Google recently made some changes to their Adsense program. This article from Kevin Lee does a nice job of summarizing the changes and potential strategies to consider. One point was made very clear:

Even if you have good organic SEO position, it isn’t enough. If you aren’t in PPC search results, chances are your competition is and will grab some of the valuable clicks you need for your business.

Fly low under the radar and create randomness on purpose. There! Now you have the secret of SEO.

Good article by Mike Grehan – What Keeps Search Engines Awake at Night?

If you attend a conference and Mike Grehan is on the panel – attend the session. He is always entertaining and hates PR more than I do, and I didn’t think that was possible. I still don’t get why people get so hung up on PR. There are SO many other things to look at when you view a site. Good quality links are hard to find. Period. You usually need to look beyond PR to find them, and if you only have links coming in from high PR sites – well, that’s not very random is it!

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely you will find these quality links in your inbox. There are hidden gems and good sites that request links. But, it’s a painful process. You open up link exchange after link exchange where you just want to scream. In fact, there are days when I place link exchange emails right there next to the spam that I delete once a day. In fact, I often find a few link exchange requests in the spam folder, right where they belong – aren’t computers smart?

I usually try to write back and politely say no thanks so they will remove our site from their list. I actually got a nice reply back today that asked me if I would share with them why so they can improve their site. Their links page was spidered in Google. That’s the first thing I check. However, the title said ‘New Page 1″. I’m not sure how much traffic my site is going to get from that, and I actually stopped right there. But I wanted to write back with more than that – so I checked to see who was linking to them in Yahoo. That’s usually the second thing I check if I make it that far. There were several sites that all sounded the same, their titles and descriptions were the same, and they were all linking to this site. A little duplicative content web ring going there. Enough said!

There’s a tool I use to quickly do this – it’s a FireFox extension and I have found it a great time saver. http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus/

We all can submit our articles, but what will assure us that they will be reprinted? Ezinearticles.com themselves have given us clues into succeeding …Read more

The growth of Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization into its own field has made me think, when are the universities going to pick up on this field and offer specialized degrees or IT tracks that specifically target SEO? It wasn’t that long ago when website design and development were only offered as online courses or in workshop type educational environments. Now degrees in web development and IT are offered everywhere. I’m taking additional IT courses at a state university in NY, and in the courses that I have taken, read about or experienced thus far… SEO has only been mentioned in passing. Recently, I spoke with the department head of the computer science department and while the professor does have an active interest in this field, thus far it seems to be independent interests and it may be a few years before it is introduced as a specific track or major. Perhaps the business departments and computer science departments will have to sit down and talk this one out. As for right now, we learn more about the field by attending conferences, learning from coworkers in the field, and just taking a deep breath & diving in.

Google’s Calling Card

Is Google planning to take over the world? You could be forgiven for thinking so, judging by the speed at which the US high-flyer is moving away from its core search-engine business into activities dominated by powerful rivals such as Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. Earlier this week Google launched an electronic Trojan horse. It is in the form of a “sidebar” (linking to its own services)….

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