Is Google AdWords Advertising Itself Honestly?
I’ve been working on PPC for my dad’s dental seminars business, and I have to admit that while I like a challenge, the system is really overwhelming. It makes me wonder whether Google AdWords – the PPC traffic/platform we’re buying/using – is honest in how it promotes itself.
Consider these two claims that AdWords makes:
1) Get started in minutes.
2) “You specify how much you’re willing to pay per click or impression. There are no minimum spend requirements.”
The first claim is obviously nonsense.
There’s a load of workflow to be done before you get your first click!
First, you need to have your landing page’s graphics designed.
Then you need to have the pics sliced and coded into html, which takes at least a day for even the highest volume shops at their most expensive. Otherwise it’s a few days.
Next you have to do keyword research and plan out how you’re going to organize the campaigns thematically. Yes, campaigns is plural, because everyone knows that to manage AdWords efficiently you have to make liberal use of campaigns in your account structure.
Assuming you want a good quality score, you’ll probably want to further organize campaigns by match type, and subdivide adgroups into plurals and singulars.
Then, naturally, you’ll need to brainstorm ad copy that matches the particular nuances of each campaign’s keywords and match types.
That copy has to be reflected back on the landing pages, which will also need additional copy.
Note: If the landing pages do anything but simply email you the form, or funnel traffic deeper with a click, you’ll need to tie the landing page to an email marketing program or to a CRM system.
Web analytics have to be integrated, and you’ll likely want to use a split-testing solution immediately to increase your conversions
…
The second claim also is laughable.
First, Google has this arbitrary algorithm known as Quality Score.
With landing pages, ads and keywords that the system all rated as fine, along with decent CTRs between 1-4%, Google still decided that my dad’s Quality Score on some keywords should be 4/10.
Second, Google has a ‘minimum first page bid.’ That’s a variant that also plays with these and other factors.
How in the world is that not a minimum spend requirement?
On PPC Blog’s private forum, people are calling it price gouging.
And in all this, there’s of course the auction system which is ridiculously more advanced than most of us realize, let alone have even time to understand.
Which is all, naturally, assuming you’re not mislead by common PPC myths.
-----------------------------------------
Making the Process Clear: Improve Your Search Engine Rankings in 6 Steps
Ranking higher in search engines is something that every business is trying to do (or at least they should be). If you search the web, there will be no end of advice on how this or that will get you to rank better. This sea of information can lead to decision paralysis when it comes to actually implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. This post pulls all this together into a practical blueprint for ranking higher in search.
Step 1: Do Keyword Research
First, pick a set of keywords you want to target. Make a list of 15-30 keywords that are relevant to your business. Choose unbranded keywords that relate to your business or industry, as opposed to choosing your company name. List these keywords with their associated information in 4 columns titled Keyword, Relevance, Difficulty, and Volume. Pick your own relevance score on a scale of 1-5. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find information on difficulty and volume (the number of searches per month).
From this set of keywords, pick about 10 of them that have high volume relative to their difficulty, and are relevant to your business. These are the keywords you want to target.
Step 2: Set Ranking Goals
Now that you have basic information on your keywords, you should set ranking goals for them. These goals should be time-framed, For example, you can have a 6 month plan, and monitor your progress bi-weekly or monthly.
In the end SEO is a bit of a black box. Setting realistic ranking goals is not a pure science. The goals act as more of a motivator, and can be modified if your results are not what you thought they would be.
To make your goals as realistic as possible, see how well you are doing in SEO relative to your competitors using Website Grader, a free tool powered by HubSpot. If you’re score is below 50, chances are there are some easy things you can do to improve it.
Step 3: On-page Optimize
By now, you know what pages you want to rank higher, and what keywords you are targeting for them. Now, all you need to do is target them. I recently wrote a little guide on keyword targeting, which I hope you check out.
One warning I should put here – before you tailor your page to target a keyword, make sure your target page is not ranking for other other keywords. If you have one page targeting multiple unrelated keywords, you might consider creating multiple pages for each keyword.
Step 4: Build Internal Links
On-page optimization is only about 25% of search engine optimization. The other 75% is link-building. To gain SEO authority, you want to get links from relevant pages going into the page you want to rank higher for. The easiest way to do this is by leveraging your current online real estate. Here are two effective and overlooked strategies for internal link-building:
Put Links in Your Blog Posts
Blog posts are a probably the best opportunity to build internal links. Each post is a new page that search engines see. If you put a standard link bar or footer on your blog, then each new blog post will contain a link to the pages you’re targeting.
Put Links on Your Home Page
Your home page will usually be the page with the best authority on your website. Putting links to your target pages in your navigation bar or in a footer with keyword-driven anchor text can be an effective way to improve SEO.
Step 5: Build External Links
Finally we arrive at external link-building. Get links from relevant websites with high authority is the most effective way to raise the authority of your own site. Some people call this the ‘hard’ part of SEO. I wouldn’t say that, but I would say that it takes patience. If you follow the guidelines below consistently, you are sure to gain plenty of inbound links.
Blog
Link building is one of the many benefits of blogging. Blog posts can be great viral pieces of content that gain inbound links.
Promote Your Content in Social Media
If you want people to link to your content, they need to know about you. Get involved in Twitter, Digg, and Facebook. Connect with people in Google Groups or LinkedIn Groups. Whatever you need to do to connect with your audience in a way that’s engaging for them, do it. Become a valuable resource and they will be more likely to link to your content.
Make Your Content Shareable
Make sure to put links on your site so that people can tweet and share your content via facebook. Instead of spreading the word about yourself, let people take the initiative to spread the word about you. Not only is viral content more likely to gain inbound links, but links in social media now count as inbound links for search engines.
Submit to Directories
Submitting your website to legitimate directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory can help you get found, and gain inbound links. You can check out these free directories to instantly improve your search engine authority.
Step 6: Monitor Your Progress
Now that you’ve done all the basic steps, its time to monitor your progress. Create a basic SEO Dashboard with the columns Keyword, Target Site, Monthly Searches, Difficulty, Rank, and Rank Change. Monitor and update your rank on a regular basis – for example, every 2 weeks. Your rank change is the difference in your ranking since the last time you checked.
Above all, do not give up on SEO. Your rankings might rise and fall over the course of your process, but getting to higher rankings can take time. However, it is a necessary component of an effective online business strategy.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
SEO News of 29-7-2010
Why SEO Gurus Got Slapped in the Face
t felt like only yesterday when SEO gurus ran the search world.
There they were, changing hundreds an hour while they poked around on their computers, analyzing keywords, calculating algorithms and directing cheaper labor overseas to conduct their link building projects — all with the belief that these tactics were the only thing needed to gain top rankings on Google.
Once upon a time, that's all that was needed to rank high on Google.
Flash forward to today and now SEO "gurus" who once killed it on the search scene, are scratching their heads and screaming at their offshore partners.
News flash: your tactics are now considered spam.
It could be said that social media hit mainstream about four years ago. Around that same time, all hell broke lose. Facebook's flood gates opened to everyone; YouTube was crawling to the top of Alexa; and, everyone wanted to know what Ashton Kutcher ate for lunch on Twitter. Once everyone else started to care about what everyone else was saying, search started to listen.
Of course search engines started listening to the massive amounts of conversations and user generated content created online, which is called real-time search.
That content has answers and we're all just searching for answers anyway aren't we? Who better to trust than Kim Kardashian or your best best friend from high school on Facebook? (slight sarcasm).
Nevertheless, social is now important for search marketing and the agenda of Search Engine Strategies (SES) SF 2010 is a reflection of that.
SES is a global conference held annually in cities around the world. Less than a month away is SES San Francisco, which starts August 16th. While previous years conferences have focused primarily on SEO, SEM, PPC strategies for search, the focus more recently has shifted to social media. But why?
Social media is playing a huge factor at SES this year, according to Byron Gordon from SEO-PR.com. This has nothing to do with social media as a buzz word or a fad. It has to do with the undeniable fact that search has changed, dramatically and quickly. One minute you are showing up on the first page for keywords with their queries, the next minute, Google ignores you as spammer. Why? Too much SEO and too little SMO (social media optimization).
SEO and Social now need to work together. An SEO practitioner can no longer apply the same tactics to be a top rank without integration of social media as well. Further, the way people search, make decisions, and what they click on has change. In fact, there is very little discussion of paid search at this years SES San Francisco event.
There are some great topics and speakers to be discussed at the event. Agenda topics range from Introductory SEO or Social Media to in depth topics like Augmented Reality and Facebook.
What I do not see covered in depth however, is social search — a new way people are starting to search and make decisions about what to click on and even buy.
I would expect to see a full discussion period blocked out for this topic. While I do see mentions of the changes to search, etc. the face of social search in itself deserves more consideration at a search engine strategies conference.
Aren't the new strategies involving social to optimize search essentially what people expert to learn from attending? What do you think?
----------------------------------------
Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O.
Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”
So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.
In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.
Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.
Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.
Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.
In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.
Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.
She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.
She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.
Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).
“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
-------------------------------------
Image SEO Expert Knocks On Bing Image Search
A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search.
The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content. Which is often the case, simply cause Google is much faster than most search engines. But Zeus breaks it out to say that their image search is even more disappointing.
Zeus said that typically he sees at most 10% of his pages or images in Bing Image search, sometimes only 5% or less. He said:
Bing Image which in my case has 45 images listed of 22,000.
Now, Bing has made some very good strides and I believe many are rutting for them to gain some more share. Heck, I even think it would be a good idea and I am an Apple guy.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
----------------------------
Algorithms: The Cure for Copywriter’s Block
Writer’s block, or perhaps more accurate these days, blogger’s block, is a common occurrence. Great bloggers try to pump out insightful and engaging content daily, but eventually the question becomes, what more can you write about? It’s at times like these when I suggest you delve into a little keyword research.
Rather than struggle internally to find topics for your next blog or article, let data drive your reporting or writing. Tools like Google’s Adwords KeyWord Tool, BlogPulse and Wordtracker are good for discovering what topics are trending for Copywriting inspiration.
Content Farms vs. Attention Mines
Newspapers and journalists have bemoaned the growing industry of “Content Farms” in recent years. As sites like Examiner.com and Demand Media grow in prominence, traditional publications are losing web traffic and thus, advertising opportunities. But how are Content Farms getting so many readers? Shouldn’t the journalistic reputation of major newspapers and magazines be enough to attract readers? Not anymore, thanks to search algorithms.
Algorithm as Editor
As online journalist Jason Fry (@JasonCFry) explains in a recent post, Content Farm sites use of algorithms to create story ideas in an “algorithm-as-editor” model. This flies in the face of the traditional writing style in which editors or bloggers assemble story ideas through a keen journalistic, yet un-digitized public awareness or crowdsourcing. Now, writers are guided by search engine queries, a model you can use when attempting to ward off copywriter’s block.
Attention Mines
Noted journalism entrepreneur Michael Tippet (@MTippet) reengineers the somewhat spammy reputation Content Farms have evoked by calling the collection of sites Attention Mines. In this sense, writer’s still hold the key to the car, so to speak. Writers, bloggers and professional journalists can all use algorithms in developing story ideas, but don’t let search queries alone guide your pen. Keyword research is only one component to identifying what readers want and what they need. If we let search engines write the stories, we’d read nothing but Justin Beiber
Make Headlines, Don’t Write Them
There’s a big difference between merely commenting on search queries and using them to write good copy. If you’re posting a blog or article, strive to create a headline and add to the conversation, rather than merely rehashing the keywords you saw in your keyword research.
Algorithms can tell you what readers want, but more importantly, they help you understand why. In your keyword research, you’ll come across story ideas that make sense, but a few that are out of the blue as well. A great article can come from those outliers. Keyword research can help you find what an audience wants to read, but as a writer, you must give them what they need..
--------------------------------------
How to Automate and Scale Your Guest Blogging
One of the things we do to help our SEO efforts is to write professional articles about our niche. We believe this is a great way to get links, and anyone can do this in their own niche.
Let’s say for the sake of example that we sell wedding shoes. Our staff knows a lot about this subject, and is very experienced in that field of work. Therefore this niche produces the most natural topics to write about. We would write about how to choose the most comfortable wedding shoes, or how to choose ones that will support your feet best and still have high heels, or what is trendy currently … You get the point.
The next step is to publish these articles as guest posts in as many blogs and websites as possible, so we can get the precious links.
First we need to make contact with bloggers that tend to write about weddings, introduce ourselves and offer articles to them. These bloggers are more open than others to receive and publish guest articles about wedding shoes.
At this point, we encounter the first problem – How do we find a large number of these bloggers?
Our immediate solution was very simple – We search for posts regarding weddings, so we can contact their authors. We do that by utilizing Google Blog Alerts on one generic keyword that appears in these posts in high probability: “wedding”.
You can do this by going to Google Alerts, then type “wedding” and choose “Blogs” as the type, and fill the rest of the fields. If you’re logged in to Google when you do this, then you have the option to receive the alerts in a feed instead of email.
An employee reads the alert feed frequently (let’s say twice every day), looks at all the new blog posts about weddings, and identifies bloggers that we can contact.
This employee then tags these blogs in Delicious, with the tag ‘GoodBlog’.
If you are not familiar with Delicious tagging, this is the time to explain that each tag creates an RSS feed (we call this a tag-feed), which gets filled with URLs as you tag them. This usage of Delicious Bookmarks is a very powerful productivity tool, and it’s free!
So these blogs get tagged as GoodBlog, and thus an item is generated in the Delicious tag-feed, and we let another employee read this tag-feed and contact the bloggers. A rather simple process that is also mostly scalable. This process so far requires only little man-power.
While doing this, we found out that a single Google Blog Alert on a generic keyword like ‘wedding’ ends up with a huge quantity of results… Some of them are interesting and related to weddings – so we can contact their authors, like this one. But others aren’t relevant at all, or are spam blogs (splogs), scrapers (a growing phenomenon), and other Internet junk.
For example, a few irrelevant sites that keep popping up are gossip sites and magazines that talk about celebrity weddings and stuff like that (for example, this one). They are not likely to accept out wedding-shoes articles, so we prefer not to contact them. If possible, we prefer not to see them at all in the alerts.
So this brings us to the second problem – How do we separate the wheat from the chaff?
We observed early-on that it would be enough to filter out a limited amount of specific spam sites and other unrelated sites that, for one reason or another, appear again and again in the alerts.
Our first idea for a software-based solution was to write a PHP script to filter certain URLs from the alert feed, and thus generate a filtered feed. A quick sketch for such a script is:
1. Read the alert feed
2. Iterate over all items
3. Remove items from sites we don’t want
4. Keep all others
5. Output the kept items as a feed
This kind of script would do the job, but it would require tweaking the script every time we wanted to add a new site to filter.
So we came up with another trick, and this is the main point of this essay: The list of sites to filter doesn’t need to be hard-coded into the script.
Instead, the script can use several Delicious tag-feeds that contain the list of the sites to filter out.
So now we have an improved feed filter that generates a modified feed on-the-fly. The employee who reads the modified feed, can use one tag (‘GoodBlog’) to mark a blog for later contact, and another tag (‘BadSite’) to mark a site for future filtering.
The feed-filter script will filter any entries from a site that was tagged with any of these, from then onward!
The end result: A large and ever-growing list of good wedding-related blogs that we can contact and publish articles on.
Any blogs that we already identified and maybe contacted, as well as any spam/junk/irrelevant sites that we don’t want to see anymore, are all filtered out of the alerts feed. As an added bonus, the whole process tends to optimize itself over time, so the employee has less and less spam to go through.
From the productivity and usability point of view, the most important aspect of this whole system is that the user interface is dead-simple and intuitive for the employee. They tag a site, and it works as expected.
We want to share this element of the system with everybody, so you can all do this kind of thing. We call it the PHP Feed Filter, and we give it to you here for free, so you can use it for your SEO efforts.
A word about how it works
We use very simple RSS parser and writer classes, based on PHP’s XML facilities. However the parser doesn’t work well for Google Alerts ATOM feeds, so we also included SimplePie, which handles those feeds well.
If you wish to use the feed filter for your own system, you should:
* Generate a Google Alerts feed and put its URL in the sample script file where it says “Unfiltered alert feed”.
* Generate tag feeds in Delicious as you see fit (they appear at the bottom of the page when you look at tagged entries), and put them in the sample script file where it says “Filter feeds”. You can also use private feeds if you wish to keep all your work hidden from competitors.
* Let your employee enter the sample script’s URL in their RSS reader, like Google Reader.
* Remember to tag the homepage, and not a specific post or page, so that they get filtered correctly.
Summary
Note that the code is not very optimized and a bit crude, but it is very simple and straightforward. You should be able to modify any part of it quite easily to fit more complicated use cases. This is also why we used free 3rd-party services like Google Blog Alerts and Delicious Bookmarks.
A system such as this allows you to scale your article distribution and guest blogging efforts while maintaining efficiency. In fact, in some ways efficiency increases over time as you learn which sites you wish to avoid in future.
We hope you find our code useful and please do let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve it!
t felt like only yesterday when SEO gurus ran the search world.
There they were, changing hundreds an hour while they poked around on their computers, analyzing keywords, calculating algorithms and directing cheaper labor overseas to conduct their link building projects — all with the belief that these tactics were the only thing needed to gain top rankings on Google.
Once upon a time, that's all that was needed to rank high on Google.
Flash forward to today and now SEO "gurus" who once killed it on the search scene, are scratching their heads and screaming at their offshore partners.
News flash: your tactics are now considered spam.
It could be said that social media hit mainstream about four years ago. Around that same time, all hell broke lose. Facebook's flood gates opened to everyone; YouTube was crawling to the top of Alexa; and, everyone wanted to know what Ashton Kutcher ate for lunch on Twitter. Once everyone else started to care about what everyone else was saying, search started to listen.
Of course search engines started listening to the massive amounts of conversations and user generated content created online, which is called real-time search.
That content has answers and we're all just searching for answers anyway aren't we? Who better to trust than Kim Kardashian or your best best friend from high school on Facebook? (slight sarcasm).
Nevertheless, social is now important for search marketing and the agenda of Search Engine Strategies (SES) SF 2010 is a reflection of that.
SES is a global conference held annually in cities around the world. Less than a month away is SES San Francisco, which starts August 16th. While previous years conferences have focused primarily on SEO, SEM, PPC strategies for search, the focus more recently has shifted to social media. But why?
Social media is playing a huge factor at SES this year, according to Byron Gordon from SEO-PR.com. This has nothing to do with social media as a buzz word or a fad. It has to do with the undeniable fact that search has changed, dramatically and quickly. One minute you are showing up on the first page for keywords with their queries, the next minute, Google ignores you as spammer. Why? Too much SEO and too little SMO (social media optimization).
SEO and Social now need to work together. An SEO practitioner can no longer apply the same tactics to be a top rank without integration of social media as well. Further, the way people search, make decisions, and what they click on has change. In fact, there is very little discussion of paid search at this years SES San Francisco event.
There are some great topics and speakers to be discussed at the event. Agenda topics range from Introductory SEO or Social Media to in depth topics like Augmented Reality and Facebook.
What I do not see covered in depth however, is social search — a new way people are starting to search and make decisions about what to click on and even buy.
I would expect to see a full discussion period blocked out for this topic. While I do see mentions of the changes to search, etc. the face of social search in itself deserves more consideration at a search engine strategies conference.
Aren't the new strategies involving social to optimize search essentially what people expert to learn from attending? What do you think?
----------------------------------------
Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O.
Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”
So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.
In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.
Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.
Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.
Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.
In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.
Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.
She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.
She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.
Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).
“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
-------------------------------------
Image SEO Expert Knocks On Bing Image Search
A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search.
The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content. Which is often the case, simply cause Google is much faster than most search engines. But Zeus breaks it out to say that their image search is even more disappointing.
Zeus said that typically he sees at most 10% of his pages or images in Bing Image search, sometimes only 5% or less. He said:
Bing Image which in my case has 45 images listed of 22,000.
Now, Bing has made some very good strides and I believe many are rutting for them to gain some more share. Heck, I even think it would be a good idea and I am an Apple guy.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
----------------------------
Algorithms: The Cure for Copywriter’s Block
Writer’s block, or perhaps more accurate these days, blogger’s block, is a common occurrence. Great bloggers try to pump out insightful and engaging content daily, but eventually the question becomes, what more can you write about? It’s at times like these when I suggest you delve into a little keyword research.
Rather than struggle internally to find topics for your next blog or article, let data drive your reporting or writing. Tools like Google’s Adwords KeyWord Tool, BlogPulse and Wordtracker are good for discovering what topics are trending for Copywriting inspiration.
Content Farms vs. Attention Mines
Newspapers and journalists have bemoaned the growing industry of “Content Farms” in recent years. As sites like Examiner.com and Demand Media grow in prominence, traditional publications are losing web traffic and thus, advertising opportunities. But how are Content Farms getting so many readers? Shouldn’t the journalistic reputation of major newspapers and magazines be enough to attract readers? Not anymore, thanks to search algorithms.
Algorithm as Editor
As online journalist Jason Fry (@JasonCFry) explains in a recent post, Content Farm sites use of algorithms to create story ideas in an “algorithm-as-editor” model. This flies in the face of the traditional writing style in which editors or bloggers assemble story ideas through a keen journalistic, yet un-digitized public awareness or crowdsourcing. Now, writers are guided by search engine queries, a model you can use when attempting to ward off copywriter’s block.
Attention Mines
Noted journalism entrepreneur Michael Tippet (@MTippet) reengineers the somewhat spammy reputation Content Farms have evoked by calling the collection of sites Attention Mines. In this sense, writer’s still hold the key to the car, so to speak. Writers, bloggers and professional journalists can all use algorithms in developing story ideas, but don’t let search queries alone guide your pen. Keyword research is only one component to identifying what readers want and what they need. If we let search engines write the stories, we’d read nothing but Justin Beiber
Make Headlines, Don’t Write Them
There’s a big difference between merely commenting on search queries and using them to write good copy. If you’re posting a blog or article, strive to create a headline and add to the conversation, rather than merely rehashing the keywords you saw in your keyword research.
Algorithms can tell you what readers want, but more importantly, they help you understand why. In your keyword research, you’ll come across story ideas that make sense, but a few that are out of the blue as well. A great article can come from those outliers. Keyword research can help you find what an audience wants to read, but as a writer, you must give them what they need..
--------------------------------------
How to Automate and Scale Your Guest Blogging
One of the things we do to help our SEO efforts is to write professional articles about our niche. We believe this is a great way to get links, and anyone can do this in their own niche.
Let’s say for the sake of example that we sell wedding shoes. Our staff knows a lot about this subject, and is very experienced in that field of work. Therefore this niche produces the most natural topics to write about. We would write about how to choose the most comfortable wedding shoes, or how to choose ones that will support your feet best and still have high heels, or what is trendy currently … You get the point.
The next step is to publish these articles as guest posts in as many blogs and websites as possible, so we can get the precious links.
First we need to make contact with bloggers that tend to write about weddings, introduce ourselves and offer articles to them. These bloggers are more open than others to receive and publish guest articles about wedding shoes.
At this point, we encounter the first problem – How do we find a large number of these bloggers?
Our immediate solution was very simple – We search for posts regarding weddings, so we can contact their authors. We do that by utilizing Google Blog Alerts on one generic keyword that appears in these posts in high probability: “wedding”.
You can do this by going to Google Alerts, then type “wedding” and choose “Blogs” as the type, and fill the rest of the fields. If you’re logged in to Google when you do this, then you have the option to receive the alerts in a feed instead of email.
An employee reads the alert feed frequently (let’s say twice every day), looks at all the new blog posts about weddings, and identifies bloggers that we can contact.
This employee then tags these blogs in Delicious, with the tag ‘GoodBlog’.
If you are not familiar with Delicious tagging, this is the time to explain that each tag creates an RSS feed (we call this a tag-feed), which gets filled with URLs as you tag them. This usage of Delicious Bookmarks is a very powerful productivity tool, and it’s free!
So these blogs get tagged as GoodBlog, and thus an item is generated in the Delicious tag-feed, and we let another employee read this tag-feed and contact the bloggers. A rather simple process that is also mostly scalable. This process so far requires only little man-power.
While doing this, we found out that a single Google Blog Alert on a generic keyword like ‘wedding’ ends up with a huge quantity of results… Some of them are interesting and related to weddings – so we can contact their authors, like this one. But others aren’t relevant at all, or are spam blogs (splogs), scrapers (a growing phenomenon), and other Internet junk.
For example, a few irrelevant sites that keep popping up are gossip sites and magazines that talk about celebrity weddings and stuff like that (for example, this one). They are not likely to accept out wedding-shoes articles, so we prefer not to contact them. If possible, we prefer not to see them at all in the alerts.
So this brings us to the second problem – How do we separate the wheat from the chaff?
We observed early-on that it would be enough to filter out a limited amount of specific spam sites and other unrelated sites that, for one reason or another, appear again and again in the alerts.
Our first idea for a software-based solution was to write a PHP script to filter certain URLs from the alert feed, and thus generate a filtered feed. A quick sketch for such a script is:
1. Read the alert feed
2. Iterate over all items
3. Remove items from sites we don’t want
4. Keep all others
5. Output the kept items as a feed
This kind of script would do the job, but it would require tweaking the script every time we wanted to add a new site to filter.
So we came up with another trick, and this is the main point of this essay: The list of sites to filter doesn’t need to be hard-coded into the script.
Instead, the script can use several Delicious tag-feeds that contain the list of the sites to filter out.
So now we have an improved feed filter that generates a modified feed on-the-fly. The employee who reads the modified feed, can use one tag (‘GoodBlog’) to mark a blog for later contact, and another tag (‘BadSite’) to mark a site for future filtering.
The feed-filter script will filter any entries from a site that was tagged with any of these, from then onward!
The end result: A large and ever-growing list of good wedding-related blogs that we can contact and publish articles on.
Any blogs that we already identified and maybe contacted, as well as any spam/junk/irrelevant sites that we don’t want to see anymore, are all filtered out of the alerts feed. As an added bonus, the whole process tends to optimize itself over time, so the employee has less and less spam to go through.
From the productivity and usability point of view, the most important aspect of this whole system is that the user interface is dead-simple and intuitive for the employee. They tag a site, and it works as expected.
We want to share this element of the system with everybody, so you can all do this kind of thing. We call it the PHP Feed Filter, and we give it to you here for free, so you can use it for your SEO efforts.
A word about how it works
We use very simple RSS parser and writer classes, based on PHP’s XML facilities. However the parser doesn’t work well for Google Alerts ATOM feeds, so we also included SimplePie, which handles those feeds well.
If you wish to use the feed filter for your own system, you should:
* Generate a Google Alerts feed and put its URL in the sample script file where it says “Unfiltered alert feed”.
* Generate tag feeds in Delicious as you see fit (they appear at the bottom of the page when you look at tagged entries), and put them in the sample script file where it says “Filter feeds”. You can also use private feeds if you wish to keep all your work hidden from competitors.
* Let your employee enter the sample script’s URL in their RSS reader, like Google Reader.
* Remember to tag the homepage, and not a specific post or page, so that they get filtered correctly.
Summary
Note that the code is not very optimized and a bit crude, but it is very simple and straightforward. You should be able to modify any part of it quite easily to fit more complicated use cases. This is also why we used free 3rd-party services like Google Blog Alerts and Delicious Bookmarks.
A system such as this allows you to scale your article distribution and guest blogging efforts while maintaining efficiency. In fact, in some ways efficiency increases over time as you learn which sites you wish to avoid in future.
We hope you find our code useful and please do let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve it!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Latest SEO News of 28-7-2010
Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O.
Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”
So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.
In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.
Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.
Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.
Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.
In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.
Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.
She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.
She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.
Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).
“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
-----------------------------------------------
UK SMEs 'failing to pick up on SEO'
Small businesses in the UK are not taking advantage of search engine optimisation (SEO), according to a new report.
Analytics SEO found that more than half of the 1,000 SMEs surveyed had negligible, ineffectual levels of SEO, while some had none.
Seventy per cent of firms with fewer than 50 employees had basic or non-existent SEO.
Overall, only two per cent had invested in analytics software to monitor return-on-investment – meaning that more than nine in ten businesses were failing to track responses.
There was a huge disparity between small and large companies, with the average small firm only possessing 408 inbound links.
In comparison, the average UK company has 6,874 inbound links.
Writing in Econsultancy, media expert Graham Charlton commented that companies could be losing out on sales.
"[Small] businesses should be looking to correct this as, implemented well, SEO has the potential to be a very important and cost-effective sales channel.
"Whilst not every company will have the resources or know-how to run an effective campaign, simply getting the basics right, such as ensuring that a site can be indexed and contains relevant content, can make a noticeable difference to search results," he said.
----------------------------------------------
Firefox – SEO Programmers Heaven
You’ll have no doubt been working one day and asked yourself, “There must be a simpler way to do this”. You’re right, there probably is, in the form of a Firefox add-on. There are thousands of add-on’s to choose from for Firefox, some are useful, some are pointless, and many you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.
For SEO purposes, Firefox add-on’s are a programmers heaven. There are dozens of useful add-on’s for SEO in the Mozilla database. A few of SEO Consult’s favourites are listed below with a description of their use. Try them out, you won’t be disappointed!
Firebug – This tool is not just one for the SEO programmer, but also for any website developer too. It gives you a small icon in the status bar which when clicked brings up a console style window. Inside is a multitude of tools designed to help you diagnose and repair broken web pages. By far the most useful feature is the ability to edit and monitor on the fly changes of CSS, HTML and JavaScript live on any web page. This is far quicker than editing a page, uploading and refreshing.
Live HTTP Headers – This tool shows you the headers served up from the web server so you can see if there are any redirects in them, such as 301 or 302 redirects. It will also show you if there are any elements not found with a 404 error. 302’s and 404’s are like the plague to Google, and they won’t get indexed. Use this tool to help you identify and remove them.
Server Spy – This is a basic but very useful tool to tell you which version of Apache, IIS or other web server software the server hosting the website is running. This is especially useful if you need to know whether you can use an htaccess file or not, or see if a script is likely going to be compatible with the website or not.
HTML Validator – Tired of the W3C Validator being so slow? We were too, so we installed this tool which uses a very close algorithm to the W3C Validator to help us diagnose HTML/XHTML errors. The tool installs itself to the status bar where it displays the number of errors on each page you load automatically. Double clicking brings up the source code window and the validator console for your diagnosis. When all the errors are repaired, finish off with a check using the W3C Validator to be sure, as the algorithms aren’t identical. A validated page is a good looking page to Google.
Web Developers Toolbar – This is by far the most useful tool any web or SEO programmer can use. The variety of features included is huge, and it allows you to do hundreds of things you would normally crawl through browser menus to do. Some examples are outlining elements, disabling images and JavaScript, viewing the CSS file, disabling CSS, resizing the browser window, view the source code and page headers… The list is almost endless. Ease of use and compatibility is a large factor in conversion rates, so make sure your website works the way it should.
Now you have some useful tools, install them and see how well they help you. And remember, they’re all free and get regularly updated. From an SEO perspective, you can increase your throughput by a long way with these simple tools.
---------------------------------------
5 Things You Need to Know to Succeed With Bing
With the impending implosion of Yahoo’s disappointing Panama project and seeming overnight surrender of search to the big boys of Google and Microsoft it’s time we all started paying a little more attention to Bing and particularly Microsoft adCenter.
Just the other day I was talking with some bright minds in the search space and when we got to the topic of Bing the lights were on but no one was home. Which got me think about how since its launch most of us have largely ignored the MSN/Bing advertising platform, as illustrated by the small number of advertisers on Bing compared against Google’s estimated 1.5 million advertisers, due in large part to the limited consumer reach and previously very poor functionality. And while it’s still a few months away I think it is high time we start thinking about how we manage search in Bing and want to share with you 5 things you’ll need to know to find success with Bing.
* Dynamic Text Insertion: Most advertisers are familiar with Google’s dynamic keyword insertion function that allows an advertiser to take the search query and dynamically insert it into ad text. Bing takes this feature to a whole new level. Not only can you dynamically insert the search query into the ad but you can also conditionally insert other pieces of text into the ad or display url. For example, if the search query is red roses you could insert the word red rose into the ad text but could also make a condition that shows a price of $24.99 when the search query is red roses but $19.99 if the search query is yellow roses. Proper use of this should improve relevance which will help improve CTR and/or conversion rates.
* Scheduled Bid Adjustments: On both a campaign and ad group level advertisers can both increase or decrease their bid levels based on geography (by city, metro,. state/province, country/region), demographics (age and gender), day of week, user device (mobile or desktop/laptop) and time of day. This requires marketers to really understand their underlying core business metrics but the marketers that know their metrics and understand these features can heavily skew the Bing search landscape in their favor.
* Bing Uses Quality Score Metric: While this doesn’t come as a surprise to many it is important to note that Bing also uses a similar metric to Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo’s Quality Index (they call their metric Quality Score Unfortunately this is one area that is pretty crappy in Bing. At this stage Bing doesn’t display quality score that ties to a keyword, ad, or account. However, there have been some instances we’ve heard of that in order to establish high quality scores bids have been increased by 2x which have driven bids down in the mid to long term. Note that everything we’re hearing is that Bing is in alpha or beta of rolling out Quality Score for advertisers.
* Search Management Tools: Microsoft’s adCenter has a tool similar to Google’s desktop tool (Adwords Editor) that resides on an advertiser’s local machine. The name of the tool isn’t the most original – Microsoft adCenter Desktop but the tool has some great functionality
o Extract keywords for your ad group based on a URL or MSN’s keyword tools
o Ad distribution (search vs. content) and geo-targeting and add ad group-level negative keywords
o Similar functionality to the excel plug-in described below.
On top of their desktop application adCenter also offers an excel plug-in feature with features that provide deep keyword research insights. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.
* Dedicated Time and Resources: Once Bing is powering the organic and paid search results for Yahoo there reach will be extended and their resources will be more heavily focused on improving their advertising tools to allow them to increase monetization per query. The advertisers who will win in the land grab for search real estate are those who are willing to dedicate their time and resources to test and optimize Bing early and often.
It’s going to be rocky at first and there are lots of things that adCenter needs to fix such as exposing their quality index, improving their reporting interface, and many more items but with nearly 30% market share (Yahoo+Bing combined) we can’t afford to ignore Bing any longer. Check for more information about Bing in the upcoming weeks. I think you’re going to love Bing!
---------------------------------------------------
How to Re-Purpose Your Content to Optimize it for Traveling Season
I feel lucky enough to work from home for about 3 years now and to be able to travel wherever I want with my family. This is what I have actually been doing for the past month – traveling (and struggling with somewhat screwed schedule). However another side of this story is that being an Internet marketer who works from home, I am never free. I work while traveling and try to make each of my vacation minute “useful” for my work and business.
This has inspired me to share some ways that would help those hard-working travelers like me and let them use your content while on the go.
1. Offer Various Ways to Download Your Content
I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:
* This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
* It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
* This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):
Besides simply offering your readers an alternative format enabling them to download and access your content, a pdf file could also increase your reach. For example, Scribd, a popular document sharing site may generate some decent traffic to your blog.
2. Create Quick Outlines of Your Monthly Editorial
Imagine how many people are now coming back home from holidays: you may help them a great deal by offering a quick but useful recaps of your previous posts (for the past month, week, etc). These overviews won’t probably generate many Tweets or comments but they will engage users in another way: they will encourage them to go through the content they may have missed.
An alternative way to represent the information you have previously blogged about would also be nice. For example, a well-branded PowerPoint file representing your previous posts will be much appreciated. Besides, this way you can re-use your content by publishing it to SlideShare (which, in turn will be shared in your LinkedIn network if you use SlideShare official LinkedIn application):
You can also create a downloadable copy of your recap (in an eBook format) to allow various ways to access and go through your outline on- as well as offline.
3. Create an Audio Version of Your Content
An audio post comes incredibly handy (and appreciated) while you are on the go. While PDF version of your content makes it more “offline-friendly” as well as easier to use on iPad, the audio version makes it possible for your readers to listen to your articles on their iPod while on the plane or even on the beach.
I have reviewed one plugin that “adds voice to your posts” – Odiogo automates the process of turning each of your blog posts in a podcast (as well as adds the option to download your content to your blog feed):
If you want to make the process more selective and the voice less “machine-like”, there are other applications like Audacity which is free recording software.
Creating an audio version of your blog posts will also increase your exposure as you can submit your content to heavily-used podcast directories like iTunes (To submit to iTunes, go to the iTunes Store, navigate to the Podcasts directory, and click on the Submit a Podcast link.)
Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”
So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.
In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.
Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.
Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.
Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.
In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.
Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.
She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.
She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.
Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).
“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
-----------------------------------------------
UK SMEs 'failing to pick up on SEO'
Small businesses in the UK are not taking advantage of search engine optimisation (SEO), according to a new report.
Analytics SEO found that more than half of the 1,000 SMEs surveyed had negligible, ineffectual levels of SEO, while some had none.
Seventy per cent of firms with fewer than 50 employees had basic or non-existent SEO.
Overall, only two per cent had invested in analytics software to monitor return-on-investment – meaning that more than nine in ten businesses were failing to track responses.
There was a huge disparity between small and large companies, with the average small firm only possessing 408 inbound links.
In comparison, the average UK company has 6,874 inbound links.
Writing in Econsultancy, media expert Graham Charlton commented that companies could be losing out on sales.
"[Small] businesses should be looking to correct this as, implemented well, SEO has the potential to be a very important and cost-effective sales channel.
"Whilst not every company will have the resources or know-how to run an effective campaign, simply getting the basics right, such as ensuring that a site can be indexed and contains relevant content, can make a noticeable difference to search results," he said.
----------------------------------------------
Firefox – SEO Programmers Heaven
You’ll have no doubt been working one day and asked yourself, “There must be a simpler way to do this”. You’re right, there probably is, in the form of a Firefox add-on. There are thousands of add-on’s to choose from for Firefox, some are useful, some are pointless, and many you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.
For SEO purposes, Firefox add-on’s are a programmers heaven. There are dozens of useful add-on’s for SEO in the Mozilla database. A few of SEO Consult’s favourites are listed below with a description of their use. Try them out, you won’t be disappointed!
Firebug – This tool is not just one for the SEO programmer, but also for any website developer too. It gives you a small icon in the status bar which when clicked brings up a console style window. Inside is a multitude of tools designed to help you diagnose and repair broken web pages. By far the most useful feature is the ability to edit and monitor on the fly changes of CSS, HTML and JavaScript live on any web page. This is far quicker than editing a page, uploading and refreshing.
Live HTTP Headers – This tool shows you the headers served up from the web server so you can see if there are any redirects in them, such as 301 or 302 redirects. It will also show you if there are any elements not found with a 404 error. 302’s and 404’s are like the plague to Google, and they won’t get indexed. Use this tool to help you identify and remove them.
Server Spy – This is a basic but very useful tool to tell you which version of Apache, IIS or other web server software the server hosting the website is running. This is especially useful if you need to know whether you can use an htaccess file or not, or see if a script is likely going to be compatible with the website or not.
HTML Validator – Tired of the W3C Validator being so slow? We were too, so we installed this tool which uses a very close algorithm to the W3C Validator to help us diagnose HTML/XHTML errors. The tool installs itself to the status bar where it displays the number of errors on each page you load automatically. Double clicking brings up the source code window and the validator console for your diagnosis. When all the errors are repaired, finish off with a check using the W3C Validator to be sure, as the algorithms aren’t identical. A validated page is a good looking page to Google.
Web Developers Toolbar – This is by far the most useful tool any web or SEO programmer can use. The variety of features included is huge, and it allows you to do hundreds of things you would normally crawl through browser menus to do. Some examples are outlining elements, disabling images and JavaScript, viewing the CSS file, disabling CSS, resizing the browser window, view the source code and page headers… The list is almost endless. Ease of use and compatibility is a large factor in conversion rates, so make sure your website works the way it should.
Now you have some useful tools, install them and see how well they help you. And remember, they’re all free and get regularly updated. From an SEO perspective, you can increase your throughput by a long way with these simple tools.
---------------------------------------
5 Things You Need to Know to Succeed With Bing
With the impending implosion of Yahoo’s disappointing Panama project and seeming overnight surrender of search to the big boys of Google and Microsoft it’s time we all started paying a little more attention to Bing and particularly Microsoft adCenter.
Just the other day I was talking with some bright minds in the search space and when we got to the topic of Bing the lights were on but no one was home. Which got me think about how since its launch most of us have largely ignored the MSN/Bing advertising platform, as illustrated by the small number of advertisers on Bing compared against Google’s estimated 1.5 million advertisers, due in large part to the limited consumer reach and previously very poor functionality. And while it’s still a few months away I think it is high time we start thinking about how we manage search in Bing and want to share with you 5 things you’ll need to know to find success with Bing.
* Dynamic Text Insertion: Most advertisers are familiar with Google’s dynamic keyword insertion function that allows an advertiser to take the search query and dynamically insert it into ad text. Bing takes this feature to a whole new level. Not only can you dynamically insert the search query into the ad but you can also conditionally insert other pieces of text into the ad or display url. For example, if the search query is red roses you could insert the word red rose into the ad text but could also make a condition that shows a price of $24.99 when the search query is red roses but $19.99 if the search query is yellow roses. Proper use of this should improve relevance which will help improve CTR and/or conversion rates.
* Scheduled Bid Adjustments: On both a campaign and ad group level advertisers can both increase or decrease their bid levels based on geography (by city, metro,. state/province, country/region), demographics (age and gender), day of week, user device (mobile or desktop/laptop) and time of day. This requires marketers to really understand their underlying core business metrics but the marketers that know their metrics and understand these features can heavily skew the Bing search landscape in their favor.
* Bing Uses Quality Score Metric: While this doesn’t come as a surprise to many it is important to note that Bing also uses a similar metric to Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo’s Quality Index (they call their metric Quality Score Unfortunately this is one area that is pretty crappy in Bing. At this stage Bing doesn’t display quality score that ties to a keyword, ad, or account. However, there have been some instances we’ve heard of that in order to establish high quality scores bids have been increased by 2x which have driven bids down in the mid to long term. Note that everything we’re hearing is that Bing is in alpha or beta of rolling out Quality Score for advertisers.
* Search Management Tools: Microsoft’s adCenter has a tool similar to Google’s desktop tool (Adwords Editor) that resides on an advertiser’s local machine. The name of the tool isn’t the most original – Microsoft adCenter Desktop but the tool has some great functionality
o Extract keywords for your ad group based on a URL or MSN’s keyword tools
o Ad distribution (search vs. content) and geo-targeting and add ad group-level negative keywords
o Similar functionality to the excel plug-in described below.
On top of their desktop application adCenter also offers an excel plug-in feature with features that provide deep keyword research insights. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.
* Dedicated Time and Resources: Once Bing is powering the organic and paid search results for Yahoo there reach will be extended and their resources will be more heavily focused on improving their advertising tools to allow them to increase monetization per query. The advertisers who will win in the land grab for search real estate are those who are willing to dedicate their time and resources to test and optimize Bing early and often.
It’s going to be rocky at first and there are lots of things that adCenter needs to fix such as exposing their quality index, improving their reporting interface, and many more items but with nearly 30% market share (Yahoo+Bing combined) we can’t afford to ignore Bing any longer. Check for more information about Bing in the upcoming weeks. I think you’re going to love Bing!
---------------------------------------------------
How to Re-Purpose Your Content to Optimize it for Traveling Season
I feel lucky enough to work from home for about 3 years now and to be able to travel wherever I want with my family. This is what I have actually been doing for the past month – traveling (and struggling with somewhat screwed schedule). However another side of this story is that being an Internet marketer who works from home, I am never free. I work while traveling and try to make each of my vacation minute “useful” for my work and business.
This has inspired me to share some ways that would help those hard-working travelers like me and let them use your content while on the go.
1. Offer Various Ways to Download Your Content
I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:
* This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
* It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
* This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):
Besides simply offering your readers an alternative format enabling them to download and access your content, a pdf file could also increase your reach. For example, Scribd, a popular document sharing site may generate some decent traffic to your blog.
2. Create Quick Outlines of Your Monthly Editorial
Imagine how many people are now coming back home from holidays: you may help them a great deal by offering a quick but useful recaps of your previous posts (for the past month, week, etc). These overviews won’t probably generate many Tweets or comments but they will engage users in another way: they will encourage them to go through the content they may have missed.
An alternative way to represent the information you have previously blogged about would also be nice. For example, a well-branded PowerPoint file representing your previous posts will be much appreciated. Besides, this way you can re-use your content by publishing it to SlideShare (which, in turn will be shared in your LinkedIn network if you use SlideShare official LinkedIn application):
You can also create a downloadable copy of your recap (in an eBook format) to allow various ways to access and go through your outline on- as well as offline.
3. Create an Audio Version of Your Content
An audio post comes incredibly handy (and appreciated) while you are on the go. While PDF version of your content makes it more “offline-friendly” as well as easier to use on iPad, the audio version makes it possible for your readers to listen to your articles on their iPod while on the plane or even on the beach.
I have reviewed one plugin that “adds voice to your posts” – Odiogo automates the process of turning each of your blog posts in a podcast (as well as adds the option to download your content to your blog feed):
If you want to make the process more selective and the voice less “machine-like”, there are other applications like Audacity which is free recording software.
Creating an audio version of your blog posts will also increase your exposure as you can submit your content to heavily-used podcast directories like iTunes (To submit to iTunes, go to the iTunes Store, navigate to the Podcasts directory, and click on the Submit a Podcast link.)
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Latest SEO News
Expert recommends video production SEO for brand marketing
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is something all online companies should be doing to improve brand awareness, it has been claimed.
According to Rob Griffin of Media Contacts, brands that are not focused on ecommerce should still invest in search engine marketing.
In an article for Search Insider, he explains that brands with an advertising presence in channels such as TV, radio, print and outdoor, still need to address online marketing as consumers are increasingly turning to internet searches to find out additional information on companies.
He highlights video productions in particular as a way of boosting search results.
"Don't be afraid to sink resources into your own SEO because of the inherent benefit it will have on your sponsored search efforts. For one, video SEO is a great way to get some extra mileage out of your creative and content investments as well," he said.
A recent report by research firm eMarketer found that online advertising spending will reach $61.8 billion (£40.5 billion) worldwide this year.
----------------------------------------------------------
The Thinning Line Between SEO and Social Media
I’ve been doing SEO for as long as I can remember. I rarely stop to look at the distance I’ve made since I started; more notably, the change in the SEO space and the change in my own philosophies. But when I do stop and look, I realize that I’m even more excited about SEO today than ever before.
I believe heavily in the significance of social media. Even though the blogosphere blows up with “SEO is dead” posts at least three times a year, I don’t think it is. On the contrary, I think it’s merging with social media. From TrustRank to editorial content to personalization, there’s so much in social media that Google adores. It’s just the way Google is going, and it’s far bigger than integrating Twitter for real-time searches. I believe Google is coming out with ‘Google Me’ for more control in the semantic web – that’s a pretty bold move into the social sphere.
New Content Marketing vs. Old Technical Recommendations
For me, content marketing as an SEO concentration is the largest slice of the pie. I still think about link building, and respect the specific values it brings. I still perform technical audits, but I really don’t get as gritty as some SEOs still do. I see many agency audits as part of my day job, and can’t help wondering if those SEOs believe in the value of what they’re recommending, or just making the recommendations because it’s routine, easy, and profitable. I think SEO matured past the order of keywords in a title tag, or some bloated code.
Google knows it’s their burden to overcome bad code, poorly crawlable navigations, and all the other traditional obstacles. They know that even the worse sites (to a limit) can have the best content for a user. If Google can’t figure out how to serve this content, the users will lose faith in Google’s results. Justified or not, Google made their own bed. Sometimes spending dozens of expensive hours with a design team or web platform just doesn’t make sense to me anymore. If it’s something I can change quickly on a WordPress platform, then I have no problem erring on the side of caution. But if it’s deflating the code of an entire platform for a hopeful benefit, I just don’t feel comfortable doing that. I don’t like making recommendations and dropping them in the lap of non-technical executives. Just feels cruel. I don’t feel I created any real value.
Creating Value Through A Social Media Approach
SEO for me is about optimizing for engines on behalf of the users. SEO is creating value for everyone involved. In my case, my niche is in ecommerce. I optimize for customers. I turn sites into authoritative hubs. I write and publish with a face. I’m not afraid to publically admit to a mistake if I cross the line. I communicate with customers like I would if I were working in a brick and mortar store, and provide a forum for conversation wherever possible. I don’t try to beat my audience – I meet the interested customers in the middle. In other words, I don’t run around with a megaphone like a carnival worker verbally assaulting passerbys. Instead I engage them on their own terms.
This includes a lot of day-to-day marketing, trust building, and value promotion. The “give to get” model really seems to bring power to an online store, just as long as that store is more than a thin vending machine. Direct conversions? Not always. But it’s not that easy anymore. There is still a long term reward, from branding to optimizing your other marketing channels, that helps websites survive this online climate. It’s old school marketing, really. The first version of the web isolated traditional marketing. Now in Web 2010, it’s obviously back with a vengeance. SEO needs to continue accepting that.
-----------------------------------------------------
UK Companies Not Utilizing SEO
According to results by ThomsonLocal.com and Analytics SEO, from the UK’s first audit of small business websites, almost 50% of all UK business websites are not using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as part of their online marketing strategy.
Analytics SEO set out 30 criteria as key signals of SEO quality and fed them into their pioneering SEO software that was able to automatically and simultaneously perform an SEO audit of all 1,001 sites.
Here’s a summary of the findings.
The general state of UK business websites
■ 47% of all business websites have none or very basic levels of SEO
■ Over 70% of companies with less than 50 employees have none or very basic levels of SEO
■ Unsurprisingly larger companies tend to have better websites
■ With a few exceptions, the length of time a business has been trading or the type of business has little on no bearing on the quality of its website
■ 12% of all business websites are not indexed in any search engine
■ 0.6% of business websites are under construction
■ Only 3% of all business websites could be considered to have advanced levels of SEO
Technical Configuration of Websites
■ 74% of businesses have no basic website analytics software for tracking site visits
■ Only 2% of all businesses used advanced website analytics software
■ 82% have no HTML sitemap
■ 75% have no XML sitemap
■ 69% have no Robots.txt file configured
■ 71% have no Custom 404 page configured
Website Content
■ 35% do not have unique Page Titles
■ 56% do not have unique Page Descriptions
Popularity
■ The average company with less than 50 employees has 408 inbound links
■ The average UK company has 6,874 inbound links
“Now more than ever consumers are turning to search engines like Google and Bing, as well as local search websites for help in finding the best local suppliers,” said Jill Pringle, Marketing Director, ThomsonLocal.com, which commissioned the research.
“Local businesses need to wake up to the fact that investing in better quality websites with original content can bring them new customers more quickly, and ensuring that the website they build is search engine friendly is essential in today’s market.”
Woweb, a leading UK SEO and web design company in Lancashire, said “Any business website can dramatically increase revenue with a good SEO strategy. We’re seeing companies increase turnover by upwards of £50,000 per year just from having a solid search engine plan. However SEO is not a quick fix, it takes time to achieve but rewards are great once accomplished.”
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is something all online companies should be doing to improve brand awareness, it has been claimed.
According to Rob Griffin of Media Contacts, brands that are not focused on ecommerce should still invest in search engine marketing.
In an article for Search Insider, he explains that brands with an advertising presence in channels such as TV, radio, print and outdoor, still need to address online marketing as consumers are increasingly turning to internet searches to find out additional information on companies.
He highlights video productions in particular as a way of boosting search results.
"Don't be afraid to sink resources into your own SEO because of the inherent benefit it will have on your sponsored search efforts. For one, video SEO is a great way to get some extra mileage out of your creative and content investments as well," he said.
A recent report by research firm eMarketer found that online advertising spending will reach $61.8 billion (£40.5 billion) worldwide this year.
----------------------------------------------------------
The Thinning Line Between SEO and Social Media
I’ve been doing SEO for as long as I can remember. I rarely stop to look at the distance I’ve made since I started; more notably, the change in the SEO space and the change in my own philosophies. But when I do stop and look, I realize that I’m even more excited about SEO today than ever before.
I believe heavily in the significance of social media. Even though the blogosphere blows up with “SEO is dead” posts at least three times a year, I don’t think it is. On the contrary, I think it’s merging with social media. From TrustRank to editorial content to personalization, there’s so much in social media that Google adores. It’s just the way Google is going, and it’s far bigger than integrating Twitter for real-time searches. I believe Google is coming out with ‘Google Me’ for more control in the semantic web – that’s a pretty bold move into the social sphere.
New Content Marketing vs. Old Technical Recommendations
For me, content marketing as an SEO concentration is the largest slice of the pie. I still think about link building, and respect the specific values it brings. I still perform technical audits, but I really don’t get as gritty as some SEOs still do. I see many agency audits as part of my day job, and can’t help wondering if those SEOs believe in the value of what they’re recommending, or just making the recommendations because it’s routine, easy, and profitable. I think SEO matured past the order of keywords in a title tag, or some bloated code.
Google knows it’s their burden to overcome bad code, poorly crawlable navigations, and all the other traditional obstacles. They know that even the worse sites (to a limit) can have the best content for a user. If Google can’t figure out how to serve this content, the users will lose faith in Google’s results. Justified or not, Google made their own bed. Sometimes spending dozens of expensive hours with a design team or web platform just doesn’t make sense to me anymore. If it’s something I can change quickly on a WordPress platform, then I have no problem erring on the side of caution. But if it’s deflating the code of an entire platform for a hopeful benefit, I just don’t feel comfortable doing that. I don’t like making recommendations and dropping them in the lap of non-technical executives. Just feels cruel. I don’t feel I created any real value.
Creating Value Through A Social Media Approach
SEO for me is about optimizing for engines on behalf of the users. SEO is creating value for everyone involved. In my case, my niche is in ecommerce. I optimize for customers. I turn sites into authoritative hubs. I write and publish with a face. I’m not afraid to publically admit to a mistake if I cross the line. I communicate with customers like I would if I were working in a brick and mortar store, and provide a forum for conversation wherever possible. I don’t try to beat my audience – I meet the interested customers in the middle. In other words, I don’t run around with a megaphone like a carnival worker verbally assaulting passerbys. Instead I engage them on their own terms.
This includes a lot of day-to-day marketing, trust building, and value promotion. The “give to get” model really seems to bring power to an online store, just as long as that store is more than a thin vending machine. Direct conversions? Not always. But it’s not that easy anymore. There is still a long term reward, from branding to optimizing your other marketing channels, that helps websites survive this online climate. It’s old school marketing, really. The first version of the web isolated traditional marketing. Now in Web 2010, it’s obviously back with a vengeance. SEO needs to continue accepting that.
-----------------------------------------------------
UK Companies Not Utilizing SEO
According to results by ThomsonLocal.com and Analytics SEO, from the UK’s first audit of small business websites, almost 50% of all UK business websites are not using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as part of their online marketing strategy.
Analytics SEO set out 30 criteria as key signals of SEO quality and fed them into their pioneering SEO software that was able to automatically and simultaneously perform an SEO audit of all 1,001 sites.
Here’s a summary of the findings.
The general state of UK business websites
■ 47% of all business websites have none or very basic levels of SEO
■ Over 70% of companies with less than 50 employees have none or very basic levels of SEO
■ Unsurprisingly larger companies tend to have better websites
■ With a few exceptions, the length of time a business has been trading or the type of business has little on no bearing on the quality of its website
■ 12% of all business websites are not indexed in any search engine
■ 0.6% of business websites are under construction
■ Only 3% of all business websites could be considered to have advanced levels of SEO
Technical Configuration of Websites
■ 74% of businesses have no basic website analytics software for tracking site visits
■ Only 2% of all businesses used advanced website analytics software
■ 82% have no HTML sitemap
■ 75% have no XML sitemap
■ 69% have no Robots.txt file configured
■ 71% have no Custom 404 page configured
Website Content
■ 35% do not have unique Page Titles
■ 56% do not have unique Page Descriptions
Popularity
■ The average company with less than 50 employees has 408 inbound links
■ The average UK company has 6,874 inbound links
“Now more than ever consumers are turning to search engines like Google and Bing, as well as local search websites for help in finding the best local suppliers,” said Jill Pringle, Marketing Director, ThomsonLocal.com, which commissioned the research.
“Local businesses need to wake up to the fact that investing in better quality websites with original content can bring them new customers more quickly, and ensuring that the website they build is search engine friendly is essential in today’s market.”
Woweb, a leading UK SEO and web design company in Lancashire, said “Any business website can dramatically increase revenue with a good SEO strategy. We’re seeing companies increase turnover by upwards of £50,000 per year just from having a solid search engine plan. However SEO is not a quick fix, it takes time to achieve but rewards are great once accomplished.”
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Latest SEO News
Microsoft Earnings Report: Revenue Up 22% & Net Income Up 48%
Microsoft announced earnings and beat expectations of Wall Street. Microsoft reported, “record fourth-quarter revenue of $16.04 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2010, a 22% increase from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.93 billion, $4.52 billion and $0.51 per share, which represented increases of 49%, 48% and 50%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period.”
The Online Services Division is where the search finances fall under. That includes Bing and the Yahoo alliance. Revenue in the Online Services Division was up 13 percent, to $565 million. But the division saw a loss of $696 million due to spending on on research and development on Bing and “reimbursement and implementation” and “third-party development and programming” with the Yahoo deal.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Fwix Launches Hyperlocal Search Engine
Fwix, a growing player in the hyperlocal news space, has launched the beta version of what it’s calling a Local Trend Search tool at search.fwix.com. It lets users search for things “happening at any place right now” (recently would be more accurate) at more than 200 English-speaking locations worldwide.
The above is a search conducted this afternoon for yankee stadium with New York as the city location. (I moved the map around a bit to improve the screenshot.)
On the far left, you see several types of content refinements — News, Events, Photos, and Updates. The latter includes posts from sites like Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla. News results come from traditional media sites and local blogs. Events results come from sites like Eventful and StubHub. The Photos results seem to rely very heavily on geotagged Flickr images.
You’ll notice that there’s an advertisement showing above the search results on the left. Fwix offers locally-targeted advertising via its AdWire product.
The Local Trend Search tool is interesting and appears to have potential as the company continues to develop it. But like Fwix’s primary hyperlocal news product, it seems to suffer from lack of coverage in smaller towns.
Fwix isn’t the only company trying to connect current news/updates and local search: Sency has a real-time/local search mashup and Bing already offers several similar features in its Bing Maps Apps product, though the Bing experience isn’t as cohesive as Fwix’s is right now. And let’s not forget Google Maps; it already has data layers for photos, videos, Wikipedia, real estate listings, etc. … and could probably match Fwix pretty easily by adding news, events, and status updates if it wants to.
-----------------------------------------------------
All New Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
Today, Microsoft launched a revamp of their Bing Webmaster Tools. I talked to them back in June, when they previewed the tools at SMX Advanced, and they told me that they were starting from scratch and rebuilding the tool from the ground up. So how are things different? They say they are focused on three key areas: crawling, indexing, and traffic. They provide charts that enable you to analyze up to six months of this data. Note that none of this information is available unless Silverlight is installed. See more on that later.
Crawling, Indexing, and Traffic Data
Microsoft tells me that they provide, per day, the number of:
* pages crawled
* crawl errors
* pages indexed
* impressions
* clicks
Sounds interesting. Let’s dive in.
Traffic – Impressions and Clicks
The data is very similar to what Google provides. (Although Google currently only provides the latest month’s data. I’m not sure what happened to the historical data they used to provide.)
It’s potentially useful to compare click through rates for Google and Bing, although Google provides the additional data point of the average position. Without that on the Bing side, it’s hard to discern anything meaningful from the comparison. Note that for both Google and Bing, the click numbers reported in webmaster tools in some cases vary significantly from what is reported in Google Analytics (and in other cases are nearly exactly the same). Google has some explanation of why the numbers sometimes vary, but my guess is that Google Analytics is reporting in particular organic Google traffic from more sources than Google Webmaster Tools is. Google Webmaster Tools also clearly buckets the numbers.
Unfortunately, while Microsoft provides six months of data, it appears that you can only view it on screen and can’t download the data. This makes the data much more difficult to use in actionable ways.
This chart shows the number of pages in the Bing index per day. This certainly seems useful, but it’s deceptive. Decreased indexing over time seems like a bad thing, worthy of sounding the alarms and investing resources to figure out the cause, but indexing numbers should always be looked at in conjunction with traffic numbers. Is traffic down? If not, there may not be a problem. In fact, if a site has had duplication and canonicalization problems, a reduction in indexing is often a good thing.
The ability to use XML Sitemaps to categorize your page types and submit canonical lists of those URLs to Google and monitor those indexing numbers over time provides much more actionable information. (Of course, Google doesn’t provide historical indexing numbers, so in order to make this data truly actionable, you have to manually store it each week or month.)
Index Explorer
The Index Explorer enables you to view the specific pages of your site that are indexed and filter reports by directory and other criteria.
Again it can be useful to drill in to this data, but it would be significantly more useful if it were downloadable. When you click on a URL, you see a pop up with controls to block the cache, block the URL and cache, and recrawl the URL. These are the same actions described below (see “block URLs” and “submit URLs”).
Crawl Summary
This chart is similar to what Google provides and shows the number of pages crawled each data.
Crawl errors are still available, but the “long dynamic URLs” and “Unsupported content type” reports are missing. In their places are additional HTTP error code reports. (The previous version of the tool listed only URLs with 404 errors.) Since Google provides all of these reports as well, the additional value is mostly in knowing if BingBot is having particular problems crawling the site that Googlebot isn’t. As with the query data, you can’t download any of this information, only view it on screen, which makes it much more cumbersome to use.
Block URLs
The new block URLs feature appears to be similar to Google’s removal URL feature. You can specify URLs that you want to remove from Bing search results. However, this feature differs from Google’s in that you don’t also have to block the URL with robots.txt, a robots meta tag, or return a 404 for the page. Microsoft told me that they are offering this feature because site owners may need to have page removed from the search results right away but might not be able to quickly block or remove the page from the site itself.
I find this a bit dangerous as it makes troubleshooting later very difficult. I can see someone blocking a bunch of URLs or a directory and someone else, months or years later, building new content on those pages and wondering why they never show up in the Bing index. Microsoft did tell me that they recommend this feature as a short term, emergency solution only, as the pages will still be crawled and indexed, they simply won’t display in results. But recommended uses and actual uses tend to vary.
Submit URLs
This feature enable you to “signal which URLs Bing should add to its index”. When I talked to Microsoft back in June, I asked how this feature was different from submitting an XML Sitemap. (And for that matter, different from the existing Submit URLs feature.) They said that you can submit a much smaller number of URLs via this feature (up to 10 a day and up to 50 a month). So I guess you submit XML Sitemaps for URLs you want indexed and use this feature for URLs you REALLY want indexed?
Silverlight
Yes, I realize this is a technology, not a feature. And in fact, it may well be an obstacle for some users rather than a benefit. (For instance, I primarily use Chrome on my Mac, which Silverlight doesn’t support.) But Microsoft is touting it as the primary new feature of this reboot. Since most of the data is available only graphically, and not as a download, without Silverlight, you basically can’t use Bing Webmaster Tools at all.
What’s Missing
Microsoft says that they “hit the reset button and rebuilt the tools from the group up.” This means that many of the features from the previous version of the tool are now missing. When I spoke to them, they said that they took a hard look at the tool and jettisoned those items that didn’t provide useful, actionable data. So, what have they removed?
* Backlinks report – This feature did, in fact, have useful data if you invested a little effort in configuring the reports. You could only download 1,000 external links (and the UI showed only 20), but you could see a count of the total number of incoming links and could use filters to download different buckets of 1,000. For instance, you could filter the report to show only links to certain parts of your web site or from certain types of sites (by domain, TLD, etc.). Of course, I have no way of knowing how accurate this data was. It seems just about impossible to get accurate link data no matter what tool you use. Below is some comparison data I grabbed before this report went away yesterday.
* Outbound links report
* Robots.txt validator – This tool enabled you to test a robots.txt file to see if it blocked and allowed what you expected. Google provides a similar tool.
* Domain score – I don’t think anyone will be sad that this “feature” has gone away. No one could ever figure out what it (or the related page score) could possibly mean.
* Language and region information – This was potentially useful information, particularly in troubleshooting.
Overall, the relaunch provides data that’s potentially more useful than before, although this usefulness is limited without the ability to download the data. I also find the Silverlight requirement frustrating, but it remains to be seen if this is a significant obstacle to use of the tool. There’s nothing here that Google doesn’t provide in its tools, but with the Bing soon to be powering Yahoo search, site owners may find getting insight on Bing-specific issues and statistics to be valuable.. Historical information is great (although you can get this manually from Google if you download the data regularly), but particularly with query data, it’s hard to know how accurate the reports are (for both Google and Bing). In some cases, the data is misleading without additional data points (such as having click through data without position information and overall indexing trends without details).I always welcome additional information from the search engines, but as always, make sure that the data you use to drive your business decisions is actionable and is truly telling you what you think it is.
Microsoft announced earnings and beat expectations of Wall Street. Microsoft reported, “record fourth-quarter revenue of $16.04 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2010, a 22% increase from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.93 billion, $4.52 billion and $0.51 per share, which represented increases of 49%, 48% and 50%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period.”
The Online Services Division is where the search finances fall under. That includes Bing and the Yahoo alliance. Revenue in the Online Services Division was up 13 percent, to $565 million. But the division saw a loss of $696 million due to spending on on research and development on Bing and “reimbursement and implementation” and “third-party development and programming” with the Yahoo deal.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Fwix Launches Hyperlocal Search Engine
Fwix, a growing player in the hyperlocal news space, has launched the beta version of what it’s calling a Local Trend Search tool at search.fwix.com. It lets users search for things “happening at any place right now” (recently would be more accurate) at more than 200 English-speaking locations worldwide.
The above is a search conducted this afternoon for yankee stadium with New York as the city location. (I moved the map around a bit to improve the screenshot.)
On the far left, you see several types of content refinements — News, Events, Photos, and Updates. The latter includes posts from sites like Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla. News results come from traditional media sites and local blogs. Events results come from sites like Eventful and StubHub. The Photos results seem to rely very heavily on geotagged Flickr images.
You’ll notice that there’s an advertisement showing above the search results on the left. Fwix offers locally-targeted advertising via its AdWire product.
The Local Trend Search tool is interesting and appears to have potential as the company continues to develop it. But like Fwix’s primary hyperlocal news product, it seems to suffer from lack of coverage in smaller towns.
Fwix isn’t the only company trying to connect current news/updates and local search: Sency has a real-time/local search mashup and Bing already offers several similar features in its Bing Maps Apps product, though the Bing experience isn’t as cohesive as Fwix’s is right now. And let’s not forget Google Maps; it already has data layers for photos, videos, Wikipedia, real estate listings, etc. … and could probably match Fwix pretty easily by adding news, events, and status updates if it wants to.
-----------------------------------------------------
All New Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
Today, Microsoft launched a revamp of their Bing Webmaster Tools. I talked to them back in June, when they previewed the tools at SMX Advanced, and they told me that they were starting from scratch and rebuilding the tool from the ground up. So how are things different? They say they are focused on three key areas: crawling, indexing, and traffic. They provide charts that enable you to analyze up to six months of this data. Note that none of this information is available unless Silverlight is installed. See more on that later.
Crawling, Indexing, and Traffic Data
Microsoft tells me that they provide, per day, the number of:
* pages crawled
* crawl errors
* pages indexed
* impressions
* clicks
Sounds interesting. Let’s dive in.
Traffic – Impressions and Clicks
The data is very similar to what Google provides. (Although Google currently only provides the latest month’s data. I’m not sure what happened to the historical data they used to provide.)
It’s potentially useful to compare click through rates for Google and Bing, although Google provides the additional data point of the average position. Without that on the Bing side, it’s hard to discern anything meaningful from the comparison. Note that for both Google and Bing, the click numbers reported in webmaster tools in some cases vary significantly from what is reported in Google Analytics (and in other cases are nearly exactly the same). Google has some explanation of why the numbers sometimes vary, but my guess is that Google Analytics is reporting in particular organic Google traffic from more sources than Google Webmaster Tools is. Google Webmaster Tools also clearly buckets the numbers.
Unfortunately, while Microsoft provides six months of data, it appears that you can only view it on screen and can’t download the data. This makes the data much more difficult to use in actionable ways.
This chart shows the number of pages in the Bing index per day. This certainly seems useful, but it’s deceptive. Decreased indexing over time seems like a bad thing, worthy of sounding the alarms and investing resources to figure out the cause, but indexing numbers should always be looked at in conjunction with traffic numbers. Is traffic down? If not, there may not be a problem. In fact, if a site has had duplication and canonicalization problems, a reduction in indexing is often a good thing.
The ability to use XML Sitemaps to categorize your page types and submit canonical lists of those URLs to Google and monitor those indexing numbers over time provides much more actionable information. (Of course, Google doesn’t provide historical indexing numbers, so in order to make this data truly actionable, you have to manually store it each week or month.)
Index Explorer
The Index Explorer enables you to view the specific pages of your site that are indexed and filter reports by directory and other criteria.
Again it can be useful to drill in to this data, but it would be significantly more useful if it were downloadable. When you click on a URL, you see a pop up with controls to block the cache, block the URL and cache, and recrawl the URL. These are the same actions described below (see “block URLs” and “submit URLs”).
Crawl Summary
This chart is similar to what Google provides and shows the number of pages crawled each data.
Crawl errors are still available, but the “long dynamic URLs” and “Unsupported content type” reports are missing. In their places are additional HTTP error code reports. (The previous version of the tool listed only URLs with 404 errors.) Since Google provides all of these reports as well, the additional value is mostly in knowing if BingBot is having particular problems crawling the site that Googlebot isn’t. As with the query data, you can’t download any of this information, only view it on screen, which makes it much more cumbersome to use.
Block URLs
The new block URLs feature appears to be similar to Google’s removal URL feature. You can specify URLs that you want to remove from Bing search results. However, this feature differs from Google’s in that you don’t also have to block the URL with robots.txt, a robots meta tag, or return a 404 for the page. Microsoft told me that they are offering this feature because site owners may need to have page removed from the search results right away but might not be able to quickly block or remove the page from the site itself.
I find this a bit dangerous as it makes troubleshooting later very difficult. I can see someone blocking a bunch of URLs or a directory and someone else, months or years later, building new content on those pages and wondering why they never show up in the Bing index. Microsoft did tell me that they recommend this feature as a short term, emergency solution only, as the pages will still be crawled and indexed, they simply won’t display in results. But recommended uses and actual uses tend to vary.
Submit URLs
This feature enable you to “signal which URLs Bing should add to its index”. When I talked to Microsoft back in June, I asked how this feature was different from submitting an XML Sitemap. (And for that matter, different from the existing Submit URLs feature.) They said that you can submit a much smaller number of URLs via this feature (up to 10 a day and up to 50 a month). So I guess you submit XML Sitemaps for URLs you want indexed and use this feature for URLs you REALLY want indexed?
Silverlight
Yes, I realize this is a technology, not a feature. And in fact, it may well be an obstacle for some users rather than a benefit. (For instance, I primarily use Chrome on my Mac, which Silverlight doesn’t support.) But Microsoft is touting it as the primary new feature of this reboot. Since most of the data is available only graphically, and not as a download, without Silverlight, you basically can’t use Bing Webmaster Tools at all.
What’s Missing
Microsoft says that they “hit the reset button and rebuilt the tools from the group up.” This means that many of the features from the previous version of the tool are now missing. When I spoke to them, they said that they took a hard look at the tool and jettisoned those items that didn’t provide useful, actionable data. So, what have they removed?
* Backlinks report – This feature did, in fact, have useful data if you invested a little effort in configuring the reports. You could only download 1,000 external links (and the UI showed only 20), but you could see a count of the total number of incoming links and could use filters to download different buckets of 1,000. For instance, you could filter the report to show only links to certain parts of your web site or from certain types of sites (by domain, TLD, etc.). Of course, I have no way of knowing how accurate this data was. It seems just about impossible to get accurate link data no matter what tool you use. Below is some comparison data I grabbed before this report went away yesterday.
* Outbound links report
* Robots.txt validator – This tool enabled you to test a robots.txt file to see if it blocked and allowed what you expected. Google provides a similar tool.
* Domain score – I don’t think anyone will be sad that this “feature” has gone away. No one could ever figure out what it (or the related page score) could possibly mean.
* Language and region information – This was potentially useful information, particularly in troubleshooting.
Overall, the relaunch provides data that’s potentially more useful than before, although this usefulness is limited without the ability to download the data. I also find the Silverlight requirement frustrating, but it remains to be seen if this is a significant obstacle to use of the tool. There’s nothing here that Google doesn’t provide in its tools, but with the Bing soon to be powering Yahoo search, site owners may find getting insight on Bing-specific issues and statistics to be valuable.. Historical information is great (although you can get this manually from Google if you download the data regularly), but particularly with query data, it’s hard to know how accurate the reports are (for both Google and Bing). In some cases, the data is misleading without additional data points (such as having click through data without position information and overall indexing trends without details).I always welcome additional information from the search engines, but as always, make sure that the data you use to drive your business decisions is actionable and is truly telling you what you think it is.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Latest SEO News
Website Security Tips for SEO
Website Security Tips for SEO
A hacked website can seriously affect your search engine optimization efforts. This article will explain the three ways it can hurt you, the major forms of attack, what makes a site vulnerable to them, and what you can do to protect your site from hackers.
A hacked website's impact on SEO can be separated into three major categories:
Effect on search engine ranking. Major search engines like Google will penalize your website as an "attacked" site or site hosting malware, and then your rankings will be dropped until the website has fully recovered from the attack.
This loss of rankings will of course affect website traffic, which your website needs in order to produce sales and profit.
Effect on customer quality experience and security. Sometimes, even though a site is not hosting malware (and is not labeled with the "This site may harm your computer" warning in Google's search results), if your website security is compromised and you're not aware of it, the attacker can plant scripts in your website in such a way as to steal your customers' personal and financial information.
Examples of this information include user passwords, Social Security numbers, credit card information, etc.
Effect on trust. If your website security is compromised and your website has been confirmed as hosting an attacker who steals customer information, you might be liable to cover for damages, refunds, etc. The worst part is that the "trust" you may have once had as a reputable and secure merchant will be lost. And of course, it will be very hard to re-establish and recover your lost reputation.
No matter how good your website's SEO is, if you ignore the site's security issues, then all of your efforts to increase rankings and traffic will be gone in an instant the moment an attacker gets inside your website and compromises everything.
This article will examine some of the most common security issues found in most commercial and non-commercial websites and suggest some tips to help you improve or tighten the security.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo SEO Analysis in Comparison to Google Search Ranking Results
Yahoo's search engine market share as of 2010 is second only to Google's; it is 6.24 percent globally. Therefore, if you want to increase your site's organic search engine traffic, you might as well consider optimizing for Yahoo. This article will examine the Yahoo search engine's ranking behavior by comparing it to Google's, using actual websites, rankings, keywords and common search engine ranking factors (onsite and links).Are you skeptical about Yahoo's share of the market? Here's a report on search engine market share to set your mind at ease.
This article's objective is to spot clear differences in ranking preferences that could help provide a “white hat” clue to optimizing websites for Yahoo.
Study Background
In this study, we will examine one of the most competitive markets in the online world, take a look at the websites below and its corresponding Yahoo and Google search engine rankings.
You will notice immediately a drastic ranking difference between Google and Yahoo for the targeted key phrase "buy viagra."
As you can see, www.buyviagra.ms ranks at the top of Yahoo.com, while it is not ranking at all in Google. Meanwhile www.atlanticdrugs.com is ranking at the top of Google, while ranking only at position 135 for the same targeted keyword in Yahoo.
Are you wondering why? This is the subject and detailed objective of this study. You will need to examine the onsite and link ranking factors that differentiate Yahoo from Google substantially.
(Page 2 of 4 )
Below is the onsite analysis summary between these two websites:
Based on the results, there aren't any big differences between the two. The canonical issue on buyviagra.ms is not so substantial as to cause such massive differences in ranking (Google can handle the presence of both non-www and www versions).
However, examining the domain profile further nets us an outstanding discovery:
Actually looking at the total pages indexed by Google, there were no indexed pages for www.buyviagra.ms, which means that this domain has actually been BANNED in Google.
Also, the domain age differences are fairly comparable, and the buyviagra.ms server is geographically located in the United States.
What could have caused buyviagra.ms to be banned in Google is another question, which only deepens the mystery of why it is ranking at the first position1 inYahoo
US for “buy viagra.”
The causes will be examined and analyzed later.
Let's start by analyzing the link statistics in terms of the number of root domains linking to the website, the quantity of link anchor text, and the link quality (relevance of the links), as explained in my earlier article on Bing optimization.
Below are the results:
It is obvious why atlanticdrugs.com is ranking very high in Google. It's because of the high number of root domains linking to the site (a positive Google ranking factor) as well as favorable results on the anchor text and link quality.
Buyviagra.ms has a very poor link profile that is highly disliked by Google, especially given to the number of root domains, anchor text and link relevance (quality).
The above stats do not explain why buyviagra.ms ranked highly onYahoo , but strongly affirms why www.atlanticdrugs.com should be ranking above buyviagra.ms in Google.
Digging further into the link statistics of the overall domains (coming from all external link pages, NOT just in terms unique domain analysis) :
It is now clear why www.buyviagra.ms sits at the top of Yahoo for "buy viagra." The site boasts a massive number of inbound links (coming from all pages in other domains, not just unique domains) that use the targeted keyword “buy viagra.”
It is so strong that by numerical estimates, it has around 9599 back links, as compared to only 407 links by www.atlanticdrugs.com that use the targeted keyword in its anchor text.
Why www.buyviagra.ms is banned in Google
A website will be banned in Google if there is a violation with regard to search quality guidelines, as outlined here.
It is important to know why buyviagra.ms is banned. This will serve as a warning, and an affirmation of the search quality guidelines. It will also illustrate the differences between Google and Yahoo ranking behavior.
Analyzing the domains that linked to www.buyviagra.ms (using www.backlinkwatch.com and filtering for unique domains), reveals that the website-in-charge set up seven different domains at the same hosting IP address and cross linked them, and then linked them to www.buyviagra.ms . The violation, according to Google's search quality guidelines, is in creating multiple domains of “substantially” similar content. Detailed screen shot below:
The domains shaded in yellow cells are the “mirror domains” that were set up containing substantially the same content as www.buyviagra.ms.
It is highly possible that the overall owners/webmasters/controllers of these domains may be related -- or even the same person -- because they are all set up under the same IP address.
It is interesting to know that www.buyviagra.ms rankings are not affected in Yahoo due to this mirror domain issue, even though it is stated in the Yahoo search engine quality guidelines that it looks for "Original and unique content of genuine value," and includes on its "unwanted" list both "Multiple sites or pages offering substantially the same content" and "Multiple sites offering the same content.
From the overall analysis results, we can extract the following information:
1.Yahoo strongly considers the overall count of the backlinks pointing to the optimized website that use the targeted keywords in the anchor text, not just the unique count of root domains, which Google favors (according to common observation).
Recommendation: You can rank if you have a massive amount of links from any pages outside of your domain (not necessarily coming from unique domains) that use the targeted keywords in the anchor text. However, bear in mind that if you use this type of link building strategy, you will not rank favorably in Google. And of course, since Google still have such a huge percentage of the entire searchengine market share, you should probably not do this.
2. You will be banned in Google if you create multiple domains of substantially similar content. But it is interesting to note that the domain rankings have not been affected in Yahoo despite their guidelines prohibiting duplicate/mirror domains.
Recommendation: Creating multiple domains is not recommended as a favorable strategy at all. If you would like to increase your Yahoo rankings, you might as well look into a balanced strategy that could make your site appear favorably in most searchengines , not just in Yahoo.
3. Link relevance is still a strong factor in Google rankings, as with the total amount of root domains and the use of targeted keywords in anchor text.
Recommendation: This where you need to think very carefully. This study teaches some lessons. Atlanticdrugs.com is highly favored in Google (because of its highly favorable link profile, as seen in our results), while this website ranks only at position 135 in Yahoo.
So if you need organic traffic and cannot afford to lose it, follow Google's link profile suggestions, as Google can provide you with a much greater amount of traffic than Yahoo does (of course, this translates to more business).
If you follow link profile suggestions for ranking in Yahoo alone, you may not see a favorable result in Google, which also means that you will lose a lot of opportunities to get substantial search engine traffic.
4. There were no substantial differences observed in basic onsite SEO techniques between Google and Yahoo.
Recommendation: Google's onsite SEO checklist is pretty universal, as it is not only applicable to Google but to other search engines as well, like Yahoo.
Again, as I noted in my article analyzing the Bing search engine for SEO purposes, Yahoo's search engine may evolve over time, and this analysis may not be applicable in the near future.
Website Security Tips for SEO
A hacked website can seriously affect your search engine optimization efforts. This article will explain the three ways it can hurt you, the major forms of attack, what makes a site vulnerable to them, and what you can do to protect your site from hackers.
A hacked website's impact on SEO can be separated into three major categories:
Effect on search engine ranking. Major search engines like Google will penalize your website as an "attacked" site or site hosting malware, and then your rankings will be dropped until the website has fully recovered from the attack.
This loss of rankings will of course affect website traffic, which your website needs in order to produce sales and profit.
Effect on customer quality experience and security. Sometimes, even though a site is not hosting malware (and is not labeled with the "This site may harm your computer" warning in Google's search results), if your website security is compromised and you're not aware of it, the attacker can plant scripts in your website in such a way as to steal your customers' personal and financial information.
Examples of this information include user passwords, Social Security numbers, credit card information, etc.
Effect on trust. If your website security is compromised and your website has been confirmed as hosting an attacker who steals customer information, you might be liable to cover for damages, refunds, etc. The worst part is that the "trust" you may have once had as a reputable and secure merchant will be lost. And of course, it will be very hard to re-establish and recover your lost reputation.
No matter how good your website's SEO is, if you ignore the site's security issues, then all of your efforts to increase rankings and traffic will be gone in an instant the moment an attacker gets inside your website and compromises everything.
This article will examine some of the most common security issues found in most commercial and non-commercial websites and suggest some tips to help you improve or tighten the security.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo SEO Analysis in Comparison to Google Search Ranking Results
Yahoo's search engine market share as of 2010 is second only to Google's; it is 6.24 percent globally. Therefore, if you want to increase your site's organic search engine traffic, you might as well consider optimizing for Yahoo. This article will examine the Yahoo search engine's ranking behavior by comparing it to Google's, using actual websites, rankings, keywords and common search engine ranking factors (onsite and links).Are you skeptical about Yahoo's share of the market? Here's a report on search engine market share to set your mind at ease.
This article's objective is to spot clear differences in ranking preferences that could help provide a “white hat” clue to optimizing websites for Yahoo.
Study Background
In this study, we will examine one of the most competitive markets in the online world, take a look at the websites below and its corresponding Yahoo and Google search engine rankings.
You will notice immediately a drastic ranking difference between Google and Yahoo for the targeted key phrase "buy viagra."
As you can see, www.buyviagra.ms ranks at the top of Yahoo.com, while it is not ranking at all in Google. Meanwhile www.atlanticdrugs.com is ranking at the top of Google, while ranking only at position 135 for the same targeted keyword in Yahoo.
Are you wondering why? This is the subject and detailed objective of this study. You will need to examine the onsite and link ranking factors that differentiate Yahoo from Google substantially.
Yahoo SEO Analysis in Comparison to Google Search Ranking Results - Basic onsite and domain profile examination
(Page 2 of 4 )
Below is the onsite analysis summary between these two websites:
Based on the results, there aren't any big differences between the two. The canonical issue on buyviagra.ms is not so substantial as to cause such massive differences in ranking (Google can handle the presence of both non-www and www versions).
However, examining the domain profile further nets us an outstanding discovery:
Actually looking at the total pages indexed by Google, there were no indexed pages for www.buyviagra.ms, which means that this domain has actually been BANNED in Google.
Also, the domain age differences are fairly comparable, and the buyviagra.ms server is geographically located in the United States.
What could have caused buyviagra.ms to be banned in Google is another question, which only deepens the mystery of why it is ranking at the first position1 in
The causes will be examined and analyzed later.
Let's start by analyzing the link statistics in terms of the number of root domains linking to the website, the quantity of link anchor text, and the link quality (relevance of the links), as explained in my earlier article on Bing optimization.
Below are the results:
It is obvious why atlanticdrugs.com is ranking very high in Google. It's because of the high number of root domains linking to the site (a positive Google ranking factor) as well as favorable results on the anchor text and link quality.
Buyviagra.ms has a very poor link profile that is highly disliked by Google, especially given to the number of root domains, anchor text and link relevance (quality).
The above stats do not explain why buyviagra.ms ranked highly on
Digging further into the link statistics of the overall domains (coming from all external link pages, NOT just in terms unique domain analysis) :
It is now clear why www.buyviagra.ms sits at the top of Yahoo for "buy viagra." The site boasts a massive number of inbound links (coming from all pages in other domains, not just unique domains) that use the targeted keyword “buy viagra.”
It is so strong that by numerical estimates, it has around 9599 back links, as compared to only 407 links by www.atlanticdrugs.com that use the targeted keyword in its anchor text.
Why www.buyviagra.ms is banned in Google
A website will be banned in Google if there is a violation with regard to search quality guidelines, as outlined here.
It is important to know why buyviagra.ms is banned. This will serve as a warning, and an affirmation of the search quality guidelines. It will also illustrate the differences between Google and Yahoo ranking behavior.
Analyzing the domains that linked to www.buyviagra.ms (using www.backlinkwatch.com and filtering for unique domains), reveals that the website-in-charge set up seven different domains at the same hosting IP address and cross linked them, and then linked them to www.buyviagra.ms . The violation, according to Google's search quality guidelines, is in creating multiple domains of “substantially” similar content. Detailed screen shot below:
The domains shaded in yellow cells are the “mirror domains” that were set up containing substantially the same content as www.buyviagra.ms.
It is highly possible that the overall owners/webmasters/controllers of these domains may be related -- or even the same person -- because they are all set up under the same IP address.
It is interesting to know that www.buyviagra.ms rankings are not affected in Yahoo due to this mirror domain issue, even though it is stated in the Yahoo search engine quality guidelines that it looks for "Original and unique content of genuine value," and includes on its "unwanted" list both "Multiple sites or pages offering substantially the same content" and "Multiple sites offering the same content.
From the overall analysis results, we can extract the following information:
1.
Recommendation: You can rank if you have a massive amount of links from any pages outside of your domain (not necessarily coming from unique domains) that use the targeted keywords in the anchor text. However, bear in mind that if you use this type of link building strategy, you will not rank favorably in Google. And of course, since Google still have such a huge percentage of the entire search
2. You will be banned in Google if you create multiple domains of substantially similar content. But it is interesting to note that the domain rankings have not been affected in Yahoo despite their guidelines prohibiting duplicate/mirror domains.
Recommendation: Creating multiple domains is not recommended as a favorable strategy at all. If you would like to increase your Yahoo rankings, you might as well look into a balanced strategy that could make your site appear favorably in most search
3. Link relevance is still a strong factor in Google rankings, as with the total amount of root domains and the use of targeted keywords in anchor text.
Recommendation: This where you need to think very carefully. This study teaches some lessons. Atlanticdrugs.com is highly favored in Google (because of its highly favorable link profile, as seen in our results), while this website ranks only at position 135 in Yahoo.
So if you need organic traffic and cannot afford to lose it, follow Google's link profile suggestions, as Google can provide you with a much greater amount of traffic than Yahoo does (of course, this translates to more business).
If you follow link profile suggestions for ranking in Yahoo alone, you may not see a favorable result in Google, which also means that you will lose a lot of opportunities to get substantial search engine traffic.
4. There were no substantial differences observed in basic onsite SEO techniques between Google and Yahoo.
Recommendation: Google's onsite SEO checklist is pretty universal, as it is not only applicable to Google but to other search engines as well, like Yahoo.
Again, as I noted in my article analyzing the Bing search engine for SEO purposes, Yahoo's search engine may evolve over time, and this analysis may not be applicable in the near future.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Latest SEO News
Google Ratings: Could they Change Your Business?
Honestly, I was a little negative about the idea of ratings extensions when they first started being syndicated. How will we manage the bad feedback? Will the swamp of reviews associated to aggregators ruin small-to-mid level advertisers' chances to benefit from this extension?
Consumer Driven Call to Action
After a little introspection and some peer debate, my attitude toward the product flipped. If anything this extension allows brands the ability to take over more space on the page while introducing a more dynamic call to action.
As mentioned in "Image Ads in Search - Yep, They Help" around Google's other extension products, we've seen an average increase in CTR of 13 percent while conversion followed at more than 14 percent. Should we expect to see similar increases for advertisers? If Google eventually picks up more onsite review content...you bet.
Onsite Review Partnerships
A majority of the ratings have been scraped from sources like Epinions, ResellerRatings.com, Viewpoints, and Bizrate. I traditionally skim these aggregators during research mode, however I prefer onsite consumer feedback.
Google's partnership with Bazaarvoice on the product search side of the business should tie in well with paid "ratings" enhancements. Will Google eventually allow advertisers the ability to filter onsite vs. comparison sites? Will advertisers be able to manage certain aspects of these ratings? Will ratings ever be involved in quality score?
Extension Stacking
Visual search will continue to evolve. Google's platform truly gives them the momentum to try anything. Their ability to stack extensions within the results is creating a better user experience through informative visual cues.
One of the better extensions is anything related to their plus box product (e.g., product plus box, local map extensions, form extensions, etc.). What about stacking ratings within the plus box extensions? Would it benefit retailers to have product plus box extensions that include product specific ratings under each product? What about hoteliers using the map extension to show property location plus associated ratings?
Real-Time Search
As more results shift to real-time search, expect the engines to also try integrating the same results into paid search. Could Microsoft leverage their Facebook investment by incorporating the "Like" functionality within their paid results (i.e., 15 People Like this product).
Pandora has already taken a step in that direction with their "Joe Smith Likes this artist" setting within the music interface. Your Facebook friends with similar musical taste are then pictured below the live artist. What if Microsoft uses their profile (and opt-in) information to match you with ratings created by your friends with congruent profiles?
---------------------------------------------------------------
International Link Building -- the Best of the Whole World
The absolute best thing about the Internet is having no country borders. You're only a mouse click away from websites all over the globe, allowing you to chat, share, and trade with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Online business can offer a worldwide variety of people to buy your services or products, which is a great advantage. But how do you make sure you target the right audience, local or international?
Search engines operate internationally and locally. For example, a search query in Google.com can and will give different results with the same search query prompt in Google.es, Google.nl, or even Google.co.uk. No matter what keyword.
Of course, you'll have some overlaps (e.g., when you look for an international brand or product), but search engines always try to offer you the most relevant result (i.e., results in your language). Your preferred language is determined from the language settings of the browser, chosen search engine (.nl, .es, etc), and (in most cases) the IP address of your (local) Internet connection.
What Causes the Search Results to Differ in Local Search Engines?
Some country-specific aspects help search engines easily determine if it's relevant enough for the local search query. The major aspects:
* Top-level domain (TLD) (i.e., domain extension).
* Language of the content.
* Additional robot instructions (meta/Webmaster Central).
* Location of the hosting.
* Source of incoming links.
Incoming Links Provide the Right Signs
If you're looking for an international brand locally and it has a multilingual website, you'll most likely get the website on the local ccTLD (country code top level domain -- .nl, .de, .fr, etc.), instead of the international website on the gTLD (generic top level domain -- .com, .net, .org) domain. This result is preferred because of the matching ccTLD, language, and hosting -- especially because there will be a lot incoming links with these similarities.
In other words, the backlink profile of majorbrand.nl will have more incoming links from Dutch sources than majorbrand.com. Therefore, Google.nl will prefer to show you majorbrand.nl in the search results simply because it's more relevant for the Dutch search query.
Active in Multiple Countries?
If you're active in multiple countries and want to gain rankings locally, it's wise to split up your website. Splitting up the content is absolute minimum, but this probably won't be enough to rank within the local search engines.
You have to clearly distinguish your multiple languages so it's easier for search engines to discover and mark the right language. Of course, you can split up your website into local TLD versions (if still available). As stated before, TLD is a major factor for search engines to determine the language.
The pros of splitting your website into local TLD versions:
* A local TLD is the most important locality factor.
* Local links are gained easier to local information.
* The right country information scores, not just the right language.
But, be aware of the cons of local TLD versions:
* Domain authority takes time to accumulate for each TLD.
* Unique content is needed, even if it's the same language.
When to Split up
There are best practices when it comes to splitting up your website if you want to offer your services in multiple countries. Depending on the main country you're focusing on, the amount of local competition or different languages in one country (e.g., Canada, Belgium).
Depending on your own situation you can split up your website you could use one of these solutions:
* Focusing on one mayor country and some additional countries: Make sure you have your main content on one ccTLD and use and gTLD (e.g., .eu,) for the other countries/languages.
* Many countries, but minor competition: In this scenario, a gTLD with separate subdomains (de.brand.com) or directories (brand.com/de) per country/language will do.
* Multiple countries with competition: The best way to compete is with ccTLD domains for each country. With separate domains you can boost individual domains and compete more effectively.
* Multiple languages in the same country: A common question, one that can easily be solved with a ccTLD domain for the country (e.g., .ca for Canada), but separate the languages on subdomains (fr.brand.ca, en.brand.ca, etc).
Link Building on Country Level
if you have a local business or made it local by splitting up your website, you can start with local link building. Good local links have relevance, authority, and transfer (RAT), as covered by my colleague and friend Peter van der Graaf.
Therefore, you can start off with a search for "www" in country-specific Google versions. This is a great start for exploring unknown territory, directly showing you the local authorities. Analyze the local importance by searching for relevant search terms because you need to pick potential link partners that are relevant for your business.
The unknown territory of local search engines makes link acquisition harder because you might not have the right language skills yourself. Fortunately, this can be overcome. Here are some helpful tips:
* Submit your website to local directories. Directories don't require much language skill and are available in every country, so this is a great way to start (bonus tip: check your competition from here).
* Hire local link building teams. Every country probably will have some clever Internet marketer who offers (local) link building services.
* Get links from local business partners. If you're doing business internationally there could be some local business partners to hook up with. Offer your products or services in exchange for a listing.
* Get into the local news. You wouldn't have started your business internationally if you didn't have a unique product or services. Use this to your advantage by publishing facts, results, or other findings, which you applied to the local market. If you make it to the local news listing you'll rapidly gain authority.
Pitfalls -- Please Keep off the Grass
Getting good, valuable links isn't an easy job. Hiring a local link building team is a good option, but you should never buy links. Of course you can buy links, but just know that nine out of 10 times these links won't help your local business.
A lot of services simply can't help you obtain relevant links that are also local links. You may be promised 1,000 links, but none will help you because the links are gathered from non-local directories, non-local weblogs, forums, and websites that aren't relevant. Result: You're stuck with 1.000 links with zero value.
Avoid these pitfalls, and use these other link building tips if you want to be viewed as serious competition by the locals. Good luck expanding your horizon!
-------------------------------------------------------------
10 Top Tips to Secure Social Media Success
Social media is constantly developing. The sooner you get on board and up to date, the sooner you can take advantage of all the exciting new technologies and opportunities.
1. Get Going
It's easy to decide you want a social media campaign and then get distracted and delayed -- social media marketing will rarely be a business essential.
But you must not put it off, your competitors won't. Get planning, get prepared, and get going.
2. Get Prepared
OK, so you're socialising online and suddenly someone launches an attack against your brand, what do you do?
By using platforms such as Twitter, you lay yourself more open to attack through these mediums -- it's easier for angry customers to leave negative comments publicly, for example.
Of course, they would possibly be doing so anyway, but if you're actively promoting your brand through social media, than you're also probably searching for mentions, so you'll probably see any comments sooner.
So, work out a strategy. If you see a negative mention, will you refute it? Use legal threats to silence it? Ignore it? Respond to it as though it's any other customer complaint?
A blend of refutation and resolution works best. If you're in the right, then make your case and, if you're in the wrong, aim to resolve the issue.
Whatever you decide, have a strategy in place in advance so that you aren't left scrambling when the situation arises.
3. Get Blogging
There are many ways to socialise online but blogging is definitely my favorite. It's great for SEO because it encourages inbound links and also fills your pages with naturally keyword-rich content.
But the social implications are at least equally important. To name just a few: a blog presents your brand in a friendly, accessible way, it shows you as a thought-leader within your industry, it encourages conversation and it gives people a reason to return regularly to your pages.
If you only do one social marketing activity this year, make it a blog.
4. Get Tweeting
Twitter is an excellent marketing platform, although it admittedly can be hard to do well. However, there are some easy wins to be had on Twitter: it's less time consuming than a blog, but it has the same potential to massively expand brand awareness.
There's loads of online guidance for getting started -- just make sure you remember that quality is important, even when you only have 140 characters to play with.
Follow the rest of the advice in this blog post to avoid spamming, overselling, or otherwise alienating your followers.
5. Get Some Perspective
Before you start trying to use social media, work out what it is you want to achieve. There's no point spending time and money interacting online if you don't have a clear idea what it is you hope to get out of it.
For example, if you get 10,000 Facebook fans, what do you then intend to do with them? How will they benefit your brand? If you have 500 Twitter followers, what then?
Before you write your first Tweet, post your first comment or launch your blog, take some time to work out what you're planning to achieve and how social media will help you.
Make sure you're realistic because it's attaining these goals that will keep you motivated to continue when the novelty has worn off and the regular work is being shunted to one side by other projects.
6. Get Talking
Social media is just that -- social. It isn't a one-way street. You need to be having conversations online if you want to gain followers, fans, and readers.
So get socializing. Reply to tweets about your company or brand, interact in forums, answer comments on your blog -- have conversations.
In a real-life social situation, you'd be pretty unpopular if you simply talked without listening -- and it's the same online.
7. Get Realistic
People don't want to read advertising. They won't share your blog posts if they're just sales pitches, they won't retweet your messages if they don't add value to their own followers.
Understand this before you embark on your social media campaign, because it's at the heart of this difficult area of marketing.
Your interactions need to have value for the online market. They aren't a captive audience and they won't read or interact with your online presence if they get nothing out of it.
If you're adamant that you want to sell socially, then offer discounts and voucher codes in the social media space -- that's value-adding and is pretty much the only way you can get away with pushing products through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other online community spaces.
8. Get Active
Once you've begun your social media marketing efforts, it's important not to get bored or let the momentum drop as other projects intrude on your time.
Successful social media marketing is really a daily effort, not something you can work at every now and again.
The real benefits come when you make a regular effort -- even a weekly blog post or forum presence is better than nothing. This is especially true since Google launched its new indexing system, Google Caffeine, which searches the web far more quickly than before, and places a high value on regular content.
So, don't begin working with social media only to abandon it when it becomes obvious it takes effort and time. Effort and time is the price of a successful social media campaign.
9. Get Good at it
This is perhaps the most important tip here. It doesn't really matter how often you fill your pages with new content if it's not interesting and relevant.
Rewritten press releases, content copied from elsewhere, irrelevant ramblings about your favorite types of cheese -- this kind of filler content won't be read, it won't be shared, and there will be no online buzz (unless, of course, you're in some way involved in the cheese industry...).
You need some skill at writing articles for the online audience. Not to worry, though, there is plenty of online guidance. Just remember to keep trying to add value.
When it comes to subjects, consider the kinds of questions you asked when you first entered your industry and write answers to them. Your expertise will make your post valuable.
10. Get Motivated
What destroys a social media campaign? It's rarely negative press or legal issues. More often than not, it's apathy that kills your marketing campaign.
Social media is an ongoing effort and you need to keep the effort up. Success is slow growing but it will only come if you maintain your campaign.
That's why you need to keep your goals in mind at all time -- and use analytics tools to see just how helpful your social promotion has been. If you can see the difference it's making to your business, then it will be much easier to make time for the work.
Stay motivated by keeping your goals in sight and monitoring your success.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Google Tops U.S. June Searches Again With 65% Market
Google is once more number one search engine in the U.S. for the month of June with a market share of 65%, research firm Nielsen said in a report.
Google's cut of the U.S. search pie was 65% or almost 6 billion queries out of the total 9.1 billion conducted in June, just 0.1% below May's level and compared to a 66.1% share a year ago.
Yahoo came in number two. It registered 1.2 billion queries, or 13.7% of the total market, or the same slight 0.1% weaker month-on-month performance but a more significant drop from 16.2% the same period last year.
Closing in on the gap with Yahoo, number three was MSN/Windows Live/Bing, accounting for 13.4% of the U.S. search market in June, up 0.4% from last month and also a jump from last year's 8.9%.
Number four was AOL at 2.1%, unchanged from last month and down from 3% last year. Ask.com was number five, at 2%, also unchanged from May but up from 1.8% in June 2009.
Google, Yahoo and the Microsoft sites accounted for 92% of total U.S. searches in June, compared with 91.8% in May. Including AOL and Ask.com, the top five search engines accounted for 96.1% of total U.S. queries in June, up from 95.9% in May.
Nielsen said it does not count contextual searches.
Google is slated to hold its second-quarter earnings call http://investor.google.com/earnings.html tomorrow, July 15th, at 1.30 PM PST or 4.30 PM EST.
source from:http://searchenginewatch.com/
Honestly, I was a little negative about the idea of ratings extensions when they first started being syndicated. How will we manage the bad feedback? Will the swamp of reviews associated to aggregators ruin small-to-mid level advertisers' chances to benefit from this extension?
Consumer Driven Call to Action
After a little introspection and some peer debate, my attitude toward the product flipped. If anything this extension allows brands the ability to take over more space on the page while introducing a more dynamic call to action.
As mentioned in "Image Ads in Search - Yep, They Help" around Google's other extension products, we've seen an average increase in CTR of 13 percent while conversion followed at more than 14 percent. Should we expect to see similar increases for advertisers? If Google eventually picks up more onsite review content...you bet.
Onsite Review Partnerships
A majority of the ratings have been scraped from sources like Epinions, ResellerRatings.com, Viewpoints, and Bizrate. I traditionally skim these aggregators during research mode, however I prefer onsite consumer feedback.
Google's partnership with Bazaarvoice on the product search side of the business should tie in well with paid "ratings" enhancements. Will Google eventually allow advertisers the ability to filter onsite vs. comparison sites? Will advertisers be able to manage certain aspects of these ratings? Will ratings ever be involved in quality score?
Extension Stacking
Visual search will continue to evolve. Google's platform truly gives them the momentum to try anything. Their ability to stack extensions within the results is creating a better user experience through informative visual cues.
One of the better extensions is anything related to their plus box product (e.g., product plus box, local map extensions, form extensions, etc.). What about stacking ratings within the plus box extensions? Would it benefit retailers to have product plus box extensions that include product specific ratings under each product? What about hoteliers using the map extension to show property location plus associated ratings?
Real-Time Search
As more results shift to real-time search, expect the engines to also try integrating the same results into paid search. Could Microsoft leverage their Facebook investment by incorporating the "Like" functionality within their paid results (i.e., 15 People Like this product).
Pandora has already taken a step in that direction with their "Joe Smith Likes this artist" setting within the music interface. Your Facebook friends with similar musical taste are then pictured below the live artist. What if Microsoft uses their profile (and opt-in) information to match you with ratings created by your friends with congruent profiles?
---------------------------------------------------------------
International Link Building -- the Best of the Whole World
The absolute best thing about the Internet is having no country borders. You're only a mouse click away from websites all over the globe, allowing you to chat, share, and trade with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Online business can offer a worldwide variety of people to buy your services or products, which is a great advantage. But how do you make sure you target the right audience, local or international?
Search engines operate internationally and locally. For example, a search query in Google.com can and will give different results with the same search query prompt in Google.es, Google.nl, or even Google.co.uk. No matter what keyword.
Of course, you'll have some overlaps (e.g., when you look for an international brand or product), but search engines always try to offer you the most relevant result (i.e., results in your language). Your preferred language is determined from the language settings of the browser, chosen search engine (.nl, .es, etc), and (in most cases) the IP address of your (local) Internet connection.
What Causes the Search Results to Differ in Local Search Engines?
Some country-specific aspects help search engines easily determine if it's relevant enough for the local search query. The major aspects:
* Top-level domain (TLD) (i.e., domain extension).
* Language of the content.
* Additional robot instructions (meta/Webmaster Central).
* Location of the hosting.
* Source of incoming links.
Incoming Links Provide the Right Signs
If you're looking for an international brand locally and it has a multilingual website, you'll most likely get the website on the local ccTLD (country code top level domain -- .nl, .de, .fr, etc.), instead of the international website on the gTLD (generic top level domain -- .com, .net, .org) domain. This result is preferred because of the matching ccTLD, language, and hosting -- especially because there will be a lot incoming links with these similarities.
In other words, the backlink profile of majorbrand.nl will have more incoming links from Dutch sources than majorbrand.com. Therefore, Google.nl will prefer to show you majorbrand.nl in the search results simply because it's more relevant for the Dutch search query.
Active in Multiple Countries?
If you're active in multiple countries and want to gain rankings locally, it's wise to split up your website. Splitting up the content is absolute minimum, but this probably won't be enough to rank within the local search engines.
You have to clearly distinguish your multiple languages so it's easier for search engines to discover and mark the right language. Of course, you can split up your website into local TLD versions (if still available). As stated before, TLD is a major factor for search engines to determine the language.
The pros of splitting your website into local TLD versions:
* A local TLD is the most important locality factor.
* Local links are gained easier to local information.
* The right country information scores, not just the right language.
But, be aware of the cons of local TLD versions:
* Domain authority takes time to accumulate for each TLD.
* Unique content is needed, even if it's the same language.
When to Split up
There are best practices when it comes to splitting up your website if you want to offer your services in multiple countries. Depending on the main country you're focusing on, the amount of local competition or different languages in one country (e.g., Canada, Belgium).
Depending on your own situation you can split up your website you could use one of these solutions:
* Focusing on one mayor country and some additional countries: Make sure you have your main content on one ccTLD and use and gTLD (e.g., .eu,) for the other countries/languages.
* Many countries, but minor competition: In this scenario, a gTLD with separate subdomains (de.brand.com) or directories (brand.com/de) per country/language will do.
* Multiple countries with competition: The best way to compete is with ccTLD domains for each country. With separate domains you can boost individual domains and compete more effectively.
* Multiple languages in the same country: A common question, one that can easily be solved with a ccTLD domain for the country (e.g., .ca for Canada), but separate the languages on subdomains (fr.brand.ca, en.brand.ca, etc).
Link Building on Country Level
if you have a local business or made it local by splitting up your website, you can start with local link building. Good local links have relevance, authority, and transfer (RAT), as covered by my colleague and friend Peter van der Graaf.
Therefore, you can start off with a search for "www" in country-specific Google versions. This is a great start for exploring unknown territory, directly showing you the local authorities. Analyze the local importance by searching for relevant search terms because you need to pick potential link partners that are relevant for your business.
The unknown territory of local search engines makes link acquisition harder because you might not have the right language skills yourself. Fortunately, this can be overcome. Here are some helpful tips:
* Submit your website to local directories. Directories don't require much language skill and are available in every country, so this is a great way to start (bonus tip: check your competition from here).
* Hire local link building teams. Every country probably will have some clever Internet marketer who offers (local) link building services.
* Get links from local business partners. If you're doing business internationally there could be some local business partners to hook up with. Offer your products or services in exchange for a listing.
* Get into the local news. You wouldn't have started your business internationally if you didn't have a unique product or services. Use this to your advantage by publishing facts, results, or other findings, which you applied to the local market. If you make it to the local news listing you'll rapidly gain authority.
Pitfalls -- Please Keep off the Grass
Getting good, valuable links isn't an easy job. Hiring a local link building team is a good option, but you should never buy links. Of course you can buy links, but just know that nine out of 10 times these links won't help your local business.
A lot of services simply can't help you obtain relevant links that are also local links. You may be promised 1,000 links, but none will help you because the links are gathered from non-local directories, non-local weblogs, forums, and websites that aren't relevant. Result: You're stuck with 1.000 links with zero value.
Avoid these pitfalls, and use these other link building tips if you want to be viewed as serious competition by the locals. Good luck expanding your horizon!
-------------------------------------------------------------
10 Top Tips to Secure Social Media Success
Social media is constantly developing. The sooner you get on board and up to date, the sooner you can take advantage of all the exciting new technologies and opportunities.
1. Get Going
It's easy to decide you want a social media campaign and then get distracted and delayed -- social media marketing will rarely be a business essential.
But you must not put it off, your competitors won't. Get planning, get prepared, and get going.
2. Get Prepared
OK, so you're socialising online and suddenly someone launches an attack against your brand, what do you do?
By using platforms such as Twitter, you lay yourself more open to attack through these mediums -- it's easier for angry customers to leave negative comments publicly, for example.
Of course, they would possibly be doing so anyway, but if you're actively promoting your brand through social media, than you're also probably searching for mentions, so you'll probably see any comments sooner.
So, work out a strategy. If you see a negative mention, will you refute it? Use legal threats to silence it? Ignore it? Respond to it as though it's any other customer complaint?
A blend of refutation and resolution works best. If you're in the right, then make your case and, if you're in the wrong, aim to resolve the issue.
Whatever you decide, have a strategy in place in advance so that you aren't left scrambling when the situation arises.
3. Get Blogging
There are many ways to socialise online but blogging is definitely my favorite. It's great for SEO because it encourages inbound links and also fills your pages with naturally keyword-rich content.
But the social implications are at least equally important. To name just a few: a blog presents your brand in a friendly, accessible way, it shows you as a thought-leader within your industry, it encourages conversation and it gives people a reason to return regularly to your pages.
If you only do one social marketing activity this year, make it a blog.
4. Get Tweeting
Twitter is an excellent marketing platform, although it admittedly can be hard to do well. However, there are some easy wins to be had on Twitter: it's less time consuming than a blog, but it has the same potential to massively expand brand awareness.
There's loads of online guidance for getting started -- just make sure you remember that quality is important, even when you only have 140 characters to play with.
Follow the rest of the advice in this blog post to avoid spamming, overselling, or otherwise alienating your followers.
5. Get Some Perspective
Before you start trying to use social media, work out what it is you want to achieve. There's no point spending time and money interacting online if you don't have a clear idea what it is you hope to get out of it.
For example, if you get 10,000 Facebook fans, what do you then intend to do with them? How will they benefit your brand? If you have 500 Twitter followers, what then?
Before you write your first Tweet, post your first comment or launch your blog, take some time to work out what you're planning to achieve and how social media will help you.
Make sure you're realistic because it's attaining these goals that will keep you motivated to continue when the novelty has worn off and the regular work is being shunted to one side by other projects.
6. Get Talking
Social media is just that -- social. It isn't a one-way street. You need to be having conversations online if you want to gain followers, fans, and readers.
So get socializing. Reply to tweets about your company or brand, interact in forums, answer comments on your blog -- have conversations.
In a real-life social situation, you'd be pretty unpopular if you simply talked without listening -- and it's the same online.
7. Get Realistic
People don't want to read advertising. They won't share your blog posts if they're just sales pitches, they won't retweet your messages if they don't add value to their own followers.
Understand this before you embark on your social media campaign, because it's at the heart of this difficult area of marketing.
Your interactions need to have value for the online market. They aren't a captive audience and they won't read or interact with your online presence if they get nothing out of it.
If you're adamant that you want to sell socially, then offer discounts and voucher codes in the social media space -- that's value-adding and is pretty much the only way you can get away with pushing products through blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other online community spaces.
8. Get Active
Once you've begun your social media marketing efforts, it's important not to get bored or let the momentum drop as other projects intrude on your time.
Successful social media marketing is really a daily effort, not something you can work at every now and again.
The real benefits come when you make a regular effort -- even a weekly blog post or forum presence is better than nothing. This is especially true since Google launched its new indexing system, Google Caffeine, which searches the web far more quickly than before, and places a high value on regular content.
So, don't begin working with social media only to abandon it when it becomes obvious it takes effort and time. Effort and time is the price of a successful social media campaign.
9. Get Good at it
This is perhaps the most important tip here. It doesn't really matter how often you fill your pages with new content if it's not interesting and relevant.
Rewritten press releases, content copied from elsewhere, irrelevant ramblings about your favorite types of cheese -- this kind of filler content won't be read, it won't be shared, and there will be no online buzz (unless, of course, you're in some way involved in the cheese industry...).
You need some skill at writing articles for the online audience. Not to worry, though, there is plenty of online guidance. Just remember to keep trying to add value.
When it comes to subjects, consider the kinds of questions you asked when you first entered your industry and write answers to them. Your expertise will make your post valuable.
10. Get Motivated
What destroys a social media campaign? It's rarely negative press or legal issues. More often than not, it's apathy that kills your marketing campaign.
Social media is an ongoing effort and you need to keep the effort up. Success is slow growing but it will only come if you maintain your campaign.
That's why you need to keep your goals in mind at all time -- and use analytics tools to see just how helpful your social promotion has been. If you can see the difference it's making to your business, then it will be much easier to make time for the work.
Stay motivated by keeping your goals in sight and monitoring your success.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Google Tops U.S. June Searches Again With 65% Market
Google is once more number one search engine in the U.S. for the month of June with a market share of 65%, research firm Nielsen said in a report.
Google's cut of the U.S. search pie was 65% or almost 6 billion queries out of the total 9.1 billion conducted in June, just 0.1% below May's level and compared to a 66.1% share a year ago.
Yahoo came in number two. It registered 1.2 billion queries, or 13.7% of the total market, or the same slight 0.1% weaker month-on-month performance but a more significant drop from 16.2% the same period last year.
Closing in on the gap with Yahoo, number three was MSN/Windows Live/Bing, accounting for 13.4% of the U.S. search market in June, up 0.4% from last month and also a jump from last year's 8.9%.
Number four was AOL at 2.1%, unchanged from last month and down from 3% last year. Ask.com was number five, at 2%, also unchanged from May but up from 1.8% in June 2009.
Google, Yahoo and the Microsoft sites accounted for 92% of total U.S. searches in June, compared with 91.8% in May. Including AOL and Ask.com, the top five search engines accounted for 96.1% of total U.S. queries in June, up from 95.9% in May.
Nielsen said it does not count contextual searches.
Google is slated to hold its second-quarter earnings call http://investor.google.com/earnings.html tomorrow, July 15th, at 1.30 PM PST or 4.30 PM EST.
source from:http://searchenginewatch.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)