SEO 101

Having moved to a new State recently, I have been relying on  Local search to find various services. This got me thinking about the impact Local Search has on a client’s business and therefore how important it is when optimizing a site to understand how customers use Local search .

Local search comprises of  what is known as Nearcasting and Farcasting. Viewers maybe looking for something nearby ( Nearcasting) e.g. a chinese take-out near their residence,  or they may search with local intent but for a location that may not be local (Farcasting) e.g. A Denver, CO resident searching for a hotel in downtown, New York City.

There are an vast number of online businesses targeting viewers searching for  something located in a particular area. Hotels, restaurants, legal services, health services, and more can use geo-targeted SEO tactics to out-do competitors and improve their rankings for geo-targeted terms.

Here are some the most important points to keep in mind when optimizing for local search:

-Work on keyword research, ensure that highly searched terms are targeted and
prioritize your optimization based on the relevance of the pages. Ensure that the website has content and pages that are relevant to the search terms.Use synonyms and regional colloquialisms where possible.

-Keep an eye on how competitors’ sites are faring, check on Page rank, site optimization and so on, use SEO tools to check their incoming links.

-Optimize your pages for geo-targeted search. Use targeted search terms and try and be creative while using them in metatags and within the content of the the site.

-Create listings and verify them on Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Microsoft Live Local. Submit the site to Local Directories and online Yellow Pages.

Work on getting Reviews from from users, reviews have a lot of impact in most geo-targeted and local platforms.

-Work on Link-building with other service or product partners that support the client’s business.

-Ensure that the physical address and phone number of the business is incorporated in  text format on every page of the site.

In a few words, letting a Viewer know precisely what the Business is about and where to find it will get the site ranked on top for local search.

It’s easy to think of a domain name as being one of the least important issues that impact your online business, however nothing could be farther from the truth. Having a good Domain name is extremely important to the online presence of a business.

To ensure that your business draws the maximum number of visitors it is imperative that your domain name is one that is memorable and makes an impact on the viewer. It should be easy to remember and straight forward. Avoid  complex and hard to pronounce words. Unless  the business name dictates it, try and avoid numerals and initials.

Try and limit your domain name to ten charcters and avoid exceeding twenty charcters at all costs. A great domain name is less than ten characters; a good domain name is less than twenty characters, going over twenty characters is less than acceptable.

As far as extensions go,  the .com domain name extension is the best by far, because it is the most widely used. The .net extension is the second best,  certain extensions are related to the kind of business, for example .gov is restricted to government related sites, while .org is typically used by not-for-profit organization and educational websites and .info extensions are generally used for informational websites.

I’s also important to use the right spelling and to avoid using symbols as viewers who misspel or who do not remember to ad the symbols may land on a competitors’ site.

A good domain name should be short and sweet and something that sticks in the viewers’ memory and draws them back to your site.

If you have pages that are doing well but some that are struggling, you think to yourself “What can I do to improve this page?” “Should I rewrite the content to make it fresh?”

In this case, rewriting content will not boost the page’s rankings, same goes for streaming an RSS feed onto a page to make the content of the page changing and fresh. Page rank is actually determined and merited by other factors such as inbound links and keyword placement in your page such as the title tag, headlines, etc.

But on the other hand, adding new content pages such as articles, resources or Blogs will increase traffic to your site. Frequently adding new content to your site will get the search engine spiders to crawl your site more regularly which will have your pages indexed faster.

Assuming that these new articles, resources or Blogs are written for the users and not just for Page Rank, it should be interesting enough that it attracts links on its own. And as long as these inbound links are quality and industry related links, the Page Rank of the page should be doing well without much maintenance.

All in all, frequently changing a page does lead to it being crawled more, meaning that the spiders can crawl to the new pages faster but one must do additional work such as linkbuilding and others to climb up the ladder in Page Rank.

We all hear that duplicate content is bad, bad in terms of everything - from academics to SEO!

Search engines despise duplicate content. Why? The reasoning behind this statement is that search engines want to provide users with dynamic results available on the web. That is not going to happen with duplicate content - users will find query results with exact same information for their unique search results. For example, you’re researching on the web on Socrates.  Generally when doing research, you want to find as many variety of information and facts as possible and with duplicate content, the user may not be able to do so and won’t find search engines much as a useful portal for their research.

Search engines want to be relevant to their users’ searches as possible. And in order to do so, search engines try their best to deliver relevant results by filtering out duplicate content pages from search results.

How they filter duplicate content is by determining which page is the original page by looking at site authority, PageRank, and links to the content page.

To find out if your page has duplicate content or if someone else has content from your site, visit CopyScape.

As a business owner, you want to see how well you are doing in search results. So, you get online and do a search for your business name or, perhaps, your name. To your surprise, on page one of the search results are slanderous comments made about you or your business that are not founded. A competitor may have hired someone to comment on blogs or write articles or reviews about your business in order to harm your web traffic.

This is a serious problem and steps need to be taken in order to protect your reputation. But what do you do?

Not much can be found on the web with advice on combating this issue, but there are a few steps that you can take to help reduce the harm these comments are doing. I recently had a client who was in a similar scenario. He is an Austin Lasik Surgeon who specializes in LASIK, E-LASEK/PKR, and cataract surgery with amazing results for his clients in and around Austin, Texas. He is successful because he and his eye surgery staff take the time to answer all their clients’ questions and they put in the effort to be available around the clock for their clients. This can be a very high bar for a competitor. When marketing tactics have failed to make you do better than your competitor, you may be tempted to lower yourself to slander. This is what Dr. Howerton’s competitor did.

This competitor may have hired someone to post slanderous blog comments about Dr. Howerton and his Texas Eye Surgery Center. The interesting thing is, these comments were posted on blogs that had nothing to do with eye surgery or Lasik. They were on a blog about the most random topics.

I was asked to combat these slanderous attacks with SEO techniques. I started with research and brainstorming. This was something new to me and I wasn’t sure where to begin.

1. Requesting the comments be removed.
   I started with going to the sites that hosted these malicious listings and tried to find a place where I could submit a complaint and request that the comments be removed. Not all websites have this option, but some have a place on each comment where you can flag it as “spam” and place a warning on it. You may have to create an account in order to do this, but it is well worth it. Even if the comment isn’t removed, at least it has been flagged so others can see the potential harm.
2. Searched for blogs in his target market.
   Having a list of blogs for Dr. Howerton to leave medical advice on and to leave his URL in the contact area of the comment helped give more places for good listings in search results when his name was searched.
3. Searched for review sites:
   I found many sites for his clients to place reviews about their experience with him and his staff. Creating as many places as possible for good comments will help override the bad in searches. Some sites I suggested for reviews are Epinions, Kudzu, and Real Self.
4. Created profiles on business listings:
   I helped Dr. Howerton create profiles about him and his business where his URL could be left. We added a photograph of him as well as his contact information and address of his Austin Eye Surgery Office. Some sites we used are Epinions, Kudzu, and Insider Pages.

The great thing about the slanderous comments made against Dr. Howerton is that they were comments in blogs and not articles are blog postings. This means that the comments get pushed down over time. A slanderous article or blog posting gets staying power with time. The longer information is on the web, the higher the rankings can get. This means that it is important to start combating the slander right away.

These steps were a good start against the slanderous comments, but I needed to do more. That’s when I started researching.

I came across a very useful blog posting titled Blast Negative Publicity off Google & Yahoo. This post gives five useful steps to attacking slander on the web. I have summarized these steps and added my own comments. So, please visit the original posting at the link in the first sentence of this paragraph.

Step 1:
Contact the website owner about the slanderous comment and politely ask that it be removed. You may have to prove who you are and that the comment is indeed slander.

Step 2:
Look at the keywords used in the article, blog posting, or comment that search engines might be picking up on. These keywords could be your name, business name, or the keywords you use on your website. The author of this blog suggests clicking on the ‘cached’ entry in the search engine listing. The keywords that the search engine used to index the page will be highlighted. Use these same keywords when writing articles, blog posts, comments, or when your clients are writing a review of your business. This will help these good comments to appear with a search and hopefully will appear before the slanderous comments. Make as many listings with these keywords as possible to push out the slander. This is important. Put these keywords in the title of the article, blog posting, comment, or review and in the body text.

Step 3:
Create free classified ad listings and post these listings under the business services category. Make sure you put your name and business in the title and the body text for search engines to find. Use other important keywords in your body text as well. Free classified ad listings show up in search results in the first week of posting. Do as many postings as possible and post them for the longest time allowed.

Step 4:
Write articles about your business and expertise with a title that uses important keywords with your name and business. Post these on your website and on free article submission sites. Be sure to include keywords with the body text including your name and business name.

Step 5:
Create free directory listings. There are many free directories out there and you can leave your name, business name, contact information, a small blurb about your business with keywords, keywords, and a link to your website. Using the keywords that are used in the slanderous material will help push the slander down in the search results.

Trying all these steps will help combat the slander. The situation may improve immediately if you start right away, but it may take a few months depending on how long the article or blog posting has been on the web. The sooner you start improving the situation, the better. If you have any problems or need more help, please be sure to contact your nearest SEO representative.

Good luck!

A new study about the click behavior of web searchers shows that searchers click specialized content within general search results more than they do within the results of specialized searches.

Within the last year, all the major search engines have begun returning blended results for some searches. For these searches, specialized search result types such as news, images and videos appear along the regular web pages on the search result page.

The following study shows which results are clicked most often:

36% of searchers click news results within blended search results, while only 17% click a news result after conducting a news-specific search.
31% of search engine users click image results within blended search results, while 26% click an image result after conducting an image-specific search.
17% of search engine users click video results within blended search results, while only 10% click a video result after conducting a video-specific search.
Images are the most clicked result type after a specialized search.

News items are the most clicked result type within blended search results.

The study also revealed some trends that show that the first page of the search results is getting more important:

68% of search engine users click results on the first page of search results.
Only 8% of search engine users review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result.
49% of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they are looking for, change and/or re-launch their search after reviewing just the first page of search results.
37% of online users associate appearance at the top of search results with a company’s leadership within its industry or category.

This clearly shows that it is very important to be listed on the first page of the search results. If your website cannot be found in the top 10 results for your keywords, then you need to pay attention to the optimization on the site.

In addition to getting top 10 rankings, it is also important that your web pages attract clicks. Make sure your web page titles are compelling and that the descriptions attract the attention of viewers and interest them enough to want to click on the link to your site.

Your website must be found in the top 10 results and it must also be attractive enough so that people click on it. If your website is not listed on the first result pages you stand to lose a large chunk of viewers who could be potential customers.

Maybe MacIntosh was onto something when they created the iPhone to easily glide through albums or images but there is a new visual search engine in town that is taking similar concepts and using it towards search engines, SearchMe. SearchMe allows users to visually search the web rather than by text like Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves (Jeeves - whatever they’re called now). A lot of pages found on the search engines can be deceptive where it turns out what you were searching for isn’t on the page you clicked on.  Well, now you’d have to hit the arrow button to go back to the search engine to find a page that contains what you’re looking for. Call it laziness, call it whatever you will.

SearchMe allows users to visually scroll through web results of what the user is searching for before they click on the site. It definitely helps you avoid pages you don’t want to go into. If you can’t read what is on the site, you can zoom in the site for a larger view similar to the iPhone.

SearchMe allows users to search 3 different ways: visual search, category suggest and list view. For example, if you were searching for cherry blossoms, you would see visual results of webpages containing webpages. You can scroll through the webpages to see which site fits your needs the most. For the category suggest, if you search a keyterm that is ambiguous, you’ll see at the top of the page category suggestions for the keyterm you typed in. As for list view, the search results show text results as well as visual results of webpages – which you can resize whether you want the visual view bigger or the list view bigger.

SearchMe may just be the new way to search online.

Where do you think the ads will be placed?

Social Media Marketing is the latest buzz in the Search Engine Marketing industry, everyone wants to know all there is to know and everyone is keen to jump onto this bandwagon.
So what is Social Media?                                                                                                   According to Wikipedia, social media includes “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other.”

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video and technologies such as blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP. For the last few years this was all considered related to, but separate from mainstream media. Now there is hardly any differentiation.

Examples of social media applications that facilitate social networking are Google Groups (reference based), Wikipedia (information), MySpace and Facebook (profiles), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (microblogging) and LinkedIn (professional connections). Many of these social media services can be integrated via Social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, and Plaxo.

What is Social Media Marketing?                                                                                               Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through participation in various social media networks.

The goals of a SMM program will differ for every business or organization, however most will involve building brand/idea awareness, increasing visibility, encouraging brand feedback and discussions as well as possibly selling a product or a service.

People gather together to use social media and are usually segmented by their choice of a community, their interests and the way they use the social site/tool. Most visitors enter through the wide topical lens of social media channels and exit them to reach your narrow-focus website.

Example: someone searches YouTube for plastic surgery videos, finds an original video you uploaded and notice the URL to your plastic surgery site. They click through and visit your site. You are then responsible for converting these viewers into loyal buyers.

What is Social media optimization?                                                                 Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

SMO can include participation in profile creation sites, adding RSS feeds, adding a “Digg This” button, blogging and incorporating functionalities like Flickr photo slides and YouTube videos. .

In Social media optimization referrals are created through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.

In a similar way, viral marketing utilizes word of mouth through friends and families and blogging achieves marketing goals by sharing content through RSS and blog search engines such as Technorati.

Rohit Bhargava is credited with inventing the term SMO. His original five rules for conducting Social Media Optimization are:

Increase your linkability
Make tagging and bookmarking easy
Reward inbound links
Help your content travel
Encourage the mashup
Spam in social media:
As with search engines, social media is prone to spamming. However networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook have taken actions against spam to lessen the occurrence of malicious activity. Some social media sites, such as Digg, empower users to bury content that is considered low quality or spam.

Apart from getting traffic and attention for your website, Social media marketing can accelerate the promotion and spreading of ideas among targeted audiences and to promote a specific event/website or business. It can be used to lessen the impact of negative reviews and to build quality inbound linking for your site.

Social media optimization and marketing is a strategic and methodical process to establish your influence, reputation and brand within communities of potential customers, readers or supporters.

Title Tags are commonly known as the title of the page and is displayed in the top bar of the search engine and as the header in search engine results. Some good information is in the article All About Title Tags. But the title tag can also be used on links and images. Alt Tags are extremely important for images, not only so computers can make the information audible, but for search engine robots to know what the image is about since they cannot see the image. This helps in higher page rankings. The title tag can be added to the <img> tag along with the alt tag. It is important not to replace the alt tag with the title tag since the alt tag carries much more weight than the title tag. The title tag can also be placed in the <a> tag to help define the link. This is great for footer links that are short and do not have a lot of keywords. The question is, “Do search engine robots give weight to the title tag?”

Not much has been written on this subject. There are a few blogs that briefly discuss this topic. SEO Book by Aaron Wall talks about which is better, the alt tag or the title tag. The answer is obviously the alt tag, but it is a good blog to read.

Another blog is Search Engine Optimization Journal by Nick Stamoulis. He references Aaron Wall’s blog and suggests that title tags be used in links, but not too much with alt tags as it might seem like spam to search engines.

Alt tags appear in browser windows when you hover your cursor over the images, but do not appear in Firefox. The title tag appears when your cursor hovers over images in Firefox. So, I place both title tags and alt tags on images for better viewer usability. It’s a good “just in case” thing. I am not sure if it helps boost page rankings, but it can’t hurt.

I have also tried placing title tags on links other than just footer links. I am still testing this theory out. It can help users get more information about what a link is about and it can be annoying to some users when that yellow horizontal bar pops up, but it might boost rankings. It is something to research and test. I’m assuming it isn’t that important since there is hardly any blogs or information about it.

I used title tags in the links for a client of mine, Portland Cosmetic Dentist Dr. Sue Wendling. I also placed title tags on all her images along with the alt tags. She has quite a few clients’ before and after photos in her Cosmetic Dentistry Smile Gallery. This helps give more places for keywords and more descriptions of what the site is about. The title tags need to be the same as the alt tags so the search engines will not think it is spam.

The title tags on links should also be similar to the link title. If a footer link says “Home,” the title tag would be “Cosmetic Dentistry Home.” This shows the search engines that the title for the link is about the page the link is linked to, but has a keyword in it. Keywords are essential and it is important that we do everything we can to place keywords throughout a site without it degrading viewers’ usability and seeming to be spam.

I suggest more testing and experimenting be done with title tags. I am interested in learning more.

Whenever new SEO techniques are shared with the SEO community there is always a rush for the information. The Google Quality Rater Guidelines supposedly “leaked” from Google recently are no exception. Overall, there really aren’t any extreme revelations about their ranking system and most of the information is easily found in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

It seems the “Rater Guidelines” has only slightly more detail about classifying spam. Most importantly, I didn’t see any rules that the average search engine optimizer hasn’t already assumed was in place. We already know that Google loves informative websites as we see here with KeratoconusHelp.com, when we Google search: Beverly Hills Keratoconus.

I found the classification for websites, (Vital, Useful, Relevant, Non-Relevant, and Off-Topic), interesting. But a good part of the information in the guidelines describe spam techniques used by various webmasters to trick search engines into listing their site.

In Google’s eyes, white hat SEO techniques are the quickest way to the top of their listings. Sure it may take a few before you find yourself at the top of listings, but this is the best way Google has found to keep out the junk.

All optimizers know about the “dark-side” of SEO and very few use the tactics, which I attribute to Google’s heavy hand in banning the sites from their index. As we can see with this Pittsburgh Cosmetic Surgeon , there is no Google authorized fast lane to the top of search engine listings, the road can be difficult depending on the industry and the amount of competition. We must abide by the commandments given unto us by the Google gods and they will reward us in return by providing us with 1st page listings.