Search Engine Optimization News, Website Promotion Tips

Posted By jucick on January 13, 2010

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy for people to come together and share opinions, experiences and thoughts on a number of topics. Smart companies understand this and are using the power of social media to connect and inform their customers, and potential customers. Referred to as “Social Media Marketing”, it’s a smart way to open the lines of communication between you and your prospects.

Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a
campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with social media.

There are many different forms of social media, so it’s impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working them all, at the very least you should claim your name or company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t want to find out later that someone has the user name that you want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available try http://Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry later.

So how do you monitor all the buzz? How do you monitor your brand and protect your hard earned reputation? I thought you’d never ask. There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you pull out your wallet.

These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often referred to, will help you to define keywords or phrases you wish to track and then watch for any mention of your company name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor your online reputation. Similar to High School reputations, protecting your image online is the name of the game, and just as in real life, everyone has one to maintain.

Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at your disposal:

1) http://BackTweets.com : A search engine for Twitter. See who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email alerts of new findings.

2) http://Addictomatic.com : A little different than the others, you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to your topic.

3) http://Buzzoo.net : All about Internet buzz, it tracks several different websites to bring you what’s “hot” right now.

4) http://Surchur.com : Search for the latest and greatest on topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for your chosen topic.

5) http://Commentful.Blogflux.com : This service watches for comments on blog posts, Digg, Flickr, and others and notifies you of any findings.

6) http://AlertRank.com : A better way to organize and sort Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a spreadsheet format of what it finds.

7) http://BoardTracker.com : A search engine for forums only. Monitor discussion boards and be notified by email when a thread matching your search terms is discovered. Free to use.

http://www.google.com/alerts : I’ve been using this “secret weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you receive the links. Free and nice.

9) http://BrandsEye.com : An online reputation management tool with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation. Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at $1.00.

10) http://Twazzup.com : Another Twitter only search engine.

11) http://SiteMention.com : Type in your url and find out what’s being said about you. The results returned are gathered from Google Blog Search, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and many more.

12) http://Brandwatch.net: This service tracks your brands, companies, even the competition. Sign up for free weekly updates on any brand. Their detailed reports break down what sites like you, your most talked about features, weekly summary of all blogs and forum activity. Very similar to the old “press clipping” service.

13) http://Trackur.com : A tool that scans many websites, including blogs, news, image and video sites, forums and notifies you of any mention of your brand, products/services. Easy to use and affordable. Prices vary depending on need, a personal account is only $18.00 a month, corporate account $88.00 a month with other options also available. Try a “personal” account free for 14 days.

14) http://FiltrBox.com : This one searches online news sources, Twitter and others to find out what’s being said about you or your company. Pricing is based on the number of users, but there is a free version that provides “5 filters” and 15 days of what they call “article history”.

15) http://SocialMention.com/alerts : Just like Google Alerts but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos and more.

16) http://BlogPulse.com : A search engine that searches only for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and off it goes to gather results.

17) http://BackType.com : Billing itself as a “conversational search engine” they index millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media.

18) http://sm2.techrigy.com : Industry insiders claim this to be the leading social media monitoring solution online. Choice of free or paid version. Free is limited to five searches and 1,000 results. There are three paid professional levels: Gold, Diamond, or Platinum.

19) http://ReputationDefender.com : This paid service finds out everything there is to know about you online, and if negative information is found they try to have it removed. Different types of plans are available such as “My Reputation”, “My Privacy”, starting at only $14.95 a month.

20) http://Topsy.com : Topsy will track your tweets that have been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be amazed at what you find.

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL

Just as there are many ways to market your company using social media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some level. How smart are you?

Source: SiteProNews

Category: SEO News | Comments Off
Tags: Blogging, SEM, SOCIAL MEDIA, TOOLS

Posted By jucick on December 18, 2009

Being bloggers we all like good comments. A good comment adds to the conversation, provides useful information and relevant links. The commenter doesn’t drop many links to his/her multiple blogs or websites in the comment text.

And we all hate spam. The owners of “DoFollow” blogs observe an explosion of borderline spam comments and moderate like crazy!

You may think you did everything right. You typed your SEO terms into the “Name” field and wrote a comment. And since the blog is “DoFollow” why not add one more link in the signature to get more backlinks and clicks?

You think this is smart. However, you hurt yourself.

Don’t think the blogger is stupid when you leave a comment. If the blogger considers your comment as spam, you just wasted your time and you will not get backlinks with your keywords as the anchor text. At best, the blogger will simply delete or edit your comment. At worse, they will report you to Akismet. In either case you won’t get any link juice.

The thing to remember is that if you are reported often, you will have troubles with commenting on all blogs protected by Akismet or Spam Karma (most known anti-spam plugins for WordPress). Akismet or Spam Karma will reject you before the blogger sees your comment.

How does the plugin recognize spam comments? It analyzes the following things:

* Time between the page loading and comment submission. If the comment is posted immediately after the page is loaded, the plugin thinks this is an automated submission. It’s supposed that people will take time to read the post before submitting a comment.
* Occurrence of the “stop” words in the comment text and URLs (comments containing “blacklisted” words like “porno”, “viagra”, etc. are automatically marked as spam)
* Quantity of URLs in the comment text. More URLs, more risks to be flagged as spam.
* The size of URLs in the comment text is compared against the text size. If the whole URLs size is bigger than the size of the text, the comment will be marked as spam.
* “Spammy” IPs are filtered (if your comments are reported as spam many times, your IP will be blacklisted).
* The plugin looks at how old the post is and how much time passed since the latest comment on the post.

In addition, some blogs can have plugins that give a “DoFollow” link after you leave several comments on the blog. So, you should not count to get a “DoFollow” link on your first visit.

Things to Avoid When Leaving a Comment

I would suggest that you remember this rule – “Don’t be greedy”. When you comment on a “DoFollow” blog for the first time, post a well thought comment with one link and your name as an anchor text. It’s like asking for a slice of pie. The blogger won’t begrudge you a slice but they won’t give you a whole pie!

Well, below is a list of common things you should avoid when leaving a comment on a “DoFollow” blog:

* Many irrelevant links in the comment text. Your comment will look spammy if you insert a lot of URLs that are not related to the post or to the comment text.
* Too short answer. Some bloggers may treat your short comment like “Thank you, great post”, “Thank you, I agree”, or something like this as spam even if you have the proper “Name” and don’t abuse the links. Of course, you can thank the post author for a great article if you liked it. But also, think about adding some information to this, maybe share your own experience, or add some more useful resources to make your comment more valuable.
* Duplicate signature at the bottom of the comment. As you already have your signature in the “Name” and “Url” fields, there is no need to repeat it in the comment text. The readers who will want to visit your website can click on your name.
* Large number of similar comments per day (if a search engine bot finds, for example, 100 comments with the same anchor text and comment text per day, it looks a bit unnatural and your links will be devalued).

There is one more important thing to think about: SEO term in the “Name” field. Some bloggers may allow the use of the keywords in the “Name” field, others may not. Before submitting a comment, take a look at other comments (if the post has any) to find out if the keywords are allowed in the “Name”. If other people submitted the comments under their names or nicknames, you should do the same. Some bloggers can let you write something like “Julia — Directory Submission”. But again, look and make sure other commenters did it.

dreamstime When DoFollow Blogs Can Hurt YouWith all that said, I would highly recommend that you avoid using automated comment submission tools. Yes, you are able to submit dozens or even hundreds of comments every day using an automated tool but will those links do any good for you? I bet no. You have no control over your comments. The program just fills in the form with your name, URL, email address and writes some text it thinks appropriate. The search engines are (or will be) smart enough to recognize automated submissions and devalue your links. A hundred of comments with the same URL and anchor text per day is the first “red flag” for the search engine saying that the comments were made automatically. In addition, the submission rules differ from blog to blog. What is OK for one blog may be considered as spam on another blog. You risk to be added to the “blacklist” and won’t be able to post comments anywhere. They will end up in the Akismet or Spam Karma spam folders.

In short, if you want to improve your search engine position, visit “DoFollow” blogs. Read the post, scan other comments to know what is allowed in the comments and only after that leave your well thought comment on the post. Quality over quantity – that is the rule to follow when building links from blog commenting.

Remember that there is no “easy button” to push. You can’t just set the things and sit patiently waiting they will work without you putting ANY effort! You will get outstanding results only if you are willing to take time to make them happen.

Source: FastBlogFinder

Category: Link Building, SEO Tips | 1 Comment »
Tags: LINK BUILDING, no-follow, SEO, TIPS

Posted By jucick on December 14, 2009

Speculation in the search industry is rife this week with claims that Google Search Personalization has changed the SEO playing field. But has it really? Or are people freaking out for no good reason? To find out, we’ll look at how it impacts SEO in the negative and positive. But first, let’s have a quick refresher on how Personalized Search works.

What is Personalized Search?

For the past few years, Google has been monitoring what you search for when logged into your Google account and in particular, what sites you click on in the SERPs. If you favor particular sites, Google takes note and customizes future searches to show you more results featuring your favorite sites, more often and in higher positions.

For example, if you like t-shirt shopping online and are a regular visitor to Threadless as a result of logged in Google searches, Google would feature pages from Threadless more in the SERPs you see for t-shirt related search queries than would normally be featured in SERPs shown to others for the same search queries. Likewise, pages from Threadless would be pushed higher up the search results than they would normally be.

Personalized Search has been in place for signed-in users for years, but this month Google rolled out personalized search to users worldwide, whether they are signed in to a Google account or not.

Apart from privacy concerns, the announcement has prompted the inevitable “SEO is dead” claims that always seem to surface whenever Google announce a change to their search functionality.

So let’s take a look at how/why personalization might influence search engine optimization.

Why Personalization DOES Impact SEO:

* If everyone sees different SERPs based on their searching patterns, how can you measure a consistent ranking? How can you reach an audience if their search queries are already *rigged* to show your competitor’s brand?
* On page optimization and link building will no longer have as much influence on your site’s rank for competitive search queries.
* Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their own sites may have a false impression that their sites are ranking well in the SERPs and cease or refuse SEO services.
* Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their competitor’s sites may have a false impression that their sites AREN’T ranking well in the SERPs and blame their SEO.
* Companies / brands with more traffic have a better chance to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites. This creates branding opportunities via snippets.
* Webmasters will start optimizing more for other search engines like Bing where they can have more of an impact on organic results.
* It will become even more difficult to rank for generic keywords and search phrases (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share), meaning long tail search queries will become much more important in an SEO campaign.
* Search spam should start to be filtered out as very few people will be revisiting spammy pages. That should eventually push more relevant, naturally optimized pages higher up the SERPs, particularly those in competitive industries.
* Fresh content will give sites an advantage because new pages are more likely to stand out to searchers in personalized SERPs. Same goes for real-time content generated by Twitter, Facebook etc. Static sites are going to fall to oblivion.
* Audience targeting and snippet relevancy will become more important when optimizing web pages.
* PPC ads will have to try harder to compete with increasingly brand-biased SERPs.
* PPC will become more popular as people find organic SEO too complex and abandon it.
* Personalization should help normally lower ranked sites to get to the top a little faster via loyal customers and visitors.
* Titles, META descriptions and text snippet optimization will become SEO priorities.
* Top SERP performers will fall down the ranks if their snippets and offerings are not competitive enough, allowing lower ranked sites to take over.
* Manually checking your site rankings, or those of your clients with personalization switched on will result in skewed, inaccurate SERPs.
* Rank checking tools like WebPosition will no longer be accurate. Clients will stop asking for ranking reports (hooray!).
* Some think that Google could be using personalization to monitor user-driven search in order to tweak the PageRank algorithm based on what users actually search for.
* Brand new sites targeting competitive search queries have very little chance of appearing in SERPs customized by personalization, even with SEO.
* If you don’t rank well now for your target search queries, you might slip further and further off the radar as searchers refine their SERPs by clicking on the higher ranked sites.
* If clicking on SERPs begins to impact what users see, hackers may develop malware etc. that automates SERP clicking.

Convinced that SEO is dead yet? Hold your horses. Let’s aim for some perspective here.

Why Personalization DOESN’T Impact SEO:

* Personalization has been in place for some time already – since 2005 in fact.

* The main Google PageRank algorithm still applies, it’s just the delivery of the results that has changed.

* Any SERP emphasis is user-driven rather than algorithm driven and personalization changes only relate to search queries closely aligned to your web history.

* Most non-personalized SERPs are not identical these days anyway. There is evidence of changes even based on the same search query on same PC in the same location a few minutes apart. Different datacenters and Everflux between them mean consistently shifting SERPs.

* SEO isn’t just about SERP ranking. Think usability, keyword selection, conversion design, branding, social media, online reputation management etc.

* Even if a searcher’s favorite brands come up in the SERPs and even if they visit them, they won’t always find what they’re looking for and will keep looking through and clicking other results, leveling the playing field eventually.

* People won’t necessarily visit your site based on rank – if it’s relevant, it will get found.

* Real Time Search and Universal Search are pushing the organic results down the SERPs anyway. Personalization is unlikely to have as big an impact as those factors.

* Personalization will encourage repeat visitors for sites that can attract clicks. In this way, customized SERPs act as a search engine based bookmarklet.

* Web history only lasts for 180 days if you’re not signed in, so unless searchers do multiple related searches and click on results during that time-frame, personalization may not even apply.

* Although they are not revealing the percentage of search results impacted per page by personalization, Google keeps harping on about wanting diversity in the SERPs so they are unlikely to allow personalization to skew your search results too much.

* You can tell if personalized search has influenced the SERPs you’re viewing by the *customizations* link at top right when logged in. You can view the same search without customization to see how the SERPs look to persons who have opted-out of personalization.

* You can switch it off permanently!

Get a Grip, People

Personalization has been in place on Google for over 4 years. This isn’t a new algorithm, it’s simply a new delivery mechanism. It’s important to remember that a large number of Google users are logged in to a Google account of some kind when conducting searches anyway, so they won’t even notice the difference.

The other thing to keep in mind is that personalization is all about relevance and usability. Webmasters have been focused for too long on rankings and trying to crack a spot in the Top 10 search results for their target search terms. Similarly, searchers have been too lazy to look beyond the first page or two of search results. The rollout of personalization hopefully sees relevancy start to influence and drive our search behavior more so than rankings.

In some respects, Google has simply handed users the steering wheel and encouraged us to drive their search engine. So my conclusion is that while personalization does impact SEO, it is not a SEO killer so much as a search rank killer.

Rankings are dead. Long live Relevancy!

Source: SiteProNews

Category: Search Engines, SEO News | Comments Off
Tags: BRANDING, GOOGLE, personalization, POLICIES, RANKINGS, SEARCH, SEO, SERPs