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5 Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3

March 9, 2012 By

Google Panda 3.3 has caught some people off-guard and made a lot of SEO professionals freak out. After perusing SEOMoz’s discussions on the matter — these are the guys who do SEO for a living — it seems no one really knows what Panda 3.3 has done to their sites. I just know a lot of people aren’t happy about it.

There was one particular change, out of 40, that has everyone freaked out: “Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.”

Now, no one knows for sure what it means, but chances are, if you have been relying on a backlinking strategy to increase your search engine ranking, or you’re painfully agonizing over your anchor text’s keywords, that may become a problem for you in a few days or weeks. We’ll have to see.

In Wednesday’s post, I discussed four changes Panda 3.3 is bringing to bloggers.

  • Improvements to freshness: Google can put fresh content in their results more quickly. Newer posts, articles, and pages are found more easily. This means the quicker you are in hopping on a trending topic, the more likely you are to win search.
  • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: They can see when a new topic is spiking in popularity, and makes it easier to identify in realtime. If you search for breaking news, you’ll be able to find it sooner, and start writing about it.
  • Improved local results: They can more easily detect whether search queries and the results are local to you. If you search for “Topeka plumber,” and you’re sitting in Topeka, they’ll make sure you see those results first.
  • Link evaluation: This is the big one that’s freaking SEOs out.

Based on these four important changes, what kinds of changes can/should you make to your blog to take advantage of the Google Panda 3.3 update, as well as past updates over the last 12 months? These are five long-term changes you need to start making right now, and make as a part of your regular blogging habit.

1. Focus on local content whenever possible.

If you own a local business, or you’re a local businessperson, you need to write about your business in your city whenever possible. If you’re a real estate agent, write posts about real estate in your city. “How to Stage Your Minneapolis Home Before a Showing,” “Five Things To Fix Before Your Next Minneapolis Home Inspection.” Be sure to use the name of the city in the body copy too.

Learn the html schema code for your particular data types, and tag the appropriate content. (More on schemas in a minute).

2. Use the rel=author tag in your Author bio, point it at your Google+ profile.

First, make sure you have a Google+ profile. (There’s plenty of stuff out there about why you should be using it, so I won’t go into that here. Just know that it’s especially important to SEO now.)

Next, make sure that every blog post you write, whether it’s your own or a guest post, links back to the Google+ profile, and uses the “rel=author” tag. Here’s an example:

<a href=”http://bit.ly/xyLk6s” rel=”author”>Erik Deckers</a>

Hint: By shortening your Google+ profile link with Bitly, it gives you another analytics measurement point. If you really want to get creative, use campaign codes with each article you publish or guest publish, and you can see what kind of click-through traffic you’re getting from a post to your profile.

3. Use schemas whenever possible.

Schemas are a new web classification system created by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Among other things, this is going to help with local search, as well as personal branding, because you can add your city and your name to your blog posts. This will help Google and the other search engines identify you and your town. You’re going to get a boost in local results and a boost on searches for your name.

There are a few hundred schema types, and you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to learn and use them all. In the meantime, there are plugins to use, and you can also identify a few useful schema tags for yourself to use on a regular basis.

For example, if you’re using the PostalAddress schema, to tell Google “this is my local address,” you would write:

<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>5348 Tacoma Ave.</span>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Indianapolis</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>IN</span>
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>46220</span>

We’re starting to use schemas here at Pro Blog Service, but we’re still learning the best ways to use it, and are limiting ourselves mostly to the SchemaFeed plugin for WordPress. Suffice to say, schema is a giant, complex system, and by using it only for blog posts, it’s like using a race car to drive down the block. Still, we’re just bloggers, so what do you want?

We’ll have more about using schemas for blogs in a future post. For more information in the meantime, visit Schema.org.

4. Fix your grammar and punctuation errors

One of the changes that Panda has wrought, starting back when it was first introduced was, that it even started looking at grammar and punctuation errors. While Google has not said they are evaluating pages for grammar and punctuation quality, we have discussed in the past how they are looking at user-generated indicators — time on site, bounce rate, click-through rate — to determine the quality of a blog or website. If your page is filled with errors, and visitors don’t like reading what you wrote, they won’t stick around for very long, and Google will determine that your page must not be a good one.

The same is true for the quality of your writing. If you’re a good writer, or even a fairly passable writer, you have nothing to worry about. If your writing has all the quality of a 10,000 word conspiracy theory manifesto that was written at 3 am in someone’s parents’ basement, then you’re going to have problems.

5. Don’t worry so much about anchor text and backlinks

Like I’ve said, no one is sure exactly what Google meant by “we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” Some people think it means anchor text is no longer a factor, other people think it means they have devalued backlinks. Google already devalued backlinks when they first released Panda, but others have tested this and found that links still carry some weight.

We do know that Google has been seriously knocking many of these link farms and poor quality sites that did nothing but create thousands upon thousands of backlinks. Any SEO strategies that were built on this tactic are now (or soon will be) on the scrap heap, completely useless.

If you have been knocking yourself out trying to earn backlinks and you agonize over anchor text, you may want to pull back a little on it. Don’t give up on it yet, because until someone knows for sure which indicator has been shut off, it’s still a viable strategy. All we’re saying is don’t give yourself an aneurysm trying to figure out exactly the right keywords and placing all the right backlinks in all the right places.

While these five changes are rather involved, they’re going to be important in the coming months as Google continues to force us to focus more on the quality of our writing and content, and less on the automated SEO strategies that many people have been employing as a way to game the system.

If you’ve already been writing good stuff, and earning your links organically, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re good to go. Keep up the good work.

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    Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Four Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3  •  Keywords : Google Panda, SEO, search engine optimization, blogging, schema,  • 
    Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

    Four Important Changes Google Panda 3.3 is Bringing to Bloggers

    March 7, 2012 By

    Google Panda has been the bane or boon of every serious blogger and SEO professional, provided they can remember the difference between bane and boon (bane = bad; boon = good). While most regular bloggers and web people were unaffected, it was the power SEO users (and spammers) who were greatly affected by the changes. Many of the professionals saw their analytics and search engine rankings plummet after Panda was introduced.

    Several days ago, Google’s newest algorithm update, 3.3 (codename: goddammit so much!), has given us 40 new changes for the month, ranging from improved local search results to improving SafeSearch results to tweaking the Turkish weather results.A panda bear

    Some of the major developments that affect us as bloggers — Turkish weather results notwithstanding — are:

    • Improvements to freshness: We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
    • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
    • Improved local results: We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
    • Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

    (Note: these are just four of the 40. I borrowed their descriptions, and you will have to look through the entire list to find them. The one on Link Evaluation is near the bottom.)

    Some basic implications I can see right off the bat:

    • Freshness = regular updates. Once a week is barely going to be enough to move the needle. You may need to publish 2 – 3 times a week.
    • Spiking topics means if you can stay on top of, and write about, trends the day they happen, that would help you be a big part of the conversation. Read David Meerman Scott’s ebook Newsjacking (affiliate link) for more information on how to that.
    • If you have any kind of local focus, start writing about your city and naming it when you can. Taht tells Google your content is locally specific.
    • Don’t knock yourself out on linking strategies. It’s important, but it’s a whooooole lot less important than it was two years ago.

    This last improvement is what has a lot of people worried. We don’t know what exactly the link analysis was (Google never tells), whether it affects backlinks by shutting them down completely, turns of title tags within links, or whether they’re going to send a flaming bag of dog poo to your house if your anchor text and <H1> title tag don’t match. But you can be sure that a lot of SEO pros will be checking it out.

    Tomorrow we’ll discuss five ways these four changes will (or should) affect your blog.

    Photo credit: jlantzy (Flickr)

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      Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Four Important Changes Google Panda 3.3 is Bringing to Bloggers  •  Keywords : Google Panda, SEO, search engine optimization, blogging, backlinks  • 
      Filed Under: Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

      Use Communication Theory to Boost Search Engine Optimization

      January 24, 2012 By
      Google's Personal Results for Corporate Blogging

      The persuasion theory behind celebrity endorsements is the same theory behind Google’s new social media search.

      It’s called Balance Theory, and when you understand the essence of it, you start to understand why Google is putting so much stock into Google+. And how Google+ can enhance your own search experience.

      Balance Theory and Celebrity Endorsements

      Without getting into all the scientific language we used when I was in graduate school, balance theory basically says this:

      • I like Celebrity A.
      • Celebrity A likes Product B.
      • That means I should like (and buy) Product B as well.

      (Fellow philosophy majors will also recognize this as the 2 premises/1 conclusion logical construction.)

      In other words, I like Eminem. Eminem likes Chrysler. Therefore, I should also like Chrysler. (The danger is that if I don’t like Celebrity A, I’ll purposely not like Product B just to restore that balance. It’s why a lot of sponsors drop celebrities who get into trouble.)

      This is what marketers are counting on when they put a celebrity’s name and face on a product or company. It’s why Eminem is schlepping Chrysler on the Super Bowl. It’s why Reebok is clamoring for contracts with the NFL. It’s why Nike puts famous basketball players on its shoes.

      This is the same basic idea that goes into Google’s personalized “My World” search results. If you’ve used Google lately, you’ve noticed that a lot of your friends are appearing in those results. That’s because Google is relying on Balance Theory to help improve your search results. (Maybe not intentionally, but that’s what’s at play here.)

      Here’s what they’re doing with it:

      • I like Douglas Karr.
      • Douglas Karr has talked about corporate blogging.
      • That means I should check out what Douglas has said about corporate blogging.

      And if I like what Google has shown me, I’ll continue to use Google.

      Google's Personal Results for Corporate Blogging

      These are the PERSONAL results for "corporate blogging." But that is not really Jason Falls in the 2nd picture from the left.

      How Can You Use Balance Theory in Search Engine Optimization?

      If you’re building your personal brand, or you’re doing social media marketing for your company, the best way to use Balance Theory for your search engine optimization is to use Google+, and develop relationships with key decision makers at the companies you want to do business with.

      • Connect with the decision makers at the companies you’re trying to reach.
      • Write blog posts about the key areas and problems they’re dealing with at their company. You can find that out just by paying attention to their conversations on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.
      • Continue to share important articles with them related to those same areas and problems. (This is all part of that “be a valuable resource” stuff we’ve talked about before.)

      Then, as these people search for those particular keywords, your blog posts and your articles will rise to the top of their search engine results page. End result? “Hmm, this person seems to know an awful lot about this topic. I wonder what else they can help me with?”

      However, this is not a reason to connect with everyone you can find on Google+ or to spam the bejeezus out of them with all kinds of articles and blog posts. You do that, and you’ll most certainly be blocked and ignored by everyone you’re trying to reach. Just write about what you want to write about at an acceptable pace, and connect with a reasonable number of people on a level that doesn’t seem creepy, desperate, or spammy.

      With a little effort and just by following some common sense, you can use the Balance Theory — something usually only used by marketers with millions to spend — to start winning higher search engine rankings on your chosen keywords.

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        Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Use Communication Theory to Boost Search Engine Optimization  •  Keywords : balance theory, Google, Google+, corporate blogging, communication, search engine optimization  • 
        Filed Under: Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Marketing, Research Desk, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

        Search and Social: A Partnership for the Ages

        October 19, 2011 By
        Robbie Williams

        Robbie Williams is an SEO Consultant at Slingshot, and wrote this guest post in exchange for a guest post I wrote for their website.

        Robbie Williams

        Robbie Williams. I love his version of 'Somewhere Beyond the Sea' from Finding Nemo

        What grabs a social media guru’s attention faster than mentioning the term “social media guru?”

        The answer: Providing data-driven ROI statistics for their industry and, better yet, doing it in conjunction with SEO.

        Worked, didn’t it?

        Now that I have your attention, I want you to dabble in my thoughts for a moment.

        I’ve often pondered how a social media practitioner would address the topic of “Search and Social” as they are the two dominating powers on the Internet. Now I know. They turn to the SEO professionals to address it.

        As we all know, the Google algo is one of mankind’s best kept secrets. So I’m not going to come out and tell you that I know anything in my industry to be a 100% fact — aside from what Google tells us directly (which often keeps me up at night). However, I can back up my opinions and observations with the experience of day-in, day-out SEO practice, where dealing with rankings for an array of keywords is my entire world.

        Within this digital domain, I’ve had first-hand experience with the algorithm and how it responds to certain human signals; e.g., social signals. However, (drumroll please….) social signals alone have yet to produce an identifiable, data-proven effect on rankings in the majority of SERPs. So yes, given the access to the data streams of Twitter and Facebook, there has been a trace amount of evidence where social media has had a noticeable effect on rankings in certain keyword search queries.

        Now, back to proving ROI for social media with search. We all know how powerful social media has become and it’s not unreasonable to think that Google doesn’t realize it too. As a matter of fact, it has attempted to gain access to the Twitter and Facebook “fire hoses” (the full feed of information behind their massive firewalls) but to no avail … yet. As soon as this happens, you better believe that social media is going to have a significant effect on rankings, and it’s only a matter of time.

        ***Disclaimer: As an SEO professional, I am required to mention the discussion Correlation vs. Causation when discussing this topic. So here it goes: a page/brand/keyword will typically have social cues surrounding it because it’s a good page/brand/keyword and it will rank accordingly because of this. The reverse is not true, a page/brand/keyword will not rank only because it has social. In the world of SEO, it’s never that simple.***

        Imagine a graph illustrating the respective positions of traffic-driving, conversion-producing keywords in individual SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Now overlay it with another graph of social media activity that’s been strategically produced around the same SEO keywords.

        What do you see? Positive correlation (not necessarily causation). Additionally, imagine a Google Analytics graph showing increased conversion, increased on-page time and click-through rates, as well as a decrease in user bounce rates for those same keywords and their associated pages, overlaid on top. (I’m drooling at the thought of this, I don’t know about you…)

        Boom. professional search engine optimization company. Aside from work, he loves being outside; running, mountain biking, adventure racing, etc. Robbie’s current motto: If you keep life full, you never have time to worry about tomorrow.

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          Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : Search and Social: A Partnership for the Ages  •  Keywords : social media, search engine optimization, websites, SEOmoz, Slingshot SEO, Robbie Williams  • 
          Filed Under: Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Experts, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

          Trademarks and Copyrights Will Screw Up Your SEO

          September 20, 2011 By

          A lot of companies are using copyright and trademark symbols in their blog posts, not realizing the effect those symbols have on their SEO.

          If you use the ©, ™, or ® symbols in your blog post titles, or even the first 500 characters of your blog posts, that’s what Google will think your site is about. Those characters become part of the word, like Ke$ha or “Big $aving$,” and are harder to find without them.

          If you have the phrase Super-Mega-Global© Electric Socks™ in your website or blog post title, Google will think the actual keywords are “Super-Mega-Global©” and “Electric Socks™.”

          Honestly, when’s the last time you ever did a search for ™?

          Never. And neither does anyone else.

          I realize you want to protect your trademark and brand, but you’re not doing yourself any favors by using the symbols in your posts or pages. Your primary goal for a website/blog is to be found by the search engines, not to satisfy the ticky-tack tics of the company lawyer.

          There is plenty of room at the bottom of the blog posts, especially if you stick in a paragraph of boilerplate language at the bottom of the post.

          Just make sure you use the <small> tags on them.

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            Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : Trademarks and Copyrights Will Screw Up Your SEO  •  Keywords : SEO, copywriting, copyright symbol, trademark symbol  • 
            Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Corporate Blogging, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

            Social Networking to Play a Bigger Role in Google Search

            July 9, 2011 By

            I recently heard on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast that Google is starting to pay a lot more attention to who you’re connected to socially, and letting that influence your search results.

            For example, if you’re connected to me, and I write frequently about ghost blogging, and you do a search for “ghost blogging” on Google, results to my page will show up higher on your search results than if you’re not connected to me.

            As a marketer, if you want to promote your particular product or service, it makes sense to start connecting to people who are likely to look for that product/service on Google. Not so you can spam them — we are not, nor will we ever, advocate spamming — but so you can continue to provide them with valuable information. Then, if and when they ever have a question about your particular niche, your solution will be more likely to show up on their search results page.

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              Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Social Networking to Play a Bigger Role in Google Search - Professional Blog Service  •  Keywords : blogging, Google, Marketing Over Coffee, search engine optimization, SEO, social media  • 
              Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

              Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System

              February 2, 2011 By

              I’ve heard the question so many times, I want to shout at something: “Isn’t SEO just gaming the system?”

              Andrew Hanelly wrote a great post for SocialMediaExplorer.com about why search engine optimization would be important even if the search engines stopped running.

              And he makes a solid argument for why we should practice SEO techniques, even if we’re not actually trying to win search.

              But I want to respond to the people who think SEO is somehow distasteful, or even cheating. Those critics and nay-sayers who think SEO is “just gaming the system.”

              No, it’s not. It’s participating in the system that’s already in place.

              First of all, this is the system. You go to a search engine, you search for something like “Italian wedding soup recipes” or “how to repair a bicycle tire.” The search engine tries to deliver what you want, because it knows what it should deliver. It looks for certain clues, like the title of a website — “1,001 Italian Wedding Soup Recipes” — or keywords in the body copy, and gives you the results that it thinks will most effectively meet your requirements. That’s the system. If you want to succeed in the system, you have to do the things that tell the search engines you can provide exactly what the users are looking for.

              Second, the search engines can tell if a site isn’t very useful. It gets rid of sites that are pretty much useless. So even if someone wanted to game the system, if they’re not providing useful or valuable content, the site will soon be dropped when no one visits it, so the system weeds out anyone who isn’t giving users the things they’re looking for.

              Third, using black hat SEO tricks is gaming the system. It’s cheating, because it uses tricks that have been banned by the search engines. Using tiny text or invisible text to cram keywords onto a single page is cheating. Building link farms with thousands of links on a single page is cheating. People who do that are immediately banished from the index, and will never show up on the search engine results. So the system eliminates cheaters and Internet ne’er-do-wells.

              Search engine optimization is just the way Internet marketing is done. It’s no more gaming the system than buying a targeted direct mail list, or translating a website into Spanish to reach Hispanic customers. There’s nothing wrong with it, and people are going to continue to use it, because it works.

              Even the people who think “gaming the system” is somehow wrong use their own life optimization techniques without batting an eye.

              Would you turn in a half-finished crappy resume, because writing a good resume is “gaming the system?” Would you submit an RFP that didn’t meet all the requirements, because turning in what you’re asked for is “gaming the system?” Is practicing for a sales presentation gaming the system?

              Of course not. So why is search engine optimization — a common business practice — somehow gaming the system, when that’s the only system that’s available?

              Until you find a viable alternative, this is the only system we’ve got.

              Photo credit: VizzzualDotCom (Flickr)

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                Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System  •  Keywords : blogging, Marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search merketing, SEO  • 
                Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tools Tagged With: , , , , ,

                Five Advanced Techniques to Help Your Blog

                January 3, 2011 By

                This is not one of those posts that restates the same damn advice you get in all the other “Grow Your Blog” posts.

                I will not tell you to “write good content” or “promote your blog to your social networks.” That advice is so worn out, even the Amish roll their eyes whenever they hear it.

                So I won’t share lessons from the Mr. Obvious School of Blogging. But these are five advanced techniques you should consider. They will either grow your readership, improve your search rankings, or both.

                1) Find a deep niche. Not just a semi-vague niche — like “Italian cooking” — but a deeper one, like “gluten free Italian cooking.” While “food” is a hugely generic topic, and “cooking” is a little more specific, even a style of cooking is still too broad. But if you can get to one specific detail, you’ll dominate that market. While it may be a long-tail search, keep in mind that there are still thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people looking for that niche.

                2) Create backlinks from other sites. Any search engine optimization specialist is going to tell you that backlinks are crucial to improving your search engine rankings. Yes, onsite optimization is important — keywords in the title, anchor text, etc. — but backlinks are the best way to optimize your site, because you’re telling the search engines your site is very popular.

                The easiest way to generate backlinks are going to be via comments, but be aware that this is not a powerful way to create them. Comment links don’t have as much juice as a link on another blog. Write guest posts on other blogs, get people to reference you in other posts, and participate in forum discussions related to your blog’s topic.

                If you can get your links on a site with a high pagerank (use WebRank Toolbar or other pagerank monitoring tools), all the better. Also, getting a link on a .gov website will carry more weight than a .info or .biz site, especially if that .info/.biz site is only a year old. (Google gives more weight to domains that are more than a year old, and have been purchased for more than a year.)

                3) Create a secondary blog to create keyword-rich backlogs. The best way to control your backlinks is to create a second blog on a completely different platform or server, and point it back at your original site. Set something up on Posterous, WordPress.com, or even Blogger, and create content that is about the very same thing your site is about.

                It’s important that you put new, original content on this second site. Don’t just run an old blog post through an article spinner, or make a few edits to a post. You need to write completely new blog posts. They don’t have to be terribly long: 250 words or so. But they should be about the topic of your primary blog, and should link back to that primary blog. (Be sure to link only a particular keyword or phrase. Don’t link to an entire sentence or extra unrelated words.)

                4) Use article marketing. Article sites like Ezine.com and others are a great way to repurpose some of your writing, and build backlinks. The premise is the same as writing for a secondary blog and pointing it to your primary blog. However, unlike a second blog, you don’t have to put as much work into an article. Take an old post, rewrite and rearrange it, and then submit it to some article sites, all which will point back to your primary blog.

                5) Submit to social sharing sites. The biggest spike in my blog’s traffic in the last year came when a post I wrote for my humor blog, “Understanding 7 Different Kinds of Humor,” hit the front page of StumbleUpon.com, and got 700 visits in 2 days. In fact, nearly 40% of my regular traffic comes from my StumbleUpon submissions, so anytime I write a new humor post, I always submit it to StumbleUpon.

                This does two things for me: first, it builds a backlink from a highly-popular website (Pagerank of 8), and second, it introduces my site to a whole new group of readers. Many readers visit once and never return, but I have also gained a lot of regular readers who read my new posts or subscribe to my RSS feed.

                Other sites like Digg, Delicious, and even Bloggers.com can all build backlinks and gain new readers as well.

                While there are other advanced blogging techniques, these are the five I use over and over, whether it’s on my own blog or on our client blogs.

                My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

                Photo credit: Svenwerk (Flickr)

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                  Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Five Advanced Techniques to Help Your Blog  •  Keywords : backlinks, blog, blog seo, blog writing, searcg engine optimization, SEO  • 
                  Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tools Tagged With: , , , , ,

                  Why do Google, Yahoo, and Bing give me different results?

                  December 1, 2010 By

                  Search engine results can be rather misleading, especially to online marketing newbies. There is no one search engine central clearinghouse. They don’t all share results. What ranks high in one search engine may be lower on the list for another.

                  We were asked about search engine results several weeks ago by a potential client. He thought his company’s website was doing great because they were 4th on Bing, but couldn’t understand why he was on page 7 on Google.

                  So what are the major search engines for online marketers? Should you focus all your search engine optimization attention on Google, or split your efforts up equally among all the search engines you can find? And why do the Big Three — Google, Bing, and Yahoo — all give different results?

                  To start with, the Big Three is now the Big Two. That’s because Bing has been providing their results to Yahoo, which means there are really only two sets of results that people are finding. But Yahoo and Bing each have their own identity and own market share. More on that later.

                  Do a quick search on any topic, and you’ll see some markedly different results between Google and Yahoo/Bing.

                  Google search results for Erik Deckers

                  Google search results for Erik Deckers

                  Bing search results for Erik Deckers

                  Bing search results for Erik Deckers

                  The results from the two search engines — Google and Yahoo/Bing — shows some serious differences.

                  • In the 7 results on Bing, only 4 out of the 7 are me. The other 3 are guys from Belgium and Holland. On Google, those guys don’t show up until about page 6.
                  • Google shows my blog, my work blog, and my Twitter account. My results on Bing are 2 listings on LinkedIn (the same LinkedIn account, mind you), and 2 listings from an old website (the same website) I haven’t updated in nearly 4 years.
                  • Google provides the most up-to-date and most accurate results, Yahoo/Bing is giving out of date information and repeating itself.
                  • Google is more likely to satisfy my insatiable craving to be the center of attention; Yahoo/Bing has failed me.

                  So where should you focus your search engine attention?

                  Google. Far and away, Google.

                  Yes, Bing is picking up in popularity. Yes, Yahoo and Bing have teamed up to reach two separate audiences, but when you look at the total market share of the Big Three Two, that’s like Vermont and New Hampshire joining forces and saying they can beat the crap out of the Midwest.

                  According to a Hitwise, Google owns over 70% of the entire search market. Of course, there’s a significant change between the end of November and the end of August.

                  2010GoogleYahoo!Bing

                  2010-11-27 70.10% 15.17% 10.10%
                  2010-08-28 71.59% 14.28% 9.87%

                  Does that mean you should forsake Yahoo/Bing now and forever? No, of course not; that’s silly. But until they become a bigger player in the search engine market, focus most of your attention on Google.

                  Of course, now that Bing has teamed up with Facebook, that is going to be more of a certainty, not a pipe dream. The change from August to November is fairly significant, so Internet marketers may want to keep an eye on Yahoo/Bing’s market share and adjust their search engine optimization efforts accordingly.

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                    Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Why do Google, Yahoo, and Bing give me different results?  •  Keywords : Bing, facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Yahoo  • 
                    Filed Under: Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

                    How Search Engine Marketing Helps Your Business (A Primer)

                    October 25, 2010 By
                    Google search results for Erik Deckers

                    Do you know how search engines can help your business?

                    Are you hearing new terms like “search engine marketing” and “online marketing,” and wondering if it’s even important? Or do you think that people in your industry aren’t using search engines to find your company, because most of your sales come from offline results?

                    If you think so, you’d be wrong. Just because you aren’t getting sales through your website doesn’t mean no one in your industry is getting sales that way. It just means you’re missing an important revenue stream.

                    How big is search engine marketing?

                    According to a February 2010 SearchEngineLand blog post, Google reports 34,000 searches per second. That works out to 2 million searches per minute, 121 million per hour, 3 billion per day, 88 billion per month.

                    So if you think that “no one searches for us,” or “our customers don’t Google us,” how do you know? What stats have you looked at to tell you that no one is Googling your site? And if they’re not Googling your site, is it because no one in your industry uses the Internet, or is it because your website lives on page 6 and no one goes that deep into the results? (Hint: It’s the latter.)

                    To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk,

                    “If you’re not using (Google) because you’re in the camp that thinks it’s stupid, you’re going to lose. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid. It’s free communication, and there’s a crapload of users.”

                    While Gary was originally talking about Twitter, the idea is still the same. People use Google, and they’re looking for you. The problem is you’ll never know it, because they’re finding your competitors instead.

                    Compete.com traffic measurement shows need for search engine marketing

                    Want to see? Go to Compete.com and type in your URL and the URLs of your biggest competitors and see where you rank on web traffic. If you haven’t done much on search engines, you’ll see your competitors pulling down bigger traffic results than you.

                    Those traffic results equal sales. Even if your competition is only closing 1% of their web traffic, that’s a lot more than you’re closing.

                    But my site appears higher on Bing than it does Google. Shouldn’t I focus on Bing?

                    While Bing may be great in some things, and they have cool TV ads, Google is still by far the dominant search engine. They control 71.59% of the total search engine market. Yahoo and Bing own 14.28% and 9.87% respectively.

                    Bing is even starting to partner with Facebook, and will provide some of their search results over there. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to crush Google. It only means they’re going to eat away at some of their market share.

                    For marketers, this means you should focus most of your attention on Google right now, because that’s where most of your traffic is going to come from. If you can win some Yahoo/Bing searches, that’s great, but Google is where you should be focusing your attention at the moment. (And if Yahoo/Bing/Facebook ever gives Google a run for their money, you’ll be able to optimize for Bing as well, when the time comes.)

                    So what does improved SEO mean to me?

                    Here are a few reasons you need to focus on search engine marketing as part of your marketing efforts:

                    • Increased web traffic means increased sales. The more qualified traffic you bring in, the more money you can make.
                    • Search engine traffic is easier and more cost effective than traditional marketing. You don’t have to spend as much money on Internet marketing as you do on traditional marketing. The average month’s Internet marketing spend can be a fraction of your marketing spend on radio & TV spots, billboards, print advertising, or trade shows. A basic Internet marketing campaign can cost as little as $2,000 per month. (When I was in the poultry business, our minimum budget for a trade show was $2,000 for a 10×10 booth at a three day event in another state.)
                    • You can track Internet marketing through packages like Google Analytics. You can’t track the effectiveness of billboards, broadcast or print ads. Sure, you can count how many calls you get, but do you know how many people saw or heard those ads? What’s the actual percentage of people who called you? With Internet marketing, you can see the who, what, when, where, and how of each customer. You can see which strategies succeed, and focus more energy on those, while dumping those that don’t perform.

                    What is a search engine marketing campaign worth to you?

                    Let’s say your biggest competitor gets 5,000 leads per month on their website, and they do a rather poor job of search engine optimization themselves, which means they’re ripe for the picking.

                    And let’s say some basic SEO and blogging could siphon off just 10% of their traffic. That’s 500 more leads to your site per month.

                    And let’s say 10% of those leads — 50 people — are truly qualified. They’re not gawkers, not people out for a stroll, but are actual potential buyers and decision makers. You set up a process where people who match your ideal customer are funneled into your system, and the non-qualified customers are funneled out. So your web traffic is up, and you’re getting 50 new actual, solid leads per month.

                    You’re good at your job, so you close 10% — just 5 people — of those qualified leads. Remember, if they’re qualified, it means they’re very interested in what you sell. You don’t have to convince them to buy what you’ve got, you just have to show them you’re the best.

                    Let’s say you’ve got a high dollar item, and make $10,000 on a single sale. Closing five of those sales just added $50,000 to your bottom line.

                    A single sale would have paid for the $2,000 per month investment you just made, and netted you $8,000. But we now have an ROI of 2,500%, which not only paid for the $2,000 per month fee, but got you enough money to hire someone to handle the new workload (and you just earned it in a single month).Line graph

                    Admittedly, these are some hypothetical numbers, but you see my point. If you want to get an idea of what search engine marketing can do for you, do some basic research:

                    1. Find out who the leader in your industry is.
                    2. Use Compete.com to figure out your web traffic versus theirs.
                    3. Then figure out how it would improve your bottom line if you could take just 10% of their traffic, and close 10% of those new leads.

                    Once you know this, don’t worry about how much an Internet marketing program will cost. Worry about how much it’s costing you by not doing it. If you were our hypothetical business, the old school methods are costing you $50,000 per month.

                    And one day, they’re going to cost you a lot more, because one day, your competitor is going to figure out how to do this stuff for themselves.

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                      Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : How Search Engine Marketing Helps Your Business (A Primer)  •  Keywords : Bing, Google, search engine optimization, search engines, SEO, Yahoo  • 
                      Filed Under: Lead Generation, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: , , , , ,
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