This Sunday's (February 13, 2011) New York Times ran a front page story in the business section entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. The story discussed how J.C. Penney appeared as the number one result for hundreds of search phrases for its products. In some cases, the J.C. Penney result for a brand name appeared before the brand name company web site – the example given was the phrase "Samsonite carry on luggage." J.C. Penney's sales page for Samsonite appeared ahead of Samsonite.com.
Filed under Search engine optimization, Stuff you should not do by 
Because I spend a lot of my time tweaking and optimizing for the search engines my own sites as well as client sites, I have a good sense of the various strategies and tactics being discussed by SEO professionals as well as business owners interested in finding an edge. Generally the strategies for achieving good results on the search engines are well known – produce quality content for a human audience, produce it regularly and figure out ways (tactics) to get other web sites to link back to you using descriptive link text. I currently own or manage over 100 web sites and blogs, many of which appear on the first page of search results for several relevant keywords (search phrases)
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The Internet Marketing educator who has most influenced me is a gentleman named Ken McCarthy, who is well known for his work producing the System Seminars. Back in 2004, I attended my first seminar, where Ken and several other speakers offered up a basic rule that underlies successful commerce on the Internet – namely that "content is king."
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I publish several blogs about legal topics and have done so for several years. My Atlanta bankruptcy blog, for example, has been around since 2005 and contains close to 300 posts. It has a very solid search engine presence and links from this provide a significant amount of "link love" for the recipient.
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A topic that could never be covered enough when it comes to SEO: How to get the best results from search engines. Not only are search engines free, but they drive the majority of visitors to your site. Statistics show that your site is seven times more likely to be visited through a successful search engine search than by a pay-per-click ad.
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If you involved in search engine optimization, you may already know basic terms such as algorithm and page rank, but do you really know what they mean and how they affect your search results? You may hear them on a daily basis, but it’s important to fully understand them in order to better develop your SEO efforts.
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While you may be thinking that you are tricking search engines like Google into noticing your website through tactics such as cramming your website with irrelevant keywords and content, you may actually get penalized or ignored. The only foolproof strategy to boost rankings is to figure out what kind of quality, relevant information your audience wants and provide it for them. And once you determine the content you are going to provide, choose keywords wisely (i.e. use relevant keywords). The internet is simply jam-packed with low-quality articles, scams, and useless information; it is important to not make the same mistakes made by so many employing these tactics if you truly want your site to succeed.
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When you decide to publish a new website or blog, one of your first decisions will have to do with the domain name or URL of the site. If I am not involved from the outset, there may not be much I can do about this decision, although I certainly wish that I could change many of the URL's I see.
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If you have a web site, there is a good chance that you will receive unsolicited emails from "link managers" working on behalf of other web sites looking to exchange links with you. Often the link manager will be from India or Pakistan and his/her English will be overly formal or contain spelling or grammatical errors.
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Generate Backlinks by Commenting on "Do Follow" Blogs
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Tags: blog comment spam, blog comments, Blogging, do follow attribute, no follow attribute
Filed under Blogging, Comment spam, Linking strategies, Search engine optimization by Jonathan Ginsberg
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