A great analogy for SEO

SEO is like gardening. You plant the seeds and hope that you achieve a good harvest within a few months. If the conditions are just right, planting the seeds will bring you results without much trouble, just a little watering. If conditions are not right, you need to take extra steps such as adding extra fertilizer. If all your ducks, or seeds, are in a row you will get a great harvest.

Sometimes you expect a feast, but end up with just a few snacks. If you plant your seeds, then ignore the garden, the chances of getting a good harvest are reduced drastically, but it can still grow if you are lucky. If your soil is right and the weather cooperates, growing a great garden can sometimes be relatively easy.

Gardening and SEO are incredibly similar when you think about it. Rankings need links, just as a garden needs water. Sometimes people link to you on their own, sometimes they don’t, and you have to go out and get them – just as sometimes it will rain, other times you have to get the hose, but more times than not, you really need the hose. Niche gardening, lets say cacti, as with niche SEO, say ‘purple kangaroo shoes’, sometimes wont require much water, or links, to grow nicely, but other factors such as soil conditions need to be there, and there is always the factor of time.

Gardening takes time, just as SEO does. Once the seeds are planted you need to wait for nature to do its thing, just as you need to wait for Google. Even the best gardeners can sometimes have failed crops if there is some kind of unknown hidden poison in the soil or if the weather doesn’t cooperate – this translates to well hidden spam or search engine road blocks, or perhaps a major algorithm update. Given time however to unearth and correct any hidden problems, the garden will grow – it just may take some extra water, fertilizer, and attention.

Gardening and SEO are both things that can bring you success, but if you don’t follow the instructions and common sense, and tend to your crop, the chances of that success will diminish.

Source: http://www.stepforth.com/blog/a-great-analogy-for-seo.php

YaBING! Is Official – Microsoft and Yahoo Sign 10 Year Deal

This morning Yahoo gave up the ghost on search and signed a 10 year deal adopting Microsoft’s Bing search platform as its primary search technology. In the agreement, Microsoft will be the leading search provider for all of Yahoo’s search properties (over 100 sites) while Yahoo focuses on surviving… err I meant, “allowing Yahoo to focus on what we do best, and that is to be the center of peoples’ lives online” (Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz).

The following is Carol Bartz’s speech (note: this link and image on this page opens a windows media file) with several key sections bolded for your convenience:

Click for Windows Media Video - This picture is a screenshot of Yahoo! CEO, Carol Bartz's videoIt’s a great day at Yahoo; we are excited about our search agreement with Microsoft. We have reached an agreement that I believe will benefit our users, our advertisers, as well as Yahoo and our shareholders.

Yahoo is where millions go online every day to see what’s happening with the people and things that matter to them most. In fact, 1 out of 2 Internet users come to our more than 100 leading sites around the world every day. We know that for every one of those users, Internet search is an important part of their experience.

Yahoo will continue to feature search throughout our properties, and Microsoft will power the technology behind that search. Yahoo will be the exclusive world-wide relationship salesforce for both company’s premium search advertisers.

Why would we do this?

This deal enables us to keep a healthy revenue stream and invest in areas critical to our future, while Microsoft invests in search technology. Yahoo is excited about vesting more in our sites worldwide, our mobile experiences, and in display advertising for our advertising partners.

This agreement provides both Yahoo and Microsoft the scale necessary to compete against Google; which dominates more than 70% of all search.

The scale comes with a couple of unique benefits and advantages:

For our users: we will provide better and more relevant search results. Yahoo is commited to providing the best user experiences. Whether through our own products and technologies or working through our other innovators like Microsoft.

For advertisers the deal will offer a viable, competitive alternative in the marketplace. This gives them greater ease of use and cost savings working with a single platform and a single salesteam.

For publishers: our combined search platform will help them reach more users.

The real advantage is allowing Yahoo to focus on what we do best, and that is to be the center of peoples’ lives online. We do that with our home page, mail, finance, sports, news, entertainment, and many other products around the world. We do that with mobile experiences that are second to none. We do that with compelling advertiser products in both search and display. This deal puts our focus front and center.

I am excited about the future we are going to create.

I will try to translate: “Yahoo raised the white flag, we want to give up on search so we can make money and I knew that signing a deal with the cheesy salesman, I mean Steve, would keep Yahoo!’s shareholders from lynching me… maybe. Oh and everyone… please consider making us the center of your lives online! Really, Facebook and Google don’t hold a candle to us!”

Yahoo and Bing join forcesHere is another interesting tidbit about the negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo. As you might imagine, you can bet that Ballmer felt like a seriously fat cat when this offer was brought to the table (no matter who tabled it). Well, here is an excerpt of an interview with Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer today that was published a couple of hours ago on the Seattle Times.

Q: What were priorities for each of you in these negotiations? What were the things your team walked in with knowing you wanted or were not going to give up on?

Bartz: He wanted to make sure he beat me up.

Ballmer: I’ll defer on that one. I’m not sure I feel like the beater, maybe the beatee.

Ballmer: It needed to be a real basis to how we operationalize the thing. This is where I say Carol pushed harder than I would have myself understood. They actually have search partnerships. They’ve done in Japan. They have substantive ones in this ilk, relationships they brought to negotiation. Getting the fundamental deal, that happened faster since then.

Bartz: Listen, these things only work if both sides feel like they’ve won. And “won” means “fair.” What I really like about watching this unfold is, sure, it doesn’t mean there weren’t spirited discussions about it, but everybody is still smiling and joking, starting with Steve and I.

If you compare those poorly worded answers to the other clean and precise answers in the interview you may notice what I did – this question brought up a little heat that still hadn’t abated. Sure, this is hardly a surprise since Yahoo was obviously the underdog in any negotiations. That said, it is pretty interesting to see what I interpret as tension in something as impersonal as a written interview; especially from such weathered professionals as Ballmer and Bartz. Ahh, if I could only have been a fly on a wall in that negotiation!

To sum things up, I think this is a great mating because it finally creates a vacuum that will, hopefully, be filled by another competitor in the days to come. In addition, and most importantly, this “partnership” has the potential of scraping away at Google’s search share – which is never a bad thing.

by Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Web Marketing Inc.

Source : http://www.stepforth.com/blog/yabing-is-official-microsoft-and-yahoo-sign-10-year-deal.php

Link-Assistant.com Releases A Major Update of its Rankings Monitoring Tool Rank Tracker

Lots of businesses rely on high positions in search engines like Google or Yahoo! for visitors and sales. Independent of the budget and business size, techniques known as search engine optimization let companies achieve top search engine rankings for their websites for keywords that bring most interested and willing-to-pay visitors.

Knowing how high a website ranks over time for certain keywords lets quickly adjust search engine optimization strategy and facilitate websites’ moving towards higher positions.

Ideally website promoters check rankings daily and this takes a few hours to find where a website ranks for their keyword list.

Rank Tracker SEO software makes this process easy, fast and accurate. And with the fresh update, rank checking becomes totally hands free: a user selects a list of keywords once and then only needs to come back to see results from time to time. This saves mass of time and manpower.

Rank Tracker works for over 500 search engines and is currently used worldwide for websites in any language.

What is new in Rank Tracker?
Now the user is totally free from sitting in front of the computer screen. Rank Tracker lets schedule rank checking and reporting tasks, so the presence of the user is unnecessary.

Rankings will be checked for any chosen websites, on chosen dates and at chosen time. Results can be compiled into a report and saved locally, emailed or uploaded to a website via FTP.

What makes Rank Tracker stand out among other SEO software?

Security: Rank Tracker belongs to the only family of SEO software that uses Proxy Rotation mechanism, totally preventing search engine “blocking” problems, usually associated with SEO software.

Quick search engine updates: this software is closely tied to search engine algorithms. Whenever algos change, Rank Tracker needs adjustment to work properly. In Rank Tracker the algo adjustment time is minimal for the industry: only 4 – 10 hours.

No limits on keywords or search depth: to save resources, SEO tools normally limit the number of keywords to check and the depth of search in Google results. Rank Tracker uses unique mechanisms to ensure unlimited search.

Cross-platform: Rank Tracker works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

What else Rank Tracker does?
Besides ranking checks, Rank Tracker helps site owners detect the words that will bring most targeted visitors to their websites and that have the biggest potential.

Along with the software Link-Assistant.Com provides newsletters, SEO handbook and other SEO tutorials plus free online support to help website promoters get up-to-speed.

For additional information and screenshots please visit the Press Room on the Link-Assistant.Com company website.

De facto standard for SEO - About the company
Rank Tracker is provided by Link-Assistant.Com which develops website optimization and promotion solutions for businesses and individual site owners. Link-Assistant.Com’s SEO software has become de facto the standard for search engine optimization worldwide.

Agency / Source: Link-Assistant.Com