April fools day is coming and I know about a lot of great hoaxes coming up. Are you preparing some great stuff to get publicity and mainly “links”?

The first of April poses a great opportunity to create a safe viral. Fairly safe because you can always revert to stating it was a joke. But what makes a great April fools joke? What ingredients are required for success? Here are some tips to give you a bigger chance of success…
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Getting indexed and ranking with slightly less unique content!

Many webmasters have contacted me recently with the same problem. It’s an old problem that is still very important in all search engines. Their websites weren’t indexed entirely or perticular pages couldn’t even rank for the most unique text phrases although these pages were indexed. In this post I will give some pointers on effortlessly making pages more unique.

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Untill now personalized search results where hard to unravel. The effect was minimal (in most cases) and we had only one identity to test with. But personalized search is gaining effect and for Google the results look promising enough to continue with further personalization. So what does this mean for search engine optimization? This article will shed a light on what is known about the personalized search algorithm and how it effects peoples behavior.

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As most of you probably know, link building is a time consuming activity and manually requesting links can be the most boring SEO activity. Although this requesting needs to be done to get a good link basis, most of the time it is just too expensive to do it yourself. So when do you hire someone and who do you hire for which job? In this article I will give my opinion and hopefully you will all comment to give me your thoughts.

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What most people don’t know is that client-side scripting doesn’t normally allow for any recording of data. Javascript can’t write data to a file and that is why it needs a way to transfer the data to a server-side script that records it to a database or log file. So web analytics is in absolute sense always server-side.

In this part of the article I will explain how you get server-side information into client-side statistics and vice versa.

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When implementing web analytics programs I sometimes get the question why I use a combination of PHP/ASP and Javascript. What they probably don’t know is that server-side and client-side scripting can detect different specifics of a visit. Both types have advantages and disadvantages, but you need certain tricks to combine both. This article explains the differences and how to overcome their disadvantages. It is mainly written for people that know something about scripting, but need a quick reminder to fix certain problems.

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Search engine marketing should be aimed at return-on-investment (ROI) and goals should be achieved with as little effort as possible. Because more and more industries are seeing the potential of search engines, it will become harder to rank for everything you want. This means getting relevant traffic will require a bigger investment and that in turn can ruin your ROI.

Choosing a less competitive market and search terms with high traffic volumes can get you much cheaper traffic. But does that convert into sales? Here are a few examples how to get cheaper traffic for a better ROI.

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After a long discussion with a few fellow SEOs I think I made my point. They said: “You cannot get every site you’d like, to link to you. Most authorities and competitors won’t give their linklove.” and my opinion is: “You can get all the best authority links. Sometimes you just need an intermediate site.”

The best way to get any link, is to create content specifically as linkbait for that link or website. Normally a competitor will not intentionally link to you directly, but here’s where an intermediate site comes in. Use an existing intermediate or create your own one for full controll how the linkjuice is transfered.

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The Google algorithm changes slightly every day. Most of their very small algorithm changes are implemented to look for new signs of SEO spam. Most of the times when a new spam tactic is detected, it is verified manually and its characteristics are then fed to the algorithm. Google spamcops can also roundup all your spam manually aided by cool Google tools for internal use. So: “Don’t leave your fingerprints everywhere!” When one of your projects is caught, sacrifice it and save everything else you’ve build. (I type with my fingers, so I won’t call them footprints)

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Yeah! Google is giving easily spamable results more exposure in their search results. Untill now it wasn’t worth the hassle to optimize video, images, news, local or books. But thanks to Google Universal Search this content will start showing up in the normal results. How to optimize these types of content for search is still unknown to many SEOs, so be one of the first to know and make it your specialty. In this article I will focus on image search.

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