Search Engine Tigers

I (along with probably 2-3 other people besides her) know the ’secret identity’ of SEOFanGirl, the author of menofseo.blogspot.com. I’m not going to out her, as I believe she’s planning on doing that herself at SES Chicago 2006. What I will say though is that while she has a blog that has received a fair bit of attention in the SEM world, with mentions on SEOMoz, DailySearchCast, among others, I believe she made a mis-step by not revealing herself sooner.

Over the month of October, Andy Beal at MarktingPilgrim ran an SEO scholarship contest to identify the next up and coming SEM superstar. SEOFanGirl submitted an entry (I’m not going to say which week.). The first round of the contest was won by traffic volume, with whichever contest entry had the most unique views becoming the winner for that week. The four weekly winners were then voted on by a panel of 9 industry judges. SEOFanGirl’s entry did not win the traffic portion, and therefore didn’t make it to the judgement round. I believe that if she’d outed herself by doing a “Want to find out who SEOFanGirl is? Click on this link” push on not just her blog, but others, she’d have received a fair amount of traffic for that, and may have made it through to the next round.

Of course hindsight is 20/20, and she did at least submit an entry, whereas I just didn’t get around to it, so she is one up on me to start with. Maybe next year.

Does this image really fill you with confidence that when Bloglines comes up it’ll be better?

It has been announced that on December 11th (the Monday after SES-Chicago), that there will be a new site talking about search – SearchEngineLand.com. Now why is this special you may ask? Well, the main voice behind this new site is Danny Sullivan, the founder of what is currently the voice of search – SearchEngineWatch – and the other 2 named contributers are Chris Sherman, and Barry Schwartz (RustyBrick of SearchEngineRoundtable). With these 3 headlining this new site, you can pretty much guarantee that most people in search will be looking there for news as soon as it opens (heck, I already have it on my bloglines).

So what will happen with SearchEngineWatch? Well, it’ll probably continue along for a while, although if it starts to lose other contributing editors, losing relevance and authority, it’ll really fade away fast…

Update: Well, the news came out on Wednesday, most of those SEW contributing editors are following Danny to SearchEngineLand.com, things are going to be interesting at SEW… Next on the list will probably be SES. Danny has said that he’s going to be involved with it, cutting his role back over the next few conferences, to where he’s just going to be a speaker at SES Chicago 2007. My guess would be that the Monday following that conference (December 10th 2007) will see an announcement of a new SearchEngineLand series of conferences, which will mean that a lot of the authorities will go to / present at that, and not at the SES conferences, making them go the way that it looks like SES is going to go.

I do remember at SES Chicago 2005 that Danny said in one session that he wishes he’d really thought out the name SES, and come up with something a bit snazzier, but that it was too late to change it at that point. I guess now he gets a year to come up with that new name, and make it really snazzy…

Update2: Barry Schwartz has posted a little bit more about the move from the insider’s perspective

Update3: So I was about a year off… Danny Sullivan has already announced that his new series of conferences will start this June, with the first SMX (Search Marketing Expo) taking place in Seattle.

Jim Boykin’s We Build Pages has put out a new competitive analysis tool. Just type in your site, and the keywords that you want to check for and see what comes back. First it tells you how your site ranks, then it lists the top ten sites on Google for that keyword. It shows how they rank on Yahoo, and Windows.live (formerly MSN), the number of pages that each site has indexed, the number of links to that page, the number of links to the main domain, the number of .edu links, the Alexa rank, the age of the site, and the number of times that the keyword appears on the page.

Using this tool you can maybe see why you’re ranking in a particular way. For example, in the image above, should interstate batteries want to rank above Windstream Yellow Pages for this phrase, then this tool would indicate that putting the phrase “Batteries In Lexington” on the site a few times, may help them to move up.

The downside to this tool… it’s using the Google API key for We Build Pages, so it’s limited to 1,000 uses per day, if it doesn’t work for you, simply try again the next day, but next time try a bit earlier.