Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Google has been granted a new patent some days ago. The patent can give us further insight on how Google judges the influence of the links to your site on your Google rankings.
Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Your website will only cost you money if your website visitors don't become customers of your company. For that reason, it is important that you get the basics right. Check the six points in this week's article to find out if your website turns enough visitors into customers.
Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Having high rankings for the right keywords will have a big impact on your revenue. In this article, you'll learn how to judge the financial value of your keywords. You might be surprised.
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Get a solid foundation. The SEO pyramid shows you how to do the right things in the right order so that you get the best possible search engine rankings for your website.
Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Is Google going to add their own links to your web pages? A new patent indicates that Google might plan to change your web page content.
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Yahoo is starting to display Bing results on the search result pages. Bing results are going to deliver a lot of traffic in the near future. Is your website prepared for that change or will you lose a lot of visitors?
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - When Google displays Sitelinks below your website listing in the search results, it's very likely that your website will get more clicks and more visitors. This week's article explains how to check your Sitelinks and how to make sure that Google displays the right Sitelinks for your website.
Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - You know what you sell and you know the topic of your website. Are you sure that Google puts your website in the right category? If your website is about shoes, Google still might think that it is about frogs and toads. How can you tell Google that your website is not about toads?
Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Most people know that being listed on Google's first result page will bring them a lot of targeted visitors and that they will get a lot of sales through that listing. However, you also have to know what to do if you want to get these results. This week's article shows you six things that you absolutely must know about SEO.
Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Last week, Google published an official statement about quality links and their effect on your website rankings. In the statement, Google wants to explain their viewpoint on earning quality links. This week's article contains six link building tips that Google endorses.
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Last month, Google was granted a patent that states that the different links on a linking page have a different effect on the linked pages. How does this affect your website and what do you have to do to secure your rankings?
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Last week, Google officially announced that their new web indexing system "Caffeine" is live on all Google pages. What does this mean for your website and do you have to change anything on your pages?
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - If you want to get high rankings on Google and other search engines, you must do the right things to succeed. You have to work on many different factors to make sure that your website performs better than the sites of your competitors. This week's article helps you to check the five most important points.
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - There's new data about the number of clicks that the first result on Google's result page gets. How does this affect your website and how can you judge the financial value of your rankings?
Tue, 25 May 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - No matter how good your company is, some people will always write something negative about your site, even if you tried your best to help them. What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on Google's first result page for your company name?
Tue, 18 May 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - The anchor text of the links that point to your website is very important when it comes to getting high rankings on Google. Unfortunately, Google might not use the anchor text of all the links that point to your website. In this article, you'll learn how to find these links.
Tue, 11 May 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Google has introduced another algorithm update this month and many webmasters have seen a huge drop in traffic from Google for keyword phrases that are three or more keywords long (so called "long tail keywords"). How does this affect your website?
Tue, 04 May 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - How can you get search engines to display the web pages with the best conversion rate in the search results and what can you do to to make sure that unwanted pages are not listed? This week's article explains eight things that you can to do show search engines your most important pages.
Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Most people use a keyword suggestion tool when they try to find new keywords for their campaigns. While keyword suggestion tools are good, they should not be the first step in your keyword research activities. This article helps you to find great keywords without using keyword tools.
Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a technique that is used by all major search engines nowadays. Does your website take this into account? How does it influence the position of your web pages in Google's search results?
Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Google has confirmed that they use page speed as a ranking factor. Will your website drop in Google's search results? What can you do you keep your website listed?
Tue, 06 Apr 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Google's Matt Cutts recently made a new announcement about paid links. Buying links is a very hot and controversial topic among webmasters. Should you buy links to increase the position of your website on Google? Do paid links help your rankings? Are there any risks?
Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Getting links to your website is one of the most important things that you have to do if you want to get high rankings on Google and other big search engines. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most difficult tasks. Do you make the most of your existing links? This week, we're going to pimp your links.
Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Last week Google's Matt Cutts gave an interview in which he revealed some things that will help webmasters to better optimize their websites. In this article, you'll find the most important things that Matt Cutts said in the interview.
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Webmasters in online forums reported an unusual Google behavior. New web pages of some sites are indexed with a longer delay. Is it a new Google penalty? Or is it just a bug that affects only certain websites?
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - A small error in one search engine optimization factor can destroy your efforts in all other elements. When you optimize your website for search engines, you have to consider several different factors. In this article, you'll find the five most important factors that influence your Google rankings.
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Proxy hijacking still seems to be an issue on Google. Other websites might steal your website content and they can outrank your web pages on Google with the stolen content. Is your website affected? What can you do against these hijackers?
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Google does not list your web pages although you have a great site? This week's article lists 5 reasons why search engines won't list your website (solutions included).
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - All major search engines have special teams that try to eliminate web spam from their search result pages. Bing has just published an article about web spam. Is your website spam and are your rankings at risk?
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - If you advertise your website on Google AdWords, chances are that you found out that you can spent a lot of money on AdWords without getting a lot in return. The reason why many people spend much more than they have to for their Google AdWords ads is that they use the wrong settings in their campaigns.
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Webmasters continue to see breadcrumbs on Google's result pages. What are breadcrumbs, for which websites does Google display them and how can you get Google to display breadcrumbs for your own website?
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Google has announced a major change in the way that they handle search results by including synonyms for some words that may be used in queries. How does this affect the position of your web pages in Google's search results?
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - How does Google rank tweets in the real-time results? The Google engineer who led Google's real-time search development shares some insights.
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - How important are the long tail keywords in your search marketing campaign? Does it pay to invest your time in long tail keywords with little search volume? A new study has the answer.
Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:36:36 +0100 - Last month, Google started to display real-time results on the search engine result pages. How are these results calculated and how can you get in these results?
Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google's Matt Cutts recently suggested that the speed of a web page might become more important in Google's ranking algorithm. How will this affect your website and what can you do to improve the speed of your website?
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google was granted a patent this month that explains how search engines can deal with duplicate content issues. Does your website hvae duplicate content problems?
Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google's new Caffeine index is going to be released soon. What do you have to expect from this update and how will it affect the position of your web pages in Google?
Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Bing recently published a document about link building. Although it focuses on how Bing deals with inbound links, it can also help you to get better links for Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The most important points of Bing's document can be found in this article.
Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google Images has indexed billions of images. If your image can be found for the right keyword, then you will get targeted visitors to your website. We have six tips that help you to get your images on Google's first results page.
Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Depending on the keywords for which you want to get high rankings, you have to employ different tactics. Keywords with less competition require different tactics than keywords with high competition. Two charts illustrate the importance and the effect of different optimization tactics.
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Links from related websites are very important for the position of your own site in Google's search results. Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to convince other people to link to your site.
Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Many websites on the Internet will link to your website if you pay them for the links. Is this a good method to increase the link popularity of your website or can you get in trouble if you use paid links?
Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Many webmasters think that low quality links or links from spammy websites can have a negative effect on the ranking of their websites on Google. The problem with links from spammy websites is that it is very difficult to do something against them. Here's an official Google statement about bad links.
Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, we're showing you how you can optimize the listings of your website on Google Maps. Good listings on Google Maps can result in many website visitors.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - To get high rankings on Google, it is not necessary to have everything that Google expects from a great website. You just have to be better than your competitors. If you have a website with optimized web pages, it is usually the quality of the links that make the difference. The tips in this article will help you to get better rankings than your competitors.
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - You have probably seen the top 10 ranking guarantee that we give users of our website promotion tool IBP: we guarantee that your website will be found in the regular (unpaid) search results on Google for the keywords of your choice. Is it really possible to guarantee a top 10 position on Google? What's the catch?
Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - All major search engines use some kind of TrustRank to rank your web pages. How does this affect the position of your website in the search results and how can you improve the TrustRank of your website?
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Reciprocal links are discussed controversially among search engine marketers. Some think that reciprocal links are great, others think that they are a waste of time, another group thinks that reciprocal links work to some degree. Is there a final answer?
Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - If you want to succeed on the Internet, it is extremely important that you choose the right keywords for both organic search engine optimization and pay per click marketing. If you choose the wrong keywords, you'll waste a lot of time and money. A new frekeyword suggestion tool helps you to find good keywords.
Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Does Google care about the position of a web page on your server? Does it make a difference if a web page is in the root directory of your website or in a sub directory? How does your URL structure influence the position of your web pages in Google's search results? What can you do to improve the position of your website?
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, we're taking a look at the effect of human reviewers on Google's ranking algorithm. Google employs several thousand people who manually review the search results. Do they like your website?
Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - One of the main problems in Internet marketing is that it is often a "the winner takes it all" game. That means that the best website will get the deal and all other websites will get nothing, no matter how good they are. If you are just slightly better than your competitors, you will get many more sales.
Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Do Internet directory links still have value when it comes to search engine rankings? Can you increase the position of your website in Google's search results by submitting your site to Internet directories? A small case study has some answers.
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, you'll find out why optimizing your website is like working with a fitness coach. Is your website fit enough to get page one listings on Google?
Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - The Yahoo/Microsoft deal will have a major impact on the search engine landscape and there definitely will be effects on your website rankings and the number of visitors that your website will get..
Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google's AdWords system is a great way to get more website visitors. However, Google is also a business that needs to make money. That's why most people pay much more for their AdWords ads than they have to.
Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, we're taking a look at PageRank sculpting with the rel=nofollow attribute. Does it still work and can it help you to get better rankings on Google? What do you have to change on your own website?
Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - If you want to get high rankings on Google, it is necessary that many other websites link to your website. This is something that most webmasters know. What many webmasters still don't know is that a website that has only a few inbound links can outrank a website that has many inbound links.
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - The titles that you use for your web pages are very important. Depending on the type of traffic that you want to attract, you should use different web page title types.
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Getting listed on Google's first result page is great. It's not so great when you find out that you get a lot of visitors through your high search engine rankings but only a few customers. Search engine optimization is pointless if your website does not convert visitors into customers. You'll actually lose a lot of money if you don't take the time to optimize the conversion rate of your website.
Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, we're taking a look at the number of keywords for which you should optimize a single page of your site. It is possible to optimize a web page for a single keyword and get rankings for many keywords.
Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - If you choose the right keywords, then you will pay as little as possible for your ads and you will get more sales. This new tool helps you to quidkly create long tail keywords and keyword lists for Google AdWords.
Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, we're taking a look at a brand new keyword suggestion tool that uses a unique keyword database that no other tool on the Internet can offer you. Finding the best keywords for search engine optimization is crucial if you want to succeed with your website. That's why you should take a look at this tool.
Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Microsoft's Bing search engine has just become publicly available, allowing you to decide whether Microsoft's latest effort has the goods to take on Google. Bing promises to be a success and this article reveals everything you need to know about this new search engine.
Tue, 26 May 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Webmasters in an online webmaster forum observed an anomaly in Google's results that might indicate a new Google penalty. Which websites have been penalized and could this affect your own website?
Tue, 19 May 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Are you living in a bad neighborhood? Your website could. Did you know that your web host probably hosts several websites on the same web server as yours? Some of these websites might belong to shady businesses. If they are major spammers, your website might be banned on Google.
Tue, 12 May 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Trust is a major factor in Google's ranking algorithm. Some websites can get high rankings on Google for nearly any content they publish while other websites cannot get high rankings at all although they have optimized web page content. The reason why some websites do better than others is trust.
Tue, 05 May 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Wouldn't it be great if your website was listed twice in Google's top 10 results for your most important keywords? Although Google usually shows only one page from every site in the top results, it is possible to get two listings if you do the right things.
Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Link building is one of the hardest and one of the most important things that you have to do if you want to get high rankings on Google. As it takes so much time to get inbound links, it is very important to make sure that the links to your website contain the right keywords. Here are three things that you can do to optimize your existing links.
Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Getting high quality links is crucial if you want high rankings on Google for competitive keywords. Links from old and reputable high authority sites work best. Unfortunately, it's often not easy to get links from high authority websites.
Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Should you use your keywords in the URLs of your web pages? Do search engines look at the keywords that are included in the addresses of your web pages and do these keywords have an effect on the rankings of your website? Google and Yahoo made some statements about it.
Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - During the last weeks, Google changed three things on the result pages that are visible to all Google users. The changes are good for searchers but they might be bad for your website.
Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Search engine optimization is not difficult if you understand the basic concepts. If you know what to do, your website will get the best possible rankings on Google and other important search engines. This article will help you to better understand SEO or to explain SEO to your clients.
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google recently filed a patent application that deals with the keywords that Google finds on your web pages. How does Google find the keywords on your website and how do they rank your website? What can you do to get better rankings?
Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google's sandbox is a filter that Google's search quality team created to fight spam in the search results. This Google filter is still alive and it might be the reason why your website is not listed as high as it could.
Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Optimizing web pages for search engines is often the same as optimizing web pages for web surfers. This week, we're taking a look at nine factors that can improve the usability of your website as well as your search engine rankings.
Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Targeting several keywords on your website is crucial if you want to get high rankings on Google. The more keywords that are related to a special topic can be found on your website, the more likely it is that Google will find your website relevant to that topic.
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Some years ago, it was enough to get many inbound links to get high rankings on Google. This has changed. As Google and other search engines continually improve the way they rank web pages, getting the right links is crucial if you want to be listed on the first search result page.
Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google recently wrote in one of its official blogs that it is possible for spammers to take advantage of your website without ever setting a virtual foot in your server. Spammers can do this by abusing open redirects. What can you do to avoid this?
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Old websites have a big advantage over new websites. Websites that were around several years ago had far fewer competitors and it was much easier for them to get high rankings in that environment. How can you compete with these websites? Here are three tips.
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Many people who start a website think that it is possible to get high rankings on Google within a few days. Unfortunately, this is not possible. Competition on the Internet is fierce and there are several factors that influence how long it takes until Google lists your website.
Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Link exchange requests have a very bad reputation. The reason for that is that many people send mass link exchange requests that are nothing more than spam. However, if you want to get links from authority sites, you have to send link exchange requests. The secret of successful requests is to write link exchange messages that aren't spam.
Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, we're telling you why link building is like losing weight and how this will help you to get better rankings on Google.
Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - Google's robot decides whether your website will get high positions in the search results or not. Give Google's robot what it needs and your website will get better rankings on Google.
Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:36:36 +0100 - The new year 2009 might be a tough year for many businesses but if you do it correctly, it can be a very successful year for you. Use our 5 step checklist to find out if your website succeeds in the new year.
Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - What is the dollar value of a top ranking in Google? How can you increase your rankings? What has changed? This and many tips and tricks can be found in our 2008 summary.
Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Does Google use the bounce rate of a web page to specify the position of that page in the search results? What does this mean for your website rankings and what can you do to get a better bounce rate?
Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - In an online webmaster forum, a webmaster described the link experiment that he did with his websites. He tried to find out how linking to the home page affected his rankings. Can too many links to the home page of your website have a negative effect on your rankings?
Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Has your website lost its rankings in Google? Did your rankings drop or did your website vanish completely from Google? Many things can cause a ranking drop. This article explains what you can do to get your rankings back.
Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Two weeks ago, Google released a so-called search engine optimization starter guide for webmasters. While the Google document does not tell you how your website can be listed on Google's first result page it will tell you what you shouldn't do if you want Google to index your web pages.
Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - About three weeks ago, Microsoft was granted a new patent with the name Web Spam Classification Using Query Dependent Data. Although this patent application was filed by Microsoft, all major search engines probably use similar methods to classify web pages. Do search engines think that your website is spam?
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Do links to other websites have a positive or a negative effect on their Google rankings of your website? Are there right and wrong links? Google has published an official statement.
Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - If you want your website to be indexed by search engines, it is important that your site has a good link architecture. Here are five tips that will help you to improve your link architecture as well as your search engine rankings.
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - The words that are used to link to your website improve your search engine rankings for these words on Google. But how long should the link text be? Which words will be considered? Is there an optimal length for text links?
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - This month, the Google Webmaster blog published an article in which Google's Maile Ohye officially explained what it takes to get high rankings in Google's search result pages.
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Many people will do anything do get on Google's first result page. That's why some webmasters regularly come up with new spam methods to get on Google's first result page. Here are two new methods that people use to get high rankings on Google.
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Search engine optimization is not about getting as much traffic as possible. It's about getting the right kind of website traffic. Sometimes, less traffic can be better. This week, we're showing you that your sales can increase if your website gets less traffic. If you optimize your web pages correctly, you can multiply your revenue without working more.
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Many of the methods that promise high search engine rankings are basically spam. Google doesn't like spam at all and if Google finds out that your website contains spam elements, your website will be penalized. Will Google forgive you if you remove the spam from your site?
Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Many people still don't know what it takes to convince Google that your website is more relevant than the millions of other websites on the Internet. There are four simple rules that will help you to get your website on Google's first result page.
Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - If you're selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by the right people. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimize your web page titles.
Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Suppose that you have a great website with great content. Your web pages are perfectly optimized for visitors and search engines and you have found many related websites that could link to your site. How do you convince these websites that they should link to your website? Here are five tips that will help you to convince other webmasters.
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Last week, Google added the Google Suggest feature that had been available in beta for a long time to its main page. This might sound like a small change but it can have a big effect on the traffic that you get from Google. In addition, Google has released its own web browser today.
Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Many webmasters don't get high rankings on Google and other search engines just because Google's indexing robot has difficulty to index their web pages. Read this article to find out how you can get Google to index your web pages.
Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - The number one position on Google is something that most webmasters try to achive. Unfortunately, many webmasters don't take the time to plan to find the best keywords for optimization. This can lead to problems with pay per click and with organic search engine optimization.
Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Good link texts can give your website a boost in Google's search results. Unfortunately, many webmasters still don't take advantage of the full potential of optimized link texts. This article explains how you can make the most out of your links.
Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - A month ago, Google announced that they had improved the way it indexes Flash files. Has something changed in Google's search results in the meantime? Is this change good news for you if you have a Flash site?
Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - A new search engine has been started by former Google employees. Could this be the next Google killer? How will this affect Google and your rankings?
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - This week, we're taking a look at a new ranking patent that has been granted to Yahoo. This patent can help you to better understand how to get higher rankings on Yahoo and Google.
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Do you want to get customers from outside the United States? Is your business located in Europe or another part of the world? There are a few things to consider if your website is aimed at people outside the United States.
Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Link building is one of the most important search engine optimization steps. Without good inbound links, your website cannot get high rankings. These four easy steps will help you to link your website with some of the best sites on the Internet.
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Most webmasters face this problem sooner or later. The rankings of your website on Google have dropped and you don't know why this happened. Read this article to find out why this could happen to your website.
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Google uses the click through rate to rank the paid search results. The more clicks an ad gets, the higher it will be ranked in the search results. Does Google also use this method for the regular search results?
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Webmasters want quick and easy solutions to their problems. Most people want to get high rankings in Google and they want these rankings now. Here are the most popular quick fix solutions.
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - More and more websites get Sitelinks in Google's search results. What are they, how can they help your website and how can you influence which links Google will use for your Sitelinks? What can you do if Google displays the wrong links?
Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Does your domain name prevent your website from getting high rankings? This week, we're taking a look at the ranking problems that many webmasters experienced with .info domains. Is there a ranking filter for .info domains?
Tue, 27 May 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Although there is no such thing as a general duplicate content penalty it is difficult to get high rankings for a web page which contents can also be found on other web pages. What do search engines do with duplicate content and how can you avoid problems with duplicate content? All you need to know can be found in this article.
Tue, 20 May 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - People not involved in website optimization often have difficulty to understand search engine optimization and the different methods that are involved. If you have to explain the basic SEO concepts to your boss, the following list will help you.
Tue, 13 May 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - During the last weeks, people in online forums observed some strange Google result changes. Rumor has it that there is a new -60 penalty. Which websites are penalized? How can you avoid getting penalized?
Tue, 06 May 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - High rankings on Google can make the difference between an extremely successful online business and a total failure. The position of your website in Google's search results can make or break your business. But how much exactly is a top ranking on Google worth? What can a top ranking on Google do for your business?
Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Do search engines care about the usability of your web pages? Does it make a difference whether your web pages are easy to navigate or not? A recent patent application from Yahoo indicates that search engines might take a look at your web page design.
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - A new patent application with the name "Ranking Domains Using Domain Maturity" shows how search engines could determine the quality of a web page by its age.
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - A new study about the click behavior of web searchers has been released this month. What do people click and what does this mean for your website rankings?
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Webmasters in a discussion forum have noticed changes in Google's search results. Do we have to expect a larger ranking algorithm update? How will this influence the ranking of your web pages in Google's search results?
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Are you sure that your website visitors understand the text on your web pages? If your web pages are difficult to understand, you might not earn as much as you could with your website. There is a simple test that enables you to check the readability of your web pages.
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Is your website nowhere to be seen in Google? It might be that Google doesn't like your website because it looks like spam. Check this list to find out whether your website might look like spam or not.
Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - If you find that your per click prices are going through the roof while your conversions are going down you should check your AdWords strategy. These tips will help you to save a weak campaign.
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Many webmasters wonder how they can make Google display additional Sitelinks for their websites. What exactly are Sitelinks, how can you get them and are they worth the effort?
Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Google's new patent application on near duplicate content describes a new method how Google tries to keep its users from finding redundant content in the result pages. How does this affect your web pages?
Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Yahoo recently published a patent applications that gives some insight on how Yahoo finds and evaluates keyword phrases on web pages. How does this affect the position of your web pages in the search results?
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - We released the brand new version of our popular SEO software tool IBP. The new version IBP 10 has everything that you need to get top 10 rankings on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - The internal link structure of your site allows you to spread the link power of your home page to the individual pages of your site. The right structure can help you to increase your search engine rankings.
Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Three weeks ago, we informed you about Google's new position 6 penalty. At this time, it was unclear why Google assigned this penalty to some websites. It seems that Google doesn't use this penalty anymore. Why did this happen?
Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Search engine optimization methods are divided in two categories: black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Recent developments indicate that websites that use black-hat methods will be in trouble soon.
Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Webmasters involved in rather shady search engine optimization methods invented a new form of cloaking. That new method has been called mosaic cloaking and it is an attempt to make cloaking less detectable.
Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - A discussion in an online webmaster forum indicates that Google might have invented a new ranking penalty for websites that rank well for popular search terms. Is your website affected by this penalty?
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - Webmasters recently found an anomaly in Google's ranking results. Has Google changed its algorithm to artificially increase the ranking of new pages? This article has the details.
Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:36:36 +0100 - We published many articles in 2007 that will help you to get more out of your website. The categorized articles in this issue help you to increase the rankings on your website on Google and other major search engines.
Tue, 25 Dec 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Instead of our regular weekly articles, news and facts, we decided to publish a Christmas crossword puzzle about search engine optimization this week. Have fun! :-)
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Having high rankings on search engines is a great thing. However, it's also important that your web pages are displayed with an attractive description in the search results. If the description is not appealing to web surfers then they might not click the link.
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Last week, Yahoo announced that they now support the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header. This new tag allows you to influence how Google and Yahoo index your website pages. Has it an effect on your search engine rankings?
Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - In a recent blog post, Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts wrote about cloaking. The blog post makes several things clear. You put your website at risk if you use cloaking.
Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - It seems that Google is currently experimenting with new robots.txt commands. If your robots.txt file accidentally contains one of the new commands, it might be that your robots.txt file tells Google to go away.
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Pay per click marketing can be a good addition to organic search engine optimization. However, if you do it wrong, pay per click will cost you a fortune without bringing results. If you do it right, AdWords ads will help you to make more money.
Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - This is a common problem. Your web designer has created a beautiful page with nice graphics, great content and great Flash animations. Unfortunately, it seems that search engines won't list your website no matter what you do.
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Have your rankings dropped recently? Before you do anything, you should try to find out what has caused your ranking drop.
Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. No, reciprocal links are not dead and now I have the proof.
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - How long does it take exactly until search engines list a new site in the top 10 rankings? This test has the answers.
Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Are you sure that your website is free of hidden text? There are many ways to create hidden text unintentionally. Google might penalize your website for something you did not intend to do.
Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - It's easier to get high rankings on Google with older websites than it is with new websites. Why is this so and what can you do to get high rankings on Google if you have a brand new website?
Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - If you want to get high rankings on search engines then you have to consider many different factors. There is one factor that is more important than any other ranking factors.
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - It's important that you get the right kind of links if you want to get high rankings on Google. If you have 20 good incoming links then you'll get better rankings than with 100 bad incoming links. So what makes a good incoming link? There are several points that can make a link better than other links.
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Even if you have high search engine rankings, people still might not buy from you. The reason for that is that your website might not be trustworthy. Of course, you need a professional web design to create trust. However, there are a few other things that are necessary to convince your website visitors that they should do business with you.
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - If you have a new website then it takes some time until Google visits your web pages. Even if you submit your website to Google via their regular submission form, it usually takes weeks until Google visits your site. There are some things you can do so that Google indexes your web page within 48 hours and not within weeks.
Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Inbound links are one of the most important factors that Google uses to calculate the position of a website in the search results. Some years ago, it was enough to get a lot of inbound links to top Google's search results. Nowadays, it's not that easy. Google has started to detect unnatural linking patterns.
Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Although most professional search engine optimizers agree that the green PageRank display has little to do with the actual performance of a website in Google and other search engines, many webmasters still focus on websites with a high PageRank when it comes to link building and website promotion. The PageRank a website can be faked easily.
Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - If you target international markets then it's important to know which search engines are used by European web surfers. Google has a large market share in the US. Astonishingly, Google's market share seems to be even bigger in Europe. Here are the numbers from Germany, France and the UK.
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - High search engine rankings are important if you want to get more customers and more sales. Is it important to be listed on the first result page or is it enough to be listed in the top 30 results?
Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Google recently filed a patent application with the title "Detecting and rejecting annoying documents". Should you check your web pages?
Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest spamming techniques on the Internet. Many webmasters still use that technique although most search engines can detect it nowadays. Last week, Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts made fun of a website that used keyword stuffing.
Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Not all of your competitors might have good business ethics. If someone wants to harm your online business, he might sabotage your website rankings.
Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Some webmaster use a new search engine optimization practice to get high rankings on Google. They hotlink images from other web servers to get on Google's first results page. Will this method also work for your site?
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - There's a lot of rumor about one-way links, reciprocal links and three-way links on the Internet. Which of these links will work best for your business and which links do you need to get higher search engine rankings?
Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Many webmasters are unsure whether they should advertise their website with SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per click advertising). Actually, most commercial websites work best if you use both SEO and PPC. The exact mix depends on your goals.
Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Many webmasters overlook an important part of search engine optimization: if you over optimize your web pages, chances are that your website rankings might drop because your site has been designed for search engines and not for websurfers. Read this article to learn how to avoid over-optimization.
Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - The New York Times has recently published an article about Amit Singhal. Amit Singhal is in charge of Google's ranking algorithm. The interview reveals some interesting facts about Google's ranking algorithm.
Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Last week, Google's Matt Cutts had a Q and A on the SearchMarketingExpo in Seattle. Here's a summary of the most important statements.
Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - No matter how good your company is, some people will always write something negative about your site, even if you tried your best to help them. What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on the first result page for your company name?
Tue, 29 May 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Actually, the rel=nofollow attribute should prevent search engines from following special links. Some webmasters might have found out that nofollow links will help your search engine rankings though.
Tue, 22 May 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.
Tue, 15 May 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - A recent thread in a webmaster forum indicated that some search engine spammers might exploit the new XML sitemaps files. Has your sitemaps file been abused by spammers? Can using a sitemaps file harm your rankings?
Tue, 08 May 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Google filed two new ranking patents in April: Document Scoring Based on Traffic Associated with a Document and Document Scoring Based on Query Analysis. What do these new patents reveal about Google's ranking algorithm? How can they help you?
Tue, 01 May 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Semantic indexing is getting more and more important to search engines. What exactly is semantic indexing and how does it influence your search engine rankings?
Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Some webmasters use hidden or paid links to increase the link popularity of their websites. Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts recently commented on these links. Can you get in trouble?
Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Ask.com has joined the team so that now all four major search engines support the Sitemap protocol. In addition, the search engines now can automatically detect your Sitemaps file. What does this mean for your web site?
Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - There is a new change in Google's ranking algorithm. It looks as if more pages are added to Google's supplemental results and that Google might re-rank the results based on new quality criteria. How can your web site benefit from the new algorithm?
Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - You probably know Google's informal company motto "Don't be evil". Google is a very successful company that knows a lot about its advertisers and users. In addition, Google has a market share that would allow them do certain things. Read this article to learn what Google could do if they were evil.
Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Until now, Google has primarily sold pay-per-click (PPC) ads, so-called AdWords ads: advertisers pay when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad. Google is testing a new advertising system that allows businesses to advertise on a cost per action basis.
Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Duplicate content, false use of the robots.txt file and Google bowling can be the reason if your web site rankings on Google dropped. This article will help you to find a solution.
Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Co-citation, too many pages at once and over-optimization and cause problems with your Google rankings. Read this article to learn how to avoid these problems.
Tue, 06 Mar 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Yahoo announced support for a new meta tag called "NOYDIR". The new tag will complement the "NOODP" meta tag that is already supported by all major search engines. Read this article to learn how to use the new tag on your web pages.
Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - If you use the wrong search engine optimization techniques then Google won't list your web site. Read this article to learn how to avoid getting caught be Google's spam filters.
Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - If your web site gets caught by one of Google's spam filters, it will be very difficult to get high Google rankings. Did you check your web site against these three link filters? Read on to learn more.
Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - If your web site gets caught by one of Google's spam filters, it will be very difficult to get high Google rankings. In this article series, we'll take a look a the 15 most common Google spam filters and we'll tell you how you can get around them.
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - If you want to have a successful web site and if you want to get high rankings on search engines then your web site must have the right factors. Here are the top 5 factors for successful web sites in 2007.
Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Google bombs have become a problem for Google. The official Google webmaster blog recently had a statement about Google bombs and how Google deals with them. How does this new algorithm affect your Google rankings?
Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Matt Cutts has just revealed Google's latest ranking plans for 2007. Read this article to learn how your web site will be affected by these plans.
Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Matt Cutts is the poster boy of Google and the search engine optimization (SEO) community. Thousands of webmasters follow every single word on this blog. Rumor has it that he is going to leave Google.
Tue, 09 Jan 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Many webmasters reported that Google's spider started to index their external CSS files. What are CSS files, why does Google index them and how can this affect your rankings on Google and other search engines?
Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:36:36 +0100 - Duplicate content is a problem that worries many webmasters. Rumor has it that duplicate content can hurt your Google rankings and that web pages that copy your web site content can harm your rankings. Read this article to learn what Google has to say about duplicate content.
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
SEOmoz, a Seattle-based search engine optimization company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services.
It's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.
If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we?
Big Improvements to PRO Membership
It's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:
• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.
• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.
• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.
• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.
If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect.
Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website
Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:
• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)
• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.
• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)
There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.
The Web App is Now in Public Beta
Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.
We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.
As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.
Still Ironing Out Some Kinks
There's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon.
I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.
We Love Your Feedback
If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.
Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-)
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.
Presentation Off
Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).
Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:
Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch:
You pitch SEO before that.
Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all.
Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.
He showed the Mozzers how to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data.
He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions.
Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!>
Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:
Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO
Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy.
In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc.
Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic:
<If you're taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet...>
Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.
“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."
Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:
Show competitors in SERPs.
Match it with yeyword demand.
Show how they are doing, side-by-side.
And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.
OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.
Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”
She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:
1. What is your website trying to do?
2. If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?
3. What is the biggest threat to your success?
You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)
Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:
Social Network Filters – combine
Google Image Search - Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images
Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation.
Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised.
MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().
Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”
Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:
Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate
Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways
Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships
Take the resulting insights and dive deeper
Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company
Show the action items (not the data) to your company
Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance.
Whew... surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no... more typing at high speeds:
Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO
Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:
High Priority Tactics:
Sitemaps
Education
301s
Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking
Rel=canonical
Rewriting urls
How much it will make? What's the cost/traffic potential
Low Priority Tactics:
Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals.
URLs
Link Flow
Video SEO
Duplicate content
CMS Overhaul
W3C compliance
Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don't budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn't have an end point.
Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:
Optimize all assets!
Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.
Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:
rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem.
Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap.
Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors.
Title is the most important element.
Analytics suck!!!!!!!!
Omniture – over reports search referrers
Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images)
Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.
Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.
Tom Critchlow
Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:
Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan for
Mid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDF
Long-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before.
Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche.
Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche.
Look at how people tag stories on Delicious
The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)
Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)
Build an SEO friendly CMS:
Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:
Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:
The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:
It’s not that hard! <sigh> Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.
Thank you, Tom!
Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits
Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.
Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.
The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:
She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:
Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.
She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.
Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization
The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.
Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.
Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:
How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ...
Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:
Unclear call-to-action
Too many choices
Asking for too much info
Too much text
Not keeping your promises
Visual distractions
Lack of trust
We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.
This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.
Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman."
When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.
Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.
From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between
1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."
The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:
You have to be seen as a brand.
You have to have lots of links pointing to those pages with the brand name.
You need to have a high volume set of people searching for those terms, so off-site advertising and media buys can influence the SERPs.
Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.
Image results don’t always match image SERP's order, i.e. images for the artist "manet."
Understand, and be prepared. You will not always get the same position in the blended results, leading to frustration.
Image SEO value is reduced by the new overlay.
The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image
Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."
Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:
Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.
So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.
Video SERPs
It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:
Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit Step #4: PROFIT $$$
Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:
"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."
2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:
Straight from Google’s mouth: Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)
And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.)
Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:
Craigslist
Twitter
FaceBook
Citysearch
Google Products
Mobile devices
Garmin GPS
Wikipedia
Virtual Augmented Reality
Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:
Traditional SEO is about optimizing websites.
Local SEO is about optimizing locations.
Takeaway:
"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."
"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin' 7-pack!"
3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.
Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:
Takeaway: Don’t talk about yourself so much.
Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!
Takeaway: Try to stay positive.
If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.
Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.
Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.
Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:
Timing for retweets:
Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.
Tip: Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?
Put a bit.ly link in the browser.
Type a plus sign after it;
Hit enter to see how many times it’s been clicked through.
Retweeting is an elegant viral mechanism.
Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ...
He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.)
Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.
So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.
All One Index Soon?
Why does this happen?
Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.
Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?
Hmmmm…..It seems that Google might be moving away from having multiple indexes that must be queried for different types of content - like mobile, local, images, news, etc. to a 'one index' solution that has different types of ‘indexing attributes’ instead. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches (only need to query one index), and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….
Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature Phones
But I have gone astray – We were talking about 'mobile'. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was a separate mobile index in the beginning of Google's ‘mobile’ search– you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have somewhat sorted that one out on smart phone searches, but it you still get weird results for feature phone search (shown below)! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!
As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have both generic and specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would render and function on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.
There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.
You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘search.’ The next set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results. Search operators like 'site:' and 'link:' work in these versions of Google, and will return different results than they would in traditional search - a good indication to me that they are still using separate indexes.
Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search Engines
The best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, which will be discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? which should be live next week), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone. They should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone.
If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user-agent detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer, and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing.
Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it!
You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results.
Mobile Usability Options:
Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages Only: One set of pages that has two or more style sheets – One for traditional web rendering, usually called ‘screen,’ and one (or more) for mobile web rendering, usually called ‘handheld.’ An important note is that the iPhone will automatically pull the ‘screen’ stylesheet, unless you give other instructions. Since looking at a traditional website on an iPhone is really not a great user experience, I recommend creating a specific stylesheet that can be pulled by the iPhone. You can get very granular with this, and create separate style sheets for all different kinds of phones. You would then simply have them called in based on the screen size of the device that they target. _
Traditional Pages for Computer and Mobile Pages for all Phones: Two sets of pages – one to be shown on traditional computers and one to be shown on mobile phones. The file structure of the mobile pages should be an exact replica of the traditional pages, with the addition of the ‘.m' or '/m'. User-agent detection and redirection should deliver feature phone users and smart phone users to the mobile pages automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. _
Mobile/Traditional Hybrid Pages for Traditional and SmartPhone, Mobile Specific Pages for Feature Phones: Two sets of pages; one set of pages that are the mobile/traditional hybrid pages that use separate external stylesheets to be rendered on traditional computer screens and smart phones. The second set of pages are mobile specific pages, hosted on an ‘m.’ or a ‘/m’. The file structure should be an exact replica of the traditional file structure, with the addition of the ‘m’ or ‘/m’. User-agent detection and redirection delivers feature phone users here automatically if they click on a link to a traditional page while they are on a feature phone.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. Both sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. _
Traditional Pages for Computers, Graphical Mobile Pages for Smart Phones, Text Mobile Pages for Feature Phones: Three sets of pages. Traditional pages for traditional computers, touch-optimized pages for smart phones with touch screens, and mobile-optimized pages for feature phones and smart phones without touch screens. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users with touch screens to the touch-screen pages if they click on a link while they are on a touch-screen phone. User-agent detection and redirection delivers users on feature phones and smart phones that don’t have a touch-screen to the mobile-optimized pages if they click on a link while they are on one of those types of phones. In this scenario, you will need two mobile-specific subdomains or subdirectories. I recommend using ‘touch.’ or /’touch’ for the touch-screen pages, and ‘m.’ or /m’ for the mobile-optimized pages.
Always include links between the mobile site and the traditional site in the upper left hand corner of the page. All sets of pages should have a handheld stylesheet to control mobile rendering - This is in case the user-agent detection and redirection fails, or if the user clicks the link to see the traditional site from their mobile phone. User-agent detection and redirection should also be in-place to automatically deliver people on traditional computers who click on either version of the mobile pages to the traditional version of the page instead. It can also be used to send FeaturePhone or SmartPhone users to the version of the site that is best suited for their phone.
We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let's mash those two things together. In this post I've collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained...... :-)
Which Are My Top Folders
The top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I've been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:
Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.
Creating Geo Link Maps
Yes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled's backlinks:
Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep's wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic.... I can but dream :-)
Pretty Tag clouds
Ok, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website....
These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let's you make the pretty pictures.
Visualising Directory Links
When quickly scanning a site's backlink profile there's a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It's not that the non-quality links don't work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:
This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn't catch everything I've found that it get's you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:
Venn Diagrams
Kelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor's links that looks a bit like this:
Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.
Broken Links
I know this tool has been written about before and it's not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole's chrome extension "SEO site tools":
Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it's useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:
I like this view, especially when I'm looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.
SEOmoz Labs
While this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:
Today I'm happy to announce that we've just updated Linkscape's web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we've found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner's Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.
50% Correlation Boost to Domain Authority (with some Oddities)
You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page's importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We've been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved correlation between Google's rankings and Domain Authority.
This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn't have time to make an updated chart) _
Unfortunately, along with this update are some strange outliers, likely stemming from us not doing as good a job testing as we should. We've heard feedback from our members that the new scores, in many cases, don't make sense and seem unintuititive. We agree and we scrambled all day today (Friday) to put forward a solution. That should manifest in the next 14-20 days as DA numbers update again (separate from an index update). I'll have more on that in a separate blog post when it launches.
In the meantime, our apologies to those whose numbers are adversely affected. Things should be considerably better in a few weeks, so if reporting or KPIs have you worried, please message to anyone receiving those data points that this temporary glitch should be solved soon and DA will much better relate to a domain's top Page Authority URLs.
New Partnerships
Many of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge's enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they've shared a few screenshots with us:
Like our beta web app, Brightedge's software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).
They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you're getting). This isn't yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!
Raven Tools - an impressive suite of tools for managing SEO processes that now employs Linkscape metrics in their link analysis section
We've previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you're interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.
Improvements to Anchor Text
If you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:
We've gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape's API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:
SEO
Seo
seo
Following tonight's update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-)
Index Stats
This month, as always, we've got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:
41,362,566,619 (41 Billion) Pages
366,305,174 (366 Million) Subdomains
96,445,118 (96 Million) Root Domains
409,355,797,533 (409 Billion) Links
Some other interesting numbers this month include:
5.1% of URLs contain rel=canonical - the highest yet!
3.1% of URLs contain a meta noindex directive
2.06% of all links are rel=nofollow
57% of rel=nofollow links are internal (pointing to pages on the same domain)
43% of rel=nofollow links are external (pointing to pages on different domains)
84.9% of all links are internal (linking to pages on the same root domain)
87.5% of all links point to pages on shared c-block of IP addresses
Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year's end.
And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you've got!
p.s. We're taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:
We believe our testing for this index wasn't robust enough -we've now seen a lot of cases of DA 1 and DA 100 that clearly aren't logical moves.
While, on "average" DA is now better correlated with rankings, it makes far less intuitive sense. We think we may have optimized toward the wrong goal.
We're taking this very seriously, and may actually try to roll out an update to the DA metric in the next 2 weeks (prior to the next Linkscape update)
As soon as I have clarity and a call is made, I'll be posting another blog entry on what went wrong and details of the fix.
My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.
p.s. Update #2 - I've added more details in the section on Domain Authority. New scores will be out in the next 14-20 days prior to the next index update. Thanks to everyone for their vociferous and passionate feedback. We're working hard to make this better.
In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement.
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking about ecommerce pages, specifically how to make them unique, interesting, great content, and something that will draw in natural links. I know that a lot of folks out there who run ecommerce websites -- it doesn't matter what you're selling consumer products, B-to-B products, in this case, I am doing an office supplies example -- you've got a big problem in that people just don't want to naturally link to those pages. The content of them is not naturally interesting. But there are ways to change that. There are ways to make sure that even though you sell the same product that 5, 10, 50, 100 other stores on the web do, your product, your offering of that product is unique and interesting, draws search traffic, draws conversions, and makes more exciting things happen. I think this can be a big, big positive.
So, let me walk you through a bland example, sort of a not so good example. Here's Acme Store. They've got the standard manufacturer's picture that the manufacturer sends along with all the other information, the pricing data, the description, and the title. They just use that exactly. Manufacturer or supplier sends the photo, the price, the title, the description. They just post that up there, and then maybe you have an "Add to Cart" button.
You haven't added much value here. Right? The problem is that there are, I don't know, 50, 100, 500 other pages just like this. Boring. Right? Not exciting at all. Why would I link to this? The only reason that I can see that I would possibly link to this is if this store either offered it uniquely and no one else has it or if they have maybe the lowest price. But competing on price, as you know, in ecommerce particularly on the Web is a tough margin business. Or maybe they paid me to link to that or I have some vested interest. The search engines don't like to count those kinds of links. Plus, this is all duplicate content. It comes straight from the manufacturer. The manufacturer is sending that content out to every other ecommerce provider.
Let's take a look at an example of something done much, much better. Here I have Acme Store, but things have improved dramatically. I'm going to walk through six different elements that have really made this page so much more exciting, and they're not that much additional effort. Right? To some degree, but that's what you want. If this was as easy as the boring page, everyone would be doing it and you couldn't have the competitive advantage.
Here I've got the title. Now, you have to be careful with this. I've sort of made a creative title, right? A little bit of a creative title there. But, be cautious. If people are searching for exactly this title, they essentially want precisely that product and they know how they are searching for it, you probably don't want to change up the title dramatically, particularly if it is many multiple words. So you might consider, if the name of the product in this case was just Five Pens, sure, maybe I can add some extra descriptive text after that or I could look at what people are searching for in addition to that particular keyword and add those keyword phrases after it. But, I don't have to do this. I could just keep the standard title if that's what it takes, and I can add uniqueness in other places.
Let's start with the images. If you just take the one image that the manufacturer suggests, you're really losing out. A great example of this story is Zappos. They do all their own photography of the shoes. They make sure that those shots are great. They take it from every single angle. They've got the shoe. They've got the side of the shoe. They've got the top of the shoe, the back of the shoe, the front, the bottom. They've done a great job of optimizing these images to be unique. The great part about this isn't just that these images are now yours and yours alone, but that you can now license them. People might find them and say, "Wow, you have great pictures of this product. Can we use it?" If they do use it and they like your photos, they might link back to this page. You've got tons of opportunity.
I also really, really recommend multiple images, having different views and different ways that people can see it. Make them enlarged. Give people the ability to enlarge those images so that they can see a much bigger version. Be really careful on the duplicate content with multiple images. Sometimes you'll see websites where you click a different one of these and the URL changes. You don't want that unless it's in a hashtag, because it will create a duplicate version of this page at a different URL.
Number three, text and description. This is the key to success at companies like Woot. It was really one product a day. It was on sale. A unique idea. But the content, the written word was what sold it so well. It was just incredibly well written. It was content that was so compelling, so fun to read, so interesting and unique that a lot of people, who weren't interested in the products at all and probably never bought something from them, still wanted to subscribe to their newsletters and read their site every day because it was hilarious. There were memes that were carried on. There were themes that went throughout different products. They had promotions that went on and on. It was great. You got a sense of the personality behind the brand. I think that is what we're aiming for here. You need to decide how flexible you can be with this. If this content is written by people who actually care about the product, who are passionate about it, you're going to get such better content there.
Number four, this is an interesting one. Amazon does this a little bit with some sort of cool stats. The one that they do that I like is the popularity in a specific category. I think that's a good one. It lets people who are participating in the ecommerce process, people who write books, people who publish music, people who make a product that is sold on Amazon, they can see how well they're performing in the category. Other people who are interested in doing research or sharing or blogging about this will also share those popularity in Category X type of stats.
There are lots more things you can do beyond just what Amazon does. You could have a sales trend. When is this item popular during the year? Do people buy office supplies in January? Do they buy them in March? Do they buy them at the end of summer? I don't know. Let's see. Those sales trends are things you can show. You can show trends about who buys this and how much other stuff do they also buy. What other products do they also buy? How many of them bought this product versus another product. Amazon does one or two of those things as well. There are tons of data points that you could extract, from your catalogue, your inventory, your customer database, that are anonymous. It won't be sharing privacy issues, but are super interesting to other people who might write about it and link to it and make this page more unique and valuable.
Number five, I love the comparisons. If you've ever been to a site like CNET, they do a great job of comparing different models of laptops or cell phones or monitors or input devices or joysticks, whatever it is, against each other so you can see this one has that feature and this one doesn't have that feature and this one does. Those types of comparison charts are a real unique value proposition, because now you're not just the source for where to buy the information but where to research it as well. If you can do that well and become trusted, a lot of people who are researching are also interested in buying. Once they make their buying decision, they'll buy from you.
Finally, last but certainly not least, user-generated content. This can be done super creatively. The most common one is comments and ratings. You can do those in different kinds of ways. There can be star ratings. There can be check marks. There can be "I Like" versus "I Don't Like." The comments themselves can have multiple form fields that people fill out like, "Did you like this product?" "Yes." "What did you like about it or not?" You could have things like, "When did you get it? What's your experience with this product? How did you use it?" Have those four or five things. Or have them grade products on different features. If you have a site that is selling just a few items, you might say, "Boy, we're an office supply store. Let' see if we can get everyone to rate the usability of this, whether it's travel worthy versus whether it's rugged and durable versus whether it writes well." All that kind of stuff. Those different aspects will then make your page more unique and more valuable.
All right. I am looking forward to seeing some amazing ecommerce sites from all of you in the next few months, weeks, I don't know. We'll see how long it takes to develop. Hopefully you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week. Take care.
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!
Google's recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let's look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here's a summary of what that results page looks like today:
Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google's argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for?
Unraveling Search Intent
One of the ways you can tell what a searcher is interested in is by looking at the way they refine that search. It's nearly impossible to sort out the intent behind a search for "apple" by itself, but if you look at follow-up searches, they start to paint a clearer picture.
Thanks to a Twitter shout-out from Dave Naylor, the folks at Hitwise (thanks, Matt) were kind enough to pull some data from their Search Term Sequence tool for me. The data below is a 4-week snapshot (prior to the brand update) of what people searched for after they searched for "apple":
"itunes"
"facebook"
"youtube"
"apple"
"best buy"
"apple store"
"google"
"craigslist"
"itunes download"
Of course, some of these queries are the typical exit queries ("youtube"), and some are people who probably didn't get what they wanted the first time and typed "apple" again later (if at first you don't succeed…). Apple.com is clearly represented in some of this search intent, but there's also an implied attempt ("best buy", "craigslist") to buy Apple products at stores outside of Apple.com. In the current top 10, not a single non-Apple retailer is currently featured, a fact that pretty clearly has an impact on consumer choice.
Bing Search Funnel
Unfortunately, Google doesn't have a tool for isolating its query funnels, but Bing does over at adCenter Labs (thanks to Branko Rihtman for the tip). With the Search Funnel tool, you can isolate keywords that start or end with a specific word:
Although Bing searchers, especially the former MSN portal crowd, are known to differ from Google visitors a bit, the chain of intent for the average consumer undoubtedly has many similarities. Here are the top 10 post-"apple" queries on Bing:
"bestbuy"
"ebay"
"ipod"
"dell"
"appleipod"
"circuitcity"
"apple vacations"
"apple.com"
"sony"
"target"
Here, the trend is even more striking – a full 6 of the top 10 follow-up queries are either electronics retailers ("bestbuy") or Apple competitors ("sony"). Apple Vacations also has a top spot, clearly showing that not everyone searching for "apple" is interested in Apple computers.
The #15 spot – "apples". Yes, some people just want to find an actual apple. This reminds me of the time I searched for Brown's Chicken and the first result was Wikipedia. I didn't want the history of the company, I WANTED SOME ^$%#@ FRIED CHICKEN! Sorry, had to get that off my chest.
What Do We Want?
Clearly, search intent is a tricky thing, and "apple" is a tough search to interpret, but there's a real danger when companies start to tell us what we want based on their own self-interest, and my fear is that the brand update does just that. Given clear data on how much click-through the top 3 results grab, it's obvious that a brand that dominates the top 7 is effectively crowding out not only the competition, but retailers, product reviews, product complaints, etc. This has profound implications for consumer choice and ORM, and it will be interesting to see if this trend continues and spreads into broader queries.
Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.
Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.
1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?
At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.
How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they're on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.
But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn't only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.
This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let's see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.
Aha! Makes perfect sense, he bookmarked the Facebook Marketing Guide. It didn't send a TON of traffic, but just think of the possibilites if we actually contacted him and worked together with Chris.
These are people who are individually sending traffic to your page, you probably should think about how you can use that information. As the Community Manager for SEOmoz I know that I will use it to reach out to them. Perhaps retweet them or ask them to write a YOUmoz post. Every organization is different, and this is just one idea. But take the concept of finding the users sending you traffic and run with it!
2. Don’t forget about mobile
My good friend Cindy Krum would probably strangle me for having forgotten all about mobile. This was another area Marty mentioned and I bet many people don’t focus on it. As an example, I thought I’d jump into our analytics and see how mobile users converted.
Yikes!! Before the recent update to our PRO landing page, we had just one PRO signup from a mobile device. That’s seriously pathetic. In the last month, we’ve had 7, which I’d imagine means that the changes we made, help mobile users sign up on our site. But it’s still ridiculously low!
I also thought about looking at what visits to the tools page looked like from mobile and non-mobile browsers. Ouch! This is our highest traffic page behind the home page. The iPhone, iPad and Android were the top 3 mobile devices (not surprisingly really). Perhaps we should make it a bit easier for these devices to access our site and tools. :)
That's 482 uniques out of 61,102. Definitely something to work on.
3. “UGC is content that rocks”
That is an exact quote from Michael DeHaven, the SEO Product Manager at Bazaarvoice. Here at SEOmoz we most definitely understand the power of UGC for SEO (waves over at YOUmoz… hi!). But how can you use user generated content to help boost your traffic? Michael gave examples of how UGC helped several companies to increase traffic by adding unique, relavant, keyword rich content.
Check out this particular example for Swanson Health Products. The first image shows the product content. Sure it does have some unique content and some of the keywords they’re going for but in general the content is fairly weak.
In the next image, you see all the great keywords that reviewers of the products have added all on their own. These aren’t SEOs creating content, but real people saying what they feel about the product. Hello! What a great way to increase content to your product pages.
Another example he gave was for Opentable. Their initial implementation had the UGC uncrawlable. After they made a change and opened it up to search engines and were indexed, they had a 17% lift in traffic. Just by allowing the ratings to be indexed. Whoa!
The last example that stuck out in my mind that he gave was that QVC started sending emails to people after they purchased a product asking for a review of the product. It seems like common sense to do something like this, but at the same time it’s absolute genius. I bet you can think of at least one way to get visitors to your site to add content. Whether that’s in a review, a comment, a suggestion, whatever! Ask them a question; people love to give their opinions. :)
The point is… as Michael said it best “UGC is content that rocks,” so don’t forget about it!
4. Put “Hot Triggers” in the path of motivated people
This was the focus of the keynote by BJ Fogg the Director of Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on the second day. Now, what does that mean exactly? The idea (and I hope I get this right) to make it easy for people who are ready to do something, to do it.
For example, one reason that Twitter did so well in the beginning is that they allowed people to use text message, to send tweets. Obviously they still do, but now many people use various mobile apps when they’re on their phone. When Twitter first took off though, people were used to reading short messages with a certain cutoff length, so tweeting was simple via text. People who were motivated to tell the world what they ate for breakfast, had the ability to do it quickly and easily.
There are several ways we could employ this here on the SEOmoz site, and one way I thought we could do this is to make it easier to sign up for PRO when you want to use a PRO only tool. Check out the example below for our Keyword Difficulty tool.
Sure, you can click on "log in" and from that page you can sign up and create a free account, but there's no way other than the "Go PRO" link at the top of the navigation to take someone to become a PRO member. If someone found their way to the Keyword Difficulty tool and is ready to use it, let's motivate them to become a member. Or at the very least, check out a free version.
Ok, honestly we know this happens on our site, and we're currently in the works of improving a lot of it (plus watch for a wicked awesome new site design next week!). But think about your site, and what you want people to do on your site. Are you hindering them in any way, or are you making it easy for them or difficult? BJ also discussed the idea that the "lightest touch works." Often times the motivation exists on the users side, but they just need to be facilitated through the action. Where can you make improvements on your site?
5. Public Relations, the other PR
Also on the second day, I attended a great session “Search, PR and the Social Butterfly.” I loved that Lisa Buyer focused on ways to attract journalists to your information. She mentioned that 100% of journalists use Google as a tool when working on stories. Think about it. Your PR strategies (and we’re not talking the PageRank ones now) need to be online where the journalists are looking. So if they’re searching, you want to be there!
She talked about today’s PR being a mix of being optimized, publicized and socialized. That means making sure you've optimized your content for not only your customers but for the media as well. Make sure you’re using keywords, relevant titles and don’t forget to add social links to your press releases. Lisa had a few great tips I wanted to share on publicizing and socializing to get the information out there. Don’t just sit around waiting for it to come to you. Here are just a few ways to get your content out there:
Find journalists on muckrack.com (a place to find journalists who are on Twitter)
Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out) and submit pitches directly to journalists
Post your Press Releases to PRWeb and watch it get distributed (this is a paid service)
Use Social Media to find journalists you want to reach out to
Join #journchat Monday nights from 8-10pm EST on Twitter to chat with journalists, PR and bloggers
Look at LinkedIn and Facebook
Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld also spoke on this panel and talked about "the PubCon story." His story about how last year PubCon didn't spend a dime on marketing ads, and ONLY focused on twitter, made me absolutely giddy. I had heard rumors of this in the past, but to see the actual statistics was pretty cool. Oh, and not only did they not any money, they also saw an increase of 30% in attendance. What the... what?!
One of the things that jumped out at me the most was their use of Klout to find the influencers. This is somewhat similar to my first point above, but what they did was look up every person that registered for PubCon in Klout to see their influence and reach among Twitter. They then reached out to those with high Klout, like this guy, and thanked them for signing up, or retweeted them, etc. By contacting the people who can motivate and influence your followers (see how I just tied all my points together there?) while on their mobile phone (ok I'm stretching it), you end up gaining more reach.
This is actually something we try to do here at SEOmoz every day, how can you motivate your influencers?
Final Takeaways and Actions
Don't forget analytics. Use the information to find influencers sending you traffic.
What about mobile? Do you have users who would love to use your site on their mobile device but can't?
UGC is content that rocks. How can you utilize UGC on your site?
Put "Hot Triggers" in the path of motivated people.
Public Relations is social now, so get on it.
This year SES had a ton to offer and I highly recommend you check out some of the live blogging from the event. Check out the recap of Liveblogging for day 1, day 2 and day 3.
Speaking of conferences, we have just a few tickets left for the SEOmoz Seminar next week. Grab them before we're completely sold out!
Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:14:12 +0000 - I absolutely detest these faux SEOs who run link spamming communities. These people have no clue how to really optimize for search. They just sell, share, or recommend link spamming robots that...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Mon, 24 May 2010 18:55:28 +0000 - UPDATE: Some people have suggested that sites which have valid, up-to-date SSL certificates should still receive referral data. I haven’t had an opportunity to test that for myself. Until...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:36:49 +0000 - Loren Baker’s Search and Social network has launched a new award series. I sort of missed Search Engine Journal’s awards last year so it’s nice to see Loren’s team getting...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:58:26 +0000 - One of the latest ongoing concerns in the SEO industry appears to dwell on the number of pages that a search engine indexes (most specifically Google, but this discussion really extends to other...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:31:56 +0000 - In A Modest Proposal For SEO Standards I suggest that search engine optimization specialists (firms and consultants) include an SEO lexicon on their Websites.
There are many SEO glossaries around the...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:46:40 +0000 - “Essentials of Off Site SEO” is an article I could have written, except I did not write it — I only wrote the original article on which “Essentials of Off Site SEO” was...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:40:07 +0000 - News organizations around the world are reporting that both the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice have approved the Microsoft-Yahoo! search-advertising deal.
That will most likely...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:01:10 +0000 - The Microsite Debate addresses the artificial aspect of when brand-strength Web sites spawn child sites, microsites. The debate does not, however, really look at the natural evolution of sites that...
[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
SEO Speedwagon
Intrapromote Looks Under the Hood of Search Engine Optimization
Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:27:53 -0500 - The “Like†button has already started appearing on pages across the web, making it ever so easy to share articles and sites with your Facebook pals. What happens when you decide you really didn’t like that article? Or you didn’t...
Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:30:52 -0500 - Table of Contents Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail (Introduction) Reason One: Self-Doubt Reason Two: Not Learning Best Practices Reason Three: Not Expanding Education Reason Four: Moving Too Fast Reason Five: Poor Writing Skills Reason Six: Lack of Creativity...
Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:10:08 -0500 - Table of Contents Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail (Introduction) Reason One: Self-Doubt Reason Two: Not Learning Best Practices Reason Three: Not Expanding Education Reason Four: Moving Too Fast Reason Five: Poor Writing Skills We've covered a lot of...
Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:08:40 -0500 - Table of Contents Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail (Introduction) Reason One: Self-Doubt Reason Two: Not Learning Best Practices Reason Three: Not Expanding Education Reason Four: Moving Too Fast Ok, so you've buckled down and learned the best practices...
Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:09:43 -0500 - Table of Contents Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail (Introduction) Reason One: Self-Doubt Reason Two: Not Learning Best Practices Reason Three: Not Expanding Education I don't think I know a single industry that doesn't struggle with this. You get...
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:36:02 -0500 - Intrapromote has been selected as search and social media agency of record by Schumacher Homes, one of the country's leading home builders.
Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:27:05 -0500 - I firmly believe it can be used as an effective social media marketing tool if the correct strategy is implemented. I have been an avid user of Linkedin for the last 4 plus years and know that great things can happen when connecting properly with other users of this platform.
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:10:17 -0500 - If you have an eCommerce business and you want to gain extra traction for your products you need to be utilizing a platform that enables users to spread the word about your products online. I am not talking about social sharing services like AddThis, but a service that lets users send your product information to their friends and family via a customized widget (TAF4Commerce).
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:07:50 -0500 - There are a variety of ways to utilize YouTube as a marketing channel and I've seen some very creative videos take social media marketing to the next level. A great example is Blendtec, they have been promoting their products on YouTube for quite some time now. The most memorable instance I can recall was them placing an iPhone 3G into a blender and it taking about 8 seconds to be completely pulverized.
Wed, 30 Dec 2009 14:02:49 -0500 - When was the last time you checked your Facebook privacy settings? Do you know what your profile and activity look like to the rest of the world? Is Google indexing your personal information? Follow along as Social Media Strategist Jen...
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:56:30 -0500 - Table of Contents Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail (Introduction) Reason One: Self-Doubt Reason Two: Not Learning Best Practices We've covered two really basic reasons why good link builders don't become great. Obviously self-doubt and the lack of best...
Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:18:26 -0500 - Table of Contents Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail (Introduction) Reason One: Self-Doubt So, we've covered the biggest reason why good link builders fail. The second reason? They don't learn best practices. It seems counter-productive to want to do...
Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:30:50 -0500 - Table of Contents Ten Reasons Why Good Link Builders Fail (Introduction) Last time, I talked about the fact that over the years, I've seen so many people that could have been amazing link builders fall way too short. And through...
Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:33:16 -0500 - Having worked in link building for nearly three years, I've seen a lot of people come and go. It's the nature of any business to be sure, but sometimes it's a little more heartbreaking than others. Without a doubt, I...
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:58:06 -0500 - A good partnership between client and agency is stronger than any 'secret sauce' and will end up providing many years of solid returns for everyone involved.
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:04:29 -0500 - In an ever changing industry sometimes people wonder if what we are doing will make an impact on our clients businesses for the long run.
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:33:01 -0500 - Just because you're not creating tracking versions of your content doesn't mean other people aren't. Here's how to handle it.
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:58:06 -0500 - This morning I had the opportunity to review a site that enables recruiters and job hunters to connect with one another with greater ease utilizing micro-blog technology.
Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:48:46 -0500 - While many companies have their own PR departments, marketing pros are always on the lookout for ways to extend their PR reach. Search engine optimized press releases offer an effective way to tell stories and gain increased online visibility and...
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:43:29 -0500 - As we continue to move our resources to a “soft†platform, we realize that the flexibility of social media makes it a great culture to display the branded message. This very same identifying quality of pliability creates havoc in the...
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:24:18 -0500 - I had the chance to review a sales and recruiting tool with a funny name offered by People Toucher this morning. The layout and functionality for finding sales and recruiting opportunities is pretty professional and easy to utilize. You have the ability to use multiple search criteria when finding individuals via Linkedin's network; which makes finding the right person much easier.
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:00:30 -0500 - The index size wars are over. Lean is the new fat. It's time for Twitter to make a few small tweaks and consolidate some of its splintered authority.
Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:47:29 -0500 - If I have learned nothing else about link building in the years that I've been focusing on it, I've learned this: There is no end to the creativity that can go into a link building strategy. Without a doubt, link...
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:25:04 -0500 - If you're at all keeping your fingers on the search engine industry pulse, then you will soon find out that Yahoo! & MSN have finally decided to tie the knot. This press release has additional details on the deal in...
Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:25:47 -0500 - In today's Twitterfied online world, more and more companies and individuals are jumping on Twitter and expecting immediate results. If you're engaging in Twitter without a well-planned strategy, then you're operating in a complete fallacy. Even worse, if your site...
Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:34:09 -0500 - Recently, Google's Matt Cutts made some hints about nofollow links and their value going down. I have to be honest. I'm not surprised. Once again, we're seeing something that Google did to try and make link popularity "fair" across the...
Wed, 20 May 2009 12:51:29 -0500 - Our new optimized press release plans provide companies with a cost-effective and powerful way to stay top of mind with their customers. Recently we syndicated a press release for a client that contained helpful tips on how to prevent and...
Mon, 18 May 2009 22:07:46 -0500 - As is normally the case with a non-temporary 302--THE problem with a non-temporary 302 you might conclude--I don't know whether to link to http://www.google.com/profiles/John.Lustina or http://www.google.com/profiles/116187582762783426547 when I am referring to it.
Yet still it climbs.
Mon, 04 May 2009 21:10:22 -0500 - Why a 302 temporary redirect? Why not just keep Profile URLs numerical rather than vain if they are not going to implement a proper 301? Isn't that what they would have us counsel our clients in a similar scenario?
Sat, 02 May 2009 14:12:08 -0500 - In my recent search for the perfect Twitter bookmarklet, one that would let me post from page without leaving nasty tracks in my Tweets, I noted a trend that all but BigTweet seemed to sow, in one shade or another;...
Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:23:47 -0500 - Although unveiled in the innocuous position last--always, mind you--of the first page for your name, it seems more likely ever-prescient Google has a larger share in mind than the 10th result on a page.
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:46:41 -0500 - There's plenty going on in Intrapromote's new Press Release Department. We've written and syndicated a new branding and site launch news story for one customer, produced an optimized press release announcing Tahiti honeymoon vacation bargains, and chronicled a customer's charitable...
Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:07:14 -0500 - So often as I am discussing link building strategies or the concept of link bait, I am faced with the same question: "Aren't we too boring for all this? Who is going to want to link to us? All we...
Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:58:01 -0500 - John C. Dvorak proves conclusively that bad SEO is bad, and that he can still lure gullible people like me to showcase it.
Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:23:07 -0500 - So unless you've been living under a rock, you realize that the economy isn't as strong as it used to be. And yes, that is a rather large understatement. Many industries have been pushed into the limelight to discuss their...
Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
Search engine marketing news and information you can use to grow your business.
Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don't, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced.
There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely, if ever, do you want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Something can usually be salvaged. Previously valuable content can be made valuable again. Here are four ways you can keep good content alive, even when it's old.
Keep content up to date
Keeping your content up-to-date may sound like a simple task; but, the larger the site, the more difficult it is. Sites with hundreds or thousands of pages often have a lot of little hidden gems that can easily become stale or irrelevant. Over time, you see products and services change. A simple reference to an old pricing structure or outdated way of doing things can really throw a wrench in the works for the reader. Conflicts and contradictions breed mistrust.
Failing to find and correct these nuggets will send your readers a message that perhaps you are stale and irrelevant as well. So, spending time on a regular basis, perhaps yearly, reviewing all your editorial content and brushing it up to keep it current is an important item to put on your task list.
Redirect deleted pages
Pages on websites often get moved or deleted over time. Perhaps you are restructuring your information architecture, removing services that you no longer offer, or deleting tutorials that have become obsolete. Just because this content is considered old, doesn't mean that it can't still work for you.
Simply adding "301 redirects" or a building a custom "404" page can capture that traffic and send them to other areas of your site. This allows them to stick around long enough to see if you still have something that will meet their needs, even though you no longer have exactly what they want.
Adding redirects allows you to keep visitors on your site if they have arrived, say, from a bookmarked page or an old page in the search results. Instead of losing those visitors, this gives you the opportunity to keep them engaged with your site, with the possibility of attracting them to your other excellent content.
Repurpose old content
Blogs are a great place to re-purpose old content and provide an updated spin on it. If you're running out of ideas for what to publish on your blog, you can go back several years in your archive and find old topics and discussions for which you can provide a new take.
Blog back history can give you a wealth of topics that you can pull from to create fresh, new content for your readers.
Another way to re-purpose old content is by removing excessive content from your site and moving it over to your blog. This can be necessary after years of site content build-up. This happens when you keep adding content to your site and it becomes so bloated that your readers end up spending too much time working through your site instead of being moved through the conversion process.
A couple months back, I worked on the Information Architecture for a client, and they had this very problem. We were able to take dozens of pages of content and move it off of their main site onto their blog. The content was good, but it was excessive. This hindered the conversion process, making the site both convoluted and confusing at the same time. By moving this stuff to the blog, the main site was better able to do the job of selling and the blog became the avenue of informing readers.
Link to historical pages
Content, especially blog content, often gets buried after months and years of time passing. But that doesn't necessarily mean the content isn't valuable or even needs to be re-written.
What you can do is write new content that links to this valuable content that was written long ago. You're giving your readers something fresh, while linking to something historical, that you can use to make your point or provide more detailed information for the reader to peruse at their leisure.
Take advantage of any area of content that allows you to link to another page that provides more information. The web isn't a brochure, it's more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That historical content can be a goldmine of information, provided you're giving your new readers a way to access it.
Good content never has to die. If you're treating it right, it never will. New people are coming to your site every day. These people have not had the benefit of reading all your past or historical stuff. No need to let it go to waste. Instead, keep it alive... and keep it working for you.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid (I still clean out my e-mail—although I don't reply much—and I still moderate comments on my blog), I don't write any blog posts (on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide), and I stay off Twitter. I also don't read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitter—it's a social media fast. Each year, it's interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again. This year, I did something a bit different, because I actually returned to work on August 25th because of a client need, but I continued to stay away from social media for the last week, just to see what it was like. It's one thing for me to avoid social media while I am on vacation, but what would it feel like during my work day?
Well, the verdict is in. It felt very strange. As easy as it is for me to drop out of social media while on vacation and just hang with my wife and play with the kids, once I am back at work, it felt very odd to not know what is going on.
I mean, I had been away for three weeks on vacation, so I really had no idea what was happening, but to be working in that kind of darkness was a different experience. The first thing I had to do was to fly to a distant city and make a speech on Internet marketing to hundreds of people. In doing so, I was gripped by this semi-insane fear that I couldn't make the speech without knowing what is going on. I mean, what if someone asked a question about something that just happened and I didn't know the answer?
Of course, the speech went just fine. Internet marketing apparently hasn't changed all that much in the last month (even though apparently the Web died while I was away).
But I also noticed how much I wanted to say, with no one to tell. I usually tweet about where I am traveling, so I had to resist the impulse to tell people about my trip last week. People would send me links to things to read—not only didn't I read them, but I didn't tell anyone about them. I'll probably catch up over the next week and tweet some of them.
But it was the blog ideas that just kept coming. And I wasn't writing any of them.
Usually, I post to my blog once each day (usually I am the writer of the article, but I also edit contributions from some other excellent contributors), so every day it is a struggle to get that done. I take for granted that nice people out there are actually interested in hearing what I have to say. It was strange to have a few work days where I wasn't publishing anything. (Frank Reed published several posts on my blog while I was away, but I didn't have any work to do while on vacation.)
I now have dozens of ideas for blog posts. most accumulated during the last week at work, with only a couple from my vacation. So, while my vacation definitely recharged my batteries, my social media fast during my first week back from work filled my creative coffers. Perhaps many of you post just once a week, or even less frequently, so this is not an issue for you. And while I've never felt like I am running dry for ideas, going a few days without having to write anything has been an eye-opener.
So, I still haven't completely caught up on what's been going on, but I will soon. My social media fast has proven to me both how important social media is and how important it is to take a break now and then. Some have told me that they only look at social media during defined times of the day (I know some who do this with e-mail, too). I never understood that before, but maybe I am starting to.
Anyway, I am glad to be back, and I'm honored that a few of you actually want to listen to what I have to say. Thank you.
Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble. I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future by any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor, however the past couple of years of operating our boutique apartment rental business in SE Michigan has had more challenges than we ever imagined. But as with all struggles, there has been a bright side, a bubble burst quickly trims out the weeds and the low hanging fruit.
Perhaps a Social Media Weeding is forthcoming
2010 has been the year that many small and mid size businesses have taken the plunge, and embraced the throws of Social Media Marketing. With that, nearly every unemployed straggler has hung out their Social Media Consultant shingle.
As reported in the Harvard Business Review...
"During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt -- debt that couldn't be made good on. Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections -- linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships."
Low Barrier to Entry
Whenever the barrier to entry is low, to non existent, pitfalls loom. While the real estate bubble happened due to a multitude of reasons, whenever someone can sell a condo several times before the builder finished construction, and each selling party profits, all is well and good until the market falls off. It then becomes musical chairs and the last person standing is holding the bag. When profit occurs absent anyone really doing anything or adding any value, a Weed and Trim typically follows. Problem is, we aren't very adept at history or awareness.
Panera Bread is My Office
Nothing against the Nomads or Entrepreneurs, we all started somewhere, but when your only cost of business or overhead is your laptop, lots of crazies are suddenly Internet marketers and social media marketers. And, by all means, some of this lot are pretty smart. However once the check writers (the business owners) start requiring results, many of these Cast of Social Media Characters will evaporate as quickly as they spawned.
What is the Correction
Results, or lack there of will lead the correction. Business isn't as complicated as we try to make it. If you are doing Internet marketing or social media marketing for your client, and they aren't selling more stuff, you may well get fired, as you should. Marketing is and has always been about selling more stuff to more people for more money.
Engagement, Conversation, Connections and all of the buzz words of today won't cut it if sales leads don't increase. The truth is, Social Media Marketing is so much more than a Facebook page and a Twitter account. While there are lots of businesses and agencies doing a stellar job, many are not, and it seems the honeymoon may be coming to a close for those that lack the experience of delivering a real and measurable result.
Are your clients selling more stuff from your Social Media Marketing Campaigns?
We would love to hear your feedback. You can connect with Eric on Twitter or at The Urbane Way.
If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn't you?), you're always testing.
Always. It's the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain
insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels.
One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.
Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from
different time periods (except for ads). For example, you'd have to run
ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the
new bid price for a while. Then, you'd have to compare the results from
different time periods. The problem?
When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the
differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes. But
fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable
circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.
Google's example of this involves advertising for soccer balls.
"Let's say you're advertising soccer balls, and you decide to increase
your bids to get more traffic. Two days later, the World Cup starts, and
your clicks and impressions increase substantially. If you had simply
raised the bids in your campaign without running an experiment, you
wouldn't know how much of the increase in traffic is due to the World
Cup, and how much is a result of you increasing bids."
Let's say you raised your bids at the beginning of June and noticed this trend when doing analysis in July....
Alright,
looks great. Let's go ahead and keep that new bid. What? What's
that? That might not be the best thing. Well now, why would that be?
Ouch. That's web search volume trends for that keyword phrase. Not so fast my friend.
Enter the newest "seedless watermelon" in the AdWords system called AdWords Campaign Experiments
(ACE). With ACE, you can run simultaneous split tests with most of the
key variables in your campaigns by splitting traffic between you
"control" group (original) and your experiment group...AND...you can
analyze the results of your tests beforeyou apply them to all auctions.
This lowers the risk of diving into new, unproven strategies by
enabling you to control the amount of traffic you send to your
experimental groups; which ultimately helps you make better decisions in
your optimization efforts. You can split your traffic in 10% intervals
from 90/10 all the way to 10/90.
The cool thing about this is that if you want to run a low-risk
experiment and send 80% of your traffic to your control group and 20%
to your experiment group, you can analyze the results and find if the
changes performed better. If they did, then you can run what is called a
holdback experiment
before you fully applied the changes to your campaigns. A holdback
experiment involves running the exact same experiment again, but this
time with the control at 20% and the experiment at 80%. This way, you
confirm that the positive effects of your experiment are truly there as
the experiment is exposed to a larger amount of traffic.
When you go to analyze an experiment, you want make sure that the
statistical differences in your numbers is meaningful rather than the
result of random chance. Statistical significance is calculated based
both on the number of auctions your campaign participated in, and on the
size of the differences in metrics. Google AdWords provides icons
in your campaign when the math indicates that you can be 95%, 99%, or
99.9% confident that differences are meaningful, and not just due to
chance.
The icons are arrows that show you whether a particular element
you're experimenting with has achieved statistically significant
results, and how confident you can be that those results will carry over
to your campaign if you apply the experiment (one arrow meaning there
is a 5% probability your results occurred due to chance, two arrows
means there is a 1% chance, and three arrows means there is just a 0.1%
chance these results are due to chance).
The introduction of this new feature saves the account manager time
and makes testing in your AdWords account much more accurate, efficient
and profitable.
When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it's your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it's that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.
Think about it. If you're not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or "figure it out on their own". But, for anybody that's doing anything new, directions are a God send.
I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I'll be the first to admit that I'm generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn't help. Not even a little.
The desk had two pieces: the main desk and a small side table. Both look nearly identical, only the size is different. The directions started you out building the small table...but they didn't make that clear. I spent at least 30 minutes putting together the larger desk with the small table instructions, wondering why things just weren't making much sense.
Once I figured that out and moved on to building the desk with proper directions, I found several pieces that all looked similar, but with subtle differences. The directions didn't make those distinctions, neither verbally nor visually. Luckily, I was able to stay calm and keep the cursing to a low mumble that my kids couldn't hear!
Your content should work like directions. It needs to inform and make clear what the next step is. Giving your visitors clear directions doesn't have to be difficult. You don't have to re-write all of your content, adding in long prose of "here's what we want you to do next". All you have to do is some simple re-working of key areas.
Action Words: We often tend to write passively. We talk in terms of how things are, not in terms of what we are doing, what we've done, or what we want to do. This makes our content stagnant.
Instead, use words that convey action. Tell visitors how you achieved your knowledge or skills. Tell them how they will benefit from your product or services. Give them examples of the results they will see. And, most importantly, give them some calls to action.
Calls to Action: Using action words is never more important than ensuring your work calls action into your content. These are the directives that you provide to your visitors that lead them down the path to the conversion.
If you are not providing these directives, or are providing the wrong directives, you won't be getting the response you want from your visitors. Keep in mind that there are multiple paths to the goal. Customers need to see your products before they can buy them. They also need to know product details. Trying to move your customers to the conversion too quickly simply won't work.
Use your calls to action to lead visitors down the path of information they need to take the desired action. Some may need to see product reviews, others need to read more about your company, and still others might want to read more about what you offer. Provide calls to action to whatever your visitors might need... because they may not even know they need it.
Textual Links: Adding calls to action directly into your text is simply the best way to get visitors to heed them. Your navigation is important, but sites often put too much faith in the navigation getting the visitors to the information they want. If the visitors know where they want to go, and if they are willing to take the time to click through the navigation, then that approach would work. But, why force the visitor to disengage from your content to hunt through the navigation for what they want? Not a good idea.
That's the biggest problem with not using textual links. You're forcing your visitors to figure things out instead of providing them the directions they need right there where they are. If they are reading about your team's experience, then link to your "About Us" page. If you mention a related product, link to it. If you discuss a significant achievement, place a link to the page that provides more complete information about it.
Visitors are curious. Providing links helps them satisfy their curiosity, which in, turns gives them more satisfaction that you have "what it takes" to provide what they need.
A website that's not getting any action is a dead site. Conversion rates will be low, and bounce rates will be high. Using action words, calls to action, and textual links gets your visitors to "put out". But, unless your content is willing to provide the goods, you may not even get to second base.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Best Buy wants you to tell them the moment you walk into the store.
From Marketing Pilgrim: "The "shopkick" system is designed to detect and reward shoppers just for walking into a Best Buy store. In order to accomplish this feat, consumers must download an application to their smart phone. "
In my last post, I talked about training your text to "engage", "inform", "speak" (call to action), and "convert". The first step is to make sure the content doesn't overstay it's welcome. In this post, I'll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.
Teaching tricks the audience likes
There are two kinds of tricks you can train your text to do: the kind of tricks you like or the kind of tricks your audience likes. Obviously, training your text to do the tricks you like will make you happy... but it won't make your audience happy. You think the tricks are cool, but nobody else does. And... that's just not cool.
Most people who visit websites scan them first, then skim the text. But, they only skim read if they get intrigued by their initial scan, and they read it only if they find something compelling and interesting that warrants their full attention. There are four easy ways to train your text to be scan-able:
Paragraph headings: Your page should have a proper heading and your content should be broken up with paragraph headings throughout, depending on length. Don't get carried away by placing a heading before each paragraph. That overkill. But the longer your text is, the more it needs to be broken up into easily digest chunks that allow your readers to consume it.
Internal linking: One of the biggest missed opportunities on business websites is linking their content to other relevant areas of the site. That's what the navigation is for, right? Yes and no.
Your navigation needs to do a proper job of allowing people to find what they are looking for, but relying on it too heavily forces the visitor to know what they are interested in finding. But, adding links into your content streamlines both of those issues and also helps the visitor get to where they want to go much quicker. This is more intuitive and requires little thought or effort on their part.
Bolded Text: Bolding key words, phrases, and sentences can also allow your visitors to find key points as they quickly scan your content. Note that I said "key words", not "keywords". There is nothing wrong with using keywords in your bolded text, but that should not be the reason for using bold text. You bold text because it's important, not because you want to get a keyword in bold font.
Bullet Points: Bullet points are another way to get your visitors to read key information without having to read every word of content. Most readers will read bulleted lists while ignoring everything else on the page.
Bullets provide a very easy way to read quick bits of information that otherwise might get lost in a single paragraph. Bullet points also break up your content, which also makes the text more scan-able and skim-able. You can also use bullet points to link to other areas of your site that provide additional information without mucking up the current page content.
People love tricks. But, they don't like to be tricked. These tricks that you can use to train your content are not and should not be used as a means to deceive your audience. They are tricks that help you communicate with your audience in a way that is more to their liking. Giving people what they want isn't deceptive, unless you are pulling the rug out from under them later.
You can train your content to do things that other sites are not doing. By teaching it to keep your audience engaged with the site, and training it how to direct your readers to other areas of the site they are interested in, you're just helping people find what they need. If they don't find it with you, they will with someone else... likely because their content has learned these tricks.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
One of the best ways to add content to your website and boost your search engine rankings is through an optimized press release. You can write about any newsworthy item going on at your company: a new product, an industry award, new hires are just a few examples.
Announcing these events has several benefits beyond search engine rankings too. Journalists and bloggers for instance will come across it and perhaps do a story about your firm. They make your company look active and lively, drawing more interest from prospective customers.
Regularly scheduled press releases do this and more provided they're properly formatted. Simply writing some text and putting it online will not do a whole lot for you. Many distribution outlets like PRWeb and PR.com will reject your press release for syndication if it's not properly formatted.
So what's the proper way to format a press release?
Continue reading for ways you should format a press release for online distribution. Beyond the tips listed below, there are some additional ways you can format your press releases to further its impact in the search engines so check back next time for press release formatting tips from a social media and SEO perspective.
• Be sure your press release is at least 400 words (including boilerplate/company description at the end) and no more than 600 words.
• Write the press release in the 3rd person. Meaning, use words like he, she, they and them when writing about your company.
• Mention your company by name in the title and include your target keyword too. Include a sub-heading below your title with additional details to complement your title.
• In your opening paragraph, include your city and date first. Example: Atlanta, Ga. - August 23, 2010. Be sure your first paragraph covers the "5-W's and H" of your story - or who, what, when, where, why and how.
• Next, the main body of your press release should contain further information on points in your introduction along with quotes from an important person at your company.
• Close out the press release by offering the reader a link to click and/or a place to contact your company for further information.
• Include a boilerplate after the conclusion describing your company and website.
• After the boilerplate, include your name, phone, email, title. This gives your press release further credibility. Once you have this, include a "###" or "END" to signify the conclusion of the press release.
Double checking spelling, grammar or formatting is critical to having a proper press release. Check out the AP Stylebook or some other resource for ways to format certain words or how you should abbreviate a state and more.
And here's one of the biggies and where many website owners fall down
Don't make your press release read like an advertisement. They're meant to announce events of a newsworthy fashion. If your press release has a bunch of "salesy" type language, it will be immediately dismissed by any journalist or blogger that comes across it. You can talk up benefits of your new product or whatever news you're announcing in your quotations a little bit but that's about it.
Not to mention, most distribution outlets will reject it as well.
Take a few moments and carefully review each press release before posting it on your site and distributing it to newswires and social networks. Doing so will save you lots of time and maximize the value of doing a press release in the first place.
In the end, press releases are about informing journalists, bloggers and potential customers of events at your company. They're not meant to sell per se but draw the reader's interest in enough for them to want to learn more.
Check back again soon for more on properly formatting press releases - specifically for the search engines and how you can squeeze even more benefits out of announcing your company's news online.
If you aren't familiar with Google Places please watch this video. It's growing and could be significantly affecting your business without your knowing.
Google's Display Network has two types of targeting options. The first, automatic placements, we've talked about already. This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group. Now, we'll talk about the second - managed placements.
This type of campaign is useful for two purposes:
1. Targeting specific websites that you've already found have performed well for your ads in an automatic placement campaign to maximize your exposure on those sites.
2. Targeting specific websites that you've found through research.
With this campaign, you do not choose keywords because you are telling Google exactly which sites you want your ad to be eligible for auction, so they don't need keywords to come up with a theme to match to websites. The way to create this campaign is to choose "relevant pages only on the placements and audiences I manage" under "Networks" in the "Network and Devices" option of your campaign settings.
The easiest way to pick some websites where you want your ad to be shown is to run and analyze a Placement Performance Report of your Automatic Placement Campaign once a significant amount of data has been collected. You can export the data in this report to Excel and find some websites that have historically met the marketing objectives you have set for your ads. Once you add them to your new Managed Placement Campaign, make sure you exclude them from your Automatic Placement Campaign by selecting the placement and hitting "Exclude Placement" above the list -
Then, you go in to the Networks tab of your new Managed Placement campaign, click on "show details" next to managed placements and then click "add placements." This is where you enter and submit the sites where you want your ads to be shown.
If you are not as patient and/or you would rather not rely on Google's imperfect algorithm to find some websites you'd like to test, once you hit "add placements" and choose an ad group, you can click on a link to take you to the Placement Tool. Here, you can look up sites by category, keyword, ad type or size, and URL and the tool will spit out all sorts of options for you to pick from to add to your ad group.
You'll want to monitor these choices over time to weed out the bad and maximize the good. Remember, just because you think something in marketing will work doesn't mean it will. It has to be proven with data.
Take a look at the sites that are suggested and decide on some that are locations where your target audience frequents, select them and add them to your campaign.
Once you start to find some websites that are working for you, you can start to develop themed ad groups with your managed placements and write more targeted ads for similar types of sites.
For instance, if you sold guitars and you are finding that guitar lesson sites work well for you, group all of the sites about guitar lessons together and create targeted ads for those sites. You should see click-through and conversion rates improve significantly. This makes it easier to identify sites and themes that work best for your business.
Now, you've got one campaign that is going out to hunt down sites that will work for what you're advertising (automatic placement) and one campaign that contains sites that work for you that you can optimize for the long-run (managed placement). As time passes and data is collected, continue to add keyword-themed ad groups to your Automatic Placement Campaign to replace themes that aren't working for you while pulling the sites that work to place into your Managed Placement campaign. Frequently, you should go in and apply standard optimization techniques to your ad groups and placements similar to how you would optimize search campaigns with keywords.
Hopefully, my short introduction series to the Display Network will allow you to take your online business to new heights! Down the road, we'll get into some more advanced Display Network strategies. Hope you'll hang around.
We don't often realize this, but we can train our website content to do tricks. Unfortunately, most website content just lays around all day. This is why you see high bounce rates and poor conversion rates on so many websites. About the only "trick" this content knows how to do is to roll-over and play dead. But, those aren't tricks at all. The opossum that streaked across the highway after getting hit by a truck can do that!
What I'm talking about is teaching your content how to "engage", "inform", "speak" (call to action), and "convert". Teach these tricks to your content and you'll see a whole new level of performance on your website.
The first thing to train your content to do is not to overstay it's welcome. Like a neighbor you enjoy having over occasionally, there comes a time when they must leave. In the same way, you can train your content to know when to stop talking and show the visitor the door to the next page or pages of your site.
Leave them wanting more... and then give them more
We often try to do either too much or too little with our content. The "old school" rules of SEO said you had to have a minimum amount of content. Is it 100 words...200 words? There is a minimum number of words you need per page, but it has nothing to do with counting. It's the amount of content that is needed for the text to move the visitor to the next step.
There are three simple rules to training your text when it comes to the quantity of text to be used:
1) There is no magic amount. Some pages require a lot of text, but some don't require much text at all. But, bear in mind, that all pages need some text. Text is what convinces, persuades, informs, and helps your audience decide that they want to buy from you.
2) Keep your text as brief as possible. This doesn't mean your text has to be short, just that you don't go for length when length is not needed or warranted.
3) Use no more words than needed to convert. Your audience isn't just one person. It's many people looking at many items for many purposes. Once you start looking at personas and personalities trying to target everybody on a single page can be daunting. But, you don't have to hit everybody perfectly on a single page. Figure out what the next step is for each group, and provide that opportunity. It could be a link to an "About Us" page, a link to "Shipping Policies" or a "Buy Now" button.
The basic idea is to train your text to be minimalist while still providing ways for the reader to request an encore. They do that by clicking further into the site to get even more information, where, hopefully, that page is also trained to provide the audience what it wants as well.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
I remember the first day back at my sophomore year of college. It was the weekend before classes began, and the new students were moving into the dorms. There were cars and trucks all parked out along the street with students unloading furniture, bedding, clothes, and everything else a growing college kid needs to survive in the almost-real world.
I remember this day vividly because a bunch of us guys were scouting out the hot chicks, generously helping the new batch of coeds unload and unpack. Later that afternoon, when it was only us guys within ear shot, a buddy of mine claimed, "I got dibs on the red head." I remember thinking, "Whatever, dude!" Nonetheless, everyone knew Jon had claimed Shannon and she was hands off until he said otherwise.
It wasn't long before Jon and Shannon started dating, and a few years later they married and are still happily married today.
You Aren't Special If You're Last In Line
Dibs are a great thing. It makes us feel special. Like calling "shotgun" to get the front passenger seat, dibs allows us to lay claim to something we otherwise may not have been entitled to: the last piece of pizza, the larger bed, the first shower before all the hot water is gone, and the hot red head that needs a nice, strong college man to help her move into her dorm.
Unfortunately, too many business owners let "dibs" on their website go to everyone else, except those that matter most: the target audience. All too often site design and content is developed for the boss, or the marketing team, or even the search engines. But the audience--the people who the site is supposedly intended for--get left out. They don't get dibs, they get whatever is left over.
Does that seem right to you?
Your audience is your "A" Girl
I knew someone once who had a philosophy on his women. You could have an A-Girl, B-Girl, and C-Girl. A-Girl could in no way know about B- or C-Girl. B-Girl could know about A-Girl, but couldn't know about C-Girl. C-Girl could know about both A- and B-Girl.
Don't laugh, this is true.
This was obviously his way of attempting to build a playground in a minefield. I'm not sure how that worked out for him, but it will work as a good analogy here.
Your audience absolutely must be your A-Girl. Your content must be for her. Your visual presentation must be for her. Your site architecture and usability must be for her. And she doesn't need to know about your B- and C-Girls... the search engines, or that guy that pays all the bills and has really strong opinions.
What you write, how you write, and the overall presentation you put together on your website shouldn't be based on the boss' opinions or what we think the search engines want. Those don't have to be totally disregarded, but your audience, your A-Girl, comes first. She's the one that matters. And if she catches a whiff that the site isn't for her, she'll be out the door and onto the next site in a matter of minutes.
Keywords are important, and as I noted a few weeks back, your content isn't good content unless it's optimized. This is very true, because optimizing for your audience is the same as optimizing for the search engines. The problem is when C-Girl becomes too prominent, A-Girl is sure to notice.
Building a perfect relationship
Your keywords should be present, but not obvious. They should be a part of your relationship with A-Girl, but not overbearing. If you suddenly start giving your girlfriend gifts, she may suspect you're covering for something else. Same is true here. If you add too many keywords to your pages, they become overpowering. A-Girl isn't dumb.
Keep your content persuasive. Just because someone knows you love them doesn't mean you don't ever have to tell them. Your content should tell your audience what you want them to do. Do you want them to purchase? Download? Learn more? Add to cart? Failure to have calls to action throughout your content will lead to a stagnant relationship. The audience won't know what you want them to do next and, sooner or later, they will wander off.
Overall, you need to maintain value in your content. If you're just adding text for the sake of B-Girl or C-Girl, A-Girl will realize that there is nothing there for her. You have to keep your audience engaged. You do this by writing content that helps them learn, grow, improve, understand, etc. A relationship that does not help each side to grow is a dying relationship. If your audience isn't getting anything new, just the same content they found on every other site, they'll soon grow bored with you.
Your A-Girl needs dibs. She needs to be the first priority on your website. Sure, you can build a site that pleases the higher-ups, and can write content that is optimized for search engine placement, but your audience must come first. She's too important for anything less.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Now that you've created your keyword-themed ad groups and masterfully rolled out your display ads for those ad groups, your ads are running and collecting impressions, clicks and conversions. The next step is to allow a fair amount of data to collect so that you can then analyze how different sites are performing for you.
The most useful tool for this is the Placement Performance Report in your Google AdWords account. It segments your ad serving by domain or individual URL so you can see the performance metrics for them separately. This will allow you to find sites and categories of sites where your ads perform well and where they are struggling. The best, most important metric to analyze when looking at a site's Display Network performance? Cost Per Conversion.
Why? Google uses what they call smart pricing as their method for click charges on the Display Network. Basically, if your ad wins the auction and is placed on a site, Google determines if that page is more or less likely to end in a conversion action for you and they adjust the price of a click accordingly. This makes cost per conversion much more important than conversion rate.
Why? Smart pricing will very likely give you a scenario of metrics like the one below when comparing two sites:
If this scenario is true its because Google determined website #2 to be less likely to result in a conversion. So, they discounted the cost per click to advertise on website 2 to make up for this. But, as you can see, you are performing relatively well on this site because they've discounted your price enough to make your cost per conversion 25% lower than website 1 despite your lower conversion rate. Therefore, website 2 is working better for you despite the lower conversion rate. So, you can see how smart pricing changes the game and make cost per conversion your most important metric.
Once you run a Placement Performance Report, you will have data that you can use to make decisions about your ad's exposure. You will find sites that are both performing well and not performing well for your campaigns. If you want to block your ads from being shown on specific sites, you can use the Site and Category Exclusion Tool within your AdWords account to block these sites.
With the sites that are performing well, you may want to have more control over your bidding and targeting flexibility with them. In this case, you can take that placement and use it in a Placement Targeted Campaign, which we will talk about in my next post.
Here are some ways that you can block your ads from being shown to specific web traffic using this tool:
1. Blocking Domains - You can block top-level domains, subdomains and directories. Blocking one doesn't block the others, so you will need to enter them separately.
2. Undesirable Content - There are six types of content that you can block if you are concerned about brand protection.
3. Video Sites - You can block your ads from being shown as content ads within video.
4. Page Types:
a. Error Pages - these are displayed when a page does not exist. If someone attempts to navigate to a domain that does not exist, a page can be shown that has ads based on the mistyped URL instead of a "not found" error page.
b. Parked Domains - These domains are owned, but they have never been developed. So, all you see is ads when you navigate to these pages. This traffic comes from users mistyping a URL or using a domain name that does not exist.
c. User-generated sites - forums, image-sharing sites, social networks, video-sharing sites
In my next post, we'll take a look at targeting specific sites on the Display Network that you find through your gathered data and/or through a little research to take your online business to new heights...
One of the most important things business owners often fail to do is to make their website remarkable. It really doesn't matter what industry you're in or how many other websites you're competing against, making your site stand out from the pack is absolutely essential.
Take the movie Avatar.
Plot: Tired.
Story: Been there, done that.
Acting and directing: Nothing special.
Special effects: Absolutely outstanding.
Worthy of a "Best Picture" nomination: Not by a long shot.
Worthy of a "Best Special Affects" Oscar: Without a doubt.
So, how is it that a story we have all seen played out in 100 different movies and "message" Star Trek episodes turns into one of the most popular movies of all time? It's because James Cameron took a great heaping pile of "Meh.", and made it all, "Oooh, shiny!". It's uniqueness overshadowed the complete and total hollowness of everything else on the screen.
A lot of business owners out there feel that their business is just the same old, same old. Nothing special there. But in reality, they can take what they are doing and turn it into something remarkable. And the easiest way to do that is through the content.
A vast majority of internet searches are informational. That means people are not looking for your products or services, they are looking for information about them. They want to learn something new. And, you can be the one to give it to them.
The key to creating unique content that searchers are looking for is keyword research. Let your keyword research become your idea generator for blog posts, articles, e-books, and whatever else strikes your fancy.
When perusing your keyword research here are a few things to look for:
Easy to Rank Phrases: When looking for good traffic, you can always start with phrases that have little or no competition. Find queries that match what you provide that others have not yet optimized for. This gives you a chance to build up some rankings and traffic for good (yet lower traffic) phrases. You can immediately start siphoning off traffic from your competitors and start building a loyal audience that will keep coming back.
Niche Areas: Look for an area within your industry that your competitors are not covering or not covering very well. Find obscure topics that people are interested in, but, after conducting a few searches of your own, show that the available content on the web isn't sufficient. This creates an opportunity for you to fill in the gaps and create authoritative information of your own.
Highly Targeted Phrases: These are long-tail phrases that are very targeted for your audience, addressing specific areas of interest. Highly targeted phrases are generally pretty easy to get ranked but they also bring in an audience that has a very specific need. Write information that targets these searchers by providing new information, a new spin, a new take on, or a new way of looking at things.
Info Queries: These often fit into the categories above, but are queries performed by people looking for information and nothing else. They are typically the queries with a question that answers questions, such as "how to..." or "what is...". These queries provide a great opportunity to provide content beyond simple text. "How to" videos, diagrams, flash animations, and podcasts are all great ways to provide this type of content in a way that people find valuable. Telling someone how to do something is great, but showing them how to do it is even better.
Just because you are providing a product or service that someone else is, that doesn't mean you have to provide content that someone else has. There are plenty of ways to step outside of the box and provide valuable information that nobody else is providing. Look for these opportunities, and take advantage of them . . . before someone else does.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
As if there aren't enough obstacles for the underdog, strong brands received a boost in Google SERPs this week. The algorithm update that presents up to seven results from the same domain within a search results page was a topic of discussion during today's SEM Synergy. And so were those challenged by the update — small brands and businesses who may fall out of SERPs as Google favors big brand domains.
Also taxing small and local businesses is the decreased click-through traffic that results from a Google SERP with a local one-pack. In a thread on Webmaster World, webmasters compare their experiences with local one-box traffic, in one instance reporting a 19-25% CTR from a one-box and a 37-40% CTR from straight Web results (in position one for both scenarios).
Read more of LocalPack Covers Local SEO Bases.
While Bing-Yahoo! and Google battle it out to win the hearts of searchers around the world, businesses everywhere are locked in a similar struggle for your attention and dollars. But before you dedicate resources to beating the competition, it's important to be sure of whom your competition is. With an environment like the World Wide Web, your SEO competition can be anyone and everyone, and can change daily. It helps to know simple tasks that can be performed about once a month if you're in a very competitive space. So, when tackling the question of who your worthy opponents are, the process may go a little something like this.
Read more of Who Are You Up Against? Sizing Up the Competition.
The advice that business should blog is great and all, but the more pressing question, by far, is how. When I've sat down with clients to start them on the track to business blogging, there are many questions and much uncertainty, of the creative and technical nature. As the author of a search engine marketing blog, it's kinda my thing to think about both sides of the coin: the SEO benefit as well as the creative and community building aspects of blogging. Here are some things to keep in mind if you're staring at a sparse screen, looking to leverage the benefits of a blog.
Read more of Search Engine Marketing Blog Lessons: Tales from the Blogging Trenches
Can I get a hallelujah for Friday? Here are some fun and interesting stories to get you to your weekend.
First, how about a trip in the time machine? Employee orientation videos from Wendy's make a good point. People learn better when instructions are rapped, with belting riffs and glamour shot lighting. [I feel like I’m ready for an exciting career in fast food. –Susan]
At least Wendy's was trying to reach their team in a popular medium of the time. Knowing your audience and their interests is an important part of building community. Ben Huh, founder of Cheezburger Network, knows a thing or two about online community management. He was my guest on this week's SEM Synergy and I couldn't share this with you earlier, as I was in video editing purgatory, but now I can!
Read more of Friday Recap: Cheeseburger Edition.
I’m at the grocery store the other day and the cashier asks me what I do for a living. I tell him I’m a writer.
Him: “Oh, really? What genre?”
(Looks like he just met a celebrity. I chuckle.)
Me: “Not that kind.”
Then I thought to myself, Why should I laugh? Copywriting is certainly an art, and when you add SEO copywriting into the mix, I might as well be Pablo Neruda (a little overboard?).
Read more of Please Don't Go No. 2 on SEO Copywriting
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but there is business value in social media marketing.
How's that for a news flash, guys?
Not like I've never said it before. So why again now? Well, the idea that social is a waste of time caused quite a stir on Hacker News today as Spencer Fry's Down With Social made its way to the top. Fry makes a strong argument, however, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Why Fry thinks social media has no business value:
Skills needed for community managers are present throughout the organization. Devoting a full-time person to the job is a waste of resources.
Social media is not a fit for every business. Some sites are better served without social features.
Social media marketing can't be measured effectively. Spending without knowing the return on investment is throwing money away.
Did you know that in Niger, the world's poorest nation, the lack of access to clean water causes blindness, disease and social inequity?
68% of people in rural Niger drink contaminated water.
1 in 4 children die before the age of 5.
85% of women in Niger are illiterate.
And all those issues can be helped by providing the simple life necessity of clean water.
On Saturday I started a project with a charity group to promote the cause of Wells Bring Hope online. It's an exciting proposition: take the organization's current site and social media presence and see how far you can take it. The all volunteer team is crafting a communications strategy, more or less, from the ground up. Like many SEOs and social media marketers starting a client project, we aren't starting from scratch, but are working with the platforms already established.
Read more of Non-Profit SEO Corner: Starting Out.
Is it just me or did anyone else find it tough to stay up on search industry news with SES San Francisco flying by? Now, going through my feed reader, a number of important news bites are jumping out. Thought these might be worth sharing.
Google Streaming Search Test
Evidence of a test within Google search engine results shows the displayed results changing as a query is entered into the search box. One user reports that the Google home page automatically shifts from a search box on the predominantly white page to a results page with ads as a query is entered. Such instant preview search technology is also called "incremental search."
Read more of Search and Social News Bites.
What a week! Hope everyone had a good one, and that those at SES San Francisco arrived back home safely. Susan's back in the office, which is a joy in the writers' room, because that means more smiles, stories and presents! (Yay, conference swag!)
Just for you she brought back a packed-to-the-brim archive of liveblog coverage of SES. A million thank yous to the guest livebloggers (Some of them first timers on the liveblog circuit! They're naturals!) who pumped out comprehensive reports of sessions with thoughtful advice and opinions. I'm talking to you, Alan Bleiweiss, Brent Rangen, Jayme Westervelt, John Ellis, Jonah Stein and Michael Martin. Oh, BCI's own Susan Esparza and Bruce Clay Australia's Kate Gamble didn't do too bad either. ;)
Read more of Friday Recap: Chasing Butterflies Edition.
Moderator:
Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance
Speakers:
Ron Jones, President/CEO, Symetri Internet Marketing
Wister Walcott, Co-founder & VP of Products, Marin Software
Aaron Lauper, adCenter Product Team, Microsoft Advertising
Stacie Susens, Director of Client Strategy and Development, Resolution Media
If you have a chance, I highly recommend reading the blog that covered Andy Beal’s Google reputation presentation. Tons of great nuggets of information in his presentation in regards to doing reputation management for your company. However… don't leave before you read this one on Advanced Keyword Research, of course!
For those of you who think keyword research isn’t that important, think again. Keyword research is something that can make or break a campaign – paid or organic or even social. Let’s see what the panelist have to say about advanced keyword research.
Read more of Advanced Keyword Research — SES San Francisco.
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:32:38 +0000 - Whenever I know I’ll be near some major spectacle, I try to photograph it or video it. Not only are such events great practice for a search marketer, the content is great for getting links from individuals and from newspapers. So, when I heard about the scheduled Texas Stadium Demolition, I couldn’t resist, even though [...]
Related posts:
Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:01:17 +0000 - There’s been a lot of buzz lately criticizing TopSEOs, a business which purports to rate Search Engine Optimization experts, though ratings are influenced by payments. Both Aaron Wall and Edward Lewis skewered the service with pretty convincing points. The rating service and talk about it reminded me that I actually did a sort of rating [...]
Related posts:
Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:10:45 +0000 - Many Google Maps users may have missed the recently added button, allowing users to opt-in to try out some of the Google Maps Labs beta features. The Labs options can be accessed via the new little icon button found in the upper right of the user-interface, if you’re logged-in to your Google account: The new [...]
Related posts:
Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:39:20 +0000 - For those of you who are long-term readers of mine, you may be interested to know that I’ve now launched a new personal blog, Nodal Bits. In its inaugural post, I describe how I first came to do blogging here at Natural Search Blog at the invite of Stephan Spencer, and how I believe blogging [...]
Related posts:
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:34:27 +0000 - I was tickled to see these SEO Superhero t-shirts that Covario was giving away to attendees of the SMX West conference in Santa Clara this week: Naturally, I got my t-shirt sporting the SEO Superman-esque logo! I don’t wear t-shirts a whole lot, but this is one I’ll definitely wear sometimes. It felt odd not [...]
Related posts:
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:51:13 +0000 - My article on “Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps” posted today on Search Engine Land, and I believe many of my regular readers should find it moderately entertaining. The piece covers how some elements of guerrilla marketing have found their way into some Google Maps advertising patents, and also how some others [...]
Related posts:
Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:12:33 +0000 - Happy New Year Natural Search Geeks! As some of you know, for the past five years I’ve worked with Stephan Spencer building up the Netconcepts‘ search marketing and SEO technology business. Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a very special event: Netconcepts is merging, through acquisition, with the leading search marketing software company [...]
Related posts:
Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:13:57 +0000 - The complexity of Google Adwords is always on the rise and it takes time, skill and effort to achieve good results with PPC campaigns in terms of finding the sweet medium of increased conversions and reduced costs. If you have an existing PPC campaign and it is performing decently, you can still increase its scope [...]
Related posts:
Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:46:52 +0000 - We all knew it was only a matter of time, but still secretly hoped that the honeymoon would last forever. It does appear that LinkedIn has started nofollowing public profile links…but with a strange twist. I’ve been so heads down in client audits that I didn’t discover this until, ironically, doing another audit for another [...]
Related posts:
Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:32:58 +0000 - With every passing day, the number of websites and hence the number of web pages are growing at an explosive rate on the internet. This can cause a major headache to the search engines as they gear up to meet the challenge of crawling and subsequently indexing the new sites popping up everywhere in the [...]
Related posts:
Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:33:58 +0000 - Every businessperson wants to be able to get a “leg up” on the competition. This has been the case for thousands of years and will be the case in the future. Therefore, why wouldn’t every business strive to make the most of all the potential resources at hand? A prudent person handles the operation of [...]
Mon, 03 May 2010 21:14:29 +0000 - Everyday more online retailers are adding customer surveys to their checkout process. Without consumer ratings, often merchants find that assessing whether or not customers are pleased is a somewhat of a guessing game. Consumer ratings have many benefits including the fact that merchants can gain valuable feedback about the shopping experience from the customer’s point [...]
Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:42:19 +0000 - How does Social Proof affect your business? If you don’t know the answer to the question above you may be missing out on tons of extra revenue each and every day. Social Proof is not a new concept but it is definitely overlooked by businesses and entrepreneurs. I want to share with you a video [...]
Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:25:16 +0000 - It is actually here. Some might be saying, “It is About Time.” Monday December 7th, 2009 Google rolled out real-time search results. Although it is live some of us may not see it yet depending on your location. Here is a pretty cool video that Google put together on the new Real Time Search: To [...]
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:03:05 +0000 - BuildingSocialEquity.com What is Building Social Equity 2.0? Why is it important? How can I get it? So if you watched my video above you know that I am launching my new Social Media Training Course – Building Social Equity 2.0! The tag line is “SEO Meets Social Media” because I teach step-by-step how to use [...]
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:03:09 +0000 - This is going to be one of my shortest posts ever!!! I just wanted to announce that I am the new owner and content contributor of the Social Media Blog SocialMediaVision.com. Social Media Vision Blog is a focused on Social Media, New Media, Technology, and all things Web 2.0. Social Media Vision is a blog [...]
2007-10-01 - Articles and tutorials from SEO Workers on a variety of subjects related to SEO. These articles cover a range of topics from general SEO information to solving technical webserver issues.
2006-12-05 - Poorly executed SEO campaigns can put your business at serious risk. They can lead to search engine penalties and long term harm to your organization's online presence.
2006-11-04 - Accessible Search does much more than simply provide an interface that is more easily used by persons with screen readers, or those with motor impairment.
2006-12-22 - Checking the spelling of the text on your web site is very important; to ensure good content accessibility and readability for your readers, and better crawlability and indexing for search engines.
2006-10-03 - Prevent search engines indexing secure pages, could regard this as duplicated content, thus reducing your page ranking in their search results.
2007-10-20 - It is vital to ensure your web site is ranked well in searches for your local area. Are you ranking well in the searches of your local area?
2007-10-24 - Search engines are enhanced by having the most relevant results in their index. A clean site hierarchy and an easily understood navigation structure will benefit both usability and SEO.
2007-09-12 - Before you start building links you can control the flow of PageRank to boost your most important pages and keep them out of the Supplemental Index.
2009-09-17 - You should be looking for a service which uses proven and ethical SEO methodologies to improve the search engine rankings of their clients.
2009-11-12 - Link building indicates the measure of quality of a web site/webpage, giving a higher value in search engine rankings. It can be vital to the success of your web site.
2010-03-03 - Organic search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving the traffic towards your website by making it more prominent in search engine results.
2010-03-03 - If you use professional search engine marketing, then you will be able to improve your sites ability to feature highly on searches far more quickly.
2010-05-13 - Internet Marketing is crucial for any website owner even though the methods to carry out this type of strategy are varied and a little confusing.
2007-09-07 - Glossary of Terms Used in the SEO Workers Web Site.
Dominate Google Search Results Pages for a dollar.
Automatically post to popular Video, Blog, Social Networking and Podcasting sites to
dramatically increase visitors to your products and
services. Begin to Dominate Google starting for only
one dollar.
WebSite
Auditor Enterprise is an advanced on-page optimization tool that lets you
make effective web pages using the smartest on-page optimization methods. It
will be ideal for website owners, webmasters, professional SEOs and copywriters.
Besides giving plenty of analytical information about on-page
strategies of your niche competition, WebSite Auditor gives plain-text advice
that makes optimizing a page simple even for an SEO beginner.
It creates a customizable A-Z Optimization Report that will be
ideal for presenting to SEO clients and has all data and recommendations
necessary for successful optimization of any particular website in any targeted
search engine.
In a matter of seconds, WebSite auditor will show ideal
keyword density and prominence in all page elements: title, h1 – h6 headings,
meta description, bold texts and so on.
Here is what you can do with WebSite Auditor:
- You will see why website’s competitors got their top
rankings.
- You’ll know what the targeted search engines want to see on the website’s
pages
- You will know how to change the pages to get better search engine results.
- You or your client will easily make all necessary changes under the guidance
of WebSite Auditor.
- You will clearly see what problem areas are there on the web pages.
- You’ll know how to eliminate each problem.
- You will have ready step-by-step optimization advice.
- Important on-page optimization questions will be answered in the A-Z
Optimization Report.
and much more.
WebSite Auditor provides you with different types of reports
for providing them to clients and for in-house us. All reports can be saved in
HTML or Adobe PDF for printout, emailed or uploaded to a website via FTP.
Eye Tracking Studio Knowing what people see and – more important – what they miss out is the key to an effective marketing campaign which turns people to buyers. Stop guessing and use the unique features of eye tracking to get insight into peoples attention. Imagine looking through your customers eyes to evaluate the impact of your marketing means, find hidden deficiencies and compare it to the campaign of your competitors. Eye Tracking Studio includes powerful visualizations which make communicating the results an easy task.
Eye Tracking Studio is the all-in-one software package for eye tracking studies. Designed to work with Mirametrix Eye Tracker, it makes eye tracking studies incredibly easy.
Get the most out of eye tracking with intuitive test procedures and flexible analysis tools.
- Gain insight into human cognition, consumer behaviour and oculomotor processes.
- Create powerful visualizations and perform quantitative analysis.
- Getting the most out of eye tracking has never been easier.
From fundamental scientific research to commercial studies the Eye Tracking Studio analysis suite offers an unprecedented tool for the whole lifecycle of an eye tracking study. With its new workflow it is easy to manage all kinds of studies in an intuitive and flexible way.
Get the most out of eye tracking with intuitive test procedures and flexible analysis tools. Create illustrative visualizations and statistics.
The things you will probably like most about Eye Tracking Studio are:
- getting standardized eye tracking metrics is easy
- integration of multiple data streams like gaze data, mouse movement, clicks and key strokes
- web centered workflow including detection and handling of dynamic web page elements
Image SEO Tool. This tool examines the images on your web page and tells you how well they are being "seen" by search engines like Google. Check alt tags for suiabiliyt, etc... More Webmaster ToolsMore Graphics.
Web Masters.Click Here Now to start making money. A Great opportunity to make some money. Receive
50% by offering your users Ton's of Keywords on
A Great Portal websites. Our Affiliate Program Pays you 50% on Level 1 of Every Sale of our
Text Link both searchable and static Text Link!
A Computer Portal. Freeware, Shareware. Download software. Computer languages and Programming code. Including PERL Scripts and Java Scripts. Webmaster Tools. Internet Marketing, Website promotion.
Hardware Help from BIOS to Windows and UNIX.
.jpg)
Repurpose old content
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at 
There are two kinds of tricks you can train your text to do: the kind of tricks you like or the kind of tricks your audience likes. Obviously, training your text to do the tricks you like will make you happy... but it won't make your audience happy. You think the tricks are cool, but nobody else does. And... that's just not cool.
Bolded Text: Bolding key words, phrases, and sentences can also allow your visitors to find key points as they quickly scan your content. Note that I said "key words", not "keywords". There is nothing wrong with using keywords in your bolded text, but that should not be the reason for using bold text. You bold text because it's important, not because you want to get a keyword in bold font.
It wasn't long before Jon and Shannon started dating, and a few years later they married and are still happily married today. 
This was obviously his way of attempting to build a playground in a minefield. I'm not sure how that worked out for him, but it will work as a good analogy here.
Keep your content persuasive. Just because someone knows you love them doesn't mean you don't ever have to tell them. Your content should tell your audience what you want them to do. Do you want them to purchase? Download? Learn more? Add to cart? Failure to have calls to action throughout your content will lead to a stagnant relationship. The audience won't know what you want them to do next and, sooner or later, they will wander off.
So, how is it that a story we have all seen played out in 100 different movies and "message" Star Trek episodes turns into one of the most popular movies of all time? It's because James Cameron took a great heaping pile of "Meh.", and made it all, "Oooh, shiny!". It's uniqueness overshadowed the complete and total hollowness of everything else on the screen.
Highly Targeted Phrases: These are long-tail phrases that are very targeted for your audience, addressing specific areas of interest. Highly targeted phrases are generally pretty easy to get ranked but they also bring in an audience that has a very specific need. Write information that targets these searchers by providing new information, a new spin, a new take on, or a new way of looking at things.
My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.