Posts Tagged ‘bing’

A Quick Link Building How-To for Small Businesses – Part I

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Pages within a website and across the Internet are connected through links. You have links on your website to navigate from one page to the next. You also have links to other sites you think your readers will find interesting. And finally, other sites will link to yours, providing Internet users one more way to find you.

While all three of these are important and impact search engine rankings in some way, the last type has the largest by far…which coincidentally, is the hardest links to control.

Basically speaking, the search engines’ concept is as follows: if high-quality sites are linking to yours, then your site must be pretty important and therefore, will be more inclined to show it higher in their results…you in effect receive “link juice” from other sites that link to you.

But it’s not enough to just get a couple of links and then sit still. Search engines like Google look at link patterns to your site as they build over time, not just a one-time snapshot.

So, building the right links in a consistent fashion can payoff tremendously – that much is clear. But how do I go about building strong inbound links without getting myself in trouble? Getting on Google’s blacklist isn’t much fun and hard to recover from.

Continue reading for one of the ways you can build high-quality links to your site naturally and check back again in a week for part II of our quick little link building how-to.

Variety is the spice of life – and links too!

There are all sorts of link farming schemes out there you can buy into – which is probably the first reason you should run away. This practice is known as reciprocal linking – you exchange links with other sites who will turn around and link to you on a mass scale…Google and others are on to this!

The key to successful link building is to cultivate a good mix of links over time.

Having 100 links with the same anchor-text doesn’t look natural to anyone, including search engines. When links come naturally, some may use your business name while others may use some kind of descriptive phrase for the anchor-text…they vary.

If anchor-text is the same for all links pointing to your site, it will be signal to the search engines that your links are being generated artificially, not naturally.

And consider the pages people are linking to and try to mix that up too…don’t have them all going to your homepage. Try to drive links to specific product pages, your blog, your press room, your articles and more. This will help get them ranking as well.

Also, you will want to try and influence the title tag for incoming links if any have one. If you can, you will want variety in the link text and title for links pointing to your site…again, it’s about growing your links in a natural way, not simply slapping a bunch of homogenous links up there and walking away.

Variety in your links is perhaps the most critical component of successful link building. Don’t have them all coming from the same place to the same place and so on.

Check back with us next Monday for part II of our quick little link building guide and even learn how you can easily find out which sites are linking to you.

In the mean time, take the above steps to ensure what links you do acquire don’t get you in any trouble and give you the most bang for your buck.

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Twitter Now Fastest Growing Search Engine with 24 Billion Searches per Month

Friday, July 9th, 2010

What a difference a year makes!

This time last year, Microsoft’s Bing enjoyed the title of fastest growing search engine, experiencing 22% growth in its first year of existence.

But now, Bing can no longer claim that mantle as Twitter CEO Biz Stone proclaimed at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, a gathering of the nation’s leading intelligentsia. Stone says Twitter is exceeding 800 million searches per day, which translates to 24 billion per month – almost twice as much as Bing and Yahoo combined!

(Last month, Bing had 4.1 billion searches and Yahoo had 9.4 billion)

Of course, this is nowhere near Google with over 88 billion searches a month but it’s quite respectable.

Lately, it’s been said you can jumpstart indexing of new content by posting it on Twitter in addition to your site since Google is constantly refreshing feeds from Twitter. With this newest data, you can safely assume many people are turning to Twitter to search for answers to their questions, news on current events and information on products and services.

Stone says Twitter has intentionally been trying to play this kind of angle – serving as not only a social network but a search engine as well. He argues there are many misconceptions regarding Twitter, saying that it’s “not a social network” but “…more like an information network or a source of news.”

Either way, Twitter is quickly becoming a relevant way to search for information online…we’ll see what some of the reports from comScore and others say when they come out. But if there’s any validity to Stone’s claims, you best consider how, when and if it’s wise for your business to jump in.

Evaluate the demand and presence of your industry on Twitter to get a better idea of when and how much effort you should put into it.

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6 Web Design/SEO Tips your Developer Needs to Know

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

Now that we’re halfway through 2010, many website owners are thinking it’s time for a re-design or are in the midst of one right now. If you’re in this position, one of the first things you need to do is be sure you hire a website design firm that knows how to build a site’s infrastructure properly – that is one that’s easily crawlable by the search engine spiders.

Before you start the redesign and all throughout the process, it’s important you make your SEO strategy a top priority. First, you don’t want to lose the rankings and traffic you’ve built up to now but you also will not want to miss the more targeted visitors you will get when your new and improved site is up and running.

Ignoring the following 6 steps when redesigning your site will put your online position in peril. So if you’re looking for quality web design services, be sure they understand the following before hiring them.

1.  Keep content/keyword rich pages near the top of your site’s hierarchy

Search engines are quite meticulous when seeing how pages within your site are linked together. They use this form of internal link popularity to determine a particular page’s place within your site’s hierarchy. Pages linked from every other page are given more weight than one’s linked from only a few.

In light of this fact, you should be sure your content and keyword-rich pages are placed high within this hierarchy. If a particular page was bringing in a lot of traffic before, don’t bury it too deep within the site.

2. Categorize content by niche markets and avoid duplicate content

Online searchers generally ask questions when initially looking for solutions to their problems or answers to their questions. Therefore, the more ways you can categorize your information for these different issues – or target markets – the better.

Categorize all of your top-level pages to reflect this fact and make it clear your products and services can address their problem. And be sure – regardless of how someone finds a certain bit of information on your site, be sure they end up at the same URL to avoid any duplicate content issues. For example, if a specific product can be listed as both a product and a service, place the same URL in both categories so regardless of how someone views it, they will end up at the same place.

Courtesy of cool-photos.com

Courtesy of cool-photos.com

3. Stay on top of URLs if transitioning to a new content management system (CMS)

If you’re going to use a new content management system for your site to help better administer it, be sure you place 301 redirects for any URL you have to change. Since search engines will take some time to index new URLs, you want to be sure you maintain your position in the search engines and current traffic levels.

If you must, you should re-direct your top-level pages at minimum. Doing so will quickly pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones – and prevent prior visitors from seeing a 404 error/not found message when they come back.

4. Code links with a navigation menu in a search friendly manner

It’s important you code all links within your navigation menus in a search friendly manner so they can be crawled and pass on those benefits to your rankings position. Many graphic designers don’t realize this – some Flash graphics and DHTML menus are invisible to the search engines, causing them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Therefore, make sure all navigation menu elements are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. Avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation and ensure all content can be reached through their own dedicated links.

5. Be sure your new CMS system allows you to customize HTML elements

While automation may seem nice for HTML elements like titles, meta tags, headers, URLs and alt attributes for headers, it’s imperative your new CMS system allows you to customize these. There should ideally be no limit to the number of characters for each of these elements but do remember, the search engines have limits you should stay within.

6. Avoid session IDs and other tracking links

Tracking visitors on our websites gives us insight into what works and what doesn’t. For ranking purposes though, this can be a double-edges sword. It’s best to avoid these types of internal elements but if you must, be sure the clean URL is the only one given to the search engines. If not, the search engines will duplicate the same page over many URLs, splitting your link popularity.

If your new CMS system has tracking elements inherit within it, be sure you use a canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Sharing these “secrets” with your potential developer may make them feel you’re usurping their knowledge and authority but heck, it’s your money, so be sure whoever your hire has all of the know-how to make your site work. Many professional graphic designers are not SEO experts per se.

They may create some very nice looking websites and marketing materials but it won’t matter too much if it can’t be found.

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Bing Offers inside Look at Search Technology

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

Since Google constitutes over 2/3 of online searches, search engine optimization pros like us don’t spend a heck of a lot of time worrying about the other search engines.

Nevertheless, we do like to drop in from time to time and see what’s going on with Microsoft’s newest venture into the search world – Bing. It’s been almost a year since Bing hit the information superhighway and while it’s enjoyed some growth, it’s nowhere near taking over Google’s top position.

But one thing that will help SEOs understand how Bing works that was just released is an advanced query guide.  This guide basically consists of advanced search operators webmasters can use in their site’s coding to help their rankings in the fledgling search engine.

One of the biggest advanced search operators Bing made public was the norelax operator, which automatically implements relaxcount for queries that are five words or longer. Basically what that means is any words past the fifth word in a query will not necessarily appear in the search results.

Other advanced search queries include: AND:, contains:, feed:, filetype:, language:, noalter:, URL: and more.

Check out this quick post on Microsoft’s technical site which includes a list and description for each search operator along with a quick forum on the topic from WebMasterWorld.

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Google Releases Top 1000 Visited Sites List

Friday, June 11th, 2010

A new list from Google using data from April of this year details the top 1000 visited sites in the world. It excludes certain sites – namely adults only sites, ad networks, domains that don’t load properly and certain Google sites.

Topping the list – Facebook with 540 million unique visitors in the month of April, which translates to 35.2% of people on the Internet!

The top ten most visited sites include:

  1. Facebook
  2. Yahoo!
  3. Live.com
  4. Wikipedia
  5. Msn.com
  6. Microsoft
  7. Blogspot.com
  8. Baidu.com
  9. Qq.com
  10. Mozilla.com

Websites on the list come from a diverse range of industries and specialties – social networks, other search portals, news and information, ecommerce and more.

Google made the list as part of its Ad Planner, a tool to help businesses effectively use their pay-per-click advertising services. While we don’t spend too much time talking about PPC here, it does have one main advantage when you’re first getting online – it gets your fledgling site in front of millions of users!

Aside from PPC though, this list is good information for any search engine optimization pro or group. Getting links from sites like these can give your site a powerful boost in the search engines. Ones farther down the list might be a little easier to obtain links from.

Having more links to your site boosts your site rankings and in turn, brings in more site visitors and revenues. Now with millions perhaps billions of websites out there, you may spend a lifetime trying to get on a list like this but don’t worry, you can certainly use lists like this to maximize your online stature, site visits and ultimately sales.

Check out the list for more detailed information on visitors, unique page views, the other top 1000 sites and more.

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5 Ways you can optimize your ‘Tweets’ for Search

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

It’s become clear from different blog posts and forum discussions that simple ‘tweets’ on Twitter can give your website the initial indexing and ranking boost it needs in the search engines.

We spoke the other day about whether Twitter is a good tool for getting your site indexed and ranked. While it can provide you with a good boost initially, you have to sustain that energy by following up with a good crawlable site that includes compelling, keyword-rich content.

So how can I optimize my ‘tweets’ for search that can translate into a good boost for my search engine rankings?

Continue reading for 5 steps you can use to optimize your ‘tweets’ for search.

1. Front Load Tweets

Treat your Twitter post like it’s a Meta description tag. You only have 140 characters to make your splash so be sure you put the most important part of your ‘tweet’ at the beginning.

2. Anchor Text

Be sure and get your anchor text into the URL you’re linking to from your ‘tweet.’ If you’re using a shortening service like bit.ly or j.mp (uri’s), use the custom naming options to get your anchor text in there. Use hyphens to separate words but don’t overdo it!

3. Custom Named Uri’s

When using a shortening service like bit.ly, you can take the first three words of your page’s title and use them as a custom uri, if appropriate. Start your ‘tweet’ with the URI and lead into the rest of the title and/or sentence, like a precursor. You can also include the URI in the middle or end of a sentence – it all depends on the document title.

4. Retweets

You can also recycle old ‘tweets’ that are still relevant. Front load retweets and unlike original ‘tweets,’ place credit at the end rather than the beginning. Other than that, treat retweets like you would a regular ‘tweet.’

5. Retweet Scrubbing

Go through your ‘tweets’ every so often and fix any case issues or typos you may find. You can even edit the title if the ‘tweet’s’ originator changed the title based on the destination document. This change fragments the meaning of a ‘tweet’ in some ways. Twitter’s new retweet feature prevents this from happening but doesn’t allow scrubbing.

These are just a handful of tips to get you started on harnessing Twitter to boost your site’s indexing and ranking potential. You would be surprised at what you can do in 140 characters or less!

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Can Twitter Get a Site Indexed in the Search Engines All by Itself?

Friday, May 14th, 2010

We’ve discussed the emergence of Twitter and its increasing importance in marketing your business online. But can it get your site indexed in Google and Bing all by itself?

A short discussion at WebMasterWorld says yes as one webmaster says his new blog was indeed indexed by Google. The webmaster was experimenting to see how quickly his site would be indexed by simply ‘tweeting’ out the new URL.

Much to his satisfaction, his site was indexed the same day he posted his ‘tweet.’

While he can’t say this event was 100% due to Twitter, he wasn’t terribly surprised his site was indexed so quickly considering the arrangement between Google and Twitter and subsequent amount of bot activity that tweets are generating these days.

Forum veteran “Tedster” says he isn’t entirely surprised either but neither he nor the webmaster suggest that tweets are the road to success. However, Tedster does say he knows of another site that got a page indexed and ranking with only Twitter links.

While this may seem to be a good way to jump start indexing and ranking, it’s by no means a sustainable strategy. To build and maintain high search engine rankings, webmasters have to include all of the elements – good site architecture, links and original, valuable content.

Twitter may be a good place for Google to discover and index new content but since it’s “real-time,” it certainly cannot provide sustained ranking or indexing power.

Therefore, Twitter can be a great tool in jump starting your site’s indexing and ranking but you must follow up with elements mentioned above to sustain and build your position in the search engines.

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How Many Keywords Should I Target in a Landing Page?

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Writing content for your website is undoubtedly a major undertaking requiring time and patience. Much research is required beforehand along with organizing your thoughts – all of that before you even write a word!

Considering the time and resources it takes to create landing pages and articles, you may think optimizing for as many keywords as you can is the way to go.

Absolutely not!

To be clear, I’m not saying you should only have one or two words on your page and that’s it…you can’t simply have your keyword(s) with no supporting content to go with it.

However, your page needs to have one primary focus, one underlying concept. Optimizing your webpage for several keywords dilutes the impact of your copy which means you will have wasted your time rather than taking it slow and doing it right.

In many instances, you may have two words that mean exactly the same thing – take “certified public accountant” and “CPA” for example. Both essentially mean the same thing and conceivably either one will be used in an online search. But adding “tax accountant”, “tax services” and “income tax filing” to the same page will dilute your results and keep your rankings off page 1. While these concepts are related to one another, combining all of these keywords onto one page will only frustrate your efforts.

You shouldn’t think of web pages as a catch-all where you can optimize for several different concepts at once…doing so usually results in confusing the search engine and lowering your rankings.

Reading this is probably leading you to one conclusion – “I’m going to have to create a lot of landing pages!”

Quite true…and while it’s a long endeavor, it’s well worth it in the long run. Start out with the big keywords and work your way down. In due time, you will cover your target markets and have a better position in the search engines and well on your way to higher site visits and conversions.

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Google’s New Search Engine Index – Caffeine

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Google Caffeine was announced several months ago but it was uncertain how and when it would be implemented…our post from Monday speculates that it may be in effect now since webmasters and SEOs have been noticing some changes regarding long-tail keywords.

So what is Google Caffeine?

Caffeine was formerly kept secret by Google and only limited details were released to the public last August. The search engine characterizes it as the “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.” It appears this new architecture includes crawling, indexing and ranking changes and that it’s not simply an addition or change to their existing infrastructure but rather a complete overhaul.

Based on Google’s announcements regarding Caffeine, we can best surmise that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more effectively, determining reputation and authority and returning relevant results quicker…however, Google’s spam chief Matt Cutts says the changes are “primarily in how we index.”

Most of these changes do not affect the user-interface (what you see) very much but you may have noticed some subtle changes in a search engine results page in the last few months. Take this search – “buffy the vampire slayer” for example – and how it returns video and news results midway down the page.

If we use the existing infrastructure, Google displays news results at top, video in the middle and images at the bottom.

Google’s new infrastructure has undoubtedly caused quite the stir in the online world, with webmasters and SEOs scrambling to try and understand how this will impact their rankings…along with many a speculative blog post about how to best optimize to the new changes.

In the end though, it still comes down to having the right foundational elements – a crawlable site infrastructure and compelling content – maintaining these will certainly keep you ahead of the curve.

We’ll keep you posted on Caffeine and its effects on optimizing websites for the search engines…in the mean time, keep creating compelling content for your target audience and be sure your site’s architecture is setup so search engine spiders can effectively crawl your site.

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Announced Facebook Changes Signal Major Shift, Raises Privacy Concerns

Friday, April 30th, 2010

New changes to Facebook announced at last week’s f8 conference in San Francisco have caused quite a stir in the online world…first, let me provide some detail on their changes then we can delve into the controversy…and above all, how it could potentially affect SEO.

Basically, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg articulated a new vision for the social network and of Internet search in general – that ultimate vision is for a more social Internet replacing links between pages with relationships between people and things where information is shared between Facebook and other sites.

Facebook formally announced the addition of three features: social plug-ins, open graph protocol and graph API. The first two are more for programmers but today we’ll discuss social plug-ins since it will have the most practical impact on anyone who uses the Internet and Facebook in particular.

Facebook is the sun and other sites are the planets

This analogy is a simplified version of explaining Facebook’s vision that began two years ago with its release of Facebook Apps and then Facebook Connect which is now evolving into a larger initiative making Facebook the web’s hub.

Anyone who uses Facebook is aware of their social plug-ins – Like, Activity and Recommendations are the big three. Facebook’s new capabilities now allow websites to add a “Like” button on any page on their website, essentially making a Facebook “fan” page without actually creating one on the network. If a site visitor click “Like” on a webpage and they’re logged in to Facebook, it will be transmitted back to the social network and added to their profile and feed.

For example, the online review site Yelp is adding “Like” buttons to all of its local business profile pages. Say you click “Like” on a restaurant’s Yelp page and that information is transmitted back to your profile.

Whatever your “likes” are (a store, a band, a movie, etc.), they become part of your online identity and thus accessible to the publishers and sites in the “open graph” that Facebook envisions.

The other plugins – Activity and Recommendations – help make third party publisher sites more “social” by showing what your friends like or are doing on a respective website.

And now for the controversy

As you can probably see where this is going, many professionals in the online world question Facebook’s commitment to privacy with these changes. Let’s say you click the “like” button on your favorite restaurant’s Yelp page.

This information will now be on your Facebook profile and accessible to the particular business you like. They will be able to take your information, share it and use it to base their marketing strategy. The problem is this – all sharing of information needs to be authorized by the user and it won’t be now.

You have to consider whether you want people you’ve never met and probably will never meet to see what your tastes are and use that information to their benefit without your knowledge – certainly a troubling notion indeed when you think about it.

That may be okay if Facebook users are aware of it and can decide for themselves how much information they want to share but it’s clear that most will probably have no idea what’s going on and that’s where much of the concern lies.

Facebook will eventually be sitting on mountains of data – favorite restaurant, places, musicians, movies and more – that will be structured and associated with its millions of users.  In the future, all of that public identity information will become available to Bing and perhaps Google.

How will this affect my online marketing?

Well, that remains to be seen in many respects. On the surface, this may seem like a great way to plug in to the nearly ½ billion and growing subscribers to Facebook. Facebook’s vision is to transform the web from a Google-centric internet comprised of billions of unrelated documents and sites to one where social relationships and affiliations serve as the connective tissue in a vast network.

Only time will tell how this will play out but one reply on a WebMasterWorld thread says that if you do SEO, you should start learning how to do SEO in Facebook. And it’s not your typical SEO where you handle links. Instead, you work with advertising that targets particular demographics of your target market.

We’ll certainly stay on top of how these changes affect the SEO/online marketing world and share these insights with you as they become available. In the mean time, check back with us soon to learn how you can opt-out of Facebook’s new apparatus and learn more about their other two new features.

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7 Ways to Avoid Future Duplicate Content Issues

Monday, March 15th, 2010

As we’ve discussed before, you have to be aware of duplicate content issues so you can avoid being penalized by the search engines. Google, Yahoo! and Bing go to great lengths to return a diverse set of results for their users…if they detect duplicate content, they try to determine the original article/piece and display it for their searchers.

There are several things you can do to avoid duplicate content…one of course is avoiding shady SEO practices and outright plagiarism on your site.

Continue reading to learn 7 ways you can avoid getting into trouble with duplicate content.

1. Using other people’s articles

Some webmasters simply pay for or get permission from an article’s original author to post the piece on their site unaltered. If you do this, make sure the article truly has relevance to your site.

Add your own comments or rewrite what’s already there to ensure unique content. At a minimum, run the piece through a duplicate content tool like CopyScape to see if there are any other pages on the Internet similar to that one.

2. Develop your own unique content

The easiest way to avoid duplicate content is to develop your own unique stuff. Your readers and search engines will love you for it. Develop a schedule to steadily add new and fresh content to your site.

3. If you’re running an ecommerce site, develop your own product descriptions

Many ecommerce sites use product descriptions supplied by manufacturers, which is an obvious duplication in the eyes of the search engines. These descriptions may appear on hundreds of different sites out there. Although a tedious task, rewrite these product descriptions in your own unique language to avoid duplication issues.

4. If you have a blog, do not have your date or category archive pages indexed

This feature is standard on most blogging platforms but you can block it from happening through your robots.txt file. These features hardly bring you more visitors or higher page rankings.

5. Block search engines from indexing duplicate copies on your site

Many websites include “printer-friendly” versions of articles and web pages, which could potentially cause duplicate content issues. Using your robots.txt file, block directories or files you do not want the search engines to touch.

6. Use 301 redirects if you have recently redesigned your site

Using 301 redirects to channel traffic to your new site is critical to avoiding duplicate content issues with the search engines. Whenever you move a webpage, use a 301 redirect to point your visitors and the search engines to the proper page.

7. Be careful when syndicating your content

Distributing your content to affiliates is a great way to build your brand and draw in new visitors and customers. To avoid duplicate content issues with this, post the content on your website first so the search engines crawl it first before it appears on other sites. Include a link to the original content on any syndicated site to guarantee the original remains indexed.

Taking these steps to avoid duplicate content issues is in essence preventive maintenance. If you own a car, you change the oil regularly and spend a little bit to avoid having to spend much more in the future.

Employing the above practices with your site will ensure you deliver the most relevant, unique content to your users and the search engines without threat of removal or suppression if it’s reprinted somewhere else online.

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New Study Concludes Most Searchers Oblivious to Real-Time Search

Friday, March 12th, 2010

An eye-tracking study recently conducted by online marketing firm OneUpWeb concluded that most searchers were not even aware of real-time results.

Real-time search results were recently introduced into search engine result pages on Google and Bing. Much discussion by the SEO and online marketing community ensued – and many were scratching their heads wondering how it would be a wise investment for the search engines and a benefit to online searchers.

OneUpWeb’s research confirms many of their concerns.

Their study involved 44 people broken into two groups – “consumers”, or those looking to buy a specific product, and “foragers”, those tasked with simply looking for information on a product. Last month’s study sought to answer the following three questions.

  1. Does the average Internet user recognize and understand real-time results?
  2. Are consumers finding and clicking on “real-time” results?
  3. What are consumers saying about real-time results?

According to the eye-tracking study and further interviews, the majority of participants were at least indifferent to real-time search, stating that it didn’t provide them with much. Around 73% of the consumer group didn’t even look at real-time search results…53% of the forager group did not look at real-time results.

Take a look at the eye-tracking study below to see where the searchers’ main focus of attention was. Real-time results can be seen at the bottom of the screenshot.

The U.K’s Guardian newspaper reports that real-time search agreements with Facebook, Twitter, etc. have cost Google around $15 million and Bing around $10 million. It would seem at this point that their investment isn’t proving to be worth their time.

While many techies and insiders praise real-time search results as the next big thing, the general public doesn’t seem to understand what the buzz is all about.

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6 Not So Obvious Types of Duplicate Content

Friday, March 5th, 2010

When thinking about duplicate content, we generally only consider written content. Is what you are posting on your website original? Simply copying and pasting something from somewhere else is a big mistake- that much is obvious.

But something you may not consider to be duplicate content may be considered such by search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. You see, they’re trying to return diverse content to their users …they have a vested interest in ensuring what they display on page 1 is helpful and diverse for their users.

That is what you have to consider – what do search engines consider duplicate? Not doing so could spell disaster for your site’s rankings. Site penalties can occur if a site is simply structured the same way for instance.

Continue reading for 6 not so obvious types of duplicate content to ensure you are not penalized for such an infraction.

1. Two websites share the same structure and content

Two websites having the same structure (i.e. same three column template) and the same content on a single page or site wide with the same linking scheme is prone to trouble. This is by far the most extreme example of duplicate content but the easiest to identify.

2. Identical structure with paraphrased content

Another scenario where two sites have an identical structure but the content is not 100% identical. Copywriters and content developers may see this as a grey area. But Google has a zero tolerance policy on this issue…content from one site simply cannot be a rehashed version of the same thing from another site.

3. Identical structure with similar content

In structural terms, it’s pretty clear two sites are identical. In this situation, the content on each site still has too close a resemblance. If it appears the content is managed in a similar fashion and presented in the same scope, the site(s) may be penalized.

4. Partially identical structure with similar content

While it may seem like splitting hairs, Google is very meticulous. Site A and Site B may only have a few pages that are identical but if the content between the two sites is sufficiently similar, they may take action and not index one of the sites.

5. Identical structure with reminiscent content

In this scenario, both sites have a similar structure and linking scheme while the content is relatively similar. Some content developers may think simply using a Thesaurus to change a few words may avoid detection but the search engines can spot this kind of move.

6. Unique structure with pieced together content

Two sites may have their own unique site structure and linking scheme but their content is simply scraped together from different sources the writer found. Search engines will flag this as duplicate content and act accordingly.

Image, videos and other document formats are sometimes ignored by the search engines since most don’t have the capability to spot duplicate forms of these types of content. They sometimes attempt to remove duplications based on file size, image size and file name however.  Therefore in the future, it will be important you think about this as technology continues to evolve.

It should be obvious that simply copying and pasting content to your site is not only dishonest, it is robbing the original creator of that piece without due credit and compensation. But these other scenarios where search engines may flag your site are just as important. While you may not think your site is a duplication of another, what the search engines see is really what matters.

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Posted in SEO Technology, Tip of the Day, Writing for search engines | 1 Comment »

Do Meta Tags Really Matter?

Monday, March 1st, 2010

As far as propelling your website to the top of the search engines, they don’t. While Meta tags have no significant impact on actual search engine rankings, they do provide value in how your website appears on a search engine results page (SERP).

Meta tags are basically text included in the source code of an HTML document that’s intended to describe the page to a search engine for the purpose of cataloging its content. There are two types of Meta tags – description and keyword

So do Meta tags matter?

Yes they do as the description found within the tag indicates what you want someone to see on a search engine results page. They help a searcher easily determine whether or not your page is relevant to their needs. Without it, many people will simply move on and think your site doesn’t offer them any value.

If you do not include a Meta tag in your source code, the search engine will glean your page and cherry-pick words it thinks best describes your page. This doesn’t work too well however and can result in terrible descriptions being displayed on a SERP.

You should be very careful in how you use a Meta tag though. Many SEOs have abused these tags in the past thinking it would garner them a competitive advantage. To avoid any potential problems, avoid repeating keywords and use only those words relevant to your site’s theme. Beware of any trademark infringements and check with legal counsel before using another company’s trademarked terms anywhere in your source code.

Typically, the character limit for both description and keyword Meta tags is 250, which includes spaces and commas. Anything past the 250 mark is generally ignored by the search engines.

Just be careful – improper use of a Meta tag could result in your site being penalized by the search engines.

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How Google’s Unique Algorithm Dominates Search Engine World

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Ever wonder how a search engine like Google disseminates web pages on the Internet to produce the best results possible for its searchers?

This week, engineers, product managers and executives at Google will be meeting to determine how they can make their search engine smarter. As you know from our recent post on the topic, Google has made many changes over the course of its 10+ year history.

Google has become synonymous with search, commanding around 2/3 of search traffic. But that isn’t making them slow down as they strive to “organize the world’s information” as the company’s mission statement says. None of the upstarts like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and others present a threat to Google in their own right. But going forward, search will not simply be dominated by Google but rather incorporate a combination of services.

The biggest threat to Google however is Bing, Microsoft’s revamped search engine. They’re trying to fill in places they feel Google’s algorithm falls short, namely in the health, reference and shopping sectors.

While Bing is increasing market share, Google is still miles ahead of them in the simple task of dissecting a search and returning relevant results. Using contextual signals, Google has been able to master the ability to figure out what a searcher is looking for.

Google culls data from all of its searchers to achieve these ends by seeing the search terms people use along with what they re-enter into the search if what they’re given isn’t satisfactory.

And the most incredible thing, Google makes these changes under the radar. Searchers have no idea that their searches are constantly dissected and that the company is always trying new things to improve its algorithm.

Explore this topic more in this article from Wired Magazine which outlines some of Google’s internal processes. Knowledge like this can be tremendously helpful in optimizing your website for the search engines.

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Recent Changes Signal Big Transformation with Search Engines Underway

Monday, February 15th, 2010

We’ve been discussing over the last few months changes in the online marketing world that can possibly have an effect on how search engines rank and display websites.

Things like the unveiling of personalized search as a standard feature of Google to the rise of social networking applications are just a couple of examples of such changes. It’s fair to say that based on our research and experience, social networking and bookmarking utilities have gained a big foothold in the online marketing equation.

Take all of this, along with the release of Google Buzz and some proposed partnership agreements between Google/Bing and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and you’ve got some indications that a major shift is underway in how the search engines rank and display search results.

Over the years, search engines have evolved a lot from their beginnings. For example, keywords were the only consideration in ’95 but by ’97, search engines began looking at a site’s links. Next, around 1999 and Google’s inception, the PageRank algorithm was introduced. By ’02, anchor-text links were important and by ’05, temporal data, or when links were obtained and the age of the content, became important ranking factors.

But with the events of the last couple of years, it’s becoming apparent that a site’s “social graph” is becoming as important a ranking factor as its “link graph.” Search engines, primarily Google and Bing, are relying more on social networking sites to gauge the popularity and usefulness of a website’s content.

Take a look at SEOMoz’s newest Whiteboard Friday video for more insights into the changing world of search.

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Finding a Proper Balance of Links for your Website

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! find your website through other sites linking to it. A site with a large number of quality sites linking to it signifies a certain importance to the search engines, boosting your rankings in the process.

There are many ways you can acquire links to your site. They can be purchased from a link farm, or you can get people to link to you through social networks like Facebook, StumbleUpon and Digg. In the end, the highest quality links come from sites in a similar industry whose audience will find your content appealing and useful.

Allowing the structure of links to your site to become too homogenous can cause many negative consequences for your site and its rankings. Links coming from only one type of site, or only to your homepage or links that all have the same anchor text links are all red flags to the search engines that your site has an unnatural link structure.

As a result, search engines will penalize your site, perhaps even de-listing it from the search engines.

To avoid trouble like this, you should attempt a general 80/20 link balancing act, which means:

  • 80% of your links should come from sites that are topically relevant to yours with the remaining 20% coming from unrelated or marginally related sites
  • 80% of incoming links should go to your homepage with the remaining 20% (at minimum) going to sub-pages within your site
  • 80% of links should have your keywords in the anchor text while the remaining 20% having a less optimized link, like “click here” or your URL as the anchor text
  • 80% of your links should be one-way and the remaining 20% reciprocal

Of course, these are just general guidelines but a good rule of thumb to avoid any problems with the search engines. You don’t want your site to appear over-optimized to the search engines so you need to balance your link ratios to avoid this red flag.

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Organic Search Continues Its Upward Trajectory

Monday, January 25th, 2010

It’s always interesting to see the trends in marketing online. How are people looking for information online?

For me, it continues to be a Google search using keyword phrases that closely describe what I’m looking for. I find searches like these to be very useful most of the time and if not, I can tweak the words I’m using to find what I’m looking for.

So it’s no surprise to me that organic search continues to be a preferred means of locating information online – and growing too.

According to new data from comScore, over 131 billion searches were conducted worldwide in December, 2009, a 46% increase over December ‘08. Searches in the U.S. alone grew by 22%, despite the country’s now two-year old recession.

And the U.S. continues to be the largest country on Earth when you consider online searches. While growth for 2008-2009 was much larger in countries like Russia (92%), France (61%) and Brazil (53%), the U.S. still accounts for the lion’s share of online searches.

So where do these searches originate from?

Well as we’ve reported here, Google still handles the majority of online searches – over 67% in December, 2009 with 58% growth between 12/2008 and 12/2009. And not just search engines are included in this list, which reflects a large number of searchers who go beyond the “core” search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Ebay came in 5th with 2.1 billion searches, growing by 58% year-over-year. Facebook handled 1.6 billion searches, a 43% increase year-over-year.

Data like this underscores the importance of optimizing websites for the search engines. It’s clear that an increasing number of Internet users rely on organic search to find what they’re looking for online.

How do you locate information online?

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Bing Update – Webmaster Tools Not Accepting Sites with Hyphens and Spyder Crawling Sites Twice

Friday, December 18th, 2009

It’s been a little while since we’ve reported on anything involving Bing and how it’s functioning for webmasters and SEO professionals.

While Microsoft’s newest search engine has been gaining market share in online search since its inception, webmasters and SEOs have had to deal with some glitches. Here are two of the latest.

A few days ago, webmasters were reporting in Bing’s forum that the search engine’s webmaster tools utility was not accepting URLs with hyphens in them. This caught my attention since our URL for this blog has a hyphen along with our SEO firm’s homepage (http://www.seo-advantage.com/).

Fortunately for our homepage, if you enter the URL without a hyphen, you end up at the same place.

Technicians at Bing are working on the problem and may have resolved it already.

The other glitch causing headaches for webmasters and SEOs is the crawler for the search engine is crawling a page twice – once for its compressed version and the other time for the uncompressed version.

Comments in the Bing forum complain that this is a waste of bandwidth and defeats the purpose of HTTP compression. An older thread from WebMasterWorld discusses image indexing by search engines and that possibly being a cause of the problem.

While Bing says they are working on the problem, there is no confirmation on when it will be resolved.

Stay tuned for any further updates to these issues or any technical issues with Bing.

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News Corporation and Microsoft Consider Web Pact

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Following up on our previous posts regarding content from news sites appearing in short form on sites like Google News and other blogs and news/information sites, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and Microsoft are reportedly in talks to pay the media organization to “de-list” its sites from Google.

Reportedly, Microsoft is approaching other news organizations with the same offer in an attempt to grab market share from Google. In October, Microsoft’s Bing accounted for just under 10% of online searches according to comScore.

Actions like this could prove to be a boon to the ailing newspaper industry, who has been struggling with declining print readership and advertising revenues for years. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said he will use all legal channels available to prevent Google from “stealing” news stories.

News aggregators and search engines like Google contend that collecting short pieces of articles – usually the headline and first two sentences – is allowed under the “fair use” doctrine of the U.S. Copyright Act.

Microsoft’s move is also seen as a direct assault on Google, putting pressure on the leading search engine to pay newspapers for content.

Google is downplaying this news, saying they don’t need news content to survive and that it constitutes just a sliver of their revenue.

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Collision of Social Media Marketing and SEO Revolutionizing Online Search

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

It’s long been held that social media marketing and search engine optimization are mutually exclusive – one has nothing to do with the other. Tweets on Twitter or public messages on Facebook have up until now been the exclusive domain of those sites. The only people who could see those messages were friends of the person or company that posted them.

But that’s changing thanks to some new licensing deals between social networking sites and major search engines. Bing is partnering with both Twitter and Facebook to include public content for crawling and indexing. And Twitter has also secured a deal with Google to include their updates in general search results.

What does this mean for online marketers and SEO professionals?

These developments are indeed pioneering a new world in search engine marketing. Content from social media sites will now play an increasingly large role in driving traffic to your website. No longer are these two forms of online marketing exclusive to one another.

Eventually, search will become even more personalized to each user based on their social media activity and their friends’ activity. All of SEO things we talk about here will still be very important but having a strong social media presence will now take on a more critical role in building traffic from search engine results.

As illustrated by this slide from HubSpot, social media will now become just as important as content creation and inbound links to building search engine rankings. Expect social networking analysis to become an integral part of search engine ranking algorithms going forward.

Search engine marketing firm SEO Advantage invites you to learn more about social media marketing and how it can be an effective tool to help you reach more people online at our SEO knowledge center.

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Another Headache for SEO Engineers – Bing’s MSNBot Needlessly Crawling Sites

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Getting your site crawled by the major search engines is central component to search engine optimization – without it, there’s no way your site will be indexed and ranked and no one will find you.

Search engine spiders, though, are known to go a little crazy from time to time…Bing’s reputation in this area especially caught my interest.

It appears from Rusty Brick’s analysis that all search engine spiders do this but the majority of complaints come from Bing’s MSNBot. So what’s the problem if a search engine spider excessively crawls my site?

I want that correct?

You absolutely want search engines to crawl your site but if it’s excessive, it can affect your host server and resources. Too much demand on your server can lead to your site crashing – just think about news reports you hear about websites crashing because too many people tried to visit them at one time.

Well search engine spiders are site visitors as well, technically speaking.

One webmaster on this discussion thread complains of the MSNBot spider specifically. Starting around September 17th, his site went from 300-600 page views per day from the MSNBot to 2500-3000. Another webmaster says that in the first half of October, the MSNBot catalogued over 17,000 pages on a 1,400 page site!

Apparently Bing’s MSNBot is the worst offender – over 80% of complaints of excessive site crawling involve them.

So if you seem to be having problems with your server, this could be the source.

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Search Engine Stats for August 2009 – Bing Update

Monday, September 28th, 2009

The results are in for August regarding search engine use – where are people going for their Internet searches?

Well, Google remains king with nearly 2/3 of all Internet searches in August – growing 2.6% over July.

But the biggest increase came from Microsoft’s Bing – the number of queries from users in the U.S. grew by 22%! But they still place third behind Yahoo! and Google, accounting for 1 in 10 Internet search queries in the United States last month.

Yahoo! saw its search volume drop by 4.2% in August but it still comes in at #2 with around 16% of all Internet search queries in August in the U.S.

It’s not surprising to see Bing grow like it is – they have been marketing their new search engine pretty aggressively lately. New TV ads can be seen traversing the airwaves touting the usability of this new search engine product.

Of course, they’re not going to surpass Google anytime soon, no matter how much advertising they do. Google is much more established in the search engine optimization field and the population in general. Bing will have to demonstrate how their search engine offers more value than Google if they ever hope to be the big dog in the search engine field.

Besides, yesterday was Google’s 11th birthday! If you were searching on Google yesterday, you probably noticed that the letter L in their name was replaced by two ones…causing some confusion, people saw this as a “LL” but it was merely recognition of their 11th birthday.

Happy Birthday Google!

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Long Awaited Yahoo! – Microsoft Deal Announced

Friday, July 31st, 2009

The search engine marketing blogs and forums have spoken of a deal between the two search engines for a while now. After much anticipation, a 10-year deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft was announced this week.

Not much for SEO and SEM professionals to worry about right now – the deal still needs to be approved by federal regulators. In short though, this new partnership:

    1. Microsoft acquires an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies and the ability to integrate it into existing web search platforms
    2. Each company will keep its own separate display advertising business and sales staff
    3. Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! for traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network through a revenue sharing agreement
    4. The agreement is for 10 years

    Yahoo!’s appearance will not change but will include a disclaimer at the bottom of each page saying “Powered by Bing.” Nothing will change until regulators approve the deal, expected no earlier than the first of next year.

    Integration in the United States will begin with search and then with search ads, which will now be powered by Microsoft’s adCenter. Integration will then expand to other countries.

    No need to get excited right now – it’s going to take some time for these changes to happen. And according to Rusty Brick at Search Engine Roundtable, Yahoo! has made many changes in the past so even though their agreement with Microsoft is for 10 years, don’t be surprised if something drastic changes in 5.

    Learn more at this Search Engine Land article and see what search engine optimization professionals have to say about this merger at DigitalPoint and WebMasterWorld forums.

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    Google and Bing July 2009 Updates

    Monday, July 27th, 2009

    A couple of posts in today’s Search Engine Roundtable indicate some possible changes in the offing for both Google and Bing.

    Google’s changes for July seem pretty insignificant – webmasters discussing these events in a WebmasterWorld thread are noticing old data show up in Google, indicating a possible “rollback.” Things like old cache, old dates and old snippets are appearing. It’s unclear if this is a rollback, an old index or the beginnings of something much bigger.

    Stay tuned to the search engine optimization e-blog for any updates.

    Bing is also doing some updating of its own. Chatter on the forums indicates a clear update – sites with high rankings now have poor rankings and vice versa. One commenter on HighRankings forum says this is nothing new for Microsoft’s search engine. Bing is currently dropping sites and pages like crazy at the moment, which has been a common practice for MSN search in the past.

    Here’s an excerpt of what’s going on:

    “I was no.1 for my main keyword, and had been there for quite some time. Though I went to show a client an example and searched for my term in bing and now i’m not in the top 200?

    Was a bit embarrasing to say the least!”

    See these WebMaster World and Bing Community threads for more insights.

    Check back again soon with seo-e.com for any updates and current happenings with the search engines.

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    Searchers like Bing Better but Plan to Stay with Google

    Monday, June 29th, 2009

    A new report from the Catalyst Group shows searchers giving good marks to Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. However, many of the same searchers indicated they plan on continuing with Google since they are familiar with it and use many of its additional features like Gmail and Google News.

    Key findings from the study are reported in this TechCrunch article, which says even if Bing proves to be just as good as Google, it may not matter since Google’s brand is so established and well-known.

    A focus group of 12 people was monitored with eye-tracking cameras as they conducted searches…after this, each individual completed a survey and interview. All participants were exclusive Google users before the experiment.

    Test subjects were asked to rate Bing on specific criteria: visual design, organization of features, filtering options and relevance of results. It beat Google on everything except relevance of results, the most important criteria.

    Catalyst CEO Nick Gould concludes that Microsoft “created something as good as Google and that is not good enough.” Overall, the test subjects “were not swayed.” No wonder Microsoft is spending up to $100 million on Bing marketing.

    See the full results of the Catalyst Group’s study including data from the eye-tracking cameras used to gauge the attention given to ad space on each search engine.

    See forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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    Bing Keyword Research Tool Exposes Google Weakness

    Monday, June 22nd, 2009

    Some in the business have been suggesting Microsoft’s new search engine Bing may offer better keyword research tools, especially in finding the most up-to-date keyword data.

    In terms of providing the most current trends in search queries, Bing’s keyword research tool, xRank, outperforms Google Trends according to Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch. Keywords that online marketers identify from this data are an important component in a company’s search engine optimization campaign.

    With the exception of the most popular ones, Google Trends has a three-day lag time – but xRank displays current information for that day says Schonfeld.

    Take this past weekend’s U.S. Open for instance…xRank is showing a spike in search queries for golfer Ricky Barnes for yesterday. Google Trends on the other hand has no data for yesterday.

    “This may not be a major feature, but it shows a weakness in Google’s armor,” commented Schonfeld.

    In its second week, 12.1% of Internet searches were on Bing…that’s up from 9.1% in the week prior to their launch according to comScore.

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    Posted in Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Writing for search engines | 3 Comments »

    Microsoft’s Bing Now Added to Google Analytics

    Monday, June 8th, 2009

    A week after Bing was unveiled to the world, Google has added this new search engine to their analytic reports. Webmasters expressed frustration that Bing was not immediately available in search engine referral reports Google’s free analytic reports.

    It seems Google added Bing support over the weekend, perhaps Saturday evening according to this S.E. Roundtable post.

    If you go to Google Analytics now, you can click “traffic sources” then “search engines” and see the number of keyword referrals have been sent your way by Bing since Friday, June 5th.

    The delay could be attributed to the fact Bing came online a few days before it was anticipated.

    S.E. Roundtable concluded only 0.39% of his search referrals between for this past weekend came through Bing.

    See forum discussion at Google Analytics Help.

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    Update on Microsoft’s New Search Engine

    Monday, June 1st, 2009

    On May 20th, we reported here in the search engine optimization blog an announcement that Microsoft would soon be unveiling a new search platform. It was to be called Kumo and be on display at a digital tech conference that took place last week – that’s what we thought was going to happen anyway.

    At the conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made an announcement – the Kumo name has been replaced with Bing, a totally rebranded search engine. MSN Live Search will be phased out with this change, which has consistently been far behind Google and Yahoo! in terms of search numbers.

    A commentary at Search Engine News does not interpret this move to be smart on Microsoft’s part. Basically, professional SEOs shouldn’t take these developments too seriously. Microsoft has strayed away from the user-driven solutions that have worked well for them, like Office and their acquisition of Hotmail in the 1990’s.

    According to a discussion thread at Webmaster World, Bing is supposed to go live this Wednesday, June 3rd.

    We’ll continue to monitor Bing and report here any useful functions that can help optimize your website and yield conversions.

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    Posted in Forum Watch, SEO Technology, Search Engine Watch Articles | 1 Comment »

    Microsoft Expected to Debut New Kumo Search Engine Soon

    Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

    In an attempt to grab market share from Google, it is expected Microsoft will demo its new search engine at the D: All Things Digital conference next week.

    Share of the search market has been and continues to be dominated by Google – according to the latest data from comScore, their share was 64.2% in April, up nearly 3% from a year ago. MSN search on the other hand accounted for only 8.2% of searches in April, down almost 1% from a year ago.

    After failing to acquire Yahoo! last year, Microsoft has been spending aggressively to try and catch up in the search engine game.

    See the post from D: All Things Digital here.

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