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Yahoo Now Including Bing Results – Tips for Optimizing
Posted on July 23rd, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/8KMHxER-LjU/yahoo-starts-including-microsoft-powered-search-results
Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance’s transition have begun.
Will you place more emphasis on Bing optimization as it integrates with Yahoo Search? Let us know."The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo’s VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."
Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:
As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:
- Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
- Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
- Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."
The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.
Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:
The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.
WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).
Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.
Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.
As we’ve discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you’ve not already been doing so.
Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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Google Shares Its Viewpoint on Earning Quality Links
Posted on June 23rd, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/4nC5opgciy4/google-shares-its-viewpoint-on-earning-quality-links
SEO changes all the time as search engines make adjustments to their algorithms and user interfaces, users adopt new technologies, etc. Still some things never change, like Google’s view on spammy links.
Do you agree with Google’s philosophy on link-building? Share your thoughts here.
In a new post to the Google Webmaster Central blog, the company has expressed its most recent viewpoint on earning quality links.
The first piece of advice Google gives is to get involved with the community around your topic. If you were still not convinced that social media plays a very big role in search, consider this is coming straight from Google. Now the networks your community hangs out in may vary, but engaging with the community is simply a good way to get links and build credibility, which also will most likely lead to more links. Engaging is good for increasingly visibility outside of search anyway. Nothing new. Just reiterated by Google.
Sidenote: Listen to what Arnel Leyva of Covario has to say about search and social media from this recent interview WebProNews did with him at SMX Advanced:
Another tip Google suggests is to create content that solves problems for your users – things like tutorials, videos, and tools, surveys, research results, etc. Users who find helpful content are likely to pass it on.
Google notes that humor and other link-bait tactics can work for the short term, but does not recommend counting such tactics. “It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort,” says Google Search Quality Strategist Kaspar Szymanski. “There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.” (emphasis added)“Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index,” says Szymanski. “There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.”
Szymanski also suggests looking to similar sites in other markets for inspiration – not to copy them, but to see the things that they have done to be successful and see if there is a way to apply that to your own site.
Finally, probably the most obvious tip offered here is to make it easy for people to share your content. Things like Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets can go a long way in creating new links to your content. Granted these won’t necessarily boost you “pagerank” but they will boost your visibility, which can lead to more quality links, and simply traffic, which is ultimately the goal anyway right?
Have more link-building tips? Share them with WebProNews readers in the comments.
Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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Why New Google SERPs Might Mean More Traffic for You
Posted on May 10th, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/Cxrh9uZ_zmQ/why-new-google-serps-might-mean-more-traffic-for-you
Now that the masses have access to Google’s newly redesigned results pages, it’s time to consider this in an SEO light if you have not already been considering it.
How do Google’s New SERPs Affect SEO? Comment here.
Google has had its search options available for about a year, but they have not been in the face of the user like the newly redesigned SERP is. With this new design, users don’t have any choice but to notice the options that are available. It’s not too different from Bing or Yahoo in that respect (Danny Sullivan notes that Ask pioneered this design). The difference is that way more people search with Google on a regular basis (in fact, last month Google reportedly dominated the search market by even more than usual).
SEO Strategies and Increased Engagement from SearchersThe new SERPs may shake up SEO efforts, simply because users will start going to the different options Google provides them, taking them to different sets of results. Now that the options are in the limelight, users are more likely to use them.
Yahoo tells us when they added features to their left-hand navigation bar, engagement increased. "We’ve been steadily adding more filtering options and relevant search suggestions to our left-hand navigation bar…and have seen engagement and click-throughs for those features double over the past seven months." I can’t imagine why Google wouldn’t also see an engagement increase for certain features that are now more visible.
It’s going to come down to evaluating the different options for any given query that you wish to rank for, and focusing efforts upon those. I’ll refer back to the article I posted shortly after Google launched its search options in the first place you can find some tips in that. The same general thinking still applies, but it just got more important.
New SERPs Make Social Even More Important
The options in the left panel pull from "everything" – classic Google results (universal, organic, paid, etc.), blogs from Google Blog Search, Books from Google Books (which includes magazines), Images from Google Image Search, News from Google News, Maps from Google Maps, Shopping from Google Product Search, Videos from Google Video (which includes videos from YouTube and other sources), and Updates from Google’s real-time search.
That last one is of particular note, because before users generally only saw Google’s real-time search in action on select newsy queries unless they hunted them down. Real-time search for any query is now much more accessible, which makes real-time search a bigger deal for search marketing (here’s some tips for getting found in real-time search). Here’s how Google ranks tweets.
Social interactions are becoming more important. The new SERPs also place much more emphasis on social search results. The same goes for location. You’ll notice "nearby" is one of the options. Discussions is another option. Google appears to draw from a variety of sources for this one, but it stands to reason that engaging in conversation throughout the web has some value to Google’s results. There are definitely a lot of results from forums in these results – another reason forum participation can be a valuable use of your time. Forums and Q&A are actually a couple of sub-options, but I’ve seen blog posts in the discussions results too.
Emphasis on Diversification of Where You’re Ranking in GoogleWhat it boils down to is that ranking in all of Google’s different search engines has become even more important for getting traffic from Google. Here are some tips for that. I expect traffic for sites listed in any of these to increase as a result of Google’s New SERP. Keep in mind that Google has been testing this for a significant amount of time. If you think Yahoo was seeing increased engagement, imagine what Google will attract.
I would watch for Google to add more options to the left-panel at any given time. Though they have already experimented a great deal with this layout, I expect we’ll see a lot more tweaking as time goes on.
Do you think Google’s new SERPs will increase your traffic? Tell us what you think.
Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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New Data From Google Can Help You Optimize Your Site for Conversions
Posted on May 7th, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/zkmZ2_yfehA/google-excites-site-owners-with-new-conversion-numbers
Google has just started sharing more detailed data for each individual search query in the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools. Google used to just report the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now users can click on a given search query to see a breakdown of the number of impressions (number of times your site’s pages appeared in the results for the query), as well as the amount of clickthrough (number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site) for each position your site’s pages appeared at in the results associated with that query. Google also shows a list of your site’s pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query.
Is the new data being provided by Google of use to you? Tell us what you think.
How This New Data Can Help Site Owners
WebProNews spoke with industry veteran Jill Whalen of HighRankings about how this new data can help site owners. "In the past, I haven’t found the data in Webmaster Tools all that helpful other than the occasional finding of a crawl error," she says. "Some of the information they provide isn’t quite accurate, such as when they say that certain Meta descriptions are duplicates when they actually aren’t. These inaccuracies cause people to wonder what they’re doing wrong and in some cases they even panic or waste time ‘fixing’ things that were not broken in the first place, just because they believe everything that comes out of Google."
"This new data–assuming it’s accurate–provides a new layer of information beyond that which we can typically get elsewhere," Whalen continues. "As far as I know, there’s no other way to know the actual number of times an organic listing in Google is shown to people for a given keyword phrase. That’s pretty interesting and important information!"
"Where I see some real value, however, would be in conversion optimization–trying to increase the clickthroughs for your existing organic listings. Just knowing what your clickthrough conversion rate actually is, is a whole new set of data that we never had before."
Another industry veteran, Aaron Wall of SEOBook, tells me, "For years Google has provided some mystery meat data of marginal value and so I typically have not recommended registering with their webmaster tools. But this is the first tool they have offered which flips that recommendation on its head, as these stats give you new insights into how you are doing in search – data that is not easy to get anywhere else." He’s got an interesting post up about it himself.
How Accurate is the Data?
Google’s addition of the new data has been met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Comments on Google’s announcement are overwhelmingly positive. That’s not to say, however, that there isn’t some amount of skepticism."As I said, this data will be very useful if it is indeed accurate. There’s been some Twitter buzz from other SEOs whose data doesn’t match up with their Google Analytics," says Whalen. "For our High Rankings website, the clickthroughs for any given keyword phrase didn’t exactly match what my Google Analytics showed for the same keyword phrases, but it was fairly close. For instance, my top two Google organic keyword phrases showed 3,020 and 1,193 visits when using Google Analytics. Via Webmaster Tools, the same keyword phrases show 2900 and 1300, respectively. That’s pretty close. Perhaps they’re sort of just rounding off (in a strange kind of way!). Other phrases had similar differences in the numbers."
Regardless of how precise the information is, webmasters have some new numbers to sink their teeth into, and assuming that many more share similar views to Whalen’s this might make Webmaster Tools a great deal more useful to a lot of site owners. In fact, a lot more site owners may soon be using Webmaster Tools for the first time. Google also just announced a new deal that will insert Google Services for Websites into the latest version of the Plesk Panel, which is said to be used by millions of site owners. Webmaster Tools is part of that Services for Websites package.
Will you find this new data from Google useful? Let us know.
Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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Is Your Content Getting As Much Out of YouTube as it Could Be?
Posted on May 4th, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/agZHJjU-kXk/is-your-content-getting-as-much-out-of-youtube-as-it-could-be
YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.
Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? Let us know.
However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site."When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience," says Stewart. "I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people."
"We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged," she adds.
"We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?"
"Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it," she continues. "So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience."
"The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding," notes Stewart. "It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site."
Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.
If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.
By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.
Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy? Comment here.
Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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Keyword Research Basics For SEO
Posted on April 28th, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/r1ruPMC94UU/keyword-research-basics-for-seo
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don’t convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn’t going to help too terribly much so in my opinion – I’d put keyword research higher in importance. In fact, when I’m building affiliate sites my first step is to look up keywords and competition levels – then I look into products and websites and this method has worked very well indeed. It insures that I choose keywords that with both convert and that I can rank for in a period of time and with an effort level that matches the return.
So – if you’re doing keyword research, where should you begin? Unless you’re an affiliate marketer you already have a product and since you’re the target audience of this article – I’m going to assume that’s the case. For the purpose of this article I’m going to pick a hobby of mine and also an area where I don’t have a client and imagine I’m doing keyword research for the imaginary online downhill mountain biking store DH Mountain Bikes.
So Where To Begin …
The first thing one needs to do is try to think up all the possible phrases that might apply. I call this my seed list … it’s the list of phrases that my research starts with and is generally based on brainstorming. In this case the list would be:
- downhill mountain bike
- dh mountain bike
- mountain bike
The keyword tool I generally use first is Google’s keyword suggestion tool. There are other great tools but I’ve found Google’s tool to be as accurate as any other, the price is definitely right (free), and they’re very good about providing the information required to know just how wrong the data is if you know where to look. So let’s do just that.
Before we begin you’ll need to head over to Google’s keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. In the top left (for now) you’ll see a link to a beta version of the tool. Click on the link and you’ll be at the new version of the tool which will provide you easy access to much more information – as long as you know what to look for. So let’s begin with our three seed phrases.
When you see the list you’ll first have to know what the numbers are. This tool is a tool designed for AdWords and the default number is the Broad match which means it includes every phrase with the term. For example, the term “mountain bike” has a broad match total of 2,740,000 which will include “downhill mountain bike”, “mountain bike parts”, “kona mountain bike”, etc. etc. What we want to know is how many searches are for “mountain bike”. Down the left-hand side you’ll see a set of check boxes. Deselect “Broad” and select “Exact” and you’ll get the Exact match numbers – the number of searches for the exact phrase. You’ll quickly see that 2,740,000 drop to 450,000. This is how many people searched the GOOGLE SEARCH NETWORK for “mountain bike”. Why is this in caps – because it’s so commonly misunderstood that I definitely want your attention brought to it. This isn’t the number of searches on Google.com – it’s the number of searches on all sites who’s search is powered by Google. From YouTube to Beanstalk’s blog search – it’s all in there so the data starts to get skewed from the start. Then let’s add in all the automated queries from rank-checking tools and just manual searches from you and your competitors and the data gets further skewed. This skewing will exist in all data – the thing I like about using Google is that at least we know more about what’s adjusting the data.
OK – so from there we need to organize the data into a more useful set of information. To do this one needs to understand the columns of data. The first column is the keyword, the second you’ll see is a link to the term on Google Insights. We’ll get into this later. The next is Global Monthly Searches – this is the average number of searches/mth worldwide. This can be helpful in some industries but in ours – I’m only concerned with the US market which is where my imaginary store ships to so I’m more interested in the next column Local Monthly Searches which is the number of searches in the US (or whatever region I’ve specified when entering my keyword phrases). This is the data I’m interested in. The last column is the search trend. This is extremely important but often overlooked. It is a column that wasn’t visible by default in the old/current version.
OK – let’s organize our data by search volume. Click on the “Local Monthly Searches” and you’ll see the keywords order by descending search volume. With this data in front of me I then typically look over to the Trend data to see what I can find there. In our case we’re going to see an increase in search volume in the spring and summer. This make sense of course. Think of your industry and see if the trends reflect what makes sense.
I’m also looking for anomalies. Often I’ll see phrases that jump for a single month. One has to know that unless there was a news story or other event that would spark interest in a single term or brand – a tool or some other such incident is likely falsifying the data. You need to look at these trends and see if they make sense. If not – you need to either test the phrases with PPC or just skip over them and select different phrases. There’s little worse as an SEO than focusing energies on a phrase only to find that the search volume is not what was expected based on the estimates delivered.
So now what?
So what do you do once you’ve filtered your data down to just what you’re interested in looking into competition levels on. Well – the first thing I do is to look to the trends to see if there are any phrases that obviously need to be filtered out. In this case there really aren’t any high in the search volume column. So the only thing left is to look at the competition levels to see what makes sense. For our purposes we’ll be dividing the list and research into two categories:
Major phrases – We need to decide what the long-term goals are going to be and the targets for the main pages. These will be the totally generic phrases such as “mountain bike” and “downhill mountain bike” as well as brand or type specific phrases such as “specialized mountain bike” and “full suspension mountain bike”.
Longtail phrases – We also need to look into the types of longtail phrases we’re going to want to target. In this case I know I’ll want to target specific parts which will require new research. I will spare you the details there but I’ll end up with specific models of components such as “hayes mx2”. You don’t need to know what that is – you need to know the makes and models in your industry (or other longatil opportunities such as “new york hotel with jacuzzi”, etc.)
I generally would gather together a list of 15 or 20 major phrases and 50 or 60 longtail phrases and would then head into the competition analysis to determine which phrases to move forward with.
Read other posts by this Author: Dave Davies
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What Facebook "Likes" Mean for Search & Reputation
Posted on April 27th, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/k7GrBE4W2UU/facebook-likes-mean-more-to-businesses-than-just-traffic
It’s been nearly a week since Facebook rocked the world with its Open Graph announcements, and many of us are still wrapping our heads around all of the implications they have. I don’t think there’s any dispute that it’s a huge move, and that it’s important to pay attention to from a business perspective, but just what it means for businesses is still up in the air in some regards. Like Facebook itself, or even social media in general, we’re going to see more benefits (and possibly negatives) as time goes on, and more sites and applications harness the power of said Open Graph.
As those wheels turn in our heads, there is plenty of discussion already happening around the subject – not just the Open Graph and the issues related to it (open web ramifications, privacy, etc), but how we can indeed take advantage of it.
TrafficIn a recent article we talked about why Facebook’s Open Graph and particularly its social plug-ins will be good to drive traffic. It’s pretty straightforward. The like and recommendation buttons are essentially different versions of the share buttons that people have been using to drive traffic for quite some time. The main difference is that instead of only showing up in the news feed only disappear shortly thereafter, they will remain on the user’s profile page for people to see in the future – a fixed link to your content.
Have you seen more traffic from Facebook’s buttons since they’ve launched? Let us know.
Search/SEO
Search Engine Land contributing editor Greg Sterling makes some interesting points about the search implications of the whole thing:
However, the vision here is a network of discovery tools and information that operate higher up in the funnel than search: what are my friends doing, where are they eating, what do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search. But it does represent an alternative way in many cases to discover information.Yet the mountains of data that Facebook will gain could improve Facebook search results and potentially the coming, new and improved Bing integration. At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.
Nobody’s saying Facebook is poised to replace Google, but the whole thing falls inline with the diversification of search we’ve been talking about a lot lately. Search is getting more diversified, meaning that people are using more and more applications to find the information they’re looking for. Facebook obviously plays a huge role in this. Also consider that Facebook’s search market share has been on the rise, and it stands to reason that will continue as more and more data becomes available as this Open Graph expands.
Do you see Facebook’s own search becoming more of a go-to place for finding information? Comment here.
Local
Assuming that every business rushes to get like/recommend buttons from Facebook in the way that they would rush to claim a listing in Google’s Local Business Center (Now named Google Places), Facebook may become a very valuable place to find out the best businesses to go to for any given category.
As Sterling says on his Screenwerk blog, "It could do nothing in particular or it could build the single most effective local directory and search site that exists. This data will be more valuable than anything Google has or any individual local publisher-partner possesses. That includes Yelp, YPG or anyone else that joins the Open Graph and implements these new Facebook platform tools."
This is mostly forward thinking, and we don’t know what Facebook is going to do. It’s definitely something to keep eye on. Either way, local businesses are likely to attract fans from their areas with more friends from that area, who may in turn pass it to their friends in the area. Facebook has already been a great marketing tool for local businesses, and the Open Graph will only help in that regard.
Do you think Facebook is going to become increasingly important for local businesses? Share your thoughts.
ReputationFacebook’s latest changes have plenty of implications for reputation management. Likes and recommendations are potentially great for building a good reputation, but even while there is no dislike button (at least yet), a lack of likes/recommendations may reflect poorly on your brand, particularly when your competition is getting all kinds of love from Facebook users.
On the other side of things, you may want to be careful what you like and recommend yourself. Wording of likes and recommendations can come off as inappropriate, but the bigger issue may be liking and recommending stuff that that paints you in a non-professional light. Depending on what you do and the image you are trying to portray, this may or many not be a problem, but for those who wish to be careful about how others perceive them, this is something to think about.
Should you be concerned about likes/recommendations from a reputation standpoint? Tell us what you think.
Another thing worth mentioning about all of this is that Facebook is showing suggestions for things to like and recommend to new users. Facebook has posted something of an FAQ for the new features that aims to clarify how it all works for users.
Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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Are You Getting Your Content in Front of News Seekers?
Posted on April 1st, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/f9g6pSCJk7I/are-you-getting-your-content-in-front-of-news-seekers
Getting press coverage can mean a great deal for gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. That said, there are also ways to take some initiative yourself in getting some exposure from news search.
Is news search part of your strategy? Real-time? Social Search? Press releases? Discuss here.
News Search OptimizationAs Lisa Buyer of the Buyer Group talked about with WebProNews at SES last week, news search optimization is getting more powerful with social media and real-time search. Add these to older tactics like blogs and press releases, and there have never been more opportunities to get news-related content discovered.
Press Releases
Press releases can still be a great way to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines.Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us, involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the "shelf life" of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.
"When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement," the CEO of the company behind the case study had said. "With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off. With these features we’ve seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued."
Remember, Google News indexes press releases as well.
Real-Time SearchYou’re probably already using social media in some capacity at this point. Real-time search presents an added benefit to talking about timely topics using channels that you are already using (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, etc.). That doesn’t mean spam. Spamming won’t get you very far here anyway, because Google is pretty good at filtering this. We went over a few basic tips for real-time search optimization a while back. The recap is below, but you can find them elaborated on here.
1. Use keywords
2. Talk about timely events
3. Have a lot of followers (who can share your content)
4. Promote Conversation
5. Include Calls to EngagementReal-time search is much more than just Google. There are an increasing number of players in this space, and with the rise in smartphone usage, mobile apps are giving consumers a lot of choices in how to obtain their information.
Social SearchAnother great benefit of using social media means you get to show up in your friends/followers personalized social search results for numerous queries on Google. Newsy topics are frequently the ones that trend, and that means lots of people searching. If something big happens, there’s a chance that some of your social network contacts will search for something related to that, and if you have something to say about it, there’s a good chance they’ll see it in their results.
Of course people search with the social networks themselves as well. Facebook search queries were on the rise last time I checked.
Google NewsLast September, we ran down a number of Google News SEO tips here. Google shared some tips of their own on the subject as well:
Optimizing for news search means more shots at showing up in search results period. Do you have other ideas about getting in front of news seekers? Share here.
Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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Examine Your Site’s Text, Reduce Chances of Search Engine Confusion
Posted on March 8th, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/63_IUUppKeA/examine-your-sites-text-reduce-chances-of-search-engine-confusion
Has it ever occurred to you that you may have keywords on your site that are misleading to search engines? Or that you need to take a look at all of the keywords you are trying to rank for, and think about the different meanings and contexts that those could be taken in that are unrelated to your actual product, and then eliminate other seemingly unrelated words that to a search engine could be misconstrued as an indication of one of those other contexts?
At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research.
Note: We talked to Bruce about quite a few search-related topics, but this subject is focused on more toward the end of the video (about 20 minutes in).
Clay talks about Google delivering more personalization in search results, taking into consideration things like how prior queries influence future queries. "Ranking is going to be less of a measurement," he says. "We’re going to be focused on more the traffic."
"When I decide I’m selling a hammer, I have to actively go out of my way not to have certain things appear in my site, because the search engines could be confused about what I’m talking about….I don’t mean the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. I don’t mean a bowling ball…you know, the things that show up for hammer are all over the board," says Clay.
"One of the things that I think is important, and that we’ve been working on is how do we actually do keyword research without knowing the behavioral aspects our personas that are actually going for our product? You have to understand personas now a little bit better – what kinds of things are they likely to search on, in sequence – before they type in hammer…so if they’re on an arts and crafts site, and then they type in hammer, I ought to understand that behavior in sequence, so that I can better do my keyword research and determine how I’m gonna put the words on my page. I don’t see a lot of people even thinking that way."
Personalized search is nothing new. Google’s been personalizing search results for some time, based on various indicators, and it appears that Google is looking for more ways to deliver users a personalized experience (whether they want that or not).
Between personalized search and other sources of information infiltrating search results pages, traditional SEO is becoming harder to accomplish, and Bruce says, even ineffective. That’s why it may become increasingly important to focus on relevant elements of the SERP for queries you hope to be found for.
Read other posts by this Author: Chris Crum
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As SERPs Get More Complicated, Focus on Relevant Elements
Posted on March 8th, 2010 No commentsSyndicated From: WebProNews - SEO http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-WebProNews/~3/c-2wAH6W-a8/as-serps-get-more-complicated-focus-on-relevant-elements
At SES Chicago last year, Yahoo VP of Consumer Products, Larry Cornett suggested that blended search results bring businesses a broader range of SEO opportunities, a chance to take control of their brand, and a potential increase in qualified clicks. While these blended results can tend to divert users away from organic listings, as SEO Dave Naylor pointed out at that same conference, Cornett does have a point.
Blended search results offer ways to get to the front page of search results beyond just the highly more competitive organic rankings. Sites have opportunities to show up for:
- real-time results
- news results
- image results
- video results
- shopping results
- local results (customers don’t even need to go to your site in some cases)At the recent Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, WebProNews spoke with Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik, who says companies should still build a foundation in organic rankings before trying to conquer other areas:
