Of the many competitive research tools available, Open Site Explorer shines brightly above the alternatives. It’s very intuitive – first time users will find it incredibly easy to use. You simply enter your URL, along with up to 4 competitors, and you get lots of data to start analyzing.

Total External Links

External links are useful see how you compare to competitors in online conversation and presence, and will help you set goals in your SEO strategy.

Link building can be a numbers game, and this report will help you determine whether it’s quantity, or quality (meaning high value) links that you lack compared to other sites in your industry.

Total Linking Root Domains

The Total Linking Domains report gives you a look at the diversity of domains sending links to your competitor’s websites. If you see that they have a high number of links, but a low number of total linking root domains, you know that they are getting most of their links from the same domains. It is better to have both a high number of links as well as a high number of linking root domains.

Linking C Blocks

The Linking C Blocks (or C class IPs) report refers to the IP addresses of linking websites.

While very similar to the Linking Root Domains report, this isn’t the same thing. C Blocks are your way of identifying the true backlink diversity of any given website. Getting 500 links from 500 unique C Block IP addresses is more impressive to search engines than 500 links from 500 different domains that are hosted on the same IP (or even C Block IP), which may look suspiciously like a linking network.

It is always best to have both a high number of linking root domains and a high number of linking C blocks in your link portfolio.

Evaluating the ratio between C blocks and linking root domains is also a quick way to identify whether a particular competitor is using a network of links.

Back Link Portfolio

After we have looked through these stats and set some goals on what you want to accomplish in your strategy we can next pull the backlink portfolio and see exactly where the competitors are getting their links. It is always best to sort their link portfolio by highest to lowest by page authority. This way you can start with their highest authoritative links and analyze and see how they got their link on that site and figure out a way to get a link on that site as well, weather it is a directory that you can place a link or a blog that you can offer a guest post to. It helps to think outside the box and figure out a way to get a link on their site.

Hopefully these tips will help you the next time you analyze your competitors and you will be able to find some high quality links for your site.

It is hard to know how difficult achieving rankings with a new search engine optimization project will be because so many factors play into it and Google is always adjusting its algorithm. By understanding search engines you can help clients understand how difficult an SEO’s job is at times.

So how does Google’s algorithm work?

The Anatomy of a Search Engine:

This is a basic breakdown of a much more complex process.

• A URL Server sends over lists of URLs to be crawled.
• The crawlers download the web pages then send them to the store server. The store server compresses and stores the web pages.
• Every web page is given an associated ID number called a docID then sent to the indexer.
• The indexing function is performed by the indexer and the sorter.
• All of the documents (webpages) are converted into a set of word occurrences called hits. Each hit records the word, position in document and other variables.
• The indexer sends these hits into a set of “buckets”, creating a partial index.
• The indexer separates out all of the links in every web page and keeps important information about them in another file. This file contains information about where each link points from and to, and the text of the link.
• The links database is used to compute PageRanks for all the documents. The sorter takes the barrels, which are sorted by docID…., and resorts them by wordID to generate the inverted index…… The searcher is run by a web server and uses the inverted index and the PageRanks to answer queries.

A much more in depth process of this can be found at - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

In laymen’s terms this is what it happens:

Say someone is looking for information about blu ray players. Google takes the billions of documents on the web and converts them into wordID’s. Then it looks for instances or patterns of the wordID’s across all of the documents and ranks the documents based on how often the wordID’s appear. For example,

Blu ray player

Based off of the table above you can see that document 134 shows up in every document making it the most relevant and thus potentially ranking very high in the search results. Google has to sort through millions of documents on the web that could be talking about Ray-Ban glasses that are blue, blue ray jackets, Tampa Devil Rays jerseys that are blue, Devil Ray players, Blue Apple players and so on. In addition to looking for wordID’s, links and other on-pages factors are taken into consideration when trying to rank a site. This gets very complex really quick.

Key Takeaway: Google has to create an “association” or see that your site is relevant for a given keyword out of billions of documents. That association could take months if not years to create and it becomes even more difficult to create as you move closer to the top 10 results. *We know Google has around 200 ranking factors so it would be a good idea for a client to implement as many on-page elements as possible, to send a clear message to Google as to what the page is about, since on-page elements tend to be easier to control then the link building aspect.

Knowing the basic process is good but how much information does Google have to sort through in order to find the most relevant webpage for a search query?

What Does It Take To Get a List of Results?

• More than 1 million computing hours have gone into preparing Google’s index
• More than 1 billion searches are performed on Google every day
• More than 1,000 man years have been spent on developing Google’s algorithm
• Google’s Caffeine index contains over 100 million gigabytes
• In July of 2008 Google processed 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs. What does that equate to: That is the equivalent of, “fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.” Google computes this every day.
• Google’s database of indexed pages is 5 million terabytes – A stack of DVDs holding Google’s index would be as tall as 3,192 Empire State buildings.

This is the task of an SEO, to try and help Google effectively sort through all of the web pages and then to help a client rank for a certain search query. This is why it takes time to potentially rank for a given keyword. As SEO’s optimize pages and build links Google is sorting through the tremendous amounts of data every day in order to better understand which pages should rank in the top positions.

As you can see a lot of time and energy has been spent by Google in order to bring back relevant results to users. It does not stop there. Since new web pages are being created daily, Google has to keep up with all of this new information. Because of that Google and other search engines need to be efficient and effective in how they manage all of this information.

Google is Always Changing

Even if a client has everything in place and is able to get to the first page of the search results, Google is always changing and tweaking its algorithm so it is an uphill battle.

Google made over 500 changes to their algorithm last year and Matt Cutts has stated,

“Overall, our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites……This change is just one of the over 500improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.”

The news came on January 19th when Google announced another algorithm change.

While the majority of these changes are small, a number of big changes took place last year that affected nearly 50% of all search queries.

For an up to date timeline of Google’s changes over the years check out SEOmoz.org. Since Google is always changing the way they rank sites it makes an SEO’s job that much more difficult. Keeping up to date on the latest changes and industry news is never ending for an SEO.

Obviously there are many more factors to consider when getting into an SEO campaign but I have found that helping clients recognize how much work it takes to get sites to rank can improve the overall relationship in a positive way.

Stats above can be found at:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/underthehood.html

http://adam-thompson.me/2011/02/03/google-how-big/

הבלוגר ביל סלווסקי (SEO By the sea) חושף הערב כי חברת גוגל רכשה מספר פטנטים אשר היו שייכים בעבר למנוע החיפוש Cuil אשר נסגר לפני כשנה וחצי.

Cuil,  מנוע חיפוש שאפתני אשר הוקם ע"י 2 עובדי גוגל ו-IBM לשעבר, יצר באז גדול ברשת בעת הקמתו בשנת 2008 וטען כי ברשותו אינדקס אתרים הגדול פי 3 מזה שברשות גוגל (כ- 120 מיליארד דפים בזמנו).

כיצד עלול להשתנות עמוד התוצאות?

הפטנטים שנרכשו, אינם מכילים כל קניין רוחני או  אלגוריתמי חיפוש, אלא רובם עוסקים בשיפור ממשק המשתמש ושיפור תצוגת תוצאות החיפוש. בחלק מהפטנטים שנרכשו ניתן למצוא:

• שיטה ומנגנון להצגת תוצאות חיפוש עם מגוון רחב של פרדיגמות תצוגה
• מנגנון להצגת תוצאות חיפוש באמצעות טאבים
• מנגנון להצגת תוצאות חיפוש עם עמודות הניתנות לשינוי ועריכה
• מנגנון להצגת תוצאות חיפוש עם אפשרויות שונות של מיקום שטחי פרסום
• מנגנון להצגת תוצאות חיפוש עם תפריט נפתח לעדכון\שיפור והצעות נוספות של מונחי חיפוש

מבט על עיצוב עימוד תוצאות החיפוש ע"פ Cuil

בשנים האחרונות גוגל הרחיבה את דף תוצאות החיפוש האוניברסלי והכניסה לתוכו תמונות, סרטונים, השוואות מחירים והחידוש האחרון: הצעות לאנשים הנמצאים ברשת החברתית Google+ הקשורים לביטוי החיפוש שלך (גם אם אתה לא מחובר לחשבון).

נדמה כי לאור התחרות הגוברת מצד פייסבוק ומנועי חיפוש נוספים (דוגמת בינג) גוגל איננה קופאת על השמרים ומנסה עדיין לשנות את כללי המשחק ולהעשיר את מגוון תוצאות החיפוש אשר היא מחזירה למשתמשים שלה. יהיה מעניין לראות כיצד, אם בכלל, ישתלבו אלמנטים אלו בתוצאות החיפוש של גוגל.

מה דעתך?

נושאים נוספים שאולי יעניינו אותך:

• 23 בספטמבר 2006 -- גודל מודעה חדש בגוגל אדסנס
• 10 בנובמבר 2005 -- עדכון ג’אגר מגיע לסיומו
• 12 בינואר 2007 -- אפשר להגיש אתרים אל דמוז
• 17 בנובמבר 2005 -- מהיום Google print הופך ל-Google Book Search
• 6 במאי 2009 -- גוגל אדוורדס משנים מדיניות בנושא trademarks?

Content Marketing

Content marketing is not just about words, it’s about anything and everything that conveys a message to your customer. This includes images, videos, other rich media, and obviously the actual words on your website. Because of Pinterest’s appeal to aesthetics, it is now necessary for websites to seriously consider the images they use. This means stock photography is a thing of the past.

An Example

An important thing to remember about Pinterest is that images are the “hook” to your content. For example, say you have a great recipe for rice pilaf and you have just blogged about it on your food blog. Then a subscriber of yours sees it, and thinks the recipe is rice-tastic and then proceeds to Facebook it, Tweet it and Pin it. But let’s also say that you only included one image with your recipe and it’s a stock photo you found on Google images that’s pixilated and grainy. Well, when your awesome subscriber goes to pin this wonderful recipe and hits their “Pin It” bookmark (to be discussed later), the only image they can pin, to share your recipe, is the pixilated and grainy stock photo. Now, at first you may not see a huge problem with this. Well friends, here’s the issue… take a look at this example of the Food and Drink Pinterest feed.

Look how pretty! You’re pixilated grainy image will get lost in all the amazingness of other, good quality images. You won’t get any repins, or more importantly visits, because your photo doesn’t look appetizing compared to all of these great food shots. This is why images are now crucial to your content strategy.

Pinterest Share Tools

The “Pin It” Bookmark

The “Pin It” bookmark is something Pinterest has developed to make pinning new content easy. You install it by dragging and dropping it to your bookmark tool bar on your browser.

When you want to pin something you see on a page (lets continue with the recipe motif since I love food and I love to cook), you click the “Pin It” bookmark and it gives you options of images it found on the page for you to pin. For example, if I find this delectable recipe for garlic cheese rolls on RaptorToe.com and want to pin it, this is what I see:

Then I hit the “Pin It” bookmark, it gives me several image options based on how many image files were found on the particular page.

I can choose what image I want to pin, then add a description, and choose which board I want to pin it to. From there I can share it to other social networks if I wish.

Give pinners only GREAT options for images.

“Pin It” Share Button

You don’t want to leave it up to chance that pinners will choose the best image that conveys your content. Good news! You can install the Pinterest share button on every post/page of your site to give YOU more control of how your content is shared. You can specify the description to keep messaging consistent and in-brand along with specifying the image shared. Pinterest also provides an advanced code for multiple Pin buttons per page (used mainly for Ecommerce websites). How great are they?!

Pinterest “Follow Button”

If you have created a company or brand profile (if you haven’t already, you should) you can add a follow button to your website. This way, users can keep up with YOUR pins on Pinterest.

Consider This

Here are a few things to consider when implementing images:

• WHY are you using the image? Are you using an image just because? Does it have a purpose?
• What is the message you’re trying to convey and what message does it support?
• Can the image “stand alone”? Can the image convey the message by itself?
• Is the image compelling enough to draw a click?

Because Pinterest is like crack for ADD-ers, you probably have about .05 seconds to catch the eye of a Pinner. Asking all the above questions will help focus your images so Pinners will be anxious to share your content.

Search Engine Optimization

It’s well known that social media is playing a big role in Google’s ranking factors. Pinterest is now the next big social thing, and brands need to jump on the bandwagon if they are doing SEO.

Pinterest SEO Benefit

Yes, there is SEO benefit.

Pinterest recently updated their look and functionality so some of the SEO benefit has been lost. Previously with every pin, your website received one branded, do-follow, anchor text link. This is no longer that case. You now get one no-follow, image link. Some might argue the benefit is lost. I say, along with others, a link is a link is a link. You want your back link portfolio to look natural, what’s more natural than image links? And guess what, Pinterest links don’t go away.

Tracking Pinterest

One great thing about Pinterest is that is drives traffic. With most analytics packages it tracks under referral traffic. If you use Google Analytics, like me, it’s pretty simple to gather information.

To find referral traffic in GA (Google Analytics):

• Go to the left sidebar navigation. Click “Traffic Sources,” “Sources” and then “Referrals.”
• This will give you a list of all the sites that drive traffic to your website. In that list you will find “Pinterest.com” if you are receiving traffic from pins.
• Click “Pinterest.com” in the list, it will pull open the list of all the individual pins that send visitors. If you have goals or ecommerce tracking set up, you can then see which pins actually drove leads and sales. Very cool.

Affiliate Marketing

How Pinterest Makes Its Money

It has recently come to light that Pinterest has been attaching their affiliate code to URL’s when a pinner clicks through to a website. They have been using a program call Skimlinks to achieve this. According to Adrianne Jefferies’s blog post, Skimlinks crawls through all Pinterest links and checks if the URL points to a merchant store with an affiliate program (like Amazon). When they find one, the program automatically changes the URL to include the Pinterest affiliate code.

The Controversy

The controversy has been over Pinterest’s neglect in disclosing their affiliate program. I personally don’t take offense, and honestly don’t care. But I can see how not being forthcoming can rub some the wrong way. Those that are most perturbed are other affiliate marketers that have been making money off Pinterest by tagging URL’s with their code.

So for those of you who already have or are planning on implementing an affiliate program, Pinterest beat you to the punch.

To Wrap It Up

Pinterest appeals to a very specific demographic, and that requires change in your current online strategies. Don’t miss the boat on this, Pinterest is sticking around. Part 3 of the series will address branding, and how Pinterest can benefit your brand.

And in case you missed the first post, take a look at Pinterest… What Is The Big Deal? – Part 1

In any enterprise campaign, the achilles heel is almost always a lack of organization. With organization will come clarity in goals and strategy, as well as an ability to progressively build upon prior steps.

Keep in mind that while this particular process was built for campaigns targeting a large number of landing pages and keywords, everything big in marketing can always be scaled down. For ideas on a smaller scale keyword expansion and monitoring approach I would first start at Part One, Two or Three in this series.

Data Essential To The Process

Key Performance Indicators

To organize and prioritize a massive keyword list it is essential to know which KPI’s drive the online strategy. The top 2 performance indicators a company online should use to gauge success are either revenue or leads (depending on business model). Both of these will need to be retrieved from your analytics package.

Supportive Indicators

But, as we well know, there are a few other bits of data which incrementally assist in leading to these ultimate goals and allow us as marketers to understand we are on the right direction, or in some cases missing opportunities. On a keyword level these are potential search volume, difficulty, and current position (or rankings).

I call these supportive indicators because they not only provide us insight into what will be required to achieve our ultimate KPI goals but will also be heavily integrated into this particular keyword prioritization process.

Both your search volume and keyword difficulty will come from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. The current position of each keyword you will need to derive from your choice of ranking analysis tools.

The Process

Primary Target Identification

Your first step in the process will be to single out which pages or specific categories within the site will be part of your overall SEO campaign. Keep in mind that this specific process is meant to expand a keyword list far beyond the obvious terms and ensure all potential traffic is eventually gained through a strategic approach.

This means that you could start with your already top 25-50 performing pages. So your first step would be to gather the top 50 or so location specific pages on your site. For our example we will go at this as though to be targeting a “car rental” niche.

*Note that this process works best as you work with pages that fall under the same niche.

Common Keyphrase Iteration Identification

The next step is to identify the common iterations that create big terms for each of these top pages. For instance, in the travel industry—and especially specific to car rentals—some of the biggest terms revolve around these following types:

• the word “city” itself
• the “name” of the city itself (if this doesn’t make sense just wait a moment)
• “deals”
• “cheap”
• “discount”
• “budget”
• “low price”
• or a combination of one or two of the above.

Develop Baseline List for Each Page

Now we are ready to expand into a hearty keyword list for each target page. Going along with our example of the top cities for car rentals, we now need to single out each city individually with the iterations brainstormed above and expand out a strong list using the Google Adwords Keyword tool. This can be done by dropping the list above into a notepad and running one FIND & REPLACE key command replacing the term “name” with the actual city (or unique term relevant to a specific page):

Aggregate Comprehensive Keyword List

With your terms now specific to the city (or otherwise unique element of the page your web property of focus is) it is now time to expand out a full list of terms from which we will work. This is done by placing each term (on the left) individually into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and exporting 100 keywords per single term.

With the full list of terms exported. Combine all of them together into one sheet and deduplicate the list. This will leave you with a unique list of terms.

Remove Industry Adjoining, Irrelevant Terms

One common occurrence when using the Adwords Keyword Tool is that adjoined industry terms, irrelevant to your overall purpose, will sneak their way into your keyword list. It is important to identify each of these types of terms and remove them from the list. In our example of  ”car rentals” a few common terms that arise which we remove are:

• flight
• air / airport / airline / airfare
• ticket
• fly
• hotel

The best way to keep track of and remove these is to generate your own list on the side. Then each time you expand a list filter the aggregate to remove these irrelevant terms.

Duplicate Process Across All Priority Pages

At this point you have accomplished your list for one of your list of top target pages with which we will be prioritizing. Duplicate this process across each of those top niche pages you have selected for your web property. This means that for us, we moved from Denver to San Francisco to New York and on through the 50 cities special to our “car rental” expansion purposes.

After doing this, we were left with between 250-500 keywords per target page. However, this number will differ for you depending on the industry targeted.

As you are doing this it will be best to keep each pages keywords and the data you will gather for them each in a separate sheet of the same excel document similar to that shown below:

Gather Essential Data

As we began this post, specific metrics were outlined that would be essential for this process. All your keywords for this project have been identified, so now it will be important to retrieve those metrics. As a reminder, they are:

1. Current Position (Ranking)
2. Search Volume Potential (Exact Match Monthly Search Volume from Adwords Keyword Tool)
3. Keyword Difficulty (Competition Metric from Adwords Keyword Tool)
4. Revenue (Best to get about 6-12 months worth of data from your Analytics package)

Set Benchmarks

With all data in place we are ready to start comparing and making decisions. The first step in this comparison process is to get your totals and averages. Run formulas adding up the sum [=SUM(Number 1, Number 2...)] or average [=AVERAGE(Number 1, Number 2...)] of each metric on a page by page basis.

*Similar to past posts in this series, keep in mind that in order to gather a quality average score for rankings you will need to the value showing that a term is not ranking (usually a “-” or “0″) with a 100.

Having all your data gather, totals and averages set you are now ready to calculate priorities. Rather than walk you through a step by step on this particular portion of the process it would be better to simply place the tools in your hands and let you use it at will:

Calculate Priorities

In order to determine priorities (both on a page to page comparison and a keyword to keyword comparison) the following formula will:

Let me explain:

• Weighted Authority: To place a weighted authority on highest value metric, this is done by multiplying each part on a sliding scale of .4 down to .1. Therefore making revenue (this could be leads also) the highest priority, potential search volume the second, ranking performance the third, and so on.
• Revenue: This is referring to each page’s individual revenue attribution (a sum total of every keywords revenue achieved within a particular page).
• Max Revenue Top Page: This is referring to the page that has been identified to achieve the highest return on revenue in comparison to all other pages within the campaign.
• Search Volume: This is referring to the total potential search volume of  a particular page (The sum total of all the keywords within a page).
• Max Search Volume: This is referring to the page that has been identified to have the highest potential search volume in comparison to all other pages within the campaign.
• 101-Average Position/100: The term “average position” here is referring to the average ranking of all keywords within a particular page. Because a good average position is a lower number, and all other metrics here are based on “the higher the better,” this equation will take your average position and invert it to reflect this same frame of thought.
• Average Competition/100%: The term “average competition” is referring to the average ranking of all keywords within a particular page. This is then divided by 100%.

The value achieved from this formula should be considered your “priority value.” Those pages with the highest value should be targeted more heavily first because you either have a gaping missed opportunity or it simply has the highest potential to drive more revenue.

Macrocosm & Microcosm

The beauty of this formula is that it can be calculated on a level to compare a series of web pages to each other and determine which should be targeted first (as shown above)—this is what I would call our “macrocosm”—and it can also be calculated within each page comparing keyword to keyword to determine which keywords are highest priority and should be targeted first. Comparing keyword to keyword within one page is your “microcosm.”

Is Your Brain Fried?

If your brain feels fried right now don’t worry. Mine is fried just trying to explain all of this in one blog post. As with anything else, you will likely begin to understand it more as you put it to practice.

Start by doing this process with 4-5 pages only. Get your metrics together and begin playing with the calculations. It won’t be long before you start scaling up.

Disclaimer: On-Site & Branding Signals

Above all else, when looking at targeting keywords remember that without the proper branding signals in place with quality on-page optimization, no website will sustain an quality ranking. The best way to look at search engine marketing is to:

First, be sure your on-page optimization is pristine. Each page should be optimized with purpose. If those purposes do not involve (1) usability, (2) conversion and (3) keyword targeted optimization, you are off the mark.

Second, it is essential to establish your business as an authoritative brand in the eyes of the search engine. Links pointing the site from partners websites, branded links using the business name and the URL itself as their anchor text as well as images linking to the website. Basically anything type of link that would be created in a purely natural process can be considered branded.

And lastly, begin targeting specific terms in your content and link building strategy. This last step is where the posts in this series will come into play.

Other Posts In The Series:

Post 1 - Building a Keyword List Based On Top Relevant Terms in Google Webmasters

Post 2 - Using Google Analytics for Long Tail Identification & Quick Wins

Post 3 – Using Google Webmaster Tools To Locate New Terms & Build Strong Variations

Both of these analogies are effective but, for me, they fall short covering anything more than a shallow understanding of how rankings work. The further I get into my career of managing accounts in the world of SEO, the more I learn that an effective SEO campaign is not a sprint, it is a marathon. As a veteran runner of seven marathons, I want to take the time to convey just how much an effective SEO campaign is like a marathon.

Every Runner / SEO Campaign is Different

The Runner: A runner that is already running at an elite local level will have different needs than a couch potato that is taking on the marathon to regain control of their life. It is important that any runner setting out to run a marathon look for a coach or a mentor to guide them through their journey.

The SEO Campaign: Enterprise level clients will almost certainly have different needs than a small business owner. The key is to find the correct plan for both types of clients. A business that is looking to have a successful SEO campaign should also seek out the correct employee or professional SEO firm to coach or mentor them through their campaign.

A Solid Base

The Runner: No runner should undertake a marathon without establishing a proper base of training. Runners that are thinking of attempting the marathon distance are advised to be running at least 35-40 miles a week before signing up for a race.

The SEO Campaign: In an SEO campaign, your base should consist of a proper onsite optimization. Before initiating a comprehensive link building campaign, your SEO team or agency should make sure that the pages that they will be building links to have proper title tags, meta-descriptions and header tags. It is also very important to have good original keyword rich content on your page as you start your campaign.

A Variety of Training Methods / Balanced Link Portfolio

The Runner: Runners that only put in one type of training miles will be far less successful than runners that implement three different types of training days. There are base mile days, tempo run days, and a long run at the end of the week.

The SEO Campaign: For an SEO campaign to be as effective as possible your SEO team or agency cannot rely on building one type of back link. They should aim to build a well balanced back link portfolio that consists of a variety of different linking strategies. If your team or agency does this, your campaign will be far more successful.

Timeline

The Runner: Any runner that wants to perform well in their chosen marathon, professional or novice, should schedule four to six months of solid training to give themselves a good opportunity to succeed.

The SEO Campaign: A company embarking on a serious SEO campaign should allow for anywhere from a month to several months of consistent link building before they begin to see synergy between their onsite optimization and building of back links. Just like an elite or beginning runner will respond differently to training, a campaign’s keywords will respond to link building at different rates based on their monthly search volume and competitiveness.

The Wall

The Runner: Almost everyone has heard of a marathon runner hitting “the wall.” It can happen at any time during a race but it commonly happens between miles 20-22. When a runner hits the wall, they feel like their body is shutting down and that they have nothing left to give. Having suffered through the wall myself, I have found that if you just keep moving, your body will find another gear and you will be able to finish the race, as long as you don’t quit or stop running.

The SEO Campaign: Nearly every SEO campaign will go through its version of the wall or a plateau. This event can take place at anytime during your campaign based on your industries level of competitiveness and what your competitors are doing with their own search marketing efforts. Just like a runner in a marathon, website owners must be patient. Their campaign will be able to break through the wall and continue on to greater successes, as long as they don’t get frustrated and quit.

The Finish Line

The Runner: Many people who set out to run a marathon are awakened to a scary truth about themselves; after all the training and miles, their body craves the endorphin rush of running and they cannot give it up. Instead of going back to their old life after completing their marathon, they move on to planning their next marathon.

The SEO Campaign: When a firm or business owner takes part in a successful SEO campaign, they come to a similar realization as the new marathon runner; their business cannot live without search engine marketing as a part of its long term strategy. Business owners ask themselves what their company’s next “marathon” will be. Will they target additional keywords? Focus in on a different product category? Build up their sites blog? Just like the marathon runner, the business owner has turned a corner and the marketing efforts for their company will never be the same.

So as you can see, no matter if you are doing in-house SEO or working with an SEO agency, you need to think long term, and about the big picture… there is no way to short cut your efforts and achieve your desired results.

Plan. Commit. Succeed.

גוגל הודיעו בבלוג Inside AdWords על קישורי sitelinks משופרים למודעות הממומנות.
לאור החשיבות שיש ל –sitelinks במודעות הממומנות (CTR גבוה ב-30% לפי הסטטיסטיקות של גוגל אדוורדס) קיימת מעתה האפשרות לקבל sitelinks שמציגים מודעות נוספות למילות המפתח של המודעות.
במידה והאלגוריתם של גוגל אדוורדס ימצא רלוונטיות גבוהה בין ביטויי ה- sitelinks לבין מודעות הטקסט האחרות בקמפיין, הן יוצגו ביחד עם המודעה הראשית. ההערכה היא (לפי מבחנים שנעשו) שתצוגה מהסוג הזה תעלה אף יותר את אחוזי ההקלקה.

זו הדוגמא שמוצגת בבלוג לתצוגת המודעות המרובות (לא הצלחתי לקבל את התצוגה הזו בעצמי, כל הבלוגים שכתבו על זה השתמשו אף הם באותם צילומי מסך מהבלוג של גוגל. אני מניחה שייקח זמן עד שנתחיל לראות את תצוגת ה-sitelinks עם המודעות. מי שמקבל אותן, מוזמן להודיע בתגובות, אשמח להעלות צילום מסך):

נניח שזו המודעה שלנו:

וכן, נניח שהקמפיין מכיל גם את המודעות הבאות:

במידה ותימצא רולונטיות בין ה- sitelinks לבין המודעות האחרות בקמפיין (כפי שאנחנו באמת רואים בדוגמאות),  התצוגה החדשה תראה כך:

זה חידוש מעניין ואפשר לחשוב על שימושים יצירתיים בו.
ההודעה עצמה בבלוג לקונית יחסית ומשאירה מקום ללא מעט שאלות ותהיות, למשל: האם תיתכן תצוגה שחלקה קישורים רגילים וחלקה מודעות? כמה מודעות יכולות להיות מוצגות? והשאלה החשובה מכולן (שלא תיענה כנראה באופן רשמי) היא מהם בדיוק ההקשרים שמחפש האלגוריתם של אדוורדס כדי לייצר את התצוגה.

בכל מקרה, נראה שגוגל ממשיכים במגמה להגדיל את נפח הפרסומות בעמוד תוצאות החיפוש, כשהנתח מהמסך המוקצה לתוצאות האורגניות קטן, באופן מגמתי ושיטתי.

אנחנו וודאי נעשה לא מעט טסטים בזמן הקרוב, נעדכן כשיהיו לנו מסקנות מעניינות .

נושאים נוספים שאולי יעניינו אותך:

• 28 באוקטובר 2010 -- שירות פרסום חדש בגוגל – גוגל בוסט (Google Boost)
• 15 במאי 2010 -- הרחבת מודעות באמצעות תוספי מקום
• 6 בינואר 2010 -- מבט לאחור: סקירת חידושי גוגל בשנת 2009
• 25 בנובמבר 2009 -- טכניקות מתקדמות לשיפור ציון האיכות
• 5 בנובמבר 2009 -- שילוב Sitelinks במודעות AdWords

גוגל עורכים מפגשי עיון במגוון תחומים, אליהם הם מזמנים נציגים מחברות שונות  (חברות קידום אתרים, בניית אתרים, עיצוב ועוד). הוזמנתי מטעם חברת קידום האתרים SEO Israel, לאחד המפגשים אשר נערך בתחילת חודש פבואר 2012 במשרדי גוגל ת"א, נושא המפגש היה אפשרויות הפרסום ביוטיוב.

את הפוסט הזה אני כותב בהשראת המפגש ועל מנת לשתף את הידע שרכשתי. הוספתי כמה נתונים מעניינים על מנת שתוכלו לקבל פרופורציות ולהבין מה היכולות של יוטיוב.

אלו עיקרי נושאי המפגש:

1. אפשרויות הפרסום ביוטיוב.
2. מיקוד הפרסום לקהל היעד.
3. עובדות נתונים ומגמות – יוטיוב.

אזורי סרטוני הפרסום ומודעות יוטיוב

• Promoted-Videos –"הסרטונים המקודמים" בדיוק כמו התוצאות הממומנות בגוגל (תמונה בהמשך).

• In-Sream-Ads – סרטוני פרסומת שמופיעים (לרוב) בתחילת סרטון אחר, אך ניתן גם להציג אותם באמצע הסרטון או בסופו.
• True-View – אלו סרטוני פרסומת אשר מופיעים יחד עם האפשרות לדלג על על הצפייה בסרטון "skip this add now" או "דלג על מודעה זו". מודל התשלום הוא רק בעבור סרטונים שנצפו במשך 30 שנית.
• מודעת באנר –  ניתן לשלב את הבאנר יחד עם הסרטון ולייצר יותר חשיפה.

דוגמאות "לסרטונים מקודמים" ואפשרויות תצוגה של הפרסום ביוטיוב:

סרטונים מקודמים - חיפוש עיצוב בית האח הגדול

מידות וחלוקת המסך:

• יחידת הפרסום הרגילה Masthead-standard מוצגת לרוחב העמוד בגודל – 970/250 פיקסל.
• יחידת פרסום מתרחבת Masthead-Expandable  מודעה בגודל 970/250 פיקסל לאחר הקלקה הופכת לגודל של 970/500  פיקסל.
• יחידת פרסום  שמשלבת מודעה Masthead-Tandem  (באנר בגודל 300/250).

מיקוד הפרסום לפי קהל יעד:

הגדרות הפרסום מבוצעות דרך ממשק האדוורדס תחת לשונית מסעות פרסום. תחילה נגדיר בהגדרות הבסיסיות את המיקומים (לאיזה מדינות נרצה לפנות) והשפות הרלוונטיות. בנוסף, בהגדרות המתקדמות ניתן להתאים תאריך תחילה/סיום לקמפיין, ניתן להגביל את מספר החשיפות לגולש חדש (גולש שרואה את הפרסומת בפעם הראשונה), לבצע אופטימיזציה לסרטון ואף לקבוע לאילו מכשירים או התקנים (מחשב שולחני, טאבלטים, סמארטפונים) נעדיף להציג את הפרסומת שלנו.

ניווט דרך סרגל האדוורדס

תחת לשונית "היעדים" בממשק האדוורדס נוכל ליצור קבוצת מיקוד לקמפיין על פי מילות מפתח לחיפוש ביוטיוב ולרשת המדיה. הפרמטרים אתם נבחן הם: נושאים כללים (בישול, אומנות, וכדומה), טווח גילאים ומין וניהול והוספת מיקומים (אתרים נוספים) ועוד.

בנוסף, ניתן לשלול פרמטרים מסויימים שאנו לא מעוניינים בהם (יעדים שליליים) באותו אופן (כלומר, לא נרצה להציג את המודעה שלנו למכשירי הטאבלטים ולנשים מעל גיל 40).  יחד עם זאת, חשוב לציין כי את הנתונים האישיים גוגל יודע רק אם המשתמש נמצא במצב מחובר לחשבון (גיל, מין, מיקום גאוגרפי). לטענת גוגל 30-40% מהצופים ביוטיוב נמצאים במצב מחובר.

בנוסף הממשק מאפשר לנו להבין אילו מודעות מוצלחות יותר ואילו פחות, ולמעשה עוזר לנו לבצע אופטימיזציה לסרטונים. ניתן לראות את הפילוח של הצפייה בסרטונים על פי: מסע פרסום, מודעת וידאו, פורמט, ורשת (אחד הפרמטרים הנוספים הוא כמה המסרטון נצפה).

כך זה נראה במערכת אדוורדס:

איך בכלל YouTube נולד?

האתר נוסד על ידי שלושה עובדים של חברת Pay-Pal בחודש פבואר בשנת  2005. מטרתם הראשונית הייתה ליצור יכולת (פלטפורמה) להעביר קבצי ווידאו ושמע בין מחשבים באמצעות הרשת (כן פעם היה צורך כזה!).  וכבר בשנת 2006  בחודש אוקטובר זיהו אנשי גוגל את הפוטנציאל ורכשו את האתר (במסגרת עסקת חילוף מניות ענקית).

על מנת לרענן את הזיכרון כך נראה האתר בשנת 2006 (דצמבר):

פופולריות ומדדים (בקנה מידה עולמי):

• יוטיוב הוא האתר השלישי הנצפה ביותר (על פי נתוני אלקסה).
• מעל לשלוש ביליון סרטונים נצפים ביום! (3,000,000,000).
• 800 מיליון מבקרים חדשים ביוטיוב בכל חודש.
• כיום יוטיוב תומך בכל הרזולוציות כולל כולל תלת מימד (3D) וגם HD.
• גוגל משקיעה ביוטיוב 365 מיליון דולר בשנה בעבור הגדלת רוחב הפס ושרתים חדשים.
• 70% מהתנועה ליוטיוב מגיעה מחוץ לארה"ב.
• רוב הצופים ביוטיוב הם בין הגילאים 18-54.
• בפלטפורמה של יוטיוב לנייד (YouTube Mobile)  –נרשם נתון מרשים של – 100 מיליון צפיות ביום!
• 10% מהסרטונים ביוטיוב הם באיכות HD , וקיימת מגמת עלייה.

לנתונים סטטיסטיים נוספים…

כיום ניתן על ידי עריכת השוואה לזהות מגמות בסרטוני היוטיוב. גוגל השיקו את "Trends Dashboard" אשר בעזרתו ניתן לבחון סרטונים על פי מדינות, גילאים, מין, נתוני צפייה ועוד.

הממשק נראה כך:

לכניסה לממשק

נושאים נוספים שאולי יעניינו אותך:

• 19 בספטמבר 2006 -- העברת כספים לחשבון הבנק ע"י גוגל – עדכון
• 14 באוקטובר 2006 -- האם GDrive הוא לשימוש פנימי בגוגל בלבד?
• 21 בינואר 2007 -- וויקיפדיה מוסיפה מעתה nofollow בגירסה האנגלית
• 23 ביולי 2005 -- עדכונים בגוגל אדוורדס
• 14 ביוני 2008 -- רשת חברתית באתרכם תוך דקות בעזרת גוגל Friend Connect

And so begins our three-part series discussing Pinterest basics, along with how a company can use it to build its brand and reap SEO and social media marketing benefits.

The Basic Definition

So let’s get down to the basics: Pinterest is a social media platform that allows users to share and collect pictures and videos which link back to the original source whether it’s a corporate site or a blog. If you want to join Pinterest you have to either request an invite or be invited by a friend alreadyon the network. One of the benefits of Pinterest is that it is that easy. And once you join, it becomes addicting as you see what your friends are pinning, get ideas for projects or find the next meal you want to cook.

Basic Vocabulary

Pins: A pin is the Pinterest word for a post. You can pin images shared by other users (repin) or you can pin an image from an external site (pin) by installing the Pinterest bookmarklet on your browser. You can also share your pin on Facebook and Twitter. This is an example of a pin:

Boards: Users pin images to boards that are organized into various categories. This can range from ‘Fashion’ to ‘History’ to ‘Home Décor.’

You can also add contributors to your boards, meaning you can allow other people to pin or repin items to your boards. If you are planning a party with other people and you want a place to share ideas a board would be a perfect place for that. Here are some examples of boards:

Likes: Without pinning an image, users can share their opinion by ‘liking’ an image or video they see.

Comments: Users can leave comments on images or videos others have pinned

Following: Pinterest, like Twitter, allows for users to follow one another, whether they are immediate friends, aesthetic contributors or Pinterest mavens. When following, the user is also given the choice to follow all pin boards or to follow a select few.

Followers: These are the people that are following your personal boards and recieve updates in their feed when you pin or repin an image or video.

Feed: As users login into Pinterest, they can see a live feed of images being pinned and repinned . Users can choose to see a feed showing everything being pinned, choose specific categories, or just see the people they are following.

A newer feature on Pinterest is now you can allow your feed to go on your Facebook Timeline.

What’s The Big Deal?

There have been countless articles and blog posts written recently about Pinterest because the number of users has sky-rocketed. The audience is mostly women right now, but is always expanding. Businesses are realizing the potential this platform has for branding or search engine optimization (SEO).

The next post in our series will go into depth on how this growing trend can be beneficial to branding and should be a part of content strategy.

It was late on a Friday night. My wife and I had been busy all day and all night. Now it was nearly 10:00pm, and we had not had dinner. I called into a favorite local place for takeout. We were both starving and were excited to have a late dinner date at home together.

When I got back home and opened up my meal (chicken), I found an incredibly small amount of chicken. I was very disappointed. In my opinion, I would have gotten more chicken in a kid’s meal from McDonalds.

The Thing This Business Did Right (Social Media Marketing)

When I was picking up the meals, I had to wait a few minutes for them to finish it up. While waiting, I noticed something on their counter, by the registers. They were promoting the fact that they were “now on Facebook,” and asking for people to come and like them on Facebook so that they could be notified of Facebook-only specials.

This was a great way to help people become aware that they were now on Facebook, and gave their customers incentive to like and follow them. To learn more best practices, see this post about best social media practices for 2012.

My Social Media Action

In my disappointment that night, remembering that they were now on Facebook, I snapped a picture of my disappointing meal, “liked” them on Facebook (it killed me to do that, but I had to), and then posted my picture on their wall, explaining my displeasure.

Their Social Media Reaction (Social Media Marketing Mistake)

I got up the next morning anxious to see if they had replied. What I found was not a reply from them, not a direct Facebook message, but that my post had been deleted from their wall! “Are you kidding me!!” I said out loud (and by out loud I mean LOUD). I am pretty sure that I startled my wife who was not completely awake yet.

My Social Media Reaction to their Reaction

Needless to say, I was not happy about them removing my post. I emphatically and rather quickly, reposted the picture with my displeasure of the portion size and then made a comment asking them to “please not remove my post” from their wall.

Their Reaction to my Social Media Tirade

It did not take them but 1-2 hours before they found my post and removed it once again. They still did not contact me privately either. No apologies, no trying to make things right and no explanation. They simply removed my post once again.

Now the Gloves were Off

Now in all fairness to them, they had no idea I knew anything about social media. However, that shouldn’t matter. The fact is there are going to be unhappy customers and you need to address them in your social media channels as well as converse with those that are happy. It could have been a simple apology, and a message along the lines of “we will contact you to resolve this.” Then everything after that could have been behind “closed doors” as it were; but that’s not what they did.

I was more than just an unhappy customer at this point, I was angry. Instead of reposting on their Facebook wall where they would likely take it down yet again, I simply went looking for online review sites to leave negative reviews for them and to tell of my experience with their “customer service”.

Lessons You Should Learn from This

• Your social media properties are an extension of your customer service. DO NOT IGNORE your customer’s complaints on these properties.
• Engagement is key to success with social media, with both good and bad experiences. Here are some interesting facts on small business and social media marketing.
• With unhappy customers, address them quickly on the “public” forum in which they posted and the contact them to handle it “behind closed doors.” If you handle it right, you will not only have a customer for life, you will have an advocate telling everyone about how professionally they handled your complaint. For the record, I have also had this experience as a customer, and I am an advocate for that business now because of the way they handled my experience.
• Addressing bad experiences professionally and promptly with social media is a great way to advertise your commitment to a high level of customer service. Every company gets complaints, so don’t feel like you have to hide anything.
• Like it or not, customers have a power over your business that they have always had – wait, did I say “that they have always had’? Yes, I did! Word of mouth has always an incredibly powerful factor in hurting (or helping) businesses. The difference is you have a chance to be part of that conversation now.
• Some customers will be angry enough to leave negative reviews on review sites, such as Yelp, Google Maps, or Foursquare, when you ignore their outburst on the internet.

If you’ve seen any similar examples of bad social media, share your experiences of social media marketing mistakes in the comments below and start a discussion on what could have been improved.

It can be difficult to track the exact position of keywords in Google since a number of things can affect the outcome. Personalized search, local results, and different data centers can all dramatically influence the rankings you see. Google’s algorithm changes more than 200 times a year, so rankings also fluctuate from week to week or day to day. Overall, you should be looking for trends in your rankings.

With that in mind there are numerous tools that can help you track rankings. One way to track rankings is to use filters within Google Analytics. More information about this is available on Yoast’s blog.

This information can also be gathered through Google Webmaster Tools. In your Webmaster tools click on “Your Site on the Web” and then on “Search Queries.”  This will give you the average position on Google for your site for a given term.

Paid options also exist that allow you to track very specific terms.  Rank Tracker is a paid option that automatically checks your search engine rankings and shows you if your site has moved up or down in the search results.  It can also help you discover profitable keywords you may not have considered on your own.

The SEO Moz tool is another good option that will track rankings from Google, Bing and Yahoo in any country.  This tool pulls rankings automatically and provides some nice charts to show progress.

Authority Labs in another paid tool that provides fully automated reports, allowing you to track local results, international keywords, and a large volume of keywords.

Advanced Web Ranking and Rank Checker are additional services that can be useful for tracking web rankings.

There are a lot of good ways to track search engine rankings.  If you have additional SEO services or tools that you like to use for tracking rankings, feel free to leave a comment.

Not only does this apply to commercials and conversations, the same principles can also be applied to your business’s website.  Your website is often the first impression that potential customers have of you, are you making the most of it?

1.  Capture your audience’s attention

Advertisers regularly draw you in with “humor, aesthetics, emotions and surprise”.  How does your website capture your audience’s attention?

Imagery
In the chaos that often comes with a new site design, it’s easy to jump straight to boring stock images.  Make your site stand out from the others by putting some thought into your website’s imagery; it’s often the very first thing that a visitor focuses on when they load your site.

Content
You can also capture a visitor’s attention by creating addicting content that draws them in.  It starts with a catchy headline and useful information in a presentable format.  Make sure to use charts, graphs, bulleted lists and other styling to break up paragraphs.

2.  Convey a clear message

The HBR blog post states “too much information can cloud an individual’s ability to accurately analyze a situation, and how “in good decision making, frugality matters.”.  Does the content on your site convey a clear and simple message?

Content Overload
As an expert in your field, it’s easy to inadvertently go overboard with detail and jargon. While it’s important to create SEO-friendly, keyword-rich content, you must also take into consideration the user experience.  All of the search engine traffic in the world won’t make a difference if your visitors are overwhelmed with your content.

Positioning
To slightly edit the question from the article – what is the most critical takeaway you would like your website visitors to receive?  Whatever your messaging or positioning is, make it very clear and state it often.

3.  Focus on differentiation

Depending on your industry, it’s very possible that a potential customer will visit 2-3 of your competitors.  This is especially true for eCommerce and other high-ticket purchases.  How does your website differentiate your business from your competitors?

You can differentiate your business by conveying a clear message and capturing your audience’s attention but to take it a step further, look at your biggest competitors’ websites and put yourselves in the shoes of a customer.  What can you add or modify on your website to really stand out?

Take a minute to review one of the most memorable quotes from the HBR blog post:

“Our world is filled with noise, information, and distractions; so having someone’s undivided attention — even for 30 seconds — is an opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted. If you can use those 30 seconds to capture their attention, deliver your message, and distinguish yourself from others, you’re likely to be heard, understood, and remembered.”

Much like a Super Bowl commercial, you only have a short period of a time with a website visitor to capture their attention, convey your message and differentiate your business before they hit the back button to click on the next search result.  Make the most of your website traffic by doing a self-assessment of these 3 keys and make your site stand out from the crowd.

I began working with SEO.com just before Christmas so I’m pretty new to the SEO game. I’ve basically learned that the only way to start grasping SEO is to jump right in to it. So I have put together a list of blogs that are serving as valuable teaching tools. My hope is that anyone new to SEO can benefit from this list just like I have.

1. The SEOmoz Blog

Featuring Rand Fishkin as the lead contributor, the SEOmoz blog is beneficial to readers with any level of knowledge. It has a basic,  informative guide to learning SEO, and also manages to stay on the cutting edge of the industry. This site also features Rand’s famous White Board Friday series. White Board Friday is video blog that addresses current issues with SEO each week.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/

2. Marketing Pilgrim Blog

I find this site valuable for its insights on SEO from a marketing perspective. This post regarding the brand impact of social media was one of my favorite recent pieces.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/

3. Web Pro News

I visit this blog several times a day. Its focus is on news related to online business with specific channels dedicated to search, social media, and technology news.

http://www.webpronews.com/

4. Inside Search Blog

Google’s official blog is valuable for its posts on updates to Google’s algorithm, new events in search, etc. These are updates that anyone working in the field of SEO must stay updated on.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/

5. Search Engine Land Blog

You can get information on just about anything regarding SEO and search marketing here.

http://searchengineland.com/

6. SEO Book Blog

This blog is a fantastic resource for SEO knowledge and insight, as well as some famous SEO Firefox Plug-ins.

http://www.seobook.com

7. Search Engine Journal

This blog has a lot of great information, and I found their link building posts to be especially helpful. Link building is an integral part of SEO and it can be challenging.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

8. Marketing Land Blog

As an SEO Specialist, learning about the industry from a marketing perspective is paramount. Coming from a marketing background I appreciate the insights offered here.

http://marketingland.com/

9. SEO.com Blog

And then, of course, our very own SEO.com blog. We go to great lengths here to cover all topics SEO and internet marketing related. We generally have a new post up each day, so please keep reading!

http://www.seo.com/blog/

There are definitely many more educational SEO blogs that aren’t in this list. If you feel I’m missing any important blogs, please include them in the comments below.

Here are the details.

MySEOCommunity.com is a new global social & search community, and they are celebrating the launch of their new site. SEO.com is thrilled to be one of the contest sponsors!

If you are interested in participating, head over to the MySEOCommunity.com contest page for all the official details. There are a bunch of other great non-cash prizes as well, making all the prizes add up to over $2,000. Can you say Booya?

So what are you waiting for Dr. Ivannablog? (Insert mad scientist geeky giggle here) Enter the contest today as the contest ends on March 5th, 2012. The sooner you enter, the more time you will have to promote your post, and get more attention, and possibly earn that $1000 Grand Prize!

Good luck from all of us at SEO.com

How to Set up Google Alerts

In a nutshell, Google Alerts are updates sent to your Gmail account that let you know about the most recent Google results based on queries you want to stay informed on. Here is how to get started:

1. Sign into your Gmail account
2. Go into “Account settings.” Click on  “Alerts” directly beneath “My products”
3. Let Google know the search queries you want to be alerted about, (for most SEO campaigns this will be targeted keywords and  branded terms)
4. Set how often you want to receive these alerts
5. Set up a quality filter preference (how many), this can be handy in that alerts can quickly clutter up an inbox
6. Tell Google where to deliver your alerts. This is useful if you have an address you use exclusively for clients
7. Click on “Create Alert”

The other day as I was reviewing a client’s Gmail inbox, I came across the usual three to eight alerts I receive daily (this can also be set to as-it-happens and once a week) for the keywords and branded terms I want to stay current on. The first Google Alert I opened, led me to a blog post that had been flagged because it contained the query “cocktail dresses,” (Google loves to crawl and index content!). The first thing that came to mind was to see if this blog met my criteria for a guest blog post opportunity. In this case, the blog didn’t have the authority and social following that I like to see before reaching out, but it did allow me to place a well thought-out comment that was relevant to the topic of post. While the link was no-follow (doesn’t pass link juice), search engines still index the comment. These types of links still hold value if they come from a relevant, related site. It’s also a good opportunity to increase brand awareness because Google will associate the comment and content of the blog with the link pointing back to your client’s site.

Forum Commenting

The next Google Alert I opened led me to a website where it had found the keyword “vintage clothing” in a question posted on Yahoo Answers. As it turns out, a Yahoo community member was looking for a great place online to shop for vintage clothing. Bingo! It just so happens I know of one. I responded by letting the member know about my client’s collection of vintage clothing and dresses and included a URL in my response. Not only was this a great opportunity to increase my client’s brand awareness, but also to take a potential customer to the exact page on my client’s site where she can find the products she is looking for.

Product Reviews

The next alert I opened was flagged for the keyword “rockabilly dresses.” One of the results led me to a fashion blog that had a high PageRank, domain authority and a large social following.  As I  navigated through the site, I came across a guest post letting me know that the site owner might be open to the possibility of another one. I proceeded to contact the blog owner who responded the next day saying that while she isn’t accepting guest posts at this time, she would be interested in doing a product review. As luck would have it, my client is open to giving away products in exchange for reviews (keeping SEO optimization in mind of course) and hence a mutually beneficial relationship is born.

Sizing up Your Competition

The next alert I clicked on was flagged for the keyword “vintage dresses” and led me to the vintage dresses page on a competitor’s website. While I won’t be requesting a link or a guest blog post, it does gives me an opportunity to take a closer look at a their site, analyze their backlinks, and look for new link opportunities. In this case, I found some great blogs I will be contacting for potential guest blog posts. These alerts are also handy to get a feel for topics or keywords that are trending in your client’s industry as well as for ideas to create content around.

Public Relations and Reputation Management

Using Google News Alerts is a good way to keep an eye on the great (or not so great) things people are saying about your clients on the web and can be a valuable tool and resource for any reputation management campaign. It’s an easy way to stay updated on any recent news, industry events, conferences, summits, etc., that your client is involved in and forgot to mention. These can turn into an opportunity for a press release or a blog post. You want to keep people in the know about the all the great things your client is doing!

Business Directories and Listings

Using Google Alerts can also lead you to business directories and listings that are specific to your clients industry or niche. These types of relevant links can help to build the overall authority of your website.

While not all alerts are going to be link opportunities, if you’re willing to dig a little you might be surprised at what you’ll find. Let me know about anything I might have missed or share a success story of your own from using Google Alerts in the comments below.

A link farm is a website with a high number of links to different websites with no relevance or category logic, grouping, organization, or relevance to the domain name.

If you land on a site and there are hundreds of links all over with many unrelated topics, you’ve probably landed on a link farm. Link farms ARE spam and will be considered as such by Search Engines. The key purpose of link farms are to easily and illegitimately send signals to search engines to assist in ranking.

A few important things to keep in mind when it comes to link farms:

1. If you’re using link farms in any way for your SEO, STOP! It will not serve your clients end goal to rank well and long.
2. If you take a client on or have a website where you find your website has somehow been included in a link farm take corrective action to be removed.
3. And most of all, remember that SEO is ALL ABOUT RELEVANCE. Links farms are the exact opposite of obtaining the correct relevance signals to rank organically. The best and most legitimate way to build an quality SEO marketing campaign is through legitimate digital marketing initiatives like guest blogging, public relations, high level directory link building, internal blogging and user generated content, social media and keeping your business at the forefront of news and minds so that natural links are acquired.

It’s important to do everything you can to diversify your link portfolio and make your links appear as natural as possible. This means having different types of relevant links coming from various different domains and IP addresses.

SEO Director

A director may be one of the most important hiring decisions as far as online marketing personnel goes.  A talented SEO director can make or break an SEO strategy.  This individual is ultimately responsible for measuring and growing online marketing metrics.  Finding someone who has vision and is well-rounded is critical.  Look for a director who has experience in research, analytics and actually reports on metrics.  Experience writing and implementing SEO strategy along with other online verticals such as conversion optimization, paid search and lead generation are just a few skills you want to add to your check list.

SEO Specialist

A search engine optimization specialist is going to be your Director’s right-hand man.  Look for someone with a history in quality link building.  A good SEO specialist will have examples of past work success and will be able to give guidance when building a solid link building portfolio.  Someone with experience in customer relations or engaging in customer interaction will be important, especially in today’s online environment where social media is large part of any successful online marketing strategy.

Link Builder

A good link builder is worth their weight in gold.  Anyone can find links to sites with low page rank or domain authority.  A solid link builder will understand quality link building and how to build a link portfolio that looks natural to the search engines.  They should not be satisfied with just link building but link maintenance as well so that overall link quantity continues to rise year after year.  It is important to find someone with networking skills that will build relationships which will convert into .edu, .gov and other high value links.

Content and Copywriter

We have all heard that “content is king”.  While this remains true, that content must be unique and engaging.  Consumers are demanding a better surfing experience and the search engines are continuously updating their algorithms to look for content that is truly written around what searchers want to see.  A good copywriter can write onsite content, informative press releases, occasional industry blogging, and engage in social media updates.  Each of these tactics will only become more important as your online presence grows.  Critical skills also include someone is who is great at research, and can write quickly while remaining articulate and creative.

Outsourcing

As a final part of your SEO team consider hiring experts in the respective field.  Having someone analyze your strategy and link portfolio with fresh eyes, one who knows what to look for, will give you an advantage over your competition.  Keep in mind that there are many options for SEO agencies and consultants.  Look for an agency, like SEO.com, that rank for related search terms in the SEO industry, can provide good case studies of past successes, and can map how they are going to show you success metrics for your campaign.  An agency will typically have all of the above resources at your disposal, as well as tools and the capability to efficiently build links to your site that would otherwise be outside of your reach.

Be Honest – Is Your Business Worth Talking About?

In the last six months, did your business create anything that caused people to turn their heads and take notice? I mean a product, a piece of content, a video series, a service, or anything else at all? If you can’t honestly answer yes, then why would anybody want to link to you? Duke Cannon is a perfect (but crass) example of a company that gets this, and boy are they getting links for it. Forgive me for getting so basic, but we have to get this out of the way. Natural links go to businesses that are making people talk. Do that.

Ok, that’s out of the way.

Go Find The People Talking About You

Assuming you create some kind of buzz with your products or content, you’ll come across people talking about you. If you’re big, invest in social media monitoring like Trackur to see what they’re saying and where they’re saying it. If you’re just getting going, set up a few Google Alerts around your brand name and keywords. Stay on top of what they’re saying because you might want to reach out to one of them (I’ll give you a good example of how to do this in a minute). And also, you should be where they are. If people talk about you on Twitter, you need to be there too.

Contact Those People

When you come across that glowing review of your new product, promptly contact the author. Tell them you’re grateful they wrote the review, and be generous with your praise. They may have even linked to you in their review, but if not, find a nice way to ask them to. They already love what you do, so they’ll probably support you if you tell them how much a link would help you.

That’s a lot of time spent watching moving pictures! YouTube currently receives 48 hours of video uploaded every minute and serves 3 billion videos per day.

Google+ Hangouts are changing who is producing videos and how they’re being used. Once Google lifts the restrictions on how many can join a hangout, which I suspect is coming with business pages, we’ll see more video content being created. More than just pranks and idiots filming evidence for their next arrest.

There are several things that can help your videos attain more visibility. First think about where visibility happens: on the search engine results pages (Universal Search), YouTube (or wherever you’ve uploaded your video), blog embeds, etc. To get a wide range interest you need to consider a ton of factors.

Video SEO Ranking Factors

• Keywords in title
• Number of views
• Number of comments
• Category & Tags
• +1/Shares/Tweets/Embeds
• Favorites
• Ratings
• Sentiment (Like/Dislike ratio)
• Channel views
• Number of subscribers
• Links
• Embeds
• Video Sitemap
• Channel login activity
• Speed & consistency of interest
• Quality description (click-thru factor)
• Flags (negative)

Keywords in Title

This example shows that a lot has been left on the table in terms of what other words should have been used to describe this video based on terms people would use to find the video. For example: theory, statistics, analysis, etc.

Category & Tags

The category here is probably misplaced since most people don’t find trend and variation as entertaining. For us nerds, maybe it’s properly categorized. However, the tags here do a better job at targeting words that users will be searching.

Pro tip: I always recommend multiple variations on spelling. For example: statistics & stats

Views, Ratings, Comments & Favorites

You’ll see there are over 34,000 video views so there’s some obvious interest by the public. This is important to show that it could become wildly popular vs. a similar video with 100 views.

Ratings are favorable with a few dislikes so the sentiment could be described as positive. Having a positive sentiment is not always the strongest indicator for rankings but generally the more people like a video, the better chance it has in obtaining each of the important ranking factors.

Comments are marginally active. With 34,000 views, many videos would demand a few thousand comments but this varies considerably.

Favorites are pretty good with 148. Much like comments, not everybody interacts the same way with video. Since there are more than a handful, it’s easy to see there is interest in sharing or saving this video for later reference.

Significant Discovery Events

Notice here that Event A and Event B created a large spike in views, comments, and favorites in the above chart? This is critical to understand who is going to help you get noticed and will naturally increase rankings as a result of video views, ratings, comments, favorites, etc.

Don’t be afraid to lookup what publishers are embedding videos and reach out to them to either (a) ask what videos they need for upcoming stories or (b) what types of characteristics they like to see in videos they’re planning to embed. Create a relationship and provide great video content to writers on a deadline.

Types of Videos to Produce

• Identify which keywords return video results in the universal results pages of the search engines
• Product videos
• Events
• Interviews
• Journalistic storytelling
• Screenshot (demo) videos
• Tutorials
• Production lines
• How things are made
• Announcements

Zappos product videos help consumers get a better description of the products they’re interested in buying. Along with images, there’s a very quick video where you can see products from every angle, as though you’re standing in the room having a discussion with a personal shopper. This comes as part of a Zappos strategy to launch 50,000 product videos in 2010.

Keyword Research for Video

• Standard keyword research using Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Related searches (both search engines and video sites)
• Suggest/Auto-Complete Terms (the terms that drop down as you’re typing a search query)
• YouTube Searches & Related
• Keywords from your social media friends
• Industry terms

Video XML Sitemaps

Customizing your video XML sitemap is going to require a little technical knowledge. Don’t be intimidated out of taking this important step. Hire help if you must. Research the basics, test and tweak as you go. Make sure you submit your video sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

There is more to keyword research than just search volume and researching competitors. It is key to understand your customer base and their search behavior.  For example, there are many tools such as Google Insights and Google Trends that can help you better understand what’s trending and how searchers find your product or service. It may also be beneficial to conduct a survey to gain insight into how your customer makes a purchase decision.

As you are conducting keyword research and trying to find the best opportunities, there are some factors to consider when planning for long term success.  A search marketing strategy, like any business strategy should have both long and short term goals.  While every search marketing strategy should focus on profitability, there are other factors that help build the credibility of your brand. These factors are difficult to measure; however, if you consider the principles I’ve outlined below and take some time to better understand your consumer; it will greatly affect the results of your search marketing efforts.

Outlined here are the stages of the consumer research process when making a purchase decision.  The time from beginning to end of the cycle can vary greatly depending on the price and technicality of the product or service.

Awareness of a Need

This is the beginning of every purchase decision and can be stimulated by a need or want.  It could be as basic as being hungry and recognizing the need for food or could be created by an advertisement for the iPhone 4s.

Information Search

In this stage of the buyer decision process, it’s vital that your brand is at the forefront of your consumer’s minds, or at the forefront of where they will seek information (search engines).  This is the stage where consumers are doing the majority of their research. For example, if you are in the market to buy a point and shoot camera, you may conduct a general search for point and shoot cameras.  Conducting this search will help you in the information search phase and allow you to determine which brand of camera and what features are available.

Depending on your business and the resources available to you, you will want to develop a strategy to be visible for relevant search terms. This may include targeting keywords that will not generate a sale on the first visit.  Not only is it important to be visible for the keyword but it’s also important to understand where your customers go for information through searching Google or visiting review sites.

Evaluating Alternatives

At this stage your consumers are finished feeling out the market and have developed a consideration set.  Depending on the product and the industry, most consumers have a consideration set of about 3-5 different brands or products.

Purchase Decision 

Most SEO strategies try to catch consumers at this stage of the purchase process, as this represents the lowest hanging fruit.  However, if your business has not done due diligence up to this point, your brand or product will not be in the consideration set, therefore potentially ruining your chances of making a sale. To this point, if your brand has reached your consumer at each stage of the decision process your chances of making a sale are much higher.

Post Purchase 

At this stage of the decision process, you have the opportunity to continue your relationship with your customer. This is where your customers determine their satisfaction level of your product or service.  Here you have the opportunity to encourage your customers to write reviews on your business and turn them into repeat customers.  It is much easier to keep a customer than acquire a new one.

Once you’ve thought through the consumer research process for your business, it will help you better conduct keyword research, and help you determine the strategic moves you need to make to be visible to your consumer.  All stages of the purchase decision process are important, and it’s vital to have a strategy surrounding each stage of the process.  The majority of SEO strategies focus on the purchase decision phase, by the time the consumer is in that stage it may be too late. Your search marketing strategy can incorporate anything from retargeting, utilizing pay per click services, SEO or a combination.

As you can see, search marketing presents opportunities in all stages of the buying process. To have the most effective search marketing strategy that will lead to increased brand awareness and long term success of your business, it is advantageous to incorporate a wide range of keywords as well as other elements of search marketing that work best for your business.

Be informed:

Read the first few blog posts and the writer’s “about me” section. If the site has a search bar, see if the topics you are hoping to have posted about are in line with other content on the site. Be familiar enough with the blogger to personalize an email to them, and always address them by name. Nobody wants to get an email that begins with “Dear influential blogger” or “To whom it may concern.”

Make contact via email or social media:

Many bloggers work from home, and those with kids are not always in a position to take a phone call. Check the blogger’s “Contact Me” section, which should say their preferred method of contact. If a blogger doesn’t accept promotional content, it is often noted in this section. Some bloggers like contact initiated on Twitter or a Facebook fan page. Sending an email is often the most effective way to get a timely response.

Be concise:

Nobody likes to get a long-winded email, especially when it’s from somebody they don’t know. Be personal. Explain why your product or service is relevant to their blog’s topics/focus. Explain why you have specifically chosen this blogger to promote your product or service. Give a detailed explanation of what you are hoping to have the blogger post for you, and how soon you need it. If you plan to compensate the blogger with money or product trade, the initial email is a good time to do so.

Be prepared:

If you plan to ask a blogger to post guest content, have it ready to send. Don’t expect things to be done for free. Ask if they want to write their own content, or have it written for them. Create a contract that specifies what is expected of them, when it must be completed, and how they will be compensated.

Keep the door open:

Sometimes a blogger is very interested in the chance to connect with a brand or cause, but the specific pitch is not a good fit. If your pitch is declined, it’s appropriate to ask if they are interested in being contacted for other opportunities.  Because the bloggosphere is a tight-knit place, ask if they know another blogger who might be interested. There are many bloggers who are eager to begin creating a relationship with a brand, but just need an introduction.

With these tips in mind, create a base template for your first-contact email. I have a template that I begin almost every blog pitch with, and I add in details for the specific pitch and the recipient. The bloggers who respond and work with you often will be interested in future promotions. Approaching a blogger with a personal touch will yield the best results, and may lead to great guest blogging opportunities in the future.

When going through this process, it is essential you have a specific focus in mind. For instance, if you were looking to expand a university’s web presence you may want to expand into one category of keywords that every degree could fall under, such as “online.” Meaning that instead of just targeting “business degree” or “information systems degree,” you need to locate all of the best phrases that combine those terms with “online” or other similar types.

Remember that even though we are using the example of a university campaign, this idea can work with any campaign.

First, go into Webmaster Tools and export your two pieces of data:

Top Queries:

This can be done by clicking on Your site on the web > Search Queries as shown here:

Download the table and it will appear similar to this image:

Top Relevant Keywords:

This can be done by clicking on Your site on the web > Keywords as shown here:

Download the table and it will appear similar to this:

From there we can begin combining the two pieces of data. Since we already have the focus of “online” in mind, the first task is filtering with Excel to pull only those top queries that contain the term “online” within the phrase.

With a list of “subject focused phrases” you can now begin your combination process with the “top relevant terms.” Select a single “subject focused phrase” like accelerated bachelors degree online, attach it to a “top relevant term” like university or course. Using that one phrase, expand it into a relevant cluster of terms using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

In doing this we accomplish our goal of establishing a list of phrases ideal in link building and content strategy, which helps create a stronger presence for the term “online.” The variation phrasing for each term like “accelerated bachelors degree,” will ensure that we are diverse in anchor text.

Overall Keyword Prioritization

Next, retrieve rankings for each term to begin prioritizing your campaign based on current marketing focuses and potential quick wins.

With a priority focus in place, create a short-term content and link building strategy (typically a three-to-six month strategy identifying types of links and content to target is best).

Previous Posts In The Series:

Post 1 - Building a Keyword List Based On Top Relevant Terms in Google Webmasters

Post 2 - Using Google Analytics for Long Tail Identification & Quick Wins

Next In The Series:

Post 4 – An Enterprise Approach To Keyword Prioritization & Targeting

Response Time

Although I am an Internet junkie and my cell phone bill will easily show you I use much more data than phone minutes, there are certain types of businesses where people will naturally opt to call first like plumbers, taxi service, restaurants, etc.  If your business type falls into this category, you must have the ability to pick up the phone every time, whether it be yourself, your internal staff or even an outside call answering service.  If you don’t pick up the phone, it doesn’t matter how high your website ranks or how much you paid for that yellow page ad because most people will move down the list to your competitors.

Take a minute to think about and answer:

• Do your customers prefer to call or email? Whatever their preference, are you set up to respond immediately?
• What percent of phone calls do you currently answer?
• What is your follow up time on emails or voicemails?

Communication Style

Last summer, I did a lot of research on local landscapers. As mentioned earlier, I am an Internet junkie which directly correlates to my lack of handyman skills.  After contacting 10-15 different businesses, I was really amazed by the responses I received.  While a landscaper’s communication style may not necessarily reflect the quality of work they perform, I was easily turned off by businesses who took a week to respond or gave us an uninformative, barely literate one line response.  As a business owner, I’m sure it can be frustrating to spend a lot of time responding to inquiries with no guarantee of gaining business but it’s something you need to be prepared for and try to streamline as much as possible.  Someone who takes the time to contact you and ask detailed questions is further along in the buying process and if you take the time to address their needs, you have a great shot at landing their business.

Take a minute to think about and answer:

• Does your communication style match that of your target customer?
• Does the communication and content on your website lead someone to want to contact you? How does your website site you apart from the other 10 competitors? (Hint: It’s not just a flashy design.)
• If you receive commonly asked questions and don’t always have time to write detailed answers, do you have common answers that can be sent back?
• If you offer high ticket items, does the detail and grammar of your response or website content, match the expectations of your customer?

There isn’t a guide for each business type that explains how you should communicate with your customers but take into account how they currently try to communicate with you and be honest with yourself on how well you respond both in timeliness and quality.  If you’re not sure, just ask them. Write a short, 5 question survey about the pre-sales process and have your customers fill it out.

For a local business, the ringing phone or filled out contact form is a crucial piece to your sales funnel.  Increase your sales, appointments, etc. by converting those people who are already contacting you, not just by getting more leads.

לפני כמה ימים, פרסם מאט קאטס בבלוג הרשמי של גוגל (Inside Search blog) הודעה על עדכון אלגוריתם חדש שזכה לכינוי: "Page Layout Algorithm". אלגוריתם זה נועד לבדוק שימוש מופרז במודעות באזור שמעל פס הגלילה, "Above The Fold" (האזור הראשון שהגולש רואה בדף מבלי לגלול למטה או לצדדים).

מהו העדכון ועל מי הוא ישפיע

עדכון האלגוריתם יביא לכך שאתרים, שבהם חלק ניכר מהאזור שמעל הפולד מוקדש למודעות במקום תוכן מקורי, עלולים להיפגע במיקומים. כמובן שמייד נשאלת השאלה כמה זה חלק ניכר? איזה אחוז של מודעות נחשב למוגזם? קאטס לא נותן מספרים, אבל כן מדגיש שהעדכון לא אמור לפגוע באתרים שמשלבים מודעות בצורה "נורמלית", אלא רק באלו שעושים שימוש לרעה בשיבוץ פרסומות עד כדי כך שהם מקשים על הגולש למצוא את התוכן שהם מחפשים:

"אנחנו מבינים שמיקום מודעות מעל הפולד הוא שימוש נפוץ באתרים רבים; המודעות הללו בדרך כלל פועלות היטב ומסייעות למפרסמים להרוויח מתוכן אינטרנטי. [...] השיפור האלגוריתמי החדש ישפיע על אתרים שיש בהם רק כמות קטנה של תוכן נראה לעין באזור שמעל הפולד, או שהתוכן הרלוונטי בהם נדחק למטה על ידי גושי מודעות גדולים."

דני סאליבן (Danny Sullivan) מוסיף בפוסט שפרסם ב- SearchEngineLand.com, מידע שקיבל מגוגל שהעדכון לא ישפיע על אתרים שמשתמשים בפרסומות קופצות למינהן, והוא חל רק על מודעות סטאטיות במיקומים קבועים בעמודים.

איך להימנע מפגיעת אלגוריתם Page Layout

השינוי האלגוריתמי ישפיע, לטענת גוגל, על פחות מאחוז מתוצאות החיפוש, כך שמרבית בעלי האתרים לא אמורים לראות שינויים בתוצאות (לפחות לא מהסיבה הזו). איך בכל זאת ניתן לבדוק את עצמכם, שמיקומי האתר שלכם לא מועדים לפורענות בעקבות השינוי?

• כרגיל בגוגל (הרשמי לפחות) – תחשבו על הגולשים ולא על מנועי החיפוש. הגיון בריא אמור לסייע לכם להבדיל בין שימוש הגיוני במודעות בראש העמוד לבין שימוש מופרז.
  
• כלים ותוספים שמציגים רזולוציות של מסכים – ניתן להיעזר בהם כדי לדעת איך מרבית הגולשים יראו את הדף ומכאן לנסות להסיק מהו שימוש מוגזם במודעות עבור מרבית הגולשים. למשל, הכלי של גוגל Browser Size tool שמציג איך יראה האתר ברזולוציות השונות:
  עוד אתר נחמד, הוא http://www.infobyip.com/testwebsiteresolution.php שמדמה את מראה האתר ברזולוציות השונות ומאפשר לעבור ביניהן. אם נסתכל על הרזולוציה הפופולארית ביותר של 1024X768 נראה תוצאות דומות לאתר הקודם:
  

הגולשים רוצים את התוכן במיידי!

כמו תמיד, חווית הגולש עומדת במוקד השינויים האלגוריתמיים שגוגל מבצעים וגם הפעם קאטס מתחיל את הפוסט בתיאור החוויה השלילית של גולשים שנכנסים לאתר וצריכים לחפש בו את התוכן המובטח בין כל המודעות:

"…Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away…"

כמקדמי אתרים, מעצבים ובוני אתרים אנחנו צריכים להתייחס לאמירה הזו בקונטקסט רחב יותר שמחזקת את מה שבעצם אנחנו כבר יודעים לגבי נראות האתר עבור מנועי החיפוש והגולשים כאחד. לא רק ששילוב מליון מודעות בדף מעל הפולד (ובעצם – גם בכל האזורים האחרים) ירחיק גולשים מהאתר שלכם (בין אם בכוחות עצמם ובין אם בעקבות ירידה במיקומים) גם עיצוב אתר מתחכם מדי יעשה את זה בשבילכם.

זו לא פעם ראשונה שמדברים שאומרים נציגי גוגל עולה החשיבות שיש לתבנית העיצוב של האתר. כמו שמציין גם סאליבן, רבים הניחו שכבר בעדכוני פנדה השונים ניתנה חשיבות לסוג התוכן המוצג באזור שמעל הפולד. אנחנו גם משערים שהאלגוריתם עושה הבחנה בין אזורים תבניתיים חוזרים באתר (תפריטי ניווט, פוטר) לבין התוכן עצמו וכן מכירים את העובדה שמיקום הקישור בדף הוא בעל חשיבות עצומה. גם בהיבט של הגולשים עצמם אנחנו יודעים שמיקום של טופס יצירת קשר בדף, של כפתור או של וידאו יכול לייצר שינויים משמעותיים בהקלקות ובהמרות.

ובינתיים בגוגל – עסקים כרגיל

בתקופה האחרונה נדמה שגוגל סופגת יותר ביקורת מבדרך כלל. בתחילת ינואר פרסמנו בבלוג פוסט בנושא קניית קישורים על ידי גוגל והענישה העצמית בעקבותיה. תחום ה-SEO כולו רגש לפני חודשיים עם ההודעה על כך שמנהלי אתרים לא יקבלו את כל ביטויי החיפוש האורגניים באנליטיקס אבל כן יתקבלו החיפושים הממומנים. רק לפני שבועיים התבשרנו על הצעד האגרסיבי (גם אם צפוי) של הוספת תוצאות גוגל+ לחיפושים. גם השינוי הנוכחי נתון במחלוקת, כיוון שגוגל עצמם משתלטים על חלק ניכר מהאזור שמעל הפולד בתוצאות החיפוש.

נושאים נוספים שאולי יעניינו אותך:

• 5 בנובמבר 2011 -- עדכון אלגוריתם של גוגל מציג תוצאות עדכניות יותר
• 23 בספטמבר 2011 -- איך תשיגו מיקומים גבוהים בגוגל חדשות
• 28 ביוני 2011 -- Google+: הרשת החברתית של גוגל
• 14 במאי 2011 -- חדשות Google מאי 2011
• 27 במרץ 2011 -- התשובות של פייסבוק יישארו השאלות של גוגל

Blogging is an amazing way for any business, large or small, to start to generate some visibility online. Take SEOmoz for example, although the roots of the company go way back to 1981 when Rand’s mother started a marketing business, SEOmoz got it’s start in 2004 when Rand started blogging about his “thoughts, struggles, and discoveries” in SEO. From there they started doing SEO consulting, then eventually transitioned into one of the greatest SEO toolsets you can find online. You too can get your start online just by starting a blog and writing/publishing great content on a regular basis. The whole process starts with picking a domain name, so let’s jump in.

Picking Your Domain Name

Picking your domain name should be pretty easy if you have already decided on your business name. I say “should” because if you are picking a domain name that is in line with your business name, you have pretty good chances that it is going to be available. I”m often asked the question, should I purchase a domain name that is rich with my target keywords? To be completely honest, three years ago, I would have answered heck yes! Today, not so much. I would pick a domain name that is one, easy to remember, and two, is brandable. So what’s the cost of a domain name? About $11.00 per year. Not too shabby.

Monthly Cost: $0.89

Finding A Web Host

Picking your web host is a little more difficult than picking a domain name, at least I think so. There are so many web hosts our there to choose from that it is hard to know which one is the best. I’m really scared to start listing web hosts in this post because there’s always going to be someone who has had a bad experience and will most likely comment negatively. Personally, I really like Host Monster, but it is a little more expensive if you are on a budget. If you are looking for a cheap web host, I would go with Name Cheap hosting. I’ve use them before, and they are pretty good for the price. Regardless of price, you will want to find a host that uses cPanel and has one click install for WordPress to keep things as simple as possible. Hosting through Name Cheap will cost you about $48.00 per year. Also, not to shabby.

Monthly Cost: $3.95

Installing WordPress

As I mentioned above, you will want to find a web host that offers a one click install for WordPress. I’m not the most technical person in the world and I’ll bet that most small business owners are not either, so this makes it really easy. The beautiful thing about using WordPress to run your blog is that is is FREE! No cost to you whatsoever! They also offer a huge support community to help you with any problems you might encounter along the way.

Monthly Cost: Free

Installing Your SEO & Social Plugins

WordPress out of the box is pretty SEO friendly, but there is always more you can do to make it more friendly to the search engines, especially for small businesses trying to do SEO. I’m not going to go into great detail about what plugins you should be installing to help you SEO or to make your blog more social because some of my colleagues have already written about it in previous posts. So, check out the linked posts below to get a better idea of which plugins you can install to get you going. One thing to keep in mind is that not all WordPress plugins are free, but most are. All of the plugins recommended in the posts below are free to the end user.

The Top Three SEO Plugins

The Top Eight SEO Plugins Used By SEO.com

Monthly Cost: Free

Picking A Theme

Just like plugins, there are many themes out there on the internet that are free. Honestly, a lot of the themes out there are pure crap, which is why I always purchase themes or have them built for me, but if you are on a budget, you can find a good theme or two by doing some research. If you don’t want to go the free route, you can check out WooThemes.com or StudioPress.com. I’ve used both and like them a lot. If you are going to go the free route, here are a few resources to help you get started.

Free Themes From WordPress.org

WordPress Theme Gallery

Free WP Themes

Monthly Cost: Free

Writing Your Content

Now that you have your domain, have a functioning blog that is pretty and optimized for the search engines, you need to start writing content. Obviously, the cost of writing your content is free, but it does take some time. When writing, make sure that you are including keywords that are being searched on by your potential customers. You can do some quick keyword research by heading over to The Google and simply start typing your target keywords in the search bar, for this example, I used they keyword wedding dresses.

As you can see in the image below, Google’s auto complete feature gives me some related searches to my keyword. If I sold wedding dresses online, I could blog about modest wedding dresses and make sure to use that keyword in the title of the post and throughout the content.

In my next image below, we are going to be looking at Google’s related searches feature. This can be accessed by clicking on related searches in the left sidebar. This gives me even more topic/keyword ideas to write about than auto complete. I could also write about designer wedding dresses, wedding dresses perfect for beach weddings, and many others also making sure to include the target keywords in the appropriate places mentioned above.

Monthly Cost: Free

As you can see, it is really easy (and affordable) to start building your online business through starting a blog. In my next post (probably next month), I’m going to talk about easy and affordable ways to start building links and driving traffic to your blog once you start pounding out some content. If you have any other additional resources that relate to this post, please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

Blogging is a great way to increase traffic to a website and help you rank better in the search engines.  When I suggest implementing a blog to clients, there is frequently some degree of skepticism and push-back on the importance and effectiveness of it.  I get a lot of questions like “What can I write about?” and “How do I blog and get the most out of it?”

These questions shed some light on why so many people don’t blog as they should.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of benefits that these companies are missing out on from not blogging. After some thought and research, here are 14 ways to leverage your blog to its fullest potential.

1. Title Tags

Create an informative title tag 60-70 characters in length, describing what your post is about.  If you want to rank a particular post for a particular keyword phrase, include it in the title of the page and title of the post.

2. Meta Descriptions

Provide a short description 160-170 characters in length to describe the post in the SERPs, including some sort of call to action at the end such as “Show your [industry] awareness by sharing with your friends”.

3. Social Share Buttons

When people read something they like or find beneficial, they like to share it with those around them.  Add social sharing buttons to every post to top social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, G+, StumbleUpon, Digg etc.), making it as easy for your viewers to share your posts with your friends.  This is a great way to acquire backlinks from readers that may not make the effort to link to you otherwise.

4. Social Profile Buttons

Make sure your social profile buttons and RSS feed sign-up are easy to find on the blog.  When people read blogs, they will often want to subscribe and connect with you through your other social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

5. Comments

Enable commenting on each blog post to help entice people to interact with the author of the post.  This is a great way to build relationships with people in your industry, and potential clients.  It also allows you to answer any additional questions that people may have after reading your post.

6. Pictures

“Pictures are worth a thousand words.”  Have at least one picture for every blog post that relates to what is being written in that post.  Users like to see pictures it helps entice them to read on and makes the users reading experience more enjoyable.

7. Use Links

Give users access to more information about your topic by linking to other pages of your site, and other trusted blogs and websites that can help shed more light on what you are talking about.

8. Titles

First impressions can make or break you.  The title of your blog post is your opportunity to make that first impression.  Create titles that are interesting to your viewing audience and that entice them to keep reading.

9. Content

In SEO, original and unique content is king.  Updating your blog on a consistent basis will entice visitors and search engines to continually come back to your site to read more.  Blogging frequently with high quality content will make you a reliable and creditable resource in your industry, ultimately helping you rank better in the SERPs, and can create a loyal following and clientele.  Write good posts that people want to link to, share, and that provide good usable information.  Below are some examples of what types of articles people love the most.

1. Create top ten lists – such as “10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here].”
2. Create resource lists for a specific topic.  Link to sources to go to get more information.
3. Create content that is easy to understand so everyone can understand and spread your message.
4. Talk about recent news that affects your industry.
5. Allow other authors to guest blog post on your blog.  This can help you get links from other industry related sites.
6. Share and create surveys and studies that help people interact with your blog
7. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few hundred-dollar prizes can result in thousands of dollars’ worth of editorial, quality links.
8. Write about topics and keyword phrases you want your site to rank for, then link to that page from your post.

10. Tags

Use appropriate and relevant tags on your blogs.  This can help you rank your post for those phrases in search engines.

11. Promote Your Content

Generate readership and build a following by promoting your posts on your own personal social platforms, inclucing Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.  Often, you can use social sharing widgets that give you a quick and easy way of seeing how many people are sharing your posts through those platforms.  You can also submit your blog to various blog directories.

12. URL Structure

Use the title of the post as part of the URL structure so it is easy for people to remember and link to.

• Example: www.seo.com/blog/title-of-blog-post/

13. Call To Action

Use calls to action at the end of your blog post, inviting readers to take a specific action.

For example:

1. “Let us know your opinion on the topic and leave us your comments below.
2. “Learn more about {topic} here (link to a page on your site).”

14. Have Fun with it!

Blogging is meant to entertain and provide useful information.  Don’t be afraid to use analogies and jokes to help people relate to what you are saying and endear them to you. Blog posts don’t always have to be serious.  Create articles purely for entertainment purposes from time to time.

Example:  Top 5 Villains You Never Make An Appointment With

Please share this post with your friends and let me know what you think of these tips in the comments section here or on Twitter.  Thanks for Reading

Many SEOs that I know eat, sleep, and breathe SEO. With technology today, we now can manage our search engine marketing campaigns from almost anywhere. For the iPad owners out there, I have compiled a short list of my favorite apps that help me manage my sites.

SERPs
SERPs, by Hans Schneider, is a very cool app that not only shows you where you rank, but it also shows you who is ranking for your targeted keywords. With this app, you also have the ability to manage multiple sites and multiple keywords and you can easily keep up with your competitors and their rankings.

SEO Search Ranking
Tracking the progress of your keywords and where they rank can be hard without the right tool. With SEO Search Ranking, by Leon Huang, you can track the progress of your keywords properly. Additionally, you get a historical background of where you were and how far you have come. Just like SERPS, you can track multiple sites and multiple keywords. This is a must-have app because after all, how do you know where you are if you don’t know where you have been?

Analytics for iPad
Analytics for iPad, by Mario Micklisch, brings your Google Analytics account to the palm of your hand. This tool gives you access to multiple accounts and you can run full reports. Analytics for iPad also allows you to compare reports so you can get the most comprehensive data. In fact, there isn’t much you can do in Google Analytics that you can’t do with this app.

SEO Manager
SEO Manager, by at2 GmbH, may be my favorite app on this list. With this app you can not only manage multiple sites and keywords, but it will also show you your top competitors for your keyword list. It is a very helpful tool for competitive analysis. Much like the SEO Ranking app, SEO Manager will also show you your historical ranking data of your keywords.

SEO & SEM Glossary
For those just starting out in the realm of SEO, SEO & SEM Glossary, by 138App.com, is a very helpful tool. Because many specialists seem to speak in code when they are talking about search engine optimization, you can easily keep up with the conversation by using this app to study different terms used in the industry.

SEO Course
One more great tool for novice SEOs is SEO Course, by Robert Costello. This app has several intuitive videos that will teach you the tricks of the trade including how to create the perfect keyword research and how to obtain backlinks. Don’t start your SEO campaign without at least looking at this app.

WordPress
Have you ever been out and about without your computer and the perfect blog post or idea for your site hit you, and by the time you made it back to the office you completely forgot the idea? With WordPress for iPad you will never have to miss out on an idea again because you can have complete editing access to your site on-the-go.

I hope this list is a good start for your iPad app collection. Of course there are several other apps that didn’t make the list that are also very useful. So tell me, what are some of your favorite SEO iPad apps?

Why Protest?

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

What is SOPA?

If you don’t know, click here, here, or here to read all about it.

Who is Protesting?

A few notable websites that have confirmed their participation in the protest are:

• Google
• WordPress
• Wikipedia
• Reddit
• Flickr

What Can I Do?

To see a bigger list of sites that are participating and to learn how you can participate in the biggest online protest in history, visit sopastrike.com.

At the very least tweet about #SOPASTRIKE and/or visit Blackout SOPA to add “STOP SOPA” to your twitter profile picture like these guys:

@mattcutts

@dannysulllivan

@chrisbrogan

Let’s not let a couple of silly bills ruin our industry!

Small business owners are an incredibly diverse group of people who know a lot about their chosen fields. Slightly less than half of all small businesses have more than one owner, and sixty percent of small business owners have worked in their industry for more than 20 years. That’s a lot of total combined experience. These owners are always looking for new ways to connect to their customers and clients and grow their businesses.

About 63 percent of small businesses find that social media is a good way to increase customer loyalty, and 27 percent plan to increase their investment in social media. When it comes to the impact of social media, 40 percent of small businesses find it helpful for customer reviews, 30 percent find useful for correcting problems brought up by customers, 18 percent find that it gives them a chance to defend against negative publicity, and only 5 percent feel that social media has hurt their image more than helped. If used correctly, it’s clear that social media generally has an overall positive effect on small businesses.

If your small business is one of the 52 percent that plan to increase their SEO budget, it’s important to make the most of your investment by implementing a sound small business SEO plan. You can do that with the assistance of an SEO company with lots of experience in managing successful small business SEO campaigns.

Embed this image on your site:

<a href="http://www.seo.com/blog/small-business-marketing-infographic"><img src="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Small-Business-and-Marketing-infographic.png" alt="Small Business and Marketing - Infographic "width="100%" border="0" /></a>

Sources:

• SEO Attachment: The State of Marketing 2011: Unica’s Annual Survey of Marketers
• SEO Attachment: 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report: SEO.com Takeaways
• SEO Attachment: The State of Marketing 2011: Unica’s Annual Survey of Marketers PPTX (survey based on 300 online & direct marketers)
• http://www.legalzoom.com/business-management/promoting-your-business/cost-marketing-what-is
• http://www.networksolutions.com/smallbusiness/wpcontent/files/Homepreneurs_A_Vital_Economic_Force.pdf?channelid=P99C425S627N0B142A1D38E0000V100
• http://www.thegrowblog.com/content/online-marketing-beats-offline-marketing-highest-roi
• http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/more-bad-news-for-yellow-pages/3679/

I am not going to get into content creation, how to make videos in this post, or other optimization tips. I will be doing that at a later date. These tips will only work for videos which you feel people would like to watch and search for.

Optimize the Title – In order to optimize the title, you should decide which keywords you would like to optimize for. Previous to creating the video you should have check the Google Adwords keyword tool as well as have decided what phrases are pertinent to your industry. (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Let’s say we are experts in making potato chips. We sell books and other material on the subject.

Now it’s time to decide on a title. Use the YouTube suggested search as well to help you see what some of the searches are on YouTube for your keyword.

It is advisable to check out what some of these searches return before you use any of these keywords.

Use of your site’s analytics data can also be helpful to get some ideas.

After looking at a few videos, evaluating the keywords from Adwords, YouTube suggest, and analytics, it’s time to write a title. This is not science and you may or may not change this title multiple times to test your results.

My title example:

Make Homemade Potato Chips – Recipe and Video Guide by Mom’s Chips

The first part of this uses high volume keywords as well as some variation on suggested search in YouTube. The second part of this title gives the reader a sense of value before clicking. They already know that you will show them the recipe as well as the walkthrough of how to make the chips. The third part is a push towards branding. This may or may not work. If you have a video with an introduction that brands you, you may consider leaving this out.

I hope this helps those of you that are on YouTube already or are looking to get started. Title creation is one of the most important things you can do to optimize your videos. As I mentioned earlier, more tips and explanations will be appearing on our blog in the next few weeks.

I am not going to get into content creation, how to make videos in this post, or other optimization tips. I will be doing that at a later date. These tips will only work for videos which you feel people would like to watch and search for.

Optimize the Title – In order to optimize the title, you should decide which keywords you would like to optimize for. Previous to creating the video you should have check the Google Adwords keyword tool as well as have decided what phrases are pertinent to your industry.  (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Let’s say we are experts in making potato chips. We sell books and other material on the subject.

Now it’s time to decide on a title. Use the YouTube suggested search as well to help you see what some of the searches are on YouTube for your keyword.

It is advisable to check out what some of these searches return before you use any of these keywords.

Use of your site’s analytics data can also be helpful to get some ideas.

After looking at a few videos, evaluating the keywords from Adwords, YouTube suggest,  and analytics, it’s time to write a title. This is not science and you may or may not change this title multiple times to test your results.

My title example:

Make Homemade Potato Chips – Recipe and Video Guide by Mom’s Chips

The first part of this uses high volume keywords as well as some variation on suggested search in YouTube. The second part of this title gives the reader a sense of value before clicking. They already know that you will show them the recipe as well as the walkthrough of how to make the chips. The third part is a push towards branding. This may or may not work. If you have a video with an introduction that brands you, you may consider leaving this out.

I hope this helps those of you that are on YouTube already or are looking to get started. Title creation is one of the most important things you can do to optimize your videos.  As I mentioned earlier, more tips and explanations will be appearing on our blog in the next few weeks.

Referring Keywords

If you are doing SEO right, your link building, content (both on-site and off), social media and other inbound marketing techniques will all have peripheral keyword advantage. This means that more than just those keywords you target will drive significant traffic. This is done through a comprehensive, intelligent and creative content strategy (rather than just a link-building strategy).

If that be the case, you can take advantage of this benefit and build upon it. The first step is to export your referring keyword data from Google Analytics. Depending on how much traffic the website of interest generates, your time frame should vary. Typically, I like to work with between three and six months:

Before exporting your data, be sure you are looking at both organic and paid keywords. There isn’t any point to only looking at one or the other as we are simply looking for overall keyword opportunities. With that done go ahead and export your data.

The next step is to gather your additional needed metrics to provide the ability to make comprehensive decisions. For this process those metrics should include:

1. Current Rankings / URLs:

As was mentioned in the first post, there are a number of great tools available for grabbing a high number of rankings. Once you have access to these tools the process of gathering rankings is fairly simple. You simply set up a campaign by dumping all of your keywords in. Allow for a day or so to gather the rankings, then run your export into an Excel file.

2. Phrase Length:

There are a lot of different ways to determine the difficulty of a keyword. Two common tools are the Keyword Difficulty Tool by SEOmoz and the competition metric provided in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. But for quick analysis on a large number of keywords one of the best ways to sort them by difficulty is to look at the length of the phrase. When working in Excel, drop this formula into a column to the right of your keyword list and you’ve got your difficulty metric:

=LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2),” “,”"))+1

In addition to the above metrics, your analytics export should contain the following:

• Visits
• Revenue (if eCommerce)
• Pages/Visit
• Average Time on Site
• Percentage of New Visits
• Bounce Rate

While we won’t incorporate every one of these metrics into our decision filtering, they are good to have available when considering any potential expansion.

With these in place your last step is to “Find & Replace” each of the non-ranking terms to show a value of “100″ rather than “0″ or “-”.

Identify Missed Opportunities

With all of your keywords and correlative data pulled into one, you’re ready to start manipulating. Remember, our goal for this process is to quickly create clusters of long tail phrases to target for quicker wins.

So let’s get into it.

First step is to sort your current data. Highlight all of your data and run a custom sort.  The two metrics you are including in the sort are the length of the phrase—looking at the longest first, and the current ranking—looking at the lowest first.

In this sort we identify the easiest terms (longest phrases in number of words) to target with the largest missed opportunities (ranking low in the index).

With the sort in place you will need to use your own judgment. For instance, it isn’t usually a common thing to target phrases more than 10 words long. However, pieces of that phrase may be of great value to you.

There will also be keywords that have brought in revenue that rank low and keywords that haven’t brought in any revenue. Typically a keyword ranking low yet still driving revenue should be valued above those that are not. This type of logic should be used when evaluating opportunities.

Typically I find myself looking in the middle of the phrase length spectrum and working from there.

Identify Relevant Clusters

Next, you will need to determine which of those top showing phrases are of priority to the website of interest.

Select one term at a time, then re-sort the list to show any other terms ranking for that same URL to identify potential clusters to work from in your optimization on-page and link building strategy.

The amount of what you are able to expand out and begin targeting should be determined by you and your team.

Choose your clusters based on relevance first. The ranking URL will be a great driving factor for that identification. But you can also look at the use of words within a phrase to identify any possible outliers not yet ranking at all.

From there you will want to look at each target page for on-page optimization needs then begin building out your external content and link-building strategy.

Previous Posts In The Series:

Post 1 – Building a Keyword List Based On Top Relevant Terms in Google Webmasters

Next Up In The Series:

Post 3 – Using Google Webmaster Tools To Locate New Terms & Build Strong Variations

Post 4 – An Enterprise Approach To Keyword Prioritization & Targeting

Several reasons I didn’t blog:

1. A change in my responsibilities forced me to focus attention elsewhere
2. My travel schedule increased
3. I didn’t attend as many events
4. I didn’t feel like it
5. I stopped following RSS feeds
6. Twitter allowed me to get lazy in retweeting
7. The latest mobile social media apps (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) have terrible interfaces
8. My mobile has given me more headaches than solutions; I spend a lot of my mobile time reading and socializing
9. I fell out of touch with several online friends
10. Many of my favorite bloggers slowed/stopped blogging
11. I didn’t prioritize blogging

In the end, it’s just a lot of excuses.

The benefits of blogging

Even with all the benefits of blogging, I couldn’t get back on track with a regular writing schedule. This is something I’m going to change in 2012.

My blogging has dropped to almost nothing but if my first few posts this year are any indication, I’m going to be writing a lot more in the coming months.

The benefits of blogging haven’t changed from years past:

• Fresh content to promote your message to your audience
• Relevant information that relates to your keywords and industry terms
• Multiple content formats (text, images, video, audio, etc.) that help you rank well in the ever expanding indexes that search engines display to users
• Establishing yourself as an expert and staying current in your industry
• Creating a home for all your social media activities to tie back to
• Embedding images, video, audio, etc. while providing greater context for the media you’ve produced
• Attraction of links by other bloggers
• Comments and community-building
• Shares, Likes, and Retweets that naturally build exponential interest

Shortfalls of social media sites

When Google+ launched last year, I started to appreciate what Facebook had been working toward; groups, community, and multiple formats of content (photos, videos, status updates, etc.). I much prefer Google+ over Facebook. As I’ve added people to my circles and followed the streams of data, I realized that Twitter is actually lacking severely without photos & videos, 140 character limit, groups, filters, and other great features we’ve all dreamed about.

You can only have somewhat superficial conversations on Twitter and Facebook. Getting into deep discussions becomes visible to everyone following your feed and isn’t always what you want. For example: I may not want to follow 100 tweets between two of my friends while I’m trying to check in for the afternoon. Natural limitations keep your conversations splintered among multiple status updates and threads. Blogging allows you to keep an original post and each of the follow up comments together.

Twitter and Facebook can then help you get the word out that a conversation is happening on your blog.

Blogging is different. I realized I write because it’s fun; and an outlet. I write on different subject matters and publish them to different audiences to keep things organized and targeted. Facebook and Twitter are then used to promote posts to the masses, whether they want to read about my different blog categories or not. Google+ solves this problem better than any other platform but it’s far from perfect.

My top 5 list of blogging benefits I missed:

1. Author Authority – keeping and building my audience on several subjects
2. Backlinks – promotional and SEO benefits
3. Social shares – authority, promotional, and SEO benefits
4. Guest blogging opportunities – growing my audience as a result of writing on others’ blogs
5. Creating content in multiple formats that help me control the SERPs (search engine results pages) with pages, posts, videos, social influence, etc.

What did you miss last year and what are you going to change?

העדכונים הגדולים והחשובים ביותר במנוע החיפוש של גוגל זוכים כידוע לפוסטים אצל מאט קאטס או בבלוג גוגל הראשי, והעדכונים המיועדים להתמחויות ספציפיות מתפרסמים בבלוגים המקצועיים של כלי מנהל האתרים, האדוורדס, המובייל או האנליטיקס. אבל בין הבלוגים של גוגל יש בלוג נוסף שהוקם בשנה האחרונה – Inside Search: The Official Google Search Blog. הבלוג מציג שינויי אלגוריתמים "קטנים" יותר בגוגל, ובתוך כך מאפשר להציץ בעבודה היומיומית השוטפת של מהנדסי גוגל.

בפוסט האחרון פורסמו 30 שיפורים במערכת החיפוש שנעשו בידי מהנדסי גוגל במהלך דצמבר 2011 (30 שינויי אלגוריתם במשך 30 יום! – הספק לא רע בהתחשב בכל עמדות הפלייסטיישן ושולחנות הסנוקר הפזורים במשרדים בפאלו אלטו). הנה כמה מהחשובים שביניהם:

• הכרה טובה יותר של מילים נרדפות בעברית: עיקרו של השינוי הוא ביכולת טובה יותר לתרגם מילים נרדפות בעברית על פי הקונטקסט שלהם במשפט, אבל אפשר להסיק מכך שגוגל הולכת ומשתפרת בהבנה של הקשרים ומשמעויות גם בעברית.
• סיגנלים לקביעת איכות דף תמונה במנוע חיפוש התמונות (Image Search): כבר שיערנו מזמן שאחד הפרמטרים באופטימיזציה של תמונות ברשת הוא הקשר בין התמונה והטקסט סביבה, ואכן, גוגל מודיעים רשמית שגם מנוע חיפוש התמונות יציג בראש התוצאות לא רק את התמונות הרלוונטיות ביותר לחיפוש אלא את אלה המוצגות בדפי הנחיתה האיכותיים ביותר.

• דרך אגב, גוגל פרסמו בפוסט זה שני עדכונים נוספים למנוע חיפוש התמונות: האחד הוא זיהוי ספאם במרחב התמונה (המשך ישיר לסיגנל איכות דף התמונה), והשני הוא מתן דגש רב יותר לגודל התמונה המקורית, והכלל כאן פשוט: כמה שיותר גדול יותר טוב. אז אמנם מוקדם עדיין לומר שתמונה אחת שווה אלף מילים בגוגל, אבל נראה שכדאי לרענן את טכניקות אופטימיזציית התמונות, כי הן הולכות ונעשות חשובות יותר ויותר בתוצאות החיפוש.
• אבחון דפי Soft 404 : Soft 404 הוא כידוע כינוי לדפים שנראים על פי תוכנם כדפי שגיאה 404 (הדף לא נמצא), למשל דף שגיאה מותאם אישית, אבל על פי ה-HTTP Response שלהם מחזירים תגובת 200 (הדף נמצא). מנועי חיפוש מתקשים להבין – בעיקר בשפות שאינן אנגלית – האם לפניהם דף תקין (200) שעליהם לסרוק ולאנדקס או דף שגיאה כללי המודיע שהדף שאליו הופנו לא נמצא. השיפור הנוכחי מקל על גילוי דפים אלה. אבל נקודה זו היא בכל מקרה תזכורת טובה למנהלי האתרים לחזור ולבדוק בעזרת Web sniffer או אפשרות Fetch as Googlebot שבכלי מנהלי האתרים אם אכן דף השגיאה באתר שלהם מחזיר את תגובת 404 המתאימה.

• חיפוש מוצפן גם בדומיינים מקומיים: כפי שפרסם יניב נבות בבלוג הזה לפני כחודשיים, גוגל מטמיעים את מנוע החיפוש המאובטח (https://www.google.com) כמנוע ברירת מחדל עבור משתמשים מחוברים לגוגל. מעתה ייהנו גם גולשי הדומיינים המקומיים הגדולים (צרפת, בריטניה וגרמניה) מהפרטיות המפוקפקת הזו (שהרי בתוצאות הממומנות היא לא קיימת).
• תוצאות חיפוש מדויקות יותר על פי מדינה: בחיפוש גוגל בדומיינים מקומיים שאינם .com – כמו למשל www.google.co.il – גולשים יכולים לבחור להציג תוצאות רק מהמדינה שלהם. השיפור באלגוריתם הנוכחי מאפשר לגוגל לזהות טוב יותר את מקורם הגיאוגרפי של הדפים ברשת ולהציג תוצאות מדויקות יותר בחיפושים ממין זה.
• גילוי טוב יותר של Rich Snippets: השיפור הנוכחי מאפשר למנוע החיפוש לזהות טוב יותר דפי ביקורות, מתכונים וקניות הכוללים Rich snippets. גוגל מבטיחים שבזכות הזיהוי המשופר נראה יותר דפי Rich snippets בתוצאות החיפוש.
• שני שיפורים מעניינים הנוגעים ל'חיפושים קשורים' המופיעים בתחתית תוצאות החיפוש: גוגל שיפרו את בסיסי הנתונים והאלגוריתמים המאפשרים הצגה של חיפושים קשורים כדי שנוכל לקבל הצעות רלוונטיות וממוקדות יותר לחיפוש המשך. מעניינת בהקשר הזה תוצאת החיפוש הקשור: Google browser המופיעה בחיפוש אחר המילה Browser. כפי שפרסם כאן תמיר אורון גוגל הודיעה לפני כמה ימים שהיא מענישה את דפדפן הכרום שלה ודוחקת אותו בתוצאות החיפוש אחר המילה Browser כיוון ששיווקו באמצעות קניית קישורים מבלוגרים היה הפרה של הכללים של גוגל עצמה לבעלי האתרים. גוגל כנראה "שיפרו" כל כך את בסיסי הנתונים והאלגוריתמים שלהם עד שהקשר שבין השאילתא Browser לבין תוצאת החיפוש Google Browser נעלם ואיננו… (גוגל כאילו אומרת: כרום הפר את הכללים ולכן ייענש, אבל לעומת זאת, הדפדפן של גוגל לא קשור בכלל לכל הבלאגן הזה).

• גלישה מהירה יותר לניידים (Mobile): אולי עוד רמז לכך ששנת 2012 הולכת להיות שנה חשובה מאוד ל-mobile בגוגל. אתרים רבים מפנים גולשי טלפונים חכמים (הטלפונים… לא הגולשים) לדפי אתר מותאמים לדפדפני סמארטפון. השיפור הנוכחי מציג את כתובת היעד של הדפים המותאמים בתוצאות החיפוש לניידים ובכך מבטל את ההפניות שבדרך ומאיץ את הגלישה.
• שיפור בקביעת ה-Sitelinks: שיפור האלגוריתם הקובע את ה-Sitelinks בכדי לאפשר קישורים רלוונטיים יותר תחת שם המותג, למשל של מיקום סניף של עסק על פי מיקום הגולש.
• בפוסט מוזכרים עוד כמה שינויים כמו: זיהוי ושימוש טוב יותר של תאריכים בדפי האינטרנט, שיפור בחיפוש מילות שירים, שינוי בהצגתם של כפתורי 1+ בתוצאות החיפוש – מעתה הם אמורים להופיע רק כשהסמן מעליהם או כשהתוצאה כבר סומנה ב-1+ (גוגל טוענים שהסיבה אסתטית, אבל אפשר לנחש שגם מיעוט הלחיצות על הכפתור הייתה בעיה "אסתטית" מבחינתם), הצגה מפורטת יותר של אירועים (למשל הופעות או מסיבות) לצד תוצאות החיפוש על מועדון מסוים למשל, Autocomplete משופר (עדכון תשתית שיעזור לאלגוריתם ההשלמה האוטומטית לתקן שגיאות כתיב כבר בהקשת האותיות הראשונות של מילת החיפוש), ו'חיפוש בטוח' בטוח יותר: מסנן החיפוש הבטוח (Safe Search) יסנן מעתה טוב יותר תוכן למבוגרים בלבד (ויפסיק להציג למבוגרים תוכן ילדותי ).

נושאים נוספים שאולי יעניינו אותך:

• 22 באוקטובר 2011 -- גוגל מסתירים מידע על שאילתות חיפוש לאחר שינוי SSL

Not too long ago I needed to hire a lawyer. As I looked at different attorneys in the area I turned to Google Maps to find which ones had the most reviews and most positive reviews. Although I could have done a basic search in Google I find that when looking for local services a Maps search gives me a better list for consideration. I went to visit the lawyers in person that seemed credible from the reviews that I read. After visiting with the two different lawyers I found that the reviews online were a fair representation and decided to hire the lawyer that had more reviews than the other.

As we went through our business dealings with this lawyer (I am going to call him Chris from now on to simplify things) I noticed things he did to improve the amount of reviews he was getting online. Although Chris is a lawyer, I feel many of these same tips can be applied to any person or business that offers services locally.

1- Start Early and Look For Clues

During my first with Chris he wanted to know how I found out about him. This is a common practice for businesses because it helps identify what part of their marketing budget is working. I mentioned that I looked at online reviews during this discussion and Chris said he would greatly appreciate it if I would also provide a review when the services were provided.

While a sales person is trying to build rapport with a potential client it is easy to find out how technical an individual is. Once a sale is made to a tech savvy person you can plant the idea early on that it would be great if they would share their experience online through a review or social media.

2- Emphasize the Unique Value Proposition

When I was “sold” on going with Chris he emphasized his Unique Value Proposition (UVP). As I continued through the process with Chris I noticed him talking about his UVP, not in exact words usually but the same idea was expressed over and over. Chris was telling me what I could expect through the process and what he was doing to make sure that he delivered on what I was sold on. By doing this Chris was priming me to see the things that were unique to him and his practice.

3- Repeat it Often

Although my business with Chris was not a long and drawn out process I want to give some suggestions about how you can keep the review fresh in the minds of your clients even if your services stretch over a long period of time. Usually longer service contracts have bench marks or progress points where a client can assess the progress of the campaign. Every time you provide a win for the client, fulfill something you have promised them, or reach a goal be sure to inform them. With tact and preparation, the client-facing individuals in your company can get testimonials/reviews that can be used in sales material, website testimonials, or online reviews. When a client is happy with the progress on the project it is easy to ask them for permission to use what they say as a testimony. This can be as simple as: “Thanks. We try to provide great services here at XYZ. Although we are not done, I am seeing great success in this project. I like sharing successes stories with other clients in similar situations. Can I share part of what you have said to some of my other clients?” At this point you can identify what information can be shared and how many people it can be shared with.

4- Strike While the Iron is Hot

Chris was very helpful throughout the entire process. When we got done I was happy with the end results and so was Chris. Right as we were finishing up our business together Chris expressed his happiness with the results and he said something along the lines of: “I really would appreciate it if you would write a review about the great results we achieved. Can I send you an email with a link to a location where you can write a review?” There it was. He asked for a review right after we had experienced a win together.

5- Keep it Stupid Simple (That is right I switched Kiss to mean it needs to be stupidly simple)

When I got the email that he promised he would send I noticed several things.

• There was a live link to their Google Places page. I was already in my Gmail so I easily went and wrote a review.
• Chris re-emphasized the great results we had achieved together. None of this was new to me or something that had not been mentioned before, but it kept everything fresh in my mind so I did not need to search for things to say about the process.
• He included a brief set of directions on how to provide a review.
• I was thanked for my willingness to provide a review. This made me even happier to do so.

All of this was done in two short paragraphs because word economy is very important. If you have clients with a Yahoo email then send them a link to your Yahoo local listing. Likewise if you have someone with MSN or Hotmail accounts send them to your Bing local listing. If their email is some other type use your best guess. In any of these situations it would not hurt to provide the client with links to multiple locations where they could provide an online review or become a fan, follow, like, etc. These links could include Facebook Twitter or Yelp. Remember to make it as simple as absolutely possible.

Through this entire process I was able to learn how businesses can get better reviews for their sites. If you want more reviews or testimonials it is not always as simple as asking for these reviews. There are many things along the way that you can do as a business owner to encourage people to provide these reviews though the most important thing, of course, is to always provide a quality service.

Chris is an attorney not an online marketer yet he does things that really help out his online campaign. I am not sure that he even concisely did these things to encourage more interaction online. Once a company has a process for encouraging online interaction in place, implementing it could take just a few minutes each day yet have a huge impact in an online campaign.

To learn about how local search works in more detail, watch this webinar Learn the Secrets of Google’s Local Search

Link building is a critical part of most SEO campaigns. If you have a solid strategy to obtain legitimate links from relevant websites, you’re adding value to the web and typically, raising your rankings within the search engines in the process. On the other hand, if you’re link building to sketchy websites for the sheer purpose of manipulating the search engines without providing any value, it’s easy for the search engines to see your shady tactics and adjust your rankings accordingly.

However, what happens when you’re a legitimate business that unknowingly hires a spammy SEO company? Or, what if your competitors decide to sabotage your rankings by throwing some money and/or resources at a smear campaign, filled with massive amounts of unnatural links? Does a business owner’s website deserve the“Google slap” when they had no intention of violating Google’s policies?

Personally, I have received an over-optimization penalty from the search engines because of my own stupidity. It was one of those “life lessons” that I deserved because I knew better, but applying the same consequences to all webmasters is borderline unfair.

For example, I currently have a client who has had prior SEO campaigns from illegitimate, overseas companies that did more harm than good. Those companies got him 340,000 external links over the span of 18 months in the footer and sidebar of 90 different domains using their main keywords. They also had keywords with Chinese and other Asian characters. Oh, I almost forgot, there were porn sites in there too. Did this trusting website owner deserve a penalty from Google because his SEO company is engaging in wrongful strategies?

If you had an established company and you saw a competitor quickly coming up in the SERPs, how far would you go to stop them? After all, you want to stay at the top and dominate your niche. If you were experienced enough to understand that building an unnatural link profile to a website could result in penalties, would you? I wouldn’t, but that’s because I’m an honest person. I’m willing to bet, however, that most people would try and destroy their competitor’s rankings given the chance.

Google: Help us, Help you

This isn’t the first time somebody has suggested Google allow us to disassociate our websites with another linking website. Dr. Pete from SEOmoz already gave his modest proposal in an excellent blog post on 6 ways to recover from bad links. I’m sure others have covered it as well.

There are a few ways Google could allow us to help them combat webspam. One excellent way is to create a robots-only file on your website similar to a robots.txt, where you can specify what websites you want to disallow.

If that method doesn’t work, it could always be built into Google Webmaster Tools. This concept isn’t complex and I can’t imagine it being difficult for the search engines to execute, but it definitely would protect business owners from shady SEO firms and prevent unethical competitors from sabotaging your website.

Dr. Pete already did an excellent job with his suggestion, but if this blog post has any purpose, it’s to raise awareness of this problem. Being able to disassociate incoming links at the very least, would raise the standards and practices of SEO companies and prevent oblivious business owners from getting screwed.

To me, it would make sense for Google to allow webmasters to do this. At the very minimum, it would allow inexperienced site owners to quickly recover their losses after being duped by an illegitimate SEO firm. It would also protect new websites from being sabotaged by big competitors. However, what reasons do you think Google has for not doing this?

A client asked if it would be worth investing time and focusing efforts on increasing their Bing search results. After a little time in Analytics, I thought the answer was, without a doubt, YES!



Why?



The target demographic for this client was older people, 45 years of age and above. Based on ComScore’s survey from 2007, older demographics tend to use Internet Explorer. We decided to look at the analytics and see what we could find.



After looking at Analytics, we saw that a majority of their site’s visitors (over 58%) used Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer’s default search bar obviously employs Bing

The question is, does their organic traffic line up as well? 



The combined traffic from Yahoo and Bing is 8438. That is roughly 36% of the organic traffic to the site which is a little higher than average.

However, when we look at the organic rankings of this client, we can see that the average rankings for Bing are a lot lower than the average in Google.

Out of the 36 targeted keywords for this site, the average ranking in Google is position 11. In Bing the average position of the targeted keywords is 29. How much more traffic could the site receive by focusing a little more effort on the Bing side of search?

The trends:



After looking at other clients who target older demographics I found this trend was fairly consistent. 50-60% of their traffic used Internet Explorer. Yahoo and Bing organic traffic accounted for as much as 55% of their organic traffic, and Bing rankings were, on average, 20 positions behind.



Though Google may be our focus for a majority of our work, there are times, and clients that need to have Bing as a more central part of their SEO strategy.

In my career as a journalist, I’ve had the opportunity to cover breaking news events from around the state of Utah. In the summer of 2010, a major oil pipeline developed a leak, forcing more than 20,000 gallons of oil into Salt Lake City’s Red Butte Creek. It was a major catastrophe from both an environmental and economic standpoint. People wanted to find out how the oil leak affected them, the extent of the damage, the clean-up efforts, and what government and company officials were doing to rectify the situation.

The news business is not unlike other businesses. Many have their favorite station to watch, or their favorite radio frequency locked on their preset when they want to avoid a traffic jam. Often consumers will buy their groceries from the same store, and even show preference to one brand over another. Think Apple products versus Android. During the oil leak, and the many months of clean-up afterwards, residents wanted the latest information, and consumed that information through a variety of channels. They also had very high expectations from the station, and wouldn’t have been satisfied with a 2 or 3 line story about the oil leak or a regurgitated press release.

So, how does a major news event correspond with effective linkbait content? Think about what you do when you hear breaking news through the grapevine. Let’s say you arrive at work early, sit down at your desk and turn on your computer. Suddenly, you notice your coworkers huddled around the office television, and you look at the screen and see images and video of a building fire. After watching the TV for a few minutes, you turn around and type in the URL to your favorite news station’s website to see if they’re covering that breaking news.

What if your website became that instant source for information about your industry? It can! In fact, that’s what SEO.com strives to be in the search engine optimization industry, and it’s highly rewarding to see people link to our blog posts. I don’t mind tooting my company’s horn a little, because we’ve worked hard to become one of the leaders in the industry. There’s no reason why your website can’t do the same!

How to earn links naturally

You may have heard the phrase “Content is King”. In April 2011, my colleague Kevin Phelps challenged that belief, and offered some alternatives to content marketing, including traditional SEO, PPC and social media efforts to garner more traffic. While the written word is still incredibly valuable, there are many other ways to earn links naturally. Remember my example about the oil leak? There were many ways to get the latest information about that leak, including video, newspaper, radio and website content. In the linked story, there were links to external websites so readers could get even more information about the spill. There were photos, in depth interviews with government officials, helicopter footage of the damaged areas and social media buttons to help you share that story with your friends and family. They offered a comments section, so you could share your views and stories about how the spill affected you. There were different angles of the story, like how the oil leak affected local wildlife, and even numbers and email addresses to local resources.

Now, I understand that this is a news station which has hundreds of employees on the ground and behind the scenes working on the story. Not everyone has the time or resources to invest in making content like this. The point of this example is to show you ways to earn links naturally. Let’s say you own and operate a website that sells air fresheners. Not terribly exciting, is it?

One of the elements of SEO that I recommend is having a blog on your website. Search engines want to show fresh content in their results pages, and blogging is the best way to make sure these search engines keep coming back to your site. Sometimes you can even rank for long tail keywords placed within the blog posts.

You may be struggling to think of ways to write about air fresheners specifically. In this case, you should start thinking laterally. Take a moment and think about ways people use air fresheners. How about in their cars? People enjoy taking long road trips with their families, and often use a search engine to help figure out what they need to pack. This is a great opportunity to write a 50-point packing checklist for your blog. You could even add real check boxes instead of bullet points, and make the page print-friendly. REI’s “Expert Advice” section is a great example of this. Chances are, if people find your content useful, engaging and easy to use, they’re more likely to link to it. One hour writing a blog post or article like this could easily earn many links down the road. Is the time investment worth it? Of course it is!

Follow the trending topics

I use this strategy daily on a website I own about local news. A few weeks ago, Northern Utah experienced a strong wind storm that uprooted trees, snapped power lines and caused extensive damage. People immediately flocked to the Internet to view pictures and read about what was happening in their communities. I continuously wrote new content and provided pictures that people sent to me, and Google indexed my articles almost immediately. I saw a lot of unique visits from long tail keywords, and gained a large amount of natural backlinks. Besides the established news stations, I was one of the first local websites to break the story, and became part of the conversation. Social media networks are a great way to find out which topics are trending.

Let’s go back to my air freshener example. You probably think of those tree-shaped air fresheners that you can hang from your rear view mirror in your car, but “Febreze” is a brand that seems to be set on changing peoples’ perception of what an air freshener can do. Check out their page called “Breathe Happy”, which is filled with interesting statistics like “17% think crayons are the most recognizable childhood scent”. I’m not one who would hang out on a website about air fresheners, but this page is actually pretty interesting, and there’s lots of great stuff to explore!

During the holiday season, many people like to host parties at their homes. Often, it’s a chance for hosts to spray some type of holiday-scented air freshener before the guests arrive, or after the guests leave. Why not write a blog post about tips for hosting a holiday party, and include a tip for air fresheners?

The point here is to think outside of the box, and put yourself in the place of your customers. What are they talking about? What are the trending topics within your industry?

Please share your experiences with effective linkbait, and offer any suggestions in the comment section below!

עולם ה-SEO  רועש וגואש לאחר שגוגל הענישה בדירוג באופן יוצא דופן את דף הבית של דפדפן כרום.

הקמפיין של גוגל לשיווק גוגל כרום

תחילת הסיפור כאשר גוגל שכרה את שירותיה של חברת Essence Digital על מנת לקדם את דפדפן כרום באמצעות סדרה של מודעות פרסומי ווידאו אשר היו אמורות להציג לכאורה כיצד נוכחות אינטרנטית עזרה לעסקים קטנים.

המשימה להצגת הסרטונים הללו הועברה הלאה לחברת Unruly Media אשר גייסה בלוגרים מרחבי העולם אשר כתבו פוסטים וצירפו את הווידאו. בחלק מהמקרים אפילו כתבו מספר מילים כאשר ציינו במפורש את המשפט:"This post is sponsored by Google". לפחות באחד מן המקרים, בלוגר אפילו קישר ישירות לעמוד הבית של גוגל כרום.

גוגל, החברה אשר נלחמת מלחמות חורמה נגד קניית קישורים, נתפסה עם המכנסיים למטה כאשר אהרון וול מ-SEOBOOK חשף כי עבור חיפוש הביטוי " “This post is sponsored by Google” עולים למעלה מ-400 דפים אשר נכתבו במיוחד לכאורה עבור הקמפיין השיווקי של גוגל.

מה הבעיתיות עם הקמפיין של גוגל?

ישנם מספר בעיות די קשות איתה נאלצת להתמודד גוגל בהקשר זה. ראשית, הקמפיין הזה מפר את אחד הכללים של הנחיות גוגל לבוני אתרים – אסור לקנות ולמכור קישורים:

"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."

שנית, המאמרים האלו מציגים תוכן דליל מאוד, לא איכותי ולא כל כך קשור לדפדפן כרום כפי שכתב בפירוט דני סוליבן מהבלוג Search Engine Land.

העונש שגוגל גזרה על עצמה

הבעיה הגדולה ביותר היא כי הקמפיין הפיק הרבה תוכן ירוד, בדיוק אותו התוכן אשר גוגל מנסה להרחיק מתוצאות החיפוש שלה בעדכון פנדה.
ביום הראשון לאחר פיצוץ הפרשה, עמוד גוגל כרום עדיין עמד על תילו בעת חיפוש הביטויים "chrome" ,"internet browser" או אפילו  "browser" אבל כעת נראה כי המיקומים השתנו:

תוצאות עבור חיפוש הביטוי "browser" לפני

תוצאות עבור ביטוי החיפוש "browser" לאחר השינוי, בעמוד 5

מאט כץ, ראש מטה הספאם של גוגל, הגיב כי צוות הספאם נקט בצעדים ידניים להשמטת הדירוג של העמוד www.google.com/chrome לתקופה של לפחות 60 יום.

נחמד לראות כי חברת גוגל עומדת מאחורי ההנחיות שלה ומטילה עונשים כבדים אפילו על עצמה (לא שזה מונע ממנה להציב את עמוד הבית של גוגל כרום באופן קבוע, למשך כל שעות היממה במודעות הפרימיום הממומנות עבור ביטויי חיפוש רבים).

נושאים נוספים שאולי יעניינו אותך:

• 28 ביוני 2006 -- התשובה של גוגל ל-microsoft passport
• 23 ביולי 2005 -- עדכונים בגוגל אדוורדס
• 2 בספטמבר 2005 -- אתר start.com פועל מעתה רשמית
• 19 במאי 2009 -- אתרי פרוקסי בעולם
• 1 באוגוסט 2006 -- גוגל מזהה מילים בכתיב חסר בעברית

Having jobs we love (heck, having jobs at all) makes it that much easier to work hard and provide our clients with the best in search engine optimization, technology and customer service. It also makes it possible to recognize those that are struggling and find ways to give back to our communities.

We are always looking for ways to help out those who have been hit hard by the economic downturn. Two years ago we held a contest for companies affected the most from the recession and were able to provide the winner with a 6-month contract of free SEO services to help them get back on their feet. This year we enlisted the help of our employees to provide new socks and underwear to needy children, collect food for the Utah Food Bank, and gather coats and other winter wear to donate at local shelters.

My favorite experience happened last month with our own version of an Angel Tree. I wasn’t sure if we would be able to pull it off since the needs of the family we were helping were so great, but when I saw all the gifts wrapped and ready for delivery my expectations were exceeded. I also may have shed a tear or two. As I said before, really awesome people work at SEO.com.

Individually, we can’t help everyone but together we can fight disease, homelessness, addiction, political issues, humanitarian relief and more. Make Change! Trust, an affiliated organization, uses the power of technology to help nonprofits market their charities online and create sustainable social advancement for those in need. Efforts like these help nonprofits reach more potential donors, which in turn allows others to feel the joy of giving.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy New Year from SEO.com!

"What's the best WordPress SEO plugin?"

I'm asked that question all the time, and recently took part in a debate discussing which plugin is best. I decided to draft a features list comparing the top three most downloaded SEO plugins to get a better picture of what each plugin has to offer, et voilà!

I'll be comparing and contrasting features of the All in one SEO Pack, vs WordPress SEO by Yoast, vs Platinum SEO. To be fair, there is no loser among the three because each plugin is impressive and will make your WordPress site much more search engine friendly. I'll talk about which plugin is my favorite in the conclusion, so you can review the features bias-free, and implement whichever plugin matches your specific set of needs.

If you know a developer – or anyone that would like their WordPress site to rank well in search engines – please help them out by sharing this review so that these plugins don't go unused. 

The plugins:

All in One SEO Pack
Downloads: 9,570,544
Author: Michael Torbert
Plugin page

WordPress SEO by Yoast
Downloads: 761,035
Author: Joost de Valk
Plugin Page

Platinum SEO Pack
Downloads: 656,205
Author: Techblissonline Dot Com (Rajesh)
Plugin Page

Honorable mention plugin: I can't leave out the oldie-but-still-goodie, SEO Ultimate.

Table of Contents

1. Setup and First Appearances
2. Plugin Features
3. Migration/Import/Export
4. Page-Level SEO Controls
5. XML Sitemaps
6. Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Open Graph Schema

1. Setup and First Appearances

2. Plugin Features

3. Migration/Import/Export

4. Page-Level SEO Controls

5. XML Sitemaps

6. Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Open Graph Schema

There you have it! I'll repeat myself in saying that all three plugins are fantastic and one of these three plugins should be active on every WordPress installation (that is intended to appear in search engines). With that being said, I'm a huge fan of Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin. It is by far the most complete and has the best looking user interface. I'm certain that it's only in second place in terms of downloads because it hasn't been around as long — but just give it some time.

Let's get started.

One of the best ways to make a decision about which keywords to target is to look at high performing (revenue, visits, relevance) phrases for your site that are under performing (low ranking) in the search engines. Ideally, you should gather a fairly large number of keywords and correlative metrics to make these comparisons, and come to a final target list. This first process focuses on relevance as a value indicator.

Top Relevant Keywords

Your first step is to dive into Google Webmaster Tools and retrieve your top relevant keywords. This can be done by clicking on Your site on the web > Keywords as shown here.

Download the table and it will appear similar to this image:

Now take these keywords and begin filtering. Those at the top are to be considered the most relevant. What I like to do is grab a list of 10 to 20 top terms not used in your current SEO campaign. This list is suprisingly ideal for identifying terms that don't necessarily come to mind in a typical keyword research process. For this particular campaign, a few terms not yet incorporated were "system," "new" and "company."

Once you have those keywords selected, it's time to single them out and create a cluster of relevant terms for each. Do this by going to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Include your most common keywords along with the new term.

This will give you a healthy list to filter through. In this case, once you have the document exported, to get rid of keywords you aren't looking for, filter out any phrase not using main keywords like "system" or "gaming." I prefer to keep these lists focused into groups of closely related keywords, so I filter down to between 10 and 20 phrases.

With this process, you will end up with a much narrower list than with the options we will cover in future posts.

The idea here is to take those terms Google has already identified as highly relevant, locate missed opportunities, and build upon them through common phrases related to your product or services.

This is one of the quickest ways I've found to expand a targeted keyword list for increased diversity.

Once you have established a cluster for each subject, it's important to gather some type of correlative metrics. We already have the estimated search volume from the Adwords Keyword Tool. In addition, I would recommend gathering at least your current rankings for each term in order to determine which are most worth targeting. A few common tools for doing this will be Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Advanced Web Ranking or Rank Checker.

Remember this process is based first on relevance as a factor. With this understanding we need not question whether the keyword is right for the website under review.

The next question to ask is which terms have the greatest potential for increase in rankings, traffic and revenue—and should be a point of focus in strategy. To do this use your ranking data. Sort your file to show those keywords ranking low but high in potential search volume and start making some decisions for your upcoming months content strategy.

This process is ideal when you are looking to build upon phrases already involved in regular strategy providing support to prior efforts through a diverse approach in both link building and content on-page.

Up Next In The Series:

Post 2 – Using Google Analytics for Long Tail Identification & Quick Wins

Post 3 – Using Google Webmaster Tools To Locate New Terms & Build Strong Variations

Post 4 – An Enterprise Approach To Keyword Prioritization & Targeting

A 404 page shows on a user's screen when they reach a page that doesn't exist on the website. This can happen when they reach a page that was deleted, clicking a broken link, or typing the wrong URL.

More than likely you've encountered a few humerous 404 pages in your web surfing days, but did you know a good 404 page is much more than just a placeholder?

SEO best practices suggest your site's 404 page should be a custom page to help visitors find the info they are looking for.

According to Google's Webmaster Tools help section, the page should:

• Advise visitors that the page they were searching for isn't found.
• Look the same as the rest of the site, and include a link to the home page.
• Include a search box to allow the visitor to narrow their search for the page they're looking for.
• Show a list of recommended pages or posts.

Check with your hosting provider for recommendations on how to display the 404 page properly.

1. Google Plus

Launched in June of 2011, this is Google’s hand at a social networking site. Due to the fact that they do not have access to Facebook data nor the ability to crawl Facebook user profiles, it was time they created their own social network. With the launch of their network, first in beta, followed soon after by opening G+ to the public, they quickly went from 0 to hero and hit 50 million users in 88 days.

Some of the features within their network include: Circles, hangouts, messenger, ripples, stream, and instant upload for photos. I personally enjoy using Google+ and love the instant upload feature. Another thing I enjoy is being able to filter which content is in my stream based on categories I create and place people in.

Key takeaway: If you are not on Google+ yet, you are missing the boat!

2. Google + Business Pages

If your business is not on Google+ for business pages, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to help your business establish credibility. In November, Google rolled out G+ business pages to allow businesses to give an identity to their local business or place, product or brand, company or institution. For an example of a G+ business page, look at SEO.com on Google Plus.

The Google+ business page you create for your business or for your client’s business is very similar to the concept of a Facebook page for your business. Similar to a Facebook user "liking" your page/brand, users can +1 your G+ page/brand. Social sharing and brand interaction has an effect on the personalized search results of everyone that you are friends with on the web. Ex: Facebook, Twitter, Google Friend Connect, etc.

Key takeaway: Get your business on G+. Link it to your website. Link it to your other social profiles on the web. Build your online identity in every way you can.

3. Google Panda Update

How can we begin to talk about the seo and search marketing industry without talking about the Panda Update? Google launched a new algorithm update, called the ‘Panda’ Update, named after engineer Navneet Panda.  This heavily affected many sites that had low quality content.

This update seemed to focus more on an entire site and how the entire site ranks, versus individual pages or sections of the site. This update caused an uproar in the SEO community. Many SEOs were scrambling to help their clients recover from this unexpected blow.

Key takeaway: As the Google search algorithm continues to evolve, I feel it will continually move towards the overall user experience of a website and try to rank and sort websites based more heavily on user experience factors.

4. SEO.com Named #1 Top Search Marketing Agency by Website Magazine

Website Magazine published a post listing the Top 50 Search Marketing Agencies, and SEO.com came in at #1. While working here and serving clients, I have gained an appreciation for understanding a client niche, constantly testing for results, and being open to changing your ways and processes in order to compete in this competitive industry. Additionally, I am very impressed at the array of various SEM services that we are able to offer our clients.

Key takeaway: We work in a competitive industry. Spend the time to understand your client’s business, try to view the campaign through their eyes and their shoes once in awhile, and lastly continually adapt your processes to the changing landscape to stay out in front.

5. Pubcon Vegas 2011

Vegas, Baby, Vegas!!! Need I say more? This was my first time at Pubcon, which is the largest annual gathering of search and social media industry leaders in the world. Pubcon Vegas was such a fun experience, and I was flooded with practical and tactical information I can use to help my clients.

Some of the highlights for me included meeting some of the big dogs in the industry, including Tim Ash of SiteTuners, Tom Critchlow of Distilled, Matt Cutts of Google, and Arienne Holland of Raven Internet Marketing Tools. In addition to that, it was a blast hanging out with my fellow SEO.com associates and soaking in all of the expertise and theory from fellow search marketers and social media pioneers.

Key takeaway: Our industry is constantly changing, so always test theories and recognize the power of social search influence this coming year.

6. Google Freshness Update

Google found a way to make fresh content rank better for search terms. Although the rankings are not in chronological order of when the content was posted, the update is helping fresh content rank. This means good and bad news for us SEOs.

The good is that with positive content we can get relevant pages to rank quickly and get traffic which can equal revenue for our clients. The bad news is that, if there is any negative publicity about our clients, the news will rank quickly and if socially shared will ‘naturally’ stay in the top rankings for awhile.

Key takeaway: If your client has a blog, get them to blog! If they don’t have a blog, get them a blog! Get ‘fresh’ on the internet!

7. SEO.com Christmas Party

Wrapping up a phenomenal year of business and celebrating our successes and camaraderie as a company, we had our Casino Royale 007 Company Christmas Party. We were served prime rib and chicken cordon bleu followed by hours of fake money poker games. We were in a rented venue, and it was a night to remember. To end the night we had a raffle drawing and had prize giveaways including gift cards to Subway, Wal-Mart, Visa, Amazon, as well as an iPad 2, PS3, and a 42" flat screen TV.  

Key takeaway: We had a great year and are all looking forward to a fantastic year in 2012!!
 

SEO and PPC should be considered children of the same parent: search marketing. Their strategies should be considered together for best results.

There is some debate in the industry if running PPC and SEO can cause cannibalization of traffic; and there have been studies suggest both a positive and a negative result. You should, therefore, monitor both initiatives closely to prevent cannibalization if present.

There are some great benefits however, including:

• Shared keyword data. Data from your PPC campaigns can help you identify your best converting keywords which can be applied to your overall strategy.
• Informed content strategy. As with keyword data, converting content from PPC may also convert well for your SEO campaign.
• More comprehensive ecommerce data. Ecommerce landing pages can also be used in your PPC campaign to move visitors directly the page where they can purchase a product.

Again, if you do run PPC and SEO programs together, monitor them closely to assure positive results from both. Using both programs can enable you to share data between campaigns making both more effective.

2011 was a big year for social media. We saw continued growth of sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as the introduction of Google+. Many businesses continued the adoption of using social media as part of their marketing strategies, and now we are seeing the the early stages of what the social graph in search results within Google and Bing look like.

2012 will be undoubtedly be another year of huge growth in social media, and if you have not embraced it in your business, or if you dipped your toes in the water and gave up, now is the time to roll up your sleeves and get moving in the right direction.

Here are a few ideas to ponder as you get ready for 2012.

Invest A Proper Amount Of Time – Don't Short Change Your Efforts:

The biggest investment you will make into your social media efforts is TIME. Stop looking for the easy button when it comes to social media… there isn't one. You MUST put the time in to achieve the results you want. PERIOD!

Create Your Goals – Achieve Your Goals:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so go into social media with a roadmap, and plan on how to achieve your goal. Do you want more followers, leads, sales, site visits, white paper downloads, likes, replies or newsletter signups? No matter what the goals are, if you do not plan for them now, you will lose your way and find yourself not getting what you want out of social media, and possibly giving up on it altogether. Sure, you may find yourself adjusting your goals along the way, and that is OK… but start somewhere.

Create A Content Calendar – Plan Your Content In Advance:

Set up a calendar and plan your content. Each month decide what type of content you will be posting. Will you be blogging, if so how many times per week? How will you engage your audience, will you maybe run a contest on your Facebook page, how about a poll, or a question of the day? How about creating a video each week? Does your company have a particular marketing message for the year that you should sync up with? In the end you want to create content that people will engage with, share with their friends, and provide value to all involved. 

Side note: Keep in mind that people do not care to be advertised to… so use the simple 80/20 rule. Talk/share interesting things, or engage your audience 80% of the time, and talk about yourself (self promotion (20%) of the time.

Track And Measure Your Posts:

If you use Google Analytics on your site, use the Google Analytics URL builder tool and create campaigns. Track all links going to your site from all the social networks you post on. You can test what social sites work best, what time of day is best to post, and what type of content resonates best with your audience. Obviously you will be able to track ROI of your efforts here as well. Everything has some sort of value, whether it is a lead, a fan or follower, or an actual sale, you can attribute a dollar amount to almost any action on your website. Make your time investment in social media pay for itself!

The Best Social Media Tool Is You:

While I was at SMX in Arizona earlier this month, there were many presentations on different tools you can use for social media. Anything from automation, to tracking and engagement tools… but at the end of the day, we all agreed that the best tool is you. You, as in THE HUMAN ELEMENT. At the end of the day, I am not a fan of automation for the sake of automation. But, if you choose to automate anything, just be sure you are available to answer any replies people may leave. No one likes to follow an account that does not reply or engage.

In future posts I will break down each one of these ideas into more detail, as well as have additional information, as these ideas are just the tip of the iceberg to get you thinking about social media in 2012 and beyond.

Please leave your comments below as I would love to hear from you. And if there is anything in particular you would like me to cover in future posts about social media marketing, please leave those in the comments as well.

Until next time… Doc

PS… Be sure to follow SEO.com on Twitter, friend us Facebook, circle us on Google+ and join us in the conversations.

Social bookmarking is a way for people to tag, share, organize, store, and search for useful links online. Instead of saving sites as bookmarks or favorites in your browser, you compile them online into a website you can reach from any computer. These bookmarks reference noteworthy links and can be private, public, or shared within a specified group.

Bookmarks are tagged for ease of search; for instance, you can tag a recipe site with "food," and bookmarks set to public can be searched by other readers. Once a site is bookmarked, the item can be voted upon with a like, thumbs up or thumbs down, or other voting criteria. Each different site has a unique community element to it, with nicknames for their users, such as a "Redditor" on Reddit.

Bookmarking can be used as a search engine optimization tool, making the website where the article appeared more visible. Some sites pass on link juice, others use noFollow attribute .Social tagging, also known as folksonomy, is a process by which users add metadata and keywords to shared content. Social bookmarking sites are often a target of spam, which makes tagging a valuable step for weeding through the poor quality content. Social bookmarking sites have helped many lesser known sites become discoverable to a larger audience, particularly when bookmarks are shared on other social media sites.

Depending on the website, you can bookmark articles, news, images, video, or other miscellaneous content. Some of the most popular social bookmarking websites are Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Xydo, and Pinterest.

Topic Generation

There’s all sorts of talk in the SEO/SEM space about ways to generate blog post ideas. Most of them revolve around doing competitive research to help guide your efforts. Most recently, at Pubcon Las Vegas, Arnie Kuenn, President of link building agency Vertical Measures spoke about using Open Site Explorer to find which pieces of content your competitors have that have attracted the most links. Once you know this, you can build a similar piece of content for your own site in hopes that it will attract some interest and links as well. He also suggested that you do some manual outreach to the sites that linked to your competitors content asking them to link to yours as well. Brilliant, huh?

There are lots of different ways to come up with blog post topics, online and offline. I wanted to write this post because I've been doing a lot of offline research that has helped me grow my blog content and I wanted to share with everyone what I’ve been up to.

Offline Blog Research

As I mentioned above, there's a lot of talk about ways to research blog topics online, however, there isn’t a lot of talk about researching blog ideas offline. A few months ago, I was sitting around the house flipping through one of my wife’s magazines (I don’t want to say which one in fear that I will be ridiculed by my co-workers and peers), but as I was scanning some of the content, I thought to myself, some of this content would be interesting to my readers and if I got it up quick enough, would probably attract some natural backlinks as well.

The more I thought about it, it really made a lot of sense to build a blogging strategy around content published offline. When you think about it, most of the content found in popular magazines is content that is well researched by a professional journalist and is most likely content that people are very interested in right now. Take Kim Kardashian’s divorce, bloggers are all over that and getting loads of traffic and links because of it. Most of the work is done for you. All you have to do is come up with some unique content and a different take on the story and you have a rocking blog post.

Scalability

My next thought was, how do I get a lot of ideas without having to subscribe to dozens of magazines each month. It just doesn’t make sense to spend $2-3 per issue just to get blogging ideas. Well, maybe it does if you are a hard-core blogger, but for someone who blogs in his/her spare time, it doesn’t.  A few days after my idea of using magazine content for blog ideas, I was at Target with my daughter looking at some children’s books. While there, I saw the big magazine rack and I realized that by spending 30 minutes a week in a store like Target, Wal-Mart, Barns and Noble, or even the library, that I could get a months worth of blogging ideas without paying anything at all. So I decided to build a process to help me be as efficient as possible.

Process

Identification: I first had to identify which type of magazines related to my business or blog. If you sell wedding dresses online, then you might consider all of the bridal magazines. You might also consider magazines like People which talk about celebrities getting engaged or married. I typically like to do this before I arrive at the magazine stand.

Pulling: Once I get to the magazine stand, I find the targeted magazines, pull all of them, and head to a table or nice clean spot on the floor. Whatever you do, don't sit on the floor at Wal-Mart… they aren't that clean.

Scanning: After I have my stack, I glance at the cover and the table of contents to see if anything sounds interesting to me. If so, I flip to the page, whip out my iPhone and start snapping pictures of headlines. I don’t want to use the content, but I do want to use the topic.

Organization: Once I have all my pictures taken, I put the magazines back, and head home to dump the pictures on my computer and organize them. What I am looking for here is level of interest. If something is time sensitive, I will typically move it closer to the top of my list. If something is more interesting, I move it up. If it is less interesting, I move it down. You get the idea.

Research: As I mentioned above, I generally don’t want to use the content found in these magazine articles. I like to do some research on my own (or outsource it) to build my content. This ensures that I am not blatantly copying the content and that it’s a fresh take on the topic.

Creation & Publishing: If you are a blogger, both of these steps are pretty straightforward. You can either write the content yourself, or job it out to someone on Elance or oDesk. Once you have the content, you optimize and publish it.

Results

The first time I put my process to the test, I spent twenty minutes at Barnes and Noble and found 42 different blog topic ideas. I spent an additional fifteen minutes organizing the topics and another twenty getting them all jobbed out to one of my writers for research and creation. If I publish one piece every business day, I have approximately eight and a half weeks of content ideas in just under an hour. Pretty decent if you ask me.

One thing that you need to remember is, as with anything we do in SEO, these numbers can and will fluctuate depending on the person, niche of the site, number of magazine you need/want to go through, and other factors. Don't get discouraged if you come out with just a dozen ideas the first time. It was still a worth while activity!

So, how do you come up with blogging ideas? If you have processes outside the norm, please add to the conversation by commenting below.

Hi SEO.com followers,  My name is Ty Kilgore and today I’m going to be answering the question;  How do I Rank in Local Search or how do I rank in maps? Local SEO is that something that has really taken off in the last year to year in a half.  The search engines are putting more emphasis on the users to fill out the information than ever before. So I am going to be talking about 5 different things that you can do to help you to rank in Local SEO. 

1. First thing is that you want to make sure that if you want to show up for localized terms that you have a business address and phone number that is local. For instance if I wanted to show up for terms in Lawrenceville, Georgia I would need to make sure that my business was located in Lawrenceville, Georgia and that I also had a phone number that was local to the area. 
2. Next, you will want to build out citations.  You can build these citations on the many different popular citations sites out there. For example:

• Yelp
• CitySearch
• Yellow Book
• Insider Pages
• Super Pages

And the list goes on. Essentially what you want to do is make sure that you have local citations built out and that you have all the correct information for your business listed there. 

3. The third thing that you want to do is claim you local business on Google Places or Bing. An owner verified listing will rank higher than a non owner verified listing so it’s important that you claim that listing.  To verify the listing you will need to fill out the proper information on Google or Bing using information they will send you by phone or mail to confirm that you own that place.
4. The fourth bullet point that I’ll talk about is link building. You want to link build especially to the local listings on Google or Bing so that you have different things that are pointing back to that actual page.
5. The fifth thing that I’ll talk about is getting reviews. We live in an age where everybody wants to find out what everyone else thought about a product or service and nowhere is that more important than in local search.  If you have customers that are satisfied and enjoy your product encourage them to go online to fill out a review about their experience that will also help people that come to your site to learn more about what other people think. 

Hopefully these five things will help you in your local SEO marketing campaign.

The web is comprised of information; or content. Every web page online is a living document of information that contains a specific piece of information with an intended purpose. Search engines crawl and index pages that are unique and provide value to their visitors. For example: a publisher writes content for a user (or audience) and users are often searching to solve a problem or answer a question.

Content comes in many forms including text, audio, video, images, and other formats. This is ever changing and requires a little initiative to produce content in the format users are expecting. Music videos are a perfect opportunity to reach your audience in video format because you've already produced that content. Detailed instruction manuals may be delivered via PDF or a web page with a Flash embed to interact with while building something.

Search engines have been providing multiple forms of content for the last few years (particularly Google) through universal search engine results pages (SERPs) that include links to other web pages, videos, news results, blog posts, PDF files, images, retail store information (Google Places), shopping for products online, etc.

Content is produced for many reasons including:

• Introducing concepts
• Providing messaging to engage customers
• Associating your content with other like content on the web

For example: a sporting goods store should write content that discusses sporting goods products (baseball bats & gloves) vs. information that discusses software (Windows/Mac & minimum computer requirements).

This is important to improve rankings and visibility online because you begin to look like other sporting goods stores online and the search engines use this information to segment what pages, blogs, news, videos, etc. to deliver to their users when they're searching for answers or solutions to their problems.

The great thing about creating content is that it's completely within your control. You know your products and audience, you have pictures or video, product information, marketing messaging, etc. that can be compiled into an informative piece of content. You can also create sales content, support and customer service content, knowledge bases, forums, blogs, etc. This is critical to engage further with your audience and create an active site that search engines will crawl and index for their users.

Take this opportunity to make yourself attractive for incoming links and increase the indexability of your pages. Search engines will crawl your site more frequently, your chances of ranking higher will increase, click-thru rates will improve, your audience will engage further with your brand, and you'll be building a resource online that will drive additional visitors and potential customers.

A few examples of how to create content include:

• Writing content on your blog, product, or other web pages
• Publish white papers or ebooks for download
• Create videos or podcasts to engage your audience
• Publish slidedecks of higher level concepts
• Upload detailed schematics in PDF form or with a link to interactive portions of your site
• Launch a contest whereby the winner(s) receive free product

For more SEO tips, check out the SEO.com YouTube Channel