The Illusion Of Free Market. An SEO Perspective
I have just finished reading a very interesting research paper dealing with the psychological limitations of the general consumer. The main point of this research paper is to show that the rational buyer theory has some very serious limitations and is only partially correct.
The author, Theo B. C, Poiesz, a professor at the Tilburg University and Tias Business School Netherlands argues that the free market model which in theory stimulates innovation, competition, flexibility and lower prices, but also has distinct disadvantages like short life cycle for a specific product and a continuous need for marketing, tends to be overrated and that the general behavior of a consumer can be determined by a very different set of factors such as the niche filling value (an overcrowded niche does not follow the free market rules), a higher emphasis on the perceived risk of purchase and ignorance when it comes to high tech products.
While this analysis holds some interesting points, it does not cover specifically the world of online marketing. There are no reasons whatsoever though to believe that these factors do not apply to this more restricted domain too.
Of Copywriting And Copyright Or How To Not Shoot Yourself In The Leg
In a thread over at DP a question arose of how a copywriter can use legally content from other sites. Obviously this poses a great deal of challenge given the copyright laws and the code of ethics every content writer or copywriter possesses.
I will start with an anecdotal saying coming from the academic environment: “Copying from one research paper is plagiarizing, copying from two is research”. This obviously is not true, but it can already give you hints on how to use copyrighted content in a fair manner, without breaking any law and without indulging in any break of your ethic code.
And as lists are popular nowadays I’ll give you a checklist to play with:
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A Big Slap On Microsoft’s Cheek. Windows Vista Is Officially Cracked
The paranoid activation policy enforced by Microsoft on its new Windows Vista has just seen its biggest and potentially crippling blow to date.
The hacker group Pantheon has discovered a flaw in the activation process that makes the pirated version look completely legit and which bypasses altogether the communication usually required to the Microsoft’s server.
The basic principle of the hack relies on the fact that preinstalled versions of Vista (the so called OEM versions) do not require any activation process at all. The utility released by Pantheon simply spoofs the BIOS and makes the OS believe that it is an OEM version. The great breakthrough though is the ability of applying this hack regardless of the hardware on which Vista runs.
The response from Microsoft can only be limited, as there are many legitimate copies sold under the OEM license and a move to to fix the flaw will most likely alienate and anger a lot of its customers.
With this in mind, Pantheon seems to have released the first stable crack, which is simply unfixable.
Latent Semantic indexing Part II: How To Use The Damned Thing
In the first part of this series I have described what LSI is. It is now time to take the journey further and learn how to optimize pages using this factor.
When trying to introduce the LSI element in your website, the biggest challenge found is in matching the analysis made by the Google algorithm with a similar approximation method. LSI tables are generated by analyzing thousands of webpages, something that is impossible for the average webmaster.
There are two ways to tackle this issue:
Does PageRank Equal Backlinks? Probably Not.
It is a common belief among SEO marketers that Google’s PageRank is defined solely by the number of backlinks a page has. There are reports though, that this is not the case.
There are several threads on Digital Point forum that suggest otherwise. The effect os observable when internal pages have a PR higher than the home page. A quick example:
the internal page with a PR of 4
and
Needless to say in this case the internal page has far fewer backlinks.
So what does this mean?
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Latent Semantic Indexing. Part I: A Brief Explanation
For everybody involved in the SEO business, latent semantic indexing or LSI has pretty much the stature of a legend. Everybody would like to use it, but nobody is quite sure how.
So what is Latent Semantic Indexing? If you will start googling the term, you will be in for some nasty surprise. Because there truly is a nice, clear definition, but nobody quite understands it. In layman’s terms latent semantic indexing is a technique used by Google to determine the relevancy of a keyword in its context. Now that has some truly serious implications. Keyword densities are simply not enough anymore, as they must be supported by the overall text.
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