Putting Social Media for SEO Back in Its Place

SEOMoz’s recent social media SEO piece is is informative and worth reading, but please don’t forget priorities. I dropped a simple link in the sidebar with the correct anchor text and within 24 hours the #2 listing (Ciplex.com) is outranking SEOMoz. See here. A screenshot is here. While Social Media can be a valuable part of your SEO strategy (hell, get every link you can get), don’t rely upon it. Your smarter competitors certainly wont.

New Tool: LDA Content Optimizer

After much hullabaloo and disagreement regarding SEOMoz’s studies into the relationship between the topic modeling concept of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and rankings, the dust has settled and we can start talking about what does this mean for me as a webmaster. Our own studies indicated that there is a relationship between LDA Cosine values and ranking especially among long-tail keywords. I don’t pretend to know what this means exactly, but I do know how to boost LDA scores. And if the two are correlated – LDA and Ranking – it certainly wouldn’t hurt to do so. So, without any further adieu, I would like to introduce the new Virante LDA Content Optimizer. Essentially, the tool finds keywords that you should include in your...

Signing off for a bit…

My wife and I just had our first baby, Claren Riley Jones, on Sunday. Life is rad.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) Correlations Clarified

Upon SEOMoz’s announcement regarding the relationship between LDA Cosine values and Google search rankings, I immediately had reservations about the way that many individuals in the community were reading the results. Admittedly, Rand and Ben have been careful about taking some of these observations with a grain of salt, making it clear to state that by no means does LDA represent the majority of Google’s ranking algorithm. That being said, I took special interest because, like many other SEO’s who work in competitive spaces, I have long regarded on-page factors as being only valuable for long-tail searches. My first and primary concern was that because SEOMoz’s team was looking at a large keyword set without regard to competitiveness,...

Google Instant and the Long Tail

Just something I thought worth pointing out. Since users will now be able to see results before they finish typing their query, it is very possible that sites that rank better for the short tail will get more traffic. If someone is, for example, searching for baseball card dealers, and a baseball card dealer ranks in the top 3 for baseball card, the user will probably not wait to finish their complete query. Better start focusing on root keywords.

Thoughts on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Search

First off, kudos to the SEOMoz team, and specifically, Ben Hendrickson for their stunning study and continued focus on building a data and research-driven approach to SEO. That being said, I feel like some grains of salt need to be thrown into this recent study regarding the recent study regarding the relationship between LDA (topic modeling) and search rankings. To begin, let’s make it clear that it is generally accepted that a good portion of the search algorithm is textual relevance. Similarly, it would not be unreasonable to believe that Google uses just a few sophisticated mathematical tools to accomplish this relevance measurement, making it the easiest to discern and most singularly shocking. Whenever someone struck upon the meat of this part of the...

Apple Fix This Please – IPad Select Field Abbreviation Issue