Sphinn Stories shows up faster in Google SERP

Sphinn Stories shows up faster in Google SERP

Did you all notice any difference in the Sphinn Post and stories, Google indexes and shows the most recent stories in Search Results? Something similar to Digg. What does this mean to SEO’s and SEM’s ?

Start posting some interesting posts and Industry related stories to rank within a short period of time.

Try search using a few words from the Title of the story you submitted lately and you will end up seeing the post ranking for those terms. Did any one notice this? Share your thoughts and stories here and in Sphinn.

Here is one of the story I submitted :

http://sphinn.com/story/26363 and when searched in Google for the key phrase:
"Paying search engine may not be worth"

Here is the results http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4ADBF_enUS221US221&q=paying+search+engine+may+not+be+worth

Social search is the future - Google’s Marissa Mayer

Social search is the future
Google’s Marissa Mayer says she considers social search to be an essential part of the leading search engine in coming years.

VentureBeat’s Q&A with Marissa can be found here:

Have you Considered these while optimizing for your Local listings

Consider this while optimizing for your Local listings

We all know how powerful and ROI a successful SEO in Local Optimization Campaign can yield. And with this Iphone, Google Earth, Mobile version, GPS-like location finder with Google Maps can be good news to local business owners.

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1175, in 2006, Stats for accessing the internet from a Wireless Phone for Local Search was 24 %.

According to the study, some 61% of local online searchers went on to make a purchase from a local business--but the majority of them (40%) visited the brick-and-mortar stores or picked up the phone.

Did you know that some people search the local using the Airport Codes? Which makes sense for those in that industry and who are traveling? It is easy for them to remember the Airport Code then to search the City

Imagine you are traveling and you have your cell phone in a hand, what would be an easy way to find something in your final destination or anywhere for that matter. Let’s say, while you travel you crave for Italian food and on your way to your Hotel, you like to stop by in an Italian place. What would you do? Pick up your phone, do a search for Italian restaurant with User reviews closest from your present location. You pull out the phone with the GPS like locater and search near by and end up in a good Italian Restaurant near you.

How can an Italian restaurant get listed and pop up when you search for it?

Well with some basic listings, any local businesses can be listed by following the simple step by step process. In one of my SEO post, I have mentioned, How to get listed in Local. But there is a lot you can do to enhance and get listed. What can you do?

1. In the Name field, think of using keywords and followed by the Business Name
2. You can use that additional address field to be creative with your keywords
3. Have you thought of inserting Address in the Contact us Page and other appropriate web pages?
4. How about using your phone number as a Title with keywords in pages like Contact us form page etc.
5. Use your ZIP Code both in Local listings and also in the website in any related page, why? Remember most of the time, we tend to search online using the zip code and it’s easy to type the zip code than typing the city, state in a cell phone. Using Zip code in the Title tag can be useful and not only in Mobile, even in the Search engine Page results your site will have advantage of other sites.
6. Airport Codes. Do you know who will search using Airport codes? People who are in the Airline Industry tend to use Airport Code, wherever possible to find information. Now, How about you adding your nearest Airport codes in your web page Titles and in the Local listings. Imagine how a Travel industry can make the best use of it
7. Keeping up to date information in your local listings in vital and local listings makes it easier to fix any incorrect information. Now- a- days you can instantly update your listings, Take Full advantage of it. For example, the new Fix the correct location feature in Google Map is not only helpful for you, it is also helpful for anyone who is searching
8. Ask your Customers to give a honest review of your business, that will not only help in the rankings also it will help the users to trust you
9. You can add up to ten images in the local listings. Think what images will be effective. If your location is difficult to find. Take a picture of the well know landmark or the complex and with some simple editing you can point your store location. If you are a Dentist, How about adding some before and after pictures. If you are a printer, have some samples or portfolio pictures. Find out what picture will give a location, clear description and use to those who search.
10. If you are listing your restaurant in the local listing, How about a link with Menu. You can create custom attributes, create your own link and link to an online version of your MENU. So those who search your location, can also get a feeling of what kind of food they are going to order when they arrive. Both you and them save time.
11. With Custom attributes, be creative, you can create anything you want, so why no list something unique than your competition.
12. Categories – Make use of categories in the category section. You can submit your business to multiple categories. Make use of those categories, if you don’t find the related category, you can suggest a category.
13. Operation hours are pretty handy for those who are searching, before they come to your store, they want to make sure that your store in open during their visit. So list the exact hours of operation. You can even mention that upon request you can open and also create 2 set of hours for a single day
14. Coupons- Make use of the coupons, It free and easy to create coupons, It provides you additional value to the customers
15. The easiest way to verify is thru the phone, but you can also verify thru mail which might take a couple weeks and for some businesses, you can verify via SMS.
    
    So what experience you had both Online and Offline Business Listing, Share your thought here. Feel Free to leave a comment or ask any questions regarding listing your Business in Local Listings. For more tips on Local Listings for Small Businesses, Sarasota. Subscribe to SEO Sarasota Blog and stay Tuned. Thank you for your visit. Hope you enjoyed and learned something and looking forward for your next visit. Cheers
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

Google adds YouTube-style Embeddable Maps

Google adds YouTube-style Embeddable Maps
Today Google announced a new feature on Google Maps that allows you to add maps to your blog or website just by copying and pasting a snippet of HTML. And once you embed the map, it has all the same functionality of the Google Maps you know and love; it's clickable, draggable, and zoomable.

Click here to read the post

I created one as an example here:


View Larger Map

Google Universal Search and Health care Search results

Google Universal Search and Health care Search results

One of most important and useful topic for searchers is Health and health information related topics. One of the important topic Google focuses in on Health and to provide and educate patients with much more detailed information on their health and related documents. Even now using Google Co-op there are hundreds of health related pages under Google Co-op which has been labeled under health, one of the best part about the Google Co-op or the Custom Search Engines are that you can narrow down the SEPR to specific pages and sites, which helps visitors to get right to the target.

Google Blog has got an excellent post titled Health care Information Matters where you will see how you can trust matters and when a contributor to the specific subject affects the search results.

Google is already organizing and making it easy to access medical related information. With this Universal Search Google will be soon coming up with lots of Health related search results. It will be interesting to see how Google organizes and gives us relevant and useful information thru their Search engine Page Results.


Focused Crawl or Topic specific documents that are most relevant to the searchers, these can be achieved by showing documents that describes the intellectual structure of a particular field on interest, thus providing more value and meaning. Focused crawling on domain specific documents will be the next thing for search engines, Universal search in place by organizing all the information in one place. Now the Quality of information in the page results is important for searches like Health or other scientific or specific topics.

Now everything being online, we all rely on search engines to give results more accurate and relevant, we are used to the search engines now, We expect a lot than we used to expect from the search engines a few years ago. For people who are searching for Health related topics, the results might be very important or life saving. Now lets say for example we wanted to find more information on a particular health related issue, we can either go to some specific Health related website or sites like Wiki and other places.

But we go to Google, why? Because we can get relevant results and also we have more options of knowing more about that subject and more links to related subject, that’s where the success is. If we search in Google, we not only get the results but links to buy that product, Reviews, Maps, Video of the product, Benefits of the products, Articles about that product and a wide variety of materials related to one single search.

A focused crawler might obtain and index much lower quantity of documents, but will yield higher quality Results, that’s what we all want, form the search engines. With Google Universal Search and iGoogle these types of results are very beneficial.

Thank you Google for Organizing and making it easily available for Users like me and all others.




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Matt Cutts at SMX Seattle

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Optimize your Power Point Presentation, Audio Pod cast for Universal Search

Optimize your Power Point Presentation, Audio Pod cast for Universal Search

Is your website Universal Search friendly?

My guess is soon Universal Search will have a feature to play your power point presentations as slide shows within the search results. Today is May 29, 2007. Let me see how soon Google will come up with this new feature of implementing Slide Shows within the universal Search Results.

Universal Search
Google’ Universal Search is getting into our systems already. We are used to it now with all these Search results from Images, news, Videos, Blog search, Book search, Google Base, Code Search, Catalogs, Recipes Search, Finance, Local, Maps, product search, Directory and a various medium and making them all into one, which is pretty logical and make sense to visitors who come to find answers.

As I mentioned earlier in my post about Universal Search Optimization, (Universal SEO)now SEO’s and Search Engine Marketers will have to work more and optimize more than just websites. Now they have to work on to optimize their website, on top of that, they have to optimize the Images with Alt Tags, Keywords and phrases, Videos with more tagging, ID3’s, More specific in describing, by giving a great Title, By Submitting the video to the right category with rich content, By linking back and forth to their blogs or websites.

Even thou optimizing your website for Universal Search is time consuming and takes a lot of communication and interaction within the team, it pays off for your work, which means now SEO’s need to interact with almost everyone to make the content Universal Search Friendly. Before SEO’s can just talk to the designers, programmers or webmaster, now SEO’s need to interact with all of the team, WOW, I love it. A little extra work will pay off with more Search Engine page Results, If you are a smart SEO, you can get the top five slots in the SEPR for your Site. Pretty Cool

Why should you optimize your Power Point Presentation and Pod casts?
Not too far away is the Google Power Point Presentation (Slide Shows). Even now with Google’s Gmail, you can view Power Point Presentation within the attachments. My guess is soon Universal Search will have a feature to play your power point presentations as slide shows within the search results. Today is May 29, 2007. Let me see how soon Google will come up with this new feature of implementing Slide Shows within the universal Search Results. If they come out with this feature, another opportunity for the SEO’s to optimize your Power Point Presentation. As a SEO we should think ahead and stay on top of Optimization.

How about your Pod casts? Optimize your Podcast, MP3 Files and Audio
Again this is my guess, with Videos playing within the search results. It won’t take much for Google to play Audio within the search results. Do you have a pod cast? Optimize your Pod cast, MP3 files with proper ID3’s, Title, and Description in proper category and tagging. I see another opportunity for SEO’s to gain a slot in the SERP. With all these tools out there you can easily create and optimize your Audio files.

What are your thoughts on it? Feel free to comment here on the blog.

Audio/Video SEO. Search Engine Optimization

Audio/Video SEO. Search Engine Optimization for Universal Search Results

Since Universal Search will be huge in the near future. You will see a lot of changes in the Search results. All in one Search results. Well before SEO's used to optimize a Website to come up in the Search engine Page results. What about now? Now not only websites shows up in the Search results. Now in Google you will see results from Web pages, Audio, Video, News, Blogs, Images. The more results show up in the results, the possibilities of your web page to show up in the top results are dimnishing. Why? Because of the other related content like Video, Audio, Blogs, Articles, How to's, Wiki entry, News, Images a combination of all show up.

So how do you Optimize your Content?

Make use of these free Softwares, Social Media, Audio Podcasts, Video Podcasts, RSS feeds, Blogs, Articles,Wiki, Meta Tags for Audio and Video. In this post lets see how we can optimize your Video, Audio for Universal Search Results.

How to Optimize your Audio or Video?

Audio/Video also relates to Podasts. Video or Audio Podcast. Now Voice recognition can recognize what you speak in your Podcast or Video. There are search engines where it can give results from the words or language you speak and return the results. How can you optimize our audio/video? If you are having or producing a Audio podcast, While editing, Same simple SEO works here too.

1. Give a Good Title, Description to your audio/Video.
2. Meta Tags are important for Video/Audio
3. The use of Meta Tags are like the SERP for Video/Audio Player. Have you noticed when you download a Podcast or MP3 in your Player, You see the Artist, Name of the song etc. Thats how your Video/Podcast look like in their players, So have an Author, Date, Name , Genre, Category. Everything possibly you can add while editing
4. ID3 Tags are tags that used to Optimize the File either Audio/Video. Audaticy or any other programs have the ability to edit your ID3 tags. It is very helpful for both Search engines and Visitors
5. Have Keywords within the text copy of the post
6. Bold/Italic the keywords
7. Anchor link your keywords
8. Tag your video/Audio. Tagging to let visitors and search engines know what this Video/Audio is about
9. RSS feed your Video/Audio. You can get free RSS feed for your Audio/Video
10. Geo Target your Feeds
11. Give the right Category for your Video, If you having a Cooking Show have it in Food and Drink category. This helps everyone to easily narrow down the category
12. Promote your Video/Audio thru Social Networking sites.
13. Send Invites to friends, Invite friends to join you in your network
14. Ping your Video/Audio thru Technorati
15. Embed your video/Audio in your blog
16. Have your friends rate your Rankings, ask them to give honest reviews
17. Submit your video/Audio to all the directories and search engines
18. Viral Marketing helps,If your content is good, it can be easily send to hundreds of Visitors thru Viral Marketing
19. Ask your friends to post your video or link in their blog to your Video/Audio
20. Talk about it to your firnes, Family

Video Optimization - Next Big thing for SEO

The Google Universal Search keeps all the SEO and other Online marketers to be busy than normal. It is pretty exciting to see how SEO's will start to work on Video Optimization,Image Optimization and Universal Search optimization.
For some of the clients we can create meaningful content in Video. What about your own site?
Creative Video Tutorials, Video Podcasts and other Media optimization will help. Hang on we will update, give some tips on How to Optimize for Video Search Optimization.

Optimize for Google Universal Search Feature

Optimize for Google Universal Search Feature
As more and more updates are coming up and also look at the post which Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land Posted about June being the June To Be "Month of Search Engines Bugs" on top of all of these changes, updates, How are we as a Search Marketer going to keep up with things in SEO.
Yes, it is tough, but with a little extra efffort by Optimizing our content, Images,Videos,RSS feeds,Blogs and giving an overall Optimization to the sites, News and all possible ways could help us to be on top of all things happening.
It might be challenging but interesting to watch.
Lets see how we can Optimize for Google Universal Search.

Universal Search Optimization Sarasota

Yep. That's right. Universal Search has come. How about we optimize our site, content, Rich media, Podcast, Images, Videos for the Universal Search? are we ready for Universal Search Optimization?
What do we have to do? Now it is more and more research and more opportunity for SEO's. It will be more challenging and interesting.
Better SEO’s will be busier than ever and will have to learn more and more sources.
It will wonderful to watch