Internet marketing made easy

24/7 Wall St., a Web site that publishes financial news, took at stab at identifying the 25 most valuable blogs.

Here we go again. ComScore has released its second consecutive report showing year over year and sequential flatness in Google’s paid click volume. I addressed the issue last month, noting the company’s ongoing efforts to improve click quality by reducing the number of ads on its network.

Posted by rebeccaStories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Two star links:

I have never really understood how to use nofollow links until last night. I guess I must have been very slow to pick up this technique of preserving your Google Pagerank.
On Wikipedia’s entry on nofollow links:
Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, SEOs realized that a nofollow used for an internal link should just work as well as nofollow used for external links. It makes sense, for example, to use nofollow for internal links to pages that are not relevant for search engines and only for visitors who are already on the website. This includes pages, such as “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Terms of Use” or “Privacy Policy”. Matt Cutts, one of the initial designers of the nofollow attribute, encouraged this use of the attribute.
At the bottom of this snippet, there is a reference to an interview with Matt Cutts, in which he endorses the use of the nofollow link. Evisibility has a great blog post about nofollow tags with nice illustrations to explain the “Google Juice” theory.
Dan Thies has a free SEO book that explains the basics and advanced uses of the nofollow tag.
What I did for my own blog was to add the nofollow tag on these links:

Posted by randfishWe’re just not getting any visitors from the search engines…
I probably hear that line 30X or more each week - over email, in phone calls, in conversation, on forums, etc. and to tell the truth, it would be really handy to have a resource I could point folks for some self-diagnosis. If only there were some type of medium that I could publish on… one that would be accessible on some sort of computerized system… maybe a net of interconnected pages… one the whole world could access… like a… world… wide… oh, hang on a tick.
The 7 Most Likely Reasons Your Search Traffic (and SEO) Sucks:
#1 - You Just Launched Your Website
The Issue: New websites often don’t perform well right out of the gate with the search engines. Because so much of the web is spam (probably between 1/3 and 1/2 of the 30 billion or so pages on this superhighway), engines need to establish some level of trust with a domain before they’ll start ranking its content well. Engines need time to assess your value, watch the links to your site grow over time, evaluate you based on the content you add and the links that come to that content.
How to Diagnose: This is a no-brainer. If your website just launched and didn’t receive mentions in hundreds of major media publications and across the blogosphere, you’re probably in the "not-too-much-trust," newbie barrel and need to earn your way out.
How to Solve the Problem: The same way you solve the problem of opening a new business - build relationships in your neighborhood, get your friends to refer you, make new friends, build a quality business and quality content that’s going to bring in word-of-mouth traffic. Translating all of this to the web is easy, but it becomes a huge mental stumbling block. Remember that the web is just a proxy for real life. If George’s Chicken Tacos is a crappy dive, it doesn’t matter how many times it says "chicken tacos" on the sign, no one’s going to come back twice and no one’s going to tell their friends to go. Sell great chicken tacos, offer tons of reasons why people would send their friends (maybe you have a phenomenal collection of free recipes and links to all the places to get the authentic ingredients) and you’ll be on the road to fame.
#2 - You Have No Content Worthy of Earning Attention
The Issue: You might have a great site, with all the things a buyer needs to know about your product or service, but that won’t necessarily help you in the engines. Engines rely on links - references - to tell them who’s worthy and who’s not. If your competition is earning mentions around the web while you’re stagnating with a 4-page brochure site, is it any wonder that Google’s not sending the traffic love?
How to Diagnose: Once again, it’s a bit of self-reflection. Remove yourself from your website and ask three critically important questions:

Two classified ads spurred police into action this week.

Posted by FluxxStarting last night into this morning, we’ve been getting reports of people who have recently updated their version of Firefox to the new 2.0.0.13 release and now get a blank screen when they come to SEOmoz.  We’re still working on what the exact issue is with our site and why upgrading Firefox breaks it,  but we do know that if you delete the SEOmoz "login" cookie you have in Firefox and then try to load the site again, it works.

Posted by Jane CoplandI don’t watch much television. It’s silly really. I bought a big flat screen HDTV DVR OMG WTF television before I could really afford such things and I only regularly watch two shows. Tonight, one of my two shows will go off air for the last time, leaving me with only American Idol, which I encourage you all to link to from now on as American Idle (and also to check out American Idol’s SEO lookalike).

Posted by rebeccaToday I sat in on a webinar taught by David Szetela, the founder of Clix Marketing. He gave some great tips about common PPC and paid search mistakes, and I thought I’d share them below.

Posted by Nick GernerWe’ve been working pretty hard on pulling together the numbers from 3000+ responses to the SEO Industry Survey, graphing the results, and writing up some thoughts in an article on the SEO Industry Survey.  We also picked a winner for the iPhone and will be contacting this person privately to notify him or her.  Being the new guy at SEOmoz, the gang thought it would be a good idea for me to pull myself out of the networking closet and introduce myself while I introduce the results of the survey.