SEO Information and News Blog

When you size up the search marketing industry, you really have to marvel at all the different information sources, many of them conflicting, and how search marketers are able to stay on top of what’s current and relevant compared to noise and malarkey.

The SEO Genie Will Grant 3 Wishes

In the course of talking to prospective clients, prospective business partners, attending conferences and events, reading blogs, books, discussion threads, forums, newsletters and industry publications, you can get exposure to an amazing variety of observations about SEO. Many of them are spot-on. Some of them are tales of a mythical nature. A few are just plain bunk.

For some context on this post, I think it is important to note the distinction in intent for most search engine optimization efforts: SEO for publishers, blog networks and affiliates is a different thing than SEO for lead generation and on-site transactions/sales. Many tactics are the same, but the intentions and outcomes are very different.

The myths outlined below are more concerned with SEO for lead/sales generation that we work with at TopRank.

1. “Search Engine Optimization is a collection of tricks to fool search engines”.

If you’re “fooling” the search engines, then you’re probably fooling users too. Guess how well that kind of activity converts? “Real” SEO involves a lot more than optimizing content, getting links and using disposable marketing “tricks”. Tricks and tactics may be a matter of semantics depending on who you talk to, but many of the tactics we associate with productive and long term SEO include:

• Search Marketing Strategy
• Benchmarks
• Competitive Analysis
• Keyword Analysis
• Creative Copy Writing
• Web Design & User Experience
• Information Architecture
• Server Side Issues
• Code Optimization
• Other channel marketing that affects SEO (social media, news search, blog search, etc)
• Ongoing Content Development
• Ongoing Link Building
• Web Analytics
• Conversion Analysis

2. “People in our market don’t use search engines.”

I actually used to keep my laughter to myself when people would say this. You don’t have to do too much research to find out if a market is viable for marketing via search engines.

According to a study by comScore qSearch, there are 4.9 billion internet searches per month and 133 million unique searchers. Those numbers have actually gone up a bit since the study. It is certainly true that in some market categories in the developed world that search usage is minimal, but I have a hard time thinking of any.

A quick way to start investigating a market is to search and find out if how much relevant content is out there. If your market is brand new, then you may have an easier time dominating it on search engines by becoming an authority on the topic earlier than your competition.

3. “SEO is a single event”

This one is still pervasive and indicative of what search engine optimization used to be. Sort of like “SEO circa 1999 when all you had to do was update Meta tags, add keywords to web pages and submit. Those are the Model T days of SEO.

Search engines like Google look at 100-200 factors or “signals” to determine relevancy and to decide how to sort search results. Add in the increasing numbers of competing documents from various media, blogs and web site along with more savvy search marketers and it’s easy to realize that effective SEO requires ongoing attention. “Attention to what?”, you might ask. How about: creative link building, creation and promotion of new content, integration with other online/offline marketing, social media, analytics and optimization refinements.

4. “SEO is a function of IT”

Search engine optimization started out in the cubicles of IT, but has moved it’s way into the executive offices for many companies. I believe the most recent SEMPO state of the search industry research shows that companies are no longer borrowing from other cost centers to fund their search marketing initiatives. It’s a business decision line item like any other marketing expenditure.

However, IT and Web Design/Development “buy-in” are critical for proper implementation and it’s important to understand that in larger organizations, SEO is multi-departmental. Marketing, IT, Public Relations, Legal, Creative and possibly operations might all be involved in some way with a strategic initiative to help reach business goals through improved organic search performance.

Regardless of the size of the company, SEO initiatives should be managed strategically by the business like any other major marketing initiative

5. “Our site doesn’t get a lot of visitors, so SEO wouldn’t work for us.”

With comments/myths like this, you must be wondering, “Who in the world is Lee talking to?” You would be surprised how many intelligent, accomplished corporate marketers have said the above. It appears to be the classic “chicken before the egg” type of thinking.

The reality is that comments like this are an indication of insecurity about search as a discipline or about search as a viable marketing channel for a particular business. Smart people say things like this because they are not confident about the solution being presented and want to get out of or avoid the conversation. Anyone else who uses such logic just doesn’t understand marketing.

Either way, I always recommend to companies that if they’re considering search engine optimization, regardless of who helps them, they need to look at it long term. SEO is not push button marketing and it is not for the impatient. The minimum amount of time we recommend is 6 months after implementation before evaluating whether SEO has promise as a profitable marketing channel. Anything less than that is not worth starting.

I can’t let you go without a few Bonus Myths:

• Flash is bad – No, it’s the absence of text and complete reliance on Flash that is bad.
• Database generated urls are bad – The major search engines are very good at indexing complex urls. Stay away from session ids though.
• Keywords in meta tags is optimization – Just say no.
• Extra domain names boost rankings – Pure malarkey. Make sure you redirect them properly. See Bruce Clay’s explanation on this.
• Multiple copies of my site helps rankings – Can you say “duplicate content”? Don’t do it.
• My competitors get away with spam techniques, so I can too – I can hear my mom now, “And if your friends told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?”. If a competitor is “getting away” with blatant search spam, you have a few decisions to make. One of them is how to be more creative and more aggressive (within guidelines) at becoming the authority for your category and topics.

Are there more myths and misconceptions, misunderstandings and pure bull$#@! out there about SEO? Sure there is. And the fact that, in some ways, keeping up to date with search marketing best practices is like putting a puzzle together when the picture likes to change from time to time, makes it even more challenging.

It’s all the more reason to find trusted resources that you can rely on and to build a network of people to bounce ideas off of so you can separate the facts from the myths. There is no substitute for firsthand experience.

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Poor Yahoo. For a company that survived the bursting of the dot com bubble, had the largest Internet audience for most of 2006, and boasted a $3.16 billion gross profit over the last twelve months, they’ve taken quite a vicious PR beating.

Lets hope they paid for postage

Yahoo has fared poorly in financial analyst’s comparisons with search’s gleaming poster child Google, causing their stock to plummet almost 36% since this time last year. First, a decrease in advertiser’s online display budgets caused them to reduce this year’s Q3 earnings projections. Then, the now infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto” exposed some of their organizational dirty laundry, and the ensuing re-org left many shareholders still doubting.

Out of this morass of negative publicity was supposed to emerge a hero. Its name: Project Panama. Its goal: to make Yahoo’s SEM better than Google’s. The hype surrounding Panama’s release has been deafening. But now that it’s open to the public, will it live up to expectations?

On the surface, Panama has definite appeal to advertisers. The advanced copy and landing page testing capabilities, along with geotargeting and dayparting options, will allow marketers to squeeze better results out of their campaigns. The hybrid-style auction will allow savvy advertisers, particularly brands with recognizable and trusted domains names to boost their predicted clickthrough rate, (similar to Google’s quality score), increasing their ad’s position at the same, or lower CPCs. However, there is a downside to this for them-a dramatically increased workload. The old Yahoo Sponsored Search platform was simple, you pay one penny more, you get a higher position.

There wasn’t any fancy stuff like geotargeting and dayparting, at least not through the Yahoo DTC interface. Fancy campaign management had to be executed through third party campaign management solutions with access to the Yahoo APIs. Continuing to do more of the fancy stuff and doing it right will require a lot more work. A greater percentage of advertisers than ever before will find themselves in dire need of a robust automated technology to really succeed, as well as keen analytics. In addition, advertisers will have to learn how to create and execute the sophisticated strategies suggested by analysis of their campaign data. Nonetheless, look for Panama to steal some of Google’s advertising dollars. Point one for Yahoo.

However, when you consider market share as judged by search query volume, Panama won’t make any difference. Is the average searcher even going to know, much less care, that Yahoo is selling keywords in a hybrid auction? Maybe this is just me, but I don’t see Joe User saying to Mrs. User: “Honey, Yahoo allows it’s advertisers to do geographic segmentation and the local results have been improving. Let’s use them instead of Google for our Christmas shopping!”

Yahoo has its users and Google has its users. Some consumers use both, but Google has a much stronger brand than Yahoo when it comes to search. While Panama may eat into Google’s share of advertising dollars, don’t expect it to even make a dent in Google’s query market share. Google’s got a stranglehold on the lead in query volume, and ultimately, Google tends to get the benefit of the doubt when similar opportunities are available and the budget needs to go one way or the other. Point one for Google.

So if Yahoo’s goal is to be competitive with Google, the only way to really cut into their market share is through a full-on media campaign that supports its move to make both paid and organic results as relevant as possible. Here’s an interesting statistic: in 2005, Google spent just under $500 thousand on sales and marketing. Yahoo spent over twice as much, at just over $1.02 million. These stats come with some caveats, as they don’t show whether the marketing was targeted to users or advertisers, nor do we know if Yahoo was promoting search or its other properties. Nonetheless, they paint a broad picture of the two rivals’ differing situations.

Google is able to spend less money promoting itself and still retain a larger market share based purely on the strength of its product. Yahoo is already spending more money than Google promoting itself and has a lower market share. To steal some of Google’s eyeballs, Yahoo will be forced to spend even more money promoting itself, or develop some kind of viral campaign that convinces more users to switch. Meanwhile, Google will have extra resources to devote to improving and expanding its product. Score: Google two, Yahoo one.

Yahoo is clearly the underdog, but it’s premature to say game, set, match Google. It’s pretty clear that Panama on its own won’t save Yahoo. Other heroes will have to emerge from the morass, such as a CPC based behavioral search targeting solution for Yahoo’s ads (Project Guatemala, perhaps?) and demographic targeting for both search and display ads. For the immediate future, look for Yahoo’s increased revenue from Panama to make shareholders happy starting around Q2 of next year. Beyond that, Yahoo still has an uphill battle to steal Google’s market share, and marketer’s dollars.

Tag: Yahoo, Panama

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Top Tips For Great Seo Expert Hot New!

This post is compilation of some basic tips and tricks of seo beginner to be a great seo expert .

(1) Add Title related to targeted keywords, place only important keywords, do not exceed more than 25 characters.

(2) Add meta description related to Title tag. Repeat keywords used in title two times in meta description. Meta description should be unique for each pages with targeted keywords. Do not stuff keywords into meta description. Do note exceed 255 characters.

Note: Meta description and web page content should be a good one, if not it be placed in supplement results in “Google” Read more…

By John Alexander

TIP 1. Set your focus on your client’s success.

Stop focusing on sales and start focusing on your client’s success! Do all that you can do to make them successful. Pour all of your talents into making their projects work. So many folks I talk to can never stop thinking about
where they will make their next sale, instead of working on delivering results to the clients they ALREADY have. In so doing, you establish “lifetime” residuals. Read more…

So, we are ready with some basic information regarding the upcomming webmaster meet in India. After the first SEO Meet in india, where we had 14 webmasters we are planning for a bigger meet this time where we are expecting some World Level SEO’s. You can start you guesses who they are but it is going to be one of the biggest surprise for everyone.
Currently there are a couple dp forums members confirmed who are -

Read more…