SRPI

Google has rolled out a new change to their results pages. This noticeable change is that of brand links for certain search queries.

For example, if you are searching for “baseballs”, you might get links for Rawlings, MacGregor, Ussa, Easton, NFHS, and so forth. (See image below) If you do a search for snowboards (by the way… it’s April 30 and snowing here in Utah) you might get links for Burton, K2, Ride, Forum, and GNU.

I have now seen this on a few occasions and each time the listings tend to appear near the top of the results, just below the ppc paid listings. These “brand links” are not links to the sites of the brands, however, they are links to SERPs for queries that incorporate those brands into them. For example, clicking on “Burton” will take me to a page targeting the search query “burton snowboards”.

What this means for ecommerce SEO is a more important focus on optimizing and getting ranked for big for brands. In high school, we used Rawlings and Usssa baseballs. Until I did this search query this morning, I forgot that we used the Usssa balls. If I was going to purchase some baseballs, I would probably click on one of the two brands. If you were a dealer of Rawlings baseballs, optimized for Rawlings baseballs, and showed up high in the SERPs, you might have just got my business.

It is unclear whether these results have been rolled out on a mass scale or if they are just part of a limited test. However, many of the searches I performed this morning had the brand results. Also, no one really knows how to get your brand listed in these suggestions. It is assumed that it is related to how frequent theses brands are searched for in relation to their respective items.

I’ll tell you this, when I do keyword research going forward, I will be paying close attention to the associated brands with particular search queries to see if there are any “favored” brands that I can optimize for.

See the original post:
New Change To The Google SERPs

Google has rolled out a new change to their results pages. This noticeable change is that of brand links for certain search queries.

For example, if you are searching for “baseballs”, you might get links for Rawlings, MacGregor, Ussa, Easton, NFHS, and so forth. (See image below) If you do a search for snowboards (by the way… it’s April 30 and snowing here in Utah) you might get links for Burton, K2, Ride, Forum, and GNU.

I have now seen this on a few occasions and each time the listings tend to appear near the top of the results, just below the ppc paid listings. These “brand links” are not links to the sites of the brands, however, they are links to SERPs for queries that incorporate those brands into them. For example, clicking on “Burton” will take me to a page targeting the search query “burton snowboards”.

What this means for ecommerce SEO is a more important focus on optimizing and getting ranked for big for brands. In high school, we used Rawlings and Usssa baseballs. Until I did this search query this morning, I forgot that we used the Usssa balls. If I was going to purchase some baseballs, I would probably click on one of the two brands. If you were a dealer of Rawlings baseballs, optimized for Rawlings baseballs, and showed up high in the SERPs, you might have just got my business.

It is unclear whether these results have been rolled out on a mass scale or if they are just part of a limited test. However, many of the searches I performed this morning had the brand results. Also, no one really knows how to get your brand listed in these suggestions. It is assumed that it is related to how frequent theses brands are searched for in relation to their respective items.

I’ll tell you this, when I do keyword research going forward, I will be paying close attention to the associated brands with particular search queries to see if there are any “favored” brands that I can optimize for.

Original post:
New Change To The Google SERPs

It is no secret that links are one of the largest keys to achieving a high ranking in the search engines. There is certainly a lot more involved in ranking well in the search engines than just getting links, but links are the largest single factor. There is a lot of debate about what the best links are, how to get links, what links are not worth the effort and much more. Knowing what to believe and what not to believe can be a bit overwhelming and very confusing. If you want to know for sure, you should test the different link aspects yourself and determine what aspects are the most important. However, that can take a lot of time. A quicker solution is to look at leading seo companies and experts for the best advice. Pay attention to who gets the most links from others in the industry as you study through seo blogs and forums.

There are several factors that influence the value of a link.

1- Is It Internal or External? – It is crucial that your internal link structure is done correctly, but external links are more valuable because they verify what you have already said the page was about by the anchor text you used to link to the different pages.

2- Follow or No Follow? – There is no question that a followed link is more valuable, but that does not mean that a no followed link is not valuable. Remember, not all links are for ranking, but for sales and traffic as well.  If a link will not help you in the rankings, but will bring in valuable traffic and possibly lead to a sale, then that link should also be obtained.

3- Quality or Quantity? – This may seem obvious to most, but its quality, right? Well, if that is the case, why do so many SEO experts look at the quantity of links that the competition has? Truth is it is a combination of both. A link is a link and anytime you can get a link to your site you should. How much effort should be expended to get a link will depend on the quality of the link. No one should be spending a lot of time getting low quality links, but many of them take next to no effort.

4- .edu’s & .gov’s or .com’s – This question comes back to quality aspect. Generally speaking, .edu and .gov links are considered higher quality. Anyone who has attempted to get a link on a domain with this extension knows why they are higher quality. They are tougher to get. Because they are much harder to get, the links are trusted more by search engines and human visitors.

5- Anchor Text – Any careful link campaign will utilize the right keywords for the anchor text and link it to the url it is mapped to from the keyword research. However, this is an area where a lot of Internet marketers can get sloppy and lazy. Take the time to make sure (and then double check) that you are using the right keywords and variations of those keywords to link to the appropriate pages. Using variations of the targeted keyword in the link campaign will help those links look a lot more natural to both the search engines and the human visitors.

6- Page Rank (Authority) - There is no question that a single link from a site with a higher page rank (no, we are not getting into the page rank is dead discussion in this post) will help more than a link from 100 sites with no page rank. However, again there is a balance. Balance is natural and all links should be sought after if the price in time to acquire the link is right.

7- Deep Links or Home Page – There are numerous places where you can put a link to your site where they only allow you to link to the home page, so link to the deep pages whenever you can. If linking to a deep page is an option in a particular link strategy, then you should do it – every time! Save the home page links for those areas where you are forced to do so.

8- Link Diversity – This is perhaps the largest area where link building campaigns go wrong. Too many people get stuck in one or two tactics to build links and they do not build out diversity. If you want some good rankings and you want them to stick, then you need to make sure that you are utilizing many different link building strategies and getting links coming from a lot of different sources.

In the long run the best link building strategy is exactly what Google would suggest. That is to build content, resources and tools, such as this large list of chrome extensions that people will want to naturally link to. This takes a lot more time and effort than most all other link building strategies, but in the end, these are some of the best links you can get. While doing this, you will also build credibility with your target audience; you will build your brand as an industry authority; you will receive more links from various blogs and websites; and people will share your blog post and tools with others in social networks.

View original post here:
The Best Link Strategy Starts With Mindset

It is no secret that links are one of the largest keys to achieving a high ranking in the search engines. There is certainly a lot more involved in ranking well in the search engines than just getting links, but links are the largest single factor. There is a lot of debate about what the best links are, how to get links, what links are not worth the effort and much more. Knowing what to believe and what not to believe can be a bit overwhelming and very confusing. If you want to know for sure, you should test the different link aspects yourself and determine what aspects are the most important. However, that can take a lot of time. A quicker solution is to look at leading seo companies and experts for the best advice. Pay attention to who gets the most links from others in the industry as you study through seo blogs and forums.

There are several factors that influence the value of a link.

1- Is It Internal or External? – It is crucial that your internal link structure is done correctly, but external links are more valuable because they verify what you have already said the page was about by the anchor text you used to link to the different pages.

2- Follow or No Follow? – There is no question that a followed link is more valuable, but that does not mean that a no followed link is not valuable. Remember, not all links are for ranking, but for sales and traffic as well.  If a link will not help you in the rankings, but will bring in valuable traffic and possibly lead to a sale, then that link should also be obtained.

3- Quality or Quantity? – This may seem obvious to most, but its quality, right? Well, if that is the case, why do so many SEO experts look at the quantity of links that the competition has? Truth is it is a combination of both. A link is a link and anytime you can get a link to your site you should. How much effort should be expended to get a link will depend on the quality of the link. No one should be spending a lot of time getting low quality links, but many of them take next to no effort.

4- .edu’s & .gov’s or .com’s – This question comes back to quality aspect. Generally speaking, .edu and .gov links are considered higher quality. Anyone who has attempted to get a link on a domain with this extension knows why they are higher quality. They are tougher to get. Because they are much harder to get, the links are trusted more by search engines and human visitors.

5- Anchor Text – Any careful link campaign will utilize the right keywords for the anchor text and link it to the url it is mapped to from the keyword research. However, this is an area where a lot of Internet marketers can get sloppy and lazy. Take the time to make sure (and then double check) that you are using the right keywords and variations of those keywords to link to the appropriate pages. Using variations of the targeted keyword in the link campaign will help those links look a lot more natural to both the search engines and the human visitors.

6- Page Rank (Authority) - There is no question that a single link from a site with a higher page rank (no, we are not getting into the page rank is dead discussion in this post) will help more than a link from 100 sites with no page rank. However, again there is a balance. Balance is natural and all links should be sought after if the price in time to acquire the link is right.

7- Deep Links or Home Page – There are numerous places where you can put a link to your site where they only allow you to link to the home page, so link to the deep pages whenever you can. If linking to a deep page is an option in a particular link strategy, then you should do it – every time! Save the home page links for those areas where you are forced to do so.

8- Link Diversity – This is perhaps the largest area where link building campaigns go wrong. Too many people get stuck in one or two tactics to build links and they do not build out diversity. If you want some good rankings and you want them to stick, then you need to make sure that you are utilizing many different link building strategies and getting links coming from a lot of different sources.

In the long run the best link building strategy is exactly what Google would suggest. That is to build content, resources and tools, such as this large list of chrome extensions that people will want to naturally link to. This takes a lot more time and effort than most all other link building strategies, but in the end, these are some of the best links you can get. While doing this, you will also build credibility with your target audience; you will build your brand as an industry authority; you will receive more links from various blogs and websites; and people will share your blog post and tools with others in social networks.

Original post:
The Best Link Strategy Starts With Mindset

Google announced today that they are making some pretty big changes to the Google Advertising Professionals program.

One of the biggest is a change in name. In early 2004, Google launched “Google Advertising Professionals Program.” As of today, it will be known by the “Google AdWords Certification Program.” This change will offer more training materials, more challenging certification exams, and other advanced exams that will test search, display, and reporting/analysis. It will also provide a certified individual or company a redesigned Certified Partner badge.

There are a handful of us at SEO.com who are currently certified. What this means for us — and others who want to be certified — is we now need to pass 2 exams. Companies that want to be certified need to have at least one person in their organization who is certified and have a minimum spend of $10,000 per quarter.

Another welcomed change is one that was previously known as the “AdWords Professional Search.” The AdWords Professional Search went live in December of last year without much notice. Google is now relaunching this service under the new name of “Google Partner Search.” Here you can search for Google AdWords Certified organizations to manage your PPC campaigns.

Lastly, Google has also changed the pricing for the AdWords API usage structure. The new preferred pricing section will take you through a process to see if you qualify. This, however, will not be available for another month and will launch May 26. This means some developers will get free API units based on the client spend they manage. A company is eligible to apply for the preferred pricing program if it is a Google AdWords Certified Partner and their AdWords API-based tools is in full compliance with the AdWords API terms & conditions that are set forth. More information about this can be found at the AdWords API Blog.

Read the original:
‘Google Advertising Professionals’ Changed to ‘Google AdWords Certification’

In SEO there are a lot of little things we can tweak to help a site rank better. This includes improving a site’s URL structure by making it more SEO friendly. The problem is, if you do this incorrectly your rankings could drop significantly and it could take a long time to make a full recovery.

Use the checklist below to first make sure it’s worth it to change your URL structure. If you decide it is, the rest of the checklist will help you to make sure you update everything you should. This will help to reduce your ranking drops (or at least the length of time those drops last).

Make Sure You Are Actually Changing to Something Better

Sometimes it is a good idea to change your URL structure, but sometimes you’re better off leaving things alone. Here are some examples of when it might be a good idea:

Switching from a dynamic URL structure to a static URL structure

The problem with a dynamic URL structure (example: www.siteexample.com/page.php?cat=231&prod=55234) is that you can end up with lots of different variations of the URL getting indexed. This can potentially create a huge duplicate content problem and split your link value. Changing your URLs to a static structure will give you one URL for each product or page on your site. This makes things a lot cleaner and helps to avoid splitting your link value between multiple URLs.

Just changing from dynamic to static isn’t enough of a reason to change your URL structure, though. You still need to make sure that you’re changing to URLs that are more descriptive and actually SEO friendly.

Making your URLs more meaningful/SEO friendly

I see a lot of sites with URLs that don’t explain what the page is about at all, even those with static URLs. For example, what does this URL tell you about the page: www.siteexample.com/store/prod1.html

If your answer was “Not much,” you’re right. Sure, you might be able to assume that it’s a product page, but you don’t know anything about the product.

If your site currently uses this kind of structure, it could be worth changing your URLs to make them more SEO friendly and meaningful to your audience. In other words, use some keywords. Use an appropriate keyword phrase in your URL and it will improve your SEO efforts and make the URL more user-friendly for your visitors.

When to leave things alone

Just as there are situations when you should consider making changes, there are also situations when you should think about holding off. For example, if your site is already ranking really well, you may want to leave your URLs alone.

Sure, there are “ideal situations” in SEO where everything is perfectly optimized, but if you already rank well, you could be better off leaving things alone. This is where consulting with a qualified SEO can be extremely valuable since it is a very case-by-case thing.

If you decide you should proceed with changing your URLs, the rest of the checklist items can help you to lessen the duration of any ranking drops you experience.

301 Redirect Old URLs to New URLs

If you’ve done any reading about SEO, you’ve likely heard about 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is what you use to signal the search engines that you have permanently changed the location of a URL.

So if you’re going to change your URL structure, you have to make sure that you put 301s in place to redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs. Otherwise, you’re going to send all of that previously accumulated link value to pages that give a 404 error and you’ll basically lose any link value those pages had.

Keep in mind that links that are 301ed lose some of their link value. This is one reason why you can almost always expect a drop in rankings when you change your URL structure.

Update XML Sitemap and Resubmit to Webmaster Accounts

Once you’ve updated your URLs and put your 301 redirects in place, you should also update your XML sitemap and resubmit it to the search engines through the various webmaster tools accounts. This alerts the search engines to the changes in the site and says they should come crawl it again.

Doing this can help your site to get re-indexed faster, which can help your rankings come back faster. The sooner the search engines realize you’ve made a permanent change the better!

Update All Internal Links

Probably the most time-consuming task of updating URL structure is making sure that all of the internal links in your site are updated to point to the new URLs.

You may be thinking, “I set up 301 redirects to take care of this. Why should I update all of my internal links as well?” It’s a good question. Here are a couple of reasons why you should do it

• Maintain all your internal link value. Remember what I said before about links that are 301ed losing some value? There isn’t a lot you can do about external pages linking to you, but you can retain all of the internal link value if you update the links.
• Avoid visitor confusion. If a visitor comes to your site with a slow Internet connection, it’ll be even slower when they click on a link that just redirects them. If this happens, they will likely just leave your site.

When you’re updating your internal links you should start with your navigation, footer links, and HTML sitemap. From there you’ll need to go through and clean up all of your contextual links.

Google Webmaster Tools has a tool that can help with this. Just go to ‘Your site on the Web’ and then ‘Internal links’ and you’ll see a page like this:

From here you can enter the URL you want to find links to and the tool will give you a list of the pages that have links to that URL. You might not find everything this way, but it is a great place to start.

Is It Worth It?

There are plenty of situations where cleaning up a site’s URL structure can really help it rank better. But before you go through all the trouble, take some time to evaluate your site’s structure to determine if it is really going to be worth it. Personally, I’d look at everything else I could change before I completely change a site’s URL structure.

If your site already ranks well and has an okay URL structure, you may want to leave it alone. Also keep in mind that almost any time you make URL changes, you’re going to see a drop in rankings. It’s hard to say how long this will last, because even different pages on the same site can be affected more than others.

Once you have made the above changes you should track your rankings frequently. Also keep an eye on search results to see when the search engines show your updated URL. This is a good indicator that things are starting to iron themselves out.

If you’d like to learn more about good URL structure, here are a few videos to watch from Matt Cutts at Google Webmaster Help:

Read the original:
Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure

In SEO there are a lot of little things we can tweak to help a site rank better. This includes improving a site’s URL structure by making it more SEO friendly. The problem is, if you do this incorrectly your rankings could drop significantly and it could take a long time to make a full recovery.

Use the checklist below to first make sure it’s worth it to change your URL structure. If you decide it is, the rest of the checklist will help you to make sure you update everything you should. This will help to reduce your ranking drops (or at least the length of time those drops last).

Make Sure You Are Actually Changing to Something Better

Sometimes it is a good idea to change your URL structure, but sometimes you’re better off leaving things alone. Here are some examples of when it might be a good idea:

Switching from a dynamic URL structure to a static URL structure

The problem with a dynamic URL structure (example: www.siteexample.com/page.php?cat=231&prod=55234) is that you can end up with lots of different variations of the URL getting indexed. This can potentially create a huge duplicate content problem and split your link value. Changing your URLs to a static structure will give you one URL for each product or page on your site. This makes things a lot cleaner and helps to avoid splitting your link value between multiple URLs.

Just changing from dynamic to static isn’t enough of a reason to change your URL structure, though. You still need to make sure that you’re changing to URLs that are more descriptive and actually SEO friendly.

Making your URLs more meaningful/SEO friendly

I see a lot of sites with URLs that don’t explain what the page is about at all, even those with static URLs. For example, what does this URL tell you about the page: www.siteexample.com/store/prod1.html

If your answer was “Not much,” you’re right. Sure, you might be able to assume that it’s a product page, but you don’t know anything about the product.

If your site currently uses this kind of structure, it could be worth changing your URLs to make them more SEO friendly and meaningful to your audience. In other words, use some keywords. Use an appropriate keyword phrase in your URL and it will improve your SEO efforts and make the URL more user-friendly for your visitors.

When to leave things alone

Just as there are situations when you should consider making changes, there are also situations when you should think about holding off. For example, if your site is already ranking really well, you may want to leave your URLs alone.

Sure, there are “ideal situations” in SEO where everything is perfectly optimized, but if you already rank well, you could be better off leaving things alone. This is where consulting with a qualified SEO can be extremely valuable since it is a very case-by-case thing.

If you decide you should proceed with changing your URLs, the rest of the checklist items can help you to lessen the duration of any ranking drops you experience.

301 Redirect Old URLs to New URLs

If you’ve done any reading about SEO, you’ve likely heard about 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is what you use to signal the search engines that you have permanently changed the location of a URL.

So if you’re going to change your URL structure, you have to make sure that you put 301s in place to redirect all of the old URLs to the new URLs. Otherwise, you’re going to send all of that previously accumulated link value to pages that give a 404 error and you’ll basically lose any link value those pages had.

Keep in mind that links that are 301ed lose some of their link value. This is one reason why you can almost always expect a drop in rankings when you change your URL structure.

Update XML Sitemap and Resubmit to Webmaster Accounts

Once you’ve updated your URLs and put your 301 redirects in place, you should also update your XML sitemap and resubmit it to the search engines through the various webmaster tools accounts. This alerts the search engines to the changes in the site and says they should come crawl it again.

Doing this can help your site to get re-indexed faster, which can help your rankings come back faster. The sooner the search engines realize you’ve made a permanent change the better!

Update All Internal Links

Probably the most time-consuming task of updating URL structure is making sure that all of the internal links in your site are updated to point to the new URLs.

You may be thinking, “I set up 301 redirects to take care of this. Why should I update all of my internal links as well?” It’s a good question. Here are a couple of reasons why you should do it

• Maintain all your internal link value. Remember what I said before about links that are 301ed losing some value? There isn’t a lot you can do about external pages linking to you, but you can retain all of the internal link value if you update the links.
• Avoid visitor confusion. If a visitor comes to your site with a slow Internet connection, it’ll be even slower when they click on a link that just redirects them. If this happens, they will likely just leave your site.

When you’re updating your internal links you should start with your navigation, footer links, and HTML sitemap. From there you’ll need to go through and clean up all of your contextual links.

Google Webmaster Tools has a tool that can help with this. Just go to ‘Your site on the Web’ and then ‘Internal links’ and you’ll see a page like this:

From here you can enter the URL you want to find links to and the tool will give you a list of the pages that have links to that URL. You might not find everything this way, but it is a great place to start.

Is It Worth It?

There are plenty of situations where cleaning up a site’s URL structure can really help it rank better. But before you go through all the trouble, take some time to evaluate your site’s structure to determine if it is really going to be worth it. Personally, I’d look at everything else I could change before I completely change a site’s URL structure.

If your site already ranks well and has an okay URL structure, you may want to leave it alone. Also keep in mind that almost any time you make URL changes, you’re going to see a drop in rankings. It’s hard to say how long this will last, because even different pages on the same site can be affected more than others.

Once you have made the above changes you should track your rankings frequently. Also keep an eye on search results to see when the search engines show your updated URL. This is a good indicator that things are starting to iron themselves out.

If you’d like to learn more about good URL structure, here are a few videos to watch from Matt Cutts at Google Webmaster Help:

Originally posted here:
Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure

With SEO.com’s new website, marketers now can utilize search engine optimization, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, conversion optimization, and search-optimized Web design to reach millions of online shoppers

SALT LAKE CITY – Businesses will invest $23.6 billion in search marketing this year, according to AdvertisingAge. With 14 billion online searches each month and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook rivaling the populations of the largest countries in the world, it’s no wonder why.

Now, SEO.com, a search engine optimization company, has enabled marketers to more easily harness search engines and social media to reach the millions who are online. After three years of rapid growth and evolution, SEO.com has redesigned its website and expanded its services to give marketers a more rounded strategy to drive traffic and increase online leads and sales.

“We are offering much more than just SEO, and we needed a fresh design to showcase all of it,” said Dave Bascom, president of SEO.com.

Until recently, SEO.com has been focused almost entirely on SEO services. Now it is adjusting to its customers needs and offering other Internet marketing avenues as well. In the last year, SEO.com has brought together experts in social media marketing, pay per click management, SEO Web design and conversion rate optimization. The objective in doing so is simple: Increase a client’s ROI.

“SEO is a huge part of any search marketing strategy. But it’s just one component,” Bascom said. “Combining social media, PPC, SEO-friendly Web design and conversion strategies with SEO will drastically increase traffic and sales compared to just doing one strategy alone.”

“We have moved beyond almost strictly an SEO company and have become an all-around search marketing firm,” said Chris Knudsen, vice president of marketing. “People are searching for products and services on multiple online fronts, and we’re here to help companies be found in whatever venue it might be.”

The new website also features a completely different design that helps engage visitors more with a live chat, a more interactive blog, training, webinars, forums and SEO tools.

“The new site will help businesses develop their marketing strategy, and will also be a community for other Internet marketing gurus to learn and discuss the latest trends,” Knudsen said.

About SEO.com
SEO.com is a search marketing firm that makes its clients money by driving traffic to their websites through aggressive search engine optimization, pay per click management, and social media marketing. SEO.com then turns those visitors into sales through search-optimized Web design and conversion optimization. Clients range from small startups to Fortune 100 companies.

Original post:
SEO.com Unveils New Website and Expanded Services

Checking your rankings every day is a love-hate relationship. You love it because after months of hard work you wake up one morning and finally see yourself in a top position. You hate it, however, because Google’s personalized search results may mean the rest of the world might not see you in that top position. And optimizing for that can make no sense.

After quickly clearing your cache, cookies, search history, and signing out of your Gmail account, you see the real results, and come to the depressing realization that many other people are not seeing you in that same spot. Once this realization sinks in, you will likely appreciate the following audio clip from the one and only Nacho Libre:

Thanks to Entertonment for this great clip.

With Google’s personalized search results, several factors are at play, including:

• location
• search history
• cookies
• cache

Understanding that these factors are at play and that they affect search results for everybody differently, we have to ask ourselves; is there really a number 1 position anymore? Number 1 for you could easily be number 4, or 7, or 9 for someone on the other side of the country.

So what should SEOs be focusing on?

The truth is that there are still national ranking placements to be gained, and SEOs should still be focusing on obtaining these positions for their clients. It is also true that SEOs need to help their clients optimize their sites for location-specific terms. Doing this may require some additional research, but can help bring them targeted traffic, and fight the personalization factor.

How to Check Rankings without Seeing Personalized Results

There are a few things you can do to view search results that are not affected by your personalized search history and location. Some of these include the following:

• Clear your search history.
• Clear your cache.
• Clear your cookies.
• Search from your mobile phone.
• Search from a different IP address than where you normally do all your searching.
• Add &pws=0 to the end of your search query URL and search it again.
• Have a friend, who lives in another part of the country, search that term (you might get results based on their personalized search, however).
• Sign out of any Gmail, or any other, account you use frequently while searching.

I personally don’t like personalized search results for times when I want to learn something new. I want to see the results that apply to everyone. How are you supposed to research something new if you’re just getting results which are mostly from your own search history? To me, this is a cop-out. It’s like the search engines are just being lazy and saying, “Eh, just show him the usual stuff he always searches and don’t worry about computing something new.”

I do understand that personalized search can be useful in many situations, but I personally don’t care for it most of the time.

How Do We Optimize For Personalized Search?

We need to do more extensive keyword research. We need to be more aware of trends that people are following while searching. Understanding these trends may help us “predict” people’s personalized search history. You can use tools like Soovle to view suggested terms throughout all the major playing search engines, or read great posts like, 3 Ways To Use Google’s Search Results For Keyword Research.

In the end we have to understand that personalized results only impose upon us for some search results properties, but not all. Stick to the long tail terms and the very relevant power terms and your efforts will remain effective, and it will not “suck to be you.”

Read the original post:
Battling the Ranking Confusion of Personalized Search

It is official, the Google Local Business Center is now called Google Places. This change comes as Google is shooting to re-brand their product around the Place Pages that they rolled out last fall. For those who don’t know, Place Pages are the business listing pages that are found in Google local searches. These pages have relevant data about a particular business such as reviews, images, and other important information that the business adds after they claim their listing.

There are some new features that Google rolled out with this name change. They are as follows:

1. Service Areas – Many times, businesses travel from place to place to service their customers. If this is the case, their listing can show the geographic areas that they cover. If a business does not have a brick and mortar storefront, they can make their address private, which was previously not an option.

2. Advertising With Tags – For $25 a month, businesses can use Tags to highlight their listings on Google Maps. These highlights come in the form of yellow markers that let you highlight certain aspects of your business like coupons, photos, and other features. Please note that these Tags will not affect your ranking in the search engines, but are an indicator to customers that you do have more information available that might prove to be beneficial to them. This feature is only available in a few “test” cities right now and you can expect Google to increase the number of cities in the future.

3. More Visitor Information – Google also gives businesses using Google Places information they haven’t been able to see in the past, like who’s searching for them, how they’re finding them, and where they’re coming from. This information is valuable insight and should not be overlooked by search engine marketers.

4. Business Photo Shoots – Businesses can request a free photo shoot from Google to have the interior of their business photographed and then added to their Place Page. There have been certain instances in the past where Google has done this with a few of the Local Business Center listings, I guess we now know what they were testing this option. A business can also take their own photos and upload them to their Place Page. This too is only available in a few “test” cities.

5. Customized QR Codes – QR codes are starting to become all the rage and Google is now hopping on board by providing customized QR codes from the Google Places Dashboard. When scanned, this code will take your customers to your Place Page and can be used on your business cards and other promotional material distributed by your marketing team. You can read more about QR codes here.

For those individuals, businesses, and SEO companies playing in the local search space, this change is an exciting, fresh take on local listings. We are very exited to dive deeper into these features and leverage them to provide additional value to each of our clients.

See the rest here:
Google Local Business Center — Now Google Places