We Do Search Engine Optimization.

I love SEO humor and search inspired cartoons:
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SMCLA had an educational event showcasing Google Analytics and ways to measure website success. This is one of the easiest ways to measure online social media efforts and gauge the effectiveness of optimization efforts.

Moderator, @EricaForrette did a great job keeping things active and getting attendees questions answered.

Panelists included:

• John Shiple, CTO, Ultralive
  www.linkedin.com/in/johnshiple
• Alex Becker, Co-Founder and President, Highly Relevant
  www.linkedin.com/in/alexybecker
• Andrew Hahn, Luxury Link and Familygetaway.com
  www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhahn

Below are some notes from this informative session.

This is a great explanation of how to set up Google Analytics for your fan page on Facebook. Use an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. Create a new GA account and name it facebook. Create a custom img tag for each page you would like to track: contact form, services, products etc. Add the entire custom image html tag to the bottom of each Facebook fan page that you would like to track. Read more

Classify your links by tagging the Source as “feedburner”, the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as “feed” or “email”. read more about adsense for feeds.

The Google Conversion University provides free training materials and case studies to help setup analytics. They also explain conversion funnels and how to measure visitors as they travel through your website.

There is a great writeup of the Goo Goo over Google Analytics at the SMC LA blog.

Organized by Garick who did a great job managing the 150 people show showed up.

@techzulu provided for livestreaming this event. We had over 10,000 online viewers.

location host company Mahalo.com 902 Colorado Ave Santa Monica, CA 90401

@freshbrothers sponsored pizza – it is excellent

Asok Lost his soul trying to improve his Google search engine ranking. He found that keyword research & placement along with inbound links are the foundation of search engine placement. The missing ingredient:

Ritual sacrifice, presumably of an intern.

Suggestions to Scott Adams to improve Dilbert search engine optimization: create a text version of your cartoon, rename the image with a more relevant filename, add a keyword rich alt tag, and consider linking the strip to a larger popup version.

Source: United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

I have ben to SES San Jose 3 times and had a great experience each time. The conferences had a lot of good information about search engine optimization and the networking with other SEO’s was priceless.

Search Engine Strategies Discount Code: SESF15

The training resources were a great experience, however the SES conference series has been declining for about a year and it is uncertain if they will rebound.

Suggestions For New Ideas

Search Engine Strategies needs to get into pay for performance marketing, PPC, affiliate marketing and lead generation if they want to stay relevant. SEO is still a good strategy, but it is not the latest technique. Most people know basic SEO but lead generation and specialized local advertising is the next frontier.

Just use coupon code: SESF15 and login here

If you are active in the search engine optimization industry, have a blog or site following the search industry, digital marketing, or SES then there is a good chance you’re already sending traffic our way.

We Want To Help You Make Money and the SES conference can help you do this.

Visit the area in the Search Engine Watch forums to help our affiliates with any questions and tips for gaining more traffic to your sites and learn about speaker updates. We will have some of the best online marketers available to answer your questions.

There has never been a better time to sign in and check out which new upcoming events we are currently promoting through our seminar network in New York, San Jose, Toronto and more.

SES New York, the year’s biggest show is open for registration and is expected to attract as many as 6,000 attendees this year.

New Events & Upcoming Sessions

• Introduction to Search Marketing
• Building a Search Friendly Site
• Search Around the World
• Search Advertising 101
• Universal & Blended Search
• Igniting Viral Campaigns
• Site Clinics
• Successful Tactics for Social
• Media Optimization (SMO)
• Advanced B2B Marketing
• Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
• Black Hat, White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO

Offer prospects a special 15% discount coupon when registering, good for any conference pass, or training session with the voucher SESF15.

SEO’s face a future of nearly insurmountable competition from huge established websites, and a decreased reliance on backlinks.

Search engine optimization professionals enjoy competitive advantages for ranking in the search engine results pages due to years of hands on experience, but experience, grit and force of will cannot always match giant budgets when corporations throw their hats into the SEO arena. There will always be opportunities for those grass roots marketers who do things faster and smarter, and future startups such as the Twitter.com in 5 years will contribute to disrupting the online marketplace, but the average company trying to make money with their web property will be up against daunting odds.

The Algorithm is a capitalist and is heavily reliant (currently) on back links.

Current Ranking Signals

• 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
• 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
• 20% Anchor Text of External Links
• 15% On-Page Keyword Usage
• 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
• 6% Social Graph Metrics
• 5% Registration and Hosting Data

Search engine algorithms change yearly, and have improved markedly since the 1990’s. Search engines have gotten so much more efficient at discarding low quality websites that most spammers have switched to ethical white hat online marketing tactics. In the near future, the distribution of ranking importance will change to favor larger, established, trusted brand name websites.

Future Ranking Signals

• 25% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
• 24% Traffic and Click-Through Data
• 20% Social Graph Metrics
• 12% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
• 10% Anchor Text of External Links
• 7% On-Page Keyword Usage
• 2% Registration and Hosting Data

These ranking variables involved are getting more difficult for small companies, and small operators will have a larger challenge creating search relevance. It’s more difficult to create a successful viral marketing campaign to get mentioned on heavily read blogs for improving your social graph metrics. Brokering text links with carefully crafted anchor text will not only be more difficult but less effective.

Moving a website from nothing to top ten rankings for highly competitive phrases will less of a reality – If Ford.com can spend 1 million dollars on a social media marketing campaign, there is no way a smaller car operator can match them.

Google claims to be a champion of democracy, but their future search engine may send 75% of all query traffic to big brands.

This post was inspired by Stuntdubl.

Twitter is a great tool to connect with friends and facilitate business. However if used indiscriminately it can be a waste of time and possibly hurt your reputation.

Here is how twitter helps me with my business

1. Asking questions
2. Getting specific help with complex projects
3. Connecting with people I otherwise wouldn’t
4. Sending out coupon codes, deals, specials
5. Meeting new industry specialists
6. Reputation management – seeing real time searches about my company/industry

Everyone is getting into the twitter game, see how Dilbert convinces his boss to use it.

Thanks to UFS for the Dilbert comic strip image.

This is a resource of websites, Firefox extensions for SEO and competitive intelligence.

Find extensions and tools to help in organic SEO campaigns.

SEO Tools

• SEO for Firefox – firefox plugin that provides data to inline search queries
• SEOpen – SEO Firefox Extension providing multiple search tools aggregated in one place including yahoo backlinks, keyword density, headers and page rank.
• SearchStatus – firefox plugin that provides detailed ranking stats for any website. allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing and the only tool i have seen that uses data from SEOmoz and linkscape. Check Mozrank using this firefox addon.
• KeywordSpy – good keyword research tool provides data on competitors keyword rankings and PPC spend. Competitive intelligence on keywords.
• Market Samurai – desktop based Adobe Air app which uses the Google Adwords API to parse keyword data and give options for keyword spend and natural search engine optimization campaigns. This has a different interface than adwords and more options to help you make good use of lots of keyword research.
• Majestic SEO – Provides a very large backlink and anchor text database. Competitive Link Intelligence tool allows you to find data on the sites that link to you and your competitors.

SERP Rank Checkers

• link assistant – Desktop Client based software program with lots of rank checking features
• authoritylabs – easy to use web based tool offers 10 free keywords. Nightly ranking updates
• RankChecker – another tool by Aaron Wall of SEO Book that provides quick checking in the SERP’s. check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Bing. tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker

There are other search engine optimization tools available, but these are heavily used and will help your natural search campaigns by providing clear data on the direction of online marketing. Focus on the right keywords and you have won half the search engine battle.

Misleading linkbait title aside, the real title of this video is “Can you benefit from content scraped from your website”. The premise is that if some content is copied automatically from your site, presumably this will include links back to you.

So when you prepare content make sure it includes a lot of intra-site links, and even links using your full URL. So instead of linking to /seo you should link to http://www.netpaths.net/seo to have links picked up on other sites. This is also important for your blog, which may likely be read in a 3rd party feed reader.

Im very impressed that Mr. Cutts took such a bold public stance on content scraping, and here are possible meanings:

1. Google is tired of people including them in lawsuits over content scraping. Google is effectively saying there are some (possibly negligble) value to content scraping, so please don’t make us defend ourselves while you sue your competitor.
2. Dulplicate content is such a big problem, Google is waving the white flag and giving up on trying to control blackhat spammers. They are effectively saying: go ahead and scrape, the legitimate sites will always win. Generally this is true, as the authoritative site being copied generally has a higher trust ranking than the copier.
3. Google is trying to appease newspapers (and the AP specifically) and educate them about the web. Any large news event will have thousands of articles written about it, with the majority of the articles being repurposed content. Google is telling the major newspapers and news bureaus that they should not be afraid of having their good content distributed, as they get links back as a reward for sharing and this will help them build their online authority.

Matt Cutts is the webspam god of Google, and what he says goes. He is the head PR person that interacts with search engine optimization firms In person he is a very kind and fair man, someone you would enjoy sitting down to have a beer with and discuss gadgets, code and algorithms. It is essential to listen to everything he says if you want good search engine rankings, and even more important to read between the lines to understand how the search engine functions.

Using photos is on of the most underrated method of search engine optimization I have seen. Lots of good quality images not only help sell products to customers, they also will get you more search engine traffic.

Image search engines, particularly Google’s, send some of my sites 50% of all traffic. So imagine if you had no images on your website, you would be loosing 50% of potential visitors.

For SEO it really isn’t important how you organize images, set alt tags or place them in pages. It is important to link each image – either to a larger version or a specific page. Images get much higher weight if they are linked.

For e-commerce stores, images will set you apart from the competition.
Show the back & sides of the product so I can see the connections for electronics, and so I can see if the furniture is hollow or solid, or the pattern is continued on the back. Newegg.com is a leader in this field.

Show how large (or small) the product really is. Display a product in its actual environment or placed next to another object of known size for scale. (We used to do this in geology field classes all the time, without an object in a photograph rocks can seem impossibly large)

Display the side view to relate the product’s “heft.” Show me the top of the monitor and I can see if it’s made of thin plastic and will fit in my TV cabinet. Show me how thick the sole of the shoe is and how it will affect my height.

Does the electronic product have rubber feet? Is it a gloss or matte finish? How many buttons does it have? Is the on screen menu easy to see and use? Will the remote fit easily in my hand?

Show the item in action, either with video or through action shots, and how it will interact in my home. Create an image of the single coat paint covering an old wall in one smooth paintbrush stroke.

Pictures and product videos are important because they quickly answer customers questions and concerns through visual images. These action shots will reduce uncertainty and remove barriers to purchases.

The more pictures you show, the more your customers will show you the money.

Read more about optimizing photographs at Grok.

How well do you know your website audience? Many advertisers think they know their audience well, but this is sometimes misguided or incorrect. Using analytics and online research tools you can find out more about your demographics including:

• Gender
• Age
• Average Income
• Location

Avinash Kaushik is an Analytics Evangelist with Google who explains how tools such as Google Ad Planner and Google Insights for Search provide data that help advertisers truly understand the demographics of their audience.

Video Explaing How to Use Google Analytics Tools

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