Wednesday, 12 June 2013

5 Reasons SMBs Should Focus on Search, Not Social for Customer Acquisition



One cannot deny the growing importance of social media, especially when it comes to social engagement and brand awareness. It is believed to be an effective marketing tool that helps businesses to enhance their online visibility. However, the question arises if social media is effective for customer acquisition for small and medium sized businesses?


There are many SMBs that are laying stress on using social media as a customer acquisition tool, instead of search marketing. Let’s discuss how it is a mistake and why they should focus more on search and not on social for getting new customers.
  1. Search gets businesses in front of new customers, especially when they are not aware of the brand. It makes new customers aware of the product or services, when need the same. Organic search may take time while paid search allows business to get perspective customers immediately with ads relevant to their queries. The visitor may not recognize the name of the company, but it would cater to the immediate needs.
  2. The conversion rate from search is good. Everybody is aware of the fact that social media sites are more used for socialization, while search engines are used when they want to gather information or get some product or service. Thus, the chance of converting into customer is high in case of search than social.
  3. It allows people to find the business easily. Search engine help people in finding information, such as phone number and directions. The study has brought to light that 88 per cent of mobile users who search for a local service provider take action within a day. Moreover, the number of people using mobile devices to search is regularly increasing.
  4. Social media marketing is not easy. Many people start on social media marketing with the hope that it is easy, but truly speaking, managing social media campaigns is not an easy task. Getting customers through this means is also not that easy.
  5. Search has proved to be an effective customer acquisition tool. When it comes to acquiring new customers, search engine has proved to be a remarkable tool with mobile search improving upon its effectiveness immensely. 
In social media sites, though people may like a page or post, but they may not do so with purchase intent. Thus, social media is not considered to be an effective tool for acquiring new customers. SMBs with limited budget cannot ignore this point and should utilize a proven customer cquring method.

Monday, 10 June 2013

7 In-House SEO Initiatives for 2013



As we look forward to 2013, the New Year provides limitless opportunities and the chance to nail down our SEO to-do lists. As we go through our lists, it's important to remember that there are short-term SEO tasks that we undertake on an almost daily basis, as well as bigger picture SEO initiatives that may not be implemented overnight and will take time and solid effort.
The seven initiatives listed below are among the most critical to undertake in 2013 for in-house SEOs. If you’re already working on some of them, then it's worth your effort to go all in to reap the maximum SEO rewards.

1. Rel=Author Tag

We're living in an influencer economy of sorts. Influencers can be celebrities, bloggers, authors, or other industry leaders.
Because we're in an influencer economy, and so much content is being created, the one way to differentiate content is by how many other people are sharing that content or talking about that content. An influencer has the ability to share a specific piece of content that gets more shares and gets talked about it by their followers.
For search engines, especially Google, influencers are a great solution to separate the wheat from the chaff. Not so long ago, Matt Cutts said that “over time, as we start to learn more about who the high quality authors are, you could imagine that starting to affect rankings.”

2. Mobile Search

Mobile marketing is becoming increasingly important every year, and that trend will continue in 2013. Already, roughly 16 percent of searches come from mobile devices. This means local searches will be reaching their full potential both in SEO and in PPC.
Local businesses can no longer afford to excuse themselves from SEO or Internet marketing in general. This increase in mobile searches also means that site owners need to ensure that their site is served up well on mobile devices like having one site for desktop and other for mobile device.

3. Social Search Integration

No doubt, you've heard lots of buzz about social search and how Google +1’s and shares are going to be important. Well, this is the year when you will see not just +1’s on Google and Facebook shares on Bing integrated more into traditional search results on topics that are shared, but also related topics on the same site.
Facebook just announced a major social graph search feature this week. This changes the way we search online and over time it will change consumer behavior and search as we know it today.
I tend to think there will be two kinds of search in the near future:
  • A search on documents, videos, blogs, etc. in the form of Google and Bing.
  • A search that's more driven by friends and their recommendations by leveraging Facebook’s social graph.
As an in-house SEO, you can work closely on your Facebook brand pages to ensure that all pictures, posts, etc. are tagged correctly and optimized for search.

4. Video SEO

Video is great for engagement and because of the intrinsic social sharing options in video it is great for rankings. More marketers will be leveraging video content on their site but it would be critical to optimize those videos for SEO.
In-house SEOs will have no dearth of video content in their companies. The challenge is to bring together content from all different departments into a central repository. Many large companies also have a digital asset management (DAM) group where most video content is also stored.
As in-house SEOs, your role is to bring together all the video content and work on optimizing those videos. You can also work on uploading to social channels like YouTube as that will also have big SEO gains.

5. Online PR, SEO & Social Media Integration

We have seen statements from Google that on links embedded in a news release and how much it counts towards rankings. The fact is news releases are great not just from links point of view but overall findability of your content.
The tough part for in-house SEOs is to ensure that SEO is integrated as part of process before any news release goes out. PR or corporate communications can be bit stiff when it comes to time sensitive news releases as they are working under tight deadlines.
In 2013, it's time to integrate yourself with your corporate communications and start optimizing and working social media channels on your press releases.

6. Focus on Google+

Even though community building on Google+ falls in the realm of your social media team, as SEO professionals you need to ensure that there is some sort of focus on Google+ from your social team.
In 2012 we saw steady growth on Google+ and new features being launched on the platform. Depending on the industry, Google+ has the potential to cater to niche audience with its hangout feature a real standout.
From an SEO point of view, allows your visitors to share your content by ensuring that Google+ hooks are embedded in your content.

7. Think Holistically

SEO is simply another channel to acquire customers. As in-house SEO professionals, it's essential for you to not just work with other marketing teams but also learn new skills like PPC, usability, or social media, and adopt new tactics like retargeting.
Think of this as becoming an integrated digital marketer. For current SEO pros to get ahead in their career, it's essential to learn other skills and become an integrated digital marketer.

Summary

As in-house SEO there will be the daily grind that you just can't escape, but it's important to look at the bigger picture especially at the year ahead and list the big picture stuff.
The above initiatives are not something that can be achieved over night and as such requires deeper integration with other teams. And like any big initiatives, this requires time and lot of planning.
Those are my top seven initiatives for 2013. What initiatives do you plan to work on this year?


Reference          :- http://searchenginewatch.com

EBriks Infotech :- SEO Company India SMO Company India  PPC Company India

Address             :- E-171,Sec-63 Noida(UP)-India-201301



Google Now: Taking the Search Out of Search

google-now-landing
In a world where we're distracted by some 30,000+ brand messages per day, effortlessness in the user experience is becoming a highly desirable quality. Crafty Google, in realization of this, has been working overtime on the most effortless experience possible.
Released as a standalone app for Android and as an integrated update to the Google App for iOS, Google Now assesses the behavior of a user logged into his or her Google account, and, over time, develops an understanding of what that user wants and needs.
As engagement with the app progresses, customized content begins to filter into the UI in the form of categorical “cards” – weather alerts, breaking news, calendar reminders and so forth – all compiled based on past behavior, current context, and ongoing interaction.
The more you search and use other Google tools like Gmail and Google Calendar, the more Google learns until your need to actually expend any effort whatsoever – talking, tapping, or otherwise – dissipates altogether:
  • Wondering what the weather will be like today? Just open Now and the weather card will automatically display the forecast for your current location.
  • Bad at remembering special occasions? Now will pop up reminder cards from your Google Calendar for birthdays.
  • Running late on your commute home? Now will automatically create a card with info on the next train or bus to your destination.
Essentially, Google Now takes the search out of search.

Google Now Cards 

The app launched with 15 preset categories including such essentials as Gmail, Places, sports, travel, and news, but the initial iteration was just the beginning.
At the recent Google I/O conference, several new categories were announced, including music, video games, books, TV episodes, public transportation, and research cards – a custom category based on specific niche topics you've shown interest in by virtue of search or other behaviors. It's everything you would have searched for, served up proactively before you even think to search for it.
Though the tools for actually performing a search are pretty impressive as well. As of last count, there are 60+ known commands, which, when typed or spoken will generate results cards.
For example, ask for a stock quote, the definition of a word, the square root of pi, who directed "Gone with the Wind" – and you'll get results served up neatly in card format. As an added bonus, Android users enjoy additional features that integrate deeply into other applications, enabling them to use commands to verbally compose an email or text message, make a note, and set a reminder or alarm.

A Glimpse of the Future of Predictive Search

Call it what you like – predictive, unified, aggregated – Google Now is a glimpse at the seamlessly personalized, contextually complex, nascent future of search.
Picture a business traveler in a foreign city for work with Google Now installed on her smartphone – or, even more likely, her Google Glasses.
The viewfinder of her glasses with built-in Now functionality will guide her seamlessly throughout her day in a unfamiliar locale, presenting visual maps and directions to her calendared meetings, flashing safety alerts, translating price tags into more familiar currency and presenting her with real-time tips on local business etiquette – all without her having to do more than blink.
She'll be able to text, email, and post to Google+ simply by speaking and gazing at her surroundings as she goes about her day, more efficiently than if she had a real human assistant in tow.
This is a blue skies vision of what's likely to come but it's fair to say that Now is truly the first virtual personal assistant worthy of the title.

Still, There are the Requisite Drawbacks

As with Siri, the voice activated functions have a way to go in terms of usability, though this is bound to improve with time. And, in order for a user to truly enjoy the full benefits, one needs to be using Gmail and Google Calendar not to mention an Android device (it is a Google service, after all)
Like all things Google, advertising based on your data is inevitable. Google has already announced that brands will be able to insert markup into their email campaigns that will integrate seamlessly with Now, triggering special content cards and alerts when a user receives an email to their Gmail address.
It's already possible for airline boarding passes to be automatically added to the Now interface from a Gmail message (an improvement on the Passbook model that requires proactive user input) and it's likely that offers and incentives won't be too far behind.
As Now catches on, it's very possible that we'll see more users migrating to Gmail and other Google tools in an effort to get the best possible Now experience.

Brands Will Make the Most of Google Now

It's also very likely that we'll see more and more brands asking their search agencies to develop a Now strategy that aligns with their SEM and SEO planning. With Google dominating mobile search and free Google tools like Gmail continuing to increase in popularity, it's a given that Now will become status quo for users and consequently, for marketers as well.
Of course, it's too early in the game to know what the rules for optimization, both natural and paid will be. At present, a limited number of partner brands have been included in the beta, allowing them to tag their email content with elements that will be flagged by Now and allow for translation to cards.
But there's little doubt that tools for brands will be rolling out in short order. The inherent effortless of it – what we referred to earlier as “taking the search out of search” is really what will cinch uptake for end users and brands alike. The congestion of data in our always-on, real-time world is making us crave simplicity – the more wired we get, the lazier we become.

'Technology Should Do the Hard Work'

As Google CEO Larry Page himself said at Google I/O last month that “Technology should do the hard work so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life."
The brands that are tuned in to that simple fact, like Google, are the ones that will win out in the future not just of search but of marketing overall.


Reference          :- http://searchenginewatch.com

EBriks Infotech :- SEO Company India SMO Company India  PPC Company India

Address              :- E-171,Sec-63 Noida(UP)-India-201301



How to Use Google Analytics Visitors Flow Reports to Improve Conversion Rates

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your website may not be as pretty or user-friendly as you think. How you think users interact with your website can be very different from reality.
purchase-funnel-mice-maze
Perhaps the differing viewpoints of your website aren't as extreme as the image above but they might not be too far off. Remember, you built and interact with your website and you know it inside and out. The majority of visitors have never been to your website and they aren't sure where to go or what to do.
However, don't worry. There is an extremely helpful report in Google Analytics that can help determine if your website falls into the first or second image of the mice/maze picture above: the Visitors Flow report.

How to Focus Your Visitor Flow Report

The Visitor Flow reports within Google Analytics can help you determine the complexity of your website to the average user. Are they bouncing around your website without ever entering your conversion path? Check out the screen shot below to see where this report is located in Google Analytics:
google-analytics-visitors-flow
When you first open the Visitor Flow report it can be overwhelming. There are visitor connection paths all over it from one page of your website to the next and making any sort of sense may seem impossible.
First you need to understand the basic structure. The report reads from the left to right and each column is a step (interaction) in the visitor path on your website. You can see as many pages (interactions) as you want. In the screen shot below, we included 3 interactions (pages):
google-analytics-visitor-flow-3-interactions
To narrow down the focus to only one source of traffic, you can follow the two-step process below. First, select the customize button. Then enter the traffic medium you want to analyze. For this example, we are analyzing paid search traffic.
customize-dimension-items-google-analytics-visitor-flow
You can focus the Visitor Flow report on any metric. For example, you can look at visitors from specific locations, traffic sources, devices, etc. We narrowed our focus on to paid search traffic and the report now looks like this:
paid-search-traffic-visitors-flow-google-analytics
Even with these changes, the report can still be difficult to interpret. Go one step deeper to zero-in on a specific page. Just right click on any page in your report and select, "Highlight traffic through here." Now the report will focus on traffic running through one specific page.
highlight-traffic-through-here-visitors-flow

How to Read Visitor Flow Reports

b2b-lead-gen-diagnosis-visitors-flow
For this example, we are looking at a B2B website that focuses on lead generation. Numerous products are listed on the website and if someone is interested, they submit a form for additional pricing information. Product pages are marked out with a purple line. The lead form page is marked out with a red line (they also have arrows).
When we started our diagnostic process for this website, we initially thought that visitors weren't even arriving at our lead form page. Our initial hypothesis was that visitors weren't getting passed the product pages so we were going to have to focus our optimization strategy there.
After analyzing our Visitor Flow report, you can see that all of our product pages do a pretty good job of funneling visitors to the lead form page. The weak link in our ugly conversion process is the lead form itself.
After conducting this analysis we focused our conversion optimization on the lead gen form. A few initial results included a significant drop in time-on-site and pages-per-visitor. This may seem terrible, but our conversion rate also jumped significantly as well.
This means that our lead form was doing a much better job of getting visitors to convert and they didn't have to look around the site as much. We could see the result in the screen shot below. Within our Visitor Flow report, our "Thank You," page had become a higher trafficked page (as indicated by the yellow line and green arrow):
thank-you-page-traffic-visitors-flow

Summary

As you can see here, we started off with the wrong question, "Why are visitors getting stuck on the product pages and not converting?" After analyzing our Visitor Flow report our question changed to, "Why do visitors arrive at our lead generation form but refuse to convert?"
Remember the image of the two mazes at the beginning of this article. Sure, we all want our website to be the easy-to-follow maze where no one ever gets lost. But you don't get there without constant analysis and optimization.



Reference         :- http://searchenginewatch.com

EBriks Infotech :- SEO Company India SMO Company India  PPC Company India

Address            :- E-171,Sec-63 Noida(UP)-India-201301







 

Friday, 7 June 2013

Best Keywords Selection Criteria To Do SEO By EBriks Infotech




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Google+ isn't a social network; it's The Matrix

Trying to analyse the amount of activity on Google+ in comparison to Facebook or Twitter yields little useful information - because it doesn't have the same purpose as them

 
The Matrix 
 
 
In The Matrix, the hacker Neo discovers how the world is keeping track of what he does. Google+ likes to do the same.
Pretty much everyone (myself included) has been reading Google+ wrongly. Because it bears many superficial resemblances to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter - you can "befriend" people, you can "follow" people without their following you back - we've thought that it is a social network, and judged it on that basis. By which metric, it does pretty poorly - little visible engagement, pretty much no impact on the outside world.
If Google+ were a social network, you'd have to say that for one with more than 500 million members - that's about half the size of Facebook, which is colossal - it's having next to no wider impact. You don't hear about outrage over hate speech on Google+, or violent videos not getting banned, or men posing as 14-year-old girls in order to befriend real 14-year-old girls. Do people send Google+ links all over the place, in the way that people do from LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Facebook? Not really, no.
There's a simple reason for this. Google+ isn't a social network. It's The Matrix.
Yes - you know, the one from the film. The one that knows everything you're thinking, and which guides what you see and experience.
Consider: if you create a Gmail account, you'll automatically get a Google+ account. Even if you don't ever do anything with it, the Google+ account will track you wherever you're signed in to your Google account.
If you're not signed in when you visit it, Google's front page has a "SIGN IN" button in red and white in the top right: prime colouring and location to grab your attention.
Maps? If you want to save locations, Google+ is pushed at you (for sharing too, though you can avoid it). You have to sign into your Google+ account to edit anything with its Mapmaker facility. (You have to have an account to edit OpenStreetMap too, though there are lots of accounts you can use - an OSM one, or Google, Yahoo, Wordpress, AOL.)
YouTube? You can use it without signing in (you'll get a "Sign in" label in the top) but of course you can't participate by, say, commenting. Drive? Shopping? Wallet? The soon-to-come paid music service? Google+ demands that you log in, so it can sees it all, and log it.
The reason why it doesn't seem like much of a social network is that the "friending" and "following" are just an accidental outgrowth of what it really does - being an invisible overlay between you and the web, which watches what you're doing and logs it and stores that away for future reference.
That's where the "Matrix" part come in. Next time you're searching for something, or looking on a map, or searching on YouTube, you'll see what Google has decided are the "most relevant" results (and of course the "most relevant" adverts). If you frequent climate change denial sites, a search on "climate change" will turn those up ahead of the sites run by rational scientists. Whatever your leaning, politically, sexually, philosophically, if you let Google+ see it then that will be fed back to you. It's the classic "filter bubble".
(You can, by the way, escape from the Google+ filter bubble by using its Ajax search API, which simply gives the "pure" results like you might have received back in, oh, 2007. But not for much longer. It was "deprecated" in November 2010. Although it's still working as of this writing, in future you'll need to sign in with - you guessed - a Google account.)
Of course, in the post-Google+ world, the "most relevant" results are increasingly those which also point to content on Google properties. The idea of the Matrix is that there's less and less outside the Matrix. But some people have noticed. The outcry when this version of search was switched on in the US in January 2012 was remarkable: Twitter, Facebook and MySpace developers united in writing a plugin called "Don't Be Evil", which stripped out the search biasing that Google seemed to be adding in so as to push its product in peoples' faces, and make it seem more popular than it was. Well, the Matrix doesn't really allow for things outside the Matrix; and Facebook, Twitter and (less so) MySpace all lie beyond its spidering. And in Europe, the antitrust commissioner Joaquin Almunia has said that Google has to make "more concessions" over how it presents search results - where it presently gives its properties a lot of prominence - if it's to avoid a big court battle.
Google+'s designs on our movements haven't gone unnoticed. Ben Thompson, author of the Stratechery blog, has made this point recently, as has Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis in his Google I/O impressions.
Thompson first:
Think about it: what is more valuable? [Facebook's] Inane chatter, memes, and baby photos, or every single activity you do online (and increasingly offline)? Google+ is about unifying all of Google's services under a single log-in which can be tracked across the Internet on every site that serves Google ads, uses Google sign-in, or utilizes Google analytics.
Every feature of Google+ – or of YouTube, or Maps, or GMail, or any other service – is a flytrap meant to ensure you are logged in and being logged by Google at all times.
And Evans:
Just as Microsoft cross-leveraged Windows and Office, and then Internet Explorer, Google is cross-leveraging search, Gmail, Maps, Android and everything else, tying them together with Plus.
The objective is to index not just the web but the users - to drive better understanding of the data by knowing how and where people use it. This is the point of Google Plus - it's not a social network, but a unified Google identity to tie all of your search and indeed internet use together in a Google database just like Pagerank.
If you want an alternative way to think about Google+, you could start with Horace Dediu's wonderful metaphor comparing what Google does to catching fish:
Google tries to make a business succeed through having a huge amount of _flow_ in terms of data, traffic, queries and information that is indexed. So think about this idea of them tapping into a vast stream. The more volume that is flowing through the system the more revenue they generate.
As so given this very rough analogy I try to sharpen it up by saying: imagine it more as a river. And even more than a river, as a watershed, a river basin. Perhaps a giant basin the size of a continent. The business is, let's say, capturing fish at the mouth of the biggest river, before it exits into the ocean at its delta.
And so your job (as Google) is to catch fish mostly at one point. It's the most efficient way to catch fish because you have the most flow of water at that point and building nets is not trivial.
If you use that metaphor, then Google+ puts radio tags on all the fish. It's so much easier to know where they're going. (Ignore for a moment that you're the fish. It only gets in the way.)
The question really is, now you know that, are you comfortable with it? Personally I always found the choice at the heart of The Matrix a puzzling one. The choices seemed to be: you can know that the world you live in is a blasted, awful place with a dire climate, or you can live in what seems like a fairly comfortable world (as long as you don't mess with the agents, of course).
To be honest, I always wondered whether the people whose "lives" (computer-generated or no) were upended by Neo, the hacker hero of the film, really liked having that choice made for them.
Anyhow, that's what Google+ is about. Discussing it as if it were a social network which needs activity in the way that Facebook and Twitter do misses the point. It really doesn't matter if you never use it, never fill out your profile, never fill a circle, never get added to anyone's circle. What matters to Google is that you're signed in, in order that it can form its matrix of knowledge about you.


Reference         :- http://www.guardian.co.uk

EBriks Infotech :- SEO Company India SMO Company India  PPC Company India

Address             :- E-171,Sec-63 Noida(UP)-India-201301



You Find Me On :-

Top 31 SEO Experiment​s You Want To Know About

Top-31-SEO-Experiments-You-Want-To-Know-About
If you own an online business, or work in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), then you probably know by now that SEO is not an exact science. Unlike chemistry, there is no formula that guarantees success. It does not suffice to mix the right ingredients together in order to get a substance which will be the same every time. The web changes, it changes a lot, and you need to constantly adapt to what is happening out there. Very few people stick to a single system their whole life, and instead the successful marketers will constantly do experiments and tests in order to see what works, and what no longer does. Here is a list of 31 such experiments, things that were attempted, and whether they turned out to be successful or not.
1. Plain text URLs with no link
The experiment: In this experiment, a group of marketers from the academic sector noticed something fairly interesting in some of the web sites and pages in university and college domains. A lot of the times, when a scientific paper or other academic text would be produced, the convention said that links would be spelled out, written out on the page without having a link. For example, they would write http://example.com instead of having a keyword with a link. So they wanted to know what difference that made for search engines and for discovery.
The result: Unfortunately, the test yielded no positive result. It seems like people were not going to the new URL in any more number than if the plain text URL was not there. One thing they did note however is that Google does discover plain text URLs even if they have no link associated to the.
The source: http://dejanseo.com.au/seo-experiment-with-non-link-references/
2. Google+ and Twitter influencing search results
The experiment: When Google introduced the real time search results, it meant that suddenly, tweets were part of the results. That meant anything someone would tweet out was now visible in search results. But shortly after, the company deprecated that result. So do tweets still influence search results? This experiment centered around a single tweet linking to an unindexed URL.
What quickly became clear is that while Google appears to no longer have access to the Twitter fire hose, there are enough scrappers and aggregator sites that the tweet still makes it to the search results, albeit a bit slower. But Google+ saw a much faster transition from social to search, with these results showing up in minutes.
The result: There was no question from this experiment that both a tweet and a Google+ post would influence search results, although Google+ seems to have a much more immediate effect.
The source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings
3. PageRank variation based on number of links
The experiment: The question here was whether or not the number of outgoing links on an authoritative site affected how much gain one site could get from a backlink, in terms of PageRank changes. So in order to find out, the experiment used two brand new sites, and added a single backlink on two popular sites. The first one was a site that had a moderate number of links already, while the second site had thousands. The purpose here was to see whether Google penalized backlinks on sites that already had too many links.
The result: What this test showed is that there seemed to be no impact on the number of existing backlinks present. Both sites ranked up in a similar fashion, and remained that way for months.
The source: http://dejanseo.com.au/pagerank-split-experiment/
4. High volume blogging experiment
The experiment: A small financial firm with an online site was watching its traffic numbers being completely flat for months. One day however, they received the necessary funds and goahead for an online marketing campaign. What they wanted to test was whether using regular posts, combined with social media, could increase their search traffic in the long term. They blogged for 100 days in a row, taking Twitter questions from their customers and making videos to drive traffic to their site.
The result: Because their traffic numbers had been flat for so long, they had a nice baseline to compare against. When they started blogging, they right away saw their traffic numbers come up. But more than that, they were able to track long tail keywords as well, showing that the traffic was going up. There was no doubt that in this experiment, an increase in content meant better SEO.
The source: http://www.ryanhanley.com/results-small-business-seo-experiment/
5. Content hijacking
The experiment: As part of its algorithm, Google has a rule that duplicate content will not be displayed in its results. This means that if a second site copies a page from a first site, and posts it, then that copy will not show up in Google. However, it is possible for the second site to hijack that content, appearing in search results, and making the legitimate site stop showing up. The way Google decides which site will show up is whichever has the highest PR. So all the copying site has to do is make sure they get more backlinks.
The result: The experiment showed that it is indeed possible for a brand new site to hijack content away from a legitimate site. However, there are some defenses that can help prevent this. One is by using the canonical tag, and the other is by having a Google+ profile with an authorship markup.
The source: http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/
6. How uppercase letters affect SEO
The experiment: If you do a keyword search for a specific phrase and try both lowercase and capital letters, you will quickly see that the number of hits are different. This would indicate that Google does make a distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters. So an experiment was conducted to see whether capital letters would help a post rank higher or not.
The result: The result showed that titles had no effect on the ranking. Whether a post title was all lowercase or using capital letters, the ranking speed was the same. So what accounts for the difference in the amount of hits? It turns out that the URL does. If a page name has capital letters, there will likely be more results than if it is all lowercase. If this holds true for all niches, then whether or not you use capital letters in your post’s URL would seem to matter.
The source: http://www.mavenwebsites.com/do-capital-letters-affect-seo/
7. Value of the Google +1 button
The experiment: Last year, Google introduced their Search Plus My World feature, which they said meant Google+ would be important for search results. But what is the worth of a single +1 hit on your page? If people click on that button, does it influence your ranking? The experiment used brand new pages and tested whether clicking on the +1 button changed anything for their Google rankings. The result: The result of a couple of +1 clicks was insignificant. There seemed to be no difference in ranking, at least from a typical, anonymous user. However, Google+ turned out to be important for other reasons. Whenever someone likes your page on Google+, all of their friends suddenly see that page come up on top. So the social part is very important to SEO.
The source: http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/google-plus-seo-experiment/
8. Recovering from an update penalty
The experiment: If you have been working with SEO for a while, you probably know about Google’s infamous updates, how the company constantly revises its algorithm to try and remove spam sites. There was the Panda update in particular that made a lot of legitimate sites lose ranking. Sometimes, the reason behind this deranking can be hard to find, but if you do find it, how hard it is to recover? By analyzing data before and after such a change, a group of marketers watched their analytics software to find out just how long it took for them to rise back in PageRank.
The result: It turns out that recovering after such a penalty is hard and it takes a while. But if you do fix the problem, it is possible to recover your ranking completely. The experiment showed that you can come back to the previous ranking that you used to have over time.
The source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recovering-from-the-penguin-update-a-true-story
9. Testing negative SEO techniques
The experiment: Online marketers are always quick to tell us how we should stick with white hat techniques, always use methods that are allowed by Google, and avoid using shortcuts which may seem appealing, but apparently can cause our site to lose ranking if found out. But are these warnings really true? Do negative SEO techniques lead to a loss of rank? To test this, a site which ranked in 3rd position for a specific keyword was taken and a lot of spam links were added. In total, 7,000 forum links, 45,000 blog comments and 4,000 sidebar links.
The result: While tracking the ranking, right away the experiment showed a loss of ranking. Within less than a month, the site had taken the 14th position for that same keyword.
The source: http://www.tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-negative-seo
10. Ranking a brand new site quickly
The experiment: With the Penguin update, Google has made it much harder for smaller sites to rank. Instead, the algorithm focuses on large authoritative sites with a lot of history and backlinks. So is it still possible for a new site to rank quickly for a keyword? The experiment followed a new site with a specific keyword, along with a series of backlinks being placed on authoritative sites. The linking strategy was to place not only the keyword itself but similar phrases as well, and to spread those links on multiple sites.
The result: Less than two months after the experiment started, the site managed to reach the 4th position for the keyword. This proves that even after these updates, it is still possible for a small, brand new site, to rank well when the proper SEO is used.
The source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/postpenguin-anchor-text-case-study
11. Finding links to pages you do not own
The experiment: If you use SEO tools, many of them allow you to see the number of links that go to remote pages. But using just Google Webmaster Tools, you can only see data for your own web site. However, an experiment showed that it is actually possible to view these links for sites you do not own. All you need to do is take the page that you want to analyze, and then copy its content on your own site. Google will then merge the content and show you the links to both pages.
The result: Because your own duplicate has no inbound links, what you are left with is a list of links to the other site. This is easy to do, and takes just a few days for these links to populate in your own interface.
The source: http://dejanseo.com.au/mind-blowing-hack/
12. Non-informative title replacement
The experiment: When you build a web page, one of the most important parts of the page is the title tag. We know that when the search results appear, that title is the text which will be shown to the user as the text for the link. But did you know that in some cases, Google can replace that title? It is called non-informative titles. To test this, a new page was created and the title was simply filled with keywords. Not long after, a warning message appeared in the Google Webmaster Tools saying that the title was non-informative.
The result: Searching for the name of the page, or rather what should be the correct title, actually worked. And when the page was shown in the results, the keywords were replaced by the name that the user looked for, but that name was in brackets, to show that it had been replaced.
The source: http://dejanseo.com.au/title-tag-replacement/
13. Do letter cases affect ranking?
The experiment: While it is known that whether a phrase is capitalized or not may affect the number of hits that are returned, how does it affect the results? The experiment here is to take a specific key phrase, and create two pages, one with the words capitalized and the other all in lowercase. Then, searches are conducted with both phrases.
The result: The results found is that both pages are findable with either search queries. There is no visible difference in how the title is capitalized.
The source: http://www.mavenwebsites.com/do-capital-letters-affect-seo/
14. Social media likes
The experiment: This experiment deals on whether a like such as someone clicking a Facebook like button, reshare, or +1, has an impact on ranking. To test this, pages were created and then buttons were clicked by various social media accounts. Then the results were checked against the rankings of these pages before the social media blitz, to see if those numbers changed.
The result: The pages did change in some cases. Social media does have an impact on SEO, although it is a small impact. While that may scale with multiple likes, even a single one can still affect a page’s ranking in some cases.
The source: http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/google-plus-seo-experiment/
15. Recovering after being deranked
The experiment: No one wants to see a Google update or a mistake they did derank their site. This still happens a lot, and is something you may want to plan for. But how easy is it to recover after being deranked? This experiment tested whether the ranking can be fixed after a site has lost considerable rankings for a specific keyword. After being deranked by deliberately using spammy links, they were removed and an appeal was submitted.
The result: After the appeal, it took many weeks for the site to start gaining ranks again. But even though the process is slow, the experiment showed that with good SEO, it is possible to gain your position again.
The source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recovering-from-the-penguin-update-a-true-story
16. The hreflang and canonical tags
The experiment: The hreflang tag has been available for some time now and is aimed at sites who have multiple domain names for multiple countries, and may have duplicate content before of that, such as for English UK and English US. Google allows you to use these tags to specify these things do you do not get penalized for duplicate content. The experiment used this tag, along with the canonical tag, to test whether this indeed can improve your rankings.
The result: In the end, the results showed that both tags can indeed be useful. Sites that were tested without the tags did worse than those with. Also, by using both tags you increase your chances even more, making them both useful.
The source: http://www.stateofsearch.com/hreflang-canonical-test/
17. Influencing rankings with different anchor text
The experiment: The Penguin update from Google affected a lot of sites, including those which may use a lot of links using the exact keyword as the anchor text. So the experiment checked whether rankings could be improved by using text that was slightly different. By using a brand new sites, various backlinks were made, all of which with phrases that relate to the main keyword.
The result: Ranking for that site actually went up from these indirect anchor links. By using backlinks with words similar to the keyword wanted, it did affect the ranking for the main keyword.
The source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/postpenguin-anchor-text-case-study
18. Are Nofollow links really useless?
The experiment: When adding backlinks, one key concept that every SEO marketer knows is that you should aim for normal links, not those with the nofollow tag, because those are ignored by Google. But are those links really useless for ranking? The experiment to verify this took several new sites, and started adding nofollow links over a five week period.
The result: Amazingly enough, over that period, the ranking was seen as increasing proportionally with the number of backlinks. Even though they all had the nofollow tag, and most likely played a much smaller role than real backlinks, they did influence the ranking of the sites.
The source: http://www.socialseo.com/blog/an-experiment-nofollow-links-do-pass-value-andrankings-in-google.html
19. Google Image Search analysis
The experiment: When dealing with Google Search, but few people spend a lot of time investigating Google Image Search. In this experiment, a brand new folder was shared on a site with a number of images in numerical order, all of which simply showed their file name in the image. After the crawler found the images, Google Image Search was used to see in which order they would be shown.
The result: Interestingly enough, the images did not show up in alphabetical order, or even order of being discovered. Instead, at every search, it seemed like the images would be in a random order. It seems like either the Google servers retrieved the results randomly based on network latency between the various servers, or Google uses a deliberate randomizer function to do this.
The source: http://dejanseo.com.au/seo-experiment-google-image-search/
20. The Google Disavow tool
The experiment: One of the worse message to get from Google is the warning that tells you too many spammy links are pointing to your site. This means your site is now delisted or penalized. Thankfully, the company introduced the Disavow tool in cases where you do not control these backlinks. The experiment looked at whether this tool was useful to disavow thousands of bad links.
The result: In the end, 96% of the bad links were successfully removed using the link, which makes it a lot faster and more efficient than simply trying to remove them manually. After an appeal, the site was then reinstated.
The source: http://cyrusshepard.com/penalty-lifted/
21. Anchor text proximity
The experiment: The way the anchor text is set up will impact your ranking, but what about the surrounding elements? Would a page get better rankings if you place links within a paragraph of text, next to an image, or by itself on a blank page? The experiment took several new domains and added backlinks with these various options.
The result: From looking at the different rankings, all for exactly the same keyword but with different links, it does seem like anchor text proximity matters. Those links by themselves ranked poorly, while links as part of text ranked better, and image tags ranked best.
The source: http://dejanseo.com.au/anchor-text-proximity-experiment/
22. Using canonical tricks
The experiment: The canonical tag is useful to specify which site is genuine, and which may be a duplicate. But can the canonical tag be used for other things? This experiment looked at what happens if the tag is used for non-existing pages, or if it is used at the wrong location in the page, such as within the body.
The result: Canonical does have a significant impact, but it has to be used correctly. It should be inside of the head tag and point to a valid page. Google did not trust a tag pointing to a fake page, or if it was added as part of a comment, social button or otherwise outside of the head area.
The source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks
23. The importance of emotions in keywords
The experiment: Trying to rank for common keywords like ‘SEO copywriter’ can be impossibly difficult. But one particular blogger decided to add some emotions to the task. Instead of focusing on just those keywords, she also tries to add feelings like ‘best’ and ‘worse’ to her blog posts, in order to try and help rank for the main keyword.
The result: Amazingly enough it worked, not only for ‘best SEO copywriter’ but also ‘worse’ as well. Still, because most people would typically look for the best one, it does not matter, and can prove to be very useful.
The source: http://loudcow.com.au/funny-seo-experiment-a-must-read-for-all-seo-copywritersin-da-world/
24. Finding and fixing broken links
The experiment: Since the latest Google update, a site map is important to any site. Having broken links can be a problem, and should be fixed. But finding and fixing these links can be a pain. So in order to fix them, a plugin called Broken Link Checker for WordPress was used.
The result: This plugin found and fixed all of the broken link. The result in ranking was minimal, and the site as a whole did not change rank, however links to broken pages would no longer be accessible.
The source: http://seoupdates.info/to-correct-broken-link-urls-and-image-urls/
25. Links in press releases
The experiment: Sending out press releases can be very important, because they can be picked up by the media, and many people can view your news items. But some people also add many links in those press releases, while others say those do not count for ranking. The experiment looked at two press releases to two pages which had no other backlink, one with links and the other without.
The result: More than just traffic from users who saw the press release, the results showed that Google rankings were affected by those links.
The source: http://www.seoconsult.com/seoblog/links-in-press-releases-dont-help-your-seothis-test-proves-they-do.html
26. Google counting only the first link to a site
The experiment: Rumors say that Google only count the very first link to a site. This would mean that if a page has a backlink to your site, there is no point in linking it again. Also, if the first link uses the wrong keywords, then adding a second link with the right one is useless. Worse, some think that adding more links can remove the usefulness of the first one. To check this out, tests were conducted using an unranked site and links using various keywords.
The result: The experiment showed that all links are used by Google. Even if they are not bringing in a lot of ranking for the site, the keywords are all used, and they all factor into the results.
The source: http://www.seo-scientist.com/first-link-counted-rebunked.html
27. The country specific use of filters
The experiment: Google has a presence in almost every country, and the site responds differently based on the country the user is in. But does that apply to sites as well? An experiment was done to see if a site could be filtered or penalized on a country basis. By using nofollow links, a site was linked from an Israeli host.
The result: By looking at various analytics of the traffic, it quickly became clear that some automatic filters are applied in a country specific manner by Google. This applies not only to the .IL Google site, but also google.com for visitors from an Israeli IP.
The source: http://www.seo-scientist.com/anatomy-google-filter.html
28. Using phone numbers for local link building
The experiment: Building links is not very hard, all you need to do is local sites that are in your particular niche. If you want to create backlinks for an electronics store, then finding sites that talk about electronics is trivial to do in Google. However, if you try to focus on local marketing, this may be much harder. Thankfully, phone numbers are unique by areas. The experiment was to take phone numbers of competing businesses, then use them to find links in Google. Then, taking these links, it would give a list of sites that offer backlinks to local businesses.
The result: In this particular experiment, a series of sites were found with backlinks to many of the competing stores. This allowed the finding of local review sites, business listings, and so on.
The source: http://ontolo.com/blog/phone-number-co-citation-analysis-local-link-builders
29. Cheap SEO versus expensive contracts
The experiment: As Google constantly adjusts its algorithms, some say that the era of cheap SEO is over, and only large firms can handle this new landscape. Without dedicated people to spend a lot of time on building your backlinks and your SEO, you have no chance of ranking. To test this, various sites were created and contracted out to various SEO firms, to see whether the results would go along with the price.
The result: Just like in many other industries, it turns out that the cost does not always equate to the quality of the work. Instead, the results turned out to be more based on what was done than how much was paid. Links remain the main activity which brings in traffic.
The source: Part 1: http://www.talknbusiness.com/the-seo-experiment-part-1/
Part 2: http://www.talknbusiness.com/seo-experiment-update/
30. How proper on-site SEO can increase search traffic
The experiment: Any site that grows too large is bound to start having some issues which leaves it with less SEO power than it otherwise would. For example, a site can have duplicate content, which can be found with Google Webmaster Tools, proper indexing needs to be done as well, which can be done by submitting a sitemap, and tags should content keywords such as the title and various header tags.
The result: These changes were done on a popular news site, and traffic increased by 30% as a result, showing that even well known, popular sites can get a good boost in traffic if SEO methods are constantly followed.
The source: http://www.quicksprout.com/case-study-techcrunch/
31. Most tags are not seen by search engines
The experiment: It used to be that meta tags, along with all other tags in a page, had to be filled with keywords. But now there is a sense that most of those tags are not seen by search engines anymore, to avoid exactly this type of tag stuffing. An experiment was made to see which tag could influence rankings.
The result: For the most part, the important tags are the title, headings, link anchors and ALT tags. Note that only Google see the ALT tag, not Yahoo or Microsoft.
The source: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/ALTer-Ego-which-HTML-tags-are-seen-bythe-search-engines/


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