Since last Friday, the SEO community has been discussing Matt Cutts' announcement of the upcoming Google update penalizing over-optimized websites and rewarding sites doing little to no SEO (granted they have good content).

So what's the announced algo change about? Should we, SEOs, worry? Let's have a look.

What Matt Cutts Actually Said

Answering the question "Are you out of luck if you're not optimizing your site yet your site is relevant to something?" Cutts said:

"SEO is like a coach. It's someone who helps you figure out how to present yourself better... Read more »

What would you do to warm up a cold room? Put a dozen of heaters? Or make sure the isolation is proper first? If the heat loss level is low, one heater will be enough to do the job. In case it's high, the dozen might make the room warmer, but the resources will be lost in vain.

Same is true about achieving high rankings.

What would you do to get a website rank high in Google? Build multiple links? Or check out on page factors first?

On page factors are neglected quite often. Neat design and decent content seem to be enough, and website promoters go chasing the links.

However, that's very similar to the attempts of warming up a poorly-isolated room with dozen heaters. Same goes with SEO, where a smarter approach would be to eliminate risks first so as to get to Google top 10 faster and easier. Read more »

Back in September, Google introduced GA Real Time, which has recently become available in beta for the majority of users.

Yesterday it became accessible to our Google Analytics account as well, and we decided to sort out what value internet marketers can derive from it.

Indeed, people are very excited about this feature. Watching the number of people on your site changing and the charts indicating page views per second (!) floating is overwhelming.

Yes, real-time analytics is captivating to watch. But it's not inherently helpful. Users need to understand how exactly their particular website can benefit from it.

In short, the new GA feature lets you see how your visitors interact with your site – live. You get the number of active visitors on your website, the keywords that brought them in, referrers, location by city, content they're accessing.

Here's a more detailed overview of what data you can get with Google Analytics Real-Time. Read more »

When searching the web we occasionally see PDFs and other non-HTMLs pop up in Google top 10. An example, well-known to every SEO, is Google's SEO Starter Guide.

Here are some more cases in point:

Read more »

Three weeks ago we published a post where we looked

How to Choose a Domain Name with SEO in Mind. Part 1: Brand vs Keywords.

We were aiming for a happy SEO medium between brandable and keyword-rich domains.

Now it's time to take a closer look beyond the "dot" part of your domain – i.e. choose a domain extension.

In part 1 we gave reasons why choosing brands or a mix of a keyword and a brand for domain names is a forward-looking approach.

Those who decided on the brand name will soon find another proof they made the right choice. They will discover that their catchy brand dot com domain is unclaimed and available for sale. Read more »

Several years ago, I worked for a website called ctnews dot com. CT (coil tubing), was quite a popular abbreviation in the industry the website dealt with.

Now imagine someone is asking you to write "ctnews" down... Aha, that's it! When talking about our website offline, we had hard times explaining people ctnews didn't include "city" – I guess half of our targeted traffic was lost that way.

Lesson learned: a domain name should be user-friendly, i.e. spelling and pronunciation ambiguity should be avoided.

But let's leave the linguistic aspect out and focus on SEO.

The first SEO question future website owners are confronted with is:

Should I go for a Brand or Exact Keyword Match?

Say you want your blog to rank for "viral marketing". Should you look into viralmarketing.com/.net/.org/.info/..., or should you take the path of Viper Chill and set up a brand? Read more »

What's the backbone of any successful SEO campaign? Backlinks, for sure.

Even people new to SEO know that link-building is something they should put their major effort into. Child-easy and challenging, routine and creative, link-building raises many questions.

Here are some of them that puzzle most SEO newbies:

1. What is the best link-building method?

There's a variety of link-building methods – you'll find SEO forums abundant with claims that EDU backlinks or Angela and Paul's profile links are the salt of the Earth. Most SEOs also advocate for link baiting, article submission, web 2.0 link wheels, press releases, Yahoo! Answers, forums and blog commenting – so which one to take up? Read more »

There's no unanimity of opinion among SEO guys and gals about link-building and attracting traffic with social Question & Answers Sites – some claim it's a brilliant opportunity, others say it's a waste of time. The truth is, as always, in between – a positive impact of Q&A on your SEO at large depends on the way you do it. The major Q&A service that comes to our minds first is Yahoo! Answers. In this post we shall give some practical guidance to contributing expertly to Yahoo! Answers and provide a list of other question and answer services worth trying out for boosting your SEO.  

Yahoo! Answers: Basic Things You Should Know

Yahoo! Answers is a place where millions of users meet daily to ask for help and share their own expertise (or spam, unfortunately). Those who participate earn points and grow to occupy different levels – from 1 to 7. Make sure you read the community guidelines before you start to prevent your account from being banned. Read more »

It's no secret that many international companies target the Chinese internet market. However, they soon come to realize that the generally accepted Google-related SEO practices do not work in the Celestial Empire.

In your endeavor to win the Chinese internet you should know how to optimize for Baidu. This local search engine has an amazing 99% following of the whole bulk of 420 million internet users in China. With Google having left for Hong-Kong in March 2010, Baidu became the major player in the Chinese search.

Here comes some practical guidance based on the latest experience of optimization for Baidu. We'd like to thank Andrew Molloy, an experienced internet consultant in the China and Hong Kong markets and a loyal Link-Assistant.Com's customer, for his help in writing this article.

Tip 1. Host in China or Hong Kong

The rule is the same as for other countries, i.e. the country-code top level domain of .cn can get picked up and included in Baidu even if hosted outside of China. However it is less likely that .com/.net sites hosted abroad will be observed. So better host in either Hong Kong or China. If you can't do that, get a local domain like a .com.cn. That should do the trick. Read more »

SEO strategies are at large universal. However, SEO tactics may vary from one local search engine to another. This is true of Seznam.cz, the national Czech search engine.

Seznam.cz is an extremely important search engine for the Czech Republic. With Europe dominated by Google, this is quite remarkable. In every European country the search giant is the leader — with only two exceptions. In Russia, Yandex is the biggest search engine by market share. In Czech Republic there is Seznam.cz that is very close to Google.

Seznam.cz is on SEO PowerSuite's list of search engines, and we were curious to provide our users some valuable content on ranking high in the Czech internet space.

In this post we'd like to summarize Seznam.cz's history and SEO tips you won't find elsewhere because they were exclusively provided to Link-Assistant.Com by Veronika Rozumkova, PR Specialist, Seznam.cz. Read more »