Effectively Leveraging Videos for Universal Search
Universal Search, also known as Blended Search, blends listings from local, images, video, news, and blogs. Universal Search was introduced first by Google in May 2007. MSN and Yahoo quickly followed in July and October respectively. Universal search has had a big impact ever since on how people search. We find that many companies do not have an online strategy when it comes to videos. Videos are becoming an important part of the marketing mix. Let me provide you with some background...
Google’s Ranking Philosophy
Today Amit Singhal a Google Engineer in charge of the ranking team introduced Google’s three core ranking philosophies. 1 Best locally relevant results served globally. 2 Keep it simple. 3 No manual intervention. He then took the time to break-down each one. Best locally relevant results served globally What he goes on to say is that if they run into a problem with a query they use that as method of improving the algorithm or as Amit says it no query left behind Keep it simple This is in...
NoFollow - What is it?
The nofollow is a HTML attribute for links. The nofollow attribute supposedly excludes links from search engine ranking calculations. This attribute was first introduced by Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger.com’s Jason Shellen.
Example:
Ancor Text
It has been found that Google still follows these links, but if the page was not in the index previously they will not index the page, will not show the link as a back link, and will not associate any keyword relevancy from the...
Pubcon 2007 Take Aways - Buying Links, Video, Buzz
I finally found a few minutes to blog after returning from Pubcon to an over-flowing inbox, voice messages, and rescheduled meetings. It was a great time, as always, with lots of knowledgeable speakers. Here are 3 points that seemed to be stressed by multiple speakers and attendees alike: 1 Buying links is not a good long-term strategy. Google and the other major search engines according to Matt Cutts are cracking down on sites who buy and/or sell links. Will buying 1 link get you black-listed...
Google’s Did You Mean
You surely have seen it, or you might even use it as a spell checker daily. If you search in Google and spell your word or phrase incorrectly, Google will ask, Did you mean…? with a suggestion link to an alternative search result page. Sounds like a great idea, and usually it works very well. However, let’s imagine a scenario where your brand name is close to an actual word. If my company name was ‘Fintastic Fins’, and a potential customer heard about me and searched on...
Keyword Expectation: How Do You Rank?
Article Updated: Feb. 2015 Keyword expectation is precisely what you’d think, which is kind of the point. It is the expectation a person searching online has based on the meaning of the keyword or keyword phrase they type in. The closer you are to meeting the expectations of these searchers, the higher than chance that they will visit your site, stay on your website, and convert. While this is a simple concept, many businesses are often surprised to learn that they have been mistakenly...
The Importance of Domain Name Extensions: .Com vs .Org and the Others
Article Updated: Feb. 2015 Domain name buying, selling, and brokering can be big business. People will scoop up the good ones and hold them ransom or auction them off to the highest bidder. Your whole business model may be cut down when you are forced to buy ‘i-wanted-this-in-a-dot-com-but-they-only-had.org’. But how much will it affect business? Generic Top Level Domains gTLD According to Google, if you want to compete in search engines, having a gTLD is important. This becomes...
How Google Sees Your Site
In order for Google to even begin seeing your website, it needs to be able to send it’s Google bots to crawl your website. The way that these bots crawl your website is determined by a file called robots.txt. On most websites, there are pages that utilize CSS and/or Javascript, which are often external files that are linked to from your HMTL. In order for Google to access these, and fully understand your webpages, these files need to remain unblocked by the robots.txt file. Google...
Importance of a Good Internal Linking Structure
A website’s internal linking structure is simply how each page links to other pages on the site. Seems simple enough, but surprisingly, many business owners or Internet marketers overlook how important it is to search engine optimization efforts to properly display and name internal links. How to Use Internal Links Each page on a website should link to many other pages on the site. The most common place to accomplish this is in the footer. It is out of the way, yet if users get lost on a...
What’s a Title Tag? Why Does It Matter?
A title tag is coded into each page of a site and is meant to define what a page’s content is about. It appears in the title area of a browser window and will be the default name when you go to bookmark a page. It’s defined in the underlying HTML coding of each page. Title tags are a critical part of search engine optimization, or SEO. While not as important as the content of a page in gaining rankings in the search engines, it does get heavily factored by the search engines...
The Pros and Cons of Google Analytics
Google Analytics has been on the website traffic statistics scene for just a little over a year now and looks to be in no danger of fading into obscurity. For many website owners and professional Digital marketing firms, it has become the standard for helping to manage online marketing campaigns. Much of this is due to the depth of data and the ability to cross reference categories of information. It really drills down to specifics on the who, what and when of your site’s visitors. When...
The Difference Between a Sitemap and a Site Map
Most people are familiar with the term "site map", but how does it differ from "sitemap"? Besides the obvious spelling, these two terms have completely different meanings. Knowing the difference when talking with your customer versus your Digital marketing team can make the word of a difference. Site Map A site map is a collection of plain text links to all of the pages on your website. Site maps are standard on most websites and are most commonly linked to in the footer section of the site...
Google Supplemental Results
Article Updated: Feb. 2015 Google Sandbox You may have heard about the Google Sandbox, or sandbox effect, while surfing the web for Digital marketing, SEO, SEM, or other related terms. This term is a name given to the supposed Google penalty which effects newly created websites. Although it has never been confirmed, the Sandbox has been up for discussion since 2004. The sandbox effect basically implies that Google filters webpages by the active age of a domain and by the competitiveness of the...
Using NOODP Meta Tag
What exactly is the NOODP meta tag? NOODP, or No Open Directory Project, is a meta tag that is used to prevent DMOZ, an open content directory or website’s link hub, from pushing titles to search engines that we don’t want. Instead, we want Google and other search engines to pull the meta titles and descriptions that we worked so hard on into the search results. Controlling the information that appears in search engines can have a huge effect of your rankings, your...
ModRewrite for Apache and IIS
There’s a lot of ModRewrite tutorials out there, but I always had a hard time finding a pretty clear cut explanation for the most common uses: redirecting and making search engine friendly URLs out of query string dynamic ones. Finding a simple laid out example was always a bear as well. A friend recently asked me for a rundown on using ModRewrite for both Apache and IIS servers and I wrote out a pretty good email explanation and thought, hey, perfect blog post. So here goes: Rewrite is...