SEO Mentor

So a very funny post by “The Tutor” of GoogleTutor.com really go me thinking about how addicting Search Engine Optimization can be and especially how addicting Google can be.

The post “63 signs you’re addicted to Google and the Church of Search” has signs that will either make you laugh or make you wish you never read them (reminding you that you are a loser). Here are some of my favorites:

• You have a Tivo wish list keyword search for “Google”
• You know what Matt Cutts dressed as for Halloween last year
• You know the last name of Matt, Eric, Sergey, Larry, Marissa, and Vanessa off the top of your head
• You think having Vanessa in that last item is stupid because everyone knows she left Google a while back
• You have more than 10 SEO/SEM blogs in your feed reader
• You’ve lost sleep over Toolbar PR
• You’ve said ‘just Google it‘ (grr…)
• You use Google as spell check
• You use Google to do math
• You know the full name of the person Matt Cutts spoke out to help in a court case
• You check the Google holiday logo, every holiday
• You use Google 411 instead of 411
• You know that there is more than one type of PageRank

Remember there are 63 signs at the original post. If you can answer any of these questions above, don’t worry you will be alright

This SEO Podcast I talk about some of the following news items:

Google Joins Venture for Mobile WiMAX Next-Gen Wireless Internet Access

Yahoo and McAfee Offer a Safer Way to Search with SearchScan

 Yahoo Shares Tumble After Microsoft Pulls Bid

The SEO Tip for this podcast I talked about Loren Baker’s post about Subdomains or Subfolders : Which are Better for SEO?!

“Subdomains or Subfolders? What’s better for a blog/forum/etc: a subdomain (eg. http://jobs.searchenginejournal.com/) or subfolder (eg. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/)?

Subdomains and subfolders both have their advantages, especially when setting up blogs.

For blogs, I prefer a subfolder (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/) because the link juice which is sent to that blog is going to be naturally distributed to that main domain, and other subfolders under the domain.”

Here it is my third SEO Mentor Podcast and this one is packed full of the latest SEO News and Tips. Here are some of the things that I talk about:

SEO News:

• Google Stock Up 18% to $533
• Yahoo Earnings : Q1 Increases Beat Market Expectations of Revenues that reached $1.818 billion for the first quarter of 2008
• Google Enters Utility Business : Invests in Solar Power Plant Technology
• Google Rolls Out Mobile Image Ads
• Microsoft Acquires Farecast : Travel Search & Airline Fare Search Engine
• Google Applies Copyright-ID Technology to Fight Child Porn Online

I also talked about “The SEO Baby Contest” and my last Jason Gambert post and added some great SEO tips with the help from Richard Burckhardt from Searchenginejournal.com. Here are some of those tips I thought were crucial to your search engine optimization:

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I recently had a question from Mike Florence about Universal Search and what it is. Blended Search or Universal Search, whichever you call it; both are changing the online world. Google was the main pioneer of Universal Search and of course all the Major Search Engines (of course I mean Yahoo & MSN) soon followed.

Here are a couple things changed in the search engines when Universal Search came to fruition:

Digital Content syndicated in search results such as -

• Video Content
• Images
• Press Releases
• Articles
• News
• Local Listings
• Books
• etc.

Let me show you a quick image example of what I am trying to explain in words:

As you can see from the screen shot above, images and video are part of the organic search results. I don’t see any better explanation of blended search than the above image.

So how is Universal Search effecting the SEO and Search Engine Marketing industry? Well think of it this way, at one point you were competing with 10 other results to be on the first page of Google. Now with universal search, if there is a news and video result within the search query your website now only has a 80% chance to be listed on the first page of the search engine.

So you might be asking, “What does this mean for me and my business?” Well no need to worry. IF!!! You are taking advantage of video, press releases, image optimization, news, etc. Sites such as the well know YouTube.com, PRWeb.com, and Flickr.com just to name a few will help you take advantage of Universal Search.

Now you also need to know about the latest Social Media, also called Social Marketing, Social Networking. Search engines are picking up content from Social Networking sites such as Hubpages.com, Zimbio.com, and Gather.com, and these are just a few examples. Stay tuned for more about Social Marketing in future posts and podcasts.

Hope this answers your question Mike!

Loren Baker from Searchenginejournal.com is one of my favorite writers about SEO and his latest post really made me laugh. You can check it out at Google Algorithm Exposed: Searchtoons!

Here is the one of the cartoons he used in his post describing The Search Marketer’s Interpretation of the Google Algorithm:

At his post you can see the other image of The Mathematical Interpretation of the Google Algorithm.

So I was on vacation this last week and got to watch my Cubs in spring training in Mesa, Arizona. While there I was thinking about what I could write about to help those that may stumble upon my fairly simple blog. With my experience in mentoring individuals, the question about getting websites indexed in the major search engines is always one of the first questions. So I would like to give a quick outline of what I think you can plan on when it comes to getting indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

First off there is no real amount of time that I can tell you that your site will be indexed cause I have seen my own sites take as long as 3 months and have had sites get indexed as fast as a week. But overall I have found that my sites get indexed in MSN first within on average about 8 weeks and then Yahoo follows on average of 10 weeks and Google usually shortly follows of an average of 12-15 weeks. Now keep in mind this is just from my research and also that I am talking about brand new websites.

Here is the manual way to see if your site has been indexed go to the search engine (I know this works for Google, Yahoo, and MSN) and in the search box input site:(your url) for example site:http://www.yourseomentor.com/. Then click search and if you see at least your home page in the results then BADABOOM your site has been indexed in the search engine, meaning that the spiders/robots have found your site.

Here are secret SEO tips (ok it so they are not so secret anymore) but none-the-less a great tip to getting indexed faster:

• Start your Link Building and get links from related authority websites with high pagerank
• Also link to other sites (External Links) it is rumored that some search engines don’t index sites that don’t have external links
• Content!!! Make sure that your site has content related to your site Title and Meta Tags (Note: Stay away from Frames, Flash, and all image site design)
• Do not Spam (e.g. Keyword Stuffing)

The most important thing you should remember from this article is PATIENCE, continue your SEO campaign and don’t give up.