Google Strikes WebPosition!

I have long used, and often described in class, a rank checking program called Web Position Gold. The software does many things beyond checking ranking positions, but I have never used other features, nor advocated their use. I have found this a very handy program for evaluating how well the search engine optimization and marketing techniques that we teach are working in practice. I have used it only periodically, perhaps only on a monthly basis, for any given site, in part to avoid overuse that would attract the attention of the search engines, and in part because one can obsess over rankings to no good end. Nevertheless, I find it very useful to occasionally see how my rankings on different sites are standing up on the web.

Google has never liked any of these programs becuause they can eat up so much bandwidth and processing capacity, but the only program they have ever specifically identified as something they disapprove of (at least as far as I have seen) is Web Position. Recently, they appear to have disabled the program completely. When I run the program against any of the sites I check, there are no Google results returned!

As a replacement, I have turned to RankChecker, an application that is an add-on to the Firefox browser and available from SEOBook at no charge (for now, they reserve the right to begin charging for it in the future). This is a web site with a number of good tools available and some good information about search engine marketing. It is definitely worth taking a look at if you are looking for tools to use to evaluate your web site performance.

Improve Your Google Rankings!

Google is adding a new feature to its searches that provide more opportunity for informed search engine marketers ("SEM") to improve their listings. The new feature is additional links that are included within the search engine results listing to take searchers directly to relevant information within a target page of results. A good description of the new feature is provided in this blog post. The objective of the feature is to provide the searcher with more focused results when they are available and identified properly. The goal of the SEM is to take advantage of this new feature to provide more focused results for the search engine (Google) and the searcher.

The key to accomplishing this is to first segment your content pages to provide very focused subsections within the text. A good illustration of this and the following points can be found on the American Heart Association site. When you look at this page, pay special attention to two features; one, that page is divided into sections with captions identifying the topic in each, and, second, there is a "table of contents" at the top of the page that jumps to the "bookmarks" associated with the captions identifying each section. These are the necessary steps to getting the new Google feature to work for you. The code that establishes the bookmark will look something like this ("<a id="HDL" name="HDL">") in the html of your page.

A description of the "named anchors" concept is provided in this blog post. Reviewing this post while examining the American Heart Association page and its source code should make this enhancement easy to understand and implement on your site.

Search engine marketing is always changing, and the best way to keep abreast of the latest information is regular attendance at the free Internet Marketing Clinic offered twice a month at the UH Small Business Development Center.

Social Media Measurement Lags Adoption

"The vast majority of professionals worldwide are using social technologies for business purposes..."

 The chart shown here breaks down the uses that professionals are making of social media. The article talks about the fact that measurement of ROI remains a bit of a mystery to most users. There are ways to get some measurements, and they include both "soft" measures like the statistics showing followers or friends, and harder statistics that one creates on the site by actions like offering coupons only through the specific media being evaluated. When these coupons are used, you get a "hard" measure of the impact of the media.

The full article contains some other data in charts and some additional discussion. To read it, click on the title link above.

The right click distance can improve your search engine rankings

"Some search engines (including Google) seem to take click distance into account when calculating the ranking of web pages. The lower the click distance, the more value is given to a web page."

Sounds good! What is "click distance", you might ask? This refers to the number of clicks that it takes to move from your home page to a specified page. To cut to the bottom line quickly, what this means is that pages that have a link to them from your home page are considered to be more important (and that contributes to their ranking value) than pages that are only accessible from other pages on your site.

This point also illustrates and confirms the value that a page on your site with a site map still has value in helping you to rank. A site map page is simply a page on your web site that contains a link to every major page on your site. If it is manageable, you should have a link on this page to EVERY page on your site, but that can be impractical for very large sites. Use your judgment, but make sure that your most important ranking pages are included here. A link from your home page to your site map page puts every page listed there only two clicks away from your home page. This kind of page still has a value that is not replaced by having a sitemap file in your root directory, although that is certainly good practice, as well. Do both!

This article (click on the title above, to read the full article) goes on to say, 
"In addition to the click distance, some search engines might also take the directory structure into account.
A web page with the URL www.example.com/page.htm is considered more important than a page with a URL that points to a sub directory: www.example.com/here/there/whereever/page.htm"

Paying attention to these kinds of details will pay off in improved rankings for your site on all the keyword phrases that you include on your major pages. Remember, attention to detail is what makes for effective internet marketing and what will give you the edge in a very competitive field!

Demographics of Facebook Growth

"Facebook may have started as a site geared toward the college crowd, but as the most popular social network in the US, it has broadened its user base considerably."

Things are always changing on the web, and it is important to keep up! This report discusses the growth of users of Facebook and the shift in the descroiption of who is on the service.

What we see is a growth in older users and in female users. Facebook, like much of the web, began with a larger component of young male users. As their demographic appeal changes, so do the opportunities to make use of the medium to reach diferent audiences. Always remember that you have to go where your prospects are! If they are now on Facebook, you need to be there too!

Opportunity Abounds!

I am continually impressed by how the Internet allows small businesses to compete effectively with much larger companies. That characteristic is one of the things that draws me to this field.

I ran across an interesting sentence in a recent edition of The Economist that said, "Only 5% of European Union companies born since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest in the EU by market capitalisation (sic). In America, the figure is 22%."

Most of us in small businesses will never make it to this list, but I am impressed by the large number of companies started in the United States that have made the list. Most businesses don't have the reach to even aspire to this kind of growth, but I am inspired by the thought of the possibility.

One of my posts earlier this year referred to the ease of starting a business on the internet, and that ease certainly contributes something to the startling number of really successful companies compared to the experience in the European Union. Clearly, the environment in the United States is more favorable to start-ups than the environment in the EU, but the internet is definitely a part of that environment.

Never forget, while you are working away on improving the performance of your web site, that the potential rewards for learning to be effective on the web are huge!

SEO Isn't Only About Google??

"It will be at least nine months -- and probably closer to a year -- before Microsoft takes over Yahoo's search infrastructure, theoretically consolidating 28% of the U.S. search market and mounting the first credible challenge on Google in a decade."

Not to rush into anything. There is no real sign that Bing is going to make much difference for a while. There are a few signs of some change coming along. This article (click on the title to go to the full article) points out a few differences that we need to be aware of.

When I read it, a few points jumped out. The first was that this is all still under discussion and Microsoft is still actively tweaking their operation, so nothing that we might think we know is really "fixed" yet!

With that caveat in mind, here are the points of importance that I noted:

• Bing focuses more on the use of "categories", and those terms (names of the categories they use) become more important keyword phrases.
• Bing is friendlier to Flash sites. This may open things up a little for more use of those kinds of pages within a site(?)
• Bing offers different placements for photos and video.
• Bing favors linking out more than other engines as long as the links are relevant to the overall context of the site and keywords.
• Enable MSNBot onto your site and submit URLs for all sub-pages as it doesn't automatically crawl all pages.

One of the comments posted in response to this article provides a list of suggestions for focusing on Bing that I found interesting. What I tried to look for are things that might indicate some difference in how one approaches site management with the advent of Bing. Lots of the "tips" suggested things that I think we should be doing already in optimizing for Google, which still has to be the priority for the forseeable future.

Reciprocal and Directory Links, Still Good Practice?

Yes, these are both still good ideas!

Reciprocal links refers to the practice of exchanging links with other sites on the web, like, "you link to me and I 'll link to you." This practice has been questioned because of its potential for abuse. Those are definitely legitimate questions, and extensive proliferation of links through "reciprocal fishing" (my own made-up term) is not good. For one thing, it is a lot of work, and it can lead to a lot of links that you have to monitor to ensure that they are still alive and still point to the site that you agreed to link to. Sometimes sites "die off" and are replaced by sites that you would not want to be associated with, but your link to them survives if you have not been vigilant!

On the other hand, there is good evidence that sites that are properly related tend to link to one another or to other related sites in a pattern that search engines notice and make use of. Eric Ward has been around the web a long time and has posted some research on his site about the importance of linking relationships. This is some really good information and should provide some real food for thought when considering your own linking strategy and your program.

My take-away from his piece is that linking to people who have good sites that deal with the same material that your site does (or, maybe, sites that do business with you or are in your industry?) is a good practice that will reward you with better performance on your site. If you pursue links with these kinds of site, as opposed to just scanning the web for likely reciprocal partners that you really don't know, you are likely to have fewer problems with disappearing sites or "spammy" sites.

Directory links are those that you get by obtaining listings in web directories. Getting these listings can be a tedious process, because it is hard for anyone to automate the process, which probably is at least part of the reason that the links remain valuable! For some research that indicates how these links can actually boost your site, take a look at this case study. Three pages that were "orphaned" within a site were listed in directories and their search engine positioning followed to observe the impact that the directory listings had on their performance.

The study validates the importance of getting good links to your site from directories. As in the case of any links, try for positioning your links in places that bear some relevance to what your site is about. That means, obviously, the appropriate category in general directories, but it also means seeking out specialized directories that focus on your subject matter. There are many of these specialized directories around, and they are not typically household names.

Remember, in Internet Marketing, as in just about any other endeavor, the rewards go to those who are willing to work for them! That is why persistent webmasters with small budgets can outperform companies who only have big budgets, but not the know-how or persistence.