Every day, billions of people are using Search Engines to find a host of information online. From products and services to restaurants, accommodation, statistics, companies, people, health tips, celebrity gossip, books, movies and just about everything else there is to know, online searches have become such an everyday part of life that the expression ‘Google it’ has become the most common term for sourcing information.

How exactly are people using Search Engines however, and how does this affect Search Engine Optimization?

Interesting Search Engine Usage Statistics

According to recent studies, people are far more likely to turn to Search Engines to find products and services, rather than paper-based directories such as Yellow Pages. Conversion rates are also higher for online searches compared to paper-based directories. The reason for this is that for most people, it is far easier to enter a direct search term and get instant results, along with reviews, ratings and recommendations that are seldom offered with a traditional directory. A 2010 Local Consumer Review Study revealed statistics on web users, which highlighted some rather interesting facts:

• 70% of users used the internet to find a local business in the last 12 months
• Younger users use Search Engines to find local businesses more than older users
• 67% of local users consulted online customer reviews of local businesses when searching for the business online
• Younger users are swayed by positive online reviews more than older users
• Female users are more inclined to choose a local business with positive reviews
• 69% of local users rely on online reviews as much as personal recommendations

The Evolution of Search Engines

With constant changes in Google ranking factors, algorithm and Search Engine features such as Maps, Places, Blog search, News search and other advancements in online search, user experience has become a major priority when it comes to Google and other SEs.

Trust, reputation and authority have also become a vital part of Google’s ranking factors, and content that contains spam, is not relevant, does not hold value or does not meet other ranking factors is shifted to the bottom of the SERPs. Users have far more control over the content that they see in the Search Engines too, with the option to block pages they do not wish to see in their results pages.

How Does This Affect Search Engine Optimization?

SEO has changed every bit as much as Search Engines have changed, and it is no longer enough to expect potential customers to browse your site and make a purchase. Understanding how web users are searching for your company online is the best way to plan your optimisation strategies. Content that is well-written, relevant, unique and rich in information is far more likely to be read by users.

While you shouldn’t stop optimising for Search Engines, it is important to remember that Search Engine Optimisation should also be targeted for the people who are actively searching for your company this very minute.

There is no doubt that Search Engine Optimization has changed a lot over the years. With a large number of algorithm updates to Google, updated ranking factors, reputation management and the advent of social search factors, SEO is a constantly evolving online marketing tool that is consistently shifting.

For SEO professionals and website owners, this evolution has some interesting consequences. Understanding how SEO has evolved and the new responsibilities that SEO professionals now have is crucial to ensuring that your website campaigns are getting the results that you want. This is why the evolution of Search Engines is important to all marketers and website owners who want to keep up to date on current trends and ranking opportunities.

From Search Engine Optimization to Organic Web Strategies

Compared to its early days when on-site optimisation and link building was enough to see your site reach the top of the SERPs, Search Engine Optimization is no longer a static thing at all – it is a constantly shifting tool that changes as new technology and understanding comes along. Keeping up with these changes will help you get the best rankings, through smart campaigns that get results.

Some of the ways that SEO has evolved over the past few years include the following:

• Social search has changed the way that users find information online. Over 20% of our time is spent on social networks, and as such, SEO campaigns need to integrate social media strategies as part of a healthy online marketing mix to reach the millions of users who are on Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, You-tube and other platforms.

• Content strategies are also becoming crucial to SEO success, with a large percentage of companies running blogs to draw in more traffic and ensure regular, unique content that aids both SEO and usability. Additional content such as infographics, apps and interactive content have also become more crucial as part of the SEO mix.

• Reputation has become even more important than ever. New updates to Google algorithms place a huge deal of importance on reputation, trust and authority, with sites such as Wikipedia and major newsgroups and retails appearing above all the rest in the SERPs. Monitoring of social media discussions, traffic and ranking play a key role in reputation management.

• SEO elements such as accessibility, comprehensive keyword research and strategising, linkbuilding, search verticals in images, video, mobile, web pages and social platforms as well as new search protocols such as Schema.org, Rel=Author and video XML sitemaps are far more comprehensive than ‘old school’ SEO elements used to be.

• Local search and maps have become a crucial part of search marketing, used by many web users to pinpoint their location and find services in their area. In search terms, maps is an excellent way to reach a wider audience, optimising on a local scale while providing a richer search experience for users.

As SEOMoz’ Rand Fish stated in a slide show entitled The Death & Rebirth of SEO, search is no longer living in a vacuum – today it lives in the broader inbound funnel. It is no longer enough to expect on-site work and outdated SEO principles to work. The growth of social search has caused Search Engine Optimization to evolve into something far greater than ever before, and if you are not able to keep up, you may soon find that your rankings don’t keep up either.

As awareness of Search Engine Optimisation grows, many websites are starting to realise the importance of increasing SEO rankings. For others however, there is still a great lack of understanding on the importance of having an SEO ready website. Many companies develop their websites in-house, or hire a webmaster that has some web design experience, without any SEO experience. As a result, the website rankings never seem to get off the ground and grow.

Here are some of the top ways to quickly ruin your SEO rankings:

1. Keep the same out-dated pages on the website for months or even years – Search Engine spiders regularly crawl websites to check for fresh content, which will boost rankings. Out-dated pages therefore do not help rankings, and if keywords are also out-dated, it’s a double whammy.

2. Not using unique title tags for every page – As the Search Engine spiders use page titles along with descriptions, content and internal linking to assign a theme and rank your pages, your pages will not fare very well if title tags are duplicated. No title tags are just as bad.

3. Keyword stuffing your content – Google is smart enough to know when they are being fooled, and pages that are stuffed with too many keywords will be penalised. If you do not understand how keyword density works, consult an SEO agency to have your website professionally optimised.

4. Using too much Flash in your website design – another thing that Search Engine spiders don’t like is excessive Flash. There are ways to optimise Flash elements of a site, but using it sparingly and effectively is the way to go. A small element here and there won’t do too much harm, but if the entire site is in Flash then the spiders are unable to crawl the pages effectively.

5. Using too many images and not optimising any of them – every image and even video on your website can be optimised, but when the website is comprised almost entirely of images and other media, without much text at all, the Search Engines are not able to crawl and theme your site’s pages properly.

6. Not using keywords correctly – using random words that you assume will work as well as thoroughly researched keywords, using single, highly competitive words, and using too many long tail phrases are all going to have an effect on your rankings.

7. Strange characters in your URLs – if your site URL’s look something like this: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic, there are numerous negative effects that they will have on your site. URLs should be kept in a simple directory format and include your targeted keywords and phrases that effectively describes the current page.

8. Black Hat SEO tactics – using unorthodox tactics to trick the Search Engines is known as Black Hat SEO. This includes spamming, deliberate keyword stuffing, cloaked content, doorway pages and link farming. Penalties for these kinds of tactics are very heavy, and these techniques should never be considered as a ‘quick fix’ way to attempt better rankings as they will always backfire.

9. Link to questionable websites – if you are doing some link building to try and increase your rankings, then be especially careful what type of websites you link to yourself. If you link to questionable websites, your ranking may also drop as a result of the link partnership.

10. Excessively linking to other websites – another thing to watch out for is having too many outbound links to other websites. Google sees websites that have 50 or more links to other sites as being possible link farms, which will be a one-way ticket to penalization – link to a few quality sites that are relevant, you may even boost your own rankings by linking to good resources.

In the game of online marketing, which is more powerful: SEO or Social Media? This debate has changed the way that many online marketers plan their goals, and ultimately this also affects how customers are searching for your website right this very second. While some marketers claim that SEO is all that you need, others are firmly in favour of social media marketing – in the long run, both are right… but not in the way that they may think. The ultimate winning formula is a healthy mix of both strategies, as studies show that customers use BOTH of these channels to find information online.

How the average online user finds information

The way that it works is simple – a customer is trying to find a company that sells roofing equipment. Typically, he will try searching online for a term such as ‘roofing equipment Cape Town’ for instance. This search will bring up some results for various companies offering roofing supplies, which the potential customer will make a note of, and take a look at the business websites to find more information. At the same time, this customer may also update his Facebook status with something like: ‘Can anyone recommend a good roofing supply company in Cape Town?’, and may also put this question on Twitter. He may also check out review sites to see if anyone has written anything about the companies he has found online. The reason for this is that we all like to get personal recommendations, and are much more likely to try a company that a friend or acquaintance has suggested rather than try our luck with a relative unknown company. Social media marketing relies on this ‘personal recommendation’ factor to make it easier for potential customers to learn more about your product from the people they know.

How does SEO work with social media?

If you aim for a holistic online marketing strategy that includes plenty of social marketing such as blog posts, Facebook page updates, helpful Twitter resources, YouTube videos and other content that users will want to view and share, then your job is already halfway done – you will be getting plenty of backlinks, exposure and recognition, not to mention traffic. Combine this with all your SEO strategies such as on-site work, link building and keyword rich website content, and you have a winning strategy that targets both channels effectively.

If you do not put any SEO elements into your online marketing strategies, you will not be able to bolster the exposure that you get through your social marketing campaigns however, so do not make the mistake of thinking that social media can replace SEO. The same goes for strategies that rely solely on SEO marketing – without the added benefits of social media, which draw millions of web users to content found all over the web, you will not be able to enjoy the rewards that these channels offer, such as brand recognition, online visibility, recommendations, traffic and user-based information sharing.

Include social media marketing along with your SEO campaigns however, and you have a win-win formula that will help get you the results that you want online.

When it comes to SEO strategies, many companies worry that SEO is an expense that they do not need, and often wonder why these services are expensive. Ironically, in the grand scheme of marketing, SEO is actually one of the most affordable solutions, and many companies have always been willing to spend thousands on their advertising or Public Relations campaigns. The online marketing medium is still a marketing field that many companies do not fully understand however, and this lack of understanding about exactly what it is that SEO entails is a factor that causes many companies to avoid investing in SEO services. At the end of the day however, the true value of SEO makes it one of the most worthwhile investments you could ever make for your company, and the costs involved are more than justified when you consider what you get for your budget.

Some of the core aspects of a typical SEO strategy include the following:

• Complete analysis of the Website (structure, architecture, meta data, internal linking, traffic, and so on)

• Analysis of the Content Management System (where applicable)

• Analysis of the industry’s competitive landscape

• Keyword research and on-page Optimisation

• Content strategies and link building campaigns

• Detailed Analysis and on-going Optimisation

• Conversion Analysis and Optimisation

• Analytics Analysis and Reporting

The level of skill, experience and training that is required by SEO professionals to be able to perform these tasks needs to be advanced enough to bring in results. Some SEO agencies or link building services may have ‘cheap’ offers that might seem more reasonable than the rates that established agencies charge, but in almost all of those cases, the quality of service is usual equal to the amount that you pay. Reputable agencies with a solid reputation and a good client base on the other hand, have the skills and abilities required to get your website onto the top of Search Engines – you may have to pay for these results, but you can be sure that you are getting the best possible SEO strategies. This means that you will ultimately get the best results too.

Another worry that many companies have is how to know whether an agency is reputable or if their hard-earned money will simply be wasted on a fly by night agency. There are many agencies to be found all over the web, but not all of them will be able to ensure results through tried and tested strategy and best practices. (Please note: If an agency guarantees results, run as fast as you can). The trick is to see how well their own website ranks on Google, and to also take a look at their client list, testimonials and services. Don’t be shy to call them up and ask them questions either – a good company will be happy to discuss ways that they can help you get the results you are after, and will also explain exactly how your money will be spent to get these results. Once you start understanding the process a bit better, you will soon realise that SEO strategies are actually not expensive in the grand scheme of things, and in reality, the investment is one that you will allow you to reap rewards for years to come.

If you are a small business owner, then Search Engine Optimisation for Google Local Listings is a great way to get exposure for your business by harnessing the power of Google. When you consider the huge number of businesses that can be found on the web today, it makes a lot of sense to make the most of the large number of local searches that are done by customers searching for your business online. Setting up Local Listings is also much easier than you may have thought, and with the ROI that you will get once things are set up, you should also see an increase in your overall web presence.

Here are 10 quick tips for setting up Local Listings on Google for better SEO results:

• Set up your profile – to get started, visit Google Places and create a profile. You will need to verify your address to ensure that you are the owner, but otherwise it’s a fairly simple process.

• Add images – remember to optimise your images for SEO by naming them properly. That means keyword rich titles that include your business name too. Use original images of your offices and resist the urge to add any old stock image that is not actually of your business.

• Add a local telephone number – this will be shown alongside your address, image and company name so make sure that you use the right dialing code to allow visitors to call you quickly and easily without having to access your website to hunt for the correct number.

• Add your physical address – this should be the same address that is on your website, with area codes and city to ensure that all information is 100% correct. This will also allow visitors to find your office on Google Maps – another reason to include every detail correctly.

• Remember those crucial keywords – for any Search Engine Optimisation strategy to work, you will need to use relevant, high ranking keywords that are specific to your business. There is little point in using ‘celeb style’ solely due to its high ranking if your business is selling affordable cleaning products.

• Get clever with your SEO linking strategies – a good tip is to use your Contact Us or About Us page effectively to link up to your Google Local Listing. That means including all the information, keywords and area information that you have on your listing, and linking this page to your profile. Remember to include the local business category on this page somewhere.

• Remember that multiple locations need multiple landing pages – if you have offices in a few different cities, you will need to create unique, targeted pages for each city. You will also need to create a unique Local Listing for each location to allow customers to find the office in their city easily.

• Don’t be shy to ask for reviews – this is one of the best ways to generate publicity for your business and encourage customer feedback. Even if you get some not-so-great reviews, this is still better than having a suspiciously glowing series of reviews or none at all. Customers like to know everything they can about a place before they check it out, so all feedback is good feedback in this case.

• Build links to your local listings page. As with any other web page, the search engines take the number, location and relevance of links or citations to your site into consideration when ranking your page.

• Treat your customers like gold. Everything that is said about the service or product that you deliver can add to your online presence and brand. Even offline interaction and opinions can find their way online as reviews.

With a bit of time, you will be able to set up a useful resource in the form of Google Local Listings that will add value to customers while also boosting your Search Engine Optimisation efforts.

One of the best SEO tips is something so many fail to consider, using the power of video platforms such as YouTube to boost your rankings and gain exposure. There is no doubt that YouTube has become one of the world’s top social media channels, but in its own sense, this video sharing giant also acts very much like a Search Engine, allowing you to optimise every video that you post to help increase your keyword rankings. In fact, YouTube is the 2nd largest Search Engine after the mighty Google!

The way it works is simple – if you get clever and title your videos with strong keywords, you will not only find that your videos get a higher position in the YouTube search results, but these videos will also even show up on Google in the main search results once your video begins to get more hits.

There are 3 crucial steps in the SEO video optimisation process to help you get to this point:

1. Text in your titles and descriptions
2. Number of views and recent trending
3. Ratings

These factors are determined by the YouTube algorithm, and will ultimately affect how well your video does in the SERPs. By utilising a few clever tricks, you will be able to boost your video content rating and ensure that your video makes it into the main search results on Google.

Points to consider when creating and marketing your videos on YouTube include the following:

• Title Tags – always keep titles within 99 characters or less, and use your primary keyword to ensure that you get that traffic. Adding descriptive text is also important, such as ‘Lilu the Pink Poodle takes a bath’.

• Description – make this relevant, and write everything you need to add, from company info to a story about your video. Be sure to add keywords to this too, both primary and long-tail, and don’t be shy to ask people to rank and favourite your video.

• Tags – remember that tags are essential keywords. Keep yours relevant (and targeted!) and add company names, employee names and other branding.

• Privacy – always ensure that you set your videos onto public so that they can be searched easily by all viewers.

• Comments – enabling comments is a good way to boost discussion about your video, so this should be enabled.

• Embedding – always allow your videos to be embedded, to allow users to share on blogs easily.

• Video Responses – these are a great way to have your video linked to other videos, increasing exposure.

• Ranking – rank your own video, and send out to all your friends, family and contacts to get them to rank it too (as long as you don’t spam them when doing so!).

• Sharing – post all videos to your Facebook and Twitter pages, and also share on your website. Distribute links in press releases and other updates, and even look at using Google AdWords to promote your video content.

The best thing about video is that it allows you to reach even more potential customers, especially if you aim to deliver relevant, interesting videos that viewsers are all too happy to share and talk about. Get this right, and all you will need to do is fine tune your strategy for video search optimisation to start seeing some results.

Discussions around duplicate content and the effect it may or may not have on your site’s rankings in Google and other search engines have been around for ages. It is widely agreed that any form of duplication either within your site or elsewhere on the web is a bad idea and can be the cause of sites not performing in the ranking department, content not being indexed or even removal from the search engine indexes.

Many times duplication takes place purely by accident and without any intention or malice, but even this can adversely affect your site’s performance.

Before we can look at how to find potential duplicate content issues, we need to clearly define what is seen as duplicate content and what is not.

What is Duplicate Content?

Google states that duplicate content refers to substantial blocks of content within or across domains that either exactly match other content or are appreciably similar.

Other forms of duplicate content include:

• Affiliate Marketing – another form of duplication takes place in some affiliate marketing schemes where all affiliates are provided with set information to place on their websites across the board. Google doesn’t have a problem with affiliate marketing, but sure doesn’t like it when the information displayed by the affiliates is exactly the same across all sites.
• Content snippets – this entails a small chunk of content that is used on a page that is duplicated elsewhere. If snippets are used within a substantial amount of original content the search engines won’t have a problem.

So what is classified as Original Content?

This is content that is written by humans and that is completely different from any other combination of words and characters and that is clearly not edited or manipulated by automated spinning or text processing software.

How does Google handle Duplicate Content?

If you have non unintentional duplication on your site, Google will make a choice between which one of the duplicated pages to index. Any duplicate pages will not be indexed.

Let’s have a look at a great graphical representation of Google’s handling of duplicate content from SEOMoz.org.

Duplicate content my also lead to a penalty from Google and this would mean that the site using duplicate content to affect rankings through manipulation may be removed from the search engine index entirely.

How do I know if I have inadvertently created duplicates of my pages or site?

There are a number of things that will have to be checked manually unless you would like to wait for Google to devalue your site and for rankings to start dropping or even to be slapped with a nasty penalty.

• Old and outdated files on your server – Websites go through changes including redesigns or restructuring of the information architecture of the site. If the new site is perfect and doesn’t contain any links to one of the old pages on the server, you should be fine, but why take the risk.

• Site.com or www.site .com, you need to choose - Redirect the non-www version of the site to the base URL at www.site.com or vice versa. If both exist it is seen as a duplication of your entire site. Google will be able to figure out which is your preferred version eventually by seeing which version contains the most inbound links or which preference is set in your Google Webmaster Tools account, but that takes time and could adversely influence your site.

• Use absolute links – Absolute links are links that use a completely formatted URL such as, http://www.site.com/products/coolest-thing-ever.html instead of a relative link that is used on internal site links like this, products/coolest-thing-ever.html. This becomes a problem when users come to your site through the non www version of your site (site.com) and then allows the web spiders to crawl the entire duplicated non www version of your site.

• Use canonical tags – The canonical tag can most effectively be used on ecommerce websites where one product or page is duplicated across multiple categories for example.

You can add the canonical tag to the duplicated version of the page like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.site.com/correct-page.html” />

This tag will tell the search engines that the page where this tag is placed should not be seen as a duplicate page, but should consider the URL placed in the tag as the main page that should receive the credit.

• 301 Redirect /index.html – Make sure that you redirect www.site.com/index.html (php, htm, asp, etc) to the base URL at www.site.com.

Go on a fix those duplicate content issues on your site and don’t try to manipulate the search engines with duplicate content, it’s not worth the pain.

If you have any more examples of duplicate content and how to make sure the issue doesn’t creep into your site, please add your comments.

In my previous post I reported on the fact that Google and Bing made it official that Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook influence SEO and Search Engine Rankings.

Today Matt Cutts addressed this fact in a video:

Some of the key points mentioned are:

1. Twitter and  Facebook links are used in ranking as links
2. Additional Google tries to find the reputation of the author or creator
3. Google previously stated that reputation wasn’t used as a ranking factor but now does use it as a signal
4. Up to now it has been used by Real Time Search
5. Broadening and testing this functionality to other forms of search (organic rankings for example)
6. Only public profiles that are crawlable will be used
7. It is not a very important signal right now but may change
8. Getting more followers in a spammy way just for the sake of getting the numbers won’t work
9. The reputation, industry and relevance of your followers and who you follow are taken into account

Having a great business website is not enough in the realm of Online Business. “Build it and they will come” is not an effective point of view or strategy when it comes to building your online empire. There is much to be done to get the best results from your business online.

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is divided into 3 major elements namely, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay per Click) or paid advertising and Social Media marketing.

Using these elements, either individually or in conjunction with one another, is crucial – especially for new businesses or existing businesses looking to expand into the online world.

As a new website, or a website that has not implemented any online marketing strategies, your products, services or solutions will not rank for any of the valuable industry keywords that your potential customers are searching for in the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc). This of course means that traffic to your site will be low and that ultimately you will achieve less conversions, sales and revenues without a proper online marketing strategy for your business.

PPC Advertising

Many consider PPC to be the easier strategy of the two. This may be true from an implementation point of view, but there is a lot to know in order to run an effective PPC campaign. Considerable research would need to be done, but with a little insight and savvy you will be able to find all the tools and knowledge you need from Google’s Adwords support system.

PPC is very effective in quickly attracting targeted traffic, depending on your budget.

Advantages of PPC

* Your PPC campaign can be up and running in minutes.

* No modifications to your website are necessary.

* You pay only when users click your ads.

* You can choose exactly how much you spend on the campaign.

* You control who sees your ads by use of keyword targeting.

* You can choose the language and geographic target that your ads are displayed in.

* Your campaign can be effectively tracked and monitored for optimum results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO as a whole consists of a myriad of elements that will be used to analyse your business and business needs, create a strategy, and to implement and Optimize that strategy to maximize results.

The following Questions are the Answers to your perfect strategy:

1. What does your target market want? And where are they from? (Keyword research and Geo Targeting)

2. Who are your competitors, and what will it take to beat them? (Competitor Analysis)

3. Does your website facilitate competing with these competitors? (Web layout and structure)

4. What are the most suitable online strategies for your business?

5. How long will it take to implement the strategies, and what results are achievable?

6. How can we improve your strategy to improve your performance?

Improved SEO rankings take time. Although you may see improvements in both rankings and traffic within 3 months it generally takes between 3 and 6 months to see a noticeable increase in performance.

The reason for this delay is that Google and other search engines have to crawl millions of sites daily and this takes a little bit of time. Google has large scale updates where the number and quality of inbound links toward your site, as well as the quality of resources and information that appears on your site, is ‘weighed and measured’ and then will add or subtract from your online authority and credibility – this determines whether or not your rankings improve.

Social Media Marketing

Another online marketing strategy is Web2.0 and Social media. Social bookmarking, blogging and networking can facilitate an influx of traffic and links from other sites that will add to your online reputation and credibility. But we delve deeper into social media and viral marketing at a later stage.

So as you can see, there are quite a few things to consider when starting your Online Marketing campaign. To get the results you are after you will either have to learn the ins and outs of online marketing and the online world, or you’ll have to find the right people who know the right stuff about what your business requires.