Welcome to SageRock.com Web Marketing Blog

Over the last several months we have been doing some focused optimization on our site. We haven’t done a ton of it, mostly because we are busy working with paying customers. But we have had a pretty solid plan.

We chose to target one specific phrase. We decided that we wanted to target the phrase: web marketing
So, if we had an option, instead of saying:

• search engine optimization
• SEO
• internet marketing
• Or any of the myriad of other variety of phrases, we always would say: Web Marketing.

  For the last several months, once a month, I would go out and hand check Google, Yahoo and MSN for that single phrase.

  These have been my findings so far:

  7/28/05 - Our blog is currently #88 on Yahoo

  8/19/05 - about 470 on Google
  51 on Yahoo
  do not see us on MSN

  9/29/05
  74 on Yahoo
  6 on MSN

  10/26/05
  92 on Yahoo
  do not see us on MSN

  11/23/05
  79 on Yahoo

  Today was the day I had scheduled to check. And what to my wondering eyes did appear but:

  12/29/05
  13 on Yahoo
  6 on MSN

  You can see the current results for that phrase on MSN and Yahoo here:

  web marketing - SBC Yahoo! Search Results

  MSN Search: web marketing

  This is the first time that we were able to simultaneously get both MSN and Yahoo in the top 20. That’s pretty exciting.

  I wouldn’t be surprised to check next month and find that both the listings drop off. But I’m pleased to see that we seem to be holding traction for that phrase.

  Interestingly, the big optimization move we did this month was actually “de-linking”. We had sitewide links on two other informational sites that rank well for their targeted key phrases. We decided to try taking those down because Jagger effected us pretty negatively (it still is, actually). It’s possible that this might have had a positive effect over at Yahoo and MSN.

  Jagger was interesting because we didn’t see a single client’s web site damaged in that update. But ours got hurt. We got buried back on page 2 and 3 where we were normally on page 1. I attribute this to the fact that we experiment with some more aggressive linking with our site than we suggest for clients. We often use our site for testing that goes beyond anything we would typically recommend. I think we got penalized for it.

  I don’t know exactly how long to wait between changes to see what linking changes have an effect. When I do a link check in Google, the results still show links that have been removed. I know that the results that appear in the link results are not what Google uses for its actual linking parameters. But I wonder if it still thinks the sitewide links exist on these sites.

  In Yahoo Site Explorer, the links are getting removed. Although I still see some of them.

  My next thought is that I’m considering wrapping all external links from my site in a no-follow attribute. I honestly don’t sell any links on my site. But, as an example, our blog currently links to resources that I find interesting. Right now it’s on every page of the blog on the left side. I could see that as looking suspicious.

  I also have a domain that does a 302 redirect to a subsection of our site. That is still sitewide on another site. I think that’s my first order of business. I’ll get that removed and see if it does anything.

  While I hate the fact that I’m losing traffic from Google (it’s on par with my Yahoo traffic and normally Google is 5 to 10 times the traffic I get from Yahoo), this is a good opportunity to really learn more about the post-Jagger algorithm.

  I’ll keep you posted as I continue experimenting with different ideas.

  But for now, I just feel really grateful for our Yahoo and MSN positions. Happy New Year to us!

I hopped over to Excite a few minutes ago to see if the site still existed (they do!) and this little bit of information caught my eye.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc. is in exclusive talks to pay $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in Time Warner Inc.’s online unit AOL, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.

“Those talks include, among other things, a $1 billion investment for a 5 percent stake in AOL,” said the source.

This confirmed an earlier report on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site.

What’s this mean for the future of search? Chances are pretty good AOL won’t partner with any other search provider and AdWords will still reign supreme. If I were Ingenio (AOL’s pay-per-call provider) I’d either be really excited or really scared. When/If Google launches a pay-per-call service, Ingenio could be out. On the other hand, Google might just swoop in and buy the pay-per-call provider.

Google would pay $1 bln for a 5 pct AOL stake: source Reuters

As a web marketer, this was a catchy title. Check out this sarcastic, pithy article. It’s rare that web marketing articles are a pleasure to read, so do yourself a favor and check this one out.

You don’t need to be a lawyer to catch the drift of the message.
Duo Consulting Blog: Top Ten Reasons Blogs are a Bad Idea for Law Firms

I have a lot of respect for Jim’s understanding of links. Here he gives a very realistic picture of what linking will be from here and into the future.

My own goals are to be “smarter” about it by working to get links that look as natural as possible from non SEO??d sites.

I think that’s pretty realistic.

For my money, I’m going to stop buying links for a while. I’m going to force clients to come up with something so creative and innovative, that when we approach someone for a link, they will want to give it to us. That’s pretty altruistic, I know. But I’m tired of people getting links for nothing other than cash. Making people earn their links with something other than cash is very appealing to me.

Getting people to link to you because your site is great I think has about a 51% chance of success… slightly better than even money. But quite frankly I don’t care. I’m interested in making my clients’ sites better. Telling them that they have to be innovative and creative in order to get links is just better for everybody.
Jim Boykin - Buying links under the radar

I wanted to show you this article to free online PDF conversion tools. I didn’t know they existed. So I wanted to share my new knowledge with you:
Writely Adds New Convert to PDF Feature and Another Free PDF Conversion Tool Called DocMorph: “More in the article: Web word processor adds PDF conversion.”

And I was able to tell them why: they had no spam penalties, but Google is getting better at handling paid links, and the paid links that might have helped them last year just weren?t doing them any good now.

As I was standing at our booth at Search Engine Strategies, I was talking with Eric from Performics: Performance - Based Marketing Solutions, that had a booth right next to us. Incidentally, as an aside, Eric grew up in Streetsboro Ohio, moved to Columbus and eventually found his way to Chicago. Northeast Ohio continually impresses me with the quality of people it puts out.

Anyway, Eric and I were discussing linking. He wanted to know what my linking strategy was these days. I told him that my 2006 strategy is significantly different that my strategies up until now. Linking just got more expensive.

Google is getting really efficient at finding bought links. So, it’s simply not a good strategy any more. So what’s a linker to do? We’ve got to get more creative. We need more creative content that will get sites to link to us naturally. I still feel that a company needs to solicit links. But a site should only link to you because they feel you warrant it.

That all seems obvious. But up until now, the solution for companies of all sizes was simply to throw money at the problem. It won’t fly any more. Now we are going to have to do something much harder. We’re going to have to be creative. Creative to the point that our sites actually warrant getting links.

Thank god.

That’s much more interesting for me.

Unfortunately, not everyone is a creative genious. There is so much content out there on so many topics that it’s pretty hard to get traction simply by being an expert. You need to be an expert with a twist. If you can’t come up with that twist on your own, you are going to have to pay someone like me to come up with it for you. “Twists” never come cheap.

This is doable for medium and large companies. They can hire the creative talent. But small companies will have little choice other than to come up with the ideas on their own. It is another chink in the armor of the Internet being an even playing field for everyone.

Matt Cutts: ?Tell me about your backlinks?

I often get asked by people what the demographics of each engine are. According to this article, us Google users are rich and savvy. That’s a good club to which belong.

U.S. residents who prefer Google Inc.’s search engine tend to be richer and have more Internet experience than those who primarily use competing search services from Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., a new study has found.

Study: Google users wealthier, more Net savvy | InfoWorld | News | 2005-12-06 | By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service