WebProNews - SEO

It’s a tough question, especially in a bad economy.

The question really begs another question – what is your goal for your site?

If you are operating it as a real business where you hope to either supplement your current income or rely on it as your sole source of income – then you need to be prepared to invest in search (it’s often the foundation of your marketing and a consistent source of regular traffic).

You can invest time or money and in most cases, you usually need to invest both.

I think there is someone out there spreading some erroneous information about starting a business online.  There is a lot of the “build it and they will come” mentality – in other words throw up a site and voila insta-business!

While in many ways, it is easier to do business online because you don’t need to set up physical stores and have a lot of the issues you have with brick and mortars, it is by no means a “sure thing” – you still have to work for your success.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t start an online business -  I am just saying if you expect your business to grow and treat you well, then you need to treat it like a serious business.

So, yes, it will be necessary for you to invest both time and money into generating traffic.

So back to the question at hand – how much should you spend on SEO?

You need to crunch some numbers and see how many visitors it takes to get a sale and how much a sale is worth to you to really fine-tune your budget – especially if PPC is part of your plans (so many people waste money on PPC that isn’t converting – spend wisely or it can suck you dry!)

For organic SEO you will find everything from $19.99 mass submission (avoid like the plague, you may as well burn your $19.99) to tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Most small to medium sized businesses spend between $300 – $800 per month, although I’ve also heard people say numbers a little higher, like $500 – $1500 per month is the norm.  So somewhere in that range is what you should expect to pay for quality SEO work.

It always amazes me that people are annoyed they have to pay for SEO.  People will pay for a doctor or a mechanic, or even a web designer but they seem to resent having to pay for SEO.  If you have the time and knowledge, then by all means, don’t pay anyone, do it yourself.  However if you don’t have the time or knowledge, it’s a valid, and important expense and not something you should begrudge.  Driving traffic to your site is the foundation and not the area you want to go cheap.

I’m jussayin…think about your goals and think about what you are prepared to do to get there.

Yahoo has begun testing organic and paid search listings from Microsoft. Up to 25% of its search traffic in the U.S. may see organic listings from Microsoft, and up to 3.5% may see paid listings from Microsoft adCenter. I guess you could say that the early stages of the Search Alliance's transition have begun.

Will you place more emphasis on Bing optimization as it integrates with Yahoo Search? Let us know.

"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo's VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing's share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let's not forget).

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Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft's mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we've discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you've not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.

BusinessWire, the popular newswire service, is set to launch some new services for businesses and organizations next month. These are the NewsHQ online newsroom and the InvestorHQ investor center.

BusinessWire says these microsites were developed specifically to help corporate communicators and investor relations officers house and maintain information for journalists, bloggers, investors, consumers, analysts, key influencers, etc.

"There are many benefits to employing these content management solutions," explains BusinessWire VP of Web Communications, Ibrey Woodall. "One of the main reasons the online newsroom came into existence was because public relations representatives were having a hard time getting cooperation from their technical, or IT department, when they needed a press release posted quickly. Investor relations officers also needed a means by which they could get the most recent financial news and data to their company’s investors and analysts."

"So, control was an initiating factor for this technological evolution," she adds. "Communicators needed to be able to post and organize content in a timely manner. They needed to be able to get their message on their website, and delivered directly to those who were interested in their organization."

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal of gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. Providing the givers of press (journalists, bloggers, and even everyday consumers via social media) with as many resources for finding information as possible, will only increase the likelihood of coverage. Businesses may find  these new services from Business Wire quite helpful.

It also helps that the services come with some basic SEO features, which should further increase visibility.

Google was granted an interesting patent today. The title is "System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring". Here is how the abstract for the patent describes it:

A method and system of modulating search result relevancy use various types of user browsing activities. In particular, a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones. The server also uses the relevancy values to determine and/or adjust the content of an one-box result associated with a search query.

"The patent presents a couple of assumptions about how mouse pointer movements can be interpreted," explains Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea, who presents a much more readable explanation of the patent. "For example, a longer hover over a result may indicate a positive opinion about how relevant a listing on the results page might be to a query. And, if someone moves their mouse pointer across a snippet line by line at a normal reading speed, it may indicate a higher level of attention to that result than if pointer was kept in a static position or moved randomly."

"So, the speed and movement of a mouse pointer as well as where it is placed on a search result page might be tracked to see how much attention a search pays to different search results," he adds. "If someone hovers over one sponsored listing, or ad, but not another, that might indicate more attention and interest in the ad hovered over. If a local map is shown, or a definition, or some other OneBox result, and the searcher viewing the page hovers over those OneBox results for a while, that could be an indication that the map or the definition or other OneBox listing was helpful."
 
The patent was filed all the way back in 2005, and like Slawski notes, there's no telling if Google will actually utilize it. A lot can change in 5 years, especially in this industry. Either way, they've been granted the patent. You can read it here.

Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the Bing web crawler out of beta on October 1st. It will be rebranded as "the Bingbot" and replace the existing msnbot. "It will still honor robots.txt directives written for msnbot, so no change is required to robots.txt file(s)," a Bing representative tells WebProNews.

"Improvements to the bot enable more efficient crawling, and increase the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search," he says.
 
Rick DeJarnette has more about the change on the Bing Webmaster Blog:

Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below:

From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com

will become

From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com

If Bing finds separate sets of directives for Bingbot and for other crawlers, directives for bingbot will take precedence, the company says.

I find the part about increasing the ability to crawl content on sites not optimized for search to be particularly interesting. I wouldn't exactly call this an invitation to ignore SEO. Obviously Google is still the biggest search engine anyway, but even as far as Bing is concerned, good SEO practices will likely still help your rankings.

Also keep in mind that optimizing for Bing is becoming increasingly important. Not only is Facebook giving more reason for people to search (where Bing provides the web results), but the Yahoo/Bing integration will be here (likely) before the holidays.

It's been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

How important is freshness to you as a search engine user? Share your thoughts here.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn't the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?

Matt's response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says...

"Whenever you're thinking about search engines, it's much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don't post every day. Sometimes I don't post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it..."

Matt implies that you'll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn't that much different than stuff that's already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Quality is always priority one, but I don't think that's to say that freshness doesn't count. For example, as we looked at recently,

Google's time filters (which are more readily available to searchers, courtesy of the recent redesign of the SERPs), not to mention the realtime results Google often displays, can add some benefit to providing fresh content. Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario had a very interesting post at Search Engine Land looking at how the time filter may even help smaller brands get some visibility.

Of course Google has gone out of its way with Caffeine to increase the speed at which it indexes content so it can provide the freshest results possible.

Do you take freshness into account for your search engine marketing strategy? Comment here.

A lot of people had something to say about Google's Mayday algorithm update from the beginning of May. A lot of people felt that it was costing them rankings and revenue.

Google's Matt Cutts talked more about Mayday at SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago. He said that it was designed to try and spot signals of quality on pages and sites that would be good for users, and that auto-generated pages and content farms tend to get hit the most by Mayday.

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Barry Schwartz at Search Engine roundtable is pointing to a WebmasterWorld thread indicating that there may have been another tweak on June 23rd and 24th that had a big impact on some sites' rankings again.

Cutts' advice to webmasters affected by Mayday in the first place, was basically to improve quality. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this advice would probably still apply.

Have you experienced a dramatic change in Google rankings this week? Let us know.

Nick O'Neill at All Facebook reports that Facebook has confirmed that "all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them." He also calls this Facebook's "war on Google."

While utilizing likes and the open graph as a ranking factor in search should help Facebook improve its internal search, it doesn't represent much of a threat to Google search. Google indexes the web. Facebook indexes activity from Facebook users. There's a pretty big difference, regardless of how big Facebook is.

There is certainly something to be said for Facebook search, however. There's no question that a lot lof people are using Facebook and spending a lot of time there, so having some kind of search strategy for Facebook is not a bad idea. Naturally, the Open Graph will play a huge role in this, and that means taking advantage of Facebook's social plugins. As I've written about before, Facebook likes (as well as Twitter retweets) are like the new links in some ways.

Facebook is definitely making a lot of moves to keep users getting the info they want from within Facebook. Fan pages essentially turn Facebook into a news reader. They're working on a Q&A product. They're launching content destinations themselves (like this politics page). However, no matter how much information Facebook is able to give users, that amount will always be limited, and will not be able to deliver the web in the way Google can. Of course, that's why they have Bing results for web search.

As far as search market share, it is probably Bing that stands to gain the most out of improved Facebook search. I don't know how often people are going to go to Facebook for web searches, but the more people do search on Facebook, the more they are going to see those web results from Bing, when the actual (limited) Facebook results don't deliver what they want. If Bing can deliver what they want in the top three results (the amount that is commonly displayed in Facebook search results), Bing only stands to gain.

Optimizing for Bing is very connected to optimizing for Facebook and soon optimizing for Yahoo.

SEO changes all the time as search engines make adjustments to their algorithms and user interfaces, users adopt new technologies, etc. Still some things never change, like Google's view on spammy links.

Do you agree with Google's philosophy on link-building? Share your thoughts here.

In a new post to the Google Webmaster Central blog, the company has expressed its most recent viewpoint on earning quality links.

The first piece of advice Google gives is to get involved with the community around your topic. If you were still not convinced that social media plays a very big role in search, consider this is coming straight from Google. Now the networks your community hangs out in may vary, but engaging with the community is simply a good way to get links and build credibility, which also will most likely lead to more links. Engaging is good for increasingly visibility outside of search anyway. Nothing new. Just reiterated by Google.

Sidenote: Listen to what Arnel Leyva of Covario has to say about search and social media from this recent interview WebProNews did with him at SMX Advanced:

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Another tip Google suggests is to create content that solves problems for your users - things like tutorials, videos, and tools, surveys, research results, etc. Users who find helpful content are likely to pass it on.

Google notes that humor and other link-bait tactics can work for the short term, but does not recommend counting such tactics. "It's important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort," says Google Search Quality Strategist Kaspar Szymanski. "There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site's reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them." (emphasis added)

"Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index," says Szymanski. "There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes."

Szymanski also suggests looking to similar sites in other markets for inspiration - not to copy them, but to see the things that they have done to be successful and see if there is a way to apply that to your own site.

Finally, probably the most obvious tip offered here is to make it easy for people to share your content. Things like Facebook "likes" and Twitter retweets can go a long way in creating new links to your content. Granted these won't necessarily boost you "pagerank" but they will boost your visibility, which can lead to more quality links, and simply traffic, which is ultimately the goal anyway right?

Have more link-building tips? Share them with WebProNews readers in the comments.

Google SEO vs Bing SEO has been a topic of discussion throughout the industry since Bing was launched. The topic got some heavy play last week at the SMX Advanced conference, and with Yahoo and Bing coming together sometime this year, online marketers are going to want to start thinking harder about incorporating Bing into their strategies if they are not already doing so.

Do you have a strategy for Bing SEO? Yahoo? Discuss here.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX, who presented on this topic. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts using Bing for search, Bing's share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let's not forget).

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Janet discusses a tool Bing has in its Webmaster tools that lets you see the types of links that point into you, and lets you look at their value, so you can go after similar links.

Bing is actually redesigning its Webmaster Tools, however. WebProNews also spoke with Bing's Eric Gilmore about this.

The point is, Google's Webmaster Tools have been very helpful for site-owners over the years in their conquest for better rankings. Now that Bing is growing in significance, its tools are going to be helpful as well.

Have you used Bing's webmaster tools? Did they help your rankings? Comment here.

Google's new SERP design (you know, with the left-hand panel), has created more areas for webmasters to focus their SEO efforts on. While most of the options available here have been available for quite some time, they are now in the user's face and they will be used more.

Has the new user interface affected your traffic? For better or for worse? Tell us.

Opportunities

WebProNews spoke with Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, at Google I/O recently. He talked a bit about the new Google SERP redesign, and the opportunities it creates for businesses to reach users beyond that one "trophy phrase".

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"The trick - the thing that's really important - is that it's different depending on what you're searching for," he says. "So if you're searching for Tom Cruise, you're more likely to see images and options for the different types of image search - you can say, 'show me the color images' or 'show me the large images', whereas if you're searching for Obama, you're more likely to get real-time results, and updates, and stuff like that. So, what I like about it it is it surfaces more ways to slice and dice your data, and even if you're not a power user, if you've got those options on the left-hand side, you're more likely to kind of try to explore a little more. So that's a good opportunity for webmasters and SEOs. You know, you don't have to be number one. Maybe you can be number one in a slightly different area that people will find by exploring."

"Some people get really obsessed with their one trophy phrase, or their one number one ranking, for their number one web search, and they don't think about things like image search or video search, blog search, or book search - you know, people, it's not that hard to write a book," he continues. "It can be done. And people also tend to think about search engines, when they might want to think about social media - things like Twitter, things like Facebook...because you want to go where the people are. And people aren't ONLY searching. They're hanging out online. You know, they're on forums. So I think a lot of the time, you can think about 'where can I show up besides just number one? What are the phrases people are gonna type in that show buying intent' - where they really would like to get your product? And if you're paying attention to those sorts of areas, and not just the trophy phrases, then you can find a lot more opportunities."

Matt also talks a little more about the new UI and the speed of which Google indexes content here.

Which of the options available in the new user interface have you found most helpful? Share your thoughts.

Where Freshness Comes In

One of the most important elements of this new user interface is the time filter - you can filter results by anytime, latest, past 24 hours, past week, past month, past year, or by a custom range. This isn't just about real-time search, it's about having regularly updated content, and staying fresh (though real-time search has its place within that).

Brian Klais, General Manager and VP of Product Mangagement at Covario, has a really good post over at Search Engine Land, talking about the time dimension in Google and its effect on sites' rank - in other words, how content appears when a user adjusts the time filter in the left-panel.

"Here's the bottom line: By institutionalizing a search time dimension with their UI, Google has introduced a new opportunity for all brands to steal (or have stolen) search marketshare from (or by) the competition," says Klais. "Brands that focus on dynamic site content with fresh social media output stand to gain searchers, at the expense of those brands who stay stagnant, one query at a time. The speed at which the gains and losses occur will be magnified by the availability (or lack) of content within each time filter. Now the 'recency' of social media will begin to matter in search."

To illustrate what he's talking about, he points to a query for "men's jeans" and looks at the results (which are quite different) for each time constraint. Based on this example, the smaller brand sites have a better shot at showing up the more frequently they are updated. The bigger brands tend to rank higher, the wider the range of time selected.

"The issue is a classic chicken or egg problem: unless you are present in the 'fresh' results now (aka 'recency'), you cannot accurately predict what percentage of searchers are shifting to time-filtered results in order to make the business case for action," Klais says.  "Most analytic systems will not yet parse out this traffic either; it is just lumped in with all Google organic results."

"Ask yourself this question," he adds. "Is there a way to estimate whether any of your current keyword markets are time-sensitive and if you are currently getting organic traffic from time-filtered results?"

Of course, you don't want to obsess over the time filter either. It's just one of many options to consider, but to me, a blog could be a good way to keep offering fresh and relevant content around the keywords you are targeting. Plus, it can help you in the blog search option, not to mention provide useful content and engage an audience.

Note: Interestingly enough, not long after I wrote this article, Google announced that Caffeine is now complete. This is the new version of Google's indexing system. It does not affect how Google ranks content whatsoever. What it does is speed up how fast Google indexes content. You can learn more about it here, and in this other interview with Cutts from SMX this past week. Essentially, it's all about providing users with the freshest content possible, which is why it is somewhat related to the topic discussed above.

Do you you have a strategy to provide fresh content? Tell us about it.