Google Instant and SEO – Thoughts About How It Changes Things

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  1. We May See More Traffic to Regional Sites. People regularly enter “cheap gas” and “best dentist” in search engines – without qualifying the searches at all. Organic results tend to send people to national portals, but suggest-driven search gets them closer to well optimized, regional sites. A search for “cheap gas” without Google Instant offers gasbuddy.com at number one organic result, while a “suggested” search for “cheap gas houston” gives houstongasprices.com.
  2. Google Instant Drop Down a new micro “SERP”: Those who make their way into the suggest feature get a “better than #1″ position.
  3. Google Instant Results May Change Long-Tail Search Optimization. Those of us who believe in doing long-tail marketing may find an decrease down the tail from search, and a greater need to develop segments of our site to serve those long tail queries. Searches that used to come in with two word phrases may now have 3-4 words, which helps with medium-tail optimization, but longer phrases previously further down the tail may be “clipped.” This will concentrate search terms so that Adwords bids will rise and competition increases in a sort of “cluster” effect.
  4. Google Instant SERPS offer More Impact for Trademark Blocking in PPC. If your trade name is offered in Google Instant results, and you’ve filed a trademark complaint form, the results page will be free from paid competition giving you a better shot at the traffic through organic or ppc links.
  5. Google Instant Can Improve User/Searcher Skills Forever. With Google Instant constantly popping up when you go about your daily queries, many who never really thought of keyphrases will now start to think about them. It will be a constant reinforcement of our efforts to think about how consumers search. We may have to adjust our planning to meet these enhanced skills.
  6. Google Instant Can Be an Ad-Hoc Negative Keyword Tool. There are other ways to be more comprehensive, but Google Instant can help to identify negative keywords you may want to enter in your campaigns. And I saw some negative phrases with higher index numbers that never showed up in Google keyword tools.
  7. Dramatically Reduced Spelling Error Opportunity. While many of us set up adgroups to capture spelling errors, this will have a decreasing impact as people start to use the suggest feature as a live auto-correction. Typo-campaigns may get less traffic.
  8. Hijacking Google Instant May Become a SEO Technique. It may become possible to hijack Google Instant so that competitive phrases are strategically flashed to the user. For example.. if you sell “abc widget” then a suggest of “abc widget fails miserably” could be used to divert traffic.
  9. Better Searches Offer Improved Analytics Information. With the user making clear choices among those available, we’ll have better information about what is enticing and engaging to the users. Vague, high volume two-word searches are always confusing when we’re looking to make decisions, and this might just help us plan better.
  10. Google Adwords Impressions will change.  We’ll need to consider how the rules of 3-seconds’ delay, clicks etc.  It’s hard to yet predict what is happening.
  11. Users will do more exploration. When users don’t fully know about a topic, this can change how they approach search.  Searches for “corneal transplant” can see many new avenues about the procedures, treatments, etc and spend more time in these sub-categories.
  12. Content Creation for SEO may cluster around Google Instant suggestions. If a given suggestion is offered more often, it makes sense to design content for that phrase and special derivatives.  If someone is searching for “Lasik Surgery” – content optimized for “Lasik Surgery Risks” would tend to get a lot of clicks it might otherwise have missed.   But considering personalized search here, we cannot precisely predict what will be searched for.
via buzzmaven.com

 

SmarTweeter - Smart Tweets for better SEO

SmarTweeter is a new tool to help small businesses promote themselves on the web.   SmartTweeter will create tweets out of every page on your website.   You can edit the twitter messages and can schedule the tweets to be sent out automatically - or you can do it manually any time you like.   You can optionally use avoo.net to shorten all your urls.   All you tweets can be saved as they go out into a Tweets Directory - giving you some extra link juice.   SmarTweeter makes social media objects out of all your web pages without having to do anything.  In the near future SmartTweeter will place the outgoing tweets on content rich topic pages maintained by SocialPulse.com.   This will be a powerful way for a business to promote themselves - on Twitter and also have their webpage links placed on well visited pages.  Give it a spin at http://SmarTweeter.com

Bing SEO Tips

 

Here are the Bing SEO tips:

1. Domain Age is Key
Bing appears to put a lot of stock into how long ago a domain was registered. For marketers, this means that you may look to purchase older domains if you want to get on good position in Bing.

2. Text Rules
On most search engines, the amount of text on the page usually isn’t usually a huge factor. However, Bing appears to really like pages with at least 300 words of text.

3. Link Out
With Google especially, some marketers are scared to link out to other websites because they don’t want their Page Rank to be lowered. On Bing, linking out actually appears to be smiled upon.

4. Bad News for Bloggers
Google seems to appreciate the blogosphere more than Bing. This is especially true when recent news events occur and bloggers battle with major websites for space on the search engine results page.

5. Bing Loves Titles
If you want to make it to the top of Bing, be sure to have a title that correlates to the subject at hand. Without following this SEO tip (or is a DEO tip?), your other efforts may be lost.

via everyjoe.com

 

Domain Age: Bing is a lot harsher about domain age than Google. The longer your domain has been registered, the more favor it will find with Bing. One may consider acquiring older domains to enhance the chances of being picked up by Bing.

Length of Text: For Bing, size does matter. So, ensure that your webpages have content of at least 300 words. The length of the text is more of a significant factor for Bing than it is for Google.

Link Out: Google alters your page rank based on the relevance of the link out webpages. Often, people are unsure of how a particular link out would impact their webpage and steer clear of this option. However, Bing likes link outs and increases the page ranking of those webpages that have more of them.

Title Tag of your Page: The title tag is of utmost importance for Bing. Without the relevant keyword in this area, your complete SEO efforts could be wasted.

Title Tags of Other Pages: When you link out from your page, ensure that the title tags of the pages you have linked out to have the keyword that is most relevant to your page. Bing simply loves this.

Link Popularity: Google is more fascinated with link popularity than Bing.

Factors that affect (any) SEO

Regardless of whether you are optimizing for Google, Yahoo or bing, there are these following parameters that finally dictate where your pages rank:

  • Content quality & uniqueness
  • The domain age
  • Backlinks and authority of the page
  • Neighborhood pages
  • Title, meta keyword, content relevancy

Prerequisites to get considered by bing

Even before you start optimizing your content check if your blog satisfies the following prerequisites to help the bing bot crawl and index your site.

1. Submit your blog/site to bing: Use the following URL to submit your blog to bing. If you had already submitted your website to MSN earlier, chances are you are automatically indexed by bing as well. Anyhow, it doesn’t harm if you submit again.
Submit your site to bing

2. Verify at bing webmaster central: Use the bing webmaster central to add your blog and its sitemap there in. Do not forget to verify your site using the XML verification process mentioned there in.

3. Upgrade your Google XML Sitemap plugin: If you are using an old Google XML sitemap plugin on your blog, your post updates may not be alerting the bing search bot to crawl your blog. Hence you need to update the plugin and make sure that ‘Notify bing’ option is checked.

4. Robot.txt: Make sure that you are not blocking the bing/MSN bots via any robot.txt entries.

Bing SEO tips

Now, let me summarize the optimization tips that I got to read on the bing official blog.

#1 Construct good HTML

bing seems to give more weightage to the critical HTML parts such as the page title, meta keywords (much more weightage than Google) and H1 tags. It is a must to have relevant keywords in those three areas to get the bing bot understand the importance of your pages.

#2 User’s language in keywords

For bing, it is important to use those key phrases that people actually use to search than the hyped ones such as ‘Make Money Online’.

#3 Create location aware content

Unlike Google, the geo-targeting is not something that can be forced on bing via some settings alone. Bing uses on page information to geographically categorize content. Hence if your business is located in a particular town, make sure to use the name of that town (and address on relevant pages) on your pages and meta keywords tag.

#4 Backlinks from authority sites

Just like Google, the backlinks play a role in deciding the authority of your site. Hence you have to have quality backlinks coming in from authority sites and the relevancy of the anchor text is given more importance than the page rank of the originating sites.

#5 Have good number of outbound links

Due to the monetization models around links, Google degrades pages that have dofollow (ie. without rel=nofollow) outbound links. However, as long as the content linked to are relevant with respect to the anchor text, bing loves pages that are linked to relevant content. No dofollow or nofollow worries in this case! In this particular case it’s a toss up between bing and Google. There is more weightage when you are linking to older and established domains (neighborhood matters).

#6 Simplify your site or blog

If your site or blog is heavy on rich internet application technologies (flash, too much of javascript, silverlight etc), chances are the bing bot is confused. Try to minimize the use of such technologies – not just within your blog content but be choosy on your plugins and extensions as well.

#7 Remove trailing ‘/’ from domain name

While internally linking as well as doing offsite SEO, make sure that you simplify your home URL as much as possible by removing the trailing ‘/’. Sometimes, the url with slash and the one without slash (e..g. http://www.dollarshower.com/ and http://www.dollarshower.com) are considered two entities and hence causing dilution of your backlink equity.

#8 Convert all URLs to lowercase

Due to much the same reason as mentioned above, you may convert all your URLs to lowercase for all reference and link building purposes (e.g. http://mysite.com/About to http://mysite.com/about).

#9 Simple and easy to read URLs

Use your permalink structure to keep all your links as human and bot readable ones. URLs containing too many numbers, port number, non-alphabetical characters are not very readable by bots in order to obtain valuable indexing information and relate to their contents.

Also, absolute linking (http://www.dollarshower.com/about) rather than relative path linking (./about) seems to be of help to the bots.

#10 Domain age and landing page content

Older the domain, the more authority you have in the eyes of bing (also true with Yahoo) where as it is fairly easy to tweak your site to high authority when you are trying to achieve Google SEO. Bing also value unique content on landing pages.

via dollarshower.com

Advantages and Disadvantages of URL Shorteners

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URL shorteners are everywhere now.  I cant keep up with them.  Im talking about url shorteners and redirectors as tinyurl.com and bit.ly among many others.   It doesnt take a lot of reflection to understand that controlling links is a money making venture.  I think there are still opportunities in how the url shortener uses the links.

Some of the advantages of using one are:

  • Short URLs - duh.  With the rise of Twitter and the need to keep tweets under 140 characters having a long URL is a detriment.
  • If your provider allows custom short urls - this is a great way to create a url that is both short and memorable and reusable.   For example I have a custom url that I use to point to the google map of my house - as an example it might be http://tinyurl.com/myhouse which points to a long google map url.
  • You can reuse the short url just like a normal url but your provider can accumulate statistics about how many times the url was visited.  This can be quite useful.  I use HootSuite and I often reuse a ow.ly shortenedd url if I can - so that I can see the numbers on it.
  • A good shortener will pass along the page rank to the target page by using 301 redirect.  This is good because your link gets the google mojo. 
  • A shortener is a great way to obfuscate the original url.   If you have an unsightly url (whatever that is) - then you can use a convenient url shortener to redirect your link.   The bad people also use this to hide the fact you will visiting a site you dont really want to go to.
  • I have heard that some shorteners provide access to their database of links using an API - Ill have to do some research on this.  But you can imagine the wealth of information that could be leveraged if you cross Digg with Tinyurl.
  • I am seeing more and more - the use of embedding target pages in a frame leaving the encompassing page to be branded or become an ad - Hootsuite, linkedin and Facebook all do it.  When I share a link in Twitter on Hootsuite - its nice that I can send along a bit of my own brand.

So there must be some disadvantages:

  • As I mention above - short url nicely hides the original url.  This is a common practice among Phishers.  I want to send short urls but then I read the result I want to see the target url.  We will probably be seeing more of this.
  • Tiny urls are meaningless and dont compell anyone to click on it for the most part.  On Twitter there is no link text and context so you just see the link.  The assumption on Twitter is that the accompanying text provides the context.
  • In the coming year we may be seeing a shake out of the url shorteners - and when the one you have been using goes out of business - so will your link.
  • The tiny url unless it has been customized has no natural keyword to attract and compell a person to click.

Elements Of A Small Business Website

Everybody wants a website these days - but they often don't know what to do with it.  Its really not up the web designer to write your copy or figure out your marketing strategy.  And most small businesses don't know how to do those things very well and often don't see the value in it.  I am not going to answer all of those questions today.  But I would like to outline the basic elements that a small business owner should look for in a new or redesigned website.

  • BRANDING - The site should reflect the mission of the company.  When someone lands on the first page they should be able to deduce what the purpose of the site is.  Ideally, it expresses how your company is going to satisfy a need or soften a pain.  And  importantly - it should express the business niche that you are in.   This is a giant topic in itself but a brand is a specialty in the marketplace.  It is why a visitor might be interested in your company. 
  • GREAT CONTENT - There is no substitute for great content.  This is what brings visitors back to your site.  Most companies think that listing a bunch of features is what is important - its not.  Great content is compelling and interesting to a visitor.  Your content should be error free and be meaningful.
  • VIDEO - Maybe everyone doesn't need video but I think its a convincing piece of evidence for your company.  It conveys trust and allows the customer to "get to know you".  Besides, not everybody takes in information the same way.  Some people are visual.  
  • EMAIL CAPTURE - Your website is not just so people can get driving directions.  Its about you slowly accumulating contacts for potential customers.  This can be done with a simple form that the visitor fills out.  And its always good to offer some incentive as a free estimate, a coupon, a small book or anything that might be valuable to the customer.
  • CLEAN LAYOUT AND NAVIGATION - Simple and straightforward is the way to go.   It should never be confusing for the user.    The biggest mistake I see is that there are too many choices.  
  • BUSINESS DETAILS - The business details should be presented somewhere.  It can be in an "About Us" page where you can tell the visitor about your company and who runs it.   Dont forget a contact page so that someone can get a hold of you.   Recently Ive seen some websites where you actually have to hunt to find a telephone number or email address.
  • SEO - Every site should be found on the internet using search.   You have to help Google out by making your site "Search Engine Friendly".    If you have a clear understanding of your niche in the market - you probably know what keywords people are using to look for you in Google.   These words need to be sprinkled into the content of your pages.   Specifically,  your keywords should be used in the "html title" text that show up at the top of the browser and the first line in a Google search page.   Your "meta description" tags should be filled out for every page.  And your content and links in your content should also use the keywords.
  • DOMAIN NAME - I hate it when the domain name is unlike the name of the company.  I know its not always possible to get an exact name.  Your domain name should ideally be a ".com" domain - not .biz or .org because "dot com" is the default for right now.  Some businesses use their keywords as a domain name as "santa-cruz-carpet-cleaning.com" which can work to an advantage.   Capture a domain name that is close to your business name.
  • TESTIMONIALS - Since you are a small business you will need to provide some evidence that you can deliver.  Your brand is not a promise enough like a big company brand.  People like to see that other people have used your product.  It builds trust.  I would recommend that starting out you cultivate these testimonials.
  • COMPELLING HEADING - Maybe this is handled in another section but I think its worth noting. Just like great a great headline - your site should strike someone immediately.   What can you say in the 2 or 3 seconds a visitor spends to make a decision about your company?
  • ANALYTICS - A good website evolves by eliminating things that don't work.  If you have some simple analytics for each page you can tell if anyone is visiting.  You can set measurable targets.  You might think this is hard but its not. You can use Google Analytics to see everything you need.  Its free and can be set up and installed in minutes.
  • BLOGGING - You might think that you have nothing to say or that your site doesn't need a blog.  Blogging is important on several levels.   A good blog that delivers great content (not just a pitch for your business) is interesting to the customer.  It builds trust as the customer has a connection to you as a person.  Your blog should deliver value in terms of your customer.   Your business is not about you - its about building trust with customers and satisfying their needs.  If you are not continually gaining expertise in what you are delivering then you are not going to be in business very long.    These lessons are great topics for blog posts.  And lastly, blogging is very very important to being found on Google.  Google likes blogs because they are a source of new content.   Blogging is an easy way for you to add to your website without the help of your webmaster.  Writing a small article every week will accumulate your Google power in a very short time.  You can also Twitter every new post giving you some free marketing and traffic to your site.
  • MUST BE FAST - People will leave your site if it doesn't load fast enough.  So 1.5 MB images that you are showing of your business must be prepared for display on the web.  
  • LANDING PAGES - Your website should compel a visitor to do something.  So you need a "landing page" with a clear call to action.  This might be your main page - but often its another page that is dedicated to a single offer. A good landing page will encourage a visitor to do something.  There is an art of a great landing page which deserves study.  But the basic ingredients are simplicity, ease of signup,  testimonials, a statement of benefit and a clear call to action.
  • BOOKMARKABILITY - A "favicon" (favorites icon) is the little image visible in the browser url area, visible on a browser tab, and in your bookmarks.  Every good site should have one.