Local Search is becoming essential in many businesses’ online marketing strategy. There are many search engines which primarly focus on “Local” such as Super Pages and Local.com. These engines serve up millions of pages views a month, which means companies need to evaluate these secondary avenues of traffic as well because they can lead to increased online visibility. Search Engines such as Google make it very simple for businesses to submit their websites into its local search index, therefore you can find more and more companies taking advantage of local search services.
http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2007/10/ultimate-local-search-optimization.html

Someone commented in a forum that submitting your sites to the search engines are not needed and it might even delay inclusion. According to him, just build some links instead and the search engines will automaticly find your site.
http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=4653

According to a forum, Tony Stark’s site went into first place in Yahoo UK & Ireland (worldwide search) within few days for his main search term. A month later, it gradually dropped to 8th place. l2edlvova says that the drop can be numerous problems, it could indicate two things – Tony Stark’s site are not doing good enough or his competitiors are doing better than him.
http://forums.seochat.com/yahoo-search-optimization-60/big-drop-off-in-yahoo-259525.html

Christian231 says in a forum that he is very dependent in Google because of Adsense and PPC campaigns on Adwords. He has several sites that receive over 80% of their traffic from organic search results on Google.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1436434

A forum post says that paid review program is giving negative impact to the PR. Google will penalize your PR if they found out that you are using paid review program.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1438318

According to a site, Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) is built on the Yahoo index as its foundation. A company can build their own search engine using Yahoo’s underlying technology and differentiate via the user experience.  Essentially, that’s what Yahoo is planning to do now with Bing as their underlying technology. No more Yahoo index likely means no more BOSS.
http://searchengineland.com/what-site-owners-web-developers-and-seos-should-know-about-the-yahoomicrosoft-deal-23344

Link Dumping is the Black Hat art of dropping a link to your site everywhere that is humanly possible for little to no money. Common link dumps include guestbooks, comment sections, and link exchanges. “If spamming links will bring down a site’s rankings, then I want my competitors to have spammy links. If they rank lower, I’ll rank higher.”, says QuadsZilla in his post.
http://seoblackhat.com/category/link-dumping/

According to Nethy in a forum, to appear in organic search for competitor brand keywords, you will need to have content relating to them. A common way of targeting competition brand keywords is a comparison: MyBrand vs CompetingBrand page. This is not a no downside move (as is PPC). You will need to promote your product in a certain way, comparing it to a competitor. It creates a certain brand image.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41083

The site moderator says that ‘Hats’ are oversimplified shorthand for whether an activity contravenes a SE’s ToS and other guidelines. Given their deliberate vagueness he would classify most webdev activities as ‘grey’ hat. Further most, SEO tools are not fit for purpose as they tend to mix data sources or derive conclusions about one SE with data from another – a meaningless exercise, according to him.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?s=6d24ae26f7e293e6f265c413fab3c726&showtopic=72102

Google remains unbeatable says Rakhi in DigitalPoint. He also added, Cuil search engine offers good, fast, logical results and heard that Cuil may supersede Google but when Yahoo and Bing are still fighting to win the war Cuil remains far off.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1432943

Zlimp says in a forum that if Bing can compete with Google then it can really help the webmasters because it will give another dimension to the search world plus it will give you an extra supply of traffic. If yesterday we were getting 80% of the traffic from Google, today we might get extra from Bing and we might get new users through Bing.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1435982

Testing has become a key online marketing discipline for increasing conversion rates and getting more out of search/pay per click traffic. Some of the biggest testers in the world are Amazon and Google. In fact, testing is one of their “secret weapons.”
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Testing-SEO-Landing-Pages-and-Improving-Conversion/

According to Search Engine Land, AOL and Lycos are two examples of portals that gave up their own search technologies and watched their traffic drop. Perhaps Yahoo will be the exception because Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has made plenty of noise about how Yahoo isn’t just a search engine.
http://searchengineland.com/a-search-eulogy-for-yahoo-23267

According to a site, there are defensive strategies which are designed to defend a position that the website already hold. This also creates barriers to the entry of new entrants in the market and ensuring that you may gain such position that no other can attack you and snatch your position. One of the most interesting strategies are the flaking strategies. In this case you can befoul your competitors or your enemies that there is no real threat for them and in the last moment when they realize it is too late for them to take necessary actions.
http://www.selfseo.com/story-19722.php

According to Nitinaaj in a forum, submission of your website to directories provide direct traffic to your site, it also helps in keyword rankings in Google on your selected anchor text you have used for directory submission. Any website that does not appear on the first three or four pages of search results, only few people would come across it, and that site would not have any visitors.
http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/about19322.html&sid=1646f61be8ffde83858ed9c0eecda782

Agreed SEO is part of the online marketing toolbox. Using just SEO to promote a site is missing valuable opportunities (such as ppc, email marketing etc.) that will help increase a clients revenue stream.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-makes-an-seo

According to Neiljhonson in a forum, 60 to 70% traffic from search engine is good but along with traffic you should track bounce rate of your visitors – how much time they are spending on the website and which is the most attractive page in your website.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1431861

A forum post says that you need to do a lot of on page as well as off page optimization to attain one of the top rankings. Target some keywords that have enough number of searches but don’t have too much competition.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1434374

There’s a new game designed by Microsoft, designed to help make Bing a better search engine. The game is named Page Hunt and it asks users to submit search queries that they think the site presented to them, should show up for, in Bing. The results are then scored and players can earn different points for different answers.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-hopes-to-improve-bing-with-page-hunt-game-23113

In a forum, Jeremy80 have always liked ask.com’s layout and related searches feature. They are just lacking in the marketing department but still can be a stream of traffic, although a fairly small one, according to him.
http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=3274

According to Randy in a forum, changing the URLs for no good non-seo reason is the single biggest mistake people make. URLs have nothing to do with rankings as long as the URLs can in fact be spidered.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=40820

A post from a forum says that the only reason search engines like sites that are updated is that they like to have a reason to keep coming back. Don’t change pages that already exist to make them want to come back more and more often.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1433816

Vansterdam in a forum says that those long lasting popular article directories attract a ton of natural links, especially from seo blogs & forums. So they have a lot of trust built up with Google. As for the duplicate content, Google understands that there is legitimate duplicate content. Google cares more about content that gets duplicated on more than one page of your site.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1433583

There’s a latest news about the possibility of a Yahoo & Microsoft partnership (or perhaps merger) wherein Yahoo would begin using Microsoft’s Bing search technology to power Yahoo Search, and also serve ads on Yahoo Search results and throughout the Yahoo Network which would be also powered by Microsoft AdCenter.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-microsoft-bing-search-partnership/12095/

A report analyzing traffic and click-through rates from ad network Chikita finds that “Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users.” What this means, according to the post, is those who arrive at third party sites via Bing click more frequently on ads on those sites than those coming through Google.
http://searchengineland.com/reports-bing-users-click-more-search-deal-with-yahoo-coming-this-week-23044

In a blog’s advice when your site drops, do some backlink analysis which is a good practice to undertake every few months regardless of updates but definitely necessary now that you’re dropping. What you need to do now is to analyze the backlinks of the sites that are out-ranking you.
http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/seo/site-down.htm

In a forum post, Rayter says that Google’s algorithm keeps on changing and evolving. One thing’s for sure, however, Google bots would only crawl pages and links that are dofollow.
http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/about19403.html&sid=2ef279af77125f18835f5a8c65e7dd13

Thomasram in a forum says that his client has an affiliate site. The site doesn’t have any content and the site uses frame which refers to the parent site. According to Thomasram, frames are not good in SEO perception.
http://www.searchengineforums.com/seo-general/1247239533/

CanadianEh tried a bunch of sites on seopenalty.com and found that the results were not always accurate. One of his sites showed up as VERY HIGH Penalty even though the site has PR and over 100 Google top 10 rankings. Interesting: It showed Yahoo.com as having a SLIGHT Penalty.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1428486

KC Tan in a forum says that the most powerful method to increase your PR is link bait. The most common methods are writing & submitting articles, using forum signatures and buy blog reviews.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=368647

PageRank is all about backlinks, nothing to do with how often you update your site. PR is a mathematical calculation and represents popularity on the web.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1359672

A moderator in a site have read an interesting article that says millions of successful websites get their success by giving away free content. Others have an application that visitors can use for free.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=72077

As a general rule the free channels (Organic SEO) take longer to get started and will bring more gross traffic, but typically make conversion a bit more challenging. Conversely as a general rule if you utilize paid methods that are able to better focus on your actual target audience the gross traffic levels will be quicker to attain, though at lower levels the traditional SEO.
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41035

A forum poster says that Yahoo is not using spider webs to determine rankings. It depends on the keywords in domain name, title and descriptions.
http://forums.seochat.com/yahoo-search-optimization-60/seo-for-yahoo-262938.html

SEO can be a good way to earn money because of the minimal cash investment. However, SEO takes a lot of time and effort for you to be able to see your progress and have your page indexed.
http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/about19311.html&sid=b4a1508e08210966ccde0b9a8e017936

Traffic doesn’t necessarily need to be too high to achieve conversions. It doesn’t matter if it is high or low. As long as you hit your targeted audience, it is more than enough.
http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/about1358.html&sid=b4a1508e08210966ccde0b9a8e017936

Someone posted in a forum that web design is an important factor to attract targeted traffic to your site. In designing a web one must consider it as a user friendly and SE friendly also. Having a user friendly design can help you throughout in increasing the number of returning visitors to your site.
http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/about2856-0-asc-75.html

Google has clearly been tinkering with it’s black box algorithm, adjusting search results to better reflect current events. If a new page gets a high number of backlinks from trusted sources in a short time frame, it’s fair to assume that the page is worthy of a temporary boost in the SERPs.
http://www.seo-scoop.com/2009/07/23/google-approaching-real-time-search-results/

A good tip in a forum says that it is best to include unique meta keywords and meta description on every page of your website or blog. The meta description is the most important meta tag as it helps click thru rates and it helps improve rankings.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1431201

Vansterdam in a forum says that age helps a site in Google rankings, but it definitely isn’t something that can’t be overcome. Just keep building links, especially high quality links from trusted domains.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1431600

Megaresp in a forum says that properly structuring the content of a blog is quite important. With a brand new site, it’s the homepage that matters most for this.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1429584

According to a blog, the common SEO problem for ecommerce sites is CMS (content management systems) that create different URLs for a product that lives under multiple categories. If most or all of your product pages have duplicates, you’re less likely to get your site fully crawled and indexed — meaning lost organic search opportunity.
http://www.getelastic.com/too-many-urls-spoil-the-seo-fixing-a-common-ecommerce-duplicate-content-problem/

Search engines don’t just spend their energies trying to outsmart webmasters (or rather, SEO practitioners) — they also give back to the webmaster community. Webmaster tools offered by Google, Yahoo and MSN, help site managers identify various problems with their sites, along with other features.
http://www.getelastic.com/webmaster-tools/

Arcticpulse posted some SEO tips for new sites. First is to make sure your title tags are well targeted, build unique content, then submit to a few really good quality directories such as Dir.Yahoo.com, Dmoz.org, and BOTW.org.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1429184

According to Nova, since 2004 she got better results in Google and MSN than in Yahoo search. It is best to consider optimizing long term for Google than worrying about Yahoo. Her advice if you want quick results in your site, you should consider updating your site and getting more links weekly.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1393295

Jeremy80 in a forum, thinks that MSN is still a long way from passing Yahoo in the battle for search engine market share. He strongly doubt that would happen anytime soon. Yahoo may have poor results but they are backed by a decent portal and a strong base of yahoo.com e-mail accounts.
http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=2231

Google apparently experienced some nice growth in China as well from a monetary standpoint but there were no details given by the worldwide leading search engine. One has to suspect that losing the battle in the largest growth market is not something that sits well with Google’s leadership but there may also be a growing resignation to the fact that China is just different and poses unique problems; even for Google.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/07/chinese-search-giant-baidu-posts-gains.html

SteelersFan is still trying to figure out if it is best to just use his primary keyword title phrase for his site which is the two word website name or if he should be using the 7-10 work title. According to him, he rank better for his major keyword using the two word title than that of the 7-10 word title.

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41066

Say Yebo’s client wants to leave an html version of his entire navigation in the footer of every website page. He run his site through two SE simulators and the search engines are able to follow his drop-down menus at the top of each page – so this seems like overkill to him. He heard that footers filled with repeat navigation can cause problems because they increase the rate of dupe content on pages. Also, it looks ugly because the entire sitemap is squashed into the footer.

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41212

Bermuda says that getting indexed in Yahoo and having traffic from that are two different concepts. The first one is easy to accomplish because by addition of links your site will begin getting indexed but the later case requires SEO.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1426341

Muqtada123 says in a forum that there are few differences between Yahoo and other search engines such as Google. Yahoo places more value on number of back links than the content from the page, so, an established site with a lot of incoming links, getting a good ranking on Yahoo can come naturally.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1428712

According to a forum poster, AOL is not owned by Google, it just uses Google for its organic and paid results. AltaVista is owned by Yahoo and display Yahoo search results.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1422718

A poster in a forum says that it’s pretty interesting as it would allow Bing to have almost 30% of the US search market almost instantly. Then another poster says that it would be better for Bing to keep improving. They are currently getting increasing traffic from time to time.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1420602

Google has opened up Conversion Optimizer to more advertisers. The AdWords tool is now available to those who’ve had at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days.

A post in a forum says that he doesn’t think that Google consider .biz as spammy sites, but websites which are solely made for advertising stuffs and link selling may scored as lower quality links.

In a comment from a blog post, he read that if someone is serious about search marketing they should use Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery and he’s interested in hearing why. He used both in the past and have never really felt the results to be any better than what you can get from the Google Keyword Tool.

In an interesting SEO site, it says that link architecture is one of those SEO techniques that falls under a number of different umbrellas. It has elements of technical optimization, thanks to its navigation functionality and ability to direct traffic flow through the site.

In a blog post, it says that Live search’s quality varies, sometimes very strangely. Some of their search results are as good as other search engines, while others are outright full of spam.

Google announced four changes — two of which seem worth highlighting here:
* Blocking non-home page sitelinks: The ability to block certain sitelinks from showing in Google results now applies to all pages on your site that have sitelinks, not just the home page.
* Viewing URL removal requests made by others: On the “Crawler Access” page, you can see any URL removal requests that other people have made about URLs you own — and you can revoke them, too.

A new report finds that mobile search and answers service ChaCha beat Google and Yahoo’s voice search tools in terms of overall accuracy and reliability across a range of query types in a controlled study. The study was conducted by Albright Communications/MSearchGroove in January of this year.

A guy from a forum got lucky in a sense that he receive a higher traffic in Yahoo about 700 a month and about 1200 from Google. This happened because Yahoo has a pop under box that appears when you’re typing in a keyword. It gives related suggestions for the keyword you’re typing and if your site is on that alternative suggestion page then you can score a lot of Yahoo traffic.

In a forum, it says Yahoo Answers link could be very great in terms of traffic but may not bring magical results when you take a look at them from SEO perspectives.

Here’s a tip to gain yahoo position: KEYWORDS in your domain. Yahoo loves that. Google – not so much. Also, build tons of backlinks, even if no follow.

Rushiblog in a forum was very happy because of the huge Yahoo traffic that his site got by just adding meta tag generated by Yahoo that he put into his html code.

In a forum post, Yooozy do care about PR. He says that there are some interesting things about PR you should be aware of:

-Good PR doesn’t necessarily mean good search engine rankings
-Content doesn’t affect PR directly but number of backlinks do
-PR gives an idea of popularity

According to setr84 from a forum, regional ranking are not the same. Different Google country have different results. He said that you have to target your keywords to every country separately.

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