The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog 
- Excel Tips: Removing the Auto Formatting that Changes your data into Links
I’m a data guy. I like data. I don’t plan on putting links into my excel files and I would rather make them links individually on a case-to-case basis. This is where an option in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 comes in handy. Here are the Four Steps which I took to remove the “Auto Linking” that has bothered me for months. (more…)
Written by Scott Kingsley Clark on Jun, 11th 2008 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Web Development | No Comments »
- Contemporary Surgery and Convera Launch SurgeryFindIt.com Vertical Search Engine
Contemporary Surgery, along with help from Convera, has launched a new search engine at SURGERYFINDIT.COM. This new search engine tool provides targeted search results for surgeons.
Contemporary Surgery’s goal is to provide general surgeons with “a wealth of peer-reviewed, practical clinical data and practice information”. SURGERYFINDIT.COM attempts to deliver “editorially selected Web site searches” to their end users by editing out what they call “extraneous and unrelated sites”.
Searches initiated through SURGERYFINDIT.COM will direct searches on surgical resources such as associations, peer-reviewed journals, medical schools and major medical centers, and suppliers of surgical devices.
As a sample, I searched for “gall bladder” because I had hired a great general surgeon here in the Dallas area to take out my gall bladder when I needed it removed. Turns out that they have a lot of good information, as evidenced by a search. I could see SurgeryFindIt.com very useful for both people like me as well as general surgeons.
Contemporary Surgery is published by Dowden Health Media.
Dowden Health Media, a division of Lebhar-Friedman, Inc., is a full-service healthcare communications company that specializes in high-quality communication with physicians, advanced practice clinicians, and consumers. Its highly respected, peer-reviewed journals reach more than 300,000 physicians and clinicians in surgery, psychiatry, family practice, internal medicine and obstetrics/gynecology.
Convera(R) Corporation (NASDAQ:CNVR) is the leading provider of vertical search services for trade publishers and manages the vertical search sites of a growing number of specialist publishers around the world.
Written by Bill Hartzer on Jun, 3rd 2008 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
- Jipingmi.com China Real Estate Search Engine Launches English Version
Jipingmi, the leading real estate search engine in China, has launched an English version. The English version of this real estate search engine, located at English.jipingmi.com, collects property listings from several different property listing sources that are in English and organizes the data into one search platform.
Jipingmi’s crawler currently aggregates over two million real estate property listings from more than 100 real estate websites in 21 cities in China. They have over 5,000,000 page views a month and boast 180,000 registered users.
Looking at the search results, there is still a fair amount of Chinese still included in the search results, but since the data is generally aggregated from many other sources, I can see how it would be helpful. What’s interesting is that although this is primarily in English, some of the Google AdSense ads that loaded for me (I’m in Texas), Google still loaded ads in Chinese.
Although this primarily is in English, I noticed on their page that there is not any language meta tag on the page to indicate that the page (or the subdomain) is in English. I could easily see a search engine mistaking this page for another language (it happens all the time). So, what would be helpful is if the following meta tag be put on the pages that are in English:
< meta http-equiv=" content-language " content=" en">
Generally speaking, if your site is in another language (any language other than in English), and you add a page or pages to your web site that are in English, you will want to use the language tag to tell the search engines that the page is in English. You can use the ‘language’ meta tag on pages that are in a language other than the web site’s primary one.
When reviewing the language details and how Google is dealing with this site being in another language (the English version is supposed to be located at http://english.jipingmi.com), there are other issues that should be fixed; title tags on pages are not unique, the meta description and the meta keywords tags are not optimized to their fullest, and there appears to be another sub- of a subdomain being indexed, which may be revealing some duplicate content issues. I have a screen capture of the Google search results for a site: command at Google: site:english.jipingmi.com
Jipingmi is Mandarin for “How many square meters?” or “A few square meters” and was launched in late 2007. It quickly became on of the premier real estate search engines in China. The English version currently focuses on Beijing, China and, for Beijing 2008 Olympics, is trying to promote the search engine’s use for the finding of short-term rentals. According estimates, around 500,000 foreigners will stay in Beijing during the Olympics.
With the 2008 Olympics being hosted in the area this year, I would imagine that there should be a lot of demand for an English version of the site. I searched for several apartments and found that there are many nice ones available; the only suggestion I have is that I would love to be able to see photos!
Written by Bill Hartzer on May, 27th 2008 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog | No Comments »
- How to Show Your SEO Clients Proof of Your Efforts
One challenge that faces SEO firms is that if you improve organic search traffic for a client, how do you demonstrate how much of the growth you are responsible for?
You could look at the current organic search traffic and compare it to a similar period before you started optimizing the client site. But, that does not take into account the industry-wide trends, economic trends or other underlying trends such as search traffic growth that could be adding to or subtracting from the gains created by your SEO efforts. Also, this method does not take into account any growth trends the client may have been experiencing previously.
So, how do you show your value?
For example, if you are working with a company that sells Widgets and the Widget industry is growing at 4% annually, you might reasonably expect a similar growth in Widget related search terms. However, this is an assumption. New competitors are continually entering the Widget business, including Internet-only companies without inventories or new global competitors. Likewise, existing competitors are investing in their own online marketing efforts to drive organic search traffic growth. In other words, even though the pie is growing, every participant is not guaranteed a slice of that growth. Some companies will even see declines as growth heats up.
That brings us back to the issue. Assuming you are growing your client’s organic search traffic (we hope it is not declining under your watch), how do you show what you have contributed and how do you identify industry-specific, seasonal, and keyword search trends?
If you have access to the client’s traffic data over several years, the easiest thing to do would be to look at the past 5-6 years and examine the organic search traffic data to determine the baseline growth rate. If you are seeing a similar rate of organic traffic growth month over month or year over year, calculate the AVERAGE growth rate with some extra weight given to the most recent data as recent history is the most relevant in terms of future projections.
The average growth rate should give you some idea of what sort of growth the client was experiencing on their own. Determining the average annual growth rate is ideal since many industries are seasonal and may be significantly more active at certain times of the year, if interest is relative to the weather, the holiday season, or the school calendar, etc.
In our example of the Widget company, if the company was experiencing organic search traffic growth of 5% annually for the 5 years prior to your SEO efforts, and they are now growing organic search at 25% annually, you can reasonably assume that your work has resulted in a net 20% of the current growth. 20% would be your provable contribution to growth. Your actual contribution is likely to be higher as we are calculating this with the assumption that the client’s baseline trend would have continued, rather than decreased.
If you have access to the data (Comscore, Hitwise, or Compete.com), it would be helpful to see how competing sites are growing organically or the search trends for specific keywords, which will provides clues as to the growth of a particular industry.
At the end of the day, the data will be your friend. This is why baseline rankings and traffic evaluation is so important. Unless you know where your client’s site was before, in terms of keyword rankings, organic search traffic, organic conversions, etc., you will not be able to show them how far you’ve come together as a result of your SEO effort.
Written by Chris Sivori on May, 22nd 2008 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
- Who is Optimizing YOUR Web Site?
Vizion’s president, Mark Jackson, just wrote a series of articles over at Search Engine Watch entitled “Don’t Hire a Butcher to Do a Baker’s Job” and has been getting a lot of feedback, both positive and negative.Mark’s posts take a look at who it is that companies use to perform their search engine optimization. In some cases, it is the company’s IT team that ‘handles’ the SEO. Many times a company will use a web design firm to create the site in a ’search engine friendly’ manner, but many of these firms have not taken the time to do a full analysis of the needs of the site to help it rank well in the search engines.
Here at Vizion we OFTEN are contacted by companies who have just had a new site designed and want us to come in and ‘optimize’ it for them. What we usually find are many different things in the design and Information Architecture that negatively impact the ability of the site to rank in the search engines.
Check out Mark’s two part talk about this often heated discussion and make sure that you aren’t having the wrong team working on the optimization for your site.
Don’t Hire a Butcher to do a Baker’s Job
Don’t Hire a Butcher to do a Baker’s Job - Part 2
Written by Mark Barrera on May, 21st 2008 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »