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Tuesday, January 9, 2007 |
Neil Patel and Todd Malicoat know a thing or two about Digg. As active members
of the Digg community (in addition to their roles as leading SEO consultants)
they’re afforded a unique perspective on the market. Having recently
met with Neil and Todd at Search Engine Strategies, WebProNews had the chance
to sling some burning questions.
Play
Video |
| Editor's
Note: Social
media optimization and marketing has become the hot-button topic for 07, especially
when it comes to effective strategies to promote your site. The following video
contains some incredibly valuable information from two social media gurus - Neil
Patel and Todd Mailcoat. |
How can businesses take advantage of Digg; if at all? For those already in the
game, what's being done correctly? Incorrectly?
Like search engines, Digg is controlled by custom algorithms. Hailed as "user
driven social content," its front page is (theoretically) populated with the
most newsworthy of submissions; those having been "dugg up" by the community.
In its purest form, manipulation of this system would be easy; hence provisions
to control black hat hooligans and spammy shenanigans.
On your quest to reach the front page, Advantage
Consulting's CTO, Neil Patel suggests avoiding "crews" or "circles" for reciprocal
"digging."
"I think, right now, what a lot of people are doing wrong
is that they're joining Digg crews, or groups. They [the algorithms] can notice
patterns. If the same people are digging each others stories it's not going to
be as effective. [By doing this] instead of needing (let's say) 30 votes to get
to the front page, you might need 50…"
Stuntdubl.com guru, Todd Malicoat is quick
to point out apparent sophistication in Digg's algorithms… offering our key
to success.
"It's really fascinating to see how quickly the Digg algorithm is evolving
compared to search engines in the past. They've really caught on to a lot of the
things that took Google, Yahoo and MSN a long time to catch on to… Just within
the social
spheres… they've identified what's natural and caught on to that a lot quicker."
Natural, eh? Founded on ideals of democracy, Digg owes it to their users to remain
as natural (or seemingly natural) as possible. In short, just like SEO, it's all
about visibility rather than manipulation (on the white hat side, of course).
Patel's closing advice urges us to consider why one might possibly get to Digg's
front page. It's as simple as supply
and demand... yet, like many other aspects of social media, some get it terribly
wrong.
"They're taking their website
and services and trying to get them all on Digg… submitting everything… they're
trying to monetize on it instead of saying, ‘how can I benefit the Digg community?'"
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SEO
Is About To Change
 By
Jason Lee Miller
Highly regarded SEO expert and Enquiro head, Gord Hotchkiss, while chiming in
on SEO mythbusters, came to a harrowing conclusion: SEO as we know it is about
to change drastically. Change is inevitable, but SEOers are soon to be in a sink
or swim situation.
Hotchkiss begins with reaffirming that natural search engine optimization is not dead, as the doomsday mythspreaders are saying. SEO is not just alive, but is becoming more crucial as universal search results go by the wayside.
...the current paradigm of
one query, one page of 10 organic results holds. In fact, the entire SEO industry
is hanging on this paradigm. Right now, link baiting/building, optimization, competitive
intelligence and all the rest are aimed at securing a top spot in the organic
results.
But what happens when there no longer is a "top spot" because every result is personalized, based on your geographic origin, your past search history, your behavior or preferences you've shared with the engines[?] That's where search is going. . .
Geotargeting, personalized results are a "King Kong sized monkey wrench in the SEO works," says Hotchkiss, which, to mix a fantasy metaphor, means the SEO "quest stands on the edge of a knife."
About
the Author:
Jason Lee Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Do You Go Bold Or Do You Go Strong?
While writing compelling text is one of the most important aspects of search optimization,
how you format this content is pretty important as well. With that in mind, when
it comes to emphasizing something, do you use the bold tag or the strong tag?
Would you change the format if Google preferred one to another? Well, you might
want to get the find-and-replace function ready because Google's Matt Cutts has
some advice for you. Check it out below and let us know what you think.
Subscribe
to the WebProWorld Feed
|| Chris||
Bold
or Strong? Matt Cutts explains...
You might already have noticed, also here at WPW, that many SEOs come up with statements of Matt Cutts (Google Software Engineer) and/or of other Google employees, to back up their positions, presenting them as facts!
Today I watched several videos and I came up with the following:
On the video of Matt Cutts Qualities
of a good site dated on the 31st of July 2006 is mentioned that Google
favor more < bold >. One day later (1st of August 2006) on another video
of Matt Cutts Lightning
Round is mentioned that Google treats < bold > and < strong
> exactly the same way.
So how trustworthy or accurate is the information we retrieve from those videos, etc of the Google employees?
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