<title> 2009 September</title>

Organic SEO Services & Highter Ranking

Organic SEO Services strives to get you the highest visibility possible on major search engines.

Benefits of Organic SEO Services:

  • Complete Website Analysis.
  • Keyword Research and Implementation.
  • Website optimization – Meta tags, code, images, content, etc.
  • Link Popularity Audit and Analysis.
  • Search Engines and Directory Submission.
  • Sitemap creation and update to reflect website structure.
  • Relevant Link Building strategy & development.
  • Customized Link Building and Management.
  • Article Submission.
  • Social Bookmarking.
  • Blog & Forum Setup.
  • RSS feed optimization in order to deliver fresh content on a regular basis.
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Google Rolls Out Sitelinks Display For Forums

Discussion forums are a popular way for people to find answers online, but forums often have multiple “threads” or conversations on the same topic. Now Google’s listing forums in a new way to better expose relevant threads.

In searches that bring up a forum listing, Google’s now showing additional forum threads below the main listing, like this:

Forum Sitelinks

The format is similar to Google Sitelinks, small links that sometimes appear below the main listing that shows at the top of a Google search results page or recently, within the description as well. Internally, Google calls this “forum clustering.” They been spotted earlier this month when in testing, and now they’re official.

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Google Improves Local Mobile Search, Links Maps & Mobile

In simple but still dramatic fashion, Google has upgraded browser based local search on mobile handsets. It has also tied Maps on the PC to mobile in a very effective way. And recognizing the limitations of keying in queries into a search box on a mobile handset, Google has taken a page from its Places Directory Android app and incorporated search/browse by category (with location awareness). These changes don’t appear to be major at first blush, but they potentially are and make Google’s browser-based local search on mobile devices much more formidable than it was yesterday.

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Google to Send Out 100,000 Wave Invites

Beginning tomorrow (September 30), Google will send out 100,000 invites to Google Wave. The product has received a lot of buzz, both for being innovative and not quite ready. Actually, Google admits it’s not ready for prime time, which is one of the reasons why the invites are limited.

If you’re not familiar, Google Wave is a collaborative tool that features real-time features. They’re still working on features, including group definitions, draft mode and permissions.

Those who can expect an invite are developers who participated in an earlier preview, the first people to sign up for invites and select Google Apps customers.

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Design a 3D Building for Monopoly City Streets Using Google Sketchup

Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly, have launched a contest where you can design a 3D building for their new interactive version of the popular board game: Monopoly City Streets.

But you’ll have to hurry. The deadline for the contest is next Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 11:59pm EST.

You’ll need to use Google SketchUp to design your building and then upload it to the Google 3D Warehouse to enter. Learn more about the contest rules here.

Monopoly City Streets, which launched earlier this month, uses Google Maps for its interactive game.

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New Consumer Protection PSAs Appear in Bing Search Ads

Microsoft has teamed up with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and Western Union to serve consumer protection PSAs in Bing’s search ads. The new ads address scams involving mortgages, foreclosure, credit repair and money transfers.

Some of the keywords included in the PSA effort are:

  • foreclosure rescue
  • mortgage foreclosure
  • fix my credit
  • credit repair
  • money transfer

When a searcher clicks on one of the PSA search ads, they will see a landing page with warnings about scams related to the keyword. The FTC hosts the landing pages for credit repair and mortgage foreclosure while a landing page for avoiding advanced fee fraud is hosted by Microsoft.

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Less Common Problems of International SEO

With all the hype around global growth of search engines and so many companies looking outside their borders for their next round of revenue, it’s no wonder a flurry of articles have been written on globalizing your search marketing programs. Unfortunately, some of these recommendations have been incorrect, confusing, or not focused on some of the biggest mistakes people make.

Top-Level Domains & Local Hosting

Everyone says the most foolproof method of signaling to a search engine your content is unique to a country is to get a top-level domain (TLD) and host it locally. The problem? You don’t always need to, and should evaluate the need on a market-by-market basis.

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The Myth of Perfect Conversion

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that every visitor is a potential prospect or buyer for your goods or services. The mythical 100 percent conversion rate simply doesn’t exist. It’s a delusion.

There are three types of visitors to your Web site:

  1. Noes: Those that won’t ever take the desired action.
  2. Yesses: Those that will always take the desired action.
  3. Maybes: Those that may take the desired action.

You should completely ignore the first two and concentrate on the last group. Let’s examine this more closely.

Noes

Some visitors to your Web site aren’t prepared to take action.

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Surprise-Free Browsing: Know Where You Land Before Clicking

Part of an SEO consultant’s job is to make people click to land on a page, so I understand quite clearly the following tools may screw our efforts because they make a surfer much smarter and selective as to which links to click. However I found the tools interesting enough to share because (apart from saving our own time when surfing) they introduce us to new browsing experience that we need to be aware of.

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Are You There Facebook

Earlier last week, and with much anticipation (from me anyway), Facebook launched their new ad manager. I was lucky enough to get access to the beta, but I have to admit that I’m very disappointed with the new interface. Which is way worse than being angry, right?

According to Facebook, the new ad manager includes “in-line editing capabilities, improved navigation and search abilities”. I’ll admit that the in-line editing capabilities are a big step up from the previous interface, but adding a search box and the ability to edit multiple ads simultaneously just isn’t quite what I had in mind from this juggernaut.

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FeedBurner Goes 301 All The Way

The Google AdSense for Feeds (aka FeedBurner) blog announced that all of their links will be 301 redirected, as opposed to some that are 301 redirected. In summary, when you use FeedBurner to create and host your RSS feed, FeedBurner creates special links that are used to send the reader to your web site. Some users selected to use a 302 redirected link, as opposed to a 301 redirected link, to obtain better tracking.

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Secret feature of Google Reader

Matt Cutts shows off a special mode of Google Reader.

    JVZoo Product Feed

  • Local Lead Igniter Software Software that finds businesses who are already buying leads AND shows you which cities are generating the highest amount of leads!
  • Killer SEO Secrets: Getting to the Top of the Search Engines The big sites like Amazon are selling tons of stuff for huge amounts of money. Did you know there are also smaller websites that are doing this as well? Do you know how? What if I told you we’ll tell you how you can too? Believe it or not, you can do t
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Single Purpose Homepage

It’s been a long time since I last blogged on design topics, but I think it’s time to break that streak. This post focuses on a design style that’s both retro (it’s been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it’s on the rise) - the single-purpose homepage.

First, a brief example:

Spokeo.com's Homepage

In the above design, Spokeo has just one, singular, all-consuming goal – get your email address so they can show you how their product works. There may be a few secondary links for registered users to login, access to the blog and about pages, and some logos to help improve credibility, but basically, we’re looking at remarkably driven intent behind the design.

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SEO Advice – Focus on Users, Not Engines

If you’ve been around the SEO world a while, you’ve undoubtedly heard the old adage:

Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings

Along with its peer:

SEO tactics that focus on engines, rather than users, are manipulative (black/gray hat) and will eventually be discounted or penalized

In my opinion, both of these statements are utterly false and tragically misleading. When I first considered the issue, I thought that perhaps, years ago, these opinions were more accurate than they are today. However, after visualizing the issue, I discovered even that isn’t true:

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Yahoo Search Ads Now On iPhone & Android Mobile Devices

The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog announced that your search ads will now automatically be displayed on iPhone & Android mobile phones. Yes, Yahoo said, this is an automatic opt in for all advertisers.

Yahoo said, “As of today, your ads should begin appearing immediately on these devices for relevant searches, if they have not already.” Yahoo boasted, if you didn’t have your ads on mobile devices, then “we’ve done it for you.” I assume there is an easy way to opt out, if you specifically do not want to show your ads on these devices?

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Top Microsoft Execs Get A Pay Cut

Appropriately top Microsoft executives, coming off  the “worst year ever” for the company, are sharing some of the pain. As PaidContent reports, the top executives at the company took a compensation hit based on the sales and revenue declines. Here are some of the numbers:

  • CEO Steve Ballmer $1.265 million vs. $1.34 million a year ago
  • CFO Chris Liddell: $3.5 million vs. $4.8 million
  • COO Kevin Turner: $5.4 million vs. $8.6 million
  • Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach: $6.2 million vs. $8.3 million
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Most People Don’t Want Online Tracking Even If It Means Relevant Ads Or Savings

Get ready marketers: a credible new report with sweeping implications from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley is likely to be the nail in the coffin of self regulation of online advertising. Specifically I’m talking about behavioral targeting, which largely concerns online display advertising but does marginally touch search at Yahoo and Google.

The NY Times discussed the report, released today:

The study’s authors hired a survey company to conduct interviews with 1,000 adult Internet users. The interview, which lasted about 20 minutes, included questions like “Please tell me whether or not you want the Web sites you visit to give you discounts that are tailored to your interests.” The results were later adjusted to reflect Census Bureau patterns in categories like sex, age, population density and telephone usage.

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Google Docs OCR

Google Docs API tests a new feature that lets you perform OCR (optical character recognition) on an image. There’s a live demo that illustrates this feature: you can upload a high-resolution JPG, GIF, or PNG image that has less than 10 MB and Google Docs extracts the text and converts it into a new document. Google mentions that “the operation can currently take up to 40 seconds” and a small test showed that the service is not yet reliable: it’s slow and it frequently returns errors.

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Google Hot Trends OneBox

Google started to show an OneBox at the bottom of the search results for the queries listed in Google Hot Trends. The OneBox mentions that a certain query is “#N of 100 most popular searches in the past hour”, even though Google Hot Trends doesn’t aggregate the most popular searches, which are pretty boring and don’t change very often. As Google’s blog explains, “Hot Trends lists the fastest rising searches on the web at any given hour”.


Google uses the fact that a query is suddenly popular in various ways: for example, to include recent web pages in the list of top results or to show results from Google News and Google Blog Search. Unfortunately, Google Hot Trends doesn’t do a good job at explaining why a certain query is popular, so Google should add more real-time news sources like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube.

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Link Week 6 Discovery Methods For Finding Ideal Linking Partners

One of my link builders recently had the brilliant idea of putting together and sending out a questionnaire designed to gather information how the other link builders in our agency perform their daily link building tasks. We’ve always worked on the assumption that each link builder will naturally be drawn to using certain specific tools and techniques. We’ve also found that overall, our clients benefit from working with link builders who all do things a little bit differently from everyone else. If someone gets stuck, so to speak, there are many other favored methods that can be tried.

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