TwentySix2 Marketing Blog

Have you ever had a moment of narcissism and Googled yourself? You might be surprised at what you’ll find. It’s amazing how fast your words can get picked up, twisted and turned around and BAM…you’ve got bad press, leaving you to sit there, saying, “wait, I had press?”

Because information is no longer sacred and because privacy seems to be a thing of the past, you and your good name may be a target for malicious burglary. That’s right, I said it, there are name burglars out there. And not only can they take YOUR name, but your company’s as well. Good news? There is a great solution to this criminal problem.
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Forums are these wonderful little creations that open up all sorts of topics to anyone with a question or just gathering information. They are usually niche-oriented because a forum that catered to all the questions anyone needed answered would be called the “Chaos forum.”

SEO is one of those industries that you can’t really learn everything about because it is constantly changing. I began my job a while ago and I still struggle to keep up with all the new lingo, tips and tactics that SEOers come up with daily. So, I go to a forum to check out latest news and happenings.

Do not be afraid of them! Forums are a way for everyone to advance their knowledge of a subject. If you ask a question and let current users know you are new, they will most always be kind to you and offer some REALLY great advice (just make sure your post is original. Sometimes they get a little miffed at repeated questions, which is understandable).

So without further ado, here are my top picks for SEO forums to get started in:

Guaranteed, any question you have has already been asked in one of these places, so do a little digging, read the posts and comments and you’ll probably come out of the forum way more educated than you were going in and good luck! –>

A new Google Apps tool has been released that is designed for small- to medium-sized businesses, and now you can have a Google search box on your website that allows visitors to access search results from the website, or websites, that you choose. It is called Google Custom Search Business Edition, and it provides an alternative between the “already existing Custom Search Engine, a free, ad-supported service, and Google Appliance, a hardware device selling for prices starting around $2,000 which customers manages on themselves”. Since your website does NOT have to be running Google ads to use the Business Edition application, you have the ability to turn off the ads produced by the Custom Search Engine service, and you can also customize what your visitors are looking at, similar to Google Appliance.
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Here’s a riddle from Google:

“We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.”

Did you figure it out yet? Well if you did and you have any clue what a principal eigenvector is then you’re probably stumbled upon this blog by accident and I suggest you put your resume in to Google for a job.
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Have you ever been in some remote place, like Africa, Antarctica or the backwoods of Georgia, and wished, “man I really wish I had an Internet connection here.”

Surprise!! Our wishes have been answered. Google is working on something that may just give Internet users that very connection…..well sort of.
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I recently found a great study on the latest analysis of the Google algorithm.  It gave some pretty deep insight into how the search engine giant evaluates and ranks websites, so I started to blog about the study and the findings…

Then it occurred to me that our knowledge and expertise is the one thing that differentiates our Atlanta search engine marketing firm from other agencies.  Why would I want to publish this great research?  The answer is - I wouldn’t. 

I subscribe to almost 40 search engine marketing blogs, not to mention the other blogs I read on affiliate marketing, link building and so on.  Why would I put out the best stuff I learn for all to see (including my competitors)?  I wouldn’t. 

Instead, I put the study’s findings in our client only Intranet site.  That way, our clients benefit, and everyone else just has to learn on their own.

Here is the free advice everyone gives about Google:  

• Google ranks sites based on your site’s link popularity
• Page titles are very important
• Description tags are important
• Keyword density and good content help too

Everyone in our business knows this and now you do too!

What everyone doesn’t know is that there are little nuances that make a big difference in how your site ranks.  For example, most SEO gurus will tell you that H1 tags are important.  We have actually found that Google is afraid of sites that have been over optimized, so they like H2 tags and bolded text better than H1 tags.  There you go - some really good, free advice.

The bad news is, this will change in six months and no longer be valid.  So what happens to the average search engine marketing ‘wanna be’?  They read a lot of articles and studies, but much of it is out dated and no longer valid.  They can get you on the bottom of page one (which doesn’t get you much traffic), but they can’t figure out how to get you to position one (not that we do this every time either).  The good news is, these changes in the industry keep our Atlanta search engine optimization firm in business!  Today, social networking sites like Digg help you rank well; tomorrow - not so much.  We get paid to stay on top of things.

When most SEO gurus blog or speak on panels, they keep the really good stuff that separates the experts from the ‘wanna bes’ to themselves. 

Count me in that group too.

This morning, I read the news about Google’s new universal search option, where all the results from their vertical and horizontal searches are integrated into one big mass.

For instance, searching for “Google universal search” will yield the usual web results but intermixed with those are results from searches done within Google’s news search and Google’s blog search; results like these used to come at the very top of the SERP page, but no one clicked on them because they often lacked relevancy. Now they are put into the results, depending on how pertinent they are to the keyword phrase. This means they are dynamic, changing position constantly with each new search. So the vertical results may be on page 1 or 50, just depending on what the searcher is seeking.

Universal search was forecast in November of last year, but didn’t really seem to catch on anyone’s radar, as it hasn’t been talked about for months. Now, this new product could totally alter how we get search results and also how we view them.

Since universal search launched today, user input has not really been received; however, it will be interesting to see if this really makes or breaks Google. Yahoo! and MSN were on the road to catching up, but this may just put Google at roadrunner pace.

Danny Sullivan wrote a fantastic article that explains in depth the differences in vertical and horizontal search as well as discussing what universal search will bring to the table. I highly suggest reading it for a better appreciation of how Google is once again revolutionizing search.

Google provides a variety of advanced search tools. One of the best tools is called “Google Operators” . Google Operators are powerful search functions that can help you learn a lot about your site and your competitors.
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Lately I have been reading a lot of blog posts, trying to build up my SEO knowledge and a lot of the posts concern Google, obviously. There are those who appreciate the search engine giant, and those who are doomed to hate its sometimes “big brother-ish” tactics

We can’t forget that Google is a conglomeration. Google has done an excellent job overhauling search as we know it, but they will upset people because that’s what conglomerations do; you can’t make everyone happy. However, I think in our frustration with Google, we sometimes forget the roads they paved for us. There’s that saying that you don’t ever realize what you have until it’s gone so, I took it upon myself to find out what the world would be like if Google no longer existed.

Appropriately, I began my search by Googling, “a world without Google” only to stumble upon three very interesting articles, all were informative, one was hilarious.

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