Bulbwired.com » On Page optimization

Google Caffeine Update – Real Time Search

Larry McLeod — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:52:10 +0000

Google Caffeine?

On the role of real-time search results in the search engine industry, Google has long realized that it falls short in terms of real-time search and has been busy! In recent months Google was working on a secret project: a complete renovation of the architecture in Google’s web search.

If you want to watch the videos:

…. and

Google Caffeine: Under the Cover

Google spokesperson Matt Cutts explains that Google Caffeine changes “under the cover” event. On Google’s user interface will change nothing. Caffeine Google’s search results are largely similar. The big difference is that new content much faster will appear in the top 10 Google Caffeine. This will ultimately lead to faster, more accurate and complete information in Google’s search results.

Real-time search

“Google is certainly faster Caffeine. New content will be indexed twice as fast. Google is rolling out some new adjustments to their sandbox. Performance, speed, reliability, accuracy, Relevancy and other parameters are some features that are being improved.

Here are some questions and answers, discussed on Matt Cutts Blog:

Q: How do I check out the Caffeine update?

A: If you search on URL you can get a preview of how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months.

Q: It doesn’t look any different to me?

A: The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.

Q: Is this Caffeine Update because of Company X or Y is doing Z?

A: Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.

Q: How do I give Google feedback?

A: If you want to give us feedback on how the search results are different, look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link and type your feedback in the text box. Make sure to include the word caffeine somewhere in the feedback.

Conclusion #1

Business owners need to heavily promote & manage social sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,Linkedin, and others. It also means photo sharing sites such as Picasa Web Albums & Flicker are important. It also means means blogs & local search sites such as yelp and citysearch are important….

Bottom Line folks Social Media is here to stay and your business needs to be in front of people looking for you…..

Conclusion #2

Business owners need Quality Content. Why? When you are signed into your Google account (many business owners are always signed in) Google is showing results from Social Circles in the result! How crazy is that. That means if we get all of our clients to follow us on Twitter, or all interested business owners to connect with us on Linkedin, or people follow us on YouTube.com.

THIS MEANS WHEN WE PUBLISH NEW CONTENT THEY SEE THAT CONTENT IN THE SEARCH RESULTS.

What a great way to target your target market. Google is practically telling everyone with this new addition that CONTENT is the new LINK VALUE online!

Pay Per Click management (PPC)

bulbwired — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:10:50 +0000

Pay Per Click Management – for your business or a not?

Although search engine optimization (SEO) is an excellent way to get free traffic to your website, it’s not all of the available traffic. Even more exposure for your website can be gained through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Research shows that nearly 70% of targeted visitors to a website come through free search results, the remaining 30% come through PPC campaigns. One major benefit of using PPC campaigns is that it enables you to attract the other 30% of customers that you would otherwise be missing altogether. PPC does cost money and it can cost a great deal, however, a properly managed PPC campaign can easily pay for itself. Many PPC management companies in the are experts at creating and optimising successful and economical PPC ad campaigns.

Speedy and Highly Targeted

A major advantage of a campaign is that it is highly targeted to people that are searching for what you have to offer. A professional PPC management company can easily find the right keywords and test them properly, helping make your campaign very cost-effective. Conversion rates are easily measurable if you have knowledge of proper tracking methods. You can collect data related to conversion rate, cost per sale and click-through rate (CTR), allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your ad. Another huge advantage is that all of the vital feedback from your ad testing is immediate. Ad results are available very quickly, and can be adjusted and retested in a short amount of time.

Test, Test and Test Again!

Knowledge of testing various campaigns to determine which will be most effective is vital in helping spend your marketing budget wisely. A professional PPC management company has the expertise to identify keywords for testing, determine maximum cost per click, write effective ads, create compelling copy, conduct detailed tracking, and make adjustments as needed to maximise the effectiveness of your advertising pounds. Without in-depth knowledge in all of these areas, a PPC campaign can end up costing much more money than it needs to. The profits gained from your investment in hiring professionals to manage your PPC campaigns is well worth the cost.

Track It!

The biggest pitfall encountered by inexperienced PPC managers is the lack of knowledge when it comes to tracking. It is absolutely crucial to know precisely what traffic you are receiving, where it originated from, the keywords that were used, where the user went using those keywords, and which keyword combinations get the best results. A successful campaign includes not only selecting and tracking the correct keywords, but determining proper bid prices, writing good ad copy, creating compelling landing pages, creating search engine friendly links and headings, streamlining usability, and writing those all important calls to action. Professional companies managing PPC campaigns are highly skilled in tracking every aspect of a campaign and adjusting all of the crucial items to maximise your PPC profits.

Social Media Marketing ROI ?

bulbwired — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:49:24 +0000

Is Social Media Marketing like “Cat Herding”?

The first thing I did today when waking was to run down to get some coffee. I needed caffeine in a bad way. You see, I was challenged to answer a question, can you quantify a ROI with Social Media Marketing? I already knew the answer however let me bore you a bit of what I found when searching for this topic. Google, Yahoo and Bing each had over 14 million results for “Social Media Marketing ROI’’s”. So I set out on a mission to read them all……just kidding, I barely got off the first page when it struck me.

I couldn’t help but think, “my audience is Small Businesses and if I am going to be true to this I need to be painfully blunt.” Of all the posts I read on this seemingly elusive question; “Can you put a ROI on Social Media Marketing” all and I do mean all were over intellectual attempts at trying to impress others that they have the answer. Some well meaning, others a blatant marketing campaign. Here are some of the babble.

“an overarching truth about business: The best marketing strategies, those that yield long-term value, are based not on trends, anecdotal evidence, or past “success stories” but on new scientific methods and metrics explicitly developed for analyzing often-imprecise data.”

HUH?

“The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.”

Really now!

“No marketing program has value that can be measured separately or independently. The value of marketing derives from its ability to help the organization implement its strategy … Marketing programs seldom have a direct impact on financial outcomes such as increased revenues, lowered costs, and higher profits. (Rather,) Marketing affects financial outcomes through chains of cause-and-effect relationships.”

… No impact? Ouch!

At the risk of insulting some of my colleagues I am going to stop there. The point I want to emphasize here is this; small businesses are concerned with one thing, can we make money? We can all agree ROI is hard to measure or because it is too time consuming, many small businesses shy away from social media. I myself own a small business and I am largely concerned with my bottom line. How we get to a good bottom line is with constant Plan, Do, and Review with marketing as a whole.

Ultimately, the key question to ask when measuring engagement is, Are we getting what we want out of the conversation? When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? Most, “to make money,” If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web.

In it’s simplest term let me tell you the why you need to be engaged in this type of marketing, however, Social Media on it’s own is not the end all be all. A well executed Online Presence for a business should include a well designed and thought out Web Site/Blog, Search Engine optimized pages, as well as a well researched Pay Per Click program. On top of this should be the inclusion to the 30-40 Social Media sites which will in turn earn you back links to your site.

You may be wondering, “you didn’t answer the original question”, and your right. Let me answer it this way. Did you ask the Yellow Page sales person for the return on investment? Did you ask the Value Coupon rep for that same answer? Even still there is an answer, yes in your business it can be tracked and quantified with some very simple techniques like simply interacting with your costumers. I’ll conclude with this, the Internet is the place where your potential customers are looking for your products and services and you do need to be there. Be there in a way that shows how great of a business you are.

Lastly, I hope I didn’t over simplify this issue, please comments and questions to l.mcleod@bulbwired.com, we love the interaction.

Improve your site Link Popularity

bulbwired — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:38:36 +0000

Link Popularity is one of key area to increase your site page ranking and search ranking. Incoming links are just like votes in election for your website however there is point as we have to emphases on quality links rather quantity. Valuable links are like 100 of poor links equals to 1 quality link. In this article, I would like to explain how differentiate quality links and how to get them which will effect and improve and strengthen your website ranking.

Mistakes in Link Building
It is never too late to focus on the right direction to get qualified incoming links. Here is few mistakes those may follow by SEOs, Link Builder or website owner and webmasters.

1- Focus on Quantity than Quality: It is the quality of incoming links that will bring your website at 1st page so always you should look for qualified incoming links rather quantity.
2- Link Exchange or Reciprocal Links: Link exchange or reciprocal links should be avoided.
3- Ignorance of Check and Balance for Links: If you don’t check and balance your listings periodically, you may lose your hard gain incoming links
4- Purchase Bulk Links: Search engines become very intelligent these days, you can’t make them fool by purchasing bulk links, because search engine check your incoming links frequency as well with time
5- Paid Links: Paid links can be very healthy but if they are used as a part of the strategy, if you have no idea of how many paid links you are going to have, that can upset your link building campaign.

Do You Have Categorized and Simplified Database?
In link building campaign, your database is your key to success; it is the backbone of your overall link building strategy. If you have a poor database, which is not categorized and simplified, you can’t be comfortable from your link building strategy.

Try to have categorized and simplified database, make a master database with following mentioned fields.

Important Fields for Master Database for any Link Building Campaign
1. URL
2. Direct Link (Direct Link of Submission or Registration)
3. Industry Type (Show Biz, Construction, Telecommunication…)
4. Link Type (One Way, Reciprocal, Paid)
5. Link Style (Anchor link, Title Hyper Link, URL Link, Vote Link)
6. Link Period (1 Year or Life time)
7. PageRank (1, 2, 3…10)
8. Title Limit (Characters Limit)
9. Description Limit (Characters Limit)
10. Keywords Limit (Characters Limit)

Insertion & Update Your Master Database!
Your master database (structure) is ready, now You need to make it valuable by inserting data to it, it requires an on-going updates. Don’t let anything go away as it can be used for your current asa for new projects

Quick thoughts on Outbound links.

bulbwired — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:20:36 +0000

Does anyone else find it surprising that so many site owners are reluctant to provide outgoing links on their website. Somehow they have come to believe that providing relevant outgoing links from their site can be harmful to their results in the search engines.

When you send your visitors to a relevant resource, this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing.

Relevant sites does NOT mean competitive sites.

Definitions of Relevant on the Web:

Having a bearing on or connection with the subject at issue; “the scientist corresponds with colleagues in order to learn about matters relevant to her own research” wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Evidence or information that has enough value to prove something significant to a case.http://www.attorneykennugent.com/library/r.html

If you write an article and would like to provide evidence of what you are saying, you should provide your resources within the article. Those MUST be credible resources. For example, if I write an article about website credibility, the site I point to in order to back up what I am saying must be an EXPERT on the topic, such as the Stanford Guidelines for Website Credibility. This method (used properly) gives your pages MORE value, not less. It also adds to the relevance of your page to the topic.

Incoming and outgoing links are not just about making pages filled with links. It is something that can be blended into your website in multiple ways, as it pertains to the specific page.

Think about the common interests of your target visitors and you will have no trouble deciding if a link is relevant to your site.

J Walker from GNC Web Creations
http://www.gnc-web-creations.com/

On-the-Page Optimization

bulbwired — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:07:34 +0000

The following post is just a few thoughts about On-the-Page Optimization …

… and an attempt at a checklist.

Links vs On Page SEO

When optimizing a page for competitive terms, the bulk of the ranking algorithm will be based upon link analysis and site authority. Effective link building has no limit to how much it can help your rankings for competitive keywords you are targeting. Good on page optimization helps you rank for a wide array of less competitive keywords.

Keyword Density (KD) is Overrated

Some people think that more is better, and more is better, and more is better. This is not true with on-the-page keyword density. The algorithms for grading page copy are based on a bell curve. Some pages will have near-perfect term weights. But after some point, added placement of certain words does not make a page any more relevant; in fact, it can make a page become less relevant and appear more likely to be spam.

Why Focusing on Keyword Density is a Waste of Time

About half of all search queries are unique. Many of the searches that bring visitors to your site are for keyword phrases you never would have guessed. If a site is not well-established, most search traffic will be for long, multiword search phrases.

When webmasters start thinking about keyword density, many of them tend to remove descriptive modifiers and other semantically-related terms. Since some of those terms will no longer appear on the page, the “optimized” page no longer ranks well for many queries it once ranked for.

People write, search, and use language in similar ways. Thus, if you write naturally, you are going to be far better optimized for long-tail searches than some person who wastes time on keyword density will be.

If the content sounds like it was designed for engines instead of people, then less people are going to want to read it or link to it. Time spent tweaking keyword density would usually be better spent creating additional useful original content.

Over-optimizing a Page Makes a Page Likely to be Flagged as Spam

Some places try to optimize content so aggressively that the copy reads like rubbish. Traffic means nothing if people do not talk about your business or convert on your offers. Obviously, that is no good. But it gets even worse than that…some pages that are over-optimized don’t even get traffic.

Imagine a page that starts its page title, meta description, first header, first paragraph, and second paragraph all with the same word or phrase. Does that sound like natural quality information? Or perhaps more like someone trying to game the relevancy algorithms? If it looks and smells like spam then it is likely to get filtered out of the search results.

Natural On Page SEO

You have to mix it up. Sure, make the page title relevant, but don’t forget to

mix up your phrase order
use a few subheaders that are not keyword rich
use modifiers and related terms in some of your subheaders and throughout the page copy

The more your writing sounds like it was crafted for humans instead of bots, generally the better it will rank. Search engines want to rank high-quality information. Think news articles more than optimized pages. If your content looks more like a newspaper article than a piece of obviously SEOed text, you are on the right track.

Each search engine has its own algorithms, and they do not all align with one another. Thus, the most effective way to improve your rankings on all search engines will be via link building, but proper page structure and on-the-page optimization play important roles in gaining targeted traffic, especially for non-competitive keyword phrases or in search engines that rely heavily on page content.

Page Specific Relevant Content

Almost every page is going to have navigation and design elements. For search engines, the portions of the page that matter most, and that you have the most control over, are the textual content parts. Make sure that every page that you want to rank has enough page specific content on it that a search engine can tell that the page is focused on that topic. If a page consists mostly of repetitive sitewide navigation or illegible images it is hard for search engines to trust it or know what it is about.

You can create this kind of content by adding manufacturer details, editorial reviews, customer product feedback, product comparisons, and lists of recommended similar or compatible parts.

Use Keywords in Headings

Use keywords in headings and subheadings throughout the page—this heading should capture the person’s attention and tell them they are in the right place. Think of these headings like you would a heading in a newspaper; a classic, straight SEO approach might be

Optimize Web Pages – Learn SEO Copywriting

You may wish to use something with a call to action as well. That would appear more like

Learn SEO Copywriting Techniques that Drive Killer Converting Search Engine Traffic

Heading tags go from H1 to H6, with the biggest tags being the smallest number (i.e., h1 renders the biggest font). You can change how the text appears with CSS. I usually try to get some of my primary and secondary keyword phrases and similar phrases in my page heading as well as in many subheadings.

I recommend using a single H1 tag on each page. I also try to use many H2 or H3 tags to break up the page copy and help structure the data.

Break the Page Into Pieces

h1 (consisting of primary keywords and a modifier or call to action) Only use one h1 tag per page and do not bold or emphasize it. It probably works best if it is different than your page title – different phrase order, singular vs plural, and substitute synonyms where it makes sense.

Examples of subheadings can be as follows:

h2 (similar subtopic idea with some related keyword phrases in it)

paragraph blah blah blah

h2 (another subtopic with some semantically related words)

paragraph blah blah

paragraph blah blah blah

h2 (Many subtopics do not have the same keywords as the page title and main heading. If you are writing for conversion, not all of them will, which is also good for SEO. If your page title and your headings contain the exact same keyword phrase it may look like an attempt to manipulate search relevancy. Mix it up. Keep it natural looking.)

h2 (Don’t forget to change word order and use plural and singular versions)

unordered list

paragraph blah blah

h2 (another subtopic focused on another niche)

paragraph blah blah blah

Usually the subheadings will focus on a keyword phrase that is slightly more specific than the main heading.

The next example set is going to contain a bit of self-promotion, but that is not really the intent. It is hard for me to think of structuring content without thinking about a topic, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to tell people to copy any of my pages or client sites.

Example of a Liberal Use of Subheadings

Descriptive, reader-focused subheadings improve the usability of your website, both for search engines and people. If I wrote a page about applying for a job, the page title and headers might look something like this:

Search Engine Optimization Guru Looks to Help 1 Lucky Client

Online Search Engine Optimization Expert for Hire

Aaron Wall: Your SEO Expert

Author of SEO Book: A Well-Known Search Blog

content

Top Selling Marketing Book Author

content

History in the Search Community

Speaker at Search Engine Strategies & WebmasterWorld

content

Directory Editor at Major Directories

content

Moderator at Many Professional Webmaster Discussion Forums

content

Search Engine Ranking Achievements

Search Marketing ROI Results

content

Client Testimonials

content

Don’t Go Crazy

Headings help structure the information, but you shouldn’t overdo it. If you start doing things like placing all your content in an H1 tag, bolding the H1 tags, or bolding all occurrences of your keywords, then you are doing things that would give search engines a reason to discount your page. Thus, the combined effect will be more likely to hurt your rankings on multiple fronts, since your content may look less appealing to search engines and site visitors will be less likely to buy from it or link to it.

Place Your Keywords Where it Makes Sense

After the headings, the rest of the page copy is usually written with sales conversion in mind, and I do not pay too much attention to optimizing it for search engines other than adding in a modifier here or there and making sure that I have mixed up the phrase order of core keywords in some spots. Natural writing should cause you to use your keywords throughout the text.

If you are struggling to get your keywords into the page here are some ideas:

Place keywords in normal body content.
Place keywords in heading tags.
Place keywords in img alt tags.
When the word is part of a small statement making a specific point, you may bold it or italicize it.
You may also want to include your keywords a few times in bulleted lists.
When possible, place the keywords in links, and don’t forget navigation.
Don’t focus on just one core keyword over and over again. Mix in many variations.
The key focus of the page should be on readability. If the page does not make sense to human eyes, then it is no good for a search engine and it will not make sales. You want to use keywords, but not to the point where it sounds like you are writing for the search engine and not the user.
When in doubt, ignore the keywords, write your article for people, and then come back to it and make sure you covered all the important topics you wanted to cover.

Use Variation

Since latent semantic indexing-type algorithms may be able to detect unnatural copy that lacks related terms and will score hyper-focused repetitive unnatural text as being less relevant, it is important to use some mixture of terms and phrases (i.e., in some spots you want to use terms related to your keywords and not just your keywords).

If you took your core keyword out of the page copy and replaced it with blanks, would humans to be able to understand what the document was about? If they could, you are in great shape.

Be Creative

There are so many creative ways to mix in your keywords. Assuming we wanted to target eat cheddar, we could write the following:

Spread Your Keywords Throughout the Page

Some of the more recent algorithms may have the ability to look for natural language patterns. In natural language, the different words in a keyword phrase will appear spread apart from one another in some occurances. To boost your rankings in these algorithms, you will want to use the word eat in some spots and cheddar in other spots.

Often your keywords will appear next to each other naturally. Some words like peanut and butter often occur together, but in general, all of your occurrences of the keywords should not be together unless that is how they would appear in a newspaper article about your topic.

Keywords Near the Beginning of the Source Code

Keywords near the top of the page, and before your navigation, may be weighted more heavily and enhance your search engine rankings. Search engines care about the order the content appears in the page code more than on the screen.

Reorganizing the text can easily be accomplished by writing a sentence above your branding images or through using a floating DIV or another CSS technique. When using tables, some people use a blank cell technique to make the search engines see the body content before navigation. If search engines weight where the keywords are on the page, then they most likely use the order of the words in the actual page source code and not the visual display of the pages.

Microsoft did research into visual page segmentation, and Google hired some lead Firefox programmers away from Mozilla. As computer clock cycles get more efficient, if they can improve relevancy by looking closer at how words appear on displayed pages, they will factor that into their algorithms. But likely they have easier relevancy wins elsewhere.

Page Copy Length

Clarity and formatting are more important than shear length of copy. Rather than aiming for an arbitrary word limit or cut off, you should write pages of varying length based on the goals of the page. For example, if you want to make a page look comprehensive and use that idea as part of your marketing strategy it makes sense to make that page longer than it needs to be. If you are trying to quickly communicate an important idea it does not hurt to publish that page with less text on it.

No matter how long you make it, ensure you use sub-headers, short paragraphs, bulleted lists, graphics, and other goodies that help break up the text. Most people scan before they read.