Tulsa Marketing Online Blog » SEO

Yahoo and Bing Join – Bing Results Now Show On Yahoo

Eric — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:51:05 +0000

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.

It’s clear from a bit of research that this change means that Yahoo’s search algorithm is no longer being used, and all Yahoo results now mimic Bing’s results.

This does greatly affect SEO, since the way Yahoo used to rank differed from how you could rank on Bing. Now all strategies are moving towards the Bing search engine algorithm for ranking on either engine.

Whether or not this is a test or a permanent change we’ll have to see, but it’s clear that both engines are now united, perhaps in an effort to make a dent into Google’s crown over the search market.

Good SEO vs Easy SEO

Eric — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:33:11 +0000

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.

Google’s SEO Rules

Eric — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:06:33 +0000

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).

The fact is that Google is very aware of SEO, and will even encourage someone to do it, if they do it right. They have this to say on it:

“If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.”

So Google does encourage doing SEO from the start of web design. And forgive me for the shameless plug, but yes, Tulsa Marketing Online does full SEO, and can do several levels of SEO included with our professional Tulsa web design. And the standard web design package includes on-site SEO. /End of shameless plug

If you do decide to get some SEO done for your site, there are some questions you should ask the company you are going to have do the optimization for you. Google themselves have an excellent list:

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
How do you measure your success?
What’s your experience in my industry?
What’s your experience in my country/city?
What’s your experience developing international sites?
What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been in business?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

These are all great questions to ask someone talking about doing SEO for your site. You should also check to see if their tactics are white-hat or black-hat. Some companies use nefarious means to get improvements for site listings that will eventually cause more harm than help. Avoid these if possible.

Following Google’s tips and guidelines for any SEO work is good advice, and while they will not give away assistance on how to rank in their search engine, the best tips are to not break any of their webmaster guidelines, as this tends to cause penalties or even black-listing for the site involved. Any SEO work that keeps with these rules should be solid.

SEO Experts Feedback

George — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:41:40 +0000

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.

Is Guest Blogging Good SEO?

Eric — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 04:11:24 +0000

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?

It’s a form of SEO that can work, to a degree. The main issue is that there are several blogs out there that will accept “guest blogger”s that produce any level of quality information, including bad posts.

This reduces the level of quality for that particular blog, and will usually have a bad result in general. Quality posts are respected and tend to be spread (and linked) more. In this way blogs that only accept quality posts will get more traffic, get more attention, and the search engines will notice this. Because of this these are the blogs that will rise in rankings, and those that accept any sort of riff-raff as content will fall behind.

So yes, guest blogging can be good SEO – as long as the content produced is quality content. Anything else will not work as well. But this is a standard rule for any type of link building in SEO. Only quality content will build links. The rule still applies here.

So keep this in mind – if you want to do good SEO, produce good content, and you’ll see more results than you would otherwise. Outsourcing content creation to “writers” who do not know the material (or even the proper language, fully) will not help you in the long run.

My good friend Ann Smarty had more to say on guest blogging on a post she wrote at the Blog Herald.

How To Evaluate SEO Efforts

George — Mon, 24 May 2010 21:07:23 +0000

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.There are several ways to see how the results of your SEO have impacted not just the web site but the business with which you’re working. Here are some examples:

Keep track of traffic through analytics tools (like Google Analytics). This can show differences in raw traffic, as well as showing what types of keywords are being used to source web traffic.
Keep track of backlink building. Knowing which backlinks have been built and how many can help know which ones were most effective and can also show a client how much work has been put into the SEO.
Watch changes in revenue. This is the big guns. If you can see a positive difference in the revenue stream for the business the SEO is being done for, then the desired result is being achieved. Monitoring these numbers closely can help to see the differences achieved.

These are just a few examples of ways to see how your SEO work has produced results. You can see several more from Mark Thompson at Search Engine Journal.

Proper SEO is Not Basic

George — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:57:49 +0000

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.

The key to good research for SEO is to get specific. Ideally you can test your market keywords (PPC is one option) to see what converts. When you can rank for converting keywords, that’s always better than ranking for high traffic keywords that don’t convert. Unless you’re intentionally building a landing point to send people off through ads, you want the people that land on our page to be there because they’re interested in your products/services.

To do this right requires solid SEO, and it’s not a one-step process. Good SEO is continuous, adjusts with the fluctuations in the market and the search engine algorithms, and grows where it needs to. If you really want to get the most out of SEO, a one-time adjustment will not be the best solution.

You can find out more details about what it really takes to do good SEO to get results from Ryan DeShazer’s article in Search Engine Watch.

SEO Tips Can Be Lies

George — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:23:17 +0000

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.

Web Site Speed is New SEO Element

Eric — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:06:52 +0000

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.

With the speed the world works today, being able to access a site quickly is becoming more of a judgment factor for everyone, both web browsing individuals and the major search engines. Coming to a site that takes a while to load will reduce the chances that that visitor will continue to return. And for the search engines, worse performing web sites will get a hit in SEO value (not a big one, but it still affects rankings).

To find out how to improve your site speed there are a few options available.

YSlow – One that I personally like using is YSlow. Made by Yahoo, this free tool will give you information on which elements of the page are slowest, and gives recommendations on how to refine these issues.

Google Webmaster Tools – This is another free tool that will show all sorts of information on the site, including a graph showing average load time. Hopefully you’re already using this one.

There are several other ways to increase your web site’s loading speed. But realize that this is now something becoming more of a concern for ranking in the search engines.

SEO Shortcuts Don’t Always Work

George — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:25:19 +0000

SEO is an evolving animal. There are many techniques that worked very well in the past that no longer are as effective, if effective at all.

Some of these include the older techniques (that are still somehow being used by some people). These are methods such as using the keywords meta tag heavily, trying to hide keywords behind images or in text the same color as the background, or getting bulk results for some specific SEO methods, such as directory submissions.

Nowadays there are other methods that people try, but do not work ideally for SEO.

One of these is the concept that specific SEO techniques can be used once effectively, then copied exactly for additional projects. This is like a “canned” SEO package, and will not work for different sites. Each market is different, each site is different. Proper adjustment for these variances is crucial for good SEO.
Another that is used is following a lead, by duplicating exactly what another site has done for SEO. This will work to an extent, but by setting a standard and being the first for a lot of these techniques/links you stand above anyone who comes in and duplicates. Link age comes into play here. It’s recommended you come up with unique linking techniques in addition to duplicating some that your main competitor(s) is/are using.
And one you should be very careful about – using black hat SEO methods just because you’ve seen another site get away with them. You never know when Google will find that a site’s SEO is from black hat methods, so you run a risk every time you use these techniques. Chances are they’ll catch you eventually, so it’s recommended you keep with white hat techniques and keep clean.

Keep up with how SEO operates, and you can avoid issues like this. Not staying in tune with the latest SEO methods can cause problems for your site listings and reputation. If you want to get more details on these particular issues in SEO, check out this article from Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch.

Google Could Do Better At SEO

George — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:20:01 +0000

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.

Google Does SEO?

George — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:46:54 +0000

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.

SEO in Fortune 500 Companies? Not Always Good

George — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:40:32 +0000

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.

SEO Black Hat Techniques Are Changing

George — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:15:56 +0000

There are a lot of standard black hat SEO methods that have been around for a while, but those that stray a little on the darker side of SEO keep busy. There are several new tactics that these people are using.

As SEO becomes a more prominent form of marketing, black hat methods are also becoming more well-known. The latest term for these techniques is “poisoning”, which I find appropriate. These SEOs will put their poisoned links (which contain malware and installations of other nefarious elements) into various places where people will find them through either particular keywords or through social media.

As a lot of people are not aware that these attacks happen, they can often give away account information, trusting that the sites they are visiting are reliable. These attacks come through Twitter and Facebook as well as through standard search engine results.

For more info on this, check out this article by Last Click News.

SEO for Huge E-Commerce Sites

George — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:57:12 +0000

Doing SEO for a massive site can be complex. In the case of a large e-commerce site, you have a ton of pages with the different products. How do you organize the categories do good SEO for all these pages?

This is a full project to do solid SEO, but some critical elements must be kept in mind.

Google likes unique posts, good content
Duplicate pages can hurt rankings
You don’t need to have top listing for every one of your 10,000 pages

By looking at these concepts, this means that using the 80-20 rule is a great approach for doing good SEO for a huge site. Chances are 20% of your products produce 80% of your revenue. Focus on only these elements. Make these pages have solid content and fine-tune the on-page SEO here.

By doing this, you don’t spend so much time on the other few thousand pages, and the results are worth it. In addition to this, try to be careful about categorization – it can hurt to have categories cross each other to make duplicate pages. For example, having a clothing store with a leather category and a shoe category could have the same page in both “leather->shoe” and “shoe->leather”. There are ways to avoid this, although my recommendation is to initially construct the categories in a way that this never becomes an issue. By taking care of this up front it will help with many potential duplicate content issues.

Beyond these details, keeping great SEO for the site in general will always help. Following all these tips will increase your traffic and listing positions. For more details on SEOing e-commerce sites, check out this article by Eric Enge on Search Engine Land.

Universal Search – The Next Step in SERPs

George — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:51:23 +0000

The search engines evolve, as does most modern technology. The latest revision in search engine result pages is the “universal search”. This is the displaying of results for searches in not just web site links, but images, maps, videos, blogs, and more.

The universal search allows a large breadth of information to be given that is relevant to any search done. For SEOs, this means adjusting approach on how to get relevant information out onto the web.

When trying to publicize information about something you want people to discover, to make sure you can be found by different areas within this universal search you’ll want to make sure you go across multiple areas with your information publication. This can be done through audio, video, blogging, social media – or getting creative and doing it in unique ways.

It all comes down to doing good marketing, just online. As the web evolves, so must our online marketing. For more good information on the universal search, check out this article by Ron Jones at Search Engine Watch.

iPad Announcement Prompting Black Hat SEO and Malware Attacks

George — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:41:54 +0000

The iPad is the latest Apple news and it’s been getting a lot of attention. Considering this, some not-so-nice SEOs are using the fresh keywords to do black hat SEO to infect computers across the globe with malware. They’re targeting laterally related keywords such as “Apple Tablet” and “Apple iPad Rumor”.

Be cautious if you see some weird results when you do searches on these types of terms. The eWeek Security Watch has more info on this.

SEO Strategies vs Tactics

George — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:33:34 +0000

In SEO, many people often think of the different types of SEO tactics that are put into play without ever really putting together a solid strategy. Knowing how to distinguish which tactics should be used for which market is a great skill. It’s something that is not focused on by all SEOs, but it really should be.

Beyond that, after determining which tactics are best, one of the best abilities to have is efficiency at various tasks. Knowing how to balance your time for each need that your projects require is a very valuable asset. Stephan Spencer described it very well in his article on Search Engine Land, I highly recommend viewing his tips on all of these often missed elements of SEO.

Forbes Talks About Value of SEO

George — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:24:08 +0000

When a major magazine that focuses on large businesses and exchanges of huge numbers of money talks about how important SEO is, you know that it’s worth knowing about. Forbes put up an article about search engine optimization and gave a few really great tips.

The article mentions how there are over 12 billion searches each month and that most people never look past the first page on their searches. Because of this, being on the first page of results for your market is becoming more and more valued and valuable.

The tips they talk about are details such as content, keyword organization, and even speed of the site itself. The other element I was happy to see mentioned was the reminder to never forget the visitor directly. I’ve often told people – top listings don’t matter if no one wants to stick around when they visit your page. Because of this, good web design and focus on attractive details to the customer is important.

SEO and the 80-20 Rule

George — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:19:30 +0000

The 80-20 rule is one that applies to several areas of business. This includes SEO. There are some elements in SEO that take a large amount of time and effort, especially in areas like building backlinks. In this case, deciding on which 20% of these can provide 80% of your SEO value can save lots of time while not cutting many results.

In addition to this, when you have hundreds (or thousands) of pages on your site, it’s important to try avoiding the duplicate content penalty where possible. To do this, each page must be unique and have valid content. With that many pages, even with a full staff it still takes a lot of time. In this case the 80-20 rule can be applied to choose the most important of your site’s pages and make sure they’re prepped to be crawled fully by the search engines. You can find more detail on how to apply the 80-20 rule to SEO from Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch.

Even Google Can Get Penalized

George — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:57:14 +0000

Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had). This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.

Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9). That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).

The malady that Google Japan performed? They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget. This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.

It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Web Design With SEO

George — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:43:05 +0000

SEO, by its very nature, requires changes to the construct of the web pages in the site being optimizated. Because of this it’s usually easier to integrate SEO with web design on the initial construction of the site.

By doing this in combination, the decisions of which pages to create can be more targeted from a marketing perspective, and this can make a well-ranked site look good instead of just “adjusted”.

The key to this is finding a web designer and an SEO expert that can work well together to make this process seamless. Or else to find an SEO expert that also does web design (as TMO does).

Attention to these details was pointed out by Last Click News.

Negative Attention Can Mean Positive SEO

George — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:21:35 +0000

Most companies perceive getting negative attention or negative reviews as a purely bad thing. However, any type of attention is good for SEO. It will build up links, it puts eyes on the company. And in the case that the bad review or bad attention is a minor part of what is overall a good reputation for the company, getting eyes on the company (even in this way) can be a very good thing.

Also, a balance of positive and negative attention tends to make a company look more legitimate, so this can also make this negative aspect bring positive points.

For SEO, any links that point back to the site (even if for negative reasons) will increase PageRank and sometimes may even affect keyword ranking in a good way. I wouldn’t recommend searching for negative attention, but getting some is not always a bad thing. SEO Consult in the UK has more details on why this is.

How is SEO for Bing different?

George — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:52:08 +0000

Usually in the SEO world, Google comes first. However, as Microsoft adjusts its approach, it seems that Bing is starting to get more ground. So how is Bing different than Google when it comes to SEO?

Michael Carden-Edwards from Coast Digital explained it well: Bing needs a lot of the same things Google does, but just focuses on some key elements more heavily. The primary areas that Bing checks are the following:

Domain age – Bing likes well-established sites, it shows that there’s some experience behind the site.
Quality links, both inbound and outbound – This is one area that differs from where most SEOs focus on, by looking at quality of outbound links as well as incoming links.
Substantial content on each page – At least 300 words for any page that you want ranked on Bing. It appears Microsoft is going to reduce ranking for shell pages that don’t offer much information.
Title tags – This is the one major element that fits for all SEO, and stays the same with Bing. Keep them relevant and with your keywords, it will help.

Even though Google is still king, Bing is starting to become a bigger source of traffic than before, and it’s worth knowing how to rank in their listings to keep traffic up.

Duties of an In-House SEO Employee

George — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:17:03 +0000

As SEO becomes more prominent, more companies are turning to it to increase their rankings on the search engine results and to drive traffic to their site (to increase business). The choice for these companies is to either hire a qualified SEO company or to hire an in-house SEO guru.

Unfortunately many companies still don’t realize the amount of work involved when asking one person to handle all of the SEO work. Patricia Skinner from Search Engine Journal does an excellent job of outlining all of the responsibilities any in-house SEO will hold in this article. She clearly shows that it’s something that does take time, and covers details on what to do for a company that wants quick results when you have work that isn’t always quick to show results.

Tulsa Marketing Online Blog » SEO

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