Why doesn’t search query data in Webmaster Tools appear to match what I see when searching. How come the search queries report in Webmaster Tools shows some keywords ranking and when we search for them they are nowhere to be found?

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Bing has just launched a completely revamped version of their Webmaster Tools for our SEO and webmaster enjoyment and it looks OK, if not quite perfect. Bing’s Eric Gilmore spoke at SMX Advanced earlier this summer about having hit the reset button and started with a blank sheet of paper and really having listened to their forums; building a modern and more simplified architecture. But a quick glance at the various comments on Bing’s community sites shows that they have missed out or lost a few key features.

The new toolset is supposed to offer a simplified and easier to use interface than before and they are focusing on three main topics, Crawling, Index and Traffic data.

During our review of the new toolbox, we were left with the impression that the main reason for the update was to show off their new Silverlight 4 features rather than give webmasters an impressive toolset. Most lacking is the ability to export any of the data for further analysis. However, the tools do allow you to peer into how the spider is crawling the site, and what pages are getting indexed.

Unfortunately, Bing decided to remove the Outbound links and Backlinks reports which did provide some useful information. They also removed the Robots.txt validator which really was a bad move with the upcoming change to their robot name from MSNbot to BingBot. Domain score was also removed, which we won’t miss as it really didn’t mean anything, nor did the Page Score values – good riddance to those tools, we won’t have to scratch our head wondering what they meant.  See what – Anthony M Garcia, Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools had to say

Finally we are also missing the language/country information that helped you define where your site should show up for different countries. We’ve used that in the past to help get sites in the correct search results when they were hosted in a different country than the business was located in. Another fail for Microsoft on taking that feature out.

The features they did keep and improved on in some cases are worth using. Here’s a look ath what we now have..

Crawl Data

The crawl section allows you to review up to 6 months of data which lets you see how the BingBot is spidering your site. The Silverlight graphs are admittedly real nice graphs, with easy to use sliders to view the data quickly.

The Crawl Details is an important report that shows you what URLs BingBot is having problems with, or URLs you’ve told BingBot not to index and those they believe to be malware infected.

Index Summary

The Index Summary is a new chart that displays how many URLs of your site were indexed on a day to day basis in Bing. The numbers can be a bit worrying, especially when you see a drop in URLs indexed – however sometimes that can indicate that some problems have been solved, such as duplicate content issues.

It is common to have somewhat large surges in the numbers of URLs indexed, for example the domain in the above screenshot did not implement any changes over the timespan when two thirds of its URLs dropped out and we’ve seen similar drops on other sites during the same time period. You may also find interesting that the site in the example did NOT see a traffic drop during that period with a large dip in indexed URLs. In other words, remain calm if you see a massive dip or gain in this report and be sure to study what you’re seeing.

Index Explorer

Index Explorer is just a fancy way to view what URLs from your site Bing has in its index. It’s also a tool to make it very easy to block a URL, or block the cache for a URL or entire directory. This one looks like it’s going to lead to trouble for some, read on to see why we think so…

Traffic Summary

You will need to validate your site to be able to use these new features. Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Free ice lolly anyone?

During the month of June the Bing Ice Cream Van is on tour handing out free delicious Bing Ice lollies and giving people the chance to demo the great Bing products and services as part of our Bing consumer engagement activities.

The van arrives at TVP on Monday 28^th June.  It will be parked outside Building 2, from 11am-5pm so make sure to head down for your free ice lolly.

But the tour isn’t over there, the van will head back to Cardinal Place on Tuesday 29th June and will be parked outside the entrance to Building 100 from 11am-6pm.  This will coincide with the Great British Summer 10 event taking place at Cardinal Place from 25^th June to 9^th July where visitors will have the chance to enjoy free outdoor screenings of Wimbledon, Cricket and films.

Finally, check out this link to see a Bing Maps collection of all the locations where the Bing van will be visiting during June so you can pick up your free Bing Ice Lolly and have your Bing demo.   

While  most of the factors have decreased in relevance, the concept of domain trust is having a greater importance than ever. What do we mean by domain trust and how can you get search engines, especially Google to Trust your domain?

The terms “domain trust” and “domain authority” are bandied about a lot by search engine optimization services today. Domain trust is an expression that’s commonly used these days in SEO circles. Widely recognised as being of significant importance few people are able to offer a clear definition of domain trust and how it can influence search placements.

Here’s an explanation of domain trust, what it means and what you can do to build it. But let’s first have a look at the meaning of the term “trust” ..

The search engines work tirelessly in the pursuit of relevance. The name of their game is to match queries with the most suitable returns. The better they are at it, giving people simple stress free online search experiences that deliver the goods, then the more people will use them. In other words, the more value search adds to users’ lives the more value they add to their market price.

Google runs hundreds of tests against websites and checks numerous signals in order to establish relevance. One of the most important qualities that a web site can exhibit is domain trust.

The more domain trust you have the better you rank.

Domain Trust – Who links to you?

To a large extent domain trust is down to proximity. Google loves high quality websites. Well designed, well structured web sites bursting with great content and blessed with large numbers of satisfied visitors – these are Google’s trusted domains.

The closer you live to trusted domains, in other words the more direct links your site has from trusted domains, the more trust you gain.

Sites one link removed from the trusted domain network will generate 0.01% web spam. Two or more clicks from the trusted domain network and you are moving in circles that deal in unacceptable levels of spam – levels of 1.2% or more.

Domain Trust – Who you link to

It also matters who you link to. If you link to low trust sites, expect this to damage your domain trust. You’re in bad company. Link to trusted sites to boost your own domain trust.

Reciprocal links directories? Don’t do it. Why would any credible website link to a site that spams? It wouldn’t. Google is wise to this.

Domain Trust – Registration information

Google has been official registrar since 2003. Why? So that it can look under the web bonnet and access important web registration information. Being able to identify the owners of websites  means Google can spot themes. If you own 100 sites and Google spots that 75 of them are spam sites then expect this to be reflected in search placements  through

Domain Trust – User Data Signals

Google collects huge amounts of information about what users do on the web – through Analytics, through the tool bar, free wi-fi and through third party relationships. Signals reveal how naturally a domain is behaving. If the data signals are unusual the domain might well be penalised. Normal behaviour indicates a trust.

Follow Google guidelines, prioritise quality design and quality content and allow domain trust to grow naturally.

• Domain Age – it takes time to build trust and the past history of a domain may effect domain trust.
• Link Profile – essentially looking at the range of sites that you link to comparing the good links compared to the bad links.
• Domain Trust of other sites in a PageRank type relationship.
• Social networking (not yet but maybe in the future)
• On page information such as stop words?
• Links from a white-list of sites which is periodically checked by hand for quality? A list of manually checked sites that are unlikely to become untrustworthy overnight, Wikipedia (this rules out being correct as a factor), BBC, CNN, etc.
• Contact information on a page.
• Rate of link growth, natural growth – number of links grows as  a function of time and the number of pages in a site. More content should mean more link growth.  Is there a natural rate of growth for links depending on site size?
• Duplicate Content – a site that steals content from another site would be more likely to be dodgy.
• Bounce Rate – noisy but could be a secondary factor. It has certainly been touted as a possible ranking factor for a long time. A good site would satisfy the needs of its users but this could still be acheived in one page-view.
• Link distribution – how are the links distributed on the  site. Are there any deep links or is the entire link structure concentrating on the home page?
• Long-tail rankings – sites that appear for many long tail search are more likely to have good content than simple web sites.

More companies are now committed in building an online profile to help improve their online competitiveness. You begin, commit to worrying about social media tools last, not first. Why? Because tools will change. They always do. There was a time when Netscape seemed invincible. Yahoo, too. Myspace also. If you fall in love with tools, you’ll constantly be changing directions, with no real plan to guide your way.

If you’re looking to create a sustainable, effective social media presence, then you should be able to answer these 7 questions to successfully have a social media platform in place.

1. What’s Your Pitch?
Can you describe what your company does in 120 characters or less?

2. What’s the Point (Goal) ?
What type of program is this? Awareness, Sales, or Loyalty? Pick one.

3. What’s Your Relationship with Your Audience?
What does your audience know about you today?

• Nothing
• Aware of you, but never acted
• Acted once
• Repeat actions/enthusiasts
• Advocates

Pick up  two of these segments to focus upon, but make sure they are adjacent on this scale. It’s too confusing to have a strategy that targets advocates AND people that have never heard of you. That would be two strategies, not one.

4. How Does Your Audience Use Social Media?
Using the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, understand how your target audience (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. If your audience skews older, you may not want to engage in a lot of “make a video” contests, since that segment indexes low on the “Creator” scale.

You can play with the Social Technographics Ladder data right here:

5. What’s Your One Thing?
What’s the soul of your brand. What’s the one thing that defines you – and it’s not features and benefits. Volvo = Safety. Apple = Innovation. Disney = Magic. What’s on the other side of your = sign?

Note: This is not easy to figure out. You may need to engage in some brand anthropology, and have an agency help you find your one thing.

6. How Will You Be Human?
Social media is about people, not logos. How will you let down your guard? If you’re a small company, congratulations, this should be pretty easy. If you’re a big company, how can you act small again?

7. How Will You Measure Success?
Lots of ways to measure social media success, so make sure you determine your key metrics BEFORE you get started. I recommend picking three solid metrics to track. Appropriate metrics differ based on what your objective is for the program. See the slide deck for details. Now, you can worry about tools, and outposts, and social media tactics.

Speak with your Social media Consultant to devise a plan to leverage the right strategy.

Source :TechTrends

Do you know that your employees are using Facebook during the business/working hours even when it is prohibited at your workplace? Facebook has suddenly become a website that people especially the young people cannot do without (Even our President wants to engage the youths on Facebook).?

Many have argued that Facebook is a major distraction at work place, making many not to work but to Facebook.Even if they are restricted from visiting the website on their computers at work; their mobile phones are readily available to update their status on it. The site is so addictive that most people have considered it a time-waster, yes, but I personally think otherwise because I cannot get online without going to my Facebook so is many.
The truth is you have to be focused on what you want from the site because if you don’t know how to use this medium to your advantage it can be a big time waster especially taking up reasonable man hours that would have been used in productive venture at work. The addictive nature of the website has made it impossible for people to do without it. So what do you do as to profit from this necessary evil if you want to call it that?

This article is meant to help you understand how to use Facebook to your advantage. I can rightly say here that the best thing to do is to get an Internet Marketing Consultant to incorporate Facebook into your marketing strategy through a thought-out plan.

Social Networking and Social Network Marketing

The fact remains we deeply, innately, in every aspect both in professional and personal life need to be connected. We naturally form social or business groups based on affinities and expertise. We gravitate to others with whom we share interests. Most of us belong to real world networks that formed organically. Not surprisingly, these days such networks have rapidly migrated to the online world. New technologies are playing a big role in our ability to connect with people and also stay connected. We now live in an inter-connected or wired world where success can be attained based on the amount and quality of people you know who also know you and have interest in what you do and our personality. This is the social media era.

Social media are new communication tools for businesses to leverage on to promote and build their brands, such tools and applications are Facebook,twitter,linkedIn,wiki,blogs,mobile apps etc. They help businesses reach, engage a large number of potential buyers who will in turn reach back to you immediately making the media very interactive, They are effective and also inexpensive. This has lead to a method of marketing your brand using these social networks called Social Network Marketing (SNM).

Social media marketing is basically centered on efforts to create content that attracts attention, generates online conversations, and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. The marketing message spreads from user to user and resonates because it is coming from a trusted source on the network, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

Major corporations like Coca Cola, Apple, Dell, and Pepsi etc are actively involved in social media marketing in promoting their brands. One Nigerian brand that is fast leveraging these social media is GTBank.I see their presence on Facebook, wikipedia, Youtube, flickr etc.Have you watched the recent Pepsi advert for FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa on Youtube? That advert has been viewed by several millions of people within a short period surpassing any TV viewership over the same period of time; this is the power of social media which I want your organization to use.

In case you don’t know…

Facebook is the fastest growing social networking website on the Internet today with over millions of users world wide, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004 with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes at Harvard University. It is a free-access website organized by city, workplace, school, region to connect and interact with people. With the young and upwardly mobile population of the society as active users of the portal.

Looking at the impact of Facebook on its users, it is highly regarded as the new media, which affords great interactivity and personalization.

Let’s Do Facebook (Strictly for Business)

Facebook as a social medium affords the opportunity for individuals, businesses, organizations to network with friends, fans, customers, prospects and people from different countries and backgrounds, by sharing personal information, pictures, videos, articles etc. It has the ability to connect your business with customers and also to your customers’ friends. This is the viral nature of Facebook which businesses should leverage on (read up the principle of viral marketing in my book: How to Create Unlimited Internet Wealth

This has lead to a new method of promoting businesses and brands online known as social network marketing; this is quite effective because the platform helps businesses to engage with customers and prospects directly.

It can be difficult for businesses in Nigeria to figure out how this great marketing tool can help them, because of lack of this information on how businesses can leverage the strength of Facebook to drive traffic to their businesses Facebook can help your business have new customers who are searching the product or services you offer, like I have always said, people get online searching for a solution to their problems, the platform with its tools and applications helps you connect and engage the customers with your brand, you can also create a community around your business, it helps you promote your website, articles, product, services, events, articles, contact and other things which will boost your business.

Create a Facebook Page for your Business

To start promoting your business on Facebook, the first step is to create a Page for your business; this is quite different from a personal profile. Do not create a personal profile for your business. Profiles are for people, Pages are for businesses. Facebook is building significant new functionality for businesses, and all of this functionality is only available to Pages.

There are a few differences between Business Pages and Personal Profiles:

Pages allow you to designate multiple administrators, so that you can have multiple people help manage the account, and if one of your administrators leaves the company, you can still have control over the Page. Pages are, by default, public and will start ranking in Facebook and public search like Google.com.Bing.com results. Pages are split into different categories (local businesses, brands, musicians) that help you get listed in more relevant search results. Personal profiles have friends, which require mutual acceptance, whereas anyone can become a fan of your Page without first going through administrator approval.

A Facebook page for your business serves as the hub of your marketing presence on Facebook, Facebook pages rank very high in search engines when you use relevant keywords to your type of business, create an engaging page because the success of your marketing lies on that.

How to Create a Page

To create a page log on to www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. (You must be logged in to create a Page.) Fill out your Page like you would a Profile. Click on “Edit Page” or “Edit Information” on the Info tab to add information about your business like your website, a short description, products, mission statement, Vision and so on. Add your logo as the photo for your Page. Take advantage of some of the features of business Pages like the discussion board to engage your fans.

Choose a category. Most companies will be in the” Brand or Product” category. The category will help you rank in more relevant searches and provide relevant info fields on your Page. Choose a name for your Page. In most cases, this should be your company name. Now create your Page and click “Publish” button to make your Page public.

As the administrator, your name and profile will not show up anywhere on your Page. You are the behind-the-scenes manager. When you post new information or respond to a discussion thread, it will appear to be posted by your company rather than you personally. You can designate multiple administrators as well to help with the maintenance of your Page. In addition to being the administrator of your Page, you will want to become a fan. Once you become a fan, you will be listed among all the other fans on your Page and all the Pages of which you are a fan will show up on your profile –giving your business more visibility to your network.

Promote your Page

You do not just create a Facebook page for your business and leave it at that; you need to continuously promote your page for more users to become your fan. You need to engage your fans too until they become your customers. Facebook has over 33,000 applications that can help you do this more effectively.

Always update your profile with fresh pictures, videos, add interesting content to your page. Add poll, contest, and articles to your page. Leverage the viral nature of Facebook through the news feed which gives you update of your fans and friends.

Send email to your existing customers and introduced your Facebook page to them. Blog about your Facebook page too.

You can also integrate Facebook connect on your website; this will help increase your engagement with your fans by spreading information and updates about your visitors’ activities with their Facebook friends.

Add Facebook share link to your website, this makes it easy for your customers to share information about your business with their friends.

Create regular Facebook events for promotions you are running on your product or services, events you have that will be of relevance to your fans; the good thing about this is that the events page will be automatically promoted on your Facebook page for your customers, fans and prospects to see. With this you can determine the number of people that are interested in your product or service, the friends of your fans will also see such promotion.

Continuously interact with your customers on your page, join in discussions and use that forum to answer any question they might have, for this to be effective, assign a staff that will be updating your page and interact with your prospect like I have explained.

Your business can sponsor the development of an application on Facebook, which will appeal to your fans.

Advertise your Business on Facebook using Engagement Ads and Apps.

Advertising on Facebook helps you reach millions of people. Facebook ads allow you to promote your business, get more fans for your business Page, and drive more sales. To achieve the best result, your advert should be well crafted by an expert.

Measuring the performance of your ad campaign is easy. Facebook has built-in analytics to help track ad performance in terms of number of impressions, clicks, and click through rate. Multiple ad variations can be run at the same time and ads manager helps you determine which ad deliver the best results for your business. This helps you get the best from your advert campaign.

From the analysis you can measure the total number of fans, group members, and/or friends, level of engagement and number of conversations with potential and current customers and fans can also be determined. Facebook’s built-in analytics, Insights, lets you track valuable metrics such as page views, wall posts, discussion threads, and photo views.

The overall marketing effectiveness of your page, the number of visitors from Facebook to your website that convert into leads and customers can be determined.

Following these metrics over time can help you measure the ROI of using Facebook and be more focused about how to use Facebook effectively to market your product or service. Some applications of Facebook can also help you advertise your product and service effectively.

I believe with this information you will incorporate Facebook marketing strategy into your existing marketing plan and explore this new medium for your business advantage. Contact me for further guidelines on how to use other social networks like Youtube, wikipedia to promote your business. So, is Facebook a Social Networking site for you and your business or a Social notworking site?

We all (I hope) start our online campaigns by conducting an extensive keyword research. By doing this, we create a better knowledge and understanding of the market place. In this case, your niche or sector – Having used a number of tools like Google Adwords Keyword tool, Micro Niche Finder and so on, I received an email to try Keyword Competitor. Keyword Competitor is the first and only real time keyword research and monitor tool.

Keyword Competitor gives SEO consultants feed on the exact PPC keywords competitors are using right now, exact organic keywords with high rankings. With its help it’s easy to monitor competitor’s PPC ad positions, new keyword additions and changes in organic keyword search rankings every day. With current keyword and ad data you can make better decisions in PPC and SEO. Another good thing about Keyword Competitor is that it provides its users with a free lifetime trial. With this opportunity you’re able to monitor 1 domain and 2 keywords which allows you to understand the way Keyword Competitor works. Which is essential is that you will receive daily alerts on any changes made by your competitors: newly added keywords, ads, competitors.. The free lifetime trial can be upgraded if you show a real committment to the tool, and obviously I grabbed this offer with both hands.

There are video tutorials that help figure out the way Keyword Competitor works. As a SEO expert, I wouldn’t ask for anything better than the real time data I get with Keyword Competitor.

As usual, reading my favorite SEO site and stumbled upon a great post with very useful links.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google May Finally Disclose AdSense Split … If You’re An Italian Newspaper, That Is
  How much money does Google keep for itself from AdSense ads that publishers carry? Unless you’re a big publisher, Google — which preaches “data liberation” — doesn’t say. But thanks to an anti-trust investigation in Italy, Google may share how much it keeps. At least, that is, to Italian newspaper publishers.
  It’s a simple enough thing [...]
• Twitter’s Trending Topics Algorithm Updated To Show “Immediately Popular” Trends
  Mashable reports that Twitter has confirmed they changed their trending topics algorithm last week. Twitter’s Trending Topics, which later allowed localize trends, shows the most popular subjects being talked about on Twitter.
  Twitter said they now not only look at what is most popular, but what is “immediately” most popular on Twitter. Meaning, the [...]
• Enterprise SEO Tools, Part 1: The Browser
  Everybody loves tools! For search marketers working on any level—a 10 page site or a 10 million page site—tools are essential. They save us time, they help us diagnose issues, and they give us a peek into what our competitors are doing. They can even give us a peek into what the search engines are [...]
• Getting Started With Mobile Paid Search Advertising
  After several years of lying in the weeds, mobile advertising has significantly picked up steam. It finally makes sense to understand how to effectively use and deploy mobile paid search marketing campaigns. In this article, I’ll provide some basic tips related to paid search mobile marketing. In my next article, I’ll suggest several ad copy [...]
• Learning Local Search Via Twitter
  We’ve sifted through the best tweets from the latest LocalU conference to get the latest on local seo and local search marketing.
• Openbook: See What People On Facebook Share To The World
  Want to see what people share on Facebook with the entire world — perhaps without realizing it? There’s a new site that makes this easy, Openbook.
  Look At The Embarrassing Updates!
  Last week, I explored the issue of how Facebook’s own “Posts By Everyone” search feature revealed people who might be sharing material they didn’t intend for [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Changes to Yahoo! Mail Options: Disposable Email Addresses, ymailblog.com
• Google and Intel in web TV launch, FT.com
• Web Browsers Leave ‘Fingerprints’ Behind as You Surf the Net, Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Y! Answers is heading to San Francisco…, Yahoo Answers Blog

Business Issues

• TechCrunch wasn’t invited to Google Zeitgeist. Apparently we’re seeing too much of eachother., TechCrunch

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Says It’s Shipping 65,000 Android Phones Daily, paidContent.org
• Android 2.2, Google TV Expected at Google I/O This Week, eWeek
• Google Refreshes Android Market Website – It Inexplicably Still Lacks Search, TechCrunch
• U.S Mobile Data Exploding, Revenues Top $12.5B In Q1, Verizon Now World’s Largest Mobile Data Operator, Mobile Marketing Watch

Link Building

• 10 Link Building Tools Reviewed, wiep.net
• Easy Step by Step Way to Use Youtube for Link Building, Search Engine Journal

Paid Search & Contextual

• Coffee break with clients – AAA and Razorfish improve user experience with Ad Sitelinks, AdWords Agency Blog
• Gilt Groupe, Groupon, and avoiding SEO, Scott Rafer’s Blog
• Google Restricts Ads for ‘Cougar’ Sites, New York Times

Searching

• 10 Things that Make Search a Semantic Search, Hakia Blog
• Dive deeper into Techmeme’s top sources and introducing the Mediagazer Leaderboard, Techmeme News
• Google To Offer Encrypted Web Search, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM Industry

• Another Successful “Local University” in the Books, Small Business SEM

SEO & SEM

• 5 SEO Tactics That Make You Look Like a Douche, line25.com
• API and Dataset Cheatsheet – Building Quick & Dirty Tools, SEOmoz
• How To: Properly Buy An Existing Domain For SEO Purposes, Daily SEO Tip
• Universal Search – Digital Asset Optimisation, Bruceclay.com.au
• Wordpot: Another Keyword Suggestion Tool to Add to Your Arsenal, Search Engine Journal

Social Media

• How to use social media optimization to get quick traffic, Pandia
• Stream Twitter on Your Website Using JavaScript, RustyBrick
• Twitter Marketing Strategy: 5 Steps, Online Marketing Blog
• What backlash? Facebook is growing like mad, Fortune Tech

Video, Music & Image Search

• YouTube Shows the Number of Likes and Dislikes, Google Operating System
• At five years, two billion views per day and counting, YouTube Biz Blog

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• Hosting With GoDaddy? Might Want To Rethink That Decision.
• Common Online Business Mistakes by Michael Gray, Alan Bleiweiss and more!
• Four unique social bookmarking gems

Article by  Barry Schwartz

Keyword research as part of the SEO process is no longer just having a quick look at keywords and keyword volumes, and then optimising for the highest volume terms. This ignores many factors – increasingly keyword research for SEO requires a wider view of the competitive search landscape, your customer behaviour and the search usability of your site.

If you have paid for keyword research recently, and received simply a list of keywords with numbers, I hope you know what to do with them!

Keyword research forms not only the foundation of an SEO campaign, but also supports meaningful measurement, and continues throughout to support and refine delivery, as an iterative process, throughout the lifetime of the project.

So, what is the point of keyword research?

It is to understand your market
• Do people search for your products? Is there a market already?
• Who is in the market, what are they doing, and how successful are they?

It is to understand your customer’s behaviour
• How do your customers search for your products?
• When do your customers search for your products?
• What language do they use?

It is to understand your customer’s expectations
• What do they expect to find when they arrive on your site?

With this knowledge, you are able to evaluate how well you are performing against your target keywords, and your level of search penetration. You will also be able to estimate the size of the opportunity.
A quick search will show you where you rank for your target keywords, and where your pages are returned in the results, the actual landing page that searchers will arrive at on clicking through. Is it the most appropriate page? Analytics, usability keyword tools like Omniture, live usability studies and good old common sense should inform this. If you’re convinced that the best page for the job ranks for the search phrase, if a conversion action is required, proceed directly to the Conversion Optimisation process.

At this stage, you have completed the core of your keyword research and you can begin to create an action plan, based around:
• On page optimisation of your pages that rank for the appropriate phrases
• Site architecture, internal linking and content optimisation where your site ranks, but not for the most appropriate, converting page.
• As above for keyword phrases that you don’t rank for at all. Content creation strategy where there is no existing content to support optimisation.

Rinse and repeat, taking into consideration web analytics and site search data.

Yes, just like the title clearly states: Google’s SEO report card, this new release from Google indicated that they focus on some key elements. They believe this report card can answer some of the questions frequently asked.

Actually the report card is for their product teams toimprove on their product pages using simple and accepted optimization. The provided almost a 50-page PDF, of course, ordinary website administrators would found some useful information in order to optimize their site(s).

In Google’s word:

These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users’ experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages.

The report is divided into three parts:

• Subject I: Search result presentation
• Subject II: URLs and redirects
• Subject III: On-page optimizations

SEO Tips from the report:

• The title page should be a maximum of 60 characters
• Longer Titles should be modified using fewer keywords weighted
• The meta description does not flow in the ranking of a page with a
• The meta description should always include two lines
• For Sitelinks is a hierarchically flat links with keywords helpful
• For a permanent redirect should always use 301
• Headings should be used in chronological
• keywords in h1tags has more weight than keywords in h3 tags
• The alt text of an image is similar weight as the anchor text of a link