Tag Archives: SEO San Diego

What SEO Experts Should Expect This Summer?

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Google is planning to make some big changes in its techniques to deal with the SEO in the coming few weeks. These changes are being made to combat black hat web spam. The giant search engine is thinking about some very serious ways to tackle with the problem. There are nine changes that we may witness in the near future. Let’s see what these expected changes are.

 

  • Penguin 2.0- The New Version of Penguin- Google is really very much worried about black hat web spam. It’s new Penguin update which is named as Penguin2.0 is designed to deal with black hat even more seriously. It will be much more capable than the older version and will work more efficiently.
  • Advertorials- Usually advertorials, also known as native advertising, disobey Google’s guidelines. Such advertorials follow PageRank unhesitatingly which is definitely not acceptable by the search engine at all. Google plans to deal with things like advertising and paid links masked as advertorials more seriously through its new firm policies. Google asserts that it doesn’t view advertorials as a problematic thing but they just want to make sure that they are not abused to cater to linking and PageRank needs. This giant search engine wants all the advertorials to make it obvious that they are paid advertisements.
  • Problematic Searches- Google knows well that there are lots of problematic searches which need serious attention. So the search engine is preparing itself strongly to tackle such searches. But there’s a bad news for those who suffer from such a problem, the search engine hasn’t declared so far that how will it deal with the problem. All it says is that it will definitely do something. However, it will pay special attention to some specific areas like porn related searches which have always been more spammy.
  • Upstream Linking- Like above stated problem, this part was also not well described by the search engine but it revealed that they will try to reduce the link buying as much as possible. It is thinking to employ a few new ideas to analyze the links perfectly to combat this link buying issues.
  • Hacked Sites- The search engine wants it to me more robust in dealing with the hacking problems. They are looking for new ways which may make them able to identify such issues and inform webmasters about it. It wants itself to be competent enough to provide useful information to webmasters regarding whether they their site is infested with malware or hacking problems. It will also suggest the webmasters the ways to clean up these unwanted things.
  • Authority- If you are an authority according to the Google’s algorithm, the search engine will try to ensure that these sites get better rank than other sites.
  • Panda- This update of Panda will be more capable of tackling low quality sites and suggesting them the ways to enhance their quality. It will help those sites which were previously impacted by Panda.
  • Cluster of Results from Same Website- If you have ever conducted a deep search on Google, you must have noticed that there are a few sites which appear on more than just a single page. They appear again and again on various pages. Google wants to make sure that once you have seen lots of results from just one site, they become less visible to you on the deeper pages. This initiative is taken by the search engine according to the user feedback.
  • Information for Webmasters- The search engine wants to provide useful and valuable information to webmasters through webmaster tools. These pieces of information and advice will help the webmasters to diagnose the issues with their sites.

Google strongly believes that the proposed changes will help in improving the quality of the search results to a great extent. Moreover, the volume of spam will also be significantly reduced by them.

 

Is SEO Dying?

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It was bound to happen- some person writing about the death of SEO. There are a few reasons for this speculation, try searching for “is seo dead.”

Reasons why people think SEO is dying are as follows:

First, people do not really know what SEO is. Even among marketers, people continue to believe that SEO is the “process of tricking search engines to rank a site for search queries for which it isn’t one of the better matches. With this viewpoint, it’s easy to see why people would want to conclude that SEO is a dying medium. Google and Microsoft make billions of dollars in revenue from their search engines, and protecting that revenue stream is a critical activity for them.”

If people are not using SEO correctly, they will ruin the search engine system. This is why Google has invested so much in WebSpam. When consumers receive poor search results they become dissatisfied and turn to different search engines.

Second, other people believe that social media will soon replace SEO. “These people argue that inbound links are an elitist system of voting for Web sites (you have to own a Web site to vote), and that social media will provide a much broader array of signals, because anyone with an Internet connection can sign up for a social media service and start making their opinions known. Further, they argue, more people will rely on social media for opinions on things because people love to learn from the experience of others.”

Social media sites have not been adopted broadly across the population, making the data lumpy and inconsistent- and it is easily spammed. In creating an account, no real investment is needed; all you have to do is sign up and begin posting your opinions and thoughts.

Authority is another issue here. We can assume those with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter have some authority on a topic, but the most they can offer is their own opinions. “Someone with a Web site has made a significant investment in building that site, and here the stamp of authority is likewise relatively easy to measure. However, it’s much more meaningful to receive an authoritative link than an authoritative Tweet.”

So is SEO dying?

“Not a chance. Defined properly, but still somewhat narrowly, SEO is the practice of helping publishers bring new traffic and customers to their Web site, by building and promoting high quality Web sites using technology that the search engines can parse. That need isn’t going away anytime soon.”

Make the most out of available opportunities. For example, Microsoft’s Bing. SEO can and will evolve with the changing times. The advent of universal search resulted in some changes, and created new opportunities for SEOs. The rising prominence of local search did as well. Increasing personalization will create yet more opportunities.

“For the SEO professional, staying abreast of the changing market environment is part of the price of being in this business. While change is constant, publishers use SEO as a means for obtaining new customers from search engines. As long as search is around, there will be a need for people who know how to make that happen.”

Information provided by: searchenginewatch.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan

Android OS sees significant growth in handset market

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Android is quickly catching up to iPhone to become a mobile platform to be recognized, according to data from ChangeWave Research.

The majority of growth was seen between September and December 2009. Android-based phone purchases jumped from 6% to 21%, which the much-hyped launch of Motorola’s Droid undoubtedly was a big reason for the surge. Thus, Google’s operating system was able to overtake Blackberry in the handset market.

Although iPhone remains the top choice for handsets at 28% of the market, they did see a 4% drop between September and December 2009.

Meanwhile, overall smartphone usage continues to see a steady rise, with 42% of US consumers by December 2009. Data shows that over the past 3 years, usage of smartphones has increased 27%. Additionally, roughly 13% of respondents in the study were planning to buy smartphone over the next 90 days.

According to ChangeWave, iPhone owners were most satisfied with their handsets followed closely by Android-based phones. Satisfaction rates drop significantly with other smartphones. Another common trait the iPhone and Android users have is that they share similar mobile content habits.

Written By: Sam Kim
Information Provided By: eMarketer

Subdomain Blog Post

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Although Pagerank is not available on the Google Toolbar, Google still ranks websites higher in their index if they have a higher Pagerank. It would benefit your website greatly within the search engines if all of the pages within your site’s directory contained high Pageranks so that each page is ranked higher for the keywords they possess, but this is hard to come by.

Normally, the homepage of your website is usually the page with the highest Pagerank because when online users share and link to your site (link-building), they are linking to your homepage’s url the majority of the time, rather than the subpages’ directory urls of your site. This makes your homepage more visible in search engines leading to higher traffic over the rest of the pages your site contains. Many ask the question: In theory, would it benefit my website’s subpages, and their Pagerank, if they had their own subdomains rather than using their current directory urls?

A change for a subpage’s directory url to a subdomain would look like this:

WebitMD’s current blog directory url is http://www.webitmd.com/blog

If we changed the blog’s directory url to make it a subdomain, some examples would look like this:

http://www.blog.webitmd.com/ or http://www.webitmdblog.com

By changing your subpages’ directory urls to their own subdomains, this would allow those that share and link to your site’s content to drive straight traffic to your subpages thus increasing their Pagerank individually. This is because Google looks at subdomains as individual websites themselves. This in turn, will allow visitors to come across these subpages more often in the organic results of search engines.

Is this strategy worth pursuing on your site? In theory, yes and no.

If we look at the basic rules of SEO, fresh and interesting content is key! If you have a website that has subpages where you often update and provide interesting content for the online audience, this subdomain strategy can help tremendously provided that people are linking to your subpages and the content is rich in SEO text. For those pages that are not updated very often, this would be a waste of time.

It is important to note that if you do pursue this strategy, you may experience an initial drop in Pagerank when you first create the new subdomains from your original homepage at first, but provided you stick by the smart rules of SEO, you may end up with three or four websites with high rankings instead of just one. This is certainly worth the time!

Information Provided By: Entrepreneur’s Journey
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

What is the Google Honeymoon?

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When a new website is initially released on the internet, Google may give it a high rank in the Google search index. Usually this is between 24 and 48 hours after production. On average, the page will rank particularly high, then it will drop back to whatever is normal for the website.

One theory, calling this period the “honeymoon,” suggests that Google initially ranks new pages high, so that it can collect data on how relevant the page is for particular keywords. “If during the honeymoon your pages are clicked often and the visitor hangs around for a while (doesn’t click back and choose another option from the search results) then your drop after the honeymoon isn’t significant. The logic being that your page offers a good answer to the question being asked. If your page doesn’t get many clicks or people don’t stay around then after the honeymoon you can expect your page to drop further in the index.”

It is always exciting to see your website rank well on Google’s search index, but keep in mind that once a few weeks have passed, the site may drop back to its real position.

Information Provided by: Entrepreneurs-journey.com

Written by: Samantha J. Stephan

How To Get a New Site Listed in Search Engines

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It may be a shock to Internet-newcomers, but getting a brand new site picked up by search engines is NOT easy. Search engine discovery is based on several aspects of web design, site age, and Internet knowledge. Experienced Internet users are able to link their new sites to their older sites so that Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search can discover them quickly. What do you do to get a site indexed if you don’t have any existing sites established?

How Search Engines Work
Understanding the mechanics behind search engines is crucial knowledge to have in today’s world. “In order for your website to show up in a search result your pages must exist in the search engine’s index. Each search engine has an absolutely massive index and it’s constantly updated every minute of every day. The search engines have what are called bots or crawlers or spiders, basically computers that ‘pretend’ to be browsers surfing the web devouring content like hungry monsters. Their job is to make sure the search engines have the most up to date index of web pages possible so that when a person uses a search engine they get the most relevant response available.”

Now the goal is to get the spider to crawl your page. How do you accomplish that goal?

Directories
Submitting your site to a directory is a great way to get links heading your way. Directories exist to simply list websites, usually broken down by category. All you need to do is fill out a form and depending on whether submissions are manually or automatically approved, your link will show up in the directory with a period of time, usually 24 hours.

The problem with directories is they are essentially link farms, no content and lots of outbound links. Consequently they usually have very little clout in the search engines and since your link is sitting in amongst possibly thousands of other links the little search engine spiders may never find your site.

Leave a Thought on a Blog, Forum, or Bulletin Board
This strategy is good, but delicate. You would never want to just leave your website name on a comment just for that purpose- you need to put down some contributing information as well. If your website is listed alone in a comment it is considered SPAM. This is because people will most likely end up deleting your comment, even if you think the link to your site is valuable.

“The best way to go about this is to have a signature file (most forums have a function for this) that allows a few lines of self-promotion to be included at the end of your posts. Enter the community, get involved in the discussion and contribute. Now obviously you will have more knowledge to draw from if you pick communities based on topics you are familiar with and preferably are relevant to your site. Not only do you improve your chance of search engine spiders finding your site, you might get some real humans clicking your signature and visiting your site as a bonus (this is in fact a good general online marketing strategy to get more traffic to your site).”

Beware of the NoFollow tag default set on blogs. This tag will not let the Google spider crawl your content.

Another alternative is to start your own blog. This does require more work, but if your content is good then other bloggers may post their links to you. Then, you can build a network around yourself allowing the Google spider to crawl right onto your site. When writing your own blog, you also have the option of linking pages from your website- for example “About Us” can be linked to your name and go to the About Us page on your website.

Press Releases
“This technique is easy enough to implement but faces the same issues as directories because so many people make use of it you may get lost in the crowd. You can go to a site like PRWeb, submit your press release about the news of your new website launch and they will publish it for journalists to make use of. A good press release may even circulate all over the Internet but at worst you will be at least published on PRWeb (there are others PR sites out there – try a search for “press release distribution” or similar).”

Google Sitemaps
Google provides a sitemap submission system that gives you the tools to directly communicate with Google to let the search engine know when your site updates and ensures your entire site is indexed.

Link Love and Paying for Links
“Link love is a relatively easy thing to be on the receiving end of. You have probably heard of the favor bank, the social currency of our world. You can open an account with almost anyone by making a deposit by simply doing them a favor. Maybe you’re really good at graphic design so you can create a logo, or perhaps you’re an accountant so you can offer tax advice. You can then make a withdrawal by asking for a link to your website. Favor currency flows quite freely and can easily be accrued by doing good deeds.”

Conclusion
Getting a brand new site indexed and listed on search engines is just the beginning of Search Engine Optimization. Trying to raise your site from the very bottom of the index to the top result for key terms is a long process but this step should not concern you. Some things you just have to learn as you go.

Information Provided by: Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Written by: Samantha J. Stephan

File Naming Structure in URLs for SEO

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One of the simplest ways you can improve your search engine optimization is to actually see what you named your files on your website or blog posts. You want to send your visitors to the pages of what they are actually searching for on your site and by offering keywords in the links to those pages; it will not only help them find it, but also offer more keywords for SEO.

Here is an example:
A tennis ball company offers these current links to sell their Slazenger, Wimbledon, and Wilson tennis balls in their online store:

www.bigballsintennis.com/product1
www.bigballsintennis.com/product2
www.bigballsintennis.com/product3

This is only telling the search engines that you sell products, not tennis balls. Use keywords for those specific products so that these items are more visible to your customers

Here is what they should look like:

www.bigballsintennis.com/slazenger-tennis-balls
www.bigballsintennis.com/wimbledon-tennis-balls
www.bigballsintennis.com/wilson-tennis-balls

Information Provided by: www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
Written by: Kent Seiders

Top 5 SEO Tips for Improving your Website

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You might think that the most attractive and eye-catching websites available online are the most popular to visitors. Although the aesthetic your site is important, search engines and unique visitors favor sites where the quality of layout and content of your pages is very high. By keeping your site simple, with informative and interesting content, you can increase your SEO significantly and can keep visitors on your pages longer.

Here are the top 5 tips for making your website more search engine friendly while making it more accessible for its users:

1. Improve the layout of your webpage. You want to make sure your homepage is clear and in a simple layout. You should make all of your links and navigation tools easy to find showing visitors, at a first glance, where they can go and how to find out what they are looking for. Make sure to use bullets, tables, bars, white spaces, and margins appropriately to make your website seems less cluttered. Always put your most important information at the top of the webpage so your visitors can see it without scrolling and your paragraphs should be less than 100 words for easy scans of the content.

2. Keep your webpage short in length. Physically longer websites take more time to load and also require your visitors to scroll for your information. Allow your visitors to find what they are looking for on your site without scrolling if possible. If scrolling does become necessary, make sure you add easy navigation buttons to enable visitors to jump directly to all of your pages. Recommendations include: keeping your pages fewer than 32K and making sure your pages load within 8-10 seconds.

3. Keep navigation tools a priority. Navigation tools should be located in plain sight and on top of your webpage. Navigation links should be on every page and should always provide an easy link back to your homepage. If you do have a complex website, make sure to add a search function at the top of the site.

4. Keep your fonts simple! Having fonts on your site that are too complex, too large or too small for your visitors will just make it more difficult for them to read. Fonts that are great to use are default fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana because they are legible and load on any computer, anywhere. Making sure font colors, styles, and backgrounds are clear for your visitors is essential. Use underlining and bold texts to highlight the more important texts on your site.

5. Improve your site’s content. Your content should be informative but with some uniqueness to keep visitors interested. Avoid grammatical and spelling mistakes and offer many hyperlinks to allow your visitors to pursue a topic in more detail. Search engines scan your content so keep it in plain text and offer a variety of topics concerning your website’s goals.

These tips can help take your existing website and make it more user-friendly. Visitors and search engines are more concerned about the content your site offers and how to navigate through the content rather than how attractive it is. So, it is important to utilize these tips and keep your site consistent throughout.

Content provided by: www.emarketer.com
Blog Post written by: Kent Seiders

Effective Internet Marketing Tactics

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There are many strategies that your business could engage in within the Internet Marketing arena. Marketing on the web in ever-changing and within the last 3-5 years has progressed rapidly.

How does your company make a decision on the best strategy with the most profitable ROI in your industry?

The answer to this question is quite complex and should be looked at in-depth by your marketing departments and a certified eMarketing consultant as well. The best strategy for your business could be a single tactic or a combination of a few. For most of our clients a combination of strategies seem to be the best method to gain targeted traffic as well as build credibility with the search engines. The initial on-page SEO optimization is generally the first stage followed by local search optimization and social media as well. The latter of the tactics include back-end web development and email marketing and brand identity campaigns. Each business is different as well as the internet marketing strategies that reflect that business sector.

Small businesses are generally ones that I encounter with weaker internet presence and require a long term strategies. Larger corporations typically have more developed websites yet still require internet marketing to keep up with their competition. If you are a small business, gaining presence on the internet could solely be the most important marketing push you make this year.

The facts and figures behind the rise in Internet Marketing tactics and social media users is astonishing….Do not miss the opportunity for your business to be a part of it.

-Mattan Danino

SEO Best Practices 2008….Were you following them?

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Here are a list of Best SEO Marketing Practices from this past year. How can you tell if your site is up to par with current SEO best practices?

You may not answer “Yes” to all these question but the more “Yes” answers the better.

Lets run through the list:

  • Are the keywords you’re targeting relevant to site content?
  • Are targeted keywords popular phrases used in search engine queries?
  • Do page titles start with your targeted keywords?
  • Does your site employ H1 header tags for prominent content titles?
  • Is your permanent body copy contextually sufficient and keyword-rich?
  • Do text links include targeted keywords that point users to pages within your site?
  • Do you use CSS image replacement in graphical navigation on the site?
  • Do graphics used in the site have descriptive, keyword-rich alternative attributes that are useful for visitors?
  • Does your Web site have a site map with text links?
  • Do the URLs of your dynamic, database-driven pages look simple and static?
  • Does your site have a flat directory structure?
  • Do your site’s home page and other key category pages have PageRanks?
  • Is your site listed in Open Directory?
  • Do you routinely list your site in other trusted, human-reviewed online directories?
  • Do all the pages in your Web site have keyword-rich meta descriptions?
  • Does your site have a custom error page?
  • Do the site’s filenames and directory names include targeted keywords?
  • Does your site avoid using pop-ups?
  • Is the exact same content visible to both users and search engine spiders?
  • Do you avoid free-for-all linking offers?

WebitMD advises clients to always be weary of those companies and freelancers that seem to “guarantee” placement or rankings and very often cease to deliver. I have heard dozens of horror stories and throw away marketing budgets because of this.

Stick with a trustworthy and local source for your Internet marketing needs….go with WebitMD!