Search Without SERPs: The Future of SEO?

Yesterday was Google's 10th anniversary, and I thought it would be a good time to write about something I've been thinking about a lot lately: the humble SERP. Even as Google reinvented how pages were ranked and changed the SEO game forever, the search engine results page (SERP) remained virtually the same. Consider this search result from Lycos, circa 1996 (courtesy of the Internet Archive):

Looks pretty familiar, doesn't it? It's only been the past couple of years where we've begun to see the evolution of the SERPs, an evolution which seems to recently be accelerating. Even putting aside advertising, such as Google's mind-bogglingly profitable AdWords program, search results have started to become customized, personalized, segmented, and have even begun to leave the SERPs altogether.

Enhanced SERPS

This first step in this evolution was search enhancement, when search engines began to add customized features to the SERPs to supplement the basic text results. I'll briefy discuss two, Google OneBox and Google Suggest.

Google OneBox

Back in 2006, Google started experimenting with the OneBox, an area at the top of the SERPs that contained customized information for certain kinds of queries, such as movie showtimes and stock quotes. Probably most notably, OneBox revolutionized the landscape for local search, providing integrated local business listings with Google Maps.

Pardon the large image, but it really serves to illustrate how much SERP real-estate the OneBox consumes and just how fundamentally it changed the game for searchers and search marketers in certain niches.

Google Suggest

Recently, Google rolled out Google Suggest, a pop-up menu that suggests alternative search queries while you type. For example, when I typed in "chicago pizza" on the Google home-page, I saw this:

While Google Suggest still seems like a work in progress, what's notable about it is that it potentially bypasses the first round of SERPs entirely, redirecting a searcher from one set of results to another without even seeing the original listings.

Search Without SERPs

Recent advancements go far beyond SERP enhancement, though. Lately, with technological advances in mobile devices and a resurgence in competition in the browser market, we're starting to see alternatives to the traditional search results.

Mobile Maps – iPhone

I'm a recent iPhone convert - I'll spare you the gory details, but one selling point for me was the integration of GPS. The iPhone 3G comes with a customized Google Maps application with built-in search, but instead of traditional SERPs, you get something more akin to the OneBox map:

Unlike the OneBox, though, the traditional SERP is completely gone, replaced with an interactive map based on your current location. This is obviously useful to end-users, but it changes the game completely for local businesses. If your business isn't ranking for local searches, an iPhone user probably won't find it, even if you rank well on traditional SERPs.

Direct Queries – Ubiquity

Mozilla Labs, creators of the Firefox browser, recently released Ubiquity, a tool for entering simple, customized text queries. For instance, if I call up the Ubiquity plug-in and type "map chicago pizza", I get a search preview:

Once again, results seem to be pulling from the Google Maps/OneBox data, but just as with the iPhone map, Ubiquity has completely circumvented the traditional SERPs.

Implications for SEO

As search marketers, it's hard not to be a little worried by these recent changes - as a group, these advancements are undeniably game-changers and represent a significant learning curve. The important thing to remember, though, is that this evolution is not only good for users, it can be good for clients if we're willing to adapt. SEO is a young field that is destined to break into niches and specialties, and how you best guide searchers to information will depend more and more on your clients and target industries.

Source: http://www.usereffect.com

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5 Tips to Safely Steer Clear of Poor Keyword Usage and Keyword Abuse

Increasing the volume of pre-qualified traffic to your blog or website and building credibility can’t be done overnight. And when you’re strapped for time, you want the easiest method to get the job done fast.

Some recommended methods may look easy and claim big results. The reality is many of these quick and easy methods may be sabotaging your efforts.

One such method: Throwing keywords aimlessly at content.

In the second edition of our Common Article Writing Roadblocks video series, discover the top 5 roadblocks associated with poor keyword usage and keyword abuse!

Quick Recap of the Poor Keyword Usage and Keyword Abuse Roadblocks!

1. Stuffing Keywords - Limit yourself to 2 keywords or keyword phrases for every 100 words.
2. Bolded Keywords - Save bolded keywords for headers or when it’s stylistically correct to emphasize.
3. Excessive Keywords - Ensure your keywords provide informative value and are relevant to your article topic.
4. Misspelled/Grammatically Incorrect Keywords - Write content naturally and proofread your articles thoroughly.
5. Variations of Keywords - Focus on writing for your readers and avoid adding dashes, commas, or spaces to keyword phrases (unless grammatically correct).

Always provide quality, informative content that targets readers, not search engines. Without the proper incorporation (and moderation) of keywords, throwing keywords at articles will damage your credibility and readers will be less inclined to click-through to your blog or website.

Maintain your credibility and increase trust with your readers by incorporating keywords moderately in your next set of quality, original articles!

Source: http://blog.ezinearticles.com

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3 Effective Guest Blogging Tips to Attract More Traffic

After the Panda and Penguin updates, the relevance of quality content is felt a lot more now than ever before in the Internet industry. Hence, the trend of guest blogging is welcomed with open arms by both the webmasters who get free content for their website as well as the bloggers striving to drive more traffic to their site by earning an important link in the process.

Many of you might argue that you write, say 4 posts, every day and still it didn’t make much difference in your blog traffic. Well, I won’t argue with that because at the end of the day, quality overrules the quantity of links any day. And this rule very well applies to guest blogging as well.

So to make sure that you have the right approach in your guest blogging endeavors, here are a few things that you must keep in mind:

1. Work On Long-Term Benefits – The truth is – you’ll have to work your ass off if you’re writing the guest posts yourself. Writing is time consuming and a good insightful post does take a lot of your time. Add to it the time consumed in communicating back and forth with various webmasters and finally make one of them agree to publish your post is not an easy job.

At the end of it, what do you get? Only 5 additional visitors per day from one post? And if you’re contributing, say 50 guest posts every month, it would be what…250 extra visitors per month? It’s just not worth it. Right? Well, yes if you choose to see it that way. But if you do a little more math, you’ll know that this actually means thousands of additional visitors over the years.

Interestingly, many SEOs believe that your target should be to get links from bigger and popular blogs. Sure, that would help your blog a lot but it is also true that while these blogs can drive a lot of traffic to your website, they do get hundreds of guest posting requests every month. So, the chances of being a guest blogger on such sites are limited.

It is thereby best that you concentrate on long terms goals by writing for small yet established blogs and slowly build your site’s traffic, recommends the experts at SEO Consult.

2. Take Links From Relevant Sites – After Google’s Penguin Update, it isn’t difficult to hide around for too long if spam links are a part of your SEO strategy. Contribute as a guest blogger only to blogs that are related to your niche. If you have a blog about tech blog, then you can contribute posts about various apps, computer accessories, and others.

You may even strike a middle-ground when contributing posts to a slightly different niche. For example, if you have a photography site, you can contribute a post to the gadgets section of a tech site talking about the best cameras for underwater photography.

3. Place Your Links Judiciously – Most bloggers prefer to place links in the body of the content. But placing links in your bio will also work just as well. Many people read the guest blogger’s bio and having backlinks there direct the visitors to your website.

Finally, you have to be patient. It will take a few months before you begin to see any noticeable change in the traffic of your website. 


Source: http://www.eyes4tech.com/

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Purpose & Pitfalls of Website Redesign

There are many reasons to redesign your website. The most common are, keeping pace with changes in web technology to meet visitor expectations, and changes in the way you wish to promote your organisation and brands. What follows are some of the common pitfalls of website redesign projects.

The Design

When using a design agency for your project, you will receive some glossy designs that look great on paper. The designer will have populated them with content that fits the design. But, how well does this work in the wild?

If you haven't briefed your agency about the plans for your website, you could face problems.

The design needs to be flexible if you intend to have different languages, or full and light versions of the website.

A common mistake is not making the design flexible enough to cope with different languages, extra content, alternative layouts and other future changes.

The solution is to create styles that can grow with the website. Implementation of a grid-based layout for web pages can help. The grid will help in organising content and future additions and updates may be easier if there are specific places for the content to go. Make background images large enough to cope with other languages and extra content. A term for this approach is 'flexibility within a framework.'

Creating a Content Plan

During the redesign you will want to reorganise and remove content. This is a major undertaking and the most important part of any redesign project.

As with any major undertaking you'll need a plan. Before you start, create a detailed content plan and work out which content (pages) you wish to keep and those you wish to move into your new taxonomy. Check your website statistics to work out which are the most popular and least popular pages. This will help you decide which pages to keep, and those to discard. If you don't use a web stats package already, try a free solution such as Google Analytics.

Keeping Valuable Traffic

If you do move or delete your content pages you risk losing valuable search engine traffic! Search engines don't know where the pages have gone, so remove them from their search indexes and soon, many fewer visitors are arriving on those pages.

Check your website statistics before removing any pages to ensure you are not losing significant amounts of valuable traffic. For every page you move or delete create a 301 redirect ¹ as part of the go-live.

Rather than removing good referring pages that don't work for you, think about changing them to better fulfil your needs. Make them more useful and more engaging for your visitors.

Improving Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Many organisations still have a long way to go when it comes to ranking well in the organic (unpaid) search engine results. There is a degree of mystery surrounding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), ² but there are plenty of simple steps you can take to improve your ranking.

Start by following three simple steps:

1. What do my Visitors Want?

Begin by understanding your visitors' needs. Try to put yourself in their shoes, what types of people are coming - are they students, job seekers, consumers, investors. Are these the people you want to attract?

Use keyword research ³ to identify your target market and work backwards from there.

The objectives of keyword research include:

•          Identifying the broadest possible set of keywords used by visitors.
•          Discovering which keywords are most popular and represent the primary targets for SEO.
•          Identifying keywords whose search engine ranking is realistically obtainable by SEO.
•          Identifying visitor language that can influence branding and messaging.
•          Developing new and adapted content based on visitor terminology.

What are your visitors trying to achieve?

•          Do they want to find information about a certain topic?
•          Do they want to buy something?
•          Do they want to compare one service provider with another?

What's on their mind?

2. Give Them What They Want

Once you understand what your visitors want, you can start providing content rich pages addressing these topics. Get the pages linked from others related to that topic and make sure it's easy to get to the banana. Banana you ask?

Marketing guru Seth Godin compares web-surfers to the monkeys in scientific experiments who need to go through certain steps to get a banana. If it isn't clear where the banana is (the website's main benefit), the monkey (consumers) won't bother to look for it.

Advertise your pages anywhere your target market goes, either by buying space on high-ranking websites or publishing your views and links on those sites.

3. SEO Factors

As I said before, there is a certain degree of mystery surrounding SEO, but there are plenty of steps you can take to increase your organic search engine traffic.

Firstly, don't spend time exploiting gaps in the search engine algorithms. Any gain from this is usually only temporary.

Start by checking the basics:

• Meta tags: does every page have a unique and well written title and description?
• Keywords: do your keywords appear on pages in the headings, body text, and link text?
• Cross-linking: do you have links to other relevant and complementary content on your website?
• Incoming links: do you have links to your pages from other websites, these count as 'popularity votes' for your site in the search engines eyes. Who do you know that might link to you?

You'll never have a better opportunity to do this. However, you won't see immediate improvements in website traffic; it can take several weeks for the changes to take effect.

Source: projectsmart.com

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3 Tips for Writing Great Content

Great content is an essential part of a website, but many writers make minor mistakes that cost them readers and incoming links. Here are a few quick tips to help you write better content and build traffic for any website.

1. Break up your content

This article is written as a list because web users respond well to broken-up content. Big blocks of text are intimidating, so you can keep your readers’ attention for longer by using subheadings, incorporating pictures and breaking up large paragraphs into several smaller paragraphs.

You should also try to avoid excessively long sentences, but to make your content as readable and accessible as possible, don’t obsessively count sentence length. Instead, use variety. Follow up long sentences with short sentences and vice-versa. You’ll write with better clarity and your readers will appreciate the effort.

2. Don’t focus on keywords

Many web content creators make the mistake of filling their text with a particular keyword for search engine optimization purposes. Google, Bing and other search engines will notice if you spam keywords and will penalize your website.

It’s alright to include a desired keyword from time to time, but keep keyword density to about 1-3 percent. Focus on making quality content that engages your reader. Nothing will help your SEO as much as viral shares and incoming links from other websites, and the best way to gain that type of attention is to focus on readers instead of search engine spiders.

3. Write consistently

Keep your readers coming back by providing them with new content. If your website has a blog, make sure that you follow a consistent post schedule. However, you should never create posts if you have nothing to say. Look for interesting takes on your subject that will bring in organic search traffic. Get as specific as possible.

As you build up a content library, you’ll start to naturally attract readers. Get their input, answer their questions and interact as much as possible. You’ll optimize your website for search engines by building this type of a community, and more importantly, you’ll improve every piece of content’s chances of going viral. By engaging your readers and picking good topics, you can drastically improve the quality of your content and attract a loyal audience.


Source: http://www.searchenginefather.com


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Latest Requirements to Address SEO Problems

Some of the newest sophisticated requirements to address some SEOs complexities are listed below.

1.    Geotargeting - SEOs today need tools for geotargeting a Web site that help them overcome localization. Geotargeting refers to optimizing a site for local search so that it’s included in search results when users in a specific geographic location query its keywords. Localization is the norm now; you don’t even have to be signed in to Google to observe local search in action. If you query [drug rehab], for example, Google delivers local drug rehabilitation services within your geographic area. So if you’re trying to optimize a drug rehab Web site for a particular market area, how would you know whether the site is ranking in local searches without buying a plane ticket and going there yourself? You’d need a tool that lets you run a proxy search, so that no matter where you’re physically located, you can search as if you are in some other specified place. With a proxy search tool, you could be in California and run a search from Philadelphia, or even from another country like New Zealand or Peru. 

2.    Search engine choice - Google dominates the search market in the U.S., so SEOs typically focus their efforts on optimizing domestic Web sites for Google. But Google isn’t the only game in town. Especially when serving international clients, optimizing for the appropriate search engine, the one that’s most popular with the target audience, is critical. And there are literally hundreds of reputable search engines around the globe. Busy SEOs could use a way to switch from one engine to another efficiently, without having to navigate to separate URLs and open new tabs each time. 

3.    Browser/platform independence - Most of the plug-ins and other applications designed for search engine optimization are built for the Mozilla Firefox browser. But that creates an obstacle when you’re working with clients who only use Microsoft Internet Explorer. It’s difficult to show them your findings if they can’t see what you see. SEOs today need the flexibility of working in either Firefox or IE. For that matter, they need platform independence, too: the ideal tool should work just as well on a Macintosh computer as on a PC.

4.    Multi-language capability - Can your SEO tools produce reports in any language other than English? Probably not. But as Internet marketing becomes increasingly globalized, the need for multi-language support grows. Imagine using a tool that could present its interface in the language the user’s computer was set to by default. The language barrier would be gone, and anyone could use it. The ideal SEO tool would also output reports in multiple languages. You could run a report and view it in English while your client in Argentina viewed the same report in Spanish, and their business partner in Japan could be on the same phone call viewing it in Japanese.  

5.    On-page convenience - SEOs today are constantly juggling tasks. When they’re not tweaking Web pages directly, they’re running reports, viewing reports, building spreadsheets, reading RSS feeds, researching the latest developments, keeping up with social media buzz, posting tweets and comments, and more. One thing that helps their productivity is having their SEO tools and statistics at their fingertips while they work. As they run searches, it is helpful to see keyword statistics such as daily activity, demographics and cost per click right there, without leaving the search engine results page. Viewed results should present PageRank values, backlink counts, and other actionable data at a glance. As they move from Web page to Web page, site data should display in the browser, so they don’t have to go someplace else to find it.

Quoted from  Retooling the SEO Tool Belt| Changing search engine methods require updated SEO tools

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Pimp your web page titles in 6 easy steps

source

Step 1: check the HTML code of your web pages

It's astonishing how many pages have more than one title tag in the code. If your pages have more than one title tag, they will confuse search engine robots. The tags might not be read at all or, even worse, search engines might interpret this as a spamming attempt.

You can check the HTML code of your web pages with the HTML validator in IBP.

Step 2: use your keywords in your web page titles

Use the most relevant keywords at the beginning of your web page titles. Many people only scan the beginning of the titles so make sure that the beginning of the title tag contains the right words.

Step 3: make the titles clear, predictable and irresistible

The readers of your web page titles should know what your web page is about and the title should lead to a page that meets the expectations of the searcher.

The web page title is the first thing that people see in the search results. Make sure that the wording of your web page titles is appealing, emotional and irresistible.

Step 4: keep the titles short

Although there is no official limit, you should keep the length of your web page titles below 70 characters. The reason for that is that most search engines truncate the titles after 65-70 characters on the search result pages.

Step 5: remove unnecessary words

Words such as "homepage", "Index" and your company name usually don't help your search engine rankings. Remove these words from the title tags of your web pages. Your title tags will become more relevant to the actual keywords then.

Step 6: use unique title tags

Don't use the same title tags on more than one page. Each page should have a unique title tag that reflects the content of the web page. In general, optimize different pages of your website for different keywords. The more pages of your website you optimize the better.

The title tags of your web pages are only one factor that influences the position of your web pages in Google's search results. Analyze your web pages with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to get a detailed analysis of all factors that influence the position of your pages on Google.


Quoted from http://www.free-seo-news.com



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How To Write An SEO-Friendly Article

Once you’ve done the keyword research for your website, you can then use those keywords strategically in your article submission campaign. By creating keyword focused articles, you’ll get much better results from your article marketing efforts by helping search engines to associate your website with particular keyword terms.

This article gives some quick article marketing tips on how to appropriately use your keywords in your article submissions:

1 – The Headline:

The purpose of your headline is to indicate the topic of your article.

Try to place the keyword phrase that you’re targeting at the beginning of your headline. This takes some thought – the goal is to create a headline that would capture the attention of your potential reader, but that also prominently displays the keyword phrase. The title also has to be grammatically correct and contain correct spelling.

The best SEO-friendly titles just look like a great title – no one should be able to tell that you have specifically crafted it with your keywords in mind.

Please note: In addition to the keywords you researched for your website, it’s a good idea to also do keyword research for the topics of your articles. The phrases associated with your article topics will naturally be longer, say 3-8 words long. They are more specific than the keywords that are associated with your website, but that makes them perfectly suited for article topics.

The main difference between these two types of keywords is that the ones you use in your title and article body are what you’d like the article to rank for, and the keywords you use in your resource box are the ones you’d like your website to rank for.

2 – The Article:

The topic of the article is determined by the title.

Try to repeat your keyword phrase in the first 5 sentences or so of the article, in a natural sounding way of course.

Then, just write naturally about your topic. Since the keyword phrase is closely related to the topic of your article, then variations of the phrase should appear naturally in your article. Don’t try to force it too much, and by all means don’t pepper your article with the keyword phrase.

The most important part about the article is that it is easy for a reader to understand and that it provides helpful information. So, focus on writing a well-written article that teaches your reader something. After carefully placing your keyword phrase in the 5 lines, don’t worry too much about how many times the keyword phrase appears in the article. It will show up every once in a while as you naturally write about your topic.

Also, it’s okay for the phrase to appear in different forms, for example, ‘race cars,’ ‘racing cars,’ ‘race car gear’, etc.

3 – The Resource Box:

The resource box is where you can tell a little about yourself and your business and where you can encourage the reader to click the link leading back to your website. This is also a great spot to put one of the keyword phrases that you’d like your website to rank highly for.

Many directories will allow you to create an anchor text link in your resource box. With an anchor text link, you can use your keyword phrase to form the link that leads back to your website. This helps search engines to associate that phrase with the topic of your website and can influence the search engine ranking for your site for that phrase.

Be sure not to use the same phrase each time though – you should have a list of keyword phrases for your website, and you can alternate those in your resource boxes. If you use the same phrase as anchor text each time, it can look suspicious to search engines, which could have negative SEO consequences for your website.

Let’s recap the main things to remember when creating an SEO friendly article:

=> Do your keyword research, and find phrases to target in your articles as well as phrases that you’d like your website to rank for.

=> Write naturally. The phrases that appear in your article should not be conspicuous or awkward sounding. They should just be a natural part of a helpful article.

=> Be sure to use proper spelling and grammar. This is necessary for the article to be published and also for readers to be able to understand what the article is saying.

After doing this a few times, writing an SEO-friendly article will be like second nature. You’ll become very skilled at creating content that’s useful to your readers, while at the same time crafting an article that will attract the attention of search engines.

Source: sitepronews.com

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