Thursday, July 30, 2009

Yahoo/Microsoft deal may modify future of SEO

july 30, 2009 it was announced that Yahoo and Microsoft reached a deal that could give Microsoft almost 30 percent of the search engine market, and according to at least one expert, this will change the search engine optimization (SEO) landscape.

While the deal still has to meet approval and will likely take some time before Microsoft is handling all of Yahoo's searches, SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin says the deal will have some positive and negative effects on both Yahoo and Microsoft in regards to search engine optimization (SEO).

For one thing, businesses should put at least some effort into search engine optimization (SEO) for Microsoft's Bing as it is likely to have at least a 15 percent share of the search engine market, according to Fishkin.

Fishkin writes that implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for Bing would be a good idea because of the increased "richness" of its results.

"Bing's results are, by default, 'richer' than those of Yahoo and Google. Although Yahoo will be controlling the user interface on their end, it's likely much of that 'richness' will make its way into the Bing results inside Yahoo," he wrote. "Bing also surfaces only the top five results for many queries, meaning a higher concentration of clicks on those top results."

Although Microsoft and Yahoo say they expect the deal to be completed early next year, there still may be some hurdles the companies need to pass as many in the industry expect the Department of Justice to take a hard look at the agreement.

Article source: http://www.brafton.com/

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Search Engine Visibility’ Designed to Find Your Web Site Noticed

Search Engine Visibility walks users through a step-by-step process to make their internet site search engine friendly. This not only makes a search engine more possible to index the entire site, but to help get the Web site better in search engine rankings.

Lots of our customers want to know how to rank higher in web search engines? Said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. So we formed Search Engine Visibility. This tool gives you real tactics and sound advice about Search Engine Optimization - without having to pay big bucks?

Search Engine Visibility lets users optimize their site by defining keywords, analyzing keyword and tracking content performance. Search Engine Visibility also provides top 10 SEO Checklist, Which helps identify normally made mistakes and techniques on how make a Web site stronger.

Search Engine Visibility also provides a video tutorial and other instructive materials which help users understand the search engine optimization process. Once a Web site is optimized, users can submit their Web site to the most regularly used search engines on the Internet.

Friday, July 24, 2009

SEO Students Ruffle their Stuff for Koreans

Students of SEO is Martial Arts in Dalton were a little more excited than usual for their demonstrations on Friday. That’s because they were performing taekwondo in front of an international audience.

The world famous Korean National Demonstration Team was in town for the second time in as many years to perform in support of Master Ju Hyon Seo’s Sidekick Against Drugs fund-raiser at the Northwest Georgia Trade and Convention Center.

The SEO is demonstration teams — the Little Tigers (3-5-year-olds), the B (beginners) and (elite) teams — took center stage in front of about 200 people, including the Korean Team, to support Whitfield County’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) and the Family Support Council.

Members from Lee’s Taekwondo in Chattanooga also participated.

The event not only gave SEO students a chance to see some of the world’s best taekwondo artists, it also allowed them the chance to perform for the Koreans.

Colton Mantooth performed with SEO is elite demonstration team and was excited to show off his training of the past eight years, which has earned him a second-degree Black Belt.

“Knowing their abilities and knowing how well they can perform, it does put a little bit more pressure on you,” said Mantooth, who enters his senior year at Northwest Whitfield and hopes to start his own martial arts school in the future.

“You know you have got all these other people watching, but you’ve also got a professional team that does this for a living and travels around the world performing. It’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also motivation because they’re people we can look up to.”

Seo, who helped fund the Korean Team’s trip to the United States, believes students watching professionals at work provides an invaluable experience for them. The Korean Team consisted of 14 members, plus a director, professor Kim Jung Heon of Yong In University in Yongin City, Gyeonggi province, South Korea.

“Taekwondo started in Korea,” said Seo, who is from Korea and was also a member of the Korean Team for five years after training in sparring for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. “The reason I do this is I want my students to see where this art came from. All these members that come here are highly trained.

“And it’s a cultural experience for my students as well. Team members stay at some of my students’ houses and they get to learn the Korean culture.”

The Korean Team’s performance impressed Paxton Bennett, who has been a student at Seo’s for 2 1/2 years and has earned his red belt.

“It is really cool to see all that they can do,” said Bennett, who enters seventh grade at Westside Middle School. “I try to compare our stuff to their performances and it can help you work on your technique. I want to see if I can reach their abilities.”

While SEO students were impressed with the Koreans’ performances and intrigued by the cultural aspect of the event, Kim said the feeling was mutual for him and his students.

SEO teams were very impressive,” Kim said. “Last year we were here and practiced together for about a week and they were not at as high of a level as they are now.


Article Source: http://www.daltondailycitizen.com

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Five Important Factors When Choosing an SEO Company

A lot of companies get so baffled when attempting to hire an SEO firm that they simply give up altogether and don't hire anyone. Part of the problem is that they simply don't know whom to trust for this service.

Trust is always a tricky issue, and one that is sensitively charged based on our individual experiences with others as we navigate through the maze we call life. In SEO, trust issues are further magnified by the fact that there's no one-size-fits-all solution, or one method that all SEO’s use to bring targeted traffic to their client's websites.

Here are 5 factors that all businesses should weigh when choosing their SEO firm:
Does the SEO firm set realistic expectations about what they can and can't do, or do they simply promise the moon? Smart SEOs under-promise and over-deliver, so watch out for those that do the opposite.

1. Does the SEO Company have a proven record of achievement and not just for long-tail keywords? Be sure to check references to learn whether the SEO firm actually improved their clients' bottom line in some way.

2. Does the SEO agency provide recommendations for making your site better than it currently is, or are they trying to do things to it that will normally make it worse for your users? This one sounds crazy, but a good portion of SEOs think that it's all about the search engines and not the users, and make bad decisions accordingly. Never, ever, ever let an SEO company do something that you feel worsens your site's overall serviceability or readability.

3. Does the SEO consultant tell you what they're doing and why they're doing it, or do they just want you to blindly trust them? This one should set off a major red flag if you ever encounter it. Sure, you don't need to know every last detail or to micromanage your SEO campaign, but your SEO should be able to explain their reasoning for why they want to do the things they recommend. If they can't, or if their answers don't make sense, then run (don't walk) to the nearest door!

4. Does the SEO Company use only automated methods to achieve their goals? This isn't necessarily bad; however, you need to be aware if this is what they're doing. SEO is very much an art as well as a science, and because of this, creativity should always play a big part. It's very difficult to be creative when everything you do is based on a numbers game. Just keep that in mind!

5. Like trusting a friend, a dentist, or anyone else, determining whom to confidence as your SEO partner should not be taken lightly or rushed into. Educate yourself on SEO as much as you can before you decide.

Get to know the SEO vendors you're thinking of hiring, ask them lots and lots of questions, and most of all use your gut and your own common sense to determine if you'll be a good fit. If you are unsure, then keep on looking. There are plenty of SEO fish in the sea, and there should be a few who use the methods you believe in, who are within your budget, and who will work hard to help you accomplish your website goals!

Article source: http://www.isedb.com

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

SEO can Work for Generating Local Traffics

Although many companies begin using search engine optimization (SEO) to help increase their national - or perhaps international - visibility online, some companies are only concerned about attracting customers in their neighborhood, something experts says is much easier.

As part of its Website Remedies feature, CNNMoney.com gathers a number of experts in an attempt to assist businesses looking for help with their website. Its most recent piece focused on North Carolina-based law firm Conroy & Weinshenker which is looking to boost local traffic.

Pamela Swingley of California-based Savvy Internet Marketing says there is a lot of focus on local search at the moment and notes that creating search engine optimization (SEO) content for local traffic is simpler than trying to lure people from across the country.

"Attracting local search traffic is much easier than optimizing a website for a national or international audience". "Local search is starting to really heat up."

The experts say Conroy & Weinshenker should expand their content to help increase their search engine optimization (SEO). The news provider also suggests that the site update its news site at least once a month. While this can have the benefit of increasing SEO, it can also be of assistance to prospective clients.

Many local companies saw an increase in search engine optimization (SEO) earlier this year without doing anything to their websites when Google made local search the default setting for result pages.

Article source: http://www.brafton.com

Friday, July 17, 2009

The top 5 SEO guides

As a SEO professional the majority of my time is spent correcting the SEO errors and mistakes made by my customers. The art of effective SEO optimization is convoluted with many variables, and although you can Google SEO optimization and find literally thousands of results on the subject with tips, tricks, and strategies; until you remove all unfriendly SEO code your site is doomed in gaining prominent placement on the SERPs.

1. Avoid the use of flash, DHTML, and internal java script. These coding practices offer slick visual enhancements, but are some of the biggest SEO killers. Search engine spiders see flash objects as big chunks of empty web space because there isn’t an effective SEO method to tag them to be crawled by the spiders. If you are using flash for photo slideshows then convert them into pop-up pages and reinforce them with keyword rich content and anchor text.

DHTML and link roll over effects bloat the html coding of your website and remove the important “alt” and image “title” tags which help to further weaken your SEO ranking potential. The best menu linking method is “text” based links with keyword rich anchor text. The same goes for internal java scripting this coding just pushes your relevant content down further into your code and slows the search engine spiders crawling your site. Convert your internal scripts into external .js applets and drop them in a folder in your site.

2. Non-unique, duplicate, or non-relevant content. Your websites content should be fresh and always match and relate to your sites niche. If you are selling party supplies then it would be a bad idea to have pages or content about bowling balls. Duplicate or redundant content is a big no-no as well; part of the Google PR algorithm is based on fresh relevant content.

3. Keyword stuffing and hidden text. Google and the other major search engines view these practices as spamming and can get your sites sandboxed (dropped so low on the SERPs that no one will ever find it!) or banned altogether. Keep your keyword density to no more than 5%, and never use hidden text.

4. Poor Meta data. Your Meta data is the information that tells the search engine spiders what each page of your site is about and how it relates to your content. Research your keywords and phrases and always a unique keyword rich tile for each page, avoiding stop words like “and, or, the, if, it, were”. Keep you title to 57 characters or less. Your description tag should be short and no longer than a sentence or two. Your keyword tag should always have your primary keyword first, and that keyword should also be in the first sentence on your page content. Don’t bloat this tag with dozens of keywords; this will only hurt your ranking potential. Use no more than 10-12 per page and build landing or gateway pages to promote additional keywords.

5. Always use “alt”, link, and header (H1, H2, Etc) tags. Each image and hyperlink on your site is meaning less to the search engine spiders if it isn’t tagged with relevant keyword descriptive phrases. When tagging your menu links never use tags like “click here” etc. always be descriptive. Your content needs to be user-friendly first then SEO friendly. Avoid long paragraphs. Use bullets and numbering to summarize and break up long text. This will make your key points stand out to your web visitors and to the search engine spiders as well. Always use header tags to highlight important information. A trick I always us is I start of using the H2 tag at the top of my pages and use the H1 tag further down. It seems that almost every SEO tech starts off with the H1 tag and this has caused the major search engines to give less weight to the H1 tag as a result. This doesn’t mean it is useless, but when used second or third I have noticed better results.

There are so many important strategies in achieving top ranking on Google and the other search engines, but by getting back to basics and making your site SEO and user friendly, you will have a clean web pallet to work with and build upon.

Keep your site filled with fresh relevant content, avoid “Black Hat” and deceptive practices and keep your pages easy to navigate and informative and you site will gain higher SERPs long before those who disregard or do not follow SEO best practices!

Article source: http://www.examiner.com/

Monday, July 13, 2009

Google set to wage OS war with Microsoft

Google Inc.'s entry into the operating system business poses the strongest long-term threat in years to the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software, according to analysts.

Google last week announced that it would launch its long-anticipated operating system, based on the open-source Linux kernel and built around its Chrome browser, sometime in the second half of 2010. The new Web-centric operating system will be dubbed Google Chrome OS.

Though analysts agreed that the Windows hegemony is safe in the short term, Google has the financial muscle, engineering might and industry clout to survive a long-term battle with an industry powerhouse like Microsoft.

"Google doesn't need an operating system to support its revenue stream," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. "They have lots and lots of revenue from their advertising bread and butter. That means they have [the] staying power that's critically important in this market."

Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said that Microsoft is unlikely to ignore the threat to Windows. "Microsoft, after all, is one of the more paranoid companies around," he said.

He added that Microsoft is unlikely to be adversely affected by Chrome OS in the short term.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on the Google announcement.

Analysts did note that Google must stick to the long, complex grind of developing an operating system if it wants to be successful in that business.

Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research, said that in recent months, Google has shut down or stopped supporting several products, including Google Video, Google Notebook, the Jaiku microblogging service and the Dodgeball mobile social network.

"They pick something up, get excited about it and work on it until they find another shiny new object they want to play with," Wettemann said. "My feeling is that Google needs to stop announcing things and instead execute on completing them."

Nonetheless, the Chrome OS plan has attracted the support of several top PC vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo Group, Acer and Asustek Computer.

Article source: http://www.computerworld.com

Saturday, July 11, 2009

SEO Success: Sign Of A Healthy Corporate Culture

Flatter and more-responsive organizations. Working on SEO is like taking your Web site to the doctor: a good SEO consultant will tell you what you have to do, but the hard work is up to you. Companies that listen and respond will do better than companies that justify, finger-point and go on the defensive. Healthy companies look for ways to improve; dysfunctional companies offer reasons why improvement is impossible. Companies that refuse to do the heavy lifting required to whip their site into shape generally are equally negligent in other areas of their business.

Better communication channels. SEO is by nature a cross-functional exercise. It involves many different departments, all working together toward a common goal. This approach is well within the comfort zone of healthy organizations, but totally foreign to dysfunctional ones. An SEO initiative severely tests the communication and cooperative capabilities of an organization. It requires marketing, IT, product managers and often legal to all work together, and the faster they can do this, the more positive the results will be. SEO is not a one-shot tactic. In the most competitive categories, it's a full-out and ongoing war. The companies that can respond and adapt quickly will win that war. The ones mired in bureaucracy and butt-covering will inevitably sink in the rankings.

Healthy community connections. The new era of digital communications requires companies to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their community of customers. Great companies do this instinctively. Bad companies put up huge corporate communication barricades, keeping the angry hordes at bay. Because much of this dialogue happens online, these dialogues tend to generate reams of content and links. Raving customers generate link love; angry customers generate link hate and reputation management problems. A company that can effectively engage in conversations with customers will find a natural lift in organic rankings is often the result.

Efficient execution habits. Companies that keep a clean house do better organically than companies that keep skeletons in the closet. Both approaches are symptomatic of the company's overall approach to business. Highly effective companies constantly upgrade systems and infrastructure, both in their organizations and their online presence. They invest in best of breed tools and technology. And they are able to quickly prioritize and executive as the landscape shifts. Again, a clean technical online infrastructure makes SEO much, much easier.

Executives that "get it." C-level executives who make SEO a priority realize that the marketing landscape is shifting quickly. They've been paying attention to customer behavioral trends and have committed to being proactive rather than reactive. This usually indicates well-placed intelligence gathering "antennae" and feedback loops. It also indicates an executive who isn't hopelessly mired in "old-boy" thinking and outdated command and control management models.

Corporate pride. Content might not be the sole king anymore (SEO is more of an oligarchy now) but it's still part of the ruling class. Great cultures tend to engender pride that naturally precipitates an explosion of content. People blog about where they work, people tweet and product managers enthuse verbosely about what they're working on. All of this generates great, searchable content online.

Companies get the SEO rankings they deserve. I'm guessing that if you asked any SEO consultant in the world, they'll tell you their favorite clients are the ones that are the easiest to work with: clients who listen, are proactive and for whom continual improvement is a religion. Based on what I've seen in the past decade, this attitude extends beyond the SEO team (indeed, it has to) and permeates the entire culture. There are those who game the system and gain undeserved rankings, but more and more, "organic" rankings are just that: rankings that come from the very nature of the company and how they conduct themselves in the marketplace.

article source: http://www.mediapost.com