Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Recently in the private forums Rich Schefren provides for his Strategic Profits clients there was a discussion started about search engine optimization.

The topic initially began with two questions. The first was about whether non-Google search engines penalize sites that advertise with Google AdWords (false) and the importance of having an “aged domain” and how it relates to number one rankings.

I became interested when Darryl Peddle, who claimed employment at Yahoo!, entered the discussion and offered some great SEO advice. I asked Darryl for permission to republish the tips from the discussion, which I provide below interspersed with my own opinions based on my SEO studies and experiments. Darryl also has a site called Rank Study.

SEO Advice From A Yahoo Insider

This from Darryl regarding the first question about advertising on AdWords and the possibility of penalties from other search engines as a result:

As an employee at Yahoo I can tell you that advertising on Google will in no way affect your rankings in Yahoo… that’s completely inaccurate. Why would we reduce our quality by dropping relevant sites and advertisers?

This regarding aged domains:

Regarding the aging domain. This is information that is available from the latest Google patent. And yes domain aging is becoming a solid way of determining a sites long term value and quality score. It is just one of many (100+ factors), but it’s becoming more important nowadays.

Top 16 SEO Tips

Here are some tips from Darryl, followed by my own opinion and feedback.

Read the rest of this entry >>

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As is glaringly obvious I was promoting Brad and Andy’s StomperNet launch on my blog recently (thanks to those who signed up under my affiliate link too - I suspect you will have tremendous success over the next 12 months if you implement what you learn and work with the StomperNet community).

The first post I made about the launch was back in September, exactly one month ago, then another post in early October when they opened the doors of the program and a final one yesterday. The post I made yesterday won’t actually come into play in the search engines quite yet because it usually takes a day or two for new articles to show up, that’s if you are reading this post the day I publish it of course (Friday 20th October 2006). However my two older posts are already well indexed since they were published many weeks ago.

As you might recall I wrote a piece discussing what I call the Google Honeymoon (incidentally I didn’t copy this term off anyone - I came up with it off the top of my head, but I wasn’t the only one - I’ve since seen it in webmaster forums and on other blogs - so I guess the name is sticking and all of us SEO writers are thinking alike!).

The honeymoon is a period shortly after an article is published on a blog or website where it ranks well in Google for reasons I speculated about in the full article - The Google Honeymoon Period.

Thankfully because Brad and Andy did a one day re-launch that was a few weeks after their initial launch it was possible for some sites to rank well in organic search if they had written about StomperNet during the first launch. Given the whole launch was about organic search (and conversion) I thought it would be impressive if you were to rank well for the term “StomperNet” in the organic Google results.

For fun yesterday and I a google search for “StomperNet” and low and behold, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com was ranked number one in the Google organic search results, at least for me here in Canada today and yesterday, it may well have changed if you are reading this article days, weeks or months later. Of course the only people searching for “StomperNet” were probably people well aware of what it was, but nonetheless I was very pleased to see my top ranking and took a snapshot of it to preserve it for posterity. Here it is -

As you would presume, the top keyword bringing in incoming search traffic to my blog yesterday was “StomperNet” as well.

I don’t expect this ranking to last too long because I believe my site is enjoying some honeymoon time and I also suspect StomperNet’s own sites will begin to rank higher as the search engines start factoring in all the new backlinks coming in to the site after the launch. Thankfully the timing was good in this instance, where an established site like mine could enjoy a little time in the limelight because it has history and authority in the search engines and thus ranks higher in a shorter timeframe than other, newer sites.

Once again, it goes to show if you build your blog well and implement a few key search engine optimization techniques, your blog can outrank even the SEO expert’s own sites…Go blogs!

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