Successful SEO Needs Effort, Not Quick Fixes

By: Mark Nenadic 
2006-07-25 

It would be nice if we could master search engine optimization, and procure high rankings simply by editing Meta tags, but thats just not going to happen. 

The reason is because, in order to achieve SEO success, a combined effort of different, long-term methods is required. There is no one quick fix that will solve the problem. 

Nevertheless, despite the fact that there are no easy solutions, people still insist on using various techniques to try and find them. For instance, it is possible to quickly generate high rankings from words that no internet users will search for. However, even if you rank number one, if no one uses the words, your business will flop. 

In addition, the following are some more quick fixes that many people try, and fail at: 

Changing or Adding Meta Tags " Search engines are limited when it comes to deciding what sites should be shown in the result list of a keyword search. Meta keyword tags assist search engines and help them select the pages with the most relevancy that pertain to the keyword of a Web surfer. 

Of course, there is a difference between a public search engine, like Yahoo, and an internal search engine. A public search engine contains virtually every webpage they are aware of. Therefore, they cant trust all the Meta tags they find, as not all website have been designed to provide the internet users with relevant information on the keyword they are searching for. Some website have been set up for the sole purpose of advertising and generating traffic. Thus, the goal of a public search engine is to weed out these irrelevant websites and help searchers find exactly what they are looking for. 

An internal search engine, on the other hand, consists of only a small amount of web pages or products. Therefore, it is less difficult for the search engine to produce the most relevant pages. Moreover, the Meta tags that are present on the internal search engine on your site are trustworthy; because your goal is to help your visitors find what they are looking for. 

When all is said and done, by adding or changing the Meta tags on your website doesnt quickly or slowly fix anything. The bottom line is this method will have not effect on the result of your SEO traffic. 

Increasing Web Content " Increasing web content can boost your SEO success, but this is something that takes plenty of time. Sure you can quickly increase the content by writing useless puff pieces, using auto-generating software, or ripping off content from other sites, but none of these methods are actually going to improve your business profits in the long run. 

The only web content that is going to secure your success is information that is relevant and valuable. It takes time and experience to generate this type of information, so dont try to cheat your way to the top with wasted words or words that are not your own. Stay true to your business and keep your integrity. 

Link Popularity - One of the most popular quick fix methods out there are link schemes. Anyone who does business on the internet knows how valuable links are. Links are what help to increase web traffic and increase website visibility. That being said, you will want to avoid becoming a link farm, because if your goal is to only get links to increase your SEO rankings, youre not going to take your business anywhere. 

As tempting as it might sound, you need to ignore link popularity. Your focus should be on your target market, and how you can reach them to let them know your website exists. Thus, you need to market your website, which means you may have to dish out a little money to publicize your website in local newspapers, magazine, or even in a television ad. The more your site is recognized, the better chance it has of ending up in the right niche markets to attract the right attention. 

If you want to be successful with search engine optimization, you need to commit yourself to achieving long-term results. This does take patience, but is necessary if you want to come out on top. The following tips can help bring you closer to your high ranking goal: 

Tip 1: Conduct thorough research for keyword phrases " use effective keyword programs such as KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker. The paid programs of their software will help you generate the best keyword phrases for your business. 

Tip 2: Valuable web content " Dont create a website that is overrun by graphics. SEO spiders will crawl right over these graphics and pass you by. Your website needs a reasonable amount of web content that is pumped full of valuable information. It needs to be clear and concise, and should also convey your website message which needs to include the keywords youve selected to rank high for. 

Tip 3: Relevancy " Ensure that all your link anchor text and title tags are relevant to one another, as well as to the web content that is presented on your site. 

Tip 4: Patience is a virtue " It will take almost a year, or even longer, before you begin to see any traffic from the natural results of search engines. Try not to let this get you down. Take this time to continue to improve your site and give the competition a run for their money. Eventually, your persistence, patience and positive thinking will pay off. 

Always remember, it doesnt matter how well you market your website, you are not going to achieve overnight success. Just like most things in life, taking the easy way out when it comes to marketing your business online isnt going to create you long lasting success. If you want an impressive future that provides you with plenty of reward, you need to spend the time and money, and do things right the first time.

Google launches Place Search

Google has launched Place Search, a new feature which produces results based solely around locations, in a bid to make its search offering more 'local'.

From today onwards, Google users can search for an activity in a certain place, or a type of restaurant, for example Chinese in London and the list of results will show all the places in that location which match the search criterion in a new clustered fashion.

As well as the usual linear list of search results, a Google map will also appear, with a series of red pins, showing the results on a map, and a user can click on the list of displayed review sites, such as tripadvisor.com, to find out which result suits them best.

Place Search groups the results, map and reviews sites in a new way.

Jackie Bavaro, Place Search’s product manager, wrote on the Google blog: “Today we’re introducing Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organizes the world's information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go…

"Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when we predict you’re looking for local information."

She added: “In addition, you’ll find a new link for “Places” in the left-hand panel of the search results page so you can switch to these results whenever you want. For example, when I’m in New York, I love to go out and play foosball, but a search for [foosball] doesn’t automatically show me Place Search results. If I click “Places” I get the new view.

“We’ve made results like this possible by developing technology to better understand places. With Place Search, we’re dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names.”

The global roll-out of the new tool is happening over the next few days and will be available in more than 40 languages. For a preview of the service, click here.

Google is prioritising location-based services, having just moved Marissa Mayer, its high-flying head of search, into a new role, which focuses on developing such local products.

The search giant is putting more focus on location services and local businesses, in an attempt to grow its revenue beyond its search advertising model.

Location-based services, such as Foursquare and the recently launched Facebook Places, have come to the fore in the last 12 months, as technology companies try to tap into the value of real-time, locally served advertising, made possible by smart devices.

The news comes on the day that Tory MP, Robert Halfon, calls for an investigation into the collection of personal data by Google during its Street View mapping service, another one of its localised products.

Source: http://goo.gl/iQ6L

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Nagaraju Bejgum, 

UniversityGuru Team.

Is Samsung making Google’s Nexus Two?

If Samsung’s 8 November event in New York is a key milestone for Google Android, as is rumoured, it would be unprecedented

Google Nexus One Photo: Reuters

Despite Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt telling the Telegraph earlier this year that there would be no Nexus Two, online rumours of a follow-up to the Nexus One phone are gathering pace.

Samsung is known to be holding an Android event in New York on 8 November, to which it has already begun inviting journalists – but if the announcement were to be as significant as some bloggers have been speculating, it would mark a significant break with Google’s previous product announcements.

Google’s forthcoming operating system, Android Gingerbread, is expected in this quarter of the year, but previously all software announcements by the search giant have been at least shared with partner manufacturers – the Samsung announcement appears to be exclusively by the Korean electronics giant.

This makes it more likely that the New York launch is of the follow-up to the Samsung Galaxy S handset, rather than anything even more significant.

Improvements expected in Android Gingerbread could include the launch of Google Music, which the company demonstrated at its I/O conference in May this year, as well as a new focus on gaming and revised apps. There have also been suggestions that the update will include improved copy and paste functionality.

Source: http://goo.gl/wMGG

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Nagaraju Bejgum.

UniversityGuru Team.

SEO Is Dead, And The New King Is ‘SMO’

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a web publisher, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in various media and e-commerce companies.

Over the past five years, Web publishing has been so heavily dominated by search engine optimization (SEO) that, to many publishing executives, the right keywords have become far more important than their sites’ actual content or audience. But this movement toward SEO has been dangerous, as it’s moved publishers’ eye off their most important job of creating great content, and onto the false goals of keywords, hacks, paid links, and technical engineering that their audience doesn’t know or care about.

Even venerable publishers like Forbes have traded in their leadership legacy to chase the Huffington Post pufferfish strategy of filling up Google’s database with more posts, more frequency, and more low-cost content; while stalwarts like Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX) are still chasing SEO basics like getting keywords into their URLs. 

But the recent announcement of the Facebook/Bing partnership to integrate social and search results clearly marks the beginning of the end of SEO, and the smartest digital publishers will drop everything to rethink their distribution strategy entirely.

With the rise of Facebook, we’ve entered a new era of digital media: personalized discovery. The balance of power is shifting: Already sites at Wetpaint and other publishers are seeing more audience coming from Facebook than from search.

Search was critical when answers to questions were scarce. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) can find an answer to almost any keyword query from among the zillions of pages on the web. But at a time when such answers are abundant, it’s far more valuable to find the best content for me – and increasingly, find it before I’ve even asked for it. The sort algorithm that works best for that is more correlated to who’s doing the asking than how they would phrase the ask. 
For that level of personalized results, no abject algorithm can keep up without deep knowledge of its users. Advantage: Facebook. 

The encouraging implication is that the audience values content, not keywords. And Facebook sides with the audience. And so it’s time to christen a new era of social-media optimization, or “SMO.” The era of SMO liberates publishers from the exercise of tricks, hacks and keywords. Instead, the big opportunity is now once again creating and refining the most appealing content possible. 

Imagine that.

SMO recognizes that Facebook already has the best position to introduce content to users. Already, audiences are using Facebook as the news interface to their favorite sources (both media titles and their friends) in a way that Google News hasn’t cracked the code on; products like Flipboard that take this to the next level are captivating. 

As Facebook takes its immense database of “Likes” and pivots it to inform search results, there’s no question that it will have a huge advantage in delivering a better result set for almost every user. It simply knows more. 

SMO strategy means appealing to the audience, not an intermediary; knowing what drives interest; and activating people’s desire to consume and share. Sure, there is buzz among many publishers around Facebook logins and likes, and the traffic bumps that come with them. But SMO offers more far than that. It’s about creating a positive feedback loop, where users are rewarded for both consuming and distributing content. The key is to develop virality in media like that of Zynga games and Groupon offers. Beyond, of course, creating great content and experiences that are worth sharing, publishers need to then reward their audiences with the full range of possibilities, including prestige, access, exclusive content and enhanced experiences. 

For those who are still working on implementing search strategies: if you haven’t turned your focus to SMO, you will be left behind as the allure of gaming search engines fades into the past.

Source: http://goo.gl/k454 

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UniversityGuru Team - Nagaraju Bejgum.

AdMob Brings Interactive Video Ads To Android

Google’s recently purchased mobile ad network AdMob is announcing today that it is bringing interactive video ads to Android phones. AdMob already offers the video ad formatfor iPhones.

Similar to the iPhone formats, the new SDK for Android devices includes interactive video and interactive interstitial ad units. The ad network will dynamically identify screen resolution, size, and network connection speed to serve users the best ad for each device. And Android developers have more interactive options when including ads in their applications. The new ad units themselves can be placed when an app opens or within an app.

AdMob says that it has run over 120 video and interactive interstitial campaigns for clients such as Universal Pictures, Best Buy and Seattle’s Best Coffee. Google’s big push for AdMobhas been the ability to serve interactive mobile ads across many mobile platforms, whereas single-platform options like iAd have been focused on only serving iOS devices, limiting reach for advertisers. Interestingly, Apple is also eying the video ad space and is rumored to be developing iAds for video.

Source: http://goo.gl/YQgV

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Nagaraju Bejgum.

Google Prepares to Launch Epic Broadband

As you may recall, earlier this year the ruler of the interwebs announced their plans to build and test an uber-fast broadband network to some 50,000 to 500,000 people. Just this past weekGoogle has announced its plans to beta-test the uber-fast network at Stanford University for some very lucky 850 faculty- and staff-owned homes on the campus.

Soon Stanford's residential subdivision will be equipped with internet speeds capable of 1 gigabit per second--or more than 100 times faster than what most people have access to today. The Googs picked Stanford for its “test” because the university is close to the Google campus and Google engineers will have fast and easy access to the location so that they can monitor the beta. Stanford was also open to Google testing the new fiber technologies on their streets, and Stanford's residential section is small and makes a good fit for beta-deployment.

Google plans to use this beta test as grounds for learning and making any changes needed before the big launch to a community or multiple communities of up to 500,000 people. Ever since Google announced plans to build the large fiber-network surfaced, the company has been experimentingwith new fiber technologies. Google plans to announce the winning community (or communities) by the end of the year.

I don't know about you, but I think some certain Stanford faculty and staff are about to get really happy. What's your next move Google? You've already got Google Video, Chome, Picasa, Voice,TV, Android, an upcoming netbook OS, and a huge plethora of other services and products. Next up: Google Space Shuttle!

Source:  Google Products Update
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Bejgum Nagaraju.