USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

There is no denying the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). You might have the best content ever written, but if no one knows it’s there, it won’t do you or anyone else much good. SEO ensures that your website is presented to searchers so you gain more traffic and more opportunities to turn that traffic into conversions. SEO gives you opportunities, but it’s up to you to make the most of them. That’s where conversion optimization comes in. Your site needs to be optimized not just to bring visitors to it, but also to turn those visitors into paying customers.

Engage Your Visitors

You want to engage your visitors as much as possible. Think of a way to add calls to action on your website. Remember you are in charge of how you want your visitors to search your website, and to ultimately buy from you. Adding graphics, hyperlinks, and even short forms can prompt your visitor to move forward through your website, until they have officially landed on the page you want them to be. If you decide on using forms, try to keep them short and to the point, otherwise your visitor may lose interest and move away from your website, which would be a bad thing. If you have great imagery and solid content then make it easier for your visitors to obtain more information. All of this can lead to interested visitors, which in turn can bring you more business.

Provide Vital Information

Surprisingly enough, many websites do not have the right information on their landing page. If you want your visitors to continue through your website, then you have to offer them the vital information they need, like a phone number. Yes, believe it or not, many companies forget to add their contact information for visitors to find, and this could be a problem. Remember you want to engage your visitors and provide them with easy access and information throughout your website.

Grab Your Visitors’ Attention

Gain your visitors’ interest by providing incentives throughout your website. If you want to gain information from your visitors, like their phone number and email address, then give something away in exchange. People love receiving free stuff, even if they just have to fill out a short form. Taylor your website based on the type of user you expect will visit your site.

SEO can work wonders for your website and for your business. Keep your website updated on a regular basis and optimize it to gain maximum conversions. Transform your website into a well-optimized site for search and for conversions to gain the traffic and business that will make your business a success.

Entertainment is where the action is, and Yahoo is doing their best to capitalize on it. Yahoo has introduced new search features that will enable users like you and me to access entertainment and news content more fluidly. For one thing, users can now find a slideshow above the search results for topics that are on the Trending Now lists. Keeping up to date on the latest, Yahoo search engine users will also be able to find shortcuts for entertainment related topics such as images, articles, videos, tweets, event listings and much more.

In addition to this new change, Yahoo has improved its mobile search for cell phones like the Android and of course the iPhone. By using the latest in HTML5 technology, users will be able to gain better search result by using their mobile devices. Yahoo’s new changes come from the company’s desire to reach out to its users and provide them with more relevant, interesting, and informative content that will help them get things done faster and easier.

This is just the beginning to many changes that are to come. Yahoo intends to go even further with technology by providing other UI/UX innovations. While this has yet to happen, many users are waiting in anticipation for the additional upgrades and features that Yahoo will present next. Going with the flow and keeping up with its competition, Yahoo is moving forward with better and more advanced ways to keep its users happy.

Having a quick and easy solution to monitoring your brand is important to your brand’s success. There are many ways for you to monitor your brand with help from Google Alerts. You can have Google email you whenever certain key phrases are mentioned; depending on the total number of alerts you have set up, you can bulk them all together or set up different times to receive certain alerts throughout the day. Whether you choose to monitor your brand name or your competition’s, both can be valuable.

Learning From Your Competition

Keeping an eye on your competition can help you understand consumers online. Learn what your competition is doing and what users are searching for, and then you can use that knowledge to improve upon your competition’s strategies and gain more traffic to your website. You can continue to refine your strategies by monitoring user response.

You can also use Google Alerts is to report links that are pointing to your competition. If a site is willing to link to your competitor, they might be willing to link to you, too! Also think about linking to others in your field or industry to get their attention, and do not forget to link to yourself as well.

Where and When Google is Finding You

Google Alerts allows you to see where and when Google has found you. Learn where Google is finding your name, business name, and website, and you’ll see which key words and key phrases are being used and how often. Google Alerts can provide you with up the minute information on all of this, if you choose. You can also receive information on the timeframe that your website and key words where searched for.

Keeping Hackers Out

Setting up Google Alerts for specific conditions can help you keep one-step ahead of hackers. You’ll know instantly when someone has hacked the server or unapproved content has been published if you set it up to monitor certain words in connection with your brand or site. Without these alerts, you may not immediately realize you’ve been hacked. Obviously, this could harm your rankings, and the longer it remains untended the longer it will take to fix. Set up different alerts if you have to, but make sure that your website is secure at all times.

Wrapping Up

Having as much security and knowledge about your website and brand as possible is key to success, and using Google Alerts can only help in that. Knowing about your competition’s success and tactics can help you build your brand if you know how to use the information. Keeping up to date on where your website and brand are being mentioned will help you gain the information you need to improve on your rankings. In short, setting up Google Alerts can help you not only keep track of your brand’s success, but improve upon it.

The last few weeks have shown a dramatic decline of community participation in the popular social sharing site, Digg. The demise was noticed when Digg stop receiving over 40 million unique visitors to its site every month after its redesign. Visitors from the US declined by 26% and visitors from the UK by about 34%. Because of this extreme user decline, it currently only takes about 200 Digg users to get a story on the top 10.

Digg is beginning to stabilize the decline and has added many features that its visitors have asked for, but the overall activity level of people still visiting the site is noticeably down as well. What are users looking for, and how can user voting sites like Digg survive?

Continuing Forward

Digg’s redesign took about 18 months to finish and it was only in beta testing for two months. The preparations for the site obviously fell short for what was needed. Digg’s VIP of Product, Keval Desai stated, “We had a game plan, and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better.”

The complaints that they received indicated to Digg that they still had passionate users who are loyal to the site and want things to be fixed. Now, how will they regain the users that they once had before this fiasco?

Keeping in mind the average user and how they think and maneuver, Digg and other voting sites must keep up with the demand and trends that users are expecting. Digg is still trying to meet the needs of its users and publishers large and small who make the site what it is. Even though the redesign has caused a lot of upset and backlash, Digg has recently begun to see a slow increase in user activity again. Making changes according to the habits and desires of its users has helped Digg start to gain more traffic again, though slowly.

Changing With the Times

Another voting site, Sphinn.com, has gone in a different direction that may gain better acceptance than the commotion Digg’s redesign caused. Sphinn noticed a trending decrease in voting coupled with a tendency to “game” the voting system. As a solution, instead of letting users vote for the best articles and stories on the site, Sphinn has gotten rid of voting all together. They hope to bring discussions back to the forefront by letting users add comments and suggestions to stories and articles that have been published. This allows the user to have more of a say in what is being published, without forcing the voting model. This concept could be one direction for other voting sites to take.

Concluding Thoughts

With the ever-growing trend of users desiring greater personal expression online, we might see more discussion groups popping up as user participation models continue to evolve. The ability to discuss issues separately from submitting articles has been widely popular and seems to be coming to the forefront to meet the user demands. Perhaps other voting sites might head in this direction by providing users the ability to voice their opinion in different ways other than voting. Only time will tell what will truly happen to these voting sites, and for now, users have different options to choose from to express their opinions.

The Twitter trend is spreading, and many businesses have already jumped aboard. Starting a new Twitter account is easy and can help your business grow. Sharing information and facts about your business can help bring more consumers to your website.

When starting your account, provide the following for consumers:

• A brief summary of your business and highlight your website.
• Think about how you want yourself to appear to your audience and write your bio with much thought and insight.
• Make sure to include your location and URL.

The more details that you offer to your consumer base the better. Your consumers will be able to find your business easier, and they will already know what you have to offer without searching your entire website for answers.

Get Involved and Listen

Before getting involved with your consumers, make sure that your background is designed with your business in mind. Provide a photo of yourself or your company’s logo. Make sure that your image is the right size for every monitor. Not everyone is using the same size or resolution of monitor, so keep that in mind.

Think about the audience that you want to communicate with and target. Start watching and following those with whom you want to communicate to gain an idea of what they want. Read different tweets from the people you want interested in your company, and write your tweets, blogs, and social media accordingly. Provide specific information and links that your targeted audience will be interested in, and pay attention to their response. Knowing your audience is one of the key factors to achieving your goals at business marketing. Keep this in mind when monitoring your audience and competition:

• Keep your tweets, blogs, and all social media current.
• Follow your targeted audience to understand them.
• Make sure that you respond to comments that your audience is making on all of your social media.
• Become familiar with your competition’s social media and learn how your targeted audience is responding to them.
• Gain an idea of what works with the audience you are trying to reach by reviewing their response to your social media and to your competitors.

Updating Is Important

It is a very good idea to keep up with your favorite software, tools, and services on Twitter. Become informed on a daily basis about the latest blog posts, news on upcoming features, and have information on any issues or outages that may have occurred or will occur.

Monitoring is important and so is research for your Twitter page and business. Learn about each contact that you get involved with first, and start providing amazing information that your audience wants to read about. Remember to take it slow and do not rush into it. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race. Keep this in mind when you start your new business marketing with Twitter.

Most importantly, have fun sharing your business information with your targeted audience, friends, and family.

Before you can try to get ranked well in search engines, first you need help finding the right keywords to get ranked for. What are the terms that you want people to type in to find you on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing? You’ll probably have some phrases in mind right away, but there are other steps you need to take before you start your work to rank well for those keywords.

Before you begin ranking, make sure the terms you try to rank for a worth your while. While some of the terms (like your brand name) might be obvious, a lot of the terms you work on should be researched to find out if a significant amount of people search for the term and if it’s even possible to rank for. Some of the terms you come up with might not generate any traffic, even if you’re the top spot in all of the search engines. Other keywords might generate traffic if you rank well, but that might be impossibly difficult depending on how much competition there is for the specific key phrase. If it’s obvious a lot of SEOs are already competing for a key phrase, your time might be better spent finding one that is less competitive that you can easily rank better for.

There are some good sources out there to help you find out the information you need to potential key phrases you might want to work one. SEOmoz has posted an excellent article that includes a lot of great information on this subject. Another great tool everyone looking at key phrases should use is the Google AdWords keyword tool, which can give you great insight into how many people are search for the possible key phrase each month. Google will also give you possible alternatives, so you can decide exactly what you want to go after.

Techcrunch’s CrunchUp a few days ago had an interesting panel on real-time search. The panel included SEO heavyweights like Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Google’s Matt Cutts. The discussion surrounded what real-time search is, and what companies like USA SEO Pros are striving for it to be.

It’s good to know what the big whigs of search are doing to stay with the times, and while some of the panel members seemed to avoid specific answers, others weren’t afraid to address the issue head-on.

Cutts from Google’s Web spam team was asked what approach Google is taking to attack the real-time search problem, and all he would say is that they’re working on it as they always have. This was very different from the answer Microsoft’s representative gave when he mentioned Bing’s integration of Twitter results, and specified that real-time search is something they are definitely focusing on.

A few other panel members made some good points when the group was discussing the definition of real-time search and exactly what it is. The consensus when defining real-time search seemed to be that it is a collection of the consciousness of the Internet, where as traditional search engines are the Internet’s memory. Where regular search engines will bring up what has happened in the past, real-time search brings up what is happening in the now. Real-time search is what the Internet is thinking, not what it used to think.

Another point that was brought up is that real-time search needs to distance itself from the rankings that traditional search engines use. While filters should be put in place to get rid of spam and the like, there should be no ranking system when it comes to real-time search results. This is obviously  a matter of debate, but as real-time search gains popularity, this debate will no doubt take place where it needs to, and the resolution that companies come to should be interesting.

Check out video of the panel while they were at CrunchUp below:

Real-time searching. Many claim to offer it, few actually do. The leader of real-time search so far would have to be Twitter. Many celebrities take part in tweeting, companies do so, and it’s mentioned as a major part SEM from many speakers if you have ever attended a Wordcamp convention. But what is real-time searching exactly? Just as importantly, what isn’t it?

As stated by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, blogging is not one of those things that can be considered real-time searching. This is due, he says, to the amount of time that is taken from its conception to it’s publication. Which could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days depending on the amount of research put into said post. Hardly anything close to what one would consider “real-time”.

So what is real-time searching? Tweeting, of course, is as good as it gets as far as we’ve come technologically. But you can’t exactly search for it on Google and expect to see your best friend eating a peanut butter cookie. One; because it’s just not first page material. Two; because Google is currently unable to index the lot of the tweets that occur on Twitter. The only one capable of doing so thus far is, of course, Twitter itself.

So what is the advantage of real-time searching in comparison to regular search engines? Maybe you want a broad subject in a field such as…lets say computer components. Try that on a real search engine and you would undoubtedly get companies trying to sell you their products, not about any advancements made. The results you find may even be dated a month old or longer. Real-time searching in comparison would give better results in terms of if a company was planning to release a better video card, or was designing a higher-end motherboard. Sure, you are bound to see some mundane results like “lol Hey, I picked up a new 8GB USB. Ted owes me a dollar.”, but this is the internet we’re talking about, random stuff happens.

In my opinion, if Twitter and Facebook were to do a joint effort, the result could only be beaten by computers hooked up to our brains. Tweeting our thoughts in true real time.

The video below is Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, discussing real-time search and his company.

Indexing and crawling are two concepts you need to learn about if you ever want to rank in search engines. Without crawling, you site can’t be indexed, and without indexing, your site can’t rank. You have to know how to do the first two in order to achieve the third, and the third is the whole point of SEO.

It’s tough to know exactly how search engines work, but there is one outfit that does a good job of coming up with a lot of reasonable assumptions based on testing and experience in the SEO business. SEOmoz seems to be right most of the time when it comes to search engine optimization, they have some good tools to use, and they recently released a video that explains the details behind crawling and indexing pages.

While the information in the video is really just the best guesses that the SEOmoz team has come up with, they make a lot of sense and SEOs can reasonably assume that SEOmoz people know what they’re talking about. While a lot of what’s discussed is common sense, it’s always good to see it laid out on a whiteboard and put in front of you all at once. It shows people exactly what they need to focus on, and how much work has to potentially be put in to it.

Of course, after crawling and indexing, the pages still need to rank well, but you have to walk before you can run. Make sure your pages have the potential to rank before you try to increase their rankings.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Crawling & Indexing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

We just posted a great article on our main USA SEO Pros company blog about search engine market share and user loyalty. There have been a few articles coming out about how loyal searchers are to one search engine, and how that could work for or against Bing and the other Google competitors.

No one has come close to Google in terms of market share for a long time, so they’ll probably need to come up with something pretty unique in order to compete. The fight has long been for second place, and Yahoo! has held that spot for a while now, except for one day in early June when Bing took the #2 spot for less than a day.

Zack at USA SEO Pros has looked in to the concept of search engine loyalty and has posted a great blog about it. If you’re interested in the material, make sure to check it out, the link is at the beginning of this article.