2005 September

One of the most important things you can do to optimize and promote your blog is to use tags. Many web sites use tags to help users organize information.
Technorati is probably the most famous for using tags along with del.icio.us and Flickr.
Many blog systems already categorize posts which Technorati can recognize when you ping it. [...]

Organic search optimization is gaining more and more credibility as paid search contines to become more competitive and costly. All that awareness generates interest in how exactly, search engines rank Web pages.
There are few articles that really spell it out and even those that do get outdated pretty quickly. If there’s one thing you can [...]

In one of the first such studies in the world, after a 1 month research period, which included advertising on 85+ web media and 50 different ad creatives, our preliminary results show that new customers were, on the average, exposed to the ad creative 16.9 times before making the purchase.

MarketingSherpa has released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Benchmark report. 3,271 search marketers provided real-life results data for the survey.
The new report includes new statistics on clicks, costs and conversions as well as information on SEM test effectiveness. There’s some pretty compelling data regarding outsourcing site optimization to a search engine optimization agency as well. [...]

While listening to a WebmasterRadio.fm podcast with Detlev Johnson and Todd Freisen recently, I noticed a comment Detlev made about bringing back the I-Search discussion thread he moderated several years back. I-Search was a tremendous resource for information on search engine optimization and marketing for years. I contacted Detlev to see if this was indeed [...]

It looks like Google is now sending out “You’re Banned for 30 Days” notices to sites that are deemed to have certain levels of quality content, but that violate aspects of Google’s guidelines. Via Search Engine Forums and Threadwatch
Example slightly edited of specific names:
From: Google Search Quality DO NOT REPLY
Date: 8 September 2005 23:10:04 BDT
To: [...]

As confusing as search engine optimization can be for most newcomers, selecting a SEO firm can be almost as daunting. There are many considerations and often times companies are confused about how to go about selecting the right company.
Referrals are one of the best ways to find a search engine optimization vendor since there is [...]