Google’s Matt Cutts

I totally agree with Matt, the quality of posts is by far the most important factor to having a good blog for both readers and search engines a like.

I always tell clients that they should try and write a quality blog post once a week. Now when I mean quality, I don’t mean that it has to be long. It  just has to be well written and informative.

The reason is that I want people to come to my clients sites not only because Google put the site high in the results but because they find what my clients write interesting. If people don’t like what is being written and never come back they’ll never convert into customers.

So as much as I hate to say it, I agree with Matt about creating quality content is some of the best SEO out there.

This is the Link Report for September 25th through September 28th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• The Easiest Way To Explain the Marketing Process | Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing –
• 4g Wireless Evolution : What is WiMAX? – Consider the existing Internet opportunities for Internet connectivity today — broadband wireline, WiFi, and even dial-up. There are issues with each one: broadband service can be expensive, depending on the provider, and it certainly isn’t available in many rural areas; WiFi has very limited range, again limiting coverage, and dial-up is simply slow and can’t come close to meeting requirements for today’s applications.
• An Important Analytics Distinction: Bounce vs Exit – Bounce rate can be an incredibly helpful metric, particularly when trying to not only drive more traffic to your website but trying to get more of that traffic to convert. However, it’s vitally important to understand what bounce rate is, how it differs from percent exit, and where you can potentially misunderstand the data.
• Link Building Outreach: 5 Steps To Maximize The Value Of Every Opportunity – Extensive backlink prospecting and qualification, even with automated research processes and crawlers, can take days. Creating highly-linkable content can take even longer. Because of this significant investment, we often recommend conducting your organic link building outreach in a way that maximizes conversion rates, grows relationships with both linkers and link decliners, and ensures that any future link building campaigns are faster, easier and more effective.
• 6 steps to KILLING long tail keywords for SEOs & Content writers – When you are fortunate enough to be blessed by the Search Gods, you need to maximize that blessing, one strategy most of us probably don’t take full advantage of is blowing out the long tail keywords when we already are getting signals from the search engines that they like our site for head or short tail keywords.
• Good Call-To-Action Buttons | UX Booth – The call-to-action button is an important tool in the user experience designer’s box of tricks. In this article I’ll give you a few pointers on providing effective ones.
• Official Google Blog: Jump to the information you want right from the search snippets – For most search results, Google shows you a few lines of text to give you an idea of what the page is about — we call this a "search snippet." Recently, we've enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page.
• Web Development Project Estimator – The Web Development Project Estimator is a simple tool that allows web designers and site developers to quickly and thoroughly estimate the time and materials required for a proposed web project.
• SEOmoz | Why Linkbait is a Tactic the Search Engines Will Always Value – There have been more than a few debates and suppositions over the years about the potential value of linkbait/viral content strategies and whether search engines will always reward these practices.
• China Blocks TwitPic After Explosion Images Go Viral – China is now blocking TwitPic in the hope of stopping the flow of information.

This is the Link Report for September 8th through September 9th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• WordPress Acquires Grammer Gramer Grammar Checking Software – Automattic has announced the acquisition of After the Deadline, a service that provides spell checking, style checking, and grammar checking. Huzzah!
• 7 PPC Tools that Can Help Your SEO Efforts | The Adventures of SEO Boy –
• Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing | WebProNews – Don't forget that Bing and Yahoo are still part of the mix. People still use these search engines and therefore you should optimize for them (Well at least Bing)
• Have a Facebook Page? Post on Tuesdays – As it turns out the best time to post to your Facebook is on Tuesday. Find out why.
• Protect Your Company’s Collaborative Spaces – You need to be prepared to lock out former workers from your online network once they leave. Good article from the people at GIGAOM
• United Way hopes to net new donors via social media – When one of United Way’s 500 cause members on Facebook asked her friends to donate money to the charitable organization in lieu of buying her birthday gifts, officials at the Greater Dayton agency were not only pleasantly surprised but excited about the possibilities for future fundraising.
• Should you ‘friend’ your doctor on Facebook? – CNN.com – Staying connected with your doctor takes on a whole new meaning. Good? Bad?
• Obama’s Facebook advice: Making a prez: The Swamp – "Let me give you some very practical tips,'' the president told the high schooler. "First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook.
• The Internet Marketing Driver: SEO, Forms, and Hidden Content – The Danger of Coding Yourself Into Search Obscurity – Too much coding with forms and hidden content Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) shows you how to fix this and do well in SEO
• AIM Now Goes Both Ways (With Twitter And Facebook) – Remember AIM? Yea that thing called Instant Messaging. Wow that's dated. Well now AIM can be used as a Facebook/Twitter app

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on the news hyper update to Google. Post your thoughts below in the comments.

The video:
To place this video on your web site, copy/paste
the following code into your HTML file:

More WebProNews Videos

Google's Matt Cutts

Google’s Matt Cutts on the Google Webmaster Tools Help YouTube channel says that regardless of how you construct your site, either in a CSS-based layout or a Table-based layout, Google will be able to find and index your content.

Please keep this in mind that Cutts says in the video that regardless of which way your site is built Google will “try” and index it. Now with CSS-based layouts your code is cleaner and less cluttered. It’s been proven that the more cluttered your site is with extraneous code the hard it is for your Website to be indexed.

So when Cutts says it doesn’t matter and Google will “try,” don’t you think the more adventagous thing to do would be code in such a way that makes it easier for search engine robots to spider your site? I think so. What do you think? Watch the video and post your comments!

There was a very interesting article in Search Engine Land blog yesterday. The author points out some very interesting points:

But what about those that have a more basic Flash site that does indeed provide information? For them, I would ask, why Flash? If you don’t need to allow your visitors to interact with your website, then why not just use HTML with Flash accents? Because even if the search engines are indexing the information contained in Flash (more on this in a bit), there are other reasons not to use it. First and foremost, not every browser has Flash installed. In fact, currently on an iPhone, Flash shows up as a little blue cube. Second, many Flash-based sites use only one URL for the entire site. Besides the search engine implications of that, it is also a nightmare for bookmarking, as well as for most web analytics programs.

via Are The Search Engines Really Indexing Flash?.

So I leave you with this, if your site does not need the wow power and interactive feel of Flash, but you want to capitalize on the search results, leave Flash for another day or another project.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – When to Track Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.