This is just a quick look at basic SEO factors and how Digg screwed them up.

I am not going to get into complicated internal linking sturctures, or even discuss things like nofollow and robots.txt

This will be just SEO 101 that any webmaster should know.

1. Title Tag

Used on Digg

<title>Digg – Topsy Search &amp; Twitter Backups</title>

Most SEOs think that keyword prominence is important for both ranking and click-through rate thus this title would be much better as:-

<title>Topsy Search &amp; Twitter Backups @ Digg</title>

5/10 but no banana

2…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Inside The Google Voice Phone Booths

  Over the coming weeks, UK-style phone booths will pop-up around the US in airports and at universities, allowing anyone to make free calls to anywhere in the world. The promotion is designed to spread awareness of the Google Voice service…

I am a SEO geek -if there were 140 characters on Twitter that have meaning – I might want to be able to find it, or help other people to find it.

It is one of the main reasons I left Twitter. The SEO strategy in place at Twitter was holding my content hostage from normal indexation by Google, and Google have so far failed at indexing historical content.

Topsy Search

I welcome the news yesterday that Topsy have improved their search & Danny has more in-depth coverage…

Google’s recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let’s look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here’s a summary of what that results page looks like today:

Apple…

Attention all Bloggers! We know many of you use AdSense to monetize your blog, and we wanted to be sure you didn’t miss out on the invitation to Blogger’s 11th Birthday party. Using Meetup Everywhere, you can find a party in your area that will be filled with local bloggers like you. We hope you’ll take advantage of this great opportunity to swap stories about your readers, learn about some new sites, share tips about earning with AdSense, and get to know other passionate bloggers…

We recently launched the Google Certification Program and we’re glad that thousands of you all over the world have taken the new exams and joined the program. This certification program replaces the Google Advertising Professionals program. To provide you with time to make the transition, we’ve run both programs side by side during a six month grace period which ends in October. To retain certified status and continue using the badge within your marketing collateral, you’ll need to meet the requirements of the new program…

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.
If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist…

As Google methodically picks off the reports in the Adwords Report Center, moving reporting to an ad-hoc model in the main campaign UI, some interesting little tricks are popping up.

In the past, if you tried to keep track of how much traffic Google is actually sending you compared to how much is truly available, you ran a campaign report and checked the box for “Impression Share”…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing

  Yahoo just announced the transition from Yahoo Search powered results to Bing powered organic Yahoo search results is now complete. The search ads are still from Yahoo but the free, organic results are now powered by Bing in the U…

I recently took my own endorsement advice and bought access to Spyfu for a PPC campaign I’m managing, which is having CTR trouble on some keywords.

Besides my use for my own campaign, the Spyfu membership – especially Domain Ad History tool – was useful in critically appraising this post from Epiphany, which discusses how Lego are apparently not buying keywords they’re targeting for SEO, an apparently obvious mistake…

About a week ago, we hosted more than 130 Google Scholarship recipients in our Beijing office. These outstanding undergraduates and graduate students in computer science and software engineering from more than 20 universities across China were the recipients of the Google Excellence Scholarship and the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship—our first scholarships in China. The students participated in an awards ceremony and toured the Google office…

Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it’s fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft’s Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it’s a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that’s now unavailable.

While Yahoo! is maintaining their Site Explorer service, the use of advanced query parameters on searches using the link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results…

Alexa, a free and well-known website information tool, recently released a paid service.

For $199 per site Alexa will audit your site (up to 10,000 pages) and return a variety of different on-page reports relating to your SEO efforts.

It has a few off-page data points but it focuses mostly on your on-page optimization.

You can access Alexa’s Site Audit Report here:

http://www…

We recently added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom designed to help you set and improve your AdWords bids so you get the most for your money.In this course, we’ll show you how to calculate your value per click (the most you can pay for a click in order to still make a profit) and how to experiment with different cost-per-click (CPC) bids to find the most profitable bids for your business…

When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO. But in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Back to School Time: A Refresher Course on Writing Great Ads

  In this month’s column, we’ll take a quick refresher course on what goes into writing great ads and then we’ll evaluate a few recent ads to see if they make the grade…

I don’t know whether to call the last few days “Leo Gate” or “Social Media Gate” or “Buzz Gate” but one thing it certainly highlights is how different the Google Buzz Team is:-

1. Responding rapidly to situations

Not just with a social media celebrity such as Leo, but with all users with problems. Quite often a user familiar with Buzz will just @message one of the Google Buzz Team is something needs some kind of interaction with an engineer to resolve, but quite often the Google Buzz team members get involved without being prompted…

In an effort to expand the availability of sensitive category blocking (also known as category filtering) worldwide, we’re happy to announce that sensitive category blocking has now officially launched in Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Portuguese. As you might know, this feature is also available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Arabic with testing being done for Russian. With sensitive category blocking, you can prevent ads from up to 11 specific categories from appearing on your pages…

I’d like to invite you to the London Pro SEO seminar we are running on the 25th and 26th October.

With a 98% satisfaction rating and 95% of attendees recommending it to others, we were blown away by the positive feedback we received last year. Seasoned pros like Rob from Easynet Connect called it the "highlight of the year" and we have plenty more where that came from (see for example: "a must attend event for any SEO professional" –PricewaterhouseCoopers)…

Leo Laporte seems a little upset with Google Buzz & Twitter – actually social media in general – to be honest in many ways I agree with him – if conversation happens for lesser mortals like me it is because I have reached out and actively looked for conversation engaging with others.
At times it seems like Leo suggests that content might be somehow filtered out of other people’s feeds…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• De-Mystifying Cost Per Action and Its Impact On Search Marketing: Webcast next Tuesday

  Next Tuesday at Search Marketing Now, Jeremiah Andrick, Online Customer Acquisition Manager at Logitech will discuss Cost Per Acquisition (CPA — what it is, how to calculate it, and how it affects search marketing…

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.Over the last few weeks, we made it easier to find more kinds of information in Gmail as well as use multiple Gmail accounts at once. Google Docs and Google Sites both added new features, and we released improved tools to move existing data to Google Apps…

Because beating Yahoo and Bing into a necessary merger was just too easy, and because they’re sitting on [Dr Evil moment] MILLIONS (ok….. BILLIONS) of dollars, Google’s AdWords team decided to rest on their laurels and take a few years vacation.

Seen in a Google AdWords account I manage:

Gotta love bloopers .

This is part of my Friday photos and fun categories…

Everyday it seems like a new SEO tool or toolset is launching.

I’ve been quite impressed with the improvements and enhancements to Raven’s SEO Tools since they launched. There are so many features in Raven but I want to focus on some of the really unique ones which make Raven a must have for me.

Link Research Tools

Raven has 2 powerful, time-saving tools in their Link Research toolset…

• Or reduce the chance of malware submissions
• Or improve the signal to noise ratio to reduce overhead in manual checking
• Or cover some of the overhead in approving manual submissions

Then the way Google worded this might be of interest.

We designed security into the extensions system from day 1 but we’re always looking for more ways to protect users. So, today, we are introducing two significant changes in the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery: a developer signup fee and a domain verification system…

On Saturday, August 21st, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to our regularly scheduled system maintenance. While you won’t be able to log into your account during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual.

AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times. We’ll continue to update you here as we always have, but you may want to take note of our intended dates and times to help you plan for any scheduled downtimes further down the road…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Search Results Dominated By One Domain

  Is it a test? Is it a bug? Is it a permanent change to Google’s search results? No one knows, and Google hasn’t answered our questions about it yet. What’s “it”? As Malcolm Coles describes in a blog post today, Google is allowing a single domain — from a well-known brand — to dominate the […

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.Recently, a group of Google product managers challenged one another to run 100 miles over 30 days in the interest of encouraging summer fitness. I grew up in Huntsville, AL, where I always loved exercising and experiencing the great outdoors, so I took to the challenge immediately…

In a world where 140 characters can make or break a brand, where customers expect instant gratification 24/7, there’s little (if any) time for self-doubt or antiquated mindsets when it comes to marketing your company. You’ve got to study up, spread your wings and soar into action– armed with an iron-clad PR strategy advised and amplified by search and social media.

The Search, PR and the Social Butterfly session at #SESSF looks to deliver informative insight & tactical takeaways, featuring  Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group, Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed, Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld, Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Founder and Director of Search & Online Communications, Nordic eMarketing, and moderator Susan Bratton, Co-founder, Personal Life Media…

We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to be able to easily share tips for developing a successful AdWords strategy with others like you. To help you do that, we’ve created a new category in the AdWords Help Forum: the Small Business Corner. The Small Business Corner is designed to give those of you who are running your own AdWords accounts the opportunity to share best practices in discussions with your peers so that you can make sure your AdWords account is doing all it can to support your business goals…