Ryan Pitylak

Google Friendfeed API

Google Friendfeed API launched today, 3/12/2009.  There are open-source plugins available for Drupal, Wordpress, and phpBB.

Moving Your Site

When moving ips
1. DNS TTL: Set down to 5 Mins
2. Bring up site to exist on both IPs
3. Point old IP to point to new IP address
4. Wait 5+ minutes and take down old IP address

When moving URLs
- 301 Redirect a subdomain.
- Move a subdirectory first.  Not the entire site.   Check it out a week later and see if the move happened appropriately and you didn’t lose search traffic.
- Good to have a 301 redirect from each old page to the new page on the new site.  Don’t just redirect to the root

What is the best way to get your back links back when you move your site?
- If you are getting a back link from an important location, make sure you ask them to move the links over directly to your new site.

What Determines Rankings

Do clickthroughs help determine rankings?
- Click-through is not used when determining the search results
- Toolbars tracking clicks are also noisy indicators for value

Links & Pagerank are still major indicators for success
- Big opportunity to create services for APIs, Twitter, etc, that will help you get good links.  White-hat link bait.

What would do to optimize site

- Site architecture: Think of DMOZ: 13 top level categories, each one goes down, etc.  A linking strategy that bounces around throughout the site is bad.  Good keywords in URL.
- Titles: Good keywords in title.  Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to insert some keywords into your title.
- URL and Title can have different keywords in them – this allows you to get 2 different keyword sets for ranking.
- Check server logs – what terms are you ranking for?  If you add more articles about the same topic, cross link them, might move from page 2 to page 1 for the keyword.
- Try to add 1 page of content a day (article/etc).

Additional comments
- Does Google have a Fast Index
o Yes, from update Fritz
o Go much faster than daily
- Do Twitter follower numbers increase PageRank?
o No
- More links causes Google to search deeper in your site
- Fresher content should be on top
- Posting a lot doesn’t help you to show up higher, but people do link to you more when you post more frequently, which drives up the SEO content.
- Drupal is one of the best CMS systems on the web.
- DIV Hidden text: If you create a bizarre way to hide text, it would be black hat, but typically it’s ok.  Google loves killing sites that have blackhat seo hidden text that is obviously spammy.

A great article by searchengineland talks about quality score of landing pages.  The big myths are:

Myth 1: My keyword has to be on the landing page

Myth 2: Adding a privacy policy will increase my quality score

Myth 3: My site is in Flash, so I can never have a good quality score

Myth 4: My page is all images. The new load time guidelines are lowering my quality score

Myth 5: Adding an ‘about us’ page will increase my quality score

Myth 6: Google hates affiliates

Myth 7: Microsites and dedicated landing pages no longer work

Myth 8: If my site doesn’t have a high Pagerank, I can’t get a good quality score

Myth 9: If I only have manufacturer descriptions, I will never have a good landing page quality score

It’s definitely real.  The question is how long does it take to get out of the sandbox and what does it take to beat it.  After a lot of reading, it’s clear that you can get out of the sandbox quickly, but it seems like it’s a pretty difficult task for a small website.  This may be why the larger sites seem to exit the sandbox quickly, but the smaller sites continue to have problems.

Here is an interesting read on the topic:

http://www.mikesquarter.com/escape-google-sandbox-146/

Interesting to say the least!

The day has finally come when Google has made their traffic stats available in a meaningful format.  The bars they used to use were horrible (albeit better than with no bars).

This is great news for trying to actually pick keywords for natural search.

Ryan Pitylak is active in the SEO community.

Search Engine Land wrote a great article about the top 10 SEO myths. I’ve provided my comments below each myth.

Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines.

Comment: Your site should be found through links from other sites. Submitting them to search engines does nothing because your site will only gain popularity if other sites link to you.

Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap.

Comment: A well designed site should have a good linking structure, and the search engine should properly follow the linking structure without problem. In this case, you would not need a sitemap.

Myth 3: You need to update your site frequently.

Comment: This has a lot to do with the type of site you have. However, most content is inherently static and doesn’t require that you update it too frequently.

Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings.

Comment: I believe these have been purposefully made separate so that there is no confusion about how it impacts results. I would argue that Google should consider giving people better rankings if they’re willing to pay for keywords, but I sure 100 other people could argue why that’s against the social good. I just believe that the ability to pay for keywords is an indicator of a keyword’s success for the company, and therefore, should be an indicator that the site is relevant to the topic.

Myth 5: Your site will be banned if you ignore Google’s guidelines.

Comment: I’ve never personally known of anyone who this has happened to. However, I don’t hang out in the black hat SEO community, and I don’t know what happens there. My assumption is that people in that community bend the rules so much that they do get into trouble. However, unless your doing things that are just plain bad, you’ll be fine.

Myth 6: Your site will be banned if you buy links.

Comment: Ha ha. That’s all I have to say about that. Advertising is advertising. You can penalize a company for buying ads on another website.

Myth 7: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings.

Comment: I believe this has some value, but it must be part of a bigger content on-site picture.

Myth 8: Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page.

Comment: I don’t believe your keyword tags have much to do with rankings.

Myth 9: SEO copy must be 250 words in length.

Comment: Why not 200? Why not 300? Who picked 250? That’s funny.

Myth 10: You need to optimize for the long tail.

Comment: Love the long tail. Stick those keywords in your description tags, but don’t really worry about them too much. Don’t stick them in your H tags, don’t put them in your alt tags, etc. You should work hard for the top keywords. Remember…Focus.

Ryan Pitylak is a search engine optimization guru.

Search engine optimization on a local level is an interesting proposition for most businesses.   Depending on whether you are a local business trying to increase your SEO rankings, or whether you are a national business with many local services, your SEO strategy will vary.

I ran a local Austin website for a long time, so I learned how to promote a local website.  The main strategy is to ensure that you have enough local content developed so that you can be shown in the results for long-tail local keywords.  You want to create a lot of content about each keyword that’s relevant to your area, and ideally you’d create a page specifically designed to target that keyword.  And, don’t forget, you need links from local businesses in your area.

If you have a national business with local services, your strategy will vary, but only slightly.  You’re essentially doing all of the same things that you would do for a local website, but each page on your site that is linked to a specific location should be treated as an individual site from a content and linking perspective; the advice for these areas can be found above.  The extra component to consider is proper interlinking within the site, as it can be hard to make all of those pages show up highly in the search results.

E-consultancy wrote a report about B2C marketing in 2008.  What’s shown is that over 44% of companies feel like they need to increase their lead generation efforts.  This is a big opportunity for internet marketers.

Marketing Pilgrim highlights the different lead generation channels that people use to generate leads.  SEO, Email, and PPC topped the list as the most profitable channels.

Email marketing to in-house lists is an extremely valuable tool for businesses that is often overlooked.  SEO and PPC are typically considered, but some companies find SEO overwhelming.  Consider hiring a marketing expert to help you with your company’s internet marketing needs.

I had a birthday BBQ last month and my friend was twittering back and forth with her friends (great party huh!). Well, no, we actually had a fun time, but I just didn’t realize how popular twitter had become over the past year. I know they launched at SXSW, which is where I was coincidentally showcasing a start-up I was working on at the time, www.unlockaustin.com.

Twitter really got it together! And, now, for those of you who are not paying attention, Twitter will infiltrate your life, just like Myspace did, just like Facebook did. Get ready!

Company Fesses Up to Corn-Popping Cellphone Clips

Viral marketing is taking an interesting twist these days. It’s exciting to see companies “murking,” as described by New York Times Magazine writer Rob Walker, which is a form of stealth advertising by a company.

This ad was great because they took a common fear and tied it into their product. Are you afraid of cellphone signals frying your brain? Well, they can pop pop-corn (so goes the ad). What does that mean for the consumer? Well, obviously, you should buy a blue-tooth headset. Sometimes the brand of the advertiser is less overt. For example, you could just have a person using a bluetooth headset toward the end of the ad in a less obvious way, and it would still get the message across.

Viral marketing is taking a serious twist, and it’s going to continue to be very interesting. We’ll see more companies perform more fun and exciting stunts to get the attention of the consumer, and ultimately, the consumer not necessarily know what is advertising and what isn’t advertising. Isn’t that the end goal of the ad agency anyway? The goal is to make more people consume the brand. Well, if the messaging is seeping into your body from every angle, it’s hard not to consume the brand….

Ryan Pitylak performs many services, among which are Viral Marketing Services

PPC marketing requires good quality scores for a successful marketing program.  A great article was written here:10

Ways To Increase Your Adwords Quality Score - A Mini Case Study

This is an incredible analysis on how to deal with low quality scores.  A great read for any PPC expert!