Posted April 8, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Yahoo is posting a series of “how-to” articles for social media on the company’s advertising blog. Interestingly enough, the subject of the latest edition is ” How to Dominate Search Results Through Social Media Sites ,” and the example Yahoo’s Laura Lippay points to as how to do it is Matt Cutts, who of course works for Yahoo’s chief rival, Google. Ironically, Lippay talked to us last summer about “the secret” to outranking your competitors: She looks at a sample of Yahoo’s search results for the query, “Matt Cutts”: “Not only does Matt’s own blog appear at the top of the page, but he also dominates the results with his likeness on several sites, including Wikipedia , Twitter , Blippy and Facebook .,” says Lippay. “Although not everyone can have their own page on Wikipedia, social networks like the ones that Cutts appears on are prime examples of how you can dominate search results for your name or brand .” “As websites gain search engines’ trust and rise in importance over time the way social networking sites like Facebook , LinkedIn and others have been doing, they tend to rank well in search results,” adds Laura. “Try creating (and maintaining when possible) profiles on other sites like MySpace , Squidoo , YouTube , Vimeo , Flickr or any number of social sites that make public profiles available to search engines. Search engines will often show image or video thumbnails from some of these sites in search results as well, which generally evokes more click-throughs. All of these pages with your name or your brand could end up in front of prospective clients or any searchers looking for you or your company. ” First of all, I’m not criticizing Lippay for pointing to how the employee of a rival is doing things right. Frankly, Cutts does make for a pretty good example of her point (Lippay herself also has a decent amount of profiles showing up in a search for her own name as well), and neither Google nore Yahoo is really in the business of SEO, so the the point is fairly moot. The post did lead me to compare the Yahoo results with Google’s results for “matt cutts” which may or may not have been intended. While it’s certainly a matter of opinion, I have to say, Yahoo actually provides the more relevant results in this particular example, which is interesting, considering the query is for a Google guy. Personalization features could possibly be involved, but I don’t see why they would keep a Facebook result out of the mix, especially considering I’m Facebook friends with Cutts. As a matter of fact, I wrote about a relevance issue I found with this exact query not too long ago – I found that when I searched for “matt cutts”, Google’s personalized results (the starred results feature in particular) were pushing down the more relevant results. Looking at the results for the query again, I’m not even seeing Matt’s Facebook profile. To Laura’s point about “trust and rise in importance” with regards to sites like Facebook (it recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in a week’s time , mind you), it’s interesting that his Facebook profile wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of the results. In fact, it’s not even in the first ten pages. On Yahoo it’s in the top 3 or 4. Granted, on Google, all I would have to do to find him on Facebook would be search for “Matt Cutts, Facebook profile”, but without the result in a search for just “matt cutts”, Google is telling me that this is more relevant, not to mention the starred results and all the rest.
Tags: business, cutts, employee, Matt Cutts, query, Relevance, Review and Story, Search, Search Engines, SEO, Social, starred, yahoo
Posted April 2, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub , which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology it its indexing process. Do you want your content indexed instantly?
Tags: complex project, Google Search, push, quality, quality content, recapped, Review and Story, Search Engines, SEO
Posted March 29, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Getting press coverage can mean a great deal for gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. That said, there are also ways to take some initiative yourself in getting some exposure from news search. News Search Optimization As Lisa Buyer of the Buyer Group talked about with WebProNews at SES last week, news search optimization is getting more powerful with social media and real-time search. Add these to older tactics like blogs and press releases, and there have never been more opportunities to get news-related content discovered. Press Releases Press releases can still be a great way to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines. Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us , involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn’t believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the “shelf life” of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic. “When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement,” the CEO of the company behind the case study had said.
Tags: case study, content, news search, Search, search engine, SEO, Social Search, space, web site traffic, Webpronews
Posted March 9, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click How important is your domain name to you brand? Most online businesses would probably consider it to be quite important, and with good reason. Sometimes before searching, customers may simply opt to go to the “yourbrandhere.com” URL simply because it makes sense. Now, sometimes that URL is already taken, and for start-ups, that’s something to consider in itself. As Monte Cahn, Founder and President of Moniker mentioned in a recent interview with WebProNews, it’s a good idea to make sure the domain name is available when coming up with a name for your brand, or at least make sure that you are able to acquire it. Products have their own brands, and this way of thinking can also be applied to them in many cases. Cahn notes that even the big companies make mistakes in this area. For example, you would expect Apple to own iPad.com, considering the huge announcement about the device the company made this year, but someone else has that domain. Cahn also stresses the importance of covering your brand in terms of domain names. This means getting all variations possible. Get typos, different extensions and country codes, etc. Use 301 redirects on misspells of key brands (including singular/plural versions). However, when it comes to domain names for different products, he says it’s best to build sub-sites around those with their own content, which can help drive link juice, SEO value, and traffic. Getting the .com that reflects your company name is not always possible, unfortunately. In these cases, it may serve you well to find a different aspect of your brand to center your domain around, but this will require a greater level of promotion of that URL than a simple companyname.com. For example, if there are unique key phrases within your company’s slogan, you may find such an opportunity there. Domains should be easy to remember, not too long, easy to spell, relevant to your brand, and avoid complicating characters such as hyphens. I think one key to a successful domain name is simplicity, although there are always exceptions to the rule.
Tags: cahn, different products, domain name, domain names, domains, importance, Monte Cahn, plural versions, SEO, sure-the-domain, the-importance, traffic, way of thinking
Posted March 8, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Has it ever occurred to you that you may have keywords on your site that are misleading to search engines? Or that you need to take a look at all of the keywords you are trying to rank for, and think about the different meanings and contexts that those could be taken in that are unrelated to your actual product, and then eliminate other seemingly unrelated words that to a search engine could be misconstrued as an indication of one of those other contexts? At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc . who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research. Note: We talked to Bruce about quite a few search-related topics, but this subject is focused on more toward the end of the video (about 20 minutes in). Clay talks about Google delivering more personalization in search results, taking into consideration things like how prior queries influence future queries. “Ranking is going to be less of a measurement,” he says. “We’re going to be focused on more the traffic.” “When I decide I’m selling a hammer, I have to actively go out of my way not to have certain things appear in my site, because the search engines could be confused about what I’m talking about….I don’t mean the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. I don’t mean a bowling ball…you know, the things that show up for hammer are all over the board,” says Clay. “One of the things that I think is important, and that we’ve been working on is how do we actually do keyword research without knowing the behavioral aspects our personas that are actually going for our product? You have to understand personas now a little bit better – what kinds of things are they likely to search on, in sequence – before they type in hammer…so if they’re on an arts and crafts site, and then they type in hammer, I ought to understand that behavior in sequence, so that I can better do my keyword research and determine how I’m gonna put the words on my page. I don’t see a lot of people even thinking that way.” Personalized search is nothing new. Google’s been personalizing search results for some time, based on various indicators, and it appears that Google is looking for more ways to deliver users a personalized experience ( whether they want that or not ). Between personalized search and other sources of information infiltrating search results pages, traditional SEO is becoming harder to accomplish, and Bruce says, even ineffective. That’s why it may become increasingly important to focus on relevant elements of the SERP for queries you hope to be found for.
Tags: behavioral aspects, Bruce Clay, Internet Marketing, internet marketing firm, little bit, queries, search engine, SEO, ucla, video