Natural Search Blog


10 Practical Actionable SEO Tips To Boost Your Website Visibility

Today’s post covers ten practical actionable SEO techniques that can give your site a major boost and help it achieve better visibility in the major search engines. These observations are made by Whitespark, a SEOmoz member who attended the recent SEOMoz PRO Training series.

These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.

There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.

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Search Engine Ranking Factors in 2009

Recently, SEOmoz released a fantastic biennial search engine rankings report. Every two years, SEOmoz interviews the top 100 minds in the SEO industry. This time, they have gathered data from the top 72 SEO professionals to give a clear idea of how the search engines rank documents.

This aggregate data gives any SEO professional the key factors that Google uses when it comes to ranking sites on the SERPs. It is a thoroughly interesting read and will assist all SEO professionals be it a beginner or an advanced level practitioner.

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10 Tips For Buying Domain Names

Buying domains can be a tricky issue. A crucial factor in the success of an online start up is a fantastic domain name. It is easy for people to remember and link to the site. Domain names should be easy to spell, easy to say and have a .com extension.

If the domain name aptly represents the industry or niche it does business in, it can get direct traffic where users type it into the address bar and reach the site. It also represents your company in cyberspace and is the first port of call online.

There are two tricky issue involved in the buying of domains. The first is that you cannot use comparable sales figures (as in the case of real estate). The second is the intrinsic value of the domain name itself (as in the case of vehicle, jewellery etc). These are intangibles and cannot be used as bargaining chips at the negotiating table.

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Do Users Trust Organic Or Paid Results More On Search Engines?

It is a known fact that Pay Per Click (PPC) model of advertising has contributed the most revenue to the Google coffers in the past few years. The fact that paid search contributes to only 12% of the total search traffic is fascinating with a bevy of tools flooding the market all promising to deliver the ultimate solution in paid search marketing.

Organic search is still the biggest driver of search traffic at a whopping 88%. Unlike paid search where results are measurable accurately and instantly, the organic SEO process is a long term strategy with measurable results becoming clearer over time. Yet, the big question in every online marketer’s mind is – Which results do users trust more on search engines – the organic or paid results?

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Link Building Through Social Media – Is It That Difficult?

The post today deals with link building using social media. Most SEO practitioners love to use social media to build backlinks to a site. It is a powerful method and can gain numerous inbound links in a short period of time.

For this, the content has to be of high quality along the lines of linkbait and capable of going viral. It gets picked up by various social media properties and earns lot of link love. Yet, there are people who complain that they are not having success in using this technique. One of the major reasons for failure is the inability to build relationships.

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The Future Of SEO

Today’s post covers a very interesting topic – The future of SEO and is based on a Whiteboard Friday discussion by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz. The search marketing industry is today poised on the brink of explosive growth and is seen to be the major source of advertising eclipsing the likes of the traditional mediums such as television and print media.

It is an interesting trip to the future and Rand’s views are equally interesting on what would be relevant in 5 to 10 years from now. He admits these are his personal views and is not an indicator of things to come. But it is a good reminder to be ready for it if it materialises in future.

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Google Image Search – Second Only To Web Search In Size

This post is based on the interview between Eric Enge and Peter Linsley, Google’s Product Manager for Image Search. It reveals some interesting aspects of image search which is growing at an accelerated pace.

A recent survey by Hitwise in February 2009 shows Google Image Search as part of the troika of top web properties owned by Google in terms of traffic and revenue.

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Domain Diversity – Key Metric For Higher Google Rankings

Domain diversity is an important SEO factor that is crucial for a site in order to rank well on the Google SERPs. This is achieved by the site gaining inbound links from a diverse set of domains. This is a daunting task as it is not easy to get inbound links. The best way to achieve this is for the site to contain top quality content that makes it a standout in the industry in which it operates.

Research done by the experts at SEOmoz indicated (above the 95% confidence level) that domain diversity is a key metric that helps a site achieve top rankings. The diversity here refers to the number of links coming from a variety of root domains to the site in question.
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Search Engine Crawling and Indexing Factors

The post today is about getting a site crawled and indexed effectively by the major search engines. It can be frustrating for a site owner to find that her newly built site with bells and whistles is just not appearing on the Google SERPs for a search query relevant to her business.

It is a good idea to have some knowledge of the factors that influence the crawling of a site and its successful indexing before the site ranks on the SERPs. The site can be built in a user friendly way that allows the spiders to know what to crawl and how frequently to crawl.
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Natural Search Marketing is Just in Time Conversation

I had the extreme pleasure of presenting to some of the biggest brands around at the 2009 Brandworks University. This year represented 19 years that Lindsay, Stone & Briggs has put on this annual branding conference. Brandworks is very unique in many ways as conferences go: attendance is mostly done by invitation, but attendees still pay a fee to attend; rather than elective presentations running simultaneously, there’s one block and presentations flow back-to-back and are formulated to relate to and support each other as well as the underlying theme; rather than a typical podium setup, presentations are done “in-the-round;” and it isn’t hard to find attendees who are able to claim 5, 10 or more years of attendance. Needless to say, if you ever get the opportunity to attend or are invited to speak, I highly recommend it.

This year’s talk was around the core theme of the “conversation economy” and how marketing, branding, and business in general is being shaped by and around conversations. Not surprising, there was a fair amount of talk around social media. Of course, my portion was to focus on natural search as part of this conversation, which thanks to blended search, crosses over and intersects all marketing channels. While my view on natural search hasn’t changed much over the years, preparing my presentation for the conference helped me frame it up with the exact message phrasing that I’ve been looking for – “just in time conversation.”

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