Yahoo! Sponsors SEO Seminars

Yahoo! Search Marketing Canada, is scheduled to sponsor SEO seminars, hosted by The Search Engine Academy Toronto and Montreal SEO Workshops, taking place in February and March, 2007.

Search Engine Academy Workshops are Certified Search Engine Optimization Training Courses, where you work hands-on with expert instructors, while you acquire genuine SEO knowledge. The 2, 3 and 5-Day Workshops are designed specifically for a) people with little or no previous experience in SEO and b) for current SEOs with experience but little or no formal training. Unlike at seminars where you sit and listen passively, at our workshops, students work in real time on actual websites. Students experience a combination of training mixed with live demonstrations and individual, and group, projects to build their search engine marketing skills with maximum information retention in the minimum amount of time. Everything is included in the Toronto Workshop so there is nothing extra to buy. Tuition includes 5-Days of hands-on instruction plus 3 months of membership to resources after class, plus the 6 Month Mentoring program.

Greg Mate, President of Search Engine Academy Montreal remarked, "At a launch party last week Yahoo ! Search Marketing Canada announced that they were sponsoring two SEO 101 Seminars for their major clients. We are obviously thrilled with the opportunity to work with Yahoo ! Canada and we look forward to providing their clients with search engine marketing guidance designed to grow their businesses."

The first two 3-hour seminars - a morning and afternoon session - held in Toronto on February 20th 2007, was quickly booked to capacity. The seminars focused on Why Canadian Business Need to Include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Marketing or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) in the Marketing Mix, and some Basic SEO Tips.

Mr. Mate continued, "The timing is right, our next Certified Toronto (hands-on) SEO Workshops run from March 26-30, 2007 (2-Day Basic Essentials SEO Course Mar 26-27, 3-Day Advanced SEO Mastery Training Mar 28-30, and 5-Day Intensive SEO Workshop Mar 26-30) and in Montreal (also in English) from June 18-22, 2007.''

Barry Byers, President of Search Engine Academy Toronto and Greg Mate, President of Search Engine Academy Montreal, have been Professional Search Engine Optimizers and Internet Marketers for several years, and have assisted numerous businesses in gaining top Search Engine rankings and increased focused traffic in both Canada and the United States. Together they have designed and programmed effective websites as well as consulted on SEO and marketing on existing sites. Now you too can benefit from their years of hands on search engine marketing by attending their live Search Engine Optimization / Search Engine Marketing workshop training courses.

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! seeks to provide online products and services essential to users' lives, and offers a full range of tools and marketing solutions for businesses to connect with Internet users around the world. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

To learn more about the event Agenda, please visit: www.searchengineacademy.ca/workshop_agenda.htm

For more info on Yahoo ! Search Marketing Platform, please visit: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/.

A Quick Outline of Search Engine Optimisation

A number of factors need to be considered when optimising a web site for the organic results of the search engines. The cumulative effect of optimising all parts of a website is greater than the sum of its parts optimised individually.

A number of factors need to be considered when optimising a web site for the organic results of the search engines. The cumulative effect of optimising all parts of a website is greater than the sum of its parts optimised individually.

Each factor overlaps with, or is related to, at least one other, and for maximum results the big picture needs to be captured by a search engine optimisation strategy.

This article outlines the elements an effective SEO strategy should cover.

Content
Body content should be relevant and not copied from anywhere else. The density of keywords and phrases should be approximately 5%. Related keywords and phrases can be used to boost relevancy.

Search engines like to see that a web site is serving current and valuable information. Frequently changing content and the addition of new pages will keep both search engines and users interested and can improve rankings.

Titles tags
Titles are the most important tag used by the search engines for determining the topic of a page. They should be relevant, concise, not use repetition and unique to every page. A call to action can encourage click through from the search engine results pages

Inbound links & PageRank
Due to the democratic nature of the major search engines, a web sites reputation is based on the number of relevant and trusted incoming links. The better the reputation, the higher a web site will usually rank. Reciprocal links carry little weight these days. Editorial citations have the most value as these are nearly always human edited.

Indexation
Generally speaking, the more pages a site has indexed, the better its chances are of ranking high. Certain infrastructure and content issues can hamper or even prevent the indexing of pages, and thus, have a negative impact on rankings.

HTML/XHTML & CSS
Weight of keywords, relevancy of a page and a site as a whole and its 'crawler-bility' (the ease at which a search engine can read a sites content) can be maximised by effective use of CSS, HTML and XHTML.

Meta tags
Whilst meta tags are no longer used by the major search engines for ranking, they must still be unique to every page and have certain limits placed on character length.

For the purpose of ranking, meta tags can actually be omitted altogether. However the description may be used as the snippet in the search engine results pages, so there is an opportunity to increase click through rate.

Keyword choices
The choice of keywords is essential to determining the relevancy of a page. Targeted keywords should be placed in the title tags and sprinkled evenly throughout the body copy, without making the text contrived or the keyword density too high.

Internal link structure
The internal linking structure is paramount to how a site is ranked. Search engines like to see a clear and logical hierarchical structure. This improves crawlability and can help maximise internal PageRank, which solidifies a web sites ranking position. Search engines also give more weight to links found within body content as these are usually human edited.

Spam
Any activity that falls outside the search engine guidelines is considered spam. The potential penalties range from negative impact on rankings to permanent de-listing.

Source: http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) And SEO

Indexing has always been considered a highly targeted science. Enter a search query into Google search and the pages that are displayed are generally optimized towards that exact word or term. However, in their continual battle to server the most relevant but most natural pages with genuinely useful information Google has injected latent semantic indexing (LSI) into its algorithms.

What Is LSI?

LSI is a unique indexing method that potentially takes Google search one step closer to becoming human in its way of thinking. If we were to manually search through web pages to find information related to a given search term we would be likely to generate our own results based on the theme of the site, rather than whether a word exists or doesn't exist on the page.

Why Search Engines Might Adopt Latent Semantic Indexing

The extremely rigid form of "keyword indexing" also meant that black hat SEO techniques were easier to implement. Search engines could be manipulated into ranking a site highly by using set formula. Originally, cramming a page with a particular keyword or set of keywords meant a site would rank highly for that search term. The proceeding set of algorithms ensured that your link profile played more of an important part than your keyword density. Reciprocal linking soon followed once again making it possible to manipulate the search engine spiders by exchanging links with tens, hundreds, or thousands of websites.

Reciprocal linking was soon beaten as Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo and MSN gave less credence to a reciprocal link as they did to a one-way inbound link. Latent Semantic Indexing is another, particularly powerful, method to try and make their result pages appear more natural with natural pages filled with natural content.

The Effects

The introduction of LSI has seen some dramatic changes in the search engine result pages already. Sites that had previously performed well because of an impressive link profile based on a single keyword have found their pages slip in the rankings. Other pages with a more diverse portfolio of inbound links are taking the lead with search terms for which they had not previously performed.

SEO is far from dead because of LSI, in fact if anything, it has probably increased the need for professional white-hat SEO on your website. The field of SEO, though, has almost certainly changed. Website content copywriting for Google's benefit is not merely made up of keyword density and keyword placement as it once was and link-building techniques will need to change to incorporate LSI algorithms but it can be done.

Writing Content For LSI

If optimizing solely for Google then a web page can, theoretically, be naturally written and naturally worded. When we write we instinctively include the appropriate keyword in our text. In order to avoid repetition (or keyword optimization, as it was once called) we would often alter some instances of these keywords for other words with the same or very similar meaning. We naturally include the plural or singular form of a keyword as well as different tenses and a number of different stems of that keyword. In the eyes of LSI algorithms this is all good news.

Looking At Your Link Profile

A link profile should no longer consist of thousands of links with the same anchor text (that of your primary keyword). There's no reason to panic if you already have this kind of profile. Instead you should look at relevant and similar terms and improve your link profile by gaining links using these as your anchor text.

What It Offers Web Searchers

From the point of view of web searchers, LSI offers some distinct advantages over its earlier form of indexing. For example, LSI recognizes that the word "engine" in "search engine optimization" is not related to searches for terms like "steam engine" or "locomotive engine" and is instead related to Internet marketing topics. In theory, LSI results give a much more accurate page of results as well as providing a broader range of pages still geared towards a particular topic.

Where Google Leads, Others Generally Follow

It is widely acknowledged that Google is the search engine at the forefront of latent semantic indexing. On the whole they try to generate results pages that are literally filled with genuine, useful results and LSI certainly provides another string in their bow. Yahoo and MSN, for now, seem more than happy to go along with keyword specific indexing although Yahoo are known to look at singular and plural keyword variations as well as keyword stemming when judging keyword density.

The Effect On Your Website

How it affects the individual Webmaster is dependent on how they go about promoting their site already. If the pages are filled with natural content including keywords and keyword alternatives, and the link profile is similarly diversified for a number of related keywords then the fact is it won't change very much. However, if all of your efforts have been concentrated, either on-page or off-page, with a single keyword then it's time to readdress the balance.

News Source: Entireweb

Tweaking SEO and SEM Strategies

Online retail sales this holiday season will be a healthy improvement over last year, according to research cited in Part 1 of this three-part series on holiday shopping.

Whereas the consumer drives all traffic to online retail Web sites, the savvy e-tailer can create helpful site search processes in order to raise profits and maximize the consumer's experience.

Most large retailers have already locked down their Web sites as they prepare for a profitable ride. Nonetheless, e-tailers should keep an eye on their search strategies -- and change what is not working -- en route to seasonal sales.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) offer two strong cases in point. Although these initiatives can drive Web traffic all year long, experts recommend customized SEO and SEM tactics for optimum cyclic results during the holidays.

Tailoring SEO and SEM strategies concurrently is an important practice, according to a new survey from Web analytics firm WebSideStory that demonstrates how equally efficient these tactics actually are. As it turns out, paid search has only a slight edge -- 9 percent to be exact -- in conversion rates over organic search.

"There is a strong synergy between paid and organic search. The bottom line is that marketers need to optimize both to achieve maximum results," said Heather Lloyd-Martin, president and CEO of SuccessWorks, a search engine optimization firm.

With conversion rates 50 percent or higher than overall site conversion rates, both paid and organic search remain very important acquisition sources for online marketers, Lloyd-Martin said.

However, the goal is to use Web analytics best practices to understand how to truly optimize SEM campaigns and conversion rates.

With only a few weeks of holiday shopping -- and with those few weeks typically accounting for a large percentage of an e-tailer's revenues -- search initiatives must be effective or go bust.

The steps may be the same year round: Build a list of relevant keywords, write targeted titles and descriptions, and prepare an effective bid strategy . However, the proper approach to those activities can be dramatically different during the holidays.

Selecting Relevant Keywords
"You may want to expand your keyword selection list during the holidays. Think about what users are searching for as it relates to the holiday period," Pato Spagnoletto, director of Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Search Marketing, told the E-Commerce Times.

If you sell electronics, for example, then you may choose keywords like "DVD" or "Sony" most of the time. During the holiday season, though, you may want to expand the selection to include modifiers like "Christmas gift idea" or "electronics gift card."

Maintain keywords that are consistent with inventory availability -- there is no sense in optimizing or advertising your site for products that are sold out, only to frustrate site visitors.

"Leverage some of your SEM dollars to increase your visibility on the more expensive, higher volume, more generic types of keywords," Cam Balzer, vice president of Performics, told the E-Commerce Times. "Sometimes multichannel retailer budgets need to take into account branding dollars to increase visibility. That's a separate component of the campaign, apart from ROI (return on investment) driven keywords."

"Make previously searched-for items more visually prominent, comprehensively detailed, and accessible via fewer clicks to attract both humans and search engines," said Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik, who recommended analyzing and acting upon information from previous years' server logs. "Look deeper than the 'big' holidays to uncover oft-overlooked celebrations."

Write Targeted Titles and Descriptions
The same goes for titles and descriptions, which should include buzzwords such as "holiday" or "electronics for dad." The search term should be positioned prominently in both the title and the description, according to Spagnoletto, and you should also customize descriptions by category, such as gifts, clothing or home decor.

"Pricing should be used as part of the promotion whenever possible," Spagnoletto said. "Be sure to include information such as the end date of the promotion, free shipping and the last date for on-time holiday delivery. If you have multichannel options, be sure to list 'in-store pick-up.' The most important keywords should find themselves within the first 70 characters of the description."

If the term "Tiffany" doesn't show up in your title or description when a searcher is looking for diamonds, then you risk losing that searcher to a pure play or some other merchant that leveraged the term effectively. The idea is to keep changing what doesn't work and keep embellishing what does work for maximum conversions throughout the holiday season.

"Search, both natural search and paid search, can be very nimble during the holiday season, allowing you to make a lot of on-the-fly adjustments," Balzer said. "If you have got marketing budgets that aren't performing as well as you'd want in other vehicles, you can quickly shift those dollars into search and often get an immediate lift in visibility and performance from those dollars. That can happen in a matter of days."

Prepare an Effective Bid Strategy
SEO doesn't have to be expensive, but SEM can cost serious money.

Budget adequately for promotional periods, such as the holiday shopping season. That may mean increasing your overall spend or increasing your spend on specific keywords and phrases. It may also mean having one budget for early shoppers, another for last minute shoppers and yet another for post-season holiday bargain hunters.

"There is no guideline as to how much more to spend on SEM marketing for the holidays. We suggest looking at it from an ROI perspective to determine how much you can afford to spend and how much that spend will yield in terms of sales," Spagnoletto said. "Your ROI may be a little better during the holiday shopping season because more people are shopping online."

Last-Minute Tweaking
Companies should consider optimizing their site pages for mobile phones, given the increased number of people who may be comparison shopping from the mall, Google's Lasnik noted. What's most important, however, is early planning, he added. It's a mistake to leave optimization and testing until the last minute.

"Actions have to be both timely and user-friendly. While the holidays may be temporal, planning for them should occur year long," he added, noting that spamming-type practices should be avoided and, if used, could result in your site being delisted from the major search engines. "Acting slow and steady wins the race," Lasnik said.

News Source:http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/must-read/54433.html

On Page Optimization

Search engine spiders ‘feed’ on HTML. It is very important to give them the proper ‘diet’ to rank well on search engines. Using proper HTML markups makes the page fun to read for the visitors and easy to crawl for the spiders.

Caveat: overdoing may get you branded as SPAM.

These are the major on page factor one should be careful with while designing the web pages.

Meta Content

Page Title: Include 1-2 of your most important keyword phrases here. Ideally, around 8 to 10 words or around 70 to 90 characters including spaces.

Meta Description Tag: Is reflective of the content on the page. I should ideally be between 20 to 25 words or 250 characters including spaces. Include the main keywords at the beginning of this tag.

Meta Keywords Tag: Contains the keyword phrases that are also used in the copy of the page, Title tag, Meta description, and other tags. It is advisable to add plurals and common misspelling.

Web page theme

Filename: use the main keyword/ key phrase. In case of key phrase use "-" as separator (e.g. "file-name" and not "filename")

H1, H2, H3 header text: Defines the Size of fonts. For SEO the order of importance is descending starting from 1. It is advisable to use style sheets (css to define the size, font and color of the H tags).

Bold Text/ Emphasis/ Strong/ Capitalized: These tags are used highlight portions of text which are more important.

Alt Tags: Keyword relevant Alt tags give name to the images. These tags are displayed if the browser cannot display images and also explain the image to the search engines.

Title Tags for Tables: This serves similar purpose for the table as title tag does for the page.

Internal Link Structure: Content relevant and evenly spread internal links help in optimization and ranking.

External Link Structure: Be careful with the external links. Link only to relevant websites. You do not want to send the spider away from your website unless it has seen enough.

Keyword density and spread

First text on Page: Having keyword as the first word on the page helps. If the first word cannot be the keyword, have it in the first sentence or the first paragraph.

Keyword Density: Maintain keyword density of 5- 8% on a webpage. Keyword density affects ranking on almost all major search engines.

Keyword Spread: One should take care to have keywords throughout the webpage. While some search engines give importance to the first and last paragraphs others read through the entire page.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of studying the search engines and their indexing algorithm in and changing or designing a web site to rank high on user searches. Rank is the relative position in the search engine results page for a keyword / key phrase search.

No fancy links, no doorway pages, no spamming techniques can achieve what clean, logical and spam free coding (HTML) can. Here is a quick checklist to drive the search engine spiders to your website.

Search engine optimization coding Checklist:

CSS: Using CSS as it simplifies site maintenance.

and

tags: A must. Place your keywords in the HTML header codes

and

tags.

Anchor text: Use keyword rich anchor text that best justifies your landing page.

Title Tag: Maximum 90 Characters.

Keyword tags: Maximum 25 words.

Browsing Menu: If you use java script menu include redundant set of text links.

Internal Linking: Ensure that you have good internal linkage and no dead pages.

Dynamic URLs: In case of dynamic URL’s use tools to convert dynamic links into static. The correct way to use newly created static pages is to place links to the dynamic pages on the static pages, effectively submitting the static pages to the major search engines manually.

Use HTML validator (http://validator.w3.org)

Other tags: & tags perform well than in the eyes of Spiders, without compromising website aesthetics.

Avoid placing links in images

Avoid Javascript, flash and frames

Avoid Dynamic URLs.

Source: http://www.rankuno.com/seo-articles/page-optimization.asp

Recent Changes at Google, Yahoo, and MSN

There are many changes taking place in the top search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are all adapting to the many transformations occuring within the search industry. Because of these changes, I thought I would take the time to give you an overview of what's taking place within the market and how it affects you as a webmaster. To begin, let's start with Google.

Back in 2003, Google would index and crawl the web about once a month and everything would change all in one shot. WebMasterWorld would actually name these updates with names like Brandy, Florida, and Bourbon.

Google has moved away from these monthly updates to an ever-changing process. You can now see daily changes within the SERPS with the biggest changes occuring during algorithm updates.

Late June and July of this year saw some major changes within the Google algorithm. If your site was hurt from this algorithm change, you should re-examine your site and be sure to follow the guidelines below:


1. Pursue a continuous linking campaign with other quality sites. This can be achieved through article syndication, exchanging RSS feeds, submitting to directories or syndicating a press release.
2. Create a Google sitemap to increase the coverage of your webpages.

3. Make sure your site has a clear navigation system. Every page should be reachable from at least one static link.

4. Avoid all deceptive or manipulative behavior. Don't get involved in linking schemes. Avoid all forms of cloaking and avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Besides the changes taking place within organic search results, there have also been recent changes within Google Adwords. In July of 2006, Google updated their landing page algorithm. These changes have harmed a number of online marketers. Many advertisers who had been paying five or ten cents a click are now required to bid at least 50 cents to a dolloar or more. There are also other advertisers who kept their bid prices, but those bids are now buying only 3rd or 4th page positions when they used to buy first page positions.

Some advertisers have even been effectively shutdown.

However, keep in mind that not all advertisers have been affected. There are four main types of sites that have been hit the hardest. These include:


one page sales letter websites
squeeze pages
adsense sites (particularly those involved in Adsense arbitrage)
affiliate sites
The new landing page algorithm gives a quality score to every landing page. Fortunately for us, Google has left some clues as to how they are ranking these pages.

Below are 3 general guidelines that will help those who have been hurt by the recent updates.


1. Provide relevant and substantial content.
2. Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information related to the product or service in your ad.
3. Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site's content.
To stay in accordance with the new quality score guidelines, you may want to remove all Adsense ads from your landing pages, create or find more original content for your sites, ensure that your landing page has at least 500 words, and check to make sure that your ad relates perfectly with the content of your landing page.

Google is getting smarter everyday. Our job is not to trick the search engines but to deliver truly valuable information to our visitors. By doing this along with some basic on-page and off-page optimization techniques, you should perform very well in the search engines over the long-haul.

There have also been some recent changes at MSN.

They have changed the name of their search engine spiders. Before the changes, they were all called "msnbot,". Fortunately, they are now starting to group their spiders into separate categories.

The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products.
The MSN News bot is msnbot-news.
The MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media.
The MSN search bot is still called msnbot.

It should now be much easier for webmasters to decipher what's really going on in their web logs. In addition, webmasters can also block specific bots if they need to, without blocking MSN Search.

Last, but not least, there is Yahoo. This company has experienced some very exciting changes within the past few months.

One of these is the launch of a new Yahoo Search Crawler. The new crawler is faster and more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, website owners should notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the Yahoo crawler.

Yahoo also released an index update in mid-July. You can read all about it at http://www.ysearchblog.com.

In addition, there are a number of other, smaller-based search engines who are leading the way in the future of search engine technology. One of the best examples I have seen is Eurekster.com. They have developed a social search engine powered by the wisdom of crowds.

Eurekster makes use of its own SearchMemory technology, which remembers the sites a user finds useful and presents them higher in the results the next time they search. Then, Eurekster lets a user share their searches and sites with friends. For example, if you do a search on "internet marketing", you'll see sites related to "internet marketing" that your friends also found useful. These results are marked with an icon.

This personalization helps to increase relevancy in a way that no algorithm can match.

I expect to see many changes within Google, Yahoo, and MSN in upcoming years as they merge search engine technology with social search in order to make search results more relevant as well as personalized. One thing is clear, the future evolution of search is sure to be exciting to watch.

News Source: http://www.seo-news.com/

incuBeta wins global award

Cape Town based online marketing company, incuBeta, has won an international award for the second time in 3 years from the world's leading affiliate marketing company, Commission Junction.
incuBeta Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Vinny Lingham was present at the awards ceremony in London last week to accept the award for Commission Junction's UK 2006 Award for Leadership in Innovation.

Commission Junction (owned by ValueClick) is a global leader in the online advertising channel of affiliate marketing.

Commission Junction, with offices in the US, UK, France, Germany and Sweden, develops sustainable relationships for advertisers and publishers through their performance-based solutions and host annual conferences dubbed "CJU" (Commission Junction University) for their affiliates.

incuBeta won the Commission Junction award for innovation in the US in 2004.

Alison Guise, UK Country Manager for Commission Junction said this is the first year we have held awards at Commission Junction University UK, and the high calibre of winners truly demonstrates the importance of internal ambassadors for affiliate marketing within companies.

The winners of the awards were selected from Commission Junction's massive base of advertisers and publishers, with the awards recognising excellence in three categories: outstanding individual personal contribution to affiliate marketing; exceptional performance in affiliate marketing; and lastly for innovation in affiliate marketing.

incuBeta is in its third year of operation and now employs over 40 technologists and search marketers. They have offices in Cape Town, London and Los Angeles and offer global online marketing solutions for an array of high profile global clients such as eBay, Hilton hotels and Thomson travel.

Furthermore, incuBeta are one of Google's biggest clients and one of Yahoo!'s biggest representatives outside of the North America.

"We are very excited to have been recognised for our work in the online marketing industry by Commission Junction UK," said Lingham.

"We have worked extremely hard to compete on an international level and have developed sophisticated proprietary software to maintain our competitive edge.

"Awards like this ensure that we gain even further global credibility for the services we offer and maintain our share of this billion dollar industry."

News Source: http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/companies/display_article.aspx?Nav=ns&lvl2=comp&ArticleID=1518-24_1973251