With Bing replacing Yahoo search results, there will be only 2 main players. Percentages base on comScore's July 2010 stats.

With Microsoft’s recent purchase of Yahoo! search, you’ll now find all your searches in Yahoo! matching exactly those in Bing.

So, if your website ranked 1st in Yahoo! and 10th in Bing for “best burritos in Fort Collins” before the purchase, you’ll now find yourself ranking 10th in both search engine results.

In one sense, this makes optimizing your site a little easier, reducing the number of search companies you’re trying to impress with your content.

In another sense it doesn’t change anything. The steps for you to get good rankings for the words people are using to find you are still the same:

• Create really good content
• Do what you can on the page and in the html code to make it clear what your content is about
• Get tons of quality links to your pages

And yet, now you have to make sure you’re really on your game for Bing. Before the merger, Bing received about 10% of US searches. Now they will be receiving about 30%.

That’s right–one-third of US Internet searches will show search results from Bing. So, be sure you’re up-to-snuff on your Bing placements.

comScore’s July 2010 stats, the closest stats prior to the merger, show the search traffic rankings:

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The massively popular social media micro-blogging website Twitter (http://twitter.com) began another attempt at making money yesterday, starting a feed called @earlybird.

“[@earlybird]…are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account.”

The idea is that advertisers will pay Twitter to put out an update that links to their product. Twitter states that most of the advertisers will be large international brands at first, advertising nation-wide (USA) deals. They plan to look into area-specific deals down the road.

Twitter also claims that their focus is on picking deals that users find valuable and interesting.

Will it work?

The deals that Twitter selects are going to be crucial to this model’s success. They need to pick some extremely buzz-worthy deals from the start and then keep them coming. If they put out a bunch of deals like $2 off coupons for dish detergent, I think the concept will fail.

I’m also not confident that sales resulting from the @earlybird tweets will be enough for big multinationals to keep coming back to buy more advertising. However, I could see this being a great way for mid- to big-size businesses to clear out leftover inventory or create an outrageous loss leader promotion to create publicity.

My gut says that Twitter will get a couple hundred thousand followers to the account quickly–mostly people who love Twitter, people interested in the medium wanting to see how/if it will work, and people genuinely interested in the deals. A few folks will actually buy.

Social Media using old profit models

This will be similar to television advertising: a national audience, no personalization, no localization, and only those tuning in will see the offer. The one difference is that friends have an easy way to tell you about an offer they saw that you might like by retweeting it (forwarding it on to their followers).

Part of me thinks this is akin to when banner ads first swept the Internet. Sites displaying advertising banners on their pages initially charged advertisers hundreds of dollars per thousand views (or sometimes clicks) of their ad, following the standard print fee model for newspapers and magazines. Over time advertisers and websites both discovered that banner ads didn’t work anything like print in terms of return on investment. Now you buy banner ad space priced for less than a penny per thousand views.

What’s this mean for your social media?

Unless you’re a large multi-national, this doesn’t mean much to you for now. I recommend following the development to see how well the model works and understand how it works, because if it does you’ll start seeing it all over the place.

For more information direct from the source, check out Twitter’s description at http://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/111-features/articles/208505-what-is-earlybird.

SEO Headline Example

In search engine optimization, headlines are one of the most important factors in letting search engines know what your page is about.

Remember, your goal is to get the highest ranking possible for the specific search phrases you’re targeting. The search phrases you’re targeting should be those keyword phrases that you believe (or have research to support) your customers are using to find your type of products or services.

On this blog post you’ll notice that my headlines are focused on letting search engines know this page is about search engine optimization and headlines.

What is a Headline?

A headline in terms of search engines is any text that is defined as a headline in the source code (like <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc.). A headline can also be text that is emphasized by being made larger, italicized <em> or <i>, or bold <b> or <strong>.

When viewed in a browser, headlines can practically look like anything–from small and normal-looking to huge and headline-looking.

On this blog some of the headlines appear in a browser like this:

h2

h3

h4

h5

How To Write Great SEO Headlines

The best practice for letting search engines know what your page is about, is to:

• use the heading tags in descending order of importance with <h1> being degrees more important than <h6>
• only use one h1 tag per page
• use the keywords in your headline that you’ve decided are the most important for you to rank well for that fit with the content on your page. For instance, if you sell wheat beer, headlines on a page talking about your cultivation might be “Wheat Beer Cultivation” and “How our cultivation is different” and “Why wheat beer tastes better.”
• use words in your headlines that match up with the words used in the page title, meta keywords, meta description, and text on the page. The more consistent you are on each page, the more confidence search engines will have in what your page is about, the higher you’ll rank for that keyword phrase.

Contact us here if you have any questions.

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One of the main ways the search engines find your site is by looking at how your title each page.  This is a lot like going to the library and looking at the titles on the shelves or the titles and the old card catalog or the titles in their electronic search system.

If you look at the top left hand corner of your web browser (like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) you’ll see the title of the web page. In this case, it’s similar to the title of this post: “Quick Fixes for Big Search Ranking Improvement: Title Tags.”

Just like in the library, if the title is obscure or doesn’t use the words that you expect it to, you probably won’t think it’s the right choice.  Because search engines work mostly of the text the same thing is true for them.  If your web page title does not match up with the content on your page or the words that you hope people use to find you, it has much less of a chance coming up high in the search results.

And just like in the library, it’s important that each book–or in the case of a website, each page–has its own title.  It will do you no good if every page of your website has the same title.  In fact, if search engines discovered duplicate titles on a web site they’ll sometimes try to come up with their own title instead that will likely not use the keywords you want.

Google says:

“Make sure that each page on your site has a useful and descriptive page title (contained within the title tags). If a title tag is missing, or if the same title tag is used for many different pages, Google may use other text we find on the page.”

How To

We’ve already seen how you can check what the title of a web page is…just look in the upper left hand corner of your web browser for that page.  Now’s take a look at how to change a web page title.

Changing your title tag depends on what system you’re using.  If you’re using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla you can usually change the title tag from the edit page view.  If you’re using a web site development software like Microsoft Front Page or dream weaver or Intuit’s homestead, you can edit the title using the page options.  Or, if you only have access to the HTML code, you can change the title by editing the title tag, which looks like this:

<title>Your title here</title>

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If ranking well in search engines is a priority for you, you need to know about robots.txt. It’s something so small and so simple that it’s easily overlooked by even experienced web developers and search engine optimization folks.

A little history

When search engines started reading public websites, they soon realized that some people didn’t want their information shared all over the world. Instead, some websites have a need to keep some or all of their content private.

To accommodate this, reputable search engines came up with a simple solution where they basically said, “You just tell us what you want public and what you want private, and we won’t index the private stuff.”

Robots.txt

Which brings us to robots.txt. Search engines decided that if you make a text file (a file with the extension “.txt”) and name it “robots,” they’ll look at it and do what it says.

They went on to give us a specific way how to tell them what to allow and what not to allow. You can see those specifications here.

The most basic robots.txt file will look something like this:

User-agent: *    # applies to all robots
Disallow: /      # disallow indexing of all pages

The instructions above would tell all search engines to not index any pages on the website.

Some website hosts and software have this setting to disallow all search engines as the default. Others allow you to set it in an admin area (like WordPress or Joomla). Still others allow you to do whatever you want with it, which means you have to create it, define it, and upload it yourself.

Here’s the Rub

How does all of this affect you? If you or your web team has accidentally left the disallow default set or defined the instructions incorrectly, search engines are be leaving you out of their results altogether.

This single, tiny mistake will absolutely obliterate all your other search engine optimization investments.

Check for Yours

So, right now, go check to see if you have a robots.txt in your main web directory. Do this by typing the following into your browser’s address bar:

http://www.put-your-domain-name-here.com/robots.txt

If you don’t have one, that’s okay. By default, search engines will include you in their indexes.

If you do have one, make sure that it doesn’t have any instructions to disallow search engines from adding your site to their search results. It may have the word disallow and that’s okay, as long as that word isn’t followed by anything else, especially a slash “/”.

If you’d like someone to take a look and see if yours looks alright, feel free to give us a call.

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Today Google told the world about their new method for organizing and displaying the world’s information. In their announcement, Google said:

“Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

So What?

When Google changes what they focus on to sort search results, it can dramatically affect your website’s position in the rankings. Let’s say before Google caffeine your website came up 1st for the past year when someone searched for “custom tile.” After caffeine your site might now come up 10th.

Google’s focus is always on giving you the best possible search result. That way you keep using Google and then they can keep selling ads, which is where they get the bulk of their revenue. This change in which search results you’ll see has the same intention of providing the best result. It has just added weight to the recency–the newness–of the information.

So, realistically your website’s ranking may not change at all. You might still come up 1st for “custom tile”–just as long as your website still has relevant, quality information. The one BIG CHANGE is that your site is now helped more than ever by RECENT CONTENT.

What To Do for SEO Now?

So, what do you do for search engine optimization to make sure you keep coming up high in search results? Here are a few suggestions:

• First, check your rankings for keywords you’ve been tracking and see how you’ve been affected.
• Continue creating relevant, helpful content on your website
• Start a blog to keep churning out new, keyword specific content
• Add more pages to your site each month–as long as it makes sense to
• Be found other places than your website, like on social media sites and social media bookmarking sites
• Continue getting more and more websites to link to yours using keywords you care about

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You will be astounded by some of these facts. They’re amazing even if you don’t use social media.

In the end, the points are:

1. Social media is an incredible tool most people are using
2. It has a chance to make or break your business
3. You should start using some mix of it

Web Malama has been on the social media bandwagon for a while now and we’ve had mixed success and learned along the way.

Give us a call if you’d like to hear some of our successes and failures, or if you’d like to tell us yours!

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The beauty is, no one really knows. Search engines keep their formulas secret because it means no one can take advantage of or manipulate the rankings (which I’m personally very much for).

Ideally, your website should just be set up well with honest links in, accurate descriptions, helpful information, and well laid out, thereby helping search engines to see you for what you are and deliver traffic accurately.

So, how do you get ahead on the search engine Serengeti and survive another season?

For a couple of years now, SEOMoz, an industry search engine optimization leader, has published a list of what SEO leaders they surveyed believe to be the most important factors in search engines ranking your website.

The idea is that these factors seem to make the biggest difference. Follow these rules and you’ll likely come out ahead of 95% of other sites.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

Check out the 2009 full report here.

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Having a unique title for each and everyone of your web pages that tells visitors and search engines what your page is about gives a big bang for your buck. For just a few minute’s time, you’ll be helping search engines get a better picture of what your site is about.

First off, what is the page title?

The page title is what tells both people visiting your site and search engines what the page is about—the page’s topic or contents. You can see the webpage title in the upper-left corner of your Internet browser.

Page title in Internet Explorer 8

Page title in Firefox 3.6

In these example pictures, the page title is “Search Engine Optimization Basics #1: Exist.”

Depending on your operating system (Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc) you may also see the page title in your main taskbar area.

Next, what’s a good, search engine optimized page title?

A good page title concisely describes that page’s content to your site visitors and search engines while using the keywords you want to rank well for.

For popular (read: competitive) keywords, put your keywords at the start of the title tag. If your company or product name will be more convincing to get people to buy what you’re selling, put the name first, then your keywords. For example:

• Keywords | Company or Product Name
• Company or Product Name | Keywords

What’s a bad page title?

A bad page title is one that:

• is really long (like more than 5 or 10 words)
• is the same as any other page on your site (don’t ever have duplicate page titles if you can help it)
• doesn’t use any keywords you’re trying to rank well for
• doesn’t describe the contents of what’s actually on the page

Lastly, how do you change a page title?

Your page title comes from the background “source code” that is the behind-the-scenes guts of your webpage. Specifically, the title information lives in the “title meta tag.”

Depending on how you go about editing your pages (with a content management system, a keyword management tool, or manually in the source code) changing your page title can be more or less difficult or time-consuming. In many cases, to change one page’s title tag should only take a few minutes.

If you have a content management system like WordPress or Google’s Blogger for instance, you set the page title by simply typing it in the page’s “Title” text box when you create or edit your pages or posts.

If you do it manually, because you prefer to or because you have to, search somewhere near the top of the page’s source code file for:

“<title>”

Your page’s title will be between a starting and ending title tag. For example, the title of the page you’re reading right now is:

<title>Search Engine Optimization Basics #2: Titles</title>

Simply change the words between the starting and ending title tags, save the document, and upload it to your website to save over the previous version.

If you want to be found in Google, Yahoo, or Bing’s rankings, they must first know your site has graced the Internet with its presence. Until then, hope and wish as you might, it is a certainty that you will not appear in their results.

Here are a few ways you can make search engines aware of your terrific new (or possibly old) website:

1. Tell them. Submit your website address (URL) directly to them:
   • Google: www.google.com/addurl.html
   • Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
   • Bing:http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
   • Open Directory Project: www.dmoz.org
2. Get another website that is listed in search engine results to link to yours. It’s like overhearing a conversation. The search engine overhears someone else talking about your site: “Hey Bill, who did you say was a good mechanic on my side of town?” “That would be Henry over on 4th street. He’s great.”

Wait a few days, then check the search engines for your website. If you see any of your website’s pages, congratulations they know you exist!

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