While conducting research on the benefits of Google+ I stumbled across Matt Cutts… If you are not familiar who Matt Cutts is a Google software engineer. More importantly Matt currently is the head of Google’s Webspam team. Matt Cutts Seems to have a weighted advantage due to the changes with Google+ and search results. Seems funny to me that the lead webspammer at Google is indeed a spammer.

It appears Mr Cutts needs to look into the effect Google+ plus is having on very specific search results.

Don’t ban me Matt!

This is purely a rant… While doing exploratory research and goal setting for a client of mine. When I was asking them what “the current” goals / metrics for their campaign I was informed they were tracking the typical analytics. Search Traffic, Conversion Rates and Bounce Rates. But the one metric that threw me off was “Impressions”!?!

When talking about goals and metrics for SEO we often talk about Click Through Rates (CTR), Rankings, Traffic, and Bounce Rate, but never Impressions. Typcally Impressions are meant for Display Media or SEM (paid search) initiatives.

This would not be big deal if this was a isolated incident. Now I am hearing this as of late and seems to be the buzz word by my clients in late 2011. I am concerned that practitioners are preaching the impression metric. With the advancements of Google and Bing webmaster tools; it is easier to isolate this type of metric, but in my opinion this should not be considered a main goal / metric. If you are able to rank correctly for terms then impressions will follow as well as search referral traffic.

I am curious what your thougts are? Are impressions realy that relevant? Or is this just a bi-product or a micro-metric that show quick wins?

Thanks for reading!

In this day and age within the SEO community DAO or Digital Asset Optimization is all of the rage. With universal search becoming more apparent on Google and Bing DAO is becoming more and more important within a successful SEO campaign. Recently I have watched two co-workers have a small tiff to rank their sites for “#1 Most Handsome Man“.

The most interesting thing is the DAO that was done to humiliate the other was extremely comical and very effective. Within the Image results in Google the main competitor has been placed with a great photo for #1 Most Handsome Man

This will be interesting to see what shakes out with these two. I am sure they will want to rank the images to compete with one another.

Feel free to comment below or share the image to vote for the #1 Most Handsome Man!

Just recently I have noticed while running several tests on the major search engines and their ability to server and rank site via proximity searches. I first started to see the trend a month or so ago. I was trying to rank a site for “Michigan Green Plumbing” to assist with the certification process for the company to become more green.

First, let’s define what proximity searches are: (via Wikipedia)

a proximity search looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. In addition to proximity, some implementations may also impose a constraint on the word order, in that the order in the searched text must be identical to the order of the search query. Proximity searching goes beyond the simple matching of words by adding the constraint of proximity and is generally regarded as a form of advanced search.

For example, a search could be used to find “Michigan green plumber”, and match phrases such as “Michigan green plumbing”. By limiting the proximity, these phrases can be matched while avoiding documents where the words are scattered or spread across a page or in unrelated articles in an anthology.

While conducting my testing I have noticed several issues with proximity searches within the three major engines. The target site ranks for the desired search term “Michigan Green  Plumbing” and Michigan Green Plumber” in both Google and Yahoo. Bing has the main indifference out of the three.

Tagging – The site is tagged via the title tag and targeted body copy to compensate for the term “Michigan Green Plumbing”

Again while this works to be in close proximity to “Michigan Green Plumbers” both Google and Yahoo rank the site accordingly and Bing only references the site for the exact term.

Google – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing

Google – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber

Yahoo – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing

Yahoo – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber

Bing – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing

Bing – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber

In conclusion when targeting proximity searches it is an acceptable best practice to include them into your research for both Google and Yahoo, but when it comes to Bing stick to the old fashion techniques for each and every targeted keyword on you list.

Will this trend disappear with the merger of Bing and Yahoo? Or will Yahoo results be close minded to proximity search terms?

Just today Google has prepared for the world cup. If you go to Google.com and search for World Cup you will notice the that they sever up the current games and TV times.

If you happen to also find yourself scrolling to the bottom where the next pages normally are displayed in the following fashion has been replaced with Gooooooaaaaaaal.

Most successful social media campaigns utilize back links to complement the SEO campaign. This is one of the metrics for producing a ROI for the campaign. Link building is one of the top factors in SEO and it has been proven to be a strong component of long term SEO success. Link building via social media allows the company to focus on two key areas to any business playing in the online marketing space.
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Recently I had an interesting discussion about social media and the effects it has on SEO. The main focus we couldn’t escape talking about the famous “Dominos Pizza YouTube Incident.” The incident It happened quite a while ago, but I’m pretty sure everybody’s seen at least part of the famous YouTube video where Dominos employees Kristy and Michael film themselves doing some pretty disgusting things to the food.

The main area of the discssion was the Dominos video because it’s an excellent example of viral media, using social media, and how social media relates to SEO. Shortly after it was uploaded to YouTube, the video was being spread around the web at one of the faster rates recorded for viral content. On its first day, over 1 million people viewed the video – even before the news stations started running the story.
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