Imagine you are looking for fresh information, and are one of the hundreds of students searching for new scholarships each year. The top result Google shows you is a CNN news article for a $250 white's only scholarship from 2004. It was a stunt to shock people and send a message, and as a side effect anyone searching for new scholarships on Google gets to see that message.
Imagine if virtually everything you chose to trust eventually betrayed you. You try to create shifting rules and push your worldview to try to make it manageable, but even in your attempts to do so people call out the self serving nature of your suggestions. Every day thousands of people share free information about how to take advantage of you, and in return you wade through garbage and do everything you can to suppress it, but work for a company with policies that encourage information pollution.
When a page or section is new and you are competing against older sites that have built authority for nearly a decade one of the easiest ways to gain traction is to pick a specific keyword phrase that is not that competitive and go after trying to rank for it.
Often I find myself making a page title relevant for a wide basket of related keywords, then when I check the rankings the page comes in at #12 or #16. My mom's blog currently ranks at #13 in Google for weight loss calculators and #4 for free weight loss calculators using the page title Free Diet, Calorie, & Weight Loss Calculators. The page also ranks #30 for diet calculators and is deep for calorie calculators.
The best thing to do here is to focus the title on the phrase closest to ranking at the top, and try to get it a few more links. If the page starts picking up organic traction after ranking and eventually grows into a self reinforcing authority status then I could help it get more traffic by including those related phrases that don't make much sense to highlight in the page title right now.
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If a site has 100 units of link equity and offers 10 sitewide categories then each category gets 10% of the link equity. If that same site limits its number of sitewide categories to 5 then each category gets 20%. By being a webmaster who tracks results one of your biggest advantages you have over webmaster who do not track results is you can limit your navigational selection to suit your financial goals.
I have been noticing with Google recently that if you search for something like seobook video that Google pulls in results for SEO Book video as well. They may have been doing this for a while, but if so it seems like it recently got more aggressive. If you are banking on targeting an unpopular version of a keyword you may actually end up having to compete with some of the most authoritative pages ranking for the alternate more authoritative version.
This feature, spell correction, and toolbar search suggestions eat away at some of the easiest portions of the organic SEO arbitrage market by helping search engines consolidate language usage patterns as best they can.
Sometimes when a Google engineer decides he is pissed off at a site he or she may penalize the site in a way that the company does not rank in the top 30 results for any search query, including branded navigational queries. Imagine if you search for SeoBook and couldn't find this site? How is that a good user experience for searchers using Google?
Many authoritative tool pages have gobs of link equity, but rank for few keywords beyond their official name because they offer little background information. Providing no background information not only wastes ranking opportunities, but also makes it hard for some people to use the tool.
Late on Friday afternoon is a brilliant time for Google to announce a major change with their news service if they do not want people to talk about much. With their AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press syndication deals, Google claims they are improving duplicate detection, increasing listing variety, and as a net result they are sending MORE traffic to the people they signed syndication deals with.
When you have scarcity you have price control. But the web makes most forms of scarcity a farce. That is why so many marketers place arbitrary limits on their offerings (like sales price ends today or we are only letting in x more customers), to make it seem as though their information is bound by some limits. Just about every idea worth selling is accessible for free if you spend enough time to sort through it all, and just about everything ends up bootlegged on eBay and Limewire.
If everything is available for free then how can we sell anything?
If you are struggling to come up with marketing ideas look at what has already worked. Start with a random number, say 5 and work your way up to 120, combining the number with words like
If you are in the legal field you can substitute the generic words like tips with laws or criminals. If you are in the tech field you can substitute generic words like tips with hacks or nerds.
After adding those Google Gadgets to the tool section of the site I appreciated how unorganized it was, so I re-organized it, created categories, and linked out to many useful marketing tools hosted elsewhere. Hopefully you find it more useful and more helpful now.
A while back I created a Google Gadget for keyword research and competitive analysis. I also just created a Google Gadget for link analysis.
With a click of a mouse you can add either of these to you iGoogle homepage. In addition, you can install them into any webpage by inserting a small JavaScript code. Visit the SEO Book Google Gadgets page to check them out. Please comment with any feedback you have on improving these.
I also am inserting them in this post so you can see what they look like in a web page