The competition is over

The Clifinar competition officially ended thursday nighrt and the winner wasn’t me.
Despite not winning I have learned quite a few things about SEO and how search engines index information. I also got a confirmation regarding the strength and power of social media and web 2.0 sites. I was also surprised by the power of one site in particular which I will not disclose right now.
Another thing I found is that I actually like writing a blog about SEO and web marketing and I probably will keep on writing it.

My next post will be back on topic, right now I just wanted to let you know about the end of the Clifinar competition and that the Clifinar’s themselves are still running and so does this blog.

Web analytics

A large part of my work at Compucall Web Marketing has to do with web analytics. I wanted to write my own post on the subject, and I probably will. However, yesterday I received a link to a very good post on the subject of web analytics and more specifically Google analytics.

After reading the post I decided I will simply post a link here so you can go and read it straight from ther source. I strongly reccomend doing so.

The post is written by Avinash Kaushik in his blog. So if you want to learn more about Google analytics now is the time.

Clifinar competitors analysis

Clifinar rising (thanks to wagg66 for the image)

As you know, I am currently in the final stages of the clifinar competition. I have been writing about the clifinars and even learned a few things about the way the major search engines index information.

After the first 2 weeks of the clifinar competition the search results in Google are relatively stable and there are no major changes. So today I decided to use a few really nice free seo tools found at seomoz.org and analyze the top 4 results from the first page and the top 4 results on the 2nd page. Hopefully this will give me some more insights into the workings of Google.

Clifinar and inbound links

One way links

I’m back!

After a week of not feeling so well and not updating the Clifinar blog I’m back and ready to start on my next subject which is a continuation of a sort to my last post “content is not king“.

 We all know that good quality, original content is a very important factor when bringing relevant traffic to the site. However, content is not enough. In order to have more people see your content and get the search engines to prioritize it higher then others’ you have to get as many one way inbound links as possible to your page. One way inbound links are the best. For search engines, a site is considered as being an authority site because it is linked to, naturally by other webmasters.

In order to do that what is required first of all is a strong and large social network and quite a few hours of work. Unless you have a very popular blog or site that is frequented daily by quite a lot of visitors that can link to your site, you will need to let people know that there is new and interesting content on your site, and in order to do that successfully you need a strategy.

Content is NOT king

Following this clifinar competition and my on-going clifinar observations on the search engines I realised that contrary to many opinions out there, content is NOT king. I’m not saying it’s not important but the best I can say is that “content is princess” not king. 

So, if content isn’t king what is?

The answer to that question has to be: one way inbound links and the size of the social network you have. Basically, the more inbound links you have the more you will be considered by the search engines, Google in this case, as relevant even if your content is not as good as someone else’s.

Ok…does this mean I should stop trying to write good content?  

Clifinar – Social media bookmarking

In the first clifinar I told you about, I wrote shortly on the subject of widgets. This time I decided to write on the Social media bookmarking clifinar.

I know, it sounds pretty silly, why would we need a clifinar about bookmarking? Especially since there’s nothing new about it. I mean social media bookmarking was hot two years ago not today. 

That’s what I thought a few days ago: “online bookmarking is not relevant anymore” but I have to admit that I was wrong.

Clifinar and the search engines

A few days ago I added a new page to my blog, the cifinar observations page. Today I’ve added another one, the clifinar observations 2.

Even though the clifinar competition is an SEO competition directed at Google, I decided to see what happens on the other two big search engines: Yahoo and Live.

I have to say that some of the things I found while looking for the indexing of clifinar,  were quite surprising. I found the comparison to be interesting and informative and decided to follow my first report with another one.

I will probably continue to follow up on the way the 3 search engines index clifinar in their search results. I have backed up my findings on the clifinar indexing with screen shots from each search engine.

Feel free to go over my clifinar observations and comment if you think I missed something.

Clifinars and SEO

First, a Clifinar update: this Clifinar blog is now the second in Google’s search result for the word “Clifinar”.

And now it’s time to really let you in on the Clifinar secret.  As I mentiond before in the Clifinar introduction, Clifinars are a real asset to our company and we look forward to attending them. Allthough this week there is no Clifinar as he is on vacation, I will tell you a little more about one of his earlier ones.

The Widgets Clifinar: