<![CDATA[Cho Toan Forum - Online Business Forum - Search Engine Optimization]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/ Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:30:32 -0400 MyBB <![CDATA[Does Google Instant Mark the End of SEO?]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-does-google-instant-mark-the-end-of-seo4990 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:18:07 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-does-google-instant-mark-the-end-of-seo4990 A reporter (I believe she was from AdAge) attending Google's Q&A about Google Instant pointed out that the new search feature tends to favor big brands. This isn't really surprising, as it is these brands that are more likely to be searched for most often. After all, they're big because people know them. 

Do you think Google Instant is a threat to SEO? Share your thoughts.
iCrossing has a list of brands that come up when you enter each letter of the alphabet (not all are brands, but many are). A is for Amazon (not Apple), B is for Bank of America, M is for Mapquest (not Microsoft), N is for Netflix, P is for Pandora, V is for Verizon, and Y is for Yahoo.
You must keep in mind, however, that the instant results are personalized. Google takes into account things like your location and your surfing habits when providing you results. 

Google Instant doesn't necessarily make things any easier on small businesses, but it's showing big brands in cases where Google probably would've suggested big brands anyway. If users do a lot of local searches, it's possible that Google could show more local results (including small businesses) for those users, I'm speculating.
Steve Rubel says that Google Instant makes SEO irrelevant. "Here's what this means," he says. "No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors."
He's not wrong about that, but I'm not sure that makes SEO irrelevant. Google has been showing different results to different users for quite a while now. This is really just an extension of that.
Businesses might want to try (and have other people try) doing searches for keywords that they would expect people to use to find their site. See what comes up (keep in mind the personalization) and work from there. Easier said than done no doubt, but it's something to consider. Think about what kinds of people will be interested in your products and what other kind of searches they might be doing. It's not a science, but again, perhaps something worth considering. It might mean getting to know your customers better, which can' t be a bad thing anyway. Maybe it means asking them to take surveys. Maybe it doesn't.
The whole thing doesn't help organic SEO's case in the old SEO vs PPC debate. I'll give Rubel that.
Speaking of PPC, Google says Google Instant changes the way it counts impressions. "It's possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels," says Google's Dan Friedman. "However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the quality of your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connect them with the answers they need."

Google Instant with Ads
Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics Team says that Analytics users might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume and traffic for organic keywords. "For example, you may find that certain keywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward," he says.
You should read this post on the Google Webamster Central blog. It says that impressions are measured in three ways: the traditional way, when a user clicks on a link that appears as they begin to type, and when a user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.
 
Sidenote: Google's Matt Cutts weighed in on the whole will Google Instant kill SEO thing. "Almost every new change at Google generates the question 'Will X kill SEO?' Here's an video I did last year, but it still applies," he says.
>>

He says, however that over time, it could <i>change</i> SEO. "The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time," says Cutts. "For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results."

Google Instant will likely become increasingly important to search marketing, because not only will it roll out to more countries (it's starting in the U.S. and a select few others), but it will soon come to mobile and browser search boxes. Each of these factors will greatly increase how often Instant results are displayed.
The mobile factor actually has implications for Google retaining a substantial amount of mobile searches in general. The better (and quicker) Google can give results on any kind of query, the less reason users have to go to different apps to acquire certain information.
Google clearly said that ranking stays the same with Google Instant, but it will change the way people search. It will affect their search behavior, and that is what search marketers are going to have to think about more than ever. You should also consider that some people will simply deactivate the feature, leaving them open to Google's standard results.

Tell us what you think of Google Instant. Do you like it or not? 



Posted on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:12:35 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...end-of-seo
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...o#comments]]> A reporter (I believe she was from AdAge) attending Google's Q&A about Google Instant pointed out that the new search feature tends to favor big brands. This isn't really surprising, as it is these brands that are more likely to be searched for most often. After all, they're big because people know them. 

Do you think Google Instant is a threat to SEO? Share your thoughts.
iCrossing has a list of brands that come up when you enter each letter of the alphabet (not all are brands, but many are). A is for Amazon (not Apple), B is for Bank of America, M is for Mapquest (not Microsoft), N is for Netflix, P is for Pandora, V is for Verizon, and Y is for Yahoo.
You must keep in mind, however, that the instant results are personalized. Google takes into account things like your location and your surfing habits when providing you results. 

Google Instant doesn't necessarily make things any easier on small businesses, but it's showing big brands in cases where Google probably would've suggested big brands anyway. If users do a lot of local searches, it's possible that Google could show more local results (including small businesses) for those users, I'm speculating.
Steve Rubel says that Google Instant makes SEO irrelevant. "Here's what this means," he says. "No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors."
He's not wrong about that, but I'm not sure that makes SEO irrelevant. Google has been showing different results to different users for quite a while now. This is really just an extension of that.
Businesses might want to try (and have other people try) doing searches for keywords that they would expect people to use to find their site. See what comes up (keep in mind the personalization) and work from there. Easier said than done no doubt, but it's something to consider. Think about what kinds of people will be interested in your products and what other kind of searches they might be doing. It's not a science, but again, perhaps something worth considering. It might mean getting to know your customers better, which can' t be a bad thing anyway. Maybe it means asking them to take surveys. Maybe it doesn't.
The whole thing doesn't help organic SEO's case in the old SEO vs PPC debate. I'll give Rubel that.
Speaking of PPC, Google says Google Instant changes the way it counts impressions. "It's possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels," says Google's Dan Friedman. "However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the quality of your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connect them with the answers they need."

Google Instant with Ads
Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics Team says that Analytics users might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume and traffic for organic keywords. "For example, you may find that certain keywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward," he says.
You should read this post on the Google Webamster Central blog. It says that impressions are measured in three ways: the traditional way, when a user clicks on a link that appears as they begin to type, and when a user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.
 
Sidenote: Google's Matt Cutts weighed in on the whole will Google Instant kill SEO thing. "Almost every new change at Google generates the question 'Will X kill SEO?' Here's an video I did last year, but it still applies," he says.
>>

He says, however that over time, it could <i>change</i> SEO. "The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time," says Cutts. "For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results."

Google Instant will likely become increasingly important to search marketing, because not only will it roll out to more countries (it's starting in the U.S. and a select few others), but it will soon come to mobile and browser search boxes. Each of these factors will greatly increase how often Instant results are displayed.
The mobile factor actually has implications for Google retaining a substantial amount of mobile searches in general. The better (and quicker) Google can give results on any kind of query, the less reason users have to go to different apps to acquire certain information.
Google clearly said that ranking stays the same with Google Instant, but it will change the way people search. It will affect their search behavior, and that is what search marketers are going to have to think about more than ever. You should also consider that some people will simply deactivate the feature, leaving them open to Google's standard results.

Tell us what you think of Google Instant. Do you like it or not? 



Posted on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:12:35 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...end-of-seo
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...o#comments]]> <![CDATA[Yahoo Completes Bing Transition for Organic Results (in US and Canada)]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-yahoo-completes-bing-transition-for-organic-results-in-us-and-canada4750 Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:09:35 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-yahoo-completes-bing-transition-for-organic-results-in-us-and-canada4750 Last week, Yahoo announced that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo results - a product of the Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft. Now, the companies have announced that the transition of organic results in the U.S. and Canada is complete.

This applies to web, image, and video search on Yahoo for both the desktop and mobile experiences of Yahoo Search.

"With this week's milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike," says Yahoo SVP of Search Products, Shashi Seth. "We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network.  As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come."

"We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall," says Microsoft's SVP of Online Services, Satya Nadella. "As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season."

Both companies have indicated that the transition has gone smoothly, with Yahoo praising the speed at which the teams were able to get it done.

So, what are your thoughts on Yahoo's new search results? If you were a Yahoo user before, now you're choosing between Yahoo's and Bing's user interface.




Posted on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:46:45 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...and-canada
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...a#comments]]> Last week, Yahoo announced that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo results - a product of the Search Alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft. Now, the companies have announced that the transition of organic results in the U.S. and Canada is complete.

This applies to web, image, and video search on Yahoo for both the desktop and mobile experiences of Yahoo Search.

"With this week's milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike," says Yahoo SVP of Search Products, Shashi Seth. "We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network.  As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come."

"We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall," says Microsoft's SVP of Online Services, Satya Nadella. "As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season."

Both companies have indicated that the transition has gone smoothly, with Yahoo praising the speed at which the teams were able to get it done.

So, what are your thoughts on Yahoo's new search results? If you were a Yahoo user before, now you're choosing between Yahoo's and Bing's user interface.




Posted on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:46:45 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...and-canada
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...a#comments]]> <![CDATA[Google Activity That May Have an Impact on Rankings]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-activity-that-may-have-an-impact-on-rankings4751 Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:09:35 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-activity-that-may-have-an-impact-on-rankings4751 There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product - search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).

Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking? Tell us about it.

Algorithm Change

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today's change, only two results from http://www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History's website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it's far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

Google Tweaks Algorithm

Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this. "Brace yourselves! Another Mayday disaster coming," one person commented on our story about it.

What do you think of this algorithm change? Comment here.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury's still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP. The video demonstrates:

Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we'll see.

Should Google change search results as you type? Comment here.

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, ". their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site... I've never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip's but there was like 10-20 of them running at once."

Acquisition

Google acquires Like.com

The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it's unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

Have you noticed anything else interesting happening with Google search within the last week or so? Are you seeing things that are impacting your rankings? Let us know.




Posted on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:36:22 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...n-rankings
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product - search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).

Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking? Tell us about it.

Algorithm Change

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today's change, only two results from http://www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History's website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it's far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

Google Tweaks Algorithm

Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this. "Brace yourselves! Another Mayday disaster coming," one person commented on our story about it.

What do you think of this algorithm change? Comment here.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury's still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP. The video demonstrates:

Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we'll see.

Should Google change search results as you type? Comment here.

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, ". their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site... I've never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip's but there was like 10-20 of them running at once."

Acquisition

Google acquires Like.com

The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it's unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

Have you noticed anything else interesting happening with Google search within the last week or so? Are you seeing things that are impacting your rankings? Let us know.




Posted on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:36:22 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...n-rankings
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> <![CDATA[Federated Media Acquires Semantic Tagging, SEO Platform from TextDigger]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-federated-media-acquires-semantic-tagging-seo-platform-from-textdigger4736 Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:02:14 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-federated-media-acquires-semantic-tagging-seo-platform-from-textdigger4736 Federated Media announced today that it has acquired a technology suite and platform for semantic and linguistic profiling of web-based content from San Jose startup TextDigger.

FM says TextDigger's technology complements its own platform with semantic solutions for content tagging, filtering and clustering, that can help the company enhance the user experience, ad targeting, and semantic SEO for a site or network of sites.

"We're proud to place TextDigger's semantic profiling technology in FM's hands," said Tim Musgrove, founder and CEO of TextDigger. "I've followed FM's growth over the last few years and admire the company's work. They have amassed a great team and a solid technology platform. I’m happy that our IP and our people will be integrated into such a wonderful company. This is a great strategic fit for all sides involved."

John Battelle of Federated Media"FM's home-grown technology platform is largely an untold story," said John Battelle, founder, chairman and CEO of Federated Media. "Over the past five years, our technology team has built an extraordinary platform that drives our business and keeps us on the edge of innovation in media. TextDigger provides us with a complementary technology that will build upon the work our team began back in 2005. Expect to hear more from FM with regard to media and marketing technology solutions."

Four "key" people from TextDigger including Musgrove, VP Engineering Robin Hiroko Walsh, Sr. Director of Product Management Peter Ridge, and Lead Software Engineer Jim Hull, are also joining the Federated Media team.

TextDigger will continue its own search business. Current Chief Business Development Officer will take over as CEO. TextDigger customers will continue to be supported by either FM or TextDigger, depending on their type of project or service. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed.




Posted on Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:39:50 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...textdigger
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...r#comments]]> Federated Media announced today that it has acquired a technology suite and platform for semantic and linguistic profiling of web-based content from San Jose startup TextDigger.

FM says TextDigger's technology complements its own platform with semantic solutions for content tagging, filtering and clustering, that can help the company enhance the user experience, ad targeting, and semantic SEO for a site or network of sites.

"We're proud to place TextDigger's semantic profiling technology in FM's hands," said Tim Musgrove, founder and CEO of TextDigger. "I've followed FM's growth over the last few years and admire the company's work. They have amassed a great team and a solid technology platform. I’m happy that our IP and our people will be integrated into such a wonderful company. This is a great strategic fit for all sides involved."

John Battelle of Federated Media"FM's home-grown technology platform is largely an untold story," said John Battelle, founder, chairman and CEO of Federated Media. "Over the past five years, our technology team has built an extraordinary platform that drives our business and keeps us on the edge of innovation in media. TextDigger provides us with a complementary technology that will build upon the work our team began back in 2005. Expect to hear more from FM with regard to media and marketing technology solutions."

Four "key" people from TextDigger including Musgrove, VP Engineering Robin Hiroko Walsh, Sr. Director of Product Management Peter Ridge, and Lead Software Engineer Jim Hull, are also joining the Federated Media team.

TextDigger will continue its own search business. Current Chief Business Development Officer will take over as CEO. TextDigger customers will continue to be supported by either FM or TextDigger, depending on their type of project or service. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed.




Posted on Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:39:50 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...textdigger
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...r#comments]]> <![CDATA[Google Tweaks Algorithm to Show More Results from a Domain]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-tweaks-algorithm-to-show-more-results-from-a-domain4717 Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:54:51 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-tweaks-algorithm-to-show-more-results-from-a-domain4717 Gooogle announced today that it has made a change to its algorithm that is supposed to make it easier to find multiple pages from a single site.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today's change, only two results from http://www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History's website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it's far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

Google Tweaks Algorithm

"We're always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year," adds Keshava. "We expect today's improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page."

This change may prove to be helpful for a lot of searches, but they could still do more in this area if you ask me. For exmaple, they could rank tag pages (commonly used on news sites and blogs) as top results for appropriate searches.

For instance, if I search for "WebProNews SEO articles" or "SEO articles on WebProNews", it couldn't get any more relvant than the WebProNews SEO tag page. That points to every SEO article we have. Yet, this result is nowhere to be found for either query, and it's certainly not unique to us (ironically, another article in which I made a similar complaint ranks at the top). These pages aren't often linked to, so they don't get the PageRank, but does that make them less relevant for queries like this?




Posted on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:25:20 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...m-a-domain
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...n#comments]]> Gooogle announced today that it has made a change to its algorithm that is supposed to make it easier to find multiple pages from a single site.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today's change, only two results from http://www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History's website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it's far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

Google Tweaks Algorithm

"We're always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year," adds Keshava. "We expect today's improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page."

This change may prove to be helpful for a lot of searches, but they could still do more in this area if you ask me. For exmaple, they could rank tag pages (commonly used on news sites and blogs) as top results for appropriate searches.

For instance, if I search for "WebProNews SEO articles" or "SEO articles on WebProNews", it couldn't get any more relvant than the WebProNews SEO tag page. That points to every SEO article we have. Yet, this result is nowhere to be found for either query, and it's certainly not unique to us (ironically, another article in which I made a similar complaint ranks at the top). These pages aren't often linked to, so they don't get the PageRank, but does that make them less relevant for queries like this?




Posted on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:25:20 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...m-a-domain
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...n#comments]]> <![CDATA[How Much Should You Spend On SEO?]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-how-much-should-you-spend-on-seo4383 Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:01:01 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-how-much-should-you-spend-on-seo4383 It’s a tough question, especially in a bad economy.

The question really begs another question – what is your goal for your site?

If you are operating it as a real business where you hope to either supplement your current income or rely on it as your sole source of income – then you need to be prepared to invest in search (it’s often the foundation of your marketing and a consistent source of regular traffic).

You can invest time or money and in most cases, you usually need to invest both.

I think there is someone out there spreading some erroneous information about starting a business online.  There is a lot of the “build it and they will come” mentality – in other words throw up a site and voila insta-business!

While in many ways, it is easier to do business online because you don’t need to set up physical stores and have a lot of the issues you have with brick and mortars, it is by no means a “sure thing” – you still have to work for your success.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t start an online business -  I am just saying if you expect your business to grow and treat you well, then you need to treat it like a serious business.

So, yes, it will be necessary for you to invest both time and money into generating traffic.

So back to the question at hand – how much should you spend on SEO?

You need to crunch some numbers and see how many visitors it takes to get a sale and how much a sale is worth to you to really fine-tune your budget – especially if PPC is part of your plans (so many people waste money on PPC that isn’t converting – spend wisely or it can suck you dry!)

For organic SEO you will find everything from $19.99 mass submission (avoid like the plague, you may as well burn your $19.99) to tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Most small to medium sized businesses spend between $300 – $800 per month, although I’ve also heard people say numbers a little higher, like $500 – $1500 per month is the norm.  So somewhere in that range is what you should expect to pay for quality SEO work.

It always amazes me that people are annoyed they have to pay for SEO.  People will pay for a doctor or a mechanic, or even a web designer but they seem to resent having to pay for SEO.  If you have the time and knowledge, then by all means, don’t pay anyone, do it yourself.  However if you don’t have the time or knowledge, it’s a valid, and important expense and not something you should begrudge.  Driving traffic to your site is the foundation and not the area you want to go cheap.

I’m jussayin…think about your goals and think about what you are prepared to do to get there.




Posted on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:57:12 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...end-on-seo
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles...o#comments]]> It’s a tough question, especially in a bad economy.

The question really begs another question – what is your goal for your site?

If you are operating it as a real business where you hope to either supplement your current income or rely on it as your sole source of income – then you need to be prepared to invest in search (it’s often the foundation of your marketing and a consistent source of regular traffic).

You can invest time or money and in most cases, you usually need to invest both.

I think there is someone out there spreading some erroneous information about starting a business online.  There is a lot of the “build it and they will come” mentality – in other words throw up a site and voila insta-business!

While in many ways, it is easier to do business online because you don’t need to set up physical stores and have a lot of the issues you have with brick and mortars, it is by no means a “sure thing” – you still have to work for your success.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t start an online business -  I am just saying if you expect your business to grow and treat you well, then you need to treat it like a serious business.

So, yes, it will be necessary for you to invest both time and money into generating traffic.

So back to the question at hand – how much should you spend on SEO?

You need to crunch some numbers and see how many visitors it takes to get a sale and how much a sale is worth to you to really fine-tune your budget – especially if PPC is part of your plans (so many people waste money on PPC that isn’t converting – spend wisely or it can suck you dry!)

For organic SEO you will find everything from $19.99 mass submission (avoid like the plague, you may as well burn your $19.99) to tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Most small to medium sized businesses spend between $300 – $800 per month, although I’ve also heard people say numbers a little higher, like $500 – $1500 per month is the norm.  So somewhere in that range is what you should expect to pay for quality SEO work.

It always amazes me that people are annoyed they have to pay for SEO.  People will pay for a doctor or a mechanic, or even a web designer but they seem to resent having to pay for SEO.  If you have the time and knowledge, then by all means, don’t pay anyone, do it yourself.  However if you don’t have the time or knowledge, it’s a valid, and important expense and not something you should begrudge.  Driving traffic to your site is the foundation and not the area you want to go cheap.

I’m jussayin…think about your goals and think about what you are prepared to do to get there.




Posted on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:57:12 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...end-on-seo
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles...o#comments]]> <![CDATA[What's More Important in Search? Freshness or Quality?]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-what-039-s-more-important-in-search-freshness-or-quality4349 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:06:19 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-what-039-s-more-important-in-search-freshness-or-quality4349 It's been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

How important is freshness to you as a search engine user? Share your thoughts here.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn't the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?




Matt's response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says...

"Whenever you're thinking about search engines, it's much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don't post every day. Sometimes I don't post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it..."

Matt implies that you'll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn't that much different than stuff that's already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Quality is always priority one, but I don't think that's to say that freshness doesn't count. For example, as we looked at recently,

Google's time filters (which are more readily available to searchers, courtesy of the recent redesign of the SERPs), not to mention the realtime results Google often displays, can add some benefit to providing fresh content. Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario had a very interesting post at Search Engine Land looking at how the time filter may even help smaller brands get some visibility.

Of course Google has gone out of its way with Caffeine to increase the speed at which it indexes content so it can provide the freshest results possible.

Do you take freshness into account for your search engine marketing strategy? Comment here.


Posted on Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:00:58 +0000 at http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...or-quality
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...y#comments]]> It's been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

How important is freshness to you as a search engine user? Share your thoughts here.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn't the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?




Matt's response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says...

"Whenever you're thinking about search engines, it's much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don't post every day. Sometimes I don't post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it..."

Matt implies that you'll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn't that much different than stuff that's already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Quality is always priority one, but I don't think that's to say that freshness doesn't count. For example, as we looked at recently,

Google's time filters (which are more readily available to searchers, courtesy of the recent redesign of the SERPs), not to mention the realtime results Google often displays, can add some benefit to providing fresh content. Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario had a very interesting post at Search Engine Land looking at how the time filter may even help smaller brands get some visibility.

Of course Google has gone out of its way with Caffeine to increase the speed at which it indexes content so it can provide the freshest results possible.

Do you take freshness into account for your search engine marketing strategy? Comment here.


Posted on Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:00:58 +0000 at http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...or-quality
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...y#comments]]> <![CDATA[Yahoo Now Including Bing Results - Tips for Optimizing]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-yahoo-now-including-bing-results-tips-for-optimizing4229 Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:40:44 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-yahoo-now-including-bing-results-tips-for-optimizing4229 Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance's transition have begun.

Will you place more emphasis on Bing optimization as it integrates with Yahoo Search? Let us know.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo's VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

Yahoo Starts including Microsoft search results - paid and organic

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

  1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
  2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
  3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing's share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let's not forget).

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft's mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we've discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you've not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.




Posted on Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:28:46 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ch-results
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance's transition have begun.

Will you place more emphasis on Bing optimization as it integrates with Yahoo Search? Let us know.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo's VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

Yahoo Starts including Microsoft search results - paid and organic

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

  1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
  2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
  3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing's share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let's not forget).

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft's mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we've discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you've not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.




Posted on Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:28:46 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ch-results
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> <![CDATA[Tips for Optimizing Now That Yahoo is Including Bing Search Results]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-tips-for-optimizing-now-that-yahoo-is-including-bing-search-results4214 Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:16:37 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-tips-for-optimizing-now-that-yahoo-is-including-bing-search-results4214 Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance's transition have begun.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo's VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

Yahoo Starts including Microsoft search results - paid and organic

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

  1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
  2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
  3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft's mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we've discussed recently, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you've not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.




Posted on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:18:46 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ch-results
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance's transition have begun.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo's VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

Yahoo Starts including Microsoft search results - paid and organic

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

  1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
  2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
  3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft's mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we've discussed recently, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you've not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.




Posted on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:18:46 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ch-results
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> <![CDATA[Yahoo Starts Including Microsoft Search Results - Tips for Optimizing]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-yahoo-starts-including-microsoft-search-results-tips-for-optimizing4205 Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:24:18 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-yahoo-starts-including-microsoft-search-results-tips-for-optimizing4205 Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance's transition have begun.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo's VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

Yahoo Starts including Microsoft search results - paid and organic

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

  1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
  2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
  3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft's mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we've discussed recently, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you've not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.




Posted on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:18:46 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ch-results
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance's transition have begun.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo's VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

Yahoo Starts including Microsoft search results - paid and organic

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

  1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
  2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
  3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft's mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we've discussed recently, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you've not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.




Posted on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:18:46 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ch-results
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> <![CDATA[BusinessWire to Give Businesses More Ways to Increase Press Coverage]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-businesswire-to-give-businesses-more-ways-to-increase-press-coverage4146 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:43:07 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-businesswire-to-give-businesses-more-ways-to-increase-press-coverage4146 BusinessWire, the popular newswire service, is set to launch some new services for businesses and organizations next month. These are the NewsHQ online newsroom and the InvestorHQ investor center.

BusinessWire says these microsites were developed specifically to help corporate communicators and investor relations officers house and maintain information for journalists, bloggers, investors, consumers, analysts, key influencers, etc.

BusinessWire - Giving organizations new resources"There are many benefits to employing these content management solutions," explains BusinessWire VP of Web Communications, Ibrey Woodall. "One of the main reasons the online newsroom came into existence was because public relations representatives were having a hard time getting cooperation from their technical, or IT department, when they needed a press release posted quickly. Investor relations officers also needed a means by which they could get the most recent financial news and data to their company’s investors and analysts."

"So, control was an initiating factor for this technological evolution," she adds. "Communicators needed to be able to post and organize content in a timely manner. They needed to be able to get their message on their website, and delivered directly to those who were interested in their organization."

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal of gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. Providing the givers of press (journalists, bloggers, and even everyday consumers via social media) with as many resources for finding information as possible, will only increase the likelihood of coverage. Businesses may find  these new services from Business Wire quite helpful.

It also helps that the services come with some basic SEO features, which should further increase visibility.




Posted on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:29:04 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...s-coverage
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...e#comments]]> BusinessWire, the popular newswire service, is set to launch some new services for businesses and organizations next month. These are the NewsHQ online newsroom and the InvestorHQ investor center.

BusinessWire says these microsites were developed specifically to help corporate communicators and investor relations officers house and maintain information for journalists, bloggers, investors, consumers, analysts, key influencers, etc.

BusinessWire - Giving organizations new resources"There are many benefits to employing these content management solutions," explains BusinessWire VP of Web Communications, Ibrey Woodall. "One of the main reasons the online newsroom came into existence was because public relations representatives were having a hard time getting cooperation from their technical, or IT department, when they needed a press release posted quickly. Investor relations officers also needed a means by which they could get the most recent financial news and data to their company’s investors and analysts."

"So, control was an initiating factor for this technological evolution," she adds. "Communicators needed to be able to post and organize content in a timely manner. They needed to be able to get their message on their website, and delivered directly to those who were interested in their organization."

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal of gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. Providing the givers of press (journalists, bloggers, and even everyday consumers via social media) with as many resources for finding information as possible, will only increase the likelihood of coverage. Businesses may find  these new services from Business Wire quite helpful.

It also helps that the services come with some basic SEO features, which should further increase visibility.




Posted on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:29:04 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...s-coverage
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...e#comments]]> <![CDATA[Clickbank Product Tactics 101]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-clickbank-product-tactics-1014114 Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:39:54 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-clickbank-product-tactics-1014114
Four of these facts are a part of the product description and are as follows:

$ Sales- This points to how much your commission amount will be for every affiliate sale

% Sales- This percentage refers to the percentage of the product sales price $/Sale represents (The $Sales is usually more important)

% Refd - This percentage refers to the percentage of the sales of the product coming from affiliate sales

Grav- The Gravity of a product is a measure of how many affiliates are promoting it. This is usually one of the most important factors in deciding to promote a certain product.

However, the far most important basis for choosing a clickbank affiliate product is the conversion rate. The conversion rate simply implies to how many visitors out of a certain number buy the product. So for example, if 2 out of every 200 visitors to a sales page buys the product, then ultimately you end up having a 2% conversion rate.

The question that can be nagging though is how do you find what the conversion rate for a product is? Well by looking at products in the Clickbank market, you can identify certain key aspects.

1.) “Gravity”& it’s Significance : As mentioned before, the gravity is the measure to how many affiliates are promoting a product. Every clickbank product is marked by a “gravity” number, which is often on the far right, under the product title. This “Gravity” number represents how well the clickbank product is converting for affiliates. Therefore, the higher the gravity number, the better the product is converting. Also, it is important to avoid extremely high gravity numbers as these indicate an extremely high competition, so aiming for a gravity number of (example) 71.43 to 125.22 would be a good idea. This would mean the product has proven itself but the competition is low enough to still succeed in. As well, attempt to find a refund rate that is lower than 3% or 2% as this will also increase the chances of not getting refunds and keeping profit.

2.) Merchant’s Sales Copy: Questions to keep in mind is how good is the sales copy? Will it convert as much as you would like? Are the colors annoying, or are they subtle and engaging enough to make sales and get the point across? Overall, its important to have an idea of the sales page as to whether it will attract attention from the buyers perspective.
3.) Other Key factors in deciding if a Clickbank Product is a great fit:

a.) Make sure the $/Sale is greater than $20. If this number is lower than that it will be tough to profit from techniques such as Google Adwords or other paid advertising.
b.) As mentioned before shoot for gravity that is anywhere between 50 or 70 between 100 to 120. Anything lower than these numbers would indicate that this certain product isn’t popular enough and will not sell well. In addition, any numbers higher than 100 will indicate that this product is too popular and thus the competition is ridiculously high.

Just knowing the basics of the Clickbank MarketPlace can be a starting point in finding high converting products.]]>
Four of these facts are a part of the product description and are as follows:

$ Sales- This points to how much your commission amount will be for every affiliate sale

% Sales- This percentage refers to the percentage of the product sales price $/Sale represents (The $Sales is usually more important)

% Refd - This percentage refers to the percentage of the sales of the product coming from affiliate sales

Grav- The Gravity of a product is a measure of how many affiliates are promoting it. This is usually one of the most important factors in deciding to promote a certain product.

However, the far most important basis for choosing a clickbank affiliate product is the conversion rate. The conversion rate simply implies to how many visitors out of a certain number buy the product. So for example, if 2 out of every 200 visitors to a sales page buys the product, then ultimately you end up having a 2% conversion rate.

The question that can be nagging though is how do you find what the conversion rate for a product is? Well by looking at products in the Clickbank market, you can identify certain key aspects.

1.) “Gravity”& it’s Significance : As mentioned before, the gravity is the measure to how many affiliates are promoting a product. Every clickbank product is marked by a “gravity” number, which is often on the far right, under the product title. This “Gravity” number represents how well the clickbank product is converting for affiliates. Therefore, the higher the gravity number, the better the product is converting. Also, it is important to avoid extremely high gravity numbers as these indicate an extremely high competition, so aiming for a gravity number of (example) 71.43 to 125.22 would be a good idea. This would mean the product has proven itself but the competition is low enough to still succeed in. As well, attempt to find a refund rate that is lower than 3% or 2% as this will also increase the chances of not getting refunds and keeping profit.

2.) Merchant’s Sales Copy: Questions to keep in mind is how good is the sales copy? Will it convert as much as you would like? Are the colors annoying, or are they subtle and engaging enough to make sales and get the point across? Overall, its important to have an idea of the sales page as to whether it will attract attention from the buyers perspective.
3.) Other Key factors in deciding if a Clickbank Product is a great fit:

a.) Make sure the $/Sale is greater than $20. If this number is lower than that it will be tough to profit from techniques such as Google Adwords or other paid advertising.
b.) As mentioned before shoot for gravity that is anywhere between 50 or 70 between 100 to 120. Anything lower than these numbers would indicate that this certain product isn’t popular enough and will not sell well. In addition, any numbers higher than 100 will indicate that this product is too popular and thus the competition is ridiculously high.

Just knowing the basics of the Clickbank MarketPlace can be a starting point in finding high converting products.]]> <![CDATA[Google Eyes Mouse Movement as Possible Search Relevancy Signal]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-eyes-mouse-movement-as-possible-search-relevancy-signal4049 Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:56:10 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-eyes-mouse-movement-as-possible-search-relevancy-signal4049 Google was granted an interesting patent today. The title is "System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring". Here is how the abstract for the patent describes it:

A method and system of modulating search result relevancy use various types of user browsing activities. In particular, a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones. The server also uses the relevancy values to determine and/or adjust the content of an one-box result associated with a search query.

Mouse movement as a ranking factor?"The patent presents a couple of assumptions about how mouse pointer movements can be interpreted," explains Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea, who presents a much more readable explanation of the patent. "For example, a longer hover over a result may indicate a positive opinion about how relevant a listing on the results page might be to a query. And, if someone moves their mouse pointer across a snippet line by line at a normal reading speed, it may indicate a higher level of attention to that result than if pointer was kept in a static position or moved randomly."

"So, the speed and movement of a mouse pointer as well as where it is placed on a search result page might be tracked to see how much attention a search pays to different search results," he adds. "If someone hovers over one sponsored listing, or ad, but not another, that might indicate more attention and interest in the ad hovered over. If a local map is shown, or a definition, or some other OneBox result, and the searcher viewing the page hovers over those OneBox results for a while, that could be an indication that the map or the definition or other OneBox listing was helpful."
 
The patent was filed all the way back in 2005, and like Slawski notes, there's no telling if Google will actually utilize it. A lot can change in 5 years, especially in this industry. Either way, they've been granted the patent. You can read it here.




Posted on Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:59:51 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ncy-signal
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...l#comments]]> Google was granted an interesting patent today. The title is "System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring". Here is how the abstract for the patent describes it:

A method and system of modulating search result relevancy use various types of user browsing activities. In particular, a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones. The server also uses the relevancy values to determine and/or adjust the content of an one-box result associated with a search query.

Mouse movement as a ranking factor?"The patent presents a couple of assumptions about how mouse pointer movements can be interpreted," explains Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea, who presents a much more readable explanation of the patent. "For example, a longer hover over a result may indicate a positive opinion about how relevant a listing on the results page might be to a query. And, if someone moves their mouse pointer across a snippet line by line at a normal reading speed, it may indicate a higher level of attention to that result than if pointer was kept in a static position or moved randomly."

"So, the speed and movement of a mouse pointer as well as where it is placed on a search result page might be tracked to see how much attention a search pays to different search results," he adds. "If someone hovers over one sponsored listing, or ad, but not another, that might indicate more attention and interest in the ad hovered over. If a local map is shown, or a definition, or some other OneBox result, and the searcher viewing the page hovers over those OneBox results for a while, that could be an indication that the map or the definition or other OneBox listing was helpful."
 
The patent was filed all the way back in 2005, and like Slawski notes, there's no telling if Google will actually utilize it. A lot can change in 5 years, especially in this industry. Either way, they've been granted the patent. You can read it here.




Posted on Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:59:51 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ncy-signal
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...l#comments]]> <![CDATA[Basics of a SEO Mindset]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-basics-of-a-seo-mindset3877 Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:13:06 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-basics-of-a-seo-mindset3877

1.) Submitting your site to many Search Engines

In getting search engine traffic the most obvious thing to do would be to submit a site to many; or as many search engines as humanly possible. The fact of the matter is that you do not need to submit your site to any search engines at all. Spending time on other activities such as building internal & external links that will point to or within your website pages. Another activity would be writing good content for your site, such as seen in article marketing. In addition, you can submit to social bookmarking sites or article directories that will get more traffic. What this will end up doing is getting the search engines to indirectly index your and as a side effect rank you high with the possibility of much more search engine traffic coming.

2.) Rush to get High PR but Not Search Engine Traffic

Many are excited to get High PR, but the reality is that PR is not equivalent to search engine traffic at all. If you have a high PR site but are not targeting to a right set of keywords for seo, you will not get get the expectations you want in terms of search engine traffic. Therefore, a right seo mindset for PR is developed from people linking to your site. If web pages with a PR5 link to you, you should be able to get a PR4. And this is all that it means. A high PR page will get indexed more regularly than sites below but that is the only true benefit from high PR, thus not meaning you will get more search engine traffic to your site.

One of the best ways to get high search engine traffic is to forget about high PR as it will come slowly once you add links that point to your site. Focusing in on writing more articles, and posting valuable unique content to your blog daily with a low competition long tail keyword will have the search engines satisfied; or in other words search engines love this and will rank you a higher position.

PR 101- What PR signifies is Page Rank, and this is what Google and other search engines generally apply to each page on the web. Search Engines such as Google also apply a score between 0 and 10 to PR (page rank). Thus, new pages will typically have a page rank of 0. On a yearly basis, search engines update page rank approximately 4 times.


3.) Not needing SEO, already ranked high For My Name

Many people consider that having a specific phrase ranked high in the search engine is enough to not need SEO. For example; “Breaking the bank with Billy”. Being ranked high for specific phrases is a good thing but the fact is that the number of people searching for this specific phrase is extremely low, if any. This is why it is wise to do SEO, and to aim for much more common phrases, such as “making money online fast”, since this would be a higher aim for searchers online.


Overall, the heart of SEO is (or should be) to target keyword phrases that have lower competition. It is possible to rank high without high PR by building more internal & external links to your pages and by daily updating blog or website content. By doing this you can easily get a faster index and rank higher.]]>

1.) Submitting your site to many Search Engines

In getting search engine traffic the most obvious thing to do would be to submit a site to many; or as many search engines as humanly possible. The fact of the matter is that you do not need to submit your site to any search engines at all. Spending time on other activities such as building internal & external links that will point to or within your website pages. Another activity would be writing good content for your site, such as seen in article marketing. In addition, you can submit to social bookmarking sites or article directories that will get more traffic. What this will end up doing is getting the search engines to indirectly index your and as a side effect rank you high with the possibility of much more search engine traffic coming.

2.) Rush to get High PR but Not Search Engine Traffic

Many are excited to get High PR, but the reality is that PR is not equivalent to search engine traffic at all. If you have a high PR site but are not targeting to a right set of keywords for seo, you will not get get the expectations you want in terms of search engine traffic. Therefore, a right seo mindset for PR is developed from people linking to your site. If web pages with a PR5 link to you, you should be able to get a PR4. And this is all that it means. A high PR page will get indexed more regularly than sites below but that is the only true benefit from high PR, thus not meaning you will get more search engine traffic to your site.

One of the best ways to get high search engine traffic is to forget about high PR as it will come slowly once you add links that point to your site. Focusing in on writing more articles, and posting valuable unique content to your blog daily with a low competition long tail keyword will have the search engines satisfied; or in other words search engines love this and will rank you a higher position.

PR 101- What PR signifies is Page Rank, and this is what Google and other search engines generally apply to each page on the web. Search Engines such as Google also apply a score between 0 and 10 to PR (page rank). Thus, new pages will typically have a page rank of 0. On a yearly basis, search engines update page rank approximately 4 times.


3.) Not needing SEO, already ranked high For My Name

Many people consider that having a specific phrase ranked high in the search engine is enough to not need SEO. For example; “Breaking the bank with Billy”. Being ranked high for specific phrases is a good thing but the fact is that the number of people searching for this specific phrase is extremely low, if any. This is why it is wise to do SEO, and to aim for much more common phrases, such as “making money online fast”, since this would be a higher aim for searchers online.


Overall, the heart of SEO is (or should be) to target keyword phrases that have lower competition. It is possible to rank high without high PR by building more internal & external links to your pages and by daily updating blog or website content. By doing this you can easily get a faster index and rank higher.]]> <![CDATA[New "Bingbot" Will Crawl Non-optimized Sites More Easily]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-new-bingbot-will-crawl-non-optimized-sites-more-easily3843 Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:37:20 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-new-bingbot-will-crawl-non-optimized-sites-more-easily3843 Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the Bing web crawler out of beta on October 1st. It will be rebranded as "the Bingbot" and replace the existing msnbot. "It will still honor robots.txt directives written for msnbot, so no change is required to robots.txt file(s)," a Bing representative tells WebProNews.

"Improvements to the bot enable more efficient crawling, and increase the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search," he says.
 
Robot - This is not the real Bingbot, but it will be here in October.Rick DeJarnette has more about the change on the Bing Webmaster Blog:

Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below:

From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com

will become

From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com

If Bing finds separate sets of directives for Bingbot and for other crawlers, directives for bingbot will take precedence, the company says.

I find the part about increasing the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search to be particularly interesting. I wouldn't exactly call this an invitation to ignore SEO. Obviously Google is still the biggest search engine anyway, but even as far as Bing is concerned, good SEO practices will likely still help your rankings.

Also keep in mind that optimizing for Bing is becoming increasingly important. Not only is Facebook giving more reason for people to search (where Bing provides the web results), but the Yahoo/Bing integration will be here (likely) before the holidays.




Posted on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:05:05 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ore-easily
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...y#comments]]> Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the Bing web crawler out of beta on October 1st. It will be rebranded as "the Bingbot" and replace the existing msnbot. "It will still honor robots.txt directives written for msnbot, so no change is required to robots.txt file(s)," a Bing representative tells WebProNews.

"Improvements to the bot enable more efficient crawling, and increase the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search," he says.
 
Robot - This is not the real Bingbot, but it will be here in October.Rick DeJarnette has more about the change on the Bing Webmaster Blog:

Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below:

From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com

will become

From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com

If Bing finds separate sets of directives for Bingbot and for other crawlers, directives for bingbot will take precedence, the company says.

I find the part about increasing the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search to be particularly interesting. I wouldn't exactly call this an invitation to ignore SEO. Obviously Google is still the biggest search engine anyway, but even as far as Bing is concerned, good SEO practices will likely still help your rankings.

Also keep in mind that optimizing for Bing is becoming increasingly important. Not only is Facebook giving more reason for people to search (where Bing provides the web results), but the Yahoo/Bing integration will be here (likely) before the holidays.




Posted on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:05:05 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ore-easily
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...y#comments]]> <![CDATA[Webmasters Cry Mayday for Google Rankings Again]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-webmasters-cry-mayday-for-google-rankings-again3831 Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:18:30 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-webmasters-cry-mayday-for-google-rankings-again3831 A lot of people had something to say about Google's Mayday algorithm update from the beginning of May. A lot of people felt that it was costing them rankings and revenue.

Google's Matt Cutts talked more about Mayday at SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago. He said that it was designed to try and spot signals of quality on pages and sites that would be good for users, and that auto-generated pages and content farms tend to get hit the most by Mayday.


http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/...ed-bg.gif) repeat-x scroll left top; width: 326px; height: 208px; text-align: center; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Tahoma,Verdana,Times,serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;">
nclick="window.open('http://videos.webpronews.com/video/getcode.php?movie_name=smxadv10_mattcutts', 'Code', 'scrollbars,height=450,width=500')" href="javascript:return false;">More WebProNews Videos

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine roundtable is pointing to a WebmasterWorld thread indicating that there may have been another tweak on June 23rd and 24th that had a big impact on some sites' rankings again.

Cutts' advice to webmasters affected by Mayday in the first place, was basically to improve quality. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this advice would probably still apply.

Have you experienced a dramatic change in Google rankings this week? Let us know.




Posted on Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:53:02 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ings-again
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...n#comments]]> A lot of people had something to say about Google's Mayday algorithm update from the beginning of May. A lot of people felt that it was costing them rankings and revenue.

Google's Matt Cutts talked more about Mayday at SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago. He said that it was designed to try and spot signals of quality on pages and sites that would be good for users, and that auto-generated pages and content farms tend to get hit the most by Mayday.


http://images.ientrymail.com/webpronews/...ed-bg.gif) repeat-x scroll left top; width: 326px; height: 208px; text-align: center; -moz-background-clip: border; -moz-background-origin: padding; -moz-background-inline-policy: continuous; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Tahoma,Verdana,Times,serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;">
nclick="window.open('http://videos.webpronews.com/video/getcode.php?movie_name=smxadv10_mattcutts', 'Code', 'scrollbars,height=450,width=500')" href="javascript:return false;">More WebProNews Videos

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine roundtable is pointing to a WebmasterWorld thread indicating that there may have been another tweak on June 23rd and 24th that had a big impact on some sites' rankings again.

Cutts' advice to webmasters affected by Mayday in the first place, was basically to improve quality. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this advice would probably still apply.

Have you experienced a dramatic change in Google rankings this week? Let us know.




Posted on Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:53:02 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ings-again
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...n#comments]]> <![CDATA[Likes Mean Relevance in Facebook Search]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-likes-mean-relevance-in-facebook-search3822 Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:48:48 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-likes-mean-relevance-in-facebook-search3822 Nick O'Neill at All Facebook reports that Facebook has confirmed that "all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them." He also calls this Facebook's "war on Google."

While utilizing likes and the open graph as a ranking factor in search should help Facebook improve its internal search, it doesn't represent much of a threat to Google search. Google indexes the web. Facebook indexes activity from Facebook users. There's a pretty big difference, regardless of how big Facebook is.

There is certainly something to be said for Facebook search, however. There's no question that a lot lof people are using Facebook and spending a lot of time there, so having some kind of search strategy for Facebook is not a bad idea. Naturally, the Open Graph will play a huge role in this, and that means taking advantage of Facebook's social plugins. As I've written about before, Facebook likes (as well as Twitter retweets) are like the new links in some ways.

Facebook is definitely making a lot of moves to keep users getting the info they want from within Facebook. Fan pages essentially turn Facebook into a news reader. They're working on a Q&A product. They're launching content destinations themselves (like this politics page). However, no matter how much information Facebook is able to give users, that amount will always be limited, and will not be able to deliver the web in the way Google can. Of course, that's why they have Bing results for web search.

Facebook Search Results

As far as search market share, it is probably Bing that stands to gain the most out of improved Facebook search. I don't know how often people are going to go to Facebook for web searches, but the more people do search on Facebook, the more they are going to see those web results from Bing, when the actual (limited) Facebook results don't deliver what they want. If Bing can deliver what they want in the top three results (the amount that is commonly displayed in Facebook search results), Bing only stands to gain.

Optimizing for Bing is very connected to optimizing for Facebook and soon optimizing for Yahoo.




Posted on Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:10:40 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ook-search
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...h#comments]]> Nick O'Neill at All Facebook reports that Facebook has confirmed that "all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them." He also calls this Facebook's "war on Google."

While utilizing likes and the open graph as a ranking factor in search should help Facebook improve its internal search, it doesn't represent much of a threat to Google search. Google indexes the web. Facebook indexes activity from Facebook users. There's a pretty big difference, regardless of how big Facebook is.

There is certainly something to be said for Facebook search, however. There's no question that a lot lof people are using Facebook and spending a lot of time there, so having some kind of search strategy for Facebook is not a bad idea. Naturally, the Open Graph will play a huge role in this, and that means taking advantage of Facebook's social plugins. As I've written about before, Facebook likes (as well as Twitter retweets) are like the new links in some ways.

Facebook is definitely making a lot of moves to keep users getting the info they want from within Facebook. Fan pages essentially turn Facebook into a news reader. They're working on a Q&A product. They're launching content destinations themselves (like this politics page). However, no matter how much information Facebook is able to give users, that amount will always be limited, and will not be able to deliver the web in the way Google can. Of course, that's why they have Bing results for web search.

Facebook Search Results

As far as search market share, it is probably Bing that stands to gain the most out of improved Facebook search. I don't know how often people are going to go to Facebook for web searches, but the more people do search on Facebook, the more they are going to see those web results from Bing, when the actual (limited) Facebook results don't deliver what they want. If Bing can deliver what they want in the top three results (the amount that is commonly displayed in Facebook search results), Bing only stands to gain.

Optimizing for Bing is very connected to optimizing for Facebook and soon optimizing for Yahoo.




Posted on Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:10:40 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...ook-search
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...h#comments]]> <![CDATA[Benefits of Email Marketing]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-benefits-of-email-marketing3819 Fri, 25 Jun 2010 01:09:43 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-benefits-of-email-marketing3819
Through opt-in email addresses the response rate is real high, and so the internet allows email marketers great chances for profit, list building, and traffic. But, besides the simplicity of email marketing there are some basics to understand to know that you’re going through it in the best way.

Like mentioned, there are great benefits to email marketing, so it makes sense to take time to understand it. There’s a few benefits of marketing through email & I will quickly cover them here.

Fast-
First, the greatest benefit of all is the fast approach of email and the just as fast responses. It is possible to send out your first email and then get orders in the inbox in minutes. Email marketing is pretty much the fastest and amazing out of all marketing methods when you use it correctly.

Testing-
Marketing emails will usually have to be tested. Testing is a typical part of any kind of marketing. With email marketing the testing is much faster since the process of email marketing is sped up anyways, and so testing various emails will be faster.

Affordable-
When doing email marketing not much money has to be spent. All that is needed is a computer, internet, and time to write an email. Email marketing in general is free although you will have to pay for other things in order to do so.

Response-
Another amazing part about email marketing is the ability to get responses in almost light speed; basically minutes. The reason is that the individual on the receiving end will receive the email and then make a decision. They will either delete your email without reading it, delete it after reading some or all, or read it and buy what you’re promoting/marketing. And the best part is those that are happy with the product or purchase could forward it to friends or family, thus increasing sales and your customer base.]]>
Through opt-in email addresses the response rate is real high, and so the internet allows email marketers great chances for profit, list building, and traffic. But, besides the simplicity of email marketing there are some basics to understand to know that you’re going through it in the best way.

Like mentioned, there are great benefits to email marketing, so it makes sense to take time to understand it. There’s a few benefits of marketing through email & I will quickly cover them here.

Fast-
First, the greatest benefit of all is the fast approach of email and the just as fast responses. It is possible to send out your first email and then get orders in the inbox in minutes. Email marketing is pretty much the fastest and amazing out of all marketing methods when you use it correctly.

Testing-
Marketing emails will usually have to be tested. Testing is a typical part of any kind of marketing. With email marketing the testing is much faster since the process of email marketing is sped up anyways, and so testing various emails will be faster.

Affordable-
When doing email marketing not much money has to be spent. All that is needed is a computer, internet, and time to write an email. Email marketing in general is free although you will have to pay for other things in order to do so.

Response-
Another amazing part about email marketing is the ability to get responses in almost light speed; basically minutes. The reason is that the individual on the receiving end will receive the email and then make a decision. They will either delete your email without reading it, delete it after reading some or all, or read it and buy what you’re promoting/marketing. And the best part is those that are happy with the product or purchase could forward it to friends or family, thus increasing sales and your customer base.]]> <![CDATA[What's More Important in Search? Freshness or Quality?]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-what-s-more-important-in-search-freshness-or-quality3761 Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:37:52 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-what-s-more-important-in-search-freshness-or-quality3761 It's been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn't the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?




Matt's response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says...

"Whenever you're thinking about search engines, it's much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don't post every day. Sometimes I don't post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it..."

Matt implies that you'll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn't that much different than stuff that's already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Quality is always priority one, but I don't think that's to say that freshness doesn't count. For example, as we looked at recently,

Google's time filters (which are more readily available to searchers, courtesy of the recent redesign of the SERPs), not to mention the realtime results Google often displays, can add some benefit to providing fresh content. Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario had a very interesting post at Search Engine Land looking at how the time filter may even help smaller brands get some visibility.

Of course Google has gone out of its way with Caffeine to increase the speed at which it indexes content so it can provide the freshest results possible.




Posted on Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:58:58 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...or-quality
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...y#comments]]> It's been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn't the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?




Matt's response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says...

"Whenever you're thinking about search engines, it's much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don't post every day. Sometimes I don't post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it..."

Matt implies that you'll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn't that much different than stuff that's already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Quality is always priority one, but I don't think that's to say that freshness doesn't count. For example, as we looked at recently,

Google's time filters (which are more readily available to searchers, courtesy of the recent redesign of the SERPs), not to mention the realtime results Google often displays, can add some benefit to providing fresh content. Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario had a very interesting post at Search Engine Land looking at how the time filter may even help smaller brands get some visibility.

Of course Google has gone out of its way with Caffeine to increase the speed at which it indexes content so it can provide the freshest results possible.




Posted on Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:58:58 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...or-quality
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...y#comments]]> <![CDATA[Google Shares Its Viewpoint on Earning Quality Links]]> http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-shares-its-viewpoint-on-earning-quality-links3733 Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:49:14 -0400 http://www.forum.chotoan.com/Thread-google-shares-its-viewpoint-on-earning-quality-links3733 SEO changes all the time as search engines make adjustments to their algorithms and user interfaces, users adopt new technologies, etc. Still some things never change, like Google's view on spammy links.

In a new post to the Google Webmaster Central blog, the company has expressed its most recent viewpoint on earning quality links.

The first piece of advice Google gives is to get involved with the community around your topic. If you were still not convinced that social media plays a very big role in search, consider this is coming straight from Google. Now the networks your community hangs out in may vary, but engaging with the community is simply a good way to get links and build credibility, which also will most likely lead to more links. Engaging is good for increasingly visibility outside of search anyway. Nothing new. Just reiterated by Google.

Another tip Google suggests is to create content that solves problems for your users - things like tutorials, videos, and tools, surveys, research results, etc. Users who find helpful content are likely to pass it on.

Google's Kaspar Szymanski Talks Building Quality Links Google notes that humor and other link-bait tactics can work for the short term, but does not recommend counting such tactics. "It's important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort," says Google Search Quality Strategist Kaspar Szymanski. "There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site's reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them."

"Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index," says Szymanski. "There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes."

Szymanski also suggests looking to similar sites in other markets for inspiration - not to copy them, but to see the things that they have done to be successful and see if there is a way to apply that to your own site.

Finally, probably the most obvious tip offered here to make it easy for people to share your content. Things like Facebook "likes" and Twitter retweets can go a long way in creating new links to your content. Granted these won't necessarily boost you "pagerank" but they will boost your visibility, which can lead to more quality links, and simply traffic, which is ultimately the goal anyway right?




Posted on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:39:22 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...lity-links
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]> SEO changes all the time as search engines make adjustments to their algorithms and user interfaces, users adopt new technologies, etc. Still some things never change, like Google's view on spammy links.

In a new post to the Google Webmaster Central blog, the company has expressed its most recent viewpoint on earning quality links.

The first piece of advice Google gives is to get involved with the community around your topic. If you were still not convinced that social media plays a very big role in search, consider this is coming straight from Google. Now the networks your community hangs out in may vary, but engaging with the community is simply a good way to get links and build credibility, which also will most likely lead to more links. Engaging is good for increasingly visibility outside of search anyway. Nothing new. Just reiterated by Google.

Another tip Google suggests is to create content that solves problems for your users - things like tutorials, videos, and tools, surveys, research results, etc. Users who find helpful content are likely to pass it on.

Google's Kaspar Szymanski Talks Building Quality Links Google notes that humor and other link-bait tactics can work for the short term, but does not recommend counting such tactics. "It's important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort," says Google Search Quality Strategist Kaspar Szymanski. "There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site's reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them."

"Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index," says Szymanski. "There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes."

Szymanski also suggests looking to similar sites in other markets for inspiration - not to copy them, but to see the things that they have done to be successful and see if there is a way to apply that to your own site.

Finally, probably the most obvious tip offered here to make it easy for people to share your content. Things like Facebook "likes" and Twitter retweets can go a long way in creating new links to your content. Granted these won't necessarily boost you "pagerank" but they will boost your visibility, which can lead to more quality links, and simply traffic, which is ultimately the goal anyway right?




Posted on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:39:22 +0000 at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SEO-News-...lity-links
Comments: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/0...s#comments]]>