- Search Engine Journal: 5 Quick Ways To Optimize For Local Search
- Natural Search Blog: Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics
- iMedia Connection: 10 Winning Ways to Optimize Local Search
- SE Round Table: Local Search Marketing Tactics
- Small Business SEM: 10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search Algorithm
- SearchEngineWatch: 8 Ways to Improve Your Local Search Results
- The Karcher Group: Optimizing Local Search
- Improve the Web: Optimize your site for local search engine traffic
- Local SEO Guide: http://www.localseoguide.com/
- WebProNews: SES: Six Tips For Local Search Marketing
- Single Grain: Optimizing for Local Search
- ClickZ: A New Form of Local Search Optimization, Part 1
- SE Journal: Local Search Optimization Think Globally, Act Locally
- Search Engine Land: Using Images For Local SEO
- Search Engine Guide: “Local Search Engine Optimization” Yesterday and Today
- Search Engine Lane: Advanced Local Search Optimization Tips
- Info Mean: Local Search Optimization – A Guide to Getting Started
- Search Anyway: Using Yellow Pages for Local Search SEO
- SEO Design Solutions: Local Search Engine Optimization Tips to Improve Organic Rankings
- Local Internet Marketing – Local Search
- Wolf Howl: Local Search Tips, Tricks & Secrets
- Search Engine Guide: Boost Your Local Search Presence
- Bruce Clay: Search Engine Relationship Chart – Local Edition
- Sugar Rae: Before You Launch that Local Small Business Website
- Peter Krasilovsky: Local Onliner
- Expose Local: http://www.exposelocal.com/
Category Archives: Uncategorized
local Search Engine Optimization Tips
Quality Is A Google Ranking Factor But What Is It?
There is a deep discussion going on at WebmasterWorld on how Google defines quality and if quality is a ranking factor.
(1) There is no doubt in my mind that “quality” is a ranking factor in Google. What quality is exactly isn’t always easy to define. But with Panda and Google’s other updates, quality is a key factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.
(2) How do we define “quality”? That is a good question. It is not as easy as looking at AdWords “Quality Score” algorithm, it is much more complex. Google probably has dozens of different metrics for various elements of quality. Some of those metrics include link quality, content quality, page layout quality, and so much more.
Of course, to get a glimpse of what Google is looking for in terms of quality, just go back to Amit’s high quality post on the Google blog in regards to helping Panda sufferers.
The WebmasterWorld thread is trying to break down each element of quality but is that effort worth while?
Too Much SEO? Google’s Working On An “Over-Optimization” Penalty For That
Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.”
Matt Cutts said the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks. The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Cutts said. To give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that have content that is not as great but do a better job with SEO.
Here is the audio clip, you can find Matt saying this about 1/3rd the way in. I have tried to transcribe it below but note, it is not 100% word for word.
What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.
Top 10 PPC Search Engines
Top 10 PPC Search Engines
1. https://adwords.google.com
2. http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/
3. http://www.miva.com
4. http://7search.com/advertise/
5. http://www.abcsearch.com/
6. https://adcenter.microsoft.com/
7. http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/findology/
8. http://www.marchex.com/adhere-ppc/affiliates.html
9. http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/searchfeed/
Top Google Searches of 2011
And my personal favorite is the only tech personality to make it to the top 10.. Steve Jobs, who was one of the pillars of computing and internet age and will be missed by India’s netizens.
| Fastest rising searches | Fastest rising people | Top Searches |
| Facebook IBPS Google+ World Cup 2011 Bodyguard Ra.one Anna Hazare IPL 2011 Poonam Pandey Ready |
Anna Hazare Poonam Pandey Steve Jobs Anushka Sharma Salman Khan Justin Bieber Kajal Agarwal Katrina Kaif Vijay Mallya Aishwarya Rai |
Facebook YouTube Gmail Yahoomail Yahoo IRCTC Rediffmail Indian Railways way2sms |
| Top Searched People | Top Searched Movies | Top Searched events/news |
| Katrina Kaif Anna Hazare Salman Khan Poonam Pandey Justin Bieber Aishwarya Rai Sachin Tendulkar Kareena Kapoor Steve Jobs Priyanka Chopra |
Bodyguard Ra One Harry Potter Delhi Belly Singham Ready Mankatha Transformers 3 Dookudu Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara |
IPL World Cup 2011 CBSE result 2011 Diwali Lokpal bill Japan earthquake Aadhar card Osama Bin Laden Pakistan F1 |
Title Tags – Is 70 Characters the Best Practice? – Whiteboard Friday
Bad title tag joke. For years, we’ve been telling people, the length of your title tag should be 70 characters or less. That this is best practices. But what does this really mean? Is it absolutely true? What happens if your title tags are longer than 70 characters?For example, the title of today’s post within the meta description is 77 characters. Not this title, but the actual HTML title tag, if you look at the source code, you’ll find that the title tag of today’s Whiteboard Friday is 77 characters. We’re actually over the 70 character title tag limit. Is that bad? Are we going to go to SEO hell for that? What does that mean?
Well, recently people have been doing some experiments to see just how many characters Google will index within a title tag. For years, we thought it was 70s. It’s fluctuated. But recent experiments have shown that Google will index anywhere between 150, one person even showed that they will index over 1,000 characters, and I will link to these experiments in the post. But does this mean that you should use all of those characters to your advantage? Can you use them to your advantage? Well, I got really curious about this. So I decided to perform some experiments here on the SEOmoz blog with super long title tags. We’re talking extreme title tags, like 200 characters long, 250 characters long, just blew them out of the water just to see what would happen.
Experiments
On the first experiment, I took 10 posts that did not get a lot of traffic, but they were pretty consistent traffic from week to week. I kept the old title tags and I just extended them with relevant keywords up to about 250 characters long. The results blew me away. In that first experiment, my traffic, over about a 12-week period, rose 136%. You can see, I’ll try to include a screen shot in the comments below of the Google Analytics. It exploded. I got really excited. So, I tried a second experiment. (Correction, the experiment took place over a 6 week period, not 12 like I stated in the video.)
The second experiment I tried with existing successful pages, pages that were already getting a fairly high volume of traffic, that were getting a consistent level of traffic every week. On that experiment, over about the same 12-week period, traffic rose 8%. Cool, but overall site traffic rose 9%. So it was actually 1% below the site average.
For a third experiment, I tried again on a completely different site, a personal site. I changed a few pages, title tags. Traffic actually went down over a 12-week period 11%. On that site overall site traffic went down 15%.
So, in one of these experiments, the long title tag seemed to work really well. In the other two, it just seemed to be a wash. Why did this happen, but not here? I am going to get to that in a minute.
Title Tags less than 70 Characters
Now, what are the arguments for short title tags? The best practices that you always hear about, keep it less than 70 characters. There are reasons why this is best practices and why we recommend it time and time again.
The first reason is that Google will only display the first 70 characters, in general, in their SERPs. After that, they’re truncated. Users aren’t going to see them. So, if you are writing title tags longer than 70 characters, you’re basically writing it for the search engines, and time and time again we’ve found that if you’re doing something specifically for search engines and not for users, there is probably not a lot of search engine value in it. There might be some, but probably not much.
The second reason is our Correlated Ranking Factors, a survey that we perform every couple of years. Our highest on page correlation value for keyword specific usage was if it is found, if the keyword is found in the first word of the title tag, that was a 0.09 positive correlation. It is not a huge correlation, but it was our largest on page keyword factor. Year after year after year when we perform these correlation studies, we see a direct correlation between the position of the keyword in the title tag and how important it is in the query. So, the closer the keyword is to the beginning of the title tag, the more likely it is to be important in the query. You’re going to see this time and time again. It’s very consistent. Hundreds of webmasters know this from personal experience. You want your keywords at the beginning of the title tag to rank for those keywords. The further out you do it, at 220 characters, those keywords aren’t going to count for very much.
Now the third reason is kind of new in today’s world, and that is the rise of social media. Twitter limits characters to 140 characters. So, if you have a 220 character title tag and you’re trying to share it on Twitter through automatic tweets or Facebook or whatever, they look spammy, they’re not shareable, people don’t want to share them. Shorter title tags, snappy, work really well.
For all these reasons, and for most of the time we found that longer title tags don’t help you, we say that less than 70 is best practices. Now, people get confused by when we say best practices what that means. Does it mean an absolute rule? No. It just means best practices works most of the time. It’s going to be your best bet. All other things being equal, it’s going to be what you want to implement, what you want to teach people to do, and generally how you want to practice.
So, what happened here? Why did this experiment rise 136%? Well, if you remember, these were low volume pages, pages that weren’t getting a lot of traffic anyway. The reason it rose, we suspect, is because those title tags were poorly optimized in the first place. They didn’t match the content. When we added a few keywords to the end, Google interpreted that as, hey, these match a little bit better to the content, and that’s why it rose. It was a fluke. If we would have wrote the title tags better in the first place, we could have seen this traffic all along.
So, with this in mind, I have some suggestions for your future title tag use, and best practices is going to continue to be less than 70 characters.
Nine factors that affect your website usability and SEO
Optimizing web pages for search engines does not mean creating special pages for search engines. Optimizing web pages for search engines is often the same as optimizing web pages for web surfers.
If you do it correctly, your website will be attractive to both web surfers and search engine spiders. The following list shows nine factors that can improve the usability of your website as well as your search engine rankings.
1. You should have fast loading web pages
Usability: Web surfers don’t want to wait for web pages.
Search engine optimization: Search engines can index your web pages more easily.
2. Your web pages should be easy to read
Usability: It’s easier for web surfers to read your web pages.
Search engine optimization: Near-white text on a white background and tiny text is considered spam by most search engines.
3. The contents of your web pages should be clearly arranged
Usability: Clear headings, paragraphs and bullet lists make your web pages easier to read.
Search engine optimization: Clear headings, paragraphs and bullet lists make it easier for search engines to find the topic of your web pages.
4. Your web page images should use the IMG ALT attribute
Usability: Web surfers with images turned off and visually impaired visitors will be able to see the content of your images.
Search engine optimization: Search engines cannot index the content of your images but they can index the content of the IMG ALT attribute.
5. You should use custom 404 not found error pages
Usability: If your 404 not found page contains links to other pages of your website or a search form then people might remain on your website.
Search engine optimization: Proper 404 error pages make sure that search engines index the right pages of your website.
6. Your website should be easy to navigate
Usability: Clear and concise navigation links that are easy to find help your website visitors to find content on your site.
Search engine optimization: Clear and concise navigation links that contain your keywords make it easy for search engines to index all of your web pages.
7. Important content is above the fold
Usability: Web surfers with small computer screens can quickly see what your web page is about.
Search engine optimization: The sooner your important content appears in the HTML code of your web pages, the more likely it is that it will be indexed by search engines.
8. Your web page titles are explanatory
Usability: If web surfers bookmark your web pages, a clear web page title will help them to find it again.
Search engine optimization: The web page title is one of the most important SEO elements. It should contain your keywords and it should look attractive so that web surfers click on it when they see your web page title in the search results.
9. The URLs of your web pages are meaningful and self-explanatory
Usability: It’s much easier to remember a web page like www.example.com/support than a web page like www.example.com/123123-werwc.php?2342234.
Search engine optimization: If your URLs contain your keywords, this can have a positive effect on your search engine rankings. Dynamic URLs with many variables can lead to problems with
How Google makes improvements to its search algorithm
Here’s a short video we put together that gives you a sense of the work that goes into the changes and improvements we make to Google almost every day. While an improvement to the algorithm may start with a creative idea, it always goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing.
