Archive for the ‘Affordable SEO’ Category

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Why You Should Concentrate More Natural SEO Efforts Towards Bing & Yahoo

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

1418288072_1b35d8b66b_oIf you have been following this natural SEO blog, you’ve noticed that we’ve been talking a lot about Microsoft’s new Bing search engine and the deal that the software giant struck last month with Yahoo. And we’ve been getting a few responses that run along the lines of what’s the big deal? Everyone uses Google anyway. Concentrating on Microsoft or Yahoo for natural SEO is a waste of time.

Yes, Google still leads in the search engine market, in pretty much all imaginable categories. And if you’re a dedicated Google user (confession: I am. I use Gmail, Google Reader and Google News several times a day), it may seem pointless to spend time and money on gaining natural SEO positioning for Microsoft’s Bing and the new Bing-powered Yahoo search engine. But those impressions can be deceiving. As the technology blog at the New York Times reported last week, the gap between Google and Bing is not as large as many think.

In raw usage, Google still commands 65 percent of the search market. But another crucial measure that anyone specializing in natural SEO should pay attention to tells a different story. Yahoo and Microsoft’s “searcher penetration” in the United States is 73 percent. Searcher penetration is the percentage of people who use a search engine, even if only infrequently. In other words, while most Americans still use Google for the majority of their searches, 73 percent of Americans still turn to Yahoo or Bing regularly.

So why is that important? It means that if Yahoo and Bing have access to nearly three quarter of online Americans. That means that if they can find a way to convince users to switch from their search engines and away from Google, they’ll be able to get their message to the majority of computer users. That could mean big changes for natural SEO as well.

You can see the full report statistics here at the comScore Website.

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Natural SEO for Social Media Profiles

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

naturalseoIf you’ve spent any time browsing our Search Circus blog—or any other decent Internet marketing blog—then you know the importance of implementing natural SEO on your Website for maximum search results. Natural SEO can mean the difference between having a Website that languishes in obscurity and having a Website that gets the traffic it deserves.

But did you also know that it’s possible to optimize your social media profiles? Many believe that since they don’t have access to the actual code on their Facebook or LinkedIn pages, they have no power over how those pages will rank on search engines. But that’s not exactly true. There are, in fact, several things that anyone can do to implement natural SEO on their social media profiles. Nicole Boderm lists them on her blog. Here are a few of the highlights:

Facebook Natural SEO:

  • Get a vanity URL if possible – read FAQ’s Here
  • Use the Facebook notes section for posting blog posts
  • Under Privacy > Search settings select “create a public listing for search engines”

LinkedIn Natural SEO:

  • Your past work history should go back 10 years . Explain what you did at each company.
  • Write/Get Recommendations & Ask/Answer questions
  • Comment on the LinkedIn blog and link back to your LinkedIn profile.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Find more natural SEO tips on this blog post.

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Changing Nofollow Rules to Affect SEO Web Site Design

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

nofollow

Have you implemented the

“nofollow” HTML tag on your SEO Web site design yet? If your answer is no, then don’t go scurrying off add it, since it looks

like Google has put an end to nofollow’s usefulness in SEO Web site design. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we’ll explain what nofollow is.

Nofollow is a tricky HTML SEO Web site design attribute to describe. According to Wikipedia, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.”

That’s kind of jargony. So here’s a definition in plain English: nofollow is a SEO Web site design tag that tells search engines to not “count” a certain outbound link. There are several ways that Google decides how Webpages are ranked, and one of the most important is by the number of links that a Website is getting. A Website that’s getting many links coming to it means that Website has more authority. Say you wanted to link to a Website, but you didn’t want to contribute to its authority. The nofollow tag means that Google won’t count your link when it compiles that Website’s authority.

That’s the first SEO Web site design principle that’s important to understand. The second is that Webpages with authority have more link power. And when that Webpage links to others, it portions out its link power evenly to those other sites. Say you have a nice, authoritative home page that links to every other page on your Website, just as a proper home page should. But why should you give that valuable link power to rarely-visited pages, like the Terms of Service page? Or the FAQ page? Wouldn’t it be better if you could somehow channel that link power to pages you actually want people to find in search engines?

Until recently, you could do just that with the nofollow SEO Web site design tag. When you placed the nofollow tag before the links to your FAQ or ToS pages, you would be sacrificing those page’s potential for authority (since Google wouldn’t count those links from your homepage), while boosting the link power sent to your other, more crucial pages.

But things have changed. According to Matt Cutts, Google’s in house SEO guy, nofollow doesn’t allow Webmasters to portion out link power to preferred pages anymore. So what can Webmasters do? First, they should remove all nofollow tags, since they’re basically of no value. Then, they should concentrate on the best methods of creating a Website that gets great search rankings: ethical link building, fresh content and lots of relevant pages.

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