Without SEO, what do you think you’re building with?
I’ve never seen a building that was built from the roof down. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that is exactly the way many website owners think they can build one. We spend hours and days trying to get traffic to our sites without building from the ground up! Unless the foundation is laid, there’s nothing that you can drive a nail into.
I’ve done everything from article submission to social media to videos, to try and drive traffic to my sites and get a higher page rank. Guess what happened? Very little!
Then, I decided to do seo on two sites, but never really did anything else to get traffic… I did nothing of any consequence on these sites like I did with the others and yet, I started seeing a higher page ranking!
SEO is the absolute most powerful thing you can do to build the foundation of any website!
When I checked back on these two sites months later, I couldn’t believe that one site had a page rank of 2! A Page rank of 2 and I never added any more content, added no more links, had made NO changes whatsoever and yet I now had a Page Rank 2! Do you see the power of seo?
If you already have a site that is ranking, but have not fully done the seo on all pages of the site, you will be pleasantly surprised at how much difference it makes. It could take you up 2 or more page ranks very quickly.
What’s the real reason most people don’t want to do seo?
Simple… it’s work and it’s complicated to remember every little detail that needs to be done to get it perfect! Anytime it’s complicated and takes too much effort, most of us just don’t do it!
If I told you that there is an easy way to get the job done and get your web or blog pages fully optimized so the search engines just love your site, would that sound good to you? It sure did to me, but that’s not what really got me excited about using seo to maximize my rankings.
I bought an expensive seo suite of search engine optimization tools for my html sites and it requires a constant monthly fee to use. I hate monthly fees!
Well, if you use WordPress themes for your blogs or websites, which you should, then this plugin for seo will absolutely be the best news for you since “sliced bread!” (In fact, I’m using it right now as I write this article!) Every time I add to the article, I simply save the draft and look at my seo score on the right seo pressor score box!
I know exactly how the seo spiders will look at my page. It even does many tasks for me automatically, like bold my keywords, italicize my keywords and underline my keywords, without me having to lift a finger!
It’s like having a seo professional walking me through “every step” of my article, so I get it just right! It is without a doubt, one of the very best values I’ve spent money on since starting in this business!
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Mar 4th, 2011. 
We all know that Google changes their algorithm like we change underwear. (Well, hopefully you do anyway…)
What happens when you type a keyword into the Google search box? Your query is sent to Google machines and compared with all the documents stored in their index to identify the most relevant matches. In less than a second, their system “spits out” a list of the most relevant pages and also determines the relevant sections of text, images, videos and more. What you get is a list of search results with relevant information presented in “snippets” beneath each result.
Google always tries to give you “exactly what you want.” That’s been the goal from the beginning.
The “new” key ingredients of Google search in 2011 are:
Relevance
Comprehensiveness
Freshness
Speed
- Relevance. Google’s one main innovation was Page Rank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today they use more than 200 signals, including Page Rank, to order websites, and they update these algorithms on a weekly basis. (They offer personalized search results based on the web history and location.)
- Comprehensiveness. In 1998 Google launched with about 25 million pages, which even then was a small fraction of the web. Today they index billions and billions of web pages, and their index is roughly 100 million gigabytes. They continue investing to expand the comprehensiveness of their services. In 2007 they introduced Universal Search, which made search more comprehensive by integrating images, videos, news, books and much more into their main search results.
- Freshness. In the early days, Google bots crawled the web every three or four months, which meant that the information you found on Google typically was out of date. Today, they’re continually crawling the web, ensuring that you can find the latest news, blogs and status updates minutes or even seconds after they’re posted. With Realtime Search, they’re able to provide us with breaking topics from a comprehensive set of sources, just moments after events occur.
- Speed. Their average query response time is about one-fourth of a second. The average blink of an eye is one-tenth of a second. Speed is a major search priority now, which is why they don’t turn on new features if they will slow down their services. Instead, search engineers are always working on new features and ways to make search even faster. In addition to smart coding, on the back end they’ve developed distributed computing systems around the globe that ensure you get fast response times. With technologies like auto complete and Google Instant, they help you find the search terms and results you’re looking for before you’re even finished typing.
Since these are the areas that Google is focusing on, shouldn’t you be working on these areas to improve your sites traffic? You should be…
If you want an SEO, Internet Marketing Company that works toward those goals in tandem with Googles algorithms, give us a call or go to our website for a FREE look at your current SEO efforts.
We can tell you where to start. http://abundantlifeconsultingservices.com/
Filed under Google, Internet Marketing by on Feb 15th, 2011.
Google Might Make Web Design More Important…
Google is apparently testing a feature in its search results pages that allows users to see full-page previews of sites before they click through to them.
Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm spotted the test, providing the screenshot below and saying, “One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information. This shows that they have the technology to know exactly where a piece of text is on every single web page. The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results.”
That doesn’t include the ways Google is changing the way we search on mobile devices with things like Voice Search and Google Goggles (not to mention Google TV).
If the preview feature goes on to become a full-fledged feature, I’m going to have to consider that a major one. This could dramatically affect clickthroughs, for better or for worse. We’ll really get to see how big a part web design plays in conversions at that point. It’s conceivable that consumers will be drawn even more to well-known brands and familiar layouts.
Late last year, Google released a tool called Browser Size that shows you how others view your site. More specifically, it shows you the percentages of people that will see certain portions of your site without having to scroll. This shouldn’t really have much affect on the full-page previews in SERPs, but it can come in handy for when the user clicks through.
We’ve reached out to Google for more information on the preview feature. We’ll update when we get more info.
Update: Google gave us the classic response: “At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments.
Filed under Breaking News by on Oct 10th, 2010.
by Jeff Sexton
I couldn’t help but write down a few comments and links in response to a recent Smashing Magazine post. Designed to Sell: 8 Useful Tips to Help Your Website Convert kicks major butt, and I thought you’d both enjoy the article and a few comments/additions thrown in for each of the 8 tips:
Tip 1: Subiminal Suggestion
Basically, make sure your design elements – and most especially your pictures – enhance your credibility and put visitors in the right emotional frame of mind to convert.
Sound advice, to be sure, but the example Website the author (Dmitry Fadeyev) provides seemed kind of lame to me. Here’s a more-thorough 5-minute video on this principle by Dave Young:
Tip 2: Prevent Choice Paralysis
Too many choices results in buyers avoiding a decision and failing to convert. You need to make it easy for a buyer to say yes without getting too bogged down in the details. One way to do this is to provide a recommended or “best value” option.
But here’s where I’d go a bit beyond that by looking at this through the lens of temperament:
- Spontaneous temperaments like recommended and “most popular” options. They also ver much want to shorten the time spent shopping and setting up so they can maximize time spent actually DOING THE THING. If your recommended option helps customers get out on the playing field quicker, then be sure to tell visitors that.
- Methodical temperaments will want to know WHY you believe this is the best value and how you can prove it. Show your reasoning/methodology in coming to your conclusions and offer up proof of value. This may involve linking to a mouse-over or additional page from the recommendation box. Maybe a little link on “Why we recommend this package.”
- Competitive temperaments don’t necessarily need a recommendation, but a quick way to narrow down their choices by advanced filtering. Or a quick way of knowing why the choice you’ve labeled as premium will give them an edge. Keep them in control and convinced they’re getting an advantage through their purchase and they’ll convert.
- Humanistic temperaments usually want to know how easy it is to upgrade or downgrade a recommended service or swap-out a product if your recommendation ends up not quite suiting them. They also want a sense of your motivations in recommending one product over another and possibly if they can Chat or call someone about the recommendation.
Tip 3: Show The Product
This is very similar to my post on “Show me the pics.” People want to see what they are buying. Not only do the pictures answer questions, but people want to imagine using the product.
What I’d add to this is that one picture often isn’t enough and that action photos are gold. For software and services that means not only offering product tours with lots of screenshots, but also in using scenario-based product tours rather than functionality-based tours. Walk me through doing something rather than randomly showing this or that functionality.
Tip 4: Let People Try It
Great (and self-explanatory) advice, but I was glad that Show the Product came before this. I’ve seen a fair amount of software companies believe that visitors would just leap at a free trial in order to experience a product first hand, and that just aint how it works.
Visitors invariably want to sniff a product out BEFORE downloading it and investing time with it. Realize that “Free” doesn’t really equate to risk free. Dmitry writes about the positive benefits users’ emotional “sunk costs” that come with using a free piece of software – the kind of thing that leads to a paid updgrade vs. a search for a whole new product. What he doesn’t mention is that visitors are well aware of that sunk cost and will avoid downloading software unless and until they have a decent sense that it will work well for them.
So, yes, by all means, let people try the product for free. Just make sure you show them enough of the product and what it can do that their willing to invest the time trying it out.
Tip 5 & 7: AIDA and Next Steps
I combined these because they are intimately related and are both areas Future Now has quite thoroughly covered. We, of course, add the “S” of Satisfaction onto the end of Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.
Also, planning persuasive momentum/next action steps should be more involved than simply ensuring visitors can find a buy button when they’re ready to buy or that you have some additional link made available to them.
Finally, you gotta love this money quote from the article:
“…you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead,think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that.”
Amen, brother. Amen.
Tip 6: Guide Attention
Having just finished writing about the impact of design on visitor eye tracking, I naturally found this to be the best part of the article. Lost of great stuff on intelligent use of design to guide the eyes/attention of the visitor.
As for additional resources on the Web, check out
The Elements of Design Applied to the Web
Good Call to Action Buttons
Making Tabs Work for You
Looks can Kill Design Effectiveness
Color, Contrast, and Dimension
and Rowland Wilson on Composition
Tip 8: The Gutenberg Rule
I really don’t have too much to say about this one, other than it’s another rule of thumb for good composition/page layout and that you should go and take a look at it for yourself.
And that’s it. I’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and additional resources as well. Let me know what ya think…
Filed under Marketing Online by on Sep 8th, 2010.
By Chris Crum
Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance’s transition have begun.
“The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft,” says Yahoo’s VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. “However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing.”
Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:
Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:
As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:
- Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
- Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
- Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also says that “now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition.”
The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October.
Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:
The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.
WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).
Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.
Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.
As we’ve discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you’ve not already been doing so.
Filed under SEO News by on Jul 24th, 2010.
