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!!

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

One of the things even a novice in Internet Marketing would have predicted at the end of 2008 was the fact that more and more traditional marketing spending will move online at a rate more increasing than before. As told, the spending was expected to increase in organic SEO, and it has, and it will continue to do so (more in later posts in the series).

Ok, so as search engine marketers, there were few predictions that are mostly evident by the content of our blogs:

Prediction 1:

• Google will take a step closer to ruling this world: kidding, no bet I am not, we at TG realize the importance of knowing how Google is changing, and that is why we watch the search engine behavior closely, some examples are here, here, and here. Point being, we all use Google for search, so more and more of SEO world will try to learn the Google insides more than ever.

Convert or not? Definitely yes, for the reasons just mentioned above.

Holds for 2010? Definitely go. Let’s hold this till next year.

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Prediction 2:

• Lots of small businesses will try to enter SEO business. Lots of them will try to enter the business just to make money, and because they are expecting losses in other departments. But as they say, big fish will always eat the small fish.

Convert or not? Yes, the acquisitions in the industry have been astounding in number.

Holds for 2010? There are so many new companies coming up with technology in the s            same areas (e.g. PPC), that they are bound to be merges to create more space in the market.

Prediction 3:

• More money will be spent on SEO and SMO. Lots of people will realize the importance of organic SEO in their campaigns, and they will continue to invest more in this area.

Convert or not? Yes, there is lots of data about the same on the web. Fact remains that tried and tested methodologies like link building, good content, small codes, smart design will always remain the basic priority of any SEO optimizer.

Holds for 2010? Kudos (More data and analysis on this later).

to be continued

Year in Review—Online marketing in hindsight...

As the market demands fell, businesses looked towards newer ways of selling their business. Internet was the obvious choice, everybody look towards it, the small and medium sized businesses in particular. That is where companies like us came in to sell our services. As more and more companies started venturing to SEM and SEO, the chunk of pie that everybody got, got smaller and smaller. The shrinking budgets meant that the marketers got smarter and we as SEO services providers faced ever so harder times in trying to convince the marketers to spend a bit of their money.

E.g. the people who want SEM of their websites do not know that 80% of the clicks happen through organic results. Yet, 80% of the money that is spent on SEM goes to PPC and other advertising. In-exposure to facts can be costly to those who know it too, because that is exactly what happened in 2009, where a multitude of companies came into SEO field and promised things that lured lots of businesses.

What’s my point?

I am not saying that PPC is not worth it, it just means that the better companies always know how to balance the budget that is dedicated to SEO and the amount that is spend on PPC and other paid advertisements.

Many had predicted that SEO would be dead by the end of 2009, but isn’t, the traditional SEO is here to stay, and I admit my foolhardy predictions a year ago. In some ways, I would have been correct if I had said that SEO would be dead but for organic search engine results marketing—would you agree that the search engine business is going in that direction?

Web remains the most effective way to market business these days because that is where the people are: our moms and dads are on the Internet, the college guys are on the Facebook, and people like us are always on there!!

So many of the things happen, and we tend to discuss lots of things in the hindsight, and so let us see what are the things we would have easily predicted in the beginning of the year from the search engine marketers perspective.

….to be continued

Google tweaks—affects your SEO/SEM efforts...

Google is already making sweeping changes to its algorithm in an effort to make the user search experience better. Now, they have introduced a new search parameter that will be taken into account when it decides which site is better one to be promoted up the order—the page load speed.

It makes perfect sense that Google acknowledges the fact that user experience is time and again hampered by sites that have many features and takes ample time to load at the first place. I personally don’t like sites which take forever to load, I want my information and I want it quickly. Many webmasters  wondering why the their sites bounce rates are so high might want to rethink their site structures and take care of the site loading time in the future (now they have another incentive for doing so!!)

If you’re wondering how you can quantify the “magic-speed” factor, then here is the link to the tool that Google has put up for install:

The Page speed Tool

The tool clearly tells us about how well our site is performing when compared to other sites.

Another important factor that will play important role in your SEO campaign is ‘Personalized search’. It necessarily means that all the user generated content that Google is collecting all this while will now be used to rank the pages that show up in the search engine.

It will be interesting to see how much change they make to the site rank depending on these factors. Also, it is important to note that very big sites have got lot of data to load, e.g. Amazon, do you think Google will lower the page rank for Amazon user by user?

Browsers tools for SEO...

There are many browser plugins (esp. for Mozilla) to help SEO analysts. The browsers’ becoming more intelligent has lead to browsers highlighting lots of data that is useful when using many of the SEO tools. SEO tools can be used for variety of analysis, depending on the features one is looking for.

Some of the features that an SEO analyst should be looking for in SEO browser based tools are:

• Meta data report
• Analysis of robot.txt
• Lists of all the internal links
• List of all the external links
• Number of words
• Number of images in the site
• JavaScript elements
• Information about the cookies
• Source code View
• Link checker

There are varieties of tools that will serve the above purposes, but the top three tools that would be worth looking into are:

http://whois.domaintools.com/

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/se-spider.html

http://www.seo-browser.com/

All the above three tools have different strengths, using only one of them might not serve the purpose entirely. For e.g. one might be better for server and Registrar info, one might be better for purpose of analyzing the code, and something like SEObrowser tool might be better for giving the site a quick health check.

Link building in SEO is evolving...

It used to be different earlier, I would say for the good. Link building a.k.a link acquisition used to be a mechanical labor process, in which we would start the process by searching for directories, get the relevant links, start emailing the relevant sites, and then start begging or buying the links. As I got more experienced, I found that many Blogs/sites have got a wide area network which link to each other not because they think it will better the SEO of their websites, but because they had genuine reasons for doing so.

Moreover, with the Google search algorithms (yes, there isn’t really a reason to believe the other ones!) getting intelligent day by day, it makes sense to buy/get “white hat” kind of links for the site for achieving greater legitimate and relevant traffic for one’s site. And with Web social media changing and now back-links being available for just about anyone who has got a point—Yeah, I am talking about the power of Digg, Reddit, and Stumble, which give powerful back-links to just about anybody with good content.

The Viral marketing has already “shifted” in many ways. Now it gives a greater platform for naïve bloggers to market the blogs without any external effort, and gives companies like us a chance to analyze and take advantage of the Social media marketing. We sometimes even suggest the clients not to buy links and instead rely on deeper tactics such as content embedding and long tailing for “longer” results.

With more and more user data available to search engines like Google, one wonders how the algorithms are going to adopt to give the users some “real time” links and suggestions instead of just relying on some calculations based on back-links. The algorithms are definitely accounting for the potential “misses”, which will be improved as the days go by.

Few more things that are changing the way link building is viewed are:

• The power of twitter, it is amazing how Google is philotweeting
• Freshness of the links gaining more importance
• User generated data
• The unimportance of paid linking

As the market evolves, we have to hope that we still are able to bear the fruit in a forest where every tree is fighting for resources.

Client is everything—but what should the clients...

We should not try to be smart, smartness will only last to get the project—the results one will deliver will speak volumes, and then clients can decide about whether to continue with the services or not. So client always has a choice. But it happens many times that clients do not seem to be all that willing to give a chance to the service provider. Most of the times, it is because the clients are misinformed about what is SEO or what can be done with SEO. They forget to realize that there are only 10 top results displayed on the Google search results page, and not everybody can fit in there.

But isn’t that what SEO is all about? Why should I even go for SEO?

At present, the kind of algorithm Google search uses is based on calculations, and calculations are always taken advantage of. That is why Google clearly says that one should not worry about search optimization techniques, and instead worry about quality content and site structure. But there are companies who have already made it big in the market and they promote other sites solely based on their reputation (not the clients product). And if you are ready to spend lot of money, you too would get such ranks, but how many of the “traffic” will convert into customers? You never really can get such answers, can you?

So what is my point?

Instead of deciding your online marketing strategy based on a single factor called as page rank, it makes sense that the clients should instead define their goals, their needs for the business and sit with the service providers and talk about achieving those goals instead of demanding and then not benefitting.

But clients come first, isn’t it?

I never disagreed with that, I am just saying that we can create a better playing field for the clients and the SEO services by understanding the “catches” in each other’s fields and then do make the most of what is available.

So what exactly should the client ask from the SEO services company? To be continued…

SEO tools for beginners...

If you are just starting out in SEO field, you will wonder about what kinds of tools you should use for various purposes. You want to search the page rank of a site, you open Google and start searching, then you want to analyze the keywords for a page and you start searching again. Web is filled with numerous tools for various purposes; these choices might overwhelm a beginner—I know how it feels.

So we decided to put together a list of SEO tools for the essential tasks that you may come across at various stages.

Here is the assorted list:

For checking Domain stats

Check domain age

For checking HTTP Headers

HTTP path Tool

For checking back-links

Backlinks of a website

Backlink Analysis tool

Google Page rank check, Adwords Keyword tool

Tool for Advanced Google searches
Google Page-rank Checker
Google Data center wise PageRank by Google data center
Google Adsense Keywords Search Tool

Google Keywords Analysis tools

Keyword Density Tool
Keyword Density Tool
Keyword Density checking Tool
Keyword Suggestion

Link Popularity/ Site Link Analyzer checking tools

Tool for checking the depth of the links
Tool for checking link Popularity
Tool for checking Link Popularity
Link Price Calculation Tool

There are more tools coming your way, please check back in.