Must Have SEO Practices in 2010 Revisited

If you don’t currently have a mix of organic and paid search engine results then you should consider it. By having both paid and organic results you will increase your webpage visits by roughly 15%. Remember with paid results you get clicks immediately where with organic results you have to wait and see how your work gets indexed.  While it’s true that organic results don’t cost you per click they still cost you whatever time you put into it. That is unless you have to pay someone to optimize your site then you have to calculate your return on investment.  Keep in mind that there are users on search engines that don’t understand the difference between paid and organic results. They happen to click on the first thing they see, so if you are the top paid listing they you will most likely see the benefits of getting increased clicks because you are the first result they see.

Make sure that you or your brand has a social networking identity by using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and FriendFeed to name a few.  By doing this you will also have the ability to show up in real-time search engine results.

If your site doesn’t currently use video consider adding video to your site. More and more users are clicking on video results in the search engine result pages. The search engines are showing video results in their SERPS. You want to ensure that your video is of high quality and informative.

Add these practices to your site in 2010 and increase your exposure!

• Inbound links should be relevant – Matt stated that the number of pages that Google indexes is proportionate to your site PR value (PageRank). More of your pages will be indexed if you have many inbound links. If your site has enough inbound links then all of your web pages will be indexed.
• Duplicate content is not good – Any duplicate content pages will be removed from being indexed. As has always been the case duplicate content can cause ranking issues.
• Slow loading time can create problems – If your website is slow Google may not index all of your web pages. Google may set a limit to how many pages they will index for a slow site. When you think about this it makes sense Google wants to provide high quality content to their users so if your page doesn’t load in a respectable amount of time then that has a negative impact.
• Redirects – 301 redirects won’t pass the full PageRank. If you create 301 redirects from old page to the new pages, the link power will be passed on but not at full strength.
• Low quality web pages – As has been stated in the past “content is king”. Pages that Google considers to be low quality might not be crawled.
• Affiliate pages – Affiliate websites won’t get high rankings. Affiliate links won’t pass any PR value.
• Site architecture – Good website structure is important with a good navigation system. My take is site structure may be the “new king” making content Queen.
• Navigation – Don’t use JavaScript for website navigation. Google may not index links that are imbedding in use JavaScript.
• Don’t purchase links – Links should be natural and not be paid for. You can be penalized for this infraction.
  

Up to date Search Engine Blog with News and Information

For up to date search engine news and information visit John Battelle’s search engine blog and stay up to date with the latest industry trends. Below is a brief from Wikipedia on John Battelle. Visit John Battelle’s Future of Search blog.

John Battelle - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


John Linwood Battelle is a journalist as well as founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing. He has been a visiting professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and also maintains Searchblog, a weblog covering search, technology, and media.

Battelle is one of the original founders of Wired magazine, the founder of The Industry Standard magazine and website, and "band manager" of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing. He has also written for Business 2.0 and is program chair for the Web 2.0 conference. He studied at UC Berkeley, earning both a B.A. in Anthropology in 1987, and a M.Jour. (Masters in Journalism) in 1992.

In 2005, Battelle published The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, chronicling the rise of online search engines and, specifically, Google.

• First and foremost who is your target audience, nailing this down is key.
• If you are selling a service or product inform them of the benefits of that service or product.
• Talk about what makes you different then everyone else, for example if you have the best price then let them know it.
• Make sure that your ad flows well and is easy to read.
• Have a strong call to action; tell them to do something NOW!
• Have the BEST customer service available at all times.
  

Buying Expired Domain Names

Have you ever tried buying an expired domain name? It’s much easier said than done.  In order to buy an expired domain name you have to wait until it drops and then you have to battle all of the services that are also trying to get that expired domain name. Let’s take a look and see what you need to do to get an expired domain name.

You could develop your own API script that plays the drop catch game along with the big players. Unless you are a programmer though that is not likely to happen. Most registrars show an expiration date for all of the domain names that they have registered. That date is not the same as the drop date though. When a domain name expires there is a 40 day grace period that allows the owner to still renew their domain name.  The domain name owner can renew during that 40 day period without penalty.  Once that 40 day period has passed a domain name now enters what is known as the redemption period. During this period the Whois information starts getting purged. If the domain name owner tries to renew during this phase then they will need to pay roughly $100. After the redemption period the domain name becomes locked while it goes into the deletion process phase. It takes roughly 5 days for the deletion process phase to complete. During this time the domain name will be dropped from the ICANN database, and now becomes available to the public. This process takes roughly 75 days in total.

The trick now becomes being the one to get that domain name once it drops. The drop occurs when Verisign releases it from their database. In order to get into the game of snatching this domain name you should have a snatching service working on your behalf. These services ping Verisign frequently and try to snatch that domain name.

So who are the services that you can employ to get these domains for you? We recommend three services. 1.) Enom at www.enomcentral.com, 2.) Pool at www.pool.com, and 3.) SnapNames at www.snapnames.com.

Happy Domain Name Hunting!

• What everyone sees when doing Google searches now varies.
• Google tracks your likes and dislikes and shows you relevant results.
• What other users see for the same search can be very different. You may see many results for your sites that others may not see.
• What you click on in the serps is stored and can affect your personalized search results in the future.
• So now with the above bulleted points it now becomes near impossible to associate a URL with a keyword ranking in Google.
• Now the best way to measure organic search results is by tracking keywords through your analytics program.
  

Mobile Search Growing in Popularity Everyday

With the invention of the smartphone came many new apps, mobile search apps among them. If you’re involved in the tech industry in any way then mobile search is just as important to you as doing searches on your main desktop computer. So let’s take a look at some of the popular mobile search apps.

If you have a touchscreen phone give taptu a try, taptu has become a popular mobile search app for touchscreen phones. Google, Bing, AOL, Yahoo and Ask all have mobile search apps that are reminiscent of their traditional web apps.  While most of these web apps are in their infancy the future looks bright.

Wikipedia defines mobile search as the following: "Mobile Search is an evolving branch of information retrieval services that is centered around the convergence of mobile platforms and mobile handsets or other mobile devices. The services allow users to find mobile content interactively on mobile websites, and mobile content shows a media shift toward mobile multimedia. Simply put, mobile search is not just a spatial shift of PC web search to mobile equipment, but is witnessing more of treelike branching into specialized segments of mobile broadband and mobile content, both of which show a fast-paced evolution."

Last but not least there is the convenience of using ChaCha. Just text ChaCha at 242242 with your question and within minutes they will respond to you with an answer. This is a convenient, quick and easy way to get search results without having to do the work!