Internet Marketing Strategies » SEO

What Is The Sandbox?

admin — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:05:14 +0000

Have you ever used Google and noticed that something was different than it usually is. sometimes it is for a period of time, and then it goes away after a day or two or three. When that happens, there is a chance that you were in the Google Sandbox.

So what is the sandbox? Think of it not so much as a place for Google to play… but rather test. That is, they often “test” changes in their search engine results, their display, what they may display (or not display) and the likes of such. That is, they test it among a group of users, but not against the whole population. They then measure how users interact with the changes. They might measure how long it takes the user to make a decision. They might also measure how long a user interacts with the decision. And they measure various other metrics.

The information provided by these metrics are useful to them. They use the data to accept, reject, or refine changes to the way they deliver content to the user.

But to the internet marketer, recognizing the subtle changes from the sandbox is an opportunity to foresee the potential future of internet marketing and improve the way content is being created and delivered.

I consider the images below as a possible sandbox experiment.

non-sandbox

Probably Google Sandbox Result

And since images can’t be tested… I have copied the potential “Sandbox” content with links intact:

—————————————————————————–

Agape Chiropractic Pompano Beach (954) 545-9750
www.agapechiropractic.com/ – Cached
Agape Chiropractic, Dr. Michael Haley, Chiropractor serving Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale. (954) 545-9750. See our Video! Quality care at affordable …
Meet The Chiropractor – NanOmega 3 – Office Hours – About Us
500 S Cypress Road, Pompano Beach - (954) 969-8800

“Dr. Mike Haley has amazing hands, and so far has not only helped my …“ - arizonahighways.com (3)
citysearch.com (2) - judysbook.com (1)

—————————————————————————–

In one image, we see the usual September 2011 results one would see if they search for a chiropractor in Pompano Beach. There is a Google places listing with Google reviews. But in the other image, we see Google reviews and reviews from non-Google review sites! There is also plenty of other content to consider in this combined places / organic combination of a result from the likely sandbox.

This is particularly interesting because recently non-Google reviews disappeared from the Google places pages. All of the sudden reviews from places like yelp, citysearch, and jusysbook became less important.

But if the next image is indeed from the sandbox, then it indicates that Google is probably working on getting non-Google reviews back in the mix. Therefore, Google probably does value non-Google reviews. So encouraging customers that like your product and service to review on the network of review sites is probably a beneficial thing.

So if you notice a change on Google, consider the potential for benefit such insight can give you when it comes to marketing your business or the businesses of your SEO clients.

WordPress Plugins

admin — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:17:19 +0000

I recently read a document by Dan Raine outlining the plugins he uses and the reasons which might change the way I do things a little bit. They include:

pubsubhubbub - to increase indexing speed.

SEO Ultimate – might be quite the update to the seo pack I currently use and even replaces pretty link as well as adds some awesome keyword auto-interlinking features.

WP No Category Base

Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite Support

W3 Total Cache

WordPress Silo Plugin

RSS Bomber - I suspect this is the “affiliate” link he was going after in his pdf. When copying the pdf link, it gave me the actual text instead of the url it was pointed to… so if you click this link in my post and buy the plugin, nobody gets the affiliate commission. He probably should have done it in HTML so I could have copied the actual link from him!

Akismet - to get a free API key, click here.

Ultimate Google Analytics

WP-DB-Backup

ThemeFuse Maintenance Mode

WPtouch

Facebook Comments for WordPress

Topsy Retweet Button

For Dan Raines write-up on these important plugins, click here.

Welcome to SEOWebMeeting!

admin — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:39:40 +0000

The purpose of this site is to provide a FREE efficient and effective means to improving your online presence. To create your own “blogsite”, sign up for our Free Online WordPress Tutorials in the box above. We will deliver 1 short free video lesson to your email box every weekday. It should take you on average 10 to 20 minutes per day 5 days per week for about 1 month to have an excellent website. WordPress is perfect for beginners as well as professional web designers. The easy Dashboard interface makes creating your pages a snap and takes care of most of the “optimizing” of your page and site so that the search engince can find you. You’ll also learn how to change the template or even create a custom template so you can make your site look and feel like it was designed by a professional web designer.

Go ahead and sign up now. The course if absolutely free to you. The links to the right are the “resources” that I use such as hosting and tools to help better improve my site. I chose these tools because they seem to be the best “bang for your buck”. They are “affiliate” links. Should you choose to purchase something following one of the links on the right, they will pay a commission to me. This does not increase your purchase price, however, it may lower your purchase price.

Image Tags

admin — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:41:32 +0000

Search engines look for on-page text in the obvious places like headings, sub-headings, and in paragraphs. But on web pages that have more images and less text, search engines look for text in the image tags. Image tags also play important roles other than talking to search engines.

Alt image tags provide text in text-only browsers or in browsers that have the image features disabled. Someone might not want to see images to improve browsing speed.

Title tags also provide valuable information to the reader and can appear as a caption or mouseover text for the viewer. Captions appear under the image. Mouseover text appears when the user holds the cursor over the image for a couple seconds.

The name of an image might also be important for SEO purposes. For example, “computer.jpg” is a better name than “DSC0007.JPG”

Consider the following image coding:

the picture is named “3057377.jpg” and might better be named “seo-tools.jpg” (or whatever it is). For text only browsers (or when people have images turned off) it might have alt text as “Free-SEO-Tools”. Search engines also look at this alt text for better indexing. It might have a “title” tag in it too that says: “This Free SEO Tools Book is the Key to YOUR Success!” The title tag is also mouseover text.

Here is an example of image code from one of our sites:
http://aloe1.com/images/stories/aloe/brainscan1.jpg” mce_src=”http://aloe1.com/images/stories/aloe/brainscan1.jpg“>

Notice the code is a little more telling of what the picture actually is. I decided to use the title tag as a caption as well, that is, the text appears under the image on the page.

In addition to this “on-page” SEO practice. prior to uploading your images, right click on them and edit the image properties. You can actually attach image properties to the image itself including title, tags, description, author, and more. This is a relatively untapped part of SEO and seems to have a dramatic effect on image ranking.

SEO Tools

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:12:50 +0000

Important SEO Tools

Take the FREE Online WordPress course

SEO Tools. If you know of other SEO Tools I should look into, please leave them in the comments with a helpful description of what they are.

pingomatic?

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:22:06 +0000

List of Ping sites to increase indexing speed – Borrowed from Michael Roberts.

http://www.michaelrroberts.com/blog/crazy-fast-tip-that-is-going-to-rock-your-indexing-times/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Google Reviews

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:27:31 +0000

If your leaving Google Reviews, make sure your account profile is updated and linked to your website. It’s just another way to increase your web traffic. Watch the video for more.

Creating Backlinks

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:56:25 +0000

After you start this video, be sure to change the “360p” to a higher resolution like “HD” and then watch full screen!

Before you watch this next video, click the “Market Samurai” image on the top right, download and install your free trial version – We will use it in this video. Don’t worry, after your free trial, you only lose some of the functions! The keyword research module remains free! Also, after you start this video, be sure to change the “360p” to a higher resolution like “HD” and then watch full screen so you can see what I am doing!

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. If all other things were equal (but they never are), the website with more backlinks gets better rankings.

But not all backlinks are created equally. A few significant things to consider when soliciting backlinks include:
The page rank of the website linking to yours
The relativity of the website linking to yours
The anchor text used in creating the link
The type of domain extension linking to your site

Page Rank

There are various ways to determine a sites page rank. Some other time I’ll cover chasing the competitions backlinks by page rank. But without getting into too much detail here, sites with higher page ranks are usually sites that have been established for a long time, have lots of quality content, have lots of backlinks to their sites, and have lots of visitors to their site.

Relativity

Regarding relativity, if you are a chiropractor, links from other chiropractors or chiropractic organizations would benefit you most. Having backlinks from sites about pine wood derby cars linking to yours wouldn’t harm you and in fact would benefit you; but it probably wouldn’t be as effective as the more relevant backlinks from chiropractic related websites.

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the actual text on the page that is linked to your website. For my business, I am primarily interested in the search terms “chiropractor pompano beach” which is my key search term and the city I am in. So a link to my site that reads “chiropractor pompano beach” (like the one you just read) is the preferred anchor text. In the preceeding link, I also used relative “flyover” text also know as “mouseover” text. This may also have SEO benefit. Go ahead, mouse over it to try it!

Domain Extension (.com, .edu, .gov)

The type of domain linking to your site can also have impact on your rankings. Search engines may prefer links from .edu’s and .gov’s over .com’s, .net’s, and .org’s (and many others). It would make sense that government organizations and educational institutions only link to quality sites. So their links must be more valuable. As a side note, if you are trying to rank high in the UK, .UK extensions will probably be more valuable than .com’s. If in Australia, .au. You get the idea.

Creating Backlinks by Tying It All Together

One easy way to build backlinks is by commenting on other peoples blogs. You should find blog sites relative to your website. Blog pages that allow comments with backlinks will have the text fields for you to complete including “Name”, “Mail” or “email”, and web site” or “URL”. Somewhere on the page, they probably also say “blog”, “wordpress”, or some other blog related name. So a google search for such sites would include those words. As an example, I might do a google search for “chiropractic name mail url wordpress”, without the quotes of course. If I wanted to only find .gov’s or .edu’s, I might also include the domain extension delineation “site:*.edu” or “site:*.gov” in my search.

When you complete the “name” field of the comment section, you might want to use an “anchor text” name. I often use the name “chiropractor”. This will become the text that links to my website. If other comments on the page do not use anchor text names, it is possible that the moderator is only keeping real names. My rule is, if other people are doing it on the page, then it is OK. If I don’t see it in other comments, the moderator might be deleting comments that are using intentional anchor text names.

Once you find a blog that you want to comment on, make sure you add to the page you are commenting on. Most comments are “moderated”. That is, before the comment sticks, the moderator will receive an email notifying them of your comment. They can review your comment and choose to accept or delete the comment. Non relevant and insulting comments will likely be deleted.