Google Plus: Growth by Brute Force - getFound SEM

When Google’s new search feature “Search Plus” started favoring Google+ results several weeks ago, the change was immediately resisted by competing social networks like Twitter and Facebook. In addition to receiving negative publicity regarding the new Search Plus feature, an ongoing FTC investigation was expanded to further research the potential antitrust and privacy concerns of the new search feature. However, recent actions by Google demonstrates a firm commitment to the new feature and the Google+ social network.

During a phone call with investors last week, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google+ has doubled in size over the past 90 days. Page also stated that the social network, which now has over 90 million users, has a high level of engagement from its users.
However, Google has been accused with artificially boosting the number of Google+ users as a result of “forcing” users to sign up for the service. Now, when a new user creates any type of Google account, the system requires that the user register a Gmail account, fill out a Google profile, and join Google+.
Google said the following regarding the recent change to the registration process:

“We hadn’t changed our Google Accounts sign-up flow in more than seven years so it was due for a refresh. We’re working to develop a consistent sign-up flow across our different products as part of our efforts to create an intuitive, beautifully simple, Google-wide user experience. Making it quick and easy to create a Google Account and a Google profile enables new users to take advantage of everything Google can offer.”

In the past, it was easy for a user to simply register for one service (i.e. Gmail) without the requirement to join Google+. In addition, the option of registering with an existing email address has now been removed.
Although Google automatically creates a Google+ account for all new users, it is easy to delete the Google+ profile in the accounts setting page.

[Sources Include: Google, ars technica, & Google Operating System]
by David Angotti

Video Search Engine Optimization - Original Content, How Much Should it Cost - getFound Sem San Francisco

You are told you should have original content on your website blog. You look at your marketing resources and you know you can't fully commit a person for original content. You think should I hire a freelance copywriter to help with the work? If there is no one in the company that has the writing skills it might be a good idea. A professional coywriter will certainly have the ability to create content for a website or blog that can capture the attention to get your brand noticed or address your target market. The next question is, what should you pay to outsource this content. It does depend on when the content is needed by, how much research is needed and what is the length of the post. You are probably looking at $50 to $200 a post.

A few thoughts to remember before you outsource your content:

Never send you content overseas. It might cost you less but you more then likely won't get great content that provides value to your readers or your brand.

Don't rely on junior people to write the content. They won't have the in-depth knowledge about the business and industry to produce content. A professional will do the research.
 
ou get what you pay for! A $5 article is a $5 article. How much effort would you put into something if you were only getting $5 for it?

Tags: search engine marketing San Jose CA, getfound San Jose CA, search marketing San Jose CA, search engine optimization San Jose CA, internet marketing San Jose CA, video seo, social marketing, video seo bay area"

Search Engine Optimization Bay Area - 45% of Daily Tweets are from Mobile Devices - getFound SEM San Francisco

Yesterday, at the 2011 Mobilize conference, Twitter’s VP of engineering Michael Abbot spoke with Om Malik regarding Twitter’s overall growth and the role mobile devices play in that growth. Prior to joining Twitter 16 months ago, Abbot led the software and services team at Palm.

Since Abbot joined the company a little over one year ago, Twitter has seen exponential growth. Last summer, Twitter had just over 60 million total daily tweets and that number has increased to over 230 million daily tweets. Amazingly, approximately 45% of the 230 million daily tweets originate on mobile devices.

While discussing whether Twitter is concerned regarding the additional traffic the iOS integration will provide, Abbot indicated he is confident Twitter can handle the traffic volume:

“During the last nine months, there’s been more infrastructure changes at Twitter than there had been in the previous five years at the company.

One of the highlights of Abott’s interview was when he stated Facebook “sucks at everything” and indicated that Twitter is not focused on what its competition is doing. Abbot said Twitter is committed to keeping their service simple and providing users with an optimal experience. He believes that Twitter’s success is due to the simplified, easy to understand nature of the service.

[Sources Include: All Things D & GigaOM]

By David Angotti

Video Search Engine Optimization - Social Bookmarking Strategy Tips? getFound Sem San Francisco

A recent study found that the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon accounts for 50% of all traffic derived from social media , surpassing even Facebook as the leading source of traffic. While we have to take these numbers with a grain of salt—StumbleUpon exists solely to share links, while Facebook is the central hub of most users’ online social lives—this data lends credibility to the value of social bookmarking sites as part of your social media marketing and content promotion campaigns.

A social bookmarking strategy, when handled correctly, provides a lot more value than just a few credible links. It can help drive traffic, increase brand awareness and build your online presence. Here are 3 tips for developing a social bookmarking strategy:

1. Promote everything, every time
The crux of a strong social bookmarking strategy is consistency. Every time a company blog post or article goes live, you’ve got to submit to all of your bookmarking sites that day. You want to give all of your content a fighting chance to be found by your target audience, so cherry picking which days and which content your submit undermines your own efforts.

2. Find niche social bookmarking sites
Just because they may be smaller, that doesn’t mean they can’t be valuable. Large social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit cover dozens of topics and cater to a vast audience. A niche social bookmarking site allows you to submit your content and know that it is being presented in front of the right audience. For instance, in the SEO world, two big niche social bookmarking sites are sphinn and SERPd. When submiting Brick Marketing blog posts to these two bookmarking sites, other SEO and Internet marketing professionals are going to be reading them.

3. Make your content shareable
You don’t have to be the only one that submits your content to social bookmarking sites. By incorporating social bookmarking buttons into your blog and website, you are encouraging your audience to share your content with their own social network. The search engines look at social signals like this (how many people are sharing your content) to determine how valuable a piece of content is and where it will rank in the search engines. Every share counts!

by Nick Stamoulis

Tags: search engine marketing San Jose CA, getfound San Jose CA, search marketing San Jose CA, search engine optimization San Jose CA, internet marketing San Jose CA, video seo, social marketing, video seo bay area"

Video SEO - Does Twitter Help Your SEO - getFound SEM, San Francisco

Twitter is one of the Big 3 of social networking (alongside Facebook and LinkedIn) and a valuable component of any social media marketing strategy. There are probably hundreds of blog posts out there telling site owners to get a Twitter account because they are “supposed” to. But what are the real benefits of incorporating Twitter into the online marketing mix? Can Twitter actually help your SEO or is it just another place to make noise and hope someone notices?

Here are 3 ways Twitter affects your SEO:

Social Signals
Both Google and Bing have admitted that social media signals are being incorporated into the search algorithm as a ranking factor. While we can only speculate as to how important social signals are, it’s probably save to say very much so. Bing patterned with Facebook to create a more personalized, social SERP and Google launched its own social networking platform. I doubt the two search behemoths would do so if they weren’t assigning some value to social signals.

So how does Twitter play into this? Content shared on Twitter can be indexed by the search engines and actually rank in the search results. The more time a piece of content is Tweeted and reTweeted, the more important it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. Just like your site thrives off of quality links, so do social signals.

Author Authority
Author authority is why it is important to take the time to actually build a Twitter profile and connect with real, human users. The search engines know that when they announce a new ranking signal, the spammers come out of the woodwork and try to manipulate it. If Google says reTweets are important, you can bet that black hat companies are creating hundreds of dummy accounts that exist solely to reTweet their content. Author authority aims to put a stop to that.
The search engines don’t just look at how many times your content is being Tweeted, but who is doing the Tweeting! How long has that person been active on Twitter? Who are their followers? What kind of content do they usually share? They want to make sure that spam profiles don’t artificially inflate the popularity of a piece of content. Having a dozen real profiles Tweet your blog post or article is worth much more than having 100 bots do the same.

Brand Awareness
If you think the only goal of SEO is to rank number one, you’re missing the bigger picture. Of course you want to rank well, but SEO is also designed to increase your overall online presence and brand awareness so your target audience can more easily find you. Twitter is a great way to increase your brand awareness. It allows you to connect with your customers in a new and personalized way. When someone Tweets about your brand/products, they are broadcasting your message to their social network as well, increasing your reach.

by Nick Stamoulis

Tags: search engine marketing San Jose CA, getfound San Jose CA, search marketing San Jose CA, search engine optimization San Jose CA, internet marketing San Jose CA, video seo, social marketing, video seo bay area"

Top Ten Google SEO Ranking Factors - getFound SEM

People don’t really understand that there are many different factors that fall into place when determining where a website ranks in the Google search engine results. Some things to keep in mind when you are wondering why your site doesn’t rank well. It is not always just the obvious reasons that are holding it back.

Here is the list of the top 10 of important Google SEO ranking factors to consider:

1. Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. If you just bought your domain a few weeks or even months ago you have a long road ahead of you. The reality is the age of your website helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.

2. Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? Find out through your hosting company what continent or country your site is hosted in. This can often times play a large role in search rankings. Always use a reputable hosting company. If your company is US based then use a hosting company in the United States. Also, I always recommend a dedicated IP when you can. There are virtual dedicated and cloud hosting solutions that are more affordable. Never use the cheapest hosting. The reality is, if you cannot afford hosting you should re-consider the business.

3. Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server, which sites like Godaddy usually are have been known to house hundreds of websites on one server. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not classified as spam.

4. URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is part of the onsite search engine optimization process as well.

5. Content: Content is very important. To start make sure you have text on all your important pages, then make sure it is good text consisting of your targeted keywords spread throughout naturally. Simply put, ALWAYS write your content for humans, your website visitors first and NEVER write content for the solo purpose to achieve Google search engine rankings. Chances are the content will not be user focused or provide value to your visitors.

6. Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should have easy made pathways connecting to your other pages from every page of your website. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Essentially make sure the site is clean, easy to use and interlinked to help the user experience.

7. Trust: Do you at least have a mailing address listed on your website? You should if you don’t. Google likes to see trust factors on websites so anything you can add that could help build trust for your audience will benefit your rankings. I always recommend having a phone number on each page of your website. Make it easy for people to do business with you, it all starts with establishing trust and that starts with contact information on your website.

8. Keywords: Make sure your website is optimized using your keywords. This means any alt tags for images, meta page information and existing content at the very least of things. Remember to naturally optimize your website based on the content of each page of your website.

9. Bounce Rate: Although bounce rate might not seem important if Google sees that nobody hangs out on your website for more than a few seconds before they leave this could be a ranking problem over time. Make changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things, like video, newsletter sign up, call to actions, etc will help improve your bounce rate over time. Make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics.

10. Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. If you sell animals toys but you are linking to a site that sells shoes that is not very relevant and over time could really impact your rankings. Bottom line is if it makes sense to link to another site, then do so, but remember you could be sending your visitors away from your site.

11. Inbound Links: I know this was a list of my top 10, but I felt I had to mention inbound links. The key here (speaking as a white hat SEO person), don’t buy or exchange links. Market and promote your business online to build visitors to your website over time. If you do, then the relevant links will follow!

**Note: As the Google (and yes there are 2 other major search engines!) algorithm changes there are always new ranking factors that come into play, such as the page load time and many others. 

There are many extensive factors that Google uses when determining website rankings. Very important to get these factors correct otherwise you could find yourself just spinning your wheels. The bottom line is it is all about relevancy and earning your visitors (and yes Google’s) search engine trust over time.

Tags: "search engine marketing San Jose CA, getfound San Jose CA, search marketing San Jose CA, search engine optimization San Jose CA, internet marketing San Jose CA, video seo, social marketing, video seo bay area"

getFound SEM - Video SEO

The State of Web Video

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When you produce a video now, there’s no dearth of places to publish it. Though YouTube remains the dominant player in the industry, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Viddler, Metacafe, and a host of other sites (most of them free) have fragmented the market. There’s no need to build or host your own video player, and you can leave the heavy bandwidth duties to them rather than your own server.
Just as there’s lots of competition in the platform arena, competition among videos themselves is growing wildly. YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost said over 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, and about 120 decades of video are uploaded each year.
Hundreds of little tweaks and tricks exist in optimizing a webpage for search, yet the entire realm of video SEO right now consists of only a few to-dos and a lot of finger-crossing. Zamost summed up the basics for ranking high in a YouTube search:

“Have a clear, descriptive title, and include as many accurate tags as you can. For example, if you’ve created a video that shows how to tie a bow tie, your title should be ‘How to tie a bow tie.’ That’s really important, because that’s [what] your target viewer probably wanted to learn. So think visually — ties, dress, how to dress nice, how to tie a tie, how to tie a bow tie, etc.
It’s also important to note that many users who are searching for video just want to be entertained, and may not be looking for something that precise. So if you’ve created compelling content, think about how a user would likely find it. Tags like ‘funny video,’ while generic, can be very useful.”

Many publishers, however, are concerned with getting links and traffic to their site, not just their YouTube page. Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of the multi-million dollar SEO agency SEOmoz, emphasizes the importance of placing videos on your own site and submitting a video sitemap to search engines.
“Video results are often far easier to ‘rank,’ than standard web results, but there are some hoops you’ll need to jump through,” Fishkin said in an e-mail.
However, users sharing videos by embedding or linking to them in their own sites often leads to traffic and link juice being sent to the third party site (like YouTube or Metacafe) that actually hosts the video, rather than a publisher’s own. A vital part of SEO strategy is getting other websites to link to your site. If people are linking to your content on YouTube, your site doesn’t build much (if any) link equity or page rank at all, which can be discouraging for web publishers.

Because search engine robots only understand actual text, they can’t determine the quality of a video by the content inside it — only by the links to it and the content around it, like the title or tags. People have muddled over this problem for a long time, and a couple of realistic solutions have recently emerged.
First, YouTube now has the ability to place captions on its videos. The transcript of a video can be attached to its timeline, allowing users seek to specific portions of YouTube videos by phrase. This transcript can be searched and indexed by the engines, meaning your video content itself can count toward ranking now. Whereas originally you had to provide your own captions to attach, YouTube can now do captions automatically. As with any robotic transcription however, human intervention may be required to fix computer-generated mistakes in the text.
Placing a video’s transcript in its description has been a somewhat common SEO practice in the past, but the marriage of the transcript to the video timeline itself is a definite advancement.
Another company to recently stumble on a similar solution for web video SEO is the New York-based SpeakerText. SpeakerText helps you perform the same transcript-to-video matrimony as YouTube captions, but further puts SEO power in publishers’ hands through a concept it calls “QuoteLinks.”
Basically, once your video has been “speakertexted,” you can embed it on your own website with the transcript attached. Visitors can select a chunk of the transcript, copy it, and paste it in their own blog or website as a link to the exact moment in the video where the quote appears. The link goes to the publisher’s site, not YouTube’s. Right now SpeakerText only works with YouTube, but the company says it plans to provide the service for other platforms in the future.
“Anytime somebody quotes, it will link back to the original source, which is good for the end user because they can actually see it in context,” said CEO Matt Mireles, “… and the publisher gets rewarded because it not only sends viral traffic directly, but then the link creates huge SEO.”
SpeakerText is free if you provide your own transcript, and you can order transcription through the site at what it claims is roughly half the cost of traditional transcription services. SpeakerText utilizes an army of “Turkees” at Mechanical Turk to do the transcribing.

Tags: "search engine marketing San Jose CA, getfound San Jose CA, search marketing San Jose CA, search engine optimization San Jose CA, internet marketing San Jose CA, video seo, social marketing, video seo bay area"