Recently I was working for Morningstar Properties to optimize their Mini Storage and Marinas websites. While they had nice and clean websites neither were SEO friendly. After working off and on for a couple months we have both sites fully optimized with search engine friendly titles, metas and descriptions as well as copy on their pages that is geared towards they keywords that they are looking to capture for organic search traffic.

On the Mini-Storage site we dynamically update the location pages as well to make them more locally appealing by utilizing the location address and neighborhoods by integrating them into the titles. Also by recoding some of the styles to use H1 and H2 tags we’ll better tell the crawlers what is important.

Over on marinas, we also made major title updates and added a quick directory of locations on the home page in text so it is easily seen by users and crawlers alike. All and all a very fun project to work on and best of all seeing positive keyword ranks very quickly was cool to see!

Morningstar Marinas – http://www.morningstarmarinas.com/
Morningstar Mini Storage –  http://www.morningstarstorage.com/

I always look at where traffic is coming from, especially from traffic that I purchase. Back in November a client’s site had a huge spike in traffic from junk ad sites. Most of the site ad ads from Yahoo and due to Yahoo’s less than optimal ad software I had to block these sites manually by domain. I had noticed in Compete.com’s site that competitor sites had also been receiving a lot of traffic from these sites.

Today (ok – I let this sit for a while LOL) I think I have uncovered at least one source of traffic to sites like that and confirmed my belief that the sites are as I had suspected junk click sites built for the sole purpose to generate content advertising publishing revenue.

Here’s how it works:

1. Internet users sign up for a site like www.treasuretrooper.com
2. They are offered 5 cents to click on links. When I first joined I was offered 7 links and could come back the next day to click some more.
3. There’s a message that says: “Receive 5 cents for each of the links that you click below! After clicking, please click any link that interests you on the page that pops up. You may click each of these links once every 24 hours. Please note that cash click earnings do not count towards reaching minimum payment.” and a few links:
   1. Asthma Relief Online
   2. My Diabetes Center
   3. Best Online Teaching Degrees
   4. Find Nursing Degrees Online
   5. Best Psychology Degrees Online
   6. Best Guide For Fitness
   7. Bank Account Wizard
   8. When I clicked Find Nursing Degrees I ended up here: Nursing Degree Answers which is a short page with a bunch of Yahoo ads.
   9. That site is similar to a lot of others I have seen that dynamically serves up Yahoo Publisher ads. Search on any topic and you will get different ads.
   10. TreasureTrooper.com is well ranked in countries like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India which is not bad by itself but if you are a US company doing business only in the US who don’t need that foreign traffic. Although according to Alexa almost 50% of their traffic in the US.
   11. In Alexa one of the suspect sites has 100% of traffic from US which I find hard to believe. However three of my client’s competitors receive between 5% and 11% of their traffic from India but they don’t do business in India.

There’s surely dozens of affiliate sites like these signing up people from low wage Asian or Eastern European countries where a $50+ a month can buy a lot. There’s something terribly wrong about this as someone makes $0.05 cents to click on a link where the advertiser is charged $1-$10+. For the advertiser is results in excessive clicks that don’t convert. If they are not aware of these sites they’ll end up paying a lot more for their online advertising budgets than they should.

Matt Cutts from Google has mentioned that there areover 200 variables in the Google Algorithm that effect how your site shows up in their engine. Here are the top 50 that I could find:

Domain: Age of Domain, History of domain, KWs in domain name, Sub domain or root domain,  TLD of Domain, IP address of domain, Location of IP address / Server

Architecture: HTML structure, Use of Headers tags, URL path, Use of external CSS / JS files

Content: Keyword density of page, Keyword in Title Tag, Keyword in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords), Keyword in KW in header tags (H1, H2 etc), Keyword in body text, Freshness of Content

Per Inbound Link: Quality of website linking in, Quality of web page linking in, Age of website, Age of web page, Relevancy of page’s content, Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text), Anchor text if link, Title attribute of link, Alt tag of images linking, Country specific TLD domain, Authority TLD (.edu, .gov), Location of server, Authority Link (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links: Uniqueness of Class C address

Internal Cross Linking: No of internal links to page, Location of link on page, Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties: Over Optimization, Purchasing Links, Selling Links, Comment Spamming, Cloaking, Hidden Text, Duplicate Content, Keyword stuffing, Manual penalties, Sandbox effect

Miscellaneous: JavaScript Links, No Follow Links

Pending: Performance / Load of a website, Speed of JS,

Misconceptions: XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings), PageRank (General Indicator of page’s performance)

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Now that Yahoo & Microsoft have signed a ten year deal, we’ll see Bing replace their own search engine shortly. Yahoo will focus on media and MSFT will focus on search. What does this mean for the search landscape? Will Yahoo & MSFT do more deals together or is this it? Now that MSFT has their teeth into YHOO will they eventually be able to purchase them or do they even want to anymore. Lets take a look at their deal…
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