Drupal Sessions Login Issue

A couple hours ago the sessions table for Drupal needed repaired or emptied because it was not allowing SEO Book users to login. I just emptied it, so you need to login again to comment, but it should work well again. Sorry about that.

Find Top Paying Keywords for Google AdSense

High Value Keyword List Data for YOUR Business

This video is about more than just generating keywords for AdSense sites, it is about finding the most valuable keywords for any business. But most the people searching for top paying keyword lists are looking for AdSense keyword lists. I wanted to welcome those searchers to this site by making it easy for them to find this post when they search for related keywords on Google (hence the use of AdSense in the page title).

Discover Your Top Keywords

In this video I explain...

Google Local Becomes a Destination

As mentioned on SearchEngineLand, the Google Local onebox may now include up to 10 links in it. The increase from 3 to 10 results was allegedly due to usability testing, but them using text smaller than the rest of the text on the search results doesn't really conform to good usability standards either.

Start your search on Google

Clickthrough to a Google map

Clickthrough to the top review site there - still get Google maps

While Google is playing catch up maps will remain open and free. Google Video lost to YouTube because of the viral nature of YouTube. And that cost Google $1.65 billion. Google will not make the same mistake with maps and local.

Most local plays are not viral, and those which have developer platforms limit usage. In a few years Yahoo! will be wishing they begged people to spread that data far and wide to build a leadership position in the market, which is what Google will do via syndication.

If Google can drive a lot of traffic to their local listings and start encouraging user reviews that gives them another way to keep users on the Google network and monetize the search results.

Self Investment 101: Are You Measuring OPPORTUNITY Cost?

When you evaluate the actual opportunity cost of business opportunities, most client relationships, equity stake deals, and other partnership opportunities fall short of what you could do on your own. The only ways it works out is if their is a symbiotic relationship through different approaches that balance out each other's shortcomings, or if you can learn something from working with them.

Problems With Many Opportunities

  • Unwilling Clients: Many clients are unwilling to change their sites to add unique content or value to them.
  • Employee / Slave Wage: Work for equity stake partnerships where the partner provides the domain name and you do everything else are both lopsided and useless.
    • At any time the partner with lots of domains can decide to screw up the project you are working on together, and has 0 time investment and limited capital risk by only putting one or a few domains into the partnership.
    • 6 months or a year after working with you they can take all the knowledge you spent years learning and apply it to their more valuable names while giving you nothing for teaching them everything you know. They were not teaching you how to buy domains why they were accumulating them for years. Why give all that knowledge up for a slice of a slice of a slice?
    • Buy an alternative average quality domain and keep all the equity. Build it up with sweat equity and learn your market. Buy great domain names when you can afford them.
  • Follow the Crowd: Many marketers try to saturate a field with affiliates marketing their products and teach affiliates how to market that same product as a piece of the product that is sold. The margins on those opportunities get compressed with each additional competitor you sell that product to.
    • Many marketers show stats out of context, use meaningless sample sizes, and/or lie about the hows and whys.
    • People hype opportunities long after they no longer exist because they are addicted to the easy profits still rolling in from old work building out an affiliate network.

Are You Moving Up the Value Chain?

I am not against any of the above models as a starting point, as everyone has to start from somewhere. But if you....

  • love business
  • love what you are doing
  • want to create a sustainable business
  • can afford short term risk for long term stability

...you need to build equity from your work, and have a controlling stake in the outcome. If it sounds to risky to change then at least start building a site for yourself in your spare time.

What If? ...

Sure it would have been nice to have been an early programmer at Google, but for every Google there are thousands of market losers. Investing in yourself is the best investment you can ever make, and you one have to be right once.

What happened if you invested in Google a month ago? It seems those who just bought into that market hype just lost a couple dollars. Will Google go back up? Most likely. Will they increase in value at a rate as quickly as you can? Not likely.

How Links Can Build Value & Profits

This is a somewhat basic video about how links can drive value. Props to Stunty for his 12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them.

How I Got My Google Ranking #6 Filter Removed

My site was stuck ranking at #6 in Google for a lot of keywords. The site that I had that got hit was a site that I had not built links to in a year, and the on page optimization for it was done years ago. Realizing the issue might have been on-site as much as off-site I decided to tweak it a bit...

  • All page titles on the site have a brand name in them as this site is devoted to reselling a brand. For the deep product pages the brand was at the end of the page title and on the homepage the brand had one word in front of it. About a half dozen core pages in the site started with the core keywords of a brand the site was reselling. For those page titles the brand related terms were moved to the end of those page titles.
  • Some of the sitewide image navigational links had alt tags in them that contained a piece of the core keyword that the site was filtered out for. I removed that modifier and let the navigational links be slightly less descriptive.
  • I also got the site a few new links which did not focus on the site's core keywords, but I don't believe that these were the key to getting it ranking again, as the site already has thousands of inbound links, and their were only a couple new links of low to average quality.
  • I nofollowed links to some of the to administrative type pages, but I don't think that was a make or break issue either.

The site is ranking in the top 3 or 4 on many Google IPs for many search queries. My sample size is only 1 site though, so I would love to hear what you did to get your sites ranking again if you have any sites that recovered from this Google penalty / filter.

Direct Visitors vs the Google Machine

Rich Skrenta recently mentioned an article about being within the confines of Google:

So it strikes me that the time is right to make some big bets. You can't make those within the system. My advice: start from scratch, take some chances in finding marketing channels outside the Google system. Be bold - make some bets while the upside is still very big and the downside is pretty small.

Google's is getting closer with some large ad agencies, which likely means stability and growth for that model:

"We are sharing our information to help Google develop the right platforms and Google is sharing technology to help us develop the best services for our clients," said Publicis Chairman and CEO Maurice Levy in an interview. "Google is not going to be an advertising agency," said Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt. "We've all sort of figured out where everybody goes now."

The three big areas for growth for those not big enough to partner with Google are domain names, social networks, and public relations.

The first day auction results for the DomainFest auction are in. Most of the people buying domains are still speculators betting around Google / operating outside of the Google game. If you take your SEO knowledge to that market and add in a dash of content you are rolling your own strategy. Domains that seem ridiculously overpriced seem way too cheap when you add in a top Google ranking.

Max Levichin (or someone posing to be him) just started a blog. His first post offered tips for how to successfully launch a social networking development platform, including:

Make the #1 measurable goal of your PR team the amount of coverage that successful (or just interesting) developers get. People will jump through all kinds of hoops to be in the papers. Double so if the article lists them next to a [your] big brand.

As Google grows smarter and the web gets more competitive the key to dominating Google is to matter outside of Google and/or own the media. The media is getting pretty cheap, and trending lower.

While the networks are sleeping talent is looking to become the publisher.

Video Gary Round 2?

Found this video ranking #19 in Yahoo! for SEO...

And it is only going to get worse with guys like John Reese recommending everyone become an internet marketer selling to internet marketers just so he can prime the pump to sell his latest product and build a downstream of affiliates. Stake your claim before the fake experts turn your market into snake-oil:

And by creating a lot of fake value (encouraging everyone to pose as experts) you actually ruin chances of all new commers as customers will grow more and more skeptic and will tend to go for proven marketers (avoiding the anonymous which might also have a lot to offer)

Yahoo! Search, Please Turn Down Site Authority in the Algorithm or Drop Tag Pages

Does it make sense for MySpace profile pages to rank on the first page for one of the 10 most competitive terms on the web? Should English to English page translations inherit domain authority from another domain? I don't want to out anybody, but I see way too many tag pages ranking in Yahoo!'s search results. The easiest way they can improve their search results is to simply delist any page with tag in the URL.

If they continue down this path inside a few months they will link to nothing but internal site search / tag pages on other sites. Where is the value, innovation, or thought process in that? What percent of Yahoo! searchers want to see Wordpress.com tags pages and how many Yahoo! Pipes pages are tagged with a brand name? What does a searcher do when they land on a page like this?

If you are going to trust user generated content on authority sites, expect a lot of users to create content just for Yahoo!. :)

Another Update to SEO for Firefox

We updated SEO for Firefox again. The Yahoo! childnodes error is fixed, and we added BOTW directory listings to the stats we pull in to SEO for Firefox.

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