Archive for the 'Google News' Category
Search engine optimization (SEO) has really taken corporate Canada by surprise or a better way of putting it would be bewilderment. Most decision makers in this country know that SEO is important but are not sure exactly what it is and how it can ultimately effect the bottom line of their companies. Because of this uncertainty Canada still lags behind the USA and the UK in terms of utilizing SEO to drive quality visitors to their websites and grow their business .
The secret that many large companies in the UK and the USA already know and that the more progressive Canadian companies are now just starting to find out is that having a ‘real’ professional SEO in-house is like having a “secret weapon” – and just to clarify, I am not exaggerating, blowing my own horn or using a poor analogy. This is the cold-hard truth and up until now a very well kept secret.
Here is an example in support of my above statement:
-In my last in-house position the basic numbers supported the true power of SEO as the ultimate ROI (return on investment) and secret weapon. When the company made conversions through more traditional marketing methods both online and off with banner ads, radio commercials, TV spots and print advertising the cost per acquisition was $49.00 When they made acquisitions through SEO the cost was $9.50 – considering SEO brought in almost 20 million dollars in revenue in 2008 I would say that not only was this an amazing ROI but it is really what kept this company afloat.
Having an in-house SEO allows a company to be very ‘light’ on their feet and take advantage of opportunities that would otherwise not be found or leveraged to their full potential. When you have an edge on your competition by using SEO to increase your website traffic, brand awareness and ultimately your companies profits it can open many doors for partnerships because everyone in your industry or complimentary industries wants to be part of a successful company.
When the boss/board of directors/owners/CEO or president wants to test market a new product or service they can jump in with both feet knowing the in-house SEO will support and find ways to promote and analyze the potential of the new endeavor. When someone comes knocking to sell them advertising or the newest greatest profitability scheme they can have the SEO sit in on these meetings and offer ‘real’ advice based on hard data. For example, we had the Yellow Pages folks in for a meeting last month and they were telling us of their newest and greatest ‘improvement’ coming down-the-pipes in which we would be able to bid on top placement in their online directory. The section they were recommending for us was one our SEO (me) knew only garnered us a few dozen hits a month even in spot 4 on Google – so it gave us the heads-up on what type of bid would be worthwhile (a low one) where-as another company in our market might get sucked into bidding very high for the same keyword because they did not know the actual value of it.
When a partner in the industry was refocusing their mission thereby leaving a website up for grabs the in-house SEO was able to see the value in this site and the company was able to acquire it before it went to public auction where it would have fetched 4 or 5 times the value we paid.
Really, I could go on and on….leveraging current market share, taking advantage of hot news trends, driving long-tail traffic to inner pages, raising the value of current affiliate and membership programs, developing good will with suppliers and friends, spotting red flags on the horizon and avoiding penalties. I can’t count the times I have sat in on a call with my boss and x supplier, x salesperson, x investor, x affiliate, x business proposal and had valuable input into what the offer might mean to us. Simply because as the in-house SEO you live and breathe the business and industry you work in – knowing the data and pitfalls from the inside out give you tremendous knowledge and insight.
Having an in-house SEO really is a secret weapons, sort of like having in-house council but it costs a lot less, for now!
When a company is as rich as Google they don’t really have to worry about the competition, they just buy them up.
Google has officially announced that it is taking mobile display advertising provider in exchange for $750 million. This deal helps create Google’s mobile ad platform as AdMob’s mobile display joins Google Mobile search ads and SMS.
The following is the joint statement by both companies:
“Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time. AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup – generating impressive year on year revenue growth – and we’re excited to welcome this talented to Google,” says Susan Wojcicki, VP of Product Management at Google.
Mobile ads is the wave of the future so we always expected the big ‘G’ to be a major player. They actually might end up being the ‘only’ player.
There is a long standing rumor that Google wishes to ‘take over the world’ – now that might not be exactly true but they sure as heck got their fingers in a lot of different pies! While the title is a bit ‘tongue-in-cheek’ at the moment, it might just be the future?
While this post is not directly related to SEO, it does give a glimpse into where Google is headed and what type of power they wield. How long till Google offers free SEO advice or automated SEO advice?
The turn-by-turn GPS market is huge and you just have to take a look at the juicy prices Garmin and Tom-Tom are charging for their hardware. Even the iPhone apps are priced quite high in the $99 range.
When I heard Google was including free turn-by-turn navigation directions with each and every Android mobile OS, I was first shocked, then awed! I mean wow, what an offer and what a catch! My dad always told me when conducting business you should think of a nice hook to get folks involved and start the buying. But this not only hooks but it is line and sinker as well. To add insult to injury it will also likely spin the entire GPS market on its head because it sure as hell gets much harder to sell something to people when they can get it elsewhere for free.
Hopefully Google will stay too busy with this and other ‘bigger’ plans of world domination and leave us alone for a couple of decades.
So Google finally stepped up to the plate with a post over at GoogleWebmasterCenteral on blog comment spam but the real question is did they give us good, useful information or just open up a Pandoras box of ways to ‘kill’ your competitors in the search rankings?
FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people’s hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.
FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one’s site in the long run.
Now many folks are drawing the obvious conclusion, should I just go buy a blog spam commenting package from overseas for $10 and hope the dozens of spam comments will sink my competitors rankings? Google answers back that if your competitors link profile is otherwise healthy then this type of offensive won’t make a difference but what happens if your competition is relatively new and has a really small link profile with just a few dozen links? Will I then be able to sink them for all the semi-competitive keywords they are beating me out on because of their high quality content?
I just wish Google would do away with their shroud of secrecy and start being more transparent because this sounds like they just opened the door with a sneaky, under-handed method of playing dirty.
Many SEO’s and Google themselves have been preaching the relative un-importance of visual page rank for ages….now it appears Google is finally ready to put its words into action – they have removed Google page rank from being reported in Google Webmaster Tools and here is the official explanation:
Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools. I think this is a good thing, since I agree it is obsessed over too much, plus what Google showed in Webmaster Tools was not very useful to webmasters.
Good first step, now let’s see what other changes this leads to.
SEO is Almost Dead…Just Barely Surviving…(cue the death rattle)!
Author: SEO Company GeekFor those of you new to the SEO world you can rest assured that if the sky has not fallen yet – it soon will, any second, maybe…this same drum has been beating for the past 5 years and every few months a new SEO Prophet has some newfangled reason for it to be the truth, THIS TIME!
Here is a posting from a forum on Feb. 2006
-We had a quick page rank update a couple of days ago and it pretty much surprised everyone. Even though page rank does not seem to mean a heck of a lot these days every update still seems to get the webmaster and SEO community up and jump’in! Personally I am wondering if my weird news site will ever see some green juice again but the PR0 does not seem to be hindering the steady flow of traffic – this week it was extra busy averaging around 1,100 visits a day.
-Finally the ‘SEO’s are criminals’ buzz is calming down. After Matt came out and said that SEO’s will be held to higher standards and Google is tracking them there was a long and painful cry of foul across the entire industry. Myself I don’t really think it is such a big deal and the SEO playing-field has never been level anyways.
-As far as the ‘page rank sculpting’ episode I will simply say I feel sorry for the SEO firms that sold this to their biggest clients and now have to figure out a way to get their foot out of their mouths.
What will next months buzz bring….no idea, maybe a new conspiracy theory about Google and Yahoo! planning to buyout MSN to stop BING from conquering the world?
In big news today Matt Cutts says that page rank is actualy good for something….getting your site crawled faster. It seems that is the way the Google creepy, crawly spider goes about its business and here is the little graph he offers up in his slideshow.
Now the question is….I had a new post, maybe even this post crawled in 5-8 mintues and I am a little PR2, so how much faster would I get crawled if I was a PR4 or PR6. I think I will still be able to sleep at night at my current page rank level.
FYI: This post was indexed within 4 minutes.
There was an interesting post over at SEO Book titled: Buying Links vs Buying Rankings vs Stealing Content vs Selling Scams
It focuses on the hypocrisy that is present when it comes to link building, buying rank and the morality of it all. Personally I have a problem with Google passing judgement on any site that sells advertising links, saying they are attempting to game the search results but then they go ahead and sell top sponsor ad space to the highest bidder. So how exactly is that providing their searchers with the most relevant results?
