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Never Underestimate the Real Power of Long-Tail Keywords

Before 2010, May Day simply referred to May 1st, a celebration of the beginning of Spring, or International Workers’ Day (Labour Day), as practiced in many countries, most notably in Russia… The alternate spelling Mayday was a signal used by ships’ captains and airplane pilots to announce “Come and Help me!”, as derived from the French word, “m’aidez”… Google’s Mayday Update Beginning in May 2010, Mayday became the code word for a major ranking change in Google and new attacks of “Google paranoia” by webmasters everywhere… As webmasters, we should leave the paranoia to those who truly have a reason to be paranoid, like my ex-wife and her family. Google has always advised that we, as webmasters, should focus on giving searchers what they are trying to give Google’s search users: the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers. As for myself, many of the new ranking factors included in the Mayday Update are things that I have expected the engineers at Google to include for a long time… Call me strange if you will — my ex-wife and her family do — but I have always tried to plan my website optimization based on what I thought Google should have been doing already… So, when Mayday finally came, I was ready… Unlike many of my peers, I was not crying in my beer in the aftermath of Google’s Mayday Update… About the Mayday Algorithm Update An article on Search Engine Guide ( http://bit.ly/8ZQ9yL ), about Google’s May Day Update, suggested that Matt Cutts, of Google’s Webspam Team, said at Google I/O 2010, “this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.” So if your website was hurt by the Mayday Update, you should pay attention to this article, because “the way things were” is gone forever… Vanessa Fox, formerly of Google, in another article at Search Engine Land ( http://selnd.com/bOqqcE ) suggested that the update primarily affected e-commerce websites that rely upon a product manufacturer’s product description… In other words, if a webmaster uses the default product description given by the original product manufacturer, then the product sales page will have taken a hit in Google’s search listings… Fox also said, “Before, pages that didn’t have high quality signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals. And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don’t have as much weight in ranking if the page doesn’t have the right quality signals.” It seems that a lot of webmasters dismissed Fox’s view as just plain wrong, but I side with Dave Davis, who said, “I believe she was right on the money.” ( http://bit.ly/b4sGKy ) As the questions about Google’s Mayday Update spiraled, Matt Cutts did a video for the Google Webmaster Central Channel at YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp ), about the Mayday Update ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM ). In that video, Cutts emphasized that Mayday is only one of more than 400 tweaks that Google does to its algorithms each year, and he further emphasized that Mayday has been fully tested and is a permanent change to Google’s search algorithms. What Mayday Means For Google Search The Mayday Update was primarily focused on changing how Long-Tail Keywords were handled by Google’s search engine… To make sure that you and I are on the same page, Long-Tail Keywords are those search phrases that contain more than 3 words. For example, as I was researching this article, my search query at Google was: “Google long tail keywords mayday”.

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Never Underestimate the Real Power of Long-Tail Keywords

spring

Twitter acquires Smallthought Systems

Twitter announced Thursday it has acquired a group known as Smallthought Systems a start up responsible for Trendly, an application that lets web sites find out more about the usage and traffic data that is collected by Google Analytics. The popular microblogging web site, which also recently announced it would integrate advertising with searches through its Promoted Tweets, plans to use existing Smallthought employees as part of the web site’s analytics team. The new employees “have joined our analytics team and will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners,” according to a post by Kevin Weil on the official Twitter Blog. The company required extra staff and resources to maintain the overflowing amount of information the Twitter web site handles each day, according to CEO Dick Costello. The service currently receives more than 65 million updates every day from its users, whose numbers fall near 200 million. “Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service,” the company said in the posting. The staff from Smallthought and Trendly will also be working on new tools and products to offer for Twitter partners in the future as well. This acquisition is just the most recent of Twitter’s growing list of technology assets.

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Twitter acquires Smallthought Systems

spring

Keyword Research Basics for SEO

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don’t convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn’t going to help too terribly much so in my opinion – I’d put keyword research higher in importance. In fact, when I’m building affiliate sites my first step is to look up keywords and competition levels – then I look into products and websites and this method has worked very well indeed. It insures that I choose keywords that will both convert and that I can rank for in a period of  ime and with an effort level that matches the return. So – if you’re doing keyword research, where should you begin? Unless you’re an affiliate marketer you already have a product and since you’re the target audience of this article – I’m going to assume that’s the case. For the purpose of this article I’m going to pick a hobby of mine and also an area where I don’t have a client and imagine I’m doing keyword research for the imaginary online downhill mountain biking store, DH Mountain Bikes

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Keyword Research Basics for SEO

spring

YouTube launches local news feature

YouTube’s local news feature ‘News Near You’ provides YouTube users with relevant news videos based on their location. This follows expansion by parent company Google into other areas of media coverage, but unlike the Google News service - viewed by some media agencies as a source of competition - YouTube’s local news feature is being presented as a source of advertising revenue to broadcasters, and a means of attracting a wider, more relevant audience

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YouTube launches local news feature