Search Engine Watch.com’s Duncan Parry Offers Tips on Staying Caught Up in Search News

The last few months are the best indication in a long time that the search business is constantly changing. Duncan Parry at SearchEngineWatch.com points out that today’s new employees in the business have never heard of AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and many of the other search engines that once dominated the field.

In his article “How to Keep Up to Date In Search,” Parry offers some pointers on what to take note of in this business, and what to ignore, since it will eventually change anyway.

1. Ignore noise. Parry says that with all the blogs and articles published every day, there are more “experts” entering this field by the minute. Most of it can be ignored. Everybody has an opinion, Parry says; whether those opinions mean anything depends upon whose saying them. He suggests sticking to sites that you find to be credible and correct. He also says to keep up to date on technical developments in the products you currently use or are planning to use.

2. Get an RSS Reader. All sites worth their salt have RSS feeds. Make sure you have access to a reader so you can add your favorite sites to it. This puts all relevant articles into one easy-to-find place, and allows you to add more at any time. Parry recommends Google Reader for its ease of use, and Feedly for its looks. (Feedly can be linked to Google Reader to give you the best of both worlds.

3. Watch the mainstream press. SEO sites are not usually the first place that you will find interesting news about developments in the profession. That’s given to major news sites first. Subscribe to the New York Times, USAToday, BBC News, etc.

4. Learn about digital technology in General. Along with Mashable.com, Parry provides a significant list of popular sites that you should be reading.

5. Some search sites are musts. Specifically, Parry recommends SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand. They offer daily newsletters and feeds. They sum up the news you need to know and make it readable. Parry also recommends Search Engine Roundtable, as it often seems to be the first site with hot news from Google.

6. Don’t be afraid to cut. Culling from your Reader list over time is to be expected. If a site isn’t doing anything for you anymore, get rid of it.

Parry says that there’s good stuff to be found out there, but even the good stuff can get overwhelming. Determine which experts are worth your time and trust and take it from there.

SEOBook’s Aaron Wall: SEO (Usually) Doesn’t Create Demand – But Here’s What Does

In a recent Blog entry at SEOBook.com, Aaron Wall answered a question he was asked at a recent speech that he felt he had to think about a bit: How do you get your geo-local page to rank better when adding the location information?

Upon introspection, Wall realized the actual issue wasn’t so much ranking, but creating demand. Says Wall, “The core issue here is this: SEO fulfills, demand, but SEO doesn’t create demand.” He’s quick to add that there are exceptions to this rule, particularly when dealing with abstract products and services such as art, but these are rare.

Wall says that true demand is created by using one of three options:

Building the brand: Wall says building brand exposure is a great way to increase demand, because there are so many ways you can do it – public relations, product offerings, blog promotion, advertising, etc. Branded keywords tend to have the highest conversion rates. This means you’re likely to see a surge in both traffic to your site and sales.

Cross marketing: The “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” method works well for aggressive marketers who enjoy working with other organizations. Wall uses the example of the company that asked him the question at his talk. He recommends that they could have taken advantage of the fact that their business had a theme park across the street. They should have run “special promotions with that theme park offering discounts to frequent visitors.”

Gaining Exposure on Broader, Related Generic Keywords: Rather than trying to rank better for brand name + location, Wall says his subject company should have broadened the scope of their related query stream:

“their product category” + their location

Create a page on their product category +”near popular local attraction

Running ads that compare your product to others

Google’s new “Insight for Search” Tool an Easy way to Leverage more SEO Info, CanuckSEO Says

Software analyst Joyce Loews, writing on Jim Rudnick’s “Canuck SEO” blog, is very excited about Google’s recently released SEO tool, Insights for Search (IFS). In her article “Four Great Ways to Use Google’s Insights for Search Tool for Canuck SEO," Loews calls IFS the “obscure cousin” of Trends. She adds the software actually outdoes its predecessor in several important areas.

IFS reports the popularity of any keyword or phrase searched for since 2004. What makes it unique is that you can whittle down the results to determine the most popular search terms in virtually any State or province, and in the United States you can whittle it down to major metropolitan areas.

Results can also be determined according to content or images sought.

Citing some Canadian examples, Loews says the most searched term recently in Quebec has been recipes for “croustade a pommes,” or as we know it in America, the apple crisp.

A search on “SEO” reveals that Canada’s interest in the subject has risen steadily throughout the past six years, with British Columbia sending the highest number of searches for that term.

Loews says what IFS does best is to perform comparative research into search volumes. It’s not a numbers tool, like Keywords, but rather a way to narrow searches by region, time period of the search and search type. She says it’s a vital tool for companies with a new product to sell. They can research which areas of the country are interested in the company’s keywords. This tells companies where their potential audience is.

Another feature of IFS is “Rising Searches,” a list of keywords and search terms that have steadily risen in popularity over the years.

Loews sums up by saying that the heavily graphic-laden site should help to persuade the stubborn naysayers at your office that SEO is important, since search results are spelled out so well.

Make no Mistake: DailySEOTip.com Knows 5 SEO Mistakes that Happen all the Time

Everybody makes mistakes. It’s how you learn. And once you know it was a mistake, hopefully, you avoid it and never worry about it again. Scientists learned this lesson with the brontosaurus. After years of believing it was its own species, it turned out that the bronto was no different than the apatosaurus. You live, you learn.

In SEO, mistakes are also a reality, says Kev Strong, a guest columnist at DailySEOTip.com. Some mistakes are made more than others are, so Strong put together a list of “5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid.” He says these are the five most commonly noticed mistakes that webmasters notice when asked to analyze other people’s websites:

Duplicate Titles: Every page on your websites should have a unique tag. Many times, multiple pages are found using the same tags, which just gets confusing for the search engines. Strong says to check this by either browsing your website or searching on Google for your domain. If you see duplicate titles, change them on the pages that need changing.

Duplicate content: If you’re not repurposing pages that have been moved or changed, you run the risk of having duplicate content seen on your site by the search engines. While the rel=”canonical tag can help deter problems, it’s best to just put new content on those pages or remove them completely.

Blocking your Website: One of the most common mistakes made by people who should know better is when web developers forget to turn on the “index, follow” command for new pages. Look at your source code. If you see “noindex, nofollow,” change it immediately.

Non-Crawlable Navigation: Java script menus keep search spiders from crawling your site. They can’t rank what they can’t read, so think hard before deciding to use Java.

XML Sitemaps: These help the search engines see all of the pages on your website. You can even use a sitemap uploader, such as xml-sitemaps.com, to alert all the search engines at once to the existence of your site.

Greg Elwell at Hubspot.com: News Releases and SEO make for good partners

Greg Elwell, Founder of B2B Inbound near San Francisco, published an article recently about “4 Ways News Releases Boost SEO.” Elwell says that news releases can serve as a search engine magnet for rankings. As a result, he recommends that all businesses include a “newsroom” feature on their website. This gives you a place to publish optimized press releases. He describes these as PR releases that contain your primary keywords. The goal, of course, is more attention from both your target audience and the search engine crawlers. Elwell then lists four things press releases do that help attract attention:
They increase the number of indexed pages on your site. The more pages you have on your site, the more looks you’re likely to attract.
Press releases diversify content strategy. By developing a news release marketing strategy, you can use a wider number of news releases on your site. “Don’t just think about publishing ‘Big News,” Elwell says, but come up with as many stories as you can about various internal happenings at your company.
A press release area allows you to blow your company horn. By publishing your PR releases online, you’re telling the world about your business or product.
Press release areas are easy to maintain. All you need is a blog and RSS Feed, both of which you probably have.

SearchEnginePeople.com: Another Analogy To Explain SEO to the Masses

James Duthie, in his column at SearchEnginePeople.com, explains why analogies are so popular when it comes to explaining SEO. In his words: “People just don’t get it.” He says SEO is still one of the "dark arts" to the average businessperson, so analogies help to ease the learning curve by likening SEO to something with which everyone can identify.
In his article “Yet another SEO Analogy,” Duthie says that SEO is like property investment:

1. It needs a solid foundation: If the foundation on your house isn’t solid, everything else gets compromised. And so it is with SEO. You need a solid foundation for long-term success. Analyze customer search behavior. Study your competition. Lay your foundation for success before you build.

2. You must use high-quality materials in your property structure; With a home, what you put on the solid foundation is equally as important. Think of your website as your online property. Use only the highest-quality website code and content in your “structure.” Custom-craft your SEO to help you stand out from all the others.

3. Build in the right neighborhood: You don’t build a mansion in the slums; it will never see its true value that way. The same is true for SEO and your link building strategy. Links are your neighborhood. Seek out high-quality links. Avoid spammers and other link slumlords that won’t add any value to your property.

Own a Small Business? Mashable Serves Up Five Problem –Solving Sites

Mashable.com’s Ben Parr owns a small SEO-related startup business – namely, Mashable.com. Like any small business owner, he’s often faced with decisions that he’s never encountered before. What’s more, his mentors and co-workers frequently have no answer either. This caused him to do what millions of entrepreneurs do when they need a question answered – he turned to the internet. Then he compiled “5 Online Tools for Answering Your Small Business Questions.” The five sites he finds most helpful for answer his own questions (and believes you’ll benefit from them too) include:

• Quora – A Q&A tool that allows users to ask primarily technological and startup-related questions. It’s particularly known for being the place to reach prominent CEOs and technological experts online. You can also read posts grouped by topic.
• OnStartups Answers - As the name implies, this site caters to founders of startup businesses and the particular problems they may have getting and keeping the ball rolling.
• Hacker News. This is a friendly “startup-centric” community. Its members are very open to questions and frequently go out of their way to help get something answered.
• Twitter: This social media staple could be your immediate access to advice from other entrepreneurs you are following online.
• OPEN Forum: The active discussion areas at this American Express site allow you to ask questions and get them answered quickly. While it’s not Parr’s first choice, as he says, “it can’t hurt to ask.”

For additional information regarding the information in this article, click here.

Does Google Like Your Site? There’s a Way to Find Out

Josh McCoy’s recent article on SearchEngineWatch.com, "What Google Thinks of Your Site," answers a question that many website owners wonder about their link building program. Fortunately, says McCoy, Google itself provides you with everything you need to find out how your link building strategies are stacking up, literally, in the search engine rankings.

He first recommends analyzing your sitelinks. You can do this by searching any term that you know currently ranks you first. Optimally, you will see three to eight links that sync with your main navigation. Or, you might see links to deeper pages on your site.

Next, McCoy discusses internal links for your site – the horizontally placed links between the SERP listing description and URL for a search. To get Google to see those, make sure they’re used in the first few paragraphs of content on your page.

A third possibility is that you may see no sitelinks at all. This, McCoy says, is a sure sign that your site is "SEO unfriendly," and you need to do something about it. You wouldn’t be alone; as examples, McCoy sites both Pepsi and Coca-Cola as having sites that use Flash or Java-based home pages, which totally confuse search spiders.

Link Building 101 - How to Build Links Effectively

While links are still vital to your search ranking survival, you may have noticed that attracting relevant one-way link building to your site has become much harder these days. Many webmasters are discovering that simply asking for links, even on relevant sites, is proving to be more futile. Everyone is developing a "What’s in it for me" policy.

Many sites are so overrun with link requests that the webmasters are just as likely to delete e-mail requests without even reading them. As a result, one of the newest methods of successful link building is what is called "relationship links." In other words, you first build working relationships with potential companies that you would like to have provide a link to your site. Call them. Buy a banner on the site. Whatever it takes to start a relationship. This will allow you to get to know the webmasters on those sites. Plus, as you build that relationship, you become friends. And friends are more likely to offer one-way links to other friends than they would somebody who comes in from the cold. Relationship links do require more strategy than other link building services. But they’re certainly worth the time and effort.