Is Google Giving Your Site RESPECT?

 

Is Google giving you the RESPECT you deserve?
Tell us what you think.

 

 

 

View All Videos The Impact of Social Media on the Presidential Race Political candidates are starting to use social media to the fullest extent in an effort to gain more votes. According to Hugh Hewitt, the host of The Hugh Hewitt Show, the ability to utilize this new media will have an even greater impact on the upcoming election as it did during the 2008 election.       To design pages also for Tablets/PDA/Mobiles or wait? By: NetProwler The information here averaged over a period of 3 months on a few general topic sites, shows that we have to pay more attention to Google Chrome than we have ever done in the past. Some of our pages don't render well in GC as they do in IE/FF which we will address in due course. (CSS lines, borders and other elements desire different treatment in Chrome). Looks like we are back in the 1990 -era of cross browser compatibility issues. Our main worry is the growing trend of hand held devices (Tablets/ Mobiles/PDA) and how do we design pages for them ? The screen size varies so much - from large screen LCD TVs running Android, Ipad's 10 inch screen and the minuscule mobiles sporting 3.5 inch screens. There is no one size which fits all. My tablets show images all right - only the text needs to be enlarged. What is the general ball park figure in designing pages for the diminutive screen sizes ? Sadly we still carry over some remnants of tabled pages. Any insights? Or the whole exercise can be shelved for now? » Post Your Reply...

Tuesday, November 15, 2011   If not, maybe it's your fault. A lot of people feel that Google is treating them unfairly when it comes to search rankings. If you are one of these people, let me be perfectly blunt. There's a good chance this is your fault. You have to play by Google's rules if you want to have a good chance of being found in Google (and while there are certainly other ways to generate web traffic, Google is obviously a pretty big one). That said, Google will also be the first to tell you that "no algorithm is perfect". Sometimes they don't get it right. But are you doing everything in your own power to darn Google's RESPECT? Is Google giving you the RESPECT you deserve? Comment here. Is your site showing up in search results for its targeted keywords? If not, maybe you're not effectively using these keywords. Google is on to keyword stuffing, and content that is purely written for search. Do not over-saturate your content with keywords you wish to rank for. That said, you can use them as they make sense without compromising the flow of your content. Think titles, image labels (alt tags/title tags/captions), etc. It doesn't hurt to keep this stuff in mind as you produce content. Just don't do it in a way that compromises the quality of your page. Sitelinks Is Google showing site links for your site when it appears in search results? Right now, sitelinks are automated, but Google says it may incorproate webmaster input in the future. Frankly, I'd be very surprised if they didn't. Still, there are best practices you can follow. " For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition," Google says. If Google is showing sitelinks for your site, but you don't like the ones they've chosen to display, you can demote URLs to let Google know which ones you don't think are appropriate. To do this, go to Webmaster Tools, click the site, and go to "sitelinks" under "site configuration". In the "For this search result" box, complete the URL you don't want to appear as a sitelink. In the "demote this sitelink URL" box, complete the URL of the one you don't want to appear. Note that it might take Google a while to reflect this in search results. The Algorithm Updates It's not just about what Google has done in terms of algorithm updates. It's about what you should be doing. But perhaps you have been hit by recent algorithm tweaks. If Panda, for example, hit your site, then drastic changes may be needed. Google considers your site to be of low quality. Perhaps a site redesign is in order. Google has a whole list of questions you should be asking yourself about your site in terms of quality. Included on that list is "Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content." Google said last week that it is testing algorithms that look more at this factor above the fold. Be prepared for that. Google also just listed ten of its most recent algorithm changes. Google Is Listening. If you think you've done everything you need to do to make your site Panda-friendly, and Google is still not giving you the RESPECT you think you deserve, then let them know. The company insists that it is listening. Go to this thread and make your voice heard. Last week, they even said they have an Excel sheet of about 500 sites from this thread (at least, I assume this is the thread they were referring to). There is a person responsible for false positives, they said. You may have a legitimate beef, and Google, at least to some extent, recognizes this. Are You Expecting Google To Be Perfect? Google isn't perfect. They know this. In fact, they make this point themselves all the time It's why they constantly tweak their algorithm. They're not launching all of these updates just to mess with webmasters. Google makes over 500 changes to its algorithm over a year's time. They're trying to improve the quality of their search results. It's not in Google's best interest to return results to users that aren't helpful. They don't want to send people to Bing, which is marketing its search engine much more heavily than Google. Whether you think the quality of Google's results have gotten better or not, this is their goal. Google considers Panda a "positive change across all of its known measurements," by the way. I'm sure some of you disagree. What Are Your Competitors Doing Right? Still, you might see lesser competitors ranking above you in search results, and that can be very frustrating. For some reason, Google is giving them more RESPECT. Do you think it's going to do you any good to just sit back and complain though? It's your responsibility to analyze your competition. Look at the page that is ranking above yours. Are there some things about that content or page that they are doing better than you? Richer content? A cleaner design? Google has over 200 signals. Keep this in mind. Look for anything positive about that page, and then look at yours and compare and contrast. What are your thoughts? Comment Now... Subscribe to our Newsfeed   About the Author: Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum

 

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Marketing Pilgrim Published: "Wednesday is Sharing Day on Facebook" plus 6 more

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• Wednesday is Sharing Day on Facebook
• The Cure for Your PubCon Hangover
• Google's Verbatim Search For A True Exact Match
• Social Commerce: Where Do We Go From Here?
• YouTube Gets a Google+ Update and Plus Pages Get Ugly
• Google Further Personalizes Your Map Experience
• Political 404 Pages: From Informative to Irreverent to Boring

Wednesday is Sharing Day on Facebook Posted: 16 Nov 2011 02:00 AM PST Wednesday is the most misunderstood day of the week.  It's far enough away from last weekend that the fun memories are fading. It's far enough away from next weekend to keep you from getting too excited. And then there's that awful nickname: Hump Day. Here at Marketing Pilgrim, we say Wednesday deserves a little respect and here's why. Turns out more people share and click on Facebook posts on Wednesday, than any other day of the week. Take that Friday. Here's a chart from a new study by EdgeRank Checker. Look at Wednesday, beating the pants off all those other days! EdgeRank took this one step further, measuring the correlation between clicks and other behavior on Facebook. Here's what they came up with: § Avg Clicks Per Like: 3.103 § Avg Clicks Per Comment: 14.678 § Avg Clicks Per Impression: 0.005 Frankly, I thought the numbers would be higher. One like for every three people who clicks isn't bad. Marketing Pilgrim's Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. EdgeRank's numbers also point to the fact that pages with a large following have benefited most from changes in the news feed. But that was a whole two weeks ago. Since then, Facebook has rejiggered the formula a second time, so there's no telling where everyone is now. How's Facebook working for you? Have you seen a change in traffic since the news feed redesign? And how do you really feel about Wednesdays?

The Cure for Your PubCon Hangover Posted: 15 Nov 2011 09:30 PM PST There's no better way to test your resolution than braving a four day conference like PubCon and returning to a pile of emails and backed-up projects. Whether you're still recovering from PubCon Vegas 2011 (Nov 7-10th) or you just want to prepare for your next post-conference hangover, I have a recipe that might just do the trick. If you're one of those people who diligently keep up with your work while you're at a conference, I would like to remind you that you don't actually exist. Answer emails first Every emergency starts and stops with an email. Take Matt Cutts, who mentioned to an eager crowd gathered for his keynote address, that Google Webmaster tools is going to email you if your WordPress is not the latest version (they do for me now). Ignoring that email could get your site hacked! Check your email first to avoid a major problem. As an added bonus, answering emails early in your PubCon hangover might just check off a few tasks on projects you're going to have to get to anyways. Knock out your emails first to put out fires and familiarize yourself with the status of your projects. Approach projects with care Eventually you're going to have to pour countless hours into those detailed projects you were caught up on before you left. Work has been piling up and there's nothing short of good old fashioned blood, sweat, and tears that is going to fix that. Early in your hangover it will be hard to find the time to dedicate to intricate projects. Try to at least go through the action items and status of your projects so you're not surprised with a pending deadline you overlooked. Try to keep project time to a minimum in the beginning so you won't add to your email backlog by dedicating all your time to one or two projects. Beware of meetings Meetings are your enemy the first few days back from a conference. Avoid them like the plague, and when cornered, insist they be a phone conference or located at your office (if you can). Travel time, long winded peers and post meeting follow-ups can eat up half a day before you know it. Limit meetings to one per day and spread them out over the next week. Remind people that you just got back from a conference learning all kinds of cool stuff that will help them. Short of an emergency, they'll be happy to oblige. We've all gone through a conference hangover. Figure out your business cards If you're like me, you come back from a conference wondering who the heck all these people are. Go through your stack of cards and look for ones where you wrote on the back. These are the low hanging fruit and will usually contain the clues you need to decide to act or trash. When you decide to act, maybe consider setting a calendar reminder or task for yourself to respond to the person at a later date. There's no shame in punting a few relationships that you can get back to later. For cards without writing or from people you don't remember, check out their website. It could be that they had some tool or service you really found interesting. Again, set a reminder or bookmark the site if you like it so you can get back to it later. Of course, if the business card is about sending you business, you need to contact those people right away! The conference hangover is the opposing force of the "conference high" and can be a quick liberator of cordial feelings expressed across an open bar. Reach out to conference buddies ready to send you money before the good friend you have turns into "some guy I met at a conference". Do something with your notes This is often the most heart breaking part of my own conference hangovers. I spend a ton of money on travel, meals, conference passes and lost work time to take pages of notes that sit on my desk and eventually get shuttled away into a drawer. So many great ideas banished under old boxes of business cards and iPhone cables. Don't let your well paid for information go to waste. Dedicate some time to transcribing your notes into an actionable form like a calendar reminder set for a later date. Set it two weeks from now and maybe then you'll have the time to check out the new tool or technique you picked up in the sessions. For PubCon specifically, you'll receive a copy of the presentations on a USB drive. If you can't read your chicken scratch or you missed a session you really wanted to attend, you'll get a second chance at the information in a few weeks. Make sure to stay social This is a personal decision you'll have to make for every relationship you made at PubCon, but try to lump people into the social network where you feel it's most appropriate to engage with them. Try to limit people you're a fan of to Twitter and maybe Google + (depending on the person). For people you shared a deeper connection with, take the plunge and connect through Facebook or Foursquare. The key to maximizing your relationships will be connections through social networks. Continue your conversation and watch what they're doing next. Chances are, if you thought the person was smart at the conference, they'll be posting something else just as interesting in the future. Get this knocked out early on so you can maximize the relationship while the conference memories are still fresh. Keeping the conference high Trudging through backed up work can quickly put an end to your conference high. After a few days of catching up, go read blog recaps or watch videos from the conference. Use these visual cues to re-ignite the fire which has been dampened by your return to the real world. By waiting a few days to relive your conference experience, you'll be able to fully relish in your inspiration, free from the distraction of your new email notification flashing like a strobe light. Good luck! Image Credit: Andy Beal Photography Pilgrim's Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Google's Verbatim Search For A True Exact Match Posted: 15 Nov 2011 09:29 PM PST Google continues to refine its search function. This time it feels like they are almost going back in time by allowing users to get search results based on what they actually type: verbatim. When you go click on more search tools at Google.com you can choose "verbatim search" and the following typical algorithm assists are NOT used according to the Inside Search blog. § making automatic spelling corrections § personalizing your search by using information such as sites you've visited before § including synonyms of your search terms (matching "car" when you search [automotive]) § finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to "floral delivery" when you search [flower shops] § searching for words with the same stem like "running" when you've typed [run] § making some of your terms optional, like "circa" in [the scarecrow circa 1963] So in other words, on those occasions when you are looking for that perfect misspelled search you can have it so Google won't go in and do the thinking for you. I'll be honest, I am not sure when this would be used but Google has to keep making "improvements" to search to look like they are concerned about competition.

Social Commerce: Where Do We Go From Here? Posted: 15 Nov 2011 03:25 PM PST Social Commerce is one of those terms you wouldn't have found in the encyclopedia a few years ago but it's currently one of the hottest concepts in online marketing. Useful Social Media has put together a fun and informative infographic showing the history of social commerce beginning with virtual gift sales on Facebook in 2007. Here's a small piece of the large chart: I love the 32% of people who said they'd shop right from Twitter if they could. Count me in, too! So where do we go from here? Sudha Jamthe, the Social Media Strategist, Social Commerce for Ebay, says we should be on the look out for three "game changers" in the coming year. First, the gamification of social. This is a concept we've talked about before and it's growing stronger than ever thanks to mobile apps. It's all about roping in that consumer with an entertaining product that will keep them engaged over a long period of time. A consumer might watch a 3-minute video once, but they'll play Angry Birds for hours, returning day after day to play again and again. Last year, statistics showed that globally, Angry Birds ate up 200 million minutes a day. That's what you call sticky. Now imagine those birds flying by a company logo, over and over, and over. That's brand awareness to the nth degree. Second on the list is "social shopping scaling up inside Facebook with marketplaces and malls." This is a tricky one, mostly due to security and payment issues. People just aren't ready to go shopping inside Facebook. They don't trust the site with their personal data, they aren't going to trust it with their credit card numbers. Marketing Pilgrim's Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Finally, says Jamthe, "A lot of experimentation with social data to learn customer's intent to purchase to drive to better merchandising and facilitating shopping." Experimentation is key. We simply don't have enough data to say for sure what will work and what won't. We do know that recommendations from friends make a difference. We know that humor helps things go viral. We know that as much as people complain about privacy, they gravitate toward personalization. What we're still working on is how we can use the unique abilities of a tablet to create an exciting, new shopping experience. How we can use our mobile phone to pay for lunch. And yes, how to get people to shop through Twitter. After that, it's onward to things we can't even imagine at the moment. How cool is that? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

YouTube Gets a Google+ Update and Plus Pages Get Ugly Posted: 15 Nov 2011 01:49 PM PST Sometimes there is so much going on that we figure maybe it's a good idea to put a few ideas in one post. This is one of those times. Last week, Google+ added a YouTube widget to the news stream making it even easier to share videos with your friends. Now, it looks like the reverse is about to happen, as YouTube prepares to add Google+ functionality to its site. The Next Web broke the story thanks to a tip from someone who has seen the light. The biggest change is a navigation sidebar that will make it easier to find what you're looking for. Like Google+, the sidebar will offer quick links to subscriptions, popular videos and other categories. You'll also find videos recommended by people in your G+ circles. Overall, it's cleaner, more professional looking and a big step toward becoming an actual social network. All of which, should help you make more money on your videos. Click here to see the screenshots on TNW. Google+ Pages Take a Turn for the Worse On November 8, a Bank of America page opened on Google+. Only, it wasn't created by Bank of America. It was created for the purpose of mocking the bank as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. There were posts about bank executives meeting for a party in a foreclosed home, and the seizure of bank accounts belonging to protestors. It was well thought out and well put together and it might have had a long life had reporters not latched on to the story. Google's initial response was that they don't comment on individual pages and apparently they don't close them at the drop of a hat. The offending page stayed online for a week before it was shut down. So where do we go from here? Should Google require some kind of identification when setting up a company page? I set one up for a client and I didn't even need a company email address. I simply picked a name and created the page. As Google+ becomes more popular, more fake accounts are bound to pop up. Look at Twitter. Even with their verification system, fake celebrity accounts are rampant on the network. While Google works the kinks out of the system, companies and brands need to be pro-active. If you haven't claimed your name on Google+, do it now before someone else does.

Google Further Personalizes Your Map Experience Posted: 15 Nov 2011 10:47 AM PST It's a full time job just keeping up with and understanding the reason behind all the changes that Google makes regularly. The latest is and addition to maps that allows you to see the places you have reviewed on a map along with some Google suggestions. The more I read about these changes the more I realize just how little I go out (don't feel sorry for me because I actually like it that way). But as with any marketing update in the online space, how I use it doesn't matter a bit. In a post from the Google Lat Long blog comes an explanation of this newest maps feature. Since the My Places tab was released earlier this summer, you've been able to view all the places you've rated in one manageable list. This list is now being used to personalize your view of Google Maps, enabling you to visualize all the various places you've visited, loved, loathed, and might want to check out right on the map. Starting today, business labels for locations you've rated with Google Places will be highlighted on the map with your corresponding rating beneath it. Additional places that our system thinks you might enjoy visiting — either to eat, shop, or more — will be highlighted as well. These personalized recommendations are based on the places and ratings you've already shared. his could be good for the "out and about" set. My question is, how many places does the average person go out to eat at and do they actually forget whether they rated it as being good bad or indifferent? And do they just wander about and look for recommendations to something else in the vicinity? Anyway, it doesn't matter how I see this. It's how the target market does that counts. Are you one of the targets for this kind of map functionality?

Political 404 Pages: From Informative to Irreverent to Boring Posted: 15 Nov 2011 09:52 AM PST OK, let's set the ground rules here. This is a post about the online space but it has to do with politics. I saw a post on Facebook from the Wall Street Journal about political candidates 404 pages. It's an interesting thing to consider as political races are now very dependent on strong online strategy and execution. Based on a survey of this particular website element, it's apparent that the Republicans must fully realize just how bad they got their online butts handed to them in the last presidential election, that's for sure. So here is a glimpse at the 404 pages of those wanting to get into office. First, out of respect for the office we'll share President Obama's 404 page which opts for the informative route and does a nice job of providing options for the wayward site user to check out. Pretty much what one would expect from an online savvy group like the Obama camp. Now for the Republican side of the ledger and it looks like the front runners are playing hardball. Herman Cain's 404 page. Mitt Romney's 404 page Now for the rest of the field which looks to be an indication that we may not expect too much from these folks in the way of online irreverence or pizzazz. Michelle Bachmann's page does give at least some options and good information. The rest of the pack though? Plain vanilla and done pretty poorly at that. If their 404 efforts are any indication of their ability to help people navigate from a bad place then these are not your guys. Newt Gingrich Rick Perry Ron Paul In the end this may not seem like much but it's this kind of attention to detail in today's political environment can score big points with voters or cost you votes as well. While we will have to suffer through endless TV ads that are design to denigrate and humiliate an opponent that is no longer the only way to get information about politics……thank God. What are you looking for from the next year of campaigning that we will all need to suffer through for the next year? WIll it be another Democratic online runaway or do you think the Republicans grasp the importance of this part of their efforts to get to the White House?

 

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