BusinessOnLine SEO Blog

Should I Trust Bing's Search Engine Results?

noreply@blogger.com (Benj Arriola) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:23:00 +0000

Bing has gone all out with it's marketing campaign, not only with online efforts, but also offline claiming itself to be the first decision engine, whatever that means. Before Microsoft came out with Bing, it was MSN Search, then Live Search and many people in the SEO field still believe their algorithm did not change significantly since live.com. In my opinion their algorithm does not even come close to the power of Google and Yahoo's search technology. This explains how beneficial the new business partnership of Bing and Yahoo is. Yahoo will have a wider reach, use more resources, and Bing will have a more powerful search engine and both increase their their combined search market share.

Let's do a quick search exercise on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search Results on Google for the words: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft:

Google Results for the keyword Google

Google Results for the keyword Yahoo

Google Results for the keyword Microsoft

Clearly results are relevant, complete, and has tons of information on each keyword searched. The same seems to be true on Yahoo.

Search Results on Yahoo for the words: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft:

Yahoo Results for the keyword Google

Yahoo Results for the keyword Yahoo

Yahoo Results for the keyword Microsoft

Both Google and Yahoo showed sitelinks which should be normal for a very popular company with a very large website. Now take a look at the result of Bing below. This makes me question Bing's credibility in giving search engine results as the results seems to be biased to Microsoft owned properties.

Search Results on Bing for the words: Google, Yahoo & Microsoft:

Bing Results for the keyword Google

Bing Results for the keyword Yahoo

Bing Results for the keyword Microsoft

Wow, Bing gives pages full of information about Microsoft, and they only give 1 entry for Yahoo and 1 entry for Google. With tons of properties of Google, I can imagine something else should be in there, Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, Blogger, or even just the tons of articles talking about Google. The same goes with Yahoo! Yahoo Mail & Yahoo Messenger are two very popular products that I am sure these are very keyword focused and has tons of links using the Yahoo keyword. If Bing cannot display them, it is either their algorithm really doesn't work or their results are skewed by hand.

Even less popular search engines such as Ask and Cuil are showing better results.

Ask Results for the Keyword Google

Ask Results for the Keyword Yahoo

Ask Results for the Keyword Microsoft

Cuil Results for the Keyword Google

Cuil Results for the Keyword Yahoo

Cuil Results for the Keyword Microsoft

Hat tip to an SEO friend of mine, web designer Alfredo Palconit, told me about this search on Bing result just yesterday showing that Bing seems to have skewed results. Thanks also to Sulumits Retsambew posted the result earlier.

MSN, then Live, now Bing - What do SEOs need to know?

noreply@blogger.com (Benj Arriola) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:12:00 +0000

Microsoft has remodeled their search engine over and over again. The Microsoft Network, or MSN whose origins started as an ISP and an online portal when Windows 95 was launched, grew into a search engine that was always trailing as the 3rd most used search engine behind Google and Yahoo in terms of search engine usage with the United States.

From MSN.com to Live.com and finally Bing.com, it is now branding itself as a "decision engine." Do they mean Bing has some unique decision algorithm in giving relevant results and that it can decide on what are the best sites for you to look at? Not really. It is a decision engine that gives you various types of results that may help you decide on what you are looking for. In my opinion this just sounds like Google Universal Search Results, they just gave it a new name (from Live to Bing) and slapped a full marketing campaign on various advertising mediums to spread the word of the Gospel of Bing everywhere.

Should I even care about Bing?

From daily SEO interactions with SEO friends working at an SEO firm, SEO friends on forums I interact with daily, to some SEO competitors who joined Sulumits Retsambew SEO Contest, a large percent of SEO professionals do not even care about Bing because they believe Google has the majority search usage worldwide. Based on some research data by comScore, last April 2009, Google websites receive about 8 times more search queries than Microsoft websites.

Is this the case forever? We cannot really say since Microsoft is really pushing their search engine in this all out marketing campaign for Bing. There are some sites showing Bing gaining in market share. As for the usage, several news sites and blogs are showing an increase in Bing search traffic but this can still be due to the campaign that makes everyone curious about Bing, thus everyone checks it out. In the end, it will still boil down to how pleased the search engine users are in being able to look for what they are searching for. So we still have yet to see in the next few months if Bing's traffic sticks, continues to increase or will drop again to being only the 3rd most used search engine again.

Going back to the question: should you even care about Bing? Well, if Bing is only 8.2% of all search queries, this can still be a big number. The US has 220 million Internet users and about 73% of those use search engines for shopping. That is an estimated 13 million people searching with Bing in the US. Still a large market to target. Ok, you can say my numbers are not accurate. My B2C Local Business Search data was from Nielsen back in September 2007, but even 50% of 13 million is still a significant amount of people using Bing.

I'm an SEO and what do I need to know about Bing?

Ok SEO people, what do we need to know? Since Live.com, we have been seeing Microsoft reach out to SEO people, when they came out with their own XML Sitemap submission area, with some basic top 5 backlink info, and making an MS Excel plugin for keyword research from Microsoft's AdCenter. Now with Bing, they have released a Bing webmaster guideline document for the SEO people that care about Bing.

Most SEO concepts are the same throughout search engines. Good SEO best practices are valid for most search engines. And in this 24 pages of information of Bing's webmaster guidelines, after reading all of it, I will try to sum it up into 3 key bullet points that may be unique to Bing:

Target Category Keywords that appear on the upper left of the SERPs. You want to make sure you appear on all of them that are good converting keywords for your business. People usually narrow down search results by adding in keyword modifiers and Bing suggest these, so that people do not have to think or type and may find it convenient to click. It is even placed on the top left sidebar where navigational menus people normally click on.

Optimize the Document Preview of your pages. All SEO people know that the Title tag and Meta description tag does not only help in the ranking process but if written well, these can be more compelling to click and increases CTR. Now aside from these two, Bing now has the Document preview which based on current observations it is pulling in the initial content found on the page. Thus, for your first few paragraphs, it would be ideal to write something very unique that compels users to click on.

Having your address and phone number which is a normal practice for Local SEO is a good thing since Document Preview will try to look for this information and place it in the preview window.
If you do not want this feature enabled, you can use the nopreview tag.
<meta name="robots" content="nopreview" />

Implement SEO Flash Best Practices. Bing has expressed their sophistication in this technology by specifically stating the following:
When titles and/or Meta descriptions don’t exist on an HTML page, at runtime Bing creates a best-effort caption from relevant external sources of reliable information to populate the caption with meaningful data for the searcher. Bing, in the effort to improve searcher experience and avoid empty captions, can even construct captions using keyword inbound link text from external, authoritative websites to help create basic captions where no publisher data exists.

Initially this sounds good. But sometimes any information based on other websites may give you a limited amount of control. Every business has enemies and sometimes even if the enemies are a minority, they can sometimes be the "noisiest" online and could be creating a significant amount of negative publicity for your business. You do not want Bing to show this information thus as a precautionary measure: always do Flash properly.

Everything else mentioned in their webmaster guideline whitepaper is all standard SEO best practices applicable to other search engines, such as good content, unique title tags and Meta tags, avoid duplicate content, etc.

So if you know SEO already these are the 3 main differences you might want to look at when optimizing for Bing.

Cli.gs URLs Hacked Forwarding to lansner.freedomblogging.com

noreply@blogger.com (Benj Arriola) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:16:00 +0000

Cli.gs, (Cligs) a URL shortening/forwarding service has been hacked where several users have been reporting their older created forwarders were all going to 1 single location. Below is a screenshot within the Cligs user interface displaying some older saved forwarded URLs in my own Cligs account.

All of which were now going to:

http://lansner.freedomblogging.com/2009/06/14/twitter-hashtag-conversations/25613/

And all had the title:

Hashtag? How to join those Twitter

In the early days of URL forwarding, probably the most widely used service was TinyURL which has served well for people that were sending links via email or instant messenger because sometimes long URLs with tons of parameters get cut off in the sending process by human error, or technical error.

When microblogging came out, and Twitter gained a lot of popularity, more URL shorterners started popping out because of the limited characters allowed in a microblog post which is usually 140 characters. One of the popular URL shorterners is Cligs and the value added service Cligs had over the others, was the free web analytics bundled together with the URL shorterner. One more benefit that many others also had was the custom folder name, and the changeable URLs.

I am not sure if the changeable URL was a good idea, but URLs can always change, link in changing a domain, changing a CMS platform, and you would not want to have dead-404-shortened-URLs. But once someone gets to exploit a security hole on Cligs, this can be a vulnerability of losing all your created forwarders and will be forwarder to some place else.

From an SEO point of view... if any of your forwarding URLs get's posted by one way or another on some other site that has good search engine friendly links, Cligs forwarders are actually 301 redirects, thus giving link value. So who ever hacked into Cligs, must have had this in mind to steal some links in the attempt to rank higher.

Now the question is who has done this? That we really don't know. Although we do now that http://lansner.freedomblogging.com is owned by real estate bloggers Jonathan Lasner and Jeff Collins. Could they be responsible for this? What are your thoughts?

My Free SEO Webinar About Measuring ROI from Organic Search

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:10:00 +0000

On May 5th I will be doing a free SEO webinar about measuing the ROI from Organic Search. This presentation is based on my SES presentation but will be much more in depth (I only had about 10 minutes to speak at SES, The webinar is close to an hour). Please follow this link to sign up. The presentation is Wednesday, May 5th, 2009.

Sorry I have been lagging on the search cycle series of articles (the Webinar is focused on measuring and optimizing around the search cycle), but work has been unbelievably busy. I hope to start again next week. In the mean time, please mark your calendars for May 5th and my free SEO Webinar from BusinessOnLine.

Catfish

Measuring the Search Cycle: How to Improve the ROI of Search

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:44:00 +0000

My recent presentation at Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York afforded me the opportunity to talk about:

The importance of measuring the right data from each step in the "search cycle" and then,...

Taking action based on that data.

Many people get caught up in metrics and measuring all kinds of things that don't drive any tactical optimization activities. In an ongoing SEO campaign, resources for continued optimization need to be prioritized based on analytics data, so as to maximize ROI. Therefore, we need to measure the right data in each step of the "search cycle" in order to understand the proper allocation of those resources.

The "search cycle" is a five step process that illustrates how potential customers become customers through search:

Each of the steps in this process have certain metrics that can be leveraged to drive SEO strategy. Because of time constraints I was only able to discuss rankings and traffic at my presentation. For today's blog post, I will be discussing Search Rankings and Wednesday I will write about Search Traffic.

Search Rankings:

In the search rankings phase of the cycle, its obvious that the primary metric of concern is the ranking of a phrase. But it's important to note that where the phrase is ranked is not always consistent between users. Between localization, personalization, universal search results and ranking fluctuations between data centers, ranking #1 for a particular phrase in Google, Yahoo or MSN, isn't as clear cut as it once was. That isn't to say that top listings for competitive keyword phrases aren't important, they certainly are. But they are getting harder to measure accurately.

It's also worth noting that typically, an enterprise level Web site that gets thousands of search visitors a month, is not able to check rankings for every keyword permutation that they are interested in. Therefore they chose a smaller set of "fat head" keywords that are competitive and will in theory, generate the highest revenue or at least search traffic. But in reality, if you optimize a site for a three word phrase, you are likely also optimizing it for dozens if not hundreds more related long tail keyword phrases. And the resulting taffic from these long tail keywords for sites that target high traffic niches can be significant.

The main takeaway here is that rankings in and of themselves don't tell the whole story about your SEO campaign. So its important not to rely solely on rankings as the primary metric of success. It's certainly a key indicator, but the rest of the search cycle must be considered in order to both understand and improve your ROI from search.

So with that in mind, I gave some tips on how to use search rankings to drive SEO strategy:

You should create a "keyword map" in Excel that lists all of the keyword phrases that you are targeting as well as which URL you would like ranked for that URL. The keyword map serves a number of purposes.

One, it is a permanent record of which pages have been optimized for which keywords. This is very helpful in both internal and external link development on an ongoing basis.

Two, in the event that a different page on your site is listed for a particular keyword, it allows you to see the differences in what content you think is most relevant for that phrase versus which content Google thinks is most relevant. Often times this will provide excellent clues on how to improve your optimization.

Additionally, you can then ensure that the messaging on the page that is ranked, is consistent with the page you thought was going to be ranked, thereby improving your conversion rate. In other words, if you sell a product and you have a blog post about the product, and the blog post gets more links and gets ranked higher than the product page, make sure you have a "buy now" button on the blog post.

The second way rankings can drive strategy is understanding that rankings in the top 10 are the only rankings that really matter, because they are the only rankings that consistently produce traffic. Therefore, it makes sense to monitor your top keywords to see which in are the top 30 or so that are not in the top 10. These rankings illustrate an immediate opportunity where a few small improvements can make a big difference.

Additionally, it pays to look at long tail keywords that convert well and add them to your optimization. Often times it doesn't take much optimization to really improve your ranking for a long tail keyword. And the difference in traffic between a #8 listing and a #3 listing can be substancial.

In summary, any ranking not in the top 10 represents an opportunity for continued optimization. There are usually more opportunities for more SEO (content, internal links, external links, etc) than there are resources. In that event, it is useful to prioritize based on which terms convert better, which terms drive the most profitable sales and which terms are in markets where the company has a competitive advantage. It is advantageous to have a keyword map that serves as a master gameplan for your optimization. This will allow you to understand if your visitors are going where you want them to and that they see messaging that will result in the highest possible conversions. Adding long tail keyword phrases to your map that convert well according to your analytics and then optimizing for those phrases can significantly increase rankings for those phrases.

Rankings are really just the tip of the iceberg as it relates to what you need to measure to maximize your ROI for your organic search campaign. In my next blog post, I will talk about traffic metrics, what's important, what isn't, and how that data should drive your ongoing optimization.

Hidden Content/Cloaking - Any day can be April Fool's Day

noreply@blogger.com (Benj Arriola) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:25:00 +0000

The Internet goes wild on April Fool's day. This year, you may have noticed some already from Google's CADIE, YouTube's mirror image and the one I liked was Reddit's pages were redesigned on various parts of their site that look like Digg, Fark, Slashdot and maybe more.

Here at BusinessOnLine, as mentioned in our last years April Fool's Day blog post, we work hard and we play hard. For some reason, everyone seemed so busy with client projects that no well coordinated prank was executed this day of the pranks in 2009.

But since we do play hard aside from work hard, any day here can be like April Fool's day. An earlier prank happened on March 4, 2009. This is the office cubicle of our HR manager.

And in this prank we did, blackhat hidden content. We cloaked the HR's office.

Too bad, all of us never saw Trevor's reaction that day. He usually comes in at 5:00am. Too early for the rest of the company.

Any day can be April Fool's Day here at BusinessOnLine.

My SES New York 2009 Experience: SEO Adventures 3000 Miles from Home

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:53:00 +0000

I just got back from SES New York on Friday where I was very honored to have an opportunity to speak and to contribute to an outstanding session called "Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers". Between myself and the other exceptional speakers including Cindy Krum, Founder and CEO of Rank-Mobile; Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board and Managing Partner and Founder of Beyond Ink; and Seth Besmertnik, CEO & Co-Founder of Conductor, Inc. I felt like we put on a very informative session and the feedback I got from audience members after the presentation was very encouraging. I will be presenting a separate blog post later in the week covering some of what I spoke about at the conference.

I was happy to have an opportunity to speak right after Guy Kawasaki's keynote speech which I thought was fairly well done and educational despite what some other people have suggested. I thought most people coming away from the keynote were energized and ready to learn more about SEO, SMO and everything in between. So I wasn't surprised that we had an almost capacity room of about 150 people.

After I was done speaking, I attended some of the sessions in the afternoon although I admit I skipped the session after I spoke to unwind and get some pizza. I have been to SES before so I wasn't particularly confident that the stock lunch menu would be to my liking (I was happily surprised that SES has definitely improved their food selection since last time I was there two years ago). Props to the SES New York organizers for taking care of the problem. However, I was more than happy to have some authentic slices of pie from Ray's Pizza around the corner from the Hilton where the conference was taking place.

While we are talking about the Hilton, let me say that the hotel is fantastic. The only complaint that I have (and it's a big one), is if your going to charge a $250 discounted nightly rate, don't try to weasel me for $15 extra a day for Wireless Internet. If nothing else, be smart enough to realize that at this conference its pretty much a given that almost everyone needs it. So bundle it in with the total package cost and let me be happily surprised that my laptop works as soon as I enter my room. That was a REALLY annoying part of the whole experience.

Overall though I had a great time. I thought that the sessions were really good for the most part. I thought Michael Gray had one of the better presentations that I saw, and was impressed with the amount of tactical advice that he gave people that could be implemented immediately. I am a big fan of sessions that teach people how to do things, rather than those whose speakers pontificate about high level subjects that make for interesting coffee conversations, but don't really help you make money.

For example, in the session titled "Universal and Blended Search: An Update", the people that were from agencies did an ok job discussing some tactical elements of Universal Search. But the search engine representatives seemed like they were giving a commercial about all their Universal Search properties. There was no real tactical advice and it felt like that they were all trying to convince people that their search engine was cooler than the other guys (and it wasn't hard to figure out how to spend advertising money with them... *lol*). Ironically, Google, who invented the phrase Universal Search, was not part of the panel. Thankfully for them. So that was a little disappointing.

But the session on video search was outstanding. It was probably the best session I went to (or at least tied with the "feed" session that Michael Gray was part of). It's amazing how the popularity of video has turned YouTube into the second biggest search engine in America. And goes to show you how important video content is to SEO.

I also learned a lot more about social media, especially with regard to how cool targeting ads can be with FaceBook. Actually there is a lot of cool stuff happening at FaceBook. If you haven't set up a page for your business on FaceBook, now would be a good time. Between the social media capabilities, the viral possibles, and the potential SEO benefits, a FaceBook page for your business should be a priority for your online marketing efforts.

It wasn't all business in New York (although mostly it was). The first night, Monday, I went to sleep early so that I could be well rested for speaking. Plus the 6 hour flight is always draining. The second night we went around the corner to a little New York bar filled with other SES attendees and talked a little SEO over a couple Heinekens. The last night I went to Dave and Busters in Time Square which was definitely the highlight of the trip. I got to hang out with my friend Heather and we were thoroughly entertained by the wisdom of Bruce Clay. Bruce is a fun guy to talk SEO with. His experience and his passion about the subject of SEO are almost unmatched in the industry. We both laughed when I reminded him that I met him six years ago. Time Flys.

So I had a great time, but after three days of intense SEO and meeting all kinds of amazing people (like Jefferey Eisenberg for example), I was VERY happy to get home (although not so happy with the extra hour of waiting for our plane to take off... *lol*). One fantastic thing about living in San Diego is your never really sad to come home. It's not paradise, but its pretty darn close.

And it sure is a lot warmer here than New York :)

Stay tuned later this week for my blog post about my session and some of the SEO tips that I spoke about. Have a great week!

Catfish

MSN Search Engine is out of Touch with Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:40:00 +0000

Steve Ballmer, chief executive for Microsoft, said today that MSN is in an advantageous position in search because they have the freedom to experiment while Google has to "play it safe" based on the size of their organization and the success of their business model.

Earth to Steve, your search engine is not competitive to Google's because that's all they do is experiment with new search technology. And they hire the smartest people to do it. It was Google that was the first to push Universal Search, which was a huge change to the way people searched for things. It was Google that came out with Webmaster Tools that enabled site owners to better understand how the search engine was indexing their site. It was Google that first used a quality score to influence PPC results. It was Google that came out with the Big Daddy update that solved a lot of canonicalization problems that MSNs engine still chokes on.

MSN/Live Search to my knowledge hasn't done much to innovate search. Thier MSN live experiment was a huge failure. They had a directory and then closed it. They still can't figure out redirects as well as Google or even Yahoo. The fact that their results are so influenced by on page factors makes them more susceptible to spam, scrappers and other black hat SEO techniques. They never have organic search engines at conferences to help Webmasters but they definately have advertising reps if you wanna spend money. The whole culture that MSN portrays is an organization that can't move because its so big that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Google on the other hand projects a young, innovative culture that "gets it".

If MSN is ever going to become competitive in this space, they need to get a grasp on how far behind they are and spend more time actually creating search technology innovations that resonate with users. Rather than having their chief executive officer say things like "Our search does not need to be all things to all people." I mean what does that say? We only care about some people? It's certainly not a winning philosophy when your trying to compete with Google and you have the resources that Microsoft does.

My other recommendation to Microsoft... buy Twitter. At least then you would own something that people actually cared about.

That's my MSN rant for a Friday. Hope to see everyone at SES New York next week. I will be speaking in the first session after Guy's opening keynote presentation. The session is entitled "Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers". See ya in NYC!

The views and opinions stated by the authors of blog post is of the author alone. These statements may not necessarily be the statements of BusinessOnLine (BusinessOL.com) or any of it's employees.

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The Right Techniques & Attitudes for Local SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Joy Kim) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:18:00 +0000

Building Your Local Reputation Online

Step 3: Participate in Online Local Community

As mentioned in our previous blog post about blog comment strategy, participating in online community that is relevant to your business and industry is a key way to increase your online visibility.

Blog comment strategy was discussed as a way to build relevant links to your site and to increase visitors within a targeted industry.

In local search optimization, your participation does not have to lead to obtaining a link, but it should lead to increasing your business name’s relevancy to your local information such as your address, local phone number, city, or any other neighborhood area names. The ideal local business profile would be the following, as demonstrated on this local ABC Chennel 7’s special Valentine’s Day coverage web page:

Your Business Title
Street Address
City, State Zip Code
(Local Area Code) Phone Number
Link to Your Website

Obtaining your local information on other websites doesn’t have to wait till another Valentine’s Day coverage of local broadcast station website. You can start with free online local directory that offer reviews and generate good traffic, such as Yelp.

The key to obtaining local references is to make sure those sites are crawled by Google for local content. Since local references do not get a link back, if a local directory site is not on the list to be crawled by Google for local content, your efforts to build local relevancy for local SEO won’t be so effective.

One of the ways to check is to look through “Web Pages” tab when you search for a relevant local keyword in Google Maps.

In the example above, you can tell SignOnSanDiego.com is one of the San Diego local sites that are crawled to find local business information, by looking at the Web Pages tab.

One thing you need to keep in mind in building your local relevancy through an off-page SEO campaign is that you should not just pick the local listing ranked at #1 and try to obtain all the local references that company has. Your company is unique from any other local companies, and it should be reflected in your local reference portfolio. You should have a unique combination of keywords and service areas, and optimizing for those local keywords to reach your targeted local audience should naturally lead to having a unique local reference portfolio. Besides, if you just follow them, you will never get ahead of them.

To be unique and outstanding, your local reference portfolio shouldn’t be just about Internet Yellow Pages or few major local directories. Be active in your online local community to find more local resources your locals visitor to find local information and contribute helpful content about your industry, and your local references should naturally grow with the trust you gain within the community.

Overall, optimizing for local search engines offers an opportunity to turn online traffic into your offline visitors, and in the process of local search optimization, you will get plenty of chances to create buzz about your business and gain trust as an industry expert within your online local community.

If you haven’t read about Local Keyword Discovery and Exploring Google Maps Features for Local Business Listings, check them out.

Does Google Need SEO? You Might Be Suprised!

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:55:00 +0000

One of my colleagues today looked up the word Search Engine in Google. The results were very surprising. Google ranks #6 in Google for the word search engine. Does that mean that they really consider themselves the #6 best site for users for that term? How is Altavista considered #1? When is the last time you used Altavista? LOL.

So if your listening Matt Cutts, I thought I would help you guys out with a couple SEO tips:

That title you have on your homepage that says "Google" isn't really that keyword focused. You might try changing it to:

"Google Search Engine - Find Information on the Web including Images, Video and More"

I admit I haven't done any extensive keyword research for Google before making this tag so it might need to be slightly tweaked based on the best keywords. You guys being Google should know what your most important keywords are though. Of course you guys being Google should know better than to rank yourselves #6 for the phrase "search engine" ;)

Description tag. Um, here is what Google's SERP description is:

Shopping Groups Books Scholar Finance Blogs · YouTube Calendar Photos Documents Reader Sites · even more » · iGoogle | Sign in. Google. Advanced Search ...

That doesn't exactly conform to your best practices for writing Meta descriptions. According to this link, Google itself has a poor Meta description tag (actually it has none). And even though that description tag won't help Google rank any better in Google, it will help in MSN and Yahoo. You would think that Google would be leading by example with this kind of stuff.

Change some internal links. Link that logo you have in the search box on the upper right hand side of the Webmaster Blog with an alt tag that says "Google Search Engine" or at least "Google Search". I am sure you guys have enough internal link opportunities to figure it out...

So all sarcasm and poking fun at Google aside, this kind of result doesn't exactly inspire confidence that Google's algo is perfect (or even close). It also goes to show you that some of the biggest brands still need SEO ;)

Exploring Google Maps Features for Local Business Listings

noreply@blogger.com (Joy Kim) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:46:00 +0000

BusinessOnLine Local Search Wednesday Series: Part 2

Step 2: Registering Your Business for Google Local Business Center

Last week, I began this series by stressing the importance of local keyword research. This week, let's talk about how to use those local keywords when you add your business listing in Google Local Business Center.

Claiming your business listing in local search engines is one of the most crucial steps to take, in order for your company to appear on Google Maps results. Adding your business in Google Local Business Center (LBC) is like having your business indexed by Google, and your listing will be in the Google's local business database to be used for geo-targeted queries.

Another reason you should claim your business in Local Business Center (LBC) is that if you do not claim your business listing, your listing can be stolen by your competitors or any random people, also called Google Maps Hijacking. They can edit however they want. But, once you claim your business listing, Google will send you postcard notifications when someone attempts to change your phone number, to prevent your listing from being stolen or displaying wrong information.

One of the most important features to utilize in LBC is the category. The key here is to use the keywords you discovered during your local keyword research as your categories. If you know that your local customers are using a particular search term to find your listing, don't be afraid to create a new category.

Having that keyword in your category or in your business title will make a difference in your rankings for that keyword. However, you should not change your business title just to include your keyword, and so, category is THE place to list your important keywords. You can choose multiple categories, but use them wisely as you might risk diluting the focus of your keywords.

You should also work on the description of your company. Do not copy and paste from your website's description or from your About Us page. Think about what your local customers are seeking when they are searching for local keywords. For example, if you are a car dealer, and #1 reason for locals to choose a local car dealership is service packages, then tell them about the value of having a lifetime oil change package from a local dealership.

Once you're done with providing essential information such as your phone number and address as well as the categories and description, all the rest features are there to help users get additional information, and from business owners' perspective, to help your business listing standout from other listings at a glance.

Here are two features that take a second to use, yet makes a big difference in attracting locals' eyes.

Photos: Uploading photos of your business in LBC will increase your listing's visibility by having your picture displayed right under your thumbnail along with the text results.

Business Hours: Once you provide your business hours, your “more info” page will display a big table of open hours. Knowing the hours will also help locals plan their visits before you close.

Other features that would help serving your local customers include parking availability, brands carried, and prices for major services or products you offer. You can post additional information by using custom attribute tags.

You can also post a coupon through LBC. Posting a coupon through LBC will encourage searchers to choose your business over others and help track your ROI for local marketing.

Lastly, now Google Maps give an option to search videos within the mapped area. If you have a promotional videos or branded educational videos, don't forget to post them through LBC. It will be another way to increase your brand recognition.

With your local business listing posted with local-keyword focused materials, now the real marketing begins. Next week's Local Search Wednesday series will discuss how to obtain local relevancy by targeting off-page local information online.

This blog post is a part of the BusinessOnLine's Local Wednesday series. If you have not read the previous one about How to Get Your Business Listed in Local Search Engines, read about it or you can go to the next one that is about The Right Techniques & Attitudes for Local SEO. I really appreciate your feedback in the previous blog post and if you have any other new questions, I will try to get them answered in the next post.

Eliminate Potential Google Duplicate Content Penalty with SEO Tag "REL=Canonical"

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:19:00 +0000

Upon further review of the new tag rel=canonical, that is used to let search engines know what URL you want indexed for any given page of your site, I can't find any reason why you wouldn't want to make it a standard part of every Web page on your site. This tag proactively handles a number of potential duplicate content issues.

*special note about "duplicate content penalties": Some people feel that it is very important to be clear that a duplicate content "penalty" is not really a penalty. Google is not punishing your site for having a Web page that has the same content as another Web page. But what it is happening is, if your page is not the original version of the content, it is highly likely that your page will be put into the supplemental index which makes it less likely to rank well for competitive terms. So in effect, it's the same end result of incurring a penalty but in fact there has been no "penalty." For some reason this game of semantics is very important to some members of the SEO community, so I wanted to make sure I was clear with everyone that I know the phrase "duplicate content penalty" is not entirely accurate, but it is how most people view the situation.

Having said that, here are some of the issues that the rel=canonical tag can help with:

Capitalization: The search engines treat each unique URL string as a separate entity. So any variation in a URL, no matter how slight, creates a new URL in the eyes of the search engine. This includes differences in capitalization, although Google specifically has been much better at figuring this out on its own since the "Big Daddy" update. So for example, when an engine indexes these URLs:
http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/ and http://www.businessol.com/Seo-Blog/ it sees two different URLs for the same content.

This happens often because Webmasters are not standardized in the way that they link to 3rd party websites. Some Webmasters and blogs capitalize letters in URLs out of coding practices or habit.

In the old days, Google would have not been able by itself to figure out that these two URLs are the same page. And therefore one of these two URLs (most likely the one with the least amount of Page Rank) would have been put into supplemental results and the links that pointed to it would essentially be lost (because now they point to a page in the supplemental results that isn't going to rank for much and they are not helping the other URL that is listed in Google). But nowadays, Google is pretty good about figuring this stuff out although not perfect. And the other engines are not very good at this kind of thing. So by including the Rel=Canonical tag on every page of the site, you make it easy for all the engines to consolidate URLs that have capitalization problems.

Dynamic URL Strings: Whether its tracking codes like www.domain.com?tracking-code or CMS systems that generate multiple URLs for the same page, the issues with these pages are the same as the issues for capitalization. But now instead of an elaborate 301 redirect strategy or costly adjustments to your backend system, this simple tag solves the problem.

Other Canonical Issues: Some other issues that Google already does fairly well but that can still cause problems include www versus non www version of the Web site (domain.com versus www.domain.com), session IDs and also linking using IP addresses. This tag if correctly implemented, should fix all of these problems.

Given the number of potential issues that this tag can correct, it should be added to every page of your site. If your site is dynamic, this should be a pretty easy addition.

How to Get Your Business Listed in Local Search Engines

noreply@blogger.com (Joy Kim) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:07:00 +0000

The Three Things You Can Do to Increase Offline Traffic: Part 1

You might have heard about local search as a buzz word, and wondered what it meant exactly or how it differs from traditional SEO in developing an online marketing strategy or an SEO implementation process. In this BusinessOnLine's Local Search Wednesday series for the next 3 weeks, we will explore how users may experience local search, what it is & the three major steps in local search optimization.

First, let’s explore how users may experience local search features from certain types of keywords that trigger search engines to suspect the possibility of searchers’ intent to look for local (geo-specific) information.

For example, if you search for “pizza” in Google, whether you wanted some web pages about pizza’s history or recipes, you will be prompted to enter your location in case you wanted local restaurant information.

If you enter your city or zip code, you’ll then see what’s called Google OneBox, which displays 10 relevant local business listings with their locations marked with thumbnails on a map of the city.

If you’re a sophisticated searcher and use a long tail search term such as “pizza san diego ca” from the beginning, your search results will display OneBox at once, and your web search results following OneBox will be different too. Notice how Domino’s Pizza’s general web site listing stays with OneBox if you have entered a zip code after being prompted above. The results page above shows a mix of local business search results and general web search results. However, the search results for “pizza san diego ca” display all localized results (See below) as Domino’s Pizza result is gone and San Diego location of Woodstock’s Pizza shows up. PPC listings are changed as well, as they show addresses in San Diego below.

We will explore more scenarios from the users’ end as we continue this Local Search Wednesday blog series. For now, let me provide a clear definition of local search optimization before we move on to the first step of the local search SEO process.

Definition of Local Search Engine Optimization

Local search optimization is an online marketing campaign that targets local audiences on the Internet by using various off-page local relevancy building strategies and by using keywords with geo-modifiers, such as city names or zip codes. For example, local search SEO would optimize a local business listing for keywords such as “sushi restaurants 92101” or “sushi san diego ca”, while traditional SEO will focus more on keywords like “how to make sushi” or “sushi market”.

Local search optimization’s goal is to increase visibility on local search engine result pages, such as Google Maps. This would ultimately lead to offline, in-store sales, increased brand recognition and even long term relationship building.

Step 1: Local Keyword Discovery

Like all marketing campaigns, a local search optimization campaign should start with learning about the audience you want to reach. Understanding and finding effective keywords to reach your local consumers who are interested in your business is very crucial in local search SEO, as it begins with defining the service areas your business covers. For example, if you own a sushi restaurant, you would want your city and cities nearby as well as different names locals might use to refer to certain areas or neighborhoods in your town. If you own a car dealership, the areas your business serve would be much bigger than a sushi restaurant because people are willing to travel farther to get a good deal on a car than they would for sushi.

In addition to defining your local business’ service areas, you should also research whether there are unique keywords your local customers use to land on your business listing. You can use keyword research tools that show which keywords are searched in which areas.

After defining your local service areas, you may discover the needs to develop geo-targeted content for each area. For example, if you discover your customers come from only one specific area, you may want focus on optimizing your About Us page or Contact Us page for that area mainly. If you find out, your local customers come from several different areas or use different geo-modifiers (city names or zip code, etc) to find your local business listing online, you may want to create new pages for each major area and use those specific search terms throughout the pages. However, the focus is to develop helpful local information about your service or industry, while using the right term to refer to the area, rather than repeating your local keywords over and over for the sake of SEO.

You will also want to set a page that would satisfy the intent of local searchers as a landing page for local search engines. If local customers would be wondering about a particular service, make that service page as a landing page. For the sushi restaurant example, it might make sense to submit an About Us page with customer testimonials about how tasty your sushi is compared to other local restaurants and allow that to serve as a landing page.

For next Wednesday, we will examine how to get your business listed in Google Maps through Local Business Center. It would be best if you subscribe to our RSS feed so you won’t miss it!

Local Search Wednesday Part 2 is up now: Exploring Google Maps Features for Local Business Listings. Part 3 is about The Right Techniques & Attitudes for Local SEO.

I appreciate your feedback, and if you have any other new questions, I will try to get them answered in the next post.

Google Announces New SEO Tool to Stop Duplicate Content Problems!

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:44:00 +0000

Good news from Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live who have announced support for the rel="canonical" tag. This new tag with the following syntax:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=whatever">

This should be placed in the head section of each page of the site, with the URL that should be used as the primary URL for that page.

So if for example, if this page is linked to somewhere in the site with this URL:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=whatever&trackingid=1234

where a tracking id has been appended, Google, Yahoo and MSN will now understand that this page is really the original:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=whatever

Therefore the duplicate URL is not indexed and the link connectivity is assigned to the right page. This is a wonderful new tool that now allows sites with extensive tracking codes to use that technology without duplicate content issues. Additionally, sites have CMS systems or dynamic Web platforms that generate multiple URL combinations for the same page can now be brought under control without a huge list of 301 redirects. Cheers to the search engines for getting this one right.

Catfish

Online Marketing Summit (OMS) 2009 Conference Recap

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:36:00 +0000

Well now that I have almost caught up with the work I missed from being at the 2009 Online Marketing Summit, I have to say, what a fun time! If you missed my presentation on Long Tail Keyword Optimization, Kate Fleming did a wonderful job of summarizing the main points of the presentation. Additionally there were a lot of other great presentors and presentations which made this conference the best one ever in my estimation. Thanks again to Aaron Kahlow and his whole staff of tireless workers for making it such a success. And who can forget the free Jamba Juice!

For my personally, the opportunity to perform and sing in my acoustic project for the first time ever in front of the 100+ people at the Thursday evening cocktail hour was amazing. I really enjoyed myself and so did my band. Thanks to everyone for all the kind words and wonderful feedback about the performance. That was our first show together as a band and we are looking forward to playing a lot more of them soon.

If you missed this year's event, don't forget that regionals are coming and definately make plans to be here next year. It really is one of the coolest conferences that you can attend. See ya soon!

Catfish

Work Hard and Play Hard at BusinessOnLine - Celebrating Another Great Year

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:39:00 +0000

I have to admit, I love my job. Not only am I one of the privileged few who get to work in this crazy and fun industry called SEO, but I get to do it with some amazing people who know how to work hard and know how to play hard ;) We celebrated another successful year on Friday with a "Day of Surprises". And certainly the biggest surprise was not the double decker bus that picked us up in front of the office, but rather the Tequila tasting that shortly followed the bus ride. I have to say, big kudos to Trevor for one of the best ideas for a work function ever. And who knew there was so much to know about Tequila, and that Patron really isn't that high quality relatively speaking.

Unfortunately, my knee wasn't up to the scavenger hunt through downtown San Diego or the resulting bar hop, dancing, and karaoke, but my partners in crime (the BOL staff) represented us in fine fashion. So now that we took a little time to celebrate last year's accomplishments, it's time to focus on the new year and the challenges of 2009. I can't wait to see what this year brings!

Here are some pics from Friday:

Tequila Tastes Best When BusinessOnLine is Buying!

Fun on the Bus

It's a dangerous crowd...lol.

You can feel the competition in the air.

The secret to winning is having a good plan

There's more than bragging rights at stake in this scavenger hunt!

There is no place like home

Our fearless leader is not scared to wear pink

A Preview of my 2009 Online Marketing Summit (OMS) Presentation on Long Tail SEO Strategies

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:24:00 +0000

Wow time sure does fly. Seems like only yesterday I was doing my SEO for 2008 presentation at OMS 2008 here in San Diego and now it's already 2009! I am really looking forward to seeing everyone again this year and getting another opportunity to talk SEO with so many other industry professionals. And, what's really exciting for me is that this year, Rand Fishkin will be speaking at OMS for the first time!

If you are not familiar with Rand, he runs SEOmoz.com, is a very well respected speaker at a number of SEO conferences, and he has contributed a great deal to the SEO community. So it's very exciting for me to have an opportunity to speak at the same conference as Rand and talk a little SEO. I know that the OMS community will be very impressed with the depth of knowledge and experience that Rand brings to the table. And he is a really nice guy.

I will also be trying to bring some new SEO ideas and tactics to the table for 2009. My presentation this year will be focused on targeting the long tail. If you're not familiar with the concept of long tail SEO, here is a good reference for you. Essentially we are talking about putting yourself in a position to capture as many of the less competitive keyword phrases as you can, on an ongoing and consistent basis. During my presentation, we will be talking about some of the on page, off page, universal search and social media SEO tactics that will improve your ability to target relevant, long tail keywords.

Some of the SEO topics that we will touch on will include keyword research, page titles, content optimization, internal linking strategies, blogging tactics, other social media opportunities and using analytics to augment your campaign.

It makes a lot of sense for companies to focus on long tail SEO for 2009. Advancements in personalization and Geo targeting are making it less and less likely that any two users will see the same listings for the same search query. That's not to say that rankings for competitive keywords won't continue to be a focus of SEO. But rather, just like the stock market, you should be diversified and not put all your SEO eggs in one basket.

One last thing, if you haven't already signed up for free to be part of the OMS community and checked out all the cool SEO and Internet marketing blog content, visit the OMS Blog and do it!

Original dog image is a modification of a preview image of a 3D dog model by Andrey Kravchenko on his gallery on TurboSquid™

Proven Spam Free Blog Comment Link Building Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (David Lewallen) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:12:00 +0000

The crucial element to any effective strategy for link building is to have a consistent ongoing campaign. Much like the fable of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race. Incorporating link building as part of an overall SEO campaign involves deciding on a pace that is realistic and sticking with it. If you are just beginning a link campaign a good starting point is to build 3 links per week, and then gradually increase your weekly number. There are always new and inventive ways of building links. One such strategy which will be discussed here is by commenting in the blogosphere.

Blog > Read other blogs in your industry > Participate on those blogs by commenting > Build a link to your blog in your comment > reap the rewards

Blog commenting is one of the best ways to market your blog if you are incubating a brand new blog or want to increase your readership and build quality links on an already established blog.
If you make interesting/intelligent/insightful comments on highly trafficked and well recognized blogs in your industry and build links to your site through your nickname or within the comment itself, you will be;

attracting many relevant visitors

building quality links to your blog

promoting your brand

building some authority in your industry

Once you leave a comment with a link on someone’s blog, they will check out your site. So there is at least one relevant visitor to your blog per comment. If the blog you’re commenting on is in your industry then there is at least one relevant link (we will discuss nofollow / dofollow a bit latter) to your site for your commenting effort.

If you make interesting comments on highly trafficked blogs in your industry, your potential for relevant traffic is infinite. You are also putting yourself in a position to generate natural links because that blogger that followed your link may be looking for topics to cover for their next blog post and just may reference your content.

Best practices for blog commenting for link building include; writing a compelling blog post and then searching on Google Blog Search for any other bloggers that may be writing about the same or similar topic. Read the entire blog post and the other comments. Make useful comments and keyword focus your username (do this intelligently, as keyword focused usernames tend to sound spammy.) Some bloggers are more strict than others when it comes to keyword focused usernames (especially do follow blogs) so read the blog’s commenting policy if they have one. If the blogger has strict rules for leaving links, follow those rules to the T even if it means not leaving a link at all. Use Cligs to track the clicks you get from your commenting effort.

Avoid using any automated blog commenting software and make sure that your comment is not mistaken for spam. Bloggers are especially acute to any form of spam and will report spam by using programs such as Akismet . This is a program that blocks certain commentators based on email and IP addresses as well as the commentator’s name. The rule of thumb is to make your comment sound relevant to the post and avoid phrases such as “I like your blog” or “great post” or “interesting insight”. The bottom line is remembering that your comment will go through a human review and concentrating on making an insightful comment that adds interest and attracts relevant visitors should alleviate any spammy looking comments. If you find that you are having a difficult time coming up with a comment that you like on a certain post than skip it and find a post that you have something of value to add.

Comment on all blogs that you find interesting and relevant to your industry, however commenting on dofollow blogs will help your SEO effort, (don’t just comment on a dofollow for the sake of a link, make sure it’s relevant and that the page your linking has real value to those following the link.) Remember that you are an evangelist for your brand and people can see right through you if your intentions are in the wrong place.

Chances are you will end up finding a few blogs that you really like, when you do, submit the best posts to your favorite bookmarking site, this will add to your profile at your social bookmarking site of choice which will increase your authority at such sites. By commenting on these blogs and submitting posts to bookmarking sites you will end up building a relationship with that blogger. They will start to read your blog, submit your posts to bookmarking sites and eventually you will develop some quality banter which can lead to industry contacts. Link building is about cultivating relationships and this is one of the best strategies to develop those relationships and give back to the community.

Image Credits: Comment box by: Seigel Display Products

10 SEO Tips from Google's Guide to Search Engine Optimization

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:15:00 +0000

I just finished reading Google's guide to SEO. It was very gratifying to see that our process is consistent with the content of this document.

Here are some of the highlights:

1) Always focus on User Experience.
2) Always have unique page titles and Meta descriptions.
3) Use short concise URL strings, preferably with descriptive words.
4) Make your site navigation as flat as possible.
5) Avoid using generic page names like page1.html.
6) Be consistent in your internal linking (caps versus no caps, www versus no www).
7) One URL to each document, avoid duplicate URL paths to the same content.
8) Have an xml and html sitemap with no errors.
9) Use breadcrumb navigation
10) Make sure the link text of all internal links is keyword focused.

There is a lot more in this document that makes for a great read about SEO, especially for those just learning the art. Reading it is the perfect way for any SEO to start a great new year.

Happy Holidays

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:52:00 +0000

On behalf of the entire BusinessOnLine team, I would like to extend a happy holidays (Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Ramadan, happy whatever you celebrate)to all our readers. We hope this season brings you joy, happiness and time with family and friends. We are looking forward to a fantastic 2009 and we are committed to making the SEO blog even better next year. Have a great holiday, be safe, and eat a lot of food!

Catfish

3 Top Ways Blogging Enhances Your SEO Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:41:00 +0000

There are a number of reasons why any company should consider blogging. The social media opportunities, networking opportunities and ability to enhance brand reputation are all compelling reasons to participate in blogging. Often times however, these benefits are hard to quantify in a way that illustrates the ROI that is achieved through blogging. Fortunately, blogging is also one of the best available tools to improve your SEO campaign if leveraged properly. Therefore, it is much easier to justify the expense of blogging when one can show the direct SEO benefit to the Web site because search activity is much easier to tie to ROI than brand management or even social media in many cases. Here are the 3 of the top ways that you can use your blog to enhance your SEO campaign:

Create new content

Create new internal link opportunities

Create new external links

While it may seem obvious, one of the biggest advantages that a blog gives you with respect to SEO, is a consistent source of new keyword focused content. Most Web sites do not update or add content very frequently. In many cases at the enterprise level, adding or changing content requires a lot of resources. Often times the content production team must agree to add or modify the content, the marketing and branding people might have something to say about it, and then you need to wait for the IT production schedule to allow you to publish. The end result is not much new content.

Blogging typically allows content producers to circumvent this entire process because most of the time, blog post topics are controlled by bloggers. Because the content lives outside the main information architecture of the site, the marketing team usually has less concern about the impact of the content to the overall site design, messaging and conversion funnel. This also allows for more flexibility in terms of what content can be produced for the blog and therefore, what keyword phrases can be targeted. And because the blog enables the author to publish directly to the Web site, the content production schedule is not dependent on the IT production schedule. For these reasons, effective blogging can give you a huge competitive advantage in your ability to produce keyword focused content.

Another benefit that all this additional content affords your SEO campaign is the ability to create additional internal links to relevant content from new blog posts. Those new internal links will enhance the ranking opportunity of the pages they link to. Having an ongoing strategy to create internal links from blog posts to relevant pages within your Web site should be a key element in your ongoing SEO campaign. If you’re on Wordpress, you can make this process easier by using the following plugin:

Cross Linker Wordpress Plugin

Blogging not only creates additional internal linking opportunities, it is also one of the best ways to acquire one way external links. There are three primary reasons that blogs are so effective for link building.

First, assuming you are creating compelling content that helps your users solve problems, you will naturally acquire links from Webmasters and bloggers who link to your content as a reference. This is especially true of bloggers, who tend to link to other blog posts as references or as talking points for their own blog posts, much more frequently than do traditional Web masters.

Second, blogs humanize your Web site and give you a more personal voice in the blogosphere which allows you to develop more personal relationships with other bloggers. These relationships often result in links as well as votes for your content in social bookmarking networks. And because a large percentage of the users who read social bookmarking sites like Digg and social news sites like Delicious are bloggers, favorable exposure on these types of sites can also produce a number of high quality, relevant, one way back links. Additionally, inclusion and subsequently links on some social media sites like Mixx.com, can also provide some direct SEO value.

Third, blogs publish their stories through RSS feeds. RSS stands for really simple syndication. An RSS feed is a data file that contains information and content from your blog in a standardized format that readers can understand. Some Webmasters include these feeds as a supplement to their own web site content through a feed aggregator that displays snippets of your blog posts on their site. The snippet will have a link back to your blog post for the complete blog post, thus establishing a link to your site. Again this assumes that you are creating thought leading content that Web masters and bloggers can use as a reference.

Blogging is a great tool for SEO. It allows you to create new keyword focused content easily, creates new internal linking opportunities and can be a huge catalyst for external links. By analyzing the search traffic that your blog brings in as well as the links that it attracts, you can begin to paint a more accurate picture of the ROI that your blogging efforts are having on your SEO campaign.

Photo Credits: Thiago Felipe Festa & Beau de Noir

New Corporate Blogging Webinar: Using Social Media to Maximize the Reach of Your Message

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:34:00 +0000

I just re-recorded last month's corporate blogging Webinar. You can find it here:

BusinessOnLine Corporate Blogging Webinar by Catfish

Let me know what you think and have a great week!

Catfish

3 SEO Basic Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings Today!

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:47:00 +0000

There are a lot of small details in the world of SEO that are important to understand in order to maximize your SEO campaign. Everything from PageRank sculpting using rel=nofollow, to XML sitemap feeds, to analyzing competitor backlinks. But some of the biggest gains in SEO can be accomplished by paying attention to the basics. Here are my top three basic SEO tips we apply at our search engine optimization firm that can help you increase your search engine rankings TODAY!

Keyword focused Page Titles - You would think in 2008 that every man, woman and child in America would know that having keywords in your Page Title is step 1 to actually getting ranked for those same keywords. Ok, so maybe I am overstating it just a little. *lol* But I still see a huge number of clients and potential clients that have web sites with the same page title on every page of the site, or with little or no keyword focus.

Incidentally I have said this before and will continue to do so. Limiting page titles to 64 characters because that's all Google displays is not good for usability or SEO. Page titles should primarily serve as a reference point for users as to what the content of the page, and even the web site, is relevant to. Page titles should convey as much relevant information to the user as possible and should read like intelligent sentences. Personally I limit page titles to about 150 characters as this is near the upper limit of what we have found that Yahoo will actually index and is close to the maximum number of characters that most users are capable of seeing in their browser. Of course many of the page titles I create are no where near 150 characters, it just depends on what is called for based on the keywords and content found on the page.

Homepage Alt Tag - In Google, a link is a vote. Even if the link comes from your own web site. So my motto is, vote for yourself early, and often! If you don't vote for yourself, who else will? And one of the most powerful ways you can vote for yourself is via the Alt Tag (The alt="" attribute of the image tag.) on your homepage logo. Most web sites have a company logo that they link back to their homepage. And all too often that Alt tag lacks keyword focus. Most commonly the alt tag is equivalent to the company name. That's great if you are having a hard time getting ranked for your company name. But in order to maximize the SEO benefit of that link, it is much better to use at least a couple keywords in the overall phrase.

According the Matt Cutts Alt tag video, Alt tags should be around 4 to 7 words in general. I lean a little closer to 7 most of the time myself as I believe that good, detailed Alt tags help with both usability and accessibility as well as SEO. For example, if I was writing an alt tag for Sony PlayStation, instead of "Sony PlayStation" as my Alt tag, I would use "Sony PlayStation Video Games and Game Systems". This tag not only conveys useful information to the end user, but also helps the search engines understand that Sony PlayStation is relevant for phrases like "video games", "video games", "video game systems" and many other phrases based on the permutations that can be derived from the keywords found in the Alt tag.

This same concept should be applied to all image links, especially any images you might have in your global navigation.

Internal Linking - As previously discussed, a link is a vote. And while external links are certainly a huge driver of search engine rankings, internal links can often times yield very powerful results if leveraged correctly. One of the best ways to use internal linking to augment your rankings is to simply find occurrences of the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and make sure those phrases are all linked to the same page within your site. You can usually find a number of different pages on your site that mention any particular keyword phrase you are targeting. Linking all these occurrences to the same page sends a strong signal to the search engines that the page being linked to is relevant for that keyword text. This can be a very fruitful exercises if you have a blog as many people do not take enough time to link blog content to Web site content.

It's good to do this exercise on a monthly or semi-monthly basis using not only the keywords that you have identified that you want to rank for, but just as importantly, the keywords you already rank for. This is especially true for the long tail keyword referrals that can be seen in your analytics report. It's very common to get a good lift for long tail keywords by just adding a handful of internal links as many of the longer tail phrases are not that competitive.

So there is your SEO plan for the day:

1 - Evaluate and add keyword focus to ALL the page titles in your Web site (do the Meta description tag too!).
2 - Add keyword focus to all image Alt tags, especially images that link
3 - Evaluate opportunities within your site to link keyword phrases you are targeting (as well as phrases that you are currently ranked for), back to the pages that have the best chance to rank highly for them. Do this on a consistent and ongoing basis.

See you at the top of the search engines! Have a great week.

Catfish

SEO on JavaScript Lightbox JS Content

noreply@blogger.com (Benj Arriola) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:19:00 +0000

Lightbox JS was popularized by Lokesh Dhakar where he made a nice friendly degradable JavaScript function where thumbnails can be linked to their larger images but load dynamically using JavaScript in a separate <div> box that loads in an animated manner. Many webmasters have adapted this and users like it too since there are no more page reloading and the need to hit the back button to go back to the thumbnail view. You can see demonstrations on the Lightbox JS website. After Lightbox JS came out, many other implementations of this technology emerged where the applications have been used not only for images, but for videos and also any content in general. The benefit of using this technique aside from the seamless fluid integration, they do not open as separate popup windows using a new web browser instance that is sometimes anti-popup blockers.

Generally, when would you use Lightbox JS?

When you need to display something briefly to the website visitor and you do not want them to leave the current page where the page has to reload again and to move back, you would have to press the back button. Often you see this in:

Thumbnail Preview Images
When clicked on, they open the larger image in a Lightbox.
*Real life example. (Click on any image on the page.)

Thumbnail Preview Videos and other Animations
Similar to images, just using animations or videos.
*Real life example Click on any video thumbnail.)

Tips and Other Brief Helpful Information
As guides to users on your website, you can give small tips here and there without them getting lost in the loading of a new page.
*Real life example (Click for more information on each dog.)

Fill Up of Quick Forms
Quick questionnaires, surveys and other simple forms that would only take a few minutes or seconds to fill up. People may want to fill up these quick forms.
*Real life example (Click on Request a Quote)

SEO Issues in using Lightbox JS and Similar Technologies

Depending on how you intend to use Lightbox, each way can have their own unique SEO issue.

Content Written by JavaScript/AJAX
If the content of the dHTML popup window is written by AJAX or even JavaScript alone, search engines disregard this content.

Loss of keyword focus with multiple Lightboxes
Content of a Lightbox JS popup can be already existing on the same page but are not displayed right away using some CSS and/or JavaScript tricks and their contents only appear when pulled by the dHTML popup. Here is an *example of this where three lightboxes are on top, but the content is actually on the page already as non-displayed <div> boxes.

Somehow this is sometimes good because the content can be read by the search engines as they are all on the same page. This works well for photo galleries with picture descriptions. At least we know search engines can read the content.

This does not work if various Lightbox popups were meant to have different topics and this mixes the focus of the keywords on a single page.

Pulled from a different URL
This may solve issues with keyword focus, as you selectively choose the content on the page and anything in a Lightbox can be on a separate page not diluting the content focus. Although the problem here is the content will be pulled in various ways, either AJAX or HTML iframes, where both have crawling issues.

SEO Solution to Lightbox JS content

There are many out-of-the box code, ready to use for the Lightbox JS effect. Here are a few:

Lightbox JS

Thickbox

HighSlide

Greybox

Suckerfish HoverLightbox Redux

Lighbox Gone Wild

You can totally make one from scratch or you can use one of the above and modify the code. For the purposes of this discussion, I chose Greybox. Because it is easy to use having the content source as a separate file. This solves the problem of content focus dilution. Greybox is pretty easy to implement by any web designer/developer and links are clean and degrades gracefully which is a good practice of using JavaScript and AJAX for SEO.

The solution does not rely on modifying Greybox in any way. The solution is really within the file that loads within the Greybox.

To explain this further, look at the *SEO friendly Lightbox JS example found here using Greybox.

There are two links found on that page. The first one is how you normally implement Greybox and the second is how it is done to make it SEO friendly.

The nice thing with these Lightboxes, the links are normal links with normal <a href="..."> values, this way they are crawled properly by search engines which is good. The not so good part is when the contents of these Lightboxes get indexed by search engines, they are indexing a partial page and you do not necessarily want people to land on this partial page. Thus you can use JavaScript to redirect to a similar page with the same content but with the navigation and design elements the page normally has.

Why a JavaScript redirect?

Search engines disregard JavaScript, and this is what you really want to happen since the design elements are only for the users and not for the search engines. Just be very careful to make the content of both the Lightbox and standalone page exactly the same to avoid running into any red flags that may perceive the site do be hiding any content.

Notice in the examples above, there is no difference between the two implementations in terms of how it executes. Although as search engines crawl the contents of these Lightboxes, and when visited directly on a link from a search engine, people will see two different looking pages.

When both implementations will be crawled and indexed, the link found in search engine results will appear differently. The normal implementation will display a partial page that nobody would want to go to. This can be as worse as a 404 page. Because it seems to go nowhere and appears to be not part of the site. The optimized Lightbox JS example on the right will show something else. It will still pull in the correct page template and would work as a standalone perfectly fine. Thus pleasing both search engines and human visitors of your website.

Greybox uses an iframe running this file and parameter: greybox/loader_frame.html?s=0 Depending where you saved your greybox files, the absolute URL of this will be your referring URL. Using your favorite scripting language, detect the referring URL and redirect by JavaScript to a page for humans with the exact same content but with the design elements and Navigations. Also include a noindex tag on this page to avoid any duplicate content issues. In the examples posted, the SEO friendly Lightbox JS loads seofriendly.php, but if the referring URL is not Greybox, it redirects to a noindex page seofriendlyuser.php. This example used PHP with the following code:

<?php if($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]
   !="http://www.ajaxoptimize.com/seogreybox/js/greybox/loader_frame.html?s=0"){ ?>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
   <!--
      window.location = "seofriendlyuser.php";
   //-->
</script>
<? } ?>

Although this example was in PHP, this could also be done in other languages. You may need to do your own research on that for .Net, ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl, MivaScript, JSP, Phyton, TCL and other languages

*Examples above are used to show that this is used by current day web designers. BusinessOnLine is not associated with any of the websites used above. The examples above may change or modify their website over time and may not be valid examples in the future but were valid examples during the time this blog post was first written.

Top 5 Ways to Evalute the SEO Ability of Your Creative Agency or Web Design Firm

noreply@blogger.com (Catfish) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:24:00 +0000

One of the things that I notice about a lot of Web Design firms and even creative agencies who say they bake SEO into everything they do, is that very few of them bake it into there own sites. Now I don't want to call anyone out today but I do want to give people a quick little guide on the top five things to look for when evaluating the SEO ability of design firm that says they know SEO. I mean, if SEO is part of their overall offering, they would be silly not to SEO their own site right? And if they haven't taken the time to do that, is that a firm that you can really feel confident in? I think you know my answer. *lol* So here is the top 5 things that I would look for in a design firms web site that will give you some idea if they know what they are doing:

1) Are their page titles unique on every page and are they keyword focused. If you see a site with Page Titles like "About Us - Company Name", they have not been optimized. Page Titles should read like intelligent sentences or phrases and convey as much information about the content of the page as possible. If you see short page titles that lack keyword focus in relation to the content that is on the page, that's a sure sign that the optimization skills of this company are lacking.

2) Are all their pages indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN? Many times if a site is dynamic or has extra long URL strings with too many parameters, search engines can have some difficulty indexing pages. Doing a site:www.domain.com search on the company URL can tell you if the pages you see on the Web site are indexed. If they are not, or there are issues with duplicate content where content is indexed, your company might not be the best option for SEO.

3) And speaking of dynamic URL strings, if your design firm has you using URLs that are a mile long with more than 4 or 5 parameters, you want to recheck #2 to see if those pages are indexed. Google does fairly well with long URL strings nowadays although they are inconsistent at best. The other engines are farther behind in their ability to understand and rank these types of pages. So it's best to be on the safe side and have URL strings which are as short and easy to understand as possible.

4) Flash - While there have been a lot of advancements over the last year in SEO, it is still not recommended that your site be completely based in Flash. Usability and accessibility concerns aside, unless your design team has a specific solution to optimize your Flash, like using FlashObject or one of the other Flash Solutions that Benj has recommended, your SEO millage may vary. And if they put your primary navigation for your site in Flash with no alternative way for spiders to see it, you have clearly found someone who does not have a SEO.

5) JavaScript - Again, if the entire site navigation is built in JavaScript with no alternative text link navigation or noscript tag, odds are the company in question has a very limited understanding of SEO.

Obviously there is a lot more to SEO than these five issues. But these are pretty easy to spot and can be a quick clue as to the relative sophistication level of your Web design firm or creative agency as it relates to SEO. If they don't offer SEO as part of their services, then these types of issues may be expected. But if they do offer SEO and these issues exist, it might be time to re-evaluate whether or not you want to engage that company for SEO work.

I hope that helps a few people in their decision making process. Have a great week!