Vab Media

Search Plus your World with Google

Andrew — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:23:50 +0000

Last week Google made some changes to your search results. If you have a gmail and Google + account, and are logged in at the time of performing a search, you will see personalized results. They are calling it Search Plus your World. We noticed this change last week, and this is really promoting your friends and professional Google + connections.

What is Search Plus Your World showing you?

Personal Results

The new “Personal Results” view that appears in your search results now personalizes the search result listings you get based on both your social connections and your own search behavior. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through your Google+ social network connections now also appears in results. According to Google “The social search algorithm and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful.” They are featuring Google + content as well as photos that have been shared on it. If you look at the image below of a search result for Vab Media, it shows the first result is our Google+ business page and then it shows links and images we have shared on the G+ plus network. This is a nice personal search feature.

Google profiles are featured more now

Another important algorithm change is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be featured more in Google search results. The search results themselves are devoting much larger emphasis to displaying material from a Google+ person or Google+ Business Page. The results individuals see are now catered toward people in their own social networks, quite similar to how Facebook’s algorithm works when you search for people on FB.

People & Pages Suggestions

The final algorithm roll out is Google’s suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow. These will appear on the right-hand side of your search results, when Google decides they are relevant. Perform a search for movies or music and you will see many suggestions. You might see well known or famous people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. Google is allowing you to be able follow them and connect with them on their Google+ social network.

Our conclusions

Overall, we find the integration that allows for searching through private and public material interesting. We think many people will find some value in it. If you don’t want these personal and private search results you can search in google chrome incognito mode or log out of your google account to get just public search results.

This opens up a whole world of possibilities for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and business owners. Now, you can promote your services to your colleagues and friends. You’re in their circles, so now you just need to put your most popular links on Google + Social Network. Contact us for more marketing ideas and questions. Read the actual article from Google below.

“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.” -Amit Singhal, Google

*A disclaimer from Vab Media: There’s been a lot of controversy in the web world and SEO community that the Giant, “Google” is promoting its own products in search results. Whether this is true or not is not for us to decide. We just want to let small business owners know about certain changes and how they can take advantage of Google’s Search Algorithms, even in the case that they may change in the future.

Foursquare helps you get more foot traffic…and now.. more brand exposure

Vania B — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:14:32 +0000

Both Foursquare and Facebook allows users to check into their place. Create a Foursquare brand page for your business.

We recommend using both, but in this post, we’ll talk more about foursquare because it has a lot of cool features that not all businesses may know about.Why use both? Different perks for different customers- not all your customers will check in through Facebook, and foursquare users are accustomed to receiving the badges earned on Foursquare; Foursquare embraces the gamification of social media.

What are badges?

Foursquare gives out special badges depending on the type of check-in:

If you check into a movie theatre, you get the popcorn badge, If you check into somewhere for the first time you get the newbie badge. If someone checks into a business many times, they can eventually get the mayor badge.

If a person becomes a mayor, business owners should respond to that appropriately. Not only is that person a loyal customer, but they are publicizing they are at your location. So if you aren’t taking advantage of that free publicity, you should. In order to take advantage of this free publicity, you should set up a campaign that gives your customers special treatment for checking into your place often, for the first time, when they bring a friend or two.

Whether your customer checks in with Facebook places or Foursquare, either one allows users share their status update to Facebook, but only Foursquare allows users to share their status update to twitter and facebook. If they have their twitter account connected to Linkedin, their Linkedin contacts will also see their location. Either way, each one has its advantages, but setting up both could help you grab a higher percentage of market share.

Foursquare, however, has a few more things that would give you even more visibility. Here’s a little more about how you can use foursquare to invite repeat customers:

In addition to offering a special deal to clients that check in to your location for the first time, you may also write a tip, that will allow customers that check in to a nearby location to see your “tip.” This tip could go like this, “Since you are at….(nearby location)….Check out (your Location).” You should especially do this if you know there is a nearby location that gets more foot traffic than you normally do.

Likewise, share the love and place tips about businesses around town. It will not only show that your business is happy to live in that area and promote local businesses, but may also get you some exposure. You may do this with your own profile, your business profile, or your business brand page.

Business brand pages are new on Foursquare. Foursquare has been an app that local businesses use to get clients., but now brands can put up brand pages. What does this do? It allows brand pages to place tips about places around town and tips that you feel are relevant to help promote your company from the Website or on a iPhone.

It allows you to showcase your brand to locals and those visiting your local town, so that they recognize your brand. See the check-in snapshot of Vania’s iPhone after she checked in to Cruzio. It shows Vab Media placed a tip! Cool. To get started, you can go to foursquare.com/create_page and put in your companies information. A Foursquare brand page has the potential to become an essential social platform in a world where businesses are using social media tools to get their name in front of as many people as possible.

Contact us for quote on social media marketing campaigns and tutorial prices and visit our blog for more info.

Ten Most Recent Google Search Algorithm Updates.

Andrew — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 06:22:30 +0000

Google has just announced its ten most recent important algorithm changes yesterday on their blog Google Insights.

We have been noticing many search engine changes lately.

We wanted to analyze a few of the algorithm changes that we think our important to webmasters and website owners. There are 3 out of the 10 that we would like to talk about in a litter further detail.

1) Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content

“This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.” -Matt Cutts

The above paragraph points out that Google is starting put more attention to the text in “Actual Page Content” than headers and menu content. This approach conforms to what they’re looking at from a “inbound links” or back-linking point of view as well. They seem to be putting more emphasis to links from the actual content body of the page than the header, side navigation or footer links. So, make sure that the actual body of your text includes your most important search terms. Don’t overdue it though with the amount of links.

2) Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors

“We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.”-Matt Cutts

I myself, have been noticing lately in search results that the exact keyword phrase anchor text is not always the deciding ranking factor lately. We don’t know if this has been abused by people wanting to fool the search engines. Google seems to paying more attention to the page content than the backlinks. They’re also say they are de-emphasizing the “exact anchor text” backlinks. This means you should look at altering your “exact anchor text” approach if you have not already done so.

Let’s say that you wrote a blog titled “Private Jets”; if you build links to this page only with the “Private jets” anchor text, Google might see it as possible spam. That’s why the anchor text strategy should be diversified and not concentrated on only one or a few phrases. Instead you can also use “Luxury jets, private planes, Gulfstream” etc. This will be much more effective. If you need help in finding semantically related synonyms for a specific search term, just use the “Google Suggest” feature for terms that Google thinks might be relevant for the term “Private Jets”. Or look at the bottom of a page for other search terms that Google is suggesting.

3) Fresher, more recent results

“As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.”-Matt Cutts

Business websites that have news in their content will benefit from this. This means that you need your update your content more often now. We would suggest you to get a list of your most read or visited / converting pages from Google analytics and create a schedule to update these every 30 days or so. You can make slight changes to the content of a page. If you do not update content, you might see your search rankings drop, as fresher content becomes available elsewhere. It will help if you have a dynamic sitemap, which will reflect the “last update” dates and times. This is very important algorithm change. These are just a few of the 500 algorithm changes that have happened over this past year. It is good to stay up search engine news in order to protect your business online. We would like to know what other website owners think about these changes?

Below is a copy of the changes as worded by Google webmaster Matt Cutts:

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Contact us for more information on our SEO services and check out our blog.

Are long-Tail Keyword Phrases good for my Business?

Andrew — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:52:12 +0000

What is a Long-tail keyword phrase?

“Long-tail keywords” are a string of three or more words that make up a phrase which are very specific to your products or to what you are selling. Whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be much closer to the “ready to buy” phase and are actually are looking to purchase something. In most cases, studies have shown that the less specific and shorter a keyword search is, the more likely a person is in the research phase, and not ready to make a buying decision.

An example of this concept, if someone searches “Ipod” compared to “Ipods for sale” or “Ipods for sale in Santa Cruz”. Which one looks like a more serious buying search query? The concept of long tail is fairly simple: Try to tap into the large amounts of search traffic using longer keyword phrases. Like regular one or two word short tail keywords, using long tail keywords in your titles and throughout your content can define what a web page is about and what the website wants to come up for in search engines and on Search Engine Page Results (SERP).

Search engine algorithms’ are getting more complex and are always changing.

This description explains indexing, “ When a website gets crawled by search engines, the search engines use automated software programs known as bots or spiders to survey the web and build their data bases. Web documents are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each web page are added to the search engine index. When you enter a search query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best urls are are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top. The most common form is text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.” -Monash.com

All indexable words within a page, are used by google bots to display the most relevant search results. Of course, the repetition and placement of consecutive words are some of the biggest factors that search engines use.

Another difference worth noting between short and long tail keyword phrases are the search results. If you were to search the keyword “renovation” in Google, you will receive 109,000,000 results. Then, if you look up the short tail keyword phrase “home renovation” in Google, it returns 18,900,000 results. Finally, if you enter the long tail keyword phrase “home renovation contractors in Greenwich, CT” , it provides 270,000 results. Although the long tail keyword phrase is searched less than the shorter keyword phrases, there is much less SERP competition.

Another reason to include multi-key word phrases into your content, is that they tend to be easier to rank for, compared to generic single and double keyword phrases.

As another example, if you tried to rank for the keyword phrase “home renovation” you will be facing huge competiton from big renovation brands like HGTV and the show This Old House. These kinds of brands tend to have more authority, money and a higher PageRank than regular construction companies or businesses. That’s why we are suggesting to our clients, the use of targeting more location specific, longer tail keyword phrases.

Using long tail keywords to corner a smaller market has just as much potential, if not more, than using short tail keywords in a larger, more exposed market. Some sites may find that the long tail isn’t quite as useful in their market, while other sites will do far better by targeting the long tail. Either way, using long tail keywords where you can, will definitely give you the advantage over your competitors.

Research on recent search trends in the last few months has shown that long-tail searches of five-plus words used increased by an average of 7%. Also, 75% of the websites that were studied saw a decrease in the number of one- and two-word searches. Since last December’s launch of Google Instant, a new search enhancement that shows results as you type, most searchers prefer a more refined search. Given this info, it’s good idea to analyze your website and to ask yourself these questions:

Is my site optimized enough for Long-tail searches? Will it rank organically as search queries become more and more refined?
Does my website incorporate a strong link building strategy for mid- to long-tail keywords as anchor text?
Is my website optimized to allow bots to crawl and index the deep and potentially long-tail keyword pages?

Bing integrates Yahoo traffic data into webmaster tools.

Andrew — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:46:24 +0000

Google dominates roughly 65 percent of the search market. While Youtube, Yahoo and Bing are constantly fighting over the remaining market share.

Last month the merger of Microsoft webmaster tools and Yahoo site explorer was announced. This change comes to help webmasters since yahoo’s search traffic tool Yahoo Site Explorer is set to shut down later this year. This has been the primary webmaster tool for those looking to optimize for Yahoo. After all Yahoo sites have migrated to Bing-powered search results.

“Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer,” stated Hemant Minocha, Product Manager of Yahoo Site Explorer. He further stated that, “Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.”

Bing recently announced new features to its Webmaster Tools that will show traffic stats from Yahoo directly in the Webmaster Tools reports. While this move appears to be the start of integration, Duane Forrester, senior program manager for Bing Webmaster Tools, suggests it’s not really the start of something new, per se.

“Data integration is important because it gives you a true sense of what Bing is serving and where you are being served by Bing,” Forrester told Search Engine Watch. “Whether it’s on Bing or Yahoo, it’s all Bing and this is why we’re doing this.”

Bing Webmaster Tools will now be showing integrated data from Yahoo within certain areas and reports. Given the combined effort the Search Alliance represents, it makes sense to showcase relevant data from both engines within a webmaster account. Most areas and data within the accounts will not be affected. The short list of areas you will notice changes in are as follows:

To see this new, integrated data, click the Traffic Summary Report or Page Traffic report under the Traffic Tab

Impressions – will go up based on combined data numbers
Clicks – will go up based on combined data numbers
Click Through Rates (CTR) as appropriate from above (change only due to the mathematics involved in the first two items)

Impressions data will rise because we will now be showing you combined impressions for your listings across both search engines. For each query term in the list within the report, your impressions represent the combined number of times your result showed, based on queries initiated by searchers at both Bing and Yahoo. Clicks data will follow the same pattern. CTR data is a factor of the first two items, and will rise or fall based on searcher click activity at each search engine. -Bing webmaster tools

The changes affect the numbers shown only. No actual rankings will be affected by the combining of data within Bing Webmaster Tools. As a visual reminder that data is now combined, you will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages.

At this current time the data will be combined, not separate. The data will also update in any market where Bing is powering Yahoo search.

“Any optimization that you do on Bing Webmaster Center tool will be reflected in Yahoo! organic search results,” stated Hemant Minocha, although he clarifies that some areas of the world are still on the pending list for transfer to a Microsoft-powered back end.

You now will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages. Many people really like the accuracy of Yahoo’s site explorers back-link data over Google web master tools. We shall see if Bing can continue to innovate it’s search engine and web master tools, to be able fill the void for Yahoo site explorer’s departure.

Helpful tips for optimizing videos and content for search engines

Andrew — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:02:49 +0000

Here are some basic tips for video search engine optimization (Video SEO).

The integration of videos is by far the most important of Googles Universal Search integrations with at least one video included in nearly 50% of search queries. This presents an awesome opportunity to quickly get on 1st page for your keyword phrase search results with just a few videos. Nevertheless, not enough businesses have been capitalizing– only a small percentage of websites are actually optimizing their existing video content.

Choose keywords for video. Just like the Google adwords key word tool, their product Youtube also has a keyword tool. https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool provides the opportunity to examine search volumes for individual keywords. With this you quickly get an idea of which keywords are relevant for video optimization. Keywords that have a high search volume here are also often displayed right at the top of the Universal Search integrations in the normal Google SERPs and therefore have a higher click through rate.

video appropriate keywords are keywords where a user will often click on videos in the search results or where the search query is made up of their [existing search] + video. With this kind of keyword, videos provided with prominent video integrations will feature prominently in SERPs. YouTube is the most important video platform and has just recently surpassed yahoo as the second largest search engine in the world and, with a large online community, powerful marketing tool for companies.

Here are the some tips that will help your video get more views and rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs):

Content: As with your website’s content, your video content should also be relevant, clear and crisp. It should be able to convey the message in an interesting or different way.
Title: should contain the most important keywords, arranged with the most important keywords first. keep the title around 60 characters, any more will not be displayed.
Description: video’s description should contain the keyword more than once and should use additional, semantically related keywords to avoid keyword stuffing. Which means you can simply use alternative terms that describe the same concept and thus strengthen your foothold for all of the related terms of that subject.
Keywords: Add your keywords in the content or description of your video. Even your video transcript should be keyword-rich. Adding a relevant transcript serves more than one purpose- your video becomes accessible to people with hearing disabilities as well as it becomes relevant for search engine spiders. The filename of the video should also contain the keywords.
Tags: Add up to 10 or 15 tags – using the most important keywords.
Comments: Allow viewer comments and feedback on your video. The more people talk about your video, the higher will be your ranking on search result page.
Linking: Link your video to relevant content on your site. While linking ensure that appropriate keywords are used. Also make your content relevant so that others link to your video too. More the number of inbound links, higher will be your ranking.
Sitemap: Add a video sitemap, submit video sitemap to search engines. This will help web spiders to index your video more easily.

Vab Media and Muse Cinemedia will be speaking on August 2nd, at Santa Cruz Business Connect about conceptualizing and marketing videos for business.

Post Google Panda factors to think about besides Page Rank

Andrew — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 04:23:27 +0000

Having a high Page Rank for your site is good, but it’s not the only factor that determines your website’s relevance in terms of search results.

What is the real end goal to having a successful site on the web? To make more money, attract more visitors and readers right?! It is impossible to know and understand every search metric and algorithm being used, since Google uses more than 200 to determine search engine result pages (SERP). In the post panda era, creating your sites content with the reader’s experience in mind is a good place to start. Google Analytics is a helpful tool to use for measuring your site’s web traffic.

The more you think about the visitor experience when creating robust content and adding pictures the better off you will be. These metrics are important to look at for the user experience. In the post panda seo environment, the amount of time users stay on your website will play a role in how Google views your site. Seomoz did a whiteboard friday a few weeks ago about post panda and your site, they went into a lot detail about this subject.

“Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that’s decent. That’s pretty good. If they’re browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, “Ew, I don’t know if I want to get myself involved in that. They’ve got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I’m not going to get involved.” Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.” – Seomoz Rand Fishkin

Below are a few definitions from Google web master’s latest blogs about this subject:

Conversion rate
Bounce rate
Clickthrough rate (CTR)

Conversion rate

A “conversion” is when a visitor does what you want them to do on your website. A conversion might be completing a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, or downloading a white paper. Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who convert (perform a conversion). This is a perfect example of a metric that, unlike PageRank, is directly tied to your business goals. When users convert they’re doing something that directly benefits your organization in a measurable way! Whereas your PageRank is both difficult to measure accurately, and can go up or down without having any direct effect on your business.

Bounce rate
A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s underperforming and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit.

Clickthrough rate (CTR)
In the context of organic search results, your clickthrough rate is how often people click on your site out of all the times your site gets shown in search results. A low CTR means that, no matter how well your site is ranking, users aren’t clicking through to it. This may indicate that they don’t think your site will meet their needs, or that some other site looks better. One way to improve your CTR is to look at your site’s titles and snippets in our search results: are they compelling? Do they accurately represent the content of each URL? Do they give searchers a reason to click on them? Here’s some advice for improving your snippets; the HTML suggestions section of Webmaster Tools can also point you to pages that may need help. Again, remember that it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if searchers don’t want to click on.

google-panda-update

Conclusions about Page Rank and Search Engine Page Results factors to keep in mind.

PageRank is just one of many ranking factors used to determine ranking in search results. Try to improve your website’s speed or loading page time. Studies show faster sites create a happier user experience. When a site responds slowly, visitors get impatience and spend less time there. Sometimes using flash and image sliders can slow down your website. These are just a few of the 200 metrics Google uses. Of course relevance of a page is still the biggest factor in search results. The anchor text of a link is usually far more important than whether it’s on a high PageRank page. And having lots of high quality backlinks is also important in search results. If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for. See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best. Feel free to visit our other blogs for more useful information.

Google is always changing and evolving, are you?

Andrew — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:48:35 +0000

What You Need to Know About Today’s SEO

Google is creating new algorithms all the time.

“The “Panda” algorithm change has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality websites. Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.” -Google webmaster blog

SEO is a moving target. Search engines are constantly changing and evolving; they are consistently refining their techniques and algorithms to supply the best, relevant results to searchers.They are also making it tougher for unfair “black hat” marketers to manipulate search engine results by trying optimization tricks. This is a good thing… at Vab Media ; we have always advocated using ethical SEO based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to boost your rankings and traffic.

That is the reason why we stress to our clients that SEO should be considered a marathon instead of a race to the finish line. Using tricks and manipulation may get you fast results but they are going to be fleeting and may even be damaging. Using legitimate and effective SEO strategies will deliver more impressive, lasting results.

Local SEO is the method of targeting buyers in a local geography for the services and products that local companies provide. According to comScore, an industry leader in Internet research, 63% of U.S. Internet users perform local searches. Of those local searches, roughly 41% were hunting for info on a local service in their home area.

The study also found that consumers searching locally typically take action. Almost half (47%) of local searchers visited the local merchant as a direct result of their search behavior. For small to medium sized businesses, local SEO now has the one of the highest investment returns our of all the marketing mediums online.

While most people still use a variety of different methods to find local business, the study found what people seem to prefer as their first choice for doing so: (Source: comScore, Georgia Institute of Technology).

1. Search Engines (31%)

2. Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)

3. Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)

4. Local Search Sites (11%)

4 reasons to do SEO:

1. Better ROI – SEO is a long term strategy which brings a greater ROI than in PPC marketing.

2. Credibility – SEO work brings higher levels of credibility with your customers. (About The Author)

3. Track & Prove Success – Discover what your customer are typing into Google, and which keyword convert the highest. We install web metrics to show you what is working and what is not working with your SEO strategy.

4. Tapping the trend — 81% of all consumers are now making purchasing decisions online. Websites are no longer optional. SEO will drive traffic to your site.

1^st Page Google Guarantee

Despite what you read, it is impossible for any SEO company to guarantee you a #1 ranking in organic search engine results. However, we understand that you still want some assurance that you will get the best possible results by signing on with us instead of a competitor.

Vab Media Web Design and SEO Marketing Firm has a stellar track record of helping our clients increase their rankings and, more importantly, their sales through our web site optimization services. Even though there is no way we (or any other company) can guarantee a 1^st Page ranking in Google, Yahoo! or Live Search (MSN), we are willing to put our money where our mouth is by offering you our 1^st Page Google Guarantee.

Under our 1^st Page Guarantee, if we do not deliver the results we promise (10 new first page ranks) we will render our services free of cost until we deliver on our promise. This lowers your financial risk as you will only be charged fees for truly measurable results… first page rankings! Vab Media will bring the client’s web site to the 1st page Google results for 10 new keyword phrases. This ranking guarantee is not search engine specific and only applies to those clients who complete The SEO SUCCESS Plan (3 month plan).

It is important to realize that the competition is also spending money on SEO, and this will affect your ranks. If your competition decides to spend money to out rank you, we do not have control over this. For this reason, client is encouraged to continue to work with Vab Media to sustain the ranks. For the most part, once you get ranked, only a minimum amount of work is required to sustain ranks.

Company Overview: About Us

Vab Media is a search engine optimization firm specializing in local and national organic search. We help clients increase their sales through local and national search engine optimization. Vab Media will work exclusively with your business to promote your website to search engines using acceptable practices based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to boost your ranking and traffic. Our goal is to make sure your website is visible to potential customers who are searching for products and services in your business category .

Search Engine Optimization

To really make your SEO campaign a success, our SEO team will first develop a deep understanding of your business; what you are trying to accomplish and what your goals are. Our discovery interview provides you with the opportunity to supply us with the required information that we need to make your campaign a success. In addition you can ask any questions that may be concerning you in regards to the types of changes that will be made to your web site, when to expect results, how it’s possible for you to help maximize your campaign and more.

Keyword Research

The keyword research process is the foundation to a successful SEO campaign. Our total keyword research process permits us to identify the following :

Target keywords which will produce the highest volume of traffic
Keywords that the competition are using to find success
Significant high traffic keywords your rival does not know about
Newly rising keywords primarily based on new trends & services and products related to your site
Keywords with high conversion rates to raise your ROI

This info will help us identify search phrases that are vital to your SEO campaign and overall net success.
Website Analysis

There are 3 key areas the search engines look at ; your web site code, your server and your prior history inside search engines. Our team completes a total research package based on your domains origination, to the way the search engines see your site today. Below you will find an inventory of areas our team will cover :

Research of server at the host level, DNS setup, IP setup
Research of site structure & page relations
Current indexation standing across the major search engines
Research of any issues now impacting search engine spidering
Research of site link structure, page structure, navigational structure and hierarchical system of content of the site.

Content Analysis

A Content Analysis Report is performed on pages throughout your web site. This permits us to identify the present pages and content which has the capability to help support your selected keywords and sustain long-term top 10 rankings. If your internet site is short of additional content, we then assign one of our pro content writers to guarantee the correct selling message is conveyed and new creative copy is written specifically with SEO Goals in mind.

Content Writing

There are occasions when sites don’t have enough content to support their SEO campaign ; there are times where pages in your site are ideal for the visitor, but missing integral parts for a successful SEO campaign. As you may know, Content is King on the net. We provide a professional content writing service that will permit you to keep your current content intact, while incorporating new content and / or pages in your site to maximize the success of your SEO campaign. This highly creative content will incorporate your selling message, robust calls to action and exhibit the same appearance as your current net pages. In addition, we write with theme keywords to respect LSI (latent semantic indexing). You will always have the final say of any new content made for your web site.

Competitor Analysis

The only real way to beat the competition is to understand the competition! Our SEO team will identify the competition based totally on the keywords you select ; find the keywords that they are targeting, discover sites that link to them, compare your site to your competition, and identify precisely what is needed to out-rank them and get top ten rankings for your target keywords. This info is then used to craft your Link Plan , Content research, and SEO Implementation.

email us at vania@vabulous.com or visit other pages on our website for more information http://vabulous.com/

Google PageRank Updated 2011

Andrew — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:01:08 +0000

Google PageRank Update June 27, 2011

Google has updated its PageRank this week. The last major Pagerank update was around January 20, 2011. So it has been around 5 months since the last one. Google used to follow a more predictable update schedule. But, in the past year or so their schedule has been less predictable.

You really never know with Google, but for most what you see is what you get.

Google describes PageRank:

“

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

If you own a website, and you want to know if your Google Pagerank has changed, check your PageRank now:

Here is a link to Google PageRank checker.

Here are some tips on how to increase PageRank.

Vab Media just went from a PR3 up to a PR5. We are really excited about this! Even more exciting is that two of our SEO clients Broadbent Construction and RSI Insurance went from a PR 0 all the up to a PR 4.
Please remember it is Pagerank, meaning each and every page can have a different rank. Generally your homepage or main index page will have higher rank than your inner pages and posts. But, occasionally an inner page, such as a popular blog post will out rank your homepage. The more you update your site’s content the better. Keep your readers in mind when deciding what to post next. It also helps if people are commenting and linking to your blog posts. The new Google Panda is awesome!

How to target and rank high for low competion keywords

Andrew — Mon, 30 May 2011 20:46:55 +0000

How to target and rank high for low competion keywords Don’t try to optimize your website with keywords that have too much competition. As an example. If you did a google search for the keyword “SEO” it returns a result of 716,000,000 pages! You don’t need be a marketing genius to realize that there is a lot of competition for this keyword and that it is going to be extremely hard to rank for this term. So instead concentrate your efforts on keywords that are much more attainable and easier to rank for.

By now you understand the importance of doing proper keyword research. So you probably want to know how you do this. Well it is important to point out that, people have different methods and tools for achieving this research. In the first instance I believe that your primary goal is to find and optimize your website for ‘Low competition keywords’.

‘Low competition Keywords’ are those keywords that have a good monthly search volume but relatively low competition. I classify good monthly search volume as anything over 1,000 searches per month and preferably 3,000 searches. By low competition I mean that the sites occupying that first 10 places in Google can be beaten.

Good monthly search volume + Low competition = SEO success.

High monthly search volume + High competition = SEO failure.

Now is it easy to find these ‘low competition keywords’? The answer is no! The internet is extremely competitive, when other seo firms find these ‘low competition keywords’ they take advantage of them for clients. However that is not too say that there aren’t still a lot of excellent ‘golden keywords’ still to be found.

Start with understanding, that the goal of proper seo keyword research is uncover keywords that have a good monthly search volume and relatively low competition. When I am conducting keyword research I look at it as a process or in stages.

First,I decide upon a niche or business category that I might want to get into, this could be something like ‘NY commercial Insurance’ or ‘home renovation’.

Second, I use keyword research tools to ascertain the interest in the niche or category and look at keywords and search volumes. Then I look at the bigger picture, i.e.: how competitive is the niche overall for certain keywords?

Finally I look at the top 10 websites and ascertain what my chances of out ranking them. After all ultimately your goal is to be no.1 on Google, or at least on 1st page. So in reality the only real competition are the 10 websites that occupy the position on the first page.

Ok lets look at each stage in more detail.

Stage 1 – Deciding What keyword Category To Get Into
Really this is a decision that you have to make on your own. You might be really passionate about a particular business sector or subject. You’d be really surprised at what interests other people share as well. One tip is to check out Google Trends. You can see what is popular at the moment and you can also see a chart of topics popularity. Initially it doesn’t what matter what niche or category you choose because you’ll soon find out whether there is any market for it.

Stage 2 – Determining if there is a market for the category
Once you have decided on the business category that you want to get into you need to ascertain whether there is a market for it. Now, there are many different ways to do this but the easiest way is to use the Google Keyword Tool or the free wordtracker keyword tool. Use the tool to analyze monthly search volumes. As mentioned if the monthly search volume is over 1,000 then it might be something that you want to get into. You want to get a list of keywords related to your business ready for stage 3.

Stage 3 – Looking at the ‘bigger picture’ for certain keywords.
Once you have your list of keywords, you now need to have a look at the bigger picture. This will help you get an idea of the chances for ranking. This does take quite a lot of time and effort but believe me it is well worth it.
*Note this information I am about to give you is the real juice of seo keyword research.
I am assuming that from stage 2 you have a list of keywords that get over 1,000 monthly searches. Take the keyword and type it into Google and do the following:

Step 1 – General Search
Type the keyword into Google and make a note of the results. There are no hard and fast rules, use your own judgment. If the search results return over 100,000,000 pages then the chances are that the keyword is quite competitive. Conversely if the results are less than 1,000,000 then it is possible that the competition is not so bad. Use a general search to get a feel for the size of the competition.

Step 2 – Perform “inanchor” search ** very important**
The next step is to perform the following search into Google.
inanchor:”keyword”
The inanchor search command shows us how many websites have the keyword as anchor text pointing back to their website. We may assume if they have the exact anchor text pointing back to their website that they have done some sort of linking building campaign for that keyword. Therefore it is logical to assume that they are the competition. Generally a result of under 1,000 is good and definitely under 100,000 search results.

Step 3 – Perform “intitle” search
The next step is to perform the following search into Google: intitle: “keyword”
This result will reveal how many websites have the keyword in the title tag. It is generally accepted by most seo professionals that the title tag is extremely important for seo, as it is one of the first things that the search engines look for. This command can help give us an approx figure of the number of website competing for this keyword. Granted some websites may have put these keywords in their title tag by accident but the majority have put it there for a reason; i.e., they want to rank for a particular keyword. No hard and fast rules about the numbers, obviously the lower the better.

Step 4 – Perform “intitle” and “inanchor” search
Now you want to perform both the inanchor and intitle search term. Input the following into Google
intitle:”keyword” inanchor:”keyword”
This will give you an approximate result of serious SEO competition. Smart SEO marketers will have the keyword in the title tag and will be building backlinks using the keyword as the anchor text. Therefore I think this helps to give us a fairly good idea of the competition. Remember the lower the search results from this command the better. Results of less than 1,000 may indicate to us that we can beat them with a relatively small amount of back link building. The higher the number the more competition.

Stage 4 – Analyzing the top 10 websites for your keyword
That concludes stage 3. Hopefully by now you have chosen a keyword that has a good monthly search volume and relatively low link building competition. However we can’t stop there. You now must analyze the top 10 websites on page 1 of Google. So far we have only compared the number of competitors, not at the strength of the competitors. It is my opinion that you only need to try and beat the first 10 websites. After all, your goal is to rank number 1 or at least get on the 1st page for the keyword. So we now need to analyse the strength of these top 10 competitors.

Step 1 – Type keyword into Google
The first step is simple, type your keyword into Google and make a note of the top 10 results.

Step 2 – Take each site and have a look at its backlinks.
The second stage is to have a look at the backlinks that each site in the top 10 results shows. Now as I have mentioned before I believe that it is impossible to get an exact result on the number of backlinks that a site has pointing to it, however we can still get an idea.
Try going to Yahoo site explorer or One Utility. Enter the domain name and have a look at the number of backlinks the site has pointing to it. The more backlinks means the more backlink building competition for you.

Step 3 – Have a look at the age of the domains.
Most seo pro’s believe that older sites are more trusted by Google. Do a quick search to ascertain the age of the domain.

Step 4 – Have a look at the onpage optimization of each site.
For each site go to the homepage and then right click “view source.” This will allow you to see the source code. Check to see if you can find the following:
A. Keyword at the beginning of title tag.
B. Keyword in the keyword tag
C. Keyword in the description tag
D. Keyword in the h1 tags.
E. Keyword sprinkled throughout the page.
An absence of these might indicate that the site isn’t properly seo optimized and could mean that you could take advantage of this. It is my opinion that it is ‘offpage’ factors, i.e., the number of backlinks that a site has pointing to it that is the most crucial!

Step 5 – Analyze if any sites have your keyword in the url.
The search engines put some weight on keyword rich domain names. If one of the sites in the top 10 results has the exact keyword you want to rank for as the domain name then it may be harder for you to beat it.

Step 6 – Check the Page Rank of the domains.
Page rank is a way of Google showing us how important it thinks a web page is. You want to have a look at the page rank of the top 10 websites. Now it is quite possible to outrank a site with a higher page rank than yourself, however it is useful to help build an overall picture of the domains strength.

Step 7 – Check for prominence of Web 2.0 properties
A SERP (search engine results page) that has a lot of web 2.0 properties (e.g.Squidoo,Flixya,Hub pages) may indicate to us that we are going to be able to rank well. Unless the web 2.0 properties have been heavily backlinked, then with our own back linking tactics we have a definite chance of beating them.

Perform all 7 of these steps and you should be able to get a good feel of your likelihood of getting your site on 1st page of the top 10 websites. This is a lot of information to take in, especially if you are just starting out in seo. Hopefully by now you can see the importance of it. So before you do any search engine optimization make sure that you perform proper keyword research. Visit our blog for more information.