Don’t Forget the Low Hanging Fruit in SEO Search engine optimizers and SEO clients alike tend to often fall into a daydream state coveting the attainment of the first place ranking for their industry’s top keyword(s). You should in fact wish for this, and no doubt work for it. The problem is that many wear proverbial “blinders”, dead set on the single keyword obsession. While you plan and work toward long-term SEO goals, which is fine, you should take notice that you may have several low-hanging opportunities helping to drive short-term success as you plug away at those top terms. Where to Go and What to Do Start by logging into your Google Analytics program. Export a list of the top 10 or 25 pages to have handy. It also makes life a little easier to filter out branded traffic as we only want to look at non-branded traffic in this example. Take this list of 50 keywords or so and either manually assess rankings or generate a ranking report in Google and Bing. Pay Attention to the Small Things
Teenage Prodigy Wins Intel Award for 'Micro Searches' Seventeen-year-old prodigy Nicholas Schiefer won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award in the category of computer science for his idea of a search engine algorithm that does "micro searches." Basically this type of search grabs data from obscure social media sources like Facebook posts, tweets and other small bits of data to provide more robust searches. It's no secret that there many young entrepreneurs in the tech and social media space. Mark Zuckerberg created the first version of Facebook in his Harvard dorm room at age 19. The blog Dvice posted another video interview with Schiefer. The key part of the algorithm he developed, he said in the video, was something called a Markov chain. "The crux of my technique was to try and identify statistical relationships between words and use those to get better search results," he said. Maybe one day we'll see him manning Google.
A 6 Step Process for Keyword Research Any good SEO campaign starts with proper keyword identification and categorization. Clients often ask how many keywords they should try to rank for. There is no “right” answer to this question. Here is a basic strategy for how you can approach keyword research. 1. Identify a comprehensive list of words that are relevant to your business and that indicate that the searcher may be interested in your content. 2. Use the Google Keyword Tool (along with tools like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery if you have access) to expand the seed word list and to understand relative search volumes of all your keywords. Keep in mind that Google's projected search volumes are typically not accurate and are really only useful in comparing the relative popularity of one word to another. 3. Your new expanded list is your "keyword universe." These are the keywords that you will want to track rankings for as a general barometer of health. 4. 5. 6.
Google starts to integrate Google+ with search results Google is taking another step in integrated personalized content into its market leading Web search offering, announcing three new features—Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and People and Pages—as part of a new search configuration called Search plus Your World. Expanding on search personalization features the company originally introduced back in 2009, the idea behind Search plus Your World is to pull information from users Google+ profiles, circles, posts, photos, and more and present them alongside general Web search results when appropriate, as deemed by Google’s sophisticated matching algorithms. What’s more, Google says users will have full control over what information is and is not available for others to search, as well as control over how their search results are personalized. “Search is still limited to a universe of Web pages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met,” wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal.
3 Ways to Use Social Media to Improve Your Search Rankings Are you happy with the traffic coming to your blog or website? Have you kept up with the changes in search engine optimization (SEO)? This is essential for most businesses today. Keep reading to learn how Google changes are making social media more important and what you can do about it. Recent Google Changes Put Spotlight on Social Media On April 24, 2012, webmasters around the world were dinged by the Google “Penguin” update—one of the latest in a series of algorithm modifications designed to weed out low-value results from the natural search engine results page (SERPs). Google's Penguin algorithm update was a recent search engine change designed to eliminate spam from the natural search results. The Google Penguin update had three primary objectives to minimize the SEO impact of the following web marketing elements: Low-quality and manufactured website backlinksOn-page over-optimization“Black hat” (or illicit) SEO techniques #1: Use Social Networks to Generate Strong Content Ideas
Search, plus Your World Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. This is search that truly knows me, and gives me a result page that only I can see. Profiles in Search Every day, there are hundreds of millions of searches for people. Now, typing just the first few letters of your friend’s name brings up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete.
9 Ways to Completely Sabotage Your Global SEO Strategy We all know there are many different strategies and tactics that can factor into generating more traffic to your website. And there are even more to consider if your business targets an audience that spans multiple countries, because you'll need to create a global SEO strategy for your website, too! But going global can be a daunting task, and you may not know where to start. That's why we've created an international SEO guide compiling all the best tips international marketers should know. 1. Want to make your website sound like a complete idiot and undermine your company's credibility to an international audience? 2. You might have avoided setting up a .co.uk counterpart for your .com site for fear of Google deeming this as “duplicate content,” since there’s not much of a language difference. 3. According to Trimark Solutions, many webmasters will simply keep one single sitemap for their entire website, which is not nearly as efficient to maintain and update. 4. 5. 6. 7.
A Guide to SEO Salaries By Market [INFOGRAPHIC] Sometimes finding your dream job is like an Easter egg hunt: It's not only how you look for jobs, but also where you look for them. It seems like common sense, but in order to hedge your bets and ultimately nab a high-profile gig, it's all about location, location, location. This handy map, researched and developed by Onward Search ranks the cities where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) positions are most clustered and breaks down average salary ranges by rank, from entry-level to the big boss. It's unsurprising that the mantle for most available SEO gigs is New York City (with L.A. and San Francisco hot on its heels), but smaller markets like Atlanta are also willing to pay comparable salaries for top-notch talent. Are you hungry for a position in the SEO world? Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. Web Designer at Rodale in Emmaus, PASocial Media Coach at Socialbyte in Lake Zurich, Ill.Front End Developer (HTML) at Big Picture Group in Los Angeles
Are You A Strategic SEO Thinker? Today, I want you to think about how a set of search engine optimization recommendations may be perfect for one website while lacking or wrong for another. I want you to think about strategic decision making. We know there is more to Internet marketing than search engine optimization and there’s a lot more bells and whistles to choose from these days. How can you combine SEO knowledge with CMS features, design and technology? Time to don your thinking cap. For example, imagine that you sell a sole style of cut-off jean shorts, but in several colors. A domain with high authority may be capable of presenting search engines with a single page for Cut-Off Jean Shorts whereas a site with lower authority may be served better with separate pages for each color: Blue Cut-Off Jean Shorts, Purple Cut-Off Jean Shorts, Green Cut-Off Jean Shorts, etc. If your site is a major brand and enjoys a top-flight external link profile, one URL may be your best choice. What if you are unsure?
5 Google Paid Search Products You Need to Know Tessa Wegert | November 10, 2011 | 1 Comment inShare33 Google is nothing if not progressive, and for this reason many of the innovations made to AdWords warrant a closer look. For many digital marketers, the fall of 2011 might be remembered for bringing dynamic advertising to paid search. Google's newest offering, said to flip "the search engine on its head," does away with the traditional keyword advertising approach in lieu of matching landing pages with the right user search. Dynamic Search Ads is just one of dozens of innovations Google has made to its AdWords product over the past few years. Google Image Search. Google is infamous for experimenting with its AdWords products (not to mention giving them countless different names).
11 Content Optimization Techniques for Content Marketers Content optimization is getting trickier these days, as users’ behavior toward how they use the web tend to grow over time, plus the fact that a lot of web content providers on different niches are pushing out tons of “great content” in a steadily growing rate. This progression on web usage has allowed search engines to identify more data that they can use to assess webpages that should be ranking well on their search results (based on usability, social, authority and so many other factors). Miguel Salcido recently asked 17 experts on what on-site ranking factors they think are most important to optimize this year, which inspired me to write this post – and I also think that it’s worth checking out too. Anyway, content marketing is making a trend, proving its power as a very effective marketing tool that can tremendously grow a brand’s audience, following and customer base. Accurate Page Titles Use LSI keywords within the content Authorship Markup Length of Content Use of rich-media content