Vizion Interactive

Using Hootsuite & Twitter to Stay on Top of the Subjects That Mean the Most

Zach Browne — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:08:23 +0000

I’ve been reading a lot of negative things about Twitter lately and every article I read leads me to believe that the author really has not captured the true value of what Twitter brings to the table in regards to its power as a search tool. If set up properly Twitter can not only deliver instant and real time information, but it can drastically change the way you search for that information. Instead of a proactive search method, Twitter can deliver a passive way to collect information on the subjects that mean the most to you. Think of it as a ‘keyword based, real time RSS feed” delivering only the content that you desire, you just have to know how to set it up.

The way I have set up my interaction with Twitter all started back to my own doubts of Twitter’s importance. Even after gaining 10,000+ Twitter followers the last time I checked, I still fought with the value of what I could use it for. So one evening I decided I was going to figure out how I could use this globally popular service to enhance my day-to-day perusing activities.

I started playing with Twitter Search, keying in terms that I was interested in such as ‘bookmarklets’, ‘link building tips’, and ‘Google Chrome’. I suddenly realized that the results I was looking at were basically the latest and most current information on the subjects I was seeking to learn more about. So that gave me a few ideas.

I first opened up my new Hootsuite account, which I thought was so cool but just couldn’t figure out any good uses for, and created an Application Shortcut in Google Chrome (my new favorite browser, Beta 5 of course). Then I set up tabs for each subject I was interested in staying on top of. After that I assigned a few keyword terms to each tab and voila!, I had a real time, passive search portal that allowed me to follow everything I am interested in with out searching each day. I now keep it open all day every day and truly stay on top of what’s happening each day in my industry. This technique also works great with Tweetdeck. Good luck!

404’s: A Great Way to Lose Site Traffic!

Josh McCoy — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:58:04 +0000

404 errors, dead pages, bad links, whatever you like to call them are a great way to increase your bounce rate, decrease your online revenues and make you look sloppy. This form of conversion suicide can be corrected by monitoring your site well to make sure that you are not contributing to the probability of your site rendering 404 errors or that others on the web are not properly linking to your site.

Not ensuring that all site pages are linked correctly and redirected appropriately is like waving good bye to site visitors. There are a couple reasons why your site may have 404 errors evolving from server requests. This can include a URL rewrite where folders may have changed yet certain internal pages didn’t make the rewrite file. Other reason reasons for 404 File Not Found errors include internal linking to pages that may have the link structure of the above explanation or that there may just be a typo in the internal link. Another reason for a 404 error may not be your fault at all. This can simply be someone who is link to your domain but to an incorrect page. This can also relate to the first reason above where you did not include all site pages in the URL rewrite and now inbound links arrive at pages that no longer exist.

I know, we have all been here before, we recognize our mistakes, run our heads into a wall a few times and move on. Below are a few suggestions I have found helpful for assessing the potential of 404’s on-site.

Utilize site crawling tools. I use OptiSpider and like this because it quickly crawls the site and reports on any 404 errors so I know off-the-bat what needs to be fixed. With any new clients I assess this is one of the first areas I look at. There’s no telling what your neighbor’s cousin Eddy missed when he redesigned your site last year.
Google Webmaster Tools can be very helpful for assessing dead pages, broken links etc. The Crawl Errors section will tell you what pages are listed as unreachable and what links out there on the web from other sites are breaking.
Generate an XML sitemap. This is another form of crawling your server and will let you know what page errors it finds. Google Webmaster Tools above will also tell you about error pages in sitemaps but this is just another way to assess the situation from a different vantage point.
It should go without saying that you should have custom 404 pages for your site. If not, go ahead and run your head into a wall a few more times and come back to this post. The custom 404 page allows you let visitors know that they have reached a non-existent page and that you would like to provide them with the navigational opportunity to find the page which holds the information they are looking for. This custom 404 page also houses the analytical tracking code in the footer of the page template hopefully that all of your other site pages possess. I as well as the other 99% of webmasters and search marketers use Google Analytics. Since we have made sure that we possess custom 404 pages with our tracking code it is easy to find 404 errors that are currently indexed in search engines or are coming from other referring sites. Simply go to the Content section, filter to 404 pages and do reverse path research to note where the referring source, keyword and such have brought about the 404. I like this method because you can drill down on a recent 404 from a search engine listing and hopefully repair it before you lose the listing.

Managing your 404’s is not that hard to take on once you have found a few methods such as those above. If you are working with an internal web team or third party developmental resource it will also save a lot of time if you host a quick SEO 101 crash course to address proper page redirection and internal linking practices to get everyone on the right page, no pun intended.

Need help making your site perfect?

Search Engine Optimization: Pushing Google to Display Real-Time Web for Any Keyword

Bill Hartzer — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:11:17 +0000

Back in Dec 09, Google announced the integration of the real-time World Wide Web in their organic search results. Google told us that their goal is to strive to bring us “the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices” we “use to access it.” They introduced real-time into the search results like this:

I would equate this move to Google Universal, where they algorithmically add news, images, blog results, music (if it’s related to music), and video into the organic search results. Somehow, algorithmically, the Google search engine adds these features into the organic search results. You have probably noticed that sometimes they show it in the search results (for certain keyword phrases) and Google show do not show the real-time web for other keyword phrases that you search for at Google.com.

As a search engine optimization expert, I have been intrigued by this part of the search engine algorithm. In other words, I have tried to figure out how to literally push Google to display the real-time web (the “Latest results for”) for a certain keyword or keyword phrase.

Well, I am happy to be able to tell you that I have “cracked the code” so to speak, and am able to now “force” Google into showing the “Latest result for” a particular keyword or keyword phrase. In other words, if the “Latest results” is not presently showing for a keyword phrase in the Google search results, I am able to drive Google into displaying the “Latest results” for a keyword or keyword phrase of my choosing.

Let us take a look at an illustration of what I am speaking about. As an sample keyword phrase, let’s use the phrase “vizionweb”, as in our Vizion Interactive Twitter ID, @vizionweb. If you look at the following search result, you will see that there are no “Latest results for vizionweb”.

But, after a particular period of time (which I won’t reveal right now), you will see that a search for “vizionweb” does, in fact, show the “Latest results for vizionweb”.

I have proved this with several other keywords and have been able to use my technique in order to push Google to show the “latest results for”, display the real-time web, for a certain keyword phrase of my choosing.

Why would you want to do this?
Candidly, I can tell you that doing this, forcing Google to show the “latest results for” a certain keyword phrase when Google currently does not show the real-time web for that search phrase, is advantageous. I have currently not tested it specifically, but most likely if the real-time web is displayed in the Google search results for a certain keyword phrase then the Click-Thru Ratio (CTR) is going to be better than normal. It just stands out more, and more individuals are going to click on it, particularly if it was not previously displaying. And if you are able to control the content that shows up in that little real-time internet box, you may be able to get more relevant traffic to your web site.

So how did I do it?
What is the secret sauce? Currently, manipulating the Google search results in this way requires a combination of particular types effective social media accounts from particular social media websites that are linked together properly. I am not going to specifically address which accounts and which social media web sites are participating, but you may be able to figure it out if you take the time to look. Furthermore, disclosing exactly what it takes is not just not in my best interest right now, particularly because clients are paying for things like this.

What I will say, though, is that Google, just like all of the other search engines out there, does have its defects and holes so to speak, and there still are things that a SEO professional like myself can do to drive more traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization: Should You Optimize for the LeapFish Search Engine?

Bill Hartzer — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:56:55 +0000

I have written about the LeapFish search engine earlier, as you might recall. I am a fan of LeapFish, not only because LeapFish is the fastest search engine, but because I believe LeapFish is one search engine that might really have a chance of making it to the big-time. Further affirming this, LeapFish continues to grow its user base.

LeapFish anticipates that there will be more than 20 million searches in 2010 at their search engine. They have lately reported strong early adopter growth in 2009, and they have reached a 10,000 Alexa rank in one year.

So, if you are optimizing your web site for search engines, using the latest search engine optimization tips and search engine optimization best practices, should you optimize your web site for the LeapFish.com search engine? Let’s consider the facts, first:

– LeapFish reported that at its current growth rate and with its new partnerships, the search engine expects more than 20 million searches to be performed in 2010.

– In 2009, LeapFish made essential advancements and innovations to its growing search engine including; real time search, deeper search results, personal homepages, content sharing features and proprietary Twitter and Facebook applications, that have facilitated the growth of the search engine from an Alexa traffic ranking of 150,000 to 10,000 in less than one year.

So, should you pay attention to LeapFish and try to optimize your web site’s web pages for LeapFish.com? Not necessarily. Let’s take a look at the LeapFish.com search engine results pages (SERPS) for a keyword search for “search engine optimization”:

LeapFish is what you would call a “meta” search engine. This search engine currently combines search results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing.com, and other sources, such as WikiPedia and even Google News, to deliver search their results. So, if you are already showing up in the top search results for a keyword on any of those search engines, you will most likely also show up in the search results on LeapFish.com for a keyword search.

While I would not spend a whole lot of search engine optimization man power on optimizing your web site for LeapFish specifically, it is important to keep in mind that you have to be aware of one factor. What’s that factor? You need to show up in the top search results on Yahoo!, Google, or Bing.com in order to show up on LeapFish. This is yet another reason to not only make sure that you show up on the first page of Bing.com, Yahoo!, or Google, but you should try to show up in the top 3 search results there.

Becoming a Spider In a Few Easy Steps

Josh McCoy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:25:57 +0000

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.

As said by Google and many in the search marketing community, 2010 is the year to reduce your page loading time. First things first, you must take note of your web speed and any issues that may be present in this area. We cannot think about on-site factors until we make sure that the bots can get on the site. Several factors can lead to very long page load times including, more than a handful of externally referenced CSS files and JavaScript files, an abundance of images and or multimedia usage on site pages. Shoot for page sizes of 100kb but no more than 200kb. This can get tricky sometimes when you want to give visitors a fair representation of your site. Ways to decrease your page sizes include image compression, and compilation of externally referenced files to name a few. A tool that I am fond of within this topic is the Web Speed Analysis tool. Remember, no one likes excess baggage and your site visitors as well as the crawling search engines will enjoy your site much more with quicker accessibility.

Next up, take a look at your W3C validation. We’ve cleaned up the file sizes and now we have to ensure that the crawling engines can read and assess the information on your site. No one likes rush hour traffic and this is what it is like for a crawling spider that hits stop and go traffic because you did not have clean code. Finding any code validation glitches are done with validation tools such as the Markup Validation Service. This report will tell you all of the code errors you have on a site page which may be a hiccup for a crawling bot. It is also a good practice to utilize a site spidering tool to mimic the crawling of your site much like a search engine spider would. I prefer OptiSpider and enjoy the opportunity to let this tool show me what pages or potential glitches a real bot may encounter when on the site. These tools can also show those forgotten pages on your server that need to be redirected.

In the next step, paint an hour glass on your back, ok, just kidding. We now know that search engines can access the site quickly, understand the code, now we just need to tell them where to go. The biggie here is one of the simplest. Ensure that the robots.txt file does not command search engine to neglect the entire site or major folders/directories/pages of the site. For more information on this I usually point people to the Wikipedia robots exclusion reference. Now that we now where we don’t want them to go we can focus on where they should go. Every site should include and XML sitemap. This markup language gives information on site content to the most popular spider, “googlebot” in its most appealing format, kind of like spider food. Next, we want to make sure that we have a standard HTML sitemap created which links to all site pages or at least the categorical/higher level directories. It is best practice to link this page from the footer of every site page.

We’ve come a long way, fast loading pages, understandable code, and a pathway to where the spiders should travel. As we pretend to be spiders we must also remember our SEO caps and think about how they traverse the site. As we begin to think about the information architecture and how the site is “webbing” out I suggest you think of a handful or two of your most important pages. These pages of subjects will become the main navigation of the site. From these pages additional information will web out. This shows the search engine spiders a content hierarchy and with sound practices such as identical navigation on all site pages (no alternating links in the main nav), and breadcrumb navigation you can drive this point home even more. Another sound tip is to think about keyword relevance. Visit a link within the copy on your homepage. Assuming you passed remedial SEO you are linking internal site content from a keyword-rich text link. If so, click on the link. Does this new, quickly loaded page feature the previous link text’s keyword in the title element, heading and content? If not, then the homepage’s link text is incorrect, the linked page is incorrect, or your keyword usage on the linked page is incorrect. This may take quite some time to complete across the site in regard to link text usage but time well sent. You are painting a picture of relevancy to the crawling search engine and the last thing we want to do is make them stop and scratch their heads. Do spiders have heads? Sorry, I don’t know that one.

While we have spread the process of pretending to be a search engine spider across a few steps, it will in some cases take a fair amount of time to ensure you have a truly search engine friendly site. I have never, I repeat, never come across a site that passes all of these areas with flying colors. Then again, maybe that is a good thing because I like having a job.

Having trouble becoming a spider? Expert SEO consultation is only a click away.

Content Strategy: Divide and Conquer

Josh McCoy — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:57:00 +0000

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 1000 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.

Too often I work on sites with a small amount of copy on site pages. When I begin working with a site with an abundance of site copy I am truly elated, but often I find pages where there is too much copy on site pages. Too much copy on site pages? Yes, that’s right an SEO just said that. The problem here is that the expanse of copy is covering so many keyword topics that it dilutes any one term’s intended keyword focus. Whenever I encounter this problem I go with the old methodology of “divide and conquer”. For example, you have a page which describes in 1000 words the five different industries your company provides services for divided by sub-headings. This is a great opportunity to keep this page as a linking page to five separate pages which each now better focus on “’x’ services for the ‘x’ industry”. Each page’s content is now extremely focused on this topic and will likely better rank for this specific term better than before when it was only a fifth of the page’s keyword focus.

Several site areas can take advantage of this content strategy. An FAQ page with 15 great keyword-rich questions with 15 keyword-rich answers with a moderate amount of copy can easily become 15 new site pages highly targeted for long tail question searches on the web. This strategy rings true for glossary terms on a site. An abundant definition now receives its own page where before it was one of 50 terms on a page, and now, you have 50 highly targeted pages ready to rank for definition searchers. I think by now that you get the picture, “content is king” in SEO, and will be for some time to come. But it doesn’t end at that, the “divide and conquer” method ensures that your content will work for you instead of existing as a nothing more than a bulk of un-focused content.

Search Engine Optimization Tip 36: How to Remove a Page from Google

Bill Hartzer — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:18:09 +0000

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 Google Account. Then, log into Google Webmaster Tools and “add your site”. Then, you’ll need to click on the “verify your site” link that they provide in Google Webmaster Tools. You’ll be asked to either add a file to your website or add a meta tag to your site. This is normal, they’ll need proof that you own the website. Once you’ve added the meta tag or added the file, you can verify the site.

Once it’s officially verified in Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Click on “Site Configuration” then “Crawler Access” and then “Remove URL” as shown below:

2. Then, after you’ve clicked on “Remove URL”, you’ll need to submit a new removal request as shown below:

3. You now have several options, as shown below:

– Individual URLs: web pages, images, or other files Remove outdated or blocked web pages, images, and other documents from appearing in Google search results.
— A directory and all subdirectories on your site Remove all files and subdirectories in a specific directory on your site from appearing in Google search results.
— Your entire site Remove your site from appearing in Google search results.
— Cached copy of a Google search result Remove the cached copy and description of a page that is either outdated or to which you’ve added a noarchive meta tag.

What you choose here will depend on whether you want to remove a page, remove an entire section of the site (like directory), the entire site, or even the cached copy of a Google search result.

Completely Remove the page from your site.
If you want the page to just disappear altogether, then you’ll first need to remove or delete the page from the web server first. Then, use the Google removal tool as I just described above. You’ll need access to your website, of course, to do this. Either FTP access to your website or maybe even access to the content management system that you’re using will be needed.

Password Protect the Page
If you put a user ID and password (require one in order to view the web page) on the web page, then Google’s crawlers will not be able to use that log into the page to crawl it.

Add the No Index Tag to the Page
Google, and other search engines, when they see the noindex tag on a page, generally won’t index the page. It’s preferred that you put the nonindex tag in the header area of the code on the page, but you might try adding it to another part of the page…that should work, too.

Add the Page to the Robots.txt file
Every site should have a robots.txt file, our site has a robots.txt file here. Make sure that you “disallow” crawling/indexing.

Remove all links to the Page
If there are links pointing to a web page, then most likely it will remain in the search engine index. If you have pages on your website that are linking to the page you want to remove, get rid of those links. You can easily go to Yahoo! and search for: link:http://www.vizioninteractive.com/page.html if page.html is the page that you want to find the links pointing to it. There may be other pages on other websites linking to that page, so you’ll want to get those links removed, as well. You may need to ask those other webmasters to stop linking to your page.

As you can see, there are several options for removing a page from the Google search engine. In many cases, you may find that it’s better that you do many of these things in order to get the page removed. Certainly, which ones you do will also depend on whether or not you to keep the page accessible or whether or not you just want the page to “go away”.

Yahoo Paid Inclusion Is No More

Mark Barrera — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:43:34 +0000

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 to Yahoo.

From what we can tell, the program officially ended on January 5th. We saw some discussion on the 4th that people were still seeing paid results in the Yahoo SERPs, and we have confirmed with a client that they were billed up until the 5th of January. This site is no longer having to pay the per click and management fees, but apparently are still getting the benefits of the program.

The site in question was feeding old URLs to Yahoo instead of the URLs that were re-written by us in Q3 of 2009. So more than 8 days after the program was shut down, we still see very similar rankings as well as the old URLs being indexed. However, these URLs ARE being 301 redirected, so we would expect Yahoo to begin to index the new URLs quickly as this is a high volume site.

So we will continue to monitor the traffic, as you should also, because there is no telling what may come from any URLs that were running in the Search Submit Program.

Are Real Time Results Showing for Your Brand?

Mark Barrera — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:12:52 +0000

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 – if you are talked about across the web often enough, you might want to have some Social Media and/or Reputation Management efforts of your own to counter what’s being said.

Vizion’s feelings on this (as well as some peers within the Industry) is that Google (and now Yahoo) will have to find a way to counter spam in this space. Right now, there may be some measures in place by the search engiens preventing someone from spamming the heck out of Twitter and gaining Page 1 real estate for keywords, if only for a few moments, but it is still definitely possible.

Check out a search for SEO (see screenshot) where Vizion President Mark Jackson has easily achieved first page on Google for “SEO”! Is that spam? It certainly could be if desired.

So, I’ll leave you with this…

It’s time to start actively discussing this with your marketing team and put in place systems to monitor your brand for possible issues related to reputation management.

For those of you who want more info on this, here are a few posts that you might want to read:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/11/what-googles-real-time-search-means-to-seo-ppc-reputation-management

http://outspokenmedia.com/seo/google-real-time-spam/ (pretty scary possible abuse that could occur)

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-goes-real-time.html

What is the Average Load Time of Your Website?

Mark Barrera — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:50:32 +0000

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 other external services you may be referencing)
Combining CSS files

You can also use the Page Speed plugin to get an even more in depth look at other areas that you can tweak in order to improve your page load time. Or if you just want to see how long it takes to load each object within your page, you can use the free tool at from Pingdom.

If you want to learn about best practices for site load performance, I suggest starting here.

The page speed project within Google Code has been around longer, but Google seems to really be putting an emphasis on this metric and encouraging webmasters to pay attention as well. Granted, I haven’t seen evidence that they are currently using this as a ranking metric, but it is always possible that this could become one of their more than 200 ranking factors if it hasn’t already. So it is time to start getting familiar with your site’s page speed and make the necessary changes to give you a competitive advantage. Even if they don’t base your rankings on this data, studies do show that faster loading sites lead to a better user experience so it is definitely worth your efforts.