Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

As Father Time marches forward…  here’s a summary of the key developments across the SEO Industry in 2011.

Google started the year dominating search, and no surprise, Google still dominates search now; although Bing was able to capture modest market share gains.  According to comScore, there were 17.8 billion searches in November 2011, of which 11.7 billion were run on Google, and Yahoo! + Bing accounted for 5.4 billion collectively. Continue reading →

At RankPay, we spend a lot of time reviewing trends and tracking how SEO activities influence and sustain prominent rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo! on behalf of our customers.  However, we also spend dedicated time each day understanding how to optimize our own site. Continue reading →

Google is increasingly including relevant videos prominently within the natural results.

Recent research has proven that ranking a video is often more likely to gain ranking increases as consumers have come to trust, engage and expect that quick videos can be very helpful.  That said, you will quickly see that video optimization relies heavily on judicious use of the right keywords – this cannot be emphasized heavily enough, so make sure you have done your keyword research properly.

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Matt Cutts at Google announced a change in the search engine giant’s algorithm which will target sites with low levels of original content. The upshot is that sites which have created original content will be more likely to gain search exposure for that content than someone else who has copied it. This ties in neatly with previous posts on the need to ensure you have quality content and while copying someone else’s great looking articles and blog posts is quick and easy, it is also called “cheating” and search engines hate will hate you for it. Continue reading →

Setting up a website is the same as hiring a bill board.  If you have a bill board in a high traffic area, you can expect better results than a low traffic site.  With a website, when you first launch it, your site is located in the equivalent of the desert; what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) does is drive traffic and consumers to your site.

This is why you cannot embark on an online strategy without implementing effective SEO first.

Here are 5 genuine reasons why SEO is vital to your business:

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Microsoft’s Bing has effectively taken over Yahoo!’s search engine business.  The deal sees almost all of Yahoo! worldwide users being able to continue using the familiar interface, but with the actual results powered by the Bing search engine.  The deal was covered in one of our August posts on the Bing-Yahoo!-Google search engine love triangle.

Initial indicators coming out of the business data and bean counting analysts is that the deal is delivering positive results, for both paid and unpaid search results.  In particular, the results demonstrate that Bing is a more effective platform for delivering advertisements on the Yahoo! search engine; if you’re a marketer, this is the news you want to hear.   This is crucial if the combined search engine is to start gaining any traction and win market share from Google, which dominates the search market, but there is going to be an uphill struggle before the partnership is anywhere near out of the woods. Continue reading →

Google owns the search engine world and Bill Gates is not happy about that, so Microsoft has been positioning itself to challenge the upstart rival on several fronts. The two are direct competitors for several cloud computing and SaaS solutions (Software as a Service) amongst others, but it is the bitter, to-the-death fight over the search engine market which is attracting mainstream attention.

Microsoft’s Bing is now providing the engine power for Yahoo! search users in Canada and the United States.

We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what is going on. When this century is out, the Microsoft/Google business showdown is going to be analyzed and used as a business case study in how to gut a competitor.

Google commands a 65.8% share of the US search market, Yahoo! takes 17.1% and Microsoft’s Bing has a lowly 11% (according to Comscore’s July 2010 data). Continue reading →

We recently wrote on the Bing/Yahoo! merger deal which is Microsoft’s direct challenge to Google’s search engine and online advertising dominance.  Just as that deal moves forward and North American Yahoo! users are now having Bing power their search results, a newcomer arrives, complete with Venture Capital funding.

So who is daft enough to take on Google and Microsoft at their own game? Continue reading →

Ten years ago a leading bank took me in as a customer and gave me a stack of marketing literature and business guides and one immediately caught my eye – it baldy advised me NOT to waste my time and money on engaging SEO experts to get my website ranked more highly because my website (if I had one) would rise to the top “naturally” as long as I had a good site offering what visitors wanted.
Today, whoever wrote that drivel would either be (a) fired, or (b) given a bonus from the bank bail-out monies. Continue reading →

Optimizing a web site for SEO purposes means a variety of things to different people; it can mean optimizing your content for keywords and relevancy, optimizing presentation, navigation, usability and a host of other factors.
One factor which many non-web savvy operators overlook is the actual web coding itself.

Web coding is not really computer programming: what is happening is web code is it being used to arrange the representation of a web page. Think of a shop window full of products, the window dresser does not make the actual products on display but they do arrange the display itself and the elements which are used to enhance the product placement. In a nutshell, this is what web coders and programmers are doing – arranging your web display for use in an internet browser, such as Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox. Continue reading →