How to Please the Penguin: Making Friends with Google’s New Ranking Algorithm

Posted by Vania B on May 11, 2012 | 0 comments

What is Penguin and why do we care?

Penguin is Google’s cutesy name for a powerful secret formula, a special blend of factors that currently determines Google search rankings. Penguin, just like Panda and previous Google formulas or algorithms, is part of the company’s ongoing mission to highlight Good and penalize Evil. In the Google Universe – the Googleverse, if you will – good web content is original. Good content is relevant to search terms. And good content is naturally popularized; it doesn’t rely on shady tactics to get a #1 ranking. Read on for specific tips about how to please the Penguin.

The Penguin likes keywords but only in moderation. Articles written by keyword stuffers (i.e., writers who go keyword-crazy) suffered major hits when the Penguin started patrol. How can the offending sites recover? You don’t need to order all new articles with lower keyword densities. One strategy is to use synonyms or near-synonyms as substitutes for overused keywords. For example, if you’ve used the keyword 2013 Lexus GS too many times in a review, replace some occurrences of the phrase with words like luxury hybrid or powerful vehicle. Besides that, the Penguin likes anchor text diversity. Varying the words used in your links may help improve your website’s ranking. In particular, it’s a good idea to monitor your use of “money keywords” versus the alternatives.

• Money keywords are the words and phrases you’re trying to rank well for.
• Non-money keywords are words and phrases such as “this blog post” or “our website.”

Microsite Masters has found that the new Google formula discourages sites that use money keywords as anchor text in 65% or more of inbound links. Thus it could be advantageous to actually use your domain name or a straightforward “click here” invitation as your link text.

Have Authorities Vouch for You

The Penguin is wary of strangers. Inbound links from authorities in your niche resonate with the Penguin. When an authoritative domain in your industry posts a link to your site, the Google ranking program becomes more confident about your relevance and high quality. After all, an authority link can’t be manipulated through gray-hat or black-hat tactics.

Conversely, spam recommendations will raise red flags. Excessive forum posts and low-quality blog comments are examples of inbound links that can hurt your ranking. If you’ve been a link farmer in the past, it’s time to prune your crop! You might find that removing harmful links is time-consuming, expensive or impossible. If that’s the case, focus on developing high-quality links through legitimate means such as guest blogging, content marketing and gaining authoritative recommendations. Also, submit a list of stubborn bad links to Google and explain how you’ve worked to remedy the matter.
Remember: The More Things Change…
Penguin has the same overall vision as its predecessors: to showcase original content that’s useful or entertaining. Now more than ever, Google can avoid highlighting the low quality or copied pages that have only risen through aggressive backlinking and other shady means. When you provide great articles, videos, infographics and so forth for web surfers, you’ll give the Penguin what it wants and you’ll become viewed as an authority by a wide web audience. Everybody wins.  

Google is always changing and evolving, are you?

Posted by Andrew on Jul 9, 2011 | 1 comment

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/

How to target and rank high for low competion keywords

Posted by Andrew on May 30, 2011 | 11 comments

Increasing your site’s Google Page Rank

Posted by Andrew on Apr 16, 2011 | 3 comments

How to Increase Your Google Page Ranking

The most common question webmasters have in relation to Google is: “How do I improve [or increase] my PageRank? Before we go in to answering this question, it is important to take into consideration what PageRank is, how it is calculated, and what it means for your site.

Google PageRank, based on a scale of 0 to 10, is the means by which Google ranks the worth of particular site. Theoretically, a site with a PageRank of 8 is generally of more use to the average visitor than a site with a PageRank of 3. Accordingly, sites with a higher pagerank rank higher in the Google search results for a given keyword than those with a lower pagerank. The goal of google’s search results is to provide the user with the most trustworthy sites that include the particular keyword phrase they have entered into the search field.

PageRank is calculated based almost entirely upon two factors: how many other sites link to your site, and the PageRank of those sites that link to you.  Ideally, you want a lot of sites with a high PageRank to link to your site. Getting many low or zero PageRank sites to link to your site won’t do you much good.  In fact, there is some evidence that Google penalizes sites that have an abnormally high number of low PageRank sites linking to them. This situation is usually indicative of someone trying to cheat the system by simply adding links to useless pages in so-called “link farms.” So, in a sense, Google is capable of recognizing whether your site hangs out with a good crowd or a bad crowd by what kind of sites link to yours. It is much better to get a few sites (preferably a .ORG or .EDU) with a high PageRank to link to yours (especially those with PageRanks higher than your own) than a bunch of sites with low or zero PageRank.

PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale. What this roughly means is that the difference between PR4 and PR5 is likely 5-10 times than the difference between PR3 and PR4. So, there are likely over a 100 times as many web pages with a PageRank of 2 than there are with a PageRank of 4. This means that if you get to a PageRank of 6 or so, you’re likely well into the top 0.1% of all websites out there. If most of your peer group is straggling around with a PR2 or PR3, you’re way ahead of the game. Currently our website is a PageRank 4.  The higher up you get in the numbers the harder it is to move up. Meaning it is easier to go from a PR1 to PR2 than it is to from a PR5 to a PR6.

PageRank is crucially important because it determines, in part, in what order your website will show up in Google’s results. Besides PageRank, the other factor is largely website content – i.e. what your site actually contains, what keyword and keyword phrases are present in your text and how often they appear. If two sites have basically the same content, cover the same topic, and have the same keyword saturation (the percentage of keywords in the entire text), then the one with the higher PageRank will almost always come out on top.

Okay, now for ways to improve your PageRank, legally and fairly:

New York SEO, Search Engine Optimization

Posted by Andrew on Apr 3, 2011 | 23 comments

           The best Search Engine Optimization Services in New York. (SEO)

New York City, with a population of over 8,000,000 people, is the most populous city in the United States. It is known for its status as a financial, cultural, transportation, and manufacturing center. This dangerous combination makes competition of small and mid-sized businesses pretty fierce. Many organizations push online marketing efforts, spending thousands on prepaid advertising, paid search campaigns and other activities.

However, the most effective way to get your target audience — doesn’t matter what business you’re in — is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your New York business can easily crush competition by capturing the best possible customers — people who search for your services, and find them. 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, 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.

So how does this magic work? Simple:
- a customer types in something like “New York Business Insurance” into a Search Engine like Google or Bing
- if you were selling Insurance and were our client, your website would be come up on they first page of google for targeted key words.
- if the customer goes for a map search, your business would be listed on the map — easily visible to all customers
- you get your New York customers, conversions, sales, etc
*note: New York Business Insurance is merely an example, people search for everything, literally
We offer a full spectrum of services from concept to website development and the actual SEO. If you already have a website, we’ll easily modify it (without any serious visual changes — unless you want them of course!) to get more Search Engine visibility. Want to increase your companies sales? Try conversion rate optimization services to help turn more visitors into customers.

Ready to get started?

Call Us Today 831 205-0164   

Search optimization for video, video seo

Posted by Andrew on Jan 20, 2011 | 0 comments

This article will outline tips for optimizing your video files to get traffic to your web site.

Check out Vab Media SEO Firm’s channels on Vimeo, Youtube and Vator.tv! The challenge for web site owners is how to integrate video into their marketing programs without losing traction in the search engines. Media delivery technology has grown faster than web search indexing methods, leaving video, media, and elements like Flash to languish in organic search. Search engines still rely primarily on text elements to sort the web. Below is a screen shot of a search query “Restaurant Insurance New York,” we made a video for our client RSI Insurance, that is now on the 1st page for this competitive long tail keyword phrase.

Search engines have started to automatically include relevant videos in search results as a way to give searchers a variety of possible results. With Google’s Universal Search integration, video seo is a relatively untapped market compared to how many text web pages are out there.  The video search engines can’t look inside the video to tell what the content is. For that reason, they rely on other on page factors, the metadata within the video file itself, the title of the video, inbound links and anchor text to determine what the video is about. There is a proper method to optimizing your video for keywords and keyterms that will lead the web searcher back to your website, and supplement your search engine results. Combine SEO with video to leverage your market and watch your  business traffic grow!  Here are a few tips to help others find you on youtube:

• Develop videos that reinforces the message of your brand.
• Create compelling content, if the content is not compelling, then the users will not share it or favorite it.
• Link back to related content and videos on your site with a keyword anchor text.
• Tag your channel with keywords related not to your content, but to what people are searching for.  To get some ideas type in a search term into youtube’s search field and see what comes up as recommendations – use those keywords.
• Tag your video with keywords.  Use the same technique above.
• Allow Users to rate your video. Search engines will pay attention to this when ranking these videos.
• Make good use of the thumbnails to help users decide which video to watch.
• Include most important keywords in the beginning of your video’s title.
• Use appropriate keywords in the link text, keyword rich anchor text carry a lot of weight.
• Start liking other videos, subscribe and friend other youtubers.

The youtube community is a pretty welcoming community. Let us know if you need any help!