About Google's Real-Time Search Platform

In December Google started to show real-time search results. Google's real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable them to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. This is due to the support of our their new partners that we're announced in December with: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, denti.ca and Twitter.

Google's real-time search results are displayed for blog posts, news, tweets, etc. Google looks at these posts and evaluates whether they are spammy or not. If it looks spammy then it won't be considered for real-time results. Google also appears to look at the number of time e tweet has been retweeted to determine the quality of a post. They also look at a posters followers to see how many high-authority followers it has. If the poster has many high-authority followers then the odds are that that post will make the real-time results.

Real-time searches are not returned for all searches. So it is still much better to use conventional SEO to get your website to the top of the SERPS than it is to try and get your tweet to come up in real-time search results. If your tweet or blog post is relevant enough to come up in real-time search it will be because your followers and retweeters have deemed it as such by passing it on to their followers.

SEO in 2010

2009 saw many social changes on the web and those changes will continue to grow and prosper in 2010. 2010 looks to be a good year for the SEO industry. Forrester research is predicting that SEO spending will double from 2010 to 2015. SEO will trail only social media and online video as places where marketers will be shifting their dollars. SEO continues to outpace PPC based on Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). With the economy still projected to be sluggish in the first half of 2010, it will be a good time for websites to shore up their SEO, and position themselves stronger in the organic SEO marketplace.

Google is slated to maintain its 80/20 dominance over Yahoo and Bing in regards to search engine traffic.

Real-time and personalized search will continue to gain in popularity. The numerous real-time search engines will most likely merge their technologies and have less representation. They do provide a look into what the latest trends are and for that reason I believe that their popularity will continue even though others say that it will not.

Have a happy and safe New Year, and we will see you in 2010!

Google Adwords and Your Road to Success

 I'm not sure how many of you know that 95% of Google’s profits are generated through AdWords. So if you're thinking that the search giant makes its money through search alone you couldn't be further from the truth. Having said that, had it not been for the search engine then AdWords wouldn't exist. Google had the foresight to develop AdWords when Go who later became Overture was the market leader. They developed an application that competed with Overture and eventually beat them.
 
 Google AdWords provides you with a paid alternative to SEO. If your site is new to the web you can generate income for your business immediately while you wait for your organic SEO to kick in.
 
 AdWords allows you create ads and choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business. When people search on Google using one of your keywords, your ad may appear next to the search results. Now you're advertising to an audience that's already interested in you. People can simply click your ad to make a purchase or learn more about you. You don't even need a webpage to get started – Google will help you create one for free. It's that easy!

With the proper marketing and research your website can generate business as soon as you're open for business with AdWords. We have helped many of our clients compete in their marketplaces as soon as they started their businesses. Call Hieroweb Interactive today and let us help you on yur road to success. Call us at 805-582-2081

Three Components to Good E commerce SEO

Good SEO document structure and content are keys to doing well with your search engine optimization strategy.  To simplify the process if you pay attention to 3 things and do these three things well your SEO strategy should work very well for you. All told SEO is not difficult but it is time consuming. You want to do your homework so you set yourself up to succeed.

 The three areas of focus are:

    1.) Your on page SEO
    2.) Your navigation scheme
    3.) Your inbound link strategy

Lets break down these three components:

Your On Page SEO

Each one of your products needs to have its own specific page and be optimized for 1 or 2 key phrases. You document structure needs to be clean and non intrusive with things that take away from your topic. Use your key phrase in your title tag, h1 and h2 tag, and in your descriptive product text.

Your Navigation Scheme

Have a clean descriptive navigation scheme that identifies your product. The name of your product linking to the page of that product is what you want to achieve here. You don’t want to use non descriptive text and link to a product page, the end user will be confused if you do that and will leave your site or abandon their cart.

Your Inbound Link Strategy

Your inbound link strategy is extremely important to your SEO being successful! Find similar sites or information sites, or product review sites and setup inbound links from those sites. Contact the webmasters and arrange for one way, two way or three way link exchanges. Search your competitor’s sites to see who is linking to them and arrange to have links come to you from these sites also. If you are not already in the major directories: DMOZ, Yahoo, and Google submit your site to these three directories. Establish inbound links to all relative pages of your site not just your homepage. This link building process will take time, but done right it’s rewards will pay off for you.

Can the Speed of Your Website Hurt Your Rankings?

Matt Cutts had mentioned at Pubcon that Google was looking into making website download speeds part of their algorithm. Apparently their take is if a site loads fast then that makes the searching experience better. People who use search engines generally want their information quickly and are not prepared to have to wait an extended period of time. So if you want your site to do well in the search engines and if you rely on that traffic make sure that your site and your pages load quickly. You can get a good idea of how your website speed ranks by going to www.alexa.com and looking at the average load time results for your domain name. If it’s not good then work on ways of improving it.

Things you can do to speed up your website:

• Have a good reliable fast web host.
• Combine any JavaScript or CSS files into 1 and compress them.
• Minimize the images on your website and optimize all images.
• Go through all of the images on your website and analyze their need, are they relevant?
• Optimize your HTML code and check for compliance by running it through a code validation program or site.

By following the easy steps above your site should improve in load time immediately.

Other Speed test tools:

    * Pingdom Tools
    * Web Pagetest
    * Web Page Analyzer
    * Free website speed checker
    * Submit Plus

SEO Your Twitter Account

With the recent buzz around real-time search you want to optimize your Twitter account so you come up in regular and real-time search results.

Use your name or your company name when setting up your Twitter account. Try to avoid special characters like dashes and underscores. Don't use giberish like “xcvryhtuYYtis” for your user name this dilutes who you are and makes you un-searchable. Update your profile bio with things that identify you or your business. Make this bio very pertinent to what people should search to find you.

Then there is the nature of your tweets. If this is a business account then you want to tweet about what it is that your business is passionate about. Keep your tweets pertinent to your industry as well as having conversations with your followers or industry professionals that may now follow you. Keep your tweets professional in nature and maintain a positive attitude. Tweet regularly and often about the things that your followers will be interested in. The more interesting your followers find your tweets the more likely they are to retweet them and that's good for your business. Lastly link back to your website whenever possible. Even though Twitter has a "no follow" rule on links this will still get additional traffic to your website.

Keys to Building Successful Landing Pages

 I am a strong proponent to the school of less is more. Structure a page so it flows nicely but design it with simplicity in mind. Over stating or over design just make it harder to get to the point and make the experiencea positive one.
 
 Your landing page is the closer and in being such you want it to deliver the pitch and close the deal. Here are the keys to building successful landing page.

• Show your product in an attractive way and put it front and center.
  
• Describe your product so it makes you want to buy it. Keep it straight and to the point, less is more.
  
• Only speak about your product and nothing else.
  
• Have a very strong call to action, repeat it in different styles.
  
• If your call to action can provide a discount or something for FREE, promote it strongly.
  
• If possible offer free shipping as part of your promotional jargon.
  
• If possible provide a fresh, uncluttered video with an attractive salesperson who draws attention and is well spoken. Test your ad with and without the video and compare.
  
• Echo the keywords that were used to promote your product.
  
• Offer a simple product zoom option so the use can see your product closer. Must look clean and professional.
  
• Offer testimonials on the product.
  
• If possible offer a live chart with a customer service rep.
  

Link Development for your Website

 Every day we read how important link building is if you have a website and want to do well in the search engines. But how do you get those links, and what type of links do I look for? These are very good questions.

 The key is not just getting links, but getting quality links. You could go out and submit your site to all of the hundreds of mom and pop directories out there and then you would have backlinks. This would not be very hard to do and wouldn’t take too much time and effort. The major directories are definitely sites you want to get into like the Google Directory, Yahoo Directory and DMOZ.

Of equal importance is getting links that are relative to what you do and provide equal value. One way to help here is to develop a good tool that serves you industry a good purpose and then good out and advertise it. In developing something like this people will naturally link to you because of have a good resource to offer.

Another excellent way to get links is to become an article writer in your field of expertise and have these published on websites and blogs.

 The key to good link development is not getting links but to get quality links. Happy link building!