The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog
- 2010Feb1Becoming a Spider In a Few Easy Steps
I know what you’re thinking and no, I cannot help you to launch webs out of your hand, scale skyscrapers, or become Tobey Maguire, I’ll give you an image to make happy though. On the other hand, approaching your site as if
you were a spider, bot, crawler or however you choose to call them may actually help you get a better understanding of how your most important visitors view your content.- 2010Jan22Content Strategy: Divide and Conquer
I imagine it is quite safe to say that most of us in the search marketing sphere have heard the quote “content is king” a few thousand times or so. But is it really? Is content really the trump card? Will 500 words of moderately relevant content get me to page one tomorrow?
The fact of the matter is that yes, “content is king”. In my opinion, 200 words of highly targeted copy will do more for your search marketing efforts than a 1000 words focused too broadly on several different terms. Now for those of you who are hell bent on broad keyword focus and putting all your eggs in the Latent Semantic Indexing basket, this may not be the type of strategic thinking that you want to hear. But for those of in search of optimizing further down the tail, increasing site pages and giving your visitors the exact content they what to read…then read on.- 2010Jan14Search Engine Optimization Tip 36: How to Remove a Page from Google
This is Search Engine Optimization tip number 36 in my continuing series of Search Engine Optimization tips. All of these search engine optimization tips are meant to be specific in nature, they will not take that long to review, and are directly to the point. This search engine optimization tip has to do with removing a page or a specific URL from the Google search engine.
I’m not going to go into a great deal of explanation about why you would want to remove a page from Google, there are many reasons for doing that (which might include the fact that it’s a duplicate page or maybe even a page that has sensitive data on it that you don’t want given out to the whole entire world). But, what I am going to do is give you several options for removing a web page from Google. After I name each option, I’ll give you some more details about it.
Use Google’s own removal tool.
First, you must verify your website in Google Webmaster Tools, to show Google that you’re really the website owner. To do this, you need a [...]- 2010Jan14Yahoo Paid Inclusion Is No More
Yahoo recently shut down their paid inclusion program referred to as Search Submit. What was Search Submit? Simply put, it was a way to include certain pages in their index and to influence the frequency of re-indexing your site. How does this affect you? It probably doesn’t if you weren’t participating in the program. If you were, you may want to pay close attention.Some of the features of this paid inclusion program included the ability to create your own titles and descriptions to be displayed on Yahoo’s search engine results page and even have enhanced listings that could draw in higher click rates than the average search result.
The downside was that you paid on a per click basis for any keyword that you included in your feed to Yahoo. Yahoo claimed that the program didn’t increase your rankings in their search results, but they also claim the it might “lead to more relevant ranking” which seems to be favorable positioning to me. Many large brands participated in this program and many companies worked as partners “managing” this feed [...]- 2010Jan14Are Real Time Results Showing for Your Brand?
Last month, there was a pretty important change in Google which allows them to provide in-depth, real time search. That is, Google launched the inclusion of Twitter results (and others) into the SERPS (search engine results pages). Yahoo has also announced that they are doing the same.
This isn’t happening for every single query. And, we’re trying to determine when it is that Google determines to pull these into the SERPs. Right now it looks like searches on news worthy searches and other large volume queries for large brands. The amount of recent news, Twitter, blog and other mentions seems to also help trigger these results. But lately we are seeing more of this inclusion across many type of search results.But, for those of you who do not have a Twitter account, and may be a popular “keyword” (that is to say, your brand is a popular keyword), you may want to pay particularly close attention to this.
“Why?” you ask? Here’s the thing…
Let’s say that your brand is “coca cola” (see screenshot).
At any time, someone could be posting something about your brand. You’d have to be a pretty popular brand, but [...]
- 2010Jan14What is the Average Load Time of Your Website?
I am pretty certain that after reading the title of this post that you thought about the speed of your site but couldn’t pin it to a precise number because it is a metric you never worry about. Well, it is time to start paying attention to this site metric, because it may be a factor in your rankings in Google in 2010.
Google recently announced a new experimental feature in Google Webmaster Tools that will allow you to see your average site load time. Google will analyze your site load time as compared to other sites on the Internet, using data gathered via the Google Toolbar. Google then shows some sample page load times as well as suggestions for optimizing the speed of the site.“On average, pages in your site take 2.0 seconds to load (updated on Jan 10, 2010). This is faster than 67% of sites.”
The most common types of recommendations I have seen on some sites include but are not limited to:
Enabling gzip compression
Combining external JavaScript
Minimizing DNS lookups (this means minimizing the calls to external service scripts such as ShareThis, ReCaptcha, Gravatar or any [...]- 2010Jan13Top SEOs…My Rant Continues
Back in 2007, I wrote a post on TopSEOS.com in which I described my past experience in advertising with them and how I felt about the lack of transparency in their rankings of the “top seo firms”.
I have waited, and waited, and waited for some firms that I respect – who participate in this – to push the folks at TopSEOs.com to be more up-front about how the lists are developed and paid for. And, if they can’t get the people at TopSEOs.com to be more upfront about the fact that this is a “pay to play” marketing list and not a true “list of the top SEO firms”, I suggest that these companies do our Industry a favor and walk away. Yes, I’m suggesting that they turn away from this (very good) lead source until TopSEOs.com is more transparent. Only when many of the paid advertisers drop out will the folks at TopSEOs.com change their ways.
Perhaps things have changed (though I doubt sincerely that they have) and TopSEOs.com is at least making an effort to reach out to customers of these SEO providers to verify that they in fact to deliver SEO services, and provide testimony [...]
- 2010Jan13Yahoo! Shopping to Outsource to PriceGrabber
In what I would call a surprise move, Yahoo! is discontinuing the Yahoo! Shopping and outsourcing it to PriceGrabber. So, if you are currently using the Yahoo! Shopping API, I would start making plans to make sure that you’re integrated with PriceGrabber or at least have taken the necessary steps to start getting your products on PriceGrabber.
As you may recall, Yahoo! Search is going to be powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Microsoft’s Bing will now be the search engine on all Yahoo sites. From what I can tell, though, I have not seen anything in the search deal that details what is going to happen to Yahoo! Shopping. Now we know, though, as Yahoo! quietly announced it on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog:
After careful consideration, we have decided to enter into a strategic partnership with PriceGrabber to power the Product Submit functionality of Yahoo! Shopping as of March 11, 2010. As a result of these changes, Yahoo! will no longer provide the Shopping Web Services API, including Shopping Results (the “Yahoo! Shopping Syndication Services”) to you as of March 11, 2010.
What does this mean to [...]
- 2009Dec30Barbecued SEO: As Only A Kansas City SEO Could Tell It
Yes, I know, this is quite possibly the most ridiculously titled search marketing blog post you have ever read. Hang tight and read on, you will soon see the reasoning behind this post title and no, you probably won’t be licking your lips afterwards.
- 2009Dec30Paid Search: Code Red
If your paid search manager suddenly fell off the face of the Earth could you pick up where they left off easily without having to contact anyone for logins?
400 E Royal Ln