The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog
- 2008Jun27New Survey Says Consumers Turning to Internet Because of Economy
A new June 2008 survey of 1243 Internet users reveals that consumers expect to reduce their overall spending in 2008. However, the respondents said that they will be decreasing their offline spending and not their online spending. - 2008Jun16GeoSpot Deep Local Search Launches Mobile Web Service
GeoSpot, a location-based services and social activities site has launched the Beta release of GeoSpot(TM) Mobile Web service. This Mobile Web search service is a search of local businesses and other POIs (points of interest) that are open either now or at a specified time. Instead of listing POIs of which many may be closed, consumers only see those that are currently open or those POIs that are opening soon.
If you use the Mobile Web, GeoSpot’s Mobile Web service allows you to use contextual navigation to find related POIs. You can see the specific location on a map or you can simply use the phone dial feature to immediately contact the businesses. According to Geospot, Inc., GPS capability will be added soon. 
The GeoSpot Mobile Web service currently works on any mobile phone that has a web browser. All you have to do is connect www.geospot.com using your phone’s web browser and the GeoSpot servers will automatically provide the version appropriate for your mobile phone.
From what I can tell, GeoSpot is currently available for [...]- 2008Jun5Vizion Interactive Newsletter – June 5th, 2008
Letter from the President
It’s been quite a while since our last newsletter, so allow me an opportunity to catch up with each of you: Over the past year, we have doubled sales and (over) doubled our staff. As we’ve added people to our staff, we have also added more senior-level talent to the team, including the addition of Kim Patterson (CFO), Bill Hartzer (SEO/Social Media), Mark Barrera (Client Services/SEO/PPC) and Chris Sivori (SEO/PPC). With this growth, we are also opening an office in Overland Park, Kansas, slated to open June 15, 2008. Overland Park is a suburb of Kansas City on the border of Kansas and Missouri.We have recently launched Service Experts’ new website www.serviceexperts.com, signed on Voxant/TheNewsRoom and Mannatech for Social Media Marketing programs and added Bluegreen Corporation, Cookies By Design, and The Thomas Group, among others, to our SEO and PPC rosters.
Our portfolio of services grows deeper every month, so please stop by our website and learn more about our Email Marketing services, Social Media Marketing and our exciting new tool, iMarketing Manager. If you have any questions, or believe that there may be a fit for us to work [...]
- 2008Jun3Contemporary 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 [...]
- 2008May27Jipingmi.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) [...]- 2008May22How 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 [...]
- 2008May21Who 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 [...]
- 2008May15Sk-rt Social Network Rebrands as Kirtsy, Fails to Follow SEO Best Practices
Sk*rt, the social network geared towards women, has rebranded as Kirtsy. Sk*rt, originally at www.sk-rt.com, is now at www.Kirtsy.com. I suspect that one of the reasons they rebranded was that they were not affiliated in any way with Skirt! Magazine (at www.skirt.com), the “Women’s online resource for opinion, poetry, fashion, resources, fun and irreverence.” I fully applaud the rebranding effort from Sk*rt.com to Kirtsy.com. However, from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective, they have committed SEO suicide by not redirecting to the new site the right way.
If you go to www.sk-rt.com (or any URL on the old site), you’re going to be greeted with a “splash page” on the sk-rt.com domain telling you that they’ve rebranded as Kirtsy. 5 seconds later you’re redirected to the new URL. The only problem here is that this is not being done properly. A 301 Permanent Redirect needs to be used–I never ever recommend using a meta refresh to redirect visitors. In fact, using a meta refresh to redirect visitors will almost certainly screw up the site’s search engine rankings.
Currently, the [...]- 2008Apr22Websites Celebrating Earth Day 2008
Happy Earth Day 2008. While researching this Earth Day blog post today, I was amazed by the lack of overall participation amongst the search engine marketing community in promoting Earth Day. However, the few that I did find truly did an amazing job of promoting Earth Day 2008. I thought I would point out some of the best Earth Day blog posts as well as the sites that have done something on their site to help promote Earth Day 2008.
Certainly if you’re a search engine marketer or in the search industry and I haven’t mentioned you here feel free to make a comment below to point it out.
Search Engines Promoting Earth Day
My friend Barry (Rusty Brick) and Search Engine Roundtable always does a great job of changing the header of SE Roundtable whenever there’s a holiday or other significant event to promote. That definitely keeps me coming back to their site to see what they’re doing. Earth Day 2008 is no exception, and you need to check out their special header today. I just love their glowing Earth.
SE Roundtable also has a great wrap-up post detailing many of the search [...]- 2008Apr10IAC Launches Rushmore Drive New Black Search Engine
Black Web Enterprises, a company owned by IAC (IAC also owns the Ask.com search engine), has launched Rushmore Drive, a search engine that is the first of its kind to attempt to deliver more relevant search results to the black community.
According to a news release today, Rushmore Drive uses “patent-pending technology, a vertical search algorithm” to deliver search results based on “increased penetration of sites heavily trafficked by the Black community.” It uses technology called SearchPlus, which is apparently technology that combines general search results, news search results, and job search results, with a dynamic layer of Black-targeted search results and user-generated content.I performed a search for “search engine optimization” on Rushmore Drive and was surprised by the search results.
While I am not surprised that SEO Chat is the first result, I’m puzzled as to why a web design and development firm, a Virginia web design firm, and an Atlanta website design firm show up in the top 10 search results for “search engine optimization”. I do like the addition of the “narrow your search” and related news and video results that are displayed, though. [...]
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