USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

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.

If you’re interested in running your own Web site or doing anything involving search engine optimization, it’s a good idea to check out the YouTube videos Matt Cutts hosts. Cutts seems to be the embodiment of the Google algorithm, so anything he says should definitely be looked in to. The videos on this channel involve Cutts answering questions that people have asked concerning ways to get their Web sites ranking better on Google’s search engine.

These videos can be extremely helpful. Some of the stuff is just common sense, but there are dozens of videos, and chances are you’ll find something out you didn’t know before.

Cutts’ job title at Google is “Head of the Web Spam Team,” which doesn’t sound like “SEO Ambassador,” but that ends up being a good chunk of what he does. He can be seen attending most of the large search marketing conferences, and routinely gives presentations on how to properly rank well in search engines. Cutts also gives tips on what not to do while putting together pages on a Web site, since there are a variety of different penalties that can be enforced by engines like Google’s.

Below are a few different videos from the channel you can check out. If the content seems interesting, the link at the beginning of the post will take you to the channel that as all of the different video Matt Cutts has done so far. By the way, he has the same red shirt on in a lot of the videos, because he’ll do a series of videos, then publish one each day.

If you’re familiar with the Internet at all, you’ve most likely heard of YouTube. Heck, even television shows make references to it. Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’ve been on it a few times yourself. YouTube is changing how they feed us the ads of their sponsors. Having the ads stuffed down at the bottom is no longer working for them and they seem to think a new approach is needed. This brand new approach involves placing ads directly in whatever clip you’re trying to watch and giving you the option to watch a longer clip.

Oh wait, Hulu has already been doing this for months.

Personally, I believe this to be a step in a better direction for YouTube in terms of profit. As secure as investors felt before about placing ads with YouTube, they’ll feel even more secure in the fact that the user will have to take an active part to expedite the process of watching the clip/show they wanted to watch. Even if you choose to watch the smaller ads throughout the show, the user has to make notice of whatever ad is being placed there.

Frequenting Hulu quite often, when running into those ads, the longer ad at the beginning seems a lot more favorable than those interruptions while watching. According to TechCrunch, they won’t always be ads. Just someone who really wants their video to become viral. Really makes one wonder exactly how much something like that would even cost and how much people are out there with an excessive amount of spare change to throw around.

All in all, YouTube (and moreover Google) seems to be behind the times in terms of this little ad-dition to their site, but at least they’re taking a step in a better direction. If Hulu comes up with something more brilliant than this before Google does, I will be sorely disappointed. While I’m sure that users will be angry over this in the short term, people will quickly realize that if they’d like to keep it running, the site has to show some profitability or it’ll quickly go to the wayside and ask for donations.

And I’ve never seen those business models turn out well.

It would seem that the king of the Internet might have plans of becoming king of the seas. Google has filed a patent for what is being called a “water-based data center,” which means they would be putting many of their servers and network centers on ships and sending them out to sea.

This would allow Google to have their servers all around the world and have their services a lot closer to many places that are still without servers. Many people all around the world would get data at a much faster rate.  Now, I know this might sound a little crazy and to tell the truth, it sounded crazy to me at first. The more I got to read about it though, the more it sounded like a cool idea.

Not only is Google thinking about moving to the seas, but they have also come up with a way to cut cost and maybe become the most environmentally friendly company of the 21st century. In the patent that was filed, it shows a system that would generate power just by the water hitting the side of the ships the servers are on.  I am sure there is a lot more to it than that, and it is a very cool idea.

On top of all the power that would be saved, the cooling of the servers would also be a lot easier with all of that cold ocean water around, but this plan does not come without its draw backs. If Google were to do this, they would be putting themselves out in international waters. This means they would not be protected by the U.S. or any other nation.

There is also the means of staying connected to the web while at sea, since being linked to satellites is still too slow for most practical uses. I believe their best bet would be to stay connected by running wires from the anchored ship to the land, but even that comes with a lot of maintenance.  All in all it should be fun to see what comes of this, and most of all, see if any other companies start to move out to the seas as well.

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is, “How do I get better Google rankings for my business?” While the answer to that question can be very complicated, a lot of people who ask me this seem to think I’ll be able to tell them something quickly that will fix all of their problems.

The truth is, it takes a good amount of knowledge, some consistent work, and a little bit a creativity to get the results you’re looking for. It’s not as simple as a quick fix, and in today’s search engines, it takes more than some content and a good product. Ranking your business on Google can be especially tricky, since this is the search engine that a lot of people go after. You need to have your website optimized in order to have a chance to compete on a search engine like Google.

One of the problems with getting your website optimized, is that the rules what you you should do to increase your rankings can change from day to day. Search engines are changing their algorithms all the time, which means if you aren’t staying on top of the updates, your site can suffer some unexpected penalties. A good way to combat this is to hire an SEO firm where their job is to stay on top of these changes, so they can optimize your site accordingly.

Google is a very competitive search engine, so getting good rankings for the key phrases you want can be very difficult without some professional help. Unfortunately, a lot of companies charge large amounts to help you get the rankings you need. Some firms charge as high as six figures to get your business ranking on top of the search engines. This kind of price might work well for top-shelf large businesses, but what about small ones? That’s where USA SEO Pros comes in.

We focus on search engine optimization for all kinds of companies, including small businesses. And in addition to our SEO services, we also provide companies with the other Internet marketing services they may need. Make sure to check us out if you’re looking for SEO services, but can’t see why you’d need to spend five of six figures on your campaign.

With the first day of SMX (Search Marketing Expo) Advanced passing, there were a few things that were of interest from an SEO point of view. The “SEO Ranking Factors In 2009” was one of these things. A lot of what we already know still holds true and other SMX events like the one in London covered some of the information, but there were some tweaks to how search engine giant Google is going to be looking at things. There is a lot of speculation into Google’s future algorithm concerning links: 47 percent of people believe that the importance of links will decline while of course, still retaining at least some importance.

The URL, Title and Alt text came up as the most important on-page factors according to Rand Fishkin. Images having alt text are not only better for page validation, but seem to have a correlation with high rankings. In their words though, “Correlation is NOT causation,” which is important to note. Personally, I find it funny that Outspoken Media has this bit of information on their site, and fails validation through W3C’s Validation Markup Service for not having alt text in their images. Even a blank alt text would have gotten them out of that pinch.

A bit of information that may interest people is the data from SEOmoz concerning their view of Google’s algorithm:

• Trust authority of host domain - 25 percent
• Link population of specific page - 22 percent
• Anchor text of external links - 20 percent
• On page keyword use - 15 percent
• Traffic and CTR data - 7 percent
• Social graph metrics - 6 percent
• Hosting and registration - 5 percent

What concerns me the most is trust authority of host domain. For those just getting into setting up their own site with the hope of getting on page one of Google, this list of just how trustworthy a host domain is definitely not readily accessible. Setting these hosting providers up with a numerical value seems like it would be something Google would just sell to the highest bidder. Those in the know of numerical values would abuse it, setting up where the authority was highest. Godaddy is likely on the list of one of the higher providers since they’re mainstream enough to have sponsored NASCAR.

Another bit of information that is sure to hurt a lot of sites out there such as Squidoo is the possibility that Google may change their Nofollow algorithm. SELand broke it down very simply:

“…if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.”

The sculpting that sites do to give more authority to certain things rather than others is going to lose effect. Making site owners modify their sites accordingly without sculpting, since it won’t hold as much weight.

On a final note, it seems that MSN’s new project Bing is sponsoring two of the time blocks for SMX. A small pittance for the trouble to have caused many over the personal and business tracking of ranks over keywords. Looking at Bing, it doesn’t seem any different from MSN’s old design when it came down to the submission.

Here’s a funny side note: When I had first heard of Bing, typing bing.com directly into the URL bar brought up nothing. But searching for Bing on Google and clicking on their link made it work. Good job Bing.

Not much video has been released from SMX Advanced 2009 yet, but there are other videos like this one with Matt Cutts from SMX events earlier in the year.

It’s definitely not perfected yet, but Google has made some changes to their search engine that could potentially affect SEO. This doesn’t mean SEO has to be affected in a negative way, but optimizers should be thinking about some new ways to get ranked in Google’s new categories in their results.

Now, when people search for anything in Google, there is a link at the top that says, “Show Options.” This link brings up categories that will organize the search search results. The categories include reviews, videos, forums, recent results and a few other super-fun categories. While the “recent results” categories seem to be an attempt to compete with Twitter, the categories SEO marketers should be focusing on are the reviews, forums, images and videos.

These are new ways to get ranked well on Google. Marketers need to figure out the best ways to get ranked for these categories, which might end up being easier than getting ranked in the main section of the search results. Make sure you post some reviews about the company you’re working for, and also post on some forums. If you haven’t made any videos yet, it’s time to sign up for YouTube and get on the ball. It’s only a matter of time before other people start doing this, and so make sure to get ranked before the competition does.

These changes go along with the recent changes made to promote and increase visibility to Google profiles. These profiles are another chance for people to get ranked in Google, but instead of for a review or video, it’s for their name.

Google seems to be trying to make their searches more relevant (imagine that!), and while this may work for some searches, like people’s names or certain videos, it probably isn’t going to be a “Twitter Killer” or change and SEO community and any major way. If you’re  search engine optimizer, you can probably relax a little bit. You’re job will change, but the job of someone in the SEO field is changing all the time. This shouldn’t be new to you, and it’s a change that can be dealt with.