15th September – BOTW In Talks To Purchase DMOZ Directory From AOL (steaprok)
Jeremy Schoemaker broke the news that popular web directory, Best of the Web, is in discussions with AOL to buy DMOZ (the Open Directory Project). AOL acquired DMOZ during its takeover of Netscape, and the directory’s data (now Open Source) has been used to varying extents by most of the major search engines and portals including Google. DMOZ inclusion has been like Mecca to SEOs since the late 90′s, with the links seen as extremely authoritative and great trust builders. The directory has been overshadowed by outages, poor maintenance and reports of editorial bribery over recent years; which the site’s new owners have done little to address. Best of The Web already boasts a successful and growing directory of its own, with paid and regulated editorial staff. The purchase of DMOZ would give BOTW a substantial traffic boost and another valuable asset to offer to its existing client base.
Direct Link: Shoemoney

16th September – How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages (dailymoolah)
With the increasing usage of mobile internet devices (e.g. iPhone, Mobile Broadband) and broadband take-up in rural areas, local search is more important than ever. Dev Basu looks at how to maximise the exposure that your business receives through this medium, ensuring that your site or contact details are above those of your competitors.
Direct Link: Dev Basu

16th September – 5 Ways to Improve Tracking Phone Sales From PPC Traffic (boydy)
Phone numbers are still a vital requirement for many e-commerce and service-based websites, a fact that can drive your conversion optimiser crazy. Travel sites are notorious for converting many of their online leads over the phone, with complicated insurance packages and awkward travel dates forcing the customer to call. Some companies prefer or even require customers to pick up the phone, sometimes not giving the option of online completion. So how do you track the effectiveness of PPC campaigns when customers swap the mouse for the telephone? Ian Cowley looks at 5 solutions to help you match-up phone orders with search generated traffic.
Direct Link: Setfire Media

16th September – Information Architecture Is Crucial To Good SEO (UtahSEOpro)
Eric Enge gets back to basics with his discussion on Information Architecture and its important role in SEO. He looks at situations that can hamper crawling and makes an example of how Amazon uses its IA to help with the indexing of pages within its site.
Direct Link: Search Engine Land

18th September – Google Maps announces Quality Guidelines & Reinclusion Option (mbeijk)
Google Maps/Local started looking like the wild west days of the web, with simple little tricks helping marketers push their clients to the top of the results. Google is fighting back now though, with strict policies and penalties to kick businesses into line. One such policy tackles old-school style keyword stuffing of business names, which does actually make a significant impact on local listings. I’ve set-up a working example of this for [seo in london], setting our company name as “SEO” (don’t try this at home kids). If you think that you may be living outside the local rules currently, I’d advise taking a quick look at this to make sure Google doesn’t give you a beating.
Direct Link: blumenthals.com

18th September – Live Results Becoming More Relevant Than Google? (martinbowling)
Dave Snyder asks whether Live.com results are able to challenge Google on relevance, using a generic car query for his example. I personally haven’t run a human query on Live for many months, mostly because Google hasn’t really screw up when I’m looking for things. Mel Carson challenged me on my prejudices towards Live in Ireland many months ago, and my only reasoning for not using it was relevance and spam. I’ve joked during a few conference presentations that Google could use Live results as its spam filter, they really used to be that bad. Maybe it’s time to try Live for a week though?
Direct Link: Snydey Sense

2nd September – Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project (ciaran)
The biggest news last week was Google’s announcement and launch of it’s new browser “Chrome”. First impressions seem to be that web page load times are much faster than IE and Firefox, although lacking the add-on community which has made Mozilla’s browser so popular amongst the techie community. Chrome could potentially gain a substantial market share very rapidly if Google used their existing partnerships and influence. Google Pack for instance is heavily promoted across their AdWords network with infinite spend budgets, so I’m sure we’ll see similar marketing take place for Chrome soon (and possibly see Chrome replace Firefox in the Pack). Google is a major contributor to the Mozilla Foundation who develop the world’s 2nd most popular web browser, which will most likely continue in order to benefit from Firefox’s existing market share. Mozilla recently agreed to extend their partnership which sees Google as the default search engine and homepage until 2011, although the future is uncertain with Yahoo or (less likely) Microsoft possibly challenging Google for this source of searchers when the agreement comes up for renewal again. Chrome ensures that Google retains full control and gives them new avenues to track and analyse user behaviour.
Direct Link: Blogoscoped

2nd September – How To Build Links To Linkbaits That Don’t Go Viral (jasongreen)
This post by Andy Boyd looks at what to do when your linkbait isn’t the instant success that you thought it would be, including how to rescue campaigns before they die and what you can do even after they’ve been buried in the graveyard of Digg.
Direct Link: Set Fire Media

2nd September – Google cedes Belgium to Germany (ciaran)
In a humorous twist to Google’s Chrome browser launch, The Register spotted that one of their tutorials features a “revised” map of Europe. For a company that prides itself on being international and globally aware, it’s worrying that they are unable to recognise the sovereignty of countries. Surely a company of Google’s size has hundreds of compliance officers and legal specialists to spot issues such as a cartoonist’s inability to draw a map?
Direct Link: The Register

2nd September – The Last Website Checklist You’ll Ever Need (TCSM)
In a very impressive SEO checklist, Stoney deGeyter outlines all the things to tick off when launching a new site or auditing an existing website. There is still a lot of debate regarding some of the points recommended, although it still forms a excellent resource for those starting out in SEO or managing their own commerce site.
Direct Link: Search Engine Guide

3rd September – Searching With Google Chrome & Omnibox (UtahSEOpro)
Danny Sullivan looks at the Omnibox search functionality on Google’s new chrome browser, showing how it may change user behaviour. With the address bar and search box combined, Chrome allows you to perform site specific searches by entering a domain following by the search query. Will a more mainstream user base actually ever use this though?
Direct Link: Search Engine Land

3rd September – Did Twitter Lay Down for Google? (DavidWallace)
Rae Hoffman questions the reasons behind Twitter’s decision to nofollow profile links after a tip-off about a loophole found by Dave Naylor. The Twitter founders immediately nofollowed all outbound links after Google Engineer, Matt Cutts, told them of Dave’s discovery. This was most probably done hastily in fear of Google’s wrath, although Rae asks why this should be done in the first place – as Twitter already kills spammy accounts and users are the ones adding valuable content and promoting both Twitter and their profiles.
Direct Link: Rae Hoffman

4th September – Online Reputation Management Via SMO (rickgalan)
David Snyder publishes his well-received presentation from SES San Jose, where he talks about reputation management using Social Media. This can be used to repair brand search results which may not be favourable, by pushing the negative results onto the 2nd or 3rd page.
Direct Link: Snydey Sense

26th August – Why SEO copywriting is so damn important (Paige119)
Heather Lloyd-Martin gives a gentle reminder of why web copy is still so important, and we’re not talking about the keywords. No matter how much traffic you send to a website, most sites only earn money if the visitor converts in some form – and copy that sucks does not help. I admit to using rather poor, one cent per word, copy on many of my affiliate sites, although then go back and improve it once the pages start to rank. On a brand site, there’s no excuse for bad copy and it’s well worth multi-variate testing alternative copy via a PPC campaign to see what converts best.
Direct Link: SEO Copywriting

26th August – How to Get Google to Index Your Site Deeper (SiteMost)
Partial indexing of a site is a common occurrence for mammoth websites, especially when they have poorly constructed site architecture. Ann Smarty shows you how to identify whether your site is getting fully indexed and ways to help improve this.
Direct Link: Search Engine Journal

26th August – How Google Suggest Changes SEO (mdjensen)
It’s quite possible that search engine users may change the way that they search, after news that Google Suggest will be implemented on the Google homepage. Suggest is already used by millions of people via toolbars and the Firefox search box, although will soon be opened up to everyone. Michael D Jensen thinks that this will alter searcher behaviour, perhaps reducing the number of long tail searches, as users will more likely select one of the suggestions given by Google in the drop-down list. It also makes it even more important for your sites to rank for the terms suggested when typing in a core term. This is not always possible however, with 3 out of 10 suggestions being brand names on a search like [poker].
Direct Link: Solo SEO

26th August – Social Media Marketing ROI- Metrics and Analysis (DavidWallace)
One of the things that SEO and Social Media Marketing share is a difficulty in answering the inevitable client question “What will be the ROI?”. When Muhammad Saleem heard a recent conference panel draw a blank on this question, he wanted to outline how “value” at least could be determined. His post outlines metrics that can be used to prove and show this value, as an important part of the marketing mix.
Direct Link: Search Engine Land

27th August – AJAX and Non-JavaScript Experiences for SEO friendly websites (planetc1)
AJAX can result in SEOs literally pulling their hair out, with it often being implemented so badly that page content consists of nothing more than a few words in the navigation bar. This does not mean that all AJAX is bad though, and Tony Adam shows the difference between good implementation and the bad. If PayPal can get it right, I’m sure that the rest of us can!
Direct Link: Tony Adam

27th August – Google Suggest(s), A New Reputation Management Nightmare (tonyadam)
Google Suggest has certainly caused a stir in the community, although not just for the way that it could change searcher behaviour. Martin Bowling shows how search suggestions could become a reputation management nightmare, with the most outlandish and controversial gossip being suggested under the names of well known figures. Google could get into hot waters with some of the suggestions being associated with names, possibly even effecting the way that someone may vote. What would you think if Google suggested that Obama was an “antichrist” or recommended that you read about John Edwards’ “Love Child”?
Direct Link: Martin Bowling

28th August – Get More Calls on Yahoo! Local (steveespinosa)
Lastly, Stephen Espinosa gives some advice on how to increase your Yahoo! Local call rate by 1.8 times by making some simple changes. A short but sweet post that may be handy to those of you experimenting with Local.
Direct Link: Stephen Espinosa