Monthly Archives: March 2009

New Search Engine College Tees are Here

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As regular blog readers will know, we are sponsoring the upcoming SMX Sydney conference by providing a Search Engine College branded t-shirt to every attendee. The final design by Pete Newsome was chosen by readers of this blog, as part of a fierce competition.

So I was very excited today to receive the very first t-shirt to roll off the printing press (front pictured – click for a larger image).

Thanks to Ace Tees in Christchurch for going above and beyond the call of duty to get these done in time, despite delays with the blank tees arriving.

We’ve gone for both ladies and men’s sized tees this year with the design printed in a slightly smaller size on the ladies tees. At the suggestion of our printer, we’ve added green to the cat’s eyes to make them stand out and look a little ghoulish. They look awesome!

Want one? You’ll have to come along to SMX Sydney or sign up for one of our Search Engine College Certification Pathways within the next month or so. If there’s enough demand, we’ll also add them to our Cafe Press Campus Shop.

Twitter Tweak Has Advertisers Excited

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In case you missed it, Twitter rolled out some in-line text notices on their web application today.

The rollout has tweeters all a-flutter (and advertisers salivating) that it might be a sign they are about to introduce some type of monetization model like Ad-Words style pay per click advertising on the site.

Read more over at my SiteProNews blog: Is Twitter Testing Ads?

UPDATE: Yes, Twitter WAS testing ads. Cha Ching!

Search Engine College Site Outage

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Attention Search Engine College students. Our domain www.searchenginecollege.com is currently not accessible due to a DNS issue. We are working on this as quickly as possible but due to propagation time, it may take a few hours before you see the site back up and running again.

Please rest assured that no assignment or grade data has been lost – this is purely a domain redirection issue and not a breach of server security.

Apologies for the delay and if you have sent any email to us over the past 24 hours, please resend it once you see the site back up and running.

Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE: Site is now back up and running, PHEW! If you’ve sent email to an address on our domain over the past 24 hours, please resend it. If you’re waiting on feedback for an assignment you’ve uploaded, please check the assignment page as post-grading notification emails may not have been sent by our server during the site outage. Until the site has fully propagated, you may find site access fluctuates. This should only last a few hours. If you have ANY other concerns, please msg me via the College system while you’re logged in, thank you.

UPDATE 2: Site access is fluctuating for some people. Unfortunately, the site is still not available to everyone. This is a standard domain propagation issue as the DNS is updated across web servers globally. All we can suggest is to keep trying to acess the site every few hours until propagation has finalized and hold off sending email to our domain until this has completed. Dotster have assured us this won’t take more than 72 hours :-( If you need to get in touch urgently, use the big red Ask Kalena button to the right. You can also access the site via IP address: http://67.222.96.39

Remember, patience is a virtue!

Have you registered for SMX Sydney yet?

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For my Australian-based readers, did you know it’s only 3 weeks to go until the SMX Sydney Conference? If you’re unfamiliar with the event, basically it’s the biggest search marketing conference in Australia and it’s held annually.

If you haven’t registered yet, don’t panic. You can still save $195 on the All Access Pass if you register before March 17. The agenda’s shaping up nicely and there are some must-see speakers attending this year, including:

– Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz

– Darren Rowse of Pro-Blogger

– Aidan Beanland of Yahoo7

– Rob Kerry and Jane Copland of Ayima

– Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc.

– Stephen Pavlovich of Bony Toad

– Greg Boser of 3DogMedia

And of course the most important reason to attend is the free Search Engine College tshirt you’ll receive in your groovy courier bag.

I’ll be wandering around, live blogging as many sessions as I can and making a general nuisance of myself.

Wanna join me? Register now!

Q and A: Is it true that a web page can only be optimized for one target keyword?

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QuestionDear Kalena

Our search person at work insists that a Web page can only be optimized for one target keyword. He says that if you try to optimize for more than one, the page loses keyword density and won’t rank as well. He was saying that if we had 3 keywords, we should create 3 pages to catch all searches.

What do you think works better, or would be more efficient?

Regards
Harrison

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Hi Harrison

It is very possible to optimize a page for only 1 keyword/phrase, but not always practical. I generally aim for 3 or 4.

Most web sites have hundreds of keywords and phrases they are targeting but not the ability (or content!) to create a page for each one. Pages that are focused on a single keyword can often look spammy or lack quality if the content is too thin, particularly if a keyword is repeated too often.

Also, the home page of a site is usually the most important in terms of ranking potential, link popularity and Google PageRank. Just optimizing the home page for a single keyword or phrase is a waste of valuable keyword real estate!

When it comes to targeting multiple keywords, I always recommend choosing keywords/phrases that are closely related, use variations or perhaps word stemming, for example:

24 kt yellow gold
gold chains
yellow gold chains

So you could easily target these 3 individual terms with the single sentence:

“We sell the finest quality 24 kt yellow gold chains importehttps://www.ask-kalena.com/files/2009/03/page/d from italy”

Therefore targeting them a few times on a single page would be a breeze. But each case is different in SEO and you should weigh up all the options before deciding on a way forward.

A lot will depend on the competitiveness of your keywords, how many other pages are optimized for the same keyword/s, how many links point to the page, the content on your page and the amount of text used (impacting your keyword density).