Internet search is kind of like the Duey Decimal System of the Internet

Anybody that’s ever used he Internet is well acquainted with the concept of search engines. Search engines are to the Internet as the Dewey Decimal System is to any public library. Search engines provide us the free mechanism to find a virtual needle in a global haystack. While Internet users use search engines on a daily basis, they often take for granted the very critical task that they perform and the value that they add to our Internet experience. Whether it’s searching for information to perform a task, making a purchase from the convenience of our home or from our mobile phone on the go or just getting to a particular destination online, search engines get us there.

As an Internet marketer, search engine marketing is one of the most important tools we have at our disposal. In particular, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the discipline of ensuring client content shows up on the first page of search results for searches related to a business’s product or services or the problems they solve. This is sometimes referred to as driving natural search traffic to a website, which can have a great ROI (Return On Investment) as there is no incremental cost for each user that comes to your website via clicking on organic (non-paid) search results. Understanding how Internet search works will give us hints on how to perform SEO more effectively.

When you think about it for a moment, what search engines do and how fast they do it is really amazing. For instance, in sub-second response time, search engines search through their index of hundreds of billions or even trillions of web pages available on the Internet to find those few references that are most relevant to your particular search. That includes informational searches such as how to change a tire on automobile, transactional searches such as purchasing an electronic device over the Internet or navigational search, using a search to locate a particular company and branded website.

In the brief (3 min. and 15 second) YouTube video below, Matt Cutts, lead Engineer in charge of Google’s web search quality regarding spam, describes how search works in terms that most Internet marketers and users can understand. Obviously, the devil is always in the details and for those engineers with the time an inclination, much more hints can be found in the Google public patent filings.

Google is by far the most used search engine in the US with nearly 2/3 of the US search market share. Other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! which is powered by Bing and others work in a manner similar to Google. Understanding how Google uses over 200 factors to determine relevancy and which factors are most important, will prepare an Internet marketer to think about how to create, edit and optimize web pages so that Google understands the content and can score its relevancy high relative to related search terms. The business goal is for Google, Yahoo!, Bing (insert your search engine of choice here) to return a reference to that page in the first page of the search results, which as many already know from experience, is often as far as many of us look before trying another search. That’s why being on the first page of the search results for phrases relative to our business is the holy grail from a search engine marketing standpoint, especially if when we don’t have to bid funds for the right for our link to show up there and pay for each incremental click and resulting visit to our webpage.

Hopefully this video has provided some insights into how search engines work and the role that they play in the Internet experience. If you found value in this post, please like eBiz ROI on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ebizroi(or click like button directly below) and Follow eBiz ROI on Twitter @eBizROI (or click the Twitter follow button directly below) to stay connected to the Terrific Time for Traffic series and other quality content for growing your business online while maximizing marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

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Seven SEO Tips for Anchor Text

The following Whiteboard Friday video from Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder of SEOMoz, highlights the subtle nuances of anchor text (clickable part of a text link on a webpage), its position within a web page and the efficacy of different strategies to maximize a websites sites ranking in the search results, which can have a profound impact on the amount of visitors originating from search engine users. The great thing about Rand and SEOMoz is that they are SEO industry through leaders who take a data driven approach to their tool development and training videos.

All About Anchor Text Whiteboard Friday Video

 (running time: (9 minutes, 35 seconds)

1. Multiple anchors from the same page do NOT provide additional value
2. Diversity of the anchor text link provides the strongest value
3. Fluctuating the anchor text itself is debatable, though many will use this tactic to mask search engine spam and search results manipulation
4. The first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts
5. Internal anchor text helps a tiny bit (funny presentation of definition of tiny, both in the video and comments following it)
6. If a link uses an image, then the alt attribute of the image tag usually, but not always, becomes the anchor text.
7. Surrounding text is likely used as a signal, especially when the anchor text itself does not have much content or value (e.g. click here)

Understanding these seven anchor text tips and how to apply them to your SEO campaigns, both on-page and off-page, can help the optimized site achieve a high ROI (Return On Investment) for search engine optimization initiatives while helping to drive targeted, sustained, qualified traffic.

If you found value in this video, I strongly suggest that you check out the actual All About Anchor Text Whiteboard Friday as there were 103 comments from the video from a highly experienced, engaged, SEO community, many of which ask insightful questions or add experience that in some cases supports Rand’s points, while others offer a competing perspective and food for thought. The video, which was release last Fri, 6 Jan, and today, 10 Jan, has 4,737 views with 76% watched on average (how far into the video on average viewers watched). For online video, these stats are impressive and indicative of the value of these Whiteboard Friday videos. You can always get up to date stats by clicking the video stats button just below the video player. If you are an SEO, do yourself a favor and add these to your Friday agenda. Remember, free to watch + no registration required = no brainner!

About SEOMoz Whiteboard Fridays

SEOMoz Whiteboard Fridays is a learning series developed by SEOMoz available to those interested in learning SEO. No registration or membership is required to view, and for other content curators to embed these videos free of charge. This is not only good for SEOMoz exposure and brand distribution, but if done effectively by adding your own value to the content by commentary or analysis, it can be an effective tool to enhance search engine marketing. With 103 comments at the time of this publishing, that’s great crowdsourcing highly relevant, targeted content which is what Google rewards these days.

About SEOMoz

SEOMoz.org develops SEO software, conducts extensive studies using a mix of data from actual search results and sites, then combines that data with expert opinions from the worlds top SEOs. SEOMoz and hosts the web’s most vibrant SEO community of which, eBiz ROI is a member.

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The video contained in this blog post is from a recent whiteboard Friday hosted by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org, a well-respected thought leader in the SEO industry.

In the video, Rand covers five specific tactics that SEO’s can use for optimizing a webpage. An attractive attribute of on page optimization is that it is something that is directly within the control of the webmaster or the person(s) managing the website as opposed off-page optimization, which can be much more outside the control of the webmaster.

In the video,Rand covers each of the five on-page SEO in some detail citing some real world examples. The video length is a total of 12 min. and contains a lot of useful information that can benefit your on page optimization strategy.

The five on-page SEO tactics covered in the video include:

1. Semantically connected words and phrases
2. Block level optimization (optimization of certain regions within a webpage)
3. Internal and external linking strategies
4. Happiness of web visitors (in Google’s estimation)
5. Content uniqueness and formatting

Provided is a link to the video transcript for the Advanced On-Page Optimization – Whiteboard Friday. If you follow this link, you’ll also benefit from the dialogue of over 80 comments following the transcript. The one question in the comments that remains unanswered is whether or not outbound links should be no followed (i.e. rel =”nofollow”) or not without negating any positive treatment from the search engines for outbound links.

If you found value in this post, please like eBiz ROI on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ebizroi(or click like button directly below) and Follow eBiz ROI on Twitter @eBizROI (or click the Twitter follow button directly below) to stay connected to the Terrific Time for Traffic series and other quality content for growing your business online while maximizing marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

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Bing for Search Marketers: Why they should take note

Bing’s rise to 30% search engine market share in the US has been slow but steady. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the story about the race between to the tortoise and the hare. Last I checked, Bing had 12 consecutive quarters of winning search market share from Google and as we all know, competition is necessary for innovation. Google+ will provide the same drive for innovation to facebook over time in the social realm.

 One of the Interesting things to note is that as a result of the Bing/Yahoo! relationship, Yahoo! Site Explorer will be deprecated (retired) and search marketers will now have to find alternative sources of competitive link information. That is to say that Bing webmaster tools will continue to provide link data from the Yahoo! link database, but only for websites that users own and have verified ownerships rights to.

The good news is that there are other great data providers such as the SEOMoz and Majestic who offer similar, enhanced data available on market as a whole that can be used to gather competitive intelligence but all known tools have an associated licensing fee. eBiz ROI relies on SEOMoz for its competitive link profiling and link building efforts and find that is a great tool for this task. Bottom line is that it appears that the days of Yahoo! Site Explorer providing free, competitive link data are sadly drawing near to an end. The reality is that Yahoo! site explorer lacked key data about the value of individual links that makes tools like Open Site Explorer with the licensing fee.

For an interesting discussion on the topic from an SEO perspective, the video below, featuring Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz and Duane Forester of Bing offers some interesting expert perspectives. Rand and Duane delve into some of the new and exciting roadmap features of Bing and even shares some of the aspects of how Bing builds their roadmap and why search marketers, and SEOs in particular, should pay attention.

Pump Up The Bing – SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday

Some of the most interesting takeaways from this discussion, for me at least, is the 4% lift in spend by Bing users, of which, 57M+ exclusively use the Bing search platform. Also, the 23% increase in likelihood of purchase from Bing users over users from others search engines user base.

These are all great reasons for search marketers to pay attention to Bing. Traffic is good, but conversions are better. I, for one, am looking forward to using enhancements to Bing’s webmaster tools.

For SEO Page Title Size Matters

Title Tags are Key SEO On-Page Optimization Factor

Experienced SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practitioners know that few keyword factors of a webpage matter more in on-page optimization than html title tag. These title tags are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is helping the search engines determine how relevant a webpage is relative to a user’s search querry. For instance, when viewing a webpage the title tag contents are displayed in the title bar of most browsers while viewing that web page.

There are number of studies with real-world data that back this up such as the SEOMoz 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors study which showed a .9 correlaton for keyword usage in the first word of a title, which was tied for first place in this witht he number ot times a keyword is repeated on a page for all of the page level keyword usage factors studied. I highly recommend you take a look at this study as it is the most comprehensive, publically available SEO Factors study that I am aware anywhere which includes input from some of the top SEO experts in the world combined with examining a larged data set of thousands of queries and search results. Best of all, it is FREE!

Another key reason that the title tag is such an important component of a webpage from a SEO standpoint is that the title tag is what shows up when the corresponding page is returned in the search results for the user’s search query. In fact, it’s the title that becomes the clickable link in the search results that users click on to navigate to the desired webpage. Therefore, title tag AND composition is a key factor in driving click through rates.

For example, if you think about how you read a newspaper or some other periodical, you often scan the titles to determine which articles are worth investing the time to read. Sort of like subject lines in an email being correlated to the likely hood that you will open that email.  In the search results, a compelling title can help drive increased traffic through higher CTRs (click through rates) independent of search results position. That is not to say that pages higher in the search results don’t get a larger share of the clicks just that a well written title can influence CTR also.

Why are 70 Character Titles considered an SEO Best Practice?

A long-standing best practice among many SEO practitioners is to utilize a limit of 70 characters when creating html page titles. The primary reason is based on the widespread belief that search engines only evaluate the first 70 characters of an html page title. It is a fact that most popular search engines truncate title tags after 70 characters in the search results which probably contributed to the proliferation of the assumption that search engines only evaluate the first 70 characters of a page title. The following video will present evidence that challenges this long-standing assumption and cover best practices in html page titles along with the reasons why.

Cyrus Shepard, SEOMoz SEO on Page Title Size Impacts

In the video below, Cyrus discusses in detail why page title size and composition matters for when it comes to optimizing a webpage for search engines, improving rankings and click through rates.

If you are interested in learning more about SEO and how it can help drive consistent, sustainable, targeted traffic to your business website, then subscribe to the eBiz ROI Internet marketing blog, consider using one of the many mechanism on this page to follow our coverage of new, interesting and actionable SEO information. If you found this topic interesting, then please share it with your friends.

As always comments are both welcome and appreciated and if you look at the SEOMoz 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors study.

SEO Checklist

SEO checklist

Having a website without visitors is like having a restaurant without patrons. There are a number of different avenues that businesses can use to drive traffic to their website. These include mentioning their website address in TV ads, radio ads, print ads, Internet ads that link to the website. While all of these methods are valid methods to drive targeted traffic to a website, investments in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can represent one of the best opportunities measured by return on investments for driving targeted traffic to your website, especially if you’re advertising budgets for doing multichannel advertising are limited. Having an SEO checklist to aid in designing SEO into your new business website from the ground up is a hugely valuable tool in helping ensure your website shows up in the search results for relevant queries by your targeted customers.

An SEO checklist is particularly useful for businesses just launching a new website as many new businesses are doing today, by the thousands. It is cost-effective to design a website with SEO from the start as opposed to retrofitting SEO into existing websites whose design many not have been benefited by an SEO checklist during its design and implementation. Therefore new website design with SEO in mind should factor in things like accessibility, keywords and phrases (search terms) targeting and building quality content that users and search engines will rate highly just to name a few. If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of new businesses launching a new website soon, the following video may be of value to you either as a SEO practitioner designing/implementing your own/clients website or as an informed purchaser contracting with a third-party to design/impelement your a website where SEO is a key project requirement.

Just to provide a credibility baseline for the SEO checklist provided in the video below, SEOMoz.org, the video producer, is a world renowned leader in SEO tools, knowledge and SEO thought leadership. This video features Rand Fishkin, the cofounder and President of SEOMoz.org.

If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, what it is and how it can help your business by driving targeted traffic either on a local, regional, national or even international level for your new website, then why not contact eBiz ROI for a complimentary SEO consultation to determine how the SEO checklist presented in this video can be integrated into your business website, helping ensure that your Internet marketing investments will be rewarded with targeted traffic and sales while providing your business and business website with the online visibility and ROI it deserves.

Improve Rankings and Traffic from Google

This video is produced by SEOMoz, a leader in the Search Engine Optimization field. This episode of Whiteboard Friday, released on July 29, 2011, provides some creative mechanisms to help avoid the next Google Panda Update or other Google improvements to their program which ranks websites in search results based on a number of Factors.

Will Critchlow from Distilled joins Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder and CEO of SEOMoz, to discuss an amazing and creative idea of Will’s to help publishers, advertisers and business owners who have suffered negative impacts of the Google Panda search program update. Wills insightful tools and technique will provide viewers valuable insights in how to design your business website to be best position it in the Google Search results, today and into the future.

Web page Questions to ask to Improve Rankings and Traffic from Google

Below are some specific questions used to evaluate a web page and its likelihood to be ranked highly in the Google search results:

1. Would you trust the information presented here?
2. Is this web page appear to be written by an expert?
3. Does this web  page have obvious errors?
4. Does the web page provide original content or information?
5. Does this web page contain insightful analysis?
6. Would you consider bookmarking this we page?
7. Are there excessive advertisements on this web page?
8. Would you be surprised to see this content in print?

This video from SEOMoz provides some background into the Google panda update, a program update by Google released in late spring of 2011, with the intent to improve the Google search results relevancy and quality as measured by a quality control group within Google. The specific technique discussed in the video involves creating a questionnaire similar to what experts infer the questionnaire that Google used to improve its search algorithm. Since this is highly proprietary to Google, no one knows for certain, but Will is well-versed in this topic and is in a good position to make educated guesses. This questionnaire would be then distributed to website visitors to gain insightful feedback to help align business websites with key usability factors believed to drive the Google search algorithm the corresponding Google  search results.

The questionnaire, once developed. would be distributed to prospective website users to gain valuable insights on how to improve the usability of the website which is believed by many to be the major focus of the panda update by Google. Though the primary objective of the questionnaire is to improve rankings and therefore traffic from Google, the other attractive benefit inherent and using this kind of technique is the expected improvements to website usability and users engagement as a result of acting on real life feedback.

As always, thanks for reading and your comments, questions and insights are always appreciated.

SEOMoz recently presented a review of some interesting analysis of correlation data of key ranking factors during one of their regular Whiteboard Fridays video series. For those not familiar with SEOMoz, they are a worldwide SEO thought leader and provider or world class SEO Tools and Research.

Whiteboard Fridays are an informative, free video resource focused on topics of interest to SEO practitioners and accessible to anybody online. In this Whiteboard Friday video, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz presents a preview of some of the correlation analysis a data set generated from a recent set of over 11,000 search results studied across Google and Bing.

The video is organized into an introduction on the difference between correlation and causation as illustrated in the creative example. The remainder of the video goes through three key takeaways from studying the large data set. Those three takeaways include:

1. Google and Bing search algorithms similar for many basic SEO factors such as a number of linking root domains, keywords in the title, keywords in the domain, document length, and others. The good news is that you’d don’t have to build content optimized separately for each search engine.
2. Facebook shares very highly correlated with higher Google rankings which suggests that users who are able to engage users to share from their web content will likely see benefits in rankings
3. nofollow links were shown to have a negative correlation
   which means that sites which had links that included no follow links performed better in the search results then those that had only follow links, validating the value of securing no follow links.

We hope you find the video below both interesting informative and will put some of the correlation data to use in your SEO practices.

For those new to the SEO industry, Aaron Wall is one of the top, most cited SEO gurus in the world. His site www.SEOBook.com has some of the best free such as the SEO Toolbar, SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker, all three of which I personally use multiple times  every day.

If you have not been to www.SEOBook.com and want to learn more about Search Engine optimization, I strongly recommend you check out this website.  There is tons of free, high quality content. Unlike much of the other free SEO advise and clutter out their on the Internet that can waste your time and distract you, SEO book content will move you forward.

eBiz ROI has no business relationship with Aaron or SEO Book but feel that the free content including articles and tools is so good that we need to pass it along to our readers.

For true SEO pros, www.SEOBook.com offers a premium subscription service based on a month to month subscription model providing members access to SEO experts, training videos and premium tools. Since not currently a subscriber, I cannot comment on those, but would love to hear from experiences from others that are subscribers to SEO Book.

We all know that to Google and its loyal users, relevancy of search results relative to a user’s search is the most important aspect of the search engine user experience. If users are not able to find what they’re looking quickly and efficiently using Google, they’re likely to try one of the other competitive search engines such as Microsoft  Bing or Yahoo! which is now powered by Microsoft algorithms or perhaps one of the emerging new search engines such as blekko.

In fulfillment of its quest for relevancy and to maintain its dominant market share by continuing to satisfy its users, Google recently rolled out the Panda algorithm update in attempts to weed out what Google and many of its users consider to be low quality content otherwise known as Web SPAM.

What’s interesting about the Google Panda algorithm update is that after the rollout, Google was able to evaluate its efficacy using results from data gathered through the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension. Using this data, Google was able to evaluate how aligned its Panda algorithm update results were relative to the opt-in user data collected through the Chrome Extension. The results are what many would consider impressive.

This evaluation of Panda algomithm update evaluated sites on Chrome users blocklist compared to sites whose ranking (position within search results) were negatively impacted as a result of the implementation of the Panda algorithm update. According to Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, what Google found “If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.” According to Amit, though opt-in user data collected from the Chrome Blocklist Extension was used to evaluate the efficacy of the algorithm update, none of the user data was considered in the design and implementation of the algorithm update.

Time Clean up the SPAM (or to you Monty Python lovers, Bring Out Your Dead!)

The key take away for website owners, SEO consultants, webmasters, content creators and anybody interested in having their web pages rank higher in Google for the long term is the need to create quality, unique content and perform different optimizations as recommended by Google and the other search engines based on content relevancy relative to your targeted keywords.

If you have a website that’s about “affordable Internet marketing services,” then that website content should be about Internet marketing topics and the content should be materially original. The content should also contain useful (though subjective and very difficult to directly measure) information so that not only search engines rank the page well, but users find that information both relevant and useful.

As an aside, some of you may be aware that Google can validate relevancy of content, even for high-ranking content, by measuring how long a user stays on a particular webpage based on clicking on a search result. If your site is ranked number one for “affordable Internet marketing services” and users click on your site and then, within a few seconds, clicks back to the Google search results then clicks on the number two site and then stay on that second site several minutes, Google is able to capture this data and factor it into relevancy evaluation of the search results and make adjustments. Of course user time on page after clicking a search result is just one of hundreds of factors that Google uses in its algorithm to determine webpage relevancy, and ultimately, ranking in the search results.

If investing in content generation is part of the plan to promote your website, business, product, service and/or brand, and you want to reap the rewards from Google, then quality matters, and like it or not, at over 2/3 of the market share of US searches, Google matters!