Search:
Site   Web

SiteProNews

SiteProNews

Article Categories





By David Jackson in Featured

google2A few months back, I wrote an article titled Google’s Panda Update: Haters, Cheaters and Consequences. The article was my defense of Google’s constant algorithm changes. In that article I naively wrote the following:

“Unlike a lot of cynics out there, I believe that Google is trying deliver the most relevant and useful search results possible.”

Well, I’ve always been a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong. And I was wrong about Google. Dead wrong. Like so many others, I too was fooled by Google’s clever sleight of hand. Let me explain.

Google’s Clever Sleight Of Hand

Over the years, Google has had numerous algorithm changes:

* 2003-05-01 “Fritz” update
* 2003-05-16 “Florida” update
* 2007-01-25 Googlebombs “defused” update
* 2009-02-20 “Vince” update
* 2010-05-01 “Mayday” update
* 2011-02-24 “Panda” update

By Matthew Meyer in Featured

spn_exclusiveGoogle Place Search (formerly known as Google Places) rules local search. Just try it. Go to Google and type in “Personal Injury Attorney Your City.” The first seven listings in the “natural search listings” are all Google Places pages. Since 20% of searches are local and the majority of their over $30 billion in revenue comes from small businesses, Google has decided to go hard after local small business advertising.

They started by creating 50 million Google Places pages using aggregated data from online directories and the Yellow Pages. These pages are mobile optimized and attached to Google Maps.

Only about 8% of local businesses have actually claimed their Google Place Search page. Even less have fully optimized their pages. However, this is changing fast. Local businesses are getting hip to the importance of Google Places pages. If you have a local business, the first place potential customers will start to find you is on your Google Places page from their smart phone. You want to make sure you are at the top of the list for your category. Here is how you get a jump on your competition in local search:

1. Stake Your Claim!

Google made the Google Place Search Page now you need to claim yours. You need to claim it because it is possible that the information listed is not correct and the more completely you fill out your page the higher it is ranked in searches. In order to be able to add information to your page you need to claim it first. Google verifies your claim to the page by sending you a postcard by snail mail with a confirmation code or by sending you a message on your phone.

By Sheldon Stolman in Featured

googlelogoObtaining placement in the “7 pack” of Google Local business listings is extremely powerful. This article will show you how to get in Google local business results for your city. To achieve hi rankings in Google’s local search cannot be guaranteed, but if you do the following, your chances increase tremendously. If you need help with any of these contact a qualified Atlanta SEO company, they can help.

1) Create a Google local business listing in Google Places, and claim this listing via phone code or direct mail code.

2) As best practice address should be near the center of the city you want to show up in, should be a physical address not a P.O. box, and should have a local phone #.

3) Optimize listing for keywords you want to be found under – add keywords in categories, description, services, etc.

4) Complete every section of listing – add pics, video, coupons, etc.

5) Add this listing to local business directories – yellowpages, superpages, manta, kudzu, yelp, etc… There are hundreds. Also add your listing to data aggregators like infousa.com. These are whats called citations and are probably one of the biggest factors for local search.

6) Claim as many of these listings as possible – delete any duplicate listings as duplicates can count against you.

7) Positive reviews on all these directories help your local listings as well. Solicit current clients to give you positive reviews on these directories as well as your Google local listing.

To get an idea of the number of citations you might need and what directories you can list in, you should do competitive analysis on bing local. This gives you a listing of your top competitors citations and where to get them.

Better Google local business results can be accomplished on your own, but if you don’t have the time why not hire an Atlanta SEO Expert to help. Visit Searchdogmarketing.com Today! If your hunting for the right Atlanta SEO Company to enhance your businesses Google ranking and keep you there, SearchDog Marketing is just that company. They are experts in giving your webpage that added boost it needs to take out its competitors. So for an Atlanta SEO expert who understands how to get results visit SearchDogMarketing.com Right now!

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

googlelogoGoogle wasn’t satisfied with just having Instant Search, now it has introduced something called Instant Previews. Searchers and web users can now browse a large instant “preview” of a site’s content by placing the cursor over the small magnifying glass displayed beside each listing. These previews are large and Google sometimes highlights a major paragraph or quote from each displayed site.

Searchers can get a general look at the layout and design of a site, onpage graphics and bold headlines can usually be seen from the preview. However, small print and the general content of the page can’t be read, so searchers will have to click through to your site if they want to read your information. Assuming of course, they don’t find what they’re looking for in the headlines or bold print.

Google Instant Previews Screenshot

Whether searchers will use this new feature remains to be seen, but these instant previews could have some ramifications on who gets the “click through” to their site. One would also reason that getting the top spot in the rankings have diminished somewhat, if searchers can quickly preview all of the top 10 listings and then make their decision. So they might not click the top listing, but decide one lower down is worth clicking. This could make any listing on the first page more worth having, not just the top one.

This doesn’t really affect any of your SEO strategies and you should be optimizing for the search engines as usual. After all, getting those top rankings for your targeted keywords in the major search engines is what brings in the quality traffic to your site. In this regard, it’s business as usual.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

googleRefusing to sit still long enough for anyone to catch up, Google has rolled out another Labs experiment to the public. Google Social Search Beta launched last October, hard on the heels of Personalized Search. But this week, Google graduated Social Search out of Labs and into the public sphere.

By Bill Platt in Featured

Everyday it seems, people are asking me the optimum numbers of inbound links they need to acquire for their website in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links – of equal or higher quality – than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God”.

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder as to how many inbound links they might need to acquire in order to rank in the Top 4 of Google’s search results or even the Top 10 of Google’s SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone.

Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

No one can truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until one has take the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

  • You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
  • You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of “no consequence” links in their results.)
  • You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that offer links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a “snapshot” of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking, and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a “snapshot” picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle”.

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, then you need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the “snapshot” offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

  • If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
  • Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the “quality of your content”, rather than the “quantity of your content”.
  • When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

=== Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

Bill Platt has provided SEO services since 2004. In 2009, he transformed his SEO service, into one that helps people defeat negative search results in Google. By improving the rank of positive website reviews in the search results, negative search listings begin to disappear from the public eye. If you would like to learn more about how Bill’s Reputation Management SEO service can help your business, visit: http://911reputation.com/ Bill has also owned http://thePhantomWriters.com/ since 2001.

Read more articles written by: Bill Platt

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

A couple of bloggers have reported seeing breadcrumb trails in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) lately, meaning they may be testing the inclusion of breadcrumb navigation as part of site snippets.

Breadcrumb navigation shows the user’s path in relation to their current location. It’s the little trail of keywords you often see at the top of the page, below the main header image telling you what section of a site you are on. There’s a good explanation here.

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped blogged about seeing breadcrumbs in Google SERPs as far back as July. Leo Fogarty has seen a couple of results on closely related search queries. Now Chris Crum of Web Pro News reports a few random instances of breadcrumb SERP usage.

Google have always encouraged webmasters to use breadcrumb navigation for usability purposes and now they’re apparently going to reward webmasters who take their advice by including breadcrumbs within their site snippet.

Here’s a screengrab of how breadcrumbs look in the Google SERPs for the search query “car hire Spain”:

As you can see, the keywords in the breadcrumbs that match the search query are bolded, meaning that they are included in the algorithmic ranking factors for that query. So potentially, the use of breadcrumb navigation as an SEO tactic has just become a whole lot more important.

A check of the pages displaying the breadcrumbs in their snippets confirms the use of breadcrumb navigation and the exact breadcrumb trail included in the snippet e.g. http://www.auto-europe.co.uk/car-hire/Spain.cfm.

I personally haven’t seen any breadcrumbed SERPs but it’s apparently quite rare so far, with the testing possibly limited to UK sites.

Have you seen any? Please let us know via the comments below.

By Dave Morgan in Featured

I just started reading Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” —   and I love it. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since he told me about his idea for the book almost a year ago. As many of you know, Jeff is a former journalist and media executive and now very high profile blogger at Buzzmachine.com.

In Jeff’s book, he writes about the very successful — and fundamentally different — approach that Google takes in running its business relative to virtually every other company in the world. He details its obsessions in serving users, its “publicness,” its ability to create and exploit network effects. Then he hypothetically applies these principles to a number of other industries, from banking to retail, always asking the question, “What would Google do?” His stories and ideas are fascinating and the book is a fast read. I highly recommend it.

However, my purpose in writing today about Jeff’s book was not just to review it, but also to follow his advice and turn the question back on Google. Why? Because as I read the book, it occurred to me that Google has done some things that are not “what Google would do.”

Google has built an extraordinary business in search by focusing on the user and giving searchers more and better information faster than any other company. Its effort to organize the Web’s information certainly created “the world’s greatest Yellow Pages.” Then, the company combined this search directory with an enormously powerful and profitable advertising business, AdWords, which delivers commercial messages that are very relevant to the search results. Finally, its strategists extended the scale of the AdWords business with the creation of AdSense, where tailored commercial messages are distributed across millions of other Web sites. The combination of Google Search, AdWords and AdSense has given the company a media franchise of a size, growth trajectory and profitability such that the world has never seen before.

I think that the order in which Google created these businesses is important. AdWords worked because of the power of Google Search. AdSense worked because of the existing power of AdWords. These products would not have worked nearly as successfully, if at all, if they had been launched in reverse order.

Why then, when Google launched Google TV and Google Print, did it focus first on the advertising sides of those businesses? Essentially, these products aggregated commercial inventory from traditional media companies and offered them for sale through the same kinds of self-service interfaces used for AdWords and AdSense. Both Google Print and Google TV seem to have been the company’s attempts to horizontally extend its online ad franchise into traditional media, but neither product had the advantage of leveraging a massive user base viewing a “Googlized” directory of print or television content. Neither of them really focused on the user, nor did they follow users.

To me, Google Print and Google TV seem like the kinds of new business extensions that more traditional corporations would implement — on the counsel of expensive, brand-name management consultants, of course — rather than follow the model that Google did in building its core franchise. Maybe this is why Google Print wasn’t successful and was recently shut down. I don’t know how Google TV is faring, but my bet is that it will never be anything like the franchise the company has in search.

Why? Because they didn’t do it like Google would. What do you think?

Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA and Real Media, is Chairman of — and a partner in — The Tennis Company, which owns TENNIS.com, and TENNIS and SMASH Magazines.

By Randy Zlobec in Featured

When looking at Google, one is struck by the somewhat Orwellian nature of entering a search term and being watched by Big Brother in a dispassionate, detached yet interested manner. When looking at the patterns people use in searching, it does come close to that totalitarian character from the George Orwell novel, 1984, but that is the truth of our times. Google is neither good nor evil. It just IS, and with that realization, people should adapt to the new SEO frontiers and how to not only deal with but capitalize on the wealth of information that search engines collect.

By Sean Proske in Featured

Getting your site listed on the first page of Google’s search results is a bit like getting a loan from a bank.

You aren’t likely to be approved for a loan if you have no income and no

Google trades in a different currency… traffic, and just like the banks assess risk before lending money, Google will assess risk before “lending” traffic.

« Older Entries

Subscribe to SiteProNews Articles

Receive New Articles As They are Posted


Webmaster Headlines

Amazon Axes Cloud Storage Prices

Microsoft, 24/7 Want To Better Serve Your Customers

Trendnet security cam flaw exposes video feeds on net

Apple supplier employee describes working conditions

Google Chrome Is Now Available For Android (And It's Fantastic)

SEO and Social: It Isn't One or the Other

How to Create Marketing Offers That Don't Fall Flat

9 Free Tools For Link Discovery & Content Creation

7 Must Have Search Related Chrome Extensions for 2012

8 Quick Tips for Writing Bullet Points People Actually Want to Read

Recent SiteProNews Articles

RecentSiteProNews Articles

7 Things NOT to Waste Your Time On When Doing SEO – A SEO-News Exclusive Article

How To Write An SEO-Friendly Article

Guru Kool-Aid: Are You Drinking It? – A SPN Exclusive Article

How to Generate Leads With Linkedin

Technology Solutions: Cloud Computing

9 Common Title Tag Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

SiteProNews Blog News

Google Celebrates Art Clokey’s Birthday
Not many people will recognize the name Art Clokey. But a lot more people will recognize the green c...
more >

Reader Rescue : Should My Meta Description Tags Just Duplicate My Title Tags?
Hi Everyone From early days learning SEO, I went ahead and did all my meta descriptions with a bi...
more >

Death of Steve Jobs Fails to Break Twitter Record
We all heard the sad news yesterday that Steve Jobs, founder and visionary at Apple, had died at...
more >

Recommended Links


   Get Facebook Fans

   Submit Express - SEO Services

Wordpress 3.3.1