JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

I went into Face­book yes­ter­day and noticed at the top it now had News Feed and Live Feed.  Wasn’t sure what it was except that Live Feed looks very much like Twit­ter with benefits. 

Facebook’s Ray­lene Yung  explains: “While see­ing real-time activ­i­ties is extremely valu­able, we also want to be sure you don’t miss other inter­est­ing con­tent. After hear­ing feed­back from many of you and explor­ing some new designs, we decided with today’s changes to move what you used to see in High­lights from the right-hand side to the News Feed view in the main col­umn so you can more eas­ily engage with both views.”

Chris Crum’s arti­cle states they are test­ing so this may change due to how users react. 

What do you think?

There are a num­ber of good arti­cles out there about what is going on with Google and Bing when it comes to Rank­ings and search results.

“Google and Microsoft have both inked deals with Twit­ter, and Microsoft has also inked one with Face­book to inte­grate Twit­ter and Face­book updates into Bing search results. Google will be adding tweets to search results.” says  Chris Crum.

Google’s Marissa Mayer says, “We believe that our search results and user expe­ri­ence will greatly ben­e­fit from the inclu­sion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look for­ward to hav­ing a prod­uct that show­cases how tweets can make search bet­ter in the com­ing months. That way, the next time you search for some­thing that can be aided by a real-time obser­va­tion, say, snow con­di­tions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and shar­ing the lat­est and great­est information.”

Click here to read more of his article.

I have been read­ing a lot about long tail key­words lately. In truth, maybe the phrase is new but the con­cept is not.

When you think about it, would you search for “car” if you were look­ing for a car? I doubt it. You would prob­a­bly type in car, model, color, fea­tures, etc. That is basi­cally what long tail key­words refer to.

So why use them? The best descrip­tion I read is:

“The core idea of long tail key­words is that there is less com­pe­ti­tion for them, so it’s eas­ier to get good search engine rank­ings. As well, peo­ple who search cer­tain long tail key­words are much more likely to be poten­tial pur­chasers. By opti­miz­ing your web­site and deliv­er­ing con­tent to match these search queries you will be attract­ing vis­i­tors who are search­ing for spe­cific (my note: spe­cific is impor­tant) service/product information.”

So, for exam­ple, if you are a coach, don’t just use coach, or career coach, as your key­words, use some­thing like “coach to help with career goals” or “need a coach to help with career goals”. But — but– take it one step fur­ther, for exam­ple, “coach to help with my career goal as a pub­lished author in children’s books”. Now that is long tail!!

Read more here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/SEO.html

Jan

In pre­vi­ous blog posts I have explained to you that author­ity sites are what you should be striv­ing for if you are inter­ested in top posi­tions on the search engines and a few key things to do to get you there. In a new post, one item I read about today (which I do on my own site) is a FAQ page.

FAQ page con­tent answers real user ques­tions about your prod­ucts or ser­vices. One page may work but you also may want to look at hav­ing mul­ti­ple FAQ pages if it fits your products/services.

In a recent WebProNews post Chris Crum states “Web busi­nesses may ben­e­fit by cre­at­ing FAQ con­tent that is tar­geted at answer­ing real user ques­tions about their prod­ucts.” Read more here:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/05/why-faq-pages-could-boost-your-google-rankings

Check out my FAQ pages here for the basic idea of FAQ pages:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/faq.html

Jan

What you/searchers select from search results shape future queries based on your choices. Have you noticed when you search for one thing and then another that you are shown options? These options that may be of inter­est but may be way off the mark of what you are look­ing for? Yes, they are fol­low­ing your pref­er­ences and this will hap­pen with your poten­tial vis­i­tor as well. This, in fact, could actu­ally make it harder for searchers to find what they are look­ing for.

So what can you do to help searchers find you?

The best organic SEO is con­tent (Con­tent Is King!)

Bob Massa put it well:

“I believe any­one can be suc­cess­ful at online mar­ket­ing or even traf­fic gen­er­a­tion and search engine place­ment specif­i­cally, if they just stop look­ing for ways to trick machines and instead look for ways to con­nect with humans”.

The need for qual­ity, engag­ing, and usable con­tent is becom­ing more impor­tant than ever.