Archive for category SEO

Webtrends Analytics software

Posted by George Sklavounos in Affiliates, SEO on March 26th, 2011

Strategic consulting and program development

Rapid deployment and solution development

Extend your team with Webtrends expertise

Monitor your sites and Apps

Test, segment and target

Improve Ad performance

Profile your prospects and customers

Publish mobile and Facebook Apps

Listen and participate

Jan 2011

Measuring the Trends Behind 4.5 Billion Facebook Ad Impressions

by Justin Kistner

Jan 2011

2011 Predictions for Mobile

by Bret Bernhoft

Resources

Why Webtrends now measures Facebook

Justin Kistner | Mar 04 2010

2010 is proving to be the year big brands shift spending to social media

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff | Jan 13 2010

The Latest In Analytics

Finally, measure what happens inside Facebook apps, tabs, and shares.

via Products & Services.

SEO

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Rich Snippets

Posted by George Sklavounos in SEO on March 17th, 2011

Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it’s as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. For example, here are a few relevant lines of the HTML from Yelp’s review page for “Drooling Dog BarBQ” before adding markup data:

and now with microformats markup:

or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:

By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google’s search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we’re excited about the possibilities.

To ensure that this additional data is as helpful as possible to users, we’ll be rolling this feature out gradually, expanding coverage to more sites as we do more experiments and process feedback from webmasters. We will make our best efforts to monitor and analyze whether individual websites are abusing this system: if we see abuse, we will respond accordingly.

To prepare your site for Rich Snippets and other benefits of structured data on the web, please see our documentation on structured data annotations.

via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Rich Snippets.

SEO

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9 Sure SEO Tips

Posted by George Sklavounos in SEO on March 15th, 2011

9 Sure-Fire SEO Tips

1) Steal Your Competitors’ Keywords

* Look at the keywords they use in their title tags.
* Look at the keywords they use to link to their “money pages”.
* Some webmasters are dumb enough to include their money keywords in their meta keywords tags. Take a look at these but keep in mind that smart SEO people won’t do this. In fact, just to mess with wannabe SEO’s they might actually put bad keywords in the meta keywords tags to get others to use them.

2) Fix Canonical URL Issues

3) Pay Attention to Your MozRank

SEOmoz has a tool called LinkScape that calculates your MozRank. MozRank is a great metric that evaluates the QUALITY of your incoming links. (Most link assessment tools only focus on quantity). If you have more links than your competitors but they’re ranking above you, you should compare your MozRank to theirs; maybe your competitor has fewer links but they are BETTER than yours.

If your MozRank is higher, you have more links than them, and they still rank above you, then you probably have an issue with the lack of keywords in the anchor texts of your incoming links.

4) Get a Double Listing

A double listing (or indented listing) can sky-rocket your click-through-rate (CTR)! How you can get a double listing?

5) Use Google Webmaster Tools

You really have no excuse not to use this amazing tool. These are some of the things your can do with it:

6) Create a Google Sitemap

Now that you’re using Google Webmaster, create a sitemap using this tool: GSiteCrawler.

7) Use Google to Get Keyword Suggestions

Start typing your main keyword in the Google search box and get ideas for keywords. For a more detailed keyword research use the Google Keyword Tool.

Learn the 4 Truths about the QUALITY of Links

9) What To Do If You Ever Get Penalized By Google

First off, avoid spammy black-hat tactics so this never happens. But, if you’ve been a bad boy/girl, this is what you should do:

Reade the entire article at: 9 Sure-Fire SEO Tips | Search Engine Journal.

SEO

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Search Marketing Industry Must Adapt or Perish

Posted by George Sklavounos in SEO on March 5th, 2011

Why the Search Marketing Industry Must Adapt or Perish

A New Model

More recently, the search engine’s algorithm has put most of its weight towards links around the web. To the search engines, a link is a vote of confidence. But not all links are created equal. A vote of confidence from someone influential in society is much more powerful than that of an Average Joe. A link from NYTimes.com is much more powerful than one from “JoesHardwareShopInNYC.com.”

SEOs figured this out too. It’s called “link building.” We either create high quality content (which is what Google likes) and hand it off to websites in return for a link (white hat SEO) or pay for a link without providing any content (black hat SEO).

With the proper techniques, good SEOs can take a website and, with good link building techniques, put them in the top 10 to 20 results for a term that gets millions of searches a month. And as of right now, it still works.

But as SEOs look around the field, it’s obvious that the engines are changing. Their most recent update, focused on killing content farms, saw had a nearly 12% change in their algorithm.

There is no doubt that the keywords on your pages and the inbound links to your site will still play a major role in rankings, but the next big change is the”you” factor.

The “You” Factor
In 2009, Rand Fishkin wrote a blog post titled “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines.” I think if he wrote the post today, he might reconsider that first adjective.

As recent changes to Google have illustrated, search engines are moving towards a more user-focused algorithm. Most Internet marketers would agree that humans are much harder to manipulate than a computer-based algorithm. While there are certain aspects of life that are consistent for all people — eating, sleeping, and so on — everyone has their own unique set of preferences that define them as an individual.

So why hasn’t Google been taking these unique preferences into account in its search rankings? Well, it has, but not to the same extent that it has been changing its algorithm. In the past, links (which were often created by humans) were the most natural way to determine relevancy and popularity. As the Internet has evolved over the last decade, links aren’t controlled by human placement to the extent they were years ago. But, as the Internet has evolved, so has the way humans can express themselves. Online behavior isn’t limited to e-mail and stand-alone blogs anymore.
read the entire article at: Why the Search Marketing Industry Must Adapt or Perish.

SEO, SMO

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Binpress

Posted by George Sklavounos in SEO on February 7th, 2011

The source-code marketplace
Binpress is a marketplace for source-code, where developers
can buy and sell source-code packages from each other.

Languages
PHP components
Ruby components
Python components
C# components
VB.NET components
Java components
JavaScript components
Other components

Helping buyers make a decision
Every package you publish has a dedicated landing page that is professionally designed and optimized for conversions. We use our expertise in design and user experience to help prospective buyers make a purchase decision.

Helping you sell your code
We invest heavily in several distribution channels including SEO and PPC campaigns, partnerships with affiliates and cross-site promotions.
We handle marketing for you and help you make the sale

via Binpress.

JavaScript, Php, Ruby, SEO

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The Rise of Mobile Search Engine Optimization

Posted by George Sklavounos in SEO on December 22nd, 2010

The Rise of Mobile Search Engine Optimization
The Relationship Between Mobile Sites and Search

Search Engines Treat Mobile Sites Differently

Mobile SEO Best Practices

Generally, search engine optimization for a mobile website is similar to optimizing a desktop website. Relevant and fresh content will keep users interested. Be sure to use unique, descriptive and readable titles. Meta descriptions should be unique and have a strong call to action.

In addition to all of the above recommendations, there are some baseline tips for mobile SEO best practices that may seem obvious, but often are forgotten:

* Make sure your mobile site doesn’t limit access to just mobile devices (because search bots are not mobile devices).
* Create and submit a mobile sitemap.
* Be sure to optimize your site’s performance to render fast results for users and search engines.
* Make sure your mobile URLs are viewable on a mobile device (Google will not deliver them in results unless they are compatible with published mobile markup standards such as XHTML Basic 1.1, XHTML MP 1.2 and WML 1.3).
* Register your mobile site on Google Places, which recently unveiled a location-based recommendation engine called Hotpot.

via The Rise of Mobile Search Engine Optimization.

Mobile, SEO

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3 Ways Social Media Marketing Helps SEO

Posted by George Sklavounos in SEO on December 12th, 2010

In addition to being a great standalone marketing strategy, social media marketing is also widely used in concert with search engine optimization. One of the reasons social media marketing has been so widely adopted by those in the SEO industry is because of the dramatic impact that social media has directly on search engine listings. Here are three ways that social media impacts those:

1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links

It’s no secret that a successful social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new inbound links to your site. It’s also no secret that inbound links are one of the most important things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings.

The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited

2) Using social media websites for reputation management

Lots of social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative thing when it comes to managing your reputation.

On one hand, it is very easy to control the first page of results by leveraging these sites. Get people talking about your company or site positively on Digg, MySpace or YouTube, and you might end up with those almost as “good references,” listings that show up on the first page of search engine results for your name, along with your own site.

On the other hand, if you’re not careful, it can be very easy for someone to tarnish your brand with social media. Take Comcast for example; if you look at the first page of results on Google for comcast, you will notice that there is a video on YouTube of a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.

3) Ranking pages on social media websites

Do you have a new site that you’re having trouble ranking? Consider trying to rank a page on a social media site instead. Like I mentioned above, these sites rank extremely well on the search engines. Their domains are very powerful and with a few links to an internal page, it has a great shot of ranking, even for competitive keywords.

So if you’re launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks, you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. I’m not saying it’s better to have these pages rank than your own site, but it’s definitely better than not having anything ranked.

As you can see, there are a number of situations where social media can affect your SEO efforts, both positively and negatively. In fact I’m willing to argue that it’s becoming more of a necessity to learn how to use social media in concert with SEO. It is also important that you are conscience of the impact that it can cause to your reputation and you manage that effectively, but that’s a separate post for another day.

SEO, SMO, Social media

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