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.

Technorati Tags:

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.

In the latter part of 2009 both Google and Microsoft struck deals with Twitter almost simultaneously. This gave both search engines the ability to have real-time results for search queries. Microsoft hit the ground running with the deal and immediately released their version of real-time search also announcing that users with more followers will have their tweets ranked higher and those who essentially retweet will have those tweets ranked lower. Google, on the other hand, took its time to release its version of real-time search.

Google integrated real-time search with its traditional SERPs with its sources being a number of social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter of course. Sticking to tradition, Google did not release how they will rank tweets initially. However, in a recent interview with Amit Singhal, who led the development for real-time search for Google, with MIT’s Technology Review reviled one part of Google’s ranking algorithm for tweets.

From what Singhal said in the interview, Google will rank tweets in the same way it ranks web pages. It is, in essence, Google’s PageRank algorithm rewritten for Twitter; replace links with followers and you got its “TweetRank” algorithm. Singhal said that tweets will be ranked based not only on how many followers you have, but also “how reputable those followers are.”

The common practice of using hashtags in tweets may be a bad thing for those trying to rank their tweets. Hashtags are commonly a sign of low quality tweets and will become a part of Google’s spam control strategy. This may, in fact, cause a significant reduction in the usage of hashtags by Twitter users.

Being Google, they did not tell us everything about how they will rank tweets. Keep in mind that Twitter is Google’s only source for real-time search; Facebook, MySpace, and other social network, as well as blogs, will play a big role in real-time search. Though they have not released any official information, it is probable that Google will rank things like Facebook posts in the same way it will for Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Bing, Twitter, Search Engine Optimization

Google to Rank Tweets by http://thewebsquad.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/01/14/google-to-rank-tweets/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.technologyreview.com.

When you hire an SEO firm they all pretty much promise you the same thing, first page rankings in the SERPs for certain keywords. How do they do this; by creating lots of backlinks to your website, tweaking your website a little bit, and writing quality content. This is great for most people and as long as they see results they don’t question the firm’s methods. However, like with a lot of things, there is a good way to get on the first page and a quick way (A good SEO can do both, but for the sake of simplicity I will talk about the two separately). Search engine optimization is like a marathon, it takes time and a good strategy to get to the front.

The quick method of reaching the first page involves creating lots of backlinks and content very quickly, kind of like a sprint. With this method a lot of SEO’s will just focus on building links from wherever they can and to the homepage only. Like sprinting in a marathon, this may get you to the front quickly, but you will soon run out of steam and start to drop back. It may take awhile for other websites to catch up to you so you could remain on the first page for a few months or even a few years depending on how many of your competitors have hired SEO firms. SEO companies are able to get away with this because the average person does not know a single thing about search engine optimization, and for those that know a little bit they do not know how to check where the links are pointing to. When people get a summary report from the SEO firm it may look something like this:

Oct. 2009*
	New links: 200
	Total links: 2,000
	SE Ranking “Keyword A”: #3
	SE Ranking “Keyword B”: #5
	PageRank: 3
	Amount Due: $4,000
*Not Real Stats

What they do not tell you is that out of those 2,000 or so links, 1,990 are pointing to your homepage and about 1,000 (maybe less) of those links are actually relevant. They figure that you will never check this or have the knowledge to check it. However, it is fairly easy to check how many links are pointing to your website and where they are pointing to using Yahoo Site Explorer. All you have to do is enter the URL of your website (Note: http://www.site.com and http://site.com will return different results so use the URL that is ranking) and Yahoo does the rest. If over 70 percent of the links are pointing to your homepage that is a bad sign, unless of course you just signed the SEO contract in the past two or three months then 70-80 percent is normal. If the SEO is doing a good job then you should see this percentage start to drop below 70 within the next few months.

If you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm you might want to do some research on their website using Yahoo Site Explorer. If 90 percent or more of their links are pointing to their homepage, chances are that they will do the same to your site. They may tell you that their method is the best way to getting to the top quickly, but remember search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint.

The good way search engine optimization strategy is to link to all or most of the pages on your website. A good percentage that will return strong rankings would be 50 percent of the backlinks point to the homepage and 50 percent point to other pages. This method still has most of the links pointing to you homepage which is the most important page of your website, but also have links pointing to the content of your website, this is also known as deep linking. Deep linking is a very underutilized strategy in search engine optimization because it takes longer to reach the first page of the search engines, but in the end the strength of your rankings will be much better and you will even rank above others who used the sprint method.

Another part to the slow and steady method is getting quality, relevant links. Many times SEO’s who use the sprint method will get links from where ever they can whether the site is relevant or not. Some of the best (or worst) examples of this are commenting on hundreds of unrelated videos (i.e. man breaks world record for corn eating and linking back to a law website), commenting on unrelated blog posts (commenting on a law blog and linking back to a health website), and creating a fake program and having the download URL point to the clients website (I have actually seen all of this done more than once). This might yield a lot of links, but since they are unrelated they do not have much weight to them.

A good way to think about links is to compare them to change; the lower the quality the lower the value. For example, using the sprint method will yield lots of low value coins like pennies and nickels, and maybe a few high value coins like quarters and half-dollars. The slow and steady method will yield a lower number of coins but they will be of higher value such as quarters, half-dollar, and dollar coins. So in the end which would you rather have 1,000 pennies, 500 nickels, and 250 quarter(1,750 coins, $97.50); or 500 quarters, 250 half-dollars, and 50 dollar coins (800 coins $300)?

Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO? by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

In the world of SEO you don’t hear much about Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. This is because Bing is still has less than a 10 percent market share of all search engine traffic. However, it is gaining its market share, and fast to the demise of Yahoo. This increase in Bing’s market share has SEO’s looking at how to rank well for this new search engine that is still in its infancy compared to Google and Yahoo.

Not much has surfaced on how to rank well in Bing’s SERP’s due to its age, but in the webmasters blog on the Bing website it does tell us their link building policy and how to go about building links. It reads very much like a Google blog on link building, using many of the same standards as Google. The blog talks about site relevance, authority sites, and what will get you penalized.

In the blog they talk about something they call “spam rank” which factors how ‘spammy’ your site is, the lower the better. They also mentioned that in the webmaster tools on Bing, they tell you if your site is blocked from the index, and why which is new compared to Google. This tool could prove to be useful if a webmasters site is penalized from both Google and Bing, they can actually fix the problem instead of guessing why you were penalized in the first place.

Bing’s growing popularity may be the end for Yahoo, especially since both companies are in talks about Bing taking over Yahoo anyway. It is unlikely that Bing will be a major problem for Google by itself, but if they take over Yahoo, Bing could have a combined market share of 28 percent compared to Google’s 65 percent. The future of search engines could be an all-out cyber war.

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.

Google has officially removed PageRank from it webmaster tools. This comes after years of subtle hints that PageRank is not as important as people would think.

Google PageRank is Gone —>

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.