Browsing CJ I discovered a network which reminds me Overture keyword tool. KeyCompete is a keyword tool that finds the keywords and key phrases your competitors are using in their PPC campaigns. Tool also shows competition which that is bidding on keywords. 

 Enter a company domain name KeyCompete returns a list of keywords used by that company in its SEM campaigns. Moreover, it is possible to do the opposite way research by entering keyword and tool will show you websites which used this keyword on Google AdWords and other PPC services.

 Report Preview:

 Simple features from KeyCompete are avaliable for free, but for custom reports you have to register and pay.

Many experts was trying to explain of what the Google Algorithm formula might look like. Some of them came with very close ideas but it was still just thoughts, guesses, theory with lack of evidence.

 As SEO expert I decided to challenge myself and try to explain Google Algorithm. My work based on my observations, research, reading, and rankings of my clients.

 Domain:

• Domain age
• Domain history
• Domain name
• Domain usage
• Branding
• gTLD
• Where registered (Geographic location)

 Inbound Linking:

• Link age
• Related website
• Website quality (TrustRank)
• Deep links
• Page straight
• Quantity (not really important anymore)
• Type of a website (blog, directory, forum, social network…)
• Anchor text
• Surrounding text (text around link)
• Link Position (content, footer, header, sidebar etc)
• One way
• Reciprocal
• Page type (partners, news, clients, archive, resources etc)
• Amount of other inbound links on the page.
• Pagerank (loosing value)
•  gTLD (.gov, .com, .mil rank better)

Keywords:

• Domain, folder, url
• Header 
• Meta title (keep under 150 chars)
• Meta keywords (keep under 500 chars)
• Meta description (keep under 200 chars)
• Tags
• Position in content
• Page title
• Anchor text

Content:

• Duplication 
• Grammar mistakes
• Punctuation
• Academic language
• Paragraphs
• MLS writing style
• Tags and title
• Location on the page
• Keywords
• Amount of content pages
• Amount of unique words, letters
• Content changes (old pages without changes rank worse)
• Privacy page
• Contact page
• Address / phone / e-mail / fax / organization name /

 Technical issues:

• Page load time
• Language (PHP, HTML, CCS etc)
• Software / script website use
• Website structure (folders, pages, linking)
• URL structure
• IP
• Programming mistakes
• 404
• Redirects

Media and Social Media Presence:

• Appearance on media websites (news, articles)
• Appearance in social networks
• Social bookmarking
• RSS feed subscribers - ?????
• Alexa, Technorati rank - ?????
• Yellow Books, Google Maps - ?????

 Online behavior:

• Human review if appeared on popular keywords
• Buying / selling links without “nofollow”
• Fast link building
• Link similarity with another site
• Forum, blog, comment field spam
• Usage of duplicate content
• Unlimited link exchange (reciprocal linking)
• Banned before
• Linking adult, illegal, banned, poor quality websites
• Adult, illegal, abusive content
• Scam
• Anchor spamming
• Backlinks from link farms
• Reported by user
• Legal issues (branding, trademark, privacy)
• Rude words and abuse in content
• Cloacking
• Hiding content in background
• MacAfree SiteAdvisor reports (red flag)

 If I find more information about Google algorithms it will be posted on this page right away.

The war between company owners and employees over internet usage will never stop. It is the same like to forbid phone usage or conversations about work with other people.

Office clerks with blogs and accounts on social sites can create incredible power for official company website and increase online presence. From one side you can hire web design and SEO company to run corporate website, but from another side regular people who work for you can write about your company in their blogs and journals.
  
  Some companies already found benefits when their employees use social networks and own a weblog:
  HP for example hosts employee’s blogs on official HP website and everyone can run work related or personal journals.
  Chapel Hill Tubal Reversal Center in North Carolina use a weblog to allow all people in the office share information and participate in discussions.

Benefit for company:

People in the office use social sites and run weblogs. 

Large appearance in social media like Digg, Technorati,

 Facebook, Del.icio.us, Zimbio.

Extra backlinks, content, online presence, and visibility

 for your company.  Positive feedback.

Increase in search engine rankings.

Extra traffic through blogs and social media.

Company wins over competitors through collective work.

  Blogging became a new phenomenom which attract more people every year. People with different education, interests, points of view, and personality start their online journals. It is interesting to know what motivate bloggers to write and publish blog posts. We decided to ask bloggers a simple question: Why do you blog?

We found 99 regular bloggers who gave us their answers:

Here some extra information our participants shared with us:

•  EBORG9, Las Vegas (Blog - 124bpms): ”I love the subject matter of my blog…and someone told me if I did it , that it would not be successful. I love a challenge!”

•  JohnE, Pompano FL (Blog - Learn To Market Online): “I started using blogs as a way of keeping track of some kata, some projects & rough drafts of documents (no matter where I was). After a few months, they started to get google rank and hits so i thought that I would link back to my main site to build it’s google rank.”

•  Unfettered (BlogCatalog profile): “I think I blog because standing on a street corner with a sandwich board and a bullhorn doesn’t pay as well as it once did.”

• Svetoslav Marinov, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada (Blog - Devcha) ”Usually I blog about some programming problems and their solutions, because this could save some time to people that have the same problem.“

(more…)

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran is a blogger. His blog launched in August 2006.

 Blog link: http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/

 President of Iran post not only about his political view but also about childhood and personal life. He also send messages to regular readers, one post Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adress to and American mother whose son was killed in Iraq.

 Interesting fact: Most people who comment on his blog are US residents. Here what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote about his readers:

 ”Numerous letters, which are written by people to me everyday, contain remarks, suggestions and effective criticism and I know them like divine blessing.”

Last summer I was hired by psychologist who provides helpful information on his website for people with family problems. We were trying to monetize site which already has over 3000 unique visitors per day. By adding a web store to sell books he wrote in past 15 years he reached about 10-15 daily customers right away. Client was more than happy because it was a good money (each book cost $40).

We decided that $400 - $600 is not enough from 3000 people per day. We rejected to use Google AdSense, affiliate programs, ad space sale. Instead of finding sponsors we began to visit competitor websites to find what they sell and offer for people who got family problems. From one competitor we got idea to create subscription service providing extra information, email notifications, ability to receive unpublished chapters from the books, daily tips to keep family strong, etc. Our calculations wasn’t wrong and we got 1 new subscribers each day (out of 3000 daily visitors), if it will stay the same in the future… total income will be over $45 000 after first year and almost $135 000 between July 2008 and July 2009.

Checking another website we found that competitor offers live phone support for visitors charging their credit card $150/hour. The same thing we did on our website and now my client charge callers $200/hour because his name is bigger. Moreover, the same competitor gave us a hint to create a page with office, location, hotels, airport, driving directions to meet our client in person. This step increased amount of clients, especially rich clients who fly from all parts of the United States to get professional support from psychologist.

In the case I described above I made myself and and my client richer only because we worked to check strengths and strategies of our competitors. By finding key success factors we applied this to our website and reached significant increase in profit.

Media scanning is also an important factor to find how competitors advertise product, where they keep ads, how much they spend, and who they target.

Online media scanning even more important because it is good to know who link your competitors, their search engine rankings, keyword destiny, share of voice, and traffic they receive.

How to check competitor online presence:

•  Find who link your competitor. It is possible using backlink checking tool like LinkVendor Domain Popularity or by typing link:domain.com on Yahoo (Yahoo provide the best information about who link a website).
• Sign up with Google AdWords and check how your much competitors bid on targeted keywords and key phrases. Use “share of voice” function to check percentage of clicks each competitor receives.
• With Technorati it is possible to find how strong competitors in blogosphere and how many bloggers write a posts describing their products and services.
• The last thing which might help is Google Pagerank and Alexa Rank status.

MySpace. The year 2007 was the worst year for MySpace. Media rave, honors, and criticism were received by Facebook. Everyone kind of forget that MySpace has almost 3 times more visitors than Facebook (57 million unique visitors in November vs. 22 million Facebook visitors). In December, on the USA Today pages were announced that MySpace will renovate design and features. Email, weather, news, easy photo and video share are products which developers promise their visitors in upcoming year.

FaceBook. Army of people who use Facebook almost doubled in 2007. Now it is not just a network for college students and campus activities, Facebook became a mega network where you can find even people who are older than 70. In the year 2008 we should see if Facebook will finally jump over the ocean and become popular in other countries (like MySpace) or it will stay as US network.

SpicyPage. Social network for bloggers, webmasters, and regular people to share links and information. It seems to me that webmasters mistreated SpicyPage because in the beginning they were refusing to provide direct link for submitted news. SicyPage used to give their own URLs to every submitted link redirecting visitors only after click, recently all redirecting codes were removed and now SpicyPage work the same way like Digg, Reddit, or Mixx.

Zimbio. News social site which was created by developers who took the best ideas from Digg, Technorati, Newsvine, MyBlogLog. Zimbio is a network which accepts all types of information from registered members. User can simply write a story, share news link, submit RSS feed, bookmark site, ping a blog, submit video, upload picture, create a poll… all this information could be rated my other members and the most popular / picked by community content appear on homepage and category pages.

LinkedIn. Network for business dealings, over 5 million people who are looking for business partners or wishing to find clients created profiles in 2007. Company expects to reach 10 million users in 2008 and become #1 online business network.

ClipMarks. I wrote before about this social network in the article Clipmarks is Another Proof How Far Web 2.0 went. Unique way to bookmark pages is making this site different from regular social bookmarking networks like Digg or Mixx. Clipmarks seems for many users too smart and geeky, next year will show us if general user are ready to accept this way to save information.

9Rules. Another clone of Newsvine and Zimbio which look like a next big thing in social news industry. Web developers spend most of their time to create unique design and newest user interface. 9Rules design can satisfy esthetes.

Unique US Visitors in November 2007

Source: USA Today 

Are Meta Tags Necessary?

The latest versions of Wordpress blog software were released without description and keywords meta tags. Wordpress explained their decision to remove meta tags on their development site:

“Some search engines don’t use the meta tag information any more because many people abused it. In fact, meta tags may not represent the content of your site.”  - Meta Tags in Wordpress

We can argue with Wordpress opinion for a long time, it is better to make research to understand importance of meta tags for search engines and rankings. I took dynamic website about classical music called Everynote for testing. Unique thing about this site that webmaster use the same meta keywords and description on every single page. It gave me a chance to find a web page which does not contain words in content which included in meta keywords description.

For research I picked a single page about Ludwig van Beethoven: http://everynote.com/piano.choose/0/2/2/_.note

On Google, Yahoo, Msn, and Ask I typed:

“Everynote Universally considered one of the greatest composers of all times, Ludwig van Beethoven library”

•  Library is the word which included in meta tags but does not appear anywhere in content. Also, the same word “library” does not appear as anchor text in links (backlinks) which point to this page.
• Universally considered one of the greatest composers of all times, Ludwig van Beethoven - first sentence from page content.
• Everynote - domain name

Results:

• Google - 1 position*.
• Yahoo  - 1 position.
• MSN    - page does not appear in search results.
• Ask      - 3 position.

Conclusion: Google, Yahoo and Ask search engines still read meta tags and rank websites if keyword appears in meta keywords / description. MSN search engine does not rank a websites according words and phrases which written in meta keywords / description.

*- Google cache tells that there are links which point to this keyword (library), in reality there are no direct backlinks for page we tested. Also, word library does not appear in any links from Everynote or any other domain name.

Are you familiar with social media spammers? They never contribute to community, they just hundreds groups, invite everyone to be a friend, and send messages like: “Vote for me and I’ll vote for you”.

Social spammer is always use other members in their own interest and the only thing they want from you is to click their link. Most of them don’t have real profile, they have no avatar or they use their company logo, website link on spammer profile looks like list of keywords.

Social spammers are headache not only for popular networks like Digg or MyBlogLog. Less popular sites like SpicyPage, Bizzlo, or Zimbio are also receive spam submissions and messages. People spam social media not only for traffic, but also to increase link popularity and search engine rankings. Many spammers gave up to terrorize free directories and blog comment fields because most of them require human approval. Social media sites approve links and deliver comments automatically hoping that regular users will block it by clicking “spam” button.

  As shown above, these spammers used 2 accounts to submit Viagra spam on Digg and vote for it. All links are came from the same user and the same domain, in comment field they submitted information about prices and extra links to order. We count at least 740 Viagra links which still bookmarked on Digg.

MyBlogLog spam comments for ShoeMoney:

Shoemaker is the one who got 20 public comments in past month (Shoemaker and God only knows how many private comments arrived), 15 of them are spam. Now I am not surprised why Jeremy hasn’t checked his profile since last June.

To decrease amount of spam, owners of social networks have to make hard decisions. Here some changes which was made recently by different social sites:

• Delicious added “nofollow” tags for all submissions.
• MyBlogLog doesn’t allow to join more than 15 groups in 1 day.
• Sphinn gives all new members limited access for 7 days.
• Reddit set up 5 minutes waiting time between submissions.
• Zimbio allow to post only in 1 group.