Squidoo.com is a social media community created by Seth Godin (UI Simplicity Guru for those who don’t know) that is built around “lenses” which are easy to build, one page topic sites within the Squidoo community. Squidoo is different from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace because you can create a series of lenses (pages) that is a different topic on each and relate them to each other, off site content and your profile. It’s kind of like a hosted blog, but easier to get going and, well, different. There are lots of good tips, ranking capabilities and search capabilities. Squidoo boasts over 800,000 unique pages, but Google only shows 114,000 in a site:*.squidoo.com search which makes me wonder how well the site is crawled.

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I’ve been working with a lot of clients lately on site re-designs and below is a list of questions that I find helpful to ask and answer before handing off directions to the the designers and developers.

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Google announced yesterday and started rolling out Adsense for Domains which is simple version of parking on keyword centric domains. While Google used to require a minimum of 750,000 visits per month, now virtually anyone with a domain can add Google Adsense ads directly to a domain without going through a parking platform like SEDO, GoDaddy, etc.

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I’ve been giving a presentation to the University of Washington’s MBA Direct Marketing class for the last 3 or 4 years courtesy of the professor Elizabeth Stearns. I recently updated the presentation and thought that I would post it on the site for your enjoyment. Click here for the .pptx file of the SEO/SEM 101 Presentation. Enjoy

As any good SEO’er knows, linking is incredibly important component of SEO. A great example is Real.com - a page rank 10 site - that used to not be crawled or cached because they used javascript to sniff and segment the inbound traffic - including search engine bots. Since search engine bots don’t follow javascript links, the content of the site off of the homepage was not getting crawled and cached. However, since SOOOOO many people were linking to www.Real.com to get the RealPlayer, the page rank was extremely high.

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I just spent some time playing around with VeryRelated.com. They use the Yahoo BOSS tools to draw some relationships between keywords and subjects. They look at both size relationship (home many of the two keywords are in the same phrases) as well as size of opportunities (the number of keyword searchs for the combination). It’s a nice way to present the data in an easy to digest manner while giving you a new way to consider additional keyword categories around your core terms.

Finally! Google has added some volume estimates to their keyword research tool (located here). This is a good thing as you can get a better idea for the total volume of terms vs the relative strength of terms you would get through Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker (still important tools to have in you kit).

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