Why Facebook Surpassing Google in Search Volume May Mean Very Little to Business
This morning, BusinessWeek posted an article on this and many other Google woes. While Google may indeed have other issues, in my opinion, search isn’t one of them. Here’s why. (more…)
Around here, we call it “The Scallion.” It’s a play on The Onion, but slightly less clever. Every month I gather together the news that I’ve found around the web about SEO, the search engines, and the internet in general. I put it all in small, easy-to-digest niblets that I send around in a newsletter to the whole company – web designers, writers, account managers, etc – so that they can keep up without having to spend hours reading the same articles over and over.
This month, I’m sharing it with you.
I began an SEO overhaul last week for a legal client. It’s an older website, one that our firm did not design, and their rankings have been suffering inexplicably. Investigating the site architecture, I quickly realized that the previous designers had stored the old copies of the site in subfolders that were live on the web. They weren’t excluded from crawling in the robots.txt. Cue the facepalm.
Why, WHY would a competent designer do such a thing!? I implored my Facebook friends. The most designer-ish of my friends quickly responded, “Wouldn’t you do that for the historical record?” In general the response seemed confused by my objection. My reply quickly evolved into a rather substantial treatise on spidering theory, so I decided to make a blog post of it. Here’s my answer:
No. You don’t store old copies in a live subfolder. EVER. If you want a historical record, store it locally. Store it on an external hard drive, a thumb drive, a floppy disk – whatever. DON’T KEEP IT IN A LIVE SUBFOLDER. Here’s why.
Since Facebook is one of the top most visited site (even before Google), you may want to consider joining!!!!! For a free and easy marketing strategy, why not join a site that gets numerous amounts of visitors?!!!! If you are a business owner and you want to use Facebook to the fullest, read about the top ways to get more visibility and sales to your site.
1) BUILD A FACEBOOK FAN PAGE. This is different from your profile. A fan page is a page where you can describe your business in details with information including contact information, images, events, practice areas, etc. People can become fans of your page. When setting up your title, use keywords that relate to your business or what you would like to be found for. Provide as much relevant information about your business and possibly a photo so fans can relate to your site more.
2)BUILD A FAN BASE. Be proactive about getting fans to your fan page by inviting people or using your “Suggest to Friends” link. Your “suggest to Friends” link will allow you to invite all of your Facebook friends.
3)INTERACT AND ENGAGE WITH YOUR FANS. The easiest way to interact with your fans is to have conversations with them. Asking open-ended question, give people the opportunity to get a conversation started. This way you can provide them with the information they are searching for.
4)PROVIDE GOOD CONTENT. Content attracts comments from your fans! Post regular content including blogs, updates, articles, or anything that relates to your business. The more activity on your page, the more attention you will attract!
5)USE YOUR FAN PAGE TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE. List your website either in your information section or post links in your “status updates” You can also use applications to enter in your blog feed so that your blog post automatically pull to your page. Use this fan page to lead visitors to other resources you may have.
If you don’t have a Facebook profile or a Facebook fan page, step into 2010 and SET ONE UP!!!!! Easy, simple, FREE, and a great way to market your business!!!!
I may be a total girl when it comes to actually using most of the tools in anyone’s garage, but I absolutely love them. I love the magic that happens when a painstaking task becomes effortless thanks to a brilliantly engineered device. Since I like to nerd-out about my favorite things while talking about SEO, let’s see if I can draw some parallels between my three favorite actual tools, and their theoretical SEO counterparts!
The “mini power tool” (shown in the photo) that was developed and used by NASA for the last repair of the Hubble Space Telescope combined with the fastener capture plate developed for many uses on the same mission is an awesomely specific and effective combination. The mini power tool was developed specifically to allow astronauts to remove tiny screws from one panel of the Hubble telescope. It had to be made smaller than previous power tools in order to gently remove the small screws, and a light was installed in the front of it so astronauts could clearly see them. The fastener capture plate allows for the screws to be removed cleanly, capturing all the screws as they are removed so they don’t drift off into space… or worse, inside the telescope.
This tool reminds me a lot of Yahoo! Site Explorer. It is an invaluable tool to SEOs for either evaluating your own backlinks or looking at the backlinks of a competitor. There’s really no better tool for the job. SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer is a close replacement, and certainly offers some nice metrics in addition to links, but we’ve found that it doesn’t give as complete or accurate a list as YSE. We are devastated with the thought that it might go away. Both of these tools are great examples of tools engineered to a very specific purpose. However, they also both share a ginourmous fault – being a one-trick pony. Yahoo! Site Explorer only shows us backlinks – why not also show local citations and reviews? Why not allow an option to see social media citations? Yahoo could also take a page out of SEOmoz’s book and show some trust rankings. My next favorite is a much, much more versatile tool…
Awhile back, I found this nifty method of tracking backlinks** in Google Reader. It’s kinda awesome, really. I use it to track my clients and their competitors, and I can generally expect to walk into the office on any given morning and see somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty newly discovered backlinks to look over and investigate.
Today I walked in to find 350, and they’ve been flying in fast and furious all day long. As I’ve typed this, another 23 have landed in my reader.
We haven’t done anything special on our side, and the links are all the usual stuff, so I have to wonder if Yahoo! updated its spiders.
Why would I suspect Yahoo! over Google? Well, that’s simple: Google may be the reader, but Yahoo! Pipes is the source of the RSS.
Has anyone else noticed an increase in spidering or other activity associated with Yahoo?
**To use the pipe, clone it, then edit source, update the URL and properties, save, run, subscribe. Wash, rinse, repeat.
3/11/10 Update: Why yes, yes they did! Check out this post over at Search Engine Land: March 2010 Yahoo Search Update.
As the competition for first page listings, web traffic and business leads keeps getting tougher, optimizers are always looking for new ways to get inbound links and authority and credibility for their clients’ sites.
The fact that results from search queries now increasingly include real time search results , it’s becoming imperative for us to craft strategies above and beyond the traditional link-building methods.
While making sure that the fundamentals like custom Title tags, compelling descriptions, high quality content and user friendly interfaces remain the cornerstone of our work, we can successfully use some strategies to boost the presence of our sites.
These strategies will bring definite advantages to our sites, helping us get an edge over competition in the search engine rankings and potentially bring in high quality web traffic and business leads for our clients.
Way back in 1993, I went to college and got my first ever email account. It was a novelty back then. No one but the rich and the ubergeeky had computers in their dorm rooms. We stood in lines in computer labs and printed our papers on a dot matrix printer.
About a year later, my friends and I discovered the world wide web, and we taught ourselves HTML by raiding the page source of sites we liked and programmed everything in PICO, Elm and, sometimes, Notepad.
One time, when I wanted to post a photo of myself on a website I had built (on the space allotted to my UIUC student account), I scoured a few IRC channels to find someone who had a scanner, a highly advanced, rare and expensive piece of equipment. I found a guy who agreed to scan it for me for free, and so I stuck my senior yearbook photo in the mail. To South Africa.
Spam was still a strange sort of canned meat product.
When I went home for Christmas break, I’d been so spoiled by my dorm’s 56K dialup connection that my dad’s 28.8 modem was unbearably slow.
Back in the day, I created a website on a topic for which Yahoo didn’t yet have a category. I asked them to add it and they did. Try getting that to happen today!
Back in the day, I went to a Trek convention (shut up) and Wil Wheaton gave the audience his personal email address. And it was on AOL.
Today, I think nothing of pulling up Google Maps on my smartphone to get GPS voice navigation to a restaurant whose address I don’t even have. I watch TV with a Macbook in my lap. I work in a career field that didn’t even exist when I built my first web site. My 80 year old Grandma sends me email, and my sister uploads videos of my niece to Facebook.
The internet has come a long, long way since its infant state as a lawless underground timewaster of the early 1990s. It was only natural this video by Vimeo user JESS3, “The State of the Internet”, caught my attention. The numbers? They blow my mind.
JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
The News
Google announced Friday that they’ve added a new filter to its search options. Most casual Google users don’t know that search options even exist, so here’s a state-of-the-art graphic to show you where you can find it:
When options are expanded, this is what you see, minus my red circling:
When you select “Nearby”, it gives you the opportunity to set a custom location. The default location is wherever Google determines your location to be via its nifty geolocation mechanism.
So plug in your search term, set the location and, ta da! Local results for your search query!
Why You Should Care
Let’s compare the screenshots below. The key phrase of the day is Injury Attorneys Waukegan, and the attorney we’re looking for is Thaddeus Bond, Jr., P.C., a personal injury attorney serving Chicago and its suburbs.
