The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO

* A few years back I used to get popular on Delicious with my resources lists for SEOptimise. Delicious has been already neglected by then as their owner at that time, Yahoo didn't really invest in it. Nonetheless when a post got popular and thus entered the Delicious it still got around 1000 - 5000 visitors but more importantly it got many more Delicious saves which resulted directly in links on websites, often automatically. Later on, Delicious abandoned the front page concept and moved th [...]

* This is the third post in our weekly column - Link Building Technique 3: Hunt for Blunders. The probably most positive aspect of mistakes is that you can learn from them. Unfortunately in most cases people only learn from their own mistakes if at all. Learning from mistakes made by others seems to be too difficult. We rather repeat the mistakes from the past. On the Web the situation is completely different, it's much better. You can see how other people fail in real time and not only l [...]

* "Content is king" is one of the widest spread Internet memes. Whether you agree or not you will see the phrase referenced all over the place. For several years Google was one of the most ardent supporters of the "content is king" philosophy. Why does Google want you to "create great content" and lots of it? In order to explain why I wanted to track the first mention of "content is king" just to find out that Bill Gates declared in January of 1996. Also Sumner Redstone of Viacom said it [...]

* This is the second post of our weekly column - link building technique 2: go where the attention is Bloggers in most cases do not break news. Unless your plane has crashed and you have survived to make the first photo of the aftermath you won't have the opportunity to be the first person to report something very often. The few big press agencies in most cases decide what's "news": Reuters, AP or DPA. Some stuff that gets reported is actually not really news at all, the latest Apple pr [...]

* SEO has been pronounced dead ever since inception, in recent years the number of people claiming that SEO is dead for one or another reason has grown significantly though. One explanation for this trend is that publishers want to gain attention by badmouthing a whole industry, especially as it works really well with SEO practicioners and their enemies. Both cried foul each and every time like some dog which barks once you cross a line entering its territory. The second major explanation [...]

* Social sites come and go. I've been active on social media from around 2007. This was already the second or third wave of social media services. At first sites like Delicious Slashdot Friendster were all the rage. They were already almost forgotten by the time I started connecting with people on social media. Digg has replaced Slashdot and MySpace was already more popular than Friendster. I've been mostly participating on StumbleUpon and later joined Twitter to move most of my ac [...]

* While most people argue that SEO is either white hat or black hat in reality much of it is more or less gray. In fact most people don't even know when some technique ceases to be white and starts to be black. Some techniques considered by Google to be black hat are seen by people in the SEO industry as only gray. Why is there so much confusion whether a given technique is black, gray or white? Well, the reason is simple, in spite of all so called transparency by Google the Go [...]

* I've been following the SEO industry long enough to be able to recognize an SEO expert from what s/he says or writes. Also I'm humble enough to recognize that while I rock at getting links there are link building specialists out there who practice it on a daily basis for projects where you need more than outstanding content to get to the top. We all know that SEOmoz and Search Engine Land have several writers who are among those but here I'd like to name some of the best link bui [...]