Search Engine Optimization News, Website Promotion Tips

Tons of Tips for Ranking in 5 Other Google Engines

Posted By jucick on April 6, 2009

Leverage More Google Properties For Traffic
It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.

Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.

1. Ranking in YouTube

As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:

- An accurate and descriptive title

- Make sure your description is just that – descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.

- Descriptive keyword tags

- Avoid keyword stuffing

It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:

- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags

- Include the word “Video” in your titles because people do search for it.

- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.

- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.

- Encourage participation by enabling everything.

- use meta data

- use captions and subtitles

- use watermarks

- use Google Maps integration

There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.

2. Ranking in Google Image Search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, “Other tips to double dip in image SEO include”:

- Add images to your Google Local Business profile

- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

- Add images to local business citation sources.

- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

3. Ranking in Google News

Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, “News page views are up to trillions monthly.” More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:

- Only indexes articles three days old or less

- Only indexes it once

- Read Google News Help for Publishers

- Google News XML Sitemap and monitor it

- Section names (keywords in News XML Sitemaps)

- Host “most popular” and “breaking news” sections on your site

- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description

Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. You should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.

4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.

For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”, “Music, Nicholasville KY”, and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less

- Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

- have pages, mentioning your area of service

- your phone number

- your physical address

- directions on how to reach your office

- use landmarks (“after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower” that’s three landmarks altogether)

- have links pointing to you from local websites and directories

- have a domain hosted locally (if locality is your primary concern)

- have ccTLD (country-specific domain – google.ca, for instance)

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.

5. Ranking in Google Blog Search

Back in ’07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:

- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of “high quality” blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

Some negatives he mentioned:

- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.

Wrap Up

It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.

Source: WebProNews

Category: Link Building, Search Engines, SEO News, SEO Tips | Comments Off
Tags: GOOGLE, RANKINGS, SEARCH, SEO, TRAFFIC

How to SEO-analyze your competition

Posted By jucick on March 28, 2009

Besides from creating optimized content on your web site you’ll have to keep an eye on what your competition is doing and how they do it. And by that I mean that you’ll have to check a whole bunch of things before you attempt to create a page that will target a certain keyword and also after you’ve done it. Why ? Because if you are on the first page there’s a big chance of you being analyzed by others. You always have to know what your competition is doing. This might seem a little odd at the beginning but as time goes by, it will become a habit and doing a quick check on a competitor’s web site will let you see how well they’re doing. Here are a few things that you should check and analyze in what regards the web sites you compete against.

How many

This is the most basic thing. Doing a basic Google search on a keyword will show you how many web sites you are going against. Don’t be get scared about this number no matter how big it is. Why ? Because this is not really your competition. Try and see how many web sites target the keywords in the title of their pages by searching “allintitle:keywords” and after that how many use the keywords in URLs “allinurls:keywords” and finally how many have links with text containing the keywords “allinanchor:keywords”. These 4 basic searches combined will offer you a much more accurate image. See if in all 4 cases the top 5 remains the same. If it changes then you should try and see why ?

Another thing to look for is if the web sites that rank on the first page are ranking with the top domain or with a particular page. A particular page is much more easy to analyze then a top domain in terms of how they are using the keywords and what backlinks do they have to that specific page. If the top domain is ranking well then you should try and find out more informations about it, like : how many backlinks and from what anchor texts and what web sites, how many pages on that web site target the keywords in titles, URLs, anchors and text and so on.

How well are they doing it

Analyzing the traffic that the top web sites get is a good indicator of how well are they doing their job. This is something you can do with Alexa.com or Compete.com. Another interesting tool is Google Trends which will provide all sorts of informations like which countries deliver the most traffic to a specific web site, what other web sites were visited by the same users and what other keywords they’ve searched for. All these web sites let you run comparison searches on two or more website. The results can be really interesting and could indicate which one has a much more powerful brand image and in what countries or language.

All these informations are a part of how to analyze your competition and the results can offer a good image of who your are going against. Automated tools are really helpful to help you get a much more accurate image of the competition’s web sites.

SEO Tools to use

Backlinks analysis tools : backlinkwatch.com or webconfs.com

Link search or directory search : soloseo.com

Here is a tool that will take your keyword, run a search and then see what other keywords does the top ranking web sites also target : justsearching.co.uk

Here is a tool that will perform an analysis on a web site and also offer comparisons : spydermate.com

A good way to analyze your competition’s presence on social networks is bizshark.com or how they are targeting a specific keyword with nichewatch.com

Source: Optimizing The Web

Category: SEO News, SEO Tips | Comments Off
Tags: ANALYSIS, SEO, SOFTWARE, TIPS, TOOLS, TRAFFIC

Where Social Media Fits Into the SEO Equation

Posted By jucick on March 26, 2009

We hear a whole lot of talk about social media marketing these days. There is plenty of evidence that there are great benefits to this medium, but there are still many questions about it as well. What questions do you have?

I thought it would be interesting to explore social media and how it relates directly to search engine optimization. I sent a couple of questions to several online marketing experts to get their thoughts on the subject. So contained here are the thoughts of Todd Malicoat, Joe Griffin, Joe Whyte, and Stephen Pitts.

Chris Crum: Where does social media fit into the SEO equation?

Todd Malicoat: Social media is an integral portion of a successful SEO campaign in the current landscape. Social media marketing helps mainly with creating the global link popularity that is essential to high rankings. Successful social media distribution of high value content has helped to solve the issue of not having enough unique linking domains or global link popularity, which has traditionally been one of the most difficult SEO variables to succeed at.

Joe Whyte: Social media is great as one piece of the Internet marketing puzzle, so is SEO for that matter. The links, traffic, brand engagement and conversational marketing piece to social media is very powerful. Selling it as a stand alone service has always created some issues for me as it takes time and it does not reap the same rewards for clients as quickly and securely as traditional SEO. It is great to do a linkbait piece and get to the top of Digg and see all of that traffic come through but all clients are looking for is a return that affects their bottom line and they want to be able to equate a certain campaign to that success. Social media has always had problems in that regard. Converting Digg and StumbleUpon users to sales is just NOT realistic for every company and every site owner out there.

As the social web evolves, this hole will be filled and is already starting to be filled by the development of more social networking, bookmarking and sharing sites.

In my opinion, the best social media marketing tactics to fit into your online marketing campaigns would be researching who you need to target then cross reference that criteria against the different social sites in order to quantify for yourself and your client that you are targeting the right sites. Then building a presence while engaging users and creating unique and interesting content for that community is the best method.

By doing this you create brand awareness, ubiquity and engagement which is the ultimate goal. Social media marketing is great for targeting the same demographics but just on a different platform away from your traditional search engine results pages.

Joe Griffin: Building a presence in the social web is all about reputation and branding. Most of the web’s top ranking websites maintain strong brand recognition in their respective industries. Strong branding leads to natural inbound links, and this is the lesson to be learned about building a reputation within social media networks. Most of the major social networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, purposely nofollow or truncate outbound links. This strategy drastically cuts down spam in their networks, and improves their quality and relevancy in the major search engines.

So, simply building profiles and linking to your site won’t help. If you’re interested in leveraging social media portals to improve your website’s rankings, then you need to look at the strategy in a completely different light. First and foremost, participating in the social web means building brand recognition, which can be used for your personal brand, your business brand, or both. It’s the brand recognition that leads to improved linking to your website – it’s not the social media websites themselves that will give your website link popularity. The inbound links will come from bloggers, forum moderators and users, resource websites, and new friends and colleagues that you will meet along the way.

Social networks build brands. Brand building is the key to top rankings over the long haul. Recent updates by Google, including the Vince update validate these comments.

Stephen Pitts: Social media is a form of offsite promotion, just like link building. A quality link doesn’t only come from any site, but one that is relevant and has visibility to engines and users, as should a social media effort. As with a SEO campaign, a social media effort should not be considered a project, rather a process that is continual. It can be one of the most effective means to entice users to speak and share online what you offer along with what is great and not so great about you.

Chris Crum: Strictly from an SEO standpoint, what are the benefits to using Twitter, Facebook, etc.?

Todd Malicoat: I’ve honestly yet to have someone show me a great SEO use for Facebook. There is certainly potential for distribution through it though, based on the raw size of the user base. With either medium, and with ANY social medium – the goal is simple for SEO’s: high distribution of top level content so it gets well linked.

The traffic will ultimately help with this, and having traffic from the right people (namely webmasters and promiscuous linkers) will help immensely with this. Twitter, on the other hand, HAS been a fairly valuable SEO tool in the same way that Facebook isn’t. It helps to get your best content in front of the people that will want it in a very timely fashion.

One main consideration with twitter should be that most people are not engaged. To truly use twitter as a means for distribution, you need to have very engaging, or very specialized content. “Cat blogging” (random posts about whatever is on your mind) didn’t work for regular blogging, and people have seem to forgotten this rule when it comes to microblogging. If you’re going to use twitter, stay on topic at least MOST of the time in order to keep the increasingly distracted attention of your users.

Joe Whyte: Well with the nofollow tags on these sites the link value can be debated. I tend to think that link value is still passed but at a much lower value. We also know that these links do get picked up and put into Google’s and Yahoo’s backlink checker and we know that nofollow still allows spiders to cache and index, which is still great.

There have actually been case studies out there for people who build nofollow back links to terms and it has been documented that there have been shifts within the rankings. However I mostly use Twitter, Facebook and similar sites to build a targeted community that I could market to. Also it’s another great way to open up a “connection line” with potential or current customers. It is also a great way to do some reputation management – We saw this with Rebecca Kelly of SEOmoz and I think it was Verizon or something. She was unhappy and decided to tweet it to all of her friends. A Verizon rep contacted her through twitter and helped her out where a telephone customer rep did not.

This is a great example of social media for reputation management. One more way Twitter and Facebook can help with SEO is through a method I call parasitic hosting. Parasitic hosting is the process of creating pages on social sites and 3rd party sites that you do not own and building an optimized page for your business. This page has the ability to rank for a particular term through traditional SEO techniques and can be another way to dominate your SERPS!

Stephen Pitts: Twitter and Facebook are a means for traffic and plant seeds that will hopefully turn into links and spur additional traffic. The other way is to use these platforms to find out what/how people find you and want to find you. Social Media is similar to organic visibility, it provides an opportunity to get a click, but the delivery is so important because if it isn’t delivered correctly it might not be seen!

Source: WebProNews