Traditionally, the main ways for brands to get found online are through SEO (search engine optimization) for corporate websites and  PPC (pay per click) by keyword bidding.

However, having good SEO will also depend on a series of fundamental aspects that will guarantee an increase in website traffic: good content, fresh content, good use of keywords and relevant phrases.

This means that if you want someone to find you easily and appear in the organic results, you must provide your website with a good selection of keyword phrases relevant to your business.

In result, you’re creating exposure for your brand and providing both searchers and search engines with what they’re looking for.

How do you fulfill this? Corporate blog. Blogs are rich in content, contain thousands of relevant keywords and get updated continuously with fresh, new content…exactly what search engines need in order to find you.

The more keywords the better the chance of appearing in the search results and the greater the chance you get spotted by a prospect.

Once you get found, your task is to develop a sincere and open dialogue with customers. Adopting a corporate blog could be one of the best ways to build a meaningful and ongoing customer relationship allowing for your readers to participate in conversation and interact freely with their favorite brand.

Is Google polishing up before Bing continues to steal win over more search market share?

The fact is that Google has been working on what people have been referring to as caffeine or a next-generation architecture for its web search, as stated on the official blog. It’s the first step in a process that will let Google push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions, it continued.

As shown on the results for my search on Starbucks coffee (the word caffeine inevitably led me to choose Starbucks as my query term), Caffeine returned 8,970,000 results in 0.13 seconds whereas the standard Google search returned 9,610,000 in 0.20 seconds.

You can already see some differences between the two searches, but how will this affect SEO for example?

One of Google’s aims is to deliver results fast, which means that the more relevant content your website has, the higher the probability of coming up within the very first page results, hence, the higher ranking. In addition, if the loading time of your website is fast, it will result in better user experience and once again contribute to the effectiveness your SEO efforts.

For now, test out some searches of your own and, if needed, provide Google with some feedback by doing a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and clicking on the page link that says Dissatisfied? Help us improve.

Just out of curiosity, I ran a search on both engines for ‘gender test’ due to all the recent buzz about the female athlete who’s thought to be a man…results weren’t that impressive. Try running the search yourself.

Another good reason: there are millions and millions of people surfing the Web (or Google for that matter),who are constantly in search of information, services, and products. And some of these people can represent potential clients who happen to be interested in what you’ve got to offer.

What are some ways in which you can stand out in order to get users to click on you? The two most common ways are paid advertising and natural or organic search. The latter is entirely dependent on what Google thinks about you and whether your content is in any way relevant and interesting.

How does Google calculate page rank? In very simple terms, without getting into the whole algorithmic aspect of it, it estimates a websites’ rank by the number of pages linking to it. So, this means that if a renowned website links to you, say Cnn.com, your page rank will quickly go up due to the fact that Cnn’s PageRank is 8 making a page with lots of credibility compared to one with a PageRank of 3.

Coincidentially, an article from Cnn.com which I was just reading defines PageRank as the currency of the Web. In short, it says that a link from a site with a high page rank counts for way more than a link from a site with low page rank.

Google’s official advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.”

On one hand, it is very important to do link building, however in must be done correctly. But before that happens, you need to make sure your website has the right, relevant content that helps you show up in the search results. As Cnn mentions, the Web is a vast territory and getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking.

Once you get the relevant content, you work on your PageRank. How? You try to get as many inbound links as possible from those resources whose page rank is high. How? By spreading the word about your product or service and getting people to talk about you. The more people talk, the more those and others will come to you for information which will in turn make you a very credible and valuable company.

Universal Search is Google’s recipe for mixing different user intents in a Blended SERP.

Whether to face it as a challenge or an opportunity is up to your smooth SEO techniques!

You’ve already optimized your existing site content, you’ve learnt to use smart keyword-dense file names for your images and tagged videos of your products and services on YouTube and MySpace… however, it’s not enough: there’s more to Universal SEO than just this.

Search engines are using data collection to offer a better targeted variety of results: image and video thumbnails, news, local search results, maps, audio clips, Social Networking profile pages, shopping results, books, the list is growing day by day, and you don’t want to see your website pushed down the rankings by all these types of Blended Search results.

• Do you own a restaurant, or a small shop? Local business owners  can easily compete on Local Search with bigger brands by adding a business listing to Google Maps.

• Do need to manage your client’s (or your own) online reputation? Social Networking profile pages are the answer: take advantage of social media options for your business and rank high with your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile pages!

• News: optimize your press releases as you would do for your website pages!

• PDF documents: ever heard of OCR? That’s Optical Character Recognition, a technology that allows Google to index your PDF scanned documents. Next time you upload a scanned document, think about SEO!

Well, I know what you are thinking now: “where is the rest of the 77 SEO Tips you promised me?” Please, relax and enjoy blended SEO. 77Agency would never allow your competitors to access the best  SEO Services we reserved especially for you!

Many people are wondering what kind of approach is most appropriate at times of crisis. Some are tightening their belts and cutting budgets short, others, are contemplating jumping on the opportunity to build and strengthen their brand.

Some marketing strategies have proved to be more effective than others, particularly during economic recessions. And yes, it takes guts to invest in something as brand building when the economy softens. But it is also true that it’s imperative trying your best to preserve your customer base, perhaps some kind of activity should be executed to keep the momentum going, wouldn’t you say?

Another important factor is that of picking up the pieces; if competition is cutting back and going quiet, that’s when you should step in and entice those customers to switch over to you, thus gaining advantage over weakened rivals.

A recent study by the Online Marketing Blog gives us some insight on the top 5 tactics marketers will emphasize in order to survive the rough times. Results were as follows:

Search Engine Optimization- PPC- Blogging are listed as the top 3. It’s important to add social media takes up 5 spots amongst the first ten results since it is not listed as one category within itself.

SEO- is a high impact tactic for reaching audiences online. Many people find what they’re looking for via search engines, hence your goal should be to get on the first page of results. PPC - could be a bit more tricky but it is the easiest tactic to implement in order to drive more traffic and bring a good ROI for your business. Blogging- as part of the social media category, is a quick and effective way to create brand awareness, target vast audiences and encourage interaction, engagement, connection between customers and brands.

To look at the entire poll results by Online Marketing Blog visit www.toprankblog.com

I ran a check and discovered that Google officially first announced its new attempt to evolve and increase the quality of its results on May 16th, 2007 calling it Universal Search.

Reading their press announcement they also claimed Universal Search is based on a “model that will offer users a more integrated and comprehensive way to search for and view information online”.

Explained in simple words Google is trying to provide users what they are looking for not just by focusing on website content but by including results from different data sources that could briefly be summarized in Videos, Maps, Images, Wikipedia, influential blogs (Technorati), and influential libraries (IMDB).

Let’s take a look at one example which shows the results on Google.com for a user searching for “madonna”:

As you can see, Google is aggregating the most relevant results as an attempt to interpret users needs and prioritizing results taking them from established sources that specialize in a specific category.

In my example, Google has already learned that Madonna is a singer and a user searching for a singer is most likely looking for:

1. the official web site
2. biography
3. discography
4. news/gossips
5. video
6. images
7. lyrics

And look at the results:

1st.  madonna.com – the official site

2nd. madonna entry on wikipedia: the most trusted encyclopedia on the web

3rd. madonna entry on imdb: the most trusted movie library on the web – she’s a singer and an actress

4rd. latest article with Madonna’s picture from one of the major newspaper aggregators- news.google.com

5th. Madonna’s MySpace page: including the most relevant info on Madonna from her profile in one of the top 3 social media on the web

6th. Madonna’s Videos on YouTube

7th. Madonna’s songs on LastFM: the most established online radio network

My example could be replicated with any other artists, celebrities, etc…but could be generalized and extended to ANY established brand.

What will change is the library of established sources that Google will refer to. Most of them we already know and can expect to find:

1. Wikipedia
2. YouTube
3. Images.Google.com
4. News.Google.com
5. MySpace
6. FaceBook
7. Linkedin
8. Imdb
9. Technorati
10. Digg

But if Universal Search implies better, more relevant results from established sources, it also opens an opportunity for what I call Universal SEO.

Universal SEO is extending its efforts and attention in seeking 1st Page positioning on Google by working not just on the client’s website but also by establishing, controlling and improving its presence within the pool of sites we know Google treats as priority and preferential sources within its ranks.

One example: whilst Madonna owns her MySpace profile and what Google is displaying is the official Madonna MySpace page, in YouTube the result is “a” video that happens to be tagged as Madonna where I would have expected to find the official Madonna YouTube channel instead.

My article is really to explain how SEO is now a broader area of competency and work that goes well beyond the traditional optimization of a site.

I call this new way of maximizing your site’s visibility and brand across a multitude of social media/blogging/…: Universal SEO.

I’ll be writing more on this topic in the future…

“This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google’s ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value – although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google’s algorithm is contained below.”

SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors

Google’s Webmaster Tools recently introduced the Content Analysis feature. It alerts webmasters of titles that Google might find too short, and META descriptions that are too short or might conflict with the webpage content.

If you have admin control over a site, make sure to check it regularly and act upon the hints it will give you to ensure optimisation for Google.

See here for the official Google explanation.

When will Yahoo! give in and introduce equal sitemap format?

Google introduced the use of sitemaps for video today. It allows webmasters to let Google know the location and description of their videos, which is undeniably good for video SEO. If you are featuring videos on your site, you can attract a decent amount of traffic if these videos pop up in search results on Google Video. And Google Universal Search which also shows videos.

But the service has received some critique on its own blog, and rightly so. The most important questionable point is that this service is – for now – only useful for Google search. Google representatives say that they hope that other search engines will follow, but this means that we will still have to work with two video sitemaps to upload. Three for the sites that also have a mobile version. And since we work with Yahoo! as well, which demands its own sitemap formats, that means that the total amount of sitemaps we will have to upload is between four and six. We think that it is time for a universal sitemap format, and we suppose Yahoo! will have to come up with it; they have more to gain as Yahoo! is often the second advertising platform after Google, and it is hardly ever the other way around.

We expect Yahoo! to introduce the same format as Google for their sitemaps soon, and think that in the end also video sitemaps will be included into the general sitemaps, making the lives of us SEO specialists a lot easier.

The proper naming and listing of images on a website can do wonders for the site’s visibility, we experience at 77. Image search can become a good source of visitors to your site once you know how to archive and name your images. At Blogstorm they conducted an image search test for a few search terms. Ask.com and Google came out of the test as the clear winners, whereas Yahoo! and Flickr did not look so good.

A great part of Internet users relies on Google for their searches and Google is integrating the image search more and more into the normal web search. In that sense, it is becoming more important to post relevant pictures with the right names and tags. We can grab this marketing opportunity now, and at the same time get prepared to do the same thing for video advertisements.