SEO Tools

Traffic Surfing with Google Trends

May 2, 2008 – 11:41 pm
Google Trends shows the top 100 searches for a given day. You can use Google Trends to help generate traffic to a site by writing a quality article using one of these high-volume search terms. This is a natural (organic) way of generating traffic that we at Gnosis Arts like to call "traffic surfing." For example, last month I was looking through Google Trends and found out that the term "spitzer's girl" was among the most searched terms. It was obvious why: at the time, the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal was making headline news in just about every media pipeline in the nation. So, I used this traffic trend to my advantage. I wrote a unique, quality editorial about the Spitzer scandal, titled the editorial "spitzer girl," and then posted the story on my website's news page. Then, I submitted the article to digg.com - a popular social media site. After about ...

Posted in Traffic Generation | No Comments »

Domain Name Server (DNS) and Internet Protocol (IP) Optimization

April 26, 2008 – 6:03 pm
Part of good search engine optimization (SEO) involves domain name server and Internet Protocol optimization. DNS/IP problems can affect the performance of your website. Moreover, there is some evidence to support the claim that the major search engines (especially Google) utilize DNS/IP quality as part of their Quality Score calculations. Issues such as load time, server failure, 503 HTTP Header errors, and bad IP neighborhoods can have a negative impact on Page Rank (PR). And, since Page Rank is a contributing factor in search engine ranking position (SERP) it pays to have a basic understanding of DNS/IP problems and their resolution.  What Is a DNS Server? DNS server stands for “Domain Name System" server. This is the actual URL name of the server which hosts your individual domain. When someone types in your URL in their browser’s address bar, the browser begins to look for the name of the server on which ...

Posted in DNS/IP Optimization | No Comments »

The TLD Debate Revisited

April 19, 2008 – 7:11 pm
Do Search Engines Give Preference to Certain TLDs (Top Level Domains) Than Others? This question has been circulating around SEO circles for some time now. SEOs are always looking for “white hat” methods to improve search engine rank placement (SERP), and so naturally one of the questions we ask concerns preferential treatment of TLDs. The general consensus among SEO professionals is that the search engines (SEs for short) do not grant any special treatment to various TLDs. That is, they do not give certain TLDs a “head start” by granting more intrinsic trust or authority to them. Nevertheless, I’m not wholly convinced of that, and I have learned the scientific value of never simply taking anyone’s word for things. In the absence of hard data, I find that many claims of members of the “SEO Intelligentsia” are simply unfounded and do not hold up under rigorous, methodical experimentation. So, I decided to conduct ...

Posted in Domain/URL Optimization | No Comments »