Natural Search Blog


Google’s Ranking Advice in Blended Search at SMX West

David Bailey at SMX WestJust a quick post here on some simple tips that David Bailey of Google advised in this morning’s session on “The Blended Search Revolution” at the SMX West conference in Santa Clara:

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Yes, you can automate SEO - we’ve done it!

Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal wrote a post highlighting Commerce360’s stated intention to build automatic optimization software, using a lot of venture capital they raised for this purpose. Loren asks, “Can SEO Be Automated?”

Inspired by this thread, Lisa Barone at Bruce Clay, Inc. responds with “You Can’t Automate Search Engine Optimization” (which is just the tiniest bit ironic, since Bruce Clay’s Dynamic Site Mapping tool arguably provides a level of automated search optimization).

While Commerce360 is looking to create search optimization automation, we’ve already been accomplishing it for quite some time here at Netconcepts, as I outlined in an earlier article on Automatic Search Engine Optimization. So, do I think SEO can be automated? Hell, yes!

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Automatic Search Engine Optimization through GravityStream

I’ve had a lot of questions about my new work since I joined Netconcepts a little over three months ago as their Lead Strategist for their GravityStream product/service. My primary role is to bring SEO guidance to clients using GravityStream, and to provide thought leadership to the ongoing development of the product and business.

GravityStream

GravityStream is a technical solution that provides outsourced search optimization to large, dynamic websites. Automatic SEO, if you will. Here’s what it does…

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When Google Changes Page Titles

As most webmasters are aware, the text put within a page’s <TITLE> tags appears in two places - at the top of the browser window when a user is viewing a page, and it appears as the link anchor text on Google’s and other search engine results pages. But there are some rare occasions when Google will display different link text on their result pages than what is used in the <TITLE> text. So, why is this happening, and could it be happening to you?

I was recently researching some problems that a client was exeriencing due to bad advice given to him by a prior SEO agency (they’d encouraged him to buy links and participate in link exchanges, I found, among other sins). While looking into the site’s problems which included various over-optimizations and bad usability design, I discovered that when I used a particular keyword to search in Google, his site’s homepage came up with a completely different title in the search results. Most of his other desired keywords brought up his HTML <TITLE> text like normal, but this one did not…

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Tips for University & College Website Search Engine Optimization - SEO

A couple of weeks ago when I spoke at the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic day on Search Marketing in San Francisco, I got a lot of SEO questions from attendees who were from the educational community. I realized that college and university websites have a lot of unique aspects to consider in natural search optimization, and that there’s not a lot of specific advice out there specifically for them, so I thought I’d put together a brief list of tips which could be beneficial to any .EDU webmasters who are looking to improve their natural search marketing. Read on for more info.

SEO for .EDU Sites

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AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran

The San Francicso leg of the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Marketing this past Friday was really great! The crowd was intimate, which allowed all of us speakers to mingle and have some quality discussions with folx, and the seminar/conference/workshop was excellently organized.

Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.

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In other news, a new free Clinic

Search Engine Journal today opened free SEO Clinic for sites in need of optimization or with specific challenges that have not been overcome.

A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).

It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences.  If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse.  I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see.  That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).

To participate, simply contact the team here.

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Tips for Local Search Engine Optimization for Your Site

Increasingly, businesses are becoming aware of Local Search, and how optimizing for this channel is vital those that have local outlets. Each of the main search engines has focussed effort on their local search tools as the best strategy for continuing growth in online advertising, and the subject has become sufficiently important enough to merit a special Search Engine Strategies Conference devoted to the subject tomorrow in Denver. The importance of Local Search is further underscored by stats issued in a press release today by comScore, showing that Local Search continues to gain in marketshare.

So, how exactly could one optimize towards Local Search?

Read on and I’ll outline a few key tips.
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Robots Meta Tag Not Well Documented by Search Engines

Those of us who do SEO have been increasingly pleased with the various search engines for providing or allowing tools and protocols to allow us to help direct, control, and manage how our sites are indexed. However, the search engines still have a significant need to keep much of their workings a secret out of fear of being exploited by ruthless black-hats who will seek to improve page rankings for keywords regardless of appropriateness. This often leaves the rest of us with tools that can be used in some limited cases, but there’s little or no documentation to tell us how those tools operate functionally in the complex real world. The Robots META tag is a case in point.

The idea behind the protocol was simple, and convenient. It’s sometimes hard to use a robots.txt file to manage all the types of pages delivered up by large, dynamic sites. So, what could be better than using a tag directly on a page to tell the SE whether to spider and index the page or not?  Here’s how the tag should look, if you wanted a page to NOT be indexed, and for links found on it to NOT be crawled:

<meta content=”noindex,nofollow” name=”ROBOTS”>

Alternatively, here’s the tag if you wanted to expressly tell the bot to index the page and crawl the links on it:

<meta content=”index,follow” name=”ROBOTS”>

But, what if you wanted the page to not be indexed, while you still wanted the links to be spidered? Or, what if you needed the page indexed, but the links not followed? The major search engines don’t clearly describe how they treat these combinations, and the effects may not be what you’d otherwise expect. Read on and I’ll explain how using this simple protocol with the odd combos had some undesirable effects.

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New WordPress Plugin for SEO

I’ve just released “SEO Title Tag”, a plugin for WordPress. As the name implies, it allows you to optimize your WordPress site’s title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation. For example:

  • If you define a custom field (called “title_tag”) when writing or editing a post (or static page), that custom field will then be displayed as the title tag.
  • The post title and blog name are reversed for better keyword prominence within the title tag.
  • You can shorten or eliminate the blog name altogether from your title tags.
  • You can define a custom title tag for your home page through the Options page.
  • It will use the category’s description as the title on category pages (when defined).
  • If you’re using the UltimateTagWarrior plugin, it will put the tag name in the titles on tag pages.
  • It will also cook you dinner and all sorts of other amazing, useful stuff (not really).

Get the plugin now: SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin

I’d love your feedback, as this is my first WordPress plugin.

Enjoy!

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