The Search & Social Blog From Amplify Interactive

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Welcome to Christian Reads… (So You Don’t Have To) – SEO Edition. This is the first of my bi-weekly’ish ongoing attempt to give you all a quick, hard-hitting blog post that pulls together the best SEO articles I’ve seen and have been reading the past couple of weeks along with some key observations from each.

Here is a collection of links to other resources on the Web that have to do with SEO that I found interesting. Have any you would like to share? Please add with a comment!

March 2011: Search Market Share By The Numbers

• This was a blog post we put up on April 12th.
• Bing / Yahoo continue to slowly gobble up market share from Google. Google controlled 64.42% of the search market in March 2011. This percentage has been shrinking.

U.S. Google Panda Update, Round 2: Shrinking Demand For eHow

• Updated U.S. figures on how Google’s Panda update hurt content farms’ search engine rankings.
• Also lists some of the winners from the update that have seen an uptick in search rankings.
• While it was thought eHow escaped many penalties when the update first went live, it looks like eHow was hit pretty hard, losing ~66% of its organic visibility in Google.

New! AboutUs Site Report

• Our neighbors two floors up released their first paid tool – the AboutUs Site Report.
• Check up to 50 URLs and get stats on each page’s website visibility – from title tags to whether you’re allowing search engines to even index your content.
• Looks to be a great tool to be able to see just how well a web page is fairing from a search engine optimization perspective.

Coming Up First Is Not Accident

• An article at Boston.com that goes into how business can use fair or dirty SEO tactics to gain search engine rankings.
• Interesting tidbit to come out of the article – “A study released in September by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 58 percent of those who were surveyed search the Internet for information on products and services before they buy.” Honestly, I could only predict this percentage getting higher and higher.
• Some clickthrough rate percentages depending on search engine rank were hit on. There’s a big different in CTR from the first organic position to the fourth.

5 Site Optimization Blunders That Will Kill Your Rankings

• 5 essential ways you can effectively screw up your organic search engine rankings. From duh (don’t block search engine spider access to your site) to, our favorite, flash-driven websites.
• Pro-tip – when you have the desire to put a picture of a spider in your blog post due to talking about search engine spiders, holy crickets, please use a drawing or cartoon spider and not the real thing!

Have you read any nice SEO articles recently? Please share!

My personal Christian Reads…

Been reading a book called Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer and I have to say, it’s diabolically witty and well worth looking into. A fun except from it:

“Lots of forms. Stacks of forms. An average of nine thousand, seven hundred, and forty-seven of them were required to gain entrance to Hell. The largest form ran to fifteen thousand, four hundred, and ninety-seven questions. The shortest to just five, but five of such subtle phraseology, labyrinthine grammar, and malicious ambiguity that, released into the mortal world, they would certainly have formed the basis of a new religion or, at the least, a management course. This, then, was the first torment of Hell, as engineered by the soul of a bank clerk.”