Fun with sansoftonline.com “Sansoft Web Technologies Pvt. Ltd.”

Every once in a while I get a Skype connection from someone trying to sell Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services. My standard rebuttal is to show them how my business ranks higher than theirs on a search for “search engine optimization”. We do relatively well because years ago I posted a very basic article on Realistic SEO. Generally speaking, the site isn’t particularly authoritative on the subject, so the search has the link down in no mans land on page 22 or so (for a search done in Canada; if you’re outside the country your results will probably place it on page ten million or so). If you add “realistic” to the search then it comes up much higher, but still in desperation land (page 2 or 3). (more…)

On Content Marketing: It’s about Content, Stupid

gold_flickr_digitalmoneyworld_180x180For the past few years, the leading edge of online marketing has been “content marketing”. As advertising becomes increasingly ineffective at driving sales, and as most lead generation tends to come via search engines, marketers have figured out how to produce content that ranks well in search, which brings traffic, which converts to sales/revenue/whatever.

The problem is that as more and more people buy into this, there has been a subtle change. Now the industry is engaging in “marketing content” rather than “content marketing”. The result is a flood of low quality content. Ten thousand blogs, all rehashing the same information in slightly different ways. So much duplication and plagiarism that it’s impossible to tell who had an original idea, if anyone. (more…)

Bye Bye Blogger!

Okay so it’s been a long time since I’ve made a post here. There’s lots of reasons for that, but one of them has been that I just couldn’t tolerate Blogger anymore.

After looking at a variety of solutions, I finally stumbled upon Serendipity (www.s9y.org), and it looks like it’s going to do the job very well.

There’s still a few things to take care of, a few broken links and style tweaks to get into place, but it was easy to install, fairly easy to extract data from Blogger, and it generates decent HTML.

We’re back in business!

More on That Little Block on the Top of the Page

It’s always fun to try to decipher how an algorithm works. It’s going to be even more fun to write this post without biasing the results: the requirement is to be abstract without being obscure. It seems now that the main page is responding to content, but only that near the top of the page. All linked content pages are still responding as previously described.

This suggests that the top of a page is what’s important, which is an interesting observation, both for those seeking higher placement and for those viewing results. The old adage of "put what you want to say in the introduction" holds true more than ever. I suspect "the top of the page" is the text below the second level header.

If the results no longer trigger off topics related to biochemistry, we’ll know this is true. What’s missing is a way to discover when an indexing event has occurred.

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