Bharati Ahuja

Integration Of Social And Search Results In SERPS

Google posted on its official blog recently about the display of social search results being mixed throughout the search results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created.

The social search results currently are being dominated from Twitter as is the case in the Real Time Search results also. Improving the quality of search results and making the search results more and more relevant is a constant endeavor of the search engines. The relevant social buzz from a concerned social circle is a very logical signal which influences decisions in real life.

Now, this has been added to the virtual platform too and you can know what other people in your social circle connected to you are talking about related to the searches you make. The search results shortlisted by you get a backing if you get an opinion about it from a know person. This in fact makes you feel confident about your decision.

View the video for an example:

As always, you’ll only get social search results when you choose to log in to your Google Account. We’re starting to roll out the updates today on Google.com in English only and you’ll see them appear in the coming week.

From the SEO perspective how these social signals get incorporated in the algorithms by the search engines for rankings, only time will tell us. But the factors of popularity and authority of the social media accounts will surely be the factors which shall get woven in these algorithms.

According to me SEO is what you say about yourself or company , Social Media is what others say about you. When both these versions correlate then you win the confidence of the people and have a good word of mouth which with social media has become the world of mouth now . The marriage of social and search results has given birth to the concept of online reputation which has to be taken care of with great wisdom, honesty and intelligence.

Hence,

Think Before You Tweet And Pause And Ponder Before You Post.

Managing all the other UGC (User Generated Content) like comments, answers in forums, reviews, feedbacks, ratings, etc. is of equal importance as you never know how these may be incorporated in the social aspect of the search results in future. As all UGC are opinions and viewpoints of people which can be considered for further decisions.

Ecommerce- The Pros Cons And Why I Love These Sites

Guest Post

What’s the first thing you do when you start a new site? Pick a niche. Well my niche is ecommerce, granted it’s a little broader than what you would typically expect but the one thing that I’ve always found strange about affiliate sites is that you build the site and optimise it to attract visitors and once they get to your site your trying to push them off your site and onto the merchants. Now I’m not trying to put the boot into affiliates and I’ve made a lot of money from these sites and they help to pay a lot of peoples wages but for me when I get a visitor to my site I want to keep them there as long as possible and still make money from them. With a web shop I can do that.

A webshop is a different breed of site and to make one work there needs to be a lot going on in the back ground, things that the customer will never see. Stock control, warehousing, dispatch and staffing are all key elements to running a successful web shop. There is little difference between running a web store and running a shop, you still need to deal with useless suppliers and you will always have the problem of keeping your customers happy, but to me these are just par for the course and I have found the more of these types of sites I set up the smoother I can make the backend process.

The web is a competitive place and it seems that with a lot of the industries I’m currently in it’s just a race to the bottom on price, who can be the lowest and still make money and this isn’t something that’s going away, so we either need to differentiate ourselves from the rest of our competition, or we can lead that race to the bottom and either tighten things on the back end or shift more products. The words “box shift” springs to mind.

Now before I completely put you off ecommerce sites let’s talk about the good things and why I have spent years learning to build these into successful businesses.

Dropship is word that warms my heart it takes away a lot of the hassle with the back end and in the industries were these work best you are more or less working as an affiliate for the drop shipper, margins will be effected so just make sure you pick an industry where price isn’t necessarily the driving factor behind a sale and in time holding the stock your self will allow you to increase margins.

Now this is where there more traditional web marketing comes into play. Many people believe that building links to an ecommerce site is one of the hardest things to do and they may be right, but I see this as a good thing, if you are a better link builder then your competitor then you can beat them. If you can write better copy then your competitors you can drive more sales, in most cases this isn’t hard to do as they just copy the product description from the manufacturer’s sites. Why not get an army of affiliates to work for you, we already know what they look for in a good offer so why not give it to them and let them drive sales for you.

I think the idea of running a webshop has a stigma attached to it but there really isn’t that much to it, if you believe that you have what it takes to drive traffic to the site then you’ve got a good foundation to running a successful ecommerce store and you’ll find that everything else will fall into place after that, there is a lot of trial and error involved in the early stages of any business but this is where we learn from our mistakes and build on our successes. Well I hope there is something here that will help you make the move to ecommerce and all the great things that go with it.

Author Byline:

This is a guest post by Neil Jones, head of marketing for eMobileScan a leading providers of bar code scanner and barcode printers, including the Zebra GK420D

E-commerce / SEO - 02/16/2011

How Good SEO Contributes To The Larger Objectives Of The Web Eco System

Anyone connected to the digital marketing world is aware of the fact that SEO though a marketing strategy is very different from other online marketing strategies. SEO has the same objectives as marketing but the path followed by genuine SEOs to start reaping the benefits of SEO for a client is very creative, different and also involves the ethics.

Paid presence and visibility on the web lasts till the dollars are being rolled out whereas the presence and visibility attained as a result of good SEO lasts for a long time and also adds a brand value and a recall value if you rank for many important keywords related to your industry. As in order to rank high for niche keywords the SEO has to work on the Off-Page optimization factors which in the process helps in creating a web identity for the concerned company and website of the company.

While creating quality footprints on the web which will influence the SEO campaign of the website SEOs have to work on the quality aspects of the website, whether it is on-page or off-page.

Aspects Of The Website Which Help The Web Eco System And The Website:

1) Content: If the web administrator keeps on removing unwanted and outdated content from the site and from the index of the search engines it surely will help in reducing the content clutter on the search engine servers and thus help the search engines indirectly to maintain the quality of search results.

2) Error Free HTML Code: We are all aware of the W3C compliance but many times don’t pay much heed to it as the search engines have not made it as a compulsory ranking factor. But if the HTML is worked upon keeping in mind the W3C compliance and the HTML is error free though it may not have any direct benefit on the website but will surely help the web have error free HTML on the web servers which in the long run can help the search engines in many ways.

3) Setting Proper 301 Redirects And Cannonical Tags : By using the 301s and canonical tags efficiently helps the SEO of the site but also again helps in reducing the duplication of indexing by the search engines thereby again contributing to the quality of the search results and also reduces content clutter on the web servers.

4) Follow Search Engine Guidelines: Search engines always offer webmaster guidelines and tools so that they can guide the webmasters and these guidelines if followed also helps the search engines with their algorithms as it helps them to index and rank websites better.

5) Guest Blog If You find it difficult to Maintain Your Own Blog: Many people start a blog but cannot keep up to the regular updation of the blog and after sometime it becomes a web entity which is just existing for the sake of it without having any value again adding to the unwanted web material on the WWW. Always delete such blogs created out of curiosity and with no intention of being used in future. Just because you get it for free does not mean you do not bother about it. If you do not have the time for regular updation you can derive the benefits of blogging by writing guest post for blogs which are regularly updated and well maintained and have good readership as this way you can share your knowledge with the readers and also get SEO benefit.

6)Educate The Client About What Is SEO: Many times the SEO company works hard and gets the high quality rankings, visibility and web presence for the client but at times due to some differences the client may discontinue with a certain SEO company and appoint another one and thereby the previous work done may get affected adversely but the client may not be aware of this at all as he has no clue about what genuine SEO is all about. Hence, it is necessary to have discussions with the client time and again to inform him about the SEO changes made and also about how SEO is making his digital asset (The website in this case) more valuable day by day.

I think this is a part of SEO ethics because the client spends a lot of amount to get the rankings and the benefit derived thus should be nurtured and taken care of for which he needs to understand the purpose behind all the SEO changes made from the brand building and maketing perspective. He may not be interested in the technicalities which can be strictly kept out of discussions.

The search and web ecosystem revolves around the people who publish content, people who index content and people who search for content. We all who use the internet fall in atleast one of the categories and we can in our own little way help the web by focusing on what way we can contribute to the web rather than only putting the blame on the search engines for not giving us quality search results.

As the internet is a network of networks, we need to harness all the viral and linkable content efficiently, according to me mentions, links, email accounts on your own domain, etc. present anywhere in the cosmos of the web world and search engines will surely pass on the necessary link juice if the content is readable by the spiders and can be indexed when the internet servers are being crawled.

I have just mentioned a few SEO practices above but if you check on every ranking factor you use for SEO it will have a larger and broader purpose for the web ecosystem rather than just giving you the rankings if implemented. The algorithms built are not built in a vacuum or as a result of somebody’s imagination but by working on what would be the best practices based on past experience , research and detailed study of human behavior and indexing bottle necks so that quality results can be churned out for the searchers.

We keep on using the SEO practices for content , now we need to understand the intent behind every thing implemented on the site and make a valuable contribution to the web cosmos as an SEO. Every action if backed by the right intention does surely gives you the deserved returns.

SEO - 02/12/2011

It Is The Collective And Selective Voice On Social Media That Matters

Marketing is all about reaching out to your potential customers and marketing teams are always willing to experiment methods which will attract more footfalls to their store or more eyeballs to their website. Undoubtedly the marketing teams are allocating increasing budgets to online marketing rather than traditional marketing methods.

SEO, Social Media Integration, Uploading Videos, Writing Blog Posts, Participating in online communities, Sharing knowledge and views through guest posts are some of the ways we recommend and encourage our clients to have a quality web presence.

Companies are adopting social media for establishing an online brand, for customer support, for launching new products, etc. Whenever we have the social media training sessions and workshops the main question which often comes up is that:

What if competition uses it against us by spreading negative posts?

Undoubtedly Social media has a tremendous reach where a positive word spreads fast but the negative word spreads faster. But, when you have a social media presence atleast you can listen to what is being said about you. Just because you do not listen that does not mean people are not speaking about your brand. If you listen then you can put your point forward using the same media.

It does not matter if one social media profile speaks against you . The word of mouth becomes the world of mouth when a collective voice speaks about it in the same tone. There will be likes and dislikes, there will be positive tweets and negative tweets but eventually the majority along with the way you handle negative publicity on your social media profiles will matter the most.

If that is the fear that is stopping you to engage on social media then remember the basic Math rule learnt in school that when adding numbers always subtract and keep the sign of the larger number (Thats your collective voice - Know which voice should be ignored and subtracted and which voice has to be heard) . So, eventually it is the majority which sets the opinion and if majority of the people are speaking against your product then it is high time you did something about it and these social signals itself can be at times the true feedback you needed.

Trust me when such negative campaigns get converted to positive word of mouth due to the action taken by the company to accept their fault and make rectifications a whole new impetus of positive feedback is generated which adds more goodwill and online reputation. People like it when they are being heard or are being answered to.

Again it is not about numbers totally the authority voice in your industry matters a lot and they voice their opinion only when they totally accept a certain product and vouch for a service or when they are totally in disagreement of a product, service or viewpoint as their main aim is to safeguard the interests of the industry rather than getting personal.

Hence, don't just follow the herd, listen to the collective and selective voices.

Social Media - 02/08/2011

Twitter Testing New Advetising Platform - Beta Stage

WebPro News interviewed David Szetela ofClix Marketing who is one of the few advertisers included the Twitter’s beta program for testing Twitter’s Ad. Platform. In his interview he mentioned that the program had similarities to the Google and Facebook Ad. programs but with some differences. Twitter some time back had introduced the concept of Promoted Tweets and is testing the Twitter Self- Serve Ad. System before going with it in a big way. it is a self-serve program with a little difference to it as currently you cannot start your ad. campaign on twitter like anybody and everybody can you do it on Google . In order to become a part of the Twitter Ad. Platform one needs to contact twitter to get embedded in the Twitter Ad. Program.

View The Interview:

The Ad. Program is based on the concept of the promoted tweet, where the advertiser can tweet something then contact Twitter to promote it when someone searches something related to that or he can also have somebody influential retweet that tweet and the advertiser can promote that retweet. How will Twitter Measure The Cost Of Advertising or Promoting The Tweet/Retweet:David Szetela said that the payment for the advertising will be based on a new metric called he Cost Per Engagement (CPE) and the engagement will depend on the following factors:

Retweet Of The Sponsored Tweet

Reply To The Sponsored Tweet

Click On A Link Of A Sponsored Tweet

When Somebody Favourites The Sponsored Tweet

If any of these actions take place the advertiser pays the agreed amount to Twitter. The second metric will be engagement rate (ER), which is similar to click-through-rate (CTR). According to http://www.emarketer.com/PressRelease.aspx?R=1008194 “Promoted Trends is seeing good traction in the marketplace, which gives us cautious optimism for Twitter’s fledgling ad products,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, author of the upcoming report “Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: 2011 Outlook.”

Let’s see how this paid scenario picks up on Twitter and will we have a so called Organic Engagement V/S Paid Engagement on this Social Media for SMM like we have a SEO v/s PPC on the search engines for SEM? But one thing is for sure Twitter is growing.

News / Social Media - 01/31/2011

Google's Algorithmic Change To Prevent Content Spam Is Live Now

Matt Cutts had mentioned earlier this month on http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html - “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

He confirmed on his personal blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/ that the Google Algorithm has been updated and live now to prevent content spam.

Matt Cutts has also posted about this update on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286

Before this announcement also there were many SEOs who were discussing about the effect on the SERPs http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4258897.htm

Google / SEO - 01/29/2011

Using Google Webmaster Tools Appropriately For SEO

I have been using the Google webmaster tools since time immemorial now, but using them appropriately for analyzing the website from the SEO perspective is always an ongoing learning process. Google keeps on adding valuable features to the tools and keeps on making it more useful to webmasters and SEOs.

Maile Ohye – The Developer Programs Tech Lead from Google explains this very clearly in the following video.

The Webmaster Tools features she has explained in the video are summarized as follows:

Sign Up For Email Forwarding In Webmaster Tools in Message Centre
Check For Search Queries
Use Keywords To Target Content
Reduce Duplicates Through HTML Suggestions And URL Parameter Handling
Diagnose Crawl Errors
Prioritize Content Through Internal Links
Verify Access Through Fetch As Googlebot
Use Site Performance To Improve Speed

View the video for a detailed explanation 🙂

SEO - 01/28/2011

The Highlights Of Conference Click Asia Summit 2011- ‘The Power Of Digital And Mobile Marketing In Asia’

Last week I had the Opportunity to participate in the largest marketing event in Asia delivering Digital, Social and Mobile marketing solutions – Click Asia Summit 2011. It was a 3 day summit with a focus on ‘The Power Of Digital And Mobile Marketing In Asia’.

The highlights of the conference:

The conference started of with a very inspiring keynote by Gurbaksh Chahal, RadiumOne . It proved a point that in order to be successful in the digital world one does not need a string of degrees and qualifications attached to his name but a focused approach , dedication and hard work. Gurbaksh’s session encouraged the entrepreneurs to take failure also as an opportunity and go ahead with more positivity rather than getting bogged down.

The delegates had to keep choosing the options of the sessions available , trust me it was a tough one as whenever you made a choice somewhere you felt that you are missing out on the other session which was equally informative.

The sessions onMobile Web: The New Mass Media byMahesh Narayanan, Google India and There's an App for That! By Neil Burton, Web Spiders – UK proved that mobile marketing strategy has to be a part of your digital marketing strategy if you want to future proof your online presence for the long run as statistics and data proved that more and more people are switching on to their smart phones to surf the web and downloading more and more Apps. For their smart phones.

But I think that as smart phones become smarter and internet connectivity becomes better and cheaper for the handsets there will be no need to download Apps. But the handsets will be used more like we use our laptops today. We discarded our desktops for laptops, now we shall discard our laptops for smartphones and that will literally put all the power in the hands of the people as people will shop surf more online due to the ease and accessibility always available in their hands.

The presentation on Metrics-Analysis-Action! And the Day 2 Keynote on Digital Analytics By Gillian Muessig, SEOmoz focused on the following points:

No analytics signal is a signal in itself
Data is not information and reporting is not analytics
Always dive deeper and track to find answers to how the offline and online advertising is lifting each other
Data is not analytics – As just having a car is not sufficient you need a driver to drive it – Just data is not enough you need to analyze it and decompose the metrics to get answers which will help you to take corrective actions and right decisions.

Gillian’s informal way of speaking and reaching out to the audience for questions attracted everyone’s attention and made a dry topic like analytics very interesting.

The sessions on :

Advanced View on PPC vs. Organic by Jeff Adelson Yan, Levelwing

Search Engine Marketing - Dead and Buried? (PANEL) by

Milind Mody, eBrandz

Navneet Kaushal, PageTraffic

Raghavendra Satish Peri,IBM

Best Practices: Online Marketing Vivek Bhargava, Communicate2

They all focused on the importance of having a marketing mix of SEO, PPC, Local Search with a focus on Google Places. They also stressed on the fact on how one marketing strategy helps on leveraging the other sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. As these topics a very vast in themselves the extent to which they were discussed was not sufficient and satisfactory.

The first day concluded with a refreshing session by Mr. Anupam Kher touching the human side of technology and baffling everyone with a down to earth talk and chat on how success has made him more humble and how failure and adversities in life can make you a better person.

On day 2 the following workshops:

Ecommerce In India: Opportunities & Challenges (PANEL)

Dirk van Quaquebeke, Brandmile Ptd. Ltd.

Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal India

Digital Marketing, Lead Nurturing and Social Media for B2B Enterprises

Neil Burton, Web Spiders - UK

Anol Bhattacharya, GetIT

Mobile Marketing & Brands in the Mobile Web Environment

Naveen Tewari, InMobi

Rajiv Hiranandani, Altruist-Mobile2Win

Clearly stated the emerging of the mobile web and the current trend of mobile Apps. Kunal Bahl described the ABCD of Indians as A for Astrology, B for bollywood, C for Cricket and D for discounts. and went ahead to discuss the success of Snapdeal India . The key factor for any ecommerce site to be successful is to give a predictable experience on the site to the visitor was the main takeaway.

Dirk van Quaquebeke, Brandmile Ptd. Ltd. Mentioned that the India is fashion conscious, Indians have disposable income and are early adapters to e-commerce and deals and discounts work well in the Indian market.

Neil Burton, Web Spiders – UK and Anol Bhattacharya, GetIT spoke about lead nurturing and Social media in a B2B scenario . The importance of content for lead nurturing was highlighted .

The content should be remarkable and ignite conversations. The main takeaway - Content provides the context for conversations in social media. In a B2B scenario for social media forget about the image supply as much as information as possible. The main ROI for a B2B campaign is lead generation and building relationships.

B2B is different from B2C
Create a strategy
Talk business from start
Talk numbers , statistics and data
Build a community

The session on Twitter for Business by Pradeep Chopra, Digital Vidya was a runaway hit with a very individual style of conducting the session Pradeep Chopra immediately connected with the participants and I am sure convinced everyone to start tweeting.

The # tag for the conference #cas11 surely became the trending topic.

On day 3 there were two specialized workshops to choose from, one was on Advanced SEO and the other one was on Social Media Marketing.

The SEO workshop was conducted by Bill Hunt, Back Azimuth Consulting and Benedict Hayes, Communicate2

Rajiv Dingra, WAT Media spoke about the importance of blogging.

They were full day workshops covering the following topics:

Time	Advanced SEO Workshop	Social Media Marketing Workshop
9.00 am - 5.00 pm	Bill Hunt, Back Azimuth Consulting Benedict Hayes, Communicate2 Rajiv Dingra, WAT Media	Gaurav Mishra, MSLGROUP Asia Gillian Muessig, SEOmoz
	Introduction SEO Factors Architecture Content Authority The Algorithm SEO Campaign Strategy	1. Real-life social networking game How do we connect with others on social networks around our passions? How do connections lead to conversations, collaboration and community? How can brands connect with people around their passions?
	SEO for Complex Websites The Challenges The Specific Challenges for Large Sites What to Avoid in, Large Sites Especially How to Rope in Stakeholders How to Maximize your Search Shelf Space How to Centralize your Efforts The Downstream Impact How to Maximize Searcher Stimuli	2. Community-centric integrated marketing How is the social web changing integrated marketing and the role of agencies? How can brands create a series of integrated marketing campaigns that build upon each other? How can brands leverage owned, paid and earned media into their integrated marketing strategy? Pepsi Refresh case study.
	Managing Complex Search Programs How to Effectively Deliver Search at Scale Key Focus Areas for an Enterprise How to Integrate SEO in the Workflow Roles and Responsibilities within the SEO Team How to Make a Page Search Friendly What are Organic Search Diagnostic Metrics? What are Organic Search Performance Metrics?	3. Social web strategy for business impact How can brands leverage conversations, campaigns and communities for business impact? How can brands build online communities to organize and energize their evangelists? How can brands measure business impact, platform influence and program engagement? Dell case study.
	The Dynamic Issues in SEO Spidering About URLs Indexing Optimization Listing How to Manage Keywords Understanding the Intent of the Searcher	4. Social web strategy in the B2C context How can brands use contests to build high-engagement communities? How can brands use communities to drive retail footfalls? How can brands create cause-based communities to connect with their stakeholders? Starbucks case study.
	How to Manage Complex PPC Keywords Creative Development Google Quality Score Optimizing Landing Pages	5. Social web strategy in the B2B context How can brands use communities to strengthen relationships with partners? How can brands use communities to attract and motivate talent? How can brands use communities to establish thought leadership? Microsoft case study.
	How to Measure the Success of a SEO Campaign Reporting Executive Dashboard Search Health Report PLP Scorecard Search Effectiveness Metrics Integration Metrics How to Build a Business Case	6. Strategy on a post-it note game What are our brand values and business objectives? Who are our brand evangelists and what are their passions? What is our core platform and program strategy and how will we measure success?
	Searcher Intent Modeling Searcher Intent Modeling Overview Searcher Intent Modeling Steps Integrating Paid & Organic Search Keyword Arbitration The Challenges The Keyword Conflicts How to Allocate Keywords
	Link Building Digital Asset Optimization The Challenges A Checklist The Best Practices
	Enabling Success in a Large-Scale Global Search Marketing Program The Burning Issues Fundamentals of Search marketing Search Organization Audit Enterprise Search Ecosystem
	Managing a SEO Process Managing a Team Managing the Keywords Managing the Technology Managing the Performance Managing the Priorities

Conference Pics :http://www.flickr.com/photos/64046153@N03/sets/72157626961170824/

Content marketing. / SEO / SEO Events - 01/24/2011

SEO Though a Subset Of Internet Marketing Has An Edge Over Advertising And Marketing.

The larger goal for SEO and PPC campaigns is the same – To gain search engine visibility, get targeted traffic and thereby business enquiries or online sales. A well managed SEO or a well managed PPC campaign have the potential of achieving these said goals.

Whenever we talk or discuss about organic rankings we discuss about how the search engines are improving their algorithms for churning out quality results as per the ranking factors which mainly revolve around the content and other quality factors of the website.

When we discuss about PPC campaigns,conversations and discussions get focused on the bid amount and how the search engines are working on reducing the click fraud rate. This basic difference itself tells us that PPC is pure advertising but SEO is about getting ranked for quality results.

A SEO campaign helps you:

To establish an online brand
Have a good online reputation
Gain maximum visibility all over the web
Helps you work on the website to making it more rich in content and error free HTML
Solve Cannonical Issues
Eliminate Duplicate Content
Add more meaning to the images of your website
Work on many other technical aspects of the website like HTTP headers, 404 pages, 301 redirects etc.

The SEO efforts put on a website continue to pass on the benefit of all the footprints created by the SEO campaign even if you stop working on the SEO after say about 1 – 2 years but, the PPC benefit gets terminated when you stop paying for the listing. Though there are situations when PPC can give the immediate return needed but SEO is something that cannot be ignored by any business owner having long term goals and plans for tapping the online market and establishing and online presence in the long run.

SEO has the same objectives like the other online marketing campaigns but in addition SEO also helps the website owner to establish an online brand by reaching out all over the web for making a presence of the site being optimized via social media, local directories, other topical sites and communities where the site can get links and have a platform to speak out the company ideas, values and goals.

Moreover, SEO relates to optimization for all the search engines not Google alone. Hence, any good SEO campaign will focus on all the search engines which have their own index and try to get maximum visibility on them. We know that Google is synonymous to search and has the maximum market share but you never know which search engine might just get bigger and bigger and start being used for search. For example Bing is gradually gaining popularity though at a very slow pace .

A genuine SEO campaign does not only help the website owner to get the high SERPs for the targeted keywords but also contributes in helping the search engines deliver quality and relevant search results.

The search engines time and again offer webmaster guidelines, tools and other help forums to help the SEOs with the search results. The following link tells us Google wants the SEOs to follow certain ethical guidelines in order help in the quality search results as an SEO campaign also has the ethical factor woven into its functionality.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

Hence, if your SEO campaign is a genuine SEO campaign rather than only a Google Optimization programme then you sort of future proof your search engine organic presence.On the other hand paid listings and other marketing campaigns give you a very short lived visibility for your site.

SEO - 01/09/2011

Why User Generated Content Will Be More Important In the Future For SERPs

As we all know that the social signals are a part of the search engine algorithms for determining the SERPs. Social media gives an equal platform to each and everyone to voice their opinions, views, thoughts and in various ways using whatever media they are comfortable with – images (Infographics), videos, text, etc. All this is giving an exponential increase and impetus to the UGC – User Generated Content on the web.

This UGC and the links on such content which add value to the content has the potential to push the SERPs up or pull the SERPs down of the links mentioned. Content has been the king on the web world but the UGC does not only have the plus points of the content but also has the power of the intent added to it. Hence, it has the potential to push or pull in the positive or negative direction.

User generated content may be in the form of:
• Reviews
• Comments
• Feedbacks
• Testimonials
• Ratings
• Blogposts with a focus on a certain product or company
• Tweets on Twitter
• Posts on Facebook
• Wikis

All that is voiced on such platforms about a certain company, product or service generates a WOM which creates an online reputation of the company . Hence , it is the user who has to be focused on in the whole campaign of promoting a website. The UGC will depend on the user experience the visitor has on the website .

The co-relation of the other metrics like the time on site, bounce rate, the goals achieved, the number of new and repeat visits and other such metrics from the analytic reports and the UGC will determine the popularity and the purpose of the website which will in turn affect the rankings and over all visibility of the site.

Well this is my perception, only time will tell as to how all this gets more and more incorporated in the search engine algorithms and how it is reflected in the search results.

SEO - 01/06/2011