MeetUp In Israel - SEO and Affiliates

This is my second MeetUp meeting of Affiliates SEO professionals in Israel. The meeting took place in my apartment in Tel Aviv and it was wonderful! I figure that I should summarize the main points and topics so here we go:

• Pay attention to discrepancies between adwords and your favorite monitoring tool

• Try adwords conversion optimizer for campaigns with high level of conversion

• Google is cracking down on biz ops (?)

• constant communications with the affiliate manager is important

recommended sites mentioned :

1. http://www.askpavel.com (SEO)
2. http://www.mattcutts.com  (SEO, GOOGLE)
3. http://www.wickedfire.com (Affiliates)
4. http://www.techcrunch.com (industry news)

I think that next time we should meet in a coffee shop (Frishman and Dov Hoz?)

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I find out that the task is not easy especially for Mac users. I use Microsoft Entourage which acts like Outlook but in fact, lacks a lot of its capabilities. So after I spent a day searching for a solution, I find out the best way to go about doing it. Here is a step-by-step instructions ho to transfer your hotmail folders to Gmail and Entourage:

1. Follow the instruction from this tutorial
2. Now your Gmail account is set on Entourage
3. The next thing is to transfer your emails from Hotmail to Gmail
   • get back to Gmail in the browser
   • click on “Settings”
   • click on “Accounts”
   • click on “Add a mail account you own”
   • type the your hotmail email account (i.e. you@hotmail.com) in the popup window
   • click “Next”
   • in the next form fill out the followings:
     
     • user name: your email address (i.e. you@hotmail.com)
     • password: your hotmail password
     • POP Server: pop3.live.com
     • Port: 995
     • check “Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail.”
     • click “Save Changes”
       

       Hotmail to Gmail - POP Settings

4. Now all your Hotmail Inbox is being transferred to Gmail
5. If you have many folders in hotmail, like I have, you will need to make extra steps
6. start Windows XP (in Parallels or on a different machine)
7. open Outlook 2007
8. create an HTTP account for hotmail in Outlook
9. Create an IMAP account for Gmail in Outlook
10. Select the folders in the hotmail account
11. Drag them to the gmail account
12. Press “Send and Receive”
13. When finished, delete the accounts if you want
14. Open Entourage
15. In Entourage right-click or Control-click your Gmail account name in the folder list and select Receive Complete Folder List from the contextual menu. Your new labels will appear as folders.
16. Entourage will sync
17. That’s It!

Ranking #7 on Google SERP

After a month of intensive quality link building, RDezine.com moved up from the #30th rank to the #7th for the key phrase “baltimore seo“. I think I’ve concluded my experiment and here is a summary of what I found:

1. Optimizing your web site is the first thing you ought to do – this got me from Google’s sandbox to somewhere on page #12
2. Creating a blog in order to provide fresh content constantly – that got me to the #3rd and #4th pages
3. Building quality links from authoritative sites in your niche
   • comment: if you can get any .edu or .gov links, you be move up
4. Commenting on blogs- months after I didn’t not create any links, i commented on some blogs of Harvard University students that deal with SEO or Internet and I moved up a page!  I think that the nofollow issue should be reexamine since I notice a crewel in nofollow links on my site.
5. Joining niche social networks and groups – search groups in your niche, advertise your site
6. Patience…

and that is it! (well not really, but it is a start )

Oh, on Yahoo I have the #4 spot and MSN –NADA!!!

Now I need to focus on constructing a website in Hebrew – or should I say “tel aviv seo”

Hebrew, English and SEO

One of my clients, a business English school in Israel, has uses English words in a mainly Hebrew text. The company name is in English which is left-to-right (LTR) and the rest is Hebrew (RTL).

Here is the problem: Hebrew and English in the title probably don’t make any sense, that’s my suspicion any way. In my next experiment I’ll try to move around the words in English in order to see if it change any result.

I’ll keep you posted…

Want to be on Google's first page?

“So what do you do?” they ask often, and roll their eyes when I say “SEO and website optimization”. The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers mainly to the process of focusing your content to specific search terms or phrases. For example, if one is searching for “SEO company in baltimore maryland“ , one will find that usually the search terms appear in the title or one of the headers. This occurs because Google thinks that words that are the the title page and/or in the headings are more important than the words in the paragraph.

So what determine the order of Google’s search results? NO ONE KNOWS! period. Some people know many of factors in that formula but no one can grantee first placement on the search results.

Google considers many other factors such as:

• links to your site and their quality – link from an article is better than just a page full of links, right?
• site optimization - follow the SEO basic guide and Google Webmaster Guidelines
• proper site listing - do not post it everywhere, choose the right directories.
  • http://www.dmoz.org
  • telephone companies’ online information
  • local commerce organizations
  • any government site
• domain name age – new domains have some hard times
• hosting company – choose a big one!
• location - there is a priority to the searcher location (if I’m in the UK and searching for a web designer to hire, I more likely will get results from the UK (.uk domain names) than from web designers in France ( .fr domain names.)
• content – content is a king!
• content age – who wants wrinkly cucumbers?! keep the content fresh!
• depth of content – 3 level deep is enough
• web site internal linking

During the years, SEO professionals started to notice pattens that occur when a change or addition is made, and SEO methods started to form. Some methods have been condemned by Google and announced “illegal” practice, for example: cloaking is technique in which the content presented to the search engine is different to that presented to the user’s browser. Such a technique will be the practice of so called: Black Hat SEO. Google will penalize websites that use Black Hat SEO practices by “throwing” the website to the sandbox – somewhere not in the first two pages of the search results.

This article was written by Rudy Dallal, an SEO in Baltimore, MD and Tel Aviv, Israel.

To be continued…

Google ignores "nofollow"?

The other day I thought to take a look at the Google Webmaster Tools section. I suddenly saw four errors in the “Not Found” section. The errors were pages that “nofollow” links were linked to them. How can it be? I remember Cutts saying that Google’s crawlers reads the attribute and they ignore the link. As a conclusion, spam does work and for all the SEO out there: continue with comments-link-building-nofollows!