Blogs Of SEO

Infographic: How To Do Keyword Research For SEO

2012-09-28T12:02:00.000+05:30

Good SEO begins with good keyword research. After all, if you don’t know the ways people are seeking your content, it’s pretty hard to ensure that your content “speaks” to them using the words they search for. The folks at Promodo have an infographic outlining some key parts of the keyword research process. Understanding that each page has its own terms to target, brainstorming possible terms, researching with the Google Keyword Tool and more are covered. Check it out:

Infographic: How To Rank For Your Name In Google (Hint: Use Social Media Sites)

2012-08-08T11:47:00.000+05:30

Want to rank better in Google? If you’re an individual, you could build your own site and hope it does well. But you might have more success by creating a page for yourself on a social media site like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Ranking On Google: The SEO Way

For those unfamiliar, the process of trying to rank better on Google and search engines in general is called search engine optimization. We’ve even got a short SEO video that explains it:

Success with SEO depends on a range of signals that search engines interpret, such as those covered on our Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors. You could build a web site, then hope that site gains enough favorable signals to rise up in Google. But for individuals, tapping into social media sites allows you to rank better on the favorable work those sites have already done or gained with Google.

Ranking On Google: The Social Media Way

A new infographic from the people at BrandYourself explains this more. It covers stats based how over 1oo,000 BrandYourself users rank on Google, showing how social media sites can help:

The infographic starts out with stats that back up facts already well known: lots of people search for other people on Google, and few searchers go past the first page of results that they get. So what shows up on the first page is important.

How Social Media Profiles Rank

The bottom part of the infographic is most interesting. It shows, on average, where personal profiles from various social media sites tend to rank in Google’s results.

For example, Facebook and Twitter are both in the #4 box, which means on average, they tend to rank fourth in Google (obviously, only one will be fourth in any particular search, not both, but we’re talking about the average placement here).

The surprise to me was that LinkedIn gets the highest of rankings. The list looks like this for major social media sites:

LinkedIn: #3
Facebook, Twitter: #4
Google+: #7

Google+ was another surprise. Google’s taken a huge amount of flak that it seems to favor its own social network, Google+. If that’s the case, how come Google+ doesn’t rank higher, on average. It might be that this study didn’t reflect personalized results. It might also reflect that not a lot of people still have Google+ accounts.

Dominating The Page

The middle of the graphic covers the concept of “owning” or “dominating” the first page of search results, where every result is one that you control, something that those who are seeking to have a positive appearance in Google aim for.

This is again where social media profiles come in. The ones from major social media sites listed above are all easy to obtain. Once gained, they might help you rank better for your name and “push down” other results.
Some of the other social media profiles not listed (but on the infographic), those from more niche sites, can also help. Open a WordPress blog, a Tumblr blog, a Vimeo account, a YouTube profile or a Flickr account, and the study suggests there’s an excellent chance these will gain first page rankings, as well.

Remember, however, something really negative that gains widespread attention might stay in Google’s top results, no matter what you try. Just ask Rick Santorum. Getting your own social media profiles make sense for a variety of reasons, including helping your Google “reputation.” But they are no guarantee of making negative listings disappear.

In addition, working in a negative fashion to remove results you don’t like — such as through ill-advised legal threats — might actually help cement those negative results in Google, if they gain much attention.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/infographic-how-to-rank-for-your-name-in-google-129850

30 Free Ways To Market Your Small Business Site

2012-06-26T17:23:00.000+05:30

Are you looking for ways to market your small business website with a limited budget?

Whether it’s with established sites such as Google and Facebook, or newer outlets like Pinterest, there are plenty of options available to promote your site.

There are at least 30 ways to market your website with a time investment and no credit card required. Some of these are oldies but goodies, while others are newer and exciting avenues you may not have tried out yet.
Here are 30 things you can do today to get started marketing your website for free.

Press releases still work. Granted a submission to PRWeb or a Vocus account make the pickup and link benefit much easier, but those cost dollars – so for this article lets reiterate the best free press release sources:
- 24-7PressRelease.com
- PRLog.org
- IdeaMarketers.com
Send the press release to your local media outlets, or any niche media outlets that may be interested in what you do.
Claim, verify, and update your Google Local Business listing. This is extremely important. Google Local Listings have been absorbed into Google+, so be sure to check out this great resource over at Blumenthals.com to keep up to date on how to manage your Google Local Listing.
Find a niche social media site that pertains to your exact business and participate. Be helpful, provide relevant and useful information, and your word of mouth advertising will grow from that engagement.
- Examples:
  - Travel or hospitality business – Tripadvisor.com forums
  - Photography store – Photo.net or RockTheShotForum.com
  - Wedding Planning or Favor site – Brides.com or Onewed.com forums
  - Search your niche or service plus forums to find ideas. If there isn’t a forum out there, consider starting one.
Build a Google+ page for your business and follow businesses that are related to your product or service niche. Share informative and relative content and link to your profile from your website. You should also consider allowing users to +1 your content on a page by page basis.
Setting up joint benefit with local businesses or others in your niche can help you reach eyes you never did before. Be sure to answer the question "Will my user find this information beneficial as they shop and purchase?" every time you link to a resource, or request a link or listing on another site.
Comment and offer original, well thought out, sensible information, opinion and help on blogs that are relevant to your website's topic and be sure to leave your URL. Even if a nofollow tag is attached, you could gain a bit of traffic and some credibility as an authority on the subject matter. This is not blog comment spamming, this is engaging in a conversation relevant to your website's topic.
Set up and verify a Webmaster Central Account at Google.
Set up a Bing Webmaster Tools account and verify it.
Update or create your XML sitemap and upload it to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Write a "how-to" article that addresses your niche for Wikihow.com or Answers.com. This is kind of fun and a good resource for getting mentions and links. Looking at your product or service in a step-by-step manner is often enlightening in several ways. It can help you better explain your products and services on your own website. I will say I don’t know why some of these sites still rank well, many of them are junk. I do like most of the answers on the two sites mentioned above. Be picky with where you participate.
Write unique HTML page titles for all of your pages. This is still extremely important, don’t skimp on this one.
Share your photos at Flickr – get a profile, write descriptions, and link to your website. Don't share photos you don't own or have permission to use.
Start a blog. There's nothing wrong with getting the basics of blogging down by using a free service from Blogger or WordPress.
Make sure your Bing and Yahoo Local listings are up to date.
Update and optimize your description and URL at YP.com. They'll try to get you to spend money on an upgraded listing or some other search marketing options. Don't bother with that, but make sure the information is accurate and fresh.
Use your Bing Webmaster Tools account to look at your incoming links. How do they look? Are all of the sites relevant and on-topic? If not, reevaluate your link building practices and start contacting any of the irrelevant sites you can and ask them to take down your link. A clean and relevant incoming link profile is important; cleaning up bad links is a necessity until we can tell Google and Bing which links we want them to ignore.
Make a slideshow of your products or record an original how-to video and upload to YouTube. Be sure to optimize your title and descriptions. Once it's uploaded, write a new page and embed the video on your own Web site. Add a transcription of the video if possible.
Try a new free keyword tool for researching website optimization, then see #20.
Add a page to your site focused on a top keyword phrase you found in #19.
Build a Facebook Page and work to engage those that are interested in your product or service. Facebook is so much more robust than it ever was! Create groups, events, and photo albums. Link to your Facebook profile from your site and allow visitors to your site to like and share your content.
Install Google Analytics if you don’t have any tracking software. The program is pretty amazing and it's free. You need to do this if you haven’t already. It's that important.
Start Twittering or start doing it much better than you are now – it's a great way to network with like-minded individuals.
Pinterest is hot right now. If you have visually stimulating content that is relevant to the site's demographic, you can find great success right now. Be sure you're using solid practices for marketing on Pinterest as you get started.
Create a new list in Twitter and follow profiles of industry experts you know and trust. Use this as your modern feed reader. I don’t use RSS feed readers anymore. I like content that has been vetted by my peers and is worthy of a tweet or two.
Try a new way to write an ad for a struggling PPC ad group or campaign.
Review your Google Analytics In-Page insights and take note of how users are interacting with your page. Where to they click, what is getting ignored. Make changes based on this knowledge.
Set up a Google Content Experiment through your Analytics account and test with the information you obtained and changes you made in number 27.
Build a map at Google Maps and add descriptions for your storefront, locations, and nearby useful points of interest. Make your map public and embed it on your own website. Add links back to relevant content on your site if possible to each point of interest.
Keep reading Search Engine Watch for more free tips and tricks.

There you have it – 30 ways to market your website. Get to work and make something happen! There's no reason to say you can't be successful because you don’t have a huge advertising budget. Time is all you need.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2048588/30-Free-Ways-To-Market-Your-Small-Business-Site

Responsive Web Design: Introduction & Impact

2012-06-21T10:34:00.001+05:30

Last week, there was little surprise when Google’s Pierre Far announced responsive design as company’s formal recommendation for mobile delivery. Responsive Web Design is the approach that a design should be flexible enough to adapt to the screen size and platform of the visiting user.

This (relative) uniformity in user experience would appear to be wonderful for search engines and developers alike.

Google was going to face a major conundrum: if every site had an entirely separate experience for mobile and desktop users, which site would actually be the one worthy of the incoming link? Would that rank pass to the mobile site and, if so, how much and why?

This is especially important when considering that there are predictions that mobile usage will overtake desktop usage by 2014. By encouraging developers to create one cogent web experience that adapts to the platform, Google is likely able to preserve many of its link algorithms and — to a certain degree — avoid the daunting burden of attempting to evaluate mobile and desktop versions as separate entities.

For developers, the benefits are also clear: the burden of needing to maintain multiple versions of a website will disappear over time. Additionally, a move to RWD will likely create a “Mobile First” mentality, which will inevitably result in a more clear architecture and user experience that is appropriately weighted.

Understanding Responsive Design

For a design to be responsive, it typically needs the following three attributes:

Fluid Grid: A fluid grid system uses percentages to define column or div widths instead of pixels. For example, a “hero” might have a width of 650px in fixed width design, whereas it would be labeled as 100% in the CSS of a fluid width design.
Media Queries: Media queries enable custom CSS based on the min-max width of a browser. For example, a media query with a max-width of 450px would be intended for mobile only browsers.
<link href="css/phone.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="only screen and (max-width: 450px)">
Responsive Images: Similar in nature to the fluid grid, responsive images don’t have fixed widths but instead have a max-width (typically labeled at 100 percent when displayed on a desktop). This enables images to be scaled down to fit the width of the screen on which the webpage is rendered.

The output of these attributes is simple to recognize. Simply take a responsive design such as Starbucks and manually resize the browser. You should notice the screen resizes and adjusts based on the width of the browser.

Getting Started with Responsive

Below are just a few great tools for experimenting with responsive design.

Twitter Bootstrap: Twitter Bootstrap is a fantastic toolset for quickly building responsive sites and landing pages. Most developers consider this a must-have for its robust base CSS and Javascript plugins.
Themeforest: WordPress addicts and do-it-yourselfers might want to take a look at Themeforest’s WordPress Templates. There are hundreds of responsive designs and a pretty active community reviewing them.
Net Magazine: Check out Net Magazine’s top 50 tools for Responsive Wordpress Design.

Immediate Impact

Responsive Design should help encourage the proliferation of more mobile experiences, especially in the small/medium business world. This unofficial standard will be an important step as it will ensure many small/medium businesses will have a mobile presence without significant additional expense. Whether these presences will be able to monetize will be a different story.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2184616/Responsive-Web-Design-Introduction-Impact

Search quality highlights: 39 changes for May - Inside Search

2012-06-09T12:47:00.001+05:30

May is often a big month for us in Search, and 2012 has been no exception. This month we had exciting announcements including the Knowledge Graph, better search for users in mainland China, and an updated Search App for iPhone. We also released new sports features, deeper detection of hacked pages, and much more.

Here’s the list for May:

Deeper detection of hacked pages. [launch codename "GPGB", project codename "Page Quality"] For some time now Google has been detecting defaced content on hacked pages and presenting a notice on search results reading, “This site may be compromised.” In the past, this algorithm has focused exclusively on homepages, but now we’ve noticed hacking incidents are growing more common on deeper pages on particular sites, so we’re expanding to these deeper pages.
Autocomplete predictions used as refinements. [launch codename "Alaska", project codename “Refinements”] When a user types a search she’ll see a number of predictions beneath the search box. After she hits “Enter”, the results page may also include related searches or "refinements". With this change, we’re beginning to include some especially useful predictions as “Related searches” on the results page.
More predictions for Japanese users. [project codename "Autocomplete"] Our usability testing suggests that Japanese users prefer more autocomplete predictions than users in other locales. Because of this, we’ve expanded the number or predictions shown in Japan to as many as eight (when Instant is on).
Improvements to autocomplete on Mobile. [launch codename "Lookahead", project codename "Mobile"] We made an improvement to make predictions work faster on mobile networks through more aggressive caching.
Fewer arbitrary predictions. [launch codename "Axis5", project codename "Autocomplete"] This launch makes it less likely you’ll see low-quality predictions in autocomplete.
Improved IME in autocomplete. [launch codename "ime9", project codename "Translation and Internationalization"] This change improves handling of input method editors (IMEs) in autocomplete, including support for caps lock and better handling of inputs based on user language.
New segmenters for Asian languages. [launch codename "BeautifulMind"] Speech segmentation is about finding the boundaries between words or parts of words. We updated the segmenters for three asian languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, to better understand the meaning of text in these languages. We’ll continue to update and improve our algorithm for segmentation.
Scoring and infrastructure improvements for Google Books pages in Universal Search. [launch codename “Utgo”, project codename “Indexing”] This launch transitions the billions of pages of scanned books to a unified serving and scoring infrastructure with web search. This is an efficiency, comprehensiveness and quality change that provides significant savings in CPU usage while improving the quality of search results.
Unified Soccer feature. [project codename "Answers"] This change unifies the soccer search feature experience across leagues in Spain, England, Germany and Italy, providing scores and scheduling information right on the search result page.
Improvements to NBA search feature. [project codename "Answers"] This launch makes it so we’ll more often return relevant NBA scores and information right at the top of your search results. Try searching for [nba playoffs] or [heat games].
New Golf search feature. [project codename "Answers"] This change introduces a new search feature for the Professional Golf Association (PGA) and PGA Tour, including information about tour matches and golfers. Try searching for [tiger woods] or [2012 pga schedule].
Improvements to ranking for news results. [project codename "News"] This change improves signals we use to rank news content in our main search results. In particular, this change helps you discover news content more quickly than before.
Better application of inorganic backlinks signals. [launch codename "improv-fix", project codename "Page Quality"] We have algorithms in place designed to detect a variety of link schemes, a common spam technique. This change ensures we’re using those signals appropriately in the rest of our ranking.
Improvements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm.
Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated. [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"] We have algorithms designed to present the best possible result titles. This change will show a more succinct title for results where the current title is so long that it gets truncated. We’ll only do this when the new, shorter title is just as accurate as the old one.
Efficiency improvements in alternative title generation. [launch codename "TopOfTheRock", project codename "Snippets"] With this change we’ve improved the efficiency of title generation systems, leading to significant savings in cpu usage and a more focused set of titles actually shown in search results.
Better demotion of boilerplate anchors in alternate title generation. [launch codename "otisredding", project codename "Snippets"] When presenting titles in search results, we want to avoid boilerplate copy that doesn’t describe the page accurately, such as “Go Back.” This change helps improve titles by avoiding these less useful bits of text.
Internationalizing music rich snippets. [launch codename "the kids are disco dancing", project codename "Snippets"] Music rich snippets enable webmasters to mark up their pages so users can more easily discover pages in the search results where you can listen to or preview songs. The feature launched originally on google.com, but this month we enabled music rich snippets for the rest of the world.
Music rich snippets on mobile. [project codename "Snippets"] With this change we’ve turned on music rich snippets for mobile devices, making it easier for users to find songs and albums when they’re on the go.
Improvement to SafeSearch goes international. [launch codename "GentleWorld", project codename "SafeSearch"] This change internationalizes an algorithm designed to handle results on the borderline between adult and general content.
Simplification of term-scoring algorithms. [launch codename "ROLL", project codename "Query Understanding"] This change simplifies some of our code at a minimal cost in quality. This is part of a larger effort to improve code readability.
Fading results to white for Google Instant. [project codename "Google Instant"] We made a minor user experience improvement to Google Instant. With this change, we introduced a subtle fade animation when going from a page with results to a page without.
Better detection of major new events. [project codename "Freshness"] This change helps ensure that Google can return fresh web results in realtime seconds after a major event occurs.
Smoother ranking functions for freshness. [launch codename "flsp", project codename "Freshness"] This change replaces a number of thresholds used for identifying fresh documents with more continuous functions.
Better detection of searches looking for fresh content. [launch codename "Pineapples", project codename "Freshness"] This change introduces a brand new classifier to help detect searches that are likely looking for fresh content.
Freshness algorithm simplifications. [launch codename “febofu", project codename "Freshness"] This month we rolled out a simplification to our freshness algorithms, which will make it easier to understand bugs and tune signals.
Updates to +Pages in right-hand panel. [project codename “Social Search”] We improved our signals for identifying relevant +Pages to show in the right-hand panel.
Performance optimizations in our ranking algorithm. [launch codename "DropSmallCFeature"] This launch significantly improves the efficiency of our scoring infrastructure with minimal impact on the quality of our results.
Simpler logic for serving results from diverse domains. [launch codename "hc1", project codename "Other Ranking Components"] We have algorithms to help return a diverse set of domains when relevant to the user query. This change simplifies the logic behind those algorithms.
Precise location option on tablet. [project codename “Mobile”] For a while you've had the option to choose to get personalized search results relevant to your more precise location on mobile. This month we expanded that choice to tablet. You’ll see the link at the bottom of the homepage and a button above local search results.
Improvements to local search on tablet. [project codename “Mobile”] Similar to the changes we released on mobile this month, we also improved local search on tablet as well. Now you can more easily expand a local result to see more details about the place. After tapping the reviews link in local results, you’ll find details such as a map, reviews, menu links, reservation links, open hours and more.
Internationalization of “recent” search feature on mobile. [project codename "Mobile"] This month we expanded the “recent” search feature on mobile to new languages and regions.

Source: http://insidesearch.blogspot.ch/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-changes.html

Link Building A-Z Guide – Definitions & Terms

2012-05-08T12:00:00.002+05:30

When those of us in search marketing talk and write about link building, we tend to use terms that we think are very commonly understood. We bandy around phrases like "CTR on page 1 of the SERPs is better than on page 2" and "god help me if my content gets deindexed."

However, for the new guys and gals out there (and that includes people who are both learning about building links and clients who seek link services) this link building guide will help define and explain some of the more common link building terms, from A to Z.

A - Anchor Text, AC Rank, Actual PageRank

Anchor text
The content inside of the anchor element ( < a>anchor text < /a>) and is designed to give you an idea of what the content you are pointing to is about. The anchor element contains an href attribute where the target of the link is designated. The anchor element is, many times, called an anchor tag.

AC Rank
Majestic SEO's measure of a page's importance, on a scale of 0 to 10. It can be considered an alternative to Google's PageRank and is used in various link tool programs. The AC Rank stands for A Citation Rank.

The Actual PageRank
Google's value for your page, and it's not what you see on a tool or your toolbar, as that isn't updated frequently enough to reflect the true value.

B - Backlink Profile, Blog Network, Bing, Blekko, Bait

Backlink profile
A term used to describe the links coming into a site from sources other than the site itself.

Blog networks
Exactly what they sound like: networked blogs. Their importance in link building has recently been compromised as several high-profile and large networks (e.g., BuildMyRank) have been devalued.

Bing
The most popular alternative to Google's search engine at the current time, owned by Microsoft.

Blekko
Also a great alternative to Google and prides itself on being a spam-free search engine. It has some great features that can help you when link building.

Bait [link bait]
Content that is specifically designed in order to naturally attract links.

C - Conversion, CTR, Content

Conversion
A term used to describe an event where a user performs a certain action that is valuable to you as a site owner. Some webmasters view a contact email as a conversion, for example, while others simply view an actual sale as one.

CTR [click through rate]
A term associated with PPC but becoming more popular in the general SEO vernacular as some speculate that it may become more important in ranking. Your CTR is the number of times your listing is shown (triggered by a search and referred to as impressions with PPC) divided by the number of times it's clicked upon, calculated as a percentage.

Content
The subject matter, in text and images, of your site and its pages. Content is also used to describe anything that your brand produces, whether it's a guest post on another site, an article that you distribute, a press release, or an infographic.

D - Deep Link Ratio, Directories, Drain Rank, Deindexed

Deep link ratio
The percentage of links that go to your subpages vs. just your home page. Many different views abound about what number is ideal.

Directories
One of the most consistent ways that people have built links throughout the years. There are paid and free versions, directories that accept all submissions and many that are quite picky about what they'll accept, and while they have fallen out of fashion somewhat recently, they are still a valid source of traffic.

Drain rank
This refers to the idea that linking out to other sites drains your PageRank.

Deindexed
Refers to being thrown out of a search engine and removed from their database.

E - External Link, Equity

External links
Links that go from your site to someone else's site. Some people nofollow them in order to prevent them from receiving any link juice.

Equity
The group of links pointing to your site at a point in time.

F - Followed Link, Footer Link, Footprint

Followed links
Links that are allowed to send link juice to their targets. For ranking purposes, these are the kind of links that you want. A link without a rel=nofollow is a followed link.

Footer links
Links that appear in the footer of a site, generally on every page. These were originally so abused that many SEOs now consider a footer link to be very poor. However, there are still legitimate footer links.

Footprints
Ways of identifying patterns that you're using to build links. For example, if 75 percent of your links come from non-U.S.-hosted sites and are all on blogrolls, that's a big footprint. A "natural" backlink profile should not have many obvious footprints due to its organic nature, therefore having easily identifiable footprints is a potential bad sign for your site. However, you can have a good footprint too (such as if you had a lot of great and authoritative links from respected news sources because your site was constantly being cited there.)

G - Google, Guest Posting, Graph

Google

So powerful, it's now a verb. No matter what anyone says, almost all of us market to what Google wants.
Guest posting

A popular way of building links and creating new content. Many sites actively recruit for new guest posters and some are amenable to the idea when contacted. The whole idea of a guest post is to raise exposure for a brand on another site, but it's quickly becoming a spammy and abused method. However, when done correctly, guest posts can bring you some fantastic traffic.

Link graph
Generally speaking, the link graph is a representation of links for sites. It can be thought of as being the "normal" for a niche of sites but may also refer to links for a certain market sector/keyword/locality/etc. You can use a link graph for competitive research to define what everyone else is doing and see where you stand in relation to that. A complicated thing to define, as it's not a discrete concept.

Href, Hashtag, Hidden Link

href
An HTML attribute that lists the target of a link. An example is < a href="http://www.w3schools.com">Visit W3Schools < /a>.

Hashtags
Widely used on social network platforms in order to associate a tweet/comment with something. They begin with #. On Twitter, hashtags are used to help trend certain ideas. For link building purposes, hashtag searches on Twitter are useful for finding good potential link targets.

Hidden link
A link that is intentionally coded in order to not appear as a link. It can be hidden using a text color that is the same as the background, placed inside an irrelevant image, font size 0, etc. These are viewed as manipulative and deceptive and can cause Google to remove your site from their index.

I - Image Link, Internal Link, Inbound Link

Image link
An image that is linked to a target. Image links are part of a natural link profile and can pass link juice, but they do not include anchor text as regular text links do. Instead, they use an alt text (which is also used by screenreaders) to give information about the link target.

Internal Link
A link from one page of your site to another page on your site.

Inbound links
Links coming to your site from a site other than your own. The anchor text of an inbound link supposedly tells the search engines what your page is about, thus helping you rank for that term.

J - Juice

Juice
A term used to describe the benefit received from a link, also referred to as link juice.

K - Keyword

Keywords
Words or phrases for which you want to rank in the search engines. They should be present in your copy and in links pointing to your site.

L - Link Profile

Link profile
The collective group of sites that link to you.

M - MozRank

MozRank
A method of measuring the link popularity of a webpage by SEO software provider SEOMoz. Becoming a more important metric by the day, almost akin to PageRank.

N - Nofollowed Link

nofollowed link
These are indicated by placing a rel="nofollow" into the link code. A nofollow is designed to tell Google that the link should not pass value to the target. Nofollows are also used internally for PageRank sculpting and to indicate that a link is sponsored/paid. Nofollow links are not good for ranking purposes but they can be good for traffic.

O - Outbound Linking

Outbound linking
The practice of linking from your site to another. Many people nofollow these links in an effort to conserve link juice, but that practice is becoming a bit more frowned upon recently.

P - PageRank, Panda, Penguin, Paid Links

PageRank
Google's measure of a page's importance. There's a difference in what you can see as your PageRank and what Google thinks it is.

Panda
A Google algorithm update that can make grown men cry. It first struck fear into our hearts in February 2011 and was an effort to force higher quality sites higher up in the SERPs. After the first update, we've seen several more. There's way, way too much to go into here but you can read all the SEW articles about it here.

Penguin
A new search algorithm designed to detect, and boot out, spam. Like Panda, it made us cry and several sites were "accidentally" affected by it, so badly that there's actually a form to fill out if you think you're one of those accidental cases. Again, there's too much to go into so read about it here.

Paid links
Refers to links that are bought and placed on a website, with the intention of helping the buyer's website rank better. When not indicated as such, are a violation of Google's guidelines and are a risky tactic. Paid links can be problematic both for the site selling them and for the webmaster buying them as both practices can get you penalized. If a link has been purchased, it should be indicated as such with a nofollow according to Google.

Q - Query

Query
Simply a question that you ask a search engine or a database, whether or not it's in the form of a question. We refer to queries in terms of how many times someone searches for a keyphrase, and in manners related to seeing where you rank in an engine.

R - Rel, Robots, Redirects, Rot, Rank

Rel
An element that gives the role of a link. Current uses critical for link building are to say whether a link should be followed (the default) or nofollowed (rel=nofollow).

Robots
Search engine bots, but robots can be slang for the robots.txt file, which gives instructions to engines about what to do with your site. If you don't want certain pages to be indexed, you block them in the robots file. There are also meta robots tags (< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">) A robots.txt file is also found at url.com/robots.txt.

Rot
A term used to describe what happens when there are links pointing to pages that are no longer available and not properly redirected or handled.

Rank
Where you show up on the SERPs.

S - Sitewides, Social Signals, SERPs, Spam

Sitewide links
Links that are on every page of a site. You commonly see them in sidebars and footers, and while they once were a pretty easy way to get good rankings quickly, they're no longer viewed so positively. You do tend to find them in almost any backlink profile though, as they are part of a natural profile.

Social signals
Signs that your site/post/article is doing well socially, on the main social network platforms. Social signals are thought to be an ever-increasing method of measuring importance in the search engines and may become a bigger part of algorithms.

SERPs [search engine results pages]
The pages Google, Bing, and others show you after you've performed a search.

Spam
Jokingly referred to as being "sites positioned above mine", but is defined as being anything that clutters the web and makes for a poor user experience. Spam links are considered to be links that are irrelevant and low-quality but pursued simply to improve rankings.

T - Twitter, Toolbar Pagerank (TBPR)

Twitter
A social media platform where users communicate through 140 characters or less. It's becoming more and more useful for finding good information as it happens.

Toolbar PageRank [TBPR]
The number from 0 to 10 that you can see that reflects the most recently updated idea of how important your site is to Google. It is not Google's true value of your site.

U - Underline, Unnatural Link Warnings

Underline
To signify most links, the linked keywords will be underlined. Links are commonly coded with underlining; style manipulations that do not underline a link can be considered to be a hidden link.

Unnatural link warnings
Like lice, nobody wants to see them. They are messages received in Google's Webmaster Tools that indicate that some potentially unnatural links have been detected for your site.

V - Velocity

Velocity
Your link growth speed. It can be measured with Link Research Tools.

W - Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools
Google's free platform that you can use to keep an eye on your site in Google's eyes. It can be a first line of defense when you notice any negative changes with rankings and traffic.

X - Xenu

Xenu's Link Sleuth
One of those old-school things that anyone who's been involved in SEO for more than a few years probably loves. Xenu's Link Sleuth identifies broken links on sites.

Y - Yahoo

Yahoo
The other search engine. Many link builders will refer to being listed in the Yahoo Directory, which used to be one of those things that we all recommended. Today, Bing provides the search results you see on Yahoo.

Z - Zzzzz

Zzzzz
Sleep, which you definitely need if you're going to link build. It's tiring work!

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172916/Link-Building-A-Z-Guide-Definitions-Terms

Your Website Might Be Over Optimized If …

2012-04-19T16:38:00.003+05:30

There has been a great deal of speculation about the shape and form search engine rankings will take after Google’s chief spam cop Matt Cutts first announced that the search engine is working on devising a new penalty for sites that are “over optimized” or “overly SEOed.”

While speaking during a presentation at SXSW in mid-March, Cutts said that for the past few months Google has been working on a new penalty targeting websites that are overly optimized, and that the new over-optimization penalty would be introduced into search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks.
Cutts indicated that the new over-optimization penalty was being designed to level the playing field between sites that have great content, but can’t seem to rank above sites that have content that isn't as great, but do a better job with search engine optimization. Yet here we are in the middle of April none the wiser as to what an over-optimization penalty actually entails.

Some have speculated that the new over-optimization penalty will likely be triggered by “unnatural” linking structures since Google is starting to send out more “bad link” notification messages via Webmaster Tools. Others contend that with Panda and Farmer filters waxing on and waning off, Google is growing its working knowledge of how visitors interact with bad content. It is indeed for this reason that much of the recently published SEO advice focuses on reducing bounce rates and increasing time spent essential web pages.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Today, we can forget all that. Because now is the time to ponder the search engine over-optimization debate in a style worthy of the comedic wit of Jeff Foxworthy.
Please place your tongue in your cheek as we present to you some thoughts and suppositions about how you too might be able to recognize that a website has been over optimized.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your content is scraped from some other websites’ “aggregated” content.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your inbound links originate mostly from other sites you own.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your home page has more AdWords content than visible words on a page.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your site’s pagination structure breaks for each new paragraph.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your website has the same product page in every color and every size for every city in every state.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your website offers free resources, but only to visitors that provide their charge card details.

Your website might be over optimized if … You never bought links, you only rented them.

Your website might be over optimized if … The declared language of your website is “Spamglish.”

Your website might be over optimized if … Your web content loads way too quickly.

Your website might be over optimized if … You keyword-rich-and-hyphenated URLs all use the same phrasing on subdomains numbered www1 through www99.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your only inbound links come from Wikipedia.

Your website might be over optimized if … All the inbound links pointing to your site use the same anchor text.

Your website might be over optimized if … All your friends only over-share your web content.

Your website might be over optimized if … All your inbound links come from forums.

Your website might be over optimized if … All your inbound links come from Blogger comments.

Your website might be over optimized if … You just happen to really, really like white text on a white background.

Your website might be over optimized if … You have someone else’s rel=author details under another author’s byline.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your visitors see something way different than GoogleBot “sees.”

Your website might be over optimized if … Your content is so good you need to charge visitors a fee for reading it.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your content is so good that its rel=canonical tags can be found in other websites.

Your website might be over optimized if … Only bad sites link to your content.

Your website might be over optimized if … Your website used to rank for [your website might be over optimized if], but now it only ranks for [search engine watch] + phrases.

Parting Thoughts

When I first read about Google’s warnings for its forthcoming over-optimization penalty I checked the calendar to make certain it wasn’t April 1. Reassured that the idea of an over-optimization penalty was not some sort of bad April Fool’s gag, it became obvious that at least to Google “over optimization” is indeed the new search engine spam.

What can you do to avoid triggering one of Google’s algorithmic penalties or results-dampening filters? Act smarter than a fifth grader, and create great content that your visitors will randomly comment upon and share with various friends.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2168809/Your-Website-Might-Be-Over-Optimized-If-

Why Links Matter?

2012-04-11T12:54:00.001+05:30

Whenever I'm asked about what I do for a living, I say something like this: "you know those pieces of text that you can click on inside of a webpage, the ones that take you somewhere else? I place those."
Blank stare. Sometimes they respond with, "OK, but why?" That's a damn good question. The "why" behind the existence of links has been a bit more absent than it should be, especially for people who are new to the field.

Why Do Links Matter?

Hyperlinks were the main method of building the Internet and connecting sites through HTML, allowing people and bots to move around and find what they needed. They were like any other citations, methods of getting additional information by going somewhere else.

Contrary to popular belief, Al Gore didn't invent the hyperlink. The term itself was first used in the 1960s, before most of you were born.

In 1998 there was the first on-paper mention of PageRank, just before Larry Page and Sergei Brin actually founded Google. The theory behind PageRank became part of the basis of the Google algorithm, and continues to be so today.

To greatly simplify the concept, PageRank is a popularity contest wherein the pages with the most support (via inbound links) behind them should be viewed as the most important ones. You could increase a page's importance simply by building as many links as possible to it.

As anyone who deals with SEO knows though, it's a lot trickier than that.

Not All Links Are of Equal Importance

A link from the homepage of a powerful site like the BBC will be of a higher quality than a link from the links page of your high school's blog.

If a competitor that ranked above you in the SERPs had 100 more links than you, you couldn't just go grab 101 links and rank above him. Some links are simply more valuable than others, particularly links from authoritative sites (like respected news sites) and links from .edu and .gov domains.

Like every other SEO tactic, this was abused, differing opinions abounded, and everyone tried to nail down the exact science of it.

In 2005, the nofollow link attribute came along and ruined all our fun. No longer could we throw tons of links at sites in order to make them rank. That can still work as you'll see at times, but quick wins with links aren't as plentiful as they were pre-nofollow.

In 2009, PageRank was removed from Google's Webmaster Tools, mainly due to the fact that people didn't really understand that the number they saw wasn't a true representation of their sites's importance (and was updated about as frequently as your grandma's hairstyle.)

Note: there have been some updates to the original PageRank patent, which Bill Slawski covers in detail here.

The PrePageRank World

What did we do before we had that pesky little toolbar indicator? Without that one commonly misunderstood metric to constantly monitor and agonize about, we used rankings and traffic as an indicator of our performance.

We could also rank a site without links, just by keyword stuffing (cramming keywords into my tags and content to the extent that 50 percent of my words were that exact keyword, for example) and cloaking (figuring out how to send search engine spiders to one place where I keyword-stuffed while showing users a nice, pretty page). Those were the good old days when you could get a link on a site and not get cussed out by your client because they wanted all PR 4s and up and you, stupidly, got a link on a new but very relevant and well-trafficked PR 0 site.

We still knew that links were important. They just didn't make us crazy.

Link exchanges were very big. Having a page just devoted to outgoing links was huge. It was a softer, gentler time when link building as we know it today was innocent. The only people that I knew who built links were generalist SEOs, and looking back now, it's easy to see that we did it badly by today's standards.

Actual PageRank

There's a point that gets lost a lot, one that makes it obvious that actual PageRank and visible PageRank are two very different things.

The PageRank that we can see represented in the bar, a number, from a PageRank checker, etc., is updated infrequently and isn't the actual PageRank that Google assigns to your site. The actual PageRank calculation, if shown here, would make all of our heads spin. Let's just say that it's a lot more complicated than a number from 0 to 10.

Toolbar PageRank

This is what you do see (and sometimes confuse with actual PageRank.) Toolbar PageRank is one of many factors in how your site will rank but its importance is way overblown and oversimplified. You will see sites with a Toolbar PageRank of 1 outranking sites with a Toolbar PageRank of 5, due to various other considerations (like social signals, for example.)

PageRank Sculpting and Link Juice

Now here is where things get particularly interesting to me. Pages have their own specific PageRank (both actual and toolbar) and through linking elsewhere, they can send link juice in the same way that they receive it.

If a page has 10 outgoing links on it and none are nofollowed, each page linked to should receive one-tenth of that page's link juice. If five links are nofollowed and five are not, each of those five followed links should receive 20 percent of that page's link juice and the five nofollowed links should receive none of it.

Due to this idea, people began to experiment with manipulation. (Can you imagine SEOs manipulating anything?) We nofollowed certain links that went to other site pages, ones that weren't quite as important as the others but ones that we did link to in the navigation. That seemed OK.

Later, like with almost everything else, it got complicated. I won't bore you with the details here. Suffice it to say it's not a widely recommended practice anymore. Some still do it, some don't, but controlling link juice didn't work as we hoped it would. You'd think we would all learn our lessons but no, no we never do.

So Why Do Links Matter Today?

Oddly enough, they matter for the same reasons that they have always mattered: they send traffic by making connections and yes, they are still a large part of ranking. I don't see that changing any time soon, even though many people (and myself) think that certain other factors like social signals are becoming important.
A good link will send you nice link juice and help to boost your rankings so that you'll get more traffic and hopefully more conversions. A great link will do the same thing but it will send you traffic on its own.

Some links probably do absolutely nothing positive. You can get a link on a high-profile site and no one will ever click on it. You can receive referring traffic from a footer link on the crappiest site you've ever seen. You can get a rankings boost from both of those links. It's like magic.

Then there's the concept of authority. Links from other sites will lend credibility and authority to your site, ideally, through using you as an example. When a site links to you, the anchor text is viewed as an indicator of what your site is about.

Like the rest of this, that is no longer a perfect system. Theoretically, the keywords that a site links to you with should boost your authority for that topic.

If CNN linked to your site with an anchor of "great place to buy a computer" then your site would probably be viewed as an actual great place to buy a computer, and you'd probably rank higher for that phrase than if you'd gotten that link from your mom's local birdwatching site. However, the birdwatching site would still help you rank for a great place to buy a computer, but since it's most likely not as authoritative as CNN, to actually get a noticeable rankings boost, you'd need to get that link and more of the same for it to make a difference.

CNN has authority signals, which engines can take into account: people link to it, they reference it on Twitter and Facebook, they comment on stories, they comment on videos, the traffic is probably truly amazing, and the brand itself is one that most people recognize. One link from a site like that is much, much more powerful than more links from sites that have no social traction or online footprint.

Here is What I Truly Believe

The importance of links may lessen a bit, but it won't go away completely. The web was built on links. You can rank well without them of course (think breaking news stories or blog posts that get loads of attention on the first few days), but depending upon what shows up in a search engine's results is just as bad an idea as depending upon any one route into your site.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166568/Why-Links-Matter

Infographic: The Google Panda Update, One Year Later

2012-02-25T14:26:00.000+05:30

One year ago, Google launched its “Panda Update” designed to filter low quality or “thin” content from its top search results.

Below, our infographic produced in conjunction with BlueGlass covers how Panda works, what it impacted and the various updates from Panda 1.0 through Panda 3.2 that have happened along the way.

After the infographic, you’ll also find more information about the Panda Update ranging from in-depth analysis of how it works, “winners and losers” and well as recovery tips.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-112805

Everything You Need To Know About SEO Web Structure & Internal Links

2012-02-17T18:14:00.001+05:30

Website structure and internal linking is one of the most inconsistent topics within search engine optimization. Not only are SEO practitioners frequently at odds among ourselves, we must compete with the often conflicting goals of designers, usability experts, and marketing or sales teams. There is a lot of disagreement out there.

Look for yourself. Pick five websites from among your favorite SEO companies or experts. Compare their navigation structures on the homepage, category pages, topic pages and content pages. I am confident you will find noticeable differences.

Does the top navigation use dropdown links?
Do sidebar or top navigation links cross sub-categories and topics?
What type of navigation links do you find in the footers?

What are we to do?

Google says, “Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links” and, “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.”

Google used to suggest limiting the number of links on a page to 100 or less. As Matt Cutts explained, this assists usability and to prevents web pages from dividing PageRank too thinly.

At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience.

Matt Cutts, March 9, 2009

Both are good points; however I suggest that using 100 links as a benchmark does not work well. Websites with high PageRank can be more liberal with links and content than sites with low authority.

If your website has a lot of authority, say a Blekko Host Rank of 1,500 your pages can easily link to 100 other pages. But if your Host Rank is 50 you probably want your pages to link to only your homepage, category pages and a few important SEO keyword optimized target pages. The more raw ranking strength a website possesses, the more liberties it can take with internal linking.

How Should You Structure Your Website?

The following graphic shows the most typical ways website content gets organized. Structuring with categories, topics and sub-topics provides horizontal and vertical hierarchy.

While you can extend this infinitely, the accepted best practice is for pages to be four clicks or fewer from the homepage.

These are my preferred Strict Navigation Rules for a 0–4 depth website:

The Homepage links to all Category Pages (down)
Category Pages

Each Category page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Category page links to all Category pages (across)
Each Category page link to its own Topic pages (down)

Topic Pages

Each Topic page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Topic page links to all Category pages (up)
Each Topic page links to the all Topic pages within its Category (across)
Each Topic page links to its own Sub-topic pages (down)

Sub-topic Pages

Each Sub-topic page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Sub-topic page links to all Category pages (up)
Each Sub-topic page links to all Topic pages within its own Category (up)
Each Sub-topic page links to all Sub-topic pages within its own Topic (across)
Each Sub-topic links to its own Content pages (down)

Content Pages

Each Content page links to the Homepage (up)
Each Content page links to all Category pages (up)
Each Content page links to all Topic pages within its own Category (up)
Each Content page links to all Sub-topic pages within its own Topic (up)
Each Content page links to all Content pages within its own Sub-topic (across)

As you grok this internal linking structure, keep in mind two things are happening here.

First, we are pushing PageRank down into the site. What may not be obvious is you are pushing PageRank back upwards. PageRank is a renewable resource.

After search engines measure a webpage’s raw ranking strength, they reuse some that authority by dividing it among the outbound links on the page and sending it along. Since every page links back to the homepage and category pages, this navigational structure gives those pages the most PageRank.

At this point you may be asking, But Tom, if the homepage and category pages are getting all that authority how do I make my content pages rank?

After all, the content pages are where you optimize for most keywords, right? This is where search engine optimization gets interesting. Your site architecture and internal link structure create the framework within which you optimize, but there is much more to SEO.

Taking Site Structure To The Next Level

Beginning with the top of your website, seasoned optimizers dislike generic categories such as products or solutions. Why waste all that ranking authority on generic pages when employing keywords as categories makes for a far stronger SEO strategy.

Can your turn your product lines into categories?

For example: Wedding Gowns, Bridesmaid Dresses, and Flower Girl Dresses are ideal categories for a bridal shop. Look at how www.amazon.com and www.zappos.com sets-up their categories. Try to emulate this.

Exceptions create high ranking opportunities. Cross-link to create SEO hub-pages. Send extra PageRank to important SEO pages.

If you have a Gasoline Powered Chainsaws page, each time you mention this, link to that page. Use sidebars or content windows to feature and link to your chainsaw page. Write multiple pages or supporting content that can link naturally to it, for example a tutorial on chainsaw safety or guide to properly cutting down trees or article called How to Survive the Upcoming Zombie Apocalypse will all work well.

The problem with creating cross-links to hub-pages is if you create too many links to too many pages, you eat away at your internal linking structure. Avoid this by limiting which hub-pages to cross-link to from your home, category and topic pages. Keep supporting content on the same level or lower in your website organization.

Make category, topic and sub-topic pages content rich. If your category pages are nothing more than links to sub-pages you waste ranking authority. Target these pages to keywords and fill them up with relevant content.

It always seems to come back to creating link-worthy content and having a strong link building and social media program to get off-site links, mentions and shares. The last thing you want is for all your off-site links to point to your homepage.

Yes, PageRank gets reused. But search engines limit or dampen the amount of authority with each re-pass. Having off-site links to many different pages not only sends ranking authority to the target pages, it extends the amount of PageRank which gets passed throughout your website.

Besides that, links to many pages is a basic signal of website quality, it increases a website’s search spider crawl budget, and extends the number of pages the search engines will index and include in their rankings.

Final Thought

Using internal linking to create a vertical site architecture is like setting-up a Monopoly board for game play. You still need to buy properties and add houses and hotels to have a chance at winning.

However, if you never open the box, put the game pieces on Go, lay out the Chance and Community Chest cards or set-up the bank, you cannot play the game.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-seo-web-structure-internal-links-110994

Infographic: Social Media Networking Site Cheat Sheet

2012-02-14T15:30:00.000+05:30

Do you know your Twitter from your Facebook? Your Google+ from your Tumblr? Designed for small businesses, the “cheat sheet” below might still be useful to anyone trying to get familiar with some of the social media networking sites out there.

The infographic is from the folks at Flowtown and provides some basic tips, lingo and relative audience size for various social networking sites, though Pinterest was too new to be included, apparently:

Want the infographic for yourself? You’ll find it here: The Small Business Social Media Cheat Sheet

Source: http://marketingland.com/infographic-social-media-networking-site-cheat-sheet-5927

Guide to Finding Link Building Targets on Social Media Sites

2012-02-08T17:50:00.000+05:30

There’s been a lot of debate in the SEO community lately regarding social media versus traditional linkbuilding methods. While some SEOs argue that social media links are the wave of the SEO future, traditionalists staunchly maintain traditional, authoritative links from quality sources are still the best way to go.

Whatever your stance, I think it’s easy to agree that gaining links from trusted authorities is desirable for any site — but that doesn’t mean the rise of social shouldn’t affect our outreach methods.

We’ll start with the obvious: social sites allow you to network and build relationships with industry players and authorities. Someone who’s gotten to know you over social media is going to be more receptive to a link request than someone receiving a random email from an outside party.

Further, social media offers a quick way to see that you’re a legitimate source with an active interest in the field — you’re not just out to spam any email address or Twitter account you can get your hands on.

However, social media also offers an ideal way to find and target industry users for specific linkbuilding outreach campaigns, too. Of course, before you can start targeting, you’ve got to identify who you’re trying to reach.

Courtesy of Hubspot.com

Identifying Your Target Audience

There are three main strategies for choosing your linkbuilding targets:

Industry Players: These are the active, trusted people who rank well in your industry and can give your site a hefty SEO boost.
Audience Platforms: Reaching out to larger platforms can give you access to your target demographics (a mommy blog with a strong following in your demographic, for example).
Natural Sharers/Curators: These are the people who’ve amassed an audience based on carefully selecting and sharing content from outside sources (Maria Popova from Brainpicker is one example). You may find them more receptive to linkbuilding campaigns since they have a strong interest in finding high-quality links.

Iron Out Your Persona

If you’re building links for an outside site (a client’s site, for example), you’ll need to build an appropriate online persona to match. Obviously you won’t do well reaching out to a fashion blogger with your SEO Twitter account. No matter what social site you’re using (Twitter, Delicious, etc.), your account should match the industry you’re reaching out to.

If you’re trying to build links for your own website, you’re the primary source and voice of your linkbuilding efforts. There’s no need to build a separate persona: just use the social media accounts you already have.

Only Use High-Quality Content

Choose the highest-quality content you have for your linkbuilding efforts. You’ll get better results by promoting informative content (an infographic, a comprehensive case study, etc.), not your homepage link.
The content you choose should be highly original and offer real value to your target audience — something that’s exciting, something they haven’t seen before.

Here’s a look at the various outreach methods for social networking and bookmarking sites.

Search Twitter Directories & Search Engines To Find Applicable Users

Aside from searching Twitter for relevant keywords or hashtags, several sites make it easier for linkbuilders to find and analyze relevant users:

Directories: Twitter directories such as Twellow and WeFollow are perhaps the easiest way to find relevant Twitter users. Search by relevant tag (“writers,” “SEO”) or user location. Twellow also has “Twellowhood,” a searchable map which lets users find Twitter users near them.
Search tools: Sites like Listorious and Followerwonk allow you to search Twitter bios for desired keywords. Followerwonk also lets users analyze a Twitter user’s followers, so if you find one applicable target, you can easily search the other accounts that target is following.

Search Klout For Industry Influencers

Klout lets you easily search influencers by category (“SEO,” “bloggers,” etc.). Better still, Klout lets users connect their profile to a variety of other accounts, including their WordPress site — meaning minimal research for linkbuilders is required. Keep in mind that you’ll need a Klout account in order to access the site’s search services, however.

Search Delicious For Like-Minded Users

Delicious requires more legwork than Twitter or Klout, but it’s a unique way of finding users already prone to sharing. There are three main ways to search Delicious:

By tag: Enter in your keyword and you’ll the most popular links from that category, or “tag.”

By site: Enter in a competitor’s URL to see the users who’ve bookmarked it in the past. Alternatively, use tools like Quantcast.com to find out your site demographics — Quantcast has a section to see which other sites rank well with your site traffic (Wall Street Journal readers also tend to read Smart Money, for example).

By related article: Find an article that’s relevant to your content? Search that article on Delicious and peruse the users who’ve saved it.

Most professional users will have their website clearly listed on their profile. For better luck, try investigating the users who enter in a unique description for the site you’re bookmarking — you’ll have a higher probability of finding the serious users over the casual ones.

Stumble Categories For Guest Posting On StumbleUpon

If you’re sick of paging through “Write for Us” Google results, StumbleUpon offers an attractive way to quickly discover new blogs. Simply enter in your targeted topic and you’ll be able to click through relevant stumbled blogs in a matter of seconds. You can also comment, network, and discover new ideas for content while you’re stumbling.

Search Newsroom Leaders On Digg

Digg currently has a beta feature called “Newsrooms” that collect the most influential topics and users by category. If your subject falls under one of Digg’s Newsroom categories, you can browse through the Newsroom’s “Leaders” (the top Digg users in that particular category).

Search Google+ For Relevant Users

As Google+’s role in Google search increases, it’s doubly important to start courting major players on the network. Find PeopleonPlus.com is a useful G+ directory, but don’t forget you can also search the site through a simple “site:plus.google.com” search.

Search & Analyze LinkedIn Profiles, Groups And Answers

A networking powerhouse, LinkedIn contains three fantastic ways of finding relevant targets:

Advanced Search: Search member profiles by keyword via LinkedIn’s Advanced Search feature (located in the top righthand corner of your profile). You can tweak your searches to include only certain industries or groups as well.
Answers: Check out the Answers section to browse through LinkedIn’s “Top Experts” or “Category Experts.” For a more tailored response, search for applicable questions that relate to your industry and target relevant responders.
Groups: Searching for relevant groups or looking for leads in group forums can often pull up some terrific targets.

The Golden Rules Of Linkbuilding Outreach Campaigns

No matter how you choose to contact your newfound targets, always remember the following four “golden rules” of linkbuilding:

Have a purpose. Whyare you contacting that specific person? Tell your target exactly why you’re reaching out to him.
Tell them how you found them. Showing your research helps showcase why you chose that particular target.
Keep it short and sweet. Your targets are busy people — get to the point quickly or risk wasting their time.
Call them by name. The quickest way to get your message deleted is to lead with a “Dear Sir or Madam.” Do your research and learn your target’s name. It’s the simplest rule, but it makes a huge difference.

Conclusion

Remember, like any part of linkbuilding, social linkbuilding research takes time. These methods may give you new and original ways to find targets, but they don’t cut any corners. The same rules apply: build your networks. Build trust. Start communicating and sharing relevant content.
Do the legwork, assemble your contact list. The links will come — but it’s going to take some real and serious effort on your part.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/guide-to-finding-linkbuilding-targets-with-social-media-108817

Future of SEO: Change, Convergence, Collaboration

2012-02-08T16:32:00.000+05:30

Forrester's Interactive Marketing Forecast for 2011-2016 predicts that 26 percent of all advertising spend will come from interactive marketing reaching a grand total of $77 billion by 2016, with $33 billion of that coming through search.
Although the report states that search will lose some share from 55 percent today to 44 percent of all interactive spend in 2016, it also states that “Marketers refocus their search marketing strategies on 'getting found' by users through any medium — not just search engines.”
While many posts have been written that address change in particular reference to Google, little has been said about how these strategic changes by Google are a result of, and indeed further catalyst to, convergence and collaboration.
Today, that is the main topic of my conversation – convergence and collaboration. It’s a big topic that requires a big post. Why? Like it or not, SEO has changed and its future relies upon a complex relationship with content marketing, social media, and collaborative technology.
The end result is a whole new way of thinking about utilizing SEO and social media strategy and technology.
What’s more, with the input of some expert insight, we will identify a whole new set of the new roles to the SEO landscape that are now totally justifiable – not just as part of a current SEO role, but as full-time roles in their own right.
With change comes great opportunity for the switched on SEO.
Trigonometry (from Greek trigōnon "triangle" + metron "measure"[1]) is a branch of mathematics that studies triangles and the relationships between their sides and the angles between these sides.

Change - A Brief Chronology of Google Change

Chronology of Change (Content), Technology & the Search Engines

Google has changed the way that people find information in search. Taking a step away from the hype and debate, Google Search Plus Your World was launched to solve issues regarding trust and authority of content by adding people, pages, and profiles that are all also fully integrated in search results. Hence, whenever I say change I also think content.
Google's changes over recent years, such as Caffeine and Google Panda updates, are mostly concerned with content and relevancy issues. Google’s SSL changes are driving many SEOs to change and adapt the way they work with a renewed focus on quality content, social media signals, and technology.
In parallel, the closure of Yahoo Site Explorer and gradual reduction in the number of free, reliable, relevant search engine tools has led to an increase in the number of new entrants into the SEO technology market.

Convergence - SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing

Changes in the industry and with the search engines (a.k.a., Google) represent the convergence of search and social media, data and personalization, strategy and tactics.
The increased prominence placed on social media content, seeding, and sharing (social media optimization) has meant social signals are now a standard part of any search optimization techniques. The convergence of SEO and social media has really meant that change is no longer imminent, but upon us.
A new breed of ‘inbound marketers’ aim to take advantage of the convergence of social media, SEO, and content marketing, according to the Marketing Sherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report - SEO Edition:

60 percent plan to increase their social media budgets.
60 percent plan increases in landing page optimization.
57 percent plan increases in SEO.
41 percent plan increases in content marketing.

Change is the Convergence of Social Media, Content Marketing & Technical SEO

Google Search Plus Your World is, in its own words, “bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search” and while many argue the case for a level playing field and the inclusion of Facebook and Twitter data the fact remains that it has an impact on how SEOs work and collaborate with their peers in social media and content marketing as well as with their clients.
Not only do Google’s recent changes typify the convergence of SEO and social media, it also changes the way in which SEO and social media people plan to work together as increasing prominence is given to quality content from social media sources and new influences on rankings.
Suddenly, SEO is being built around circles of social influence with social link building strategies being built in parallel. Content then needs to be made easily sharable through collaboration across social networks through links, and for the time being, Google Circles.
SEO now has to be as conversational as it is contextually relevant and building a framework for optimizing conversational type marketing fits neatly into this.

Convergence - SEO Technology

As the role of SEO develops and converges with social media, we're beginning to see many changes in the SEO technology landscape. For some, this has meant building and adding features as a result of changes within the search environment and the convergence of SEO, social media, and content marketing strategies. For others, developmental improvement has been a continual process, with the major focus being on the importance of identifying and maximizing new SEO opportunities via collaboration with clients through enterprise and productivity based SEO systems.
If you need more evidence then Forrester's Interactive Marketing Forecast now includes a new category – SEO Technology – which will taper to a 12 percent compound annual growth rate.

What’s more, a recent survey from BrightEdge concluded that 72 percent of search marketers surveyed stated that they would spend more on search marketing technology in 2012 compared to 2011.
The changes we mentioned before by the search engines and the convergence of search, social, and content based strategies have meant that shiny new SEO tools and new generations of enterprise SEO platform are being built and developed. Enterprise SEO platforms enable SEO professionals and their clients to achieve a higher ROI from their campaigns by focusing attention on this convergence and focusing on opportunities for collaboration and overall increases in productivity and efficiency.

Tools vs. Platforms

It's important to distinguish between a tool and a platform.

Tools: Most tools serve a single purpose and are specifically designed to help with one specific area of your business. For example, that could be keyword research, link analysis, and analytics.
Platform: A platform provides a holistic solution to a number of client and business needs by offering a suite of integrated tools, most likely in this case, to include monetary, productivity, and relationship management type solutions.

Many SEO tools have developed in line with, or as a direct result of, the changes made by the search engines. The recent closure of Yahoo Site Explorer has given rise to a number of alternatives from providers such SEOMoz site explorer, Web SEO Analytics, and SEO Book toolbar, which all offer free alternatives alongside numerous other options such as Googlehacks.
The rise of Enterprise SEO technology is encouraging business and agencies to collaborate and take advantage of new developments and the convergence of SEO, social media, and content marketing strategies.
Intelligent systems are being developed that use data sources such as Alexa, Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO to refine data relative to business outcomes. These tools combine a number of elements from keyword research, site crawling, backlink analysis, reporting, productivity & CRM, and social media – all with different degrees of capability.
Tool based platforms like Linkdex, Raven Tools, SEMRush, gShiftlabs, Searchmetrics, Conductor, Sycara, and BrightEdge are all developing into enterprise SEO platforms of the future.
These platforms focus on change, convergence, and collaboration by introducing workflow and task management solutions on top on their SEO toolsets and analysis.

Many of these tools are beginning to look like enterprise SEO platforms, but the reality is that there are so many tools to choose from that finding the right can be difficult and depends upon the scope of your role and your client brief.
Companies such as Linkdex and Conductor also offer a suite of SEO tools with a large focus placed on ‘the business of SEO’ and the value derived from close collaboration and the culture of SEO within agencies and businesses alike. Platforms like Linkdex and Brightedge place an emphasis on seizing potential opportunities, something that I like to call ‘opportunity cost based SEO’ by placing monetary value on SEO opportunity and providing competitive comparisons while building enterprise solutions.
As social signals converge in the SERPs, enterprise SEO solutions providers are beginning to integrate and add social media elements to their offerings (i.e., Searchmetrics has been marrying together analytics, search and social media data).
Many other tool providers take a more comprehensive view of the relationship between SEO and PPC with Kenshoo and Covario teaming up on SEO, PPC, social, and local. Other tools such as SEMRush are launching AdSense advertising reporting and Facebook Ad data into their toolbars.
Many full service digital marketing suites now incorporate SEO metrics as they too focus on the convergence of search, social, and display media. Platforms such as IgnitionOne incorporate PPC and SEO data in their attribution systems and the Adobe acquisition of Efficient Frontier gives a deeper insight into how the wider search, social, display, and digital ecosystem appears to be evolving.
In 2012 I expect further innovation from SEO platforms such as integration with Google analytics and the convergence of data sets from Webtrends, Coremetrics, Hitwise, and Omniture. We're already seeing more convergence and collaboration in the SEO tools space partnerships with outside data sources such as BrightEdge and comScore partnership.

Social Media & CRM Opportunities

While SEO platforms develop there are also many gaps and opportunities to incorporate social media CRM tools into enterprise SEO platforms.
SEO relationship management is maturing, but there is still an opportunity to identify and manage influencers beyond backlinks. Manage and nurturing social media relationships with the people ‘behind the links’ presents even more of an opportunity to converge and collaborate on SEO and social media strategies.

At the moment it's probably too early to work out the best way to calculate these social media metrics but once more accurate becomes available more data can be measured beyond numbers of tweets and likes. Social media tools such as Trackur and Radian6 offer insight and features based on social enterprise beyond the current functionality of the majority of SEO.
Other tools such as Basecamp, Huddle and Trello, are collaborative tools that help SEO and social media people, departments, and agencies.
I would be tempted to say that this market may quickly move from segmented to fragmented. As a result, in 2012 I think we'll see:

Further organic and VC investment towards innovation in the enterprise SEO space, with a focus around social signals and metrics and API development – take away the theory of convergence and collaboration and this is your technical solution.
Many smaller SEO and social media companies sharing resources via merger and acquisition.
At least one SEO platform being integrated, via acquisition, into an automated content marketing or CRM platform, or even large agency network.

Collaboration

Hopefully you can see that changes in the search environment, the focus on content and social signals, and the growth, convergence, and development of enterprise SEO platforms fosters a need for collaboration.
The question for the SEO is, “Is your glass half full or half empty”?
I asked a few SEOs across the globe, and within my ‘social circle’, for feedback in this section.
Rather than resist change the opportunities to “reinvent the SEO wheel" are there to be taken by:

Close collaboration with industry peers across content, social, PR, and digital media channels – from SEO to TV
Utilizing the changes, convergence, and innovation in SEO technology to collaborate more efficiently and effectively with your industry peers, clients, and agencies accordingly.

For many a year we have seen white hat vs. black hat debate. In 2012 it could be that we will see a new argument – perhaps inbound marketing vs. black hat social media?
Will we see a new name for SEO, the inbound marketer, and will we (should we) expect more hats, 6 hats thinking, on the SEO table – maybe that’s one for our colleagues at SES to consider?

The Technician

From coding, crawling, keyword ranking, link analysis and link building tools to productivity social media, content and CRM - the opportunities for the technical SEO, developers and programmers to work together on integrated and innovative solutions are probably higher than they have ever been given the growth of SEO and social media technology.

The Social Media Specialist

While many argue and debate about the convergence of SEO and social media strategies the technical knowledge of how search engines work (to date) lie in the hand of the SEO.
Whether you're a strategist or a technician, social media people need to collaborate with you just as much as you and them.

The Psychologist

If there is ever a time to be inside the mind of the consumer it’s now. Looking at the psychology of sharing is something that SEO people have been doing for a long time and it’s important that strategies on social content, reach and conversion match the psychology of the link builder and buyer personas.
What makes someone tick isn't necessarily what makes people click. The experienced SEO knows this far better than a traditional content marketer.
Bas van den Beld, search & social strategist and SES speaker, makes an interesting point on technology and psychology: “Tools can help you find the way people use the web, they can help you understand how people think and therefore help you understand their perspective.”

The Consultant

The speed and volume of change in the SEO industry is so great that it can be a challenge for people in the industry to keep pace with change, and also communicate the effects of those changes to clients, in-house departments, and agencies. With the convergence of so many channels, the emergence of new social media platforms such as Pinterest and their subsequent relationships with SEO, the opportunities to learn, share, and educate are vast and continual.
The consultant can share knowledge, investment and SEO tips with social media peers. Clients have a thirst for knowledge but many lack the ‘know how’ and the available resources, to make the most out of change.
"The intention is often not malicious but suppliers usually benefit from pulling the wool over the eyes of their customers," said Kelvin Newman, organiser of UK search event Brighton SEO. "A mixture of growing maturity and ‘once bitten, twice shy’ cynicism is leading to greater transparency and openness and a need for close consultation and collaboration.”
The consultant can work with clients and peers to build and nurture trust and also combine SEO and social media strategies and data most effectively. The consultant works very closely with the technologist below.

The Technologist

Choosing the right blend of technology and utilizing many of the SEO tools and platforms mentioned in this article requires a consultative and collaborative approach. Each client and each opportunity will require a different combination of tools that can be split between keyword tools, link analysis, management and content/CRM. Those who choose a move to complex Enterprise Platforms will require significant levels of training.
The role of the technologist ensures that the selected solution fits your client’s needs by answering some basic questions:

What specific tools will they use?
Who will use the tool?
Where will it be used?
How many people will use the tool?
Would an Enterprise SEO Solution be a better fit?
Will the users be in-house – how much collaboration is needed?
Are the users across the whole organization?
Will specific tools alone complement each other? – social media and CRM?
Who owns and control the data?
If you use an enterprise solution – do we share costs and build alternative pricing models?

“I will have one client who won't know what meta data does, other use tools like screaming frog on a weekly basis” said Alex Moss, head of SEO at Pleer. “Eventually all prospective clients will have more knowledge of what you do as an agency and I wouldn't be surprised if they ask you what tools you'll use to perform specific actions with many wanting to be involved in the decision making and usage of the tools”
A technologist can help collaborate with consultants, clients, and in-house SEO departments to share access to some of the tools that help them and the client see the monetary value of SEO in their sector.
The growth of SEO technology, according to Forrester, will have an impact on SEO charging models and agency fee structures and for some (those who look backward in my opinion) SEO technology can be seen as a threat to agency fees. My argument would be that the the role of the technologist can foster collaboration, sharing data, and joint investment in SEO technology with agencies and clients.
New pricing structures are ‘naturally’ developed based on scalability and the efficiencies gained by the very adoption and growth of SEO technology. Technology is changing the way we work so it will naturally change the way in which it is priced over time.

The Trainer

Everyone suddenly seems to want to know about the convergence of search and social, so there should be much more focus on education and understanding towards clients. It’s vital to teach clients how things work and make them understand what they are doing, why are doing it, and what results to expect.
“We've found that clients knowledge of SEO and mindset has been shifting for the last couple of years, especially towards looking at SEO from a business/marketing perspective," said Kevin Gibbons, from SEOptimise and Search Engine Watch author. "For this reason education and training is becoming a very important part of the service you provide."
If you are a technologist then training people on the use of technology is a must. With such a high level of continual change in the industry there are massive opportunities to train and educate clients in the development of new techniques, technology, platforms, and integration and learning’s across social media platforms.
As many companies take some elements of SEO in-house and with the every expansive role of SEO and its convergence with other marketing disciplines agencies and clients need to find a ‘happy medium’ for consultation, training, and implementation.
“When I was on agency side I definitely saw a shift from having the agency doing the bulk of the work to being used in more of a training and consultancy role," said Simon Heseltine of AOL. "This is a shift that has really been gaining momentum over recent years.”

The Innovator

All of the above sets you well on your way to becoming an innovator. 2012 is the year of change in SEO with opportunities opening up all the time to work, outside the silo, closely with your peers and clients to expand the role of traditional SEO from content SEO, social SEO through to reach and frequency and viral SEO

Conclusion

The way you work, the tools you use, and your approach to SEO have all changed. We all know that, but taking action is a totally different ball game.
If you're open to changing the way you think about SEO and are willing to change the way you view the search world (as a marketer), then the opportunities, tools, and platforms are available for you to take advantage of right now.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2144350/Future-of-SEO-Change-Convergence-Collaboration

Under Threat Of Being Blocked Google, Facebook Comply With India's New Internet Censorship Rules

2012-02-07T14:40:00.004+05:30

After China and the US, India is the third largest internet market in the world. But India has philosophically aligned itself more with China in pursuing a policy of censorship toward publication of content deemed “offensive” or “objectionable” by individuals, groups or the government.

A recently enacted law seeks to remove all such content from the internet in India. Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were sued under the law and had been arguing in Indian court that it was all but impossible for them to comply as a practical matter. The law makes online publishers potentially liable for the acts of individual users and third parties (think “offensive” blog hosted on Blogger or “objectionable” video uploaded to YouTube).

According to a BBC report Indian Communications Minister Kapil Sibal said the following in December about the desired impact of the new law:

My aim is that insulting material never gets uploaded. We will evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal with the issue. [The companies] will have to give us the data, where these images are being uploaded and who is doing it.

Google, Facebook and others had argued that they had no control over individuals and should not be held liable for their conduct accordingly. They said they cannot “pre-filter” material generated by millions of users. This is what would be called a “prior restraint” against free speech in the US.

Indian courts have been unsympathetic and demanded that the companies comply or be blocked entirely “like in China.” The BBC says that the companies have now complied and removed offending material at issue in a particular civil lawsuit.

However the overly vague nature of the statute on which these claims are based almost guarantees that Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and other online publishers in India will face a steady stream of litigation from individuals or groups “offended” by this or that image, article or video.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-facebook-comply-with-indias-new-internet-censorship-rules-110377

Google Blogger URL Redirects Censor International Users

2012-02-06T17:08:00.000+05:30

When Twitter announced they were instituting a new censorship policy, the micro-blogging platform faced an immediate and severe backlash from the majority of the web community. Now, as a result of a previously announced change to the Blogger platform that was initially announced on January 9th, the Blogger platform has also come under scrutiny. The change, which deploys a country-specific URL to the Blogger platform, will allow Google to censor and remove content on a country-by-country basis similar to the new Twitter policy.

When required by local laws and regulations, Google has said they will remove content in a manner that impacts the smallest number of potential readers. The Google Blogger site says the following of the new change:

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers.”

The changes, which are already live in India, Australia, and New Zealand, enable Google to easily remove content on a per-country basis by redirecting users to an address that utilizes a country-code top level domain. For example, if a U.S. blog’s address is http://name.blogspot.com and a user with an India-based IP attempts to visit the blog, Google will send the user to http://name.blogspot.in. However, if the blog’s readers would prefer to reach the U.S. (non-censored) version of the site, they can add “ncr/,” which stands for “No Country Redirect” to the end of the URL (i.e. http://name.blogspot.com/ncr/) and the user will no longer be served the country-specific (potentially censored) version of the blog.

The new Blogger policy does not currently affect blogs that use the custom domain feature.
Do you feel that the new Blogger policy is necessary to maintain the continued free flow of information while simultaneously complying with local regulations?

[Sources Include: Search Engine Journal, Mashable, Economic Times, & Google Blogger]

The Enterprise SEO Guide To Response Codes

2012-01-17T16:24:00.000+05:30

Response codes impact every page, image and file on your website.

A visiting search engine bot figures out what to do based on those codes. Incorrect response codes can cause:

Indexation problems;
Duplicate content;
Site performance problems;
All manner of other site higgledy-piggledy.

Enterprise SEO is all about big, site-wide wins.

Response codes are just that: They’re easy to set up. They have a broad impact. Seems like a slam-dunk to me.

And yet, when I checked 1,000+ large sites—’large’ meaning ‘more than 5,000 pages’—only 30% got their response codes right.

Thirty. Percent.

With that, I dust off my response code tutorials, and write this quick guide to response codes for enterprise website developers, SEOs and anyone else who will listen:

The Big Three Response Codes

There are three response codes you want to know the most about:

404. Page not found. If a file simply doesn’t exist, your server should deliver a 404 status. You can use a 410 response if you want Googlebot to retry the bad URL less frequently.

301. Page permanently moved. If you’ve permanently removed one URL and replaced it with another, use a 301.

302. Page temporarily moved. If you’ve removed something and will be putting it back, use a 302.

There are others: 200 means ‘OK’. Hopefully, you’ve got that one squared away.

Page Not Found Responses

Most important: If a browser or bot visits your site and attempts to load a file that does not exist, it should get a 404 response.

404 is how a server says “Uh, that file isn’t here.” It’s not a bad thing. It’s the right answer when someone clicks a broken link, or a page is just gone.

You can get tricky with redirection if you want to try to preserve link authority of a deleted page. But the default answer for a missing page should be 404.

The problem: Many sites deliver 302 temporary redirect, 301 permanent redirect or, even worse, 200 ‘OK’ response codes. This leads to massive site duplication and terrible crawl efficiency. Visiting bots spend their time crawling worthless content.

Possible causes and solutions:

.NET loves to take over control of 40x errors, replacing them with a 302 redirect to a friendly error page. That’s nice. But totally wrong. Turn off .NET’s 404 handling and let IIS take over, instead. You can still have a friendly error page.
A misguided developer may have thought that redirecting all ‘not found’ errors to your home page helps users. It doesn’t. It’s totally confusing, like going into a revolving door and coming out at some random location. Provide a friendly 404 page that explains something went wrong and provides options.
Someone may have set up a redirect page that uses a javascript or meta refresh to then reroute visitors to a ‘best guess’ page. See the previous item—same problem.
If your site’s on PHP, it may be using header('location: /'); die();. Try something like header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");, instead.
Your site just delivers a 200 ‘OK’ code no matter what. I have no idea why you’d do this, but I’ve seen 100-200 sites that do. Change it.

A 410 response is OK, too. It causes Googlebot to more quickly remove a URL from the index, and to retry the URL less often. You can read up on 4xx codes, and just about every other status code, on the W3′s Status Codes definition page.

What Kind Of Redirection?

Redirects are a powerful SEO tool. They let you consolidate authority in the right places. But you have to do ‘em right.

A 301 code tells a visiting bot or browser that the page it’s loading is gone, forever, and the URL of the replacement page. Use this to consolidate authority and resolve basic canonicalization issues.

A visiting search bot will transfer some of the authority of the old URL to the new one. It will also eventually stop visiting the old URL, replacing it with the new one.

A 302 code tells a visiting bot or browser the page it’s loading is gone, but only temporarily. A visiting bot will keep returning to the old URL, checking to see if the page is back.

The problem: As near as I can tell, large sites randomly mix 302 and 301. They lose authority in some cases, and force bots to crawl permanently-removed content again and again.

Possible causes and solutions:

IIS 6 and earlier didn’t have a nice, clear button that said “Make this a 301 redirect”. Instead, you must check “A permanent redirect for this resource”. By default, that box is unchecked. So the default behavior is a 302, temporary redirect.
You’re writing redirection into your Web application, but you left out the status code. Some servers are configured to default to a 302, temporary redirect if you don’t set the status code to 301.

It’s Not That Hard

No matter how complex the server infrastructure, getting the big three response codes —404, 301, 302— right makes for sitewide wins. If you’re running a big site, look to your response codes. Get ‘em right. It’ll boost SEO, performance and user experience.

7 Quick Tips to Keep Your SEO On Track in 2012

2012-01-11T18:05:00.000+05:30

Once again, we've rounded the corner on a new year and many of us find ourselves re-evaluating our performance throughout many of life’s facets, whether it's how much we exercise or how well we eat. Just as we would to continually yearn to better ourselves, we have to take a moment and reevaluate what we’re doing to continually achieve within organic search visibility.

Taking a look at your overall SEO strategy from time to time is a great way to slow down, breathe, and see if you're still on track for SEO success. Any long-standing effort in life deserves an evaluation from time to time.

No SEO success is realized without solid benchmarks. It's important to continually compare progress to past dates to assess improvement.

A new year provides a great point to review year-over-year data to get a big picture of SEO success without the rigors of seasonality and other factors that can mar short-term analysis. Beyond assessing numbers and percentages, it’s also a great time to assess overall strategy, assess where SEO is going, and adjust accordingly. Plus, it’s nice to get away from all those numbers every once in a while!

It’s a New Year…Time for a Review of Your SEO Campaign!

So, you’ve spent the last year building that “sports car” of a site. In actuality, many of you have been trying to stay abreast with the fast moving world of SEO and find yourselves looking at something resembling more like a "Mad Max" vehicle. For those of you who aren’t Mel Gibson fans, I’m alluding to the fact that you have added to a site little by little and as new SEO opportunities and trends emerge you find yourself looking at a site pieced together that isn’t so pretty.

I must admit that I’m guilty of this from time to time. I’ll take a look back and see that we have added a link, page, content snippet, etc. here and there and when I take a look at the big picture I have multiple links to the same page on a given site page, over-usage of keywords, or – even worse – lack of intended keyword focus on site page. You’ve been so busy monitoring the day-to-day worries of rankings, traffic, 404s, 301s, duplicate content, and on and on and haven’t doubled-back to see what the compilation of your team’s efforts are portraying.

So, how do we review our SEO strategy and ensure we stay on track?

1. Site Mission and KPIs

Revisit the mission of the site/company as well as the KPIs for the site. We know where we want to go with the site, are we still on track.

2. Review Annotations in Google Analytics Timelines

Hopefully you're extremely organized and have notated all changes and implementation dates for SEO initiatives and don't have to fish through email for hours.

3. Look at Your Link Profile

Utilize a tool such as Open Site Explorer and review your overall anchor text counts. Have you gone hog wild in the last year with non-branded keyword anchor text and forgot about branded linking?

4. Assess Top Keywords

Review Google Webmaster Tools and assess the top keywords and their variations found on your site. This helps to provide a holistic view of what Google’s understands your site content to represent.

5. Review Internal Page Links

Stay in Google Webmaster Tools and review your most heavily linked internal pages. You might be surprised that you have unknowingly added certain page links across the site in navigation etc. over the last year and now these are showing as more important than other key site pages.

6. Are You Ranking for the Right Keywords?

Now, head over to your site. Review your targeted keywords, the intended pages for which you want to rank for, and the pages that actually rank for the terms. That is if it does continue to rank.
Ensure that if you’ve added additional content, whether it’s text or images, that it still helps to support the keyword theme of the page. Have you added internal links into the copy whose anchor text may be too similar to the respective page’s keyword theme, confusing search engines? In other words, don’t link from the bicycles page to a product page with the anchor “bicycles.”

7. W3C Validation

You have had a year of designers/developers making continual changes to the site. If you haven’t been continually monitoring this, run a W3C validation to ensure your code is still clean as well as page load tests to assess any page elements dragging down load time.

Summary

Granted, this quick spot check of your SEO strategy doesn’t ensure SEO domination in the new year, but you may be surprised that it can show from a 30,000 foot view that too many small steps to the left or right can leave you far off the path in your journey for SEO success. Now, hopefully you’ve cleared your head of any SEO insecurities and you have more time to get back to your other New Year resolutions!

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2136668/7-Quick-Tips-to-Keep-Your-SEO-On-Track-in-2012

Google+ Passes 62 Million Users, Estimated To Hit 400 Million By End Of 2012

2011-12-28T16:12:00.001+05:30

A flurry of activity has circled Google+ as of late, and the effects are beginning to show. TV commercials, enhancements and cr oss promotion on Google products have helped Google+ flourish in the month of December. Paul Allen, the self proclaimed “Google+ unofficial statistician,” has pinned the Google+ user base at 62 million as of December 27th.

This is lift of 12 million visitors within the month of December, and has Google+ posed for the largest month-to-month volume increase since October 1st. This means that nearly 1/4th of all Google+ users (24%) have joined in the month of December. Google+ is now growing by approximately 625,000 users a day.

Google+’s growth in 2011:

July 13 – 10 million
August 1 – 20.5 million
September 1 – 24.7 million
October 1 – 38 million
November 1 – 43 million
December 1 – 50 million

Allen also has some staggering estimation for the continued growth of Google+. The estimate for Google+ users at the current growth rate is 293 million users by the end of 2012, but Allen is bullish on these numbers. He estimates the acceleration will continue and predicts Google+ will end 2012 with over 400+ million users.

Image Courtesy of Paul Allen

If these numbers are remotely accurate, 2012 should be quite prosperous for Google’s newest foray into social media. All information and Google+ stats courtesy of Paul Allen.

Source: http://marketingland.com/google-passes-62-million-users-estimated-to-hit-400-million-by-end-of-2012-2193

Delicious Gets A Mini-Makeover – Updates To Design, Usability & Media

2011-12-17T12:52:00.000+05:30

The popular bookmarking site Delicious rolled out a new look this week. A major change to Delicious occurred in September, and the new look helps to enhance the new changes and is a byproduct of user feedback.

Delicious was re-purchased by its original founders in April, and has been working on major feature upgrades since the transition. The new enhancements are geared to make content discovery easier as well as improve the look of the site.

Cleaner Design

While the September design helped to give Delicious the visual push it required, some elements were still outdated. The new look helps keep the look clean, consistent and modern.

Delicious stated the following about the new design:

Giving Delicious an interface flexible enough to add new features moving forward was a strong consideration. It required us to take into account overarching themes like how content types get presented (stacks, links, actions, and so on) to minute details like a consistent button style.

Better Discovery With Stacks

The largest improvement to Delicious this year has overwhelmingly been the addition of user-created stacks. These elements allow users to group (or stack) similar content together in an easy to consume format. This week’s improvements have helped to make browsing stacks and finding information even easier. A new navigation bar has been installed that makes browsing by topic easier:

A new change has also been implemented for users who are browsing stacks. More focus has been placed on images and video as the new layout resembles a newspaper format:

The Delicious team has been hard at work lately, with more to come soon. The lead designer and senior software engineer released the following statement about the recent changes:

Delicious has been a work in progress since the beta re-launch, with our attention primarily on completing the migration from Yahoo!. We’re focused now on innovating Delicious to empower web discovery, and actively building the team and dedicating the resources to make it happen.

So stay tuned for more improvements, enhancements & marketing opportunities from the revived Delicious team.

Source: http://marketingland.com/delicious-gets-a-mini-makeover-updates-to-design-usability-media-1602

Do As I Say, Not As I Do: A Look At Search Engines & SEO Best Practices

2011-12-02T16:13:00.001+05:30

Now that the holidays are upon us, we all probably could use some cheering up. So I thought I’d have some fun with our favorite search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, and Blekko.

At Nine By Blue, I have been developing software that automatically checks sites for technical SEO best practices. Normally we run it on our clients’s sites to quickly check for issues and monitor them for any future problems.

But I was curious to see what I would find if I pointed the software at some typical pages on the search engines’s sites and then compare their implementations with the technical SEO best practices that we typically recommend.

Below is a list of some of the issues that I found in no particular order.

Disclaimer #1: This list is intended to point out how difficult it is to fully optimize a site for SEO, especially large-scale enterprise sites. I’m not claiming that I could have done any better, even if I had full control of these sites.

Disclaimer #2: Yes, I’m aware of Google’s SEO report card, but I have never read it because it is too long. Also, I didn’t want to be influenced by it.

Use a Link Rel=Canonical Tag On The Homepage

Most of the sites that I reviewed had many different URLs that lead to the home page. This can be because of tracking parameters (i.e. http://www.site.com/?ref=affilliate1) or default file names (i.e. http://www.site.com/index.php), or even duplicate subdomains (http://www1.site.com/).

Because of this, I always recommend putting a link rel=canonical tag on the home page. This ensures that links to these different home page URLs all get counted as pointing to the same URL. I also recommend adding this tag for any other pages that might have similar issues.

I was surprised to find that Bing was the only site that had a proper link rel=canonical tag on the home page.
YouTube also has a link rel=canonical tag, but it was pointing to an improper URL “/” instead of the full URL “http://www.youtube.com/”.

Avoid Duplicate Subdomains & 301 Redirect Them To The Main Subdomain

With a few exceptions, I have been able to find a duplicate copy of the sites that I review.

I have a list of typical subdomains — like www1, dev, api, m, etc. — that will generally turn up a copy of the site. Other duplicate copies of a site can be found at the IP address (i.e. http://192.168.1.1/ instead of http://www.site.com/) and by probing DNS for additional hostnames or domains.

These duplicate subdomains or duplicate sites have a negative effect on SEO because they make the search engines crawl multiple copies of your site just to get one copy. It can also cause links intended for a particular page to be spread out among multiple copies, reducing the page’s authority.

The best way to fix this is to use a permanent (301) redirect to canonical subdomain’s version of that URL. If that isn’t possible, then a link rel=canonical tag pointing to the canonical subdomain page will work almost as well.

For example, an entire duplicate copy of Bing.com is available at http://www1.bing.com/. Compounding this is the fact that the page has a link rel=canonical tag also pointing to http://www1.bing.com/ and all the links on the page point to www1 as well.

Other subdomains, such as www2 through www5 and www01, all properly redirect to www.bing.com with a 301.

Blekko has an old, pre-launch copy of its site at http://api.blekko.com/. (Here is their old executive page.) Fortunately, this subdomain has a robots.txt file that is preventing it from being crawled. But these pages, like the old executive page at http://api.blekko.com/mgmt.html is also available at http://dev.blekko.com/mgmt.html and the main subdomain at http://blekko.com/mgmt.html.

It would be better to 301 redirect these URLs to the current management page at http://blekko.com/ws/+/management than to leave multiple copies of them on different subdomains.
YouTube redirects its duplicate subdomains www1 through www5 to www.youtube.com, which is in line with best practices. Unfortunately, it redirects with a 302 (temporary) redirect rather than a recommended 301 (permanent) redirect.

Use Permanent Redirects From https: URLs To http: URLs IF They Don’t Require SSL

Another type of duplicate copy of a site that I usually find is the SSL/https version of the site. https is appropriate for pages that require security, like a login page or a page for editing a user profile, but for pages that don’t require security, it is a source of duplicate content causing crawl inefficiency and link diffusion.
The recommended solution for this is to redirect pages from https to http whenever possible.

Our software detected duplicate https copies of most pages, including Microsoft’s help pages, the YouTube about pages, Google’s corporate page, and even the Google webmaster guidelines.

The duplicate content issue with the Google webmaster guidelines page (and the other Google help pages) is compounded by a link rel=canonical tag that points to either the http or https version of the URL, depending on URL is requested.

It is important to make sure that the link rel=canonical tag always points to the intended canonical version of the page, so be careful when dynamically generating this element.

A request for https://www.bing.com/ results in a security warning (shown below) due to a mismatched SSL certificate. This is common for sites using Akamai for global server load balancing.

It even pops up for https://www.whitehouse.gov/. I’m not aware of a way to get around this issue, though I would love to talk with something at Akamai about this.

Use Robots.txt File To Prevent URLs From Being Crawled

Sites generally have different types of pages that they don’t want to have search engine’s index. This could be because these pages are unlikely to convert or aren’t a good experience for users to land on, like a “create an account” or “leave a comment” page. Or it could be because the page is not intended for Web browsers, like an XML response to an API call.

Bing’s search API calls, which are made to URLs starting with http://api.bing.com/ or http://api.bing.net/ can be crawled by spiders according to the robots.txt file. This can be devastating to crawl efficiency because search engines will continue to crawl these XML results even though they are useless to browsers.

A search on Google for [site:api.bing.net OR site:api.bing.com] currently returns about 260 results, but based on analysis I have done on clients’ Web access log files, it is many times more URLs than these have been crawled and rejected.

Use ALT Attributes In Images

Images should always be given alternate text via the ALT attribute (not TITLE or NAME as I have seen on some sites). This is good for accessibility issues like screen readers, and it provides additional context about a page to search engines.

Though many images on the pages that were checked had appropriate alternate text, I couldn’t help but notice that Duane Forrester’s image on his profile page didn’t. But he is in good company because Larry, Sergey, Eric, and the rest of the Google executive team don’t either.

Avoid Use Of Rel=Nofollow Attributes On Links To “sculpt PageRank”

A rel=nofollow attribute on a link tells search engines not to consider the link as part of its link graph. Occasionally, I will review a site that attempts to use this fact to control the way that PageRank “flows” through a site.

This technique is generally considered to be ineffective and actually counterproductive, and I always recommend against it. (There are still valid uses for rel=nofollow attributes on internal links, such as link to pages that are excluded from being crawled by robots.txt.)

None of the search engine pages I checked were using rel=nofollow attributes in this way with the exception of the YouTube home page.

In the image below, nofollowed links are highlighted in red. Links to the most viewed and top favorited are being shown to search engines but general music, entertainment, and sports videos are not.

Return Response Codes Directly

A URL that doesn’t lead to a valid page should return a 404 (page not found) response code directly.
If an invalid URL is sent to Bing’s community blog site, it will redirect to a 404 page. Here is the chain:

The URL http://www.bing.com/community/b/nopagehere.aspx returns a 302 (temporary) redirect to
the URL http://www.bing.com/community/error-notfound.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/community/b/nopagehere.asp, which returns a 404 (page not found) response.

The recommended best practice would be for the first URL to return a 404 directly. If that isn’t possible, then the redirect should be changed to a 301 (permanent) redirect.

Yahoo’s corporate information pages do something interesting when they get an invalid URL.

A request to http://info.yahoo.com/center/us/yahoo/anypage.html, which is not a valid URL, correctly returns a 404 (page not found) response.

But the 404 page contains an old school meta refresh with a time of one second that redirects to http://info.yahoo.com/center/us/yahoo/.

A 301 redirect to this page is the recommended way to handle these types of invalid URLs.

Support If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified Conditional GETs

I am a big fan of using cache control headers to increase crawl efficiency and decrease page speed. (My article on this topic is here.)

I found it interesting that out of all the URLs that were checked only a few Google URLs supported If-Modified-Since requests and none of the URLs supported If-None-Match.

Periodically Check Your DNS Configuration

As part of a site review, I like to use on-line resources like http://intodns.com/ and http://robtex.com/ to check the DNS configuration.

DNS is an important part of technical SEO because if something breaks with DNS, then the site will go down and it isn’t going to get crawled. Fortunately, this rarely happens.

However, I have reviewed sites that had their crawling affected by DNS changes. And I have reviewed several large sites that had their DNS servers on the same subnet, essentially creating a single point of failure for their entire business.

As expected, all the search engines had no serious DNS issues. I was surprised to see that two of them had recursion enabled on their name servers because in some rare instances that can be a security risk.
My recommended best practice is to run these types of checks at least once a quarter.

Conclusion

These are a few of the issues that were found that I commonly see or think are important. There were others, but they were relatively minor or subtle things like short titles, duplicate/missing meta descriptions, missing headers, and too many static resources per page.

Normally, I would have access to Web access log files and webmaster tools, which allows our software to check a lot more things.

I hope this gives you some ideas for things to check on your own site. And I hope that when you find something that you realize that even the search engines have their own technical SEO issues from time to time.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do-a-look-at-search-engines-seo-best-practices-102698

The Art of the Follow-Up Post

2011-11-18T11:06:00.001+05:30

Classic linkbait campaigns follow a “throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks” model. Which begs the question: what do you do when it does stick? Let’s say you’ve written a solid piece of linkbait, and you’re ranking on page one for a topical head or near-head term. So what do you do next?

Well, one way to think about the situation is that you have a temporary landing page with strong topical authority.

Particularly given the latest algorithm update, your odds of a short-term success are a lot better—and the price of resting on your laurels is that much higher. But here’s the good news: Google is still ranking topic pages, not just news stories. (Just Google any celebrity’s name and see.)
So, how do you keep your page fresh?

Spotting Opportunities With Google Suggest

Let’s say you’ve written a solid, well-researched, and attention-grabbing piece focused on a great keyword. Fantastic. Google can tell you exactly what to write next: type your keyword into Google, hit space, and scan the suggestions—every one of them is a follow-up waiting to happen.

These don’t have to be nearly as high-quality as the original; users would rather find (and Google would rather rank) a 300-word piece whose headline matches a long-tail query than an 800-word piece whose headline is missing half of the words in the query.

It gets better: you can also test out related topics, and see which search suggestions are missing. Google Suggest’s dirty little secret is that they lean on new content, not just search query data.

If people aren’t searching for a simple variant of an emerging keyword, you can write about that variant and literally shift searcher behavior.

The autocomplete fun doesn’t stop there, either. It’s actually creating brands. Lyrics site rap genius is one of the search suggestions for “rap,” and Yahoo!’s “Primetime in No Time” is a top suggestion for the query “Primetime.” And this goes full-circle: the top suggestion for “Primetime” is “Primetime lyrics,” and the top result is from—wait for it—Rap Genius!

Recaps & Context

The problem with reporting news is that you eventually run out of it: no story keeps happening forever. When things slow down, there are two easy angles you can take:

Recaps: sum up a few other pieces on the same topic.
Context: run a recap, but of a related topic or story. The definition of “context” in online news is ridiculously broad: if it’s directly related, it’s defensible; if it’s indirectly related, it’s merely a clever parallel. (This is the argument behind, e.g. “[X] Marketing Lessons from [Zombines / Lady Gaga / Rick Perry / My Plumber]” articles.)

As long as it’s original content, on topic, and accurately timestamped, it’s going to look like a continuously updated story. And it’s helpful to readers, too: people who search for a topic right when it gets hot are more likely to be subject-matter experts; the amateurs get active later in the news cycle. So it’s safe to be repetitious, if you’re saying similar things to different audiences.

Twitter-Based Resuscitation

Here’s a trick perfected by Business Insider, champions of fast-twitch news reporting. If you have a story that’s really taking off, post it to Twitter again—this time, swap your headline for a pull quote. If it’s a great story, it’s going to stay quotable; the better the story, the more times you can get away with this.
Compare:

I always wondered what a “McRib” was made of. Now I know http://read.bi/uOow21

THE McRIB: A “restructured meat product containing a mixture of tripe, heart, and scalded stomach” http://read.bi/uOow21

Same article, obviously. One headline is straight to the point: one’s a little gross but very good at grabbing attention. (And it doesn’t hurt that McRibs are in the news.) A quick hit like this can revive a flagging article. Don’t abuse it—but you’ll be surprised at how much you can get away with.

After Google’s freshness update, we’re doing News SEO whether we like it or not. Google is pushing for a faster, more reactive Web, with a SERP that looks more like a news feed or a Twitter stream. And part of that means keeping the story moving, not just reporting it once.

Fortunately, they’ve equipped us with the tools to do that exceptionally well.

Image from Flickr user Patrick Doheny, used under creative commons.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/the-art-of-the-follow-up-post-in-news-article-publishing-100804

9 Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

2011-11-08T14:24:00.000+05:30

It’s not surprising that small businesses make mistakes in Google Places when setting up and claiming their profiles. It can be confusing and the guidelines even change over time. So, here’s a list of some common mistakes to avoid.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a “what not to do” article (see What NOT To Do On Local Business Websites). But it’s worthwhile to emphasize some of the things I still see local businesses doing wrong in Google Places, since some of the more common stuff results in needless frustration and delays.

Nine Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

Again, do not try these at home!

1. Use a post office box for your address

I know it doesn’t make sense – this should be alright to do for businesses which do not have physical addresses, and you may even find some competitors doing it, but Google Places doesn’t like it. If you register a new listing with a P.O. box, you can expect it won’t rank for many primary keyword combinations. (For background on this subject, read about Google Places and businesses without addresses.)

So, find a street address to use for your business. Use your home addresss (often not ideal for privacy/security reasons), or partner with another business that will allow you to share their street address, or contract with a company that provides mail service with a local address.

2. Add directions into your street address

Including directions in the street address field (ex: “on corner with Elm Street”) can result in your map location being messed up and/or can cause Google difficulty in linking information from other business directories for your listing.

Either leave the directions up to Google’s automated map features, or include the helpful directions in the description field, if you absolutely must.

3. Tell Google not to display your address

This often goes hand-in-hand with businesses that use P.O. box addresses, but not always. What’s confusing about this is that Google Places provides this as an option, but they neglect to tell you that it may royally affect your ability to rank. The reason is that they prefer to show business locations on the map, and their algorithm is instantly dubious of any business that obscures its office location.

So, if you’ve traditionally used a P.O. box and are thinking of switching to your home address in combination with not displaying it, then think again. Okay, theoretically, you might be able to develop enough credibility with Google Places to overcome whatever governors they have on rankings for address-obscured companies.

But in practice, this is such an uphill battle with no information or feedback from Google about your status that you might as well avoid the beating at the begining and simply don’t toggle your address display off.

4. Use product names and place names in the business category field

It’s confounding that these are free-form, and it’s silly that Google doesn’t merely warn you if they detect a place-name in this data field for your Place page. But what Google wants here is just the business type, such as “Accountant”, “Florist”, “Attorney”, or “Electronics Shop”.

Do not put the names of products here (generally), nor your city names, even when combined with the category name. Google really hates this and it might even get you dinged!

5. Use a call tracking number as your business’s phone number

There are folks that have a fetish for statistical data who like to argue with me over this one, but there continues to be a pretty good consensus among those of us who are expert consultants for local SEO as to our stance on the matter.

Using an alternate phone number makes it harder for Google to match up your data from multiple sources across the local ecosystem, which can reduce your ability to rank.

For most small, local businesses, rankings and performance in search results ought to trump the desire to have tracking to see where your phone calls originate. Performance is a necessity, and analytics in this case is a comparative nice-to-have!

Google has come out and officially stated not to use tracking numbers, too: “Types of phone numbers that should not be included are: call tracking numbers and phone numbers that are not specific to a business location.”

6. Post some shill reviews in Google Maps

Getting your employees to help you in posting positive reviews for your business, and/or posting negative reviews about your competition, could result in your listing getting flagged by users and automated algorithms.

People can often sense that a review may be false, and this can result them stating their suspicion outright in their own review under your listing, for all to see, or they may report the listing to Google.

Either way, any juice you got from those reviews might get revoked along with anything else you’ve touched in Google. False reviews are against the law, too, so stay away from this dishonest, bad practice. Instead, harness the power of reviews in acceptable, positive ways.

7. Make radical changes to your business name, address or phone

Changing your address or business name in Google Places is highly risky to the stability of your rankings. Google canonicalization algorithms may struggle to match up your data from across the Web afterwards, and it could even cause your listing to get flagged as potentially compromised or as an attempt to manipulate.

Expect a few weeks of disruption to your rankings at minimum, assuming you can change all the various citation references out there to match. If you can’t get them to mostly sync up consistently, then expect longterm ranking impact and perhaps also ongoing problems in terms of duplicate listings, too.

If you occupy a really great ranking spot, you might consider leaving it as-is.

8. Add lots of fictional office listings in each city all over your metro area

Once you’ve poisoned the entire pond, the negative effects will eventually come back to roost with the rankings of your real, original location!

You may think you can add listings all over without Google detecting it, but your competitors will “helpfully” flag each listing and tell Google that you’re not really there. Expect to have your faux listings tank in the rankings and they’ll take your real, original listing with them.

9. Ignore that your map pinpoint location is completely off

You may be an ADD, multi-tasking, stressed-out small business owner, but this is something you’d better pay attention-to or it can irritate potential customers, reduce your walk-in traffic, and even get your listing erroneously flagged as out-of-business before your realize it.

So, check your map location and use the tools to correct it if you’re significantly off.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be publishing this list. After all, these items result in loads of work for those of us in local search marketing. However, untangling borked business listings is more difficult than setting up a fresh, new business profile completely from scratch.

So, avoid these bad practices so that you can spend more energy on further promotion efforts, rather than trying to correct something that’s been borked!

Source: http://searchengineland.com/9-common-ways-to-bork-your-local-rankings-in-google-99336

Infographic: The Top Three US Search Engines

2011-11-01T17:41:00.000+05:30

How big is Google compared to competitors Bing and Yahoo — and can they catch it? One metric is the number of searches each search engine handles in a given month.

Search Engine Journal created a nice infographic charting these figures over the past few years. It highlights Bing’s climb, mostly at Yahoo’s expense:

Want the infographic for yourself? You’ll find it here: Comparison Of The Top Three Search Engines: Bing+Yahoo > Google?

Remember, it’s possible for a search engine to see its share of searches drop while the actual number of searches — the search volume — rises. Also, month-to-month changes are often mean little. You want to see a trend emerge over time.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/infographic-the-top-three-us-search-engines-99036

Infographic: Why Content For SEO?

2011-10-18T12:20:00.000+05:30

How does content help with SEO efforts? The folks at Brafton have produced a “Why Content For SEO” infographic with lots of stats and information about the topic that you might find interesting:

Source: http://searchengineland.com/infographic-why-content-for-seo-96834

Google Search Share Plateaus, BingHoo Gains, AOL Drops

2011-09-14T19:01:00.000+05:30

The comScore search market share numbers for August are out. What they show is Google seeming to hit a kind of plateau. Over the past year it seems to be bumping up against a market share ceiling of around 65-66 percent. By contrast Yahoo and Bing gained slightly and now have a combined 31 percent of the US search market.

Ask held steady at 3 percent and AOL appears to be continuing its long, slow decline. By the end of the year AOL search should be at or below 1 percent of the overall market.

Google query volume and its share are flat; though mobile, which is growing rapidly, is not included in these figures. Yesterday research firm IDC predicted that by 2015 more people would access the internet via mobile devices than PCs.

That trend disproportionately favors Google over its immediate rivals because Google has a much larger share of mobile browser-based search than it does on the PC. If PC search query volumes grow overall so will Google. For now, however, there doesn’t seem to be much more growth available in terms of market share. Mobile is a different story and will continue to be an important growth driver for Google.

According to comScore there were a total of roughly 17 billion search queries in August across the five largest search engines. We can estimate that roughly 3.4 billion of those search queries are local or tied in some way to location. This is based on extrapolating from Google’s “20% of searches are related to location” formula.

We can also crudely estimate Google sees somewhere between 1.6 and 2.1 billion additional queries in mobile a month in the US.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-search-share-plateaus-binghoo-gains-aol-drops-92714