With so many hats to wear, we know you don’t have much time to play the role of marketer. But attracting potential customers is an essential part of growing your business. With that in mind, we designed Google Tags, our newest online advertising offering through Google Places that lets you personalize your Google.com and Google Maps listing with specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos or a custom message.

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Let me take a half-step back. First of all, I just finished a monster piece on the Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance detailing the upcoming transitions for advertisers and publishers, and I’m admittedly a teensy bit weary from the experience. Not complaining, mind you, it was a great opportunity and hopefully a decent article. It’s just left me with a bit of a search hangover, if you will.
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The data is normalized to allow different datasets to be analyzed simultaneously and can be compared by either search terms, location, or time ranges. In addition, the data can be split on the different industry categories and across other Google properties, such as image search, news search, and product search.

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Any Boise SEO Company worth their salt will certainly agree that SEO can be broken down into a few distinct parts:

• Website Framework
• Content
• Links
• Traffic

I’ll focus on each of these individually.

Website Framework

To be a legitimate Website Design Company in Boise you’ll need to understand the basics of what constitutes a search engine optimized website framework. The framework must adhere to several best practices like :

• Using stylesheets instead of tables and HTML declarations like font, etc.
• Using a document hierarchy that builds upon itself. In other words, use H1, H2, H3 just like you would in Microsoft Word. If you are working with a website design firm that fails to use these basic tags then please stop immediately and hire a Boise SEO Company. If your website never gets found then it is useless from the start.
• Move all scripts including JavaScripts into external included files.
• Use inline tags like title=”" and name=”" as appropriate to further enable the use of keywords in the code.
• Use alt tags to textually declare the content of an image
• Link to other pages, internal and external to your website using the keywords as the linked words. I’ll elaborate. If I am linking to a Boise SEO Company on another website I would hyperlink the words “Boise SEO Company” not the words “click here”. The objective here is to provide context to what will be fond beyond the link.
• Avoid, if not eliminate flash all together. Flash that must be retained should use XML and  sifr technology to pull text from the XML source. Ok that’s geeky and you may need some help from your developer, but here is the key. XML is plain text that is wrapped in “contextual containers”. You can search for a definition, but the crux of the matter is that this plain text is pulled into the flash and rendered as the designer would like, but because it can still be read as XML by the search engines then it is search engine friendly. This is a common mistake most Boise SEO Companies make.
• Use an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap provides a dual benefit. It both defines the pages in the website for the search engines; and it can be linked into webmaster tools for the major search engines.
• Which leads me to: submit your sitemap to the search engines through their various interfaces. An XML sitemap tells the search engines that something has changed whenever it is updated.
• Use a title tag, description and meta-tags. Google weighs title tags very heavily, but does not place any emphasis on descriptions and meta-tags. That being said, Microsoft and Yahoo! do, so don’t ignore them.
• For good measure, ensure you write a value based message as your description. This is what provides the searcher context for what comes next. Seriously, don’t miss this opportunity to sell them into clicking on your link.
• Include your keywords in your URL (web address)

Content

Now there is a lot more, but if you got this far then you will be a long way towards optimization. So next we’ll talk about content.  You’ll notice I used the words Boise SEO Company several times in this article. I used it in the title, in the meta-keywords, and linked it even back to the home page of this website. Well quite honestly I am stacking the deck a little bit; and it’s a fine line. For every 100 words you write use your keyword of phrase 3 to 5 times. There I said it. Rocket science right? No, it’s not! It’s a process and method of writing that will ensure that if your page gets found.

Consider this: These dumb little search engine spiders that crawl the web trying to discern what this page is about has to look through everything I have written and land on Boise SEO Company. I can be verbose, mix the words around, be clever, whatever, but if I do not provide adequate saturation around the key phrase Boise SEO Company then the spider will put my page in the wrong place. It’s not that your website isn’t in Google, it’s simply in the wrong place. As a Boise SEO Company it is my job to realign it and get it correctly positioned; and this happens through proper saturation of keywords.

Links

Links, well they for a very long time were uber tricky. I’d write an email begging some company to link to me with a promise that I’d link to them and then I’d have to verify it was all linked right and then keep checking cause they wanted the link and didn’t want to link to me and always assumed that they could sneak and break the link 15 days after we talked .. Yeah, what a mess! Ok, it’s easier now. Here’s how to get links. Shhh I know my competition will hate me for telling you, but here it is, the secret.

• Use social networks to get links. Write something and put a link to your website. Don’t shrink that link, write it out and post it. Sounds hard huh?
• Write summary articles and press releases about anything cool your company is doing and publish them using the free PR wires (Google it). Make sure you include a link back to your site. A good article can get you 40 quality links.
• So let’s broach the subject of quality. Quality links are better than quantity. Links transfer equity from the originating site to yours. This means if they are a trusted source, you know reputable then it means a lot. This is so simple. In the real world if the President said “this is a great company” that means a lot more than some guy in a check out line. It works the same. The good news is that news websites tend to score high on the reputation scale so a link from them transfers a lot of equity. Love it? I do!
• We are  Boise SEO Company and we are located on Fairview Ave. If you’ve riven down Fairview ever then you’ll realize that there are a lot of signs. In the business world the bigger the sign the more visible you are, but when big gets too big it becomes ridiculous. Links are kind of like the size of your sign. You need enough links to be a little than on par with your competitor. In other words make your sign slightly larger (more links). Don’t go overboard here because it doesn’t provide a viable cost / benefit. You simply have to be better optimized than the next guy. Certainly he is going to build a bigger sign than you right after you put yours up, and I hate that too, but I didn’t make the rules so don’t shoot the messenger.

Traffic

Ok we are almost there. If you are still with me please stand up and stretch. I am putting myself to sleep, but I think I’ll make it. Here’s the chicken and the egg scenario. I need optimized to get traffic, but how do I get traffic before I am optimized? Traffic plays a role in that it tells the search engine that you are worthy of note. Facebook gets a lot of traffic and therefore ranks high in the search engines .. you get the picture. So how do you get traffic? Again with the secrets .. Use social networks to drive traffic. As a Boise SEO Company (thought I would sneak that in again we never perform SEO for a client without including the social networks as a part of the optimization. We have to feed the content machine because that is what Google wants. Feed Google and Google will feed you.

Ok so that’s really it. Sure I didn’t include everything here, but most everything is here. SEO is not rocket science, but it is a skill set and that is why companies in Boise and far beyond hire us to help them with their SEO. SEO is like accounting – sure you could do it, but having a professional do it for you ensures it’s done correctly. There is no fuzzy magic here and at Seybold Scientific we are completely transparent (as you can see) around our processes. We’d love to earn your business, but more so we’d love to see you succeed and if that means using our methods to grow your SEO position then more power to you. Thanks for spending some time with me.

All the best,

George Seybold

208-639-0781

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.

Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here’s a good explanation of how it all works.)

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we’ve built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Source: Google

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Seybold Scientific provides search engine optimization and advertising (PPC) management services. To find out more, contact us at (208) 639-0781

Stefan Tornquist, research director at Econsultancy, emphasised the fact that this area is still experiencing solid growth that he describes as “significant”.

“Looked at in comparison with other digital channels, the percentages of growth in 2010 might be higher,” he explained.

Mr Tornquist warned that this could be due to a larger drop in these alternative channels.

He predicted that the North America will experience a similar growth rate in this area as will the UK, France and Germany.

Earlier this year, Econsultancy and Guava published research that showed the proportion of firms looking to increase spending on SEO and natural search has risen five percentage points this year only.

It found that only 14 percent of companies reported that they are decreasing paid search spending, with four percent planning to spend less on SEO in 2010.

Growth in search marketing is likely due to gains in the economy as companies enter the marketplace again.

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Seybold Scientific offers a host of search optimization and advertising services. Please contact us at (208) 639-0781 to learn more, thank you.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are going to get a lot more personalized moving into the future. It’s already started, but will continue to become increasingly noticeable. This raises some questions not only about SEO and ranking, but how one manages their online reputation. The fact that different people will be seeing different results in a search for your name or your company’s name is going to throw a few forks in the spokes of the online reputation management process.

SearchWiki

Google recently launched SearchWiki, a way for Google users to rearrange their own search results and vote specific results up or down, leave comments, etc. This is one element of personalized search that has some industry professionals a little worried.

“I’d say that the most significant thing to happen in the search industry in 2008 was the advent of more personalized search, and even more so, the new addition of SearchWiki showing up in Google,” High Rankings CEO Jill Whalen recently told me. “It’s too soon to really know what will happen with that, but my guess is that it will cause some reputation management nightmares for many companies.”

It’s going to affect how marketers help their own clients maintain positive reputations as well. WebProNews Blog Partner Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim, who created the online reputation-monitoring tool Trackur, talked a little about this with me.

Andy Beal”It’s certainly something to be concerned about–especially when you consider that Google hasn’t placed much constraint on its use,” he explains. “For example, what’s to stop a competitor’s employees from littering SearchWiki with negative ‘reviews’ about your business? How will that be policed? Google has indicated that SearchWiki data may be included in the regular algorithm in the future, but has been somewhat vague about how companies can address falsely posted comments.”

The future isn’t necessarily all bad for reputation management though.

“On the other side of the coin, we have Google’s plans to further personalize search results based upon an individuals preferences and search history,” Beal tells me. “I’m intrigued by a number of possibilities here, not all of which are negative.”

“First, one web site’s ‘vote down’ is another’s ‘vote up,’” he explains. “Think about it. OK, so a user could vote down your web listing, but they could just as easily vote down your competitor. Now, instead of spending endless nights worrying about how to move from #2 on Google to #1, your target customer just did the job for you–albeit confined to their search browser only.”

“Secondly, let’s go with the worst case scenario and assume that a user voted down your listing in Google,” Beal continues. “They would have done that anyway! OK, so now they have the option to actually vote you off the Google ‘island’ but prior to this feature, they were mentally excluding you anyway–so you’ve not lost much.”

As has become popular opinion of where Internet marketing will go as a result of Google’s changes, people are going to have to start worrying less about where their site is ranked in Google, and more about analytics, and how their site is presented.

“Businesses will finally realize the vital importance of not just ‘ranking’ but also displaying a compelling TITLE and description/snippet,” Beal says. “If a searcher’s finger is hovering over the voting buttons, you want to make sure that your listing is enticing and engaging. A TITLE stuffed with keywords might get you to #3 in Google, but if the guy at #8 has a really engaging offer in his TITLE–you get voted down, he gets voted up.”

The truth of the matter is, nobody really knows for sure what new online reputation management strategies are going to have be implemented when things like intent-based search and personalization become the everyday norm. I would venture to say however, that Internet marketers are going to need to be savvy in the reputation management area. As Google adopts these Digg-like tools we can expect the “Giggle” interface to become one that disrupts the way businesses think around their position in Google and how they maintain it.

Indeed, syndicated links can provide some ‘link juice’ which can be seen as a potential SEO advantage.  For those of you unaware with this concept, the idea of syndication is that RSS feeds (which do not have the ‘nofollow’ tag) can in fact be used to provide some RSS value to the links you post in Twitter.

I have made an effort over the past couple days to find a single URL that has been indexed as a result of a single syndicated RSS feed.  So while some people, as I have said before have had some varying amount of results providing direct SEO value from Twitter, it proves to be an inefficient venue.

This means that syndication of Twitter is not a widely developed idea.  It might be a great idea for someone to develop a chatter application, but even then we are limited to the potential hope that this will be picked up by the search engines.  In short, it seems like a lot of effort to propagate a link, and resources are probably better utilized if your goal is SEO.

Hope for the future?  Absolutely.  One potential, most likely move, is Twitter will begin to use bit.ly exclusively for their URL shortening services.  For those who are not aware of this relationship, bit.ly is a product of Summize, which has been purchased by Twitter.

This as I understand will have some serious SEO chops. Bit.ly analyzes all shortened URLs through Open Calais (developed by some friends of mine at a company I used to work for), and making this data available in public RSS feeds.  As Thomson Reuters, and Bit.ly, look to find other ways of presenting this content and creating toolkits for development teams through Open Calais, the possibilities could be mind-boggling.

There is a serious future for it.

That said, Twitter remains primarily a way of building your relationships online.  As an SEO tool it remains pretty inefficient.  Would I say not to use it?  Never.  Twitter is a valuable marketing tool, and its influences will grow over time.  There is no doubt about that fact in my mind.

However, I would, as a seasoned Product Manager, suggest tempering value vs. effort when pitching it as an SEO application in your organization or to a potential client.  I believe that you risk creating expectations, or potentially creating a project where effort exceeds the return.

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By achieving certification in Google AdWords it ensures that the people managing your online campaigns have the familiarity and knowledge to provide clients the edge in the competitive advertising arena. AdWords is a highly sought after medium, where competitors are constantly looking for top placement at the lowest possible price. This also means that AdWords is growing in complexity, and through a certification you can be assured that it keeps individuals at the top of their game.

To receive the AdWords certification individuals must pass what some say label as a “grueling final exam” where they are required to demonstrate their knowledge and competence of their paid search management. Passing the exam and achieving certification as a Google Advertising Professional is considered an advantage with distinction in a highly saturated market where differentiation is critical to the client’s success.

Welcome to Seybold Scientific – We take an analytical approach to marketing online. This means that every client engagement has performance goals and key performance indicators attached to their account. Seybold Scientific requires a minimum of 50% of our staff to become and maintain their Google Certification. Being Google certified reflects our commitment to ongoing skills development and maintaining excellent relationships with our professional partners. We are a customer-focused company, our customers demand excellence and we focus every day to exceed those expectations.