Posts tagged SEO
What SEO can do for you
Apr 28th
In this guest post, Techistan’s Susan Kennedy explains why your SEO strategy commands your constant attention.
Wikipedia defines search engine optimization as the procedure of raising the levels or traffic quality (traffic being visitors) to a website from the natural unpaid search engine rankings. In reality there are a lot more facets to it than just that.
SEO is generally split into two camps:
1) Page optimization;
2) Off page optimization.
Search engine optimization must be continually worked on. But why would you need to do that? To stay ahead of your competition by coming higher than them in the rankings list.
No matter what you think of them, Google are the king of the search engines. Everyone wants to get to the top of them. According to the Cornell eye tracking study the site listed in the No. 1 position in Google gets 50% of the clicks. The site listed in number 10 gets a meagre 2%. More clicks = more traffic. More traffic = more sales. That is if you have what the customers are looking for. Read the rest of this entry »
Google 99.9% sure it will shut China site: good news for Yahoo and Bing?
Mar 15th
Talks with China over censorship have got Google nowhere fast and the search engine giant is now “99.9%” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, according to weekend reports. But what will its China exit mean for other search brands and furthermore, search advertising?
If there were a set of traffic lights blocking Google competitors wishing to expand in China with a red light, it’d now turn green – or at least yellow.
There are more than 380 million internet users in China and the search engine market is now estimated to be worth over $1.5 billion. And it’s still growing! At a phenomenal rate, actually. From 2006 to 2010, it is expected to see a compound annual growth in excess of 30%.
But the Chinese internet market is still relatively young, and as the rest of the nation starts to get online, the size of its search market is set to rocket. Is it really a good idea for Google to get out?
Google seems to be holding its search engine to ransom. It’s annoyed it can’t get what it wants, but what Google is perhaps failing to realise is, if it exits China, it will lose a massive slice of the potential search marketing pie and could open the road for Yahoo to overtake it in the usage stakes.
Yahoo and Microsoft are on the path of assault and Bing is already doing incredibly well. Imagine if it goes into China and cleans up, picking up where Google left off. There’s a whole search worked out there, censorship or not, there’ll now be a huge gap in the search market in China.
Even though Yahoo has been present in China for some time, it has never enjoyed the popularity it would like – but China remains somewhat of an untapped market in an economy that is crying out for reform and change.
SEO – beyond the page
Mar 11th
Bruce Townsend, ecommerce software supplier, Actinic
As a search engine optimisation specialist, people often ask if I can guarantee to get their web pages into top three positions on Google. The answer of course is, ‘no’ – at least, not for useful phrases that lots of people are actually searching for. Anyone who gives such a guarantee is either focussing on the wrong phrases, or using questionable techniques that could backfire in a big way.
For any given phrase there are plainly only three top three places, and probably hundreds or even thousands of web pages competing for them. Moreover, with Google’s heavy emphasis on inbound links, rankings take time to build.
That doesn’t mean that top rankings are no longer achievable. But it’s not a short-term ambition, and it cannot be guaranteed.
Fortunately, it’s no longer just your web pages that can get you into search.
All the main search engine listings now incorporate results from a variety of sources, not just web pages. They include images, video and news; links from blogs and social bookmarking networking sites like del.icio.us, Facebook and Twitter; and in the case of Google, product listings and results from Google Maps.
So as well as optimising your web pages, try some of the following:
· Upload video about your products to YouTube, optimising the title
· Save useful bookmarks, including some of your site pages, to del.icio.us
· Join Facebook and Twitter
· Build up networks of friends and followers on all of the above
· Optimise image filenames and Alt attributes
· Submit your products to Google Products
· Get listed on Google Maps
· Publish news to online PR sites
And if you do those things and constantly link back to your own web site, guess what? You will gain traffic from many more sources – and your page rankings will improve as well.
Can PRs do SEO?
Feb 17th
Charley Hayes is a public relations practitioner and social media strategist at Onlinefire, says that SEO is becoming more and more important to PRs.
SEO PR or ‘Search Engine Optimisation Public Relations’ is a term which has been banded around for a number of years, but it is only recently that the PR industry has adopted the practice in earnest.
This is mainly because there’s been a lot of controversy over who should own SEO, but fundamentally, SEO and PR go hand in hand. They work together to dramatically enhance a brand’s online presence and positively influence search.
Specifically, the aim of SEO PR is to increase brand visibility and conversation when consumers search for your products or services. After all, the first few pages of Google should return only the most relevant and positive news, reviews and commentary. You want your brand to be at the top of that list.
Link building is another important area where SEO and PR work together. Incoming quality links are a vital part of success on Google, and the value of these links to a company website cannot be underestimated.
Brands have relationships with a plethora of organisations, and PRs spend much of their time helping to promote and nurture these relationships. To successfully build your brand position on Google, it is essential to encourage relevant and high-ranking sites to link to you. This is where SEO PR again plays a pivotal role.
Whatever you believe about the debate – PR and SEO are working towards the same end goal; to achieve positive brand exposure to future potential customers.
Charley Hayes is a public relations practitioner and digital PR specialist with wide ranging client experience; from technology to travel and sports to drinks, in both business-to-business and consumer sectors. A social media strategist at Onlinefire, Charley has worked across online PR campaigns for Virgin Media, Panasonic and the Post Office.
Why web filters could be bad news for internet marketers
Jan 25th
We always hear of talk that web filters are hindering some businesses. SEO key words aren’t always so simple, or so innocent as one magazine in Canada has just found out.
The news that Google was to pull out of China over mounting frustrations over censorship laws last week shocked the search industry.
Just one week earlier, Yahoo and Bing had announced it was to succumb to internet censorship pleas from the Indian government, banning searches for terms such as ‘sex’.
Such searches would return this message: “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content. To learn more about SafeSearch requirements in your country or region, see How Bing delivers search results.”
While we may have been confused (because sometimes ‘sex’ is within context…for example ‘sex discrimination’) by the actions of the Chinese and Indian governments, now we can be a little worried about the impact these censorship rules given that the internet is more global than ever.
Canadian magazine ‘The Beaver’ has recently had to rename the almost 40 year-old title as it has been deemed as ‘vulgar’ in internet search terms.
An alternative meaning to ‘The Beaver’ is something crass that has no relation to the Canadian semi-aquatic rodent, actually.
And that alternative meaning causes web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name.
Needless to say, has internet filters become more common place not just in certain countries and governments but also in the workplace, the past two years have posed a problem for the magazine.
A few years before Internet use became common, the magazine, which now has a circulation of about 44,000, sought its readers’ opinions and decided to stick with the name.
The last issue as The Beaver, which announces the name change to Canada’s History, was mailed to subscribers last week.
Filtering ISP’s is bad news for some businesses, and makes the marketer’s job a little tricky when it comes to key words and what classification their brands and websites might come under.
Some of possible repercussions of this censorship are:
1. This will result in significantly lower connection speeds (in the order of 80%).
2. As the filters will rely on a ‘black list’ provided by a government body, it opens the door to potential misuse or political interference.
3. Perhaps a veiled attempt to ‘Control the Conversation’ emanating from a growing and more vocal constituency via blogs and social media.
Do you think internet censorship will eventually affect you?
SEO tips for Bing
Dec 2nd
Think you have a good SEO strategy for Google? You better adapt it for Bing
Following yesterday’s news that Microsoft’s Bing is gaining share on Google (its searches are up 7% for October), I thought I’d look into the company’s stance on search engine optimization (SEO) – you know, now that people are flocking to the site.
Microsoft’s stance on SEO doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s, however, users won’t get the same results on both Google and Bing, which is how to two can coexist in the first place.
The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy. Remember that Microsoft’s Bing is the “decision engine”.
Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam.
In a white paper for webmasters, Microsoft says: “There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing. However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog.”
Bing separates results into categories, which has so far worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up.
Bing also has the explore pane, which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of “search options.”
Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say “mobile phones” for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.
With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the results, it’s about getting to the top of the right set of results. Having quality and relevant content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.
“Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design,” says Microsoft, as quoted on Webpronews.com.
Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?
Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad:
- If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them
- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.
- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)
- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links
- Avoid “bad neighbourhoods” like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.
- Avoid hidden text
So that’s where Microsoft stands on SEO practices. Remember that when you are thinking about SEO and how to rank higher, the rules as they were set out on Google when we first starting talking about SEO have changes. Search engine marketing is about to become a whole lot more complicated.
Business networking strikes back
Nov 19th
Bruce Townsend, online marketing expert at ecommerce & EPOS supplier, Actinic (www.actinic.co.uk)
Only a few years ago, networking was the thing that greased the wheels of business. It wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew, that built the reputation of your company. Whether at exhibitions and events, or in the local Chambers of Commerce, pressing the flesh and chewing the fat with like-minded people was the way to put the word about. Handing out bits of free advice opened doors for the occasional sales pitch, and brought the business rolling in.
The worldwide web changed all that. The online channel became the new growth opportunity, and on the internet it wasn’t who you knew, but what you knew that counted. Early conversations were about HTML and Perl script and how to physically create an online presence. As technology became easier to use, and more companies went online, competition increased and the debate switched to PPC and SEO, and how to get your web site visible in search results.
Today, we may be on the cusp of another switch. In the UK, 90% of searches go through Google. For any given search, Google only offers twenty places in the first page of results, and ten of those are adverts. It’s getting crowded at the top, and harder and harder for new entries to gain visibility.
But fear not, because rescue may be at hand. And guess what, it’s good old-fashioned networking in another guise. More and more businesses are gaining a foothold and building a profile online using social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, and business-oriented services like LinkedIn and Plaxo. Even Twitter, the bastard child of blogging and social networking, is being put to effective commercial use.
Initially dismissed by business skeptics, these sites are finding their place in the armoury of business marketing tools. Is your business represented there?
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