it’s a good way to start building links from websites with the .EDU extension.
Tags: domain names, link building, SEO, YahooPacing Quality Link Building Strategies
When it comes to link building initiatives, it is important to look beyond the sheer volume of inbound links to your website. Getting hundreds of incoming links from low quality sites is decidedly not as beneficial as a handful of links from high authority sites.
As would be expected, most of these “high authority” websites are inherently more difficult to get linked from because of their stricter requirements, and affinity to only associate with other “high authority” sites. There might also be unforeseen bureaucracy issues with getting in touch with the link building decision-maker, which may bring your link building initiatives to a standstill.
Tags: link building, SEO, social media marketing