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Posts Tagged ‘information’

As an SEO, I know that my industry is constantly changing and evolving. That is one of the reasons why I truly love marketing through the search engines. One upcoming change will be the release of what has been code-named “Google Caffeine,” which can be beta-tested here. It will be a new, more powerful version of Google’s search engine technology. You can read more about it from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Because I rely on search engine optimization to grow my client’s businesses and my personal websites, I pay attention anytime Google gives out little bits of information regarding the future of their search engine.

The following quote from Google tells us a lot about this new project’s role in the future of search:

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions.”

That one sentence tells us just about everything we need to know about the future of Google search. It tells us where we need to be moving to stay ahead of the curve in our industry. Here is how we can do it:

1. Site & Indexing Speed: Google is going to be crawling more sites, more pages on those sites, and adding them to their index much faster. We have known for years that Google and the other search engines love fresh content. The problem is that there is so much new content hitting the internet every single day that they needed to come up with a solution to keep their index up-to-date with the latest news and information. The key here is that you need to continue to add new content to your website often. As Google increases their indexing speed, your new pages will get picked up faster and you will rank better.
2. Accuracy: Websites that will continue to dominate the search engines will be the ones that can properly match up the keywords people are searching on with the content of what they are actually looking for. I believe Google is not only interested in which sites people are actually clicking on, but what their behavior is like once they arrive at the particular website. The key here is that you should take all the time you need to make sure you are targeting the proper keywords, that the content on your website is related to the search term, and that it is enticing enough to keep visitors interested. Conversion optimization will also play a huge roll in converting more of your visitors into buying customers. One thing I always tell my clients is, “I can bring you traffic, but what good is the traffic if it doesn’t make you more money?” This is true regarding targeting the wrong keywords and having a crappy web design that doesn’t convert the traffic.
3. Comprehensiveness: Google will continue to favor “authority” sites. You know, those sites that do an excellent job of completely covering their niche. The key here is that if you want a website that ranks incredibly well for your main keywords, you better be ready to put in some blood, sweat, and tears. Google wants to see and rank sites that are thorough and comprehensive resources for the people who are looking for information about a particular topic. This is exactly why it is crucial that you continue to build new pages on your website that rank for each and every one of your relevant keywords. Remember, Google continues to show that they prefer larger, older websites that are loaded with useful information.

This information is nothing new. These are the things we are currently doing for our clients and that you should be doing now to increase your search engine rankings. However, there are many websites who are not doing these things and will fall far behind when Google finally releases their new search engine technology.

That is why you need to get started TODAY! If you do, you will be far ahead of your competitors who push aside this information and you will develop what is known as a competitive advantage.

Good luck!

Over the past few months, discussions have been going on in the Webmaster Center Blog regarding how to optimize a site! Recently, Kristin Meldahl of Bing highlighted some of the recent information that the Webmaster Center team has published on optimizing site architecture in their SEM 101 column. The information appears to be useful to webmasters and web publishers. There are four recent posts that focuses on various aspects of site architecture optimization, such as file/page issues, links, content and page meta information. The posts are:

Site Architecture and SEO – file/page issues (SEM 101)

Making links work for you (SEM 101)

Architecting content for SEO (SEM 101)

Head’s up on tag optimization (SEM 101)

The series of posts is indeed very helpful and useful for webmasters. For more information on site optimization, keep visiting the Webmaster Center blog .

Are you being kept in the dark by your current SEO firm? Do you wish the communication lines were a little more open? It’s too bad that some SEO companies view communication and sharing as a conflict of interest rather than an opportunity for reinforced, attack-at-all-sides teamwork. Amazingly, some SEOs believe clients would only stick around long enough to find out their methods and then bolt! In sharp contrast, SEO.com has found that as we share valuable information and resources with our clients, it builds the relationship and they achieve greater success.

I love the work I do at SEO.com. It is a privilege to work at one of the best, if not the best, SEO firms out there. We have consistently helped our clients rank on page 1 of Google (which holds about 70% of the search engine market share) for multiple targeted keywords. Each day I marvel at the methods we employ to help our customers achieve their desired conversion goals. I quickly gained great trust and admiration for SEO.com for many reasons, but especially for how transparent and open we are with our clients in regards to the methods and tools we use to help them.

At first, I was taken-back by it and wondered why any successful company would consider sharing valuable company tools, intellectual property, methods and training with a client who could choose to go out on their own and mimic the same techniques. But I quickly realized that there was no genuine risk and it is one of the reasons why we are so effective.

There are no big secrets in Search Engine Optimization. The work is very transparent, and most anyone can do it. Quality optimization only takes a lot of time, knowledge, dedication and skill, and that’s where an SEO firm comes in. We work for hours a day doing the tasks that anyone with SEO knowledge could do-because we have the time, and the training, to do it. We spend multiple hours every day doing keyword research, looking at our clients’ competitors, link-building and offering site optimization recommendations.

Every now and then we all need to be brave and do something different. We have to break the molds and stereotypes to step out of the norm and stop following the crowd if we want to be special and set apart. I’m proud to work for a company that does this. Many SEO firms simply do the basics for their clients. SEO.com is great at the basics too, but we also do things no other firm will-transparency with clients being only one example.

For example, a current client of SEO.com has seen phenomenal results in the year they have employed our services. During their first six months online they had no sales and only a handful of page visits. As a result of this failure, two of their four investors backed out, and the remaining two investors began desperately searching for a new firm. During their first month working with SEO.com they had 15 sales. By the third week of the second month they had between 5 – 6 sales a day. By the third month they began asking questions about what we were doing and how we were doing it. They even asked if we could show them our SEO methods, so we could work together as a team. We gladly shared the information with them. By the sixth month they were experiencing between 400 and 500 visits to their site every day and a dramatic increase in sales. At the end of their initial six-month contract they decided to double the amount of work we were doing for them and renew the agreement. Today they average between 1200 to 1300 visits and 30 to 40 sales each day!

In SEO, stepping out of the norm is usually rewarded with highly-desired results. Clients like to be kept in the loop. They like to know what is going on-especially with their money. Communication is the key. Our success and growth as a company are the result of a number of different variables, but the level of transparency and openness SEO.com offers its clients certainly deserves due credit.

In the last six months, we’ve seen many established food brands give away food using social media marketing. Using this medium, many companies have transitioned to online marketing and successfully received online and traditional press. In addition to press, many bloggers and fans of Twitter and Facebook have shared their brand preferences effectively endorsing these products.

A few examples include:

• Burger King – Whopper Sacrifice Facebook App. For Burger King, it was the Whopper Sacrifice Facebook app generating 83,000 installs and 23,000 free whoppers to customers who likely purchased fries and a drink with that. A website, Facebook app, and a few emails, tweets and text messages is all it took. You can read more from the blogosphere about the Whopper Sacrifice.
• Denny’s – Free Grand Slam Breakfast. For Denny’s it was a coveted multi-million dollar Superbowl ad that got the word out. All costs were reportedly recovered the day of the promotion.
• IHOP – Free Shortstack of Pankcakes. IHOP gives away free shortstacks each year. Did you know this? Me neither. Imagine how that would change with a few messages pushed from customer-to-customer. Think about the opportunity IHOP is missing by not keeping their 15-minutes alive throughout the year. Huge mistake!
• Quiznos – Million Subs Viral Campaign. Quiznos created a site called, MillionSubs.com and gave away one million sub sandwiches over the course of a week. I had a small meatball on wheat with an oversized double-chocolate cookie. It was delicious. And free. However, there isn’t any information about the promotion just a few months later.
• 7-11 – Slurpee Giveaway on 7/11. 7-11 stores have been giving away Slurpees for years as an annual promotion on one of the hottest days of summer. Perfectly targeting their audience and reminded them to “cool down with a Slurpee.” Notice the press release on their corporate site. Great move.

What amazes me about these promos? Just months later, I can’t easily find information about them on the corporate sites. It’s the blogger reviews, news services, Twitter and other web pages that show up in Google for their branded promo. Try it.

Traditionally, we’ve seen giveaways for food using free or buy-one-get-one free coupons, in-store taster promotions or trial giveaways, order by mail giveaways (a fantastic gimmick that grew lead lists by millions) and so on. These are all aimed at an older audience; a previous generation. A less connected people who usually believe more of what they’re told. Trying to take these old school marketing tactics online can create a negative impact because you’re approaching a younger, hipper audience that demand new forms of interaction from corporations.

A couple brands that have successfully created a social experience rather than just offer a freebie giveaway include:

• Charity Water – Twestival (Twitter Festival) raised $250,000 for awareness of the global water crisis and used the money to drill fresh water wells. Notice on the site, however, that you can easily tweet facts right from the site. A variety a messages, ready to go, so you relate to one of them and send it with almost no effort. Keep in mind, their audience are Twitter users who speak the language you see on this site. In addition, videos show more about the cause. These videos are uploaded to free video services that have their own audiences thus building traffic from two audiences simultaneously.
• Help Remedies – Selling the least sexy grocery store products in a newly re-packaged way that uses packaging as a selling point. Furthermore, there are pages on their website to entertain you while you visit. If you’re interested in finding a local place to purchase their product, you are presented with a Google Map where you can easily get directions from anywhere in the world. Funny thing is, I’d buy this over a generic product because it’s fun. Forget the fact that both products get the job done. Click through for more information about each product. It’s quite entertaining, actually.

Other forms of online marketing give-a-ways come as product reviews on blogs or Twitter promos that include re-tweeting a message that can be tracked and a winner picked.

Squarespace did this by offering an iPhone giveaway by simply using the hash-tag (#) and their name like you see below. This allows them to track the messages about their promotion. It also gave them a great opportunity to release information about their new iPhone app because they had an audience listening to the brand Squarespace and relating it to the iPhone.

Whatever the case, you can use social media properties to reach out to new audiences and avoid the age creep in your demographic. Find out how to launch a successful campaign and get your customers to become your marketers.

Image: bchow

Yahoo! has made a change to the Yahoo! Shortcut.Yahoo! Shortcut appears at the top of the Yahoo Search results page when users search for a local business. It basically shows things like how many reviews or ratings a business has. With the change, Yahoo! went on to include links to information users tend to take interest in, such as actual text of the reviews, photos and driving directions. The content is displayed right on the search results page.

In the above snapshot, you can see new options appear in the form of tabs below the business entry. Users can read the reviews, see the photos or get driving directions by just clicking a tab. The enhancement in the Yahoo! Shortcut will help users see a selection of reviews and images for a business directly on the search results page. Yahoo! hopes this will save users lots of time and help them get required information in one place.

Sure, your website has traffic, but is it the right traffic? Are the people frequenting your website finding the information they want? Many times, website owners are so concerned with the number of visitors, they lose track of what those visitors are doing, or even if they are the right type of visitors. So ask yourself, “Do I have the right traffic coming to my website?”

To address this question, look at your major keywords. Take a minute and determine whether the information on your website is relevant to your keywords if searched for on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. There are a number of times where I have seen the content of the website irrelevant to the keyword the site owner is targeting.

Second, take a look at your analytics and see what traffic the search engines are sending your way, and what keywords people are using to find your site. In Google Analytics, click on the “Traffic Sources” tab, and then click the “Search Engines” option in the submenu. From here it will give you a list of the different search engines that have sent traffic (both paid and unpaid) to your website. Click on a particular Search Engine, such as Google, and you will see a list of terms that were searched when they found your site.

Your results will look similar to this.

This report shows search patterns and keyword terms. It also provides a better understanding of how people are finding your site, and what keywords are being used. This list shows what Google finds to be relevant to your website as well, allowing insight to how Google views your site.

When reviewing the report, take a close look at the bounce rate of keywords used. This indicates whether visitors are finding their desired information on your website. Consider the example above, the keyword “hsplit download” (third from the top), has an extremely high bounce rate of 96.36%, indicating that the 110 visitors more than likely did not find the information they expected from the website. Compare that to the first term on the list “802.11bg wlan driver,” which has a bounce rate of 31.86%. From this report it is easy to determine that the content/page referring to “hsplit download” needs to be refined, and reworked.

Studying analytics will deliver an understanding of past trends, and help you make decisions on how to revise  content  to provide better results. But if you are starting new, or want a better idea of how to prepare for future traffic, there are other ways to plan for the right traffic. Last month David Scoville wrote an excellent article on getting toknow your target market, and learning from a basic focus group. He offers a simple way to find out how to understand the way your “right traffic” thinks.

When I first dove into SEO and SEM, I was taught a valuable principle when planning for keywords and targeted traffic: People who are doing research on a topic use broad keywords to gather information. Once that information is gathered, people search vary specific and generally use “longer tail” phrases to find and purchase a product.

An example of this principle would be when someone is interested in getting a website hosted; they may look up a general keyword such as “website hosting.” However, when the person makes the shift from researching the product to buying the product, they are more likely to be more specific in their search and my look for “VPS PHP web server.”

What does this mean to you? Well the conversions from a visitor to a buyer are more likely to happen with longer tail keyword searches, meaning you will have more of the “right traffic” coming to your website. Now it is apparent that there is less traffic overall associated with the more specific and sometimes longer tail keywords, but the traffic that is coming to your site is more qualified and has a better potential of converting, and that is far more important than just trying to build high traffic numbers.

Take time to evaluate your current traffic, and see what trends in your analytics can help you improve your visitor’s time on the website. The goal of proper SEO is to not pretend to be the most relevant to the search, but to actually BE THE MOST RELEVANT. Sure you have traffic to the website, and when all is said and done all traffic is good traffic, but only the right traffic will keep the website up and the bills paid.

It does not take long for ecommerce webmasters to learn that links impact their rankings in the search engines. However, many webmasters make a big mistake with the links within their own site.

In order to develop a clear understanding for this article, let’s lay down some basic information about internal links. When discussing internal links, I am referring to any and all links within your website and links that stay within the same domain. I make this clarification because some may refer to links across domains, but within sister sites, as internal. For this article we will only refer to links within the same domain as internal links.

To further clarify information you should already know, (but we won’t hold it against you, if you don’t) the clickable text in a link is called “link text“, or “anchor text“. These mean the same thing, so no need to argue which phraseology is correct, right? Anchor text is vitally important in search engine algorithms.

Good. Now that we have ground rules, let’s discuss why internal link structure is the “enemy” for most webmasters. A large portion of webmasters do not take full advantage of the ability to link to themselves using the right anchor text. Many of you are eating, drinking, and sleeping link building. You are dreaming up new ways, reading endless information on the latest link building tactics, and working hard to obtain links with the right anchor text from outside websites. How many link requests have you sent with unsuccessful results? How many hours have you spent building other web pages all in the name of link building?

Now, how many hours have you spent ensuring the links within your own site use the correct anchor text? I can hear all of the excuses already, but before you go there, let me answer the most common questions. If you still have a question, leave a comment and we will address it.

Many webmasters do not use the right anchor text within the links of the navigation bar due to lack of space. I get it and understand. No need to have an ugly site. If you cannot fit the correct anchor text in the navigation bar (top, left, right, or any combination) without the text wrapping or a really wide or tall nav bar, then just use the root word.

Example: keyword = “Easton little league baseball bats”

nav bar link suggestions = “Easton baseball bats”, or “little league bats”.

Do the best you can with the navigation bars. The truth is, they are important, but not the most important internal links you can have.

Many webmasters also overlook the page footer. This space works well for longer keywords, as it allows greater space flexibility without negatively affecting site aesthetics. Check your footer for correct anchor text usage on all relevant links. For larger sites (in terms of pages), it is not recommended to use the footer for every link. If there are too many links, navigation can be messy or difficult for site visitors. Like anything else, this can be abused and a footer stuffed with keyword links is impractical.

Another way to get anchor text is to use the alternative text (commonly misnamed the alt tag) of an image. Search engines count alternative text as the anchor text for a link within an image. Be careful to use alternative text that relates to the image, or there is danger of being labeled a spammer.

The best place for obtaining value from internal links is the content area of your page. Search engines look at this area with more trust. Why? The odds are more likely that a webmaster will place relevant and helpful links in this area, which is what search engines want. I recommend that the text color on these links matches the color of other links within the site, and that links are underlined. (For most sites this would be blue and underlined.) Don’t try to disguise the link because it shows the search engines you are not trying to hide something.

You tell the search engines what each page is about by using anchor text within the site. Search engines use the external links pointing to your site to verify this information. Get your internal links correct, and it will likely take fewer external links to rank well for the keyword phrases you are targeting. Go fix those internal links today to see improved rankings.

In my last post, How to Create a Huge Keyword List, I suggested to spy on your competition for keyword ideas. Well, today I want to delve a little further into that topic, and give you some techniques and tools for doing just that.

Learning from your competition is one of the best ways to get keyword suggestions. One of the great things about marketing online, is your competition is right in front of you, and can’t hide everything they’re doing. Here are a few ways to get keyword ideas from your competition:

1- Inspect Meta Tags
This technique doesn’t always work because enough sites have learned that meta keywords are not as important as they used to be. If your competition is still using meta keywords, it is a very easy way to get an idea of what keywords they’re targeting.

You can use SEOBook.com’s SEO XRay (part of SEO for Firefox) and easily see this information. Just do a right click and choose “SEO For Firefox”, then SEO XRay. Or you can always just look at the source code and find it there.

2- BacklinkWatch.com
I find this tool is hit and miss, but sometimes you can get some really good information from it. Just go to BacklinkWatch.com and type in the URL you want to check. It can take a while to load everything, but this tool will provide a list of pages that are linking to the site and the anchor text of some of the links. The anchor text is what you should be looking at for ideas.

3- Google AdWords Keyword Tool
You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to get suggestions for keywords based on the URL. Just choose the option “Website content,” type in your competitors URL, and see what suggestions it gives you. This can be a great way to brainstorm other keyword ideas as well.

4- Yahoo! Site Explorer and SEO Link Analysis
This is one of my favorite techniques to see what keywords your competition is using in their anchor links from other sites. First, you’ll need to download and install the Firefox plugin SEO Link Analysis by Joost de Valk. Then, go to Yahoo! and type “site:www.whateversite.com” into the search bar. This will take you to the Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Once the site explorer comes up, click on the button that says “Inlinks.” Once the next page loads, change the first dropdown menu to say “Except from this domain.” Here’s a shot of what the results look like with the SEO Link Analysis plugin working:

This plugin shows you what the PR and anchor of the links are. As you go through the list of links, you’ll be able to see what keyword phrases they are using as anchors from other sites. Chances are you’ll find a lot of your competition’s main keyword phrases this way.

5- Other Tools
There are a bunch of websites that offer to provide your competitors AdWords lists and other information. I don’t really believe them; but I figure you can use some of them for ideas. So, before you go spending a lot of money on a software program that claims to steal your competitor’s keyword list, understand that it’s a marketing ploy. Get some ideas from their free tools, if they have any, then leave them alone and don’t waste your money.

Here are some more credible sites that provide useful information:

• SpyFu.com
• Compete.com
• QuantCast.com

Of course, there are other ways of spying on your competition that I haven’t covered in this post. If you have tools or techniques that you have found helpful, please share them in the comments below!

I spend my weekend playing around with one of the most awesome things to come out in the internet ever – WolframAlpha. If you haven’t heard of it’s the fruit of Stephen Wolfram’s vision and it is real live working computational knowledge engine. Forget search engines for the moment because the geek in me is so excited about this that even if SEOs have no way to benefit from this thing (at least none that I can think of right now) it’s revolutionary enough to be posted on ANY blog or site that considers itself a follower of what’s new in IT.

So what is it about WolframAlpha that’s got me all excited? As I mentioned earlier they do not call it a search engine but a knowledge engine because that’s exactly what it is. Initially when you look at the search box it looks every bit like a search engine but once you get the results you will see why it is a knowledge engine. Instead of returning relevant links what WolframAlpha returns is a summary of information that it has garnered from all over the net. This makes me think about Star Trek, Andromeda, and all the once far fetched sci-fi computers that can answer your questions by doing the data analysis on its own.

The thing about WolframAlpha though is that since it is a computational knowledge engine it won’t return the latest movie show times or restaurant addresses, which is good news to Google and the other search engines because they are still needed for those kind of searches. What WolframAlpha will return though are all the information that I needed way back in college to make my life easier. It will compute any mathematical formula and plot functions, compute relativistic momentum, give you the financial background of a company and extrapolate the data to predict future trend, allow comparison between performance of companies, give you information about any date, and so much more. In short it is what it claims to be a KNOWLEDGE ENGINE.

Right now it’s still pretty mind boggling and I still find myself playfully entering everyone’s birthday so I can see who was born during a full moon and tease them endlessly about it (so far it’s only my father-in-law that answers to the description so I still haven’t got anyone to tease mercilessly!). And in case you plan on asking it also gives the right answer to the only question that matters:

a

WolframAlpha: A Knowledge Engine