The problem with reporting

This issue has been brought to a head several times by images showing up at the top of Google Image results that are offensive in some way. There is a link to Report Offensive Images … but it just doesn’t work. Pictures remain after many days.

And although it downgrades the quality of their product, the same issue exists with reporting spam sites. They simply remain where they are, until something automated happens to remove them.

What can we expect from Google?

Like all companies, Google has limited resources. They have built an empire on automation – but unfortunately not everything can be automated. This problem is likely to continue. All we can do is recommend that you send a quick email to Google when your SEO spam or offensive image reports are ignored, but don’t waste too much brain-space on it … it’s likely to continue well into the future.

Put your Google Suggest suggestions in here!

1. Are all p …
   Seems that maths, biology, polar bears and pregnancy are some of the web’s top topics!
2. Why do I have …
   Sometimes, you might not want to know. Squeamish-ness warning on this one.
3. Can ju …
   After looking at these search results, I had to go to Wiki. I didn’t even know who the guy was!
4. Is there a he …
   Highly philosophical. I find it amazing that people actually expect Google to answer such questions.
5. Why do emo …
   Nothing about emotions, surprisingly! Seems that pop culture reigns over neuroscience … yet again …
6. Is it cool t …
   Check out the last result here (which is hopefully the same for you as it is for me!). You notice that many of the weirder results in Google Suggest are actually song lyrics
7. Will go …
   Another wonderfully poetic mix of the esoteric and the economical!

What’s Google Suggest?

Unless you have managed to switch the feature off without even knowing what it is, you’ll see Google suggest almost any time you type in a search term in the Google box. For example, when you type in ‘Am I on…’ to Google, a drop down list comes up showing you options like ‘Am I on the no fly list’, ‘Am I on the terrorist watchlist’, Ám I on Santa’s good list’, etc. These are high volume search terms.

How to use Google Suggest for keyword research

There are three main ways:

• Use the terms there as inspiration when you are creating more targeted content pages or thinking of blogging topics
• Include the terms in your heading tags and page titles
• Include the terms in your page copy

Choose results from near the top of the list – these have a higher search volume. Of course, you will be kicking your own web marketing in the shins if you choose terms that aren’t relevant to your business … remember your golden rules!

There are other tools (and indeed, other Google tools) that do exactly the same thing. However, Google Suggest is quick, easy, and simple. A great starting point – but not necessarily the web marketing guru’s top tool .

The case for outsourcing:

Sometimes outsourcing is the only acceptable option – you run a small partnership and just don’t have time for example. Here are some other advantages:

• It might be cheaper to pay someone else for it than spend your own time blogging
• It can create a more professional blog
• Pro bloggers are often more in tune with the net community

However, there are disadvantages …

The case for in-house blogging

• If you’re trying to build yourself up as an expert and have a relatively obscure industry, you’ll almost never get the quality posts from an outsourced writer that you could write
• In-house blogging creates a real face for your company … not an outsourced face
• You have access to inside information that you might not think to pass on
• You’ll have access to multimedia relevant to your company that freelance blog writers couldn’t get.

The solution?

As with many things – a mix of both strategies works best. Start with a 50/50 mix … and adjust as you go!

HA ha haa haaaaa!

Okay, now that’s out of our systems … Zipf, Pareto and the lizard actually have some very important and scientific things to teach us about internet marketing and SEO! Here’s why you should be familiar with all of them (enough to recognise any if they walked into the bar where you were sitting), for your own SEO benefit .

1. Zipf’s Law

This law states that the specificity of any word is inversely proportional to the number of times it will be used in any context. Words which are broader and more generally applicable will be used more times than narrower words, and vice versa. The narrowness of usage is obviously compounded when you make the ‘word’ into several words, or a phrase.

Obviously, this tells us that the broader your keywords are, the more people will be searching on them. There is an enormous caveat, though … this also means there is many more websites to compete with for the rankings and traffic.

2. Pareto’s Principle

You have probably encountered this in some other form – Pareto is the ‘father’ of the 80/20 concept, or the idea that 80% of results come from 20% of the activity.

You know that you wear 20% of the clothes in your wardrobe 80% of the time … but in SEO terms, Pareto’s principle means that 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your visitors, that 80% of your visitors will come from 20% of your keyphrases … etc. In practical terms, how should you account for that? By paying attention to that 20% that generates results, and aiming to expand those areas … aiming to break the ‘law’, in other words!

3. The Lizard

You might have heard of long-tail search queries before, but not many people realise that the ‘long tail’ actually belongs to a lizard. If you graphed out the search queries on a given topic (credit checks, for example), with the most frequently used and clicked-on keywords at the left hand side of the graph near the axis, and the least frequently searched keyphrases tailing off towards the end, you’d find that in the entire conceptual environment, the head is very short and broad … and the ‘tail’ of less frequently used (but more specific, according to Zipf’s Law) keyphrases actually make up a sizeable portion of the searches.

Focus on the long tail!

What’s more, these long tail search queries usually lead to much better sales:visitor ratios, because a specific keyword is more ‘targeted’ to your website, meaning that your business is more likely to be what the customer is looking for!

Of course, the Google algorithm is a tightly guarded secret, much like the 11 secret herbs and spices in KFC chicken. And besides, I don’t think that if you knew the recipe and made the chicken at home yourself that it would taste the same, anyway! So, even though some things are meant to remain unknown, today we attempt to map out the Google algorithm for web marketing success … just a little!

Shhh! Don't tell Google!

I’ve broken down each of the elements that would go into scoring a website with the Google algorithm, and then listed the factors that come under each element.

1. Keyphrase usage

The factors that would go towards the overall ‘keyphrase usage’ score in the Google algorithm for your site would include some combination of positioning (is the keyword in the title tags, the header tags and the URL?), is the keyword used in the content of the page, and is it used in anchor text for inbound links?

2. Domain trust/authority

This element is related to the age of the domain and its inferred authority that comes from its extension – .edu and .gov domains rank better, as we know. It also includes factors like its registration history (has it changed hands), the conceptual neighbourhood of the domain (is it about buying prespcription pharma online, or about getting a university degree?), and the links pointing to the domain.

3. Link popularity

It isn’t just about sheer numbers when it comes to link popularity! We’re fairly sure that Google considers factors like the age of the links, the quality of the domains and the pages that the links reside on, the anchor text used, Pagerank, and whether the subject matter is related to yours somehow.

4. Visitor Data

If our page shows up a lot in search results but few people click on it, that may erode your ranking. Factors like search requests for your particular URL or domain, the time that users spend on your pages and the number of pages they visit would probably all factor in the algo.

5. Quality of content

There are machine algorithms for rating text readability – the Flesch-Kincaid readability test may be one of them – and they probably influence your Google rank. If you wanted another reason why its better to hire out your website copywriting, there it is!

6. Penalties

And of course, any penalties must be factored into the equation.

There’s a lot of holes in this run down of what the Google algorithm potentially entails … but also a lot of illumination!

Making your site more attractive!

Today we’re looking at a few easy, very quick, and mostly fun ways to make your site more linkable. We’ll focus on making people want to link to you, not the ordinary (but very necessary) method of spreading your link across the net, all by yourself. They may not all take 5 minutes … but are close enough!

1. Write a ‘Top Ten Myths’ List for your industry

People can’t resist reading about either the misconceptions they had, or the misconceptions other people have. Myths-list often get Dugg, and can even go viral if they are useful, funny or amazing enough. Myths are often one of the major talking points within an industry – people rarely understand your business from outside, so this should be quick and easy!

2. Spellcheck your site

Print out every page of your site and go over it for grammar and spelling errors. If you want to get authority links from .edu and .gov domains, you need to be as slick and professional as possible.

3. Get a standard privacy policy

It doesn’t take much time to download a Privacy Policy form a standard forms site on the internet, or make a quick phone call to your usually company legal service to have one made up. Privacy policies are important for building trust in the site. People are choosy about who they link out to because Google will penalize for linking out to untrustworthy sites – putting a Privacy Policy up helps overcome this.

4. Tag sites related to your on Delicious

There is always the possibility that someone out there will see what fantastic taste you have in websites, follow the trail back to your company site, and link to you.

5. List your site on your local library’s website

Links are like an avalanche – build enough, and they start building themselves. This little SEO trick should be on every business’s list!

Video Article Marketing

Video is the new black on the web. Research indicates that people absorb a heap (yes, that’s a scientific statistic! ) more information from video than they do from either audio or simple text. Almost half of the searches performed on Google return videos within the first ten results. It costs more money to make than written content and takes more time … but unfortunately, that’s why people love it! Video won’t be moving off the top of the content heap in 2010.

Better URLs

What makes one URL better than another URL? Here are a few guidelines:

• Less is almost always better
• Words are better than numbers (Ie, your pages should be named www.ladeedah.com/blog/new-products-launched.html, rather than www.ladeedah.com/blog/1234567890.html )
• Try to avoid strings of auto-generated stuff in your URLs. Anything with an equals sign, ampersand or the characters ‘csid’ (Session ID) is on the ‘boo!’ list.

There are plenty of URL shortening services, but people don’t instinctively trust them (unless they are on Twitter). It is much better to use your own URL, for both SEO and branding purposes.

Speed

Google feels the need for speed … and indications are that if they haven’t already incorporated page load speed into their algorithm, it is on the cards soon.

Already six months of your valuable time was wasted and yet you are still not getting the desired ranking in the search engine search results page of Google.

The reason is simple; quality web content rules over keywords. This means that no matter how targeting your keywords are, no matter how well they are optimized, still your website would not rank higher if your content is poor.

Quality content is determined by the depth of information being tackled in an article. Though it is concise, the content of your site must be well-built in such a way that internet users would be benefited much of must-learn things about your website, your product and services and as a whole–the particular niche you are competing in.

It is very tough to rank in particular keywords these days because the more than 4 billion web pages that are indexed by Google are added each month, even each day. You will be competing to billions of website. The only hope is that you have to venture in a particular web marketing niche where the competition is not so high but there are great opportunities to earn.

According to Aaron Wall of Seobook.com, the aspect of leading in the internet does not merely rely on which came first in the market. The big factors are the services and how these services are presented to the internet users. He enumerated the differences that Yahoo, Google and MSN have with each other.

Yahoo came first in the internet among other search engines. It is better than MSN when it comes to determining if a link is a natural citation or generated by a spamming tool. It has a bulk of internal content and paid search inclusion. The search results of a certain query are usually based on their client websites that avail their advertising program. Irrelevant links are not discounted in Yahoo. Meaning, spammed links are welcomed in Yahoo.

The MSN or Live Search is comparatively new in the search engine race. According to Aaron Wall that MSN is bad in determining if the links to a website is natural or artificial. They focus more on page content to cover up its weakness in link analysis. The relevancy algorithms of MSN are far way poor compared to other search engines. That’s why the search results are biased towards commercial ones. Even untrusted sites can rank well in this search engine. Like Yahoo, irrelevant links also work in MSN.

Google is the second oldest search engine to compete in the market. It is far way better than any other search engines. It is excellent in identifying natural links from artificial ones. It has frequent updates on every websites natural link growth. The main reason why a lot of internet users, especially researchers, because the search results are heavily biased towards informational resources. Google trusts old websites. This is the reason why the older the site, the better the ranking it gets. Moreover, irrelevant links have no room in Google.

Google’s excellence in giving relevant and useful search results is the primary reasons why most of the internet marketing experts are optimising their site for Google search engine.