This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
More users increasingly employ local search, but many companies are not adequately budgeting for it and are opting to go with traditional, ineffective media. As more industry players enter the local search landscape, search engines need to promote it more and companies need to become better educated about it.
Local search has sharply increased over the past few years, but many local companies still do not appreciate what a powerful and cost-effective tool it can be. The numbers show lots of online users employing local search, but few businesses making room for it in their online marketing budgets. Many companies are still spending valuable effort and money on traditional, ineffective media, with less than desirable means of measuring campaigns.
Some analysts believe that companies need to be better educated on the potential of local search, while others claim that search engines need to more effectively promote it. Many business enterprises still perceive local search to be complicated and expensive, and think that there is a lack of adequate local expertise to devising effective search plans. The truth is that several knowledgeable and talented players have already entered the local search industry, so let’s consider some important ones:
* Major search engines: Leading engines such as Goggle and Yahoo have separate entities in individual countries for dealing with local search efforts (i.e. Google.ca, Yahoo.ca)
* Local directories sponsored by traditional media, such as local newspapers: companies usually appear in a listing with fellow competitors, and as such pay a higher cost-per-click. These companies should consider the top paid listings of these directories, allowing users to find them more quickly
* Other local directories, such as Citysearch and CityGuide: again, companies are advised to consider placements in the top paid listings
* Local, regional or national professional directories for various services (i.e. accountants, dentists, doctors, lawyers, mortgage professionals, real estate agents): These directories gather leads, and then re-sell them to local service providers. Providers are receiving leads secondhand, however, and would increase their conversion rates by collecting their own prospects
* Local Search start-ups (i.e. ReachLocal, LocalLaunch.com), which offer local advertisers comprehensive local search marketing services. Campaign management, ranking reports and free template web pages are all provided, but at relatively high costs; the general web pages do not differentiate between each company’s individualized needs.
Companies doing lots of online business need to better appreciate how local search marketing might be more cost-effective and relevant than traditional venues. Once they fully understand the utility of local search, then the real challenge starts – finding an experienced, talented SEO provider who understands how to properly do it.
If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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This glossary of terms is provided by Yesup SEO, a leading SEO services.
Search Engine Marketing is still an emerging field, so you are likely to hear terms defined in different ways by different vendors. To make Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing more understandable, here is a glossary of industry terminology.
Algorithm: A set of mathematical rules that describe or determine a circumstance or action. In the case of search engines, unique algorithms determine the ranking of Web sites returned within search queries. Although some of the qualities used to determine ranking (for example, meta tags and number of referring sites) are known, the search engine companies closely guard the precise functioning of search engine algorithms to prevent the manipulation of the system.
Above the fold: The portion of a Web page visible without scrolling down. (Derived from the newspaper industry where the top stories appear just below the newspaper’s name and above the fold of the paper.)
Affiliates: Web sites that get a commission of some kind in exchange for sending sales or other predetermined conversion activity to merchants’ Web sites. Affiliates range from hobbyist sites to highly evolved commercial ventures with multiple merchant relationships.
Automated submission: Submitting a page or pages of a site to multiple search engines via software to automate the process. Most search engines frown upon auto submissions because they eat up unnecessary bandwidth. The exception may be when you have a prior relationship with the search engine, such as through a paid inclusion program or trusted feed relationship.
Black hat practices: Unethical practices. For example, loading your page with invisible text in order to “trick” the search engines into ranking your page highly is often considered black hat SEO.
Cache: Some search engines (most notably Google) show the page of a site as it existed when it was added to the engine’s database. If a page has been edited since it was added, the cached version will not be exactly the same version a user would see when visiting the page.
Cloaking: Showing the search engine one page and the end user a different page. Search engines (surprise!) frown upon this tactic.
Conversion: In search engine marketing, this usually refers to the number of visitors from the search engines who take the desired action when they reach the Web site. Conversions can include signing up for a newsletter, calling or emailing for more information, or making a purchase.
Crawl: What a search engine’s automated robot (also known as a spider or bot) does when following links from page to page on the Internet.
Direct feed/trusted feed: Paid partnership programs with some search engines that permit you to feed information about your pages through a direct XML feed to the search engine without the search engine crawlers needing to visit your site. This is generally reserved for large (500-plus pages) sites, such as dynamically generated ecommerce sites with query strings (question marks and equal signs) in the URL. Google and MSN don’t accept direct feed.
Doorway pages: Pages that are created primarily to rank highly in the search engines and are not generally meant for human visitors to see. These are often hidden within a site (or perhaps hosted separately and link to a site) and cannot be navigated to through normal site navigation. Doorway Pages are also known as Gateway Pages.
Duplicate Content: Content which completely mirrors or is almost identical to another block of content. Duplicate content is usually unintentional (such as a standard Web page or print-friendly page) but sometimes it is by design, such as when sites recycle content to artificially increase its traffic. Various methods are used by search engines to limit duplicate content from appearing in search results, such as discarding these types of pages.
Dynamic URL: A Web page address that is created on the y at the server level from content contained within a database. Dynamic URLs often contain query strings such as question marks, ampersands, and equal signs. The search engines are hesitant to crawl dynamic URLs because they can lead to in nite loops that may trap their spider and cause a server crash. Dynamic URLs can often lead to duplicate content, which is another reason the search spiders are reluctant to crawl them.
Everflux: the frequent updating of search results at Google, almost on a daily basis. Everflux occurs between major updates, when individual pages are updated, added or removed from the engine’s index.
Gateway pages: See Doorway pages
Index: A database of Web pages the search engine has crawled and found useful and unique enough to include.
Invisible text: Using a font for page content that is the same or similar color as the page background so a search engine will read it but a human visitor will not. All search engines consider the use of invisible text to be a deceptive practice.
Keyword density: The number of times a keyword or phrase is used in relation to the number of words on the page in total, usually presented as a percentage. If the page has 100 words and 10 of those are keywords, then density is 10 percent. The idea is to make the site more relevant to engines by increasing the frequency of keywords on a page.
Keyword phrase/key phrase: The words a person uses when querying a search engine to find what they’re looking for. A keyword phrase is also what an SEO would optimize a given page to rank highly for.
Keyword prominence: The position of keyword phrases within the HTML code and copy of a Web page.
Keyword stuffing: Repeating keywords excessively or putting an inordinate number of keywords into the copy or HTML tags of a page. All search engines frown upon this practice.
Landing pages: The page a user lands at after clicking a link.
Link bursts: a rapid increase in the quantity of links pointing to a website. Unsubstantiated link bursts can be a red flag warning to search engines, but there are now ways to qualify the value of new incoming links (i.e. the quantity of traffic passed from the link source).
Link churn: a rapid decrease in the quantity of links pointing to a website.
Link farms: Subsets of sites where each member of the community must link to each other members’ sites. Because the links are required, the search engines generally place little value on these types of links.
Link popularity: The part of a search engine’s ranking criteria which considers and analyzes the quanityt and quality of external links a site has. Pages deemed to be popular are often given a boost in the search engine rankings for the keyword phrases related to it.
Machine-generated pages: Pages that are created automatically to blanket the search engines with low-quality, high keyword-density pages in an attempt to dominate the search engine results. All search engines frown upon these types of pages. They often go by many different names and are sometimes said to be a “proprietary” system for gaining high rankings.
Manual submission: Personally visiting a search engine’s “Add URL” form and pasting in the URL and other information asked for in order to let the search engine know about any given page.
Meta tags: HTML codes that are not visible to the average site visitor but that are intended for the search engines to help them better classify a site. The two tags important for search engine optimization include the Meta keyword tag and the Meta description tag.
Mirror pages: Duplicate pages intended to gain extra rankings in the search engines. Most search engines ignore all but one copy of any duplicate content.
Natural results: See organic listings.
NoFollow: A link attribute designed by Google to tell search engines not to follow a particular link. NoFollow practices have led to a lower volume of link spam on blogs, but some argue that it diminished the valuable conversation taking place between sites.
Organic listings: Search page results that are provided free and are based on the search algorithms of the search engine. A site might have a high organic ranking without paying the search engine anything at all. Conversely, a high-spending advertiser in a keyword category might not appear anywhere near the top organic results.
PPC: An acronym for Pay Per Click Advertising A term from general online advertising indicating that the advertiser will pay for the ad by the click it receives (as opposed to by the money it makes, the views it gets or the time period it’s displayed.) Many search engine advertisers use the term PPC to describe their campaigns, not realizing it has a broader meaning.
Paid inclusion: Paid partnership programs with some search engines permit you to feed information about your pages through a direct feed to the search engine without the search crawlers needing to visit your site. This is generally reserved for large (500-plus pages) sites, such as dynamically generated ecommerce sites with query strings (question marks and equal signs) in the URL. Google and MSN do not accept paid
inclusions. Also known as trusted feed or direct feed.
Ranking: Where a page shows up in the search engine results of any given search query.
Reciprocal linking: Exchanging links with another site.
Relevancy: How a search engine determines where any given page’s ranking should be. Relevancy is based on a complicated mathematical formula called an algorithm, which takes hundreds of factors into consideration.
ROI: An acronym for Return On Investment. The amount of money made from a campaign (search engine marketing or otherwise), less the amount spent.
Robots.txt: A file located within a root directory of a website which offers instructions to search engines on which files to crawl or omit.
SEM: An acronym for Search Engine Marketing. Any form of marketing that includes the search engines. SEM encompasses paid search engine ads (PPC), as well as the optimization of pages in the organic search results (SEO).
SEO: An acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The process of altering a Web page’s copywriting and HTML coding to be relevant for specific, targeted keyword phrases that relate to the site in question.
Search engine optimization copywriting: Writing the visible text on pages so they use the targeted keyword phrases being optimized for in order to gain search engine visibility.
Search engine spam: Pages that make use of deceptive techniques in order to appear more relevant to a search engine query than they really are.
Search marketing: See Search engine marketing.
Spider: An automated robot that crawls through the Web via links on site pages.
Submission: Letting a search engine or directory know the URL of a page in order for the page to be included in the engine’s database. Can be done through an add-URL page at a search engine/directory or through a paid inclusion program.
Supplemental Results: A secondary index for Google which appears on-screen to the user when matching page is not shown in the main index. Documents with supplemental results are not as trustworthy, because of low link authority, complex URLs and duplicate content or some variation). Supplemental pages will rank lower than primary search index pages and are crawled less often, with their outbound links carrying far less value.
Title tag: An HTML tag used by search engines and browsers to help describe what the page is about. The information provided in this tag is assumed to be highly relevant to the page, and therefore it is generally given a lot of weight in the search engine ranking algorithms when determining relevancy.
Trusted feed: See paid inclusion.
URL: An acronym for Universal Resource Locator. This refers to the address system employed by the Internet to locate resources such as websites. URL information includes the type of resource accessed, the server address and the file location.
Vertical creep: When non-paid, non-organic listings appear in search engine results pages. For instance, the results may be news stories or maps the search engine deems relevant to a query.
Webmaster: a person who is responsible for creating, designing, revising and/or posting information on the worldwide web.
White hat practices: Ethical SEO practices. While there is far from a consensus on what constitutes white hat and black hat practices, Google’s Webmaster pages (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters) lay out some “quality guidelines” as a basis practices it considers ethical.
If you have any questions about this glossary of terms, or wish to make a suggestion, please contact Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
The first phase in Search involved matching keywords to precise database text, but obvious limitations moved Search into a new era, where Search Engines developed ways to better understand user behaviour, including the use of user profiles. We are now entering a third phase of Search, that which involves Personalization, or understanding the actual user as opposed to behaviour. The Personalization of Search involves looking at Social Networking Theory and Online Social Networks.
The world of search and search engines is about to move from phase two to phase three, where personalization will be the key. Let’s review the first two phases before discussing what personalization means to search and SEO.
Phase 1 – Matching Keywords
Prior to the arrival of the Web and Search Engines, searching through a text-based database usually involved matching up the terms of your query to correlate precisely with how the terms appeared in those database documents.
The web’s advent ushered in a complex, interconnected network of pages linked to each other (hyperlinks), and search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo) soon developed an understanding for how words assumed importance relative to their location on the page(s). Indexing words linked to other pages assumed great importance, and links to a particular page were deemed to increase its relative importance. The quantity and quality of links to a page currently helps to define its significance.
A major drawback to this type of keyword matching is that the very same findings were presented to all searchers, despite their identity or their original search goals. Two people looking for something completely different online might get back the same results (i.e. one person is searching for information on “cookies” as they pertain to websites, while the other is looking for details on a type of processed snack consumed by some Sesame Street characters).
Phase 2 – Understanding User Search Behaviour
Engines fine-tuned their approach to search as they developed and offered users more ways to find information (i.e. Website pages). Engines started to develop ways to better ascertain what the searcher was originally looking for: user profiles (i.e. with details on search activity and history); analyses of user actions (i.e. mouse movement, page viewing time, page navigation movements, comparisons of different user web page results); and other user information (i.e. location, language preferences, type of device employed such as mobile phone or desktop).
There are several other types of user information that search engines have started looking for, including Search Results clicked upon, Ads clicked upon, Types of Email alerts and Personalized Search History. Here is a list of other searcher information sought by various engines (indicated in parentheses):
o Annotations (Google Notebook)
o Bookmarked Pages (Delicious, Myweb 2.0, Yahoo)
o Personal Profiles (OPrkut, Myspace)
o Picture Tags (Flickr)
o Queries employed and pages chosen in vertical searches (Google Maps, Yahoo local search, Froogle)
o Query revisions
o Webpages selected for customized engines (Google custom search)
Phase 3 – Understanding the User (Personalization)
Search engines are already moving towards a new phase, that of Personalization. Data which is culled from how users interact with search and related services is now being complemented with personal information or “footprints” which the user has left on the web. Just consider the user profiles created on engine sites (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, Digg.com) as well as the emerging preponderance of personal blogs (i.e. Technorati). Users can now leave their personal stamp on a seemingly endless number of pages. Even digital signatures associated with user identities
(i.e. OpenID, Typepad) are helping engines to learn more users and their motivations.
How people search, what sites learn about their targeted audiences and gauging the impact of SEO campaigns – all these dynamics are being increased influenced by Personalization. In an effort to offer up personalized search results, the various engines have already shifted their efforts towards understanding the user’s real objectives. Google is at the forefront of this shift, treating selected user queries as personalized searches, with past user search history easily referenced.
Website Owners, SEOs and Personalization
Website owners and SEO people should be prepared to ride the Personalization wave, and to identify different methods for learning about their existing customers as well as intended audiences. Finding out more about Social Networking Theory and Online Social Networks also helps reveal personal user information.
SEO practitioners would also do well to employ log file analysis and Web analytics tools, since these are useful devices for relevant measurements of results and conversions. Honesty is also important – SEO people must now come to terms with the declining importance of ranking reports and share this information with their clients.
If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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February 9th, 2009
This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are considered the big three in search. Recent significant growth in vertical search, however, has enabled it to overtake MSN as well as AOL, the fourth largest engine. Vertical search encompasses image, local, news and shopping searches.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN are generally considered to be the “big three” in the Search Engine industry. Vertical search is becoming more pervasive in the changing search landscape, however, encompassing image, local, news and shopping searches. In terms of total search numbers, vertical search has actually now overtaken both MSN and AOL.
vertical creep showing up
For the last few years industry experts have correctly predicted that vertical search results would increase dramatically. The term “vertical creep” has recently entered industry terminology, and refers to how more users are clicking on vertical listings which result from various online searches. Vertical listings now regularly appear at the top of “default results” when people search online. Google OneBox Results, Yahoo Shortcuts, AOL Snapshots and Ask Smart Search – all these are referred to a vertical creep.
Recent industry research has estimated that almost ten percent of Google visits eventually end up “downstream”, at a vertical Google property (i.e. Google OneBox Results, Google News, Google Maps, Google Image Search, Froogle). A similar percentage of Yahoo visits have also ended up downstream (i.e. Yahoo Local, Yahoo Shortcuts, Yahoo Shortcuts).
Companies looking to increase their website traffic and sales should increasingly consider vertical search as a dynamic way users find information. As a matter of fact, as a driving vehicle vertical search can probably attract more traffic to your site than all other engines, except Google and Yahoo.
If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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March 25th, 2009
This article is provided by Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
Website blogs are user-friendly and enable you to readily post relevant, new content. Blogs can be easily indexed by search engines, and augment site relevancy by making it easier for respected and pertinent external website links to find yours.
blog help search-notice
Effective SEO strategies involve designing, writing and coding for a website to increase quality site traffic and organic search engine rankings. In other words, the design keyword-rich sites should consider features such as directories, file names, body copy, and title and meta tags. Quality incoming links should be established, and “uncrawlable” sections should include alternative text descriptions (i.e. images, flashes).
Another important SEO strategy employs blogs, namely, logs on your website for recording opinions and/or information. Blog content can encompass just about all information related to your company; it can include case studies, press releases, research findings, whitepapers, opinion pieces or industry and/or marketplace observations.
Let’s review some of the advantages site blogs can provide to your SEO plan:
* Blogs are user-friendly; they are simple to create, post, update and maintain
* They facilitate easy, fast publishing, thereby enabling you to readily post new content
* New blog information complements static content on your site not frequently updated
* Regular blog posts can be picked up by the main search engine indexes, or even by blog-specific engines like BlogPulse and Technorati
* Blogs augment site relevancy by providing opportunities for incoming links to find you. Relevancy is enhanced if these links to your site pages are from respected websites
You can employ various techniques to increase the number of relevant links to your web page(s):
* Have your blog link out to sites in your industry with reputations as sources of information or which provide valuable resources to users
* Work with other industry bloggers familiar with your products and services; link to these bloggers and leave remarks on their own posts
* Assign keywords to your posts (tagging) to extend their reach and facilitate better search indexing
* Employ a Web feed format (Really Simple Syndication, or RSS) to further extend your blog’s reach
Regular, relevant blogging and having related links to your web page will help you become more active in your industry community, so that you can not only discover more about your present and future customers but also increase your opportunities to be engine-noticed.
If you have any questions about this article, or wish to offer suggestions, please contact us at Yesup SEO, an established SEO services.
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