Search Engine Engineered

The sandbox is no longer the pink elephant in the room. As webmasters, together we’ve cried about it, argued about it, and fretted over it. We’ve gone through the emotional steps, too; first there was grief (waah waah my site won’t rank), then bargaining (I promise I won’t spam if you un-sandbox me), anger (darn it, greedy Google just wants me to spend more at AdWords!), and finally, acceptance (OK, how do I beat it?).

Over a year ago, I wrote my Guide to Beating the Sandbox at WebmasterWorld (supporters forum). I think my post mostly stands the test of time, but there’s a lot more that we know now, so I figured it’s time for an update. I’m also going to try to make this guide as detailed as possible, because it seems the solution everyone (including me) constantly refers to is to build trust—without saying exactly how. So let’s get short on theory, and long on details.

Full Article: Secrets to Beating the Sandbox 2.0 REVEALED: The Ultimate Guide

Google conducted a study of the good & bad uses of code by websites. It is informative and helpful for webmasters.

P.R.A.S.E - A new SEO tool which allows you to bias Yahoo!, MSN and Google search results by their PageRank scores.

Here is a site that lists many directories to get your site listed on. The resource provides valuable information such as cost (if any), Page Rank of directory and a host of other data.
Link Directory Listings

For those whose businesses rely on the Internet to produce revenue the latest Google update, nicknamed Jagger, was one of the biggest events in the past couple years (probably since the Florida Update of 2003). With this 3-part update Google has essentially changed many of the rules and have thrown the SEO community for a loop.

In this update there are a few key areas that have impacted the way sites rank and how an SEO (or a business owner optimizing their own site) needs to approach and address the various components. The key areas that have been affected with this update are:

* The history of your web pages
* The way backlinks are counted
* Site content & structure

Read Full Article: SEO For The New Google

A tool to check your backlinks and the anchor text used in those backlinks.

Great list of the factors that can influence a web document’s rank at the major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves) for a particular term or phrase. Although it is impossible to say for certain which of these items affects which search engine or how important the factors are individually..

Search Engine Ranking Factors

MarketingSherpa’s released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Survey which includes statistics on clicks, costs and conversions as well as information on SEM test effectiveness. There’s some pretty compelling data regarding outsourcing your SEO as well. For SEO, overall site traffic lift six months after optimization was:

Agency optimized 110% increase
In-house optimized 38% increase
While marketers using SEM were much more pleased about their PPC campaigns this year over last, 8-12% were planning on cutting SEM budgets.

Here are a few SEO forums to visit:

SEOForum
High Rankings™ Search Engine Optimization Forum
Webmaster World
Cre8 Forum

Search Engine Marketing Jobs - SEO Help Wanted Ads - SEO Careers
SEMPO Job Board
MarketingSherpa Career Page