Custom Search Engine Optimization & The AP’s Linking Issues

Creating Custom Search Engine Optimization Campaigns

Search Engine Journal’s Eric Lander had a great post today reminding readers of the importance of customizing your search engine optimization campaign. I know this will come as a surprise, but those cheap template-based SEO systems they sell for $29.99 and half a candy bar? Yeah, they don’t work so great.

As Eric points out in his post, your site isn’t like anyone else’s. The subject matter may be similar to your competitors, but the site itself is unique, as are your goals for that site. So then why in the world would you trust your search engine optimization efforts to a template system?

The design of your search engine optimization campaign should cater to the needs and goals of your site in order to be successful. It’s about targeting the terms important to you, designing your site architecture so that it works for your site and making sure the complete site is tied in a way that works. Letting a template-based optimization company put your site through some magical generator that’s supposedly going to tell you how you should write your page titles or body text doesn’t take into consideration who your users are or who you are. Good search engine optimization is always site-specific.

Don’t Link To The Associated Press. They don’t like it.

No, I’m serious.

This made me laugh but WebProNews reports that the Associated Press is suing news aggregation site, Moreover, and its parent company, Viacom, because they took snippets of their articles and then linked to the AP as being the source. Those bastards! The AP is now crying copyright infringement. Sigh.

WebProNews states:

"The heart of the complaint by AP is their contention that you can’t operate a news aggregation site like Moreover (or Google News, Topix, Drudge, WebProWire, Digg and Techmeme) as a commercial venture. Unless you have an agreement with AP to carry their stories, apparently, you can’t link to them."

Seriously? I thought we were done with these kinds of lawsuits. Someone needs to send the AP a short summary of how this thing called "the Internet" works. If the AP is somehow able to "win" their lawsuit it would, in essence, mean that we’re not allowed to link to any AP story. Actually, I’m okay that.

The AP should start hanging around with the folks from Nortel Learn It. They don’t like it when you link to them either. In fact, if you do link to them, they threaten to disable the link. Oh, I love it.

Fun Finds

Performancing attempted to ruin my day with 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks.

Facebook’s traffic seems to be declining and people are freaking out.

Kim Krause-Berg did a good roundup post of this week’s top usability-related posts. Go check those out.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.