Category: Tips

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Add a Star or +1 on Your Google Searches to Share What You Like

Google has made some pretty cool updates on their search engine recently namely the +1 and the star option. These new enhancements to personalized your search results allow you to highlight what you like and then share the information with others in your social network.

As for stars, you don’t have to keep track of the things you star, Google does. In fact when you star something Google synchs it with your Google Bookmarks and Google Toolbar. Once you star something, the item will appear at the top of your search window allowing you to find the information you want to revisit quickly.

Google says: “With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant,”

Pretty cool! With stars you are actually ordering your search results the way you want! I am seeing stars now on my Google.com search pages already. Another thing Google rolled out recently was the +1. Now this enhancement I have not seen yet, but it looks powerful. The +1 is kind of like stars on steroids. Here, your social network will be able to see what you have +1’ed. Websites will even be able to add +1 buttons almost like Facebook Like buttons.

What I find interesting about both new enhancements is that Google will be using this aggregate information to move search results higher on the Google.com organic placement page. Based on that information, you’ll want to keep an eye on stars and +1 activity as this new technology matures and becomes more widely used on the Web.

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Brace Yourself How You Get Organic Search Placement Has Changed

That’s right how you get organic search placement has changed, not a little bit but a huge amount. I consider the change in how to get organic placement so significant that traditional search engine optimization is a thing of the past.

Remember when if we wanted to book a vacation, or for that matter buy an airline ticket, we had to go to a travel agent? Now, we go online to Orbitz, Expedia, or directly to the airline site and serve ourselves. Travel agents, to stay afloat, have had to specialize their services; becoming trip advisors or travel counselors. The world of SEO (search engine optimization) is changing in many of the same ways, which will be impacting the viability of their ability to remain vital in the world of today.

I am not saying that we will be self serving SEO, but rather that what the search engines consider important has changed so dramatically in this last year alone, that code optimization, black hat or even gray hat link building strategies, and massive link building programs that try to approach site webmasters for reciprocal linking are no longer workable strategies to achieve organic improvement. SEO firms will need to change dramatically to find the niche markets that do work in this “brave new world”.

As an SEO code optimization firm, we have dramatically changed our services to respond to this huge market change. We no longer offer search engine optimization services as we have previously. We’ve even removed those pages from our website. Does that mean that we can’t help clients who need to improve their organic search positions – no, it just means we must go about it different ways.

For our firm this has meant the introduction and reallocation of assets into different and new service areas. When you visit our website you will see services for Google Places, Twitter services, Facebook Business page management, four levels of blog writing, and article writing. We have focused on services that will create a great reader experience and will build authoritative information rich website and blogsite content. After all my firm is just like our blog is named, we are The Web Authority.

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Google Update Their Algorithm to Benefit Information Rich Sites

Google just did a massive update on their search algorithm which impacted what sites get pushed to the topic of organic results this past week. The bottom line is that the change will benefit information rich sites but hurt those without original content.

This is what Google said exactly: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

For our own site and those of our customers, this is very good news. When you build content that is more than just focused on your own business and services you enrich your own readers’ experience and now improve your own chances of placing higher organically on Google.

Of particular note is the comment “with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.” This is good news for clients that we have worked with to create in-depth articles and mini white papers which we have then in turn additionally used as link bait articles and have archived back on their website as HTML pages and PDF files.

This is also be good news for blogging clients where blogs are informative and information dense content but only if the blog resides on the same website server as the website files and is found in a directory in the root of the parent website.