Welcome to Natural Search Blog
Natural Search Blog provides articles on search engine optimization including keyword reasearch, on-page factors, link-building, social media optimization, local search optimization, image search optimization, and mobile SEO.
In addition to natural search optimization topics, we also cover internet marketing, ecommerce, web design, usability, and technology.
Recent Entries
Guerilla Marketing & Google Maps
My article on “Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps” posted today on Search Engine Land, and I believe many of my regular readers should find it moderately entertaining. The piece covers how some elements of guerrilla marketing have found their way into some Google Maps advertising patents, and also how some others have used creative means to get messages into Maps via “roofvertising”, “skywriting” and more.
Those familiar with Natural Search Blog may remember some of my similar past work here outlining laser graffiti ads on buildings, roofvertising, marriage proposals in Google Maps, “earth art” geoglyph ads, and sponsoring town names as an Ultimate Local SEO tactic.
It’s not surprising to see guerilla marketing tactics finding their way into Google Maps. Not only does Google itself seek to introduce disruptive technology innovations, but I expect that as Satellite and Aerial photos may get more frequently updated in such interfaces we’ll be bound to see a whole lot more efforts from people trying to get messages conveyed through the Maps interfaces.
The real question I’m left with, is if Google resells ad space on pictures of people’s rooftops and billboards, would they owe anything back to the original property owners?!?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/01/2010
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Filed under: Advertising, Futurism, Local Search, Maps, Marketing Billboards, Google-Maps, Guerilla-Advertising, Guerilla-Marketing, guerrilla advertising, guerrilla marketing, Map-Ads, Roofvertising, skywriting
Exciting News — Netconcepts Acquired by Covario
Happy New Year Natural Search Geeks!
As some of you know, for the past five years I’ve worked with Stephan Spencer building up the Netconcepts‘ search marketing and SEO technology business. Today it gives me great pleasure to announce a very special event: Netconcepts is merging, through acquisition, with the leading search marketing software company – Covario!
As part of Covario, I’m very excited for our people and our clients to be part of what is the leading search marketing software and services organization. Together, we have nearly 100 combined clients in key industries, including high-tech, ecommerce, consumer electronics, financial services, media and consumer packages goods, with many Fortune 500 brands.
Our combined SEO technologies, which include Organic Search Insight and GravityStream, promise advertisers the first end-to-end industry solution that spans the entire search optimization process: keyword research, recommendations, execution, and ongoing reporting. GravityStream is a pioneering technology for automating the execution piece. And now even more is possible.
Analysts expect marketers to increase their SEO spend by 100% over the next 5 years, to $5.0 billion by 2014. By leveraging our leading technologies and world-class SEO expertise, we will continue to improve performance and ROI for leading brands across organic and paid search, on a global scale.
(And on balmy, single-digit temperature days like today in Madison, I’m also excited to spend a bit more time out at the new San Diego headquarters)
As the world of search continues to evolve, these are exciting times indeed!
Brian Klais
Chief Operating Officer
Netconcepts
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Posted by Brian of Brian on 01/12/2010
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Filed under: General
Increasing The Scope Of Existing PPC Campaigns Effectively
The complexity of Google Adwords is always on the rise and it takes time, skill and effort to achieve good results with PPC campaigns in terms of finding the sweet medium of increased conversions and reduced costs.
If you have an existing PPC campaign and it is performing decently, you can still increase its scope and hence improve its performance by targeting more keywords in the niche you are running your campaigns in.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 12/13/2009
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Filed under: Paid Search adwords account history, Adwords Opportunities tab, auckland ppc services, increased keyword targeting, increasing keyword scope, Keyword opportunities, opportunities keyword tool, ppc, ppc campaigns, SEO
LinkedIn, But NoFollow Link Love
We all knew it was only a matter of time, but still secretly hoped that the honeymoon would last forever. It does appear that LinkedIn has started nofollowing public profile links…but with a strange twist.
I’ve been so heads down in client audits that I didn’t discover this until, ironically, doing another audit for another client. However, I also don’t recall seeing many blog headlines in my Netvibes, so perhaps this one has rather floated under the radar a bit. Even a quick scan in Google doesn’t turn up much beyond this post, ‘Linkedin adds rel=”Nofollow” to profile links‘ over at Kingpin SEO, which dates this change around early-mid November. Based on my recent audit schedule, would make this about right.
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Posted by Brian R. Brown of Netconcepts on 12/08/2009
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Filed under: Link Building, Social Media Optimization Link Building, linkedin, nofollow, Social-Media
Relationship Between Link Growth And Indexation
With every passing day, the number of websites and hence the number of web pages are growing at an explosive rate on the internet. This can cause a major headache to the search engines as they gear up to meet the challenge of crawling and subsequently indexing the new sites popping up everywhere in the cybersphere.
Today, when a new web site is launched, it will take a while before its pages get crawled and indexed in Google. With the increasing strain on hardware and resources due to the rapid growth of new sites, Google has become very strict in its policy of admitting sites and retaining web pages of sites in its index. It is a case of survival of the fittest in cyberspace.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 11/29/2009
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Filed under: Link Building, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimization Add new tag, auckland seo firm, baclinks, crawling, directory submission, editorial links, external linking profile, google index, indexation, link growth, link growth patterns, linkbait, linkerati, natural link building, Netconcepts, PageRank, ppc services, search engine optimisation, value of deep links, virtual real estate
Inbound Deep Links Benefit Page Rank Distribution Sitewide
Many a time, you would have come across sites (especially the large ones) where the deeper you dig into the site hierarchy, you can see the Pagerank toolbar grayed out or having a value 0. In general, the home page is the starting point for a website and it accrues the maximum Page rank.
The entire domain’s authority and trust is reflected by this page rank value. The home page then tends to distribute this page rank to the first level (categories), the second level (sub-categories) and the third level product pages which we often refer to as link juice. In general, the first level pages tend to derive the maximum link juice from the home page. But in a site with excessive number of sub-categories and product pages (money pages), the pagerank distribution is not proportional with some gaining link juice and a large majority not gaining any.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 11/15/2009
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Filed under: Link Building, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Site Structure auckland search engine marketing, categories and sub-categories, decent internal link juice flow, domain authority, domain trust, google index, great internal link juice flow, inbound deep links, internal link juice flow, internal linking architecture, marginal internal link juice flow, Netconcepts, page rank distribution, pagerank sculpting, pagerank threshold, ppc services, product pages
New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data
Do you use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool for your keyword research? If not, you might be missing out. Like all keyword research tools, it may not be the end all be all, and it isn’t without its own little quirks, but it is still rich keyword data whether you use it on its own or in relation with the other keyword tools you are using.
Google has modified the tool over time, and one of the great additions was the ability to see the monthly demand via a small little bar chart. This can be very useful for factoring in seasonality or growing demand for certain phrases. Wrapping your head around the actual numerical data is a bit more challenging. The Local number is just for the most recent month while the Global number is a monthly average. This is further complicated in that the Global number includes the world essentially while the Local number may factor in your campaign settings and locality (based on your AdWords campaign configuration).
To help tighten up data and provide a little more insight into the Local numbers, I just released an Excel spreadsheet that can take your Google Keyword Tool’s export and annualize the Local demand numbers. In some cases, this may dramatically change the order of importance of keywords to target.
Best of all, this tool is free to use so give it a play. The link below will take you to the download page for the tool as well as more detail about how it works and an example.
Google Keyword Tool Annualizer
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Posted by Brian R. Brown of Netconcepts on 11/13/2009
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Filed under: Google, Keyword Research, Tools google keyword tool, Keyword Research, Tools
How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign
PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are a sure fire way of attracting traffic to your website almost instantaneously without the rigors of an SEO campaign that is required to bring your site on top of the SERPs. The most important thing to be aware of when it comes to a PPC campaign is understanding the rules to play the Adwords game.
Google’s policy of serving relevant ads in response to user queries coupled with complex factors like quality score can make Adwords a minefield for a novice or intermediate level practitioner so much so that a lot of money is coughed up to elicit a poor ROI (Return on Investment) or not the best bang for your buck in layman terms.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 11/08/2009
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Filed under: Advertising, Paid Search ad copy, ad groups, analysis of results, auckland pay per click marketing, cost savings, cpc, Google Adwords, Keyword Research, landing page, landing page optimization, Netconcepts, pay per click campaign, ppc, ppc account history, relevancy, ROI, SEO, targeting
Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
Search engine marketing is increasingly becoming popular with people from all walks of life and businesses of all hues adopting the web in a big way. The global recesssion has clearly thrust SEM into the spotlight as a great way to drive targeted traffic that is measurable and also making a huge difference to the bottomline of any company, the $ generated in revenue.
Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 11/01/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, General, SEO Amazon, auckland search engine optimisation, backlink profile, Google-Trends, natural search, Netconcepts, on page optimisation, Paid Search, ppc marketing, search engine optimisation, Search-Engine-Marketing, Social-Media, twitter landscape, unique quality content
SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel - Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2
During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs.
Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites often have nearly as many constructs for title tags. Three things that a quick scan of our data will tell us:
- General constructs and patterns used
- Title tag duplication
- General sense of optimization quality (potentially)
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Posted by Brian R. Brown of Netconcepts on 10/22/2009
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Filed under: SEO, Tools, Tricks excel, internal linking, seo audit, title-tags, Tools, xenu
