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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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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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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Every blackhat tactic can and will be detected one day. As long as you keep under the radar everything is fine, but you’re bound to get caught at least once in your career. And when you do get caught, you need to make sure only one of your projects will be affected. Search engines like Google are very good at linking different accounts to the same person, so a blackhat SEO needs multiple identities.

How do you hide connections between websites?

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What can you do when search results on your name are full of negative comments? Potential customers are increasingly checking for online references before they trust a website, company or person. Your own website is the most important factor, but directly after that people use search engines to see what other sites say about you. In this article I will give tips how you can cleanse your online reputation.

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Yes, it is possible to send data to Google Analytics without executing javascript! In this tutorial I will try to explain how this can be done and I will give some good examples. Server side analytics enables you to measure data like rss, image or pdf visits.

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Google Analytics is a fairly complete webanalytics program, but it has some flaws. As I showed in my article on Google Analytics tweaks, you can overcome many of these flaws with the use of tweaks. In this article I will show what you can do with custom filters and extra profiles on the same website.

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The behaviour of people using search engines and vertical search is different for every target audience. As a search engine marketer you should always know the target audience and how they search. In this article I will share some of my experience on the subject of “searcher behaviour”.
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