Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2009-10-23

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October 23, 2009 Welcome to the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. You know that Google's motto is "Don't be evil." How well are they living up to that motto? eWeek highlights 11 ways the search engine giant breaks that promise. It makes for thought-provoking reading, especially in an industry where so many of us live and die by our rankings. This week's articles get right down to business, with useful information to help your online business succeed. You probably know there are two kinds of sitemaps; did you know that using an automatic XML sitemap generator for the one you show Google's spiders may do more harm than good? Wednesday's article shows you how to build a customized one for your site that will give you better control over what gets included and excluded. Trying to collect more links? Tuesday's item shows you how to build linkable pieces and titles. Need some help doing the math for your business? Monday's must-read piece shows you how to do the return-on-investment calculation, and provides some tips for improving your ROI. A number of factors go into good SEO, but the big ones are content and links. Which is more important? One member of our forums makes the provocative statement that content without links is dead. As you can imagine, this led to a lively discussion – which you can join by stopping by this week's thread. After you've shared your opinion there, why not share your knowledge on Tutorialized? You know it as the place you can find more than 100 SEO-related tutorials (to say nothing of the other topics we cover), but did you know that you can also upload your own tutorials for the whole world to see? It's easy, it's free, and if you're looking to get the word out about your expertise, it's certainly worth trying. Our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, talks about a "dirty little secret" of sorts: buying links. Far more people actually do it than will admit to it. But Google keeps getting better at catching – and devaluing – paid links. Should you still try it? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES Create a Customized Google XML Sitemap Building Linkable Pieces and Titles Return on Investment Calculation for Online Businesses SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail Developer Search NEW! Download a free trial of IBM WebSphere Message Broker V6.1 Download a free trial version of WebSphere Message Broker V6.1, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) built for universal connectivity and transformation in heterogeneous IT environments. WebSphere Message Broker distributes information and data generated by business events in real time to people, applications, and devices throughout your extended enterprise and beyond. Learn more. Hello World: WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Manage, govern, and share services across your organization by using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Follow the hands-on exercises to learn how to navigate the Web interface to publish, find, reuse, and update services. Learn more.

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It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: The first ever SEO Forum, featuring Juan Valdezburg, DevShed Hulk, and Superman. Aqua Man seen crying in the corner. Watch the video!

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Create a Customized Google XML Sitemap by Codex-M 2009-10-21 An XML sitemap is a type of sitemap Google suggests that you submit to them through Google Webmaster tools. This is not the kind of web sitemap you usually see when you are visiting a website. Rather, it is the kind of sitemap that helps Google crawl your site better. This article will show you how to generate one. Note that this kind of sitemap is supposed to NOT be accessible by visitors. For example, you should not be putting a link to this XML sitemap where visitors can access it. This XML sitemap is meant for search engine bots only, like Googlebot. If you are still confused and a newbie when it comes to sitemaps, see the obvious difference below. Read Create a Customized Google XML Sitemap

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Building Linkable Pieces and Titles by Katie Gatto 2009-10-20 One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to get other blogs to link to your content. Getting any site to do this will increase your site's traffic. Getting a high traffic site to link to your content can be one of the major ways to draw a new, and hopefully steady, readership to your site. The question on the mind of every blogger is, how do I get sites interested in linking to my content? Some people have set up networks where you can trade or even buy content links. These sites rarely work as well as they claim. This is primarily because sites with high traffic and loyal readers do not need to trade or sell their links. They can make their money with advertisers. Great sites link to content because it will be of use to their readers and offers something relevant. In this piece we are going to look at some of the ways that you can create that type of highly linkable content, and hopefully put your site on the road to success. Read Building Linkable Pieces and Titles

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Return on Investment Calculation for Online Businesses by Codex-M 2009-10-19 "Return on Investment" (also called "ROI" or "Rate of Return") is one of the most important measurements for online business success. A high return on investment means that there is substantially greater income to cover the operating cost of the website. Or in other words, it simply means that the business is profitable. Why is it important to measure ROI? If you need a business to last for a lifetime, it should sufficiently cover all of the operating expenses of the website. If the entrepreneur fails to meet this requirement, she/he will be forced to close down or sell the website to another owner. In this article, I will illustrate possible ways to increase the return on investment in a website by proper investment planning. This involves selection of the proper web hosting company, using web development agencies, and/or even low cost tips on website marketing. Be warned that I am not recommending any particular web hosting or web development companies in this tutorial; it is your job to look for the right one that meets your requirements as stated in your business plan, and that includes % ROI calculation. Read Return on Investment Calculation for Online Businesses

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! Tips for SEO Friendly Websites Form follows function. Before designing a website there are quite a few important factors to consider. Read the tutorial. What Does Seo Stand For? What does seo stand for? Simply put SEO stands for search engine optimization. Read the tutorial. Submit Your Sitemap to Google Techniques you can use to submit your sitemap to Google. An imperative step to get good rank! Read the tutorial. 30 SEO Tips for Web Designers & Small Business Owners 30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. How to Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Crowd Quick tips to improve your blog from every aspects! Read the tutorial.

How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.

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Every so often our forum members propose and discuss some interesting questions pertaining to some general principles of SEO. This week's thread highlights one of those discussions involving the relationship of links to content. Be sure to stop by the thread and add your two cents! Noj Content without links is dead. For the non-theological, a wordplay from "faith without works is dead" but ......... Not an anti-content statement, but an understanding that content alone will not make a website rank. We have some very eminent members on this site who quite rightly emphasis the importance of content. However this content (whatever the quality) is only useful if people see it, thus the requirements of links. The advice to tell somebody to focus on good content when they have no, poor quality or very few links pointing to their site is just bad advice. Any SEO strategy needs to employ both on and off page factors, link baiting is only a reasonable off page strategy when a certain critical mass of traffic has been reached, before that point it is an exercise in futility. Discuss.............. NMmarketing I think one of the reasons for focusing the importance of content is because, for most website owners, they are more familiar with their own business/expertise than with SEO link building. It would be an easier start for them to focus on creating good content. If you are selling something you know better than anyone else, then you are in the best position to produce quality content for others to link to. That's where they can add value, and added value creates something. EGOL Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In the case of getting the highest quality links without paying for them - you must FIRST have great content. Once you have great content it is a lot easier than most people believe to get links. Sometimes, exceptional content can have hundreds of links or more within 24 hours just by tossing it in to an appropriate social media site... it's like tossing gasoline on a fire - if you have the right content. Other times, exceptional content requires old-fashioned link requests to get links... getting links isn't easy all of the time. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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Think Twice Before Buying Links If you spend any time in the SEO Chat forums, or among white hat SEOS, then you know that buying links for gaining a good position in the SERPs is frowned upon. If Google spots it, your site's ranking will actually drop as the search engine discovers – and deprecates – your purchased links. Still, the practice of buying links persists in certain quarters. If you're thinking about doing it to boost your rankings, a recent thread on our forums will probably pull you up short. One poster shared an entry from Matt Cutts' blog. Cutts, as you know, is the go-to man at Google when it comes to eradicating search engine spam. He often talks about the kinds of things they catch. In this particular entry, he's in a room full of webmasters who give them their URLs for him to analyze. He has full access to his spam detecting tools. The webmasters want to know why they're not doing so well. Guess what? In most cases, in just a couple of minutes, he could tell whether a site was overdoing reciprocal links or trying to buy links. He was even able to tell one site that the reason they weren't doing as well this year as last year is not because of a spam penalty, but because Google is getting better at handling paid links – so they're just not getting the same boost from them that they used to. The kicker? He spotted that a totally legitimate company, with an overall good site and lots of good, natural links, had been trying to buy backlinks – and that's why they weren't doing as well as perhaps they deserved to be. Cutts was even able to determine from where these companies bought their backlinks! Still not convinced? The original post on the thread this post came from linked to a Search Engine Journal article on buying text links. The article listed 101 techniques to use. It's a good read; obviously, there's not enough room to list them all here. But the author makes his point at the end: "...you can take virtually every organic link building technique and achieve the same thing with money. You can earn your linkbait or you can buy them or both...Practically speaking, the net result is identical." As I see it, there are two ways to interpret this. You can buy links, as long as they look like they have been built naturally. Or – if the net result is identical, why pay for links? Invest your time and effort in building good content and an attractive site structure, and earn your links. You may well save money in the long run. Read the relevant post.

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