Look Through The Eyes of Google

Google Webmaster Tools has announced the addition of “Labs” section which includes two new features for webmasters.

• Fetch as Googlebot &
• Malware details

It appears that Google is taking the ‘Labs’ route to introduce new features to a larger audience and thereby illicit more feedback and shorten the test phase. This also means that these features are not as robust as the others that are available in WMT and should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Fetch as Googlebot
Out of the two, ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ is of more interest to SEO professionals as it enables them to see what Googlebot sees. It is different to seeing the cached version of the webpage, which can be retrieved by using the “cache:www.xyz.com” query in Google search, and then clicking on “Text-only version”.

It is also different from simply viewing the source code of the webpage because:

1. It shows HTTP header information which is not available if you simply view the source code. This information will allow you to check and test redirects implemented on a particular webpage.

2. It enables you to test if the server is returning any information differently then what it is supposed too.

3. It also enables you to find if the server returns a different page to Googlebot than that to the user. In order words, you will be able to determine if any “cloaking” has been done in the past or outside your knowledge.

All in all, this feature empowers webmasters to trouble shoot and test URLs specifically for cases related to Googlebot as it uses the same user-agent and IP range as Googlebot.

Malware details:
Previously, Google webmaster tools reported when a site was flagged for having malware. This feature takes it a bit further by providing snippet of codes that is/are considered to be malicious.

This will help you to quickly identify and eliminate any malicious code that has infected your website. It would thus reduce the probability of your website being flagged by Google as “This site may harm your computer” if your websites happens to be infected. You can read a detailed deliberation on this on Google Online Security Blog.

Both these features provide some much needed information along with ease of accessibility to webmasters and would certainly help us all in making informed decisions.

About Author – Kneoteric is a leading online marketing company providing SEO service, online marketing consultancy, PPC Services and link building service.

Google Recommendations to Move up in Search Results

I just gone through with Google’s official view point about the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on Google Grants Blog, where Galen Panger, an Associate, Google Communications and Google for Non-Profits, has focused to bust the old myths about SEO like SEO is all about technical and one should not perform SEO, if he/she doesn’t have technical/programming knowledge. He also mentioned the same in his post “what you can accomplish with SEO doesn't require any programming or technical skills, but it does require a big-picture awareness of your issue.”



He has also recommended few points that one should consider while doing SEO for his/her website:

1. To obtain good results in search engine rankings, one must first require knowledge of keyword research and keywords popularity. Take the concepts and phrases in your site and compare them with related using the tools Google's Keyword Tool and Insights for Search. Make sure to develop related pages focused on what people are talking about and in the language they use.
   
   
2. Use these key phrases on the pages where they accurately match with the page content especially in page titles, section headings and in URLs. If you have added many pictures or graphics associate with that page, make sure to make an arrangement in a way that your most important content should be appear on the web page as Googlebot doesn’t read the images.
   
   
3. Finally, link popularity is the main factor that determines much of your ranking in search results. Link popularity can be calculated on the basis of how many quality websites are linking to your websites. To increase link popularity, post the informative content on your website so that others would love to link with your website. Use social media optimization activities to attract plenty of quality backlinks.

Top 11 Internet Marketing Tools that a Internet Marketer Should Use

While looking for some internet marketing tools, I landed on Evan Carmichael's post The Top 11 Tools You’ve Never Heard Of for Internet Marketers - SEO University. I found these tools very important so featuring the same on my blog.



1) Firefox Extensions (https://addons.mozilla.org/en‐US/firefox/) - Add-ons are extensions of the browser that add new functionality to Firefox or change its appearance

• Pros: Tools work right within your browser, very quick, very powerful, and very free
• Critiques: None ‐ critiques usually resolved with extension updates
• Cool: Audit a clients site live: SE issues, opt. improvement
  
• Cost: FREE

2) IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com/) - IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs.

• Pros: Real‐time monitoring of blogs/social media, Link, topic & trend tracking tools
• Critiques: Can’t search videos directly, Some searches take up to a minute to load
• Cool: BigBuzz Search
• Cost: FREE

3) Google Geo Search (http://www.contentranch.com/google-geo-search-tool/) - The Google Search Tool is a simple tool that creates a url to the official google search page based on the location and data center you choose.

• Pros: Search Google by region, Simple to use, quick and streamlined
• Critiques: None
• Cool: No ads, No clutter
• Cost: FREE

4) Domain Report Tool (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm) - The Domain Report tool will check Google, Yahoo! Search and Live Search to see how many pages for each site are indexed in each engine.

• Pros: Tally & compare search engine indexing, Determine competitor search presence
• Critiques: No export option, Can take up to 5 minutes
• Cool: Free! Even without ‘Bruce Clay’ subscription
• Cost: FREE

5) BackTweets (http://backtweets.com/) - Search for links on Twitter.

• Pros: Search Twitter for links to your site, See’s through compressed URL’s, Sort results by date or user
• Critiques: None
• Cool: Set up regular RSS updates
• Cost: FREE

6) Know’em (http://knowem.com/) - KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.

• Pros: Check brand‐name availability for 120 social networks, Very quick and easy!
• Critiques: Occasional network error when pinging site(s)
• Cool: Promote brand cohesiveness, Monitor brand/identity theft, Can automatically register your username for extra$$
• Cost: FREE

7) SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com/) - Spy on your online competitors and download competitors keywords and adwords.

• Pros: Great competitive insight on PPC & Organic, Works in browser, quick & thorough, Free stuff is good – though you can subscribe for more
• Critiques: Busy interface, Not intuitive as to what a particular button/tool does
• Cool: Dashboard: charts and data mash‐ups
• Cost: FREE plus subscription options

8) Backlink Checker Tool (http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php) - Enables webmasters to check their pagerank, monitor the PR of competitor’s backlinks, estimate a value of their site, and more.

• Pros: Quickly oversee a site’s backlinks, Show which links have the ‘nofollow’ tag, List anchor text for incoming links as well as their PageRank
• Critiques: Don’t forget the ‘http://’ or it returns no results
• Cool: Smartpagerank.com also has other useful tools
• Cost: FREE

9) GSiteCrawler (http://www.gsitecrawler.com) - Windows Generator for Google SiteMap Files.

• Pros: Crawl simulation provides detailed spidey‐vision, View canonical and duplicate content issues, aborted URLs, page, file sizes and more, Automatic XML sitemap creation
• Critiques: Large sites may take a few hours and need to be run overnight, Crawlers will get stuck in a loop on sites with dynamic URLs
• Cool: One‐stop audit shop, Exports multiple reports
• Cost: FREE

10) Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) - With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

• Pros: Identify phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on, Geo‐target where to sell your products, Identify product seasonality, Identify if news stories relate to spikes in searches
• Critiques: No “real” search frequency number only relative comparison
• Cool: Breakout tool identifies phrases rising in search frequencies
• Cost: FREE

11) Epiar Negative Keywords Lists (http://www.epiar.com/ppc-negative-keyword-lists/) - Negative keyword targeting is becoming increasingly popular to weed out worthless impressions and clicks in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

• Pros: Save 5% to 40% on PPC spend! And maintain/increase sales, Quick! Set of 14 or 19 online questions, Premium NKL custom keyword research per PPC campaig, Instantly generates list of top 2500 or 5000 negative keywords
• Critiques: Not free
• Cool: Premium NKL prioritized: Top 250 for Yahoo! or Top 65 for MSN
• Cost: One time fee; no subscription

Google Changes and the Future of SEO

The imminent death of SEO has been a hot topic amongst SEO professionals for quite some time now. Some SEO professionals worry that their careers are in jeopardy since search engines are continually making improvements to their technologies. Search engines are in the process of completely revamping their ranking strategies to fight spammers and improve user experience. For example, Google is currently improving intent and behavior-based search in order to provide more relevant search results. So what does this all mean for the future of SEO? Is the death of SEO an inevitable outcome of the advancement of search engines?

People have been predicting the end of SEO since the very beginning. While it’s certain that things on the SEO front are always changing and that search engines are getting smarter, SEOs will continually adapt to these changes just as they have in the past. As long as search engines list websites without requiring the websites to pay a fee, SEO will exist.

Google’s Improvements and What They Mean for the Future of SEO

In the quest to fight spam and improve user experience, Google is in the process of implementing a series of changes in behavior and intent-based search. Every person who conducts a search for a particular term will have different results based on their location and search history. As a result of these changes, SEO has to switch from only targeting keywords to focus more on increasing traffic and conversions. A possibility is that link building will become far less important in the future of SEO because Google will determine the value of a website based on how visitors engage with it. The ultimate goal of websites will be to provide compelling content that entices visitors to read, share, bookmark, and so on.

Social input through voting is another feature that search engines are tinkering with in order to provide user-controlled rankings. Search engine users might have the chance to vote for sites they like and sites will get ranked based on such votes. The model will be similar what’s seen on social voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Of course, search engines will have to find a way to ensure that votes are made naturally in order to prevent black hat SEOs from fooling the search engine bots.

Google and other search engines are raising the bar in SEO. Initially, this will make it harder for SEO professionals to do their job but the end result is positive. Spammers and black hat SEOs will have more difficulty succeeding in their unscrupulous efforts and search engine users will be provided with content that is more relevant.

Humans, Not Machines

As always, the aim of webmasters and SEO professionals should be to appeal to humans. People spend so much time trying to trick the search engines that they forget who they are ultimately serving: people! Your site should be optimized but your priority should always be to fulfill needs and provide solutions. Considering the direction that SEO is going, human actions and behavior will ultimately determine rankings. Your SEO success depends on your ability to engage people through great content and social media marketing.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/google-changes-and-the-future-of-seo-949419.html

10 Tips for Getting (or Keeping) Your Next Search Marketing Job

As the economic climate worldwide has shown uncharacteristic elements of strife and turmoil, I've been getting more and more questions asked about finding and keeping a job in the Internet marketing space. As a CEO, and someone who employs quite a few folks, I think I can give some fairly detailed, albeit personal, advice on this topic.

So - if you want to keep the job you've got, or earn your next one, let me recommend these strategies:

1. Be Metrics Driven
   If you can show a company that's thinking of hiring you that you know how to track metrics around search - whether it's rankings, competitive intelligence, PPC performance, etc. - and you have the pretty charts and graphs to show them from your last (or existing) gig, you're well on your way. Management at companies large and small love data, love charts and love "chrome" - seriously. The better and more robust your charts and datasets, the better off you'll be. Make Excel your friend and learn to love pivot tables (or just get really good at splicing Omniture/Google Analytics in smart ways).
   _
2. Show Initiative
   You don't have to implement a new project under the table or in your spare time and then try to convince everyone it's great. In fact, management can often get frustrated by employees who use "spare" time on their own projects without running it past someone first. However, just an email every few weeks with a project idea, a way to speed up production, a test implementation of new technology, features or report layouts goes a long way. Your superiors will feel like you aren't just in this for the 9-5, but that you're actively trying to make a difference.
   
   Case in point - today I got emails from three different people at SEOmoz pitching some new ideas for improving YOUmoz, building a new tool for Labs and re-organizing content in the PRO library. Not all of them can be pursued right away, and a few take dev time and resources, but they show dedication and interest - which is far more critical to the growth and success of a company in an emerging field like search.
   _
3. Pro-Actively Improve Your Knowledge
   I absolutely love it when I find a skill in an employee that I myself haven't cultivated. It adds so much extra value to the organization, in everything we do (Q+A, tool development, guides, consulting, etc). Go out and find a niche you're passionate about, dive in, and report back with your findings. A quick email to your SEO or marketing team commenting on trends in acquisition of affiliates, building reputation management accounts, learning the Google image search algo more thoroughly, etc. is a fantastically positive indicator.
   _
4. Support Your Co-Workers
   Trust me when I say that one of the biggest positives is when someone in the organization is overwhelmed and another team member can pitch in to tow the line. The teamwork that builds and the emotional positivity that flows from those types of actions is irresistable. It's the type of action that can make you a company favorite for months or years to come. So, if you see a co-worker drowning under the load, offer to help, dive in and kick ass. That's the kind of person every manager wants on their team.
   _
5. Don't Play Politics
   Likewise, when rough issues arise, or feelings run hot, don't panic, don't over-react and do what's best for the company. It's easy to be selfish when you're feeling overlooked, under-appreciated or bad-mouthed, but standing strong and never swaying from a position of objectivity carries considerable weight. Let your potential new employer know that this is the kind of person you are and you'll remove a huge element of risk that every manager worries about.
   _
6. Don't Be Thrown Off By Logistics
   The dev team doesn't have time to implement your idea. Management is too busy to approve a formal budget. Your co-workers' time is caught up with other projects. Don't worry. Take your idea and find ways to scale it down or re-think so that you can design/implement on your own. I know how hard the barriers can be to taking initiative in companies where times are tough and focus is tight, but if you can do it independently, you'll earn the respect and admiration of your execs. It's incredibly hard to let someone go once you know they can build value all by themselves, even if/when the rest of the team is swamped.
   _
7. Create Accurate Expectations
   I haven't ordered these by importance, but if I did, this might be #1. In business, as in usability (and life), creating expectations and delivering on them is the most critical aspect to success and happiness. If you tell your boss you can have something done by a certain date, have it done on that date. If you deliver reports, analyses, written documents, blog posts, etc. at a certain quality level, don't suddenly produce something of lower value. Likewise, if you've just joined a new position and want to impress everyone (or are worried about your job and are attempting to compensate), don't create expectations in others you can't regularly fulfill. It's excellent to demand more of yourself and improve with time, but I believe false expectations are one of the biggest causes for dissatisfaction on both sides of the employment aisle.
   _
8. Maintain a Positive Profile in the Industry
   There's no doubt about it - search is a strange industry. We've got cults of personality, popularity battles, people willing to go to extremes to get noticed and a lot of personal branding (much of it professional & positive and some the reverse). To prosper at a job in the search space and to help keep your chances for the next gig as robust as possible, keep your personal brand positive 100% of the time. Thinking about leaving a nasty comment because you felt slighted? Skip it. Want to post something harshly controversial on your Twitter account? Better think twice. At a bar with comrades who are speaking negatively about another individual - feel free to provide an opinion, but refrain from personal attacks and unprofessional comments. This industry is still tiny, and I can tell you that every day, comments come back to me about what person X said about person Y (especially if it was said "in confidence"). Keep your nose clean, and you've got a far better chance that others will do the same when it comes to your references and reputation.
   _
9. Provide Productivity Statistics
   A few of the folks at SEOmoz have started a weekly email series describing their tasks, projects and accomplishments for the week. I absolutely love it. It's an easy way to get caught up on what's going on in their professional lives and in the operations of the business without feeling nosy or interrupting. It's also a fantastic tool for employees who are worried their efforts might be overlooked or under-appreciated. If I've got an email in my box telling me what you've been working on, I'm much more likely to give praise and direction than if those tasks (even the critical ones) fly under my radar.
   _
10. Bring Business to Your Organization
    If you participate in the social web, attend events, have contacts in the field of business or even just go to a local meetup every few weeks/months and create a positive impression for your company, you're doing very smart things for your career. In a downturn, organizations seek to cut the excess; they don't want to potentially dismiss a direct source of revenue (even if it's just possible revenue). And for managers who aren't always great at accepting internal reviews or trusting their own judgement, external validation from a customer or partner goes a long way.

I hope these have proven valuable, and I'd certainly love to hear others from hiring managers, directors and CEOs of other firms in the space. I also now owe some quid pro quo and a blog post on how employers should treat their people in order to find and retain the best quality staff. After all, employment is a two-way street, and both parties need to be able to both give and receive in equal proportion.

PS: This Article is originally written by randfish

Befriending PPC for SEO benefits

Pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) are widely used for search engine marketing, but are mostly performed in isolation to one another. The cross utilization of data is seldom seen, which if done, could potentially produce far better results.

The idea behind this post is to ascertain how best PPC can be used to gain useful insights, which when implemented in search engine optimization can help us derive improved results. Mentioned below are few tasks that can be performed better by using PPC to ‘test the waters’.

1. Keyword selection: There is no shortage of free and paid keyword research tools but the data presented by them is not always accurate. Many of us would have learnt this fact the ‘hard way’ – by optimizing for keywords that don’t deliver targeted traffic, or for that matter any traffic at all. It is a costly mistake both in terms of time and money.

PPC can be used to determine the ‘traffic generation capacity’ of keywords by mining raw data such as number of impressions for that particular keyword. This data can be extrapolated to predict the traffic yielding capacity of keywords. Optimizing the website for such keywords would therefore drive more traffic to the website.

2. Building a wider keyword portfolio: Every website has a set of core terms it wants to rank for, in addition to other semantically similar key phrases. High rankings for core terms will deliver maximum targeted traffic, but at the same time the importance of ranking for secondary terms cannot discounted.

By running a PPC campaign for core terms on broad match, we can identify keywords other than the core terms that trigger the ad. This will not only help in building a database of relevant keywords that are searched for, but also assist in ascertaining keywords that Google considers relevant to the core terms. Tapping these keywords along with the primary keywords would therefore channel more visitors to the website.

3. Judging keyword efficacy: As everything else in search engine marketing, not all keywords are made equal. It is a well established fact that some keywords convert better than others, but the only certain way of knowing keywords that convert better is to test.

PPC is a quick and efficient way to check the ‘conversion potential’ of both the primary and secondary key phrases. Optimizing your website for keywords that drive conversion is a sure shot way of generating more revenue.

4. Writing compelling descriptions: Meta description may have lost its importance as a ranking factor but plays a crucial role in enhancing ‘click through rate’ for organic listing. In short, it is the ‘ad copy’ for organic listing.

PPC can be used to test different versions of ad copies and their corresponding click through rate. The best performing ad copies, based on their click through rate, can then be improvised to develop Meta descriptions that are likely to attract more clicks.

5. Testing landing pages: A website that does not have the potential to convert visitors into customers is no good.

In order to create a landing page that facilitates conversions it will need to be tested, modified, and tested in an iterative manner. Since PPC has the propensity to deliver quality traffic quickly, testing can be performed without waiting for organic rankings and the consequent traffic.

The whole exercise of leveraging PPC to build a high performing SEO campaign has an additional bonus attached to it – you get the ‘best of both worlds’ and here’s how.

It is a well established fact that an online marketing campaign produces best results when search engine optimization and PPC are implemented in tandem, and compliment each other.

After initial spillage and fine tuning, the PPC campaign that is being used to churn data will start to deliver positive return on investment. Synergizing the PPC campaign with your search engine optimization campaign will result in a holistic search engine marketing campaign. This is bound to deliver best results. And our philosophy is - why settle for less when you can get the best.

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