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SiteProNews Blogs

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• Titus Hoskins

Has Google Replaced Content as King of the Web?

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

While great content will always get you noticed, I have come to the somewhat obvious conclusion that “Content is NOT King, Google is King” on the web. This is a slightly different mindset when it comes to getting traffic and marketing on the net.

This new mindset doesn’t change the fact that you still have to create great content, but it changes the way one goes about promoting that content on the web.

In the last few years, Google’s share of the search market has grown to 65% or much more in most areas of the world. This domination of online search puts Google in control of what content is seen – regardless of its quality.

It plays a major role in your content’s visibility, a role so great that without Google’s approval, your content is not exactly dead in the water, but your chances of succeeding is much less than with a thumbs-up from Google.

Now, the real turning point (light bulb moment) for me was Google’s recent promotion of its own products or data, as in the whole “Google Plus Your World” search results features which were introduced a few weeks ago. Google is actively showing and promoting its Google+ profiles and posts within its SERPs.

Many believe Google is sacrificing both relevancy and quality by only showing its own data (as opposed to Twitter’s and Facebook’s profiles/posts which Google claims it no longer has access to) when Google users are logged into their accounts.

3 Onsite SEO Touchups – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Nick Stamoulis in Featured

“SEO is never done” is a phrase that is thrown around a lot, mostly because it’s true! However, when most people talk about the continuation of a SEO campaign, they are usually referring to offsite link building. SEO is about more than developing inbound links! Without a well optimized link to send traffic to, all your hard work offsite is just going to waste. Don’t let your onsite SEO go years before you revisit it. Here are 3 quick onsite SEO touchups you can do today to make sure your site is in top SEO shape:

Replace Old Whitepapers With Updated Versions

All industries change with time, some just evolve faster than others. If you want your website to become a trusted source of information for your target audience, you have got to make sure you are giving them the most up-to-date and relevant information at all times. That’s simple enough to do on a business blog; as long as you are publishing new content on a regular basis, the blog will stay fresh and useful. However, many site owners forget to treat their website’s resource section with the same care.

As part of a well-rounded content marketing strategy, you should be creating whitepapers, articles, videos and other forms of informational content for your target audience. However, these whitepapers/ articles are not forever current. As your industry evolves the information in them becomes obsolete. Unlike your business blog, which may get updated every day with the latest and greatest industry news, these whitepapers can sit for years on your site, waiting to be downloaded. When was the last time you read through those whitepapers? How much of that information is still applicable today?

Websites are for SEO – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Joseph Baker in Featured

Many businesses have a strong focus on their advertising campaigns, integrating pay-per-click ads, targeted email marketing, social media, and traditional advertising to broadcast their products and services to potential customers. One critical area that many businesses fail in, though, is SEO.

On-page SEO in particular tends to fall by the wayside or is tacked on almost as an afterthought. This would be fine if the majority of users went directly to the website, but most find a website through use of a search engine, even if they already know the URL of the site they’re visiting. The rules for on-page SEO can seem daunting, but in reality the basic on-page rules are fairly simple. Producing quality content that people will want to see should be one of the main concerns, and providing a friendly, functional user interface will improve not only the experience of those using the site, but also the website’s ranking in Google.

Content

Google’s Panda updates have added a new dimension to Google’s algorithm, allowing it to judge content similarly to a human. This is consistent with Google’s attempts to refine its algorithm to the point where every searcher will find the exact result they want as the first result on their first search. Because humans desire content, not filler or ads, the Panda update emphasizes that. Sites that want to rank well on Google must make sure that all of their pages have deep, well-written content.

Before Panda, some sites attempted to fool search engines by posting a well-written paragraph followed by several paragraphs of keyword-stuffed unintelligible text. Now, though, Google can see through that. Content must also be unique, because every time it is reused Google values it less, lowering the rank for the page. Including relevant keywords throughout the text will make the context of the page and site easier to determine, resulting in a higher rank. Going too far, though, will hurt rankings, so keywords should only be used in situations where they might naturally occur. By updating the website’s content–not the overall design–frequently, businesses show search engines that their site has new, up-to-date content that will provide something fresh for users, resulting in higher search rankings.

Site Architecture

Making the website easy to navigate for users will also increase its chances of ranking well on search results. Every page should navigate back to the home page and to the most popular pages or categories, while the least popular pages should be accessible through a standard menu. Page titles should be unique, short and readable. Some businesses include the full business name on every page, but that is an unnecessary and unwise policy. As with the content of the site, search engines favor unique titles and descriptions. Reusing titles and descriptions for unique pages is a red flag for search engine crawlers and will likely result in a lower rank. Links within the site, whether in the menu or within the content of the site, should be optimized. Appropriate, simple anchor text should be chosen in order to help search engines properly categorize links and pages.

In the past, optimizing a website for search engines was very different from building a positive user experience. While keyword stuffing and cloaking used to be capable of quickly raising a site’s position on search results pages, those tactics are now singled out and penalized. Instead, websites should be built to provide users with a positive experience and useful, unique content. As search engines continue refining their algorithms and creating newer, more intelligent crawlers, building for SEO and building for users will increasingly become indistinguishable.

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Joseph Baker is a freelance writer living in the Midwest. He enjoys working on his novel and drinking large amounts of Earl Grey tea. He writes this article behalf of American InterContinental University.

Could New Generic Domains Spell Trouble for Google & Webmasters?

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

ICANN, the governing body for all Internet addresses, has announced new changes on how domains will be named in the future, which could definitely spell trouble for not only Google but all the other search engines as well. But they won’t be the only ones. Small webmasters and online marketers should be more concerned and troubled by the introduction of these new “generic” or “dot anything” domains.

Why?

Mainly because these new ICANN changes will transform and alter the web forever.

The impact and range of this transformation will largely depend upon two factors. First, how wide or liberal will ICANN be in their interpretation and implementation of these new domain naming changes? Second, how quickly Internet users adjust to these changes and for that matter, whether or not, they will even use these new generic domains.

However, if human nature stays true and previous Internet usage stays firm, web users will want the fastest and easiest way to find what they’re looking for on the web. This is where the new “generic” domains could change the whole playing field. It could even possibly transform the web as we know it today.

Google Launches “Adwords Interests” Out of Beta – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Nancy Gibbins in Featured

Google Adwords Interest is certainly an *interesting* concept in respect to getting more relevant eyeballs on your ad. The program essentially allows advertisers to stalk their potential users based not only on their search habits or the site they are currently visiting, but also other information. What other information at this point seems to be unclear. That having been said, my best guess would include other sources of information about internet users gleaned from the other sites we are visiting – Gmail, Buzz info, groups or blogs we read and sites we +1.

From where I’m standing this is a fantastic way to continue to reach the desired audience, even when they aren’t on a site that is relevant to their interests. It’s a way to stay in their face which is good when reaching the right person is the ultimate goal.

There are a few things I’m curious to see play out as the program progresses and more widespread analytics start to stream in. First what will this mean for Click Through Rate and how this will affect overall CPC? Second, will this lead to stronger conversion rates for Display Network campaigns? And finally, how will this affect mobile search? We will have to wait and see on all points.

If this particular way to reach users seems vaguely familiar to you, then you would be correct. This is the advertising model for Facebook PPC. The main difference is the incredible reach that Google has through search partners and the display network as well as more points of information Google has access to thanks to all of its ancillary products.

Google has been working like the little engine that could in trying to get into the social network business with products like +1, Google Buzz and the Facebook-esque Google Friend Connect launched in 2008. They just can’t seem to make it happen like Facebook can. No bother though, Google’s juxtaposition of advertising reach and personal information about users will more than likely win the race.

So now what to expect? Perhaps bedfellows Bing and Facebook will be launching their own version for the MSN Display network.

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Nancy Gibbins Roberts is the found and chief strategist at Jump Marketing in Atlanta, GA. With more than 20 years experience in bringing businesses to the web she is an authority on analytics and strategic interactive marketing.

Flashy Websites Can Be Too Hot for Bots

By Michael Cottam in Featured

Website designers often employ technologies like Flash, JavaScript, Ajax, and Silverlight to make their sites attractive, fast, and easy to use.

While there are great reasons to use these technologies, they can create problems when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Web page content that’s wrapped in a fancy package can be difficult – or impossible – for a search engine to “see.” That means the search engine crawlers may have a hard time understanding what your page is about, and so may not index all your important pages.

The search engines may also find it difficult to follow any links – internal or external – you’ve placed in web page content rendered in Flash, Silverlight, or other technologies. That matters because search engines use your internal links to discover other pages on your site, to understand how pages on your site relate to each other, and to determine which pages on your website are more important than others.

Designers sometimes incorporate the search function for a website into their designs. That can be helpful for people, but it may pose problems for search engines trying to crawl your site. If pages on your site are accessible only from a search box, the search engine won’t be able to see those pages, because search engines don’t type keywords into search boxes to find relevant web pages.

The Truth About Search Engines and Flash

By Jill Whalen in Featured

It seems that once a year for the past five years or so, a search engine representative will stand up at a conference and announce that they are now indexing Flash. Website designers jump with glee, and SEOs lament that all the work they did educating their clients on why they need to curb their use of Flash will be for naught.

Think of it this way: If Flash were a food, it would be an herb or a spice. Let’s say it’s basil. While basil is great in pesto, it’s not something that you’d make an entire meal out of. You use it to add flavor to your tortellini. And yet designers around the world – as well as CEOs who want to appear cool – want huge chunks of their websites in Flash. Sigh.

Of course, if the search engines truly are indexing Flash this time around, then what’s the problem?

Flash Can Be Cool

Flash sites certainly can do some neat tricks. People can interact with them in ways they can’t with a plain-Jane HTML website. Interaction is certainly good, because it can make a site “sticky.” And people pass around fun websites to their friends so they can make the little balls spin, or play with the cool virtual cubes. This is great for some websites that are looking to entertain people.

Can Google Truly Make Quality Content King of The Web? – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

For those webmasters and e-marketers who can remember a web without Google, life was much less complicated and a lot less tumultuous back then. Since Google came onto the scene and became the dominant search engine in the world… things have changed drastically.

And not necessarily in a negative way, those same webmasters probably jumped for joy when they reached the top of Google for their keywords. Then they complained just as loudly when Google made one of their never-ending changes to their algorithm and these webmasters saw their rankings drop or in some severe cases, disappear from the web altogether. In those early days, most of Google’s major updates were kept secret until the fallout got webmasters fuming or rejoicing.

However, in recent algorithm updates or changes, Google has openly broadcasted these changes to anyone who was listening. The same openness applies to Google’s recent changes dealing with “content farms” and “low quality content” in Google’s SERPs. Matt Cutts stated in his blog, “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

How Search Engines Work : A Case Study Of Google

By Dele Ojewumi in Featured

Search Engines, especially Google have evolved technologically (amongst other parameters) over the years. The computing power of the software and hardware now deployed by the search giant can better be assessed in terms of the functions it performs and its wide reach.

How Search Engines Work

Broadly speaking, search engines’ functions can be divided into three:

* Crawling

This is the use of special software commonly known as bots, crawlers or spiders to access information on various websites through principally three means:

1. Links from other websites already in the search engine’s index or gathered while crawling

2. Url’s/links submitted by webmasters

3. Sitemaps submitted by webmasters

Ordinarily one would visualize the bots as some crawling objects moving rapidly all over the web via links to reach different websites in performing its tasks. However, in reality that is not the case. It operates from a particular physical location and is akin to your web browser. It operates by sending various requests to the web servers from which it downloads/fetches various information on new web pages, updated web pages and dead links which are all used to update it’s index. As web pages are crawled, new links detected on these web pages are added to the engine’s list of pages to crawl.

In the process of crawling, the engines encounter challenges in the sense that there is a trade off between minimizing the resources it spends on crawling and maintaining an up to date index. It tries to avoid re-indexing an unchanged web page while it strives to capture all changed web pages in order to keep its index always current.

* Indexing

The search engines stores the pages it’s crawlers retrieve from various web pages in a massive index database. It sorts this information based on search terms and arranges it in alphabetical order. This sorting enables rapid retrieval of documents from the index when search queries demand them. It processes the words in the web pages noting the location of the keywords within the pages e.g. title tags, alt attributes. The engines do process many, but not all content types. As an illustration, it cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

To improve search performance, the search engines ignore (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). These words are so common and do little to narrow a search, and therefore can safely be ignored. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, in addition to converting all letters to lowercase, to improve it’s performance.

* Search Query Processor

This is what most search users are conversant with and in fact quite often erroneously regard as the “search engine”. It comprises some components with the most visible being the search box or interface through which the search user interacts with the search engine, forwarding his search query for processing.

When a user sends in a query through the interface, the index rapidly retrieves the most relevant documents for the search query. Relevance is determined algorithmically based on many ranking factors numbering over 200. A key factor amongst these is PageRank which is a measure of the importance of a web page. This is determined by the number and quality of links pointing to the web page. It is however important to stress that not all links are equal as links emanating from high ranked web pages is considered more powerful than links from low ranked web pages.

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Why not visit => www.homebiz-supermarket.com/profitable-business-ideas/2009/12/plug-in-profit-site-2 where many internet marketing newbies are attaining internet marketing success. Dele Ojewumi is an Internet Marketer, Chartered Accountant and Economist and the webmaster of => www.homebiz-supermarket.com/profitable-business-ideas/.

Google Instant Preview Changes How Search Results Are Viewed

By Peter Bowen in Featured

Google Instant Preview is a new feature following the September roll out of Google Instant which completes searches while they’re being typed into Google’s search field, with the goal of significantly reducing time spent searching.

But is the new feature really going to speed up the searcher’s experience, or is it yet another complicated layer on what was once a simple and easy-to-understand search interface? Google’s own research revealed that on average searchers using Google Instant Preview are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the search results they click after seeing a visual preview next to the organic listing.

Google Instant Preview essentially gives users the ability to see a website before they visit it. Google accomplishes this by taking a screenshot of every webpage in its index and giving users access to it via a magnifying glass icon that sits to the right of every search result.

When a user clicks on the magnifying glass icon, a screenshot of the webpage in question will appear to the right of the search result listing. It’s an at-a-glance view of the website page without actually having to visit the webpage.

One of the key elements to Instant Previews though is that Google sometimes highlights a section of the page where the page description occurs. This becomes a useful feature when you’re trying to find information on a specific person on a page that lists dozens or hundreds of people. Instead of having to scroll through the entire page to find the person, you can just look at the Instant Preview and see where they are on the page.

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