Verizon Is Open Today

Verizon wrote and distributed a press release announcing that they are open for business today.

In other news, the earth is still rotating on its axis and the nation's capital is still Washington, DC.

via Marketing Shift

Your website needs space!

Your website needs space! Between the search engine optimization changes you make, that is. I've had the pleasure of working with some very well-established companies, with well-established websites lately, and my new favorite slogan is "proceed with caution." That's because a lot of larger websites come to us with pretty impressive rankings.

They've already paid other SEO firms or in-house specialists to cover the basics of their on-page optimization, and they are looking to us to use our competitive intelligence tools to help them enhance their rankings even further.

When you're working with a site that is already in the top 10 or top 5 in Google for some major keywords, there's a lot at stake when you make changes. You have a tremendous opportunity to increase targeted traffic to the site by making adjustments to the tags and content and getting the site ranked a few spaces higher in the engines. But, you also have to be careful not to go over board and break something that's not broken.

The best solution is to make your changes one step at a time. If your research is telling you that you could probably make the title tag more competitive by making a few changes, make them and then wait to see the impact of the changes in the engines before making your next move. This way, you'll be able to gauge the success of your changes along the way and you can backtrack without guess work if something you do leads to a drop in rankings.

Al Scillitani urged us to take this approach on a major website we've been working on, and we've had tremendous success with it. The site is still in the top 10 in Google for all the terms it was ranking for when we started, AND we've been able to bump the site into the top 5 for several major keywords, which lead to some impressive jumps in traffic.

Keyword Density in SEO Copy

Keyword Density. Everybody wants it. But how much is too much?

At Fortune Interactive, we use SEMLogic, which tells us the Keyword Density of the top ten pages for the term we're looking at. From there we have a pretty good idea of what percentage we need to place on the page.

Those of you w/o SEMLogic have to do this manually. Just look up the term in Google and run the top 10 sites through a Keyword Density analyzer.

Also, check out the cached version of each page to see the placement of the keywords. Most of the time, the keyword is "peppered" throughout the text. But try to match what you're seeing in the top ten results if you want to rank.

Of course, keyword density is only one metric to consider in optimizing a page. And you'll have to keep an eye on the neighborhood of results for any keyword you're optimizing for (that's why an SEOs job is NEVER done!). The results can change quite often, and maybe next time the spiders go round, you'll be on the first page.

Technorati: seo, search engine optimization, online marketing

Yes, we're still here

I know, I know. We've been gone. We haven't called or even sent an email. Poop on us.

Life has been crazy at Fortune Interactive. Our beloved Search Marketing Manager, Al Scillitani, has left us to go in-house. I was absent last week, Nicole got married, Meg's on vacation.

It's crazy around here.

But we're back!

So what can you expect?

I've got alot of posts I want to write when I get the time later this week. I'll be writing about the wonderful world of PRINT and how you can integrate it with marketing to promote your site.

One of my favorite print magazines is Inc. You should really pick up the current copy. It's got a TON of great articles, including why Friendster ended up being such a disaster.

So sit tight, stay tuned, and I'll catch ya on the next post.

Google’s OOPs!!!!!!

I suppose it was only a matter of time, but webmasters from all around the globe are finding themselves slapped square across the face with the -950 Penalty, or the Over Optimization Penalty.

After spending thousands on specialized tools, manpower, and over-priced expert advice, you’ve optimized every page on your site and have achieved killer rankings for all your main terms; but maybe not for long.

This goes beyond – er – to the side of Google spam filters. In various verticals (there is much speculation that this penalty is applied only to specific keywords), Google robots are looking for sites that are optimized so well, they are seen as unnatural. We’ve seen a site that was ranking on the first page for three highly competitive words for over a year suddenly disappear (well not completely disappear – they’ve settled, quite uncomfortably, about 950 positions lower).

Ironically, this recent change has not seemed to drastically affect spam sites at all. A cynical friend of mine made the observation that none of his sites automatically generated for the purpose of Adsense revenue have been beaten down. Could it be that as long as Google is making money on the site, it’s overlooked for a certain time period?

Probably not, but I think the world of Internet Marketing could use a Google conspiracy theory. And if you wanted to really go out on a limb, you could hypothesize that since Google has access to millions of companies’ revenue data they could put a cap on how much one makes. When they start to go over their allotment, all Google has to do is increase the minimum bids or invent a new penalty. But I digress….

From what is being discussed in forums, the key to lifting a -950 Penalty, if you find yourself in this mess, is a site-wide process of de-optimization. That’s right – start removing all of the changes recommended to you by those tools and experts. Look at your site map through Google Webmaster Tools to see if there is an abundance of internal links pointing to the same page. Look for an abundance of identical anchor text pointing to those pages. Change your meta-tags and H1 tags to deemphasize the term you want to rank for. Remove some of those semantically relevant terms that appear too frequently in your text.

But how much is too much? I have no idea. And is seems that presently, neither does anyone else. I know that Google is responsible for connecting this planet on a scale unheard of 20 years ago; that their business philosophy is one unparalleled; that an infinite amount of information is available wherever you are at any time. I know these wonderful things to be true, but today I would like nothing more than to kick Google square in its robot testes.

Linking: Be Creative!

One of my clients got a great opportunity to get their name out there and was also able to leverage the opportunity for top-quality backlinks to their garage flooring website. Extreme How-To approached JNKProducts.com for an article on a one-day garage makeover.

My client wrote an informative article on how to make over your garage in one day, on a $1,000 budget and included strategic link text back to JNKProducts.com. We also helped by optimizing the article with keywords and thematically relevant supporting words. This is a great example of how sites can look for mutually beneficial opportunities to gain high quality backlinks.

Check out the article on ExtremeHowTo.com: http://extremehowto.com/xh/article.asp?article_id=60438.

Webkinz

Children in this era are getting a head’s up when it comes to technology. Webkinz offers kids and adults the chance for online learning. These small toys have a virtual version of their stuffed pet in which they must take care of online. Kinzcash is given to take care of their pets as a way to teach responsibility and use of currency. The stats for the Webkinz can be raised by feeding, playing, bathing, and exercising the virtual pet. The media requires a lot of reading which in turn provides kids with a learning experience. My 7 year old nephew has more computer knowledge already than most kids that I know!

Well, that beats Chutes and Ladders uh? Give it a try.

Header Tags: A Pesky Reminder

Today, I came across a client that was using a

tag for their header instead of a header tag. While this isn't the most important metric for the search engines, they do give more weight to the words inside an h1 tag or h2 tag than other words on the page.

You never know when that might make the difference in your rankings!

Also, Wordpress users - beware. Your sidebar headers may contain h1 and h2 tags. Use a lower tag, such as an h4 or h5 tag instead. I recently changed that on one of my blogs and noticed new pages aren't falling into the supplemental index as quickly. That doesn't mean I shouldn't build links (I still have a bunch of pages in that stupid index). And it also doesn't mean Google shouldn't figure out a better way to index Wordpress, but it might help you in the meantime.

Search Engine Decoder

If you are ever not sure how the search engine structure is set up, check out The Search Engine Decorder from search-this.com. This will show you who's giving who the information for their results, and who each engine is getting it's information from. It breaks down the results to primary, secondary, dirctory and paid search engine results. You can also see the ownership of each engine, as well as their Nielson netratings.