SEO Update | Search Engine Optimization Updates | Jerry Okorie

Google Launches Help Center For Hacked Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:51:00 +0000

Google has just launched a help center for hacked sites, complete with step-by-step instructions and videos that outline each part of the process. The videos feature Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google (and her Googler colleagues), who told me “we wanted to connect our capability to detect and alert site owners of their hacked sites with improved resources to help them recover.”

For some time, Google’s been letting site owners know when their sites have been hacked, but this new help center takes the next step and walks through how to fix the site and get the warnings removed from Google’s search results. Although as Maile notes in the blog post: “while we attempt to outline the necessary steps in recovery, each task remains fairly difficult for site owners unless they have advanced knowledge of system administrator commands and experience with source code”.

The blog post also provides steps for avoiding getting hacked in the first place: “Just as you focus on making a site that’s good for users and search engine friendly, keeping your site secure for you and your visitors is also paramount.”

The help content is a collection of videos (totally over an hour in length) and articles that provide comprehensive and detailed information about how sites get hacked and why, and spam techniques and how to detect them, in addition to explanations about how to recover from the hacking. It’s all pretty fascinating stuff, even if your site hasn’t been hacked (well, fascinating if you’re kind of geeky, like I am).

Google has decided to kill off more products

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:14:00 +0000

Google develops many products, not all of which are hits with the public

Google has announced that it is dropping seven more products in an effort to simplify its range of services.

The out-of-season “spring clean” brings an end to services including Google Wave, Knoll and Google Gears.

It is the third time that the US firm has announced a cull of several of its products at the same time after they had failed to take off.

Experts said the strategy might put off users from signing up to new services.

Google announced the move in its official blog.

“We’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward,” said Urs Holzle, Google’s vice president of operations.

“Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience,” he added.

Wave goodbye

The seven latest products earmarked for the chop are as follows:

Google Wave – an attempt to combine email and instant messaging for real-time collaboration
Google Bookmarks List - a service which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends
Google Friends Connect – allowed webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code
Google Gears – much-hyped effort to maintain web browser functionality when working offline
Google Search Timeline – a graph of historical query results
Knol – a Wikipedia-style project, which aimed to improve web content
Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal – a project which aimed to find ways to improve solar power
Google had previously announced its plans to kill off some of the projects on the list.

It has now given details about when the switch-offs will occur. For example Wave will be retired in April, and Knol content will be taken offline in October.

Lessons

The diverse nature of the list illustrated how Google operated as a company, said Richard Edwards, principal analyst at research firm Ovum.

“Any company with the resources and number of brains that Google has will have ideas, only some of which will fly. Hitting the zeitgeist is tricky to plan or predict,” he said.

The steady stream of innovations from the search giant and the open way it announced them had been a welcome change in a tech industry that had traditionally kept its cards close, said Mr Edwards.

But he warned that Google needed to be careful about how it announced new products in future.

“It can hype the bejesus out of new announcements and it can be difficult for people to pick out the substance from the hype,” he said.

There were, he said, “lessons to be learned” from firms such as Apple which took a more measured approach, announcing just a handful of new products once or twice a year.

Focus

Some experts think that Google is streamlining in order to concentrate on its Facebook rival Google+.

The network gained 10 million users within the first 16 days after its private launch, and 40 million within the first 100 days, making it the fastest-growing social network in the history of the web.

But Mr Edwards was sceptical about how successful the service would be in the long-term.

“There is no likelihood of people flocking away from Facebook at the current time unless it commits some hideous faux pas on privacy,” he said.

“Something may displace Facebook but I’m not sure it is likely to be Google+,” he added.

Read more : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15853323

Microsoft's Search Efforts Look Increasingly Futile As Google Gains Share

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 12:36:00 +0000

It looks like the Micro-hoo partnership is not working, as the search share of Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo has declined in October 2011 according to report by ComScore.

Google Sites accounted for 66.2 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.8 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.3 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.6 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network comprised 2.6 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent.

Microsoft spent more than $5 billion on its online business in the last year and lost $2.5billion.

Do you think Microsoft is going crazy after search for nothing?

Product URLs – a Duplicate Content Minefield

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:56:00 +0000

Over the past few months I have been conducting lots of SEO Audits for a vast range of clients of all sizes. One thing that always seems to come out of the audit as a significant action is to look at the URL structure and duplicate content, with a special note for the product URL.

I find it extremely frustrating that with today’s technology and the skill set of most developers, CMS Platforms still generate multiple URLs for products associated with several categories. This instantly generates duplicate content for a single product, and if this is replicated across hundreds if not thousands of products, a serious duplicate content issue occurs.

To give you an example of what happens with some CMS Platforms (all CMS platforms are different), I have described a scenario below that is from the point of view of both a merchandiser and platform.

Merchandiser: a leading retailer has a new product that needs adding to the CMS.

CMS Platform: generate a generic URL that incorporates the product title and the SKU:

www.domain.com/product/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232

Merchandiser: the product that was added is a waterproof jacket; this fits into three categories, which were selected from the options available.

CMS Platform: generate three new URLs, BUT they are SEO friendly with keywords included.

www.domain.com/category/sub-category-1/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232

www.domain.com/category/sub-category-2/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232

www.domain.com/category/sub-category-3/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232

Merchandiser: the product is added to the correct brand

CMS Platform: another URL is created for the brand product.

www.domain.com/brand/product-title-plus-sku-011232

THREE MONTHS LATER: the winter season comes to an end, so the close of season sale is on.

Merchandiser: the product didn’t sell very well and was added to the sale.

CMS Platform: a new URL is created for the product that is now associated with the sale category.

www.domain.com/sale/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232

The scenario above describes adding the product to three different core categories, a brand and sale category, resulting in the creation of five different URLs to go with the generic product URL.

Now what is the issue with that, when they are keyword rich?

One of the biggest, if not THE biggest issue with e-commerce sites is the amount of duplicate content that is created, the majority by products and product listings. The above shows a perfect example of how duplicates are being created by multiple product URLs through CMS Platforms.

So how do you solve this issue? There are a couple of ways, depending on how far you are along with the CMS and how co-operative your web development team are.

1. When adding a product to the CMS, make sure that the platform creates just ONE generic URL (www.domain.com/product/product-title-plus-sku-number-011232 ) that can then be associated with multiple categories, brands, sale page etc. This will allow the merchandiser to select multiple categories to associate the product with, which will link through to the same URL. By ensuring the use of just one URL, the amount of duplicate content would be significantly decreased.

There are numerous large brands that are already using this method to good effect, although in slightly different ways, including:

John Lewis
http://www.johnlewis.com/27573/Style.aspx
http://www.johnlewis.com/173405/Style.aspx

Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0470554185
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-KDL32BX300-32-inch-Widescreen-Freeview/dp/B004AHKUJA/

2. If your web development team are unable to change the way the URLs are generated, speak to them about automatically creating a rel=”canonical” tag for each product with the generic URL added. This will provide the search engine with the generic URL to index instead of the other multiple URLs

3. If you are unable to implement either of the above recommendations, then I would suggest 301 redirecting the multiple URLs to the original generic URL. Before going ahead with this option, I would strongly urge you to try everything you can to get your web development team to implement either of the first two options. Option 3 will take up a considerable amount of time, with collating the different URLs for each product and then 301 redirecting them.

The S.E.O. Rapper Drops Science on Search Optimization

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:19:00 +0000

Maybe you read my colleague David Segal’s eye-opening story about search-engine optimization on Sunday.

Or, in the hullabaloo surrounding the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL, perhaps you read Claire Cain Miller’s article about that site’s S.E.O. prowess in getting articles to the top of Google’s search rankings.

Perhaps stories like this piqued your interest in S.E.O. and how it works.

And let’s say you also love hip-hop.

You’re welcome.

Google goes local in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:04:00 +0000

After the recent updates to Google places, Google maps, Google local search products and Adword site selection seems that Google puts its focus in 2011 on the local search market. A proof is the recent failed takeover of Yelp and Groupon. As of today, the UK Yelp site launched. The local online advertising market is huge – actually it’s enormous and can be compared to your usual daily TV figures.

For SEO specialists, this signal in 2011 is to work on local search optimization. Google’s Senior Vice Persident Susan Wojcicki said yesterday that the local market's biggest focus for 2011. According to its starting 70 to 90% of customers search the Internet first and then makes the choice to any store in the neighborhood they will buy the product.

Previously as an entrepreneur/organization you will be mostly be found on Yellow Pages. Today, customers use Google to find you. Google offers the possibility to your website for free places to register for Google. Before it becomes competitive, go now to begin optimization on google places for your website and appear quickly in the top ranking.

30+ Advanced SEO Tactics, Techniques and Resources (55+ Links)

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:10:00 +0000

There is no single definition of advanced SEO. There are a few of attempts to describe what it might mean or consist of and what not but there is no entity or authority that could define such a broad term like advanced SEO.I can’t define advanced SEO either. What I can do though is to collect 30+ advanced SEO tactics, techniques and resources.

These methods are no doubt advanced in the sense that they are new and progressive, sometimes more difficult than basic SEO or require special tools and expertise. Some of the tactics are no short term tactics, they’re probably strategies.

Also I’ll attempt to debunk the wide spread notion that just a few tactics out there are somehow advanced SEO by virtue of their sheer complexity, difficulty in implementing or tediousness.
Most notably I refer to the controversial practices of so called PageRank sculpting and IP delivery. While both are highly contested to be valuable at all or “advanced SEO” most SEO methods below are not controversial. They have an undeniably positive impact on your SEO efforts. Some will contest whether they are advanced or even SEO but they don’t hurt your site or business like the two above often do or at least might when badly executed.

Web Design/Development
Landing page optimization for organic search results
ROI oriented usability testing (Split A/B Testing etc.)
Streamlining information architecture towards a predefined sales funnel
Enforcing security considerations to prevent crackers from compromising your system and hijacking your site’s authority
Implementing dynamic scalability for large sites by self replicating processes
Siloing content on important keyword optimized pages (instead of PageRank sculpting)

Web Analytics
Identifying the target audience by age, income, education, computer skills, region and understanding it
Conversion attribution to find out how many stages were involved in making a person finally appear on site or buy
Twitter analytics to follow your true fans and connectors who spread the word and realistic Twitter traffic numbers
Monitoring long tail keyword combinations and frequency for early acknowledgment of trends
Time based and historic keyword research to identify potentials for recurring traffic spikes

Content Creation
Creating videos, ebooks, infographics and other rich media for SEO purposes
Semantic SEO trying to understand user intent and serving the appropriate content
Business blogging beyond solely SEO copywriting keyword rich content for search engines
Writing of “magnetic Web content“, with “killer headlines” and irresistible hooks
Defining an SEO code of ethics for your company and anticipating upcoming industry standards
Allowing and managing and user generated conent with crowdsourcing, tagging/folksonomy
Predictive SEO in order to be the first to offer supplies for demands that don’t exist yet

Link Acquisition
On topic widget bait for long term recurring results (not just link bait)
Creating both funny and engaging quizzes. Example: SEO expert quiz
Preparing and implementing contests to actively empower audiences as brand evangelists
Establishing reputable awards or annual best of collections. Examples: Web 2.0 awards, Semmys
“Pulling a Calacanis” that is stirring controversy to gain attention and make adversaries and supporters to link to you

Social Media Outreach
Proactive online reputation building, instead of just reactive firemen like management
Social CRM for all relevant groups (beyond “customers”). Example: Influencers
Creating and spreading viral memes through various media independently of your own presence there
Creating communities both inside and outside your own websites. Example: Dell Idea storm
Disseminating social media press releases and cultivating blogger relations

Expanding into New Markets
Embracing Twitter plus other Microblogging for business purposes
International multilingual SEO on one site or creating parallel sites
Geo-location based local SEO and IP delivery for international businesses
Mobile search optimization with appropriate CSS formats for different use cases
Introducing “real life” SEO with links you can scan with your mobile

So you see that you don’t have to resort to PageRank sculpting or other questionable SEO techniques advocated by some people in the SEO industry who often fail to embrace a holistic fndability appraoch and instead overtly focus on technical aspects.

This list does not contain all current advanced SEO methods, by far not all of them.
I compiled this list quite quickly from the top of my head. The 30 tactics that first came to my mind got listed. Afterwards I searched for the links supporting or explaing these tactics. So you are welcome to add some more advanced SEO tactics I didn’t mention yet!

What is Life?

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:49:00 +0000

It has been said that a man can live 40 days without food, 4 days without water, 4 minutes without air and 4 seconds without hope.

A man without hope is already dead, however what gives us hope?

Could it be a deep sense of purpose! A higher calling to something greater than where you are right now?

I honestly believe that a deep sense of purpose and conviction to the better of humanity can lead a man to truely experience life in full, however when it's all said and done, what's left.

When life runs its time and all that's left is the unknown destination we all have to go someday.....

What's next? Actually What is this Life?

Is it an assignment in preparation for the next life or is this all the life we will ever experience?

Philosophers and Scientists have pondered upon this with no credible answers to give us all. We are all but mice in a maze, puzzled and going round in circles.....when will it all end.

In order to experience life in full, I am confident beyond all resonable doubts that you must first experience the source of life itself.

Connect a light bulb to its source and you will discover its purpose, establish its value and determine it's worth......with the same measure, connect a man to his source and he will truely find the key to happiness, all answers to life's questions and our final destination.

With this I say....

Myles Munroe once said: "Where purpose is unknown abuse is inevitable"

It has been said that a man can live 40 days without food, 4 days without water, 4 minutes without air and 4 seconds without hope.

A man without hope is already dead, however what gives us hope?

Could it be a deep sense of purpose! A higher calling to something greater than where you are right now?

I honestly believe that a deep sense of purpose and conviction to the better of humanity can lead a man to truely experience life in full, however when it's all said and done, what's left.

When life runs its time and all that's left is the unknown destination we all have to go someday.....

What's next? Actually What is this Life?

Is it an assignment in preparation for the next life or is this all the life we will ever experience?

Philosophers and Scientists have pondered upon this with no credible answers to give us all. We are all but mice in a maze, puzzled and going round in circles.....when will it all end.

In order to experience life in full, I am confident beyond all resonable doubts that you must first experience the source of life itself.

Connect a light buld to it's source and you will discover it's purpose, establish it's value and determine it's worth......with the same measure, connect a man to his source and he will truely find the key to happiness, all answers to life's questions and our final destination.

With this I say....

Myles Munroe once said: "Where purpose is unknown abuse is inevitable"

If you don't know your true purpose in life, chances are someone else is abusing you.

Imagine two married people with no sense of purpose before they actually got married. They got married thinking they will find comfort and security in the arms of each other - A selfish start to a truely broken home - Abuse is certainly inevitable - It then becomes a ME! ME!! ME!!! defined relationship. SELFISHNESS AT IT'S BEST - You don't want that trust me.

Discover your purpose before you destroy your life and someone elses.

Give me a man with hope and I have found a believer, connect a believer to his source and you discover his purpose, give the believer room to grow and soon you will find the works of his hands flourishing and deep rooted, planted by the streams of cool water and withering not.

Alas! I have found a DREAM MAKER.

We all dream dreams but very few ever become DREAM MAKERS!

Many are called but few are chosen.

A dream maker knows that he is only limited by how much he allows his mind to limit him.

Jesus said: "Nothing shall be impossible for those that believe"

You have the ability to be in both the world of dreams and the the world of reality, however did you know that what happens in your so called reality must first happen in your dream world.... the real world....where your true being excels with no limitation.

Did you not know? You may be living in the flesh of man but you are of Spirit. The workmanship of God...."Those who worship him will worship him in spirit and truth for God is Spirit.

The more you spend in the spirit world(In the presence of God), the more you push back limitations of this world.

Norman Cousins once said: “Death is not the greatest loss in life, the greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live”

There is time for everything and everything becomes beautiful in its own time. Divine purpose must be known inorder for you to live a fulfilling and promising life.

Stop allowing the contraints, limitations, negativity, set backs and unjust systems of this world to break you apart. Allow your divine purpose to change the world around you and not the other way round.

It's time to connect back to God as we come to the end of the second month of this decade.

Why Everything You Were Told SEO Was About Is Now Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:18:00 +0000

Over the last few years (in-fact year after year), website owners with traditional businesses have always felt that there must be "free" web traffic out there. Most have heard of the phrase "Search engine optimisation" (SEO) and probably even more fell into one or more of the snake-oil companies promising the earth.

It is well worth the non-SEO expert, with a root in the real world, taking the time to read this article, to understand that SEO in 2010 is nothing like SEO of a few years ago and to see why modern SEO is both simple to grasp and incredibly complex - if not impossible - to master in 2010.

It should help you change you approach to SEO and take your strategic view beyond many of the companies still promising the earth for "little or no money down".

The roots of SEO and why they do not work in 2010

As soon as search engines started to exist, back in the 1990s, their business model was typically advertising related. Some companies tried to build search engines where you paid for the service, but the public gravitated towards the free services like Yahoo and AltaVista. The problem was that the adverts - typically banners - where nowhere near as sophisticated as the search engine algorithm itself, so the search results were WAY more targeted than the banners.

Users very quickly learnt to ignore the display advertising of old. Seconds later, SEO was born.

At that time - the search engines were based on understanding (predominantly) the content of the web page they were indexing. In particular the TEXT on the page. They weren't interested in pictures, so much, and certainly the web was growing so fast that there was no effective way for search engines to properly understand how a web page sat in relation to every other web page on the internet.

This meant that people developed the notion that there must be "some" kind of magic formula that would put their web page at the top of the search engines, if they just built the page in the right way. This was great. After all, if users were looking at the top results, instead of the untargeted adverts, then a "free" top results was worth fortunes. These were the days of "Keyword stuffing", moving on to "H1 tags" and ""Title Tags".

It did work - for those that stayed ahead of the curve - but the pace of change and the increase in complexity of the search engines have made this partly a fool's errand - at least when treated in isolation. (This coming from a leading SEO company, so you know there's a "BUT" at the end.)

The search engines increased their relevancy, ultimately, by not by relying on the text on the page any more. This first manifested itself in the 90s with a company called "GoTo", later called "Overture" who - for some years - changed the face of search results by allowing advertisers to buy - on a per click basis - the top few results on many of the search engines, including MSN.com.

Then Links became a significant factor in a search engine's understanding of a web page's authority in context - so that a page could not be an authority across too many keywords at once. Link building remains highly important to users to the algorithms to this day, in the traditional results... but now the game has changed again. Twice.

What's different today?

If you look at a modern day search engine, like "Bing", then the old "text based" results are not as important as they used to be. The modern search engines have reduced the effect of any manipulation of these results in part by better understanding the USER's requirements, rather than the web page's profile. In doing so, one of the first questions a search engine asks itself (in a mathematical sort of way) when a user types in a search are questions like:

- What do I know about this user? (How can I use this to help give better results?)

- Where in the world are they? (And does this make a difference?)

- Do they want Pictures? News? Video? A Map? (None of which apply to the old school SEO techniques above)

- Are they using a mobile device? If so will they want something different?

- How should I mix and match results of different types of data?

These kinds of questions are not things that a web page can easily influence. Most of these questions change the very data sources that the search engine displays to the user. How can you expect to get the "number 1 slot" on a web result if - for one user - this is a map and for another user it is a trusted newspaper report? Of course, you cannot. Or at least, your only way to do this is to reach BEYOND the search engines, to get into the mind of your ideal user.

That means that modern Internet marketing strategies have to play to the traditional marketing theories as well.

Your BEST bet in search is to convince the user to not type in a generic phrase in the first place. But rather to type in your brand.

Failing that, you need to go WAY further into your customer's mindset than saying "I want to be number one for...[add keyword here]. Your customer isn't typing that word into the search engine in EXACTLY that way. They may capitalize the first letters - did you take into account that this might suggest something about their age? They may frame their keyword by adding a region. So many things change the datasets being used in the results, that - like doubling a single grain of rice on ever square on a chessboard - you soon find that all the rice in China will not be enough to fill the beast.

I promised a "but" though.

The "but" is that in diversifying the data sets, the search engines have given smaller companies renewed possibilities to shine. I don't think that it can be denied that the quality and relevance of search results in 2010 are a world away from the quality of (say) 2005. At times, in a given industry, it appears a single company dominates a market - but even if they do, the search results generally endeavour to provide diversity.

Bing - in particular - is helping users to make an informed choice before they click. SEO still has a huge value - but in much more targeted situations. It needs to be preceded by a clear understanding of your target users on a one-to-one level and also the internet marketing needs to be aligned with other marketing, to closely associate your brand with a particular type of user journey - a journey where the website itself may be only a transitory step to purchase or conversion.

Yes - SEO is still hugely important. But now every visitor from organic traffic is important because every visitor represents a person - not a number.

Thanks

Dixon Jones

www.receptional.com

Social Bookmarking More About Sharing Than Bookmarking

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:02:00 +0000

I have been in the SEO industry for more than 4 years now. From what I have learnt from my experience, is that Social Media is the most aggressive tool in the internet marketing industry to gain web traffic in a short period of time. Most of the SEO experts refer to it as Viral Marketing with a mix of SMO, Social media marketing but popularly known as Social media optimisation.

I have often seen in most reputed companies based in the UK, they have social bookmarking experts who are assigned the job of bookmarking site details such as Title, Description, URLs and tags into most popular bookmarking site such as Delicious, Reddit, Stumble Upon etc.

Tis is no brainer,I believe it's the waste of technology or just stuffing or spamming these web 2.0 sites. Submitting your site details into these highly traffic generating websites is not enough. There are loads and loads of people doing it. But we should be more intelligent and smarter than others by making good use of these social engagement sites.

These are some tips below which you can use to promote your website through Viral Marketing:

1) Create full profile with real name on these websites. Submitting just the details required to bookmark sites for free is not enough. Create a profile where other members can easily get connected with you.

2) Along with bookmarking websites, it is also necessary to share these websites. Make friends, join groups of your industry and try to remain active in these sites as much as possible.

3) Create groups using most highly and relevant search term of your industry and invite your friends to join these groups.

4) Use your Gmail, Yahoo and other IM contacts in finding more people who are already using these web 2.0 sites. Also invite other friends in your contacts to join these websites which would help in networking as well as promoting their websites.

5) Instead of choosing just keywords such as "Social Bookmarking" as title choose "How Will Your Website Benefit Through Social Bookmarking". People like long phrases rather than just keyword stuffing.

Follow these simple steps and you will find a rather new look of Social Media Optimization.

I know its difficult to use these steps in all social bookmarking sites but you can easily try them in top 10 bookmarking sites of my choice.

1. Delicious
2. StumbleUpon
3. Propeller
4. Digg
5. Reddit
6. Furl
7. Mixx
8. Diggo
9. Twitter
10. Faves

You can also try some other sites that are popular as well as good traffic generating such as FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Xing etc. These are social networking sites where you can communicate with people from your relevant industry as well as share your tips and strategies all together. This above tactics describe viral marketing in whole. Viral marketing is lot more creative and the person who is able to attract traffic with content can only survive in the viral marketing industry.

So if you don't have any experience in viral marketing then choose some established company that offers professional SMO services and helps your website in getting lots and lots of relevant traffic.

Try these 10 most popular social bookmarking sites to promote your website and I assure you that there will be gradual increase in your web traffic not too long.

Microsoft Adds SEO Package to Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:03:00 +0000

How crucial is considering SEO in planning a website? Microsoft’s ASP tools Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 will be equipped with basic SEO features when released later this year. According to the linked article, the vice president of Microsoft’s development division, Scott Gutherie, thinks that using SEO is important for all websites for better rankings and more traffic. Vision Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 will have a basic SEO package, however, although more features are available through Microsoft’s separate SEO Toolkit.

The features included in Microsoft’s new ASP tools will be very basic, with keyword and description tags and URL routing included. But, as any SEO professional knows, this is a paltry amount of SEO. While description and 301 redirects are both important to optimizing any website, what about title tags, page, content, and reciprocal links? Perhaps these are included in the separate SEO Toolkit, but the SEO included with the ASP development programs is minimal, especially compared to offerings like Go Daddy’s Search Engine Visibility package.

Although adding some basic SEO can only help a website – and it should be incorporated from the development stage – thinking solely of keywords and descriptions doesn’t anticipate the issue of title tags. Ideally, title tags should be geared toward one keyword – two at the most – and with more than three incorporated into a category page title tag, the page isn’t really search engine friendly. Even though such tools by Microsoft should start developers thinking about SEO, more in-depth planning needs to be done. The main issue is devoting each page to a specific keyword or two at most and making sure all pages are equipped to handle not only description and keyword fields but also title tags and page content. After all, what’s a website without a title tag?

Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:12:00 +0000

The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes the Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module, which let you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps files.

Improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines
The Site Analysis module allows users to analyze local and external Web sites with the purpose of optimizing the site's content, structure, and URLs for search engine crawlers. In addition, the Site Analysis module can be used to discover common problems in the site content that negatively affects the site visitor experience. The Site Analysis tool includes a large set of pre-built reports to analyze the sites compliance with SEO recommendations and to discover problems on the site, such as broken links, duplicate resources, or performance issues. The Site Analysis module also supports building custom queries against the data gathered during crawling.

Control how search engines access and display Web content
The Robots Exclusion module enables Web site owners to manage the robots.txt file from within the IIS Manager interface. This file is used to control the indexing of specified URLs, by disallowing search engine crawlers from accessing them. Users have the choice to view their sites using a physical or a logical hierarchal view; and from within that view, they can choose to disallow specific files or folders of the Web application. In addition, users can manually enter a path or modify a selected path, including wildcards. By using a graphical interface, users benefit from having a clear understanding of what sections of the Web site are disallowed and from avoiding any typing mistakes.

Inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing
The Sitemaps and Site Indexes module enables Web site owners to manage the sitemap files and sitemap indexes on the site, application, and folder level to help keep search engines up to date. The Sitemaps and Site Indexes module allows the most important URLs to be listed and ranked in the sitemap.xml file. In addition, the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module helps to ensure the Sitemap.xml file does not contain any broken links.

Site Analysis Features
•Fully featured crawler engine
•Configurable number of concurrent requests to allow users to crawl their Web site without incurring additional processing. This can be configured from 1 to 16 concurrent requests.
•Support for Robots.txt, allowing you to customize the locations where the crawler should analyze and which locations should be ignored.
•Support for Sitemap files allowing you to specify additional locations to be analyzed.
•Support for overriding ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ metatags to allow you to analyze pages to help improve customer experience even when search engines will not process them.
•Configurable limits for analysis, maximum number of URLs to download, and maximum number of kilobytes to download per URL.
•Configurable options for including content from only your directories or the entire site and sub domains.
•View detailed summary of Web site analysis results through a rich dashboard
•Feature rich Query Builder interface that allows you to build custom reports
•Quick access to common tasks
•Display of detailed information for each URL
•View detailed route analysis showing unique routes to better understand the way search engines reach your content
Robots Exclusion Features
•Display of robots content in a friendly user interface
•Support for filtering, grouping, and sorting
•Ability to add ‘disallow’ and ‘allow’ paths using a logical view of your Web site from the result of site analysis processing
•Ability to add sitemap locations
Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features
•Display of sitemaps and sitemap index files in a simple user interface
•Support for grouping and sorting
•Ability to add/edit/remove sitemap and sitemap index files
•Ability to add new URL’s to sitemap and sitemap index files using a physical or logical view of your Web site
•Ability to register a sitemap or sitemap index into the robots exclusion file

10 Ways Social Media will Change in 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:16:00 +0000

Originally published on ReadWriteWeb

This time last year, I wrote about the 10 ways social media will change 2009, and while all predictions have materialized or are on their way, it has only become clear in recent months how significant of a change we've seen this year. 2009 will go down as the year in which the shroud of uncertainty was lifted off of social media and mainstream adoption began at the speed of light. Barack Obama's campaign proved that social media can mobilize millions into action, and Iran's election protests demonstrated its importance to the freedom of speech.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month -- 70% of whom are outside the US -- and it accounts for 25% of the Web's traffic, nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad -- it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.

So what will social Web bring next? What will "being connected" mean? What will the next experience be for the 2 two billion people who are connected to the Internet? Here are 10 ways what we've called social media will evolve in 2010.

1. Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies
By this time next year, social media will no longer be "social media" -- it will be an integrated, unquestionable component of your online and offline experience. Last year we spoke of cross-platform integration across media sites. Open APIs and OpenID made that possible, and even LinkedIn announced last month that it too will finally open its APIs. 2010 will be about integration and a single, cohesive experience across platforms as well as across products and devices -- Web, mobile, TV, and video -- will become near-inseparable experiences.

Users will access content from any device or platform, co-create and mashup their photos, videos and text with traditional content while interacting with each other. Publishers will create new kinds of content for the connected world, and the last years' lull in good entertainment will finally be lifted. This trend will cut across all of our activities -- from playing games to shopping to emailing and texting -- nothing will be lost; everything we do will be gathered and streamed together, allowing people to view their world of activities as if it were projected in front of them, open to change, review and input at any point in time from any device or online tool.

2. Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology
With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets -- content and capabilities -- in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web's capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people's attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.

3. Mobile Will Take Center Stage
Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information. Our phones will be used as a central hub and beacon -- enabling a slew of new capabilities and experiences.

4. Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content
2009 marked the year of open Web, and divergence of content, making content available anywhere, anytime, by anyone and to everyone; it was the year content exploded across the web, platforms and devices. The issue Google solved so magically -- content find-ability -- will become all but moot in the coming years. Instead, content relevance and quality will become the key focus. In 2010 we will start to see convergence as companies take measures to own their own content, its location and its cost. Last month, Rupert Murdoch announced he may opt News Corp out of Google, instructing it to de-index its publications from the search engine and giving exclusive rights to Bing for a fee. This means that content publishers will be able to determine where they make their content available and at what cost.

With the growth of user generated content and the dwindling relevance of search results, people will gradually shift their trust from large aggregators like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and move to searching and finding content at specific locations and, eventually, creating and integrating their own content hub into the rest of their personal digital experience. "People don't realize that everything they do -- on Facebook, Ning, Google and with their credit cards -- is being collected, tracked, analyzed, owned and monetized by these companies who provide (so-called) free services. It's not a healthy model." Says John Faber, COO of af83, a Drupal development house and co-founder of the upcoming DrupalCon.

5. Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We've Called "Social Media"
It was easy to forget that enterprises and large institutions are the originators of some of social media's pillars: listservs, forums, intranets and collaboration tools. As social media became a public domain, enterprises have been cautious participants, predominantly in the product space, with few visionary leaders like Zappos, IBM and Dell. But cautionary they are no more. With a reported average of 25% increase in funds allocation toward social media activities, in 2010 we will see a surge in adoption of social media across product, services and solutions companies.

Having the need and the funds, enterprises will determine the next generation of social experiences. They will push enhancements that meet their needs, specifically around monitoring, automation, alignment with the sales cycle and integration with existing systems, expanding social "media" to encompass the ecosystem of social computing across solutions, and making them actionable for the company. Jive, blueKiwi, Remindo and Sharepoint support companies internally. Most recently, Salesforce.com released Chatter, designed to turn the corporation, and CRM, social. With its APIs opening later this year, "Chatter can become a new layer over its Force platform, already being used by 68,000 customers, enabling companies and developers to leverage the Salesforce infrastructure in a secure environment," said Bruce Francis, VP corporate strategy Salesforce.com.

6. ROI Will Be Measured -- and It Will Matter
Return on investment on social media activities has been challenging to most companies this year. Surveys show only 18% of companies say they saw meaningful return on investment from their social media activities while the other 72% report modest, no return or inability to measure the return on their investment in social media. While the definition of ROI is evolving to better fit the world of relationships and networks, the ability to demonstrate ROI in hard numbers -- not in followers or fans -- will become a baseline business requirement in 2010. Already, both traditional firms and startups are working feverishly to demonstrate they can turn hype into science. But, only those companies who will be able to analyze and predict hard returns on investments will last.

7. Finally: Real, Cool and Very Bizarre Online-Offline Integration
Virtual worlds, games and avatars were just the beginning of the online-offline integration. In 2010 we'll see a greater push on this front as distance and physical walls will matter even less. Augmented reality -- already integrated into Yelp's latest geo-tagging enabled application -- will allow users to find relevant information and people depending on their location; Twitter360 will help people find each other, connect and see updates by location all while on the go through their mobile device. People will be able to scan products on shelves but process the sale online; you'll never need to ask for a business card again at events -- and you may actually get promotions and discounts that match your interests.

8. Many "Old" Skills Will Be Needed Again
An economic downturn coupled with the surge of social media eliminated many traditional marketing and PR roles. But this year, we'll see the return of professionals to the field. Enterprises will turn back to marketers who specialize in understanding customer psychology and who are experienced in addressing these both offline and online. Research and development divisions will turn to customer experience professionals to draw on user needs and ideation as part of their product improvement and innovation process, and sales and support will continue to deliver services online. Expect to see job postings for social media managers, social media psychologists and social media executive administrators to help manage the infinite tasks involved with communities and social media campaigns.

9. Women Will Rule Social Media
2009 revealed the growing role women play online. Women make 75% of all buying decisions for the home, and 85% of all consumer purchases. Social networks have at least 50% female members, and it is women ages 35-55 who make up the fastest-growing population on Facebook -- not the expected Gen-Y population as previously anticipated. Previously limited by organizational hierarchies and job demands, women today are free to create, express and promote themselves using social media channels. Innately excelling at communication, relationship building and multi-level attention, women will take the reins on their careers and network becoming both a sought-after consumer segment as well as driving business strategies for social-media-connected companies.

10. Social Media Will Move Into New Domains
As social media becomes integrated into our experiences online, it will have an impact on verticals such as nonprofit, job training, education, and health care. University of the People -- a UN-backed initiative to offer free education in emerging markets -- is using the power of distance learning and virtual collaboration. Obama's campaign for job training also highly relies on the power of online interaction. "The top 10 companies to work for are going to become learning companies. Instead of having 10% of time to philanthropic activities, they'll spend 10% of time on learning or teaching," says Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and director at iStrategyLabs. "Sites like I'm Too Young For This, and Know Cancer Community prove that no topic is too complex for social collaboration."

"These site help people connect and share information previously only available to their doctors," says Jennifer Benz of Benz Communications, a consultancy that works with companies to introduce social media capabilities into employee benefits and health care communication. "Companies who integrate social collaboration and conversation into health care find they have more knowledgeable employees and patients who can make smarter choices and improve the quality of their care."

Social Media as we knew it even 6 months ago has changed. By this time next year, it will have become fully integrated into everything we do online and offline. By the end of this year we'll see a move toward greater control over content and companies will fight over social media land grabs in preparation for the future.

By next year, we will no longer speak about social media technology but about what we've been able to do with it. We will discuss power of ownership and only accept quality, relevant content. As we move to automatically accept a narrowed selection of the mass content online, we will begin to crave larger reach again and the natural process of chaos and order -- constriction and expansion, convergence and divergence -- will repeat itself in an ever-accelerating pace.

Whether you are an individual, a startup, small business or a large corporation, an online presence and an ongoing conversation with your constituents is a baseline requirement -- and will take time and expertise. Companies are diverting resources and rethinking their traditional outreach strategies. "Whether you're recruiting, looking for investment, trying to get buzz -- you need to be visible," says John Nogrady, director, emerging business at Microsoft bizpark, and serial entrepreneur. Brian Zisk, founder of SFMusicTech, which is taking place in San Francisco this week, says "If you're out there as a genuine contributor in the community you can reach out to many people. Take the FooFighters' free Facebook concert, or Zoe Keating -- a local artist with over 1.2 million fans online. Their ability to connect with their fans was made possible because of the Internet."

As you read this, it may seem far reaching but so did a presidency won through the power of online community not too long ago. Whether you are a novice finally giving in to the pressures to "get on social media," someone who is highly experienced, or a visionary already looking for the next big thing, you will play a role in social media in the coming year even through your simple, daily actions. And as the social media wave dissipates into the vast ocean of connected experiences, the term itself will become an entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias and we will embark on a new era of knowledge, accessibility and experiences unbound by distance, time or physical walls.

Bing Maps Steals The Cool Crown From Google

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:18:00 +0000

Microsoft has had a collection of mapping tools and assets that haven’t been fully utilized or received the play (or usage) of Google Maps. But in an announcement today Bing Maps breaks new ground in online mapping even as it plays a bit of catch up with Google.

First, Bing Maps is introducing “Street Side” in 56 US metro areas, with the ambition to go global eventually. This is the Microsoft answer to Google Street View: immersive street-level photography that, like Street View, allows users to “walk down the street” and explore neighborhoods in cities. Microsoft began Street Side at roughly the same time as Street View but hadn’t released anything (to date) other than this limited demo site.

The environment that Microsoft has created is richer than Street View and brings “augmented reality” into Maps in a compelling way. Microsoft has also utilized its 3D mapping assets in creating the new experience. Here’s how the Microsoft press material describes the technology behind the new Maps experience:

Photosynth and Silverlight are the underlying technologies in Bing Maps that connect everything and help provide the more seamless experience. Based on Seadragon and Photo Tourism concepts, Photosynth lets us literally “stitch” together photographs to provide more realistic view of locations as they appear in real life. Photosynth-enabled Streetside imagery is built on geometric models that are reconstructed underneath the imagery to provide a truly 3D experience that shows locations as they are in real life.

The one “catch” is that you need to install Microsoft Silverlight to make it all work. But once installed the new Bing Maps beta site enables a wide range of experiences, search and discovery tools that haven’t been available (or maybe possible) previously.

In addition there’s an “apps gallery” that enable data overlays directly on the map. All of the current modules are Microsoft created but the company will enable third parties to integrate their content into Bing Maps (e.g., Yelp reviews) in the near term.

Read more here
Bing Maps Steals The Cool Crown From Google

Bing gains 7% in US search market as Google falters

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:58:00 +0000

The number of US searches conducted on Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has risen 7% in the past four weeks, while Google fell 1%, according to new research from Hitwise.

Google accounted for 70.60 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 31, 2009.

Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.14 percent, 9.57 percent and 2.62 percent, respectively.

The remaining 52 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.10 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers

Domain September 2009 October 2009 Month-over-month percent change

www.google.com 71.08% 70.60% -1%

search.yahoo.com 16.38% 16.14% -1%

www.bing.com* 8.96% 9.57% 7%

www.ask.com 2.56% 2.62% 2%

Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Oct. 31, 2009, and Oct. 3, 2009) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.

*This includes executed searches on Bing.com, Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

Source: Experian Hitwise

http://www.netimperative.com/news/2009/november/bing-gains-7-in-us-search-market-as-google-falters

Source: www.hitwise.com

All about duplicate content

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:55:00 +0000

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

* Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
* Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
* Printer-only versions of web pages

If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content, there are a number of ways you can indicate your preferred URL to Google. (This is called "canonicalization".) More information about canonicalization.

However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

* Use 301s: If you've restructured your site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)

* Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don't link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

* Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.

* Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

* Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

* Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.

* Avoid publishing stubs: Users don't like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don't publish pages for which you don't yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.....

Links:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Link building for smart webmasters (no dummies here) (SEM 101)

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:31:00 +0000

Another great post from BING WEBMASTER TOOL

Good summary of how important link building is and how to do that.

What is the point of building links?
Bing's policy on link building
How do I get valuable inbound links?
Site relevance
Authority sites
Going unnatural
Using the Webmaster Center Backlinks tool
So what can I do to get good, legitimate inbound links?

· Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content
· Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content
· Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant
· Publish expert articles to online article directories
· Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site's content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel="nofollow" attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won't automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)
· Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)
· Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications
· Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site*
· Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums
· Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom
· For more link building ideas, check out these additional link building tips.

Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details — now in Webmaster Tools Labs!

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:53:00 +0000

The Webmaster Tools team is lucky to have passionate users who provide us with a great set of feature ideas. Going forward, we’ll be launching some features under the “Labs” label so we can quickly transition from concept to production, and hear your feedback ASAP .

More:
Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details — now in Webmaster Tools Labs!

Producing effective menus

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:35:00 +0000

When designing a website it is important to try to provide as much visual support and context as possible to help orient users and to minimize the disruptive effects of jumping from one place to another whilst trying to find something.

There are 3 key navigational bits of information things people need to know when they are on an internet page; Where they are, Where they have been and Where they can go.

The following principals should be considered when designing an effective web site navigation.

Make the current menu selection clear. Your current selection should act as a "You are here" sign, reminding users of their place in the system.
Make the user’s current navigational selection visually ‘non-clickable’.
Place the most commonly used, or important items at the top or left of the list.
When secondary navigation is required, make it visually associated with and visually subordinate to the relevant parent section.
Always display the navigation and always display it consistently.
Always display links to a page’s children, siblings, parent and grandparents.
Provide redundant links on important sub-homepages.
Provide a clear link to the homepage from all pages.
Use intuitive labels for your navigational elements.
Where possible, stick to 5-9 navigational elements per hierarchy

Market Samurai Review - Keyword Wizard

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:46:00 +0000

I have recently purchased Market Samurai and have now been testing it out for a few weeks. As an SEO consultant I make it my business to understand how new keyword research tools work and the benefits and features of each.

Although I already have a WordTracker account, I decided to get the trial version of Market Samurai to see what data it produced, and I was so blown away by its features that I did not even wait for the trial to expire – I just pulled out my wallet and paid to ensure I got it before the price goes up.

Now previously my method for researching keywords in new markets and niches was to use a combination of Wordtracker and Google’s Keyword suggestion Tool, and compare results. I would then go and double check the actual results on the search pages, and click on the top 5 or 6 results to see how well they were optimised on-site as well as their PageRank.

This as you know gives you an idea of how easy it will be to rank your page on the top of Google for that search term.

Market Samurai does all this for you!

Here is a short video showing you how I use Market Samurai to research keywords for niche markets….

Basically you type in your keyword, you click one button and MarketSamurai pulls back a list of related words, just like Google’s keyword tool. You then remove any words you are not interested in and click "Analyze results". You can easily add positive or negative keyword filters to quickly manipulate the keyword list.

The Noble Samurai then pulls back information on the following metrics….

1. the estimated daily number of searches (from Google)
2. the daily search traffic – which is the amount of traffic you would expect to get if you were in #1 position,
3. the percentage of phrase searches to broad searches
4. the Google trend (in a mini-graph next to the keyword)
5. the number of competing Ads on Google Adwords
6. the number of clicks the #1 ranked Advertiser can expect per day
7. the average cost per click of this word in #1 position
8. the expected CTR if you were ranked for #1 on Adwords

… and a few more metrics calculated on the above such as daily spend on adwords if you were bidding for #1 and the SEO value of the keyword. It also gives an index of how commercial each term is. Search terms like "Buy product X" or "Purchase Product Y" have a higher commercial intent and so would likely convert better.

This alone is worth buying the software for!

However what made me decide to buy was the fact you can get the SEO competition data in one screenshot alongside all the other search data so you can easily compare how many clicks each word gets together with how much competition there is for that word.

The only feature I see missing from Market Samurai is that it pulls most of its data from Google’s database, and does not for example show you competition on Microsoft or Yahoo – however for me this is not a problem because I always optimise a new site first and formost for Google since Google has by far the major market share of the search market.

You can get Market Samurai at http://www.marketsamurai.com/

Google News Gets Search Suggestions

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:03:00 +0000

It's been in the radar for a while now about new changes coming to other Google's products. This morning, Google News Blog announced search suggestions have been added to the Google News search box as you type. Google added search suggestions as the default to Google.com just a bit over a year ago today. Now, it is the default on Google News.

Here is a picture:

The suggestions are actually tailored to news-like queries. You can find this working in the following languages English, French, Italian, German and Spanish editions of Google News.

Create Content to Improve Search Engine Results

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:59:00 +0000

Content is one of the most important pieces on a webpage design puzzle, also a useful online marketing tool. Without it, you are just showing off a graphic composition, even if done amazingly well, you are missing the necessary information your customers need to purchase what you offer.
For online marketing reasons content helps you rank top on search engines. How? When you constantly post information on your webpage web crawlers establish that you are a constant content generator, therefore you will be visited with more frequency than pages that don´t post with the regularity you do. This way you become a more important and useful website people consult regularly.

Keywords are very important in this process, especially on titles or headlines. Also on the first paragraph of your content, keywords are added with the intention of becoming the main words on your webpage, the way you are going to be found online. So, when your potential customers enter those words on search engines, your webpage appears on the first places without having to pay for words or place bids on them, like Pay per Click campaigns. You will have a natural ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines depending on how frequent you add information on your website. There are many ways of having different sections on your website to post information: News, Blogs, press releases etc. also, not all information has to be written content for customers:

• Video Content
• Audio Content
• Information tools

Widgets are information codes that can be installed on any webpage for information purposes. They take the form of onscreen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction ticketers, etc) with the intention of becoming a handy and useful tool viewers might use. Video information is also a good source to have customers enter and stay on your website for a while, view videos and be informed.
Although written content is useful for web crawlers to improve your search engine positioning, other information sources will also generate more traffic on your site. Remember, you are creating a webpage to be positioned online and a spot where people can find the products/services you offer, also a place where web surfers can find useful information and tools they search for online.

So, start thinking of useful content to post online. If you are interested in a professional company to improve your SEO strategies.

Let the expert team at SEO services take care of your online marketing strategies today.

What SEO strategy will best suit your site?

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:37:00 +0000

One of the most important aspects of any SEO campaign is to have an effective strategy in place as soon as possible. Depending on what kind of industry you are in, the strategy you choose to implement will differ. This will mostly be due to the amount of competition for the keyphrases you want to be found for. Also, you might be integrating some sort of SMO in the SEO campaign.

For easy phrases to rank for, your strategy might be simple. Get your onpage right and then do lots of link building. But for more competitive and generally lucrative phrases, you will probably need a more advanced strategy involving many more SEO techniques.

This is one reason why employing a successful SEO company to help you with your search engine optimisation is usually a step in the right direction. You can beat your head up against a wall as often as you like without a productive strategy and the result will be the same for a long time, you will have a headache.

Maybe you need more article marketing or blogs to be set up. Maybe lots of satellite websites for greater lead generation and increased SEO power. A structured campaign that runs on time every time will always bring better results than a made up effort by somebody who does not have lots of experience ranking a wide variety of websites.

Now I understand their will be people reading this who are thinking, dah, I knew that years ago, but well, this post just isn't for you. It is for the people out there who are not as well versed in SEO knowledge as others. Like business owners who just want their website to be found on Google for their main keyphrases.

So if you don't know what sort of strategy will work best for you, why not start speaking to SEO companies today, to see how they can help and what you might be able to learn.

Keyword Research Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:48:00 +0000

The overwhelmingly positive response to yesterday’s blog posting tells me that there is going to be a LOT of article writing happening between now and September 1st! So over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing an assortment of tips and tricks to help you not only generate ideas for all those new articles, but also help you identify ways to make the articles you write more effective.

One way to optimize your articles’ effectiveness is through the appropriate use of keywords. People use different words when they search for online content. These search terms are called keywords.

Keyword Research tools can help you discover topics that people are currently searching for that are related to your expertise. Use this as a springboard to write articles that directly relate to the topics your potential audience is searching for. Provide articles that answer the readers’ questions in their search query.

Popular Keyword Research Tools:

* Wordtracker: Generates keywords for search engine and website optimization.
* Keyword Discovery: Compiles keyword search stats from worldwide search engines.
* Goodkeywords: Downloadable freeware that queries a number of popular search engines to identify good keywords.
* Google Alerts: Email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of topic or keywords.
* Google Suggest: As you type in a keyword, Google offers suggestions and shows the number of results.
o Example: “Yoga” when entered into Google Suggest tells me that I should write articles about “Yoga Journals” or “Yoga Journaling”.

Key Insight: While you may be tempted to write only about the most popular topics, also remember that these topics have the most competition within the search engines — meaning, you are fighting against hundreds or thousands of competitors to get the attention of the market to your article.

Perhaps a better strategy is to focus on the middle to lower “tail” of the market by looking at the 50th-200th most popular keywords or phrases from your keyword research and use them as your basis for your next set of articles. There will be less competition for the ‘long tail’ than the short list of most popular terms and key-phrases.

Tip: Look at how your niche keywords may intersect with a holiday or current event. It’s a great way to pick up current interest traffic!

Lets make the web faster - Let us make the Web faster

noreply@blogger.com (Airmekah) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:59:00 +0000

"Let's make the web faster," was one this week (week 26, 2009) proclaimed by Google action. What is it?

Behind this is the idea that the web will be one of new pages and files (HTML, DOC, XML, Flash, etc.) grows. Not exactly a lot of pages can be search engine optimized really describe? What is in this context "not optimized, the file sizes and the large number of (dependent) files is bigger than they should be.

This accessible and optimal design, which is behind the action. While the Web by this action, which I incidentally do very well on the issue of awareness. It may well be said that "optimized" sites, ultimately, to the user faster. If you have less files to be transferred is the whole thing quickly, logically!

Google itself draws the focus to the user. However, when you consider that Google stores everything possible, then it is obvious that there is a performance of interest. I do not think Google has pushed the boundaries, but it is cheaper to existing small and optimized content to design a new computing centers (or data center) to build. Makes sense, right?

If you go to the last few years looking back, it can be concluded that the data volumes are constantly growing, to the same extent but also the data. Who can still remember modems?

More info: Official Google Blog