A Sneak Peek into the Google Ranking Algorithm

What I find amusing is that the vast majority of users, in addition to folks right here in our search industry have not the slightest idea just how often Google makes alterations to their search algorithm. What I also find interesting is how often people discuss those “Major” changes Google introduces without actually taking a step back and thinking, “well, there has got to be some sort of testing involved before they roll out with that Super Duper major change”. This is where the SEO or professional seo company MUST be at the TOP of his or her game. Search Marketers need to constantly be forecasting, thinking, preparing for what Google is going to come out with next. In this industry, it only takes a split second, a quick change by Google to throw you or client’s website rankings out of whack.

Whether it’s a change to its search algorithm, tools or other platforms Google currently operates, we seldom think about what all happens on the back-end to make these changes possible. With that being said, I recently found a short video Google released that gives users a closer look into the thought processes and types of components that go into improving the quality of their search result, the future of search and the future of Google. Improve user experience by creating an ambiance for the user, whether that be a website or a search engine, and it’s a win-win for everyone.

As the internet continues to grow and evolve each day, search gets more personalized. Users always have a choice of which website or search engine to use and this is what keeps the web a powerful arena for marketing any particular product or service offering.

Work together with Google and the sky is the limit. Very Cool… Enjoy!

Thanks for reading ~ JAWS

Google Offers To Re-Write Your Webpages On The Fly, Promising 25% To 60% Speed Improvements

In our quest for top search engine rankings, speed is everything, at least according to Google…

Google has long been obsessed with speed. It’s paramount in pretty much everything they do. Which is why the launch of Google+ with some — gasp — attention paid to design is even more surprising. But a new service Google is launching this evening very much puts the focus back on speed — an obsessive amount of focus, one might say.

Page Speed Service is the latest tool in Google’s arsenal to help speed up the web. This service is also their most ambitious yet. When you sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google, they’ll enable the tool which will fetch your content from your servers, rewrite your webpages, and serve them up from Google’s own servers around the world. Yes, you read all of that correctly.

Read more from our friends at Tech Crunch.

Reevaluating Your Company’s SEO and Emerging Data Strategy

When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), experienced marketers understand that change happens mainly due to the fact that the web is constantly changing. Because things are continuously evolving, it forces us to both rethink our strategy, as well as analyze our efforts with regards to website architecture and other technologies. With that being said, this change also directly affects the rules of SEO, which encompasses three interwoven components:

Infrastructure: Looking at the nuts and bolts of SEO at the core, there’s really no point in optimizing a website to contain your content if search engine spiders and other data crawlers can’t find it. The need for enhanced accessibility will advance tremendously as technology vendors come to the realization that sales will decline if processes and/or services aren’t more search engine friendly. SEO specialists tend to look at a site’s infrastructure first and foremost because 9 times out of 10 a website’s architecture is not up to date to reflect our target search terms (or Keywords). A site that doesn’t utilize keywords properly within these crucial components that Google uses to define or gauge relevance and expert authority for a website’s offerings, will simply not rank on the search engine indexes.

Popularity: Links, commonly referred to as ‘Back-links’, Inbound links, one-way links, or whatever you want to call them have factored into search engine algorithms BIG TIME in recent years. This has prompted or spawned an entirely new breed of opportunistic paid linking methods including link farming (or link-filled pages).

More than ever it seems that Social Media has entered into our lives and has impacted both our personal and professional lives offering up more and more opportunities for search. This hasn’t always been the case as search engines initially did not give social media much thought when considering it as a ranking factor. Moreover, links on websites such as Wikipedia didn’t count, and neither did all those Twitter and Facebook posts.

The leader of Google’s Web-spam team and unofficial spokesperson, Matt Cutts revealed the later part of last year that the search engine have now begun to include a limited amount of social links in its search rankings, those social sites and profiles that are accessible to the public and can be crawled by data crawlers. According to Bing, the search engine is now also taking into account how often a link is tweeted and retweeted to determine ranking and placement in the search results.

Content: Of course, content is still the “king” of search as you’ve probably heard this statement countless times all across media publications, discussions and conferences. Well, it’s true. Whether it’s for the search engines, encouraging people to link (link bait) or tweet; both people and the search engines care if the content is unique, useful, interesting, and exciting. This critical element has changed significantly because content that is valuable to someone, will get linked to, shared, tweeted or posted to it.

Marketers should be conscious of the types of content that is shared and spread socially throughout the web. Companies could be heavily scrutinized by the types of content they are posting and sharing. No doubt about it, Social Media has developed out into more of a significant measurement for search engine algorithms. In today’s world, not having a company blog, Twitter account or Facebook page is not only a missed opportunity to gain better search engine rankings, but also missed opportunities to connect with potential customers and sell more of your company’s offerings! In the words of Nike: “Just Do It.” It doesn’t matter how much emerging media changes or how technology evolves, our behavior and SEO continues to surround content and how effectively we’re communicating our message to our target audience. If we think it’s good, share it, allow customers to interact with it, most importantly let the search engines find it. The more informative content you have on your products and services the more customers and the better rankings you’ll achieve.

Thanks for Reading!

The Adventure Continues…

Understanding Behavioral Search and Ranking

Search Engines use a technique called behavioral search to customize a results page based on the users previous search behavior. Behavioral targeting tracks the searches you’ve run and adjusts new search results to include listings the search engine assumes will interest you. Behavioral targeting doesn’t replace all of the results you’d normally get with a regular search, but it may throw in a few extra ones it thinks would be useful to you.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes your search results differ from another person’s search results – even when you both type the same query into the same search engine? This is a scenario that is becoming more and more common.

Search engines can individually customize search results based on the users:

• Recent search behavior
• Location
• Web History
• Demographic Information
• Community

The major search engines use more than just keyword rankings to determine the order of results. Remember, they’re trying to deliver the most relevant listings possible for every search. As a result, they’ve recently started taking this down to the individual-user level. With behavioral search and personalization, results revolve around users, not a single boiler plate algorithm.

Behavioral targeting particularly affects the paid results you see (that is ads or sponsored links that site owners have paid the search engine to display on results pages, based on keywords). For instance, if you run a search for [surfboards] followed by a search for [surfing], the search engine throws a few extra paid results for surf-related products at the top or sides of the page. (Note that this kind of advanced targeting costs advertisers a pretty penny; the surf sites might get charged double when a user clicks their behavioral-targeting-enhanced listing, compared to their standard pay-per-click rate.

IMPORTANT – The organic results (non-paid listings that display on results pages) also may show slightly different listings or listings in an altered order. Even if you’re not logged in, the data for your search history may influence your search engine results, compared to the search results you would see if you were a new user searching for [surfing]. Your previous search for [surfboards] influenced the search engine to assume [surfing] as in riding waves, rather than the actual accessory to ride those waves.

Thanks So Much For Reading!

~JAWS

Get Yourself Organized!

Or Better Put, ORGANIZE YOUR ASSETS…

Creating a Website is almost like baking cookies. You’ve gotta have all of your ingredients for the recipe before you even get started; otherwise, you could be in the middle of mixing chaos only to find out that you don’t have eggs or sugar (which happen to be two vital ingredients to baking delicious cookies). With that said, there are certain steps to ensure that you have everything ready before you begin. If you’re in the process of starting a website, it’s crucial  to organize your assets. What’s going to go on our website, content, pictures, etc? Sift through everything that you have. Remember, users love dynamite content, but you must also have readable, well written text in addition to that fantastic video and images. The goal is to enhance the user’s interest and engagement, allowing them to spend a good amount of time on your website.

Go through all of your print materials, if you happen to have any white-papers or other useful info, choose images and resources you can use on your site that are interesting… If there’s something you don’t think will WOW, the user, chuck-it (I’M SAVING YOU TIME), clutter will always be clutter. Two words; eye-popping and useful are the two key ingredients you’re going to need for your website content. Engagement objects like fun images, videos and interactive elements like apps and social media type files are great to have on your site and should be housed in one file on your computer so you have easy access to them when you need to add them to your site.

Naming Your Files

After you’ve pulled the most outstanding content for your website and have figured out where you’re going to put it, you’re going to need to name each asset as you’re uploading them. ***TIP*** How you name your files is important because a search engine spider actually looks at the filename as an indication of what’s actually in the file. This is another good place to have your keywords, USE THEM!

Instead of naming your image of a Red Guitar like this:

*0047002.jpg

Rename the file and ‘SAVE AS’ your uploading to describe it, something along the lines of:

* Red Fender Guitar.jpg

Like I said, USE YOUR KEYWORDS. Not only is the file now easier for you to identify when building your pages, but it also now contains a couple of great keywords you’re potentially targeting on your site. The search engines will now pick these keywords up and read them, adding them to their algorithms for ranking.

USE filenames that make sense for both the user and the search engines. You might understand the gibberish you just used as a filename, but someone else who doesn’t know you or your sense of humor might not. Also, use full words instead of abbreviations. Searchers don’t generally use abbreviations in their search patterns unless a product or service is very uncommon. Same goes for videos or podcasts. Make sure that the file name is descriptive and simple, in the long run it will help both you and search engine.

When naming your files with phrases, don’t leave spaces between words. Nor should you use an underscore (_) to separate words. Search engines interpret the underscore as it own character, so it’s like naming your file Redxfenderxguitar, which misses an opportunity to use your keywords when a search engine spiders your data. Instead, if you have to use spaces (remember, the search engines can parse words from web page filenames without any help), use periods or hypens. They won’t be read as a separate character. That way, you can have files that look like this:

limited.edition.red.fender.guitar.jpg

or

limited-edition-red-fender-guitar.jpg

Something to keep in mind; even without spaces, periods, or hypens in your filenames, a search engine can actually parse out up to 500 words that are concatenated (run together with spaces). You might want to use hyphens in places where there could be confusion in the parsing, either for a search engine spider or for the user. In those cases, you might want to throw in a dash or some periods in order to make it legible. For example, the distinction between womensexchange.jpg and womens-exchange.jpg is important!

Thanks For Reading!

The Adventure Continues>>>

~ JAWS

Deep Linking = Great Search Engine Rankings!

Throughout my SEO Adventures I have talked about linking and
how it can help to boost your search engine rankings.

If you have a well optimized website, linking will be the
single most IMPORTANT factor that will affect your rankings.

Today I want to talk about deep linking.

If you don’t know what deep linking is, don’t worry – a
deep link is simply a link to a page on your website that
is NOT your home page. A deep link can be a link to your
blog, a blog post, a product page, or any other sub page on
your website.

Most people concentrate on getting links to their home page,
but if you can spend some time getting deep links too, this
will really help to improve your search engine rank and it
will increase traffic to other pages on your site.

Here are some ways that you can get deep links:

(1) Use social bookmarking services to bookmark internal
pages or blog posts on your website. Many bookmarking
services will provide you with a do follow link back to your
site and you can easily bookmark a page to multiple services
at the same time by using a service such as OnlyWire.com

(2) Link Internally (Hot Linking) within your site or blog – make sure you
have a good navigation system within your website. This can
include site menus and also linking back to internal pages
from your home page or from other pages and blog posts where
relevant.

(3) Include a deep link in your author resource box when
distributing articles. It is good to include 2 or 3 links in the
author resource box when distributing an article. I usually
include a link to my home page + one or two deep links to
internal pages on my website. If you’re only using your site URL,

you’re missing the chance to gain great back-links to your site.

(4) Use deep linking in your blog comments. When you leave a
comment on someone’s blog consider using a deep link rather
than your home page link. It may be appropriate here to leave
a link to your blog or a relevant blog post.

(5) Use deep links in forums. Most links allow you to embed
one or more links to your website in your forum signature..

You don’t have to link directly to your home page – you
could link to another relevant internal page on your website.
You could also include a link to a relevant page in a forum
post, but be careful not to spam.

(6) Paid Directory Submissions – some directories allow you
to include deep links. However, these are usually restricted
to paid submissions.

If you incorporate some of these techniques into your
overall link building campaign, this will help to make your
links look natural to the search engines AND boost the
overall traffic to your website.

Thanks For Reading!

~JAWS

Bing and Beautiful!

During last week’s launch of the themed IE9 browser in beta , Bing provides an insight to some of the new features that will be made available in their browser via HTML5 — dubbing it a “more beautiful search experience.”

In their Blog, Bing demoed features like an animated home page that shows full motion images, smoother transitions between query and the delivery of search results, in addition to larger image and video previews. COOL!  Here’s a quick preview of what’s to come with the new Bing experience on IE9.

With features being available later this month on a demo site, Bing promises to enhance your searching experience with a more beautiful and innovative visual effect. With the recent search alliance of Bing and Yahoo, it is now important more than ever to keep your eye on Bing and what they are doing to provide the user with newer, refreshing quality, innovation, and relevance.

Thanks For Visiting!

~ JAWS

Knowing Your Competition

With any type of business, there’s a need to know who’s out there and how you compare. Having an idea of who your competition is, in addition to finding out how to beat them on various levels is just good old fashion business planning. With the world moving online at ‘light-speeds’, online business goes hand in hand with traditional (brick and mortar style) business, there are some similarities and some slight differences.  You need to build a competitive strategy, especially when it comes to search engine optimization if you want to appeal to the potential millions of people looking for your products or services online.

In regards to a strategy, the key is figuring out who your competitors are and how to make their strengths and weaknesses work for YOU. The approach is figuring out how exactly you’re going to research your competitors and how you’re going to beat them for those coveted top search engine rankings. Also, your competition in the brick and mortar world might not be the same as your competitors online. Finally, it’s one thing to know your competition; it’s another to put that information to use. Not to worry: We’ve got you covered in this post.

With any business, you’re going to want to feel out the market. Who exactly are you competing with, and are they successful? All this is important information because it can then be used to give you an idea of how to run your own business. If a business is succeeding in your vertical, they must be doing something right. Another dynamite tip is then figuring out what these competitors are doing wrong so you can capitalize on what they aren’t doing, in the meantime avoiding their mistakes.

Say your business, ‘Wilcox’s Boat Repair’ is all about boats. You repair, restore, paint, and refurbish small, medium and sometimes large boats. To get an idea of who your competition is, sit down and brainstorm the types of competitors you think would be in your marketplace. Who are your competitors? Other boat repair shops. Other places that specialize in paint and body work. Other businesses that offer other simple boat repair services. Write every single idea you can think of, even the ones you think would only be slightly connected.

Below is a graph of your business and what you do that links your competitors to you.

Now your mission is to go and research all of these companies, while asking yourself some questions about these areas of your business.

-        Tactics – How do these companies advertise?

-        Similarities – What services do these companies provide that are similar to yours?

-        Differences – How do their services differ from yours?

-        Success Rate – How is their businesses doing, do they get more or less business than you do?

-        Opportunities – What types of things are these companies NOT doing that you could be doing?

For now this a good start to your market research. Remember to keep in mind that you need to continuously research your competition, as businesses, and specifically internet businesses, are subject to changing their products, services and overall offerings. Every market and industry vertical differs, and you’re probably going to want to do a review of your competitors and research your industry at least once a quarter so you’re on the cutting edge for your particular products and services.

Thanks For Reading!

The Adventure Continues>>>

STOP! Google’s Stop Words – Making Sure You Know When To Use Them

Google’s Search Engine is highly intelligent; its search algorithm is incredibly gifted in bringing back the most relevant answer and correct information for any question or query that is asked of it. With that said, there are certain common words that the Google Search Box ignores when someone conducts a search. Words such as “where” and “how”, as well as some certain single digits are just a few elements that Google has removed in streamlining their process of efficient search. It’s an official FAQ Google States, “these terms rarely help narrow a search and can slow search results.” Of course, the main reason such words are not indexed is because doing so would massively increase the Google index (at great computing costs and with limited user benefit).

These Stop Words include (but are not limited to) i, a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, how, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, what, when, where, who, will, with.

Google is in fact so efficient at recognizing stop words that they take it a step further and are able to count stop words when used in a Brand Name, Title of a Song or Movie, etc. So, for example, a search for The Fixx will NOT be ignored and will be processed as is, returning results for the well-known 80s ‘New-Wave’ Band.

Bottom line, if a search engine had to scan EVERY single word in say 600,000 documents to find ALL mentions of the words you’re looking for, the process would take hours. The purpose of using an index and specifically ‘Stop Words’ gives Google the speed and efficiency to bring back your relevant search results in a snap so that you’re not having to wait years to get relative information.

Thanks for Reading>>>

~ JAWS

The Beautiful World of Video Optimization

In the world of video marketing, it is essential to tag your videos accordingly in order to make them easier to find in the search engines; something we SEO’s call ‘Video Optimization.’ This day in age everyone is looking at videos and uploading videos. Whether your video usage is for educational purposes or merely just for fun, proper video tagging will ensure that all your uploaded videos can easily be found both by the search engines and people who have searched them using certain keywords.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords! Not only does crucial keyword research play an integral part in the world of internet marketing when people search for your products and services online, but keywords will also assist in the branding of your business. So, in regards to video optimization and video marketing to promote you business, I can’t tell you right now, it’s important to pin the right tags to your videos.

Online video optimization has been proven to increase the traffic to your website by offering the search engines another entry point to your website in addition to giving users something they can watch. Like I said before, people love videos, they love T.V., and they love media. Video optimization and search engine optimization are comparable in the fact that Meta tagging a website is similar to tagging videos. There are still Title and Description tags that need to be strategically created using keywords so that your video can easily be discovered through search engines and people typing in keywords looking to find you.

Speaking of Videos – Animoto.com Rocks, Check out this Cool Video!!!

http://vodpod.com/watch/4211297-search-marketing

Both the title and description are used by both the search engines and users to understand what the video is about. The title tag (the most heavily weighted tag by the Search Engines) of the video is used as the headline of the video that you have uploaded; Make it your number one priority to come up with a good one! Moreover, your title should also include keywords that are frequently searched within your particular industry vertical. When deciding on the fitting title, you should think of a title that will largely represent your video. The title itself should give the viewer an idea of the video that you have uploaded. Furthermore, the title shouldn’t be too long because it will get cut off and not show the entire headline when listed in the search results.

In addition to the title, another vital tag for the video would be the description tag. The description tag should be easy to understand, concise and clear. Just like the title, it should not be too lengthy or long-winded and contain your most highly trafficked and pertinent keywords for your business.

Also, don’t forget about the video tag. The video tag consists of single word phrases that are regularly searched by people looking for things on the internet. This is similar to keywords and is only a collective of single words while the keywords themselves refer to phrases that are typically used to search for videos.

With that being said, make sure that you use the right keywords that are directly related to the content of your video. Do not and I repeat DO NOT “stuff” your tags with keyword phrases that are unnecessary because it might not become search engine friendly anymore, getting you penalized by the search engines. An important component to take away from this whole conversation is to keep everything simple, be patient in waiting for the results – with the right due diligence you should see your ranks improve within the search engine indexes sooner than later.