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Google to Offload Search Marketing Firm

04 2008 Thursday

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Google logo As predicted in my blog post last week, Google has made the decision to sell off the Search Marketing firm they acquired as part of their purchase of DoubleClick.

The Performics division of DoubleClick has been divided into two separate companies, an affiliate marketing firm and a search marketing firm, with Google announcing they will be selling the search marketing business off as soon as possible. The affiliate marketing side of the business will be integrated into Google’s existing operations.

This is taken from Google’s blog announcement:

“It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.”

Some say that Danny Sullivan’s open letter to Google last month may have prompted the search giant to take action sooner than expected. Whatever is behind the decision, it’s a smart move and one that has many search engine marketers heaving a huge sigh of relief today.

9 Ways to Make Your Site More Search Engine Friendly

04 2008 Wednesday

By Bjorn Brands in Featured

Search engines want to lead users to the most relevant information that is available online for any given keyword.

So focus on the user and ask yourself the question, “Is my page the most relevant page for this keyword online?” If the answer is yes, and you offer the best content for this keyword then you are well on your way.

The only way to get top placement in search engines is to provide very compelling information. However, search engines don’t read information like humans do.

They follow specific rules. Follow these 9 rules to rapidly boost your ranking in search engines.

1) Optimize your URLs.

If you have not yet picked a domain name for your website, don’t try to go for “mykeyword.com.” Instead, try to pick a name that you want to build your company and/or a brand around.

Yes, having the keyword in your name might help a little but don’t sacrifice your company branding just because of your domain.

2) Optimize your page title.

Create a short relevant title (60 characters max). Have the keywords appear first and don’t add any stuff such as “home page” in the title tag.

3) Optimize your description metatag.

Add the SEO keywords to the meta tag description. The description should be 200 characters max.

4) Optimize your keyword metatag.

Add the SEO keywords to the meta tag keywords. Include 5 keyword phrases max.

Example:

5) Optimize your H1 & H2 headers.

The headline at the top of your page should use the H1 HTML header. The sub-headline should follow the H2 header. Include your SEO keywords in the headline and sub-headline. Example: h1. Enter headline with keyword phrase Example: h2. Enter sub-headline with keyword phrase

6) Optimize your keyword density.

Creating a keyword rich content page is a MUST. Be creative, write good content and make frequent use of the keywords you are optimizing for.

However, make sure that your keyword density never exceeds 5% for pages with long copy and 10% for pages with little copy. If they do, you might get penalized by the search engines.

To find out what the keyword density is on your page use this free Keyword Tool at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

7) Spice up your SEO keywords.

Be sure to have your keywords appear at least once in bold, italics, and underlined in the copy. Again, do this once, but don’t over do it!

Move your keywords up.

Text towards the top of the page, such as in the first paragraph, counts for more than text further down the page. So, make sure that your keyword phrase is included towards the top of your page.

9) Use text links for site navigation.

Do not use image buttons for links. Using text links is far better. Search engines can’t read the text in images.

Search engines want to feed searchers the best information and so do you. Make sure you have the most content, feature it in a search engine friendly site.

We hope that the above tips have demonstrated that SEO does not have to be intimidating or very hard. Sure, there is a lot more that you can learn. For now just take it one step at a time.

Bjorn Brands is a successfull enterprenuer who transitioned from having his own building company to a great online business. Check out his site and see for yourself how his FREE course can help you do the same at http://www.moneyacces.com

Bad SEO: Once Upon a Time

04 2008 Wednesday

By Robert Cerff in Featured

Once upon a time, many webmasters abused the system. The system now abuses the webmasters (okay perhaps not, but these tricks no longer work).

While many of the articles written on good SEO techniques I’ve decided to turn things around and look at a few of the sure-win techniques of the past. The point is to make sure that you are no longer making use of any of techniques.

Hidden Text:
This is one of my favourites. A long time ago I even tried this one, and it worked! You picked a background colour and matched the text colour to it. Very quickly the search engines caught onto this one and simply marked the sites for spam. But that wasn’t the end however. By creating a background image of a particular colour and then making the text the same colour, you could once again benefit from hidden text. Again, it wasn’t long before the search engines caught onto this one and penalized the offenders. While webmasters continue to find ways to add hidden content to web pages the search engines will continue to find ways of exposing this and you will be penalised.

Keywords:
I think this was the first bit of code to be totally discarded by the search engines. Gone were the days of simply putting any old keyword into the meta keyword tag and hey presto, there you are. Keyword stuffing was the norm and has thankfully slowly become a thing of the past. However, many designers still seem to think that you need to fill this tag with as much as possible. Google have time and time again stated that they simply do not use this tag for anything.

Description Tag:
The description tag was abused in much the same way as the keyword tag was. Webmasters everywhere stuffed as many keywords into the description tag as possible. Because of this, the search engines no longer use this as a ranking tool. Although a well written description may not gain you rankings anymore, this can still be useful in promoting a click through by working as a sales pitch.

Gateway Pages (Landing Pages):
When mentioning gateway pages I’m not referring to those pages that you have optimised for a particular search, but rather those rubbish pages that have no value, no real content and redirect a visitor before they know what is happening. While many SEO’s still believe this is the way to go, the search engines frown on these pages as they offer the visitor little to nothing of any value.

Links:
Links are good. Links from just anybody, are bad. Gone is the day where a link from a Free For All (FFA) is worth anything (then again, was it really ever worth anything?). All those links from reciprocal link pages are now worth very little if anything at all anymore.

Cloaking:
As much as I like breaking the rules, I’ve never actually done this personally. Cloaking is as the name suggests hiding one version of a webpage from either the visitor or the robot. This was usually done by returning a specific super optimised page to the robot and then a pretty design to the visitor. While there may be the occasion where many feel this is a valid technique (returning text to the robot, flash to a visitor) it is still a massive “No-No”.

While each of these techniques has been used, abused and banned over time it is useful to remember the following:

While hidden text is very much frowned upon it is good practice to keep active code off of the webpage. By adding all of this code into a separate file and included later the search engines have less code per page to spider and this should translate into a higher text/code ratio. This should aid with text/page density, adding value to the text content.

Keywords are no longer used by the majority of search engines. Many SEO experts now even suggest leaving out the keywords tag so that you don’t alert your competitors to which keywords you are targeting. That said, as a few search engines still use keywords (although with minimum weight) it can’t hurt to add them, sparingly.

The description tag is one of my favourites. As mentioned above, it won’t aid with your search engine rankings, but it can add value to a page. If you have optimised your page to rank highly for “search term” then make sure that your description compels the searcher to click on your link. This is a short description of what the page is all about. If this tag is used as it was originally intended it can be very valuable.

Gateway pages spammed to death in the hope of tricking a visitor into visiting an unrelated website are a thing of the past. You can bet on being permanently banned for this one. However a properly optimised landing page for a particular special offer or product is still very useful. Remember that this page should offer something of value to a visitor or it still is just spam.

Links are one of the most important factors when trying to rank highly for a search phrase. While the old adage “content is king” has been worn out, the content of an anchor link is now king. So much so that a website can rank for a phrase that does not exist on its site purely from the sheer weight of links (this can be done for malicious reasons too however, often referred to as a Google Bomb).

Cloaking is still a bad idea in any form. Instant redirects are pretty much instantly banned by Google if not heavily penalized. But should you have moved a page be sure to put a 301 redirect in place. This will pass on any link strength to the new pages.

While the use of these techniques has been discouraged and outlawed over time their use can usually still be applied in some form or other. As a friend of mine always says, “It’s not what you do, but how you do it!” How very true.

Robert Cerff is a search engine analyst and marketing consultant for Prop Data Internet Solutions. He has ten years experience in e-commerce, online marketing and web development. http://www.propdata.co.za

Developing Killer Content on a Startup Budget

04 2008 Wednesday

By Andy MacDonald in Featured

The way you present your e-business to the world is the key to its success. Its so important that your website looks professional and credible so that customers will trust the products or services you are selling. Ideally, your site’s content will also be interesting and unique enough that they appreciate your brand and remember to shop with you again. You need to develop two types of content to make this happen: a “Hollywood pitch” and website copy.

The Hollywood Pitch

It’s important to have a clear idea of what your business does and what it offers to its customers—both for your own thinking but also because friends, family, customers, and even potential investors are all going to ask you, “So what does your business do?”

The best way I have found to encapsulate your new business concept is to use what I call the “Hollywood pitch technique.” You identify the basic elements of your business and compare them to familiar, existing concepts or previous successes in a pseudo-mathematical equation.

In Hollywood, new movie and TV program ideas are often pitched this way because it uses already existing success stories to give listeners a quick, positive impression of what you are proposing. Boiling down your business idea to this quick summary will also help you focus on what is important and unique about your business.

SEO and SEM Shortcuts, Spying and Stats to Dominate Google!

04 2008 Tuesday

By Michael Small in Featured

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two of the most powerful and profitable things you can do for your online business. As Google celebrates its twelfth birthday there are Internet shoppers than ever, with more choices than ever. So let’s take a few minutes to see how you can beat the competition and dominate Google.

This article has three parts; Stats, Spying and Shortcuts. Each part can be used individually or grouped to provide quicker results. The following information is what the SEO and SEM experts know and gives you the inside scoop on the tools they use.

Part 1; Search Engine Stats: This will give you the latest intel on search engines. This is to help you make informed decisions on how to spend your SEO time and where to spend your SEM money (search engine marketing, which includes pay per click advertising.)

A.) Google gets nearly half of all US searches performed on the Internet so you can bet that’s at the top of our SEO to do list. Here are the exact numbers as provided by the “comScore for searchenginewatch.com” survey:

42.7% Google 28.0% Yahoo! 13.2% MSN 7.60% AOL 5.90% ASK 2.60% All Others Combined

Keep Your Website Fresh

04 2008 Tuesday

By Bjorn Brands in Featured

What site would you prefer to go to? A site that has 100 pages of content but has not been updated in a year, or a 50 page site that keeps adding new content once a week?

Search engines think the same.

As you start to build out the content on your site, space it out and try to upload a new 200-500 word page every week.

Each one of these pages should go after a different keyword or keyword phrase. Use the top keywords from your PPC campaign.

We’ll repeat this point since it is so important: a website that is stagnant and has not changed content over the last year will never lead the pack in search engines.

What are the easiest ways to add fresh content to your page?

A) Build a site that is easy to update and change.

We recommend that you build your site in a modular way. Just think of a site built out of Lego blocks. Every page on your site will consist of a lot of Lego blocks and you can use the same Lego blocks on each of your pages.

Let’s say for example you want to change your top header. Most websites navigation bar at the top. If you are using a modular site that uses Lego blocks, then one Lego block would be for your top header. Now you can just update this one Lego block and the header on all of your 68 pages is automatically updated.

This will save you hours of work and make it far easier to update your pages and keep them fresh. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a programmer to use this. Building a modular site with Lego blocks is very easy. We cover this in detail in the module on Site Design.

B) Add dynamic content into your site.

Dynamic content is content that automatically keeps changing. In the past, adding dynamic content used to be very hard but with new advancements it has become super easy to do.

Here’s an easy way to get updated content into your website effortlessly. Let’s say that you are trying to build an expert site on “web design.”

In this case, you could go to a site such as BlinkList and automatically add the latest “web design tutorials” that people are finding online to your site. To do this, all you would have to do is:

Go to BlinkList
Look for the instructions on the sidebar to BROADCAST the content.
Copy and paste the javascript code that is provided by BlinkList into your site If you did the above, you would have a section on your site that would constantly show the latest web design tutorials that people are discovering online.

This is not only great content for site visitors but would also keep your site fresh and help significantly with SEO.

C) Attach a blog to your site.

Blogs are very easy to update and should be a key part of every search engine optimization. Search engines like Google love regularly updated, content-rich sites ‘ which is exactly what blogs are!

Most blogs are updated with new articles and information on a daily basis; over time the search engines recognize them for their wealth of information and boost their ranking.

Blogs also contain a rich supply of links. Since bloggers are always looking for ways to keep their blogs fresh, they are likely to use links rather than create all the content themselves.

Links to quality sites, including blog search engines and directories, can lead to high search engine rankings.

If you have a great site with excellent content that visitors love, this will start to work in your favor. If you are just spamming search engines and not providing value for the visitors, then Google will eventually catch up with you.

Understanding The Mysteries Of Website Aging

04 2008 Tuesday

By Richard Adams in Featured

In general, Google gives precedence to older site’s in it’s results. That is, if two identical sites existed, the older of the two would likely rank higher in the search engine results than other.

This makes logical sense of course.

If a website has been up and running for some years it is likely that the webmaster cares enough about it to keep renewing it each year.

Equally his visitors like the site enough to keep returning - thus making it worthwhile for the owner to continue working on it.

Conversely spammers throwing up hundreds of por quality sites realise that their type of sites tend to be banned from the search engines quickly so these sites never last long. After all, why pay to renew a site if you can’t get any visitors to it?

And so this leads us to the mysteries of website aging.

In short, when you launch a new website you will typically have to wait anything between 3 and 6 months for it to really start performing well in Google.

Because of this, older domain names and sites have value purely in terms of their age. Indeed, some internet marketers refer to “aging” a website like a bottle of wine, for best results.

For new web masters this is often not a possibility but as your website empire expands you may want to consider this process for faster results.

The technique is incredibly simple, and essentially involves planning ahead.

You decide on the web site(s) you will likely be building in the next 3-6 month window and buy the domain names now. You stick up a one page “holding site” - the sort that simply says “This site is coming soon” - and then get it indexed in Google.

When it comes to the time to actually build the site you have a well-aged domain.

Another tactic in the websitw aging arena is to register domains for longer periods of time for the very reasons discussed earlier.

Some entrepreneurs have claimed that registering a domain for 2,3 or more even years rather than the standard 1 year will help to convince Google that you’re in for the long haul and that you aren’t planning any “funny business”.

One final technique to discuss on this topic is that of buying existing sites or domains that have been registered in the past.

Here’s an example.

Someone buys a domain, builds a website and markets it. They start generating links to the site buy eventually for whatever reason they stop paying attention to the site.

You may well be able to convince this person to sell you their site - a pre-aged site - for next to nothing which you can then turn into your own site for an instant search engine advantage.

Alternatively you can wait until the domain name expires and hope the owner doesn’t bother renewing it.

You could then snap up this domain for the price of any other - but this time it is pre-aged. It’s already in Google’s index and has links pointing to it.

So you bought yourself a considerable asset at a knockdown price.

Richard Adams has been teaching about ecommerce and online business since 2000 and has a free report for you on how to accept credit cards.

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