Recently, a real-time search engine named OneRiot launched a real-time ad service that will automatically refresh based on trends in the social web.  Statistics have shown that the click-through rates of the real-time ads are at four times the normal rate for ads.  So what does this have in store for real-time search results?

As mentioned before in a previous post about social search, a business site’s visibility could be dramatically increased as long as they have a social presence.  Being able to connect to customers and to keep them informed of the business’s information is a major part of social search.

A connection could be made here that if the more people a business could reach through social search, the more people could be seeing that business’s site in real-time search results.  And based on the statistics from real-time ads, those results will possibly have much higher click-through rate than even organic results.

Currently, being seen in the social web world is only good for traffic from those social sites and not so much for SEO.  But based on these facts that are surfacing about real-time and social search results, social web presence could be as equally as important for SEO as link building, depending on the speculation  that many people could be clicking more on the social search results than the original organic results.

With more businesses looking to increase traffic to their websites, it is imperative to find quick but resourceful ways to separate from the crowd.  RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) provides this to add extra information into their Google search result.  From a technical standpoint, RDFa allows websites to embed rich metadata which will then be picked up by search engines, like Google and Bing.

With RDFa in place, the search result will be enhanced with a “rich snippet”, where users will see reviews, ratings, and other information that can possibly spark more interest than the description alone.  For example, a restaurant can have a rich snippet of their n-star rating, n number of reviews, and show the price range of their menu items.  Another example is a company selling different products.  When a user searches for one of the products sold by this company, a rich snippet could include a photo, price, description, and a URL that leads directly to the product page.

How can this help your website?  “It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through,” said Google on their webmasters blog.

Reports have shown that this simple change has big results.  Businesses using e-Commerce websites have reported an increase in traffic of 30% or more when using RDFa, and search engines are seeing that more users are clicking through the site instead of returning to the search results page.

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RDFa, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

RDFa – The Next Step for Search Results by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, talks about how Google will rank links coming from Facebook and Twitter.

Today, the web is a much a part of our lives as cars or television. Almost every business has some kind of presence on the web whether it is as simple as a local business listing on Google to a complete website. This allows users to quickly search for and compare different businesses when they are looking for a certain product or service which means first impressions are imperative.

A website is quickly become a necessity to compete in today’s business market no matter what industry you are in and without one you might be passing up on hundreds of sales a month. Some business owners think that having a listing in the local phone book is enough, but according to Nielson Ratings 54 percent of Americans have given up on their phone books. Another interesting fact from Nielson is that 61 percent of all online searches turn into offline sales. This means that people are throwing out phonebooks and favoring the web where they can get customer reviews, directions to the business, and compare them to other businesses in the same industry. Think of the website as a virtual salesman; they will be informing people about your product/service while trying to turn them into a customer and the best part of a virtual salesman is that you don’t have to pay them a commission or hourly wage. The key to competing against other companies is to have a quality website.

When creating a website there are several things that you must keep in mind. First of all, you should not try to build one unless you know what you are doing. Trying to build your own website with no experience will make the website, and by association, your business look subpar. You can take a class in web design, but most of the time you will not have the time necessary to learn everything you need to. Hiring a web designer is usually your best option, but many business owners are hesitant to hire one because they think it is going to be expensive. Web designers understand that business owners have tight budgets and many are offering custom website design with monthly rates much like a phone bill. When done right your website will pay for itself more than once proving to be an invaluable investment.

Before meeting with the web designer, should you choose to hire one, have an idea of what you want to do on the web, how you want to do it, and who will be using your website. These three things will go a long way in the design process of your website as it needs to curtail to your target audience. This includes color schemes, basic layouts, content, and interaction between the user and the site. Having a plan of what you want to accomplish with your website will help the web designer create a better website faster.

Having a blog on your website is also another tool that you can use to give yourself the competitive edge on the web. Blogs allow you to update your customers about happenings within your company, new products or services you are offering, ongoing sales, and more. There is really no limit to what you can and can’t do with a blog. It also gives your website a little bit more of a professional look because it tells the customer that you are really involved in the industry (providing that you post relevant content). It will also help you in the search engines because they love websites that continually have fresh content. Ranking well in the search engines means more exposure and more sales.

Probably one of the biggest SEO mistakes that people are making today is not deep linking. There are hundreds of websites that have a good design and have a respectable PR on their homepage, but start to click around and you will find out that the rest of the site has as PR 0 or worse. This is a prime example of poor or lazy SEO, and so many people are making this mistake. It is understandable to have your homepage to have a high ranking, but don’t forget that your site is more than just one page. You homepage usually does not have the majority of the content that you want people to see anyway. Optimizing these interior or deep pages will benefit your overall rank in the SERPs and increase your PageRank across your site as well.

The objective of deep linking is to optimize specific pages on your website for the one or two keywords that they focus on. For example, imagine that you were a vet and had a page on your website for each type of animal that you treated i.e. cats, dogs, horses, etc. Now instead of optimizing your homepage for each type of animal you treat and optimizing for you being a vet, with deep linking you would only optimize your homepage for you being a vet (i.e. vet in “your-city”). Then you would optimize your page about cats, your page about dogs, and your page about horses separately. If your on-site link structure is setup correctly, this type of optimization will benefit your entire site because as your deep pages gain in PageRank, they will share that with the pages above them. Now instead of having a site where your homepage has a PR of 3 and the rest of your site is PR0, you will have your homepage PR3 and your deep pages will have PR1 or 2.

Deep linking will also make your site more user friendly. Say a person is searching for a horse vet and they come to your site. Now if you optimized your homepage for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and end up on your homepage, only having to look around for your page about horses. Instead, if your optimized your page about horses for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and immediately be on your page about horses. This provided instant satisfaction, which is what internet users want. This will increase your chances of converting potential customers into real customers.

There are some instances where deep linking is not necessary. These would be for pages you don’t necessarily want people to see like a “terms & conditions” page, or pages that are not that important for users to see right away like a “contact us” page. Also, if you have a small site with just a few pages, deep linking may not be too important because your PageRank will naturally trickle down to your interior pages if you have the right setup.

Online Reputation Management (ORM), is made up of three different disciplines; Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Reputation Management (RM). Each of these are separate in the fact that they can be done independently and can have different focus levels, but are equally important when you are trying to achieve maximum visibility on the web. Each is also very different in how they affect your ranking in Google, not Page Rank; physical rank in the search engine results.

SEO: The overrated discipline

Ask anybody in the industry how to rank high in Google, they will tell you SEO and give you their own theory of the best way to do it. Although these theories and strategies may be very viable and proven, most of them are actually talking about ORM to some extent. SEO is purely based on making it easier on Google to find your website by building backlinks from various places, also known as off-site optimization, and making your website eas

Search Engine Optimization

ier for Google to read and index, or on-site optimization. Implementing both on-site and off-site optimization mainly affects your PageRank with Google. Although PageRank is important when trying to rank high in the search engine results, it is not the only deciding factor of who ranks where. High PageRank has to do largely with the number of incoming and outgoing links as well as relevancy of content. There are also a number of heavily researched and proven theories that serve as a good guidebook.

PageRank is not the only deciding factor for the search engine rankings. Google, and other search engines, are relying heavily on relevancy to the specific keyword or topic as well, even more so than PageRank. Too many people are obsessing over PageRank and giving it too much priority. The real PageRank of a website is only released to the public only a few times a year via the Google toolbar, so unless it was updated that month, it is probably not accurate. More proof that PageRank is not that important is in the search engine results themselves. There are countless examples where a website with a PageRank of 2 will beat out a site with a PageRank of 5.

Learn more about Search Engine Optimization

RM: The underused discipline

RM is where the relevance part comes in. This can include everything from writing blogs and articles, to responding to bad reviews of disgruntled customers. The object of RM is to become the best source, or the go to business, for information and services for your niche. This is not only necessary for the search engines, but for potential customers as well. If people see that you have the best

Reputation Managment

ratings in your area for a specific service, they are more likely to go to you for that service. Also, if they see that you are very knowledgeable in your line of work based on the articles or blogs that your write, they will again come to you with questions and hopefully become a customer. There is a bit of SEO involved with RM in the aspect that it is ideal to include back links in your articles to your site, or other sites that link to you (i.e. article on third-party site links to blog or other article which links to your site).

As for responding to bad reviews, that is managing your rating on sites that allow customers to review various businesses. People are more likely to write a bad review out of anger or frustration than a good review if you do a good job. Also, bad reviews can stick around for a long time, even years, and be very detrimental. The object is to try to rectify the situation by responding to the bad review quickly by commenting on their review, and resolving the situation. After you correct the situation, ask the customer if they will retract the review, or at least update it saying that the problem was solved.

5 Star Review

Simultaneously, reach out to your existing customer base and request reviews. Ask for their testimonial input. At the least, ask how their products and or services are serving them. You may learn a few things in your conversation that can lead to a positive review.

Having no reviews can be just as bad as having a bad one because it looks like you don’t do much business. Ask your customers to write about their experience on the web so that you can get a good rating, and you know how your customers feel about your business. Having a few testimonials on your website is great as well. Having a lot of good reviews will help you rank high in Google maps too, which can be just as good as being on the first page.

SEM: Online advertising

SEM includes Pay-Per-Click (PPC), paid advertisements like banners, and you can even go as far as paid directory inclusions and paid backlinks. In short, SEM can be anything that you pay for to increase your websites visibility. The common form of SEM is PPC, which appears to the right of the organic search engine results. This type of advertising is different from traditional advertising in the sense that you only pay for it when people actually click on your ad, hence the name PPC. The price of each click is determined by how much traffic the particular search term receives, how many competitors there are for that search term, and how much they are willing to pay for a click. This means that you can end up paying anywhere from $0.25-$10.00 for a single click. This makes it hard to have any real marketing budget, but Google provides tools through Adwords that help make this a little bit easier. Other types of SEM can be ad banners that are placed on a website at the webmasters digression, and paid directory inclusions.

There is another side to SEM called Adsence, which is basically hosting Google PPC ads on your website. This sounds a bit counter active as it may lead customers away from your site or blog, but you can make money from it depending on how many people click on the ads. Generally, Adsence is used on informative blogs that are not trying to sell anything as well as various article submission sites, but it can be a good source of additional income. Think of it as making money off your competitor’s success, in the end everybody wins.

Learn more about Search Engine Marketing

Pay-Per-Click Ads

What is Online Reputation Management? by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

If it is optimized wrong it could be. The basis of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make your website visible to potential customers, but if your site is not properly optimized you could be missing out on untold amount of customers. Some big companies have trouble with this, companies that you wouldn’t think that they need the extra bump in customers.

Some of the worst offenders of bad SEO are Las Vegas casinos. Many of them are missing out on thousands of customers every month due to poorly optimized sites. Google says the average monthly search volume for the word “casino” is 20,400,000*, and when you search the word “casino” the first listing is the movie “Casino”. The first actual casino that shows up is a tribal casino is Connecticut. The first Vegas casino that is listed is Harrah’s and they are #4, which is good considering they are the only Las Vegas casino until Hooters Casino on page 4. Now, realistically speaking, people would see these results and try a different search term like “Las Vegas casino” (1,000,000/mo.)*or “Las Vegas hotel” (5,000,000/mo.)*, but just imagine if you owned one of those giant casinos. Wouldn’t you want to be on the first page, if not in the top 5 listings?

Going back to our original search term “casino”, imagine that you own a casino in Las Vegas. Say 1% of those 20 million people visit your site, that’s 200 thousand visitors a month. Now out of those 200 thousand visitors, only 2000 or so actually visit your casino, whether by booking a room or just stopping by, and spent on average of $1,000 each. That’s and extra $2 million as month. This is just a basic example of how proper SEO can help your business; it’s all about presence on the web.

SEO is not an easy task, it takes time. The amount of time depends on the individual keywords that you choose. The best types of keywords to pick are those that have a high search volume, and a relatively low competition. It is the same concept as starting a business in the real world. For example, you probably wouldn’t open an electronics store across the street from Best Buy and Wal-Mart, but a gas station or electronic repair shop might do well in that location.
A big part of SEO is how your site is built and written. There are two ways to make a website, Flash, and HTML. These two can be mixed, but it needs to be done the right way. Google does not like Flash websites simple because it cannot read and index the Flash content. It sees Flash as a file and a script running the file. On the other hand, Google loves HTML because it can read the content. However, there is a bit of a tradeoff between the two. Flash makes your site look really good and there are a lot of things that can be done with Flash. HTML is versatile, but doesn’t give the same kind of flare that Flash does. The key is finding a good balance between the two so Google can index your site.

Over using Flash is another problem Las Vegas casinos have when building their websites. Wynn Las Vegas’ website (www.wynnlasvegas.com) is built entirely out of Flash; there is not one bit of Google friendly content in their site which makes its hard for it to be ranked and indexed well. Over using HTML can also be a problem when building your site. Too much can make your site hard to be indexed and ranked, too little and your site looks bland. The trick is to find the perfect balance between HTML tags and actual content. Correctly balanced HTML content spiced up with some Flash can make for a really good looking site that can be read easily by Google. That is the first step to making a good presence on the web.

The Web Squad has studied and discovered the formulas for making good, indexable websites for your business. Whether you are thinking about getting a website or already have one, The Web Squad is here to help your online presence.

-The Web Squad
*Using Google Adwords keyword tool 9/23/09

Is Your Site Costing You Money by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thewebsquad.wordpress.com.