This was something that had been coming, but it was unknown exactly when the date would be. Yahoo and Microsoft have made an alliance. It’s called the “Search Alliance”. Originally it was intended as a unification for paid advertisements, but it’s clear now that the unification is for both paid and organic listings; do a search on both Yahoo and Bing for a keyword phrase, and the results are now identical.
I’ve been taking a look at some of my competition lately and seeing their bragging about achieving first page ranking for keywords, and in some cases top position ranking for keywords. Well, for people who are looking to get SEO services from a company or an individual, be sure to keep some things in mind before being impressed by achievements such as these.
There’s a good list of things to double check (or to ask) when you see rankings like this in a portfolio:
How many results do you get for that keyword in the search engine? If you do a search in Google and get under 200,000 listings, there’s a good chance it’s very easy to rank for that keyword. There are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, if no one’s competing for the keyword, it’s easy to rank for. But again – if no one’s competing for the keyword, chances are it’s not worth ranking for. We’ve got a few clients with keywords that are ranked on the first page that have search results numbering over 6,000,000.
What kind of traffic does that keyword get? There are different ways to learn about this, but you should see if the keywords that are being ranked highly actually get good traffic. You may have a number one position, but if it only gets two searches a month – is it really something that’s worth it? As always, there are exceptions to this rule (if you can close on one of those two searches and it’s worth six figures, that’d be worth it), but usually getting no traffic means the keyword is not worth as much.
What other keywords are ranked for that site? So they have shown a single keyword phrase for their SEO’d site. Is it the only one that’s ranked? A good SEO should be able to rank highly for multiple keywords. Ideally, multiple targeted keywords.
Is the SEO company’s site ranking for keywords? If the company claims to do SEO, it would make sense that they would rank for keywords themselves, correct? If you ask and they can show no good results for their own site in the search engines, be very cautious about trusting them with your own site.
When you hire someone for SEO work, they should be able to provide information on what keywords they are targeting and show you the results that it’s bringing. Having a particular ranking is worth nothing if you don’t see results from that position in the search engine listings. Check this list to see what those results are really worth, and if it’s good SEO or just easy SEO to put something into a portfolio.
Nothing really new here, but sometimes it’s good to see what the big guns think about search engine optimization. Does Google approve of SEO? Do they have an opinion on it? Good? Bad?
Well, they most certainly have an opinion on it. In fact, they even offer solid advice to anyone interested on the Google SEO page (a page with guidelines, within the Webmaster Tools pages).
It’s always nice to have SEO experts and pros answer some of the major questions any SEO might have. It appears that someone has done just that. Outspoken Media snagged a number of fairly big SEO experts and asked some great questions, in particular about link building.
It’s pretty lengthy, so in the words of the poster, grab a nice cup o’ joe and sit down to read through this set of jewels. There are plenty of SEO questions to see answered.
Guest blogs are a new area of content creation becoming more prevalent in the blogsphere nowadays. Is this something that is good for SEO? Or is it worthless for link building?
Google AdWords has a new tool they’re trying out. It’s called the AdWords Campaign Experiments (or ACE). It’s taking some testing that normally takes a while and making it faster. Read more »
One of Google’s new developments is the adding of another search element to their engine. Time. You can now search for a certain “freshness” of content in Google’s cache. Read more »
The news is out, Google is not a fan of Microsoft Windows. The main reason is security concerns, the vulnerability that is present with the hackability of the operating system. Read more »
Trying to show the results of SEO is not just doing a search on your targeted keywords and viewing the latest position. It’s more than just that. Read more »
As many blogs that get decent traffic know, you often get a lot of spammy comments on your posts, even when you have a decent anti-spam plugin or two. Well, there are other routes to go when you STILL get spam comments. And I’ve found a nice one. Read more »
Google’s making some changes to their standard search results, to include a left hand nav bar. This has made some people (including Business Insider) wonder if it’s to imitate what Bing already has in place – a side panel to have different links for images, videos, etc.
This change will affect how people view results in general, although Google’s advertising approach will likely not change heavily. We’ll have to see what the response is when they go fully live with these changes.
When doing SEO, it’s not as easy as just picking out your main market keyword and thinking you can jump to the top with that keyword. A lot of people seem to think that generic keywords equal good sales. But this is not the case, more often than not. Good SEO requires work and research. Read more »
Not really much more to say than that. I found a post on his blog from not too long ago, and it cracked me up. Even people outside of internet marketing might find it worth checking out.
SEO tips being lies? Okay, not always intentionally, but it happens. Mainly because with the ways SEO works changing so much, a lot of old techniques no longer work. Keeping on top of these makes a big difference.
There are several, but I’d recommend checking out this great list put together by Stephan Spencer, Chris Smith, Rand Fishkin, and Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.
Apple has recently revealed news on the iPhone OS 4 update. The more interesting part of this news for marketers is the new development of iAd – an advertisement opportunity to allow ads to be created and used within apps on the iPhone. Read more »
Google is continuously finding new ways to measure the quality of web sites, to choose which pages should be ranked higher. Relevance is still king for SEO, but one new element for search engine optimization (listed by Google directly) is web site speed. Read more »
So it’s April Fool’s Day. And Google always has something good. Apparently today they have announced that Google is no longer Google. Is is now Topeka. You can find out the details here, on their blog.
But all over the world, new things have arisen with Google. In the UK, a video was put up on YouTube about their latest translation advances. You can see the details of this amazing tool on the Google page here. A similar tool is available in Japan. Google Maps got an upgrade in Australia.
And I highly recommend going to Google Maps, use street view (drag the icon of the person onto a street), and you’ll see the latest advance in Google Maps technology. Quite nice.
Matt Cutts put out his latest update with Google in his blog. It appears that Google is now allowing bookmarking within the search engine itself. The way it’s done is to use stars next to each page you want to bookmark (much like Gmail operates with stars and emails). Then for any related searches, the bookmarks will show up above all the organic listings in a separate starred list.
And for editing on any of your bookmarks, there’s now a Google Bookmarks page that you can use to go and adjust your bookmarks as you see fit. Any text you add here will be used to match searches you put in, and will display that bookmark if you search for text within these fields.
How many people use this tool we’ll have to see, but it does have some advantages for organizational use within Google.
Google released a report card last week for product pages on search engines. This report card analyzed the levels of quality for SEO on the pages.
The short of it – Google gave themselves only one “excellent” rating, got three “satisfactory” ratings and eight “needs improvement”.
Google has stated they have taken action on these results or plan to. It’s somewhat funny to hear that the big search engine doesn’t always tweak their own pages properly for SEO purposes.
If you want more details on this, you can check out this article from the Los Angeles Times.
Today a court order goes into effect to force Microsoft to allow Windows users a choice in internet browsers. Previously, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the default browser installation on Windows. As of today, that decision is no longer enforced, and users will have a choice to make that many were previously unaware they even had.
One possibility of this outcome is that Google Chrome may now see some increase in use. Google is doing a heavier push in the mainstream media, so everyday internet users will see the option to install Chrome. If a lot of them choose this, this will increase Google’s hold over the search engine market, and this will also effect many SEOs in their approach to optimization.
It appears the battle between Google and Microsoft (who’s joined forces with Yahoo) may have only now just begun. To check out more details on this story, see this article by HighPosition.net.
As everyone knows, typing in a domain doesn’t always give you the site you intended to hit. And typos like this happen all the time. There are people who have realized this and are making money from it.
There are two ways to make money from domain typos – either by using PPC and bidding on these typos (and then making money from the traffic you get on these usually cheap keywords), or by registering these domains and putting ads on the site for them.
The people that do the latter are called “typosquatters”. And there’s potentially a lot of money in the ads for higher traffic domain typos. Keep in mind that if the owners of the real domain notice you doing this, they can ask you to take the site down.
Whether or not typosquatting is ethical is a subjective question, but the fact is that some people make a ton of money from it, and so does Google. You can find out more about this and the figures involved in this article from Sideways News.
I got an email from Microsoft adCenter promoting the new alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft. They’re calling it “Search Alliance“. The aim is to have their online paid advertising fully unified before the 2010 holiday season, although they did say that they’ll wait until 2011 if they “determine this will be more effective”.
Microsoft bought out Yahoo, so now the primary tool behind both search engines will be Bing, and behind the pay per click (and other paid online advertisements) will be adCenter. The Search Alliance has stated that each company will “continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences”. Not sure exactly how they’ll pull that off with the same search engine for both, but they may just mean the search interface.
The support will be broken apart, Yahoo supporting the bigger advertisers, and Microsoft will provide support to “self-service” advertisers. They are combining their platforms for the advertising audience, so ads put together under this new alliance will reach consumers using either search engine. The Search Alliance brags that advertisers of all sizes will now be able to have access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million worldwide searchers.
At any rate, this is pretty big news – Yahoo and MS pulling together to battle the mighty Google. I expect this may be an epic battle.
The stance Google’s taken on search engine optimization has always been a little hazy. However, they do acknowledge many elements of SEO as being important for a good web design (as implied by all the information given within the Google Webmaster Tools pages). But it appears they’re taking it a step further.
Google has begun a small project by showing how to improve SEO for some select pages within countries in northern Europe. They will then put up a post about each page describing their findings and what they recommend to improve listing positions.
This isn’t exactly offering SEO services for clients (like our own Tulsa SEO services), but it is showing that they acknowledge how important SEO is for improving results, and are even willing to help by giving some tips.
Mark Jackson has a good article detailing more on this in ClickZ.
It appears that Fortune 500 companies on the whole have not caught up to the internet marketing needed to rank well for their primary keywords. And many of them still don’t use pay per click marketing, even though the combination of the ones that do spend about 3 and a half million dollars daily for their keywords.
The interesting thing here is with those millions being spent, you’d think they would put the money into SEO to push their primary keywords to the top of the listings, but it appears that they are not doing this. The companies are still improving on their listings, but it’s still a minority that are even breaking the top 50 in the SERP list for their primary keywords.
MediaPost has an article with details on the exact figures involved in the Fortune 500 SEO results, as well as their PPC figures.
