John Shehata - Marketing Strategist

the NYTimes.com drops paid subscription fees in favor of ad impressions. Though The New York Times generates over $10 million in revenue from paid subscriptions of their newspaper’s archives from 227K users, the change was inevitable.

senior vice president and general manager, Vivian L. Schiller, of NYTimes.com, said:

But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising.
What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others.

* according to Nielsen/NetRatings, The New York Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

Keyword Density:

www.gorank.com: excellent free keyword density analyzer

While many SEOs claim this is a myth, a lot of us see it happening everyday. I am discussing “white-hat” tactics that may cause over-optimization penalties. Hitting the over-optimization filters in Google is also called “-950 penalty” because site rankings get demoted 950 positions. Read the rest of this entry »

1- Avoid Session IDs
2- Use server mod reWrite when possible
3- use hyphens instead of underscores
4- include your primary keyword in the URL
5- keep your pages closer to the root directory “flat directory architecture”

1- SEOmoz has reported that some political candidates needs real SEO help, they have mentioned some examples:
John McCain’s site ranks #68 for a search on “John McCain” in Google.
» Read the political SEO landscape article at SEOmoz

I have found 2 great tools to track rankings and SERPs “Search Engine Result Pages”
1- Sitening: it has many useful tools, it is still for free, but I know they will have paid version soon. Sitening can track all your keywords on a daily basis on Google, Yahoo and MSN. They also have great tools for seo page scoring depending on multiple factors.

2- SERP Archives: It is a great tool to track your keywords and all SERP results but it is limited to Google and MSN but not Yahoo. They also provide PageRank tracking. They provide some demo pages. They still in alpha phase.

In a recent text done by Hobo, they found that Google has indexed and displayed 1 page with compliant HTML / CSS code from a group of 4 identical page.

Spiders can’t “digest” flash objects and JavaScript that well, links and text in flash are not followed or indexed.
The use of flash objects in the page layout sometimes could be necessary, but avoid having all your pages designed entirely in flash.

Acceptable uses of flash:
- Product demos and presentations
- Online videos

Dangerous use of flash:
- Entire site in flash
- Navigation menus

Spiders can’t read images, so you should replace images by text whenever it is possible. It is understood that sometimes design requires graphic headers and images, but if the image only contain text, you should consider using text instead.

Few things to consider when creating your images:
- All your images should have alt attribute
<img src="some-image-file.jpg" alt="" height="50"" width="50" />
- All visible meaningful images should have alt attribute text
<img src="some-image-file.jpg" alt="some great alt text here" height="50"" width="50" />
- Alt text should be representive to what the image is about
- Use keywords in your alt text but avoid stuffing
- Try not to exceed 5-7 words in your alt text