SEO mettle–Getting the back links...

We all know that getting the competitors back links is probably the toughest task in SEO field. It can be really cumbersome to analyze the links over and over for all the clients we are working for (unless you are using expensive software for doing the same). Lots of times the data itself is old, the links may or may not be relevant today, and many times we do not know how relevant the link we see in front of us is. So what do we do?

I stumbled upon the tool Yahoopipes, and interestingly, it has amazing tools to track our SEO project progress. Getting back to the point, it has a tool which can check the back links to a URL (the competitor in our case).

Just login with your Yahoo account and the tool is pretty straight forward to use. Add the feed to your favorite feed reader and you are ready to go. The links you get are the fresh ones and that is how you know what your competitors are up to. Also, that tells us that Google is giving importance to which websites.

You might not get all the links, but for a free tool, you wouldn’t want to miss out on any data that is available. Google alerts is another tool that you might use to monitor the back links and link activities for the sites you want to monitor, but lot of times the back links are contextual and hence we might miss out most of the links. Try this and let us know what you thoughts.

India again the top SEO outsourcing destination...

Facts speak for themselves; India has been a top outsourcing destination for variety of IT work over the past decade. As businesses go online and look for cheap solutions, they look to places like India, where many SEO companies provide top quality solutions for 10% of the price compared to the US counterparts. It is interesting to see the trends that most of the regions which top the search volumes are dominated by South East Asia.

Google continues to dominate the search market, and hence the SEO searches are attached with the term “Google”. Interesting to see that more searches are “SEO Google”, “SEO wordpress”, “SEO tools”, which shows that more and more people are blogging a lot, and more and more people are doing some basic SEO for themselves instead of relying on experts.

We spoke a bit of local seo, and it is one of the terms that are rising in the list of searches. I ran quick insights on local search in US, and I was shocked to see that the only place where the term is searched at is California. But that also is sign of things to come at places where local seo is still at infancy.

Most of the US based companies now see the potential of outsourcing, and more and more SEO companies now have offices in India. Talent gurus is one of the top companies provided SEO solutions for clients all over the US. Give us a call for a free consultation.

More insights on local search ranking factors...

Last week I talked about some of the factors that could influence a small business search ranking in your area. This would I would like to expand the research a bit further by highlighting some of the most important factors that could make a difference to your local search engine optimization campaign. I have listed the factors and given them a rating out of 5, which is my view of importance of the particular factor in local search results.

• Address of the local business listing—5
• Citations from big directories and listing providers—5
• Incoming links from big directories and listings—4
• Importance of claiming the listings on the web—5
• Amount of reviews that are present on the listing—3.5
• The phone numbers of the business—5 (yes, shocking)
• Reviews on Google which have profiles—2.5
• Categories and keywords in the business descriptions.

• Reviews on websites other than Yahoo and Google—3.5
• Photos and videos on the profiles—4
• Address, name of street, city on the listing—4
• Inclusion of detailed description about services and products—4.5

Apart from these positives, one of the most harmful things you can do to lower of chances of ranking is to have multiple listings with same address or phone number (that’s a killer). Let us know what you think about the rankings.

Tips for boosting your SEO career...

Talent gurus has hired many SEO analysts in the past, some of them good, some not so good. We as SEO analysts sometimes have this question in our minds—what does it take to excel (excel is one as we bullet it afterwards!) in this field? The answers are probably easy to find if you’re committed to your field, but we would still try to make few notes for people who haven’t got it right yet:

• Get some professional certification: It can never do you harm to get certified in your field. If you’re a doctor you need a medical degree, similarly, you can get something like an Adwords qualified stamp on your resume by enhancing your skills and taking a test.
• Own multiple skills: I as a SEO analyst assumed variety of roles whenever needed. At times, I have seen people asking for help when the clients need a simple modification on their blogs or their websites. It is always helpful to know a bit of html, javascript and css. It always adds value to what you are as a SEO analyst.
• Get a good resume: Most of the SEO resumes I have seen include link building, PPC and other experience. Not to say that they are not important, but they are the minimum, isn’t it? We would want more from a resume; it should highlight your achievements as analysts, something that clearly shows the graphs of what you have achieved for the businesses.
• Excel is important: As I said in the beginning, knowing MS Excel is not necessary, but it should be part of daily activities. You cannot go far in SEO field unless you know how to put together a good report.
• Are you attending seminars?: Only yesterday I saw a conference held at San Diego which was aimed at providing information about SEO to small business providers. Don’t be tricked by the title of the seminars, make sure that you attend such things and note down the nitty-gritty’s of the trade.
• Social networking: Not in the SEO sense, but in general, you need to have a bunch of friends who are into similar field. Expanding your skills is only possible through knowing that you do not know.
• Reading and researching: Most of the seasoned analysts spend about 30% of their time updating themselves with the current trends.  SEO is a dynamic area, there are changes happening everyday, you can never do well if you don’t know what is happening out there.
• Create a brand: In the end you should be in a position to dictate terms in your career. You would want to have a brand for yourself. How can you do that? Write a blog, meet people, be known on discussion sites, just do anything, but create a brand for your self.

Do you think you own most of the above qualities?  If yes, then we would like to know you.

What are you doing about the local rankings?...

More and more local businesses are entering the web because they want to maximize the business. One way of doing that is by marketing on the web. More and more people are willing to buy online, not only because it takes less effort, but because the entire experience of buying things online has taken leaps these days. Just the other day I was speaking to ILana, owner of a clothing store in LA, and she told me about her plans to expand the business by exposing the products in the store through a website. She herself writes the descriptions of the products available on the website and was talking about how she was teaching herself to do SEO for the website so that more people around LA could visit her site. ILana is just one person whom I happened to meet, I am sure there thousand of other businesses who are doing or trying to do the same for their businesses too.

Google always provides IP based results, so as a user, we can just ask for “trench coats”, without worrying about the place. And that is where we SEO for local listings come into pictures. In fact, it is believed that about 15% results for any product search shows the

Google Maps results, which are clicked by 85% of the people who get such results. So what are some of the factors that are important for improving your results on the local listings? Well our team has been involved in figuring out this thing for some time now, and we are able to come up with few optimizations (yeah, that’s the key—optimize, optimize and optimize).

• Key word expansion is a key factor; include as many permutations as you can before you think that your keywords represent your business the best.
• Organic search is still important, don’t forget that.
• Try various GEO keyword phrases. Do surveys, see what people are talking about, see what they are searching for; it’s fun and work at the same time.
• Evaluate the advertising sources available at hand.
• Look out what other people are doing, don’t reinvent the wheel.

Let us know how it is going.

SEO predictions 2010—SEO spending will increase...

After few serious posts about search issues that the SEO industry might end up chasing around, let’s not forget that SEO is fun—there is nothing better than doing it and seeing the results in front of you. Good news though is that more and more businesses now want to do the same. They finally realize that Web is big and that they were unaware of the sleeping lion’s power all these times. Don’t believe me, go here and see it for yourself.

Don’t mistake me for saying that the traditional marketing methods are becoming obsolete. It is still an 80-20 game, but SEM is slowly and surely eating away the pieces of the larger pie. Email marketing, and display of ads via search engines is going to quadruple in the coming years. How exactly to spend the money depends on few factors, so companies would want to spend money wisely by taking the help of the SEM and SEO companies.

SEO is still not out, though it hasn’t outsmarted PPC. But, search engines are becoming increasingly pivotal for consumers and producers, who prefer to put their business online. If one hires smartly, one would spend smartly, and hence SEO providers come to fore front there. The spending is rising, but at the same time, industry always sees that people hold back from spending money even after getting outstanding results. But failure to capture the potential due to hesitancy in spending money will only lead to failure of business and losses for the businesses.

Don’t ask for guaranteed ranking, that’s unethical I have said it before. Be ready to spend money, see what you want to sell, and how much you want to sell. May be SEO is not suitable for your type of business, hire a good consultant, we can help you too if you want. So wait for the results—as they say, you only reap what you sow!

SEO predictions 2010—“Social-recommendations�...

The way data is “picked up” from various sources to give users the best data for search has changed over the years. In the beginning it used to be straight up blogs, which were supposed to be the best possible updated source of information for a company of person. That has evolved—we have information coming from so many sources, and now the search engines display the latest information from a wide array of sources.

The way Google and other search engines are trying to calculations for displaying the search results that are most relevant is probably going to be a subject of research in the coming year too.

As mentioned earlier, real time search is picking up, and personalized search is the main aim of doing that. The kind of metrics that are going to be impact the personal search experience has still to be confirmed. How the organic results will sort out? Will it be just based on what a user clicks through? Or will it just be based on the history of the users, or may be it will be a combination of everything. May be Google will track the clicks on the Adsense ads, who knows?

But the experimentation will be on in 2010 on these two fronts. As things move forward there will few things that will remain the same in SEO world:

• The top websites will remain on top
• Small businesses will concentrate on branding (more about this later)
• There is not going to be a simple rule book for SEO

Let’s keep our search lenses on all the time and see what happens in 2010. Btw it does take a month to realize that we are in 2010. When I started writing this piece, I started with “SEO predictions 2009”—I need to get over it!!

SEO predictions for 2010—Real time search will g...

With Twitter, facebook and other micro-blogging sites gaining popularity, Google has started including real-time information in the SERPs. Google took some time to get into the business, but now it has started playing with it, even though the initial search engine talks proved that Google real time search is a failure.

Yes, if you see the above results, you are certainly going to believe that the real time search is doing enough damage by getting results which were last uploaded on to the Internet, but this is just the beginning. The SEO gurus have censured Google for this and have handed over the game into the hands of some engineers, who, according to some, are responsible for putting it up altogether.

It isn’t about the fact that whether such results will confuse SEO experts, it is about the fact that it is natural for people to ask for latest information than the “best” information most of the times. That said, it is true that we are long way away from there.

It is a very natural for people to expect the latest Lil Wayne song when they hit the artist’s name. A song name, its small video along with some information can do wonders to search experience. I cannot believe people think it should be done away with. Although I understand the rationale behind the criticism for the real time search thing, but it will be surely one of the biggest areas of research in the year 2010.

SEO predictions for 2010...

First of all— A very happy new year to the readers of the blog. Talent Gurus has been trying to expand by getting into newer forms of outsourcing solutions, and we want the clients to get the best service from an informed company. And we believe in information is power, and hence we talk about the services in so much detail that even a layman can understand what’s up on the Internet.

As promised we are back to ponder upon some of the SEO PREDICTIONS for the year 2010. How Google and other companies are going to make search experience a natural phenomenon, remains to be seen, but we can be assured of some sweeping changes in how information will be processed by machines. I am not trying to sound sentimental about the whole change, but lots of our lives and earnings are dependent on how our industry will evolve over a period of time. So without any delay, let’s get on with it:

SEO PREDICTIONS FOR THE YEAR 2010

We will deal with each of the predictions in a series of blogs over the next fortnight.

1)      Real time search is gaining pace

2)      Twitter will break through newer grounds

3)      More customizations in personal search

4)      Google will still rule

5)      Page rank might become obsolete

6)      SEO spending will rise by proportions

7)      2010 will be year of conversion

8)      More and more queries will be natural language

We will deal with these one at a time over the next few days. Thanks a lot and Happy new year’s once again.

Year in review—SEO– 2009 in Hindsight...

Alright, let us continue with few more predictions for 2009, and let us evaluate how much of what we would have predicted has turned out be true for this year.

Prediction 4:

• More and more Videos will be used to market the websites and products. As a result more Videos will become part of the search results, which online marketers would want to leverage. In 2009, a result with accompanying video will have about 50 times more chance of appearing in the results than the traditional webpage.

Convert or not? If companies asking for Social media optimizations services (youtube etc.) is any proof that video optimizations is continuing to be an important part of online marketing/SEO strategies.

Holds for 2010? Sure as heaven.

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Prediction 5:

• Blogs will become important part of your website. Interestingly there are still many major companies/businesses/people who still don’t endorse blog as a potential tool for interacting with the world on web. It is accepted by almost the entire major companies that without a blog a website and hence the activity surrounding your brand is pretty much dead. Blogging reflects the efforts of the companies to share and learn information (which is power). TG encourages all the top businesses to blog and become part of larger information sharing communities.

Convert or not? The required shift certainly seems to have started, but it seems that most of the small businesses are very reluctant towards blog. A blog is a small investment which leads to long time benefits. People visiting the website these days make sure to have a look at the blog. I guess the prediction was true, but blogging will pick up even more in coming year.

Holds for 2010? Already said that.

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Prediction 6:

• ROI tracking and analysis will gain momentum. As the economy is taking a fall, more and more metrics will be analyzed for making decisions and checking the ROI. What works and what don’t work online has to be backed up by facts, and tools that define and measure such metrics will play an important role.

Convert or not? Definitely a yes, Google and Yahoo have done lots of investment in making and upgrading the analytics too. The user generated content is now more than ever, and every savvy online marketer is using these tools to their advantage.

Holds for 2010? Not sure where the research is heading in this direction, but we will touch base with this in the predictions for 2010.

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These predictions were not facts, but they are way to measure our direction of thought. We will continue to update ourselves by keeping an eye on the latest in the online marketing world, but to predict and act is to be proactive in approach, and lots of businesses rather take action instead of waiting for reaction. We will continue our year in review series by writing down some predictions for the year 2010. Stay tuned!!